Cthulhoid Knock-offs...

DERLETH, August, The Trail of Cthulhu, Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., New York NY, 1996.

Octavo; paperback; 248pp. Minor wear; covers lightly rubbed and edgeworn; text block edges lightly toned; some offset to the inside covers; retailer’s sticker to the back cover. Very good.

“The Call of Cthulhu” is perhaps the best-known of HPL’s oeuvre, probably because it has the name ‘Cthulhu’ in the title and also because of its links to the roleplaying game, which also bears the name. When most people think of the Cthulhu Mythos, they probably think of the various likenesses (mainly plush) of the Sleeper in Rl’yeh that abound in pop culture; those who have read somewhat more widely will probably think of this short story also. The strengths of that narrative are multifarious and perhaps the best aspect of it is the fact that it weaves together disconnected elements unearthed by the efforts of the narrator, in line with its own initial sentence:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents.”

Correlating content is, in fact, exactly what the narrator tries to accomplish in the story, and it is the nebulous and half-formed results of his quest that exactly exemplify just what this sentence declares and why that inability to correlate is so merciful. The creation of a hidden revelation which lies just outside of perceptual range is what makes this story so powerful: it’s not a screaming, jangling horror-fest – which might disappoint some modern readers – but its effect is to generate a slow and steadily creeping sense of doom which is, I think, a far better and more subtle achievement.

This is one of Houellebecq’s “sacred texts” of the Cthulhu Mythos – something which will surprise no-one – but even without such lauded commentary, most fans will probably include this story somewhere in their personal ‘Lovecraft Top Five’ at least. It’s not surprising then, that other writers would look to it as a kind of touchstone for what Cthulhoid literature should be like.

The most prominent of these writers are the two individuals who took it upon themselves to preserve HPL’s body of work, creating their own publishing house and winning back Lovecraft’s literary estate from the one to whom he had originally entrusted it (erroneously) in his will. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei were reasonably well-known authors in their own rights; certainly, both were known to HPL and formed part of his literary circle. They both, however, put aside their own efforts in order to turn Lovecraft into a household name. I think we can say that they succeeded.

Derleth was best known for penning bucolic rural tales set in the American Midwest, but after establishing Arkham House, he struck out into rather more outré areas. Part of the Lovecraft estate was a notebook containing short descriptive passages, seeds of ideas, which Lovecraft noted down for future cogitation but which, for whatever reason, he chose not to develop further himself. One of these – a dream fragment – was taken up by Frank Belknap Long and became the novella “The Horror from the Hills”. Derleth himself, took many of these unformed concepts and transformed them into short stories which he ‘co-published’ under his own name and Lovecraft’s as The Watchers Out of Time. Eventually though, he saw fit to take on “The Call of Cthulhu” as well.

Lovecraft’s tale has a single researcher sifting through the contents of his uncle’s chest of papers and following lines of investigation out towards a steadily crystallising awfulness. Derleth takes this idea of tracing threads to their inevitable conclusion and puts a different spin on it. He creates a series of (young; male) investigators who become embroiled in the machinations of a mysterious academic by the name of Laban Shrewsbury. One by one, they meet and become fascinated by the secretive Shrewsbury and they are dragged into the bizarre war he has declared upon Cthulhu and all of its earthly devotees. Rather than a strange box of papers to attract the narrator(s), here we have a taciturn adventurer who doles out information only as needed and who strings his associates along on ever weirder journeys which they narrate by way of journals in a well-known epistolary format. It’s a kind of spin on HPL’s device in “Cthulhu” and, it must be said, it doesn’t really work that well, but there are a few creepy moments to be found along the way. It’s noteworthy as well that most of the concepts which he engineers in this story – Laban Shrewsbury; Space Mead – have since become canon in Mythos lore.

WANDREI, Donald, The Web of Easter Island, Consul Books/World Distributors (Manchester) Ltd., London, 1958.

Octavo; paperback; 174pp. Mild wear; covers lightly rubbed and edgeworn; text block edges toned; inside covers tanned. Very good.

Wandrei attempts to travel the same territory in The Web of Easter Island but is far less successful than Derleth. Revealingly - even though the book is dedicated to HPL - it coyly avoids using any Mythos terminology, referring to the Old Ones as “Titans” led by their leader “Septhulhu”. Part of what lets this exercise down is simply its frantic sidestepping of the Cthulhu canon. The other thing that makes it weird for the average Mythos fan is the presence of (gasp!) sex.

Wandrei’s take on “The Call of Cthulhu” has the added frisson of men encountering women; however, before any of you start desperately trying to locate a copy, Wandrei’s imaginings of what takes place betwixt a man and a woman are of a particularly adolescent nature. This ain’t no Fifty Shades of Grey (if that’s any kind of benchmark) and its inclusion is jarring for anyone familiar with HPL’s style. I’m not condemning it – I wish he’d done it better – but it’s certainly an indicator as to how Lovecraftian fiction has room to evolve.

