The Tindalos Cycle (2010): edited by Robert M. Price

The Tindalos Cycle (2010): edited by Robert M. Price, containing the following stories and poems:

• But It's A Long Dark Road (2008) by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
• Confession of the White Acolyte (2008) by Ann K. Schwader
• Death Is an Elephant (1939) by Robert Bloch
• Gateway to Forever (1984) by Frank Belknap Long
• Juggernaut (2000) by C. J. Henderson
• Mind-Pilot (2008) by William Laughlin
• Nyarlatophis, A Fable of Ancient Egypt (2002) by Stanley C. Sargent
• Pompelo's Doom (2008) by Ann K. Schwader
• Scarlet Obeisance (2000) by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
• The Death of Halpin Chalmers (2008) by Perry M. Grayson
• The Death of Halpin Frayser (1891) by Ambrose Bierce
• The Dweller in the Pot, By Frank Chimesleep Short (1990) by Robert M. Price
• The Elephant God of Leng (2008) by Robert M. Price
• The Firebrands of Torment (2007) by Michael Cisco
• The Gift of Lycanthropy (1979) by Frank Belknap Long
• The Horror from the Hills (1931) by Frank Belknap Long
• The Hound of the Partridgevilles (1999) by Peter Cannon
• The Hounds of Tindalos (1929) by Frank Belknap Long
• The Letters of Halpin Chalmers (1994) by Peter Cannon
• The Madness Out of Time (1986) by Lin Carter
• The Maker of Moons (1896) by Robert W. Chambers
• The Shore of Madness (2008) by Ann K. Schwader
• The Space-Eaters (1928) by Frank Belknap Long
• The War Among the Gods (2008) by Adrian Cole
• The Ways of Chaos (1996) by Ramsey Campbell
• Through Outrageous Angles (1986) by David C. Kopaska-Merkel and Ronald McDowell
• When Chaugnar Wakes (1932) by Frank Belknap Long

Highly enjoyable, immensely long anthology of stories related in some way to HPL pal Frank Belknap Long's two major contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, the space-time bending Hounds of Tindalos and the malign, elephantine Old One Chaugnar Faugn. As is usual in a Robert Price anthology, the notes on the stories are lengthy and detailed in their contextualization of the various stories. 

As is also usual, Price has cast a wide net both before and after the publication of the pertinent Long stories. Thus we get stories by Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers that predate Long's work and stories and poems that go pretty much right up to the year of the anthology's publication. Price has an eye for historical curiosities. The three chapters included here from a shared-universe novel may not be good, but they're both fascinating and so far as I know never before anthologized. 

This is more an anthology for someone familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos than a casual reader, as some of those afore-mentioned curiosities are not particularly good. Long's own work is idea- and energy-charged when it's early work and enervated and disappointing when it comes from later decades than the 1920's and 1930's. 

Long was one of those pulp writers who was at his best in his youth -- it's not style that one goes to Long for, but the substance of his strange and cosmic visions. Well, and a bunch of people in a vintage car chasing an animated elephant statue around the Jersey Shore so as to save the world by shooting the elephantine god with an Entropy Reversal Cannon. Recommended.

Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows

Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows: 

Alan Moore called Providence a version of his own Watchmen for the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. I think he's wrong. It's much more like his terrific Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. There's a wealth of factual material especially as related to HPL's own life here, along with an almost encyclopedic tour through all of Lovecraft's fiction. The deadly Boston molasses flood shows up in one issue. That was a real thing !!! The ghouls who got sugar-coated corpses because of it, maybe not so real. I hope.

Technically, Providence is simply named for HPL's beloved home town in Rhode Island. The title accretes other meanings as the story proceeds. 

For the first ten issues, we follow the adventures of Robert Black during the year 1920. He's a closeted gay man who has left his New York reporting job after the death of his lover to research various elements of New England legends and folklore.

Black's name riffs on Lovecraft pen-pal Robert Bloch, who would create Psycho, among other things. Like Bloch, Black originally hails from Wisconsin. Black's homosexuality plays on that of several other Lovecraft 'disciples,' some of whom (all of whom?) appear at least briefly in Providence.

The graphic novel rewards multiple readings and punishes the short attention span. Like Watchmen, Providence increases the density of its narrative by including lengthy prose pieces at the back of the comic book. This is Moore's densest comic-book work since From Hell with its 100+pages of appendices.

All one really needs to know is, um, all of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, no. Indeed, it would be interesting to tackle HPL's work AFTER reading Providence. Be sure to tell me how that goes if you try it!

The world of Providence isn't meant to be ours. One of the fascinating metafictional herein is Moore's use of the work of Robert W. Chambers, one of the acknowledged precursors to HPL in American horror. In the world of Providence there is no Chambers because elements of Chambers' stories exist in the real world -- most notably, state-sanctioned suicide booths. 

