|
Of all the members of what Lin Carter once
dubbed "the New Lovecraft Circle", i. e., second generation
contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos, Brian Lumley has certainly been the most
persistent and prolific. Though his fictional output has never been restricted
to the Mythos, it has been concerned with it more often than not. And though his
non-Mythos horror fiction is usually quite effective, displaying a kind of
leering weirdness reminiscent of EC Comics and a disquieting reality-dislocation
recalling The Twilight Zone, we shall concern ourselves here primarily
with his Mythos-related fiction. What are its sources of inspiration? How good
is it? And how has Lumley shaped the Cthulhu Mythos to his own ends? We begin
with the last of these questions.
Lumley's Mythos
Since Brian Lumley's contributions to
Mythos lore are scattered about, peeking out from corners of this and that
story, a bit of cataloging may prove useful. First, as the Book of Ecclesiastes
says,"of the making of books there is no end", and this applies no
less to Lumley's creation of new Mythos grimoires than to his actual writing of
fiction. No other Mythos scribe has resisted the temptation; why should he?
Foremost among the tomes in Lumley's library is the Cthäat Aquadingen
(the umlaut is a fairly late punctuational addition, appearing first in
"The House of the Temple"). Lumley himself explains that the title is
"a mixture of Latin and German. 'Aqua' being Latin [for water] and 'dingen'
being German for things; 'Cthäat' is of an unknown tongue and is the
transl[iter]ation of the Great Old Ones' speech into English for approximation.
'Aquadingen' means water-things, things of the water, and what the book is about
is spells devised to raise things of the water, demons of the ocean or Cthulhu." ("An Interview with Brian Lumley", Kadath,
November 1980, p. 36). This Latin-German linguistic hybrid is not absolutely
impossible, since the "aqua-" prefix does occur in some loan-words in
German, just as it does in English. Lumley sheds a bit more light on the
enigmatic word "Cthäat" in "The House of the Temple", where
he suggests it might have "some connection with the language or being of
the pre-Naacal [hence Muvian] Kthatans" (Kadath, p. 46, or Weird
Tales #3, p. 187). In the same tale, he amplifies the contents as well:
"The Cthäat Aquadingen was quite simply a compendium of myths and
legends concerning water sprites, nymphs, demons, naiads and other supernatural
creatures of lakes and oceans, and the spells or conjurations by which they
might be evoked or called out of their watery haunts" (ibid.).
Aquatic themes have a considerable appeal
for Lumley, as can be seen by their frequent occurrence in his fiction,
including non-Mythos stories (e.g.,"The Cyprus Shell", "The Deep
Sea Conch", "The Pearl"). Several of the other forbidden books he
mentions are also concerned with marine horrors. Three of these are derived from
Carl Jacobi's "The Aquarium"; they are Gantley's Hydrophinnae,
Gaston Le Fe's Dwellers in the Depths, and the anonymous Unter Zee
Kulten. "I loved Jacobi's 'Aquarium,' but in those early years I didn't
know how to write to an old pro like him, so I just borrowed" (letter, May
3, 1983). (Lumley was later surprised to learn that his instincts had been
sound: Jacobi's "The Aquarium" not only seemed Mythos-oriented;
before its edited appearance in Dark Mind, Dark Heart, it explicitly
mentioned CthuIhu and the Elder Gods. [See the original version in Fantasy
Crossroads 7]). Three more tomes of oceanic occultism added by Lumley
himself are Legends of Liqualia, In Pressured Places, and Notes
on Nessie: The Secrets of Loch Ness Revealed.
Though for Lumley the Cthäat
Aquadingen occupies the central place accorded by Lovecraft and Derleth to
the Necronomicon, Lumley does make use of the latter, supplying new
"quotations" from Alhazred in "The Mirror of Nitocris" (The
Caller of the Black, p. 70), "The Caller of the Black" (ibid., p.
