The Disciples of Cthulhu II

Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu books

by Edward P. Berglund (Editor), Walter C. DeBill Jr. (Contributor), Fred Olen Ray (Contributor)

Bad things tend happen to people who go where they are not wanted, or who over-stay their welcome once they reach their destination. This book contains thirteen new personal explorations of the Cthulhu Mythos. As its title suggests, this is a companion volume to Edward P. Berglund's earlier classic Mythos collection, The Disciples of Cthulhu. Both books are published by Chaosium, but their contents are entirely different. All of the stories in Cthulhu II are original and have never been published before. All the stories record the dire fates of people whose destinies intertwine with the Mythos.

CONTENTS

Editor's Preface by Edward P. Berglund
The Bookseller's Second Wife by Walter C. DeBill, Jr.
Eldritch by Fred Olen Ray & Brad Linaweaver
The Web by Gary Myers
Passing Through by Robert Weinberg
The Idol by Scott David Aniolowski
Time in the Hourless House by A. A. Attanasio
Special Order by John Henry Campbell and Terry Lee Sanders & Oreta Forrestine Hinamon Taylor
Lujan's Trunk by Donald R. Burleson
The San Francisco Treat by C. J. Henderson
Acute Spiritual Fear by Robert M. Price
The Eldridge Collection by Will Murray
An Arkham Home Companion by Brad Strickland
The Last Temptation of Ricky Perez By Benjamin Adams

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

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2003

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

If anyone had told me, back in 1990s when I read and enjoyed Book of the Dead, that zombies would be big business in the aughts and teens of the 21st century, with TV shows and movies and audience demand - well, I would not have believed it. And if someone back then had told me I'd ever willingly read pulp-era fiction, and more Lovecraft-inspired horror fiction, well, I wouldn't have believed them either. By 1990 I felt pretty done with Lovecraft - my interests had moved into different areas, pulp fiction in general had worn out its welcome (through thudding repetition if nothing else) and that role-playing game of the preceding years seemed to be like the last nail in the coffin, codifying the weird and numinous into manuals, flowcharts and hit points. I read Lovecraft in the late 70s and early 80s and felt about done with him.

But, as Sean Connery taught us, never say "never"....

Because here I am working for a company that turns old pulp fiction (and other stuff) into ebooks, so here I am reading a lot of it again, and Lovecraft is hot again (which does come in waves, truly) and I edit a popular horror fiction podcast so I get a lot of Lovecraft-inspired stuff...and another podcast (H.P. Podcraft) has - through some fine analysis - even gotten me to reconsider some of my opinions about Lovecraft's strengths and weaknesses as a writer ("At The Mountains Of Madness" may be slightly better than I remember it, and have more going on than I recalled, but it's still clumsily assembled)....

And, back at the job, I've been tasked with assembling a second e-book anthology of Lovecraftian fiction, while making sure not to repeat the items from the first volume (not assembled by me) - I've even been given a (miniscule, trust me) budget. So, one looks at the "to read" shelf for inspiration and...here we are....

Now, of course, that's a bit of an exaggeration for effect. I mean, I must have *bought* this thing in some used book store sometime in the last two decades intending to *read* it at some point in the future. And whatever I feel about Chaosium, I did like those themed volumes that collected related short fiction regarding some figure from the Mythos...

But this is a different animal than those themed books. Because this is all original fiction and a second volume, to boot. Which either means "the first one was so/sold so great that we decided to do a second" or, in more likelihood, "here's everything that didn't make it into the first volume."

And I could go off into a short lecture about the Lovecraft Circle and how and why it both helped and harmed horror fiction (short version - "cosmic horror" as much needed replacement for Manichean good/evil religiously-derived figures but cliquish, fan-circle inbreeding caused strange arrested development in the form as well) and how a lot of those problems seemed to have finally worked themselves out with the arrival of Ligotti and later acolytes, with the potentialities of Lovecraft's vision and concepts - instead of just his nomenclature and figures/tropes - finally coming to the creative fore. Or I could digress on how Lovecraft's true-to-his era personal failings, and his willingness to engage them in *visionary works based in a genre committed to exploring the author's own fears* (when one is doing it right, that is) have now (2015) made those willing to call themselves fans of his work as something akin to pariahs, at least in the opinions of those much more tender and emotionally sensitive than we lumpen masses - and how this present state nicely mirrors the "outsider" (heh) status that Lovecraft's own circle felt at the time of his writings when they attempted to engage the literary types and tell them of this strange figure writing odd new things ("invisible, whistling octopus" wasn't it, Edmund Wilson?). And so, the more things change... but you don't need that right now (just go read H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq- it will put you one up on the trembling Eloi of the internet, if you can handle its implications, that is - certain members of certain Goodreads groups certainly can't).

