"The Whippoorwills in the Hills"

 by August Derleth  

originally published Weird Tales, September 1948

Dan Harrop moves into the house of his cousin, Abel Harrop, a cranky recluse who has disappeared, Merie Celste-like, without a trace.  Dan feels the local constabulary have done a poor job investigating, and so intends to solve the mystery himself.  He finds the house in good order, even a book lying open on a desk in Abel's study.  

The house has no electricity, but it does have a party line, and soon UN finds himself listening in on conversations among the superstitious and ignorant locals, who seem fearful of Abel's return and past spooky events connected with him.  As an additional problem, whippoorwills sing in the tress outside the house all friggin' night long.  Loudly.  And they seem to be unusually large.  Then he receives an anonymous call telling him to scram.  He also listens in on more conversations, including about the birds, who, the local women seem to think, are trying to catch someone.  They see the birds as an omen of death.  And maybe something worse.

Dan takes some time to look at the books Abel had collected, and they are the usual titles from The Cthulhu Mythos Book Club (get 6 titles now and just sacrifice 2 more innocent souls in the next 12 months!).  He tries visiting the locals, who are mighty unfriendly.  One of them talks of Abel being taken away by "Them from outside".  When Dan is uncomprehending, the yokel tells him to forget the whole conversation and burn the books.

Dan takes a deep dive into the books and we get the Usual Derlethian Cthulhu Mythos Lecture.  While trying to sleep, he begins to hear unearthly chanting mixed with the cries of the birds.  He finds Abel's clothing in a chair, arranged in such a way that it looks as if Abel had been sucked out of them.  The bird cries start to really get to him and he runs into the night with a club, swinging madly at the birds.

Cattle starts getting killed in the area, mutilated and drained of blood.  Dan has strange dreams of alien lands and tentacled, shapeless beings who feast on one another's blood.  Someone sets the house on fire. Dan learns a bit more about Them from outside, and their ability to possess people.  The dreams and the chanting get worse.  Dan is found over the body of a local girl he has just mutilated and killed.  They arrest him and prepare to lock him up.  Don't they realize he's one of the Chosen Ones?

Despite a somewhat disappointingly prosaic ending, this is a well-above-average Derleth Mythos tale.  He avoids most (not all) of the clutzy cliches that mark so much of his Lovecraft-influenced work, and this story builds atmospherically quite well.  The dream sequences are especially effective.  

Part of what brings it down is that I read it (for the second time in ... 40 years or so) the day after reading "The House in the Valley", published five years later but basically a total rehash of this tale (and less effective) (similarly "The Sandwin Compact" is nearly a rewrite of "The Return of Hastur".  Poor Aug really was shameless sometimes).  One of my main concerns here is to review these tales as they stand, on their own merits, independent of context.  So while this is no classic by any means, it is a decent Lovecraft-influenced horror story.

"The House in the Valley"

by August Derleth 

originally published Weird Tales, July 1953

Jefferson Bates just wanted to go get away from it all and everyone else and paint, so he's all kindsa happy when his agent finds him an ultra-isolated house in a remote country valley not to far from Arkham and Dunwich.

The house is a dump; creepy-looking with furniture piled up around the outside like a barricade.  Plus Jeff gets the weird feeling there's someone there.  Also no electricity, running water, but the phone works.  It also has a bad rep.  The former tenant, Seth Bishop, was a creepazoid recluse who murdered one of his neighbors after being accused of killing local livestock.

Nevertheless, Jeff moves in.  He soon meets one of his neighbors, a dumbass youth named Bud Perkins who likes to spy on him. And hints of dark doings having been done in the house.  

That night Jeff is awakened by weird sounds seeming to come from beneath the earth.  He soon finds some old books, including a notebook kept by Seth with notes from the various usual sources. He soon learns that late in life Seth went on a self-improvement kick, reading everything he could get his hands on, and even visiting the Miskatonic U library.  

The dreams get weirder, including a giant gaseous Cthulhu head enveloping the house.  Jeff discovers a hidden tunnel in the cellars, clearly man-made, that seems pretty extensive.  Intrigued, he buys some tools and digs further.  

Bud comes around complaining about having lost a sheep.  Jeff finds evidence that he's been making nocturnal treks which he has no memory of.  He also finds some remains of the sheep in the tunnels. 

Jeff soon sometimes thinks of himself as a different person altogether, and is concerned about this painter from the city living in his house.  He absorbs himself in a diary of Seth's that he finds.  He learns of contacts with Deep Ones and information about the Feds raid on Innsmouth.  The local sheriff comes to question him.  He dreams vividly of R'lyeh, Cthulhu, and the Deep Ones.  

Bud Perkins and other locals now patrol the area, armed, keeping an eye on the house and Jeff.  One night, Jeff is awakened by the sounds of screaming coming from the tunnels.  A mob of townsfolk and a deputy sheriff turn up at his door demanding to search the house.  It seems a local boy has disappeared.

Not long after Jeff is again hearing rumblings in the earth, hearing strange music and chanting.  He finds himself caught up in adoration of Cthulhu.  He runs from the house and kills Bud Perkins.  The locals come after him.  They set the house on fire.  As Jeff is taken away, he thinks he sees Cthulhu and Deep Ones writhing in the flames.  He believes it was the spirit of Seth Bishop, possessing him, which committed the murders.

This is an above average tale for Derleth, with its focus on mental deterioration and madness, though he still indulges in the Standard Derleth Lecture on the Cthulhu Mythos.  Much is implied rather than shown, and the vision of Cthulhu in Jeff's second dream (not the gaseous head vision) is very effective.  The small moment where Jeff begins to think completely from Seth(?)'s POV is genuinely chilling.

"Ithaqua" aka "The Snow Thing"

 

by August Derleth

originally published Strange Stories, February 1941

Henry Lucas has disappeared and apparently a lot of folks think Constable James French of the Mounties has does a shitty job investigating.  Now French has disappeared, too.  But he left behind a missive.

It seems Henry Lucas walked out of his cabin one night and never returned.  But French knows a bit more about what happened to him.

It seems no one liked Lucas very much, probably because he was dishonest fuckhead.  It also seems the local injuns may be involved in the worship of Ithaqua, of whom they tell French "you are not to know."  Said worship is thought to be liked to mysterious bonfires in the wilderness, sudden "inexplicable" snowstorms, and disappearances.  

A local priest directs French to what he calls "altars", circles of stones in the woods.  The snow inside the circles is much softer than outside.  The rocks themselves are of an unknown type, and give off an electrical charge.  Also within the circle he finds booted footprints that almost have to be Lucas' (the local injuns don't wear shoes).  French also finds a site showing evidence of large fires. While poking around, French gets the sensation that he's being watched, and that danger threatens.  Soon he is accosted by what appears to be a mini-snowstorm of some kind.  Frightened, he runs, thinking he hears voices whispering for him to come back.