55), "Aunt Hester" (The Horror at Oakdeene, pp. 27-28, 38), and
The Transition of Titus Crow (p. 64). But the most interesting treatment
of the Necronomicon by Lumley (and by anyone else in a long time) is his
creation of a dubious variant version of it, Joachim Feery's Original Notes
on the Necronomicon, an "often fanciful reconstruction" of the
dread work. "His quotes, while apparently genuine and authoritative, often
differ substantially when compared with the works from which they were
supposedly culled. Regarding such discrepancies, Feery claimed that most of his
occult knowledge came to him 'in dreams'!" Feery's volume is described as
"a slim volume of notes" ("Aunt Hester", pp. 26-27). His
other works included Notes on the Cthäat Aquadingen (which probably
overdoes a good thing).
After, the Cthäat Aquadingen and
Feery's Notes, Lumley's third major bibliographical contribution is Sir Amery
Wendy-Smith's translation of the G'harne Fragments, a set of miraculously
preserved shards recording the history of a pre-human African city. This work is
obviously a clone of the Eltdown Shards of Searight and Lovecraft,
standing in the long and imitative tradition of the Celaeno Fragments,
the R'lyeh Text, the Ponape Scripture, the Zanthu Tablets,
etc.
Lumley's stories also contain frequent
references to a fictional, nonoccult work, Notes on Deciphering Codes,
Cryptograms, and Ancient Inscriptions by Gordon Walmsley, a rival translator
of the G'harne shards. Archaeologists might take warning from Lumley's
scholar-protagonists: they always come to a bad end, Wendy-Smith in "Cement
Surroundings" and Walmsley in "In the Vaults Beneath".
Other occult tidbits glancingly cited by
Lumley include the "Nyhargo Dirge" or "Nyhargo Code", the Ibigib,
the Fourth Book of D'harsis, "Ibn Shoddathua's Translation of the
Mum-Nath Papyri", the "Sathlattae" incantations, and the
"broken columns of Geph", but space limitations forbid more than our
mentioning them.
Some of Lumley's most controversial
tinkering with the Cthulhu Mythos has been in the area of theology proper, the
pantheon of gods. Lumley follows Derleth, contra Lovecraft, in making Cthulhu
the greatest of the Great Old Ones (a rubric, by the way, which he eventually
rejects in favor of the "Cthulhu Cycle Deities"). Below Cthulhu are
Yog-Sothoth (sometimes spelled "Yogg-Sothoth") and Cthulhu's daughter
Cthylla, along with his sons Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog ("my
three sons" having been borrowed from Lin Carter). Nyarlathotep, Azathoth,
and Shub-Niggurath are effectively removed from the pantheon and made impersonal
powers of the Old Ones (more on this later). Below these beings we find a vast
group of lesser entities, including the "Tind'losi Hounds", Dagon,
Chaugnar Faugn, Lloigor, Zhar, Atlach-Nacha, Nyogtha, Tsathoggua, Daoloth,
Cthugha, Glaaki, Ithaqua, Shudde-M'ell, Yibb-Tstll, and Bugg-Shash. These are
described as "lesser gods and beings more or less obscure or distant from
the central theme of the Mythos" ("The Fairground Horror",
Disciples of CthuIhu, p. 33), this last signifying Lumley's awareness of these
beings' non-Lovecraftian origin and consequent deuterocanonical status. In
"The House of the Temple" he demotes Bugg-Shash and Yibb-Tstll to mere
"parasites" or "ticks" attached to the Old Ones. These two,
together with Shudde-M'ell, the "Burrower Beneath", are Lumley's
principal contributions to the pantheon. Shudde-M'ell is described as "octopoid
[with] flowing tentacles and a pulpy gray-black elongated sack of a body . . .
eyeless . . . headless, too" (The Burrowers Beneath, p. 138). He is
elsewhere described as "an elongated, eyeless squid" ("The
Fairground Horror", p. 42). He and his brood can tunnel through the solid
earth like water. Yibb-Tstll is "a thing with black breasts and an anus in
its forehead", standing thrice the height of a man and wearing a huge,
concealing green cloak. Its blood has a vampiric life of its own and can be
invoked to cover a victim, suffocating him as with a coating of black
snowflakes. (This is "the Black" which is "called" in one
story.) Bugg-Shash is a messy elemental of cloying and slimy darkness, who once
invoked will try to drown you in slime every time you turn out the light. (His
name is probably derived from the incantatory word "bugg-shoggog" in
"The Dunwich Horror".)