No, you came here (if you're still here - anyone? is this thing on? *thunk* *thunk*) for a review. And here it is:

Most of the work here is not great. Throwaways like Gary Myers "The Web" (the internet allows Old Ones to invade our world) and C.J. Henderson's "The San Francisco Treat" (which tries to tag some Lovecraftian imagery onto the idea of auditory ear-worms, to no great effect) feel like filler. "The Idol" by Scott David Aniolowski (Justin Bieberish singing sensation has family back in Innsmouth), Donald R. Burleson's "Lujan's Trunk" (writer moves to the desolate southwest and becomes fixated on a creepy old man who spends all day sitting on his porch next to big trunk and babbling about the Old Ones), and "The Last Temptation Of Ricky Perez" by Benjamin Adams (deformed Latino gang-initiate breaks into an old lady's house only to find she's more than she seems, and knows more about his missing father than he expected) all seem like hastily conceived ideas that never pan out in interesting ways (Aniolowski's comes closest, but by failing to get inside the boy singer's psychology we never really get anywhere but a flat ending - at least there was promise. Burleson's is just standard Lovecraft plot 2A - old man with arcane knowledge - although there were flashes of nice writing).

Along similar lines, Will Murray's "The Eldridge Collection" takes my least favorite tack with modern Lovecraft stories - turning them into action-adventure pulp scenarios with secret Government occult intelligence agencies striving to fight back against the Old Ones with guns and magick. Yawn. See above comment about de-mystifying the numinous. In "Eldritch", two agents (think Mulder and Scully, kinda, but grimmer and less introspective) try to stop a mad sorcerer and his collection of paintings of mythos figures which are actually the root-images from which the Tarot deck sprang. A plus for the downer ending, I guess.

"Special Order" by Henry Lee Forrest deserves special mention for giving us a fun scenario (book store full of well-drawn, if a bit cutesy, modern characters has to deal with what happens when a weird customer puts in a book search for the Necronomicon and actually has it come through), enjoyable details (the methods of payment for the notorious tome are a bit abstruse), fine plotting (weird events begin to accumulate as the store owner becomes obsessed with the book and won't turn it over to the customer and the shopping mall locale begins to suffer occultic blowback from the long-term presence) but then.. well... let's just say that the ending commits two cardinal sins in a Lovecraftian type story (at least for me). One - it goes all big-screen, CGI extravaganza special effects with a titanic battle of forces climax and - Two - said climax involves at-least partially literal Deus ex machina, completely missing the point of Lovecraft's basic concept. So, good story but blown ending for me.

Walter C. DeBill Jr.'s "The Bookseller's Second Wife" has a college student waste his summer indexing a rare book collection, wherein he becomes wrapped up in an affair with the titular character. But, said "Bookseller" is, of course, a necromancer and so what you get is a noir/Lovecraft hybrid with a live-forever life-force sucking sorcerer and his half-human rat servitors. The focus on intermediaries of "damned tomes" is a kind of neat set-up (much like "Special Order") but the pulp plot ends up dragging down the piece at length, as every expected scenario must be played out. Again, plus for the downer ending.

Similarly, "Passing Through" by Robert Weinberg has a nice set-up - mathematics student at Miskatonic, through examining notebooks left over from "Dreams In The Witch House", becomes convinced that the Old Ones aren't evil beings but just fourth dimensional creatures, and he can contact them with the right rituals and help - but the ending is heavily telegraphed.

"Eldritch" by Brad Linaweaver & Fred Olen Ray and "An Arkham Home Companion" by Brad Strickland both at least take a somewhat different approach - to their benefit. In the former, a young man jumps ship to avoid being killed by unruly crewmen and washes up on... the island of Dr. Moreau (I kid you not), where Moreau's sexy daughter still rules the beast-men and has made deals with... darker forces. A straight ahead pulp-adventure yarn with tongue planted firmly in cheek and a nice light comic touch to the narration. "Arkham Home Companion", as might be expected, takes an NPR staple and transplants it to New England. Lasts just long enough for the joke not to get stale, which is always appreciated.

I'm going to break format and discuss the most effective piece here before wrapping up with another story. "Time In The Hourless House" by A.A. Attanasio is quite short and less an actual story than a phantasmogoric tone poem in which a man, having explored books of arcane knowledge, wanders the dreamland in search of the Elder Gods until he finds out their true secret, which he - and we - didn't expect (reminded me a bit of Ligotti). Solid and enjoyable.

