Noted Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi has authored a criticism of Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos fiction, beginning with the stories by H.P. Lovecraft that gave birth to the entities, locales, books, and other plot devices that have come to be known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Joshi further details the works of August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber and other. Joshi then expounds upon the Derleth Mythos and its influence on subsequent Lovecraftian fiction. Joshi then explores a new generations of Mythos writers and their respective expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos, including Richard L. Tierney, Gary Myers, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Walter C. DeBill Jr. and others. Finally, Joshi reviews some of the more modern authors who have taken up the Lovecraftian mantle: Jeffrey Thomas, Stanley C. Sargent, Wilum H. Pugmire, Thomas Ligotti, Joseph C. Pulver and many others.
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From Publishers Weekly
The Cthulhu Mythos-the myth pattern spun from the alien entities, forbidden books, and haunted New England towns of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction-is a popular fiction phenomenon that has inspired thousand of horror tales from fans and professionals writing under Lovecraft's spell since the 1920s. In this opinionated but entertaining study, the world's foremost Lovecraft scholar closely scrutinizes the Mythos and finds much to criticize. Separating out as the "Lovecraft Mythos" the stories in which Lovecraft developed his unique mythology, Joshi (H.P. Lovecraft: A Life) sees a distinct difference from the Cthulhu Mythos as practiced by most other writers, primarily in the absence of a cosmic perspective that gives the fictional horrors intellectual weight and gravity. Joshi lays the blame for the Mythos reducing Lovecraft's work to its most superficial aspects on Lovecraft's disciple August Derleth, who misinterpreted the intent of his mentor's work and created the template from which most Mythos fiction ever since has been struck. Though written for the small subculture of horror enthusiasts who will find its arguments provocative, this volume nevertheless offers cogent analyses of hundreds of horror stories that constitute an essential reading list for further study.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Joshi divides his highly opinionated (and justifiably so) study into nine chapters. The first three deal with the Lovecraft Mythos an already well-defined term in Lovecraft studies which applies to the works of the (frankly inimitable) Providence writer himself, and his invented pseudomythology of gods, books, and sites which, to a greater or lesser degree, crop up across the whole of his oeuvre. The next two chapters cover Contemporaries (that is, contemporaries of Lovecraft): Long, Bloch, Wandrei, as well as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, and Fritz Lieber. There follows a chapter on The Derleth Mythos, which critically examines Derleth s fatally flawed conception of the Lovecraft Mythos, and a chapter titled Interregnum, which interrogates works by writers such as Colin Wilson and Ramsey Campbell that preceded Lin Carter s study. The final two chapters, The Scholarly Revolution and Recrudescence, deal in short compass but with remarkable insight with the thirty-odd years of Cthulhu Mythos fiction that have appeared since the early 1970s, taking us up to 2008 with commentary on Mythos works of writers such as Richard L. Tierney, Thomas Ligotti, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., Brian Lumley, Wilum Pugmire, Donald Tyson, and others. n his introduction, Joshi makes no bones about his expectation that written work attempting to continue Lovecraft s legacy should be possessed of intrinsic literary merits, making clear that his study will seek to distinguish between the scope of Lovecraft s achievement and what others have written in imitation of or homage to him. Joshi notes the tendency for literary neophytes to produce work of vastly variable quality, which often amounts to no more than a tepid rewriting of Lovecraft s own stories, stories that usually lack the cosmic perspective so central to Lovecraft s own views. In the chapters dealing with Lovecraft s own work, many perspicacious comments highlight aspects of tales that many of us have read, and read about, many times over; one of the delights of Joshi s criticism is that he continually re-evaluates the tales in the light of all current scholarly knowledge. Nor does he always assent to popular interpretations of them, making novel suggestions such as that the monster seen by the narrator of Dagon is not the object of worship, but one of the worshippers. The volume is valuable for Joshi s accumulated new insights into Lovecraft s work alone, and his assessment along the way of various opinions expressed by other Lovecraft scholars ranging from, inter alia, Will Murray through David E. Schultz to Robert M. Price. But of course the bulk of the study is given over to elaborations of the Mythos by other hands. While of necessity many story plots must be recounted, the joy of Joshi s retellings is his contextualisation of them, as he discusses how a given author developed his or her contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, and the critical appraisal of the literary merits (or otherwise) of each tale. The discussions of the stories of Long, Bloch, Lieber, and Kuttner are particularly enjoyable, as Joshi interweaves his unparalleled knowledge of publishing minutiae and timelines, the derivation of terms and entities, and the relation of information from Lovecraft s letters, to the literary cross-fertilisation that went on between Lovecraft and his fellow Weird Tales writers. