Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'Doom of the House of Duryea', 'The Seventh Incantation', 'From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy', 'The Jewels of Charlotte', 'The Letters of Cold Fire' and 'Horror at Vecra'

This cover is adorable. The one on my Kindle edition is so much more
generic.

So, given that we had the anniversary of HPL's birth a few weeks ago, I figured I'd review some more Yog Sothery. As I was still tapped out on 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' type stories, I opted for Acolytes of Cthulhu, another multi-generational collection, with the stories bearing copyrights from 1932 to 2014 (the date of the updated and slightly altered Kindle reissue.) It's not particularly concerned with Cthulhu himself, the title rather referring to 'acolytes' of Lovecraft's work.

We begin with 'Doom of the House of Duryea' by Earl Pierce Jr (1936), a neat inversion of Lovecraft's beloved 'you are not whom you thought you were' trope, in which the last heir of the House of Duryea discovers that everything he ever heard about his family is true. Separated by his father for years, when they are reunited he binds his father against the slightest risk of the family curse - that alternate generations turn into somnambulant serial killers around their relatives - being true, only to discover that he is the cursed one. It is in the third person, which seems odd, as a first person narrative in the form of a confession would probably have conveyed the horror more effectively.

'The Seventh Incantation' by Joseph Payne Brennan (1963) is the opposite of the preceding story, instead depicting an outcast seeking power through the old ones, but thwarted in his dark designs by the frailty of cattle. It's a more direct cautionary tale than is usual in Lovecraftiana, perhaps equally influenced by the likes of Dennis Wheatley's satanists with its propitiatable but fickle deities.

'From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy' by Hugh B Cave and Robert M Price (2014) replaces 'Black Noon' by Lovecraft contemporary C.M. Eddy Jr in this reissue of the collection. It's an oddity, beginning with an anthropologist being offered a glimpse at the rituals of a secret subsubculture within the slightly wider faith of Haitian Voudun, only to find himself initiated into a cult of the old ones. His local guide admits that he is to be initiated into the deeper mysteries, which apparently involves being chopped up with a machete, so I don't know if the priests are supposed to have gone through that or what. It then goes a little off the boil, leading to the cult being slain by an army of machete-wielding zombie-ghosts led by the deceased guide and the anthropologist becoming a full-blown white saviour as he leads the - apparently - innocent children of the cultists out of the swamp. Our 'hero' never really does anything however (apart from engaging in morally dubious intercourse with a woman in a trance state) which may be a comment on his intention to participate in a bloodthirsty ritual merely as an observer and expecting to be untouched. As a result, this story is uncharacteristically upbeat for the mythos, and the protagonist more than usually irritating.

Next up is another early offering. 'The Jewels of Charlotte' by Duane Rimel (1935) is a simple tale. The nameless narrator is caught up by chance in the pursuit of two criminals into his decrepit rural holiday spot. The fugitives seek the grave of the eponymous Charlotte, to deprive her of her eponymous jewels, but seemingly fall victim to the mysterious guardian of her grave site, as heralded by an unearthly chime. In the best traditions of the genre, it never seeks to explain what happened and the narrator wisely punks out.

Quite the opposite is true of 'The Letters of Cold Fire' by Manly Wade Wellman (1944), a tale of devil-puncher extraordinaire John Thunstone. Thunstone is a colossus of a man, a playboy and a scholar who battles evil with strength, will and occult know-how, then goes home and shags a countess; admired by men and desired by women, and about as far from any of Lovecraft's protagonists as it is possible to get without spending his entire life playing uneventful rounds of golf. In this story, Thunstone seeks out and defeats a sorcerer who has stolen the graduation book from the super-secret anti-Hogwarts* he previously washed out from. The book allows the man to bend the universe to his will, but Thunstone defeats him with a cigarette lighter.

Wellman was a pulp writer, contributing among other works to the ouevre of Captain Future, and more than anything 'The Letters of Cold Fire' reminds us that Lovecraftian fiction was born in the same crucible as Doc Savage and Conan the Barbarian. While more recent contributions to the muscular mythos are often viewed as missing the point, Wellman is really just doing his own thing here. The only solid Lovecraftian link is a passing reference to the Necronomicon, rather than Thunstone casually giving the finger to cosmic horrors.

'Horror at Vecra' by Henry Hasse (1943) is more in keeping with the traditions of HPL's own canon, and more obviously and directly influenced by him. The narrator and his chum Bruce Tarleton visit a remote hamlet, ostensibly by accident but actually so that Bruce can pry into things that man was not meant to wot of. He wots, and is got, and thot's thot, with the narrator fleeing after Bruce is lured into a catacomb and incorporated into a gestalt thing of appropriately nebulous and unexplored nature.

* Magical schools are so hard to take seriously these days.