The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos by S.T. Joshi. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2008.

One of the most remarkable things about this new volume about the curious

literary sub-genre of the Cthulhu Mythos is that no-one until now has ventured such a

detailed critical study. Lin Carter’s Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos

(1972) combined a rudimentary account of Lovecraft’s life and work with an attempt

(equally rudimentary) to examine some of the better known tales of the “Lovecraft

Circle” – such writers as Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long and Donald Wandrei.

But Lovecraft scholarship has made enormous strides in the last 30-plus years, much

of it due to the untiring efforts of S.T. Joshi himself.

It is fitting, then, that the modern master of Lovecraft biography and criticism

has now turned his attention to the phenomenon of what his introduction aptly refers

to as the “so-called Cthulhu Mythos.” – the dissemination of Lovecraft’s concepts

into popular writing and culture, a limitless stream of stories, anthologies and novels

that seem to surge forth inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque,

malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare.

Joshi divides his highly opinionated (and justifiably so) study into nine

chapters. The first three deal with the “Lovecraft Mythos” – an already well-defined

term in Lovecraft studies which applies to the works of the (frankly inimitable)

Providence writer himself, and his invented pseudomythology of gods, books and

sites which, to a greater or lesser degree, crop up across the whole of his oeuvre. The

next two chapters cover “Contemporaries” (that is, contemporaries of Lovecraft):

Long, Bloch, Wandrei, as well as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August

Derleth, and Henry Kuttner and Fritz Lieber. There follows a chapter on “The Derleth

Mythos” which critically examines Derleth’s fatally flawed conception of the

Lovecraft Mythos, and a chapter titled “Interregnum” which interrogates works by

writers such as Colin Wilson and Ramsey Campbell which preceded Lin Carter’s

study. The final two chapters, “The Scholarly Revolution” and “Recrudescence”, deal

in short compass but with remarkable insight with the thirty-odd years of Cthulhu

Mythos fiction which have appeared since the early 1970s, taking us up to 2008 with

commentary on Mythos works of writers such as Richard L. Tierney, Thomas Ligotti,

Joseph S. Pulver, Brian Lumley, Wilum Pugmire, Donald Tyson and others.

In his introduction, Joshi makes no bones about his expectation that written

work which attempts to continue Lovecraft’s legacy should be possessed of “intrinsic

literary merits,” making clear that his study will seek to distinguish between “the

scope of Lovecraft’s achievement” and “what others have written in imitation of or

homage to him” (12). Joshi remarks the tendency for literary neophytes to produce

work of vastly variable quality which often amount to no more than a “tepid rewriting

of Lovecraft’s own stories” (13), stories which usually lack the cosmic perspective so

central to Lovecraft’s own views.

In Joshi’s terminology, the “Lovecraft Mythos” is the work produced by

Lovecraft himself, with the “Cthulhu Mythos” being an umbrella term for the

Lovecraft-inspired work of his contemporaries and successors. Joshi here, as ever,

asserts the importance of studying Lovecraft’s work as a philosophical and aesthetic

unity, and the Lovecraft Mythos is therefore seen as a mythic framework in which

Lovecraft strove to convey serious philosophical (as well as political, cultural and

other) issues. Joshi does not resile from criticising Lovecraft where particular stories,

such as “the Dunwich Horror,” apparently fail to meet Lovecraft’s own criteria

regarding mankind’s insignificance in the cosmos at large.

Defining the key elements of the Lovecraft Mythos as fivefold (a fictional

New England topography; a growing library of imaginary “forbidden” books; a

diverse array of extraterrestrial “gods” or entities; a sense of cosmicism; and the usage

of the scholarly narrator or protagonist), Joshi manages to make sense of the basic

ingredients of Lovecraft’s interconnected works, while allowing that there will always

be problems of defining which particular stories are “part” of the Mythos.

In the chapters dealing with Lovecraft’s own work, many perspicacious

comments highlight aspects of tales which many of us have read, and read about,

many times over; one of the delights of Joshi’s criticism is that he continually re-

evaluates the tales in the light of all current scholarly knowledge. Nor does he always

assent to popular interpretations of them, making novel suggestions such as that the

monster seen by the narrator of “Dagon” is “ not the object of worship, but one of the

worshippers.” The volume is valuable for Joshi’s accumulated new insights into

Lovecraft’s work alone, and his assessment along the way of various opinions

expressed by other Lovecraft scholars ranging from, inter alia, Will Murray through

David E. Schultz to Robert M. Price.

