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The Quest for Cthulhu
Brilliantly imagined by the late H. P. Lovecraft, the mythical cycle of Cthulhu is expanded and enriched in this one-volume edition of tales that only August Derleth, Lovecraft's friend and collaborator, could have produced. With the marvelously inventive novel The Trail of Cthulhu and the six remarkable stories of mythic horror included in The Mask of Cthulhu, Derleth maps the strange destinies intertwined in the quest for the ancient god Cthulhu. Under the spell of Lovecraft's imagination, Derleth weaves new horrors like the hideous eldrich deity Yog-Sothoth lurking in the New England wood of "The Whippoorwills in the Hills" and the bodiless Lloigor who breaks an occult contract to terrifying effect in "The Sandwin Compact." And in "The Seal of R'lyeh," the dreadful link between the Massachusetts town of Innsmouth and the servants of the formidable Cthulhu is coded. With narrative threads from Lovecraft's lore and some chilling mythic strands of its own, The Trail of Cthulhu tracks Dr. Laban Shrewsbury as he investigates the unspeakable secrets of the Ancient Ones. Terror mounts as he journeys from Massachusetts and halfway around an occult world to arrive finally at the drowned city of R'lyeh, where Cthulhu waits dreaming.
448 pages, Paperback
First published June 6, 2000
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About the author
August Derleth
885 books298 followersAugust William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and for his own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the Cosmic Horror genre, as well as his founding of the publisher Arkham House (which did much to bring supernatural fiction into print in hardcover in the US that had only been readily available in the UK), Derleth was a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography
A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augus...]
A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augus...]
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 4, 2013
August Derleth was a prolific writer and publisher who not only kept Lovecraft’s name and fiction alive but also helped to develop the whole Cthulhu Mythos universe which today can be found in the form of plush Cthulhus, webcomics, and other such stuff. While his own work has come to be less well known, Derleth is the prism through which Lovecraft entered the popular culture. The stories collected here represent a few of Derleth’s own pastiches of Lovecraft’s writing style, expanding and formalizing his bleak, disorganized philosophical universe into something more, I guess I have to say, palatable to the masses. Consisting of "The Mask of Cthulhu," a collection of short stories playing with retellings of various Lovecraft plots, and "the Trail of Cthulhu," a novella composed of shorter chapters following a group of academic men battling to keep Cthulhu from awakening.
While arguably Derleth writes in a much more conventional, straightforward style and on occasion capable of building some nice atmosphere, much of these pot boilers are, in a word, boring. The stories themselves are very repetitive. Even the same names pop up again and again in each story, for entirely unrelated characters. I was like, oh, a bland retelling of the Dunwich Horror. Hey, another one. Oops, this one’s a bland retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. They all follow the same formula; phlegmatic protagonist inherits/rents weird old house down the road from legend haunted Arkham/Dunwich/Innsmouth once owned by a madman feared by the locals and discovers a library of dread tomes such as the Necronomicon/Culte de Goules/Pnakotic Fragments, or all of them (they must have had these books on factory discount in 1690s Massachusetts). Weird things start happening, underground rumblings, weird dreams, and/or visiting monstrosities, and in the end a bad end comes to our hapless protagonist, or he just blows the house up and rides off on a Byakhee. You can see where the influence on the later Cthulhu Mythos gaming comes from.
The later stories in "The Trail of Cthulhu" are slightly interesting, following the investigations of the super professor Laban Shrewsbury and his six younger proteges against the cult of Cthulhu and the agents of the deep ones, who are everywhere, but is written in so uninspiring a manner that even these stories, which promise excitement if nothing else, are way too slow. In the end, "fan fiction" may be an accurate description.
While arguably Derleth writes in a much more conventional, straightforward style and on occasion capable of building some nice atmosphere, much of these pot boilers are, in a word, boring. The stories themselves are very repetitive. Even the same names pop up again and again in each story, for entirely unrelated characters. I was like, oh, a bland retelling of the Dunwich Horror. Hey, another one. Oops, this one’s a bland retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. They all follow the same formula; phlegmatic protagonist inherits/rents weird old house down the road from legend haunted Arkham/Dunwich/Innsmouth once owned by a madman feared by the locals and discovers a library of dread tomes such as the Necronomicon/Culte de Goules/Pnakotic Fragments, or all of them (they must have had these books on factory discount in 1690s Massachusetts). Weird things start happening, underground rumblings, weird dreams, and/or visiting monstrosities, and in the end a bad end comes to our hapless protagonist, or he just blows the house up and rides off on a Byakhee. You can see where the influence on the later Cthulhu Mythos gaming comes from.
