The Xothic Legend Cycle
The Complete Mythos Fiction of
Lin Carter
The Xothic Legend Cycle is published by Chaosium, Inc.
This book is copyrighted as a whole by Chaosium, Inc., ©1997, 2006; all rights reserved.
Chaosium Publication 6013. Published in February 1997, reprinted June 2006. ISBN 0-56882-095-6
Printed in USA.
For Robert Bloch and
Frank Belknap Long
... and, of course, for August Dcrleth.
[dedication by Lin Carter]
Introduction:
Xothic Romance
THE PRESENT collection provides a generous portion of Lin Carter’s work in the Cthulhu Mythos. What it excludes in the main is his considerable body of stories written in the form of chapters from the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, and the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Most of these should appear either in the Chaosium or in a projected volume, The Book of Eibon by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter. What The Xothic Legend Cycle includes is the set of his Mythos stories set in the modern day, usually contemporary with the Lovecraft and Derleth stories upon which they are based.
Of these Lin had segregated a group of five (“The Thing in the Pit”, “The Dweller in the Tomb”, “Out of the Ages", “Zoth-Ommog", and “The Winfield Heritance") to comprise the chapters of an episodic novel resembling Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu (available again from Carroll & Graf). These stones appeared in the mid-seventies in a handful of anthologies, and it was not easy for the interested reader to sit down and read them together. This novel he eventually submitted to Arkham House under the collective title The Terror Out of Time, a title that Lovecraft neglected to choose from the paradigmatic table, bur just as easily might have. (The title did appear, however, on a collection of some of the pulp stories of Lovecraft's collaborator/revision client Clifford M. Eddy, Jr.) This was a doomed effort, since following the passing of August Derleth, Arkham House seemed to repeat the fate of poor Amos Tuttle, undergoing a horrific transformation after death. Arkham House, it seemed, was no longer very keen on publishing, or even tolerating, that Cthulhu Mythos stuff. It was as if the American Bible Society had kept their name bur decided to quit wasting their time publishing scripture! Thus The Terror Out of Time was burn out of time and found no home.
I have included these stories, in some cases substituting earlier working titles Lin had used for the stories, which seem more fitting to me. Hence, “Zuth-Ommog" has been restored to “The Horror in the Gallery“, while I have retained the published title for “The Thing in the Pit”, instead of changing it to “Zanthu", as Lin intended for the book publication. Partly this is because I am not quite publishing the collection he intended, as is evident from the simple fact that these stories do not stand alone. They premiered as individual stories, and that is how they appear here, flanked by several other tales, some of which have quite as much mutual interconnection with the Terror Out of Time tales as these do among themselves. Most of them participate in that elder lore Lin called the Xothic legend cycle. This refers to the alien star Xoth where Cthulhu’s three offspring were spawned. It is patently obvious that Ghatanothoa, the chief bogey of Lovecraft’s “Out of the Aeons”, is Cthulhu under another name, so Lin, determined to harmonize the two stories (that is, to find some way of placing both in the same narrative universe), decided that Ghatanothoa must be the son of Cthulhu. The other two are Carter creations de novo: Zorh-Ommog and Ythogtha. The entities are connected, by means of the discovery of their images and of certain ancient manuscripts (the Zanthu Tablets and the Ponape Scripture) containing their lore, with the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. Characters whose names and adventures reverberate throughout the whole group of tales include explorers Abner Exekiel Hoag and Harold Hadley Copeland, curators Henry Stephenson Blaine, Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, and Bryant Hoskins, together with various latter-day Blaines and Hoags, etc.
Lin Carter’s contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos, one can see, is quite extensive, contributing new entities, books, and eerie locations to the Mythos megatext which seem to me on a par with the Mythos work of Ramsey Campbell. I believe that fact will become clear to any who have missed it, now that the whole Xothic cycle is available in one volume. Even readers already familiar with the original published versions are in for a treat, since Lin made numerous changes and expansions in the versions I have used here.
Lin Carter once styled himself not only a member of what he dubbed "The New Lovecraft Circle", but even as "the Last Disciple." That might seem both an arrogant and a short-sighted boast, as if he were Hegel announcing that philosophy had reached its final acme with him, or the Prophet Muhammad proclaiming himself the Seal of the Prophets. But that would be the wrong way to see it. When Lin Carter claimed to be the Last Disciple, it was a trick of perspective, like one of those posters which show the United States from the chauvinistic viewpoint of a New Yorker or a Bostonian. From where Lin Carter was standing, the whole genre of Cthulhu Mythos fiction seemed to be a great and mighty Ganges flowing toward him. Or think of it as a chain of tradition of which he found himself the inheritor. It all seemed to have aimed itself at him as its destination with the seeming inevitability that hindsight lends to random events.
Lin Carter saw himself as the fortunate possessor of a great inheritance, left to him by the likes of Lovecraft. Derleth, Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert E. Howard. Thus he was much like the typical protagonist of his own or Derleth’s Mythos tales: the scion of a doomed line, inheriting a legacy that is either a blessing or a curse, depending on which side you’re on. In fact, the single, central theme of his Cthulhu Mythos tales is the widening wake of “the Copeland Bequest", a collection of Pacific Island relics and idols brought back by archaeologist Harold Hadley Copeland and bequeathed to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities. Everyone it touches it marks for terrible doom, so chat history repeats itself again and again. Even this standard feature of Mythos fiction can be understood as an allegory of reading for Carter’s oeuvre: By writing pastiches, simply reshuffling the deck and retelling the old stories of Lovecraft and Derleth, Lin was doing what modern Structuralist and Post-structuralist poetics tells us is happening with every literary text. To read or to reread a text is to rewrite the text.
Lin Carter’s stories are much like the ancient Targums, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible dating from around the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. Most Jews in the Holy Land no longer commonly spoke Hebrew, the language of the Bible, so for their benefit paraphrases, something like today’s Living Bible, were prepared in Aramaic, the sister language to Hebrew, which most Jews were then speaking. What is important for today's scholars about these paraphrases is that they preserve popular interpretations of the scriptures. They are fossils of ancient reader response. We read the scriptures for ourselves, but we must not suppose that the ancients read what we do when they perused the same text. Each community of interpreters has its own set of lenses through which it reads the same text, with widely variant results. We all unwittingly bring presuppositions to the texts. When we see an ancient reader recording in a paraphrase of the scripture what he thought the scripture meant, we have a priceless window into the way the text was being understood then.