MAIL-CALL OF CTHULHU

Issue 007

copyright © 1982 by Robert M. Price
reprinted by permission of Robert M. Price

Dear Bob,

I was pleased to see in #6 that you had made use of my article "The Derleth Mythos". I can't find any major point to argue about. You have honed the subject down more finely than Dirk Mosig or I did. Of course it makes no difference whether the narrator gets out alive or not as far as my main contention goes, which is that Derleth's outlook on the universe seems trite compared to Love-craft's.

Yes, that ending to Dream Quest was somewhat corny, and it undoubtedly influenced Derleth's attempts to carry on what he felt was the Lovecraft tradition.

Incidentally, I once told Derleth I thought he was an optimist whereas HPL was a pessimist. "No," he said, "I'm a pessimist, too. " Whatever his Romish upbringing may have done to him down deep, I got the impression that intellectually he was an atheist or close to it. He also thought we were on this earth one time around and that was it.

Actually I've enjoyed the Derleth efforts very much, even if they are irritatingly sloppy at times (i.e., "Something in Wood", in which the protagonist immediately sounds out alien, pre-human hieroglyphs as if they were a familiar alphabet!). Whenever I've hauled the Mythos into a story I've retained most of the Derlethian additions and premises.

Back to the Love craft/Derleth Mythos: the two outlooks could be somewhat harmonized by remembering that Derleth's is probably that which most humans would take when confronted with the realization that monstrous beings exist, whereas Lovecraft's later tales come closer to explaining those beings' actual nature. (HPL's latest and greatest works turned out to be science fiction of a cosmic scope worthy of Olaf Stapledon.)

Cthulogian Bernadette Bosky wrote an excellent article on the Mythos genealogy [Crypt #8]. Lots to think about. Alas, the job of the syncretist/systematizer never ends. . . . I agree that Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth are probably one. Ubbo-Sathla was the source of all terrene life---in short, of us. I suspect Abhoth is all that remained of him after he had spawned the efts of the prime---just a gray pulsing puddle under Mt. Voormithadreth in Hyperborea. He(?) was still spawning grotesque efts in Hyperborian times (see CAS's "The Seven Geases" in Lost Worlds).

My favorite cover so far is the one on Crypt #4; gives me a chuckle every time I look at it. So that's what they're not telling us?

Sincerely,

R. L. Tierney
Mason City, IA


Dear Robert Price,

Thank you for the special Derleth issue of Crypt of Cthulhu. I enjoyed the contents of your little magazine and found that the analyses of Derleth's literary efforts were, for the most part, quite fair.

S. T. Joshi was quite perceptive, referring to Derleth's regional writings as "admittedly brilliant", while dismissing the Judge Peck novels as "abysmally wretched". I recently completed a commission for Greenwood Press which consisted of collecting and editing a series of critical essays evaluating the works of August Derleth. The Wisconsin and Sac Prairie Sagas come in for considerable attention, while the Judge Peck "mysteries" were relegated to a passing mention in the introduction. If ever books deserved to be burned! . . . I would hope that readers corning upon Derleth for the first time would do so by way of either Walden West or his fine collection of short stories Sac Prairie People.

In the realm of the macabre I find Derleth to be entertaining, nothing more, nothing less. Nor do I think that Derleth himself ever made any pretensions that there was anything more than "entertainment" to be expected of his writings in this genre. It is in his regional writings that one finds the "vintage" Derleth, and it is here that I would hope most people would direct their attentions when evaluating the man and his writings.

Sincerely yours,

Richard Fawcett
Uncasville, CT
[Founder, August Derleth Society]


Dear Bob:

I enjoy your publication to the nth degree, although I take issue with Vol. 1, No. 6, in which August Derleth seems to be knocked about quite a bit. To be sure, Derleth did distort the Mythos to the extremity of making the whole affair a battle between "Good" and "Evil", a scenario that HPL never portrayed and probably never envisioned. Still, no matter how "harmful" Derleth was to the Mythos (and I think he helped it, not harmed it), not enough mention was made in #6 of the fact that without Derleth’s Herculean labors over a span of more than three decades, HPL would still be shrouded in obscurity today.

As a Lovecraft scholar, you may be very interested in knowing that HPL's critics are way off base in criticizing his colorful, slangy Yankee dialects for such characters as the ancient drunkard Zadok Allen in "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and the Whateleys and others in "The Dunwich Horror". It is said that Lovecraft modeled "Dunwich" after the town of Wilbraham here in Massachusetts. Wilbraham is now a very industrious small city on the eastern outskirts of Springfield. There are other towns, however, still out here in the boondocks of west central Massachusetts that make such tales as "The Dunwich Horror" appear all the more realistic in terms of setting, at least to me. I have lived in central Mass all my life and in the west-central portion of the state since 1967. My own town of New Braintree contains only a little more than six hundred people, with two cows to every person in the community. There are still people here, from teenagers to nonagenarians, who speak in such a stilted Yankee dialect that it makes Zadok Allen's long speech in "The Shadow over Innsmouth" appear to be the epitome of the King's English. Less than two miles from my home are families residing in broken-down houses which haven't seen a coat of paint in decades and families (with some degree of in-breeding) living in the same squalor and uneducated backwardness HPL described more than fifty years ago. However, the atmosphere of decadence and degeneracy is not present. These people are simply content to remain the way they are. Others like them, although few in number, are scattered throughout the area.

