Other books edited by Ross E. Lockhart
The Book of Cthulhu
The Book of Cthulhu II © 2012 by Ross E. Lockhart
This edition of The Book of Cthulhu II
© 2012 by Night Shade Books
Cover illustration © 2012 by Mobius9
Cover design and interior graphics by Claudia Noble
Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich
Edited by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
An extension of this copyright page appears on pages 425-426
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-435-6
eISBN: 978-1-59780-436-3
Night Shade Books
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For Madeline…
…Chasing the Cats of Ulthar
And for Mike Roth
Friend, Brother, Sounding-board, Fellow Dreamer on the Nightside
Introduction
I can’t help but wonder what H. P. Lovecraft would have made of his continuing literary legacy and current pop culture prominence. On the one hand, I’m sure he would have been pleasantly surprised, once he got past the shock of seeing works he considered disposable pulp entertainments, or worse, stories and fragments he never intended to see the light of day, in print, thriving, and continuing to inspire readers and writers some seventy-five years after his death. After all, tales by the Gent from Providence are widely available in packages ranging from lurid-covered paperbacks and e-books to more scholarly tomes curated and introduced by well-respected author/editors like Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Straub. HPL possibly would have affected embarrassment over the scholarly attention afforded his fiction by the likes of Houellebecq, Joshi, and Price, but I’m sure he would also have felt a swell of pride over the recognition by these writers, and of his place in American letters, and his recognition as, as Fritz Leiber described him, “the Copernicus of the horror story.”
On the other hand, there is also the matter of Lovecraft’s place in popular culture. What would HPL have remarked upon discovering that his Jeffrey Combs-voiced cartoon avatar—H. P. Hatecraft—has solved mysteries alongside the Scooby-Doo gang (and a cartoon avatar of Harlan Ellison®)? Would he have been offended or amused upon seeing South Park’s Cartman team-up with Cthulhu against Justin Beiber to a My Neighbor Tortoro-inspired soundtrack? Would he have tried for a high score in Cthulhu Saves the World? Likewise, what might HPL have made of his recent cinematic legacy, from the titillating gore-fests of Stuart Gordon to the retro reconstructions of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society to the recently-aborted multi-million-dollar Guillermo del Toro adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness?
Regardless of what Lovecraft himself would have taken away from the various offshoots his fiction has inspired over the decades, a handful of simple facts remain. Today, H. P. Lovecraft is more popular than ever, and generations of new readers have discovered—and continue to discover—the fictional universe he created, and the philosophy of cosmicism he pioneered. Authors continue to draw inspiration from Lovecraft’s life and works, setting their own tales of cosmic horror, pitting scholars, dreamers, and occult investigators against terrifying cosmic indifference and the machinations of the Great Old Ones in Lovecraftian venues such as Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth.
Part of the continuing appeal of Lovecraft’s universe of cosmic terror is that HPL, unlike fantasists such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, actively encouraged writers he admired or mentored to play in his creation. By doing this, HPL inadvertently created an open source fantastic universe unlike any other, ultimately grounded in the modern world, but enriched by secret histories and weird cults, and populated by ghouls, night-gaunts, and Elder Things. And while some focus only on the outlying horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, it is Lovecraft’s overarching sense of connectedness, bridging Randolph Carter’s Dunsanian oneiric journey to Kadath and beyond with the still-shocking schlock of “Herbert West—Reanimator.” It all integrates.
But it takes more than a few unpronounceable names, moldy tomes, and tentacles to successfully write a story in the Lovecraftian mode. To succeed, an author must not only internalize Lovecraft’s materialistic meme, but must innovate, rather than imitate, recasting Grandpa Theobald’s broad creation, unmooring it from the social mores of Lovecraft’s time and truly making it their own. The tales collected in this volume—and the previous—do just that.
But now, the stars grow right, and the sleeper stirs. Welcome, readers to The Book of Cthulhu II. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!
Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar
Neil Gaiman
Benjamin Lassiter was coming to the unavoidable conclusion that the woman who had written A Walking Tour of the British Coastline, the book he was carrying in his backpack, had never been on a walking tour of any kind, and would probably not recognise the British coastline if it were to dance through her bedroom at the head of a marching band, singing “I’m the British Coastline” in a loud and cheerful voice while accompanying itself on the kazoo.
He had been following her advice for five days now and had little to show for it, except blisters and a backache. All British seaside resorts contain a number of bed-and-breakfast establishments, who will be only too delighted to put you up in the “off-season” was one such piece of advice. Ben had crossed it out and written in the margin beside it: All British seaside resorts contain a handful of bed-and-breakfast establishments, the owners of which take off to Spain or Provence or somewhere on the last day of September, locking the doors behind them as they go.
He had added a number of other marginal notes, too. Such as Do not repeat not under any circumstances order fried eggs again in any roadside cafe and What is it with the fish-and-chips thing? and No they are not. That last was written beside a paragraph which claimed that, if there was one thing that the inhabitants of scenic villages on the British coastline were pleased to see, it was a young American tourist on a walking tour.
For five hellish days, Ben had walked from village to village, had drunk sweet tea and instant coffee in cafeterias and cafes and stared out at grey rocky vistas and at the slate-coloured sea, shivered under his two thick sweaters, got wet, and failed to see any of the sights that were promised.
Sitting in the bus shelter in which he had unrolled his sleeping bag one night, he had begun to translate key descriptive words: charming he decided, meant nondescript; scenic meant ugly but with a nice view if the rain ever lets up; delightful probably meant We’ve never been here and don’t know anyone who has. He had also come to the conclusion that the more exotic the name of the village, the duller the village.
Thus it was that Ben Lassiter came, on the fifth day, somewhere north of Bootle, to the village of Innsmouth, which was rated neither charming, scenic nor delightful in his guidebook. There were no descriptions of the rusting pier, nor the mounds of rotting lobster pots upon the pebbly beach.