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Title: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos by Robert M. Price ISBN: 0-345-44408-6 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: best anthology i know of
Comment: my first experience with pulp came through this collection, and it is still my favorite. the early masters of pulp and their greatest stories (or almost) are collected here. this collection is excellent, particularly as an introduction to pulp. it's not too weird, focuses a lot on descriptions and understandable plots. gathered here are writers like kuttner, howard, hall thompson, derleth........ filled with masterpieces. great stories.
Rating: 3
Summary: Indiana Jones and the Demons of Yore
Comment: Hardly the best collection from the early Lovecraft acolytes, but one that will certainly appeal to the fourteen-year-old in everyone who loves the Mythos. Editor Price is an admirable scholar of this particular niche in literature, here providing rarely anthologized stories tracing the early evolution of Lovecraft's ideas as practiced by his (generally) less famous pulp fiction contemporaries and fans.
The majority of these offerings are in the "freebooting adventurer meets his doom in forbidden archaeology" vein, a la Conan creator Robert E. Howard - two of whose stories (and only one really a Mythos tale) are duly reprinted, "The Thing on the Roof" and "The Fire of Assurbanipal." Robert Bloch's "Fane of the Black Pharaoh," not one of his best but still not bad, has a British explorer running afoul of an ancient Brotherhood protecting the secrets of a mad Egyptian prophet-king. Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seven Geases" concerns the hypnotic magic of a long-forgotten serpent race, who sacrifice men to their unspeakable dark god. August Derleth - you didn't expect he'd miss out on the act, did you? - collaborates with Mark Schorer on "Lair of the Star-Spawn," detailing a missing archaeologist's plan to stop those same serpent-people from releasing their demon-gods upon mankind. (Derleth is also represented by his own virtual plagiarism of Algernon Blackwood, in "Ithaqua" and "The Thing That Walked On the Wind.") E. Hoffman Price's "The Lord of Illusion" and Henry Hasse's "The Guardian of the Book" tell stories of extraterrestrial wayfarers through the gates of time and space, uncovering ancient and extra-dimensional secrets.
Other offerings include more straightforward horror stories, such as Henry Kuttner's "Bells of Horror" and "The Invaders," C. Hall Thompson's "Spawn of the Green Abyss," Carl Jacobi's "The Aquarium" and Duane W. Rimel's "Music of the Stars." Many of these, like Derleth's stories and Bertram Russell's "The Scourge of B'Moth," are essentially...rehashes of recognizable Lovecraft classics, though one or two are fairly original and worthwhile.
And for those who long for the occasional chuckle-break from all the melodramatically histrionic proceedings, Donald A. Wollheim's "The Horror Out of Lovecraft" and Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars" will fit the bill - the latter, especially, as it comically rapes virtually every famous story Lovecraft ever wrote (with love, of course).
These aren't all the stories included in this volume, but they are indicative of the rest - certainly sufficient for anyone to determine whether or not Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos will be worth the "Price."
Now, if you'll excuse me, there's something at my window. It seems to be - oh, my God! Words cannot describe the utter blasphemous horror of the nameless dread somehow made flesh incarnate! Someone save me, before I succumb to that unutterable -
Rating: 3
Summary: Nice collection
Comment: This is a solid collection of "pulp" stories out of the Lovecraft tradition ranging from fair to excellent. Some of Price's selections may be arguable, for instance, Howard's "The Fire of Ashurbanipal" or Smith's "The Seven Geases". Both have produced tales that are rooted firmer in the Lovecraft mythos, but the first is the alternate version of the tale of the same title, difficult to find, and the second is simply one of Smith's best stories. Even the Derleth contributions are good tales, centering around his more intruiging and more independent creation Ithaqua. A couple of oddities and relics round off the book.
Price's introduction and defense of Derleth's systemizing of the mythos is less than successful. He argues, more or less, that the roots of the elemental system and the struggle of good vs. evil deities lie in Lovecraft's own tales. For instance, both Derleth's and Lovecraft's protagonists bestow upon the entities negative moral adjectives and connotations. Although I agree with Price that Derleth has been lambasted undeservedly by many contemporary critics, his arguments, in the end, are unconvincing. Though Lovecraft and Derleth both describe the evil from an antropocentric view, Derleth's objective description of the Cthulhu Mythos is explicitly in analogy with Christian mythology and, one should admit, systematic theology, while Lovecraft is objectively explicit in the complete indifference, chaos, and contingency that is breaking in upon a mechanistic materialistic reality.
The two stances, and thus the frames of their tales, couldn't be further apart from each other. If Derleth and Lovecraft weren't that different in the end, as Price suggests, the question arises why Derleth's stereotypical tales (which were really clever advertisings for his Arkham House) easily published in the worst pulp magazines, while Lovecraft barely sold any of his own. One could make an analogy with the immensely popular Hammer films of the sixties and seventies, usually depicting stereotypical struggles between good and evil, and the many contemporary horror films that reached deeper than mere dichotomies have been largely forgotten. Even so, Price offers valuable points in defense of Derleth and criticism of recent Lovecraft scholarship.
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Title: The Disciples of Cthulhu II: Blasphemous Tales of the Followers (Call of Cthulhu Fiction Series) by Edward P. Berglund, H. P. Lovecraft ISBN: 1568821433 Publisher: Chaosium Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: New Mythos Legends by Bruce R. Gehweiler, C. J. Henderson, Tom Piccirilli ISBN: 1892669196 Publisher: Marietta Publishing Pub. Date: 01 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.99 |
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Title: Nameless Cults (Call of Cthulhu Fiction) by Robert E. Howard ISBN: 1568821301 Publisher: Chaosium Pub. Date: 01 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Taint of Lovecraft by Stanley C. Sargent, Robert M. Price, D. L. Hutchinson, Allen Koszowski, Daniel Alan Ross, Jeffrey Thomas, Peter Worthy, Richard Lupoff ISBN: 0965943399 Publisher: Mythos Books Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Cthulhu 2000 by Various ISBN: 0345422031 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 25 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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