Best,

Steve Kane
New Braintree, MA


Dear Bob,

I received Crypt of Cthulhu #6 on the 20th and eagerly devoured it from cover to cover. I thought that "The Lovecraft-Derleth Connection" was a very well-written essay, due to the fact that it pointed out that Derleth was not really wrong in his assumptions about the Cthulhu Mythos. It was all really a matter of who was interpreting what Lovecraft wrote.

Joshi's "Solar Pons Meets Cthulhu" had an entirely different aspect to it than what I had been expecting from the title when it was announced in the fifth issue. The titles of the two items by Solar Pons (mentioned on p. 10) were indeed in A Praed Street Dossier. Not having a copy of it handy, I can only say that the item that mentioned these two items was more or less a resume of Solar Pons, giving titles of monographs he had written, when he was born, education, etc. This is the only place that these two items have been mentioned, outside of my "Addenda to H. P. Lovecraft: The Books" which appeared in Dave Button's Bibliotheca: H. P. L. I was glad to see that Joshi found the mention in "The Adventure of the Six Silver Spiders", where Solar Pons stated that the titles mentioned in the book catalogue were spurious creations of minor American authors.

Lin Carter's essay was a reprint that I had not seen previously. Thank you.

As for Derleth's interpreting the Cthulhu Mythos in a similar pattern to the Christian Mythos, apparently he wasn't the only one. Fred Pelton arrived at basically the same conclusions in his "A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult", which was typed in its final version around 1944 or 1945.

In "The Legacy of the Lurker", I was surprised that you didn't mention that Masterton also wrote a sequel to The Manitou, The Return of the Manitou. Although the first novel sold a lot of copies, I don't think Masterton would have written the sequel if Hollywood hadn't bought the film adaptation rights to the first novel. There are Lovecraftian mentions in almost every one of his horror novels.

I enjoyed your "The Derleth Horror" very much. I only had two complaints. It wasn't long enough and I couldn't figure out what the title had to do with the story.

Yours,

Edward P. Berglund
FPO New York, NY


Dear Bob,

[Re "The Lovecraft-Derleth Connection", Crypt of Cthulhu #6], I'm for abolishing the whole damned debate about Lovecraft & his "mythos". There just is no such thing. I think we'd all be better off (and HPL would probably benefit the most) if we would just ditch the terms "Lovecraft mythos" and "Cthulhu mythos" and "Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth" and all that other rot. The man wrote dream stories; stories based on or conceived in dreams, stories about dreams, stories that are dreams, you name it. Few stories don't fit under this broad cloak ("In the Vault" comes to mind) and those stories are generally not stories from Lovecraft's heart, but stories forced upon him: "Lurking Fear", etc. I despise Derleth's term so much because his imagination was so puny. T'other day I read a letter by HPL to AWD in which he had to explain to the poor boy that 'twas not Randolph Carter that was wiped out in "The Statement of Randolph Carter" but his friend Harley Warren. How on earth could one miss the point of such an overstated story? At any rate, I think that Derleth was trying to cram a name for Lovecraft's outsiders down HPL's throat as early as 1931. A letter I read from HPL to AWD said that HPL did not really care for the term "mythology of Hastur", which was apparently AWD's early name for the myth cycle found in a few of HPL's stories. And this was before probably half of the stories Derleth called "Cthulhu mythos" stories were even written. Also, this "Hastur" term followed the composition of "The Whisperer in Darkness", in which Hastur was mentioned in passing only twice, and indeed, was never mentioned again in all of Lovecraft's tales. Your article was interesting, but I think we should just dispense with Derleth's misguided baloney and try to determine exactly what it was HPL was writing about by studying his stories. Why try to settle the score between HPL and AWD---it seems rather futile.

David E. Schultz
Milwaukee, WI


Dear Dr. Price,

I've had more fun reading Crypt of Cthulhu than I can say. Yours is the most interesting and entertaining HPL-oriented magazine I've ever come across. I think this might be due to your mix of scholarship, tongue-in-cheek analysis, humour, and obviously genuine relish of the HPL atmosphere. It's exactly the approach to take to Lovecraft.

Your Derleth issue deserves special praise. It was responsible, objective, and fascinating. It had a wonderful cover, too. And all fans of HPL will thank you (and S. T. Joshi) for bringing out the "Lurker" fragments. Reading "The Rose Window" is like reading a new HPL story, or more exactly, a new "Fungi" sonnet. I was especially pleased, too, because I'm a fan of The Lurker at the Threshold. I'm glad you also enjoy it. The novel has a lot of fine, shuddery atmospheric moments, and is my favorite Derleth work. I also like "Ithaqua", though. Taken apart from "Thing That Walked on The Wind", which stinks, it has much to recommend it, having much of the atmosphere of "The Wendigo". I mean, the scene of Lucas stumbling about within the stone circle, with the strange, quiet snow slowly beginning to fall around him, falling from a frozen Thing he first mistook for a cloud of snow. . . .

Steve Behrends
Rochester, NY