But Lovecraft himself exists, and is a writer. And he's about to start writing that crazy Cthulhu Mythos stuff after apprenticing with Poe-influenced horror and works inspired by the wide-ranging whimsies of Lord Dunsany (who also appears as a character).

William S. Burroughs also briefly appears. The anecdote connecting Burroughs and one of HPL's disciples? That's totally true!

Moore's approach to the story privileges psychological and bodily horrors over those of the cosmic. This is a very cloachal approach to HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. The starkest moments of horror, three of them spaced throughout the book, deal with rape as the defining sin of cosmic horror. Providence is not for the squeamish. But the rape scenes are justified, and there's nothing risible about them. They're deeply horrifying.

One of the key structural elements of Providence is the format (and the idea) of the Commonplace Book. Robert Black keeps one on his journeys, containing both things he finds along the way (including a hilarious church newsletter) and his own musings. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. And Providence combines fact, fiction, comics, written sections, and an overwhelming array of different covers to give the work some flavour of the Commonplace. Make of all of this what you will. Providence rewards patient study.

To tell much more would be to give something away. Technically, Providence is both prequel and sequel to Moore and Burrows' The Courtyard and Neonomicon. Search them out! 

As to Burrows' art -- it's perfectly suited to Moore's cold, clinical eye in Providence. It's a horror equivalent of Dave Gibbons' straightforward, subtle art on Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Burrows can draw horrible imaginings with great skill, but he's at his best throughout Providence giving the reader the creeps by being matter-of-fact and (seemingly) representational.

Oh, and the ghouls. Moore and Burrows' ghouls are unlike their forebears in HPL's own work. They're a terrific, funny, strangely lovable creation. Not that you would ever, ever want to meet them, in a subway station or a graveyard or in your own living room. In all, Providence is horrifying, sad, funny, satirical, scathing work from one of comic-book-writing's Grandmasters. Highest recommendation.

Return of the Yellow King

The Hastur Cycle (2nd revised edition) (1996; 2007): edited by Robert M. Price, containing the following stories: Carcosa (1969) by Richard L. Tierney; Halta the Shepherd (1891) by Ambrose Bierce; An Inhabitant of Carcosa (1886) by Ambrose Bierce; The Repairer of Reputations (1895) by Robert W. Chambers; The Yellow Sign (1895) by Robert W. Chambers; The River of Night's Dreaming (1981) by Karl Edward Wagner; More Light (1970) by James Blish; The Novel of the Black Seal (1895) by Arthur Machen; The Whisperer in Darkness (1931) by H. P. Lovecraft; Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley (1982) by Richard A. Lupoff; The Mine on Yuggoth (1964) by Ramsey Campbell; Planetfall on Yuggoth (1972) by James Wade; The Return of Hastur (1939) by August Derleth; The Feaster from Afar (1976) by Joseph Payne Brennan; Dreams from R'lyeh(1965)/Carcosa Story about Hali(1989)/King in Yellow: A Tragedy in Verse(1993) by Lin Carter.

Robert Price does a nice job in these Chaosium Press thematic Lovecraftian anthologies of putting together a broad assortment of related stories from a long time period. The 'Hastur' of the 'Cycle' began life as a bucolic god in a 19th-century allegory by Ambrose Bierce, was almost immediately thereafter lifted by Robert W. Chambers for his pre-Lovecraftian horror stories about the looming, supernatural city of Carcosa and the mysterious, malign King in Yellow, and then incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and others. Earlier this year, Carcosa, the King in Yellow, Hastur, and other concepts riffing on Chambers and the Cthulhu Mythos played a major role in the HBO series True Detective. Rust never sleeps.

Price's notes can get a bit wonky in a breathlessly undergraduate-who-just-swallowed-nine-pounds-of-literary-theory way, no moreso than when he goes off on a riff about the true meaning of Chambers' play-within-a-story The King in Yellow, a riff not only lacking textual evidence but contradicting what evidence there is of that play's content. Oh, well.

The central importance of The King in Yellow to the development of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is as follows: Chambers creates a malign, supernatural play named The King in Yellow in the short-story cycle also called The King in Yellow, first published in 1895. The play figures in that story cycle in a number of ways. In the two Chambers stories reprinted here, the play drives one already unstable person to violent, delusional madness ("The Repairer of Reputations"). In "The Yellow Sign," the play seems to have supernatural powers leading to the resurrection of the dead and malign consequences for the two people who read the play.

Lovecraft and his literary circle (or Affinity Group, if you prefer) began to follow Chambers' lead in creating fictional texts within their fictions beginning with Lovecraft in the 1920's and continuing to the present day, from Lovecraft's demonic compendium the Necronomicon through August Derleth's Ghoul Cults, Robert Bloch's Mysteries of the Worm, and Ramsey Campbell's Book of Gla'aki. However, while Chambers' The King in Yellow was a play, future fictional texts would be 'non-fiction.' All would carry with them some danger, often mortal, to anyone curious enough to seek them out.