Our hero, Carter Graham, is an orphaned, self-reliant academic who regularly purchases physical attention from sex-workers because making friends is somehow beneath him. He finds an idol buried in a “cursed” graveyard, one postal code away from Stonehenge, and discovers a sacrificial chamber beneath its resting site. It transpires that this chamber and Easter Island are spiritually connected, and he goes there to get to the bottom of stuff. Unlike “The Call of Cthulhu” where the information within the box drives the narrative forward, the strange idol is the focus here, and the mayhem it causes as it travels across the countryside trying to get back to its original location creates the web of tales alluded to in the title.

Thus we see a working-class English family sent mad and then killed by the idol after their son unearths it in a local graveyard; two murderers fleeing Justice by boat (and anticipating some mutual hanky-panky aboard ship as they do so) who get killed when the ship is destroyed; and our Investigator Graham who barely survives the destruction of his train as he tries to take the idol to his museum, among other incidents. The resulting ‘web’ is a bit fractured and ad hoc as a result and feels a bit bolted-on in places, rather than plotted, and there are journal entries provided by Graham that feel more than a bit like ‘info dumps’ providing convenient backstory and set-ups. And then there’s this:

“After a few minutes a nurse entered. She possessed a plain, cheerful face, and tawny blonde hair the colour of toffee. Nature had assembled her lavishly. She bore an impressive superstructure and an equally prominent extension in the opposite direction; assets and attributes that overbalanced her, coming and going, but not without attraction of a massive kind.

Graham mused, ‘Outstanding examples of development that are both steatopygous and mammosus.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The Greeks and the Romans had words. The Anglo-Saxon equivalents, while pungent, are less aesthetic.’

The nurse looked blank. ‘Did you ring?’

‘No, the bell did,’ he responded with a trace of brusqueness. He hated superfluous questions, especially those of feminine origin...”

And we wonder why this friendless fellow has to pay in order to get laid!

These juvenile and un-funny moments clutter up the scenery rather unnecessarily and are hallmarks of the late-'40s morality in which the writing is steeped. Wandrei should just have taken a further leaf from Lovecraft’s book and simply avoided trying to inject this kind of Bond-esque sexiness into his work. Someone with a greater maturity might have made this kind of thing work: not Wandrei; not so much.

On the other hand, the descriptions of the weird idol – insofar as it defies description – are serviceable. Wandrei manages to get his unearthly elements up-and-running with some expedition, although a touch more clarity wouldn’t have gone astray. At times it feels as though, after reading Lovecraft, he just said to himself, ‘I get it – I just need to be vague about this stuff’, which isn’t what Lovecraft does at all. When Lovecraft describes something, he uses very precise language; it’s simply the juxtapositioning of incompatible elements that lends a sense of things not being defined. It’s what makes HPL’s stuff unsettling, whereas Wandrei is simply outlining an indescribable object in a strictly workmanlike fashion, which is a different thing altogether.

In the final analysis, this is a picaresque and rather junior-level pastiche of the Cthulhu Mythos, which displays a somewhat obvious debt to Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”, despite all the cute sidestepping of Cthulhoid names and concepts.

*****

Modern readers evince a certain frustration with the discovery that a writer whose oeuvre they’ve decided to inhale has perished, signaling an inevitable end-point to their reading pleasure at some time in the future. Sadly, there are only so many Agatha Christie novels, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle delights and, indeed, Lovecraftian horrors. Once you’ve read them all, that’s it – it’s all over. Modern publishers have noted this phenomenon and often seek to extend an author’s salability by getting ghost-writers to create more works in a similar vein, which is how we suddenly have Val McDermid writing Jane Austen, Sebastian Faulks penning James Bond novels and Ben Schott continuing the mayhem of Jeeves and Wooster. They should just stop, as far as I’m concerned: a writer’s body of work is their legacy to humanity; it should be treasured, read and re-read, not parodied in order to squeeze a few more bucks out of the ‘franchise’.

So with these two novels, it’s a case of trying to re-write one of Lovecraft’s better-known works and attempting to keep the love alive. All I can say is that their hearts are in the right place – and Arkham House must certainly have benefitted from the sales! – but in copying the master, they reveal themselves merely to be writers of a less capable standing. That’s fine; there’s obviously a market for readers who simply look for ‘more’ in terms of their reading goals. However, these are not particularly good and may not quite satisfy the hunger of those who seek them out.

And, as a final warning, the Wandrei is quite hard to get hold of: this particular edition of The Web of Easter Island retails for about $100, so shop wisely!