"Worms of the Earth"

 

by Robert E. Howard

originally published Weird Tales November 1932

Bran Mak Morn, king of the Picts, currently in disguise as a mere diplomat, watches as Roman governor Titus Sulla, has a fellow Pict crucified for killing a merchant (well...), and man is he pissed.  He wants revenge, and he wants Sulla's ass.

Catch is, Sulla lives in a heavily fortified tower and would never come down and just duel with a barbarian king.  Bran has a particularly nasty plan - to get the Worms of the Earth - the subhuman and monstrous remnants of a once-human race his ancestors drove into subterranea. 

Despite dire warnings from his advisors and ominous dreams, he presses on, finding his way to a hermit witch-woman, shunned by others because of her own half-human heritage, tells him how to retrieve an artifact of great value to the Worms, which he can use as a bargaining chip.

At great risk, Bran follows her instructions, crawling through a barrow to a weird altar-lie setup, where he steals a black stone covered in runes, which he hides at the bottom of a nearby lake.  

The Worms are summoned, and agree to pull Sulla down out of his tower and bring him, intact, to Bran for a duel to the death.   

Bran returns to the lake, narrowly avoids a monster there, and retrieves.  But second thoughts nag him.  He rides out the tower, and finds it in ruins.  The Worms have pulled the entire structure down, and taken Sulla to the rendevous point.  Bran rides out there, and finds that Sulla's experience of being abducted and dragged through the Worms underground tunnels has left him permanently insane.  Bran kills him out of mercy, curses the Worms and witch-woman, and rides away, as the witch-woman laughs and laughs...

Man oh man, what a ride.

I remember first reading this in English class, having some time to kill after finishing a final (happened to me a lot).  From the dark, brutal crucifixion that opens the story, to its dark and fatalistic conclusion, I was friggin' hooked.

This is powerful shit.  Quite possibly Howard's greatest story (though there are other contenders).  I'm always impressed upon re-reading how potent it is, from start to finish.  Howard fully pulls you into this dark world, making you feel every bit of pain, darkness, and fear invoked herein.  Top of the line, baby!

"Dig Me No Grave"

 by Robert E. Howard 

originally published Weird Tales, February 1937

It's a dark and stormy night - and Kirowan is being woken up by his buddy Conrad, who needs him to come to the house of a mutual acquaintance, John Grimlan.  Exactly why Conrad needs Kirowan for this (emotional support? Heavy lifting?) Exactly why Kirowan doesn't do what I would do and say "wha-fuck ... call me in the morning..." and go back to bed is a little fuzzy but maybe things were different in the 30's.  

Things get even fuzzier since via their conversation Grimlan was a major creep and apparently had been really old for a hundred years or something.  In any case he had earlier given Conrad a sealed envelope with instructions as to what to do after he died (immediately after I guess).  But this very night he had begged Conrad to burn the envelope and dismember his body(!!!!), neither of which Conrad did, instead letting Grimlan suffer through his last moments writhing in agony.  I mean, what kind of true friend would decline to dismember your body after you die?  Yeesh, how our morality has fallen.  

(Or perhaps Kirowan was just pissed, since only a few nights before Grimlan had gone off on a condescending tirade about how he didn't know shit about the occult or anything else, didn't know of the winds that blew from Yuggoth or the actual title of the first 1977 Star Wars film)

Down at Gimlan's place, there's no electricity, but Kirowan left Gimlan's bod laid out on a table in the library with seven black candles burning (but he still didn't dismember him!).  But he left him wearing bedroom slippers, though uncovered.  Now he's covered with an ornate robe, the slippers are gone, and the candles are lit.  And a mysterious "Oriental" is lurking in the corner.  He confesses to lighting the candles, covering Grimlan's body, and taking the slippers (the bastard!)

The envelope is opened and Kirowan reads the text, which includes a pledge of Grimlan's soul to Malik Tous, an evil Asian deity.  As Kirowan reads, the candles go out, one by one.   As he finishes, the last candles snuffs, and the house is plunged into darkness.  They hear a terrible scream.  Conrad manage to find and light another candle.  Grimlan's bod and the mysterious visitor are gone.  The men smell smoke, and realizing the house is on fire, flee.  After escaping the house, they look back, and see the place engulfed in flames, a dark, winged figure rising from the smoke, clutching what appears to be a man's body in its talons...

I actually first encountered this one in a fairly faithful adaptation in a Marvel comic, and it stayed with me.  It's not a great story but it is a very good one.  Mainly because its full of dark, spooky, claustrophobic atmosphere.  It just works.  Howard's strength as a writer was to make you feel it, and he does here - you're in that room, the candles burning, the sinister incantation being read.

Amazingly, given I've read this a bunch of times since the 80's, and the comics version many more (and since the 70's), and I just now figured out that the "mysterious Oriental" was actually Malik Tous!  DUH!!

