Brian Lumley - Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tale

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Brian Lumley - Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales (Roc/UK, 1994, 387 pages)

Content:

Brian Lumley - Foreword
Inception (1987) Titus Crow story
Lord of the Worms (1983) Titus Crow story
Beneath the Moors (1974) Mythos story
The Return of the Deep Ones (1984) Mythos story

Joshi hated Beneath the Moors, which was published by Arkham House first and is Lumley's first (short) novel. "It is difficult to describe, short of profanity, the extreme incompetence of Beneath the Moors. Not only does it borrow heavily – right down to points of phraseology – from several of Lovecraft's poorer stories (notably '"The Doom That Came to Sarnath" and "The Nameless City"), but, in spite of its attempt to mimic the verisimilitude of Lovecraft's documentary style, it presents events so preposterously unbelievable that the sense of realism and plausibility is entirely absent."

Lord of the Worms tells an early adventure of Titus Crow, and to be honest, the plot borrows heavily on C. A. Smith's The Return of the Sorcerer. Pennyless Crow must work after WWII for occultist Julian Carstairs and moves into his house The Barrows. The twist is that Carstairs wants Crow as a sacrifice. It includes pages on numerology and the inevitable name-dropping of all those evil books in Carstair's library. At over 70 pages it is a bit long for the slight plot and the twist at the end is dumb as it all depends on the plausibility for the villain of taking a crucial information at face value without checking.

The Return of the Deep Ones is a short novel about, well, the Deep Ones from Innsmouth. Marine biologist  John Vollister gets into contact with a bunch of Deep Ones on the British coast who are busy working on the release of Cthulhu and taking over the world. Vollister becomes a prisoner and is subjected to a treatment so he finally transforms into the Deep One he unknowingly is. But he takes up the fight against his brethren who attack with a shoggoth.

I never was a fan of the idea of the Deep Ones, it is having Aliens living in the sea, which is not very interesting and also changes the narrative. Lumley here basically takes the Derleth Mythos and transforms it into a bit of a textbook. Bizarrely he incorporates his story Haggopian from 1973 into the story which makes this even longer. The end is not really a surprise.