Customer Reviews

The Dunwich Cycle: Where the Old Gods Wait (Cthulhu Cycle Books)

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Replace "Space alien" with "hideous eldritch being" and "Elvis-clone" with "Son of Yog-Sothoth", and you have WHERE THE OLD GODS WAIT. Apparently they are waiting for their turn in line at the brothel called "Earth".

The good:
"The Great god Pan", "The White People", and "The Dunwich Horror": Great classics. The first two are by Arthur Machen and appear in other collections by Chaosium. "The Dunwich Horror" is one of Lovecraft's finest, in my opinion.

The rest:
Some hideous monster has relations with a human woman and progeny anf horror result all around. It seemed mostly uninspired to me, although the monster at least varied sometimes.

Finally, I found "Wilbur Whately Waiting" to capture the spirit of HPL in a way I didn't imagine. Wilbur is brought back to this world in the modern day to finish what he started. However, the world has passed him by. Every "magick" store sells copies of the Necronomicon and humans more disturbing than Wilbur roam the street. To borrow from Lovecraft, we have become so jaded that Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" wouldn't even CAUSE a scandal. The soul of the modern world is too dead to even react to one such as Wilbur. But he does find purpose in a key . . .

You might purchase WHERE THE OLD GODS WAIT just to have two excellent stories by Arthur Machen, "The Dunwich Horror", and "Wilbur Whately Waiting" will give you something to consider. As a collection, I thought the filler fell flat and brought down the rest of the book.

This book has a collection of stories that were inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror, including that famous story. It's an interesting book and if you are an avid reader of Lovecraft or of the Cthulhu mythos, this book is a must have.

A most interesting experiment. "The Dunwich Cycle" is a collection of tales that influenced and where inspired by the late H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror". Editor Robert Price certainly includes a wide variety of tales, some more compelling than others.

Among the real gems in this collection are "The Dunwich Horror" itself and the story that most influenced/inspired Lovecraft's tale, 'The Great God Pan". Compared to some of the more recent tales in the collection, the writing style and vocabulary might seem too overblown, slow moving or ancient, but it is from these beloved tales that so many others have been inspired.

Given the unevenness of most Mythos tales, this collection makes a nice addition to a Lovecraft library, having at least one story that will charm the reader.

This is an early anthology in Chaosium's "Call of Cthulhu Fiction" series, and it is quite good. I think my favourite item is "The Round Tower," by the book's editor, Robert M. Price. It is the author's contention that the third and final portion of August Derleth's novel THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD is a huge mistake on Derleth's part. As Price explains in his introduction to his tale, "The third section, the 'Narrative of Winfield Phillips,' does not fit the other two at all. Plot threads are severed, intriguing characters of whom we cannot believe we have heard the last are rudely dropped, Yog-Sothth replaces Ossadogowah, and indeed the entire premise of the first two stories is discarded." Thus Price writes his own ending to THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD, and it is a vast improvement over Derleth's original work. We also get "The Devil's Hopyard" by one of the genre's finest fantasists, Richard A. Lupoff, and a charming tale by the recently deceased (and hugely loved) Ben Indick. My own tale, "The Tree-House," is a very early Sesqua Valley story, and one that was not a success. Happily, Bob Price revised the story and hugely improved it. The Cycle books that Bob has edited for Chaosium are among the most enjoyable Cthulhu Mythos anthologies ever published. My favourite in the series is THE NYARLATHOTEP CYCLE -- it is awesome and dead cool. A sequel anthology, TALES OUT OF DUNWICH, edited by Price, was published by Hippocampus Press -- and it contains the finest sequel to Lovecraft's original story, Stanley C. Sargent's magnificent "The Black Brat of Dunwich." Hippocampus will also be publishing another new anthology edited by Robert M. Price, THE TINDALOS CYCLE.

this colection contains one great story by arthur machen concerning an experiment run afoul. HPL has a great one too, about a mysterious family, where something goes very wrong. the other stories are really really bad. we're talking about stories where nothing happens. incredibly dull. it shocked me how uninteresting and boring they were.