"At the Mountains of Madness" (screenplay)

 

by Gullermo del Tor and Matthew Robbins

unpublished and unproduced

Tasmania, 1939.  A derelict whaler named Arkham floats into a harbor and is boarded by mystified sea patrol and fishermen.  They find the ship in bad shape, evidence of it having been commissioned for an Antarctic expedition by Miskatonic U nine years earlier, some bizarrely mutilated dogs and men, and a madman barricaded in a cabin.  When he kills a sailor with an axe, he gets shot.

Meanwhile, the British are getting set for another Antarctic expedition, headed by Alan Starkweather, backbone of the Empire and all that.  He's informed that the Arkham has turned up.  With one survivor - the madman.  Starkweather is able to talk to him a bit, and he freaks when he hears they're heading for Antarctica.  He also has a hallucination in which his head blows open and becomes a mass of waving tentacles.  He tells them they must kill him if he "begins to change".  And reveals that he is Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic U.

Thus begins a flashback in which Dyer recalls being handpicked for the 1930 Arctic expedition, leaving Massachusetts with much fanfare, and leaving behind his wife, who is preggers.  

Dyer is about to make a last minute bow-out when Lake, head of the expedition, shows him something - a recently found fossil of an impossible creature found in the Antarctic.  Dyer is on board!

The expedition sails on, and with exposition and character development.  In what may be a mirage, they seem to see signs of a vast city in the fog-enshrouded mountains of the arctic regions.  Lake learns that Dyer's lover has died in childbirth, along with their child, but he keeps the news under wraps.  Another expedition member, Atwood, becomes more and more openly devout, leading prayer meetings.  Dyers becomes best buddies with a fellow named Danforth.  And a big grumpy dude named Larsen takes care of the sled dogs.

The two ships pass into cloud banks and everyone is knocked out. Dyer dreams the fossil is coming to life and sending out signals.  Apparently some time is lost (even the crew is confused by this, but several days at least have gone by when they come to), and the ship runs aground at the titular mountains.  Everyone stands around in awe at these cyclopean peaks, and structures clearly not built by human hands.  Magnetic fields prevent contact with the second ship, time seems to be moving faster than normal, and other weird phenomena take place, including an encounter with man-sized albino penguins, and the finding of weird stone obelisks under the water.  These turn out to be coffins containing the same kind of weird-ass monster as the fossil.  

As they dissect some of the thingies, Larsen and crewman Gunnarson attempt to hunt giant penguins and are attacked by a shoggoth, which has disguised itself as a wounded dog, ala John Carpenter's version of The Thing. It seems the shoggoths attack by fusing victims into their mutable bods.  

On the ship, expedition member Danforth digs out a copy of the Necronomicon he just happens to have brought along, and reads passages from it to illustrate his point that the things from the coffins are an alien race described in the ancient book.  Fellow expedition members mock him.  Conflict erupts among the expedition members, especially when Dyer finds out about his wife and child's demise.  

The scientists manage to crash a plane into the ruins of an ancient, alien city, while Gunnarson, now actually a shoggoth, joins the remaining crew back at the ship.  Larsen escaped the earlier shoggoth attack but is MIA.  The city is explored and revelations about the inhabitants are revealed.   Back on the ship, the shoggoth-impostor wreaks havoc.

An attempt is made to dissect the alien bodies, which goes awry when they turn out to be very much alive and proceed to vivisect one of the scientists.  A confrontation between shoggoths and their former masters ensues aboard the ship.  Dyer and Larsen escape and run around the ice caves arguing.  They eventually make it back to the Arkham, where they're attacked by an army of shoggoths in Gunnarson-form.

Atwood is confronted by a shoggoth in the form of expedition leader Dr. Lake.  The shoggoth-as-lake humiliates Atwood and mocks his religious beliefs.  Larsen dynamites the boat free, but in the process awaken the shoggoths object of worship - Cthulhu hisself!  They escape, Danforth dies, and Dyer ends up a madman, and we're back in the present.  Starkweather doesn't believe his story.  Dyer kills himself, and Starkweather sails for Antarctica.

Holy fuck!  Is that a wild ride or what?

A script is not a film, but can be judged by the merit of its readability and the ease with which one can picture it as a movie, and this one is very readable and easy to picture as a movie.  But I admit the movie I picture from it is a mixed bag.  There's a lot of things I like here:  it captures I think almost all the important, and even less important, details and ideas from Lovecraft's story - and in that sense does him justice.  It would make an exciting and scary film.

But, too often I see routine, trite modern horror movie stuff - crazy guys with axes, lots of blood and gore, and endless riffs on Carpenter's remake of The Thing. Which I happen to like - but the Howard Hawks original is superior.  

