Derleth and Lumley - Two 'Extenders' of the Lovecraftian Mythos
August Derleth saw himself as H.P. Lovecraft's
natural heir, weaving his stories into the Cthulhu Mythos and
incorporating the 'dreadful events in Innsmouth' and other incidents
from the original corpus. He will suggest, in a fit of
in-joke paranoia, that Lovecraft and others died young because they knew
too much - a nice little conceit. He has been much and rightly
criticised on two grounds - for being derivative (and even thieving and manipulating Lovecraft's unpublished drafts for his own purposes) but, more seriously,
for attenuating the raw cosmic horror of the original (as if he had
failed to understand its essential bleakness). Both accusations have merit.
He constructed a
mythological fantasy of good and evil much closer to religious
tradition and to fantasy than true horror. A Sumerian would have
understood his Elder Gods and Ancient Ones, whereas only a modern mind
could have comprehended Lovecraft himself. The Mask of Cthulhu, a
collection of stories from Wierd Tales, stretching from 1939 to 1957,
epitomises those failures and yet, perhaps, the reaction has gone too
far because too much was expected of Mr. Derleth. After all, he insists that his work is an entertainment and suggests, probably quite rightly, that Lovecraft held much the same opinion of his own work.
His early
championship of his master helped to ensure that Lovecraft became a
cultural phenomenon, heir to Poe in leading the American tradition of
horror and influencer of popular culture. Although his writing is not
great, by the standards of pulp fiction Derleth is solid, clear and, at
times, can write very well and suggestively. There is a minor and
unexpected erotic charge in the final story - The Seal of R'lyeh - and
the community threat to the 'hero' to The House in the Valley is well
drawn.
The chief difference from Lovecraft is one of perspective.
He is more likely to be 'simpatico' to the person drawn to the evil
which he can treat more ambiguously as just the not-good of another - as
if alien creatures have rights too. Lovecraft is, on the other hand, determinedly
judgemental. These evil forces are dominant but they are evil, or at
least anti-human rather than just non-human, to Lovecraft. The alien is
generally to be extirpated.
The American Government in Innsmouth
would have had every right to slaughter the half-breeds from Lovecraft's perspective whereas Derleth
sometimes sees them as sentient 'others' to which he, like some of his
heroes, are drawn. Abominations or just different? - Derleth's ambiguity
shows a culture in change between judgementalism and relativism. His
weaknesses may be intellectual and imaginative rather than purely literary yet he still deserves to be remembered as the leading member of the
'School of Lovecraft'.
The stories in The Mask of Cthulhu are like watching
re-runs of favourite TV shows. They are comfort food for horror fans.
They are the first stage in a process that develops with all horror tropes that have a visceral
original. They eventually end up with a child's cartoon or toy. From Dracula
to Count Duckula and so from Innsmouth to cuddly Cthulhu knitted toys.
Derleth is the first unfortunate stage in taming Lovecraft as Bela
Lugosi's Count Dracula was in taming the Nosferatu. His stories
are the sort that remind you why you wish Lovecraft had lived longer and
written more. As the years go by, it becomes ever clearer that the gap
between Poe and Lovecraft is reflected in a gap between Lovecraft and
whoever is to be the next great innovator in horror.
Sadly, it
is not Stephen King (though he is another writer who is over-diminished
by literary snobs) and it is not yet Thomas Ligotti who is too much in
the shadow of his Master and whose corpus seems small and too
out-of-the-way. Someone out there, in some American High School, is
turning their Goth mind to dark matters that must be written down ...
lest he go insane! Derleth's work is thus a sustained homage to, commentary on and even pastiche of his
friend H P Lovecraft's works, moulding them very deliberately into a
'mythos' later to be taken up by others and, in the process, completely
subverting Lovecraft's own cold and dark philosophical stance.
The Trail of Cthulhu is the most complete expression of this mixture of homage, commentary and pastiche. It is made up of five interconnected short stories which all appeared
initially in Weird Tales from 1944 to 1951, allowing Derleth to
introduce the atomic weapon by the end, useless though it may be against
the crawling chaos that our heroes are dealing with. Psychologically
he understands his audience. He is a mature late thirties when he
writes the bulk of this material but he still remembers what it was like
to be in his late twenties (the age of his young protagonists) even to
the point of ultimately being confused about one's own allegiances.
Although
irritating to Lovecraftian purists perhaps, The Trail of Cthulhu may
have been underestimated - at least as literature. All Derleth does
is displace Lovecraft's cosmic pessimism and awe with a more Manichean
struggle between alien beings with a strong nod to the Christian mythos'
struggle between Satan and God - almost certainly necessary to extend
the appeal of the genre to the American popular market. Derleth is at the Universal Monsters stage before
that declined into 'Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein'. The Mythos is
still disturbing and scary but more boy's own adventure and far from
the cuddly Cthulhu toys and Cthulhu for President memes of today.