In The Transition of Titus Crow,
Lumley turns his attention to the Elder Gods and supplies a name and a
description for one of them. This is Kthanid, who is an octopus-headed colossus
resembling Cthulhu in every way except that he is golden and glorious. This is
an imaginative stroke. Surely the Elder Gods are no less alien than the Great
Old Ones, and there would be no reason to expect them to conform any more to
anthropomorphic images of deity.
This name, by the way, has a very
Lovecraftian ring, though it is of Lumley's own coinage. It sounds like "Kythanil",
an alien planet mentioned in Lovecraft's portion of "Through the Gates of
the Silver Key" (though only in manuscript --- it is misprinted as "Kythamil"
in the printed texts).
The introduction of the Elder Gods brings
up another controversial aspect of Lumley's version of the Mythos. Dirk W. Mosig
and others have berated Lumley for uncritically adopting Derleth's moral
dichotemization of Lovecraft's originally nihilistic Mythos. It is not quite so
simple. In fact, it is interesting to note that in his earlier and shorter
fiction, Lumley largely adheres to Lovecraft's vision. There are no Elder Gods
coming to anyone's rescue. We even find passages such as these, of whose spirit
Lovecraft would have been proud:
Shaken, in awe of immensities I had never
before imagined as existing, [l was] oppressed, crushed and defeated in the
recognition of my own insignificance. (Beneath the Moors, p. 93).
Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr.
Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity.
. . . What do we know of the facts of anything, in our little corner of a
never-ending universe, in this transient revolution in the space-time continuum? . .
. I'll tell you --- we are the plankton of the seas of space and time! ("Born of the
Winds", The Horror at Oakdeene, p. 203).
Most of the rage directed against Lumley
for adopting the Derlethian heresy is sparked, one suspects, by the later series
of novels beginning with The Burrowers Beneath. We will discuss this
full-scale Derlethization later, but for the present it is sufficient to note
that Lumley's adoption of the Derleth Mythos was an informed and witting
decision. "In 'The Dunwich Horror' Armitage of Miskatonic stopped Wilbur's
brother from doing his evil on earth. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
again a learned earthman with the assistance of certain tomes handed down from
time immemorial (Where did they originate? Who wrote them?) saved the earth from
a fantastic horror. Joseph Curwen . . . was in liaison with Yog-Sothoth. . . .
Who stopped them? Derleth saw this. Given that Lovecraft had another ten years,
perhaps he'd have provided this answer. Somewhere somebody had to be superior to
the deities of the Mythos and Derleth said they were the Elder Gods. I see his
resolution as a natural outcome" ("Interview", Kadath, p.
38).
The Short Stories
As any writer's work does, Brian Lumley's
Mythos-related stories vary a good bit in quality. Though any critical rating is
liable to be subjective, perhaps to the point of worthlessness, the forbearing
reader may forgive a brief appraisal of some of Lumley's shorter Mythos fiction.
Among his best works we may distinguish
two general types: good formula pastiches and good original tales. Formula
pastiches might by definition seem to be excluded from "good" stories,
but this would be an over-hasty judgment. At least among Cthulhu Mythos fans
formula pastiches have come to be recognized as a legitimate and enjoyable genre
in their own right. Few surprises may be forthcoming in such stories, but the
real criterion is whether the author "handles it right" and creates a
good example of the classic type. Lumley has handled it well several
times, notably in "Cement Surroundings", "Rising With Surtsey",
"Born of the
Winds", and especially "The House of the Temple". Stories which involve Mythos trappings but use them effectively in
more novel ways include "The Fairground Horror", "The Second Wish",
"Lord of the
Worms", "The Horror at Oakdeene", "The Kiss of Bugg-Shash",
"Aunt
Hester", and "The
Night the Sea-Maid Went Down".
Obviously, the principal difference
between these two groups of stories is the degree of borrowing; formula
pastiches tend to resemble fairly closely previous stories by other writers in
the genre. It is not that more original stories do not borrow significantly;
rather, the use made of the borrowed elements is more creative. For instance,
Lumley seems to have used elements from Lovecraft's "The Thing on the
Doorstep" several times. But in the pastiche "Rising With Surtsey", the identity-switch device is used more heavy-handedly (as in Derleth's
The
Lurker at the Threshold) than in the clever "Aunt Hester", even
though both stories are strongly reminiscent of Lovecraft's original.
