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Post by andydecker on Jan 22, 2023 13:30:54 GMT
Scott David Aniolowski - Singers of Strange Songs: A Celebration of Brian Lumley (Chaosium, 1997, 238 pages)  Content: Introduction: The Caller of the Black and the Lord of the Worms
Brian Lumley - City Out of Time (1977)
Brian Lumley - Cement Surroundings (1969)
Don D'Ammassa - Bad Soil
Donald R. Burleson - The Temple of Yig
Benjamin Adams - Not to Force the Rhymes
Tina L. Jens - In His Daughter's Darkling Womb
James Robert Smith - The Reliable Vacuum Company
John Tynes - The Nullity of Choice
Lois H. Gresh - Where I Go, Mi-Go
Gregory Nicoll - Subway Accident
Benjamin Adams and James Robert Smith - The High Rollers
C. J. Henderson - A Forty Share in Innsmouth
Stephen Mark Rainey - Shudder Wyrm
Brian Lumley - Spaghetti (1985)
The merit of a celebration of Brian Lumley's contribution to the Derleth Mythos is hard to evaluate. Either you like his technicolour approach to everything Lovecraftian or you don't. In his foreword the editor explains his dislike of featuring individual story introductions. I think it was a wrong approach und still is. While you nowadays can research most of the contributors with a click, at the time of publishing you couldn't. You needed to be fluent in genre fiction and especially the small press to recognize some of the names. Say what you want about Robert Price, his introductions were always knowledgeable and often established some much needed context. This here is just a bunch of stories which sometimes may have something to do with Lumley or not. |
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Post by pbsplatter on Jan 22, 2023 15:35:26 GMT
What is the deal with Lumley that makes him so divisive? I’ve only read three of his stories—I thought Fruiting Bodies and The Picknickers were great fun and The Conch Shell, if dull, at least was passable.
But then I couldn’t help but smile when I read the title “Where I Go, Mi-Go,” so perhaps do not have highest taste in Mythos fiction etc.
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Post by andydecker on Jan 22, 2023 18:29:19 GMT
What is the deal with Lumley that makes him so divisive? I’ve only read three of his stories—I thought Fruiting Bodies and The Picknickers were great fun and The Conch Shell, if dull, at least was passable. But then I couldn’t help but smile when I read the title “Where I Go, Mi-Go,” so perhaps do not have highest taste in Mythos fiction etc. It's a great title, no doubt :-) Can't say anything about the story, either I didn't read read it or have it forgotten completely.
Well, Lumley. This is of course a matter of taste, but he took the Derleth Mythos version to heart and further dumbed it down. Derleth tried to destroy R'lyeh with an A-Bomb, Lumley did the same only in greater scale in his novels. He transformed the Mythos into modern (mid-seventies) action-advenure. His hero Titus Crow journeys in the grandfather-clock to the Elder Gods and fights the evil Old Ones, whose countless offsprings are called CCD (Cthulhu Cycle Deities) in the novels.
To be fair, his first Titus Crow novels are entertaining as Godzilla vs Mothra is entertaining. Basically he treats the Mythos with the same approach as those monster movies, and these first novels are surely better than his too long novellas where he repeats the Innsmouth plot again and again without adding anything new. I guess his main fault - if you want to call it that - is that he uses the Mythos concepts only as cheap theater props. He is barely the only one who works in this way, far from it, for many years this was the only way those pastiches were done, but for a while he was one of the most visible of those writers. Maybe this makes him a convenient target.
Maybe his way was the right way. If one considers the success of the role-playing games and the following merchandise like those cute Cthulhu slippers, his ideas were the right ones. Just exchange the vampire with a CCD, fetch a flame-thrower and a star stone instead of a stake and a cruicifix. Considering how later generation writers like Stross and the veritable flood of Mythos writers in the last 20 years approached the topic, they did the right thing commercially speaking. Lovecraft's cosmicsm isn't a managable - or welcome - concept for a franchise. Derleth's and friends simplistic good vs evil is.
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Post by pbsplatter on Jan 22, 2023 22:01:32 GMT
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful explanation. I share the general disdain for that sort of thing although I’ve enjoyed the board game and the RPG, and I do love the very practical approach the authorities take at the end of Shadow Over Innsmouth.
I do think it’s inevitable that if you make monsters the center of your cosmic nihilism then someone will want to fight them (and if they actually do exist physically then why not)? For what it’s worth I think Ligotti’s surrealistic approach to crushing dread and doom works a bit better because it eschews any monsters for the most part in favor of grotesques.
Still, going into a grandfather clock to fight Old Gods doesn’t seem like something I would much appreciate.
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