Any truly significant "Mythos" stories after "Shadow Out of Time"?

[Extollager]

I'm rereading At the Mountains of Madness. It strikes me that, next to this, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and that late story, The Shadow Out of Time, Lovecraft wrote no indispensable stories. They may be entertaining, but next to these they are, manifestly, not important. One might wonder if Lovecraft hadn't pretty much exhausted for himself the value of what we casually call the Cthulhu Mythos.

He died. People have gone on writing Mythos stories -- to call them that for convenience's sake -- and these may be intriguing, entertaining, or perhaps even charming. I'm saying that Lovecraft set a very high bar for the serious weird tale with Mountains and the two Shadow stories by late in his life, and his remaining output suggests that he wouldn't have written Mythos stories worthy to stand with them had he lived to write for another 25 years. I'm further suggesting that those heights haven't -- so far as I [note well the qualification] am aware -- been reached any time since. The Mythos then may be regarded, in a sense, as far as a serious literary phenomenon is concerned, as a thing of the 1920s-30s, at least as regards the pinnacle of achievement.

I'm throwing this out for discussion and debate if it seems worthwhile.

The analogy might be with, say, baroque music. A composer today could still compose a very agreeable work that in every performable way sounded like a baroque work. But no one expects him or her to write something that adds significantly to what Bach achieved.

Thoughts?

 

[Randy M.]

I'm not sure of that, Extollager. HPL's movement was from Gothic horror to Gothic fantasy to Gothic weird to Gothic s.f., and if he hadn't died he might have pursued further s.f. implications of what he'd already created. Do we have an idea of how much his late production was curtailed by illness versus loss of creativity? Had he thoroughly emptied that well, or was he simply too ill to continue? (Maybe he'd have gone realist: The Shambler in the Gray Flannel Suit? The Man with the Golden Tentacle? The Elder God and the Sea?)

As for Mythos stories ala Lovecraft, there are some fine variations on his approaches, but how strictly are you defining Mythos stories? If narrowly, then probably not. If more broadly, the work of Laird Barron and Caitlin Kiernan (not to mention writers I'm less familiar with like Wm. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas, Joseph Pulver, and others) have certainly taken their course based in some part on their reading of HPL. Perhaps not a direct line of descent, but touching on the main body of his work.

Also, your discounting of his other stories may be reasonable in looking at HPL's body of work, but The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "Herbert West, Reanimator" and "The Horror of Red Hook" have had a surprisingly strong influence on later creators.

Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

My intention was to focus on the Lovecraft work that was of real literary value; work that gives us that special poetic quality that he narrowed in on in his mature fiction. This isn't to say that there aren't people who like the other stuff and have been influenced by it or have imitated it. But if "Herbert West" dropped out of existence, we could still get anything we like in it, from other pulp horror. Wouldn't you agree? But, on the other hand, if At the Mountains of Madness and several other late stories ceased to exist, what really could take their place?

It's like with Peake's Gormenghast. If it disappeared, there'd be nothing that would do, in its place. We could go on adding examples of such things -- Le Guin's initial Earthsea books, Lewis's space trilogy, Blackwood's "Willows" and "Wendigo," etc. There are things taht remind us of them, and there may be things that imitate them, but they themselves have a special quality that's not simply due to our affectionate memories of our first encounters with them.

As regards Lovecraft and the Mythos: just yesterday I reread Fred Chappell's "The Adder." What a lot of fun -- and a real creepiness, too. But It's not "indispensable." Is anything "indispensable" (if that's not too vague to be of use to anyone but myself) in the Mythose since Lovecraft;s own contributions? I'm not saying there might not be plenty that some readers could and do read with enjoyment. But when I revisit the handful of Lovecraft's stories that I've mentioned, there is a sense that they are in a class by themselves.

Or: are they?

That's my question.

 

[BAYLOR]

My intention was to focus on the Lovecraft work that was of real literary value; work that gives us that special poetic quality that he narrowed in on in his mature fiction. This isn't to say that there aren't people who like the other stuff and have been influenced by it or have imitated it. But if "Herbert West" dropped out of existence, we could still get anything we like in it, from other pulp horror. Wouldn't you agree? But, on the other hand, if At the Mountains of Madness and several other late stories ceased to exist, what really could take their place?

It's like with Peake's Gormenghast. If it disappeared, there'd be nothing that would do, in its place. We could go on adding examples of such things -- Le Guin's initial Earthsea books, Lewis's space trilogy, Blackwood's "Willows" and "Wendigo," etc. There are things taht remind us of them, and there may be things that imitate them, but they themselves have a special quality that's not simply due to our affectionate memories of our first encounters with them.

As regards Lovecraft and the Mythos: just yesterday I reread Fred Chappell's "The Adder." What a lot of fun -- and a real creepiness, too. But It's not "indispensable." Is anything "indispensable" (if that's not too vague to be of use to anyone but myself) in the Mythose since Lovecraft;s own contributions? I'm not saying there might not be plenty that some readers could and do read with enjoyment. But when I revisit the handful of Lovecraft's stories that I've mentioned, there is a sense that they are in a class by themselves.

Or: are they?

That's my question.

The Color Out of Space The meteorite with the strage unearthly indescribable color thatdisloved into the ground the gradual horrific mutations and deaths of plants animals and The Gardner family on that farm where the meteor crashed . This is a story that be read and reread , its such a good story and arguably his best. . Its been 3 time to the big screed , Die Monster Die with Boris Karloff , Nick Adams and Susan Farmer it was lose adaptation at best. The 1987 film The Curse, thought a great film was bt more faithful and the 2019 film The Color Out of Space with Nicolas Cage was lanother somewhat lose adaption but did capture the elevens fo Lovecrats tale very nicely . Author Micheal Shea did a novel Sequel in 1984. And in the Kagan Damned Trilogy by Johnathan Maberry which has a Cthulhu and the Outer Gods Theme, you also have a slight bit of homage to The Color Out of Space .

 

[Toby Frost]

I don't think there are any other Mythos stories like that, at least not as far as I remember. I wonder if Lovecraft was moving towards another form of writing, perhaps more SF-based. But then SF, horror and fantasy were less clearly-defined back then.

I think part of the problem is that Lovecraft's best stories all have a pretty similar format, much like a joke with a punchline at the end. I wonder if this is partly down to Lovecraft's weakness as a writer of human beings. (Or possibly because he didn't feel as comfortable with other structures - he seems not to have liked the action elements of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".) Other great horror authors - Ramsay Campbell or Clive Barker, say, or even MR James - have written stories that don't really use a big revelation to make their point, or which put the revelation much earlier in the story, to great effect. It's hard not to feel that, as @Extollager suggests, that sort of story had "been done" by "The Shadow out of Time".