The later stories in "The Trail of Cthulhu" are slightly interesting, following the investigations of the super professor Laban Shrewsbury and his six younger proteges against the cult of Cthulhu and the agents of the deep ones, who are everywhere, but is written in so uninspiring a manner that even these stories, which promise excitement if nothing else, are way too slow. In the end, "fan fiction" may be an accurate description.
June 16, 2023
Derleth's Mythos stories manage the feat of both reading like Lovecraft fanfic AND missing a major point of HPL's stories. By extending the Elder Gods and their magic as a panacea against the monstrous Old Ones, the hopelessness of mankind in the face of an uncaring (if not actively malignant) universe is mostly eliminated. After reading this collection, though, I do feel the Call of Cthulhu RPG owes more to Derleth and it does to HPL. The earlier stories in the book come off as feeling like sub-par Lovecraft tales, and it doesn't help that he tends to repeat the same "special effects" from story to story. "And there was nothing left of him but his clothes…" Oooo, scary. Meh. The second half of the book is a connected set of short stories under the title of "On the Trail of Cthulhu" which had more of a pulp feel, which made them more enjoyable, but still not great. 2 stars.
January 31, 2014
I consider myself a Lovecraft fanatic. I've read and reread his works. Studied them. Analyzed and even cataloged them. Played games based on them. And as such I occasionally tread into the works of those who would attempt to expand his Cthulhu Mythos. Most of them are rubbish, and while I used to think Brian Lumley was the worst, we have a new winner. Despite August Derleth's knowing Lovecraft himself and despite his attempt to keep his works alive after HPL's death, I have avoided reading most of his work for years. Now I know why.
August Derleth's works read like the star-struck fan fiction of an unimaginative 9th grader trying desperately to capture the style and essense of his hero HP Lovecraft. There are lots of adjectives to describe this book, none of them good:
1) Derivative
The plots in this book are nothing short of rip offs of Lovecraft's. Oh, you have an ancestor in Innsmouth? Been there. Oh, you're going to land on R'lyeh? Done that.
2) Unsubtle
Every story beats you over the head with the names of multiple Great Olds Ones and Other Gods and Tomes and Places and Races. We *must* go to Innsmouth, we *must* go to The Nameless City, we *must* go to R'lyeh, we *must* go to Arkham. And at least every story MUST contain one "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".
3) Erroenous
Lovecraft NEVER EVER EVER indicated that Cthulhu was a 'water elemental' nor that Hastur was somehow opposed to Cthulhu. Nor did he ever draw parallels between the struggles with the Elder Gods and the Christian myth of the fall of Satan. Furthermore Lovecraft was fairly clear in what constituted a Great Old One and what constituted an Other God, yet Derleth changes all that and lumps them together and introduces the term "Ancient Ones" to mix it all up. Furthermore Derleth fails to place the Dream sequences in the Cthulhu Mythos, thus abandoning HPL's clear placement of Kadath in the Dreamlands.
4) Presumptuous
Lovecraft NEVER stated that the creatures in "The Festival" were Byakhee. Yet Derleth takes this not only as fact, but uses them like horses. In "The Festival", the mounting of the the flying creatures was done as part of a huge ceremony, not at all like saddling your favorite mount and going for a ride to Celaeno!
5) Annoying
If there is one single thing that makes ALL of this *FAIL* it is this simple, annoying literary tool: He makes the works of HP Lovecraft part of the fictional Universe about which those very works were describing. This fails to work on SO many levels. Think of it this way -- what if someone wrote a novel about Harry Potter and in that novel were repeated references to JK Rowling and her Harry Potter books! It is an awful, awful way to honor HPL, and in fact makes HPL more of a marionette, puppeted around by Derleth in a very dishonorable way.
I can't dislike this 'addition' to the Mythos more.
August Derleth's works read like the star-struck fan fiction of an unimaginative 9th grader trying desperately to capture the style and essense of his hero HP Lovecraft. There are lots of adjectives to describe this book, none of them good:
1) Derivative
The plots in this book are nothing short of rip offs of Lovecraft's. Oh, you have an ancestor in Innsmouth? Been there. Oh, you're going to land on R'lyeh? Done that.
