Sailor Yuggoth
Writings in the Lovecraft Tradition
Beyond the Bounds of Sanity
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
----H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Long before the expression "going viral" became a thing, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) encouraged aspiring authors to slip references to his Cthulhu Mythos into their own original-universe works. Toss out a name here and there, perhaps changed as if worn down by careless tongues or spoken with a heavy accent, and it would add an additional layer of verisimilitude to the writings of everyone in his circle. Readers coming across these little Easter eggs would get an extra frisson of dread at the sense that Lovecraft's imagined world might just be more than pure imagination.
HP Lovecraft also allowed a number of authors in his circle to write stories set more firmly in his Cthulhu Mythos. After his death, these and other authors have continued to write within his cosmos of horrific alien beings from beyond space and time, whose very existence could unhinge the minds of mere mortals. As is common when many hands work on a shared literary tradition, there have been heated debates about the degree to which one or another subsequent author's works are true to the mind of the original. While some authors succeeded in opening fascinating new vistas in Lovecraft's vision, others fell into the trap of "that which is good is not original, and that which is original is not good."
I myself came into the Lovecraft Mythos almost by accident. When I was younger, I'd enjoyed the writings of CL Moore, especially the stories of her space rogue Northwest Smith, without ever realizing just how much those works owed to Lovecraft. But the images of ancient evils, whether lurking in the swamps of a habitable Venus or the eye-twisting inhabitants of a world in another dimension, haunted my imagination for years to come.
But it was only when a friend passed me a call for submissions to an anthology of Lovecraft Mythos fiction that I really became interested in both reading and writing in the Lovecraft Mythos. As I dipped into it, the ideas captured my imagination, and from it came stories and essays, and more than a few reviews.
Last updated June 5, 2021.
