[Abe Sargent]

Okay, let's begin with a discussion of Lovecraft and the Mythos. Why should you care? Why is this stuff important? (Other than being good, of course)


HP Lovecraft was a pulp writer in the late teens, twenties through the mid thirties before he died. His early stories are written in a very Poe vein and his middle stories are written in a very Dunsany vein. It isn't until the above story, The Call of Cthulhu, that he finds his own voice. He'll only be writing short stories under his own voice for about 10 years before he dies.

Oh what ten years they are

Lovecraft is not a major writer of the time. He's not even a major pulp writer. Lovecraft was a minor pulp writer who was good enough to keep getting published and have respect and a living but not nearly enough to really skyrocket. His works were so visionary and different that manyr eaders simpyl did not like them At a time when people were turning to the pulps for cowboy stories dressed up as sci-fi stories, with simple plots, big breasts, and fights, Lovecraft wrote real literature.

It wasn't until years after his death that his writings generally became seen for the genius that they are. (There were visionaries. After publishing The Call of Cthulhu, Robert Howard wrote Weird Tales and said that this story would go down as one of the best weird short stories of all time. He was right.)

There were three major writers for Weird Tales. Clark Ashton Smith was the most prolific, Robert Howard the most popular, and Lovecraft, the most skilled. These three were great friends and exchanged letters and story ideas.

Lovecraft began using similar elements in his stories from one to the next. He would borrow a place, character, book or being from one of his previous stories in order to more fully flesh out his current story. This is the beginning of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Of course, this was just one writer sharing ideas among stories. That's nothing particularly unusual. What chanegd was the other half of Lovecraft's works.

Lovecraft is one of the most noted epistolareans of our age. He wrote letters that were pages long to correspondants, and he loved writers. He would write letter after letter to writers, asking them about their stories, complementing their style or a clever turn of phrase, and talkign with them about various ideas, stories, and so forth.

Lovecraft would counsel young writers like August Derleth and Robert Bloch while co-writing stories with tons of young writers, like Zeala Bishop and Adolphe DeCastro. This combination of writing with young writers while also counseling others and working with established writers created a cadre of writers that communicated back and forth.

Most people believe that it was Clark Ashton Smith who began the Mythos by adding an element to one of his stories. In one of his fantasy stories set in an old Earth, CAS wrote Kultulten as an evil deity. Someone wrote in and asked if this was an old form of Cthulhu. He hadn;t mean it to be so, be after considering it, he liked the idea, and responded that it was, in fact, Cthulhu.

That was the beginning.

Robert Howard grabbed the Necronomicon for one of his stories and Lovecraft responded by taking Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten and adding it to his own stories. Lovecraft grabbed the evil deity Tsathoggua from Clark Ashton Smith's writings and added it to his writings.

This give and take continued and increased with more authors and more material until Lovecraft died in early 1937. When he died, one of his proteges, August Derleth, really took over Lovecraft's works.

Derleth founded Arkham House Publishing and began compiling Lovecraft's works and publihsing them. He kept Lovecraft alive again and again through printing after printing, and Arkham House still owns the rights to Lovecraft to this day.

Derleth also wrote heavily in the Mythos. He coined the term, "The Cthulhu Mythos," and then wrote and inspired others to keep writing their horror stories in the Mythos. Derleth would also "co-write" books with Lovecraft by turning Lovecraft's outlines or short stories into novels.

The problem with Derleth, and this is why he is usually universally scorned by Lovecraft fans, is that he is not nearly the writer Lovecraft was. Where Lovecraft would spook you with mystery, mood and the unknown, Derleth would gleefully pull back the curtain. Whether or nor Lovecraft had envisioned his universe to be as Derleth painted it, one has to admit that Lovecraaft at least never revealed it, like a clever showman.

Lovecraft was a masterful magician and Derleth was the sufficient magician who made his living showing you how magicians did things.

Derleth also changed Lovecraft's visions significantly and in ways which we will likely get into later (I don't want to burden new readers with the language of the Mythos until later).

There were tons of writers that wrote short stories that incorporated one or more elements of this growing myth-cycle. In fact, writing a short story or three in the Cthulhu mileau is common for major writers. In my seven or eight Mythos antholgies, I have short stories in the Mythos by:

Neil Gaiman
Stephen King
Phillip Jose Farmer
Harlan Ellison
Robert Howard
Robert Bloch
Roger Zelazny
Brain Lumley
Ramsey Campbell
Lin Carter
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Fritz Leiber

and much more. In fact, I've read novels or works by all of these writers in other areas (King his novels, Leiber the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, Robert Howard's Conan, and so forth).

Many writers great and small have spun tales using one or mroe Mythos elements, and therefore, this world in unlike other shared worlds that are controlled by a company. This is all, for the most part, public domain. I could point you to websites that still accept public submissions from writers like me and you that are Mythos and will publish them if they are good enough.

It's a great area to read and explore, and therefore, I hope you at least read the reviews and such, even if you choose not to read the stories.