The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

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

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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.

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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.

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