2) Unsubtle
Every story beats you over the head with the names of multiple Great Olds Ones and Other Gods and Tomes and Places and Races. We *must* go to Innsmouth, we *must* go to The Nameless City, we *must* go to R'lyeh, we *must* go to Arkham. And at least every story MUST contain one "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".
3) Erroenous
Lovecraft NEVER EVER EVER indicated that Cthulhu was a 'water elemental' nor that Hastur was somehow opposed to Cthulhu. Nor did he ever draw parallels between the struggles with the Elder Gods and the Christian myth of the fall of Satan. Furthermore Lovecraft was fairly clear in what constituted a Great Old One and what constituted an Other God, yet Derleth changes all that and lumps them together and introduces the term "Ancient Ones" to mix it all up. Furthermore Derleth fails to place the Dream sequences in the Cthulhu Mythos, thus abandoning HPL's clear placement of Kadath in the Dreamlands.
4) Presumptuous
Lovecraft NEVER stated that the creatures in "The Festival" were Byakhee. Yet Derleth takes this not only as fact, but uses them like horses. In "The Festival", the mounting of the the flying creatures was done as part of a huge ceremony, not at all like saddling your favorite mount and going for a ride to Celaeno!
5) Annoying
If there is one single thing that makes ALL of this *FAIL* it is this simple, annoying literary tool: He makes the works of HP Lovecraft part of the fictional Universe about which those very works were describing. This fails to work on SO many levels. Think of it this way -- what if someone wrote a novel about Harry Potter and in that novel were repeated references to JK Rowling and her Harry Potter books! It is an awful, awful way to honor HPL, and in fact makes HPL more of a marionette, puppeted around by Derleth in a very dishonorable way.
I can't dislike this 'addition' to the Mythos more.
February 13, 2008
Actually, I came out of this pleasantly surprised. At first, it just felt like Lovecraft fan-fiction, and as a result, I took way too long to buckle down and get involved in the story. If it weren't for the fact that I was in La Habra, California and it was too hot outside to support human life, I might never have done so.
However, once I started reading (and got over the stilted, wannabe writing style), I really enjoyed myself. In fact, I spent the next two weeks making Cthulu jokes about everything and crocheting tentacle monsters for my nephew. I dug the way that the novel was set up as a series of accounts by different people that all built the same tale from different angles.
The short stories were entertaining, though with such desperate apings of true Lovecraft I almost pitied Derleth. I'll just say this for him – in the same way some people make great cover musicians, but can't write a song to save their lives, he is an amazing “cover” author.
However, once I started reading (and got over the stilted, wannabe writing style), I really enjoyed myself. In fact, I spent the next two weeks making Cthulu jokes about everything and crocheting tentacle monsters for my nephew. I dug the way that the novel was set up as a series of accounts by different people that all built the same tale from different angles.
The short stories were entertaining, though with such desperate apings of true Lovecraft I almost pitied Derleth. I'll just say this for him – in the same way some people make great cover musicians, but can't write a song to save their lives, he is an amazing “cover” author.
April 2, 2013
Quest for Cthulhu is a collection of short stories written between the years 1939 and 1957 by August Derleth. Set in the "universe" of his friend - the author Lovecraft, Howard Phillips - these stories all revolve around Derleth's vision of Lovecraft's (now) famous "Cthulhu Mythos".
Quest is actually two collections published as a single book. The first collection, Mask of Cthulhu is a collection of short stories connected only by Derleth's common vision of the "Cthulhu Mythos". Derleth's primary plot inspiration for the stories in Mask seems to have been two of Lovecraft's longer stories - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "Call of Cthulhu". The events of "Shadow" are referred to directly in all six of the stories at one point or another - Derleth seems to have been particularly fascinated by the idea of the Deep Ones (half human / half amphibious frog-like creatures) and casting them as villains in his vision of the world-wide Cthulhu cult that Lovecraft described in "Call of Cthulhu".
This does lead to some repetition across all of the stories. After the fourth time that Derleth has summarized the elements of Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" and has given the same description of the odd looking people of Innsmouth, there is a strong temptation to just skip ahead to find the next new bit. This behavior is a bit more forgivable when you realize that Derleth was writing at a time when access to previous stories was not guaranteed, and that the original Lovecraft stories were not nearly as accessible as they are today.