Given
this aspect of the case, Derleth's skill lies in weaving a story that
can include the key components of Lovecraft's story lines (Cthulhu
dreaming in R'lyeh, Innsmouth, the Nameless City, night gaunts and so
forth) in order to re-model them as a continuous narrative. Some
may baulk at the repetitions in each story (necessary as months or even a
couple of years might pass between publication of each) but I suggest
we look at the repetitions as incantatory so that the stories themselves
are a form of ritual protection against evil. All the stories
have one leading figure in the mysterious and ambiguous Dr. Shrewsbury
(the Van Helsing of the tale) and one young hero (who the Weird Tales
reader can identify with) for each so that, by the end, we have a band
of brothers with an unexpected twist in the person of the last.
Each
story is a written testimony, a Gothic horror meme that goes back to at
least Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and so to the eighteenth century
epistolary novel - manuscript, deposition, testament, statement and
narrative. This literary traditionalism also pays homage to HPL. The
writing is clear and popular, less obviously mannered than Lovecraft
but with enough references back to retain a linkage - where Lovecraft
repeats 'eldritch', Derleth barely uses it but repeats 'batrachian'
instead. He retains the 'tainted blood' theme that worries bien-pensants
today. His skill lies in his popularising and re-ordering
of something that was fragmented and still speaking only to a minor literary elite
under HPL. Some sacrifices (howe appropriate) had to be made to bring the mythos to the masses and the sacrifice is its hybridisation with the adventure novel - South
American jungles, sea-going and what would be regarded now as 'racist'
anthropologies.
Enough of Lovecraft's cosmic awe and horror
remains even if the idea that we can actually resist such evil with its
minions on earth (if it had a mind to our destruction) seems to miss
HPL's point. Such a shift can never truly be in the spirit of
Lovecraft's vision. Nevertheless, Derleth writes much better than
his critics have allowed. The journey to the Nameless City in the
Arabian desert, though it has its unexplained absurdities, is a
brilliant piece of subterranean horror which Tim Powers will have drawn
upon in his 'Declare'. A knowledge of Lovecraft aids our
enjoyment because (other than the grand philosophical betrayal) Derleth
is immensely skilled at co-ordinating the 'facts' of HPL's stories into
some sort of cohesion - not excluding travel between 'non-Euclidean'
dimensions.
The stories and their tight relationship with each
other and with their Lovecraftian sources deserves more consideration
not as great literature but as a genuine innovation in popular fantasy
that has helped fuel enormous creativity since. Are we
horrified by what we read? Rarely - too much time has passed since its
writing. Are we excited by what we read? Much more frequently because
adventure is equally what these stories are about. Are we nostalgic for
its world? Certainly.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the prolific Brian Lumley, a stalwart of British
horror, collected what his publisher called his best Cthulhu Mythos
tales in the first volume of what appeared to be a series in the making (The Taint and Other Novellas). These tales (with one dated 2005) come from the period 1971-1983. Where
does Lumley stand in the Lovecraftian canon? Well, he mostly stands as a
worthy successor to Derleth, if you take the Mythos not to be the
starting point for great literature but as a universe for pulp
exploitation. In this volume at least, Lumley largely concentrates on
tales of horrors associated with the ocean and, in one story, the winds.
The smell of the sea, as you might expect of a British writer, pervades
the book.
Most of these stories, which contain their own inner
coherence (for example, the Oakdene asylum appears repeatedly as if it
had wandered in from an Amicus movie production), were written when
Lumley was not yet a full time writer but was holding down a steady job
in an extended military career - solid, workmanlike stuff but showing
none of the signs of a mind able to give itself completely to its
subject matter.
Given the period in which they were written, most of the stories come bear loose comparison with the Stephen King collection Night Shift, which has its own occasional use of more land-based Lovecraftian themes and which we will come to later on our postings. King, as Lumley might well admit, is the superior writer, although Lumley at his best is far better than King at his worst.
The bulk of the stories
in this collection are entertaining enough - although the last two (The
Lord of the Worms, a dreadful sub-Wheatley tale of black magic whose
only purpose seems to have been to give some sort of back story to his
Titus Crow creation, and The House of the Temple) might easily have
been left out with profit. The latter, however, although largely
pedestrian and predictable, opens out (as Lumley is, on occasion, wont
to do) into some remarkable last pages of genuine eldritch horror even
as it bathetically collapses into cliche at the end. Other
stories are more solid but they contain nothing that should hold a
reader who is not a died-in-the-wool Lovecraftian, one who needs his fix
and will put up with some less potent drug than he would really like.
