The Nyarlathotep Cycle

Rating:
Summary: Take It With A Grain Of Salt
Review: As stories go, these 'cycles' collections are not so bad, but the ramblings of Robert M. Price need badly to be divided off from Lovecraft's beliefs. Were these tales presented in a manner utterly unconnected with Lovecraft, the danger would not be so great, but the danger is rearing its head again, of the pollution of Lovecraft's thought, first by Derleth and now by others, leading to readers who have conceptions of Lovecraft that are entirely false. Lovecraft's pseudo-mythology was intended as plot devices that helped evoke and serve as stand-ins for his philosophy of cosmicism. There is no good and evil, no Hindu connections, or anything of that sort. Read these stories for the stories themselves. If you want to know about Lovecraft and his pseudo-mythology, read S.T. Joshi's masterful biography of HPL.

Rating:
Summary: Robert M. Price and Nyarlathotep
Review: I was an English Lit major at Brown when Providence's H.P. Lovecraft was rediscovered by the literary community. His elaborate fiction deals with cruel monsters inhabiting weird mental universes and who would soon reduce the world to chaos. Others, including Stephen King, have developed this myth. The present book of stories is about the antichrist (Nyarlathotep, "the crawling chaos") whose appearance will herald the end times. The book is most interesting for Price's essays. Price actually styles himself "Heirophant of the Crawling Chaos". He equates Nyarlathotep's return with the familiar postmodernist stuff. The white-Western-male paradigm of rational science is about to collapse and be replaced with something finer (doesn't say what, he likes to cite Thomas Kuhn's stuff), Nyarlathotep is the tantric Siva expanding your consciousness beyond rational categories, and so forth. Except for Price's ridicule of today's Wiccans (competitors?), it's the current Left Wing campus ideology. But in contrast to postmodernist make-believe, tales like "The Snout in the Alcove" hardly present a vision of a better world. Lovecraft created his "mythos" as an extended joke. After reading Price's essays, I cannot decide whether Price, too, is kidding.

Rating:
Summary: The Black Pharoah
Review: This book will teach you all you need to know about Nyarlathotep, from his creation to his role as Messenger of the Outer Gods. Robert M Price's introduction is full of information relating Nyarlathotep with various dieties around the world. A must have for anyone interested in the God of a Thousand Forms.