Derleth has often been accused of writing Lovecraftian "pastiche". I think that for this volume at least that accusation is somewhat unfair. In Masks Derleth has his own voice that doesn't really feel like he's trying to imitate Lovecraft. Indeed, in many ways Derleth's style is less ponderous and more straight-forward than Lovecraft's notoriously archaic style inspired by Poe and other writers from the century prior to his own. In contrast, Derleth makes use of a much more contemporary voice that feels much more like other novels of the WWII and post-WWII era. And while Derleth is also as fond of the first-person narrative as Lovecraft was, Derleth seems less fond of the "found journal" style of
Beyond issues of style, Derleth also grapples with the themes that Lovecraft presented in a different way than Lovecraft himself did. Lovecraft thought that certain things were so self-evidently horrible in and of themselves that the mere fact of these events or truths being revealed in a story was enough to cause horror in the reader. The revelation of the existence of an intelligent, inhuman being, was a horrific reveal for Lovecraft, as was the discovery that a character was half-human/half-alien of some kind.
Derleth, on the other hand, does not seem to think that revelations such as these are enough to provide horror. While he is obviously fascinated, for example, by the existence of the half-human/half-Deep One hybrids of Innsmouth, the reveal that a particular character is part "water-breathing frog person" isn't really played up for the horror of the event itself. In the final story in the collection - "The Seal of R'lyeh" - the horror comes not from that revelation but from what comes after. It isn't the mere genetics that make what transpires horrible, but rather what the character go through after the revelation. Likewise, Derleth does not seem to assume that the reveal of the alien beings in the first story - "The Return of Hastur" - will be the source of any horror in the story. He seems to be working from an assumption that his readers will have read about alien monsters already and will be inured to the idea. The horror comes from the more personal doom laid on the main character by his interactions with the alien.
That seems to be the biggest difference between Lovecraft and Derleth and their conception of the "cosmic horror" of the Cthulhu Mythos. For Lovecraft it truly was cosmic - the horrors he wrote about were horrible just because they existed. For Derleth the horror of the mythos seems to have been more personal - the horrors he writes about in Mask are horrible because of their impact on individual human beings and individual lives, not necessarily because they reveal cosmic truths that destroy the foundations of the main character's conception of the universe.
Overall the first half of Quest for Cthulhu is well worth reading for those who are interested in Lovecraftian horror presented from a different perspective, as well as those who enjoy reading mid-century American horror stories.
The first half of Quest left me completely unprepared for the second half - a collection of stories previously published as Trail of Cthulhu. Like Mask, Trail collects six previously published short stories (originally published between 1944 and 1952). Unlike Mask, the stories grouped together as Trail of Cthulhu present a "serial novel" in six parts following the investigations of Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, an anthropologist who has stumbled on the awful worldwide Cthulhu cult conspiracy and enlists a number of allies in his attempts to end the cult's plans to make the stars right and wake Cthulhu from his prison at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.
Unlike the protagonists in the first half of the book, Shrewsbury is truly heroic - he is a man who has made a number of sacrifices (including 20 years of his life and portions of his anatomy) to fight against the minions of Cthulhu. He knows magic rituals that allow him to summon minions of Cthulhu's great rival, the god Hastur who dwells imprisoned in orbit around the star Aldebaran much like Cthulhu lies imprisoned in sunken R'lyeh in the Pacific. He recruits allies and travels the world foiling cult activities using his magic, his collection of "Elder Signs" and the knowledge he has gained from spending decades in a library orbiting the star Celaeno.
In short, these are not horror stories. It took me a little while to adjust to the shift in style, but these are clearly science fantasy adventure stories set in the same "universe" as Lovecraft's works rather than any attempt at horror. As adventure stories they are actually quite a bit of fun - and it's interesting to see the escalation in Shrewbury's tactics against the Cthulhu cultists, culminating in the final chapter when he .
