"Out of the Ages"

by Lin Carter
originally published Nameless Places, Arkham House, 1975

Poor Dr. Stephenson Blaine, Curator of the Manuscripts Collection at the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities in Santiago, CA.   His job is to catalog the papers of Harold Hadley Copeland, last seen running out into the snow in "The Dweller in the Tomb".  This is a drag since he considers Copeland to have once been brilliant, even though he died babbling in an asylum.

The papers seem to bear this out, as most of them deal with evidence of an ancient cult in the Pacific devoted to worship of a thing called Zatamaga/Z'mog/Zmog-Yahh/etc.  This entity is apparently properly named Zoth-Ommog, and there's an especially unusual jade image of it among the papers and artifacts...

Copeland seems to have been pursuing the worship of this deity, and of various related (Cthulhu, Ghatanathoa etc) he has bundled together as the "Xothic Legend Cycle".  Much name-dropping of deities, beasties, and forbidden books ensues.  Also include are newspaper clippings about bizarre, related events - including a reference to the events of "The Call of Cthulhu".

All of this shit starts to get to Blaine, and he has nightmares about sunken cities, and the jade idol, and finally, of Zoth-Ommog in da flesh!   Next thing you know, the cops find him standing by the ocean in his jammies, burning a piece of paper which he tosses into the crashing surf.  As they haul him off, they catch a glimpse of something gross and wormy and huge moving in the waters...

As it was Carter's wont to simply re-write stories he admired, here he has simply re-written "The Call of Cthulhu", using the same structure: a scholar receives a packet of information regarding an ancient cult.  Digging deeper, he learns that this is more than simply a myth, and that the cults bizarre objects of worship are real and alive. Unfortunately, Carter did not have HPL's gifts, and there's nothing here approaching the unsettling feel of the best moments of that original tale.  Nor does he have HPL's sense of structure - fully 2/3 of this story are simply recitations of information from Copeland's notes, all pointing in the same obvious direction.   And Carter is even worse than Derleth about rolling off long lists of Cthuloid shtuff to no particular purpose.

That being said, in the last third, the dream sequences are somewhat effective, as is the wrap-up, and the hinted-at glimpse of a Yug actually carries a touch of the chill.  This makes it all the more frustrating - one is left with the feeling that, if Carter had ever actually gotten down to it, he might have created an effective story that echoed, but didn't merely ape, the master.