H.P. Lovecraft - Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

A Del Rey Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Compilation copyright 1990 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.

The Call of Cthulhu, copyright 1928 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1939, 1945 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, copyright 1963 by August Derleth; The Haunter of the Dark, copyright 1936 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1939, 1945 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, copyright 1963 by August Derleth.

The Return of the Sorcerer, copyright 1931 by The Clayton Magazines, copyright 1942 by Clark Ashton Smith; Ubbo-Sathla, copyright 1933 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1942 by Clark Ashton Smith.

The Black Stone, copyright 1931 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, renewed 1959 by Steinberg Press, Inc., assigned to Mrs. P. M. Kuykendall.

The Hounds of Tindalos, copyright 1929 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1946 by Frank Belknap Long; The Space-Eaters, copyright 1928 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1946 by Frank Belknap Long.

The Dweller in Darkness, copyright 1944 by Weird Tales, copyright 1945, 1953 by August Derleth; Beyond the Threshold, copyright 1941 by Weird Tales, copyright 1945, 1953 by August Derleth.

The Shambler from the Stars, copyright 1935 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, copyright 1945 by Robert Bloch; The Shadow from the Steeple, copyright 1950 by Weird Tales; Notebook Found in a Deserted House, copyright 1951 by Weird Tales.

The Salem Horror, copyright 1937 by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, renewed 1965 by Catherine Reggie.

The Terror from the Depths, copyright 1976 by Edward P. Berglund.

Rising with Surtsey, copyright 1971 by August Derleth.

Cold Print and The Return of the Lloigor, copyright 1969 by August Derleth.

My Boat, copyright 1975 by Joanna Russ.

Sticks, copyright 1974 by Stuart David Schiff.

The Freshman, copyright 1979 by Mercury Press, Inc., reprinted by permission of the author and the authors agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

Jerusalems Lot, copyright 1978 by Stephen King, reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

Discovery of the Ghooric ZoneMarch 15, 2337, copyright 1977 by Richard A. Lupoff.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 9896130

eISBN: 978-0-307-54790-3

This edition published by arrangement with Arkham House Publishers, Inc.

v3.1

W hy in the name of science-fiction did you ever print such a story as At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft? Are you in such dire straits that you must print this kind of drivel? If such stories as thisof two people scaring themselves half to death by looking at the carvings in some ancient ruins, and being chased by something that even the author cant describe, and full of mutterings about nameless horrors, such as the windowless solids with five dimensions, Yog-Sothoth, etc.are what is to constitute the future yarns of Astounding Stories, then heaven help the cause of science-fiction.

The object of the preceding epistolary animus, taken from the letter column of the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories, was of course one of two Cthulhu Mythos works by H. P. Lovecraft that were being published by the magazine during that same year. Reader response to the Lovecraft stories was not unremittingly negative, but the favorable commentary tended to be overwhelmed by wails of indignation, bemusement, dismay.

During the 1930s American magazine science fiction was largely the province of a ghettoized group of action/adventure hacks who simply transformed the Lazy X ranch into Planet X and then scribbled forth the same formula stories, substituting space pirates for cattle rustlers. For readers accustomed to hopping aboard a starship, flipping on the faster-than-light drive (never mind Einsteins special theory), and blasting the bejesus out of the eight-legged men of Betelgeuse, Lovecrafts painstakingly detailed and overtly atmospheric sojourn across the Antarctic wilderness, in which his two intrepid explorers gibber and shriek before the culminant horror, was largely incomprehensible to the SF enthusiasts of 1936.

And the difference between Lovecrafts Mythos fiction and the galaxy-bustin ebullience of Doc Smith and his cohorts is more fundamental than a simple action-versus-atmosphere dichotomy. Many of the space-opera exponents of the era, such as E. E. Smith, Nat Schachner, and Ralph Milne Farley, had been born in the previous century when the universe was still perceived to function in terms of an immutable Newtonian order. Each star was a sun just like ours, and as nineteenth-century astronomers directed their spectroscopes to the heavens, they received back the reassuring message that the stars contained hydrogen, helium, magnesium, sodium, and other elements precisely like those found within our own solar system. Toward the end of the century, when physicists were congratulating themselves on what they thought was their complete understanding of the universe, was the ultimate human conquest of the cosmos really so improbable?

Not according to Albert Einstein, who in 1905 inaugurated the revolution in twentieth-century science that ultimately would forever shatter the tenets of classical physics. With subsequent developments in relativity, quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, and the like, the universe no longer seemed so comprehensible. Just as Copernicus and Galileo had wrenched humanity from the center of creation, so too has modern man come to realize that not only is he not at the center of the cosmos, but that he is a singularity in the cosmos. The universe with its neutron stars and quasars and black holes is strange to us, and we are a stranger in the universe.

Of all the science-fiction writers whose work appeared in the magazines during the 1930s, only H. P. Lovecraft transcends the gosh-wow insipidities of his colleagues to convey this twentieth-century sensibility of the essential mystery of the cosmos. All my tales, wrote Lovecraft in a 1927 letter, are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large, a statement that virtually encapsulates the revolution then occurring in modern science, as wide-eyed physicists were in the process of discovering a strange new world not vouchsafed by Newtonian mechanics. Thus the non-Euclidean angles of Cthulhus sea-sunken city (see ) represent the same non-Euclidean geometries with which Einstein had to grapple in formulating his general theory, while the unearthly emanations from the meteorite in The Colour Out of Space replicate the radium experiments undertaken earlier in the century by Becquerel and the Curies. Even current developments in higher mathematicsthe phenomenon of chaosare presaged in the Mythos tales, for the supreme deity in Lovecrafts imaginary pantheon, the blind idiot god Azathoth, reigns in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos. Suitably accoutred in Mandelbrot fractals and equipped with the Feigenbaum constant, Azathoth would feel eminently at home amid the permutations and perturbations of contemporary chaos theory.