The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1
EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI
The Madness of Cthulhu 2
(October 2015)
Black Wings of Cthulhu
Black Wings of Cthulhu 2
Shadows Over Innsmouth
Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth
(January 2015)
Acolytes of Cthulhu
CTHULHU
VOLUME 1
S. T. JOSHI
FOREWORD BY
JONATHAN MABERRY
TITAN
BOOKS
The Madness of Cthulhu
Print edition ISBN: 9781781164525
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781164532
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: October 2014
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved by the authors. The rights of each contributor to be identified as Author of their Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Arthur C. Clarke, “At the Mountains of Murkiness,” first published in
Satellite
(1940). Robert Silverberg, “Diana of the Hundred Beasts,” first published in
Realms of Fantasy
(February 1996), copyright © 1996 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Agberg, Ltd. and the author. All other stories are original to this volume, and are Copyright © 2014 to the individual authors.
Foreword Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Maberry
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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CONTENTS
Also Available from Titan Books
At the Mountains of Murkiness
by Arthur C. Clarke
The Fillmore Shoggoth
by Harry Turtledove
Devil’s Bathtub
by Lois H. Gresh
The Witness in Darkness
by John Shirley
How the Gods Bargain
by William Browning Spencer
A Mountain Walked
by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Diana of the Hundred Breasts
by Robert Silverberg
Under the Shelf
by Michael Shea
Cthulhu Rising
by Heather Graham
White Fire
by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
A Quirk of the Mistral
by Jonathan Thomas
The Dog Handler’s Tale
by Donald Tyson
Also Available from Titan Books
JONATHAN MABERRY
I
CAN REMEMBER THE VERY FIRST TIME
I
MET
C
THULHU
.
Not just the day or the situation, but the actual moment.
Cthulhu attacked me.
Seriously.
Okay, maybe I wasn’t wrapped in the coils of a tentacular monstrosity whose very appearance is too horrific to behold. It wasn’t that kind of attack.
Cthulhu hit me in the head.
I’ll explain.
I went to a dysfunctional middle school in a very poor neighborhood in Philadelphia. I’d been reading voraciously since about age eight—when I discovered the Fantastic Four, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Shakespeare in the same week! So, by the time I got to seventh grade, my reading level was a tad higher than that of most of the other kids. Not sure I was any smarter, but I was well-read. The English class, typical of public schools, was geared toward the lowest reading level, which was roughly a point where those kids thought that the difficulty the pokey little puppy had in rescuing its ball from under the couch constituted deeply challenging literature.
The teachers, being otherwise unsure how to deal with me, simply gave me to the school librarian. That arrangement was somewhere between “take him and teach him” and “hey, here’s a pet.”
The librarian, bless her soul, was a geek. A true literary geek. An acolyte in the church of genre fiction. She knew and loved all aspects of the fantastic in literature, and over the next couple of years she not only encouraged me to read and write reports about the books I devoured, she dragged me along to the meetings of a couple of private clubs for which she served as secretary. Clubs of writers. Some amateur, some professional. At those clubs—in the years 1972 and 1973—I got to meet authors who would later populate the pantheon of my personal cosmology. Writers who are, by today’s standards, the Elder Gods of genre fiction. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Robert Sheckley, Harlan Ellison, Lin Carter, and L. Sprague de Camp.
Yeah … I know.
These writers—many of whom I had not heard of when I first met them—were amused to find a kid among them who was both a reader and a wannabe writer. Most of them went out of their way to offer me advice, to share insights into what makes a great story, to encourage me to try authors whose works I hadn’t read, and to prop open all of the doors and windows in my mind.
At one event, a book-release party for his work
The Fallible Fiend
was held at de Camp’s house in Villanova, Pennsylvania. A few of the authors were in his office, mostly talking shop with me there to fetch drinks and chips and be constantly amazed. While they spoke about the industry I wandered about the room, looking at the editions of de Camp’s books that filled the shelves and at all the strange little pieces of art that he’d collected—statues, carvings, a bat skull, awards, and more. I reached up to take down a copy of a foreign edition of one of the Conan collections (
Conan the Usurper
, I believe—the Lancer edition with the Frazetta cover), I accidentally knocked down a small metal statue. I dodged too slow and too late, and the figure tonked me on the head. Luckily it landed on the carpet without damage. My head, on the other hand, was growing a nice lump.
De Camp picked up the figure and when the others saw what it was, they all laughed and told me that I must be a hero because I survived an attack by one of the Great Old Ones. I had, it seemed, been attacked by none other than Cthulhu himself.
My response was, “Who—?”