He makes it back to the priest, who tells him he has seen "tangible proof of a ghastly other world". He tells him a little about Ithaqua, and that he believes the local injuns still worship Ith and make human sacrifices to him.

 Lucas body suddenly turns up, wrapped in a gauze of snow and ice that appears "spun".  Lucas is alive, but only barely.  He mutters worshipful phrases to Hastur and Ithaqua.  Some careful questioning reveals that Lucas had stepped outside his cabin to investigate some unearthly music, and was seemingly drawn to the worship site, where a great cloud of smoke with eyes appeared, and he found himself taken away.  Far away.  Like even other planets far away.

French has written seeking authority to dynamite the worship area.  As he closes, he's about to follow and presumably interrupt some locals traipsing off to the altars.  But he never makes it, instead disappearing and turning up in the same condition as Lucas.

His superior, John Dalhousie, having received French's letter, carries out the task of blowing up the worship stones.  He intends to arrest and break up the local tribe, but then Dalhousie himself disappears, later to turn up, again, in the same condition as Lucas and French.  Authorities carry out the task of relocating the indians to various provinces, and declaring the forests where the worship took place to be off limits.

Now Augie Doggie has taken a pretty severe beating in the halls of Lovecraft fandom, and I've always defended him even though I knew his Cthulhu stuff was less-than-classic.  That's because I know what Derleth detractors don't - he was a fine writer - sometimes.  I've long wished that a Derleth Cthulhu tale would turn up that was the equal of such gems as "The Drifting Snow", "The Dark Boy", "The Lonesome Place" or "The Place in the Woods".

Well ... this tale isn't quite that.  But it is probably a near-miss.  It's genuinely effective (the scene of French realizing he's being stalked through the snow is damn good, even chilling.  The story takes itself seriously, devoid of the tongue-in-cheek nature of later Derleth/Cthulhu, and the in-jokes, and spares us the litany of mythos tomes and the lecture on the nature of the mythos.  It's a straight-up solid horror story with minimal mythos reference and all the better for it.

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind"

 by August Derleth 

originally published Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, January 1933

Capt. John Dalhousie of the Mounties is making his last word on the disappearance of Constable Robert Norris, who vanished from Navissa Camp 7 months ago and whose body just turned up in a snow bank many miles away.

Norris was investigating an apparently abandoned village named Stillwater.  He had reported some weird experiences, including a kind of black emptiness in the sky, blotting out the stars, which rushed at him, sending him scurrying for cover.  To his great surprise, three bodies came plummeting out of the emptiness, two men and a girl. They are identified as being James MacDonald, Allison Wentworth and Irene Masitte - all on the Stillwater missing persons list. Though the men are relatively unhurt, the girl is dead and frozen solid.

Wentworth babbles a lot about a Lord/God/Death-walker of the winds, and Lhassa and Leng, old ones and elementals.  The latter gets the attention of Norris' friend and host, Dr. Jamison. 

Its seems that the good folks of Stillwater worshiped a fearsome air elemental and, apparently, made human sacrifices to it.

Wentworth eventually becomes coherent enough for Norris to piece together a story.  He and MacDonald had stopped in Stillwater while travelling, and not been made very welcome.  They soon noticed the weirdness was pretty serious and, were planning to blow town, when Irene came to them, revealed she was about to be sacrificed to the air elemental, and asked them to help her escape.  However, they were set upon by a giant being from the sky which swooped down on the village environs, wailing, and scooped them up as well as the rest of the villagers.  

MacDonald dies while Wentworth continues to babble about things, including Cthulhu, Algernon Blackwood, etc.  He dies.  Dr. Jamison shows Norris some books by Algernon Blackwood and some "old magazines" containing stories by HPL.

Norris notes that previous investigators of the Stillwater vanishing found the tracks of two men and a woman, abruptly halted, and what appeared to be the tracks of some gigantic being with human-like, but webbed, feet.

Norris has also found such a print.

Soon after Norris files a report saying something that watches him from the sky is pursuing him.

When his corpse is found, he is in possession of an odd, ancient gold plaque, of two struggling beings.  It is noted that the plaque sometimes gives off the sound of the winds.  

This one was published during HPL's lifetime, and the inclusion of his stories seems to be an in-joke more than anything.  The real point of reference is Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo", which seems to have mightily impressed young Augie.  Judged on its own merits this is a competent enough "Wendigo"-riff but no more.

"The Sandwin Compact"

 by August Derleth

originally published Weird Tales, November 1940

Dave, our narrator, grew up summering at his uncle Asa's house along the Innsmouth Road not far from Arkham, playing in the coastal lands with his cousin Eldon.  Now growed up and working as a librarian as Miskatonic U, he gets a call from Eldon, asking him to come out to the house pronto.  "The owls are hooting", Eldon says, invoking a childhood pact they made to use the phrase whenever one needed desperate help.  (Very charming, but being as their conversation is private, why doesn't Eldon just say "hey man I really need your help!"? More dramatic this way anyhoo).  Off Dave goes.

Its seems Uncle Asa's gotten a little weird ("he's not himself", Eldon says).  So has the house.  Weird sounds at night, like spectral music, and footsteps, and ... wet door knobs!  Like someone with wet hands tried to turn them (you ever try to turn a knob with wet hands?) and having the whole house smell like fish.

Uncle Asa is indeed getting a little weird, responding oddly to the call of a sea-bird outside (Eldon tells Dave it was no bird - something out there is speaking to Asa).  PS Uncle Asa also looks like a frog!  That night, Dave has strange dreams of flying with the winds over strange parts of the world ... an isolated plateau, a black lake... he awakens exhausted to find the house smelling like fish,  phantom footsteps, weird vocal sounds, etc. He goes to Eldon, who's talking mythos names in his sleep, and wakes him up.  They go to Uncle Asa's room and, listening outside, get to hear him arguing with something that croaks in an unknown language.  Then they hear something in the room seemingly stomp off into the distance.  Upon entry they find the room dripping and wet everywhere.  Uncle Asa has confession to make.  It seems the Sandwin family's been selling off its oldest sons for a few generations to the Cthulhoid hordes in order to stay independently wealthy.  But Unc's having none of it, thus the baddies are after him. They're threatening to send the dreaded Lloigor (not the entities from Colin Wilson's story, btw).

All of this reminds Dave of the restricted collection of Mythos-y tomes at the Miskatonic U library, which he's already delved into and which, naturally, he now goes and delves into more.  Asa boards up the windows and battens down the hatches.

When Dave returns to the house "a fortnight later", all hell breaks loose.  Howling winds (but only inside the house), subterranean stomps, voices chanting "Ia! Ia! (insert name of mythos deity here).  After much rigamarole they bust into Uncle Asa's room and find he's basically been sucked, vacuum like, right out of his clothes!

