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Lin Carter has been
called "the grand master of fantasy", and if this epithet is meant to
denote quantity, few could challenge its aptness. For it is hard to think of
anyone whose prolific output can match Lin Carter's. But his "mastery"
of quality is something else again. Though many of his books and stories are
engaging and entertaining, they have been faulted for a certain thinness, and
for near-plagiaristic imitativeness. He has flattered-by-imltation every
fantaste one can think of, notably Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar
Rice Burroughs, Lester ("Doc Savage") Dent and inevitably, H. P.
Lovecraft. Lin Carter is certainly the grand master of pastiche, but this may be
considered a dubious honor. It is quite common in Lovecraftian circles to hear
expressions of rather severe disdain for Carter's work. The intensity of such
dislike stands to obscure Carter's editorial achievements in making much
Lovecraft and other Mythos material readily available to the public, including a
whole new generation of fans. But more than this, it is quite possible that the
distaste for Carter's own efforts at Lovecraftian fiction has led to a
too-facile judgment of his work. This essay will back up and give another
hearing to the statement of Lin Carter.
The Elder Records
Lin Carter's earliest
publications relative to the Cthulhu Mythos were his helpful twin glossaries of
gods and texts which appeared in Inside and Science Fantasy Advertiser
in 1956 and again three years later in The Shuttered Room. His first
strictly literary effort was the sonnet cycle published in 1975 as Dreams
from R'lyeh. Portions of it had appeared earlier (Amra, 1965; Spawn
of Cthulhu, 1971) as "Litany to Hastur". In our judgment, these
verses were largely uninspired and deserve but passing notice here. We want to
focus on two groups of Carter's stories which seem to reflect two phases of his
fictional work. The first is a set of pretended "translations" from
the elder lore of the Mythos. Now please note that the pretense was but a
literary device, and that unlike, e.g., Simon's Necronomicon (Avon Books,
1980), it never sought to take anyone in.
Carter derived the idea
of composing chapters of ancient texts from Clark Ashton Smith's tale "The
Coming of the White Worm", which presents itself as from the Hyperborean Book
of Eibon. In fact, Carter went on to complete a second such story based on
Smith's notes and outlines. The result, "The Utmost Abomination", is
the best of his stories of this kind. The mage Eibon himself is a character in
his tale which concerns the efforts of his guru Zylac to invoke a
"manifestation in human form" of an ancient Valusian serpent god.
After a couple of seemingly fruitless attempts, it gradually becomes apparent
that the experiment was successful--Zylac has begun to metamorphosize
into a snake! Eibon discovers his slithering master and destroys him, then flees
the castle in terror. The story is clever and effective. How much it owes its
virtue to Smith's notes is unknown.
Two more episodes from Eibon,
entirely Carter's work, were to follow. Both borrowed self-satirical titles
fabricated by Lovecraft and attributed to "Robert Blake" in "The
Haunter of the Dark". In "Shaggai", Eibon finds himself stumped
in his exegesis of the Pnakotic Manuscripts. A brief consultation with
psychic penpals throughout the galaxy reveals that his answer lies on the nasty
planet of Shaggai. Traveling there in astral form, Eibon happens to notice a
gigantic pyramid vaguely similar to San Francisco's Hancock Tower. It turns out
to cover the pit occupied by a gigantic worm conjured up ages ago by the
sorcerers of Shaggai. Ever since, the slug has been slowly gnawing away the
vitals of the planet itself. Eibon is horrified at this realization and zips
back home. To hell with his exegetical puzzler.
The last chapter of Eibon
is "In the Vale of Pnath", which obviously crosses Smith's "Commoriom
Myth Cycle" with Lovecraft's "Dreamland" canon. Eibon is again at
an impasse in his studies. This time it's a rare ingredient for an occult
recipe. His ultra-telluric contacts advise him to seek out the scholarly ghoul
Shuggob (reminds me of C. S. Lewis's demon Slubgob) who distills the precious
liquid down in the Vale of Pnath. But when Eibon sees how the stuff is produced,
he is horrified and flees homeward.
