But I knowed he would, so it’s Okay.
Yr servant,
Ezra Whateley
* * * *
Santa Monica
Mr. Whateley,
I don’t appreciate your tart tone. We’re all trying our best to be sensitive to your religion’s eschatology. Once again, our new legal department found no objections to Humpty Dumpty after receiving your gift of a large gold bar covered in moss. (You should really consider keeping your money in mutual funds.) Subsequently, “Shadow” has gone out to schools. Students and teachers are again pleased.
The police, not so much.
Same problem as before, I fear: bad timing. Recently, a half dozen postmen disappeared in Sherman Oaks. One was found dead near a cinderblock wall, split open like a Thanksgiving turkey, intestines missing. Anyway, because the postmen were federal employees, the FBI stepped in. They questioned everyone at Whitman Press except the legal department, who had resigned and left for the Barbados with the gold bar. The FBI seemed to know quite a bit about you and Dunwich. They were rude, intolerant, bullies, especially one Special Agent Hank Armitage. He treated me as if I were an ignorant dupe. (I’m sure my SAT scores tower over his.)
I’m afraid I gave them your address. Clearly, from your previous letter, you are no stranger to religious persecution by the authorities.
Let me know if you need legal help.
Sadly yours,
Martin Gelb-Crispling
* * * *
Dunwich
Goode Gelb-Crispling,
Armitage is a cursed threat, and may yet spoil the return as in times past. (I pray he dies screaming in the mouth of terrible Nyarlathotep.) Know ye the signs of the coming? Lightning shall strike for six hours and upon the sixth hour doorways shall open, admitting them from without.
But all waits upon the stars and the last book, The Children’s Necronomicon with pop up section.
Hurry ye with the printing.
Yr. Servant,
Ezra Whateley
* * * *
Santa Monica
Dear Mr. Whateley,
Thanks you so much for your thoughtful gift. I have never seen an emerald that big. (It will sure help with Shannon’s college.) May I call you, Ezra? I was a little upset in my last letter. Please forgive me. I’ve been under great pressure. The manuscript and artwork arrived for the Children’s Necronomicon. Everyone is relieved except the new legal department, who were hoping to have issues that would result in receiving one of your generous gifts. As it stands, the new book appears to be a fun, interactive, Harry Potter-type spell book with various incantations plus potions children can make out of common household items.
From the artwork, I gather kids will be opening those doorways you’re so fond of and allowing Earth to be engulfed by nightmarish Great Old Ones who topple cities and crush horrified humans. Meanwhile, the children who opened the doorways will be honored and given power over continents. (As well as pesky brothers and sisters? I kid.) Clearly this message of perseverance winning out over adversity via belief in an underrepresented religion will be well received in diversity circles.
Are you still being hassled by police? I’ll notify the ACLU.
Martin Gelb-Crispling
* * * *
Dunwich
Goode Martin,
Cursed Armitage hunts me and has brought dogs, but this time he is too late. The stars are almost right. Ye have done much to bring about the indescribable return. May ye go mad quickly and not be devoured.
Farewell,
Ezra
* * * *
Santa Monica
Dear Ezra,
Please contact me at once. (I’ve included a phone card.) We have a crossover hit on our hands. The Children’s Necromonicon (with pop-up Great Old Ones) is being gobbled up—another of your favorite themes. Kids love it. My Shannon must have four saltshakers and twenty candles in her room. I hear her up there pronouncing those jaw busting spells you so love to write. Shannon even goes online and chants with other kids. They’ve started a Facebook page. As for you, we’re besieged with interview requests from the media. The Children’s Necronomicon could be bigger than Twilight.
Your friend,
Marty
PS: Nasty weather today. Lightning’s been hitting around here for almost six hours. Hope it lets up soon.
I’m supposed to play tennis this afternoon.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Robert Bloch
Robert Bloch (1917–1994) was a prolific American writer, primarily of crime, horror and science fiction. He is best known as the writer of the novel Psycho, the basis for the film of the same name directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He wrote that “Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk,” (a quote borrowed by Stephen King and often misattributed to him). His fondness for a pun is evident in the titles of his story collections such as Tales in a Jugular Vein, Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of and Out of the Mouths of Graves. Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over 20 novels. He was one of the youngest members of the Lovecraft Circle. H. P. Lovecraft was Bloch’s mentor and one of the first to seriously encourage his talent. However, while Bloch started his career by emulating Lovecraft and his brand of cosmic horror, he later specialized in crime and horror stories dealing with the inner workings of the human mind.
