MOORE ON LOVECRAFT

 

Over the past few days I've been reading three intertwined Alan Moore comics he devoted to HP Lovecraft. Like the LEAGUE books different chapters occur in different eras. The first two, entitled THE COURTYARD and NEONOMICON, didn't strike me as very ambitious, being content to quote a lot of HPL names but not making much of a story out of them.

The third part, entitled PROVIDENCE, is much more venturesome, though at bottom I think it fails my acid test as far as incarnating its own literary myth. If one has read PROMETHEA, one will recognize Moore treating the mythology of Lovecraft as he treated Western occultism in the previous comic, trying to concoct a master narrative that unites a lot of different cultural/literary phenomena. In PROVIDENCE, he starts in 1919 with a Jewish author named Robert Blake (obviously named after for the protagonist of "Haunter in the Dark," who was in turn named for Robert Bloch). Moore has a theme much like PROMETHEA-- the nature of the real world's indebtedness to dreams and fictions-- only the fantasies of HPL, and a few fellow travelers, are the source of the breakdown between objective and subjective. Moore doesn't have Blake encounter the Usual Suspects like the Great Old Ones or the Innsmouth natives, but obscurities like The Terrible Old Man and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Is it good? Well, in the sense of holding my interest, yes. The art is very restrained, which sometimes works to enhance some of the ghastly horror-pieces. It's very talky, like PROMETHEA, but though I could see Moore's "voice" informing everything, I was interested to see how he handled both the mythology and its creator. I have seen Moore get rather smug and mannered when adapting characters he didn't like, as with James Bond in LEAGUE. However, he's generally fair to Lovecraft, who appears as a character in the story-- much fairer than the yutz who wrote LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. (That name pops up in the last couple issues of PROVIDENCE but I'm not sure Moore was referring to the bad novel or to some slang term that preceded the novel.) And since HPL played a lot of continuity games himself, Moore's extensions aren't objectionable on that level. But at times the daunting research Moore put into PROVIDENCE serves no purpose greater than spotting continuity-points, like some of Roy Thomas' more involved exercises. 

My verdict is that I can't give it my highest recommendation. But anyone who likes both HPL and Moore will probably like this.       

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (1931)

 

"...everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin."-- Zadok Allen. 

"Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent."-- the narrator of SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (given the name "Robert Olmstead" in HPL's notes).

During my early enthusiasm for Lovecraft's works, I didn't tend to reread SHADOW, in marked contrast to the more imaginative "cosmic horror" stories. For that reason, to the extent that I thought about SHADOW in terms of the author's avowed racism, I might have even accepted the reigning critical opinion of the tale, apparently shared even by annotator Leslie Klinger. That opinion, drawn from HPL's own political writings, asserts that the horror of SHADOW-- of a repulsive race of fish-people, the Deep Ones, who intermarry with humans to produce hybrids-- was a one-on-one recapitulations of HPL's unequivocal distaste for almost anyone who was not of purebred English stock (including several dominantly Caucasian nationalities, like Italians and Poles). The two quotes above, however, suggest to me that HPL was aware that such a complexion could be placed upon his story, and that he took pains to tell readers, albeit indirectly, "no, my fish-people are not just allegories for ethnicities I don't like."      

Like CALL OF CTHULHU, SHADOW starts with an ordinary man who encounters strange phenomena that initially seem merely curious, but which eventually reveal the existence of alien conspiracies of which average society knows nothing. Unlike CTHULHU, SHADOW's opening posits that narrator Olmstead is able to alert the government to the existence of the conspiracy, resulting in a wholesale pogrom against the conspirators in the Massachusetts sea-town Innsmouth. Then, as in CTHULHU, the narrator tells us all the backstory of his horrific experience, in which he discovered that most of the inhabitants of Innsmouth were hybrid descendants of intermarriages of human beings and sea-dwelling fish-people (who are said at one point to worship Cthulhu). 

I won't dwell on the many ways HPL sells this concept via his excellent attention to detail regarding the history and physical layout of Innsmouth, since that would be impractical for a blogpost. Most of what Olmstead learns about Innsmouth comes from a 97-year-old Innsmouth resident named Zadok Allen, whose tongue Olmstead loosens by giving him liquor. Old Zadok was around as a child when Obed Marsh, one of the town's leading citizens, began trafficking with certain islands in the West Indies, and so essentially "colonized the colonizers," to play upon a current political buzzword. But because other residents of the polluted town see Olmstead talking to Zadok, they come after Olmstead. One doesn't normally think of HPL as an exciting author, but Olmstead's daring flight from Innsmouth, first by leaping out of his upper-floor apartment and then pretending to be one of the hybrids as he makes his way out of town on foot, is viscerally memorable. 

For an HPL-contemporary like Seabury Quinn, the violent suppression of a conspiracy would have been the end of the story. But the kicker to HPL's story involves Olmstead-- whose mother was of "Arkham stock"-- being much more intimately involved with the spawn of Cthulhu. And this is the great conundrum alluded to in the first quote: that as much as humans may want to believe themselves the lords of creation, they come from the dark abysses of the primal waters, where everything flows into everything else.

Now, in CALL OF CTHULHU, HPL implies that people not from Anglo-Saxon ethnicities may be degraded enough to traffic with unholy cults. Yet in SHADOW, the ones who surrender Innsmouth to the Deep Ones are the members of the town's "gently-bred" (HPL's word) families. Zadok tells Olmstead that although the spawn of the Deep Ones inhabited one particular island in the West Indies, he also mentions that the "Kanakys" of other islands despise the hybrids and eventually wipe them out, the same way the government in 1927 tries (but fails) to wipe out Innsmouth. Lastly, in one of Olmstead's most close-up descriptions of a fish-man resident, he observes that the man seems alien even though he does not look "Asian, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid." While SHADOW certainly is not "anti-racist" in the modern meaning of that term, it also indicates a different mindset from 1928's CTHULHU-- for reasons that will probably never be known.     