Carter followed these Eibon
episodes with "translations" from Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon.
The first was "The Doom of Yakthoob", which relates the grisly death
of youthful Alhazred's mentor, the "Saracen" wizard Yakthoob. (Minus
the "th", this actually could pass for a legitimate Arabic name.) The
tutor meets a nasty fate at the claws of one of the Great Old Ones, summoned to
satisfy the curiosity of young Abdul. The trouble was that a fellow student,
sent to obtain a rare ingredient for the spell, has squandered the money trusted
to him and brought back "Brand X". Yakthoob finds out only too late.
The parallel with the fate of Eibon's ill-fated master Zylac is obvious, and
like Eibon, Alhazred is terrified and flees, having learned his lesson.
Or has he? In "The
City of Pillars", we learn how Alhazred led a group of fellow occultists to
Irem the City of Pillars, after learning its location from Nug, king of the
ghouls. Reaching the site, he performs the proper spell and a Great Old One
appears, only to be blasted by a deux-ex-machina beam from Betelgeuse. The Elder
Gods, of course, won't let Alhazred get away with it. He is appropriately
horrified and flees.
Plundering an ancient
text of his own for the sixth of these tales. Carter offers us an excerpt from
the Zanthu Tablets. The story is "The Thing in the Pit". The
Muvian priest Zanthu relates an autobiographical story that takes up where the
Lovecraft-Heald collaboration "Out of the Eons" left off in its
account of T'yog's attempt to destroy evil Ghatanothoa. This time, Zanthu, high
priest of Ythogtha (another Old One worshipped on Mu), attempts to make his own
cult supreme by releasing his god from its imprisonment. Learning the requisite
chant from the Rituals of Yhe, he begins to conjure. Ythogtha stirs, and
what seem to be three horizon-filling beaked heads appear, one by one, from a
ravine. But the watchful Elder Gods nip this mischief in the bud by blasting the
scene with a death-ray from outer space. Zanthu is filled with horror at the
frightful aspect of the being he had served. Jumping into his flying chariot, he
flees Mu's destruction, which his own act has precipitated.
A seventh tale,
"The Acolyte of the Flame", is said to be a "translated"
section of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, but it has not (to our knowledge)
reached print.
It scarcely needs to be
noted how greatly these six stories resemble one another. In every single tale,
the wizard (Eibon, Alhazred, Zanthu) recounts how he tampered with forbidden
things, or sought forbidden knowledge, only to regret it. At the climax, he
becomes horrified and flees. There are also several repetitions in detail. Two
stories ("Shaggai" and "Yakthoob") are both presented as
hitherto suppressed pericopae from Eibon and the Necronomicon. Two
("Pillars" and "Pit") close with a punitive interruption by
the Elder Gods. In two ("Shaggai" and "Pnath"), the action
stems from Eibon's frustration in his occult studies. (One is tempted to wonder
how, at this rate, Eibon ever obtained enough material to write his famous
book!)
Even distinctive
phraseology is repeated almost verbatim. Carter mentions the Zoogs
"concerning whom legend whispers naught that is remotely wholesome"
("Pnath", p. 210). The same goes for certain "insectoids,
concerning whom even the Elder Records preserve naught that is wholesome"
("Shaggai", p. 59). And let's not forget ghoulish Nug "concerning
whom rumor whispereth naught that be wholesome" ("Pillars", p.
24).
Collating parallel
passages is a favorite game of exegetes, but if any readers don't want to play,
they may skip to the next paragraph. But for the rest of us diletantes, here
goes:
I have recently
obtained a copy of . . . Eibon by a transaction so shuddersome that I
will spare you the details. . . . ("Shaggai", p. 57)
I paid a fearful price
. . . a fee I shall not name here. ("Pillars", p. 24)
. . . in return for a
certain price so repugnant and horrible that Mülder shudderingly refused to
discuss it and went to his deathbed with the secret locked within him. ("Zoth-Ommog",
p. 163)
And thus, by a mode I
shudder to recall and shrink from describing in detail, I came to the Seven
Onyx Steps. . . . ("Pnath,"p. 210)
We performed such
blasphemous rites that even now my soul shuddereth to contemplate. ("Yakthoob",
p. 321)
I adored the Black
Flame in a manner which maketh my soul to shrink and shudder within me to this
hour. ("Pit", p. 33)
. . . it raped forth
the Spirit of Yakthoob, which it then devoured in a certain manner which made
my dreams hideous with nightmares for twenty years. ("Yakthoob". p.