This time out Aug is bouncing off himself as much as HPL, since half the plot is cribbed from his own "Return of Hastur".  Not a terrible story, but not a particularly great one either.

"The Seal of R'lyeh" aka "Seal of the Damned"

 by August Derleth

originally published Fantastic Universe, July 1957 

Marius Phillips grandfather ("whom I never saw except in a darkened room") always warned his parents to keep him away from the sea.  Which was odd to him since in fact he was drawn to the ocean as far back as he can remember.  Nevertheless his parents raised him landlocked environs.

By the time he's in college, both parents have shuffled off and so has an eccentric uncle who leaves him boatloads of money and two houses - one in Innsmouth, one on coastal hills above Innsmouth looking out onto the ocean.  Marius moves in to the latter.

Throughout the house, and especially embroidered into a great round rug that nearly fills a study, is a seal depicting an Aquarius-type figure surmounting what appears to be symbols of a city and an octopoid beastie.

He hires a young woman, Ada Marsh, from the town, to do some housekeeping for him.  She's not much of a housekeeper, as he keeps catching her snooping around, as if looking for something.  When he asks her what she's looking for, she behaves oddly, telling him (a notebook or diary or papers) but refusing to explain what for, telling him he's too young and stupid and an outsider to understand.

Inexplicably, Marius doesn't get rid of her and in fact finds the papers hidden behind the usual books.  Unc's diary includes the whole back-story of Innsmouth, the usual blah-blah about Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, maps of the Plateau of Leng and Kadath, and notes about Unc's attempts to find R'lyeh and Cthulhu himself.  This leads Marius into several paragraphs of speculation on the Mythos and comparative religion, references to the events of "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".  

However, when he presents what he's learned to Ada, she's unimpressed and insults him.  She also tells him to find his uncle's ring.

Which he promptly does.

The ring, when worn, makes him psychically aware and changes his perception of the world.  Using it, he finds a trap door in the study that leads to a huge, deep underground cavern that opens out to the sea.

Marius gets himself some diving gear and hops in. Once in the water, he finds an unknown force starting to draw him in deeper, risking his being too deep when his oxygen runs out.  He is rescued by Ada, who is able to swim effortlessly and to breathe underwater.  She frees him of his diving gear and he discovers he too can breathe underwater.  They swim out to Devil's Reef.

Ada now joins him in his quest for R'lyeh.  They charter a boat and make for Ponape.  From there they begin to visit the various cities of the Deep Ones, finding allies.  Finally they think they have found R'lyeh.  They charter a boat out there.  A great wave seems to wash them off the boat and into the sea.  They are never seen again. 

While I can't call this a great story its certainly one of Derleth's better attempts at a Lovecraftian tale.  Obviously, he's riffing heavily (and less effectively) off of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and the usual lecture on the nature of the mythos is just as painful as always.  But it is effective, breaks the mold of the straight Lovecraft rips at least a little bit, and is at times effectively spooky (I find the never-properly-seen Grandfather bit kind of eerie even though I knew instantly why he never got to get a good look at him).

"The Return of Hastur"

 

by August Derleth

originally published Weird Tales, March 1939

Our Mr. Haddon, who has the virtue of at least having a single name (a rare thing in these parts), is the legal executor of the estate of Amos Tuttle, a cranky old coot who lives out on the outskirts of Arkham in a big creepy old house with a family tomb on the grounds.  Seems Tuttle has some funky dying requests - important as he's about to snuff it and everyone knows so - he wants the house, and a certain shelful of books, destroyed, and never passed on to his heir, Paul Tuttle.

Well, snuff it Amos does and the next thing you know ol' Paul's threatening to contest the will if he doesn't get the house and the books.  Haddon, who isn't near as shameless as a proper lawyer should be, folds.  

All this despite the fact that, before Amos is buried, his corpse mutates into a fishy-froggy-alien-looking thing, and enormous, squishy stomps are heard seemingly coming from the earth below the house.  No big, right?  Paul moves in.

The next time Haddon sees Paul, he's gone deep on Amos' shelf of un-destroyed books, which includes all the usual suspect and some notes about paying $100K for one of them, in addition to a "promise".  Well, Paul's been digging and having immersed himself in the usual Cthuloid mess (including a copy of Weird Tales with HPL's "Call of Cthulhu"), he explains the Derleth version to Haddon (Elder Gods good, Old Ones bad, etc).  Paul has worked out that the "promise" was to provide a "haven" for Hastur, the big creepazoid.  Most likely in a series of sub-cellars dug under the house.  Oh, and the Squishy Foot Stomp is still happening.

Well, pretty soon Paul's having other ideas and things get weird(er).  Someone(?) busts open the family tomb, makes a mess, and takes Amos' old bod for a ride, dumping it in front of the house.  And Amos hasn't gotten any prettier since demising.  Paul now realizes what Amos was up to with his will.  It seems that promise was a big mistake.  He now insists that Haddon blow up the house and subcellars (charges already set) and make sure the books are destroyed.  Haddon, whose seen enough, is game and, after a detour to a Judge Wilton's place to do some chin-wagging about Paul in interrupted by a phone call from Paul demanding that Haddon get his ass over there and do it now before - aggggh!! Glug, glug! Ia! Hastur etc.  Convinced, Haddon heads on over and blows the place sky high, which collapses the subcellars. Something comes running out of the house, a boneless human shape that used to be Paul, wiggling its boneless arms (ewwww!) and glugging at him, before a shaft of light with lightning bolts shoots out of it grabs the former Paul and is away.

Well now, this, I think the first of Derleth's oh-ficial Cthulhu riffs, is no classic - but it isn't half bad either.  There's good buildup, good atmosphere, a genuinely icky final manifestation, and even though it does trot out some hoary Lovecraft-riff cliches, there's a certain freshness to it here - perhaps simply because Derleth hadn't done it 50,000 times previously at this point.  All in all this one is a decent read.

"Something in Wood"

 

by August Derleth

originally published Weird Tales, March 1948

Our narrator, a fellow named Pinckney, has a tale to tale re: his old buddy Jason Wecter, a famous(?!) and famously acerbic music and arts critic for a Boston newspaper.

Pinckney picks up a little gift for his buddy, who collects weird and primitive arts (including the sculptures of Clark Ashton Smith).  At an antique shop he finds a carving, in a strange, unidentified wood, of a tentacle-faced boogie.  Wecter thinks its great.

Things start getting weird though.  Wecter's columns are suddenly scathing about artists he once liked, and champion obscure, primitive artists and cultures no one's ever heard of.

Wecter tells Pinckney that even he doesn't know where these references came from, or ever remember writing the columns.  He's plagued every night by dreams of alien landscapes and cultures, and sometimes hallucinates that the wood carving has become gigantic, and alive.  He insists the carving is changing shape, gradually moving.