       

THE READING RHEUM: AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (1931/1936)

 

This is my third reading of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, though it's my first time checking out Leslie Klinger's annotated version. Klinger also specifies that the text was taken from HPL's manuscript, whereas my earlier readings were probably based on the altered text from the ASTOUNDING publication. However, none of the corrections or annotations changed my view of MOUNTAINS: that it's an extremely important example of Mythos world-building, but that as a story MOUNTAINS feels rather inert.             

 In earlier reviews I've commented on the extraordinary power HPL could convey through his meticulous descriptions of landscapes, most often those of his native New England. He definitely moved out of his comfort zone to describe the barren wastelands of the Antarctic terrain, and since I'm sure he never traveled to either that continent or to any comparable terrain, he must have depended heavily upon travel writers' descriptions. Many of his descriptions of Antarctica rate among his best. However, despite this level of excellence, these frozen wastes have the disadvantage that they host no human tribes or settlements. This was ideal for painting a picture of all the various extraterrestrial beings that once inhabited Earth. But Antarctica doesn't carry the same associations in human culture, so HPL wasn't able to play to that particular strength in this story.               

 It occurred to me that structurally MOUNTAINS is not that different from 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER. In that short story, two dilettantes, making "terrible researches into the unknown," descend into a forbidding sepulcher, with the result that one man disappears and the other lives to tell the tale. In MOUNTAINS, a whole scientific research team ventures into the antipodean wastes and stumbles across a labyrinthine city. They find preserved alien corpses that are originally called "Elder Things," which is what I will continue to call them. (HPL most frequently calls them "the Old Ones," but I deem that confusing given his use elsewhere of "Great Old Ones" for another species of foreign entity.) Despite the other researchers in the party, only two humans survive the expedition's encounter with the horrors left behind by the Elder Things, and one of the two goes insane. Aside from the narrator Dyer, at least two named characters have strong familiarity with the rudiments of the Mythos, which made it a lot easier for HPL to lay out his large-scale worldbuilding project.                                             

I think my somewhat negative reaction to MOUNTAINS stems from HPL's approach to the Elder Things. These aliens are not godlike entities like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, but a race of scientific investigators not totally like the modern-day humans examining their remains. HPL's "Outer Ones," the stars of THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS, were also simply ETs with advanced science. However, in WHISPERER the aliens are still very mysterious in terms of their aims and motives. Dyer and others are able to decipher much of the far-removed history of the Elder Things, and the result is that the Things lose any semblance of mystery. One of the last horrors Dyer witnesses is a "shoggoth," a leftover slave-entity once mastered by the deceased Things, and many readers have liked this particular menace. But for me the effect of telling me pretty much everything about the vanished scientists and their living tools dispersed any potential for what HPL himself called "cosmic horror." So, while I appreciate the author having laid out a grand scheme of various creatures whose powers dwarf those of pitiful humans, MOUNTAINS didn't resonate with me.                                                 

  It is interesting that the Elder Things have two major prehistorical encounters with other inhabitants of the Mythos. One of those groups are WHISPERER's Outer Ones, who I tend to call "the Fungi from Yuggoth," again because "Outer Ones" sounds too much like "Great Old Ones." I absolutely refuse to call them "Mi-Go" as Klinger does, just because Dyer idly uses that Tibetan word to allege that the Fungi were once mistaken from Tibet's "abominable snowmen." Sorry, HPL, no way do I believe that any human ever saw your crab-like creatures, whether winged or wingless, and imagined them to resemble the hairy men of the Himalayas. The other major opponents of the Things are "the spawn of Cthulhu," whom the Things manage to drive out of Antarctica. All this condensed history is very useful for fans of the Mythos, but since these encounters are only being written about long after they occurred, they only register in my system as "null-crossovers." I suppose if a big-screen movie version of MOUNTAINS had come to pass, such a film would have had to show these cosmic wars on screen, and THOSE would have counted as crossovers, as they became part of the ongoing narrative. A point that concerns only me, to be sure.                 
          

THE READING RHEUM: DON RODRIGUEZ, CHRONICLES OF SHADOW VALLEY (1922)

Except for readers who have a desire to understand the many historical permutations of what I call "the magical fantasy" genre, most people are acquainted with the early 20th-century writer Lord Dunsany in terms of his being an influence on two better-known authors, Lovecraft and Tolkien. The only widely distributed paperback editions of Dunsany's work were six works reprinted releases under the Ballantine fantasy imprint in the early 1970s.

I read most of the Dunsany paperbacks many years ago, except for DON RODRIGUEZ, the author's first published novel. I had enjoyed most of the works in the Ballantine series, both short stories and two other fantasy-novels, so I expected to find the same virtues in RODRIGUEZ as I'd found in the others.

But this first novel is not only devoid of Dunsany's signature use of exalting language, it's written in a tiresome, pseudo-archaic dialect that never uses one word when ten can be fit in. Here's a sample from the first chapter:

Now there were no wars at that time so far as was known in Spain, but that old lord's eldest son, regarding those last words of his father as a commandment, determined then and there in that dim, vast chamber to gird his legacy to him and seek for the wars, wherever the wars might be, so soon as the obsequies of the sepulture were ended. And of those obsequies I tell not here, for they are fully told in the Black Books of Spain, and the deeds of that old lord's youth are told in the Golden Stories. The Book of Maidens mentions him, and again we read of him in Gardens of Spain.

Far worse is the fact that almost nothing of consequence happens in RODRIGUEZ. The titular don is a young man disinherited by his dying father back in the days of medieval Spain. He goes forth to make his own way, planning to acquire both a wife and a castle, not necessarily in that order. This might sound like a good setup for adventure, but Dunsany almost seems to be trying NOT to describe anything exciting. The most engrossing event occurs early in the novel, when the young Don rents quarters in an inn. The evil innkeeper, borrowing a schtick from the stories of Theseus, plans to kill the Don when he sleeps that night and steal all of his possessions. A servant warns the Don, who sets up a trap for the innkeeper and kills him. 

