The Slaves of Cthulhu - Tony Richards

I was in the mood for something completely different from what I usually read, and I figured a novel that, from its description, sounded like a collaboration between F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.P. Lovecraft ought to do the trick.

As a matter of fact, the narrator of THE SLAVES OF CTHULHU mentions Fitzgerald and a couple of his novels, and Lovecraft makes an amusing cameo appearance as a character when the narrator pays a visit to Providence, Rhode Island.

THE SLAVES OF CTHULHU is set in the summer and fall of 1923. The narrator/protagonist is Jay Sinclair, heir to the Sinclair diamond fortune, who is tired of being a wealthy young playboy and wants to do something worthwhile with his life. So he decides to become a novelist (there’s the Fitzgerald connection) and rents an isolated house on a lonely island off the coast to have a place to write undisturbed. Only, as you might guess, he winds up being disturbed. Boy, does he.

Nearby is the sinister-looking mansion of notorious libertine and poetess Anastasia Gorsting, who dropped out of public view several years earlier. Anastasia has an occasional party at which the dull, reclusive, and odd-looking inhabitants of the local village gather and carry on in crazed fashion. Strange lights also emanate from Anastasia’s mansion, and Jay hears indecipherable shouts coming from these gatherings. An old friend of Jay’s comes to visit him and seemingly falls under Anastasia’s spell. Jay also meets Anastasia’s beautiful but strange daughter.

Look, I’m no Lovecraft expert, as I’ve mentioned many times in the past, but it seems pretty obvious what’s going on here. And for the most part, it is. However, author Tony Richards does spring a nice twist about three-fourths of the way through the book that I didn’t see coming. It worked well for me, and do did the book overall, although I do have a few quibbles.

The first of those is that some of the words and phrases Richards uses just seem too modern for a tale set in 1923. There aren’t very many of these, but when they cropped up, they knocked me out of the story for a moment. There’s also a continuity glitch where a character has one eye, then two, then one again. That’s a pretty minor deal, too, and it’s a mistake I’ve made myself, but again, it disrupted the flow of things.

My obsessive carping aside, I really enjoyed THE SLAVES OF CTHULHU. Richards keeps things moving along at a very nice pace, the writing does a fine job of capturing the Jazz Age feel (with those minor exceptions mentioned above), and Jay Sinclair is a likable protagonist who at least tries to battle against overwhelming odds. No, this isn’t quite the Gatsby vs. Cthulhu mash-up I thought it might be, but that’s probably a good thing. If you’re in the mood for an entertaining horror yarn, I can certainly recommend this one. It’s available in e-book and trade paperback editions on Amazon. I intend to read more by Tony Richards.

Now, somebody needs to write THE ELDER GODS ALSO RISE. Jake Barnes vs. Cthulhu in Paris. The running of the shoggoths in Pamplona. I can see it now . . .

The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu - Will Murray

I’m sure I encountered mentions of H.P. Lovecraft in reading about Robert E. Howard in the introductions to the Lancer editions of the Conan stories during the Sixties. But I don’t think I ever read any fiction related to what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos until some of Lovecraft’s creations popped up in issues of Marvel’s DOCTOR STRANGE during the Seventies. I didn’t read any of Lovecraft’s original stories until much later.

While I’m only a lukewarm Lovecraft fan, I do find the Mythos pretty interesting, and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve ever read by Will Murray, so I was happy to discover that Murray has published THE WILD ADVENTURES OF CTHULHU, a collection of ten Lovecraftian stories he wrote for various anthologies. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to recreate Lovecraft’s style in these stories, although after reading his novels written in the styles of Lester Dent, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Norvell Page, I don’t doubt for a second that he could have written Lovecraft-like prose if he’d wanted to.

No, these are more straight-ahead tales, some with a good deal of action, and most of them involve agents of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Section, which is part of the National Reconnaissance Office (both fictional creations by Murray). As a result, what we get isn’t exactly U.N.C.L.E. vs. Cthulhu, but there’s a hint of that, as Murray acknowledges in his introduction.