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos provides a rewarding, enjoyable, and cogent analysis of a literary phenomenon of modern literature. This entertaining and important study ought to find a place not only on the shelves of every serious reader of Lovecraft, but in the humanities and specialist fantasy collections of university libraries. --Lovecraft Annual 2009 - Leigh Blackmore
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Authoritative and compulsively readable,
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This review is from: The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Hardcover)
ST Joshi is one of the foremost Lovecraftian scholars of this generation, author of perhaps the definitive biography and when he explores the phenomenon that HPL's fiction has become, it merits our attention. I must say I usually read Cthulhu mythos fiction and not critical comment, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and was so absorbed I set everything else aside to finish it.Bravo to Mythos Books, a wonderfully enterprising small press which usually publishes trade paperbacks. Only recently have they given us hard covers, including the comprehensive collection of Lovecraftian pastiches by Robert Price (the irony here is just sickening!) and The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos by Mr. Joshi. It is a gorgeous hardcover with 308 pages, 281 of which are the text. I noted a few typos, mostly letter/symbol substitution, for example, = for `. List price is $40 but there is a heavy discount to $26.40 on Amazon. Jason C. Eckhardt provided the cover art, a very effective depiction of perhaps the Mountains of Madness; I believe Mr. Eckhardt has done some covers for Call of Cthulhu gaming supplements and some fanzines. Mr. Joshi starts the book by discussing why an exploration of the HPL phenomenon is worthwhile, how perhaps no other set of fictional creations has been so widely disseminated and used by so many other authors or artists in so many formats and media. He discusses what he thinks are the essential features that Lovecraft developed in his fiction, a Lovecraftian mythos as it were, as a vehicle for conveying his musings on the world. These include a fictional New England topography, a library of forbidden tomes invented by the author(s), a wide array of extraterrestrial inscrutable life forms and a sense of cosmicism (as opposed to a human centric view of the world). Mr. Joshi exhaustively walks us through HPL's development as a writer, and how his stories gradually became permeated by the above essential elements. He also does a very good job, I think, of showing how Lovecraft did not worry overmuch if every single detail or timeline did not dovetail between stories. In other words, these creations/elements/features were not the object of the fiction; they were devices in service of the stories, of the cosmic viewpoint. He then explores how Lovecraft's creations and ideas captivated his contemporaries and how they, in turn, began to use these elements. However, the change to the Cthulhu mythos (from the Lovecraft mythos, per the author), happened because the story elements became the story, ie: the listing of multiple arcane volumes, and the naming of cosmic horrors akin to Cthulhu were de rigueur instead of serving the conveyance of cosmic philosophy. Mr. Joshi patiently guides us through the effect of August Derleth on the history of Lovecraftian fiction and his argument of misconstrual, deliberate or otherwise by Derleth, is very compelling. In fact, much of the Japanese mythos fiction I have read continues to promulgate the Derlethian concept that Cthulhu et al were intrinsically evil and Nodens et al were intrinsically good and allied with humanity, and that occult magic as opposed to science fiction was the order of the day. We then get an overview of some more modern writers who use Lovecraftian elements, with very critical dissections of their work. You know, I am pretty opinionated about mythos fiction, but Mr. Joshi can be downright caustic. Regarding Brain Lumley: "One can only hope that this talentless hack will permanently abandon his unwitting parodies of Lovecraftian themes and conceptions." Geeze, Sunand, tell us what you really think! I guess there won't be any Cthulhumas card from Mr. Lumley this year. Well, for