The Don then agrees to let the servant who warned him become his servant, even though the impecunious nobleman doesn't have a lot of money. Then the two wander about getting involved in various paltry events-- talking with a sorcerer who shows them visions of past and future wars, liberating another nobleman from some officious policemen. After the duo go through various unexciting events, the Don eventually makes a contact who initially seems supernatural, but is not, and that individual sets the Don up with a castle, so that he can marry a woman he's conveniently fallen in love with.

The near-total lack of romance and adventure might make one suspect that Dunsany had some notion of emulating satirical works like those of Cervantes or Voltaire. But there's no satire here, and I'm almost at a loss to figure out what Dunsany was trying to accomplish.

The closest clue I can find appears in an online observation about Dunsany's historical significance to the fantasy-genre.

Lord Dunsany's first novel, "Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley conveys its young disinherited protagonist through a fantasized Spain, gifting him with a Sancho Panza companion, good luck with magicians, and a castle" [The Encyclopedia of Fantasy]. It is a landmark tale for Dunsany, beginning his move from the otherworldly short stories for which his reputation is justly famous to novels, such as the follow-up The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Charwoman's Shadow. L. Sprague de Camp has said: "Dunsany was the second writer (William Morris in the 1880s being the first) fully to exploit the possibilities of ... adventurous fantasy laid in imaginary lands, with gods, witches, spirits, and magic, like children's fairy tales but on a sophisticated adult level." But more than this, Dunsany was probably the single greatest influence on fantasy writers during the first half of the 20th century.H P Lovecraft, in early fiction, like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, imitated him, and very well.-- FANTASTIC FICTION.

It's probably quite true that in terms of "adult fantasy"-- that is, excluding juvenile-oriented authors like Baum and Barrie-- that Dunsany was picking up on a precedent established by William Morris. Morris is of extreme importance, as De Canp said, to the history of otherworldly fantasy-- but I've read and reviewed Morris' four otherworld-fantasies, and he adopted an archaic, fusty style like what Dunsany uses in RODRIGUEZ. I don't think Morris ever wrote anything as utterly dull as RODRIGUEZ. But perhaps Dunsany had some idea of emulating, not just Morris, but the episodic nature of early chivalric romances. That might explain why he was able to use his more imaginative language in his earlier short stories (which date back to the early 1900s), but for his novel Dunsany chose to follow this dull episodic model. Of his handful of later novels, I've read just two, and I remember both as having the same enchanting combination of beautiful language and engrossing magical concepts I found in the earlier short stories. But RODRIGUEZ barely qualifies as a "magical fantasy story" at all, and then only because of the hero's rather pointless encounter with the sorcerer. I saw one review claiming that the Don makes a small cameo in a 1926 Dunsany novel, THE CHARWOMAN'S SHADOW, which I remember liking and may attempt to reread for comparison's sake in the near future.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS" (1930/1931)

 

Now this is more like it; cosmic horror the way HPL fans like it!

WHISPERER is one of the first six HPL stories I encountered in a particular collection back in The Day, and as I noted in my previous essay it eschews the dodgy dialect of HPL's immediately previous Mythos-tale DUNWICH HORROR. I'll note briefly that this time the reader also doesn't know the significance of the novella's title until the very end of the story. 

WHISPERER also resembles THE COLOUR OUF OF SPACE because it shows HPL's skill at describing the natural backdrops of the story, which in this case are the desolate woodlands of Vermont. The flooding of a local river causes the local townsfolk to circulate rumors about the corpses of mysterious beings in the waters. Albert Wilmarth, a literature teacher at Miskatonic University in Arkham, launches an amateur investigation of the rumors, writing newspaper articles on the local mythology of the aboriginal Indians. These essays cause a local farmer, Henry Akeley, to contact Wilmarth about his own experiences.

Though most of the exchanges between Wilmarth and Akeley are in the form of letters, this epistolary method of storytelling never sacrifices any tension. Akeley tells Wilmarth that for months his secluded farm has been besieged by mysterious beings which, when glimpsed at all, look like winged, claw-handed humanoids. The two humans eventually learn that these beings, "the Outer Ones," are visitors from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto), and they've set up a clandestine mining-operation in the vicinity of Akeley's farm. Only Akeley's supply of guns and guard-dogs has preserved him from being killed or abducted by these alien intruders. Eventually Wilmarth hears enough to convince him of the farmer's veracity, but by the time he physically arrives at the farm, he encounters what he thinks is Akeley, but is in truth "the whisperer in darkness."

Before I began this review-project, I mentioned here that I wondered if any of HPL's Mythos stories registered as crossovers. After all, the cosmic horror of WHISPERER is enhanced by two major sequences in which the human protagonists are exposed to an overwhelming variety of references to dozens of alien beings, domains, and deities, some original with HPL, some invented by authors with whom the writer was friendly, like Robert E Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith. (Smith had apparently shown HPL his story "The Story of Satamptra Zeros," because that tale, which was the debut of Smith's toadlike god Tsatthoggua, didn't see print until after WHISPERER did.) 

All these arcane references built up HPL's vision of a bizarre universe beyond the ken of human reason-- but references, in my system, count only as "null-crossovers." However, though the main monsters of WHISPERER are the Outer Ones-- who had previously appeared in an HPL poem, "Fungi from Yuggoth"-- they do apparently enlist one of the "Great Old Ones" to deceive Wilmarth. HPL subtly mentions that the "mighty messenger" Nyarlathotep-- who was the narrative focus of a 1920 tale-- "shall put on the semblance of men." And this imposture proves necessary because, unlike the Outer Ones with their wings and claws, Nyarlathotep had already been established as being able to pass for human. So, in addition to THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. WHISPERER is a bonafide crossover story.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE DUNWICH HORROR" (1928/1929)

 Though I respect THE DUNWICH HORROR as a major Lovecraft work, I've never liked the story that much, and my re-reading of an annotated version didn't make that much difference. At most, the annotations made clear how much HPL was indebted to the Judeo-Christian mythology of angels mating with mortals-- which myth-trope was of course also derived from stories of pagan deities begetting demigods on humans. For instance, Klinger notes that one of the angel-references mentioned by HPL was to "Azazel," an angel with that precise reputation.