The stories have an epic scope, ranging from the Arctic to the Antarctic to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, and they usually end badly for humanity. Despite that, some of them manage to achieve a considerable amount of dry humor, as well as being appropriately creepy and downright terrifying at times.

The overall outlook in THE WILD ADVENTURES OF CTHULHU may be pretty bleak, but I enjoyed it. The stories are well-written and move right along, and Murray obviously knows his stuff when it comes to Lovecraft’s work. If you’re a Lovecraft fan or a Will Murray fan, or both, I give it a high recommendation. It's available in both e-book and paperback editions.

Classic Horror Stories: The Dunwich Horror - H.P. Lovecraft

I know when I'm beaten. After reading "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and now this story, I have to take hat in hand and humbly say that yes, yes, I am an H.P. Lovecraft fan. I have been won over.

"The Dunwich Horror", which appeared originally in the April 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, takes place around a farming community in Massachusetts, in an area where the hills have ancient stone circles atop them and some of the folks who live thereabouts have strange habits, like the Whately family, especially young Wilbur Whately, who is born and grows up in the course of this story but grows up to be something other than human . . . and that's just the beginning of the weird, potentially cataclysmic things that happen.

Once again, Lovecraft injects some dialogue and action into this yarn to go along with the all the richly detailed creepy stuff. The climax is downright thrilling. Not only that, but there are also a few unexpected (at least by me) touches of humor in this story. Granted, the lines are more droll than they are laugh-out-loud funny, but still, I'll give Lovecraft credit for making me smile.

I know I said I might continue with this series after Halloween, but I believe I've changed my mind. Honestly, as much as I've enjoyed the tales, I'm about Cthulhu-ed out. I'm sure I'll return to the series, and to other horror stories, in the future, and right now I'm planning to make a whole month of it again for Halloween next year. I'll have one more horror-related post tomorrow (not Lovecraft or Cthulhu), and after that I plan to go back to reading Westerns and mysteries for a while.  

Classic Adventure/Horror Stories: The Fire of Asshurbanipal - Robert E. Howard

Now this is a yarn! One of my favorite Robert E. Howard stories, and one of my favorite WEIRD TALES covers, with art by the great J. Allen St. John. This story is considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, and rightly so, but for most of its length it's a classic adventure tale with one of Howard's two-fisted American adventurers in the Middle East, Steve Clarney, who, along with his Afghan sidekick Yar Ali, ventures into the desert to find a lost city where a fantastic, mysterious gem known as the Fire of Asshurbanipal rests in the skeletal hand of a long-dead emperor. Along the way they have to battle Bedouin bandits and an Arab outlaw and slave-trader.

Well, even if you've never read this story (and I'll bet most of you have, some multiple times like me), you can guess that Steve and Yar Ali will find what they're looking for, and more besides, and it's that more that ties this yarn in with Cthulhu and his outfit. If I have one quibble with the story, it's that our heroes act more like Lovecraft protagonists in the end, rather Howard protagonists, but I can accept that in exchange for all the great stuff along the way. I reread this in the Del Rey edition THE HORROR STORIES OF ROBERT E. HOWARD and thought it held up just fine. 

Classic Horror Stories: The Shadow Over Innsmouth - H.P. Lovecraft

Okay, now, this is a terrific story. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is the best Lovecraft yarn I’ve read so far, by far. It’s the tale of a bookish young man who’s making a tour of New England towns between his junior and senior years in college, so he can study their history and architecture. He winds up in the decaying fishing town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, even though he’s been warned against going there because the inhabitants are, well, strange. Turns out, that’s putting it mildly.

After complaining about the slow pace and lack of dialogue in other Lovecraft stories, this one is much different. It still doesn’t just race along, but it moves fairly well, there’s a lot of dialogue, and Lovecraft actually shows us most of the action instead of just summarizing it, achieving some real suspense along the way. And then at the end, there’s a twist that’s a real gut punch.