So it goes.  Wecter draws deeper into his weird inner (?) world, identifying the carving as being of Cthulhu (surprise!), and that a cult of Cthulhu is still active in the world. What's more, he likes what's happening to him, as it is opening new realities to him he never dreamt of.  Well anyway before long he up and vanishes without a trace.  

Per his will, Pinckney gets the carving back. Taking it with him out on a motor launch, he thinks he hears Wecter calling to him.  He sees that in one of the tentacles of the carving, there is now a carven image of Wecter, calling for help.  Pinckney throws the carving into the ocean.

Man ... WTF.  This actually is a half-way decent (though in no way great) story up until the last few paragraphs.  There's good atmospheric buildup, and for once we don't get a lecture on the Cthulhu Mythos or a reading list.  But then AD suddenly drops the whole ball with probably the most ludicrous ending he's ever thrown at us (and that is saying somethng)!  Boo!  

"Beyond the Threshold"

 by August Derleth 

originally published Weird Tales, September 1941

Our Narrator, who (thank Hastur the traditions are being kept!) hath no name, is an assistant librarian at the Miskatonic U library.  A job which was probably shitty even in 1941.  Regardless, he gets a letter from his cousin Frolin (presumably one of them had a father named Bilbin?) which he finds troubling.  It seems their grandfather Josiah, with whom Frolin lives, is "not himself" lately, and "a great deal of water has passed under various bridges, and the wind has blown about many changes" - phrases that trouble ON as much as phrases like "I actually really like this ring, so fuck you Gandalf" troubled the grey wanderer, albeit for less obvious reasons (said reasons not necessarily to become more obvious, but get in the van anyway).

Anyhoo, ON tramps off to the woods of north Wisconsin, where Grandpa Jo hangs out with Frolin and the Houghs, a couple of servants who've been with him since way back.  The house, built by a great uncle Leander,  is isolated and ugly, and partly built into the side of a hill.  Grandpa spends all his time in the study now, a room with book-lined walls and a hideous floor-to-ceiling landscape painted by Leander that apparently shows a bear ambling into a cave while "sad-looking" clouds look down upon the scene.  Gramps is so rooted in the study now that he's even moved his bed in there.  

Grandpa Jo seems pretty spry actually.  A former world traveller, he's onto some heavy stuff, including previously unknown continents and a lot of stuff about "the Wendigo", a dark spirit out of Native American folklore which is obviously important to him despite Gramps' continued attempts to deny it.  Impressed that ON knows something of the Wendigo, and in a most impressively shameless act of product placement, Grandpa whips out a copy of H.P. Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others (published only a couple years prior by Arkham House) and asks if ON's read it (which he has).  Gramps then speculates (or, really, pretty much says) that HPL's stories are not fiction.  He also has some old letters from great-uncle Leander, which Uncle L had ordered destroyed, but which some disrespectful relative decided to hang onto, which has more to say about names like Ithaqua, Hastur, and Lloigor.  P.S. apparently old Uncle Leander wasn't too well-liked around them parts, possibly because they say he looked like a frog (no portraits of him survive).  "Do you know what that means?" Gramps asks ON, before admitting "No, of course not."  

That night ON is wakened by the sound of strange but beautiful pipe music, the origin of which they can't determine, and the house is permeated first by a smell like swampy water, then by intense cold.  Gramps, however, takes all these phenomena in stride. 

The next night there's more fun.  Howling winds build up outside, so raging it seems like the house will be blown away (and indeed, the walls and hangings can be seen vibrating).  But - when Frolin and ON look outside, they note that none of the trees are even slightly disturbed.  Add to the cacophony of winds the sounds of the pipes again, and a sound like someone gigantic walking outside, approaching the house.

Grandpa is again unperturbed, and talks of a "threshold" which one is not meant to cross, but which he himself intends to find and do just that.  

Gramps sends the Houghs away for a vacation, while Frolin loses his mojo due to insomnia. He and ON spend more time going through Gramps' research without coming up with much.  That night the winds and flutes and stomping are back with a vengeance.  What's more, they look out the window and see a gigantic dark figure blocking out the sky, with glowing carmine (that's deep red, kiddies) "stars" where its eyes might be.  Now there's a lot of "Ia! Ia!" chanting going on, too.

Grandpa's locked in his study.  When they break in, one wall (the one built into the hill) has been blown open, revealing a cave (causing ON to realize that the painting depicted the hill before the house was built - and that same was the final threshold).  Gramps is gone - looks like he's been grabbed right outta his bed.  And there's snow and ice all over the room.

Well, somehow Frolin and ON explain all this away.  The letters and Grandpa's notebook turn up frozen in ice, in Canada, and Gramps himself turns up, frozen and dead, months later, in a desert on an island near Singapore, his pockets full of Cthulhu/Ithaqua-related goodies.

Well what to say, this is a very average Derleth piece that owes as much to Algernon Blackwood as to HPL, and doesn't hold a candle to either (check out Blackwood's treatment in "The Wendigo").  It's perfectly pleasant Weird Tales fare but doesn't pack any punch.

"The Salem Horror"

 by Henry Kuttner  

originally published Weird Tales, May 1937

"Carson" (for once our hero has at least a partial name ... albeit this time he's not the narrator) rents an isolated, creepy old house in Salem, Mass. (not Arkham??) in order to have peace and quiet to finish his latest novel (he is an author of "light romances" - which in the 30's meant more like a humorous adventure story with some kissing, kiddies - not a Harlequin special).  

Now the creepy old house comes complete with a creepy old reputation, involving a creepy old woman named Abigail Prinn who was mobbed and hanged back in the 1690's, allegedly for being a creepy old witch.  Well anyone who rents the place never stays long and they always complain about the rats, but Carson ain't buying any of that superstitious silliness so he moves in.  

Turns out the place has rats alright - big ones!  Also at least one, curiously, doesn't seem to like the sign of the cross.  

While puzzling that mystery in the basement, Carson discovers a secret chamber, with a mosaic stone floor and an iron disk press-fit smack dab in the middle of the floor.  Not only does he think this is very cool, he also thinks its a perfect workspace (???  Kuttner must have been a little weird).  So he moves his writing setup in.

He gets a visit from occultist Michael Leigh, who asks a lot of presumptuous questions (which Carson answers anyway) and to see the secret room (which Carson lets him do), then, even more presumptuously, asks Carson if he'll get the hell out of the house or at least work in another part of it. Carson tells him no to both a lot more politely than most people would, and even agrees to contact him if he has any strange dreams that night.

Which, of course, he does.

He can't remember the dream, but it wakes him up. So he takes a wee-hours stroll and ends up passing the burial yard, where he sees a dead guy propped up against the iron rail fence, staring up at the sky with an expression of terror.