The whole group of them stared at me as if I’d just asked what air was. Or what the color blue looked like. It was a reaction that spoke to an inability on their part to comprehend that anyone at that gathering, no matter how young, could possibly
not
know who Cthulhu was.
They gaped at me. First time I’d ever seen people genuinely gape.
So I said, “Well, who
is
Cthulhu?”
They told me.
Now, let’s look at how they told me. Every single one of them pronounced the name differently. Ka-tool-oo, K’thool-ooo, Ka-hul-loo, and on and on. I don’t think any of them actually pronounced it the same way. There were arguments relative to that, but we don’t need to go there.
Then they began a tag-team explanation of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, his life and work, his stories, his general strangeness, his willingness to let other writers craft stories using his characters and themes, and so on. This was not a short conversation. This was a conversation that spilled over into a general decamping to the living room, it chased us through buffet food and dessert, and I don’t think it really reached an ending but was rather terminated by the end of the party.
Somewhere along the way de Camp trotted out a copy of something called
The Necronomicon
, for which he’d written an introduction to an Owlswick Press edition.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that conversation, as long, convoluted, and layered as it was, barely touched the tip of a very large iceberg. I saw de Camp many times after that, and he always had a bit of an addendum to that conversation. Two years later de Camp’s
Lovecraft: A Biography
was published in hardcover by Doubleday.
One immediate effect of that first conversation, though, was that when I left de Camp’s house that night I was weighed down with a double-armful of books related in some way to the Cthulhu Mythos. That stack included some valuable reprints of
Weird Tales
, in which Lovecraft’s first stories appeared. And a great number of collections and anthologies that contained Cthulhu stories by Robert Bloch, Richard F. Searight, Hazel Heald, Clark Ashton Smith, Duane W. Rimel, Robert H. Barlow, Henry Kuttner, Henry Hasse, Manly Wade Wellman, William Lumley, Zealia B. Bishop, August W. Derleth, Will Garth, Charles R. Tanner, Wilfred Owen Morley, Carol Grey, C. Hall Thompson, Vol Molesworth, and Robert E. Howard.
That was the first batch.
Over the years de Camp would frequently suggest tales by other writers. For some of these I had to read them at de Camp’s house in the original magazines—
Weird Tales, Stirring Science Stories, Scorpio, The Unique Magazine, Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, Polaris, Strange Stories, Fanciful Tales, Astounding Stories, The Californian, Unusual Stories
, and others. Then he directed me to libraries and bookstores to find new stories and reliable collections.
I read more stories than I can remember. I read very good Mythos stories and I read some crap. I read stories that paved new creative ground and expanded the Mythos, and I read stuff that even by today’s standards would be considered bad fan fiction. But overall I found that the Cthulhu Mythos allowed for it all. Good and bad, weird and commonplace, original and trite, terrifying and comical.
It allowed for it in the way that a true genre does. And that’s the thing; the Cthulhu Mythos isn’t, in my estimation, a subgenre. Not of horror, not of fantasy, and not of science fiction. It has become its own genre. Okay, sure, you might argue that it is a subgenre of Lovecraftian fiction, but I don’t think I’ll get many arguments if I say that for most people—even those who are deeply familiar with Lovecraft’s
oeuvre
—when we think about “Lovecraftian” fiction we’re generally thinking about the Cthulhu Mythos. Right or wrong, there it is.
And what a world it is. Ancient races of gods, beings that cruise the vast emptiness between stars, extra-dimensional monsters, misfired breeding programs, cults of insane worshipers, sights so beyond human comprehension that the slightest glimpse will blast the mind into screaming insanity.
How insanely delicious is that!
And also how logical, in its way, and how fully formed. It also plays into the nebulous cloud of uncertainty that hangs over us all when we contemplate religion (ours and others), infinity, time, and the potential for intergalactic and interdimensional travel. Those concepts are, in real point of fact, beyond human comprehension. They’re also like crack to writers of the fantastic, because in many of us there is an ache, a yearning to try and take that formless madness and contain it with words so that it can be understood. By inviting all writers into his world Lovecraft has made sorcerers of us all.
So that brings me to this anthology.
This is the first volume in
The Madness of Cthulhu
. It contains many classic stories by some of the greatest genre writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These are stories that show the scope of the genre and eloquently argue to its creative potential. A second volume will follow in 2015, and I am delighted to have a story in it, “A Footnote in the Black Budget.” That will be my very first Lovecraftian tale, and I am more pleased than I can express. I hope de Camp will look down from Valhalla (or from whichever strnage dimension to which his soul has departed) and approve.
Each story in this volume is unique. Few, if any, of the writers actually knew Lovecraft. Most were part of the second or even third wave of post-Lovecraftian writers to dip their toes into the dark waters of this genre.