Foreword
Tentacles, Terrible Tomes, and Broadswords
by Paul Di Filippo
The Cthulhu Mythos is an early example of open-source software.
Think about it: an intangible product, originating perhaps from the initial vision of a lone individual, whose refinement and expansion depends on the efforts of myriad selfless contributors, ungoverned by rigid hierarchies of command. Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox . . . H.P. Lovecraft and company constituted the Silicon Valley of Horror of their era!
Seriously, we shouldn’t stretch this comparison too far. Coding and scribbling are two distinct pastimes. Nonetheless, Lovecraft’s willingness to have other writers play in his painstakingly conceived and reified cosmic sandbox is rare and exemplary and farsighted, an early instance of the “information wants to be free” credo of the computer age.
Of course, this kind of enterprise, where several creators world-build together, existed before Lovecraft. In the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, John Clute nominates perhaps the earliest instance: “It could be argued that the first shared-world anthology to make a significant impact on the Western World was the Christian New Testament . . . ” Indeed the New Testament experience of a multiplicity of authors all working to chronicle a shared experience or vision strikes to the heart of what HPL and his buddies were doing, a more secular and literary enterprise which today goes by several names, such as “shared-world fiction” or “franchise fiction” or even, clunkily, “multi-author braided meganovels.” The pejorative term “share-cropping” has also been tossed about.
When fans think of major contributors to the Mythos, they instantly summon up the names of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Fritz Leiber, Ramsey Campbell and others. But not quite so much attention gets paid to Lovecraft’s good friend, Robert E. Howard, he of Conanesque literary fame. But Howard did indeed contribute to the Mythos, and this volume you now peruse—ably compiled by Scott Lee—gives us the major instances of Howard’s dabbling in the eldritch shared swamp of the Old Ones.
Although the official “launch” of the Mythos is now dated to HPL’s 1919 story “Dagon,” the heyday of the “franchise” did not begin until 1928, with the publication of “The Call of Cthulhu.” We know that Howard was reading Lovecraft via their shared issues of Weird Tales, and their lifelong correspondence (lasting till REH’s suicide in 1936) began in 1930, when Howard sent a letter praising HPL’s “The Rats in the Walls” to editor Farnsworth Wright, who forwarded it to Lovecraft’s home in Providence. “A rich and vibrant correspondence immediately ensued,” says the dustjacket copy to the assembled correspondence of the two vastly different creators, A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
Howard was no slavish imitator, and his Mythos tales reflect his own themes and style and interests in a unique manner. Some approach HPL’s efforts more closely than others. Let’s take a quick look at them, in order of publication, before trying to summarize their effects.
“The Shadow Kingdom” (1929) forms part of Howard’s series on the Atlantean barbarian-cum-king named Kull, and hence slots soundly right into Howard’s Thurian-Hyborian cycle, being for the most part straight-up sword and sorcery. It was in all likelihood written before the influence of “The Call of Cthulhu.” Yet we see Howard’s early fascination with the same unknowable cosmic vistas that tantalized HPL. Brule the Pict tells Kull:
“[We] are but barbarians—infants compared to the Seven Empires. Not even they themselves know how old they are. Neither the memory of man nor the annals of the historians reach back far enough to tell us when the first men came up from the sea and built cities on the shore. But Kull, men were not always ruled by men!”
Next up is “Skull-Face” (1929), and this heady, hypnotic, feverish pulp adventure, while basically a Sax Rohmer-ish tale of an evil mastermind and the noble forces arrayed against his plans for world domination, also contains some tantalizing references to horrid precursors to mankind. Here the villain Kathulos expatiates:
“Know you who I am? Kathulos of Egypt! Bah! They knew me in the old days! I reigned in the dim misty sea lands ages and ages before the sea rose and engulfed the land. I died, not as men die; the magic draft of life everlasting was ours! I drank deep and slept. Long I slept in my lacquered case! My flesh withered and grew hard; my blood dried in my veins. I became as one dead. But still within me burned the spirit of life, sleeping but anticipating the awakening. The great cities crumbled to dust. The sea drank the land. The tall shrines and the lofty spires sank beneath the green waves. All this I knew as I slept, as a man knows in dreams. Kathulos of Egypt? Faugh! Kathulos of Atlantis!”
I uttered a sudden involuntary cry. This was too grisly for sanity.
“Aye, the magician, the sorcerer.
“And down the long years of savagery, through which the barbaric races struggled to rise without their masters, the legend came of the day of empire, when one of the Old Race would rise up from the sea. Aye, and lead to victory the black people who were our slaves in the old days.”
That evildoer’s name, by the way, proved to be a mere coincidence, not the first nod to HPL, as Howard himself explained: “A writer in the Eyrie, a Mr. O’Neail, I believe, wondered if I did not use some myth regarding this Cthulhu in ‘Skull Face’. The name Kathulos might suggest that, but in reality, I merely manufactured the name at random, not being aware at the time of any legendary character named Cthulhu—if indeed there is.”
“The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” (1931) continues in the vein of our first two tales, being the initial adventure of one Turlogh O’Brien, an exiled Gaelic swordsman wandering the world in historical Viking times. This particular exploit brings him to a mysterious island where he encounters a figure reminiscent of Lovecraft’s Charles Dexter Ward.
He was very old; he alone of all the throng was bearded, and his beard was as white as the long hair which fell about his shoulders. He was very tall and very lean, and his great dark eyes blazed as from a hidden fire. Turlogh knew without being told that this man was Gothan, priest of the Black God. The ancient exuded a very aura of age and mystery. His great eyes were like windows of some forgotten temple, behind which passed like ghosts his dark and terrible thoughts. Turlogh sensed that Gothan had delved too deep in forbidden secrets to remain altogether human. He had passed through doors that had cut him off from the dreams, desires and emotions of ordinary mortals. Looking into those unwinking orbs Turlogh felt his skin crawl, as if he had looked into the eyes of a great serpent.
