Titus Crow, Volume 2: The Clock of Dreams; Spawn of the Winds [Paperback]

Brian Lumley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Titus Crow | Publication Date: October 6, 1999

Titus Crow and his faithful companion and record-keeper fight the gathering forces of darkness-the infamous and deadly Elder Gods of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu and his dark minions are bent on ruling the earth. A few puny humans cannot possibly stand against these otherworldly evil gods, yet time after time, Titus Crow drives the monsters back into the dark from whence they came. Volume Two contains two full novels, The Clock of Dreams and Spawn of the Winds.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Second hardcover volume of three, this one reprinting two ``adventure horror'' novels written in Lumley's Lovecraft-struck youth. Titus Crow: Vol. One (published in January of this year) describes Titus Crow's discovery of the Cthulhu monsters, who have been exiled to Earth by the Elder Gods of Elysia and who swim in molten stone below the mantle and have spread nests about the planet. Titus joins with Henri de Marigny to fight these telepathic subterranean horrors, and the two speed about in a grandfather clockshaped time machine created by the Elder Gods. Crow journeys to far-off Elysia, where he is rebuilt as an android, his human mind lodged in a body with perfect synthetic organs. Now, in The Clock of Dreams, the first of the two novels collected here, de Marigny, contacted by Kthanid the Elder in Elysia by dream telepathy, learns that Titus and his beloved Tiania are prisoners of Earth's dreamworld, trapped by their enemies in hideous nightmares. Through mental communication with the time-clock, de Marigny leaves the waking world and contacts Grant Enderby of Ulthar, who alone knows where in the dreamworld of Dyleth-Leen Titus and Tiania have been imprisoned. Thanks to de Marigny's efforts, Titus is finally freed to stand up to some ectoplasmal, abyss-spawned horrors. In Spawn of the Winds, it falls upon the telepathic Texan Hank Silberhutte to track and battle the Cthulhu Cycle Deities. Silberhutte knows that Ithaqua, the abominable Force of Evil also known as the Wind-Walker, has been exiled to the Arctic region. He goes in search of him only to have Ithaqua appear as a great smoke-like blot in the sky that assaults and downs his plane over the McKenzie Mountains. Hank disappears but later begins telepathic transmissions to the medium Juanita Alvarez, telling her of his battle with Ithaqua. Carmine prose from the very pits of hell as Lumley blends Lovecraft's demons and gods with Edgar Rice Burroughs's wild sense of adventure. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Patchworks of gothic horror, space opera and lost-world fantasies. Seeds of the vivid cosmic layers that so distinguish Lumley's Necroscope series flourish in this collection, and loyal fans will surely admire their flowering."--Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (October 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312868685
• ISBN-13: 978-0312868680
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,006,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Lumley is the author of the bestselling Necroscope series of vampire novels. An acknowledged master of Lovecraft-style horror, Brian Lumley has won the British Fantasy Award and been named a Grand Master of Horror. His works have been published in more than a dozen countries and have inspired comic books, role-playing games, and sculpture, and been adapted for television. When not writing, Lumley can often be found spear-fishing in the Greek islands, gambling in Las Vegas, or attending a convention somewhere in the US. Lumley and his wife live in England.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Weird Stuff......, July 2, 2002

By 

Daniel V. Reilly (Upstate New York, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Titus Crow: The Clock of Dreams ; Spawn of the Winds (Hardcover)

Volume Two of Tor's three-volume omnibus reprints two books, The Clock of dreams and Spawn of the Winds. Much like Volume One, this book is a 50/50 affair....While the first half of Book One was GREAT, and the second half awful, we split the difference here: Part one is pretty good, if somewhat ridiculous, and part two is a vast improvement on what has gone before.

The Clock of Dreams presents us with the laughable image of two middle-aged men tooling around Dreamland in a flying GRANDFATHER CLOCK.......This is just too ridiculous to get past. The story takes place in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamland, home of my most hated Lovecraft stories, so already I have a predjudice against this chapter, but Lumley actually manages to deliver a brisk story with a few great moments; He does especially well with Lovecraft's turbaned Denizens of Leng....

