Shawn Garrett (ed) - The Second Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (Wildside Press, 2016, Ebook)
Shawn Garrett - Introduction
Duane W. Rimel - Dreams of Yith (1934)
Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft - Out of the Aeons (1935)
Irvin S. Cobb - Fishhead (1913)
Frank Belknap Long - When Chaugnar Wakes (1932) poem
Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft - The Mound (1940)
Robert E. Howard - The Thing on the Roof (1932)
Hugh B. Cave - The Isle of Dark Magic (1934)
Robert Bloch - The Secret in the Tomb (1935)
Frank Belknap Long - The Horror from the Hills (1931)
Manly Wade Wellman - The Terrible Parchment (1937)
Robert Bloch - The Shambler from the Stars (1935)
H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley - The Diary of Alonzo Typer (1938)
Henry Kuttner - Hydra (1939)
Robert Bloch - The Suicide in the Study (1935)
Emil Petaja - Marmok (1940) poem[/div]
Emil Petaja - The Intruder (1940)
Charles A. Tanner - Out of the Jar (1941)
Emil Petaja - Skydrift (1949)
George T. Wetzel - Anonymous (1951)
D. R. Smith - Why Abdul Alhazred Went Mad (1950)
George T. Wetzel - Caer Sidhi (1954)
Lin Carter - Dead of Night (1988)
Avram Davidson - Death of a Damned Good Man (1991)
Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft - Medusa's Coil
Lin Carter - Perchance to Dream (1988)
Lin Carter - The Winfield Heritence (1981)
Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long and H. P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt and C. L. Moore - The Challenge from Beyond (1935)
Darrell Schweitzer - The Last Horror Out of Arkham (1977)
Inspired by Steve's posts I took a look.
Duane W. Rimel - Dreams of YithThese Mythos poems are so bad.
HPL+Hazel Heald – Out of the AeonsThere is a mummy from lost Mu in the museum in Boston. According to the dark lore of occultist von Junzt this may be T'yog who wanted to banish dark god Ghatanothoa and failed. Seems T'yog is awakening.
Another of Lovecraft's revisions which he mostly re-wrote from scratch and added Howard's character Von Junzt. Done at the end of his career this reads in large parts like a conscious self-parody of the Mythos. Like "The Horror in the Museum" it is like a blueprint for bad pastiches.
Irvin S. Cobb – FishheadTwo rednecks kill Fishhead, a loner halfbreed who is living alone at the sea and has a bad reputation for doing unnatural things with the fish. But vengeance comes swift.
This story was supposedly an inspiration for HPL. Rich in atmosphere but slight in plot, the doubtless surprising ending comes a bit out of the left field. More a curiosity, made more interesting through the changing times.
Frank Belknap Long – When Chaugnar wakesAnother dreary poem.
HPL + Zelia Bishop – The MoundAm indian burial mound in Oklahoma is the gateway to a lost race. There is a hysterical narrator, native Americans, a Spanish explorer who is dead for 400 years and the usual hysterical narrator.
Lovecraft wrote this after a short outline from Bishop and it was published after his death. At the time the formula of the Lost Race had become stale, that the concept reads in parts like a variation of
At the Mountains of Madness doesn't help. But if you ignore the baggage it is not bad.
Robert E. Howard – The Thing on the RoofNameless narrator lends Indiana Jones inspiration #3333 Tussmann his edition of Von Junzt' Nameless Cults. Tussman wants to rob this temple in Honduras. The treasure he doesn't find – but he should have closed the door.
Classic pulp by Howard. One of his lesser horror tales. The best part is the back-story of his eldritch book, Nameless Cults. There is often something odd about Howard stories in which the narrator is just the passive observer. It just doesn't sits right.
Hugh B. Cave – The Isle of Dark MagicThe narrator, a missionary on an island in the South Seas, tells the tale of a strange visitor. Peter Mace brings a statue of his dead lover and tries to resurrect the stone idol with unholy books to have her back. Unfortunatly he doesn't know that the magic also ressurects her corpse a continent away.
The ever dependable Cave writes a nice South Seas Black Magic tale. It has the typical cliches, but it is nicely written, even if parts of the plot don't make a lot of sense. Why Peter travels from New York to the South Seas to play a bargain basement Colonel Kurtz is anyone's guess. The Mythos elements are more than slim, basically it is just another set of old magic tomes – most of them terrible unoriginal, but
Le Culte des Morts sound promising - and the name-dropping of Nyarlathotep. But it has a nice twist and is not included in the collection
Murgunstrumm, so all is good.
Robert Block – The Secret in the TombThe heir of a family curse gets lured to a secret crypt where all his ancestors were killed. There lurks a ghoul, his ancestor.
Early Bloch. The plot itself is slight, the prose is a bit too purple in places. The Mythos connection is slim again, but it is Bloch's contribution in the creation of Ludvig Prinn and his evil book
The Mysteries of the Worm. Lovecraft contributed the Latin title
De Vermis Mysteriis.
Frank Belknap Long – The Horror from the HillsSome explorer in the pay of museum curator Harris bring the statue of Old One Chaugnar Faugn who looks like an elephant to New York and dies because of the curse. Chaugnar wakes and haunts the mean streets, but a handy anti-entropy ray sends him somewhere.
This is as long as it is tedious. Characters mostly have endless, rambling monologues of nonsense while nothing much happens. Awful.
Manley Wade Wellman – The terrible ParchmentA married pulp writer and his wife get a page of the original Necronomicon, so Lovecraft didn't invent it. The page wants to put the whammy on the couple, but they can destroy it. With Holy Water.
Maybe one of the first or the first metafiction combining the Mythos and the real world. Wellman plays it for laughs, and to be honest it is kind of amusing.
Robert Bloch – The Shamböer from the StarsAn aspiring pulp-writer really wants to write a masterpiece. He stumbles upon a copy of Mysteries of the Worm. When an educated friend, a mystic in New England, tries one of the incantations, something invisible appears and sucks him dry.
Another early Bloch, straight fare, takes itself serious. So different from the later Bloch. As he kind of "killed" his mentor Lovecraft in the story, Lovecraft returned the favour in his story "The Haunter of the Dark" in which he "killed" the Bloch stand in.