At last, with “The Black Stone” (1931), we enter the arena of explicit Cthulhuiana. Our protagonist—suddenly a literary gent, and not a big-thewed barbarian—is studying Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults, a primo HPL talisman. His unwise investigations bring him to an unsavory monolith in Hungary.
“The Children of the Night” (1931) returns to Von Junzt, and also gives a shoutout to “The Call of Cthulhu” itself! Something of a “club story,” the piece follows our hero as he mentally time-slips back to a prehuman era.
Good old essential Von Junzt and his damnable book return in “The Thing on the Roof “ (1932), which involves a visit to the Latin American Temple of the Toad.
Another of Howard’s barbarian heroes, Bran Mak Morn, who lived during Classical Roman times, is front and center in “Worms of the Earth” (1932). With explicit allusions to HPL’s drowned city of R’lyeh, the tale conjures up a different species of ancient monsters, half-human, half-other.
Allied to “The Children of the Night,” “People of the Dark” (1932) features another modern-day man again psychically voyaging to an earlier era to encounter:
The Little People—I wondered if those anthropologists were correct in their theory of a squat Mongoloid aboriginal race, so low in the scale of evolution as to be scarcely human, yet possessing a distinct, though repulsive, culture of their own. They had vanished before the invading races, theory said, forming the base of all Aryan legends of trolls, elves, dwarfs and witches. Living in caves from the start, these aborigines had retreated farther and farther into the caverns of the hills, before the conquerors, vanishing at last entirely, though folklore fancy pictures their descendants still dwelling in the lost chasms far beneath the hills, loathsome survivors of an outworn age.
A surprisingly poignant story of a man whose wife becomes possessed and deadly, “The Haunter of the Ring” (1934) offers a great instance of the incursion into the mortal plane of forces from the Outer Dark:
And then at last Vrolok wheeled, with an awful shriek, throwing his arms above his head in a gesture of wild despair. And for one brain-shattering instant he was blotted out by a great black shadow—Kirowan grasped my arm and we fled from that accursed chamber, blind with horror.
A famous round-robin exercise involving Lovecraft, Howard, A. Merritt, C.L. Moore and Frank Belknap Long, “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935) is echt Cthulhu due to Lovecraft’s usurpation of the plot to dovetail with his “The Shadow Out of Time.” In the penultimate chapter, Howard takes Lovecraft’s hapless human in an alien’s body and turns him into, basically, King Kull, a conqueror of the galaxy!
“The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (1936) could be an episode in the career of Indiana Jones, as our white man hero and his Moslem sidekick discover a lost desert city where the Elder Gods have wreaked a certain curse.
“As Xuthltan died,” continued the old Bedouin, “he cursed the stone whose magic had not saved him, and he shrieked aloud the fearful words which undid the spell he had put upon the demon in the cavern, and set the monster free. And crying out on the forgotten gods, Cthulhu and Koth and Yog-Sothoth, and all the pre-Adamite Dwellers in the black cities under the sea and the caverns of the earth, he called upon them—to take back that which was theirs, and with his dying breath pronounced doom on the false king, and that doom was that the king should sit on his throne holding in his hand the Fire of Asshurbanipal until the thunder of Judgment Day.
Lastly, “Dig Me No Grave” (1937) features some of the recurring characters of the intermittent “club tales” herein, and shows us the posthumous fate of a nigh-immortal fellow who delved too deeply into the occult: “Before manne was, ye Elder ones were, & even yet their lord dwelleth amonge ye shadows to which if a manne sette his foote he maye not turn upon his track.”
Emerging from these swift-flowing, enthralling, riotous, shivery tales, the reader who is familiar with the corpus of Lovecraft’s work and its effects can judge exactly how integral Howard’s contributions were to the Mythos, and whether they achieved any of the same frissons. For my part, I find that Howard deliberately eschewed many of the touchstones of Lovecraft’s writings. The sense of hopelessness and helplessness and madness is generally underplayed. Howard was just too vigorous a proponent of Conanesque elan vital to embrace the neurasthenic sensitives that HPL favored. Howard’s protagonists generally emerge alive from their encounters with the Great Ones and their minions, and don’t plunge into permanent insanity. Likewise absent is a distaste for foreignness. Howard’s actors revel in travel and encountering other cultures. And despite Howard’s deft employment of several bookish talismans—Von Junzt, etc—his heroes are doers and men of action, not academics or scientists or recluses.
What Howard did heartily embrace and convey from Lovecraft’s literary repository was the sense of vast depths of unrecorded time, and the smallness of man’s place in the universe. This haunting riff Howard had pioneered on his own, a case of independent literary invention, and so he must have perked up to find in Lovecraft a fellow enthusiast along these lines.
Ultimately, Howard’s forays into the Cthulhu Mythos showed a comradely joy in sharing some of the superficial tokens of a friend’s imagination. But one feels that the hot-blooded Texan never fully inhabited the cool meticulous mindset or deracinated worldview of his gloomy Yankee pal, as did, say, Smith or Bloch or Leiber. Howard could write only Howardian tales, sagas of mortals contending, foolishly or valiantly, with non-human forces older and larger than mankind, while refusing ever to admit defeat. I am sure that if, say, Bran Mak Morn or Kull ever had to face a shoggoth, their response would not be a gibbering descent into incoherence, but a sharp blade sunk into a gelatinous hulk!