the most part I agree with Mr. Joshi's assessment of the various books he discusses, although he tends to object to any use of Lovecraft's creations in the Cthulhu mythos sense where there is no new exploration of HHHPL's cosmicism. I, on the other hand, just like a well written yarn in the genre. Therefore I suspect he would have little use for Robert Price's new compilation (Blasphemies and Revelations from Mythos Books) while I like most of it. He had a more charitable opinion of Dagon by Fred Chappell than I did and he mentioned some books that I am unfamiliar with or haven't read yet, and thus piqued my interest. If you want a much abbreviated discussion of a similar topic, try the introduction to the 3rd edition of The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia by Daniel Harms. If you want a more sympathetic view of Derleth read the introductions to Brain Lumley's Cthulhu mythos collections from Subterranean Press. ST Joshi has impeccable Lovecraftian credentials, his scholarship is superb and his prose is lucid. I already said how much I liked the book. Even if you don't agree with his excoriation of the legion of HPL imitators or some of the stories he reviews, this book is a wonderful addition to your bookshelf. Highly recommended! Somewhat tangentially I want to mention a disagreement I have with the author. While Mr. Joshi wishes imitators might cease and desist (except as an exercise in honing their craft while finding their own voice, or except those few who can convey something new in the cosmicism of HPL), I say I hope more writers take up the pen/word processor and keep the mythos rolling. The more stories that are written, the more chance that a new star will emerge and we'll have some new gem to read. I'll take a few dogs to gain some good stories! One other thing Mr. Joshi mentioned in passing that fascinated me was that there was considerable Lovecraftian fiction being written in Spanish, French and Italian. Perhaps some enterprising small press will take up translations of some of these works!
22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE GREATEST BOOK ON YE MYTHOS EVER WRITTEN!!!,
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This review is from: The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Hardcover)
As a professional Cthulhu Mythos author, I have an undying interest in this particular genre. Thirty years ago, Lin Carter's LOVECRAFT: A LOOK BEHIND THE CTHULHU MYTHOS got me hooked on reading and writing Mythos fiction. Carter's book was naive and filled with errors. Joshi's new book is intelligent and informed. He is extremely opinionated, and I disagree with him on some of what he writes, especially about Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" being an artistic failure. But for a clear, concise history and discussion of the Mythos as a literary genre, this book is fantastic -- the best of its kind, and as far as I can tell the ONLY ONE OF ITS KIND currently available. We have listings of Mythos fiction, but no real discussion of the authors and their works. Reading this book has filled me with renewed determination to hone my skills and write many more tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, stories that pay authentic homage to H. P. Lovecraft without merely ripping off his ideas. If you have any interest in the Cthulhu Mythos, this is the book for you. As an introduction to the stories, it is unsurpassed. It will lead you to the best books in this weird fiction tradition.I return to this book again and again -- just as I continually reread Lin Carter's far less impressive (but just as fun) book on the Mythos. S. T. divides the Mythos into those tales written by H. P. Lovecraft (which he calls the Lovecraft Mythos) and those written by others, called the Cthulhu Mythos. It must be remembered that, although the Mythos as we have it now came about hugely from tales that were written after Lovecraft's death, that he was alive when this kind of tale was beginning to be penned by the young men who adored his fiction then as we do now. I was just reading the letters that Lovecraft wrote to Robert Bloch, in the booklet published in 1993 by Necronomicon Press; and in his introduction Robert Bloch wrote: "The first fan letter I ever wrote was sent to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a few days after my sixteenth birthday. "I sold my first story to WEIRD TALES just a little more than a year later. Only a few weeks out of high school, I'd gratuated from schoolboy to full time professional writer. To this day I'm convinced it never would have happened without the suggestions, the help, and the encouragement I received from Lovecraft's letters." That first story was called "The Secret in the Tomb," so I believe -- and it has been included in the Chaosium collection of all of Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos stories, MYSTERIES OF THE WORM. Think of it -- if it wasn't for Lovecraft's inspiring that teenage boy to write, we wouldn't have Bloch's fiction! But there is a chain of influence. After I graduated from high school my