Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by C H Thompson, R Campbell & T Ligotti selected by S T Joshi for 2017's The Red Brain

If you have been following my blogging career closely, you know I purchased from Dark Regions Press an electronic copy of 2017's The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S. T. Joshi, in an effort to secure the best possible text of Donald Wandrei's 1927 story, "The Red Brain."  Today I will be taking advantage of this $7.00 investment and reading three more stories selected by Joshi, one each by people I have a little familiarity with, Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, and one by C. Hall Thompson, about whom I have to say I know almost nothing.

"The Will of Claude Ashur" by C. Hall Thompson (1947)

S. T. Joshi is an opinionated guy, and he never seems to pass up an opportunity to slag August Derleth.  In his intro to this anthology, Joshi says that C. Hall Thompson wrote better Mythos stories than did Derleth himself, and laments that Derleth, ostensibly in an effort to protect Lovecraft's reputation, discouraged Thompson from writing more.  (Thompson only has four stories listed at isfdb.)  "The Will of Claude Ashur" first appeared in Weird Tales.

Like so many Lovecraftian stories, this one is the first-person narrative of a dude in an insane asylum.  Our narrator, Richard Ashur, grew up in a big old house known as the Priory in the greatest state in the Union, New Jersey, at the seaside hamlet of Inneswich.  The Priory was the site of a lynching in the late 18th century, when the pastor living there and his wife, a woman he brought back from Hungary who was reputed to be a witch, were killed by the local villagers, she burned, he hanged.  The narrator's father purchased the Priory like a century later; when the narrator was a little kid the room in which the murders took place was padlocked, entrance forbidden.

Richard's loving mother died giving birth to his little brother, Claude, an ugly little weirdo whom everybody, from servants and tutors to animals, instinctively hates and fears.  That is, except for Dad, who dotes on the unhealthy little freak, indulging Claude's every whim--little Claude is practically the dictator of the Priory!  Claude loves to be alone, and unseals the murder room and makes of it his private sanctuary; the door remains forever locked to others, the key never out of his possession.

In the narrator's early twenties his pet dog, which Claude found annoying, mysteriously dies, and Richard, certain Claude is responsible, picks the lock of the murder room and finds shocking evidence that Claude killed the dog via sorcery.  The next day the narrator leaves home to attend classes at Princeton (what, Rutgers isn't good enough for you?)   

Richard doesn't see Claude for four years, but right after he graduates he meets his sinister brother briefly; Claude is about to start his own college career...at Miskatonic University!  There he studies The Necronomicon and other repositories of forbidden lore.  After only two years at MU, Claude wants to drop out to travel to the Far East, but Dad won't give Claude the money to do so.  Dad keels over soon after, and again Richard discovers evidence that Claude has killed one of Richard's loved ones via sorcery!

With his inheritance Claude goes on his trip to the mysterious East and other black magic hot spots, and Richard doesn't see him for like eight years; the one time he hears of his brother, it is a rumor that Claude is in the West Indies, in the jungle among the blacks, learning voodoo!  When Claude finally returns to the Priory he brings with him a gorgeous wife named Gratia, and Richard is immediately entranced by this beauty, and certain that she is somehow Claude's prisoner!

I was haunted by the feeling that, somehow, the subtle, cancerous evil that had followed Claude Ashur since birth was reaching out its vile, slime-coated tentacles to claim this girl, to destroy her as it had destroyed everything it ever touched. And, quite suddenly, I knew I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want anything to happen to Gratia. She was the loveliest woman I had ever known.      

Claude, with his indomitable will (mentioned in the title) and occult powers, becomes tyrant of the Priory once more!  He is so bold as to let Richard know that he is experimenting with methods of shifting his consciousness into Gratia's body--Claude tells Richard that Gratia is so good-looking that, with his brilliant mind installed in her body, he will be able to manipulate any man and maybe even take over the world!

Richard (and the world!) get a lucky break when Claude falls ill with a recurrence of a fever he caught in the tropics; this period of weakness gives Gratia and Richard a moment of freedom, and a struggle ensues that sees Richard's diabolical brother shut up in the loony bin.  But this is merely a temporary triumph for Richard--as we readers have been expecting since page 1, from the insane asylum Claude begins shifting his soul into Richard's body!  As the story ends Richard is in Claude's emaciated and disease-ridden body while Claude is in Richard's hardy frame, inflicting God knows what atrocities on Gratia and no doubt plotting other crimes against humanity!