Later Leigh tells him someone opened Abigail Prinn's grave and stole her bod. Leigh offers him big bucks to clear out, going on about Abby's black magic worship, and what's under the iron disk in the secret chamber, and The Necronomicon.  Carson thinks he's a froot loop, and ejects him a lot later than most people would have.  While he's watching Leigh depart, a neighbor accosts him, saying she saw "t'e brown thing" enter his house last night.

Carson falls asleep in the secret chamber and has weird dreams, involving black liquid, amoeboid shapes zooming through the Salem streets.  He wakes up, unable to move, to find a brown, mummified creature joining him through another hitherto secret entrance.

The mummy starts incanting, and the iron disk rises, a really foul odor rising from below, followed by a bit of black liquidy gloop.  Just then Leigh rushes in with a counter-incantation, and some magic stuff in a glass vial which he throws into the emerging gloop monster.  It grabs the mummy and goes back in its hole, slamming the iron disk behind it.

Carson never finishes his book, instead writing a novel called Black God of Madness which no one will publish.  Those he tells of the experience think of it as a dream.  But he knows it wasn't.  The mummy left one of its hands behind.

This isn't a bad story, and has some genuinely eerie moments which I had forgotten (actually I'd pretty much forgotten everything about it except the entity Nyogtha being a big liquid black blob that pops up out of somewhere. It is, as others have noted, kind of a rehash of HPL's "Dreams in the Witch House" but in some ways a bit tighter and more stripped down.  Still I prefer the Lovecraft even if "Dreams" isn't his best.  Kuttner was good and solid at pulp horror, but his terrors don't cut to the quick the way HPL's do.  Once banished, his baddies are done, where HPL's lingered, rattling your back teeth for years to come. A fun read though.

"The Space Eaters"

 by Frank Belknap Long  

originally published Weird Tales, July 1928

Howard (a thinly-disguised - well, actually I hope in a lot of ways he's a thickly-disguised) HPL is buds with Frank, Our Narrator who, for a change, has a friggin' name!  Howard apparently writes supernatural stories - real good ones, per Frank.  But he's having a bad night.  He's frustrated because he can't articulate or describe what he wants to articulate and describe (he then goes on to articulate and describe them - which is basically icky monsters from outer space who have colors and shapes and appearances that don't correspond to anything on our world.  Obviously you can't say something looks kinda like a cross between a lobster and a wallaby if, in fact, it not only doesn't look anything like a lobster or a wallaby - in fact it looks like some other planets equivalent to lobsters and wallabies - except said other planet doesn't have anything equivalent to lobsters and wallabies or anything equivalent to anything we've ever seen before so ... fuck this is even making my head hurt so I kinda don't blame Howard for being a little pissy.  A little pissy mind you - he's being such an ass about Frank's "prosaic" brain that I'm left wondering a little bit why Frank even pals around with the guy.  At least now we know the original inspirations for Titus Crow/Henri De Marigny.

Anyway, there's a knock on the door and its Frank's neighbor/friend Henry Wells, who drives a delivery carriage and ain't too bright, I guess.  But he's had a weird night.  He was out on the road in this terrible fog (did I mention its a really foggy, damp night? Well it is so keep track!) riding through some woods he's always thought were kinda creepy, when something fell in his lap and then jumped in his face - something wet and spongy and gross.  And then he saw something slither rapidly down a tree ... long and white and kind of like a snake - or an arm!  With a hand!  Or maybe not.  He's not sure.  Then he felt a terrible cold or pain (or both) in his head which lasted about 10 minutes.  When he got home, he looked at his temple and he had this nice clean hole there, the size of a bullet hole, going all the way into his brain!

Howard, as if he weren't enough of an asshole, starts shouting at Henry (whom he considers a "yokel") that he's obviously been shot, he's drunk, stupid, voted for Bush twice, etc.  Henry doesn't take too well to this and besides, he's got another headache, so he runs out of the house.  Next thing you know Frank and Howard can hear him screaming in terror or agony.  Frank and Howard proceed to do the natural thing: have a big argument and debate while they change into rain gear - and then go see if they can help him!  OH I forgot to mention there's now a loud droning sound in the woods...

They find him and get him back to the house, where he goes nuts and attacks Howard (which may not be a symptom of insanity, when you get down to it).  A Dr. Smith (oh the pain!) is called.  He operates on Henry while babbling a lot of flowery weirdness (actually Jonathan Harris would have fit the part well) before saying there's nothing more he can do and running away.  He seems to know something ("they have laid there mark on him"), too.  

Frank and Howard flee on Frank's launch, noting a huge shape forming in the sky over the woods, which are now aflame, which they dare not get a good look at.  They make the sign of the cross at it a bunch of times with some burning cotton waste, and it loses definition and vanishes.  Yay!

Back in Brooklyn, Howard gets to writing about the experience, and now he's got what he was looking for - a way to describe "cosmic" horrors beyond the ken of "prosaic" brains (mind you - his big "cosmic" horror is basically semi-visible brain-eating gloop monsters from outer space, as seen in many a 50's sci-fi movie [inevitably starring John Agar], but let's not pop Howie's balloon just yet - he had a rough week).

Frank reads his MS and thinks its brilliant but too horrible for words, and tells him to knock off his seeking after untold horrors.  They have a big philosophical argument until and Frank stomps off, finally tired of Howard's assholery.

That night Howard calls him - the droning's started again!  Frank rushes over (idiot).  He finds Howard writhing on floor yelling about "crawling chaos" while a dark shape beams brilliant lights into Howard's head and pages of his story fly around the room.

Frank manages to make the sign of the cross again, while covering his eyes in horror, and the dark thing bails.  Too late to save ol' Howie though.

Now let me tell you, I've been really looking forward to re-reading "The Space Eaters" for a long time, because I remembered it as being one of the best of the best.  I also remembered F.B. Long as being a genuine literary talent, having been entranced by his collection The Early Long, wherein I first read this at 14 or so, being at that time strung out on all things Lovecraft and desperately trying to find more works by his "circle".  

Well more recent encounters have learnt me that Long was no literary genius (his ideas were imaginative and his prose could be striking, but other times...).  Still I expected great things from "The Space Eaters".

Well...

Okay, let's establish this - "Space Eaters" isn't bad ... just taken down to bare plot, its not so removed from a lot of much-maligned Derleth things.  I won't go into the whole business of the cross (vs. the Elder Sign) because it seems reasonable that a powerful mystic symbol might work against some cosmic beasties even if it isn't the mystic symbol.  Its more imaginative than Derleth would have been (grosser, too).  And at times its just plain hysterical.  Howard is such a complete asshole that either Long was going over the top or he'd had a hatful of HPL at the time he wrote it ... or HPL was really that insufferable (I hope not!).  I'll say again: his concept of an indescribable cosmic horror is the plot of a movie that would now be pure MST3K fodder.  I had to snicker.  Brain-eating monsters from space??? The dialogue gets so portentous and corny that even Stan Lee wouldn't have put his name on it, especially the doctor's monologue while operating.  And the "Omigod!  Henry's screaming! He must be in trouble!  Let's go help him after we finish arguing and change clothes!" belongs in a Monty Python sketch.