The opening of DUNWICH provides some strong description of the Massachusetts town of Dunwich, and of its multitudinous associations with the New England witch-trials and with the older pagan traditions of the Amerindians. In addition, HPL dumps on almost the entirety of the rural population of the area, expanding on his disgust for Joe Slater in 1919's BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP. I was rather surprised, for two reasons, to read a line in which the writer tore down these "white trash" for their history of "half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity." On one level I found this odd because subjects of murder and incest were the common coin of the Gothic fiction that HPL thoroughly lambasted in his overview of horror fiction, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE. On a second level, it's weird to hear DUNWICH associated with "incest," because it's about a mortal woman who has sex with an extradimensional creature-- which is about as "out-cest" as one can get. I can only conclude that HPL wasn't above associating one form of abominable sexuality with another, even though the fantasy of demon-coitus has nothing to do with familial interbreeding.

I also didn't like HPL's buildup to his big reveal. For most of the story, the author keeps the focus on the repulsive figure of Wilbur Whatley, the offspring of Lavinia Whatley and the demon-god Yog-Sothoth (making his debut as a "featured Old One.") While keeping the reader busy with Wilbur's peregrinations-- which are focused on obtaining information on occult rituals in order to unleash his demonic father on Earth-- HPL throws in a secondary mystery, about Wilbur's earthly father building a huge extra room atop the Whatley farmhouse and buying cattle that no neighbor ever sees again. Wilbur is slain at one point, and his half-alien body is revealed to onlookers. The big reveal, though, is that Lavinia Whatley also spawned a second son, a huge amorphous thing that occupied the extra room, with only tangential humanity, and this offspring is also killed when a Miskatonic U scholar, Doctor Armitage, is able to defeat the ritual and banish Yog-Sothoth.

Another problem with the story is that HPL is pretty bad with both his rural characters and their dialect. He kept dialogue to a minimum in THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE. But in DUNWICH, there's a lot of farmer-talk, and it's excruciating. Fortunately, in the next Mythos story HPL eschewed almost all dialogue in yet another of his ventures into rural New England, and the results were far better. 

I note in passing that as far as I recall, the 1970 cinematic adaptation doesn't show Wilbur as being having a repugnant alien physiology that he hides from other humans, and the ending of the film is stronger for not "giving away the game" too early.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE" (1927)

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE was another of the first HPL stories I ever read, and in many ways it's a better story of "cosmic horror" than any of the "Mythos" tales. There are no references to the many alien entities of the Mythos here, and Klinger has most likely included COLOUR because of its propinquity to Arkham, the same reason the editor included THE SILVER KEY.

The "colour" of the title is some force or property dwelling in a meteor that falls to Earth near a farm in a Massachusetts farming community west of Arkham. Researchers examine the meteor, and their investigations implicitly release the strange force, which then settles within a well on the property of farmer Nahum Gardner. The meteor itself dissolves, and it's only recently occurred to me that it may have been the "vehicle" in which the "colour" traveled.

Not that HPL endows the malignant force with any sense of intentionality. For pages and pages, HPL goes into extensive descriptions of how plants, animals and humans in the community are adversely affected by the influence of the force, either dying prematurely or being altered in some freakish manner. There is no clue as to whether the force that causes all this is in any way sentient, and calling it a "colour" seems to imply that it is just a presence from another realm of being, that may not particularly intend malice but simply poisons everything on Earth by reason of being so alien to mundane organic nature. Only toward the end is there some sense that the force may seek to return to the stars that spawned it, but even that sense is largely the impression of one of the witnesses. I'm tempted to opine that the doom the Colour brings to Earth-- which may spread to pretty much every living thing eventually-- may be in line with HPL's views of the entropy of all things, according to the science of his time.

I confess that though I think this is a great story, I didn't get into re-reading it this time, probably because its slow depiction of degeneration doesn't reward repeat visits. But I think I'll always remember my first reading of COLOUR, which was like seeing the entire universe transformed into a Gothic horrorshow.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD" (1927/1941)

 

For convenience's sake I read the above Belmont paperback edition and then read through Klinger's annotations on the book. I noted that most of said notes talked about all of the antiquarian accuracy that HPL poured into this short novel-- which meant very little to me, given that I think all that detail hurt the story.

For me as a reader, WARD inverts all the strengths of CTHULHU's gradual detective-style revelation of a great mystery. WARD uses much the same structure and approach, but the story broadcasts the Big Reveal on the first page, talking about a magic ritual that can bring back "any dead Ancestour." The titular Ward, born in 1902, becomes enthralled with the legend of his sorcery-using, 18th-century ancestor Joseph Curwen, and accidentally revives Curwen's spirit, which then usurps Ward's body. Ward's doctor intrepidly discovers the truth and destroys the body Curwen inhabits.

HPL wasn't entirely without ability to create at least broad characterization, but he utterly fails to make Ward (a probable self-insert) even as interesting as Henry Wilcox from CTHULHU. Doctor Willett is no better, and Ward's unnamed parents are only brought in to serve very limited plot functions. For me WARD has only two distinctions, aside from inspiring loose film adaptations like 1963's HAUNTED PALACE:

(1) WARD is the first text to mention the Old One Yog-Sothoth, though only as a name within a mystic chant.

(2) There's a brief mention of a "Sign of Koth," which receives a little more expansion in DREAM QUEST. Robert E Howard used Koth as a place-name in the Conanverse, and in the 1930s tales of the comic-book hero "Doctor Occult," writer Jerry Siegel used the name for the titular hero's villain.

I guess I should also add that HPL may have been having some fun by portraying his self-insert as unwise for having invested so much time and energy into his antiquarian pursuits, since they bring about his doom. At the same the story may have been primarily a method by which HPL could share his passion for New England history with readers, though WARD wasn't published until after HPL's passing.

 

THE READING RHEUM: "THE SILVER KEY" (1926/1929)

In my review of CALL OF CTHULHU, I included no biographical data on what was going on with HPL in the year he wrote this major "Mythos story." But that story, this story, and THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH were all either begun or completed in 1926, the year that HPL ended his attempts to find gainful employment in other cities and returned to his beloved home town of Providence. This may not have been good for his personal life, as the move eventually led to his divorce from his wife. But the move was very good for horror fiction, because HPL wrote the majority of his major works while remaining in his cherished boyhood home.