The line may be similarly drawn between
good and bad pastiches. For example, though it takes no great detective skill to
see the great debt owed by Lumley's "The House of the Temple" to HPL's
"The Rats in the Walls" and "The Shunned House", Lumley's
tale manages to emerge as an entertaining and engaging story with an integrity
of its own. On the other hand, "An Item of Supporting Evidence" is
just a transparent copy of Lovecraft's "The Unnameable". And while
"Cement Surroundings" uses elements from "Pickman's Model"
and, as Fritz Leiber suggested, from the "Star Trek" episode The Devil in
the Dark ("The CthuIhu Mythos: Wondrous and Terrible" in Fantastic,
June 1975, p. 120), it still manages to be an enjoyable tale, much more so than
"The Thing from the Blasted Heath", which seems to be simply a
re-writing of the film Little Shop of Horrors in the light of "The Color
Out of Space".
As is obvious from the preceding, we feel
unable to class some of Lumley's stories in either of the "good"
categories. There is no particular need to dwell on these, but some attention to
two or three such stories may be worthwhile. "In the Vaults Beneath"
is a novella which seems to echo, to put it mildly, Lovecraft's At the
Mountains of Madness. Here the doomed archaeologist Gordon Walmsley takes
two colleagues with him to explore "the Outpost", an underground
colony of the star-headed Old Ones (here called the "Old Race") in
prehistoric Britain. The dumbfounded explorers make their way through the
cyclopean corridors, deciphering inscriptions and wall murals, exactly as in
HPL's original. The similarity is so close that the reader cannot feel any of
the suspense or wonder the explorers feel, since it is old-hat to readers of
Lovecraft's tale. But even worse, this includes the characters themselves, for
they too are familiar in tedious detail with the Miskatonic expedition
chronicled by HPL. So what's the big deal?
Eventually, searching by the light of
"shoggoth tissue" lining the ceiling(!), they discover curiosities
including virtually impervious aluminum foil and a gyroscopic wheel which, when
replaced (they do) sets in motion a seismic process which somehow will suck the
whole outpost, and everything associated with it, deeper into the earth, away
from the prying eyes of men. At length the whole thing sinks, including a suit
made of the flexible sheet metal and worn by the unfortunate Walmsley at story's
end. His head and hands are left. The "horrifying climax" has only an
incidental connection with all that had gone before. There must have been easier
ways to contrive of decapitating Walmsley.
"The Sister City", too, strains
reader credibility. The protagonist, one Robert Krug (his mom used to call him
"Little Bo"), gradually pieces together what we already know from
reading Lovecraft's "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" and from
slap-in-the-face "hints" in this story: that he is gradually turning
into one of an ancient aquatic race of gods. And eventually he does. There is
just no suspense here, no mystery. "Blind fool that I had been!"
Indeed! The result is unintentionally comic.
"The Sister City" as it appeared
in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos had been cut down from an originally much
longer work, the length of which (and then some) was later restored in Beneath
the Moors. This novella itself is not much of an improvement, adding as it
does a rambling account of another explorer's ill-connected exploits underground
(a weak echo of HPL's "The Mound"); in addition, it is symptomatic of
a few weaknesses that beset some of Lumley's other works and thus provides a
good springboard to discuss them. We have already mentioned the unwitting humor
in "The Sister City" and "In the Vaults Beneath". It creeps
into various other tales as well. Editor Derleth saw this, as Lumley himself
recounts: "he once said to me that a certain story was liable to make the
reader laugh more than make him frightened" ("Interview", Kadath,
p. 37). We have already mentioned a few such embarrassments, such as
"shoggoth tissue!" and the forehead anus of Yibb-Tstll, but what about
the reference in "Rising With Surtsey" to "the phosphorescent
flounderers in pressure-pounded chasms" (p. 182), or the side-splitting
epithet of Azathoth, "the Bubbler at the Hub" (in The Burrowers Beneath, p. 26)7 Come on, now!
