H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos by Lin Carter

Author:Lin Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

9. The Elder Gods

Although Lovecraft himself was writing fewer and fewer stories in the Cthulhu Mythos, his writer-friends, and in particular his younger proteges, became more and more fascinated by the wealth of background lore the Mythos contained, and by the plot potentials it offered them.

I get the feeling that they contributed new stories, new symbols, new books and demons to the Mythos rather in a sense of play. Some of the members of the Lovecraft Circle to whom I have written assure me of this. Nobody, they tell me, took the Mythos seriously (least of all Lovecraft), and they began to vie with one another to build up the pantheon and add to the gradually evolving mythology. This they did very much as a sort of game, and it is quite significant that after Lovecraft’s death the game lost its savor for many of them. The Mythos stories written when he was no longer alive to enjoy them were done more in a spirit of commemoration than in fun, Robert Bloch tells me. But we shall look into this later on.

Among the younger proteges of Lovecraft, the first to make a major contribution to the Mythos was August Derleth. He began collaborating on short stories with Mark Schorer during the summer of 1931. The two had first become friends during their high-school years, and the friendship persisted and began to bear fruit as each of the young men became apprentice writers. An entire book of Derleth/Schorer tales has recently been published by Arkham House.1*

In their preface to that book, August Derleth and Mark Schorer recalled the circumstances that led to their decade of collaboration: “That summer,” they wrote, “one of us was home from a year of teaching at a military academy in Missouri and preparing for postgraduate work at Wisconsin and Harvard,” while “the other was back to stay in Sauk City, Wisconsin, having resigned an editorial position with Fawcett Publications in order to do or die as a writer.” Both young men had their homes in Sauk City, but, as Derleth recounted it, “we chose not to work in them but to rent what had once been a summer cottage on the village’s main street... Into this cottage we moved typewriters and all the paraphernalia incidental to writing, and got to work.”

One of the first of the collaborative efforts produced in this manner was a story in the Cthulhu Mythos—Derleth’s first, so far as he was able to recall. The Lair of the Star-Spawn was its title, and it appeared in the August 1932 issue of Weird Tales. In it the two authors introduced some innovations. An explorer named Eric Marsh penetrates the hidden depths of jungled Burma and discovers the mysterious Plateau of Sung, when dwell the legended “Tcho-Tcho people” in the age-old lost city of Alaozar. “Not without base do ancient legends of China speak of the long-lost city on the Isle of Stars in the Lake of Dread,” as a character in the tale

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