In the late 1970's and early 1980's, Lin Carter revived Weird Tales as a series of paperback anthologies, he lovingly recreated the unique magazine, not necessarily as it was, but as he remembered reading and enjoying it, and pleasant memory distorts. In the same way, his Derlethian fiction is a record of what he read when he read the tales of Lovecraft and Derleth years before. He had really rewritten the stories years before, when he read and reread them in his youth. It was years later that he formalized it by putting pen to paper. For a similar case, take the difference between the book and the movie named Psycho II. The book was Bloch's own sequel to his original Psycho. The movie (like its own sequels) was the sequel, nor so much to the original novel or even to the original film (quite close to the novel), but rather to the movie as viewers remembered it, a sequel to the legend of Psycho (as Marc A. Cerasini pointed out to me). To tell you the truth, I preferred the movie version of Psycho II.
So Carter was trying to pass onto you the Mythos as he himself knew it and loved it. Some readers recoil, they think, because Carter (or Lumley or Derleth) has dared to rewrite Lovecraft or the Mythos. In fact what they cannot stomach is the fact that it is Carter’s rewriting which is on the printed page rather than their own, which they naively equate with “the real HPL.”
Let me be a bit more specific about the matter of rewriting the earlier fictions of one’s predecessors. There are two points to get straight here, about Lin Carter’s stories and about anyone else’s. The first is that, as Gerard Genette shows us, any pastiche is also a parody, an exaggeration of the original writer’s or story’s most characteristic marks, if you decide to write a Conan pastiche, chances are you are going to wind up having the mighty Cimmerian swear “By Crom!” a few more times than Howard did per story. You will probably increase the quotient of “skull-cleaving” blows, etc. Since the smaller details of the warp and woof of Howard’s style work so well, hypnotizing you as you read, you cannot quite identify or explain them, and thus you cannot quire take aim at them to imitate them in your pastiche. To compensate, you lean more heavily on the most obvious stylistic trademarks and hope the reader will think it sounds like the real thing. This is of course the reason, also, for the way many fan Mythos pastiches turn out. As immature writers, their authors cannot account for what it is in Lovecraft’s stories that grabs them so. So they go overboard with the most blatantly obvious feature, the Myrhos names and monsters. The pitiful result only makes it all the more obvious that this was never really the secret at all.
The other thing about rewriting, pastiching, is this: It is like trying to reduplicate the results of a favorite recipe you got from your mom or grandmom. You are using pretty much the same ingredients, but it’s not an exact science. It is human imperfection that allows for human individuality. And that’s good! That way, even several writers who are trying their best to imitate Lovecraft, let’s take the young Ramsey Campbell, the young Henry Kuttner, and the young Robert Bloch, each has his own unique spin. So does Lin Carter. If his tales were exactly like Lovecraft’s stories, they would be Lovecraft’s stories, which, one senses, is what some critics really want. They would like all Lovecraftian fiction besides Lovecraft’s to be reduced to nullity; they wish anyone else never to have written. I don't.
As to the how of the thing, I must repair to the Structuralists again. Not that there is no one else from whom to learn it; Lester Dent, with his Mad Libs-like plot board, was already doing Structuralism without knowing it. But I think Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp have drawn some helpful maps for us better to know what we’re trying to do when we write. Lévi-Strauss stressed the importance of the paradigmatic axis along which a story is told. That is, a plot may be almost endlessly repeated without the reader not noticing or at least nor caring much, in tale after tale. The story is not monotonous as long as the Mad Lib blanks are filled in with different options every time. The author has something like a grammatical paradigm before him every time he sits down to write. Who’s the hero going to be? Choose from “male” or “female.” “Old” or "young.” Will the hero be a cowboy? A spy? A swordsman? An average Joe forced into heroism by circumstances? Take your pick. There will be some wrong to redress. What sort will it be? Kidnaping of a maiden? Of a child? Theft of a magic medallion? Or a magic sword? By whom? An evil wizard? An estranged husband? Etc. The various options available in the paradigm are what give the story much of its variety, even if the plot does not vary. Again, read any dozen or three dozen Doc Savage novels: You'll find the same set of narrative roles divided up among a new set of names each time. But so flexible was Lester Dent’s imagination that it never grew tiresome!
The plot is plotted (no coincidence!) along the syntagmic axis. This is the train of logic that carries things along, the narrative syntax, like the governing structure of single sentences. The path proceeds through this set of windings and not that. Even here, what you do is choose from the set of options at each plot juncture: victory? Defeat? Temporary’ setback? Apparent defeat that is later revealed as a victory? There is an infinite number of possible combinations as the writer reshuffles the deck each time, spinning the wheel again for every narrative.
Cthulhu Mythos stories tend to vary more along the paradigmatic axis than along the syntagmic axis. That is, having read your Lovecraft or your Derleth, you have a pretty good sense of what is finally going to happen, though maybe not yet to whom it will happen. Will the doomed delver be a Miskatonic University prof this time? An antiquarian? A genealogist? What sort of secret will he discover? An ancient tablet? An ancestral diary? A forbidden book? And whose unwelcome attention is he going to attract? An ancient sorcerer (like Joseph Curwen, Keziah Mason, Ephraim Waite?), an Old One? If so, will it be Cthulhu, Tsarhoggua, Shub-Niggurath? Narrathoth? Does it matter?
One way to mark the difference between traditional Lovecraftian writing and the New Wave is that the latter dares to experiment more with the syntagmic axis. Different sorts of things happen in Campbell's collection New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos than did in Derleth’s Tales of the Ctbulbu Mythos. You’re off the scale with both axes left dangling when you get to Creation Press’ collection Starry Wisdom.
Lin Carter, though, was definitely a traditionalist. He just shakes up the paradigmatic dice, whispers “Yig eyes!“, and lets ‘er rip. But you know the game he’s playing. It’s the one he’s always played, with the same rules, the same narrative syntax.
One trait of Carter’s did prove an Achilles Heel, at least when it came to his Cthulhu Mythos fiction. He shared the fan’s enthusiasm for the jots and tittles of the Mythos as a system of lore, just as Trekkies pore over those manuals of the imaginary schematics of the Enterprise. To me, Star Trek lover that I am, that seems a bit much. One might view the sort of thing some of us Lovecraftians do, like compiling Mythos glossaries and theogonies, in the same light. I have that fascinated fixation on Mythos lore myself, in case you hadn't noticed. I do not consider it a fault, as long as you don’t let it run away with you. How do you know when you are in danger of letting it run away with you? I’d say one major symptom is when you start writing stories about the Cthulhu Mythos instead of stories that merely utilize the Cthulhu Mythos. Sometimes, I admit, Lin Carter very definitely did the former.