And as in Beneath the Moors where
"The Sister City" is incorporated in toto, Lumley several
times cannibalizes short stories, getting more mileage out of them by plunking
them down whole in the middle of novels which presuppose and build on them. We
find "The Night the Sea-Maid Went Down" and "Cement
Surroundings" verbatim in The Burrowers Beneath and "Dylath-Leen"
word-for-word in Clock of Dreams. This sort of thing is stylistically
jolting and time-wasting. Lumley eventually thought better of it himself; Spawn
of the Winds builds directly upon "Born of the Winds", but
mercifully the latter is summarized rather than repeated.
In Beneath the Moors, the narrator, Ewart
Masters, is gradually forced to accept the existence of "mythical"
cities like Ib and R'lyeh, again, something Mythos fans have long come to take
for granted. We must wait for Masters to catch up with the rest of us, a process
about as suspenseful as sitting through the seventh repetition of the day's math
lesson for the benefit of the one or two slow learners in the class. Anyway, as
Masters finally wises up, he ruminates about how similar this is to the cases of
other legendary but possibly real ancient civilizations including Cimmeria,
Vanaheim, Shangri-La, and even Pellucidar! What's the matter here? Lumley
destroys any verisimilitude by cataloging his fictional lands with other locales
which readers know too well are also fictional. This is the exact opposite of
what Lovecraft did, e.g., with the Necronomicon. Weird Tales readers
were led to believe the book actually existed because HPL treated it with all
the sobriety of a real hoax, mentioning it cheek-by-jowl with genuine works such
as Frazer's The Golden Bough and Murray's Witch-Cult in Western
Europe. Their "realness" seems to rub off on the invented Necronomicon.
By contrast, in Lumley's list the fictional character of Burroughs's
Pellucidar and Howard's Cimmeria serves but to reinforce the fictional character
of Lh-Yib, etc. (Granted, Lovecraft fell into the same gaffe in At the
Mountains of Madness by saying that Antarctican Kadath was just as real as
Lomar, Sarnath, and even the Nameless City, but why follow a bad precedent?)
A similar problem is Lumley's tendency to
pepper stories with a long list of Mythos references. No sooner do we enter Titus
Crow's library than we see on his shelves a whole row of books like De Vermis
Mysteriis, the Necronomicon, the Cthäat Aquadingen, etc.,
etc. Such a Mythos-barrage makes a story too predictable. The reader is liable
to think "Oh, yeah --- one of those stories again." A parallel
may be drawn here with another stylistic weakness seen by some in Lovecraft,
namely his tendency to tell readers that what they are seeing is horrible by
using words like "hideous", "detestable", "loathsome", etc. It would be better to avoid such words and instead describe the
scene so that readers may deduce the "hideousness",
"loathsomeness", etc., for themselves. Even so, Lumley's tales are
much more effective when he resists the temptation to broadcast "This is a
Mythos story" by laying on the Mythos paraphernalia fast and thick.
The Novels
When we turn to the novels of Brian Lumley, we are on very different ground. We have already intimated that this
will be the point where Lumley passes from Lovecraft's vision of the Mythos to
Derleth's, but there is much more to it than that. Beginning with the first
paperback novels, Lumley is engaged in an altogether different type of fiction
writing. "When I wrote Burrowers and Transition and the
rest, it was as much for my own amusement as anything else. . . . My point is
that if you don't look at the Mythos from as many angles as possible it will
stagnate" (letter, March 29, 1983). In fact, we will see that in the series
of five Mythos novels Lumley explores several distinctly different
approaches. But common to all of them is the premise that the Wilmarth
Foundation, a secret international organization of psychics and occultists,
based at Miskatonic University, has formed with the goal of eradicating the
Great Old Ones, or the "CCD" ("Cthulhu Cycle Deities"), a
name which itself is reminiscent of spy intrigue.
The heroes of the various novels are
agents of the Foundation engaged in one or another mission against the CCD. The
basic conception here seems rooted in Fritz Leiber's tongue-in-cheek tribute to
Lovecraft, "To Arkham and the Stars" (1966), where Wilmarth, Armitage,
Peaslee, and other veterans of Lovecraftian fiction have joined forces for
research into the Old Ones and ways of combating them. Leiber used the same
premise again in "The Terror from the Depths", and we find it also in Lin Carter's "Zoth-Omrnog".
The whole notion began as a gag, and it
has proved impossible to dispel the last whiff of silliness in any of the
subsequent stories that have attempted to use it with however straight a face.
