Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by C A Smith, A Derleth & J V Shea

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we read Henry Kuttner's "The Salem Horror," a solid Lovecraftian witch story.  In 1969, over thirty years after it debuted in Weird Tales, August Derleth included "The Salem Horror" in his anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.  In the 1970s, Ballantine Books reprinted the long anthology in two paperback volumes; "The Salem Horror" was included in the first volume.  There is a scan of this first volume at the internet archive; let's surf on over there and read from it a few more stories Derleth saw fit to reprint in his 1969 book.

(But first, we note that Ballantine's Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Volume 1 reprints several stories I have already blogged about: Clark Ashton-Smith's "Ubbo-Sathla," Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone," and Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos" and "The Space-Eaters.")

"The Return of the Sorcerer" by Clark Ashton Smith (1931)

"The Return of the Sorcerer" made its debut in an issue of Strange Tales with a fun snakeman cover.  I may groan whenever I encounter yet another a cat person in SF, but I am thrilled every time a snake person slithers into view.  (For example, I adore Chris Achilleos' cover for the 1985 Fighting Fantasy Gamebook Temple of Terror.)

There's no serpent person in "The Return of the Sorcerer," but it is still a good story I can recommend without reservation.  Our narrator is an impecunious scholar who is relieved when he gets a job for which he is qualified by his knowledge of Arabic.  The position is as live-in assistant to some old weirdo with an old house full of goofy stuff like a stuffed crocodile and an ape's skeleton, as well as all manner of chemical apparatus--our hero finds it all sort of disturbing, but he needs money, and I guess most of us know what that's like, so shouldn't be surprised he takes the job anyway.

The narrator's job primarily consists of translating passages from the Necronomicon; his employer's Arabic isn't so hot, so this old coot has been using a Latin translation, but that edition lacks passages of significance to this guy, sections about how a wizard might raise himself from the dead--no matter his condition--to accomplish a deeply-desired goal, and methods available to rival wizards to forestall such necromancy.  In short order it comes out that the narrator's employer had a twin brother, both men were sorcerers, and the hero's new boss murdered his twin and has every reason to expect that his victim mangled body is going to reassemble itself and seek vengeance.  

Less poetic than a lot of Smith's work, this is a quite good straightforward horror story about evil magic and the living dead.  A classic, "The Return of the Sorcerer" has been reprinted innumerable times in many Smith collections and various anthologies.

"The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth (1944)

We weren't happy with the story by Derleth we read for our last blog post, but we haven't given up on the chronicler of Sac Prairie and co-founder of Arkham House.  In fact, today he has two opportunities to impress us!  The first is this 1944 story, "The Dweller in Darkness," which debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that also includes Ray Bradbury's "The Jar" and a story by Hannes Bok illustrated by the author himself.  Besides appearing in the many editions of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Robert M. Price included "The Dweller in Darkness" in his 1997 anthology of stories about Nyarlathotep.

"The Dweller in Darkness" in its form is a sort of standard issue Lovecraftian story set in Derleth's native Wisconsin.  The narrator rehearses old stories and legends about a forest said to have "an aura of evil," describing such historical incidents as a missionary disappearing in the forest centuries ago and loggers being mysteriously murdered there a few decades ago and producing newspaper stories and personal correspondence as evidence of these and additional more recent weird phenomena.  Then the narrator relates the tale of how he and another college professor headed up to this haunted forest to investigate the disappearance of one of their colleagues, a folklorist who went there pursuing his research.  As if three college professors wasn't enough for one story, there is a long interlude in which the two adventurers take a break from the woods to go consult a fourth academic.   

Derleth not only apes Lovecraft's plots, but also expends way too many column inches referring directly to Lovecraft stories.  He namechecks not only many of Lovecraft's deities but also his fictional locales,  Innsmouth, Dunwich, Leng, Kadath, etc.  Maybe readers in 1944 enjoyed this sort of fan service, seeing it as an inside joke or a secret handshake or something, but I found it kind of tedious.  Even more silly is how Lovecraft and Arkham House exist within the story, and the main characters not only contact Miskatonic U. to have photostats of The Necronomicon sent to them, but reach out to Arkham House and buy a copy of The Outsider and Others, which was published five years before "The Dweller in Darkness" appeared in WT; I suppose its mention in the story amounts to clever (or obtrusive) promotion of the never-quite-profitable Arkham House enterprise of which Derleth was the head.