“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” was published originally as a stand-alone novella by some outfit called Visionary Press in 1936, then reprinted in the January 1942 issue of WEIRD TALES. I’m sure those of you who are more familiar with Lovecraft and his career than I am know a lot more about the origins of this tale than I do, and if you’d like to weigh in in the comments, please do. I’m going to settle for saying that this is a wonderful yarn, and I have a feeling it’s going to stick with me. I kind of wish I’d read this sitting on my parents’ front porch in the summer of 1967 or ’68 . . . 

Classic Horror Stories: The Call of Cthulhu - H.P. Lovecraft

I decided to go ahead and read more of the Cthulhu Mythos stories, so why not go right to the source? H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” was published in the February 1928 issue of WEIRD TALES and reprinted many times since. It’s a very impressive piece of inventiveness. In this one story, Lovecraft lays out the basis for a huge number of stories by many different authors: the Great Old Ones, vast cosmic beings that come from beyond the stars, landed on Earth in the planet’s infancy and are still alive, although dormant and hidden away in vanished cities, waiting to be called back to life by a cult of their devoted followers, at which time they will lay waste to humanity, or at least try to. Although not necessarily evil by their own standards—they’re beyond the concept of good and evil—to humans they represent the greatest horrors imaginable, or, in some cases, unimaginable.

“The Call of Cthulhu” itself is a good story, fast-moving by Lovecraft’s standards, in which the narrator investigates several related series of events that gradually reveal the terrible truth to him. One section of the story set in the Louisiana swamps and another on a mysterious South Seas island could have been really good adventure yarns if Lovecraft had done more than summarize them. Even at that, they’re pretty exciting, especially the climactic battle between a ship and the reborn Cthulhu.

This is a good example of why so many authors latched on to the Cthulhu Mythos and wrote their own stories set against that background. It’s such an epic concept, filled with the potential for drama, conflict, and action, that born yarn-spinners such as Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, and many others, naturally would see the possibilities. From what I’ve read so far, it seems to me that Lovecraft’s stories function more as a series bible than as satisfying stories of their own (although I’m warming up to his style and see its appeal).

I’m going to continue reading these stories, including some of the other authors who wrote Mythos stories, and even though this started as a Halloween-related project, it’ll probably take me longer than that. So bear with me, even though many of you probably read all these stories years or even decades ago. They’re new to me.

Classic Horror Stories: The Hounds of Tindalos - Frank Belknap Long

I’ve seen Frank Belknap Long’s name in books and magazines countless times over the decades, but I’ve read very little by him. The title of his story “The Hounds of Tindalos” sounded familiar to me, so I decided to give it a try. It was published originally in the March 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, reprinted in the July 1937 issue of WT, in AVON FANTASY READER #16 in 1951, and in many collections and anthologies since then. I read it in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, an e-book anthology published by Wildside Press.

I’m not well versed enough in all the Mythos stuff to know exactly how “The Hounds of Tindalos” is connected to Lovecraft’s work, so I read it as I would any other yarn, looking to be entertained. And I was. It’s the tale of Frank Chalmers, a student of the occult who is convinced that through a combination of drugs and mathematics that he can see into both the past and the future. He enlists the aid of a friend of his, the narrator of the story, who is supposed to pull him out of his drug-induced trance if things start to go wrong.

Well, don’t things always go wrong in stories like this? There are things man was not meant to know, after all, and when you stare into the abyss, be careful that the abyss doesn’t stare back at you. (Hint: It always does.) So when Chalmers discovers cosmic horrors beyon his ken, those horrors discover him, as well, and decide to follow him back to our earth.

I can see where this is a Lovecraftian story, but Long spins his yarn with a lot more dialogue and narrative drive than the Lovecraft stories I’ve read so far, but also without the really creepy style at which Lovecraft was so skilled. As a result, “The Hounds of Tindalos” is faster and more fun but lacks some of the impact of Lovecraft’s tales. I enjoyed it quite a bit anyway and am glad I read it.

I do have a very indirect connection with Frank Belknap Long. In the Sixties and Seventies, he worked for Leo Margulies’ Renown Publications and was the associate editor of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE for quite a while. Not while I was selling to MSMM, however. Sam Merwin Jr. came in to run the magazine a few years before I started submitting stories there, but if I’d gotten around to it a little earlier, I might have gotten rejection slips from Long, too.