The Book of Cthulhu
Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft
edited by
Ross E. Lockhart
Night Shade Books
San Francisco
The Book of Cthulhu © 2011 by Ross E. Lockhart
This edition of The Book of Cthulhu
© 2011 by Night Shade Books
Cover illustration © 2011 by Obrotowy
Cover design 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 527–529
First Edition
Printed in Canada
ISBN: 978-1-59780-232-1
eISBN: 978-1-59780-355-7
Night Shade Books
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For Jennifer, my island of sanity
amid the black seas of infinity
Introduction
In 1928, a young man, Conan creator Robert E. Howard, wrote a fan letter to Weird Tales magazine praising H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” which had recently appeared in the magazine’s pages. Howard described the story as “a masterpiece,” which he was “sure will live as one of the highest achievements in literature.”
Since then, countless young men and women have discovered the Cthulhu Mythos cycle, and have come to the same conclusion. These stories, interlinked tales of tentacles, madness, and terror created by Lovecraft, but expanded upon by his contemporaries and correspondents—the so-called “Lovecraft Circle”—are more than just simple supernatural tales, they are literature, of the highest order, with complex themes (sanity’s fragility, existential angst, questionable parentage, fate, decadence, detachment, and deterioration, to name a few), precise writing style, intricate, layered storytelling… and monsters. Some of the best known monsters in modern fiction.
Lovecraft’s impeccable storytelling—often filtered through his collaborators and “disciples”—has inspired many to pen their own Mythos tales, and the Cthulhu Mythos story cycle has taken on a convoluted, cyclopean life of its own, as further posthumous collaborations continue to expand the scope, scale, and ultimate interpretation of what is perhaps the most diverse shared fictional universe ever created.
Today, the Cthulhu Mythos cycle includes tales by some of the most prodigious writers of the twentieth century… and so far, some of the most astounding writers of the twenty-first century as well. Mythos fiction has become one of the major cultural memes of our era—everybody knows what Cthulhu looks like, even if they haven’t read Lovecraft. And it would seem that Cthulhu and his minions are everywhere, not just books and short fiction (especially online short fiction), but represented in music, toys, audio dramas, feature films, comics, and games (video and otherwise).
My personal discovery of the Cthulhu Mythos came in 1980, maybe early 1981. I received the Dungeons and Dragons cyclopedia, Deities and Demigods, which included a section—excised from later printings—detailing the Cthulhu Mythos pantheon. Erol Otus’s intricate pen-and-ink renditions of the strange alien beings of the Lovecraftian pantheon—particularly the shambling shoggoth, mysterious Mi-Go, and elegant member of the Great Race—astounded me, inspiring me to seek out the fictions on which such strange images were based. I asked around, and a friend pressed a book into my hands, telling me I had to read T. E. D. Klein’s “Black Man with a Horn.” The story scared the hell out of me, but I devoured it, and wanted more.
“Black Man with a Horn” introduced me to the larger world of Mythos fiction, driving me to spend the next thirty years delving into and exploring the Mythos cycle in all its permutations, leading me to read authors like David Drake, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and, yes, even H. P. Lovecraft. It was also my introduction to John Coltrane. So it is my honor and privilege to include not just that story, but twenty-six other tales of Lovecraftian fantasy and horror—by many of the greatest names in Mythos fiction—in The Book of Cthulhu. A hand-picked selection representing the best post-Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos literature, all in one place. Could this mean that the stars are finally right? Are we on the cusp of a Lovecraftian renaissance, or is dread R’Lyeh about to rise out of the Pacific Ocean?
Welcome, readers, to The Book of Cthulhu. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
∇
Andromeda Among the Stones
Caitlin R. Kiernan
I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering…
—H. P. Lovecraft
October 1914
“Is she really and truly dead, Father?” the girl asked, and Machen Dandridge, already an old man at fifty-one, looked up at the low buttermilk sky again and closed the black book clutched in his hands. He’d carved the tall headstone himself, the marker for his wife’s grave there by the relentless Pacific, black shale obelisk with its hasty death’s-head. His daughter stepped gingerly around the raw earth and pressed her fingers against the monument.
“Why did you not give her to the sea?” she asked. “She always wanted to go down to the sea at the end. She often told me so.”
“I’ve given her back to the earth, instead,” Machen told her and rubbed at his eyes. The cold sunlight through thin clouds was enough to make his head ache, his daughter’s voice like thunder, and he shut his aching eyes for a moment. Just a little comfort in the almost blackness trapped behind his lids, parchment skin too insubstantial to bring the balm of genuine darkness, void to match the shades of his soul, and Machen whispered one of the prayers from the heavy black book and then looked at the grave again.
“Well, that’s what she always told me,” the girl said again, running her fingertips across the rough-hewn stone.
“Things changed at the end, child. The sea wouldn’t have taken her. I had to give her back to the earth.”
“She said it was a sacrilege, planting people in the ground like wheat, like kernels of corn.”
“She did?” He glanced anxiously over his left shoulder, looking back across the waves the wind was making in the high and yellow-brown grass, the narrow trail leading back down to the tall and brooding house that he’d built for his wife twenty-four years ago, back towards the cliffs and the place where the sea and sky blurred seamlessly together.
“Yes, she did. She said only barbarians and heathens stick their dead in the ground like turnips.”
“I had no choice,” Machen replied, wondering if that was exactly the truth or only something he’d like to believe. “The sea wouldn’t take her, and I couldn’t bring myself to burn her.”
“Only heathens burn their dead,” his daughter said disapprovingly and leaned close to the obelisk, setting her ear against the charcoal shale.
“Do you hear anything?”
“No, Father. Of course not. She’s dead. You just said so.”