Once expectations are set appropriately, the second half of this book is a joy to read. Derleth's action/adventure take on the Cthulhu Mythos may not be for everyone, but if you can embrace it, the book is a fun ride. In addition, I now feel that I understand much more about the inspiration behind the Call Of Cthulhu: Horror Roleplaying In the Worlds Of H. P. Lovecraft RPG and the other "Lovecraftian" games that have appeared on the shelves over the last 40 years. Most of these games seem to owe much more to the style of Derleth's work in Trail than to Lovecraft's style, and that discrepancy has been something that has bothered me since I was first exposed to the CoC RPG back in the 80s. Now that I have finally read Derleth's work I can see the inspiration and I appreciate it - and I will be looking out for Derleth's The Watchers Out of Time and Dwellers in Darkness to see if these books are as enjoyable as Quest for Cthulhu has been.
Quest is actually two collections published as a single book. The first collection, Mask of Cthulhu is a collection of short stories connected only by Derleth's common vision of the "Cthulhu Mythos". Derleth's primary plot inspiration for the stories in Mask seems to have been two of Lovecraft's longer stories - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "Call of Cthulhu". The events of "Shadow" are referred to directly in all six of the stories at one point or another - Derleth seems to have been particularly fascinated by the idea of the Deep Ones (half human / half amphibious frog-like creatures) and casting them as villains in his vision of the world-wide Cthulhu cult that Lovecraft described in "Call of Cthulhu".
This does lead to some repetition across all of the stories. After the fourth time that Derleth has summarized the elements of Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" and has given the same description of the odd looking people of Innsmouth, there is a strong temptation to just skip ahead to find the next new bit. This behavior is a bit more forgivable when you realize that Derleth was writing at a time when access to previous stories was not guaranteed, and that the original Lovecraft stories were not nearly as accessible as they are today.
Derleth has often been accused of writing Lovecraftian "pastiche". I think that for this volume at least that accusation is somewhat unfair. In Masks Derleth has his own voice that doesn't really feel like he's trying to imitate Lovecraft. Indeed, in many ways Derleth's style is less ponderous and more straight-forward than Lovecraft's notoriously archaic style inspired by Poe and other writers from the century prior to his own. In contrast, Derleth makes use of a much more contemporary voice that feels much more like other novels of the WWII and post-WWII era. And while Derleth is also as fond of the first-person narrative as Lovecraft was, Derleth seems less fond of the "found journal" style of
Beyond issues of style, Derleth also grapples with the themes that Lovecraft presented in a different way than Lovecraft himself did. Lovecraft thought that certain things were so self-evidently horrible in and of themselves that the mere fact of these events or truths being revealed in a story was enough to cause horror in the reader. The revelation of the existence of an intelligent, inhuman being, was a horrific reveal for Lovecraft, as was the discovery that a character was half-human/half-alien of some kind.
Derleth, on the other hand, does not seem to think that revelations such as these are enough to provide horror. While he is obviously fascinated, for example, by the existence of the half-human/half-Deep One hybrids of Innsmouth, the reveal that a particular character is part "water-breathing frog person" isn't really played up for the horror of the event itself. In the final story in the collection - "The Seal of R'lyeh" - the horror comes not from that revelation but from what comes after. It isn't the mere genetics that make what transpires horrible, but rather what the character go through after the revelation. Likewise, Derleth does not seem to assume that the reveal of the alien beings in the first story - "The Return of Hastur" - will be the source of any horror in the story. He seems to be working from an assumption that his readers will have read about alien monsters already and will be inured to the idea. The horror comes from the more personal doom laid on the main character by his interactions with the alien.
That seems to be the biggest difference between Lovecraft and Derleth and their conception of the "cosmic horror" of the Cthulhu Mythos. For Lovecraft it truly was cosmic - the horrors he wrote about were horrible just because they existed. For Derleth the horror of the mythos seems to have been more personal - the horrors he writes about in Mask are horrible because of their impact on individual human beings and individual lives, not necessarily because they reveal cosmic truths that destroy the foundations of the main character's conception of the universe.
Overall the first half of Quest for Cthulhu is well worth reading for those who are interested in Lovecraftian horror presented from a different perspective, as well as those who enjoy reading mid-century American horror stories.
The first half of Quest left me completely unprepared for the second half - a collection of stories previously published as Trail of Cthulhu. Like Mask, Trail collects six previously published short stories (originally published between 1944 and 1952). Unlike Mask, the stories grouped together as Trail of Cthulhu present a "serial novel" in six parts following the investigations of Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, an anthropologist who has stumbled on the awful worldwide Cthulhu cult conspiracy and enlists a number of allies in his attempts to end the cult's plans to make the stars right and wake Cthulhu from his prison at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.