Finally, I'd like to especially mention "Acute Spiritual Fear" by Robert M. Price and contrast it with "Special Order", previously mentioned. "Order" is, to be honest, better written where "Acute" is, at times, clumsy and rushed - but "Acute" is far more ambitious in its story premise than almost anything here (save perhaps "Hourless House"). A set-up like "a divinity student at Miskatonic discovers a secret cult" sounds like just another tossed off, cutesy Lovecraft pastiche that guys used to bang out in the 1960s and 70s, but this story is anything but. Said divinity student impresses by being written like an *actual* divinity student (I appreciated his early mentions of conversion by way of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - placing the story in its honest historical context) and the Miskatonic staff impresses by being hidebound old biblical Puritan biblical scholars. While both "Order" and "Acute" have deus ex machina endings, "Order" violates the spirit of Lovecraft with pyrotechnics and archangels (at least, I will admit, cabalistically described) while "Acute"'s failure is more a function of length limitations. Seriously, this is a story I would love to see expanded into novella length (and I *rarely* say that) as the implications of the plot (the divinity student, you see, discovers that some in the Miskatonic Divinity Debate Club actually believe the second coming of Christ already occurred, decades ago, in the form of Lavinia Whately's notorious child) and especially the ending get rushed and underdeveloped, despite all their promise. A reworking or expansion of this tale could kick ass, honestly.

And that's it. In the end, pretty much what I expected, with the noted exceptions. Caveat emptor and all that....

[Brendan Coster · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories were pretty good. Solid, content rich, well written stories. None of the them provided much of a twist, however.

In reading the introduction, and how (this fellow at least) was putting the writer of the Mythos into generations -- I felt that 'this' generation lost the stark undefinable terror that I, personally, feel should be present. The old ones are now things to be painted, or found wherever, to be discussed, there merits dissected.

Again, I understand this might just be me, but within a piece in the Mythos universe (if you will) just saying the name Azathoth should make loosen some screws in your brain. Say Nylarthotep and you seriously lose a couple years off your life.

"Eldridges" (or Eldritches, maybe, its spelled oddly) was probably my favorite if only because it was Mievillian in it's, albeit limited, scope. Very much like a Mashup of 'Kranken' and "the city and the City" tossed into the Mythos,

Anyways, I had my complaints, but I happily read through the stories and was left still thinking about them to some extent.

[Mike Mclatchey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A long delayed follow up to a decent 70s Cthulhu Mythos anthology that was later updated for Chaosium, The Disciples of Cthulhu II doesn't really have any real classics, but there's at least five here worthy of your attention. Walter C DeBill Jr's "The Bookseller's Second Wife" is a young man's adventure as he takes up a job at a local bookstore. Always good locations for Lovecraftian fare, this doesn't actually concentrate on the books so much as the mysterious owner whose second wife is chafing at her situation and sizing up the new fellow for a hook up. It probably surprises no one that this does not go well. "Special Order," written by a trio of writers under one pseudonym also takes place in the field of booksellers, in this case it's in the genre I call Buffy Mythos, for the strong female lead, a feel of adventure and the constant sarcastic or ironic quipping. The Necronomicon shows up and the owner of the store doesn't want to part with it to the buyer. Robert M. Price's "Acute Spiritual Fear" is one of his strongest entries, but I skipped it this go around having read it in his Blasphemies & Revelations not so far back. Will Murray's "The Eldritch Collection" was my favorite in the book, combining the secret agencies fighting the mythos genre (like Delta Green, Stross' Laundry series, Conyers' Harrison Peel series etc - one of my favorite subgenres outside of the originals) with a whole lot of tarot and astrological weirdness thrown in from someone who has some familiarity with them (this is part of a series you can find in his Wild Adventures of Cthulhu Vol 1 and 2), and finally Benjamin Adams "The Last Temptation of Ricky Perez" where a would be gang member ends up trying to steal from the wrong older lady (I wonder why Adams doesn't have a collection, he wrote solid Mythos stories). Probably a bid dated now, but reasonable fun overall.

[Bryan Whitehead · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one’s much better than the first Berglund-edited volume from Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu series. If nothing else, this was put together specifically for this printing and made up of stories written for the book. Thus the tales found herein reflect current trends in horror fiction in content, theme and style. As with any anthology, some stories are better than others. But overall the set is quite good. I particularly enjoyed Henry Lee Forrest’s “Special Order,” one of the few times the notion of supernatural good has ever intruded into the Lovecraftian world. And Rev. Price’s “Acute Spiritual Fear” does a solid – if somewhat over-theological – job of treating the Cthulhu cult as an actual cult and exploring how his protagonist gets realistically lured into it. I already bought this volume before I read the first one, which is a good thing because I might not have purchased it after Berglund’s first go-around. But he does a much better job here. I’m glad I took it down off the shelf and gave it a try.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doesn't have any stories quite as clunky as the worst of the original collection, doesn't have any stories which quite hit the heights of the best from that one either. Call it one step forward, one step back. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...