Beagle Books' Lovecraft Boxed Set (1971): The Polished Black Jewel of Ultimate Horror

Here's an item I've never seen till now when it's being sold online: the 1971 Ballantine/Beagle/Boxer Books boxed set of five Lovecraft titles, The Arkham Edition of H.P. Lovecraft. I own a few of the Beagle/Boxer imprint editions, the various Cthulhu mythos works from August Derleth. Now I know that in the 1980s scholar S.T. Joshi began correcting all of those Arkham House editions of Lovecraft, restoring and editing them according to the Gentleman from Providence's original intent and manuscripts as much as possible. These Ballantine paperbacks are what have been replaced, as apparently they were riddled with editorial inconsistencies and whatnots. Still, they'd look great on my shelves!

I can't even begin to describe the feelings that these book covers evoke in me: starry nights of reading late with a small desk lamp for illumination, their black cover art glinting darkly hinting at the untold horrors hidden within, the spice and dust in the books' moldy scent that spoke of ages immemorial, of  secrets known but to a few brave, mad souls willing to go to strange, far places.

And I don't even like a lot of these covers! I mean, this one for At the Mountains of Madness? Ludicrous, silly, absurd. The others have their charms—Charles Dexter Ward is probably best, thanks to artist Victor Valla—but it wasn't until the surreal Michael Whelan covers beginning in 1982 that readers really had a paperbacks of HPL where cover and content aligned.

Still, I dig the crazy creepy weirdo early-'70s vibe of these editions, hearkening back to the day when only the most devoted of horror and fantasy fans knew of ol' E'ch-Pi-El, trembled before dread Cthulhu, marveled at the many-columned city of Y'ha-nthlei, and pondered while deep in shag carpet the bubbling blasphemous mindlessness of Azathoth at the center of infinity...
 

The Horror in the Museum by H.P. Lovecraft & Others (1970): Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

Can you believe I'm only getting around to reading The Horror in the Museum this month? It's true. Despite being pretty Lovecraft-obsessed since I was 15, I've always skipped over these stories which he'd ghost-written for people whose names dropped right off even horror/pulp fiction's radar. Figured there was no way they could be as weird, as unsettling, as wonderful as HPL's own. Aaaand... yes, okay, I was right, but still the best stories here, which HPL revised for other pulp writers throughout his career - yes, to detriment of his own original works - are welcome additions to Lovecraft's oeuvre. All the stories in Horror were published through the '20s, '30s and '40s in Weird Tales magazine.

Ballantine Books, 1976, cover art by Murray Tinkelman (thanks Uncle Doug!)

I discovered that many of the stories were only in the barest fragment form when they reached Lovecraft through the mail, and that one served as a sort of dry-run for his own soon-to-come masterpieces "The Shadow out of Time" and At the Mountains of Madness. If that doesn't get you to salivating at the prospect of discovering new untamed vistas of mind-blasting cosmic wonder and fright... you're reading the wrong blog, probably.

 Original Arkham House hardcover with art by Gahan Wilson, 1970

Most of the paperback editions included fewer than a dozen of the 20-odd tales included in the original 1970 Arkham House hardcover. I own the 1989 revised Arkham, but just read a sampling; most of the plots, prose, and characterization started to run together in my imagination, alas. It can get to be a bit much, all those scholarly types of tender disposition, delicate sensibilities, nervous system a hair's-breadth away from total collapse, moonish pallor and solitary habits who, with the aid of the racially-stereotyped, stumble upon ancient subterranean horrors, mind-boggling proof of alien gods with consonants and apostrophes for names (our pal Cthulhu affects the nom de guerre "Tulu" here), living corpses, and that final reveal in the last sentence. You know how it goes.

Revised Arkham House hardcover with art by Raymond Bayless, 1989

But I can recommend some titles you shouldn't miss. There are several tales from one C.M. Eddy, Jr., - a personal friend of Lovecraft's - none impressive save "The Loved Dead" (1923), which reaches purple heights of perversity in prose so ornamental the word "necrophilia" needs never be said (which caused some controversy for Weird Tales upon publication). First-person narrator, of insulated and awkward boyhood which leads to similar adulthood, relates his unholy lust, his obsessive search for his next conquest, literally writing the short tale as he lounges upon gravestones in a midnight graveyard. Dude becomes an assistant at a funeral parlor, of course.

 No case was too gruesome for my impious sensibilities, and I soon became master my chosen vocation. Every fresh corpse brought in to the establishment meant a fulfilled promise of ungodly gladness, of irreverent gratification; a return of that rapturous tumult of the arteries which transformed my grisly task into one of beloved devotion - yet every carnal satiation exacted its toll. I came to dread the days that brought no dead for me to gloat over, and prayed to all the obscene gods of the nethermost abysses to bring swift, sure death upon the residents of the city. 

Lush and pulpy as exotic rotting fruit, "The Loved Dead" is a solid if noxious gem in the collection, somewhere between the poison eroticism of Baudelaire and Gautier and the modern horror decadence of Poppy Z. Brite. And I'm sure Lovecraft wrote the bulk of it!

 

Del Rey trade paperback, 2007

"The Curse of Yig" (1928) and "The Mound" (1929), two of the more well-known stories, are by Zealia Bishop (I didn't read "Medusa's Coil"). Both are good and gruesome. It was a refreshing change-up to find these are set in the American Southwest, amongst its deserted mesas and spare vegetation, not to mention the convoluted mythologies of the Native Americans who've lived there for centuries. The latter features extensive descriptions of an alien race, one so debased and cruel it's clear HPL meant it as a real-life commentary, and in it are the horrific roots for his later, longer classics. The descent into what lies beneath that mound is nightmarishly captivating! The title story, from 1923 and ostensibly written by Hazel Heald, was fine, similar to "Pickman's Model" (which was written after the Heald story). Another Heald, "Out of the Aeons," overplays its hand, although I still liked it:

Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic - tentacled - proboscidian - octopus-eyed - semi-amorphous - plastic - partly squamous and partly rugose - ugh! But nothing I could say  could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night.

Horror ends with with a whimper and not a bang - but what a whimper. "The Night Ocean," a revision of R.H. Barlow's (with HPL above) story, eschews all mythos blather - nary a shoggoth or a degenerate anywhere - becoming a meditative piece of eerie suggestion. Told by an artist seeking respite oceanside in a rented cabin after a bout of exhausting work, it is a fine and quiet tale rife with gloomy wonder. A series of drownings occur during his stay that get him ruminating on the sea and what hides in its dreadful brooding depths.

The people who died - some of them swimmers of a skill beyond the average - sometimes not found until many days had elapsed, and the hideous vengeance of the deep had scourged their rotten bodies. It was as if the sea had dragged them into a chasm-lair, and had mulled about in the darkness until, satisfied that they were no longer of any use, she had floated them ashore in a ghastly state.

Necronomicon Press chapbook, 1991, art by Jason Eckhardt

There is palpable near-romantic yearning for nothingness in this unassuming work. In its prose-poetry and philosophy of negation, of giving up oneself to powers - perhaps natural, perhaps not - beyond our ability to comprehend, it is a powerful predecessor to Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, while also in the grand tradition of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows."

I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing.

Panther Books UK, 1975, cover art by Bob Fowke

As for all these covers, the Panther UK ones are easily my faves (I find Gahan Wilson's work entirely too whimsical for Lovecraft), and the October 1971 edition from Beagle Books at top features a monstrous kaleidoscope by Victor Valla. While I found Horror in the Museum a worthy read, as a dedicated horror-fiction fan I couldn't help but wish old HPL had devoted those countless hours not to other, lesser writers but to giving us even more of his own still-unsurpassed weird tales.

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vols. I and II, ed. by August Derleth (1969): Just Another Dream of Death

Actually it's been some decades since I read these classic Lovecraft-inspired anthologies, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and over the years have sadly lost my copies. Weird, surrealistic images on these, bespeaking of the general madness, terror, and disorientation of a reality that should not be. The first volume includes Mythos tales by the mighty likes of HPL himself, Conan creator Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, J. Vernon Shea, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and editor Derleth. The second has more Lovecraft and Bloch, Brian Lumley, Colin Wilson, and Ramsey Campbell. I daresay you cannot go wrong with either volume, although I remember the stories do vary in quality. However, in Derleth's intro, he states "It is undeniably evident that there exists in Lovecraft's concept a basic similarity to the Christian Mythos, specifically in regard to the expulsion of Satan from Eden and the power of evil." Yeahhhh... no.

These first two paperbacks, from Beagle Books, May and June 1971 respectively, are adorned by Victor Valla's insanity-inducing cover art. Below you see the Ballantine Books reprints from 1973, with covers whose art I've never totally understood or liked (neither does this fellow), from John Holmes. There was a Del Rey reprint of both volumes in one in 1998. But you can find these old editions used on eBay and Amazon and elsewhere, usually around $10 to $15. It's worth it, for these are the kinds of old paperbacks that exude that inimitable old-book smell, one of dust and mold, of dreaming death and deathlessness, where one dwells amidst the wonder and glory of the Old Ones forever...

original Arkham House hardcover, 1969

August Derleth 1909 - 1971

August Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories: (Dead) Dreaming is Free

August Derleth, founder of Arkham House Publishers, kept the H.P. Lovecraft legacy alive when it threatened to disappear into pulp obscurity. Now, more than half a century later, Lovecraft's name is venerated the world over. Derleth (along with countless other writers over the decades including Robert Bloch, Robert Howard, Brian Lumley, and Ramsey Campbell) penned his own tales utilizing the Lovecraft mythos, published in hardcover originally by Arkham House as The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) and The Trail of Cthulhu (1962). What you see here are the paperback reprints from Beagle Boxer, July 1971, with surrealist, mind-bending cover art by Victor Valla.

Derleth has been criticized by Lovecraft purists for drastically altering the philosophical underpinning of Lovecraft's original stories into a more balanced, even Christianized, cosmic whole. Lovecraft was a staunch atheist who saw a bleak, cold, and absolutely indifferent universe in which humanity had no special place. Most of Lovecraft's followers, however, adapted the mythos to their own needs and creative visions. Some feel this more humanized viewpoint weakens the impact of Lovecraft's mythos; I tend to that opinion, and have read very few of the Lovecraft followers.

However, Derleth (below) succeeded where Lovecraft (above) often failed: in writing a readable prose. In fact, many of the stories here seem practically  classic Lovecraft stories re-written in actual readable prose. His style is almost hard-boiled, with no affectation of language, no preoccupation with archaic style, no excessive adjectives, and little of the bizarre recreations of rural dialects. The stories strive for an atmosphere of cosmic dread, of fear and loathing, of awe at the vastness of space and the littleness of mankind in its void, often reach it, sometimes are rote exercises.

But there was time for me to to delve into the secrets of my uncle's books, to read further into his notes. So much was clear - he had belief enough to have begun a search for sunken R'lyeh, the city or the kingdom - one could not be sure which it was, or whether indeed it ringed half the earth from the coast of Massachusetts in the Atlantic to the Polynesian Islands on the Pacific - to which Cthulhu had been banished, dead and yet not dead - 'Dead Cthulhu lies dreaming!' - biding his time to rise and rebel again, to strike once more for dominion against the rule of the Elder Gods...

See? Nary an "eldtritch" or "noisome" or "star-flung" to be found. The above passage is found in "The Seal of R'lyeh" from Mask; it is my favorite story here, with a deepening (or perversion, as Lovecraft experts may see it) of the Cthulhu mythos and some really strong, evocative, subtle writing. It is similar to "The Shadow over Innsmouth," but since that's such a wonderful story I don't mind. "The Return of Hastur" and "Something in the Wood" are standouts too, with everything we love about Lovecraft: lonely landscapes, ancient books, strange old locals with funny accents and terrifying tales. Trail is an entire novel by Derleth but I have not read it.

 

Original Arkham House editions, art by Richard Taylor

It's good to see these two works back in print together in Quest for Cthulhu (although boo on that Godzilla-esque cover art). My moldering copies were published by Beagle Books in the early 1970s and have that great old-bookstore smell that reminds me of staying up late on summer nights reading when I was 15. I wouldn't part with them for anything, not even my very own shoggoth. While I obviously prefer the original visions of Lovecraft himself, Derleth's stories are powerfully imagined, clearly told, and come recommended from this (almost) lifelong Lovecraft fan.