But ... but ... I like Long.  I like him because at his best, his writing is really potent and evocative even if it is pulpy.  This tale begins:

"The horror came to Partridgeville in the fog."

Simple, unadorned, unquestionably pulpy and yet it works, it resonates.  To a pulp horror fan, it sets you up that something special is going to come.  Later, Henry's monologue about what he sees in the woods,  a white, snaky ... arm?  With a hand?  Or not?  may be way too poetic for a yoke, but it also recalls the unrealistic but poetic dialogue characters in Ray Bradbury stories often utter.  Long is no Bradury, but it does appear they sipped from the same cup a time or two.

All in all, not near the classic I remembered it as being, but still a fun spooky read.

"Black Man With A Horn"

 by T.E.D. Klein  

originally published New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham House, 1980

Our narrator (in keeping with Lovecraftian tradition, he is yet another Unnamed Narrator) is man in his late 70's, a native New Yorker now whiling away his last days in his late sister's Florida bungalow.  He's a once-respected now nearly forgotten horror story author, and was a personal friend of HPL himself.

On a plane flight some time earlier, UN encountered a strange, garrulous fellow named Mortimer who's wearing an obviously phony beard and says he's on the run from enemies.  Formerly a missionary in Malaysia, he apparently ran afoul of the "chauchaus" - a degenerate inland tribe, who kidnapped and killed his colleague ("they grew something in him").  UN doesn't take the fellow very seriously, but later he surreptitiously sees Mortimer freak at the sight of a John Coltrane album cover depicting Coltrane blowing his horn, silhouetted against a tropical sun.

Sometime later, taking his grand-nephew on a tour of the NYC Natural History Museum, he spots a ceremonial robe from Malaysia depicting several human figures running, apparently in terror, from a gigantic figure that seems to be blowing a horn.  The image reminds him of the album cover, and of Mortimer's reaction to it.  More digging reveals that this figure is "Shoo Goron" or "Shugoran", a herald of death or disaster.  Or perhaps a figure of death itself.

He learns that Mortimer, who had contact with UN's sister, has disappeared in Miami, and Malaysian man is sought for questioning.  There is a picture in the paper, and UN recognizes him as a man he saw on the same flight on which he met Mortimer.  The Malaysian fellow had a package of what UN took to be Asian food, which dribbled glop and produced a "treacly" smell which UN also detected at the museum.  UN goes to Miami to visit his sister and continues his investigations.  At the hotel where the mysterious Malaysian stays, he learns that the mystery man apparently had a small black child staying with him.  A young restaurant worked is found dead, his lungs inexplicably drawn up into his throat and mouth.

UN returns to NYC.  His sister moves inland from her Miami home after the place is vandalized, long claw-like marks running from roof to ground.  She passes not too long after.  UN goes to her place but can't bring himself to move on.  There are a spate of burglaries in the neighborhood.  One night a woman reports seeing a huge black man wearing scuba gear peering in her window.  Tracks like the marks of scuba flippers are found outside her home.  UN knows that this entity is coming for him.  And getting closer...

Oh man is this a great horror story.  Words fail me.  

In the classic HPL tradition, Klein builds the tale up, fact by fact, detail by detail, incident by incident.  Things that at first seem inconsequential or even amusing (the first part of the story - after the doomy intro - which is doomy but not silly - is lighthearted [and slightly gross]) soon becomes very consequential, and disturbing.   The most chilling moment, for me, comes when UN reads the transcript of a lost documentary on Malaysia, wherein a boy who has just drawn Shugoran becomes terrified even talking about it.  The concept so often repeated in the Mythos: it's dangerous to even know about it. 

Even though it has (yet another) UN, the character Klein draws here (expertly) is a real character.  Sad, lonely, and yet intelligent and sympathetic.  A synopsis does not do justice to Our Narrator (supposedly based on Frank Belknap Long).  You can see even yourself drawn into this web of darkness, seemingly instigated by nothing more than a chance encounter on a plane.  

And therein lies the saddest, and most unsettling part.  It was, seemingly, only a chance encounter on a plane.  But Our Narrator, like Mortimer, simply comes to Know Too Much.  Too much for the very real threats he faces to let him live.  These Tcho Tcho's - not the pulpy pygmies of Derleth's tales, but rather a genuinely sinister tribal cult, are clearly very smart, and very skilled, stalkers.  Incidentally - has anyone figured out why the Chaosium folks consider Shugoran to be an avatar of Nyarlathotep?  I see no clue to such a conclusion in the tale.

Another fine touch is the other characters attempts to rationalize the bizarre things they encounter.  We know (or soon realize) that Mortimer is no crank, that the winged hide hanging on the wall is no catfish,  most of all that the figure seen outside the window is not a tall black man in a scuba outfit.  

"Discovery of the Ghooric Zone"

 by Richard Lupoff  

originally published Chrysalis, August 1977

It's March 15 2337 and the starship Khons with its crew of nymphomaniac cyborgs is bouncing around Pluto when they discover Yuggoth and its satellite/neighbors Thog and Thok, Lovecraft's "Ghooric Zone".  The date is significant, being the day of HPL's death.  One crewmen is versed in Lovecraftian and wonders how HPL could have known of these planets in his time.  They make a landing on Thog.  There they find terrifying cyclopean ruins straight out of "At the Mountains of Madness".  To their dismay, they also find shoggoths...

This is a pretty friggin' weird story, written in a cinematic style that abruptly cuts from scenes of the main tale to scenes from the history of earth in future centuries to the moment of Lovecraft's demise and its place in history.  The endless descriptions of the cyborg crew get tiresome and silly, end even moreso their sexual antics, which seem like 70's era attempts at shock now.  That being said the exploration of Thog, which accounts for the final couple pages, are pretty damn evocative but I wish the two dozen that preceded it had been as interesting.  

"The Return of the Lloigor"

 by Colin Wilson 

originally published Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham House, 1969

Out story starts out in a very typical Cthulhuoid fashion.  Our narrator starts to tell us about the events he's going to relate.  But wait!  There's a big difference!! This narrator actually has a name!!!  

He is Paul Lang, a University of Virginia Literature Prof and Poe scholar.  And he's 72 years old, just so's ya know, and he doesn't give a shoggoth's ass what he's colleagues think about him now, so here goes his tale...

After meeting a colleague in Moscow, Lang becomes interested in The Voynich Manuscript, a medieval text attributed to Roger Bacon, which is either a treatise on magic, or impossibly advanced science for the 13th century (in which it was supposedly wrought), or both - since it's all written in code or cipher.