Joshi is totally right to include this story in his book of "Great Tales" and regret there are not more stories from Thompson extant--this story is good.  I love the plot (I have a soft spot for these brain/soul shifting stories and stories about difficult family and sexual relationships), and the pacing and structure are solid, and Thompson's style--the words he uses, the images and emotions he describes, the way he puts together the sentences--is effective.  Thompson piles up all kinds of cool stuff (I particularly like the way Claude's sorcery involves his artistic abilities as a sculptor, painter and musician) but the narrative moves along at a smooth and easy pace; Thompson's writing is economical, with little fat or filler, every paragraph adding to the tone or atmosphere or plot.

The obvious criticism of "The Will of Claude Ashur," of course, is that it is like a remix or reboot of (Joshi uses the phrase "riff on") Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep."  This doesn't bother me, but the tale is undeniably a derivative and unoriginal homage; Thompson even uses place names that are nods to the titles of Lovecraft stories (besides Inneswich, there is the location of Claude's lodgings while a student at Miskatonic U, Pickham Square.)

A fun story for us fans of the weird.

"The Pattern" by Ramsey Campbell (1976)   

Joshi is crazy about Ramsey Campbell, whom he says in the intro to this volume is "perhaps the most distinguished writer of weird fiction in literary history."  I have found Campbell underwhelming, myself; apparently in an effort to distinguish himself from mere pulp fiction and produce literary stories, he always seems to include in his work a profusion of details, metaphors, and cultural references both direct and indirect, but I often find all that extra clutter to be an obstruction rather than an adornment, an encrustation of barnacles that slows the story down.

Tony is a painter married to Di, a writer of children's books.  Di makes more money than does Tony, which causes some stress in their relationship (Campbell uses the phrase "inevitable castration anxiety"--here is a glimpse of the pre-woke world for all you kids out there!)  Di has been writing a book about the odyssey of dryads who have left their forest because it was burned down by a cigarette-smoking human; she partly chose this topic because it would be a perfect subject for illustrations by Tony, who paints landscapes of trees and flowers and grassy swards and the rest of it, and thus provide a chance for him to increase his exposure and thus income.

(I couldn't tell how we were supposed to feel about Tony and Di's book, which bears the title The Song of the Trees.  Are we to admire their commitment to the English countryside, or snicker at them for being vapid hippies, or shake our heads at their crass commercialism?)

These two rent a cottage in the Cotswalds next to a grassy field full of flowers to finish this book together.  (Writers are always going to some place in the country to finish their work...my wife even went to a place in the country to finish her dissertation.)  Campbell describes the landscape as seen through Tony's eyes at length:

...the sluggish sky parted. Sunlight spilled over an edge of cloud. At once the greens that had merged into green emerged again, separating: a dozen greens, two dozen. Dots of flowers brightened over the field...

As I suggested before, Campbell always seems to have these sorts of long descriptions of buildings and streets and landscapes in his stories, trying hard to show a character's personality by letting us in on how the character sees the world.  This is easy for me to admire in a theoretical way, but I rarely find it amusing or interesting or affecting.  To me, the melodramatic quote from Thompson's story above, an in-your-face effusion about evil and fear and beauty, is much more moving and entertaining.  Maybe I have a simple mind.

Anyway, Tony and Di are distracted by the weather and so forth and don't make much progress on The Song of the Trees.  They periodically hear a scream in the distance, and Tony often feels like he is being watched.  Di suddenly figures out how to finish The Song of the Trees--the dryads will come to rest in a cottage just like this one!  Tony goes into town to research those screams, reading a book of local lore and talking to a local journalist, learning that people have been hearing those screams for decades or centuries, and that murders and deadly accidents have taken place near the cottage throughout history. Something the reporter says suggests that Di is in danger, and Tony rushes back to the cottage where he finds Di, torn to pieces by a murderer, and realizes that he is about to suffer a similar fate--the scream he and people throughout the ages have been hearing is his own scream, echoing backwards from the future, and the future is now!

