Derleth and Lumley - Two 'Extenders' of the Lovecraftian Mythos
The Mask of Cthulhu (1939-1957 coll. 1958) The Trail of Cthulhu (1944-1951) August Derleth. The Taint and Other Novellas (1971-1983 coll. 2008) Necroscope (1986) Necroscope II: Vamphyri (1988) Brian Lumley 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been much and rightly criticised on two grounds - for being derivative (and even thieving and manipulating Lovecraft's unpublished drafts for his own purposes) but, more seriously, for attenuating the raw cosmic horror of the original (as if he had failed to understand its essential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 a