Spawn of the Winds fares better, because we're spared the boring presence of Titus Crow and his snooze-inducing crony, Henri. Spawn finds a team of psychics, mentioned briefly in Book One, who are abducted by Ithaqua, The Walker On The Winds, and taken to far-off Borea. From there we get a Robert E. Howard pastiche, as our two-fisted texan hero and his buddies are drawn into a war between Ithaqua's forces and the opposing army of his daughter, Armandra. The book is reminisicent of territory Lumley would cover later (and better...) in the Blood Brothers books. Spawn is a rip-snortin' action story, and together Clock and Spawn are a not bad read, if a tad predictable.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cthulhu Mythos: 1930's Pulp Style, May 8, 2002

By 

Craig Alan Loewen "Craig Alan Loewen" (Pennsylvania, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Titus Crow, Volume 2: The Clock of Dreams; Spawn of the Winds (Paperback)

Concerning the Cthulhu Mythos, Brian Lumley is a writer of the August Derleth school. While Lovecraft and others had the total meaninglessness of the universe as their cosmological base, Derleth wrote the Mythos as a battle between good and evil between ultimate forces. Lumley takes this further, stripping the Mythos of its supernatural aspects and putting it solidly into the realm of science fiction. What were supernatural aspects of the mythos stories are now an alien science as the forces of good personified in the Elder Gods struggle with mankind to keep the evil beings of the Cthulhu Mythos trapped within their eternal prisons and foil the attempts of those who would release them.

Lumley's style is also reminiscent of the pulp genre popular in the 1930's with black-and-white heroic protagonists aided by beautiful heroines in a story of non-stop, bigger-than-life struggles and battles. So, if your taste goes toward the more amoral, often pornographic splatterpunk tales that pass for Mythos stories today, you're going to be disappointed.

In the first book, The Clock of Dreams, Lumley takes us on a tour of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands adding a consistency and logic that was missing in Lovecraft's Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but retaining much of the wonder and magic. Like Derleth, Lumley is not fond of loose ends and ties up a lot of threads left by Lovecraft for others to repair. This time, Henri-Laurent de Marigny takes the role as main protagonist as he rescues his friend Titus Crow and his Elder God wife from the dream traps of Cthulhu himself.

In Spawn of the Winds, Crow and company are left behind and we are told the story of Hank Silburhutte, a two-fisted Texan with a striking resemblance to author Robert Howard. A story true to its 1930's pulp roots, Silburhutte and his friends are captured by Ithaqua aka the Wendigo and transported to the planet Borea which may or may not be in our galaxy, let alone our dimension. Be prepared for lots of descriptions of big burly men with rippling muscles and bulging sinews, beautiful alien women, and bloody battles. It's a lot of fun.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good continuation, August 4, 2000

By 

"mrmxtrblk" (Taylors, SC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Titus Crow, Volume 2: The Clock of Dreams; Spawn of the Winds (Paperback)

This two-part sequel to Titus Crow Volume 1 should certainly satisfy Lumley fans. I began with reading his recent Necroscope books and found his earlier work such as this to be just as entertaining. The first novella in the volume, Clock of Dreams, continues the story of Titus Crow and his sidekick, Henri Laurent De Marigny. It takes a change from its predecessors method of telling the story in the form of notebook entries and tape recordings and is written more like a conventional book. It takes place mostly in the Dreamlands, with Crow and Marigny battling Cthulhu and his evil minions, to prevent them from seizing control of the dreams of Mankind. The second novella (which is not quite as good since Marigny and Crow are never even mentioned and is not quite as engaging or original) features hot-headed Texan Hank Silberhutte battling the evil Ithaqua. I have yet to read the next installment of this series, but I'm sure Crow and Marigny will return! If you are a Lumley or Lovecraft fan, this book is a must-have.