Accreting around these fictional texts would be an assortment of fictional 'gods,' though in Lovecraft's world, the gods are aliens from other worlds and other dimensions in space and time. Their powers are god-like when compared to humanity's feeble abilities, but they are nonetheless natural beings, albeit of a nature utterly alien to humanity's world.

Price's selection traces the use and development of Bierce and Chambers' concepts over the course of a hundred years. Lovecraft briefly mentions some of the concepts in "The Whisperer in Darkness," and Price nicely lays out the critical basis for believing that the King in Yellow appears in that story, and that Lovecraft there makes explicit the idea that the King and Lovecraft's malign messenger of the Great Old Ones, Nyarlathotep, are one and the same.

Besides the excellence of Bierce, Chambers, and Lovecraft, we also get solid though peripherally related stories by Arthur Machen and Richard Lupoff, and an assortment of other stories that work with either Chambers or Lovecraft in the development of The King in Yellow. James Blish contributes a startling, sly gem from 1970 in "More Light," in which he attempts to (re-)create the play The King in Yellow, from which Chambers only ever gave us a few short lines and vague descriptions of characters and action. It's dynamite. In all, highly recommended.

Lovecraft Again

Future Lovecraft: edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles, including the following stories and poems (2011):

In This Brief Interval by Ann K. Schwader
In the Hall of the Yellow King by Peter Rawlik
Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep by Nick Mamatas
Tri-TV by Bobby Cranestone
Do Not Imagine by Mari Ness
Rubedo, an Alchemy of Madness by Michael Matheson
People are Reading What You are Writing by Luso Mnthali
Harmony Amid the Stars by Ada Hoffmann
The Comet Called Ithaqua by Don Webb
Phoenix Woman by Kelda Crich
PostFlesh by Paul Jessup
The Library Twins and the Nekrobees by Martha Hubbard
Go, Go, Go, Said the Byakhee by Molly Tanzer
Skin by Helen Marshall
The Old 44th by Randy Stafford
Iron Footfalls by Julio Toro San Martin
This Song Is Not For You by Avery Cahill
Tloque Nahuaque by Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas
Dolly in the Window by Robyn Seale
A Cool, Private Place by Jen White
Venice Burning by A. C. Wise
A Day and A Night in Providence by Anthony Boulanger
A Welcome Sestina From Cruise Director Isabeau Molyneux by Mae Empson
Lottie Versus the Moon Hopper by Pamela Rentz
The Damnable Asteroid by Leigh Kimmel
Myristica Fragrans by E. Catherine Tobler
Dark of the Moon by James S. Dorr
Trajectory of A Cursed Spirit by Meddy Ligner
Transmigration by Lee Clark Zumpe
Concerning the Last Days of the Colony At New Roanoke by Tucker Cummings
The Kadath Angle by Maria Mitchell
The Last Man Standing by Ezeiyoke Chukwunonso
Exhibit at the National Anthropology Museum in Tombouctou by Andrew Dombalagian
The Door From Earth by Jesse Bullington
The Deep Ones by Bryan Thao Worra
The Labyrinth of Sleep by Orrin Grey
Deep Blue Dreams by Sean Craven
Big Bro by Arlene J. Yandug

This really is a collection of short stories and poems, which explains why a 350-page book has so many entries jammed into it. No novelettes allowed, much less novellas! Most of the works appear here for the first time, with a few exceptions.

As the title isn't Future Cthulhu, some selections have only a vague aura of Lovecraftian menace hanging about them. "The Last Man Standing," for example, is a nice little story that would perhaps be better found in an anthology called Future (Mary) Shelley.

Other stories pile on the references to the work of Lovecraft, Robert Chambers, and others of their ilk to such an extent that they read like hypermanic fan fiction -- "In the Hall of the Yellow King" probably most of all reaches a level of intertextual inertia that starts off amusingly and ends up in the Hall of Inutterable Goofiness (a female spawn of Cthulhu! With boobs! Seducing...oh, never mind).

There's some nice work here, whether the droll offering from Nick Mamatas, the documentary riff by Tucker Cummings, or the pitch-perfect "The Damnable Asteroid," whose author gets the fact that while most of Lovecraft's stories were downbeat, their endings were not necessarily so -- conditional victory over the forces of darkness was a recurring plot point, no matter how dire the overall situation. A lot of stories here instead go for the destruction or conquest of everything by dark forces; that gets pretty tiring after awhile.

I wouldn't call this a great anthology -- the poems especially are a real drag. But I've certainly read higher profile homages to Lovecraft that were worse, and the shortness of the works allows one to sample an awful lot of writers one may not have heard of. In general, though, I'd argue that homages to Lovecraft -- and the Cthulhu portion of his body of work -- are best attempted at novella length. Recommended.