New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
Edited, with an Introduction by RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The late H. P. Lovecraft was a mythmaker, a visionary, a conjurer of dreams. As a self-professed outsider in his own century, Lovecraft invested his inner visions with such intensity that he was able to will an entire world into being: Great Cthulhu, the blind idiot god Azathoth, the sea-sunken realm of R'lyeh, the infamous Necronomicon. Mythic deities and alien landscapes emanated in eldritch array, like a litany of maledictions, from the pulp magazines of the era that published his fiction.
New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is a celebration of Lovecraft's achievement, a tribute to this most influential of twentieth-century American fantasists, by such present-day masters of the genre as Stephen King, Basil Copper, Ramsey Campbell, and T. E. D. Klein. The stories in this anthology are thus intended as satisfying contemporary entertainments and as a collective testimony to the darkly enduring power of this strange Rhode Island recluse, the man with the cosmic mind.
Also published by Grafton Books;
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (edited by August Derleth)
GRAFTON BOOKS
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
LONDON CLASGOW
TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND
Grafton Books
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
8 Grafton Street, London WlX 3LA
A Grafton UK Paperback Original 1988
Copyright c Arkham House Publishers, Inc 1980
ISBN 0-586-20093-2
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow
Set in Century Schoolbook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
To the memory of August Derleth whose idea this book was.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Crouch End by STEPHEN KING
The Star Pools by A. A. ATTANASIO
The Second Wish by BRIAN LUMLEY
Dark Awakening by FRANK BELKNAP LONG
Shaft Number 247 by BASIL COPPER
Black Man With a Horn by T. E. D. KLEIN
The Black Tome of Alsophocus by H.P LOVECRAFT AND MARTIN S WARNES
Than Curse the Darkness by DAVID DRAKE
The Faces at Pine Dunes by RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
What was the Cthulhu Mythos, to begin with?
The question needs to be asked for clarity's sake, for the Mythos has been so elaborated and overpopulated, reworked in attempts to give it unity, explained and contradictorily reexplained, that it is now impossible to distinguish a total structure - by no means wholly a bad situation, as I hope to show. So what was the Mythos in the first place?
August Derleth has pointed out that it was not a planned development on Lovecraft's part; indeed, Lovecraft never even gave it a name. Rather it was a step in Lovecraft's search for the perfect form for the weird tale. By 1923, in 'The Rats in the Walls,' Lovecraft had refined his method: the story's movement has far less to do with plot than with a gradual accumulation of telling detail, presented with relentless logic; the story moves single-mindedly toward terror. Yet in 'The Shunned House'
the search continues; the detective-story structure which Lin Carter has analyzed, and which has its roots in Machen's 'Great God Pan,' is yet more skilfully used, but Lovecraft is still seeking a background which will make his horrors both plausible and suggestive. He found it not in occultism, which he thought banal, but in a subtle, often vague, blend of science fiction and the supernatural. In 'The Shunned House' it is the weakest element in a powerful story: the explanation of the haunting, with its 'certain kinetic patterns' continuing-to function in 'some multiple-dimensioned space along the original lines of force,' seems a muddle. But only three years later the same method, perfected, could produce a masterpiece in 'The Colour Out of Space': the not; subtle Mythos story - one that never mentions a Mythos name, which has led some commentators to exclude it from the listing - and, in my opinion, the finest. It is certainly the classic solution to Lovecraft's problem of combining the tale of terror with science fiction.
Lovecraft required a background against which to present his elements of terror, an accumulation of detail which needed only to sound convincing, and he found it in science. His Mythos was never coherent nor did it need to be. Its function was to suggest, something larger and more terrible than was eye: stated. In recent years the Mythos at times has seemed in danger of becoming conventionalized. This is ironic since Lovecraft's intention and achievement was pre. cisely to avoid the predictability and resultant lack of terror which beset the conventional macabre fiction of his day. I must own up to my share of the responsibility for this state of things; like many a beginner in this field, I found it easy to imitate Lovecraft's more obvious stylistic mannerisms and some of his ideas. But alas, few of Lovecraft's imitators - particularly in the fanzines - are influenced by his best qualities, his skill in organizing his material and in atmospheric preparation, or his originality. And it is all too easy to convince oneself that a tale that reads vaguely like Lovecraft is an achievement.
In today's overcrowded Mythos it is nothing of the sort.
For this and other reasons, in this anthology I have tended to favour less familiar treatments or uses of the Mythos. There are a couple of traditional stories, one a completion of a Lovecraft fragment, but in the main these tales are contemporary. They contain few erudite occultists, decaying towns, or stylistic pastiches. They are themselves: new tales.
One - perhaps the only - merit of the overcrowding of the Mythos is that is it now impossible to devise a coherent pattern linking all its aspects, even if anyone were foolish enough to try. This leaves writers free once more to return to the first principles of the Mythos - to give glimpses of something larger than they show, just as Lovecraft did. Indeed, one of our tales hints at the ultimate event of the Mythos without even referring to the traditional names. I hope that readers will find in this book some of the sense of terror and awe that Lovecraft communicated so well.
- RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Crouch End by STEPHEN KING
By the time the woman had finally gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning. Outside the Crouch End police station, Tottenham Lane was a small dead river. London was asleep . . . but London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.
PC Vetter closed his notebook, which he'd almost filled as the American woman's strange, frenzied story poured out. He looked at the typewriter and the stack of blank forms on the shelf beside it. 'This one'll look odd come morning light,' he said.
PC Farnham was drinking a Coke. He didn't speak for a long time. 'She was American, wasn't she?' he said finally, as if that might explain most or all of the story she had told.
'It'll go in the back file,' Vetter agreed, and looked round for a cigarette. 'But I wonder . . . '
Farnham laughed. 'You don't mean you believe any part of it? Go on, sir! Pull the other one!'