I think the most obvious one is the scene of the Elder Things coming to and dissecting a scientist.  Here its explicitly shown, and though, as written, it sounds scary and effective, it also weakens the whole concept.  In the story, Dyer and Danforth only find evidence after the fact - men and dogs killed, the Elder Thing bodies missing, and a man and a dog apparently dissected.  They try to write it off initially as being the work of a crewman gone nuts, be we the reader know damn well what really must have happened.  And its far scarier that way than flat-out showing it happen.

Nonetheless, Del Toro was (is) trying to launch a commercial movie (Tom Cruise was supposed to play Dyer in this production), and gore and shock sell more than subtlety and creeps.

Well, you can't review a film based solely on a screenplay, but I will say this is a very readable and enjoyable screenplay that is easy to visualize as a film, so that's good.  It does a good job of hitting the checkboxes, including all the major (and many minor) scenes, elements, and ideas that HPL included in his story, while still creating something that would be marketable as a big-budget movie in today's market.  I have to give credit for both sides of that, even though I have to confess those things that would make it marketable as a current horror film are the very things I dislike the most.

"At the Mountains of Madness"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Astounding Stories, February and March, 1936

Dr. William Dyer, a geologist at Miskatonc U, has something he wants the world to know.

It seems there's a highly-publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica about to launch.  And Dyer has a dire (sorry, had to) warning for them.  You see, he was a member of a smaller Antarctic expedition a few years back, and there's some things he and his fellow survivors (hint hint - not all of his team made it back) have kept under wraps.  But now, for the sake of protecting other hapless explorers from getting in the same jam he and his got into, the whole truth and nothing but the truth shall be known!

Out there in the frozen lands, they found a previously unknown range of mountains that put the Himalayas to shame.  And some pretty amazing fossils.  And then, one member named Lake and a small team found fourteen frozen bodies (described in intense detail) that L. Sprague DeCamp flippantly described as extraterrestrial sea cucumbers.  Well whatever they are they're weird as hell and pretty gross-sounding.

What's more they found `em in layers of rock so friggin' old that such life forms couldn't possibly have existed that far back!  Well, except apparently they could, cuz ... but anyway this is an exciting find!  Nevertheless these things are weird as hell and the sled dogs hate their frozen bods so much they have to be restrained at considerable distance from them.

However, Lake and team lost contact, and Dyer takes the rest to find out what happened.  When they get there, the camp has been devastated.  Everyone's been slaughtered except one man (Gedney) and one dog.  And most of the monster bods are gone.  And someone dissected a man, and a dog, in one of the tents.  I mean dissected - not just hacked up.  Dyer decides the missing man must have gone nuts and killed and mutilated all the others.  Hid buddy Danforth ain't so sure.

Dyer and Danforth go on to discover the ruins of a huge, ancient, and decidedly non-human civilization, one which resembles things mentioned in The Necronomicon.   The beings who built this civ - i.e. the sea cucumber things - were assisted and served by a race of gloop monsters called shoggoths which they bred for service.  Apparently all earthly life also evolved from shoggoth ingredients, thus making the sea cucumbers the creators of mankind (and everything else).  They also learn of great wars betwee the sea cucumbers, the Mi-Go, and the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu.  And of a revolt by the shoggoths, and the decline and degradation of sea cucumber civilization.  It also appears there was something in the enormous mountain ranged beyond the city that the cucumbers were afraid of.  

Eventually they realize (or admit) that the cucumbers thought to be dead had actually been alive, revived, and killed and dissected the men and dogs.  They find the bodies of the now-slaughtered revived cucumbers, and also some giant, blind albino penguins - which don't seem to be responsible for the cucumber-cide.  They encounter a living black bubbling blob - a shoggoth.  They escape and manage to fly their plane out, but Danforth looks back and sees something beyond the mountains  - the thing the cucumbers feared, and goes mad, screaming in imitation of the sounds made by the shoggoths...

I remember the first time I read "Mountains".  It was a bitterly cold and gray day in January.  I cut school and stayed home, wrapped up in blankets with the lights on, as the sun never came out that day, not once - it was like perpetual twilight.   And I intended to start reading "Mountains", but I got sucked in, and 3-4 hours later I was wrapping the sucker up, my little teenaged brain blown.  

Lin Carter has called the story plodding and slow.  It is slow, though I never find it plodding. The interesting thing is it now reads to me like an archaic National Geographic article.  And that is, I think, entirely the intention.  Lovecraft, in the voice of Dyer, keeps listening times and temps and latitudes and longitudes (supposedly all of HPL's Antarctic data was accurate, at least as known in the early 30's). All of this, as in "The Shadow Out Of Time", where he does much the same thing, is intended to give an air of verisimilitude to the tale.  This is supposed to be a true story.  Outlandish, wild, and a dire warning.  Dyer wants to be believed, and he's offering up details to bolster his plausibility.

