Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

Rating:
Summary: Some commonly reprinted stories, but well worth owning
Review: A glance at the table of contents would make this book seem to be a mixed bag; while it contains plenty of little-known stories by Mythos greats, it also has soem commonly reprinted stories by equally great authors such as Howard, Kuttner, and Bloch. This is the risk any anthologist runs in the Cthulhu Mythos; some stories are going to overlap with the contents of other books the reader owns. Price makes up for this in part by including variants of stories: "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," for instance, is not the same as in most of its other print appearances. Ironically, this version is less a Cthulhu Mythos story here than in its more common version, but the story still has that Mythos atmosphere. All in all, considering the strength of the collection as a whole, few Mythos readers are going to mind rereading a few stories

Rating:
Summary: Indiana Jones and the Demons of Yore
Review: Hardly the best collection from the early Lovecraft acolytes, but one that will certainly appeal to the fourteen-year-old in everyone who loves the Mythos. Editor Price is an admirable scholar of this particular niche in literature, here providing rarely anthologized stories tracing the early evolution of Lovecraft's ideas as practiced by his (generally) less famous pulp fiction contemporaries and fans.

The majority of these offerings are in the "freebooting adventurer meets his doom in forbidden archaeology" vein, a la Conan creator Robert E. Howard - two of whose stories (and only one really a Mythos tale) are duly reprinted, "The Thing on the Roof" and "The Fire of Assurbanipal." Robert Bloch's "Fane of the Black Pharaoh," not one of his best but still not bad, has a British explorer running afoul of an ancient Brotherhood protecting the secrets of a mad Egyptian prophet-king. Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seven Geases" concerns the hypnotic magic of a long-forgotten serpent race, who sacrifice men to their unspeakable dark god. August Derleth - you didn't expect he'd miss out on the act, did you? - collaborates with Mark Schorer on "Lair of the Star-Spawn," detailing a missing archaeologist's plan to stop those same serpent-people from releasing their demon-gods upon mankind. (Derleth is also represented by his own virtual plagiarism of Algernon Blackwood, in "Ithaqua" and "The Thing That Walked On the Wind.") E. Hoffman Price's "The Lord of Illusion" and Henry Hasse's "The Guardian of the Book" tell stories of extraterrestrial wayfarers through the gates of time and space, uncovering ancient and extra-dimensional secrets.

Other offerings include more straightforward horror stories, such as Henry Kuttner's "Bells of Horror" and "The Invaders," C. Hall Thompson's "Spawn of the Green Abyss," Carl Jacobi's "The Aquarium" and Duane W. Rimel's "Music of the Stars." Many of these, like Derleth's stories and Bertram Russell's "The Scourge of B'Moth," are essentially...rehashes of recognizable Lovecraft classics, though one or two are fairly original and worthwhile.

And for those who long for the occasional chuckle-break from all the melodramatically histrionic proceedings, Donald A. Wollheim's "The Horror Out of Lovecraft" and Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars" will fit the bill - the latter, especially, as it comically rapes virtually every famous story Lovecraft ever wrote (with love, of course).

These aren't all the stories included in this volume, but they are indicative of the rest - certainly sufficient for anyone to determine whether or not Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos will be worth the "Price."

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's something at my window. It seems to be - oh, my God! Words cannot describe the utter blasphemous horror of the nameless dread somehow made flesh incarnate! Someone save me, before I succumb to that unutterable -

Rating:
Summary: best anthology i know of
Review: my first experience with pulp came through this collection, and it is still my favorite. the early masters of pulp and their greatest stories (or almost) are collected here. this collection is excellent, particularly as an introduction to pulp. it's not too weird, focuses a lot on descriptions and understandable plots. gathered here are writers like kuttner, howard, hall thompson, derleth........ filled with masterpieces. great stories.

Rating:
Summary: Worthy Collection of "Weird" tales from the Pulp Era
Review: Robert Price does an excellent job of compiling seminal tales from the pulp magazines from the Weird Tales era. Intended as a companion piece to August Derleth's collection, "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos", the focus here is on tales which spawned some of the more interesting concepts in what would be later termed the "Cthuthlu Mythos."

As you'd expect with any anthology, this collection is a bit of a mixed bag, but worthwhile for its inclusion of some of the more hard-to-find tales, which are often neglected in anthologies of the genre. Also of note is Price's lively discussion of the "Cthuthlu\Lovecraft Mythos."

In the end, this is a fine addition to the cannon of anthologies which attempt to demonstrate Lovecrafts's influence over the "weird fiction" genre and the group of writers who contributed to Lovecraft's "universe."

Recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Nice collection
Review: This is a solid collection of "pulp" stories out of the Lovecraft tradition ranging from fair to excellent. Some of Price's selections may be arguable, for instance, Howard's "The Fire of Ashurbanipal" or Smith's "The Seven Geases". Both have produced tales that are rooted firmer in the Lovecraft mythos, but the first is the alternate version of the tale of the same title, difficult to find, and the second is simply one of Smith's best stories. Even the Derleth contributions are good tales, centering around his more intruiging and more independent creation Ithaqua. A couple of oddities and relics round off the book.

Price's introduction and defense of Derleth's systemizing of the mythos is less than successful. He argues, more or less, that the roots of the elemental system and the struggle of good vs. evil deities lie in Lovecraft's own tales. For instance, both Derleth's and Lovecraft's protagonists bestow upon the entities negative moral adjectives and connotations. Although I agree with Price that Derleth has been lambasted undeservedly by many contemporary critics, his arguments, in the end, are unconvincing. Though Lovecraft and Derleth both describe the evil from an antropocentric view, Derleth's objective description of the Cthulhu Mythos is explicitly in analogy with Christian mythology and, one should admit, systematic theology, while Lovecraft is objectively explicit in the complete indifference, chaos, and contingency that is breaking in upon a mechanistic materialistic reality.

The two stances, and thus the frames of their tales, couldn't be further apart from each other. If Derleth and Lovecraft weren't that different in the end, as Price suggests, the question arises why Derleth's stereotypical tales (which were really clever advertisings for his Arkham House) easily published in the worst pulp magazines, while Lovecraft barely sold any of his own. One could make an analogy with the immensely popular Hammer films of the sixties and seventies, usually depicting stereotypical struggles between good and evil, and the many contemporary horror films that reached deeper than mere dichotomies have been largely forgotten. Even so, Price offers valuable points in defense of Derleth and criticism of recent Lovecraft scholarship.