Nowhere is this more clear than in Lumley's The
Burrowers Beneath.
The Burrowers Beneath
centers about the efforts of occult investigators Titus Crow and Henri-Laurent
De Marigny to rid the earth of the CCD. Of all the novels in which these
characters appear, Burrowers depicts them in a manner closest to that
found in several earlier short stories, wherein Crow is a smug occult
sleuth cut from more or less the same cloth as Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin.
In the earlier tales, Crow functions in various ways, sometimes as merely a
narrator, sometimes as the hero. Here he is hot on the trail of Shudde-M'ell,
having taken up the unsolved case of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith, who had been dragged
kicking and screaming into hell by Shudde-M'ell at the end of "Cement
Surroundings", and whose tragic fate had been rhapsodized by narrator after
narrator in at least nine other Lumley stories. Crow and De Marigny join forces
with the Wilmarth Foundation and finally rid Britain of the baleful influence of
the Old Ones. In many ways the book reads as Colin Wilson's The Mind
Parasites might if it had been written by August Derleth.
In the course of all this, Lumley manages
to rid the Mythos itself of some of the Old Ones. As summarized in its sequel, The
Burrowers Beneath makes these shocking revelations: "Nyarlathotep
[was] more truly a power as opposed to a being of alien flesh and blood. He was
in fact nothing less than the power of telepathy, indeed a great messenger!"
(Transition of Titus Crow, p. 19).
"We
discovered [Azathoth] to be simply the definition of a nuclear explosion. . . ." (ibid., p. 52).
"[Shub-Niggurath] is nothing less
than the power of miscegenation itself, amazingly inherent in the majority of
the CCD!" (ibid., p. 60).
(Incidentally, though Cthulhu does
literally exist, it develops that it was not he whom Johansen encountered in
HPL's "The Call of Cthulhu", but only one of his spawn.) What is going
on here is a wholesale process of demythologization, or better, rationalization,
as when the naturalistic skeptic proposed that instead of walking on the water
Jesus simply knew where the stepping stones were. And the Elder Gods are not
exempt from it, either. Crow pontificates: "In the first place, Henri, for
'Magic' read 'Science'. . . . Brainwashing, Henri! The Elder Gods .
. . made their prisons the minds of the Great Old Ones themselves ---
perhaps
even their bodies! They implanted mental and genetic blocks into the psyches and
beings of the forces of evil and all their minions, that at the sight of . . .
certain symbols . . . those forces are held back, impotent!" (Burrowers,
pp. 59-60).
Eventually, the men from Wilmarth get the
hang of wiping out the CCD, systematically nuking them as if they were dealing
with Gorgo and Mothra. "A few more of the damned horrors that won't be
making it home!" (ibid, p. 143).
The Burrowers Beneath,
then, is an attempt to write a science fiction novel, using the props of the
Cthulhu Mythos. But this transition is not successful. The whole thing comes off
sounding parodic. Parody often involves the transition of something familiar
into an incongruous setting, as when Steve Alien solemnly intoned the lyrics of
Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" as if it were the Gettysburg Address, or
when in the 50s Mad showed what it would be like if the McCarthy hearings
were run like "What's My Line?" It is not that the novel is poorly
written science fiction; if you could forget who Cthulhu and the rest are, it
would sound fine.
The Transition of Titus Crow begins
as a continuation of The Burrowers Beneath. Indeed, Part One, the first
66 pages, could easily have been stapled onto the end of Burrowers,
except that Titus Crow is absent, having escaped in his enigmatic
"time-clock" (see the short story "De Marigny's Clock" in
The Caller of the Black and before that Price's and Lovecraft's
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key") into the void of interstellar
time and space, fleeing a sneak attack by Ithaqua. "Ithaqua . . . had been
given the honor of removing us forever from the earth" (p. 25). In the
meantime, the Wilmarth Foundation manages to fry Cthylla and to do various other
damage. Toward the end of Part Two, Crow is trying to return to earth, setting
up a psychic link with Henri to use as a homing beacon.
But the evil CCD are not making it easy;
"that may be the reason for Cthulhu's planet-encircling mental blanket: a
jamming device to confuse Crow's calls for assistance" (p. 80). Indeed Crow
is the nemesis of the CCD; on him they focus all their malign efforts.