I dunno, I might find it plodding too if I came to it blind.  But since I've read it a couple times before, this re-read was thoroughly enjoyable, like re-watching a favorite old movie even though one could practically quote all the dialog.  

As it was I really enjoyed this one.  I've been putting off re-reading "Mountains" for several years because I thought I would find it slow going, but I was completely into it and enjoyed every minute of it this time around.

"Strange Eons"

 by Robert Bloch 

originally published Whispers Press, 1978

Albert Keith is having such a weird time.  He finds a dust-covered painting in a cheapjack antiques/junk shop near his SoCal home.  Said painting, even under the dust and grime, is a striking depiction of a canine, clawed horror in the process of eating a dude's head off.  Albert buys it, takes it home, and cleans it up.  When his slightly overbearing pal Waverley sees it, he has an interesting observation: why, it looks exactly like the painting H.P. Lovecraft describes at the end of his story, "Pickman's Model"!  That's not all - there's a signature on the painting - "R. Upton" ... just like the aforementioned tale's subject, Richard Upton Pickman. 

Albert, however, has never even heard of Lovecraft.  Which is a little funky for a dude who collects creepy native art and shrunken heads!  

Waverley gets very curious about the painting, where the junk dealer got it, and what else he might have from that find.  They arrange a rendevous, but when they arrive, they find the junk shop closed.  But the back door is unlocked.  Someone has ransacked the guy's stockroom, and left him dead, his face almost completely gouged away.  Deciding they don't want to talk to the coppers, Waverley and Albert head back to Waverley's place, where Waverley makes the point that the antiques dealer's demise resembles that of a character in Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear".  Hmmm.  What is going on here?  Back at Albert's pad, he finds his house has been broken into and, despite their being many valuables, the only thing taken is the painting.  Something more.  Waverley found a scrap of paper in the shop.  An old yellowed note to someone named "Upton".  Written in Lovecraft's handwriting and bearing his Providence address.

Waverely has learned there was indeed an artist named Richard Upton in Boston in the 20's.  arranges to visit a rare book dealer he knows of in Boston, named Beckman,  and check out the Boston-based warehouse source of the lot that included the painting.  Albert checks into a hotel, and Waverley gives him a stash of books by and about Lovecraft.  Albert digs into them.  That night he dreams about a phone call in which a voice on the other end tells him: "You fool - Beckman is dead."  Only it turns out this is no dream.

He manages to get Waverley on the phone to warn him.  Waverley sounds odd and congested and says he's broken his ankle.  He's on his way back to L.A., and wants Albert to meet him.  He's also sent him an envelope.  Albert's to bring it but not to open it.

Albert turns up and is let in by the hired nurse Waverley mentioned on the phone.  Waverley is bundled up in his study with a cast on his leg, dark glasses, hat, scarf over his face.  He opens the envelope and shows it is a hand-drawn map of some kind, executed by Lovecraft himself.  He explains that he's gotten to the bottom of the thing.  It's all a hoax.  Not unlike the letter Lovecraft once sent to author Robert Bloch, authorizing him to kill HPL in a story, signed by Abdul Alhazred, et al.  Albert isn't buying that - two guys are dead after all!  Seeming to have no other options, Waverley calls for the nurse who enters, holding a gun - and orders him to take the map back from Albert.  At that moment there's a fortuitous earthquake which levels the house - Albert comes to in the rubble, and finds the nurse out of action - for good - and one other thing - Waverley's gone but his hands and face are still sitting in his chair!  Albert hightails it back home through the disaster-ridden city, takes some pain-killers and a drink and contemplates what has happened.  There's obviously some crazy cult afoot!  

As Albert ponders all this, and realizes his own resemblance to one of HPL's typical characters - solitary, scholarly, plenty of time on his hands, heavily interested in spooky weird shit ... 

As he's pondering, he hears on television of a massive undersea quake in the South Pacific, near Tahiti et al.  Oh, and they give the L&L ... which rings a bell.  Looking at the map he got from "Waverley", he notes that its the exact location Lovecraft had marked on the map with an "X" and the word "R'lyeh".

So what does Albert do?

Well, the same thing anyone else would do, right?  Hightails it straight off for Tahiti!

Thanks to the quake, there's only one other passenger on the plane, Major Robert Abbott, late of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers (who sounds like he belongs in a Monty Python sketch - "dear sirs - I object to the content of that last sketch - why very few members of the British Army are miscegnated fish-people!  etc").  Anyway, after a few drinks Albert and Abbott are whooping it up like old buddies and the next thing you know, Albert's talking waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much.  He even asks Abbott is he's read Lovecraft (he hasn't - "is he a friend of yours?") and even gives him a copy of a Lovecraft collection - The Outsider no less!  Which would've fetched at least several hundred clams back in 1978, so that's a pretty nice loan!  Then tells him to get hold of him at his hotel tomorrow once he's read some of it (specifically, "The Call of Cthulhu") ("how do you pronounce that?" declaims Abbott).

