Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (71 page)

But all gussied up, the traditional material each story is based upon turns into something wholly new, viscerally exciting and a joy to just plain read. (All this is not to say that these authors and others like them have never had an original idea, but not only couldn’t they be geniuses twenty-four hours a day, they could no more avoid cultural influences then we can.) So, stripped of their writing styles, how interesting could stories based on these authors’ ideas be? The process must inevitably produce results with little apparent connection to their source material. Thus, their status as “homages” then becomes wholly questionable. Without the use of the original author’s writing style, a mention of Cthulhu here or Maal Dweb there will not be enough to satisfy the reader who thirsts for more stories from his favorite writer’s pen.

Remember my editorial in issue #14? That’s where I lamented the fact that despite these being flush times for Mythos fans with all kinds of Lovecraftian material in print and even readily available at such mass distribution outlets as Barnes and Noble and Borders, there was still a dearth of classic weird material written in the mid-part of this century (1920-1960 say).

Well, although I’m sad to report that nothing’s changed since then, a recent find moved me to go back to my bookshelves to take a closer look at just what has been coming out in the last ten years or so. (One qualification about what comes next: I haven’t been keeping that close an eye on the small press market lately, so I don’t know what they’ve been coming out with; on the other hand, just about everything from the more prestigious small presses such as Arkham House, Donald M. Grant and even Necronomicon Press can be found at the aforementioned big bookstore chains).

Anyway, I was at Barnes and Noble the other day and while scanning their bargain books section came across yet another collection of
Weird Tales
stories (
Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror
, Barnes and Noble Books, 1997). This one was edited by John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg and as I can never resist at least scanning the contents pages of such collections (I’ve never given up hope of finding anthologies that feature the mid-century authors that most appeal to me) I picked it up. Divided into seven decades with representative stories from each, there were enough stories from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s that I had never read before and by authors not usually anthologized, that I immediately purchased it (and the fact that this hardcover was only going for seven bucks didn’t hurt either!) The good thing about this collection for us fans of the old stuff, is that of its 400+ pages, only 100 are devoted to the lackluster 70s and 80s and 90s. What particularly attracted me about the collection was its mix of stories by the masters (Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Kuttner, Leiber and Bradbury) as well as by lesser known authors such as Whitehead, Wellman, Eric Frank and Ray Russell and G.G. Pendarves. Rarely anthologized stories by Bradbury such as “The Crowd,” Kuttner’ “Graveyard Rats” and Derleth’s “Pacific 421” were new to me at least.

This was just the kind of thing I liked to find and in placing it on my bookshelf at home, remembered similar books released over the last few years including
Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies
(edited by Marvin Kaye, Doubleday 1988) which out of its 44 entries very few stories were from the likes of REH, HPL, CAS and their followers. Interesting tales here included “Off the Map” by Rex Dolphin, “Funeral in the Fog” by Edward D. Hoch, “The Damp Man” by Allison V. Harding, “More than Shadow” by Dorothy Quick and “The Dead Smile” by F. Marion Crawford.

Weird Vampire Tales
(edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz and Martin Greenberg for Gramercy Books, 1992) included a similar percentage of unknowns from mid-century as Never Dies with contributions such as “Placide’s Wife” by Kirk Washburn, “Vampire Village” by Edmund Hamilton, “Doom of the House of Duryea” by Earl Peirce Jr., “The Silver Coffin” by Robert Barbour Johnson, “Share Alike” by Jerome Bixby and Joe E. Dean and even “Asylum” by A.E. Van Vogt.

Other recent collections of note have been
The Howling Man
(edited by Roger Anker for Tor Books, paperback ed. 1992) a 600 page collection of every weird yarn written by Charles Beaumont complete with individual introductions for each story by other famous writers. Tor also released a trilogy of paperbacks anthologizing three classic weird novels by Richard Matheson in 1995 including
I Am Legend
and
The Incredible Shrinking Man
; each novel is accompanied by choice short stories including rarely anthologized treats such as “Duel” and “Prey.” And not usually considered a horror writer, Philip K. Dick was given the royal treatment by the Carol Publishing Group in 1990 when they began to reprint everything the author ever wrote; of particular interest to fans of the weird are the first two volumes of the series (
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick
) in which are included some of the strangest yarns ever written such as “The Father Thing,” “Roog,” “Paycheck,” “Colony,” “Autofac,” and “The Days of Perky Pat.” More recently, the General Publishing Group has just released the first volume of the
Ackermananthology
(1997) which, although the first volume concentrates on rarely collected science fiction stories from the decades in question, later volumes promise to concentrate on such topics as fantasy and horror.

So what’s there to learn here? That maybe things aren’t as thoroughly bleak as I first let on and that a little diligence and a lot of patience on the part of the connoisseur can be rewarded in the end.

Flush times indeed!

In issue #14 I mentioned that if I was fifteen years old again, these would surely be exciting times to be a Lovecraft fan. Never before have there been so many books relating to HPL available to the general public and in formats suitable for every budget. (In the old days, most HPL related material was to be had only from a small group of independent publishers and that through mail order)! In addition, mythos fanatics can even purchase every film produced over the past forty years that have been based on HPL’s work (however tenuous and whatever the quality) instead of catching them on the late, late show whenever a local television station decided to put them on. And now there’s cyberspace, where for as little as $10/month (sometimes even free!) anyone can access what amounts to thousands of pages of material related to anything Lovecraft.

Despite these seeming riches however, there still exists the danger of sensory overload, of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material. And sometimes, this cornucopia of plenty vs the increasing demands today’s world place on our leisure time, can have an enervating effect on us, a sort of information-panic that no matter how much time we give to scanning all these offerings, we’ll never be able to absorb them all. There might even come the temptation to give up trying to sort it all out and just letting the tides of all that material simply wash over us at random (and getting our metaphors mixed!).

That’s when a bibliophile needs to stop and decide what’s really important: which items are worth his precious time and which mere Lovecraftian dissembling. And a good way to do that is to go back to the basics.

Such, I think, is S.T. Joshi and Peter Cannon’s recent volume
More Annotated H.P.Lovecraft
. This book, (which follows in the path of a previous volume called
The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
), presents many of HPL’s classic tales in a format as close to the author’s original intent as it is possible to get. (These versions have been reprinted from the latest Arkham House hardcover editions upon which Mr. Joshi had labored for years). The presentation here of such familiar stories as “Pickman’s Model,” “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” will be familiar to even the newest of HPL’s readers, but what makes this volume of more than passing interest are the scores of detailed footnotes and photographs that rest on almost every page. The information they convey, both trivial and arcane, allow readers to learn something of the daily life of the author as well as placing each story within the context of the real world from which Lovecraft drew so much of his inspiration.

With the appearance of this second volume of the Annotated HPL, it can only be hoped that the editors will follow through with the balance of Lovecraft’s stories. (And after that, who knows? Maybe Joshi and Cannon can be prevailed upon to provide the same service for other authors:
The Annotated Clark Ashton Smith
or
The Annotated Robert E. Howard
or even
The Annotated Joseph Payne Brennan
maybe)?

Despite a tendency for some of the footnotes to verge on the self-parodic (like notes explaining such vocabulary words as aurora, gibbering, eldritch, cyclopean, mesmerism; has the English language in current use strayed so far from its roots that the general reader needs to have specialized definitions of such words highlighted in editions of popular literature or are they so identified with HPL’s purplish prose as to become of a like with his own invented lexicon?), I can think of no more refreshing way for the avid reader of the mythos, harassed (and perhaps jaded) by too much product, to reestablish his roots than to revisit the stories and the mild mannered gentleman who wrote them presented in this well-rounded package.