Darrell Schweitzer - Cthulhus Reign

Table of Contents

I felt a coldness in my soul...

The teenage girl simply stepped in the void and virtually winked out of existence. Above, one of the evil low-lying clouds pulsated briefly. It had done that when the dog disappeared too. Something in me shuddered in sympathy.

Some members of the procession saw this. They broke away from the others. Into the patch they leaped, lemmings on two legs. Into the void they vanished.

A booming voice lifted. Humans! Escape into the void! Escape and you will not be consumed. Escape into death! There is freedom in death. And from the new masters of Earth! It was a centaur.

A surge of humanity responded to that hellish promise. They stampeded for the blackness. Some were trampled. Others stumbled over them to seek dark oblivion. Soon, the greater portion of them were gone. Utterly gone. I felt a coldness in my soul....

Above, the clouds pulsated wildly, as if laughing uproariously in delight.

from What Brings the Void by Will Murray

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Copyright 2010 by Tekno Books and Darrell Schweitzer.

All Rights Reserved.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1507.

DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

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First Printing, April 2010

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eISBN: 9781101428054

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction copyright 2010 by Darrell Schweitzer
The Walker in the Cemetery, copyright 2010 by Ian Watson
Sanctuary, copyright 2010 by Don Webb
Her Acres of Pastoral Playground, copyright 2010 by Mike Allen
Spherical Trigonometry, copyright 2010 by Ken Asamatsu.
English translation 2010 Edward Lipsett.
What Brings the Void, copyright 2010 by Will Murray
The New Pauline Corpus, copyright 2010 by Matt Cardin
Ghost Dancing, copyright 2010 by Darrell Schweitzer
This is How the World Ends, copyright 2010 by John R. Fultz
The Shallows, copyright 2010 by John Langan
Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names, copyright 2010 by
Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
The Seals of New Rlyeh, copyright 2010 by Gregory Frost
The Holocaust of Ecstasy, copyright 2010 by Brian Stableford
Vastation, copyright 2010 by Laird Barron
Nothing Personal, copyright 2010 by Richard A. Lupoff
Remnants, copyright 2010 by Fred Chappell

WHEN ALL THE STARS ARE RIGHT ON THE EARTHS LAST NIGHT

An introduction

by Darrell Schweitzer

A ll my tales, H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote, are based on the fundamental premise that human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human formand the local human passions and conditions and standardsare depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

That, we must admit, is a pretty stringent ideal, which even Lovecraft could not stick to all the time, it being inherent in the nature of fiction that a certain amount of human interest is necessary to keep human readers interested. Nevertheless he clearly stated the underlying philosophy behind his literary corpus, and had done so at a significant moment, because that letter accompanied the submission of the classic The Call of Cthulhu to Weird Tales in 1927.

It is probably unnecessary in this age of Google and Wikipedia to go into great detail about who H.P. Lovecraft was. Suffice it to say that Lovecraft (1890- 1937) was the greatest writer of weird and horrific fiction in English in the 20th century. He published most of his work in pulp magazines, particularly in Weird Tales , and saw only one very limited, shabby book publication (of the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth ) in his lifetime. Were he not a strict mechanistic materialist who did not believe in such things as spirit or an afterlife, he might be looking down in utter astonishment to see his work not only published all over the world but reprinted under such prestigious imprints as Penguin Classics or Library of America, this latter explicitly placing him on the same level as his own literary idols, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

One can only guess what he would have made of those plush Cthulhu dolls you can get from The Toy Vault, which are actually manufactured in China, and if anyone had told him, back in the 30s, that he would become a world-wide cultural phenomenon adapted into everything from films to comic books (just being invented in his time) and manga (unknown) to role-playing games (likewise), he would have thought his informant stark, raving mad.