The Second Wish"

by Brian Lumley
Originally published New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1980

Harry is something of a gigolo, and he's hooked up with Julia, a wealthy, still-attractive woman in her 40's.  They're taking a pleasure trip through Hungary, stopping over at Stregoicavar.

In the village, they are warned away from a nearby castle.  So needless to say, they go there.  A crazy, scruffy old man who lives there shows off his collection of rare books (guess what he has in his library?).  Then shows them his prize possession: the mummified bod of a woman he identifies as the remains of the high priestess of the cult of which he is perhaps the last remaining member.  He invites them to take the hand of the mummy and make a wish.  In order to shut him up and get them out of there, Harry takes him up on it, wishing that he could see the mummy as she was when she was alive.

With Julia rattled by the day's events and sleeping it off, Harry heads out for a local carnival and meets a hot chick named Cassilda.  She talks him into going back to her place, but blindfolds him en route.  While making out with her, he realizes where he is, and who she is, and flees.

Julia wakes up to find a naked Harry beside her, and Cassilda's familiar bouncing around the room.  Harry is bitten and dissolves into a pool of goo.

Apparently, Lumley rewrote the ending when this was published in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos in 1980, at the request of editor Ramsey Campbell.   I have a copy of New Tales, and I first read this way back in `81 or so.  But I have no specific memory of the ending, and my copy is packed away at the moment.  So I don't recall it nor have it handy to compare.  We will, therefore, take Lumley's intended ending as the official one.

This story is very reminiscent of editor Campbell's works - far more so than anything else in the Lumley oeuvre, or anything Lovecraftian.  And that is, I suppose, it's great strength.  It's one of the most mature stories to come from Lumley's hand and this is all to the good, because the tale is a complete success.  The evil atmosphere of the castle, Cassilda's up-front sexuality - Lumley manages to spin a completely modern, contemporary setting, and then introduce a very traditional, classic, fully-realized bit of supernatural horror into it.  And he does it perfectly.  This is an effectively chilling story and easily one of Lumley's best.  Probably his best Lovecraftian tale.

"The Survivor"

by August Derleth
Originally published Weird Tales, July 1954

Brace yourself, loyal readers (all zero of you), for we are about to enter the most treacherous waters of the whole Cthulhoid ocean, the dreaded and much-maligned world of the August Derleth/H.P. Lovecraft posthumous collaborations....

These are a series of sixteen tales written by August Derleth, based on, usually a couple of sentences found in HPL's notes - stories he thought about but never actually wrote.  

This is where the controversy comes in.  Because, you see, Derleth published these under the byline "H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth", suggesting that Lovecraft had a much bigger hand in them than he actually did.  

This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the various paperback editions collecting these stories generally carry a byline that reads H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.

    
This makes fanboys absolutely insane, presumably because they fear others will make the grave mistake of picking up these collections, thinking they are true Lovecraftian works (a mistake, in fact, that many HPL fans have made early in their relationships with Mr. Providence - including yr. obedient blogger hisself).   Said fear further complicated by the fact that most of these stories aren't very good (and some are real bow-wows).  

Overzealous nerd Lovecraft fans like to foam at the mouth over the very existence of these works, and especially the continued use of the Lovecraft byline, and curse Derleth's ghost to all manner of hells for ever doing such a thing.  Of course, the main reason these collections get published with Lovecraft's name prominently on display is that Lovecraft sells books and Derleth doesn't.  

As to why Derleth allowed this to happen in the first place (versus the simple step of publishing them under his own name, with a note stating that the story was inspired by Lovecraft's notes), said fans have ascribed all manner of evil evilness to Derleth's motivations.  Myself - I don't have a clue, but I can only rule it a regrettable case of poor judgment on Derleth's part.  Derleth himself was hardly a bad writer (his supernatural stories are generally mediocre and his Lovecraft-inspired writings are among his worst, true - but his true metier was straight fiction - and several of his non-Lovecraft-based horror stories are excellent, even classic), nor a hack (he was an accomplished literary figure in his time, though never a best-seller nor a Great Man of Letters), and his admiration of Lovecraft seems unquestionably genuine, despite all the perfidies S.T. Joshi would have him guilty of. 

Frankly, reading through most of the "collaborations", one gets the impression Derleth didn't take them very seriously and was mostly just having a little fun.  This might not have been the best idea he ever had, but I imagine even Derleth never expected hungry Lovecraft fans would still be seeking them out in the 21st century.  

So, nevertheless, they are here, and we shall deal with them.  And so, without further ado, let us plunge into one of the earliest, "The Survivor"....

Our narrator (unnamed) is an antiquarian (which I think is only a career in Lovecraftian stories) who leases a mysterious, very old house in Providence known as the Charriere House, so named for the mysterious, very old surgeon who occupied it.  No one around seems to want much to do with the house, and no one seems to know much about it, or about Charriere.