Lin Carter
Linwood Vrooman Carter (1930–1988) was an American author of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an editor, poet, and critic. He usually wrote as Lin Carter; known pseudonyms include H. P. Lowcraft (for an H. P. Lovecraft parody) and Grail Undwin. Many of his novels and short stories are in print from Wildside Press.
Adrian Cole
Adrian Cole lives in Solomon Kane country in Devonshire, England, and has had some 25 books published as well as numerous short stories. “Dark Destroyer” is part of the Voidal Saga, a trilogy of very weird fantasy books (available from Wildside Press).
Michael R. Collings
Michael R. Collings is the author of nine novels (science fiction, Horror, and Mystery) as well as multiple volumes of short fiction, poetry, criticism, and literary studies. An Emeritus Professor of English at Pepperdine University, he is an authority on the works of Stephen King and Orson Scott Card. He currently lives with his wife in southeastern Idaho.
John Glasby
John Stephen Glasby (1928–2011) was a prolific British author whose work spanned a range of popular genres. A professional research chemist and mathematician, he produced over 300 novels and short stories during the 1950s and 1960s, most of which were published pseudonymously under the Badger Books imprint. Wildside Press is reprinting the best of his work. We are delighted to present two original Mythos stories in this collection.
Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is probably best known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.
He was a member of the Lovecraft circle and contributed several notable elements to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos of horror stories (beginning with “The Black Stone,” his Mythos stories also included “The Cairn on the Headland,” “The Children of the Night” and “The Fire of Asshurbanipal”).
T.E.D. Klein
T.E.D. Klein is the former editor of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, but before he took over that role, he was an accomplished—if far too infrequent for his fans—writer. Critic S. T. Joshi wrote of his work: “In close to 25 years of writing Klein has only two books and a handful of scattered tales to his credit, and yet his achievement towers gigantically over that of his more prolific contemporaries.”
“The Events at Poroth Farm” originally appeared in 1972 in a fan magazine, and it immediately gained Klein a rabid following. It’s easy to see why. The version included in The Cthulhu Megapack has been especially—and subtly—revised for this pu
blication.
Henry Kuttner
Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Kuttner was known for his literary prose and worked in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. They met through their association with the “Lovecraft Circle,” a group of writers and fans who corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft.
Frank Belknap Long
Frank Belknap Long (1901–1994) was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).
H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. If you aren’t familiar with his work, well…this is a good place to start!
John McCann
An Emmy winning TV animation writer, John P. McCann enjoys the freedom of prose and the absence of budget constraints on the imagination. In addition to blogging at www.writeenough.blogspot.com, John is currently crafting a humorous book on New Age practices entitled “The Little Book of Big Enlightenment.”
Mark McLaughlin
Mark McLaughlin’s fiction, poetry, andarticles have appeared in hundreds of magazines, anthologies and websites. His most recent story collection is Partners in Slime, co-authored by Michael McCarty, from Damnation Books. His first novel, Monster Behind the Wheel (also coauthored by McCarty), is being re-released by Medallion Press.
Visit him at www.Facebook.com/MarkMcLaughlinMedia
Brian McNaughton
Brian McNaughton (1935–2004) was an American writer of horror and fantasy fiction who mixed sex, satire, and black humour. He won a World Fantasy Award for his collection of linked short stories, The Throne of Bones (1997, available from Wildside Press).
Thomas Kent Miller
Thos. Kent Miller is the author of Allan Quatermain at the Crucible of Life and Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World. He’s been published in Faunus: The Journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen, Ghosts & Scholars: M.R. James Newsletter, and The Weird Tales Collector. He names his cats after Victorian authors.
Robert M. Price
Robert M. 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. As editor of the journal Crypt of Cthulhu and of a series of Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, Price has been a major figure in H. P. Lovecraft scholarship and fandom for many years. In essays that introduce the anthologies and the individual stories, Price traces the origins of Lovecraft’s entities, motifs, and literary style. Price’s religious background often informs his Mythos criticism, seeing gnostic themes in Lovecraft’s fictional god Azathoth and interpreting “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as a kind of initiation ritual.
Stephen Mark Rainey
Stephen Mark Rainey is an author of novels, short stories, and various works of nonfiction. From 1987 to 1997, he edited Deathrealm, a magazine of horror and dark fantasy fiction, for which he won several awards for Best Editor.
Darrell Schweitzer
Darrell Schweitzer is an American writer, editor, and essayist in the field of speculative fiction. Much of his focus has been on dark fantasy and horror, although he does also work in science fiction and fantasy. Schweitzer is also a prolific writer of literary criticism and editor of collections of essays on various writers within his preferred genres, many of which are available from Wildside Press.
Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter, and author of fantasy, horror, and science fiction short stories. As a member of the Lovecraft circle, Smith remains second only to Lovecraft in general esteem and importance amongst contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales, where some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. (It has been said of him that “Nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse.”) His work is marked chiefly by an extraordinarily wide and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective, and a vein of sardonic (and sometimes ribald) humor.
Brian Stableford
Brian Stableford is no stranger to weird fiction. He is the author of more than 100 books, covering pretty much every aspect of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields, from novels and short story collections to critical essays and author studies. About his story in this volume, he writes:
“‘The Innsmouth Heritage’ is a sequel to ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ by H. P. Lovecraft. It was commissioned for use in an anthology called Shadows Over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones, but when the anthology initially failed to sell, I redirected it to a specialist publisher of Lovecraftiana, Necronomicon Press, who issued it as a chapbook in 1992. The anthology eventually sold to Fedogan & Bremer, who published it in 1994.”
Brian has two volumes of short stories now available which will without doubt be of interest to fans of the Cthulhu Mythos: The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Descents (Wildside Press, 2009) and The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (Wildside Press, 2012).
Jason Van Hollander
Jason Van Hollander is an award-winning illustrator, book designer, and far too infrenquent author. His stories and collaborations with Darrell Schweitzer earned a World Fantasy Award nomination. His work has appeared in Weird Tales, Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and many other places.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of about fifty novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly in the SF, fantasy, and horror fields. He won the Hugo award in 1988 for his short story, “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” and was president of the Horror Writers Association for two years. His most recent book is Tales of Ethshar, a collection of short stories set in the same universe as The Misenchanted Sword and many of his finest fantasy novels.
Table of Contents
THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Part 1), by H. P. Lovecraft
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Part 2), by H. P. Lovecraft
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (Part 3), by H. P. Lovecraft
THE EVENTS AT POROTH FARM, by T.E.D. Klein
THE RETURN OF THE SORCERER, by Clark Ashton Smith
WORMS OF THE EARTH, by Robert E. Howard
ENVY, THE GARDENS OF YNATH, AND THE SIN OF CAIN, by Darrell Schweitzer
DRAWN FROM LIFE, by John Glasby
IN THE HAUNTED DARKNESS, by Michael R. Collings
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (Part 1), by H. P. Lovecraft
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (Part 2), by H. P. Lovecraft
THE INNSMOUTH HERITAGE, by Brian Stableford
THE DOOM THAT CAME TO INNSMOUTH, by Brain McNaughton
THE NAMELESS OFFSPRING, by Clark Ashton Smith
THE HOUNDS OF TINDALOS, by Frank Belknap Long
THE FACELESS GOD, by Robert Bloch
THE CHILDREN OF BURMA, by Stephen Mark Rainey
THE CALL OF CTHULHU, by H.P. Lovecraft
THE OLD ONE, by John Glasby
THE HOLINESS OF AZÉDARAC, by Clark Ashton Smith
THOSE OF THE AIR, by Darrell Schweitzer and Jason Van Hollander
THE GRAVEYARD RATS, by Henry Kuttner
TOADFACE, by Mark McLaughlin
THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS (Part 1), by H. P. Lovecraft
THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS (Part 2), by H. P. Lovecraft
THE EATER OF HOURS, by Darrell Sc
hweitzer
UBBO-SATHLA, by Clark Ashton Smith
THE SPACE-EATERS, by Frank Belknap Long
THE FIRE OF ASSHURBANIPAL, by Robert E. Howard
BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP, by H. P. Lovecraft
SOMETHING IN THE MOONLIGHT, by Lin Carter
THE SALEM HORROR, by Henry Kuttner
THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE, by H.P. Lovecraft
DOWN IN LIMBO, by Robert M. Price
THE DWELLER IN THE GULF, by Clark Ashton Smith
AZATHOTH, by H.P. Lovecraft
PICKMAN’S MODEM, by Lawrence Watt-Evans
THE HUNTERS FROM BEYOND, by Clark Ashton Smith
GHOULMASTER, by Brian McNaughton
THE SPAWN OF DAGON, by Henry Kuttner
DARK DESTROYER, by Adrian Cole
THE DUNWICH HORROR, by H. P. Lovecraft
THE DARK BOATMAN, by John Glasby
DAGON AND JILL, by John P. McCann
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 112