Lang gets his hands on the book - it gives off an unpleasant aura of "nastiness" that only Lang seems to experience.  He has photostats made, then high definition photos which allow him to translate the book - which is not in cipher but simply Arabic characters which had faded over time - so it's written in both Greek and Latin using Arabic script!

After a lot of work and probably downing many Excedrin, Lang is able to translate the book, which is indeed a complete scientific account of the universe, its origin, history, geography…mathematical structure and hidden depths.  He also learns that the book has a name:  Necronomicon.

It ain't too long before Paul finds out about the fiction of Mssr. H.P. Lovecraft, and starts binge-reading.  He also catches references from Arthur Machen's work in HPL that tie in with reference in the Necronomicon.  He makes a trip out to Machen country (that's Wales, kiddies), which turn out to be one dreary place.  A few well-placed questions guide him to one Col. Urquart, who has no chin but knows a lot about Welsh legends and the mythic lost continent of Mu.  Among the things he knows is that Wales and Providence, RI are the best places to pick up Muvian artifacts (Ebay having not been invented yet). Urquart shows him a relic or two and talks to him of Ghatanothoa, chief god of Mu, and its rulers, an alien race called the Lloigor, who held the Muvians as slaves.  The Lloigor, though driven underground and deep into the ocaen by the earth's subatomic processes - all tied in with the concept of optism vs pessimism - i.e. man's eternal striving for hope vs the Lloigor's inability to even understand such a concept.  The Lloigor also have a hard-on against humans, and occasionally have struck back - c.f. the sinkings of Mu and Atlantis.

Urquart further points to the high rate of violent crime, insanity, and human perversion around this part of Wales, as proof of Lloigor infestation. A little research demonstrartes that Lang is probably onto something.  Lang also finds himself nearly sucked into some kind of robbery scam by a lecherous hotel maid and an unsettling encounter with a local inbred youth. Urquart takes a bad fall in his cellar, and blames it on the Lloigor.  He also warns Lang about Chickno, a local gypsy and head of a clan of inbred turds suspected of any number of icky crimes.

Lang soons spots Chickno in town and decides to take the bull by the horns - by taking him to a pub and getting him drunk.  Chickno warns him that "they" are only really interested in Urquart, and tells him he should get his ass back to America.  Chickno keeps blabbing about how powerful "they" are until he drinks himself into a stupor.  

The next day a mysterious explosion blows up Chickno and his whole gypsy camp.  Afterwards, the entire nearby village, and Lang and Urq, feel worn-out and under-the-weather.  They surmise that (a) the Lloigor killed Chickno for talking too much and (b) the Lloigor draw their energy, vampire-like, from handy nearby humans.

Urq and Lang head to London.  Further research suggests the Lloigor are active worldwide, and causing natural disasters and mass outbreaks of unnatural behavior.  They try to alert the scientific community, but are jeered at. They try to bring their message to the US, and catch the attention of the Secretary of Defense, but their flight to Washington disappears without a trace.

A final note in the story is an epilogue written by Lang's nephew, who outlines his conviction that Urquart was a charlatan and a phony who either conned Lang, or that the two of them were working together on an elaborate hoax.

A wild ride that recalls Wilson's fascinating books on the occult.  Structurally, its very similar to The Philiosopher's Stone in that not so much action actually takes place.  The narrator learns things ... and then learns more things.  Until a disturbing picture emerges...

For such an intellectual sort of tale, Lloigor is gripping all the way and the various references - am ix of fact, fiction, and fictionalized fact - are enough to send a curious soul off on a research binge of his own.  

Not only is it gripping, its also scary.  The last portion is an exercise in paranoia. The Lloigor, who, lets face it, are never established as other than a theoretical opponent, are definitely dangerous.  You're not supposed to even know about them.  And even their alleged allies are subject to elimination if they reveal much of anything.  Unnerving stuff.  

The legend goes that Wilson came to write this story after Aug Derleth challenged him to write an effective Lovecraftian tale (following some less-than-flattering remarks Wilson had made re: HPL's literary talents).  I'd say ol' Colin rose to the challenge.

"The Voice of the Beach"

 by Ramsey Campbell 

originally published Fantasy Tales #10, Summer 1982

Our Unnamed Narrator (Arrrrgghhh!! Another one!!!) is an author who lives alone, without a phone, in a bungalow along some English beach.  In summer, he invites a friend, Neal, to come for an extended stay.  It seems Neal has recently gotten divorced and had some kind of unspecified breakdown.  UN seems to suffer from migraines or some such as well.

The beach isn't actually all that pleasant and no one seems to go there, but Neal and UN poke around.  They find some odd little shells that should be too small to produce "seashell resonance" (yes there's actually an official name for that phenomena.  Please note before you go thinking "Wow! This Aycorn guy is really smart!" that I had to look that one up) - but as it happens they do.  Or something like it.  By the time they get back UN is feeling like crapola, but Neal wants to explore the beach further.  He's also got wind from some place about an abandoned village nearby that he'd like to check out.  They decide to do so tomorrow.  UN notices, disconcertingly, that beach seems glow, flickeringly, at night.  And that this flickering glow produces the effect of odd figures moving or dancing jerkily in the light.

They find the ruins of the village - now nothing more than big chunks of slate that form a kind of maze-like structure rising out of the sand.  In what might have been a cellar or basement, Neal finds an aged, fungus-y notebook.  The incoherent writings within make reference to the beach, the flickering lights, dancing, moving sands, the beach making you go places or sucking you in, etc.  UN dismisses it as mad ravings but Neal is fascinated and keeps studying it.  He spends more and more time exploring the beach and environs while UN spends more and more time suffering from sunstroke or heat exhaustion or just in general being unfortunate enough to be the main protagonist in a Campbell story - which anyone who's read enough Campbell knows is not really a good thing to be.

Somewhere, Neal learns that the abandoned town was called Strand, and that they seemed to be fleeing the beach for reasons they wouldn't discuss.  He claims to hear chanting in the sounds from the shells.  Neal gets weirder and more hostile and spends less and less time at the bungalow.  He talks about "patterns" ("when the pattern's ready it can come back") and the beach being some kind or alternate reality that was temporarily displaced by our reality, but is now reasserting itself and taking over.

The weirdness continues and UN can barely function.  Neal is supposed to call a doctor but doesn't (or does one come?).  UN sees what looks like him dancing on the flickering beach at night, buried up to his knees in sand.

Neal completely loses it and deafening, alien sounds come out of his mouth that sound like the odd sounds from the shells, only at massive volumes, then runs off into the night.  UN finally manages to follow him out, and finds himself walking among debris and pieces of Neal's clothes.  He realizes that the beach seems to be moving under him, the sand forming shapes (the debris are apparently not real but just shapes formed from sand - maybe), the weird sounds start up again.  He flees back to the bungalow. 