The narrator's diggings into the history seems to point to Charriere having been alive from the 17th century up to his "death" in 1927.  In the library, the narrator finds books on reptiles and dinosaurs, and a few of the usual items.  And notes left by Charriere regarding the longevity of reptiles, and certain people he has studied who have reptilian/amphibian physical qualities.  

And did I mention the place smells like a reptile house?

One night, someone breaks into the laboratory and takes some of the journal notes.  This person trails water on the floor and leaves oddly-shaped, wet footprints.  The narrator surmises that someone must have decided to burglarize the place after having a swim --- cause that makes sense, right???  

Further researches seem to suggest that Charriere was researching the longevity of reptiles/amphibians and trying to somehow grant said longevity to humans by transforming them.  It appears he had hit on a way in which a human, mutated by surgery and perhaps a bit of sorcery, could prolong their life, hibernating for long periods then re-emerging, at the cost of becoming more and more reptilian.

The nocturnal visitor returns, and the narrator shoots him.  He follows the fleeing figure into some tunnels which lead to where Charriere is buried in the garden.  There the narrator finds the reptilian body of Charriere.

I warned you Derleth doesn't seem to have taken these stories very seriously.  Thus, the absurd moment in which the narrator decides someone would take a swim and then go break into someone's house.  "Hmm, I was just takin' a dip in the backyard pool and I suddenly thought - `Hey - why don't I go break into that spooky old house and steal some notes from the guy living there!'"  

And then the further absurdity that the narrator never thinks to call the cops on what he's trying to convince himself is a mundane burglar.

Wet footprints all over the lab floor, and the notes stolen are just the ones the narrator's been studying?  I'm thinking the cast of CSI or Law and Order: SVU would make short work of this one.  But oh well.

What we have here is a competent albeit dumb (okay, really dumb) story with some decent atmospheric touches that make it not a total waste of time.  But nothing more.   There will be better Derleth stories ... although (sigh) there will be worse ones, too...
 

"Cement Surroundings"

by Brian Lumley

published Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1969

Sir Amery Wendy-Smith has a problem.  A big problem.  He's holed up in his cottage with an ultra-sensitive seismograph, which he hovers over like Gomez Addams used to his ticker tape machine.  And he mutters to himself all the time.  About weird shit.

It seems Sir Amery, an archaeologist, is the only survivor of an expedition into deepest, darkest Africa in search of the ruins of a legendary, possibly mythical, city called G'harne.  Things apparently didn't go well.  Sir Amery stumbled out of the jungle into a tribe of savages, who decided not to pop him in the stew being as he was nuts and had come from an area they considered "taboo".  Instead, said savages got him back to civilization (exactly how is not explained - but you know those savages - tricky blighters!)  As to the fate of his fellows, he will say only that they were killed in an earthquake.  He also wants to be surrounded by cement.  The English countryside has too much grass and soil!

Well, his nephew Paul isn't too keen on his unc's weird behavior, nor his obsession with two large pearl-like things he brought back from Africa, nor his library which is now full of (cue Cthulhu Reading List).  He doesn't like Unc's ranting and chanting, either.  Nor the notes he leaves laying around referring to various earthquakes and funky happenings all over the British Isles.

He likes it even less when Unc reveals (somewhat indirectly, since he's raving at the time) that, in fact, his fellow archaeologist were not killed in an earthquake, but killed by some things that ripped up out of the ground in the ruins of G'harne and slaughtered them.   

He likes it even less less when some kind of weird quake hits Unc's cottage while Paul's out.  Sir Amery is never seen again.  The cottage is collapsed, but there's a huge hole in the earth and the floor that clearly was made when something pushed up through it.

Shortly after, some final papers of Unc's are delivered.  In it is a letter, in which Sir Amery makes it clear - the "pearls" were actually eggs, offspring of the whatevers they encountered in G'harne.  They hatched.  He killed the hatchlings, but the parents, who could sense the presence of their larvae, were coming for them all along.

This story is where Lumley first introduces his own additions to the Cthulhu Reading List, the G'harne Fragments, partially translated from pre-Triassic (that makes `em around 200 million years old) tablets or shards which tell of the creepy Chthonians, also introduced (but not named) here.

"Cement Surroundings" is pure HPL pastiche all the way.  I should add that it's relatively effective as such, too.  Lumley manages a Lovecraft-like voice, while steering clear of outright mimicry.  He's made his own additions to the Mythos Accoutrements, and came up with an original monster race to boot (though it will be several years before he fleshes them out or even names them).

