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51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Contents of This Book, December 17, 2000
This review is from: The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (Hardcover)
Because there are so many different Lovecraft collections out there, it may be useful to prospective buyers to know what's actually in this volume: [By S. T. Joshi:] A Note on the Texts; [By August Derleth:] Lovecraft's "Revisions"; [Hereupon stories effectively ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft:] The Green Meadow; The Crawling Chaos; The Last Test; The Electric Executioner; The Curse of Yig; The Mound; Medusa's Coil; The Man of Stone; The Horror in the Museum; Winged Death; Out of the Aeons; The Horror in the Burying-Ground; The Diary of Alonzo Typer; [Hereupon stories moderately revised by Lovecraft:] The Horror at Martin's Beach; Ashes; The Ghost-Eater; The Loved Dead; Deaf, Dumb, and Blind; Two Black Bottles; The Trap; The Tree on the Hill; The Disinterment; "Till A' the Seas"; The Night Ocean Contrary to the claim on the dustjacket that this "collection includes all known revisions and collaborations undertaken by Lovecraft", it actually misses several: "Under the Pyramids" (a.k.a. "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"), ghosted for Harry Houdini; "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", a collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price; several revisions for and collaborations with R. H. Barlow; and participation in "The Challenge from Beyond", a pulp magazine's round robin. Still, this volume is just about indispensable for anyone seeking to build a textually sound collection of the complete fiction of Lovecraft.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
These revisions include a few of great interest to HPL fans, April 12, 2003
One of the means by which Lovecraft supported himself was in revising stories written by younger, would-be writers. These revisions are problematic because it is virtually impossible to say how much of Lovecraft himself is to be found in them. I believe that, with a few exceptions, the master of the macabre did not lend much of his influence in the retelling of these inferior tales, but a certain few of them do possess sufficient traces of Lovecraft to make them of interest to those followers in his footsteps. Oddly enough, the two stories that actually list Lovecraft as co-author, The Crawling Chaos and The Green Meadow, are the worst of the bunch. Both of these Elizabeth Berkeley stories are flights of fancy which forego any real plot in favor of lofty, dream-enshrouded flights of fancy which cannot even begin to compare to the Dunsanian, dream-cycle myths that Lovecraft perfected on his own. William Lumley's The Diary of Alonzo Typer is a rather formulaic tale of ancient evil and the discovery of a stranger's ancestral lineage upon his return to the home of a dead forebear. It gives lip service to such Lovecraftian gods as Shub-Niggurath but falls short of dramatically gripping the reader. Wilfred Blanch Talman's Two Black Bottles is another unoriginal attempt to horrify the reader by invoking a soul-reclaiming restless spirit from the confines of a dark, defiled church's cemetery; this story succeeds rather well but possesses no real pizzazz. Adolphe de Castro contributes The Electric Executioner, a rather enjoyable story that cannot but ultimately disappoint in regards to its highly improbably ending. The revised work of two authors, Hazel Heald and Zealia Bishop, do merit a closer look. Not only are their tales enjoyable and reasonably well-crafted, they do bear certain imprints of the master revisionist's singular hand. Heald's Winged Death has nothing at all to do with the Cthulhu Mythos, instead offering the chronicles of a scientist's mad, wretched, and ultimately self-destructive plot to ingeniously kill a colleague whom he accuses of discrediting his work. Heald's other tale, The Horror in the Museum, does attain a nice level of creepiness and a touch of cosmic horror. The museum in question is a wax museum, and the strange owner suggests that his distinctly horrible wax figures are more than mere wax. The protagonist, whose friendly interest in the singular artist turns to concern and fear at his increasingly mad utterings, agrees to spend a night alone in the dark museum, surrounded by horrible waxen figures and only two doors away from a creature the artist makes incredible claims about, eventually stating that it is a beast he has called down from Yuggoth itself, a beast through which the return of the Old Ones to Earth can be secured. There is plenty of Cthulhian chanting and references to be found in this story, although it does not follow the letter of the original Mythos. Zealia Bishop's tales also convey Mythos elements, yet her stories take the reader to Mexico and underneath the plains of Oklahoma, transplanting the abodes of ancient otherworldly creatures beneath the ground and reinterpreting the Mythos references in a Mexican-Spanish tradition. The Curse of Yig invokes a snake-devil of Indian legendry who exacts a most bitter revenge on those who would harm his children among the snake population, one much more malign and vengeful than death itself. The Oklahoma setting of The Curse of Yig is greatly expounded upon in the most significant tale of this collection, Bishop's The Mound. An ancient mound is guarded by Indian spirits, and all white settlers who have dared explore the area have either returned no more or returned as raving madmen. A scientist of the twentieth century cannot be expected to put stock in such tales, though, so our protagonist vows to explore the mound and finally uncover its secrets. In a major discovery, he comes across a centuries-old account of a sixteenth century Spanish explorer who claims to have journeyed into an alien world underneath the mound, one where some well-known Lovecraftian otherworldy gods are spoken of, remembered, and worshipped. It is rather fascinating to see a sort of conflated Mythos cosmology transplanted deep beneath the earth and to read of references to ancient gods such as Tulu that correlate with the Great Cthulhu. Among the revisions in this collection, The Mound most clearly bears the influence of Lovecraft himself, and while one should by no means place it in the canon of his horrific literature, it does hold a power sure to hypnotize the seekers of Lovecraftian knowledge with its implications and parallel take on the Mythos itself.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An essential element of the Lovecraft corpus, October 10, 2004
I thought that I had a complete collection of Lovecraft's stories. However, references to "K'n-yan", "red-litten Yoth", and "Yig, Father of Snakes" would crop up and I didn't know to what it referred. By using my handy-dandy Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (whose primary function is to look in what story a particular nameless entity crops up) I discovered that I should be reading "The Horror in the Museum" and "The Mound." Wonderful, but where should I look for these tales? Enter THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM AND OTHER REVISIONS.
This book contains 10 stories to which Lovecraft added his stamp (some of which he practically ghost-wrote). As in "The Challenge From Beyond", it is often not difficult to see the transition to Lovecraft's ... particular ... style of narration.
For the purposes of completeness of Lovecraft's corpus, I would recommend reading "The Horror in the Museum" and "The Mound". As far as I know, these stories are unavailable elsewhere. "Winged Death" and "The Curse of Yig" are in addition effective at evincing chills. The rest are so-so, and may strike your fancy, and for others will fall quite flat.
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