Basically, the transcendent Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos have sunk to the
level of the Penguin and the Joker.
With Part Three this book turns into a
different novel altogether, a picaresque account of Crow's adventures roaming
throughout time and space. He tangles with the Hounds of Tindalos (who like all
dogs seem enamored of chasing moving vehicles), pterodactyls, ancient Romans,
and even the Great Race of Yith, whom Crow is implausibly able to bluff and
bully into letting him go. Yet mixed with such painful scenes are good ones such
as Crow's trip to the far future where he sees a barren desert earth, whose
inhabitants have long since fled to more habitable spheres. They have left
behind a monument to their exodus, a statue of an earthling clutching a model
space-rocket --- only the earthling is a huge beetle! This episode would have made
a good short story in its own right.
As for the "transition" itself,
Crow crash-lands at one point, but is scraped up by a friendly robot who puts
him back together, better than new, like the Six Million Dollar Man. From now
on, the reanimated and rejuvenated Crow is a true superhero with powers far
beyond those of ordinary mortals. By the end of the story, he reaches Elysia,
home of the Elder Gods, in a homecoming scene right out of the Emerald City
sequence in The Wizard of Oz. There is even a conveniently humanoid demi-Elder Goddess who has never met Crow but is madly in love with him anyway.
And Crow himself turns out to have Elder blood in his veins. It is like dying
and going to heaven. This book lacks structural unity and ends too
happily, at least for Crow who just up and deserts the Wilmarth Foundation,
inviting Henri to do the same.
In The Clock of Dreams, he does.
But with this novel, things take a definite upswing. It turns out that Crow and
his semi-divine sweetheart Tiania are in trouble, and Kthanid the Elder God
summons Henri to help them. Clock of Dreams, like Transition,
begins as a sequel and then shifts gears. But whereas the latter never seemed to
jell, this book has a more coherent premise. Titus and Tiania are trapped in the
Lovecraftian Dream World, where Henri joins them to combat the CCD in their
insidious encroachment. (Yes, the spy-novel designation "the CCD" is
jarringly used even here. We even hear of the "G-creatures", gugs,
ghouls, and ghasts!). This time we have a truly innovative and clever
Lovecraftian extrapolation. If Cthulhu assaults humanity through maddening
nightmares (as in "The Call of Cthulhu"), mustn't such activity have
serious repercussions in the Dream World? If Henry Wilcox is tossing and
turning, what must be the effects on dreamers like Randolph Carter?
So a Dreamland assault by Cthulhu makes a
great deal of sense and is a bold premise. Admittedly, though, Lumley does not
take full advantage of it, for Clock of Dreams is largely an expansion of
the earlier story "Dylath-Leen", and Crow and Henri are simply
concerned with stopping the conquest of the Dream World by the Moon-Beasts, as
was Grant Enderby in the earlier story. They are made the Dreamland emissaries
of Cthulhu, but this is pretty much extraneous and serves mainly to tie the
story into the sequence with Burrowers and Transition. But despite some
overreliance on deus-ex-machina rescues, Clock of Dreams is an
imaginative and satisfying adventure fantasy.
There are various clever touches, such as
when Henri escapes imminent torture and death by taking a potion provided by
Atal of Ulthar which causes him simply to wake up back in the time-clock,
whereupon Henri chug-a-lugs a bottle of brandy in order to pass out and return
to the Dream World, this time in a safer place. And if you remember your
Lovecraft as well as Lumley does, you'll smile when you come to King Kuranes' butler speaking to him "in
an accent which was not quite Cornish'' (p. 168).
Lumley has admitted that "A lot
of my stories are adventure with a supernatural touch"
("Interview", Kadath, p. 37). This is certainly true of Clock
of Dreams and even more so with the next two novels, Spawn of the Winds
and In the Moons of Borea. And clearly, here Lumley has found his
element. These books are filled with fast action, creative and colorful settings
and characters, and a clean and fast-reading style.