In some ways this is a weakness.  There are a lot of ominous references to the G'harne monsters, but in the end, we really don't learn anything substantial about them.  It's missing a strong punchline.

"Cement" isn't any masterpiece, but it's an enjoyable Lovecraft pastiche with a touch of originality and muscle all its own.

"Polaris"

by H.P. Lovecraft
originally published The Philiosopher, Dec. 1920

The story begins with the narrator describing the night sky as observed over long sleepless nights from his window, in particular that of the Pole Star, Polaris, which he describes as "winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey". He then describes the night of the aurora over his house in the swamp and how on this night he first dreamt of a city of marble lying on a plateau between two peaks, with Polaris ever watching in the night sky. The narrator describes after a while observing motion within the houses and seeing men beginning to populate the streets, conversing to each other in language that he had never heard before but still, strangely, understood. However, before he could learn any more of this city, he awoke.
Many times, he would again dream of the city and the men who dwelt within. After a while, the narrator tired of merely existing as an incorporeal observer and began to desire to establish his place within the city, simultaneously beginning to question his conceptualization of what constituted reality and thus whether this was just a dream or whether it was real. Then, one night, while listening to discourses of those who populate the city, the narrator obtains a physical form: not as a stranger, but as an inhabitant of the city, which he now knew as Olathoë, lying on the plateau of Sarkis in the land of Lomar, which was besieged by an enemy known as the Inutos. While the other men within the city engage in combat with Inutos, the narrator is sent to a watchtower to signal if the Inutos gain access to the city itself. Within the tower, he notices Polaris in the sky and senses it as a malign presence, hearing a rhyme which appears to be spoken by the star:

Uncertain as to its meaning, he drifts off to sleep, thus failing in his duty to guard Olathoë. Upon awakening, the narrator finds himself back in the house by the swamp, but the narrator now is convinced that this life is not real but a dream from which he cannot awaken. 

(above stolen from Wikipedia)

This is one of HPL's earliest surviving stories, and falls into his "Dunsanian" stories - except that it predates his discovery of Lord Dunsany (most figure the main influence is Poe's more dreamlike stories).  It is the first mention of several cities, places and beings in the Dreamlands, and includes the first reference to the Pnakotic Manuscripts.  It's a slightly evocative tale, but nothing special.  Like many of his Dream stories, there's a strong air of melancholy and loss about it.

"The Sect of the Idiot"

by Thomas Ligotti

Published Crypt of Cthulhu 1988

Thomas Ligotti is a Michigan-based horror fiction author who's gained quite a rep since the 80's for his Lovecraft-influenced fiction, and for espousing a "life-is-meaningless-shit" philosophy that seems to make the current crop of Lovecraft fanboys swoon. 

Unfortunately, Ligotti's stories often start with a nice build-up, impressive atmosphere - and no payoff.  I liked his first collection, Songs Of A Dead Dreamer pretty well, but the follow-ups Grimscribe and Noctuary left me cold. 

He is, nonetheless, an effective writer whose work does indeed evoke HPL, especially very early HPL pieces such as "The Festival" and "The Nameless City".  

A lot of Ligotti's stories have Lovecraft-influenced themes, settings and ideas, but a few of them explicitly reference Lovecraftian ideas.  This story (which kicks off with an epigram from The Necronomicon, about Azathoth) is the most oft-reprinted of them.

A nameless narrator is vacationing in an unknown city which he will not identify.  He is very fond of this city, and of the view from his rented room (surprising, since he hates his very existence).  One late afternoon, a stranger knocks on his door.  The stranger acts strangely, compliments the narrator on his view, and leaves.

That night, the narrator has a strange dream in which he enters a room in which a number of robed figures are seated.  The shapes of the bodies under the robes, and the way they move, suggests that these are not human beings.  Finally they reveal themselves to have, instead of hands, tentacled, talon-like appendages which they seem to communicate with.

The next day, the narrator is plagued by the feeling that some great terror or malignancy is hiding behind the city's pleasant facade.  After wandering around feeling antsy all day, he enters what appears to be a dilapidated, abandoned building.  There he finds the odd chairs that the robed figures sat in in his dream.  As he investigates the chairs, he finds them oddly-constructed and not right for human backs and buns.  In fact, instead of a seat, each chair contains a cube of strange water or liquid (may I be forgiven for thinking that these sound like toilets?).

The stranger from the previous day comes and takes the narrator's hand.  The narrator pulls away and flees.  On his way back to his rooms, people seem to react strangely to him.  He discovers that his hand has become a tentacled claw like those of the creatures in his dream.

As I said, this story is very evocative, stylistically, of Lovecraft's very early stories.  The dream sequence is quite vivid and effective.  In many ways, it's all mood.  It is not a great story (and I am not sold on Ligotti), but it is interesting and memorable.