Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'The Dunstable Horror', 'The Crib of Hell', 'The Last Work of Pietro De Opono', 'The Eye of Horus', 'The Cellar Room' and 'Mythos'

It's like an extreme version of ninjas vs. pirates.

Another batch from Acolytes of Cthulhu, this time mostly from the 1960s.

'The Dunstable Horror' (1964) by Arthur Pendragon follows a palaeontologist looking for the written records of a Native American tribe and running into an ancient smallpox rape-revenge curse. It's a feature of Lovecraft's work that humans are essentially helpless before the enormity of the universe. Very rarely is the author of a supernatural horror human, and for that to be the case rather diminishes the cosmic horror aspect. Fear of the mysterious powers of wronged Native American shamans is somehow less potent than fear of an unknowable, alien intelligence. The accessibility of 'you raped my wife and wiped out my people with smallpox' as a motive makes it less monstrous, be the vengeance ever so supernatural.

'The Crib of Hell' (1965), also by Arthur Pendragon, is more of a kind, with a family secret lurking in a sealed room and growing slowly to monstrous maturity. While the threat is more alien and lurks beneath the veneer of normality, there is a distance here, and in 'The Dunstable Horror', in that the narrators are mere observers, rather than finding the alienness in their own family. A point of interest is that Pendragon sets both stories in the same fictional area of New England, the rural equivalent of Lovecraft's Arkham County.

'The Last Work of Pietro De Opono' (1969) by Steffan B. Aletti is a standard 'don't read the manual' tale, in which an inquisitive student delves into the wrong historical manuscript and accidentally turns himself into the vampiric thrall of a demonic entity and rues the absence of white magicians in a world of reason. Also by Aletti, 'The Eye of Horus' (1968) is a mummy's curse yarn packed with killer hawks. Both of these have a protagonist in the thick of things, although the threat is once again external.

A third Aletti, 'The Cellar Room' (1969), concerns spiritualism and the threat of things beyond mortal ken, and 'Mythos' (1961), by John Glasby, continues that thread, as an archaeologist probes into the mythology of Easter Island looking for the prehistoric origins of the maoi and finding more than he bargained for. In fact, it's an aspect which appears in all of these stories; it's not an uncommon theme in Lovecraftian fiction, but it seems to have been especially popular in the 60s. Most of these stories also employ the theme of the civilised world against a more primitive one that knows secrets, but unlike Lovecraft they tend to romanticise the earlier cultures; Lovecraft had almost a horror of past civilisations.