KEY, in contrast to THE UNNAMEABLE, is an unquestionable follow-up to 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER, not only because the character's full name is used, but because the unnamed narrator of the story explicitly mentions the events of STATEMENT. KEY covers some of the same philosophical ground as UNNAMEABLE, and makes Carter's dilemma far more relatable. The narrator tells how Carter once possessed a Dunsanian ability to imagine far-flung realms of fantasy, but he loses this ability as he allows his mind to be polluted by the doctrines of realism. It's hard to say what sort of philosophy Carter ends up with, according to the narrator, but it leads him to seek unknown horrors in STATEMENT.

However, thanks to surviving his horror-hunting, Carter is able to acquire a special silver key "handed down from his ancestors," at least one of whom sounds like a magician. With the key in his possession, Carter goes driving near "the lonely rustic homestead of his people," which, incidentally, lies near the fictional Arkham. Carter never precisely opens a door with the key, but just having it on his person allows him to transition back to the time of his childhood, where he essentially merges with his younger self. The narrator concludes by saying that he will try to block the probate of Carter's possessions, since he's not really dead. And possibly Carter returns to mundane life so that he can experience the more involved visions of DREAM QUEST-- though this work too has a sort of "there's no place like home" message.

As much as I like the first half of KEY, I found that the second half did not resolve any of the philosophical questions raised, and I'm not entirely sure why Leslie Klinger included it in his collection, except for the Arkham association. Klinger does not include the sequel HPL co-wrote with E Hoffman Price, which I may examine in a future post.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE CALL OF CTHULHU" (1926/1928)

 

In my review of the short HPL story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," I wrote:

Many commentators have talked about HPL's abhorrence for non-white races, and sometimes even for white ethnicities that the author considered decadent. I don't deny that he sported these racist views to make himself feel superior. Yet it's interesting that the first example of a wretched ethnicity in HPL's fiction-cosmos is lowborn "white trash," and the author treats Slater just as condescendingly as he would ever treat any other ethnic figure... In my opinion HPL was always separated from most of humanity thanks to his superb intellectual attainments, meaning that he related no better to most whites than he did to non-whites. Yet because HPL knew that he was of the same common clay as the most ignoble human being, and thus his fiction is filled with examples of his fear of degenerating into something inferior. (In Jungian terms Slater would be "the shadow" who incarnated that dominating fear of bodily devolution.)

I confess that I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of HPL, even regarding the specific topic of his theories on race. CALL OF CTHULHU, though, far more than the above short story, brings to mind the old quarrel between two theories about the concept of racial evolution (putting aside the question as to how applicable the term "race" is to the human species):

Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins (polygenesis). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.

Was HPL a foursquare advocate of one position or the other? Since polygenism was on its last legs in the early 20th century, it seems unlikely that he could have placed total faith in that theory, even if (as one online authority argued) he'd been strongly influenced by the work of Ernst Haeckel. But what I find fascinating about CTHULHU is that it promotes a sort of "psychic monogenism."

CTHULHU proceeds like a detective story, as viewpoint character Thurston labors to collate the voluminous notes left behind by his late uncle Professor Angell, who perished under dubious circumstances. What Thurston eventually learns is that there exists a widespread cult devoted to a collection of archaic cosmic entities, one of whom, Cthulhu, is said to lie buried far beneath the ocean waves. Angell's notes reveal the widespread activities of cultists, many of whom are described as "mongrel" or "degenerate." Yet at the same time Thurston remarks that the mythos worshiped by the cultists "disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it."

Structurally, this justification is identical to the one HPL uses in "Wall:" that, because cosmic visions appear in the dreams of an uneducated specimen of "white trash," said visions must have some reality outside the brain of the individual experiencing the visions. In the case of the CTHULHU narrative, the visions commonly shared by Eskimo "diabolists" and Louisiana voodoo-worshipers stem from "thought transference," which is the method by which Cthulhu and his fellow Old Ones communicate with one another and with their human servants. But CTHULHU goes a good deal farther, for Angell also discovers a particular sculptor affected by Cthulhu's call-- an educated white fellow, one presumes, since HPL does not say otherwise. This artist, ignorant of the cult or its object of worship, was spontaneously inspired to carve the same image of Cthulhu venerated by the "half-castes and pariahs." Further, during the same period that this one sculptor created his Cthulhu-image, Angell's surveys prove that numerous "artists and poets," as well as individuals who may just be psychically sensitive, experienced their own visions, which either result in strange artworks on in suicide. 

So what do the two groups have in common? All HPL says is that other (presumably white) New Englanders surveyed by Angell-- "average people in society and business"-- had no strong responses during the period when the hypothetical "call of Cthulhu" goes forth. HPL's chauvinism meant that he probably would have not credited "degenerate" peoples as possessing similar social hierarchies between workaday types and visionaries. So my best guess is that he thought that the "mongrels" and the Caucasian visionaries all shared a common psychic receptivity, which I choose to term "psychic monogeny," since no other species save humans are affected by Cthulhu's Call. I qualify this view by stating that at no time in CTHULHU does HPL promote a widespread theory of human psychic abilities, such as we get from a later "demi-follower" of the author, like Colin Wilson.

Though HPL sneered at the "puerile symbolism" of Sigmund Freud in "Wall," the aim of the cultists seems roughly parallel to Freud's idea of the unrestricted "Id." One cultist in Angell's records claims that when the Old Ones rule Earth again, they will "teach [their followers] to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the Earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." The corresponding theory would be that Caucasians functioned as the "Ego," the "reality principle" that keeps the Id's impulses in check. But since there are no records of what Freud texts HPL read, this is just an interesting side-note.

