Kevin's Watch

I said Amazing didn't I? Oops I meant Astounding--anyway I originally posted this in the 70s Ballentine Book Adult Fantasy Series thread as a follow-up, but it has more relevance here:

I consider Dreamquest of the Unknown Kadath to be fantasy but it does include a few of the "Other Gods", like Nyarlathotep, that form parts of the "Cthulhu Mythos" that many consider horror. Indeed, Ballentine and Carter were also responsible for reviving H. P. Lovecraft's work which was, pretty much, languishing in obsurity except for some badly edited and serialized stories in Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, back in the 1930s. So they essentially "reanimated" (pun intended) the horror genre, as well, back then and introduced writers that corresponded with Lovecraft or were actively writing stories inspired by the "Mythos Universe".

All part of the fictious Arkham House publishers, graduates from "Miskatonic University" such as: August Derleth (some have lumped Hogston here too-his works are quite weird), Francis Bellknap Long, Clifford D. Simak, Oliver Onions and the outstanding "proteges" such as Clarke Aston Smith and Robert Anton Wilson. Of course Wilson went on to write the immortal Illuminatus! trilogy with Robert Shea and such amazing "layman" quantum excursions as Schroedinger's Cat and the Cosmic Trigger books.

Yes, I believe he killed himself after his mother died, apparently he was real close to her. And consider Howard's publishing woes atop of that. Sad, sad story!

For American readers, I suggest getting the Penguin Twentieth Century Classic series, and/or the Arkham House Publishing, Inc complete collection and/or the new Library of America volume.

However Del Rey doesn't publish their collections with the official corrected definitive texts based off genuine original letters, manuscripts, publications, etc unlike the three sources above. They should be avoided unless you don't mind adulterated HPL.

June 14th will also mark the launch of The Modern Library's At The Mountains of Madness: Definitive Edition. Look forward to it's release. Can't ever have enough HPL can we?

Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft were the three big "Weird Tales" names of ~70 years ago. Lovecraft (not a sociable man) was friends with both of the others (mostly by mail). He and Smith were particular admirers of each others' writing.

In no way can Clark Ashton Smith be considered a "protege" of Lovecraft's. They were contemporaries. Smith was a fantasist; Lovecraft a horror writer (though some of his first published stories were some very derivative imitations of Dunsany). It was Lovecraft who immortalized Smith into his monstrous pantheon as "Klarkash-Ton."

But Smith was not some younger writer who just sat around writing stories set in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos! He was a humorous fantasist loosely in the tradition of Dunsany. Jack Vance is a Smith disciple, as Wolfe in turn was heavily influenced by Vance at times.

Smith has become far more obscure than HPL. Part of this is probably due to the fact that Vance took what Smith did and did it better and in a more modern way. Smith's writing reads as a little dated and overly formal for the sort of lighthearted thing he did. OTOH, HPL's style, like Poe's, remains more timeless in the dark context of his stories.

HPL's followers haven't really had much to add to his legacy, because at heart his message was simple enough that even he repeated himself constantly in his very small overall body of fiction: Life is meaningless and terrible; we're all at the mercy of forces far too powerful and evil/uncaring to even bother to struggle against. Once you've explored that in a dozen stories or two, you haven't left much else for Derleth et al to add (and you yourself are going to have to rewrite those dozen stories several times each).

Lovecraft's voluminous corresponce reveals a man with much to say, but in his published writings (beyond the Dunsany-imitating stage) he relentlessly pounded home the same theme in the same style and usually with the same words. He is among the most easily parodied of writers.