The next day Abbott shows up, now dressed in Bermuda shorts, and, rather than asking Albert what kind of a nutcase is he and why's he having him read this loopy pulp sci-fi when he could have been curling up with the latest Destroyer novel - actually completely understands the implications of why Albert's come there (good on him cuz I wasn't entirely sure) and wants to help.  Oh yeah, and he can totally help - getting a boat, depth charges - everything he needs.  Won't be easy but he knows the country, the culture, and has them military connections - just leave it all to him.

Albert, who ain't too-itghtbray, says hooray and goes along with everything.  So the next thing you know they're on a Japanese "fishing" boat with a creepy little crew and a silent, taciturn captain, heading out to X marks the spot.  

And sure enough, there it is, sticking out of the ocean.   The black isle itself, all black rock, weird angles, creepy structures, bad fish smell.  Everyone gets out and heads up to the door, Albert intending to drop some boom-booms in for ol' tentacle face.  But as they get there, Abbott lets slip that he doesn't have the bombs.  Didn't bring them, in fact.  And no it wasn't just a mistake.  Its only then that Albert notices the crewmen are kind of ... fish-looking.  Too late for old Albert - he ends up a Cthooby Snack.

Back in L.A., Albert's ex-wife Kay, a model, gets the news that Albert fell off a Japanese fishing boat in the middle of the ocean while drunk, and drowned.  All of this sounds a bit odd to Kay, being as Albert didn't fish and didn't drink much, but the I.D. is without doubt and sworn to by witnesses (a certain retired British army major and a certain sketchy crew of a certain sketchy Japanese fishing boat), and anyway she inherits his house and his money (did I mention he was independently wealthy?).  Kay makes her way over to Albert's old pad, trying not to dwell too much on his weird fate, which brings up suppressed memories of her seeing a drowned bod dragged up out of the ocean when she was a tot.  While poking around Albert's house and starting to spook herself out, she gets an even bigger spook when someone turns out to be in the house!  Someone being Ben Powers, from Albert's bank, there allegedly doing an inventory for probate purposes.  After some awkward and wary conversation, Kay succumbs to Powers less-than-clear charms (I'd have kicked the sucker out!) and agrees to have dinner with him.  Over dinner he asks if she's ever read H.P. Lovecraft (she's never head of him).  Then drops the subject.

Later that night, Kay talks to the bank rep, Danton Heisinger, who tells her she couldn't have met Ben Powers.  Powers died of a heart attack two days prior. 

Heisinger gets with the police and asks questions, also filling Kay in a bit on Lovecraft and asking what possible connection he might have to Albert.  

Meanwhile, Kay's agent, Max Colbin, dispatches her to a photo shoot at the Starry Wisdom Temple.  She meets with Rev. Nye of the temple, a suave, very dark-skinned Caribbean(?) man who asks that she attend an introductory meeting, if only to understand more of the Temple's beliefs.  She notices a copy of Lovecraft's The Outsider in Nye's office.

Kay attends with her photographer Al Bedard in tow, and finds herself in a lecture which make the Lovecraft Mythos sound like the latest in New Age enlightenment. Prophesying apocalypse and the coming of a new age, Nye produces what appears to be the Shining Trapezohedron (c.f. "The Haunter of the Dark") and Kay finds herself in a semi-hallucinatory state, and sees handicapped people suddenly being healed.  

Next thing you know, Al is waking her up and taking her to the car, complaining about a phony faith-healing and light show.  On their way out, Kay spots the fellow who was posing as Ben Powers in the crowd.

Kay knocks herself out with some sleeping pills and wakes up late.  She decides to call Heisinger, and her agent and tell him she's not doing the photoshoot at the temple. But the line's dead.  Then there's a knock on the door.  It's the phone repair guy - seems the landlady already reported the problem.  Can he come in?

Oops!  When Kay opens the door, it's the Phony Ben Powers.  Who shoves his way in, reaches into his canvas tool bag and pulls out .... a Lovecraft book!  

Which he demands she read.  Now! He briefly explains that he had nothing to do with the real Powers death, but he is the one who cut her phone line.  And his real name's Mike Miller. And he's "not officially" a government agent.  And he'll explain more after she's read the book (which, incidentally, is The Outsider and Others - the first Arkham House book.  Damn!  Copies of that must have been easy to come by back in `78!  Last time I looked it was going for $5,000.  There were shit-tons of Lovecraft paperbacks floating around in the 70's.  How come none of these guys went for those??) - at which time he'll also restore her phone line.  He leaves.  But when she does the obvious thing and tries to flee the apartment, she finds there's a guy with a gun waiting right outside, telling her to get back in and start reading.