buddy and I did a horror film fanzine, and I wrote to Bloch and asked him to write a wee tribute to Forry Ackerman. He did so, and we continued to correspond. When I was a Mormon missionary in Ireland I couldn't attend horror cinema, so I bought anthologies that had stories by Bloch in them. I got hooked on weird fiction, and then I got hooked on Lovecraft and began to write my own Mythos fiction -- all because of the influence and friendship of Robert Bloch. And so it goes. Lovecraft is made responsible for all of the amateurish Mythos crap out there -- but he is also the man who influenced that which is good fiction, wonderful stories. S. T.'s book goes into length describing how Lovecraft began, during his last decade, to write his tales of cosmic horror, and how those stories influenced younger writers such as Bloch and Derleth and so many others. In his introduction, S. T. writes: "It is, of course, impossible for any human being, within a reasonable time frame, to read all the multifarious contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos from 1926 to the present day -- contributions that take the form of stories, novellas, novels, works appearing in online venues, and so forth. Chris Jarocha-Ernst's A CTHULHU MYTHOS BIBLIOGRAPHY AND CONCORDANCE (1999) lists 2631 works by Lovecraft and others, although this number seems substantially inflated by numerous items that are only tangentially related to Lovecraft's conceptions. In this study, I have paid particular attention to the earliest Mythos writing--by Lovecraft and his immediate colleagues--but have had to be much more selective when dealing with what I believe to be the most significant or noteworthy works by later hands." It is fascinating, now, to watch S. T. Joshi's current career begin to resemble, queerly, that of August Derleth, in Derleth's role as editor. S. T. revised the three Arkham House editions of Lovecraft's fiction, and then went on to the endless task of editing and publishing Lovecraft's letters. But now -- now, S. T. Joshi is editing books of -- gasp! -- Cthulhu Mythos fiction! He is editing a line of Mythos titles for Perilous Press, the first book of which is a handsome hardcover edition of Michael Shea's Mythos fiction. He has edited, for Mythos Books, an anthology of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, SPAWN OF THE GREEN ABYSS, that will be published this year. Most important, he has edited a book called BLACK WINGS -- NEW TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR. It cannot be called a book of Mythos fiction, but it is an extraordinary collection of extremely fine tales by modern horror and science fiction authors who have been influenced by Lovecraft. One may say, then, that, at present, the Mythos, once so abhorred by Joshi, now has him by the balls! YOG-SOTHOTH!!! poftscript: S. T. continues his exploration and promotion of the Mythos with a new book that is forthcoming from Miskatonic River Press -- DISSECTING CTHULHU--ESSAYS ON THE CTHULHU MYTHOS. You may read of the book and eventually order it at the Miskatonic River Press website, [...] where you will also find a wealth of other titles. With this new book, S. T. has assembled an agglutination of essays by such notables as Richard L. Tierney, Robert M. Price, Dirk W. Mosig, Steven J. Mariconda and others discussing the books and gods and topography of the Mythos, the influence that Lovecraft absorbed from using the Mythos and its motifs, &c &c. Sounds delicious.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Call for the Revitalization of the Mythos Feeling,
By
This review is from: The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (Hardcover)
As previouly stated in other reviews, Joshi can be quite opinionated, though one doesn't necessarily have to agree with him to come away with an abundance of knowledge regarding whatever subject has been chosen for discussion. Such is the case with 'The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos'.The author lets it be known which Mythos writers he has shunned, and this can sometimes be taxing on one's quest for understanding. The tone flows between scholarly treatise and opinionated discourse. Overall, Joshi provides a fairly thorough overview of Mythos history, and gives at least a few lines of space to the core of Mythos fictional output, past and present. This is a book that may very well provide the Mythos story hunter with new directions in which to pursue imaginative discovery. It is, indeed, inspiring in some sections. Regarding the physical book itself...the general peruser may find it to be a tad overpriced, but titles from small publishers have small print runs, which comes at a greater cost. It is a sturdy hardback, with nicely rendered cover art. There are so many great writing talents contributing to the Mythos, and many of them would likely not see much print otherwise, so it is important for us readers/customers to support to those deserving small press publishers such as Mythos books. Books such as this would not be available without them.
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