But of course the bulk of the study is given over to elaborations of the Mythos

by other hands. While of necessity many story plots must be recounted, the joy of

Joshi’s retellings is his contextualisation of them, as he discusses how a given author

developed their contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, and the critical appraisal of the

literary merits (or otherwise) of each tale. The discussions of the stories of Long,

Bloch, Lieber and Kuttner are particularly enjoyable, as Joshi interweaves his

unparalleled knowledge of publishing minutiae and timelines, the derivation of terms

and entities, and the relation of information from Lovecraft’s letters, to the literary

cross-fertilisation that went on between HPL and his fellow Weird Tales writers.

If one cannot always agree with Joshi’s assessments of individual tales by

particular writers (I, for one, find Ramsey Campbell’s Mythos tales such as “The

Voice of the Beach” convincingly and effectively Lovecraftian), he is generally very

even-handed. Even in the important chapter “The Derleth Mythos”, which at first

reading provides a scathing assessment of Derleth’s misconstruals of Lovecraft’s

fictional aims, reducing Derleth’s so-called ‘posthumous collaborations’ with

Lovecraft to little more than conscious or semi-conscious plagiarisms of Lovecraft’s

work, a second reading shows that Joshi has expressed himself far less contentiously

than he might have. While Derleth partisans may well dislike and be tempted to take

issue with this section of the study, one can hardly argue with the bald facts of the

case as set out here by Joshi, leading to the conclusion that Derleth (whatever credit

one might give him for preserving Lovecraft’s work in hardcover) “seriously

disfigured the cosmic awe of the Lovecraft Mythos and replaced it with his own

fraudulent and aesthetically unimaginative knockoff.” (287).

The book provides the odd laugh, as when the author caustically opines that

Colin Wilson has now become “an intellectual buffoon” (220); and of Brian Lumley,

that “one can only hope that this talentless hack will permanently abandon his

unwitting parodies of Lovecraft’s themes and conceptions” (233). Hugh B. Cave was

a “cheap pulp hack” (172); a story by Manly Wade Wellman “deserves nothing but

oblivion” (173) and Peter Straub’s Mr X is “tiresome, long-winded and staggeringly

verbose”(280). The amusing way in which Joshi reveals the shortcomings of Mythos

works by authors such as Graham Masterton, Michael Shea, and Jeffrey Thomas is

most entertaining, even if it is somewhat painful to read the drubbing given to Richard

L. Tierney’s The House of the Toad, which Joshi dismisses as “a dismal failure”(275).

Praise is dealt out to Mythos authors whose work deserves it – Karl Edward Wagner,

Stanley Sargent, W.H. Pugmire, Fred Chappell, William Browning Spencer and some

others.

Adorned in superb jacket art by Jason C. Eckhardt which evokes the mystery

and awe of Lovecraftian settings, the volume is attractively presented, though there

are a few typos, for instance on the spine of the jacket where part of the title is

inverted. The worst internal typo comes on p. 32, where in a quotation from

Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City,” two errors occur within the same brief quote –

“mutted” for “muttered”, and “changing” for “chanting” – just the sort of textual

errors against which Joshi has crusaded throughout his Lovecraftian editing career.

Unfortunately, the note citations for Ch 8 are missing (299), and the lack of an index

is particularly regrettable for a work of this kind. Perhaps these matters can be

rectified with a reprint.

These proofreading faults notwithstanding, The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu

Mythos provides a rewarding, enjoyable and cogent analysis of a literary phenomenon

of modern literature. Notwithstanding comments in his Epilogue, Joshi makes it plain

that there are two versions of the Mythos – Lovecraft himself stands unmatched at the

beginning (the “Rise”) and the rest of the Mythos, while not merely unrelieved dross

(the “Fall”) is considerably wanting in its evocation of themes which Lovecraft

proposed in his own fiction. Joshi concludes: “It is safe to say, then, that Lovecraftian

and Cthulhu Mythos themes have, amidst a plethora of unimaginative and derivative

hackwork, seen a number of capable treatments in recent decades, and there is no

reason to believe that the trend will not continue into the future.” (286).

This entertaining and important study ought to find a place not only on the

shelves of every serious reader of Lovecraft, but in the humanities and specialist

fantasy collections of university libraries.

- Leigh Blackmore