So, she sits down and reads a bunch of it.  Most of it, she says later.  Anyway, after several hours Mike shows back up, repairs her phone line, talks to her about the book, explains that Rev. Nye and the Temple are a nutty cult inspired by Lovecraft's fiction, gives one of Bloch's patented lectures on psychology (these are found in nearly every Bloch story, post WWII, and as far as I can tell, all of his novels.  See Psycho for example.  In any case while Bloch clearly had a strong interest in the subject, its clear that by `78 his thinking and knowledge was still firmly stuck in the 1950's), and enlists her aid in helping bust Nye.  They want her to go through with the photo shoot, hoping it will lead them to Nye's HQ.  They'll sub out Al with their own agent, Fred.

So Kay accepts the summons to a place off the Pacific Coast Highway, north of Malibu.  A private museum.  Set high, high on a cliff above a fog-shrouded bay, making Kay think of "The Strange High House in the Mist".  She and Fred are welcomed in the museum by a scruffy young guy (allowing for another Bloch trope - the patented rant against beatniks, hippies, and basically anyone young who subscribed to any sartorial, fashion or popular entertainment not approved of by Bloch, i.e. anything post WWII - see pretty much any story or novel written by him from 1945 on and you'll likely find a rant - jazz, rock, beatniks, hippies - Bloch disdained it all) and led to chamber full of huge statues of the Egyptian gods, and Rev. Nye in full regalia.  So Kay does her posing.  As they pack up to leave, the scruffy guy steps in and shoots Fred (just like the typical rock music fan he is - per Bloch!).  Kay is interrogated by Nye, who basically tells her the Temple is a sham, but the whole Great Old Ones thing is real.  And he has some need of her.  He intends to save her life, so he says.

Nye steps out, Kay clobbers the scruffy guy (who's a wimp and a dumbass on top of being a drug addict and a rock music fan - just like all rock music fans - per Bloch) and manages to escape via a trap door which leads her way, way, way down into a man-made underground cave - where she's attacked by rats! rats!  thouuuuuuuusands of rats! She finds her way into some high-tech cryo chambers where all manner of people, young and old, are preserved in weird cryo tanks.  But she can hear things moving in the halls, coming after her.  Things that flop and croak and howl...  she keeps running down corridors and tunnels, the things in pursuit, until she finally finds her way to the mouth of the tunnel, runs out, falls, and finds herself rescued by Mike, who gets them on a boat, dynamites the tunnels, and takes her to safety.  Where she awakes the next day.  In Washington (that's safety?).

It turns out Mike has now brought Kay into a super-secret, apparently government-run (which government?) operation that is pursuing the same possibilities - i.e. this may be the work of international criminals imitating Lovecraft's fictional ideas, but there are so many correspondences and prophecies coming true that its likely what Lovecraft was writing wasn't entirely fictional.  To that end, they're sending a nuclear-armed sub out to the site where R'lyeh is believed to have risen, to nuke Cthulhu in the event he actually is there (apparently none of them ever read Derleth's "The Black Island").

Kay (whose presence among what's otherwise a mix of apparently scientists, military personnel, et al - some are in suits, some are "hirsute" - Bloch hate-speech for anyone not properly clean-cut in his estimation - is not exactly clear - scientists, military men and ... a model?)  but she's put up "safely" and starts an affair with Mike for good measure.

While Mike goes off to take care of oh-fficial stuff for a couple of days, Kay is left in the "capable" hands of fellow agent Orin Sanderson, a soft-spoken southerner who seems just fine and mostly minds his own business.  The next day, Kay awakes from a disturbingly realistic dream about R'lyeh - and of Cthu's tomb being open - and empty.  Orin takes her via private plane allegedly to the R'lyeh site, telling her the mission has been accomplished.  But along the way, reveals that he is no longer Orin ("the exchange was made while he slept" - referring to the body exchanging process used in "The Thing on the Doorstep").  Kay is taken to Easter Island, where a horde of cultists, and Rev. Nye, enact a ritual that clearly is meant to involve Kay mating with a Great Old One. A tentacled horror is summoned, and Kay passes out as it takes her in its "arms".

25 years later.  An assassination attempt is made against the mayor of Los Angeles by someone likely a member of a terrorist organization called "The Black Brotherhood".  Junior reporter Mark Dickson is there.  After reporting to his editor/producer, he makes his way to visit his foster father, Judson Moybridge.  Their conversation is odd, as Moybridge denies there is such a thing as The Black Brotherhood and demands Mark stop poking into it.