Inexplicably, he cannot bring himself to leave.  He dreams (or are they dreams) of Neal's face coming out of the wall, making the weird sounds again.  He starts to take long walks on the beach.  One day he sees the sands form themselves into what looks like Neal's face.  He too begins to contemplate "the pattern".  He realizes that the beach, or the entity he thinks of as the beach, is expanding.  One day it will encompass the world.

This is a difficult story to assess in my usual sarcastic terms. Campbell's intention was to tell a Lovecraftian tale without the usual name-dropping.  And he certainly has achieved that here.  The notebook and the abandoned village and its sketchy and unnerving history all echo Lovecraft tropes, and certainly this is as "cosmic" as "cosmic horror" gets.  One could also note that the beach entity has a certain resemblance to critters like Abhoth and Ubbo-Sathla.  

Campbell also cites it as the most successful of his Lovecraftian stories (c. 1982 anyway).  And I guess that depends on what you consider success to be in this case.

The story is difficult because Campbell is difficult.  Originally a devotee of HPL, he soon fell under the spell of other writers, especially Robert Aickman, a fine and celebrated writer of "strange stories", many of which could be rightly considered horror (but none of them even remotely Lovecraft-influenced).  From Aickman Campbell learned implication and runaway surrealism.  In Aickman's stories, bizarre events occur without explanation, and often the point of the story must be read between the lines.  The best of them are remarkable; the worst merely weird and obtuse.

Campbell can have the same joy and the same problem.  His characters, as Stephen King has noted, seem to walk around in a perpetual hallucinogenic trip, and everything is observed with weird and unpleasant metaphors - which may not be just metaphors.  Towards the end of "Beach" UN sees a discarded baby buggy ( or "pram", to our English cousins) with a pile of sand on its roof.  He sees the pile of sand open a sort of mouth shape at him.  He thinks this is an illusion.  But then again in the same scene he describes the debris turning out to be nothing but phony shapes made by the sand.  So what was hallucination and what was real?  

Moments like that make skimming a story like this impractical.  You need to read it.  And you need to read between the lines.  And sometimes the answers still won't be there.  At its best this can be entertaining - at is worst, infuriating.  The most chilling moment in a Campbell story is in a tale he now semi-repudiates called "Trick Or Treat".  A girl is haunted by a nightmare she had as a child of a grotesque, monkey-like face peering in her bedroom window at her.  Years later, she and another girl find themselves in a pit of horrors while searching for her friend's lost dog.  The monkey-like figure appears, and the girl's friend screams because she also recognizes it ("Oh no! The Monkey!").  Nothing more is said but the meaning is clear to us and the girl - the face at her window was not a dream.

Unfortunately, in Campbell's lesser stories and, too often, his novels, the neurotic protagonists continual bizarre interior monologues, the what-was-it, was-it-real and what-the-fuck-is-going-on tend to get tiresome.

There is one paragraph towards the end of the story, that for me articulates the nature of Lovecraft's greater stories very simply:

I was fleeing the knowledge, deep-rooted and undeniable, that what I perceived blotting out the sky was nothing but an acceptable metaphor.  Appalling though the presence was, it was only my mind's version of what was there - a way of letting me glimpse it without going mad at once.

Which is what HPL was saying as far back as "The Call of Cthulhu" after all. 

So in that sense, I suppose it is very successful as a Lovecraftian story.

On the other hand, I've read "Beach" twice sine the mid-80's and couldn't remember much about it.  Just a couple guys living on the beach and one goes nutso (which is essentially correct).  There are other Campbell stories that have stuck with me more and which I enjoy reading more, even if they are less "successful."  Something of a compromise score here, but:

"Herbert West: Reanimator"

 by H.P. Lovecraft   

originally published Home Brew, February-July, 1922  

Our Unnamed Narrator recounts his days at med school (Miskatonic U, of course), where he hooked up with his idol, one Herbert West, a froot loop extraordinaire who's big scientific goal was reanimate dead bodies.  Just cuz.  

The two have a lot of wholesome boys adventures, including stealing supplies from the U, grave robbing, stealing corpses from morgues, experimenting on said corpses (with varying levels of success), creating screaming zombies, burning down their secret lab, turning  the dean of the medical school (who has forbidden West access to cadavers since his experiments and theories are, after all, nuttier than a Planter's factory) - into a crazed, flesh-eating zombie serial killer (during a typhoid outbreak, no less!) (PS - despite the above West gets his medical license), helping cover up the accidental death of a boxer, reviving said boxer (who also becomes a flesh-eating zombie serial killer!), murdering a travelling salesman (yep, he gets experimented on, too), serving in WWI as a medic (not for patriotic or humanitarian reasons - just cuz it gives him more free bods to experiment on) re-animating body parts independent of their original owner (not least of which the head of an army major), and probably some other fun things I'm missing.

Eventually all of this catches up with West when a bunch of his old experiments show up one night, tear up his house and disembowel him.  Nontheless there's no evidence of same, and the police ain't buying UN's story...

Christ ... y'know a lot of people cite this p.o.s. as a fave but I can't see it.  True, it does have a hilarious "storyline" and the ludicrous gruesomeness of the whole thing is entertaining in its hysteria and cheerful buckets o' blood insanity.  Unfortunately, its barely even a story at all - more like a series of vignettes regarding the career of one very mad mad scientist.  I might add that the segment with the boxer ("Six Shots by Moonlight") contains some of the most disgusting racist crap HPL ever spun - far worse than the usually cited offender, "Horror At Red Hook" in this reader's unhumble opinion.  I can usually handle Lovecraft's gruesome racial views, however distasteful, but this one goes too far.  Stick with the Stuart Gordon movie.

"The Strange High House in the Mist"

 by H.P. Lovecraft  

originally published Weird Tales, October 1931

Thomas Olney is a "philosopher", which I guess is Lovecraft-ese for "consultant", or "unemployed unrecognized genius", who lives in creepy ol' Kingsport with his wife and kids.  

High on a cliff overlooking the town and the ocean is a strange house which the locals fear and whisper odd things about.  It's been there for generations.  Olney decides to investigate, and climbs the mountain to poke around.  

The house is small, almost medieval in construction, and does actually have an occupant.  It is also impossibly placed on the cliff edge.

The resident is a strange character, a young man with ancient eyes, who speaks of strange and ancient places and things - Atlantis, Poseidonis, gods older than "The Elder Ones".  Things get weird as Olney sees shadowed shapes around the windows.  There's a knock on the door.  Who shows up but the gods Neptune and Nodens, ancient sea deities.  Nodens takes Olney up on his shell-chariot and off they go.  They fly over Kingsport during a storm.

Olney comes back but seems more prosaic after his encounters.  He has lost interest in the mysteries of life and the universe, but seems content.

An odd little story, very Dunsany-influenced, but HPL's writing style is borderline obtuse here, and I'm not sure if he knew where he wanted to go with this one himself.  Atmospheric though.