Though these novels use various Mythos
elements, their main inspiration seems to be Edgar Rice Burroughs'
interplanetary adventure series, especially John Carter of Mars. The
similarities are too striking to overlook. Hank Silberhutte is the narrator and
protagonist of Spawn of the Winds. During a reconnaissance flight for the
Wilmarth Foundation, he and his companions are snatched away to an
other-dimensional ice-planet called Borea, from whence the whole story is
related telepathically through a psychic back on Earth. In the course of his
adventures. Hank, a brawny, strapping Texan, wins the heart of Armandra, divine
princess of Borea, and becomes its warlord. Sound familiar? Of course, but
again, Lumley uses these Burroughsian elements to good advantage and makes the
story his own. (For the record, the influence of Robert E. Howard is also quite
evident, especially in the gory battle scenes.) In In the Moons of Borea,
Henri-Laurent De Marigny is back, having chanced upon Borea in his wanderings in
the time-clock. He teams up with Silberhutte to recover the clock, stolen by the
minions of Ithaqua, Armandra's inhuman dad and the ultimate ruler of
the planet. Along the way, they rescue Moreen, yet another semi-divine princess,
you guessed it, this time for Henri (no wallflowers in Lumley's books!). There
are a number of strong features to these books, including the transplanted
cultures of Canadian Indians, Eskimos, and Vikings on Borea, descendants of
Ithaqua's captives through the centuries. In Moons of Borea, Ithaqua has
replaced Thor as the thunder-god of the Norse culture on one of Borea's
moons. All very good stuff.
In addition, there are some vivid descriptions of
strange phenomena. For instance, the first sighting of Ithaqua:
. . . we saw him like a great blot in the
sky, like smoke solidifying, taking on a vaguely manlike but gigantic shape. . .
. Then the skies darkened over in what seemed like only a few seconds, and the
black clouds boiled up out of nowhere, and he walked up the wind on his great
splayed feet and disappeared into the clouds. (Spawn of the Winds, p.
12).
And the transformation of Armandra from
her more to less human guises:
Gone again was the woman I loved
. . . to
make room for this child of Ithaqua. . . . The fine bones of Armandra's head and
neck showed redly through luminous flesh, a grinning skull of death. Her eyes
opened; beams of blinding ruby radiance shot forth to the pulsating sky. . . .
(ibid, p. 171).
But aren't these novels only incidentally
related to the Mythos? Yes and no, and this is very important. Star-stones
abound and play a crucial role in the books, as does the whole conception of
Ithaqua the Wind-Walker. But the books, of course, are nothing like Lovecraft.
In fact, the ease with which Ithaqua fits into the Borea books is directly
proportional to the difficulty with which he ever fit into the Cthulhu Mythos.
Lumley himself is clear on this. "The Windwalker didn't exist in
Lovecraft's language, wasn't part of Lovecraft's pantheon" ("Interview",
Kadath, p. 37). His introduction to the Mythos was Derleth's work, a
borrowing from Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo". Derleth, as is now
well known, had also imported a largely inappropriate schema of good vs. evil
(though admittedly, as Lumley contends, there are intimations of it in HPL).
Lumley, so to speak, takes this and runs with it. He lifts Derleth's Ithaqua,
along with the good vs. evil schema, out of the framework of Lovecraftian horror
and places both in a more appropriate genre: that of heroic fantasy. The sight
of Ithaqua cringing from a star-stone like Dracula from a crucifix ill comported
with the world of Lovecraftian horror, but it works well in adventure fantasy,
where we are used to such ethical dualism (e.g., Michael Moorcock's "Law
vs. Chaos" epics). Lumley, then, has made much better use of both Derleth's
Abominable Snowman and his dualistic version of the Mythos than his mentor
Derleth ever did.
Lumley has left himself plenty of room for
more books in this enjoyable series. Hank Silberhutte still has half of Borea
and one of its three moons to explore; Henri and Moreen still have to join Titus
and Tiania in Elysia; and the Wilmarth Foundation has yet to exterminate the CCD. Yet Lumley's most recent work has been in other directions ---
straight science fiction and fantasy, new Mythos short stories, even flashback
"pre-transition" Titus Crow adventures. So Brian Lumley seems to be
branching out, yet remaining in firm contact with his roots. Too many writers do
one or the other, but in Lumley's case readers who most enjoyed one or
another type of his work can still look forward to more in the same vein.
|
