The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Brian Stableford

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012 by Brian Stableford

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      INTRODUCTION

      The idea and literary use of “cosmic horror” did not begin with the work of H. P. Lovecraft, nor can he really be said to have “popularized” it, at least in his lifetime, although there have been few other writers who have enjoyed such a rich and influential literary afterlife. When Lovecraft invited his friends to use his own literary materials—which he used himself rather sparsely, for various idiosyncratic reasons—he could not possibly have imagined that the process would continue for more than seventy years after his death, produce hundreds of volumes, and expand to include people such as me, who were not even born until long after he had passed on.

      Even now, though, it is not entirely clear that the Cthulhu Mythos, as Lovecraft’s key endeavor came to be known, has actually been “popularized,” in spite of its overflow to such media as films, comic books and computer games. One of its chief attractions, in fact, has always been its defiant esotericism, coupled with the fact that the mere mention of it (by those whose tongues are up to the difficult task of mentioning it) can make respectable literary folk curl their lip in contempt and disdain. Like all the good stuff, the Cthulhu Mythos belongs to “unpopular culture” rather than “popular culture,” and its adherents probably would not want it any other way.

      The notion of cosmic horror is itself essentially esoteric. As an esthetic sensibility, or the source of a subtle frisson of dread, it is far more dependent on the imaginative capacity of the reader than tales of pursuit by serial killers, the sudden appearance of ghosts or doors bulging in response to unspecifiable forces on the other side, all of which are obvious sources of anxiety whose threat is close at hand. In its essence, cosmic horror is far more abstract, asking us to take aboard and appreciate some of the corollaries of the intellectual awareness that the horizons of our vision and our lives are extremely minuscule by comparison with the size and age of the universe.

      It was not until the nineteenth century that scientific discoveries allowed awareness to grow that the true size of the universe could not be measured in mere thousands of miles, nor its real antiquity in mere thousands of years. This was significant because, by and large, the everyday imagination can cope with thousands, and perhaps, at a stretch, millions, but there is no way that it can properly encompass billons or trillions, which are simply too vast to envisage. The effect that the incapacity in question has on the psyche is indescribable, as is evidence by the fact that the most commonly-used verb invented to represent it, “boggle,” is an obvious joke—one of many attempts to cope with the problem by simply refusing to recognize it. It is that denial rather than the fact itself that provides Lovecraftian fiction with its heart and soul; the fiction of cosmic horror rarely bothers to point out the mere truism of our utter insignificance in a vast and uncaring universe; what it does is to play, sometime delicately and cleverly, but always with a reserve of sheer brutality, with our inability to deal with the fact mentally, and our perverse insistence that, even if it is so, it is irrelevant.

      The Mythos was important, initially within the context of Lovecraft’s circle of friends and their attempts to lay siege to Weird Tales and a handful of other market outlets, because it provided a vocabulary of ideas that permitted certain basic aspects of an awareness of cosmic vastness to be represented. The most basic of them is perhaps Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos that lurks in the cosmic background, behind the veils of matter, space and time, but there is a good reason why the honor of being its central figure was attributed to Cthulhu, who is possessed of all kinds of useful ambiguity in the shrewdly scattered details suggesting his origin, history and contemporary existence: dead but capable of eternally lying (in more ways than one); extraterrestrial but also extradimensional; associated not only with enigmatic “star-spawn” but also with the slimy mysteries of the alien world under the sea; shadowed but in no way properly documented by the cryptic pages of the Necronomicon....

      It is because the central ideas of the Cthulhu Mythos provided the first such vocabulary that it has not only retained a unique place in literary history but continues to supply useful fuel to writers interested in working in the same territory of psychic unease. Other symbolic vocabularies have been invented since, and it can certainly be argued that some do the job more elegantly, but they can never have the primacy, and hence the “authenticity” of Lovecraft’s. It can certainly be argued, too, that it is a nobler quest for writers to invent their own vocabularies and redo the work from scratch themselves, but there is a sense in which starting over robs writers of a precious asset of recognizability: the ability to help readers orientate themselves rapidly, and to draw upon what readers already know as a resource.

      Writers of naturalistic fiction are, of course, always fully tooled-up with that resource, and even writers of heterocosmic fiction retain substantial provisions of it in the mimetic and naturalistic aspects of their heterocosms, but it is often useful to have extra supplies of recognition and familiarity built in even to those aspects of a world within the text that seek to differentiate it from the familiar world. There are good reasons (as well as a few bad ones) why fantastic universes invented by writers often outlive their creators and continue to expand and reproduce long after their genesis—and the Lovecraftian universe has some of the best reasons of all. If modern adventures in its expansion and reproduction—including this one—seem to some observers to be mere exercises in pastiche, so be it, but I certainly do not feel that what I am doing is copying, or even supplementation, but rather attempting to assist with a useful process of evolution.

      “The Legacy of Erich Zann” first appeared in a hardcover volume published by Perilous Press, as a makeweight for a short novel entitled The Womb of Time (2011). I liked it so much that I wrote a series of sequels, similarly featuring Auguste Dupin as a protagonist, confronting not only elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, but other aspects of an even vaster metaphysical system of which even the apparatus of the Mythos is envisaged an exceedingly tiny fraction. The other volumes, all published by Borgo Press, are the novella double Valdemar’s Daughter/The Mad Trist and the novels The Quintessence of August, The Cthulhu Encryption, and Journey to the Core of Creation.

      “The Truth about Pickman” and “The Holocaust of Ecstasy” were both written for anthologies of Mythos stories, the former for S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings (P.S. Publishing, 2010) and the latter for Darrell Schweitzer’s Cthulhu’s Reign (DAW 2010). “The Seeds from the Mountains of Madness” was planned as a contribution to another such anthology, but grew far too large for such inclusion and is published here for the first time.