CTHULHU shows HPL expending far more effort in chronicling all the details of the Call's influence upon humanity before he gets to the Big Apocalyptic Moment. As in the short story DAGON, the monster and his forbidding island only remain on the surface long enough to suggest the terrors that will come when Cthulhu and his kindred enjoy full reign; then they disappear, leaving narrator Thurston to realize that "we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity." Why does Cthulhu Island re-appear so briefly, which would imply that the stellar configurations are not quite right for the Old Ones' rebirth? And if it's not time, why does Cthulhu send forth his call? HPL does not say, so one can only guess.

It's implicit that in most if not all stories, HPL wanted to believe his own kindred were at the top of the cultural and racial matrix-- also eclipsing, I should emphasize, all those Caucasians with whom the author didn't identify. Yet had HPL been a true follower of racial polygeny-- a specter that sometimes appears in certain works of his contemporary R.E. Howard-- then it would be easy to dissociate the activities of "people of color" as being foreign to the nature of "the white race." The horror is made far greater by the intimation that all the grotesque people who embrace chaos share the same base nature as the most sophisticated spawn of humankind.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE UNNAMEABLE" (1923/1925)

I've heard various HPL stories described as being "his most Poe-like." Though it's true that Poe is probably HPL's greatest influence, Poe had many aspects to his work, so it makes a difference as to what aspect one thinks HPL was imitating.

"The Unnameable" is HPL emulating Poe's penchant for oddball philosophical pieces disguised as fiction. I've argued elsewhere that Poe's "Morella" is the author's take on the Aristotelian "A is A" argument, in that the narrator's daughter suffers when he first addresses his daughter by her mother's name. 

"The Unnameable" is a hard-to-follow colloquy between two characters, Carter and Manton, that takes place near an abandoned house. Conveniently enough, their argument is settled when they are attacked by an unnameable something or other, though for a change, both potential victims survive. There are no "Mythos" associations in this brief tale-- I for one don't consider this "Carter" in any way related to the "Randolph Carter" who appears in a few Mythos-stories-- and I imagine that the two movie "adaptations" had to make up anything resembling a conventional story.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE FESTIVAL" (1922/1924)

Though there are no Mythos-references in "The Festival," it comes off as a better Mythos-story than "Nyarlathotep," from which "Festival" borrows its trope of "accursed city full of demon spawn." The city in this case is Kingsport, which had been used in a previous non-Mythos tale, "The Terrible Old Man," and would be used again in future HPL stories. 

Whereas the narrator in "Nyarlathotep" is just a floating eyeball, the narrator of "Festival" has a rough reason for going to Kingsport, having been summoned by "the fathers." This is apparently a reference to the narrator's family, though the reader never meets any of those relations. The narrator knows that he's going to participate in some obscure "festival" that takes place in the Christmas season, but that is supposed to be a celebration of much older, forbidden rites. Conveniently, he knows this but not any details of the celebration, so one might assume that he was there only as a child before moving elsewhere. That said, the narrator only encounters two discrete unnamed characters, while the rest of the celebrants are just a faceless mass, the same as the hapless crowd in "Nyarlathotep," except that the city's denizens are apparently aware of the other worlds with which they commune.

Prior to the festival itself, the narrator drops references that suggest that his people may have come from the race of ocean-dwelling humanoids that assumed human form. HPL would later use this trope to greater effect in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," but the Innsmouth residents are more overtly piscine in appearance. The payoff of "Festival" is an extremely imaginative Mythos-version of a witches' sabbath. and despite the narrator's having witnessed these unholy mysteries, he survives. After recovering in a hospital he goes to Kingsport again, but now it's just an ordinary city. He gets off pretty easy to many HPL protagonists, past and future.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE HOUND" (1922/1924)

 

"The Hound" takes double honors as the first story to mention that the lore-filled compendium The Necronomicon, and as the first story HPL placed with the premiere horror-magazine of the 1930s, WEIRD TALES. But for all that, it's a fairly ordinary story of supernatural vengeance.

"Hound" follows the template of "Randolph Carter" but improves somewhat on the motivations of the transgressors. In "Carter," the unnamed narrator and his named accomplice simply want to research forbidden lore, which leads to the accomplice's demise and the narrator's implication in that death. In "Hound," the unnamed narrator and his accomplice, one 'St. John," are consumed with a morbid love of transgressing upon gravesites, liberating "trophies" for their private domicile. The two are so in love with their aestheticized form of necrophilia-- compared to the perversions of the 19th century Decadent writers-- that their house is redolent of a fragrance that smells like rotting corpses. Naturally HPL does not allude to any sexual thrills that the transgressors gain from violating the resting places of the dead, but modern readers won't be able to read their crimes as having any other possible interpretation.

The partners in crime make the mistake of plundering the grave of an unnamed "ghoul" buried in Holland, and they rip off a talisman with the image of a hound on it. As they leave they hear the baying of a distant hound. Some spectre follows them to England and mangles St. John to death, and the narrator becomes terrified enough to consider returning the talisman to its place of origin. But some entity, later revealed to be the spectre, steals the amulet. The narrator still goes back to Holland and once more unearths the coffin of the famous ghoul, only to find that the talisman is back in the hands of the corpse. The narrator hears the hound approach, takes time to write the story as a suicide note, and presumably succeeds at killing himself before the creature overtakes him.

The narrative drive is crippled by the silly game of "who's got the amulet," and the idea that the entity associated with the object wants to be back in the hands of the ghoul makes no sense. Maybe if the ghoul had created the amulet, the story would have hewed closer to the simple trope of a dead man wanting to "take it with him." HPL was evidently trying to meld that more traditional "unquiet dead" story with his evolving ideas on an imponderable demonology with no ties to Earth-religion. Fortunately HPL managed to find much better ways to accomplish the same ends in future narratives.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE NAMELESS CITY" (1921)

 

"The Nameless  City," while not a great story, is a key breakthrough for HPL with respect to "archaeological horror." From some of the story's allusions to his literary idol Lord Dunsany, I think it's likely that HPL realized that Dunsany had utilized tropes involving big, imposing buildings, and even though Dunsany wasn't dominantly writing horror, HPL probably made some connection between Dunsany's fantasy-use of the trope and its use in the domain of Gothic fiction, as per THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.