Where Derleth departs from the model of Lovecraft is in trying to marry subversive Lovecraftian pessimism and materialism with more conventional mainstream religious (there is good and evil and they are at war and good can triumph) and liberal scientific (we can figure out the universe and use that knowledge to improve our lives) thinking.  The narrator and his comrade set out for the abandoned lodge on the lake on the edge of the haunted forest with the conviction that 

we were going like two dwarfed Davids to face an adversary greater than any Goliath, an adversary invisible and unknown, who bore no name and was shrouded on legend and fear, a dweller not only of the darkness of the wood but in that greater darkness which the mind of man has sought to explore since his dawn.

The characters in the story devote a lot of time to working on a taxonomy of the various Lovecraftian deities, trying to figure out which of the four elements--earth, air, fire and water--Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep and the rest of the crew are each associated with.  These sorts of efforts to categorize phenomena, to put everything in the universe into a box, are a hallmark of modern rational thinking, but I'm doubtful it matches the atmosphere and themes of much of Lovecraft's body of work, which suggests the universe is an inexplicable chaos.

The strongest part of Derleth's "The Dweller in Darkness" is the eerie sonic phenomena our heroes encounter--a sound of wind when there is no wind, and mysterious alien music--and the scene in which the heroes finally see the faceless monster appear from outer space accompanied by its musical lackeys isn't bad.  I also like one of the few characters who isn't a college professor, a "half-breed" alcoholic, a "dark-skinned" and "ill-kempt" man with a "more or less primitive mind" who has already seen the alien entity that is responsible for the deaths and disappearances and seems to enjoy knowing something the academics don't: "from time to time [he] grinned or snickered as at some secret joke."  

Through application of firewater and threats our heroes get the half-Indian, half-white, boozehound to cough up some valuable info about the monster, and then they receive a desperate message from the missing folklorist--now a veteran space traveler seeing as he is now the captive pet of one of the malignant aliens--which provides them the method of summoning some friendlier alien beings who can neutralize the monster, who turns out to be Nyarlathotep.  Nyarlathotep himself arrives at the lodge, disguised as the lost folklorist, on a sort of recon mission and raid, assessing how much our heroes know about what is going on and stealing all their notes and evidence.  Nyarlathotep then sics his minions on the college profs, but the narrator's pal calls in the alien cavalry--fire beings--just in time to save their lives.

I'm judging "The Dweller in Darkness" acceptable, even though if I had been editing Weird Tales I would have cut the fourth college professor and the passages connecting the Mythos gods to the four elements and pruned by at least half the references to Lovecraft and his work--brief allusions are more effective than banging the drum again and again by listing HPL's whole catalog.  To make up the page count, if this was deemed necessary, I would have suggested Derleth expand the role and personality of the drunken half-Indian, who could have been a compelling villain or hero or victim whose motives and character are mysterious until a pivotal moment--is he a fervent worshipper of the aliens?  Their wretchedly put-upon or hypnotized slave?  Perhaps he's a bitter and resentful manipulator hoping to use the aliens to get revenge on the white man, or a heart sick and terrified soul desperately trying to keep interfering pale faces away from the area for fear they will inspire the monster's wrath?  Perhaps the text could develop a parallel between the man's unhealthy addiction to alcohol and his risky relationship to the aliens.

"Beyond the Threshold" by August Derleth (1941)

Like "The Dweller in Darkness," this story debuted in Weird Tales, was included by Derleth himself in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and was selected by Richard M. Price for a Chaosium anthology dedicated to a specific Lovecraftian deity, this time Ithaqua.  Also like "The Dweller in Darkness," it is set in the woods of Wisconsin; when Frank McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenburg were choosing stories for their 1985 anthology A Treasury of American Horror Stories, they chose "Beyond the Threshold" to represent the Badger State.

