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Joshi, S. T. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2008. 308 pages.
Smith, Don G. H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture: The Works and Their Adaptations in Film, Television, Comics, Music and Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. ix+168 pages+index.
It certainly proves the saturated state of Lovecraft criticism that much of the yield of recent inquiry into Lovecraftian lore has spread to the perimeters: the paraphernaha and marginaUa related to HPL, among them the spin-off culture arising in the wake of this seminal author of supernatural horror. Leading Lovecraft critic S. T. Joshi's latest volume on the Providence author, The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, similarly treats Lovecraft not as an object of inquiry but as base material for an overarching study of the progeny of Cthulhu country.
There is much to tackle: a more or less distinct zone of horror fiction as we know it has evolved from Lovecraft's then litde-valued escapades into the cosmic, the ahen, the hereditary, and the eldritch, which took as their primary metaphor the indifferent god-like monster - for instance, the one lending its name to the Cthulhu Mythos. Defining the Mythos itself occupies a central position in the book. Joshi warns that he reserves the term "Cthulhu Mythos" for the pseudo-mythological elements created by Lovecraft's contemporaries or successors ("there is reaUy no paraUel in the entire history of Uterature for such enduring and wide-ranging attempts to imitate and develop a single writer's conceptions" [20]), the founder of which he takes to be August Derleth, while he prefers to caU the realm of Lovecraft's own creations the Lovecraft Mythos. Elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, then, are mainly the aUen entities (Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Hastur, or Nyarlathotep), forbidden books (Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis, The Book ofEibon), and fantastic vistas of unnamable lands (Leng, Sarnath, Celephaïs) that caught on quickly and have produced an ever-expanding vortex of terms, names, and places that dazzle even the most ardent fan of the Mythos.
Yog-Sothothery aside, Joshi's method here is as meticulous as ever, even if his main project at the end of the day appears to be to assess the worth and merit of Lovecraft followers, sometimes with the not- so-covert purpose of separating the...