Two
stories or rather novella rise above the rest - Born of the Winds
(1972/3) and The Taint (2002/2003). These suggest that Lumley is at
his best (as in his Necroscope series - see below) when he is given the space to
tell a longer tale and develop character. In this, he is much like King
and unlike Lovecraft himself and, say, Ligotti. Lumley's other short stories
are basically pulp, at times almost pastiches of the entertaining fodder
to be found at the top end of the Weird Tales market, but these two
novella really do have something going for them.
The earliest, Born of the Winds, is derivative of Algernon Blackwood's The Wendigo which Lumley
cleverly identifies with Ithaqua, the Wind Walker, from the Lovecraftian
Mythos. The transition is seamless. Although perhaps not great
literature in that absolute sense beloved of the Academy, the writing is
atmospheric (it is set in the Canadian wastes) and it is a worthy
addition to the canon.But it is The Taint that holds our
attention. It is a small masterpiece (apparently dated 2005). It may be no accident that it
comes after well over thirty years of practice at the art of writing.
It
takes the Innsmouth story and creates a tale of miscegenation between
man and sea-beast that contains none of the racist disgust of Lovecraft.
Instead it creates a very humane story of the human costs of dark
dabblings in the past that becomes a lively metaphor for the terrible
effects on later generations of the boundary-crossing of earlier ones.
References to AIDS and CJD are not accidental, nor the idea that
scientific interest in the Innsmouth population might have its own, not
necessarily entirely evil, momentum.
There is little of Cthulhu
in this story but a great deal of interest in developing what Lovecraft
had never explained into a narrative that fills some gaps plausibly. In
this sense, it is more than another tale within a tradition, it is a
brilliant extension of the narrative, still very much loyal to
Lovecraft's 'facts' but from a more humane if pessimistic British
perspective at the beginning of the twenty first century.
It has
also been brilliantly translated into a Cornish environment - directly
across from the New England coast. The 'surprise' (we are not into
spoilers) seems no surprise when it comes and yet Lumley's skilled
writing has brilliantly drawn us away from the only logical reason the
protagonist is in the decayed fishing village and towards the
relationships between the middle class exiles who stand apart from the
locals. It is a skilled example of literary misdirection and shows what
Lumley is capable of.
This story has appeared elsewhere (in Weird Shadows over Innsmouth, publ. 2005) so that this book does not
need to be purchased if you have that volume and are not a Lovecraftian
mythos completist. On the other hand, the story is so interesting that I
would say that the book is worth the purchase for it alone - assuming
you are reasonably well educated in Lovecraft's themes and can enjoy the
other stories for what they are, dark fun.
I like Lumley. He is
an honest cove in popular literature, It is good to see him still
appearing on Waterstone's shelves but this collection is otherwise really (like
King's) strictly for the fans or for Lovecraftians (like me) who cannot
fail to get a thrill from the Master's grim world-view (albeit as
twisted by Derlethianism).
The Taint is the best story in part because it goes to the core of the Master's work and throws out all the accretions of Arkham Press. It develops Lovecraft and when we say we wish Lovecraft had written more, this is what we generally mean - that his dark vision, set in each successive time, should reflect what science, not myth, might tell us about the eldritch horrors 'out there'.
Lumley's Necroscope (part of a series) has been a regular on the horror bookshelves since 1986. Set in the early 1970s, it reeks of the Cold War. It was enjoyable enough with some fine writing in patches. It seemed little more than a workmanlike adaptation of the Transylvanian vampire story until it just took off into an amazing amalgam of Stoker, Lovecraft and zombie lore that pushed it to the next level. The combination of solid English writing and the spectacular closure help to explain why it has taken a near-permanent place on shelves that groan with Stephen King but also with some far inferior fodder. Extremely gruesome, though not gratuitously or callously so. Recommended.
The second volume Necroscope II: Vamphyri is no better
or worse than the first but Lumley certainly likes to blow things up
(castle, English country house and laboratory, the key locations of
classical horror). A psychologist might have a field day trying
to work out the mind of the author but I came to the conclusion that
Lumley is really exposing nothing more than his inner adolescent:
monsters, a bit of sexual transgression, blondes, spies, adventure, the
dead, the gruesome - and big explosions.
However, behind the
boy's own transgressive adventure, the Wamphyri (the correct spelling) are a genuine addition
to the vampire mythos, truly evil otherwordly callous self-centred
creatures who strike me as progenitors of the creatures of The Strain
which now looks derivative in comparison. Lumley can write when
he wants to. There are moments when this book (as with Necroscope)
rises above its own norm and shows an imagination that 'opens up new
vistas of horror' (in 1988). Above the average for the genre but not
quite a true classic.