322)
. . . to this hour my
dreams are made hideous by my memories of that which I glimpsed.
("Pnath", p. 213)
Speaking of parallel
passages, the reader may be surprised to find the climactic punchlines of two of
these tales lifted almost word for word from two Lovecraft endings. Compare
Zanthu's description of "that awful and eon-cursed Thing whose
FINGERTIPS I had seen" (p. 35) with the hero's description of the
buried vampire's silhouette in "The Shunned House": "this
unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen." What was the
source of ghoulish Shuggob's elixir? It was a "naked, glistening, swollen,
obscene living brain." Perhaps Shuggob had gotten the idea from
reading "Out of the Eons" which ends with this line: "For the
opening had revealed a pulsing, living brain."
This last phenomenon
leads us to wonder if these stories are not for the most part intended as
good-natured satire, a sardonic salute to the Lovecraft tradition rather than a
slavish and unimaginative attempt to copy it. Carter himself drops hints in this
direction in his account of how he came to write the tales (Lovecraft: A Look
Behind the CthuIhu Mythos. p. 181). Yet of all the stories, only "Pnath"
manages to convey any effective note of satire, with its humorous description of
the erudite ghoul and his Addams Familyesque dwelling. The style of most of the
stories (possibly excepting "The Thing in the Pit") is exaggerated and
overburdened with ungrammatical archaisms. It may be intended as a parody on the
styles of HPL and Clark Ashton Smith, but it is difficult to be sure.
To anticipate our next
section just a bit, it seems logical at this juncture to comment on the style of
the several lengthy, though nonepisodic, "translated" excerpts
appearing in Carter's other Mythos stories, especially "Zoth-Ommog".
Here, it must be reluctantly admitted, the style is just as unsatisfactory, but
oddly enough, for precisely the opposite reason! If the stories were overly
florid, these quotes from the ancient texts are too mundane, reminiscent of an
almanac. And though Carter presents quotations from sources as varied in era and
provenance as the Necronomicon, Von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten,
Revelations of Glaaki, and Ludvig Prinn's De Vermls Mysteriis, all
read as if they were written by the same hand. Of course, they were, but it's
not supposed to look that way!
A final note on Lin
Carter's "Elder Records". His references to and "quotations"
from the Necronomicon enable us to extrapolate the shape and scope of
Alhazred's book as Carter conceives it. Here are two summary statements:
"The narratives contained in the first book [were] personal accounts from
the early years of Alhazred's own career of various uncanny experiences and
magical or occult experiments. . . ." ("Zoth-Ommog", p. 174.) But
"Alhazred's fourth book describes how the followers of the Prophet Kish
fled from Sarnath before its destruction, bearing the star-stones as a means of
protection given them by the Elder Gods." ("Zoth-Ommog", p. 181.)
There are also elaborate theogonies of the Great and Lesser Old Ones (the latter
being a clever term for the various servitor-races such as the Deep Ones). May
we speculate that Carter is here sketching out the ground plan for a novelized
version of the Necronomicon, an epic fantasy along the lines of his
once-projected Khymyrium, The City of One-Hundred Kings? In such a
venture, Carter might, so to speak, cross-fertilize Lovecraft and Tolkien in
chronicling the primordial battle between the Old Ones and the Elder Gods, and
the history of the struggle of humanity against the former. If he applied the
story-telling skills evident in earlier works such as his Thongor tales, the
result might be well worth the effort. Naturally, this isn't quite the Necronomicon
as HPL envisioned it, but so what?