(Those of you stalking MPorcius Fiction Log will recall that in 2019 I attacked Barry Malzberg's Iowa story from A Treasury of American Horror Stories but in 2017 heaped praise on the Oklahoma story therein by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop.)  

As I read "Beyond the Threshold," it felt more and more like an alternate version of "The Dweller in Darkness," the same themes and concepts and even images being key to both stories, published three years apart.  Both indulge in the somewhat silly conceit that Lovecraft's work is nonfiction and both associate each of the Lovecraftian deities with one of the four elements, and both include mysterious alien flute music and both feature a sound of wind when there is no wind.  I think "Beyond the Threshold" is a notch better than the later story, being briefer and having better human drama--the relationships between the characters are more compelling and while in "The Dweller in Darkness" the human characters are sort of just spectators with weak motivations and undeveloped psychologies, in "Beyond the Threshold" there is a character who actively drives the narrative and who has a sort of exciting motivation.  This earlier story also has a more satisfyingly Lovecraftian downbeat ending.

The plot.  Our narrator is a librarian at good ol' Miskatonic U. and so is familiar with Lovecraft's work and with all those crazy old books like The Necronomicon.  The narrator is summoned to his grandfather's place in the woods of Wisconsin by his cousin, who lives with the narrator's grandpa.  Gramps is a former world traveler and a fearless adventurer, as have been several of the narrator's ancestors, including a great-uncle who was a seafarer who resided in Innsmouth!  Drawing on his own experiences in places like Leng and consultation of that great-uncle's papers, Gramps has figured out that his house in the Wisconsin woods includes a doorway and on the other side is one of the Lovecraftian alien monster gods--and Gramps wants to open this door and see what things are like on the other side!

In the climax Gramps summons this story's monster, Ithaqua the Wind Walker (I like Derleth's idea of the sound of wind with no wind and of the creepy music, but it is lame to use the idea for two different deities) and is sucked away into the secret doorway; in the denouement the narrator and his cuz are presented with the evidence that makes clear the horrible fate Grandpa suffered for his curiosity.

Besides the aforementioned anthologies, "Beyond the Threshold" would be included in a Swedish anthology, 5 Ruggiga Rysare, which I am mentioning because I like its cover.  Fans of Ithaqua should be aware that Brian Lumley had the cover story of an issue of F&SF with a story about the Wind Walker; I blogged about that story back in 2016.  

"The Haunter of the Graveyard" by J. Vernon Shea (1969)

I guess this story was original to Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.  Shea only has seven fiction credits at isfdb, but he seems to have been a very active speculative fiction fan, corresponding with Lovecraft, Derleth and Smith and producing a voluminous quantity of fanzines.  "The Haunter of the Graveyard" is well-written, with good images and atmosphere and a main character with personality, but its plot is a little slight and it is perhaps too "meta."

Elmer Harrod hosts a TV program that shows cheesy old horror movies; he dresses up in a variety of costumes and provides sarcastic commentary on the films as they run.  Harrod lives in a strange old Victorian house in a rundown part of town, next to a cemetery that is no longer maintained, it lacking space for any new burials and those buried within being so long dead almost nobody comes to visit their graves.  Sometimes children or young lovers or antiquarians come to explore the place, but it is so creepy they rarely return, and the cemetery is shunned by the birds and other small animals whom one would expect to infest its densely packed trees and high grasses.  Eccentric Harrod, however, enjoys taking walks in the graveyard and hanging around in there to read horror stories, finding the atmosphere of the place renders even mediocre tales quite effective.

Harrod has vivid dreams that guide him in the discovery of a secret door within his house that leads to an elaborate system of passages that lie under the cemetery.  He becomes more and more involved with the cemetery, even enlisting film students from good ol' Miskatonic U to shoot clips of him within the necropolis for use on his show--the graveyard's creepy atmosphere gives these clips a preternatural power.  But Harrod has perhaps overstepped his bounds and offended the secret inhabitants of the graveyard, for one night within it he suffers a terrible fate.

This one is pretty good--better than the two Derleth stories we read today.  Maybe I'll track down some of Shea's other stories.

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My path is unpredictable, but I may well read from Volume 2 of the two-volume edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, in the future.