The story's structure feels like a reworking of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but one in which a single character, this time unnamed, makes a descent into a forbidding underground domain. The narrator is an archaeologist investigating an isolated "nameless city" that seems outside the bounds of human history. He eventually finds evidence of alien beings who may have built the city, and then he narrowly escapes some barely seen horror within the darkness. In fact, the ending is a little vague about whether the narrator does survive.

Not only does Dunsany have one of his works quoted in the text, the narrator also speaks of a domain from one of HPL's Dunsanian tales, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," as if Sarnath is a real place in human history. "City" also includes HPL's first mentions of Abdul Alhazred and the famous "strange aeons" quote that will appear again in "Call of Cthulhu," though not until his next published story does HPL mention the book Abdul authored.

THE READING RHEUM: HERBERT WEST, REANIMATOR (1922)

 My review of this six-part tale, so notable for spawning the cinematic RE-ANIMATOR franchise, will be succinct. I'd long heard that this might be HPL's worst story, and despite trying to keep an open mind, I concur with that verdict. I found none of HPL's stellar use of language or his esoteric concepts. 

In fact, WEST isn't a standard story at all. All six parts are vignettes, and all save the last concern this innocent-looking mad scientist repeatedly bringing corpses to life with his special fluid. The narrator is the usual "I couldn't help just following along" type, who tells us of West's pointless enormities, none of which are given even slight self-justification, as one can find in the diatribes of Moreau and Frankenstein. West likes to bring life to dead bodies because he can, and that's about it, until the last story, in which it appears that the risen dead carry West away to his doom.

The only incident that showed a little psychological promise appears when HPL describes the aged mentor of West and his companion as an almost saintly man. West shows his indifference to affection by bringing his former mentor back to life as a raving hulk. Mary Shelley used Frankenstein's mania as a means of displaying his buried hostilities toward everyone close to him. But HPL has no such aims, and frankly, I don't know why this notion held any appeal for him. He does, however, come up with a much more substantive "living dead man" story in the 1928 story COOL AIR.

THE READING RHEUM: THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE (1920)

 Quick personal note: my first experience with Lovecraft came about when I picked up this 1967 Lancer paperback. 

It printed five of HPL's best stories-- the titular "Colour Out of Space," "Cool Air," "Call of Cthulhu,' "The Whisperer in Darkness," and "The Shadow Out of Time," and this lesser effort, "The Picture in the House." These six stories made me an HPL fan for life, even though I must admit that the main thing I liked about "Picture" was its opening paragraph.

SEARCHERS after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

I would say that this paragraph by itself is the first time HPL really found his distinctive voice, his unchallenged ability to suggest indescribable horrors through a combination of poetry and pedantry. The whole story, though, is mostly a curiosity, and back in the day I didn't quite understand why it didn't have the same impact as the others. Part of the reason lies in the fact that it is a very early horror-story, though its inclusion as an "Arkham Cycle" tale depends entirely upon being the first tale to mention the city of Arkham itself, as well as the river of the Miskatonic Valley. 

A nameless genealogist, while bicycling through New England for purposes of research, gets caught in a downpour, so he takes refuge in one of those "ancient, lonely farmhouses." Before he can even tell if the house is occupied, he sees numerous antique books. On opening one, he finds that it's written in Latin but features very explicit engravings of the cannibal butcheries committed by primitive African tribesmen. Then he meets a weird old man whose speech resembles that of Yankee settlers long extinct, and the unnamed fellow begins regaling his visitor with his enthusiasm for the weird pictures in the book, even though he cannot read Latin. He draws a strange comparison to the Bible: "When I read in Scripture about slayin'-- like them Midianites was slew-- I kinder think things, but I ain't got no picter of it." Slowly the narrator begins to deduct from the old guy's ramblings that he became unnaturally fascinated with the practice of cannibalism. Then, just as he sees possible evidence that the man has acted on his fantasies by killing some poor soul, the story abruptly ends when a lighting bolt hits the house. (The editor of the ANNOTATED edition thought the narrator survived; I think the story implies that the lightning kills everyone in the benighted house.)

The other reason this story doesn't work well is that HPL probably modeled it on some of Poe's less successful vignettes; those in which the author tried to evoke some transitory mood of gloom and then just brought the tale to a quick close, like THE OVAL PORTRAIT. Later HPL stories show a better "beginning, middle, and end" structure. On a related note, HPL is so cagey with his big reveal that I didn't clue until now that he meant to suggest that the old man might have been extending his life for decades via his cannibal-ritual, so that he actually hailed from the Puritan era. (Since this is only a suggestion, I would still categorize the story as "uncanny.")

The main reason I class the mythicity of PICTURE as "high" is that, as in BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP, the debased subject of the story is a white New Englander. Although HPL maunders a bit about the negative aspects of Puritan culture, at base he's still depicting a scion of the Anglo-Saxon race, of which HPL deemed himself a member, to be capable of descending to the subhuman depths of Black Africans. Thus for me, the nameless New Englander is, like Joe Slater, a projection of HPL's fears of degeneration. Against such powers, nothing, not even an individual with the right racial credentials, can survive--and in this, HPL ran counter to the majority of other writers who portrayed Caucasians in a more flattering light.

THE READING RHEUM: NYARLATHOTEP (1920)

 In this story the narrator is barely more than a floating eyeball as he describes the advent of the titular being. The story is also a return to the "vignette form," which may show a certain Poe influence.

Nyarlathotep is the first named being whom HPL later imports into the panoply of god-like beings in the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. He would seem to be the only one who can assume human form, for the narrator relates that during a time of major world upheavals, Nyarlathotep appears in the guise of an Egyptian who looks "like a Pharaoh." The mysterious being begins attracting numerous listeners to his lectures on "electricity and psychology," none of which HPL details.

The Egyptian lecturer comes to the narrator's bailiwick, a "terrible city of unnumbered crimes." (I found myself thinking of Biblical Sodom, visited by angels who implicitly inform God that He should destroy the city.) The narrator attends the lectures along with "restless crowds," and somehow they are all translated into one or more alien worlds, dominated by "the blind, voiceless, inindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep."

