by @Tons O’ Fun, curator of HOWLS Book Club nominees for August’s “A Cavalcade of Cosmic Classics!” category
One of the most influential movements in the history of horror literature was the cosmic horror movement of the early 20th century. I grew up reading and falling in love with these stories but have found that, unfortunately, most readers and writers today are only familiar with them through reputation. I want to change that just a little.
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith
Not just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him “perhaps unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living” or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis. Clark Ashton Smith—autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller—simply wrote like no one else, before or since. This new collection of his very best tales and poems is selected and introduced by supernatural literature scholar S. T. Joshi and allows readers to encounter Smith’s visionary brand of fantastical, phantasmagorical worlds, each one filled with invention, terror, and a superlative sense of metaphysical wonder.
—Goodreads
Clark Ashton Smith is the finest writer I’ve ever read. His craftsmanship is unbelievable. This collection by Penguin Classics is one of the best single collections of his work. The man was a marvel and the marvelous worlds he created have been unfortunately overshadowed by the works of his friend and contemporary, Lovecraft. He is a must-read author.
Bookshop* | Goodreads | Amazon
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (30th Anniversary Golden Collection) by H.P. Lovecraft and Others
Howard Phillips Lovecraft forever changed the face of horror, fantasy, and science fiction with a remarkable series of stories as influential as the works of Poe, Tolkien, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. His chilling mythology established a gateway between the known universe and an ancient dimension of otherworldly terror, whose unspeakable denizens and monstrous landscapes – dread Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, the Plateau of Leng, the Mountains of Madness – have earned him a permanent place in the history of the macabre.
In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of horror and fantasy’s finest authors pay tribute to the master of the macabre with a collection of original stories set in the fearsome Lovecraft tradition.
—Goodreads
This collection is, in my opinion, the best collection to get someone started with The Mythos. The table of contents reads like a “who’s who” of early cosmic pulp writers, but this updated edition includes works written much later, on up into the 90’s, and encompasses the history of Lovecraft’s legacy.
Bookshop* | Goodreads | Amazon
Mysteries of the Worm by Robert Bloch
Robert Bloch has become one with his fictional counterpart Ludvig Prinn: future generations of readers will know him as an eldritch name hovering over a body of nightmare texts. To know them will be to know him. And thus we have decided to release a new and expanded third edition of Robert Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm. This collection contains four more Mythos tales–”The Opener of the Way”, “The Eyes of the Mummy”, “Black Bargain”, and “Philtre Tip”–not included in the first two editions.
—Goodreads
Robert Bloch was mainly known for writing “Psycho”, but long before he created Norman Bates, Bloch was also mentored and encouraged at a young age by Lovecraft himself. Bloch’s stories began closer in style to Lovecraft’s work but eventually he found his own voice and penned some of the best examples of cosmic horror ever written. I chose this collection because it represents his contributions admirably.
Bookshop* | Goodreads | Amazon
Don’t Dream by Donald Wandrei
Don’t Dream gathers forty short stories, novelettes, prose poems, unpublished sketches and essays by Donald Wandrei into a single omnibus edition. Classic horror stories such as “The Painted Mirror”, previously uncollected stories, and unpublished material amply demonstrate Wandrei’s talents and versatility in the field of fantasy, science fiction, and supernatural horror.
—Goodreads
Donald Wandrei, along with August Derleth, started Arkham House Publishing with the chief motivation of keeping Lovecraft’s name from ever dying out. It is not an exaggeration to say that without the devotion and dedication to his memory these two men had, that horror media itself would have had a very different future. Derleth’s fiction is adequate enough, but Wandrei (the much less known of the two) shows a stunning grasp of the cosmic horror concept and his prose is quite something to behold. I chose this collection because it represents the entire horror output of a sadly forgotten literary talent.
Bookshop* | Goodreads | Amazon
The 8th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK (Vol. 1) by Frank Belknap Long
Prepare yourself for macabre spectacle and contes cruel, crawling things and loathsome gods, predators from deep inside the mind of man and from far outside angled space, all brought to you by the incomparable Frank Belknap Long!
—Goodreads
Besides Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith, there may have been no better writer of Mythos tales than Frank Long. His work, while maintaining the same style as these two, was also ahead of its time. Long was a fantastic writer who’s inventiveness and style sometimes even eclipsed the man himself. Don’t sleep on Frank Long!
Bookshop* | Goodreads | Amazon
The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell
A collection of fantasy and horror short stories by British author J. Ramsey Campbell, who dropped the initial from his name in subsequent publications. It was released in 1964 by Arkham House in an edition of 2,009 copies and was the author’s first book. The stories are part of the Cthulhu Mythos. Campbell had originally written his introduction to be included in the book The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces under the title “Cthulhu in Britain”. However, Arkham’s editor, August Derleth, decided to use it here. The contents were reprinted with some of Campbell’s later Lovecraftian work in his 1985 collection Cold Print.
—Goodreads
Ramsey Campbell is a pretty well known horror author, but his early Mythos contributions give great insight into his later works. I invite you to take a look at the beginnings of a titan of the industry, and see just what he learned from Lovecraft that inspired him to eventually go on to pen so many horror classics.
Goodreads | Amazon
And The Winner Is…
Out of these six books, HOWLers voted to read The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith. Join HOWL Society on Monday, August 23, 2021 to begin discussion!
Erik McHatton’s passion for horror literature began in grade school and can be credited to an early fascination with the “Terrific Triples” horror collections of Helen Hoke. In those books, he plumbed the depraved depths of Poe, Lovecraft, Dunsany, Bloch, Bradbury and more and was forever after put under the spell of those masters.
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