Disciples of Cthulhu...

After enjoying (enduring!) Joshi’s Black Wings, I have decided to take a step back into the past and look at another series of collected works along Mythos lines, but one that - to my mind – does a far better job. Again, serendipitously, the second volume of this Chaosium-published series came my way while sorting through the material of a bookshop in the process of closing down and I was able to include it among the volumes which the store for which I work was taking off their hands.

BERGLUND, Edward P. (Ed.), The Disciples of Cthulhu – Second Revised Edition, Chaosium Publications/Chaosium Inc., Oakland CA, 1996.

Octavo; paperback; 258pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

The Disciples of Cthulhu is a compilation edited by Edward P. Berglund and was first published in 1976. Chaosium revised the work and reissued it in 1996 under its own imprint. I first read this collection – the 1976 lineup – when I was a kid in high school living in Jakarta, long before I even knew who Lovecraft was or what Cthulhu was all about. One story in particular (which I’ll discuss shortly) stuck with me ever since and it was while trying to re-locate this tale that I stumbled upon the Chaosium version years later (I had completely forgotten what the book was called, but I knew the name of the short story). Once I had the volume back in my grubby mitts, the fact that there were other stories as well which I remembered as being great, came flooding back. For me, this is the hallmark of a good short story compilation – the assembling of quality material that sticks in your mind and which re-pays re-reading.

Of course, what makes this first volume in the series a standout success is the sheer level of talent involved. All of the big names are here: Eddy C. Bertin, Ramsey Campbell, Fritz Leiber, Brian Lumley, so – going in – you know you’re in safe hands. What builds upon this secure foundation is that the rest of the material is coherently selected and arranged, well-written and of the highest quality. Many stories in this collection are now considered mainstays of the Mythos in their own right, their concepts having been expanded and embellished by other authors and through gaming material.

Two tales are so well-known that I will deal with them in an almost off-hand manner – which should not, in any way, be taken as an indication of their quality as Mythos stories. It’s simply that, if you call yourself a Mythos fan, you’ve already read these and, probably, several times. Lumley’s “The Fairground Horror” is a quintessential Mythos set-up and follow-through, which is everything you want in a tale of Yog-Sothothery. So too, is Ramsey Campbell’s “The Tugging”, which stands out as the first of his Mythos tales which – although obviously indebted to HPL – feels like its own creature, a fresh, trans-Atlantic take on Lovecraft. If, by some miracle, you haven’t read these, do so and you’ll see from where a whole galaxy of Mythos concepts derives.

“The Silence of Erica Zann” is a pleasing and highly entertaining coda to HPL’s “The Music of Erich Zann”, replacing the Expressionist phantasmagoria of Bohemian Paris for the psychedelic haze of San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Ill-fated Erica gets caught up in counter-culture weirdness and, like her ancestor before her, struggles nightly with a demonic force, a sound which she must hold at bay by means of her voice. Inevitably, her puny human status is her undoing and her world comes tumbling down around her. Nods to Nyarlathotep abound, along with obscure references to witchcraft, but nothing is ever definitively pinned down as a cause, which gives the story a highly creepy air.

Bob van Laerhoven’s “All Eye” is a tale of the northern wilds that echoes elements of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”: here are the vast emptiness playing tricks with the mind of the lone hunter; the ancient silence of the primordial wilds creating a paradoxical claustrophobia; the hidden menace of an ancient horror only hinted at in old legends. An anthropologist and folklorist tracking down clues in an ancient explorer’s journal, comes to the wilderness in search of an old artefact known to the local indigenes as an idol to “All Eye”. Close to his goal, a strange transformation overcomes his guide and he rushes away only to encounter a travelling doctor whose clientele are the far-flung trappers and prospectors of the region. Together they return to the site of the strange event to get to the bottom of things; but is everything truly as it seems? This is a powerful story, somewhat let down by a cheese-y twist, but quite fun nevertheless.

The story that drew me back to this collection was Walter C. DeBill Jr.’s “Where Yidhra Walks”. This is not only a fascinating tale in its own right, it also provides a whole new wing of deviltry to the Cthulhu Mythos, along with its own nightmare tomes, hideous creatures and the cracked writings of those who have fallen foul of its menacing entities. If the rest of the Cthulhu Mythos didn’t exist, there’s enough in this one tale to furnish a more than adequate replacement. The story tells of a wanderer who crosses a rickety bridge into a backwoods county to discover an ill-aspected community thriving on its lush crops and toiling at the behest of a mysterious woman named Yolanda. It transpires that this ‘woman’ is actually an avatar of the cosmic entity Yidhra, a being which embodies rampant and uncontrolled fecundity and who wishes to add our narrator’s biological and technological distinctiveness to its own (well, "Star Trek" had to get it from somewhere!). In true Lovecraftian style our hero flees screaming into the night, knowing that sweet dreams are going to be a thing of the past...

A.A. Attanasio provides stories for both volumes in this series and both of his offerings have similar stylings. In “Glimpses”, we see an agent of Nodens travelling across time and space trying to thwart the machinations of Yog-Sothoth, following in hot pursuit. The tale is related in a series of ‘jump-cut’ chapters that leap across time and space, following on from each other. The canvas of the story stretches from the late Victorian era to a time in the distant future, effectively outlining how a campaign against this particular Old One would probably pan out. The best aspect of this tale is the way in which the full sense of what is taking place only crystallizes at the very end: it’s not until all the pieces are on the table that the big picture emerges and the full stakes are revealed. That being said, some of the attempts to sketch other worlds and times are just that – sketchy. With time, the futuristic scenes have dated and the Victorian stuff doesn’t quite ring true. Small quibbles, I guess.

Robert M. Price has a long track record of writing and editing in the HPL sandpit and this story shows his highly-engaging ability to take from those who have gone before and to spin something off that is quintessentially his own. In “Dope War of the Black Tong” he takes Robert E. Howard’s two-fisted investigator Steve Harrison and teams him up with the mystic Anton Zarnak to take down a tong of Tcho-tcho villains who are pushing Black Lotus derivatives on the underworld types of San Francisco. The result is a pulp delight, cops and cultists in a fiery face-off in the name of justice!

Eddie C. Bertin’s contribution to this collection is, like William C. DeBill Jr’s, a slice of mythology that fits almost seamlessly into the Cthulhu Mythos. I say “almost” because it partakes a little too much of August Derleth’s ‘elemental theory’ of the Mythos for my taste. Nevertheless, in “Darkness, My Name Is”, we have the full deal – Old One, cultists, ancient texts - in a story that is multi-layered, strange, often psychedelic, and disturbing. An investigator travels to a distant German village trying to track down an ancient temple to Cyaegha, using a range of illegally-photographed and Xeroxed tomes. What he discovers – about the town, its hidden deity and himself – fundamentally alters his very being; however, rather than draw a line under a foolish attempt to dabble in Things Better Left Alone, his actions merely open new doorways to further foolish attempts...

"The Terror from the Depths" is a great story because it attempts to weave a section of Lovecraftian tapestry out of diverse elements and lift a Mythos overview as whole cloth from disparate pieces. Fritz Leiber (‘LYE-ber’, people; not ‘LEE-ber’: he was very particular about this) introduces us to Georg Fischer a sensitive and sheltered precocious youth given to artistic pursuits, far wanderings and dubious musings (where have we heard this before?), who dreams fantastically that there are winged serpents below the ground in tunnels stretching across the landscape. He is contacted by Albert Wilmarth of Miskatonic University who – along with some other well-known faculty members – is conducting dream research into the possibility of a common dream language, among other things. Wilmarth comes to visit our narrator in California and many strange and provocative threads of Georg’s existence come bursting up out of the ground in a maddening act of revelation.

If anything, Leiber tries to stretch this piece of tapestry too far in order to cover every aspect of Lovecraft’s oeuvre and it falls a little flat by trying to do too much. There are references to “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Colour out of Space”, “The Dunwich Horror” – even Wilmarth gives a fairly offhand commentary on his own experiences in “The Whisperer in Darkness”. After setting itself so effectively as its own creature, the story dwindles away to become a footnote to Lovecraft’s other works. Still, it’s a lively read and in terms of the writing style which Leiber affects, it feels like an authentic piece of Lovecraftiana.

*****

That’s it then – Disciples One. There’s so much to enjoy here – added dimensions of Cthulhoid weirdness, great pastiche that is never treacly, cosmic awesomeness of a high order. Now, on to Disciples Two!

BERGLUND, Edward P. (Ed.), The Disciples of Cthulhu II – Blasphemous Tales of the Followers, Chaosium Publications/Chaosium Inc., Oakland CA, 2003.

Octavo; paperback; 219pp. Minor wear. Near fine.

The second Disciples volume roams further afield from the first gathering, looking for those writers with more tenuous links to – although no less indebted to – HPL and his original circle. These writers – some of whom return from the first collection - bring a rather more modern flavour to the Mythos, on the whole, and here again the quality is top notch.

First cab off the rank is Walter C. DeBill Jr. for a return performance, and true to form, his offering is wonderful. With “The Bookseller’s Second Wife” we travel over territory carved out by Joseph Curwen and his ilk, evil magicians all, trading in arcane tomes and paraphernalia. The Bookseller of this tale is one such villain and, when a distant nephew comes to work in his shop during the summer, he enters a world at once byzantine in the extreme and deeply sinister. Like all good bookshops, really! Key to this story is the eponymous wife, who seduces the nephew to help her free herself from the wicked machinations of her husband. The ending is edge-of-your-seat stuff, with horrors literally coming out of the walls!

One of H.G. Wells’s most moody works is unfortunately the one that the reader has the most trouble suspending disbelief for. The Island of Dr. Moreau quite simply got outstripped by science almost before the ink dried on its manuscript, meaning that it had a half-life of about six months. It’s a great morality tale about the evils of vivisection and animal experimentation but frankly, no matter how much you tinker with the architecture of a rabbit, or a goat, you’re never going to get it to talk. Thus it’s somewhat bemusing to discover why 1) anyone would want to write an extension of it, much less 2) try to bolt on Mythos elements to it. Still, this is exactly what Brad Linaweaver and Fred Olen Ray attempt to do with their story “Eldritch”. An ivory importer en route to England discovers himself cast adrift when the crew of the steamer which he’s on mutinies. He finds himself washed up on an island and lusting for the daughter of Dr. Moreau – herself a doctor and continuer of her father’s work – only to discover that she has incorporated the worship of Shub-Niggurath into her father’s process and needs new blood for her project. The story limps along by trying to straddle two ponies at once and is the worse for it, not least because the captain of the steamer is a Marsh from Innsmouth and even the most hardened crew of mutineers is going to take that on board before they turn traitor!

Gary Myers’s “The Web” is a prescient piece of modern Mythos tomfoolery, which demonstrates the sort of mayhem that Yog-Sothothery might accomplish when blended with the internet. Two pals dabbling on the fringes of Lovecraftiana find an online copy of the Necronomicon downloaded by guerrilla cultists with a taste for hacking. Interestingly, the online version of the work contains spells with ‘plug & play’ interfaces making spell-casting that much easier! After failing to summon Azathoth and several other horrors, the two finally meet the requirements to whistle up a dhole, a manifestation which they manage - barely - to shut down in the nick of time. What happens next is what we’d all expect from a bunch of meddling millennials...

Robert Weinberg next presents us with “Passing Through” a nasty piece of work with its roots sunk deep in HPL’s “From Beyond” and “Dreams in the Witch-House”. A feted mathematician hooks up with our narrator and together they flip through a range of forbidden tomes transcribing the arcane ravings into mathematical formulae. The maths master builds a soundless and featureless black room in his house with blackboard walls onto which he hopes the Ancient Ones will scrawl equally devastating equations with handily-provided chalk. Our narrator gets the willies at this point and begins to distance himself but, on the night of the grand experiment, he fails to receive the crowing ‘phone call of success at the pre-arranged hour, and so he goes over to the dark room only to find an awful (but not unexpected!) surprise...

Scott David Aniolowski is a well-known generator of gaming material for “Call of Cthulhu” and, not surprisingly his short stories also tend to delight and amuse. A short story in a Lovecraftian collection entitled “The Idol” might tread the well-travelled path, you’d expect; however, the idol in this case is a living one, of the type that has screaming girls rushing about after him and using him as a bull’s eye for their knickers. The narrator of the tale is his long-suffering manager, trying to keep his golden goose on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, our superstar has biological links to Innsmouth and insists on a weekend visit to the old town...

A.A. Attanasio appears again this time with “Time in the Old House”. Unlike his previous effort, this story is much more dreamlike and poetic. The narrative is simple enough: the narrator wanders into a subtle dreamscape and enters an ancient building wherein he confronts the Old Ones in all their horror before fleeing out into the night. It’s made clear to us that the imagery of the dream is merely a cloak to hide the true nature of the revelations and, to this end, the writing style is full of highly descriptive and lyrical turns of phrase, reinforcing the sensuous nature of this otherworld. Fundamentally however, this is a mood piece: colourful; powerful; but relatively slight.

“Special Order” harks back to De Bill Jr’s opening salvo, dealing with the trade in rare old tomes. 'Henry Lee Forrest' (an amalgamated pseudonym) describes for us an antique bookselling operation set in a typical American mall. A customer sends an e-mail asking the narrator to track down and purchase a copy of the Necronomicon on his behalf, something which she finds faintly ludicrous but which she undertakes anyway. Unexpectedly, the special order arrives and its presence in the store causes mayhem amongst the staff, a creeping effect that begins to pervade the entire shopping mall. To begin with, the head of the bookselling concern becomes obsessed with the tome and unwilling to part with it; another employee has an outbreak of debilitating allergies; rats begin to move freely through the service entrances of the building. When the book’s new owner turns up to claim his purchase, it leads to a crushing confrontation that almost levels the block.

Only two things bugged me about this story. One, no antique bookseller in their right mind would set up an operation in a shopping mall – it just doesn’t work given the type of customer that such businesses attract. No serious book collector is going to waste time with an operation that’s ‘up on Level 2, just past the Krispy-Kreme outlet’. The second issue was that the Necronomicon cost a measly $20,000. That’s the price for a moderately worn copy of Captain Cook’s Journals, not even a very good first edition copy. A copy of the real Necronomicon is going to be a lot more expensive than that. A lot more. I realise it’s my own background talking here and I don’t mean to downgrade an otherwise entertaining story, but it just didn’t ring true.

“Lujan’s Trunk” was a story which I anticipated as the weak link in this collection. It’s written by Donald R. Burleson who, along with his wife, contributed two tales to Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, both of which stank. I expected to be less than edified, instead it wasn’t too bad. The story involves a writer who moves to New Mexico looking for peace and quiet in order to finish his novel. While driving into town from his remote home, he notices a decrepit farm with an old man sitting on the porch. Making enquiries, he learns that old man Lujan sits there every day and night, parked next to his weird-looking trunk and minds his own business. Our novelist decides to say 'hello' and this leads him inevitably to an encounter with the trunk and its nightmarish contents. As I said, surprisingly good.

C.J. Henderson’s “San Francisco Treat” is a strange call-back to “The Music of Eric Zann”. A young man discovers that recurrent bouts of annoying ear worms cause him to see beyond his immediate surroundings to a strange dimension which becomes ever more aware of his presence with each re-occurrence. We meet him in the final stages of this bizarre debilitation, locked in a room with no visual or aural distractions which might cause some irritating jingle or trite melody to go romping through his thoughts. Unfortunately, while about his ablutions in the bathroom, the smell of a neighbour’s instant rice meal – the “Treat” of the title – awakens the advertising jingle he and his mother used to sing while eating it, and, when the police show up to investigate his subsequent disappearance, there’s nothing but the faint smell of cooking to serve as a clue.

“Acute Spiritual Fear” is Robert M. Price’s contribution to this volume. To be honest, it’s not as good as “Dope War of the Black Tong”; entertaining enough but a bit half-baked. The story involves a young seminary student who switches to Miskatonic University to continue his education into Christian theology (as you do!). He wanders about on orientation day and discovers a theological debating group which seems like just his cup of tea in terms of socialising. Little does he realise that these evangelical undergrads are splicing their Christianity with elements of local history and have come to the conclusion that the Second Coming already came and Wilbur Whateley was the One Foretold.

This tale grinds slowly, bogged down with a bunch of theological meanderings in trying to get its point across. Robert Price’s background is in theology so he knows whereof he speaks, but it gets pretty deathless at certain points. Also, the wide-eyed and affected naiveté of the students, discussing their level of faith and willingness to believe, all sounded a bit hokey to me. In the end though, there were cloaked figures at midnight, an abducted girl and a sacrifice to be made to an Old One, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Will Murray is a fan of Mike Mignola’s "B.P.R.D." comics, unless I miss my guess. “The Eldridge Collection” tells the covert travails of a pair of shady Government operatives, whose task is to prevent the madness of the Old Ones spilling out across the planet. One of the operatives is a straight-up Man In Black, all fists and pistols and no nonsense; his partner for this tale is a cartomancer, equally no-nonsense and able to sling the pasteboards of various tarot decks in order to further the investigation. Together they track down a shifty art dealer amassing the proscribed artistic output of a mad artist who designed a Lovecraftian card deck, with the intention of unleashing mayhem. This is very amusing, kinda goofy, but an excellent spin of the "Hell-Boy" variety.

What if Arkham was a bucolic little town like Lake Wobegon and HPL wrote his material in the style of Garrison Keilor? The result would probably be a lot like Brad Strickland’s “An Arkham Home Companion”. This is pastiche piled on pastiche, with the events of “The Dunwich Horror” ranking of less import to the Arkham denizens than the terrible win-rate of the local football team, the ‘Miskatonic Mystics'. This is a tongue-in-cheek fun-ride that is a joy to read and revelatory as to the real reason why Professor Armitage’s dog, Rameses, was in the Orne Library on the night of Whateley’s break-in...

The final offering in this collection is “The Last Temptation of Ricky Perez” by Benjamin Adams. Ricky, a city boy with a crippled foot, is challenged by members of his brother’s old street gang to break into the house of a scary old lady in order to ensure his place in their fraternity. Ricky, seeking revenge on a rival gang for shooting his brother and keen to bring home cash to help support himself and his mother, tries to overcome his physical limitations to pass this rite of passage. However, the scary old lady is scary for a very good reason: she reveals to him the level of treachery at work in the gang he seeks to join and shows him that Fate – in the form of the heredity bequeathed upon him by his absent “dark” father – has a hidden hand to play with his existence. These revelations show Ricky that he’s bound for much grander things than a trivial street gang...

*****

That’s all of it. On balance, I found the first volume in this series the most satisfying, in the sense that it stayed on track with HPL’s kind of storytelling – the second volume contains stories of a more internal, psychological type, along with some light-hearted pastiche. The focus in both books is on horror of a cosmic nature, not the simple blood and gore offerings that abound in other collections laying claim to Mythos turf. If you’re looking for gaming inspiration, Volume One is where you need to be; if you want some genuine Lovecraftian thrills both volumes will delight and entertain. Seek out and enjoy!

*****

Chapter Listing – Disciples I

Preface to the Revised Edition – Edward P. Berglund

Preface to the Original Edition – Edward P. Berglund

Introduction – Robert Bloch

“The Fairground Horror” – Brian Lumley

“The Silence of Erica Zann” – James Wade

“All-Eye” – Bob van Laerhoven

“The Tugging” – Ramsey Campbell

“Where Yidhra Walks” – Walter C. DeBill Jr.

“Glimpses” – A.A. Attanasio

“Dope War of the Black Tong” – Robert M. Price

“Darkness, My Name Is” – Eddy C. Bertin

“The Terror from the Depths” – Fritz Leiber

Chapter Listing – Disciples II

Editor’s Preface – Edward P. Berglund

“The Bookseller’s Second Wife” – Walter C. DeBill Jr.

“Eldritch” – Brad Linaweaver and Fred Olen Ray

“The Web” – Gary Myers

“Passing Through” – Robert Weinberg

“The Idol” – Scott David Aniolowski

“Time in the Hourless House” – A.A. Attanasio

“Special Order” – Henry Lee Forrest

“Lujan’s Trunk” – Donald R. Burleson

“The San Francisco Treat” – C.J. Henderson

“Acute Spiritual Fear” – Robert M. Price

“The Eldridge Collection” – Will Murray

“An Arkham Home Companion” – Brad Strickland

“The Last Temptation of Ricky Perez” – Benjamin Adams