It seems Moybridge wrote a book about the events of 1978, The Fall of Cthulhu, in which he outlined how a cult of crazies exploited fears aroused by a series of quakes and other natural disasters, and the sudden destruction of Easter Island via a nuclear explosion - actually the result of a nuclear test gone wrong - by attempting to link these events to H.P. Lovecraft's fiction.  The disasters soon stopped, the doomsayers were discredited, and Lovecraft's books went out of print and now can't even be found in reference libraries.  

Mark is unsettled by Moybridge's reaction,  He heads off to spend the night with his girlfriend - cue hot sex scene!  But that evening a monster quake arrives.  With the neighborhood literally falling apart, Mark and his GF cut across a cemetery to try to get to safety, but the graveyard is shrouded in fog and they are attacked by ghouls.  Mark loses his Gf - but eventually he does find what's left of her.  He makes his way to Moybridge's house but finds it ransacked, and finds Moyvridge's bod floating in the pool.  There Mark is taken by deep ones.

He awakes in a house in the Santa Cruz mountains, hosted by Nyarlathorep, who exposes Mark to the light of the Shining Trapezohedron as he explains.  

Moybridge's book was a lie.  An attempt to discredit the Lovecraft-was-telling-the-truth crowd and keep the world from discovering that Lovecraft actually was telling the truth.  Cthulhu was on the rise in 1978, and was given a setback by a nuclear blast which also took out Easter Island (oops!).  But you can't keep a good Cthulhu down.  Oh, and Nyarlathotep escaped the blast.  Along with Kay Keither.  Pregnant with the child of a Great Old One. And guess who that child grew up to be....?

And then, the Great Old Ones begin their return...

I've sometimes thought I'd like to write a Cthulhu Mythos novel, using all the tropes (people, places, things) somehow woven into one grand adventure.  Not because I think I'd produce such a great work of art - just that it would be fun to do.

Robert Bloch was a more accomplished writer than I'll ever be.  But I think his motivation here may have been pretty much the same.  Except also that Bloch knew Lovecraft, and in some ways I think this was meant as a loving tribute to his old mentor, as well as a chance to just have fun playing with all the Lovecraft-ian elements (interestingly, Bloch never once invokes his own additions to the Mythos, Ludvig Prinn et al).

The whole book can be taken as a kind of meta-fictional homage a Lovecraft, with deliberate references to "Pickman's Model", "The Lurking Fear", "The Statement of Randolph Carter", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Haunter of the Dark", "The Strange High House in the Mist", "The Shunned House", "The Rats in the Walls", "Cool Air", "The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Dunwich Horror", et al.

This is a fun read, but it isn't prime Bloch, which is too bad.  Becuase if it was, it could have been one hell of a ride.  As it is, its still entertaining, with some stumbling along the way.  

The Lovecraft story references start out clever but get heavy-handed, perhaps because he crams too many of them into the first 80 pages or so.  The "Randolph Carter" bit in particular could have been handled less clumsily.  The whole constantly forcing someone to read Lovecraft's writings - couldn't they just tell them about it? - borders on comical.  So is Miller's enlisting of a civilian (Kay) to help with a sting like this - I couldn't help but think of Tony Perkins putting on Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison. The secret cabal section is pretty damn dull until the climax.  And it takes up about 35 pages! The final portion feels rushed and inconclusive.  While its handled deftly, we're still already set up to suspect who Mark really is, coming in from the last story.  A bit of misdirection would have helped a lot.  Too much of the novel reads like Bloch's 50's-60's suspense/crime novels and not enough of it creeps into horror territory.

On the other hand, there are winning moments where Bloch old mastery shines through.  Kay's chase down the darkened tunnels is effectively suspenseful and creepy, and Bloch evokes the (likely) Deep Ones while still keeping them creepy and offscreen.  Mark and his girls' run through the fog-enshrouded, ghoul-haunted graveyard is a triumph. 

All in all, Strange Eons is a fun and worthwhile read, but no classic.

"The Mine on Yuggoth"

 

by Ramsey Campbell

originally published The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, Arkham House, 1964

Edward Taylor grew up a normal kid except he preferred reading Victorian horror novels to Winnie the Pooh and was way too interested in how witches and such did their tricks (fortunately, Harry Potter hadn't been invented yet).

In college, he started, which got everyone kicked out.  But by then Ed had inherited his folks' money and never had to work for a living, so he could cast spells to his black little hearts' content.

One thing that gets him excited is a formula for immortality that he gleans from an incomplete Revelations of Glaaki and a "horrible" book by Johannes Henricus Pott which has no title.  He comes to believe the secret is a contained made from a metal found on the planet Yuggoth, and that there are portals to Yuggoth to be found here on earth.  So he determines to find one and get himself to Yuggoth, though he's grossed out by the "lizard-crustaceans" (the Mi-Go one assumes?  Or maybe not?) and puzzled by a passage in Revelations about a pit which the Mi-Go stay away from, for fear of something in it.