The Copeland Bequest
Departing from the
device of "translations", Lin Carter has written several stories on
the pattern of pastiches like those of August Derleth and Brian Lumley. We will
leave aside isolated tales such as "Dreams in the House of Weir" and
"Something in the Moonlight", and will focus our attention on a set of
interrelated stories centering about "The Xothic Legend Cycle" and a
handful of scholarly protagonists associated with the "Sanbourne Institute
of Pacific Antiquities". All concern the horrors issuing from the doomed
expedition of archaeologist Harold Hadley Copeland, and the legacy of notes,
manuscripts, and artifacts he left to the Institute. The five stories are
"The Thing in the Pit" (already summarized above), "The Dweller
in the Tomb", "Out of the Ages", "Zoth-Ommog", and
"The Winfield Heritance".
Structurally the
story-cycle is constructed like August Derleth's collection The Trail of
Cthulhu. Each story can be read independently, but each hangs onto the
coattails of the last. In each case, the story is a first-person narrative in
the form of a diary or deposition. It is introduced by an editor or executor who
himself becomes the narrator/protagonist in the next tale. As to theme, the
whole cycle is largely a retelling of "The Call of Cthulhu" and
"Out of the Eons". Carter is frank in admitting both his admiration
for the latter and his intention to "flatter by imitation".
H. P. Lovecraft had
expressed his opinion that the ideal setting for horror tales was that of
backwoods New England. Yet he wrote so many Cthulhu Mythos and other weird tales
that he had to vary the locale. Another of his favorite haunts was the South
Pacific, which formed much of the background for the two tales mentioned above.
This historical-cultural milieu seems to have particularly captured Lin Carter's
imagination. Against this backdrop he marked out his own personal corner of the
Cthulhu Mythos, the "Xothic Legend Cycle". The name is derived from
the Xoth star-system where Great Cthulhu spawned the "Demon Trinity"
of Ghatanothoa (originally Lovecraft and Heald's brainchild), Ythogtha, and
Zoth-Ommog. All three are Old Ones worshipped originally on the lost continent
of Mu. Now their scattered centers of worship survive only on this and that
Polynesian island. The details of the Xothic Cycle are developed in the stories
themselves.
"The Thing in the
Pit" (see above) represents a selection from the Zanthu Tablets as
translated and edited by Harold Hadley Copeland. "The Dweller in the
Tomb" is actually Copeland's journal, written during his fateful expedition
to the Central Asian plateau of Tsang. Led on by hints in the Ponape
Scripture, an ancient text written on palm-frond papyrus and circulated
among occultists. Professor Copeland hopes to find the tomb of the Muvian wizard
Zanthu. In the process, his native bearers are slain or desert him, and he
presses on alone, coming upon cycopean ruins and mountains with cube-like
outcroppings. This gigantic masonry has been windworn, but otherwise preserved
by the cold. Finally he reaches the mausoleum and is shocked to discover that
the face of the dessicated mummy of Zanthu is identical to his own! He himself
is Zanthu's reincarnation!
"Out of the
Ages" (not to be confused --- ahem! --- with "Out of the Eons",
please!) is the diary of Dr. Stephen Blaine, curator of the Sanbourne Institute.
Copeland has died ranting in a madhouse, and Blaine is left to sort through his
bequest of documents and artifacts, the most disturbing of which is a jade idol
of Zoth-Ommog. Under its unwholesome influence, Blaine slips into a series of
dreams which instruct him in the rites necessary to call forth the Yuggs,
worm-like servants of Zoth-Ommog. He is apprehended late at night, clad in
pajamas and standing in the surf, yelling out the incantation. Coming to his
senses, he catches a glimpse of the summoned worm-demon, and is taken away to an
asylum.
Blaine's assistant,
Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, is the protagonist of "Zoth-Ommog". In a rare
moment of lucidity, the mad Blaine warns Hodgkins to destroy the idol according
to instructions to be found in the Necronomicon. Hodgkins journeys across
the country to Arkham, Massachusetts, where he is advised by Dr. Henry Armitage
and other Miskatonic University faculty on how to accomplish his task. It seems
that only the star-talisman from Mnar, bearing the sigil of the Elder Gods, can
do the job. Hodgkins returns just before the idol is to be exhibited publicly.
