Customer Reviews

Dreams from R'lyeh

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This is a charming wee collection of Cthulhu Mythos poetry by one of those who were, in his lifetime, utterly obsess'd with ye writings of H. P. Lovecraft. (The other manifestation of that madness is his enjoyable collection of Mythos short stories and poetry, THE XOTHIC LEGEND CYCLE, edited for Chaosium by Robert M. Price and available here at Amazon.) From the inside flap:

"Lin Carter...has, in less than ten years, made his name a respected and internationally familiar one to readers and collectors of weird fantasy around the world. Today he is considered an authority on the history of imaginative literature, and his pioneering book-length studies of the genre are modern classics of fantasy scholarship. His first venture in this area was TOLKIEN: A LOOK BEHIND 'THE LORD OF THE RINGS,' which has sold steadily through four large printings and elicited the admiration of W. H. Auden, among others. This was followed by an even more impressive work of scholarly research, and one of deeper interest to Arkham House patrons, LOVECRAFT: A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, the first booklength study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, which Fritz Leiber hailed as 'the best single book or article I have ever read dealing with Howard Phillips Lovecraft, his life, his works, the Cthulu Mythos, and the many writers who contributed to it."

Of course, Carter's scholarship in the Lovecraft study has proved, now, to be extremely slipshod and full of errors, however fun that book is to read (and I do read it, again and again, just for the pleasure of reading the history of the Mythos and its creators).

DREAMS FROM R'LYEH opens (following an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp), with the sonnet cycle from which the book takes its title, a sequence of 31 Cthulhu Mythos sonnets. It is something that some of us find irresistible, to write our own Mythos sonnets in the tradition of HPL's "Fungi from Yuggoth" (mine was called "Songs of Sesqua Valley" and may be found in my book, SESQUA VALLEY & OTHER HAUNTS). As de Camp writes in his charming (and cranky) introduction:

"...What are poems for? Lin writes me: 'No one, least of all myself, is going to take these verses seriously. They were written in a sense of fun, the shivery relish of Lovecraftian ghoulishness and Klark-Ashtonian hyperbole.' He refers to the stories and poems of the late Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), the noted writer of eldritch-horror neo-Gothic fantasies and creator of the 'Cthulhu mythos; and Lovecraft's Californian colleague and pen pal, Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), author of tales laid in the magic-haunted continents of Hyperborea, Atlantis, and Zothique. (In his correspondence with Smith, Lovecraft spelled his friend's name Klarkash-Ton, thus converting a pair of prosaically Anglo-Saxon nomina into something from the slimy depths of R'lyeh.)"

This is an important point that is too often overlooked or ignored by serious modern day Lovecraft scholars -- the Mythos was created in an atmosphere of fun, of play; and although Lovecraft was almost always serious in his writing of weird fiction, he too frolicked in that squamous play-pen, especially with such revision tales as "The Horror in the Museum" and "The Last Test." The Mythos was created with a sense of amusement, and nowhere is that sense more amply & delightfully express'd than in Carter's title page to his sonnet sequence:

DREAMS FROM R'LYEH: A SONNET CYCLE

By Wilbur Nathaniel Hoag [1921-1944]
Edited for Publication by Lin Carter

"Eternal is the Pow'r of Evil, and Infinite in its contagion! The Great Cthulhu yet hath sway o'er the minds and spirits of Men, yea, even tho' He lieth chained and ensorcelled, bound in the fetters of The Elder Sign, His malignant and loathly Mind spreadeth the dark seeds of Madness and Corruption into the dreams and Nightmares of sleeping men..."
--THE NECRONOMICON of Abdul Alhazred, III, 17; the Translation of Dr. John Dee, circa A. D. 1585.

"...Death is no deterrent to the mighty dead. Even in decay their vast intellects can fill our sleeping minds with nightmare visions of the Pit and ultimate insanities beyond the reach of reason."
--NECROLATRY (The Worship of the Dead), Igor Gorstadt; Leipzig, 1702.

"Alhazred's image of the Sleeping God leads one almost to the interpretation of Cthulhu as one of the dream-gods such as Hypnos; he is set forth as a god who infects the minds of those sleep with dark and terrifying dreams, nightmares, visions -- spreading the germs of his own evil through the world through the medium of his own dreams."
--CTHULHU IN 'THE NECRONOMICON,' Labin Shrewsbury, Ph.D., LL.D, etc.; from an unpublished, fragmentary manuscript written circa 1938-39.

Here we see that Lin Carter has indeed found that sense of play that was an initial part of the creation of the Mythos as it began in Lovecraft's lifetime. The quotation from Shrewsbury indicates, however, that Carter is perhaps as equally infested with the Derlethian impulse as he is with a genuine Lovecraftian one. Too, the influence of Clark Ashton Smith is quite potent in the actual sonnet cycle, delightfully so. Here is my favourite sonnet from the book:

XXXI: THE MILLION FAVORED ONES

From black Mnar, from Yuggoth on the Rim,
From those liquescent pits where shoggoths bloat,
Across the cosmic gulfs of spheres remote
--We Come! We Come! At the command of Him
Who is our Lord and Father. Bleak Kadath
And frozen Leng have know our awful tread;
Lost Yhe in the Pacific quailed in dread
Before our coming, and our Father's wrath...

And some of us were human once, and some
Have never even heard the name of Earth,
Abominations of a monstrous birth
Out of the womb of nightmare...When we come,
The nations kneel in fear before our step...
We are the Children of Nyarlathotep.

This sonnet cycle takes up about two thirds of the volume, and the remainder are poems of the fantastic such as "Merlin, Enchanted," "To Clark Ashton Smith," "Lines Written to a Painting by Hannes Bok" and others. It is a charming volume of playful poems; yet in their sense of play we find a very serious appreciation -- indeed, a love -- for the genius of H. P. Lovecraft and the gift of Literature that he has bequeathed unto us all. This love of the genre in all of its components is gorgeously describ'd in ye following verse:

"LINES WRITTEN TO A PAINTING BY HANNES BOK

Here where pale minarets and pylons cling
Ablaze with sunset to the scarlet peak,
Night draws across the skies her gemmy wing.

Now glides the galleon, her satin sails,
Engoldening the sea, home her to rest:
Starlit, one spire the goblin moon impales.

Bright as a peacock-plume these colors gleam.
O rare the hand that made this vision live,
Kindled these fires, wove this jewelled dream!"

I wou'd have been proud to have penn'd so beautiful a poem.