This story is OK, I guess, even if all the descriptions of the colors of trees and buildings and so on feel like padding and the gore descriptions at the end feel exploitative.  Joshi seems to think the idea of an emotionally laden scream echoing backwards in time so it can be heard before it has been voiced, and that the psychic trauma of an atrocity can similarly ripple back in time to cause earlier tragedies and crimes, is Lovecraftian, but I don't get it.  (And I guess I don't really get Ramsey Campbell, either.)

"The Pattern" was first published in the collection Superhorror, and also appeared in the anthology My Favorite Horror Story, it being Poppy Z. Brite's favorite.

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Here's a convenient list of every Ramsey Campbell story I have blogged about, complete with handy links and TL;DR synopses of my assessments.  (MPorcius Fiction Log is "recursive.")

"The Sunshine Club": A joke story.
"Getting it Wrong": Too long, lots of movie references.
"The Plain of Sound": OK.
"The Stone on the Island": I liked it.
"To Wake the Dead": I praised this one's style and atmosphere and gave it a thumbs up.
"Napier Court": I found this vague and confusing, but not bad, and employed Marxist, Freudian and feminist analytical strategies to try to sift through all the details and discover the story's meaning.
"The Old Horns": I found this, I guess an attack on paganism and sexual license, vague and confusing and also bad.
"The Church in High Street": Mild recommendation.
"Raised by the Moon": Plot is OK, but excessive descriptions and verbosity make it a slog.
"The Callers": I thought this tale about men's fears of women and the young's disgust at the old achieved Campbell's goals.
"Above the World": A long piece full of mundane details about a guy on a hike and how difficult it is for people to communicate.
"The Companion": I gave this long and slow story about a guy investigating an old theme park a thumbs down.
"Needing Ghosts": I gave this long and slow story about a failed writer investigating a town full of surreal visions a thumbs down.

"The Sect of the Idiot" by Thomas Ligotti (1988)

I may suspect that Ramsey Campbell is overrated, but I think the critical gushing over Thomas Ligotti (check out Lin Carter's extravagant praise of Ligotti in the December 1987 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu) is entirely justified.  Like Carter (who is one of those guys like Derleth who did heroic work promoting speculative fiction on the publishing and editorial side but whose actual fiction is generally considered mediocre) I thought "Vastarien" a masterpiece.  "The Last Feast of Harlequin" I praised as a perfectly crafted Lovecraft pastiche, and I also quite liked "The Greater Festival of Masks."  So I am totally looking forward to "The Sect of the Idiot," which first appeared in a 1988 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu.

"The Sect of the Idiot" does not disappoint.  I called  Thompson's "The Will of Claude Ashur" an economical Lovecraftian tale, but Ligotti here goes much further, boiling down Yog-Sothery to its essential elements, leaving a powerful tale that feels brief because of its purity, its presentation of Lovecraftian themes and images without any fripperies or embellishments, a producing pure concentrate of weirdness, every sentence potent!

A nameless man moves to a nameless town, a place to which he has long been drawn, his arrival the culmination of long-held hopes and dreams.  He takes a high room that looks down on a city of densely packed buildings whose roofs converge to render the many narrow twisting streets into dim corridors, a town which is characterized by its great age and its ability to inspire both claustrophobia and a sense of oppressively limitless space.  The narrator's fascination for this queer town through which he takes long walks, admiring the ancient architecture, reminds us of Lovecraft's own long walks in Providence and other cities, and the architectural walks of Lovecraft characters, like the guy in "Shadow Over Innsmouth."

In a dream the narrator sees a room like his own but placed still higher, one full of alien beings shrouded in obscuring cloaks, their alienness undeniable but its exact nature impossible to pin down.  He senses these creatures are somehow manipulating him and the world, but are themselves puppets of still more mysterious and irresistible forces.  Again, as in "Shadow Over Innsmouth," by the end of the story the narrator has every reason to doubt his own humanity, and believe he is turning into, or always was, one of these monsters.

Very good.  "The Sect of the Idiot" is a flawless gem of a Lovecraftian story that achieves maximal Yog-Sothery without aping or lampooning Lovecraft's own work, never resorting to little jokes (it takes Lovecraft's themes seriously, which I like) or throwing direct references to Miskatonic U or The Necromicon at you.  Highly recommended.

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The Thompson and the Ligotti are very enjoyable examples of Lovecraftian fiction; I will be reading more of their work in the future.