He arrives to find the night watchman slain by a strange looking Polynesian
(actually a Deep One), who is in the act of bowing before the idol. Hodgkins
manages to hurl the talisman at the statue, whereupon both objects vanish in a
kind of matter-antimatter blast. He, alas, is blamed for the death of the guard,
and is committed to a sanitarium. The last story, "The Winfield
Heritance", is only loosely connected with the preceding four. Winfield
Phillips (remember him from The Lurker at the Threshold?) was a graduate
assistant at Miskatonic, and had met Hodgkins on his visit there. In the present
tale, he is assigned to investigate Hodgkins's fate. This task coincides with
Phillips's uncle's funeral. As the story unfolds, it seems that the late
Professor Copeland had obtained some of his more arcane source material from
Phillips's late uncle. The rest of the lore now passes to Phillips who stumbles
onto the terrible reality of the situation when he and his cousin visit the
estate. By accident they discover that their uncle had trafficked with Ubb,
leader of the worm-like Yuggs, servitors of Zoth-Ommog. Phillips's cousin is
killed and thus has accidentally become the "red offering", the
sacrifice which entitles the horrified Phillips to his occult inheritance. As
the story ends, his resolve to resist Ubb's Faustian temptations is fading.
The first thing to note
as we analyze this corpus, is that all the stories are quite well written. All
are carefully crafted stylistically, manifesting both the concise narration of
action and the detailed description of mood that must be present in an effective
Lovecraft-Derleth pastiche. Here are a couple of particularly good passages:
. . . weird,
glistening shapes looming amidst the unbroken snows of polar summits,
threshing tentacles in the moonglow, shrill ululations --- like moving pillars
of quaking jelly, somehow strayed from other worlds or far dimensions.
("Dweller", p. 53. )
I read ever deeper in
this hellish and blasphemous forbidden lore, gripped by a sick fascination I
can neither excuse nor explain. ("Zoth-Ommog", p. 167.)
So then, Carter's
post-"translation" stories evidence a marked improvement in literary
quality. Yet having underlined this judgment, we must go on to indicate some
problems even here. First, the systematician's zeal manifest in Carter's earlier
glossaries expresses itself in his fiction when Carter crams and jams the
stories with baroque theogonies and sagging shelves of occult tomes. He lists
every Great Old One from Nug to Rhan-Tegoth, and then begets more. He lists
Prinn, Von Junzt, Alhazred, and other ever more obscure scribes. Enough is
enough; this is too much.
Second, Carter not only
borrows and copies extensively from earlier Mythos tales and pastiches, he even
conspicuously sets alongside his own versions the originals which he copied. For
instance, Professor Copeland, the scholar discredited by his peers for his
eccentric research, is a clone of Derleth's Laban Shrewsbury. Copeland's The
Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the "Ponape Scripture" is
merely a xerox copy of Shrewsbury's Investigations into the Myth-Patterns of
Latter-Day Primitives, with Especial Reference to the "R'yleh Text".
The Ponape Scripture was brought back from the South Pacific by Yankee
trader Abner Ezekiel Hoag, an obvious counterpart to Lovecraft's Captain Obed
Marsh. Carter's "decadent poet" Edgar Henquist Gordon is the alterego
of HPL's Arthur Pickman Derby and Robert E. Howard's Justin Geoffrey. All this
borrowing would not slap the reader in the face if Carter did not actually
mention Marsh in the same breath with Hoag, Leng with Tsang, Shrewsbury with
Copeland, etc.