Unlike the protagonists in the first half of the book, Shrewsbury is truly heroic - he is a man who has made a number of sacrifices (including 20 years of his life and portions of his anatomy) to fight against the minions of Cthulhu. He knows magic rituals that allow him to summon minions of Cthulhu's great rival, the god Hastur who dwells imprisoned in orbit around the star Aldebaran much like Cthulhu lies imprisoned in sunken R'lyeh in the Pacific. He recruits allies and travels the world foiling cult activities using his magic, his collection of "Elder Signs" and the knowledge he has gained from spending decades in a library orbiting the star Celaeno.
In short, these are not horror stories. It took me a little while to adjust to the shift in style, but these are clearly science fantasy adventure stories set in the same "universe" as Lovecraft's works rather than any attempt at horror. As adventure stories they are actually quite a bit of fun - and it's interesting to see the escalation in Shrewbury's tactics against the Cthulhu cultists, culminating in the final chapter when he .
Once expectations are set appropriately, the second half of this book is a joy to read. Derleth's action/adventure take on the Cthulhu Mythos may not be for everyone, but if you can embrace it, the book is a fun ride. In addition, I now feel that I understand much more about the inspiration behind the Call Of Cthulhu: Horror Roleplaying In the Worlds Of H. P. Lovecraft RPG and the other "Lovecraftian" games that have appeared on the shelves over the last 40 years. Most of these games seem to owe much more to the style of Derleth's work in Trail than to Lovecraft's style, and that discrepancy has been something that has bothered me since I was first exposed to the CoC RPG back in the 80s. Now that I have finally read Derleth's work I can see the inspiration and I appreciate it - and I will be looking out for Derleth's The Watchers Out of Time and Dwellers in Darkness to see if these books are as enjoyable as Quest for Cthulhu has been.
November 28, 2023
I actually like Derleth's writing better than HPL's, but it does still have that quaint historical feeling to it. This is two novels in one book. One is The Mask of Cthulhu, which gives us an idea of the relationship between two of the Great Old Ones. The other is Trail of Cthulhu, which Chaosium turned into a pretty fantastic RPG scenario. Both good entries in the oeuvre of the Mythos. I had fun reading them.
August 24, 2022
Cheap, ugly compilation of August Derleth's The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu. Some might argue that a desultory paperback compilation with a low-quality CGI front cover and lots of typos is exactly the sort of slipshod treatment Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories deserve. I disagree; any treatment short of the recycle bin is too good for them.
Read
October 6, 2022A lot of the sentences were just run on. I really wanted to read the original Lovelace books...
Read
March 31, 2024I don't do stars. All Deep Ones. Just what I wanted.
March 6, 2014
I've read some of Derleth's short stories before, but I believe this is the first time I've gone through a collection of his works. The first half of the book was made up of short stories that were by-the-numbers Cthulhu-mythos. I'll give Derleth this - his imagination may not have been able to improve upon Lovecraft's creations (to be fair, most that have followed haven't been able to either), but his prose is much easier to read than Lovecraft's.
The second half of 'Quest for Cthulhu' was more interesting - "The Trail of Cthulhu" is also a collection of short stories, but these were organized as an interlocking series of recollections & reports about a small group of different individuals led by a mysterious researcher looking for R'yleh in order to prevent Cthulhu's return.
Not an essential collection, but worth a look for Lovecraft fans.
Random thought: I don't think I've ever seen the word "ululation" used outside of a Lovecraft or Cthulhu mythos-related story. *grin*
The second half of 'Quest for Cthulhu' was more interesting - "The Trail of Cthulhu" is also a collection of short stories, but these were organized as an interlocking series of recollections & reports about a small group of different individuals led by a mysterious researcher looking for R'yleh in order to prevent Cthulhu's return.
Not an essential collection, but worth a look for Lovecraft fans.
Random thought: I don't think I've ever seen the word "ululation" used outside of a Lovecraft or Cthulhu mythos-related story. *grin*
October 5, 2013
Long, dry, and oh-so-desperately convinced that if it cribs Lovecraftian names that it will come off as Lovecraftian. Really just a long drag. Save the time and read "Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Dunwich Horror", or "Shadow Out Of Time" once again - you'll thank yourself after.
August 3, 2012
Readable plots, somewhat accomplished pastiches, but otherwise frankly boring. If you have not read it yet, you have not missed anything.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews