The Azathoth Cycle: Tales of the Blind Idiot God

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu books

by Robert M. Price (Editor & Contributor), Edward Pickman Derby (Contributor), Peter Cannon (Contributor)

Short stories by Edward Pickman Derby, Peter Cannon, Stephen M. Rainey, Henry Kuttner, Lin Carter, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Richard L. Tierney, Gary Myers, Donald R. Burleson, C.J. Henderson, Stephen Studach, John Glasby, Allen Mackey and Robert M. Price.

Contents:

The Mad God: An Introduction to The Azathoth Cycle by Robert M. Price
Azathoth by Edward Pickman Derby
Azathoth in Arkham by Peter Cannon
The Revenge of Azathoth by Peter Cannon
The Pit of the Shoggoths by Stephen Mark Rainey
Hydra by Henry Kuttner
The Madness Out of Time by Lin Carter
The Insects from Shaggai by Ramsey Campbell
The Sect of the Idiot by Thomas Ligotti
The Throne of Achamoth by Robert M. Price and Richard L. Tierney
The Last Night of Earth by Gary Myers
The Daemon-Sultan by Donald R. Burleson.
Idiot Savant by C.J. Henderson
The Space of Madness by Stephen Studach
The Nameless Tower by John Glasby
The Plague Jar by Allen Mackey
The Old Ones’ Promise of Eternal Life by Robert M. Price

Genres: Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraftian, Anthologies, Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction

260 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

About the author

Robert McNair Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, asserting the Christ myth theory.

A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003. He has also written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by H.P. Lovecraft.

Reviews

[Patrick Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of non-Lovecraft stories brought together by Chaosium related to, or mentioning, Azathoth;

"That last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubble at the centre of all infinity -- the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."

So that guy.

One thing we learn is that, like Superman, Azothoth is quite difficult to write a story about. As the primal chaos at the heart of all existence, there is very little that he actually does. His stats in Dieties and Demigods illustrate that;



Most Azathoth stories are about how terrible it is to find out about Azathoth.


The Stories

Azathoth by Edward Pickman Derby

Derby is the doomed protagonist of Lovecrafts 'The Thing On The Doorstep' and this poem purports to be by that imaginary man. It's not that bad and has a certain energy, especially when we come into the presence of the Idiot God himself. I have no idea who the real writer of this was but perhaps it was Robert M. Price the Editor?


Azathoth in Arkham & The Revenge of Azathoth by Peter Cannon

These are essentially posh fan-fic of 'The Thing On The Doorstep'. That story had a mind-swap in it which left open the question of what happened to its potentially-immortal villain. These two stories follow the adventures of the immortal mind itself and of the people it displaces and bodyswaps on its way. They are ironic.


Pit of the Shoggoths by Stephen M. Rainey

This is another 'Thing On The Doorstep' deriviative about a man fleeing a failed marriage holing up in one of the houses from the story decades later, being cut off by a snowstorm and finding both a Shoggoth-summoning thingy in the wall but also the spirit of the original brainswapper. This is not especially terrible.


Hydra by Henry Kuttner

Written in 1939 this one has astral-travelling students sending urgent telegrams back and forth while dicking about with an uncovered ritual which is actually a trap for a headhunting cosmic horror. The story doesn't end where the head is cut off. This is bad but fun.


The Madness Out of Time by Lin Carter

A fake translation from the Necronomicon with some adventures of the mad arab Abdul Alhalzred. It is here that we attain true, unquestionable, unforced badness for the first time in this collection. This is a ripoff of the Hounds of Tindalos in bad pseudo 16th century language as imagined by a 20th century American with a blunt grasp of euphony.


The Insects from Shaggai by Ramsey Campbell

Another writer protagonist. (To what extent are stories about Azothoth and the compulsion that draws people towards him really about the writing of horror?) Our man finds some bad bugs in the forest and gets brainraped into witnessing their Azothoth-worshipping, planet-hopping dickery. If you imagine jews bad enough to actually deserve everything that happened to the Jews, that’s the Insects from Shaggai. Out hero slits his wrists on the final page. this story has life, imagination and invention, it is not scary. None of them are so far.


The Sect of the Idiot by Thomas Ligotti

THIS does it. In terms of plotting and worldbuilding this Ligotti story is probably the slightest and lightest of them all. In prosidy and craft it is the best by quite a way. This tells the primal Azathoth story of a man drawn through shadowy mundanity towards contact with actual cosmic horror. In terms of sheer event, nothing happens. A guy finds some scary chairs and gets mutated. This is the only one so far to give me anything like a sense of disquiet.


The Throne of Achamoth by Richard L. Tierney and Robert M. Price

Standard Sword and Sorcery prose but a really interesting and unique cosmology. Tierney links Azathoth to the Zorastonian Demiurge, creator of material reality. Instead of an introverted hero he has an ex gladiator-plus-sorcerer empowered by a fragment of the Divine Spark, making him better than just about all of humanity (in a slightly creepy semi-fascist way). The hero decides to penetrate the spheres of space in order to track down the soul of his (also super-special) dead girlfriend.

This stories depiction of our solar system as being comprised of spheres of energy, each sphere being rules by a monstrous Archon, with each Archon feeding off the pain and suffering felt by those being trapped in the material existence of its sphere, before sending on the excess pain to feed the greater Archon in the sphere beyond, with the Archon of this system in turn exporting its pain to the centre of the cosmos, is really specifically and brilliantly horrible. It's depiction of all of material reality as a hideous pyramid scheme of spiritual agony would probably please both Lovecraft and Ligotti.

Ultimately our hero penetrates beyond reality and re-unites with his God-Self outside time but, being infinite, forgets his physical existence until the actions of his super-girlfriend suck him back into reality and into contact with 'Achamoth' the Demiurge in charge of all material reality, who is also his shadow-self. The conflict between them making up what we recognise of the cosmos.



The Last Night of Earth by Gary Myers

A short, sweet story about a Sorcerer in a tower who sees Azathoth rising slowly over the horizon instead of the sun and, as more of the Idiot God's being is revealed, wracks his books to work out what he is seeing. He finds out. The end.


The Daemon-Sultan by Donald R. Burleson

A likeable and well-made story. Another introverted, driven and sullen hero is prophesied to seek out Azathoth. He has no idea who or what Azathoth is and spends much of his life seeking knowledge of him. Eventually he finds a wizened wise man in a distant city who, like some kind of dark anti-sufi, reveals that;

"He who is all, He who sits enthroned at the centre of all chaos, is everywhere, for chaos has no centre. Every point in the universe of stars is the centre, thus there is no centre and the Daemon Sultan lurks nowhere, because He is everywhere. Look within yourself."

He eventually finds his way home, but is unable to forget the terrible knowledge he now posesses;

"For idle loungers about the village, though in time they did not remember L'wei-Kath, came to regard as familiar a ragged and enigmatic figure leaning windblown in the village square: a flute player piping idiotically, monotonously, weirdly upon a carven flute held clumsily in palsied hands, endlessly piping his cacophony of eerie notes, his ululand litany to his god, to the One whose face, inscrutable, was everywhere and everything and everyone, the final derangement lying behind all being, the gibbering madness of existence, pervasive, present in the very wind, tainting the very sunlight - the Daemon-Sultan Azathoth."

The slow but total and absolute spiritual collapse of the seeker into a fluting idiot works much better than the standard 'see elder god = go insane".


Idiot Savant by C.J, Henderson

We're back with standard American prose and the story of a petty and low-ranking academic assigned to clean up and archive the office of a brilliant 'non-lateral' philosopher after a mysterious mass-death incident, who ignores a long list of horror-movie cliches in order to get himself sucked into the alterverse and turned into pulp.



The Space of Madness by Stephen Studach

This was written in 1995 and reads like it was written in 1955 and I genuinely can't work out if it was made this way for reasons of irony.

"With a grin Gary swung back around to the console to prepare a letter for Radiographication back to Mother Terra Firma."

....

"And how are you doing this segment, buddy?" Roans asked cheerfully
....
"Not bad at all, friend Roans," answered Simon with a smile, "except maybe for a touch of the space yawns."

Space yawns?

This is an honest-to-goodness Science Fiction story with a space ship and everything. The people currently in charge of space find an area of 'absolute blackness'. They keep sending Astronauts into the area. The space men go insane. They have done this a few times and now they are doing it again. Nothing in this story mentions any particular plan or quality this group have space men have that has lead them to think that they will not go insane like every previous space man. It's possible this is a very subtle and genre-appropriate commentary on a horrifically materialistic and inhuman culture just tanking guys into Azathoth to see if any of them live. If it isn't satire its bad, if it is, it's dull.


The Nameless Tower by John Glasby

Expedition to Iram, the City of Pillars. Native guides grow restless. Giant tower discovered. Non-human mummies found inside. Star-mad leader guy gets inside and gets slurped up by Azathoth through an interdimensional gate.


The Plague Jar by Allen Mackey

A sort of sequel to the previous story. The framing story is an academic telling the tale to a young scholar in the US but, for once, the people doing the adventure aren't a bunch of white guys. One of the good and interesting apects of the story are the invented careers of middle-eastern scholars from Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The fundamental content isn't that different but it is nice to occasionally hear about mad scholars at the University of Riyadh rather than at Arkham or whatever.

The result is the same. They find the lost city. There's statues of evil gods and a closed crypt with big fuck off signs saying "Do Not Open: Jar of Plague and Doom". Star-mad leader opens it. Plague and doom happen. The revelation of what is actually in the jar is neatly handled. Back in the framing story the young scholar gets slurped up into a photo of Azathoth because he looked at it too long.


The Old Ones Promise of Eternal Life by Robert M. Price

This is a reasonably neat piece of psudo-scholarship that puports to link Azathoth to the Gnostic demiurge and mixes in real stuff, post-Lovecraft stories and the imagined history in Lovecraft in a reasonably interesting way.



By and large this collection of cosmic horror felt as comfortable and predictable as Sunday afternoon TV. It was like a warm glass of beer. There was some Ligotti swimming in the bottom but it didn't change the taste.

I'm not exactly angry that writing about Cosmic Horror Gods is essentially a kind of light dark fantasy writing rather than anything which might horrify and genuinely frighten, perhaps a lot of Lovecraft was like that. I do feel that Azathoth has genuine potential though. The basic idea is actually horrifying. He's hard to connect to a narrative structure but if you could, if you could do Azathoth properly, then this shit could actually be scary.

I almost want to stop people from writing about Lovecraftian deities for a few decades, at least until someone's had a really good idea. It shouldn't feel like sinking into a leather armchair. It's sad that it does.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Price's solid scholarship into the origins of Lovecraft's Azathoth is, as usual, solid and informative. The problem with this particular collection, though, is that so many of the stories were new to this volume (that is, there were very few older stories in it). This would not necessarily be an issue, but the quality of the newer work is very uneven (a hazard of Mythos-inspired fiction, admittedly, but one that the Chaosium collections tend to avoid). The best work is undoubtedly Thomas Ligotti's fine story, followed by CJ Henderson's _Teddy London_-related tale. Interestingly, it is the stories that try to build on Lovecraft's "The Lurker on the Threshold" that are the most hackneyed. The rest of the tales, from Burleson's Dusanian-flavored reflection that equates Azathoth with literary critical deconstructionism to the stories centered around the fabled (and also very real) city of Irem are all quite good. The most interesting piece is Price's own bit of faux scholarship that attempts to contextualize and identify the origins of a couplet from _The Necronomicon_. In short, the quite good stories are, unfortunately, weighed down by the hackwork, which is too bad. Azathoth (dare I say it?) deserves better...

[Little Timmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of stories based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. These are, to me, only slightly better than the original Lovecraft stories. Just not a fan of his writings. Not recommended

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Azathoth Cycle

Azathoth: 4/5
Azathoth in Arkham: 3/5
The Revenge of Azathoth: 3.5/5
The Pit of the Shoggoth: 4.5/5
Hydra: 3.5/5
The Madness Out of Time: 1.5/5 (Lin Carter cannot write)
The Insects from Shaggai: 4/5
The Sect of the Idiot: 3/5
The Throne of Achamoth: 2/5
The Last Night of Earth: 3/5
The Daemon-Sultan: 4.5/5
Idiot Savant: 3.5/5
The Space of Madness: 1/5 (actually a worse writer than Line Carter somehow. The story doesn’t take itself seriously until the last two pages and those aren’t enough to salvage anything)
The Nameless Tower: 4/5
The Plague Jar: 4/5
The Old Ones Promise of Eternal Life: 4/5

Average rating: 3.3/5
Final rating: 3/5

[Alex Aguirre]

Good

[Gustavo Krieger · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Introduction (The Mad God)", Robert M. Price - Quite good, better than I expected.

"Azathoth", David E. Schultz (as by Edward Pickman Derby) - An ok poem.

"Azathoth in Arkham" and "The Revenge of Azathoth", Peter Cannon - A two-part story that is very interesting. Thumbs up.

"The Pit of the Shoggoths", Stephen M. Rainey - A good story, professionally written.

"The Madness out of Time", Lin Carter - Terrible. I should note that R. M. Price himself says this story is bad on the introduction: "...slapdash. The narrative was too evidently mere connective tissue to hold together the Mythos data." etc.

"Hydra", Henry Kuttner - Weak. Even R. M. Price says so in the introduction.

"The Insects from Shaggai", Ramsey Campbell - Weak. A story that can´t hold the reader.

"The Sect of the Idiot", Thomas Ligotti - Another weak story. It´s not a coincidence that the last three stories I wrote about here deals with dreams/hallucinations. Characters are badly developed, the stories are haphazardly written, and the dreams are not used as something great, but as an easy way to talk about anything without caring.

"The Throne of Achamoth", Richard L. Tierney and Robert M. Price - Another story with dreams... not bad, but also lacking something.

"The Last Night of Earth", Gary Myers - An ok short story, reminded me a bit of Clark Ashton Smith.

"The Daemon-Sultan", Donald R. Burleson - A "The quest of Iranon"-like story. Fine.

"The Space of Madness", Stephen Studach - A sci-fi story that is ok to weak.

"The Nameless Tower", John Glasby - There are so many cliches in this story that I almost believe it was written by a computer.

"The Plague Jar", Allen Mackey - A little better, but still... the ending is not that amazing. They´re too similar, those authors.

"The Old Ones’ Promise of Eternal Life", Robert M. Price - This one is just plain silly. Price "explaining" some verses from the Necronomicon.

Conclusion: Some very few good or ok stories - no more than 6. Most of them are uninspired by pedestrian authors. But, ok, it´s not that terrible.

[Bryan Whitehead · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovecraft and many of his successors realized that formless, overpowering horror has tremendous potential. Unfortunately, it’s tremendously difficult to pull off, as the stories in this anthology amply demonstrate. The ultimate chaos at the center of the universe is scary stuff, but it lacks the self-writing sub-genre conventions of stories about things like vampires and werewolves. So as one might expect, the authors included herein have varying degrees of success at this daunting task. Indeed, some appear not to have taken it on at all, such as Stephen M. Rainey’s “The Pit of the Shoggoths” (a good story, but not particularly Azathoth-y). Others feature the Blind Idiot God but make ineffective use of it. Ramsey Campbell’s “The Insects from Shaggai” was particularly disappointing; it made me wonder if there would be a follow-up called “The Rodent Infestation from Skoobi.” Still it had nothing on the amateurish tedium of the Tierney/Price collaboration, “The Throne of Achamoth.” On the other hand, we get some good stories as well. Breaking with his tradition, editor Robert M. Price actually finishes this one with a bang: Allen Mackey’s excellent “The Plague Jar.” Price resumes course with a tiresome, pseudo-scholastic essay that’s the real final piece, but if one skips it the book ends on a high note. I was disappointed that my all-time favorite Azathoth tale – “The Sothis Radiant” by Will Murray – didn’t make an appearance here. But otherwise this is a worthwhile exploration of this particular corner of the Lovecraft universe.