THE READING RHEUM: BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP (1919)

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP was written before STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER but saw print after CARTER, both appearing in amateur zines before seeing reprint in WEIRD TALES. SLEEP is therefore the first true manifestation of HPL's great talent.

Herein the author first articulates his idea that human who experience dreams that suggest weird, transmundane realities are in truth tuned in to such cosmic abnormalities. The narrator is an employee at a mental asylum who just happens to be experimenting with a telepathy machine. He gets the chance of a lifetime when Joe Slater, a dirt-poor, uneducated Catskills man, is sent to the asylum for having killed one of his fellows in a moment of violent delirium.

The "alienist," as he is sometimes termed, is fascinated that an utterly ignorant specimen of "white trash" can relate "chaotic but cosmic word pictures." In particular Slater rants about beholding some malign entity, a "thing that shines and shakes and laughs," that seems to be his enemy, and that Slater feels "himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy." The alienist has no empathy for the confused mental patient, reflecting much of the author's contempt for Slater; the narrator just wants to get to the bottom of the mystery. 

His early efforts are unsuccessful, but Slater takes a turn for the worse, apparently dying due to the "turmoil in his brain." It's at this point that the experimenter attaches his telepathy machine to both Slater and himself. Falling asleep, the alienist finds himself experiencing spectacular extraterrestrial planes of existence. He also communicates with a being of pure light, who purports to be "an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep." HPL may have derived this basic notion from occult concepts of "higher selves," though he ties the concept into SF-concepts such as time-travel and alien life, since the light-being's kind can also inhabit the dreams of creatures like "the insect-philosophers" from the fourth moon of Jupiter. The light-being concludes his colloquy with the narrator by expressing the hope that he will someday re-encounter the alienist in his light-form, but only after the light-being gains vengeance on his enemy, located out near "Algol, the Demon Star." The narrator wakes and finds Slater dead, and later hears of what seems to be a massive stellar explosion in the area of Algol.

Many commentators have talked about HPL's abhorrence for non-white races, and sometimes even for white ethnicities that the author considered decadent. I don't deny that he sported these racist views to make himself feel superior. Yet it's interesting that the first example of a wretched ethnicity in HPL's fiction-cosmos is lowborn "white trash," and the author treats Slater just as condescendingly as he would ever treat any other ethnic figure. Even when Slater is dead, the alienist can't resist commenting on his "hideous face" and "repulsively rotten fangs." In my opinion HPL was always separated from most of humanity thanks to his superb intellectual attainments, meaning that he related no better to most whites than he did to non-whites. Yet because HPL knew that he was of the same common clay as the most ignoble human being, and thus his fiction is filled with examples of his fear of degenerating into something inferior. (In Jungian terms Slater would be "the shadow" who incarnated that dominating fear of bodily devolution.) But in contrast to this trepidation, HPL poses the possibility of enchanting, ethereal vistas of the sort he experienced in his most cosmic dreams-- and SLEEP is notable for giving both sides equal symbolic representation.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER" (1920)

 Unlike DAGON, STATEMENT is a story with a clear beginning, middle and end. Though the narrator Randolph Carter begins much like the unnamed DAGON protagonist, by relating a story that will end with a dire revelation, HPL doesn't execute Carter at story's end, and he went on to use the character in three later stories. 

In STATEMENT the calamity befalls Carter's boon friend Harley Warren, who is clearly the initiator of "terrible researches into the unknown." Warren drags Carter to a cemetery at night so that Carter can help Warren break into a sealed sepulchre. Warren tells Carter than his researches indicate that some strange entities may abide in the tomb, but he doesn't want Carter to go down into the sepulchre because Carter has "frail nerves." But while he descends, Warren calls up "color commentary" on what he's experiencing to Carter. Warren doesn't describe what he sees, but he suddenly yells for Carter to replace the sepulchre slab and run away. Carter doesn't leave, but he also can't force himself down into the tomb, and then he passes out when a strange voice from the tomb announces that "Warren is dead." Carter apparently passes out and is later found by police, who are probably the persons listening to Carter at the story's outset. Carter's last sight is of "amorphous, necrophagous shadows" dancing beneath "an accursed waning moon," but whether or not these are literal monsters or not is never clear.

NULL-MYTHS; BATMAN: THE DOOM THAT CAME TO GOTHAM (2015)

Someone somwhere might be able to do something worthwhile with the idea of overlapping Batman's Gothic horrors with the cosmic calamities of H.P. Lovecraft. But neither artist Troy Nixey nor writers Mike Mignola and Richard Pace came anywhere near the mark.

So it's another Batman Elseworlds. This time Bruce Wayne and his parents are around for Gotham City's founding in the early 20th century, and twenty-plus years after the death of the Waynes, Bruce launches his career as Batman. He even has two wards this time, Tim Drake and Dick Grayson, though neither is being prepared for sidekick status. He has no rogues' gallery, nor does he get involved with any form of street crime, and yet, when a Lovecraftian doom comes to Gotham, many analogues of the rogues show up in new guises: Penguin, Two-Face, Man-Bat, and Mister Freeze. At least the authors didn't resort to the overused Joker and Catwoman.

Ra's Al Ghul and his daughter Talia are fundamentally responsible for unleashing some sort of demon-gods. None of them are given the same names as the Lovecraft myth-figures, and though I tend to think there's no copyright protection for the original stories, it's possible that some gaming concern has control of, say, the name "Yog-Sothoth," which might be the reason the raconteurs came up with a facsimile fiend. Of course that means that these aren't even weak templates of the Lovecraft monsters, and so there's no crossover potential with any of these new creations. 

Troy Nixey's art sometimes achieves a good creepy vibe, but he draws a lot of characters off-model, and his demon-gods aren't particularly compelling. The story's hard to follow thanks to the authors' desire to play to Bat-fans by injecting rogue-analogues all over the place. Not only is the story a disservice to the concepts of Lovecraft, it's even dull as a Batman story. I only read it because it's been adapted into a DTV animated film and I may want to review that in future.