Third, nothing new
happens in these stories. They represent simply a reshuffling, though a creative
one, of traditional, even stock, pastiche props. The recombinations of genes
from "The Shadow Out of Time", "Lair of the Star Spawn", At
the Mountains of Madness, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", etc., are
only too obvious to need further rehearsal here. And by now it is apparent why
many Lovecraft fans dismiss Carter as a thoroughly derivative scribbler. But we
suggest that this is a superficial and unfair (though not completely
inaccurate) reading of Lin Carter. For Carter's goal is to pay tribute to the
Lovecraft-DerlethMythos. The trouble he takes not to omit any Mythos demon or
grimoire, and his explicit acknowledgment of his characters' prototypes, are his
ways of saluting his mentors Lovecraft and Derleth.
Still, the result is
stylistically cumbersome. As for his reshuffling of pastiche elements, Carter's
redundancy is more forgivable. For he does this pretty well, especially once one
sees what Carter is trying to do. His underlying assumption seems to be that the
Cthulhu Mythos pastiche is no longer a living creature. Rather it is a cherished
museum piece. So his "Copeland Bequest" cycle is a sort of
"ideal-type" or archetypal pastiche, combining all the standard
themes, and combining them surprisingly well. (To our thinking, he would have
done an even better job had he left out some of the gods and books and
references to Shrewsbury.) Carter is saying, "If I had written the
Cthulhu Mythos, this is how I'd have done it," and the result is implicitly
dedicated as a labor of love to the Lovecraft Circle, even as an impressionistic
portrait of that group.
But then, why doesn't
Carter stop writing these stories? Hasn't he said his piece? The answer is that
Carter realizes that no "new" pastiches can be written, but that the
"canonical" ones can be enjoyed not only by rereading them, but by rewriting
them in an almost ritualistic fashion. The goal in writing such "pastiches
of pastiches" is not to engage readers in a new and genuinely open-ended
story. Readers are well aware of where the plot is headed; his goal is something
like engaging them in cheer-leading, or in repeating liturgical formulae. This
is not to take Carter's purpose or his fiction overly seriously. No, Carter's
own "reverence" for Lovecraft and Company is the "reverence"
of nostalgic celebration. As Frank Trippett has written, "pap"
literature is not to be taken seriously, and is taken least seriously by those
who enjoy it most. This is, in effect, the statement of Lin Carter, and his
severe critics might stand to learn something from it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carter, Lin. "The
City of Pillars", in Lin Carter (ed.), Kadath. New York: Carter,
1974, pp. 22-25.
_____. "The Doom of
Yakthoob", in The Arkham Collector, Spring 1971. pp. 3ZO-3ZZ.
_____. Dreams from
R'lyeh. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1975.
_____. "The Dweller
in the Tomb", in August Derleth (ed.), Dark Things. Sauk City:
Arkham House, 1971, pp. 46-56.
_____. "H. P.
Lovecraft: The Books", in August Derleth (ed.), The Shuttered Room and
Other Pieces. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1959, pp. 212-249.
_____. "H. P.
Lovecraft: The Gods", in August Derleth (ed.), The Shuttered Room and
Other Pieces. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1959, pp. 250-267.
_____. "In the Vale
of Pnath", in Gerald W. Page (ed.), Nameless Places. Sauk City:
Arkham House, 1975, pp. 209-213.
_____. Lovecraft: A
Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.
_____. "Out of the
Ages", in Gerald W. Page (ed.), Nameless Places. Sauk City: Arkham
House, 1975, pp. 182-205.
_____. "Shaggai",
in August Derleth (ed.), Dark Things. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1971, pp.
57-62.
_____ (ed.). Spawn of
Cthulhu. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971.
_____. "The Thing
in the Pit", in Lin Carter, Lost Worlds. New York: DAW Books, Inc.,
1980, pp. 28-36.
_____. "The Utmost
Abomination", in Mike Ashley (ed.), Weird Legacies. London: Star
Books, 1977, pp. 79-92.
_____. "The
Winfield Heritance", in Lin Carter (ed. ), Weird Tales #3. New York:
Zebra Books, 1981, pp. 275-311.
_____.
"Zoth-Ommog", in Edward P. Berglund (ed.), Disciples of Cthulhu.
New York: DAW Books, Inc. , 1976, pp. 141-193.
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