Searching for a complete copy of Revelations leads him to Daniel Norton, a complete doofus who lives on a little sheep farm in Goatswood (why not Sheepswood?).  Norton, who mixes up his S's and z's,  calling Ed "young zur", babbles a lot about a slab in the woods near a rock formation called Devil's Steps where there may be a Mi-Go outpost.  Maybe.  But, having told him plenty, says he won't tell more till Ed goes to Devil's Steps and tries the "Voola ritual".  Which of course he does.  But the only effect is hearing "something vast stirring below his feet", which seems impressive enough!

Ed goes back to Norton demanding that he come help him, but Norton refuses, asserting that the Mi-Go are likely to nab them, take them back to Yuggoth, and feed them to "what they're afraid of ", and anything that scares the Mi-Go, Nort doesn't want to mess with.  So Ed demands he give him his complete Revelations, which he does, telling him to "keep away an' let me stop playin' round with things from Outside" (why he couldn't just stop, Ed or no Ed, is not clear but then he is established as being a dumbass).

Ed studies up, ignoring yet another warning in Revelations about a city of green pyramids and a nearby pit where something older than the Mi-Go lives that no mind can stand the sight of.  

Ed goes out to Devil's Steps and climbs the rock.  At the top he finds a plateau, three towers joined by catwalks, and an alien fungus growing all around them.  Which moves to greet or threaten him.

Inside the windowless towers, and finds the portal.  Passing through it, he finds himself changed - "it was as if his body had been torn into atoms and recombined".  As he had already expected, passing through the portal alters one's body so that it can survive and function on the other side.  A strange sound which might be an alarm rings out, but he ignores it.

He finds himself in some kind of alien city.  He begins to explore the city, which is all weird towers and shapes, and seems empty.  He finds an open area full of seats with metal discs on rods attached to either side of them.  Ed thinks this looks like a kind of cinema, and it looks "as if the space had been hurriedly vacated" (how, exactly?  Spilled Yuggothian popcorn?  It is not made clear).

Ed sits in one and discovers that a beam that passes between the two discs creates visions in the mind, either random or, if used properly, according to specific desires.  How does he find this out?  After seeing several weird-ass uninvited visions ("Great cobwebbed objects rolled from noisome caverns in the center of a phosphorescent morass, their mouths opening wetly as they hastened toward where a figure screamed and struggled in the mud."  Leave it to Campbell!), Ed thinks "what a waste", and is treated to (triggered by the word "waste") a vision of a Mi-Go (or whatever it is) taking a dump!

Putting 3+3 together, Ed decides to think about the mines he's seeking.  He's treated to a Yuggothian Google Maps vision.  But finds it will not look past a spot where the buildings end.

Still its enough.  He makes his way out to where the buildings come to a ledge, and a pit, surrounded by green pyramidal structures.  Just as he's trying to see further, as in how to get down into the pit, something comes crawling up from it - "something which slithered up from the rock ledge, glowing greenly.  It was vast and covered with green surfaces which ground together.." it knocks down buildings and "engulf(s) fleeing dwarven forms."  Ed, finally showing an ounce of brains, runs for it, back through the portal and back to the steps, which he manages to stumble down (impressive, since he had to use climbing equipment to get up).

Ed makes it home and tears the place up, burning most of his nefarious occult documents.  The coppers are called and find him raving about the Devil's Steps.  He's taken away to the funny farm where he spends all his time raving about the thing back on Yuggoth finding its way through the portal and hoo-boy will that be bad!  The docs keep his files under wraps.  It seems an X-ray shows that his lungs, which apparently did not properly re-transmute when he passed through the portal coming back, are not the lungs of a human being.

Well this is a nutty ride!  The amazing thing about early Campbell (he was just outta H.S. when Inhabitant was published) is how pulpy it is.  But its also wildly imaginative, and there are little hints of the oblique creepiness Campbell would later master (c.f. Ed's first visions from the alien "cinema".  On the other hand, there are some big lapses in logic - not least of which how completely Ed ignores the flashing neon sign in all his studies that says THERE'S SOMETHING IN A PIT THERE YOU DON'T WANT TO FUCK WITH!! - especially since Campbell reminds us of it three or four times.  Ed's rapid descent down the Steps is kinda hard to swallow since it's 200 feet high and it took him full rock-climbing to get up, and the Mi-Go scatology bit is both hilarious and very, very weird.  What in the hell was he thinking with that?

Finally it must be noted this ends up being yet another "nosy-scholar-pokes-into-things-he-shouldn't-and-goes-nutso" story of which the Cthulhu Mess-thos has plenty.  Its more imaginative than most and hints of Campbell's blossoming talent are there, but mostly its just weird, and kinda humorous.