David C. Schultz maintains that the Mythos is only a set of atmospheric props and should never be brought to center stage. This is the flaw for which Fritz Leiber excoriated Brian Lumley’s The Transition ofTitus Crow. I think Schultz is entirely correct. Being fascinated with Mythos lore in no way means you think that the stories should be about that lore. But Lin Carter did think so. He would even say up front that he wrote a particular story just to get some new Mythos items in print (and thus admitted to the official canon). This is like when a monkish pal of Erasmus asked him why the critical Greek text of the New Testament he was compiling (it was the first one after the Medieval use of the Latin Vulgate) did not contain I John 5:17b (“For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.”), the single biblical passage in support of the dogma of the Trinity. Erasmus replied that, though he was as Trinitarian as the next guy, he had to admit that the passage was not found in any ancient Greek manuscript known to him. It must have been penciled into the Vulgate to provide after-the-fact evidence for the doctrine. So he had to omit it. He agreed to include it after all if his friend could turn up a Greek manuscript containing the text. It wasn’t long before he did, though Erasmus suspected it was not in fact more ancient than a few days! In the same way, Lin was not above writing out a tale of the Mythos to provide a scriptural citation for a piece of theology he had just dreamed up.
I know it’s a tightrope we all sometimes walk; so much so that to some it must seem there is no difference between a story that uses the Mythos and one that about the Mythos. After all, the collection you are reading, like all its fellows in this series, does not contain randomly selected horror fiction, maybe a little Hawthorne here, a little Stoker there. No, what we have here is a bunch of stories whose supposed virtue lies precisely in their being "Cthulhu Mythos" titles. So aren’t the stories really about the Mythos? Aren’t we playing a pathetic game of self-deception when we pretend stories are not about the Mythos but only utilize it, sounding almost as if we regretted its presence but are able to tolerate it as long as it doesn’t become too obtrusive?
I would prefer to put it a bit differently than the venerable Schultz does. I would say that the Cthulhuvian lore functions as a subtext for the rest of any story in which it appears. I am assuming Michael Riffaterre’s concept of subtext in his book Fictional Truth. What gives a fictional narrative its ring of truth? Deep down, Riffaterre argues, we all take for granted the correspondence theory of truth. That is, we imagine that “true" statements are those which accurately correspond to the way things are. Historians should report "history as it actually happened", as the dictum of Franz Overbeck had it. Art should be strictly representational, even superreal, not that crap by Picasso. This is where the larger literary category of verisimilitude comes in: A story cannot draw the reader into a "temporary willing suspension of disbelief" (Coleridge) unless it answers, for the most part, to the rules of reality as the reader defines it. A reading public who believed much more in divine providence than we do might find Charles Dickens’ wild coincidences less jolting than we do. When we find ourselves saying, "Oh come on now'” we know the author has lost us, has fumbled the ball. He has forfeited verisimilitude and the reader rudely awakens to the fact that he is just spending his time reading some story some guy made up.
The use of a subtext provides a hidden layer of symbols with which the surface narrative text will resonate, and to which it will seem to correspond. The subtext might be a set of conventional assumptions or sentiments which the reader can be expected to hold. Then the surface events of a horror tale will ring against them like the hammers moved by the piano keys striking on the strings inside. Stephen King does this quite well, e.g., in Pet Cemetery by erecting the superstructure of the zombie tale (which by itself would be mighty hard to take seriously) upon the hidden foundation of a subtext of real-life tragedy: the horrendous aftermath of the mundane death of a child. The latter is a horror only too real to any reader who has been close to a real-life case of it.
In its opening chapters, the Gospel of Matthew depicts the Messiah as being born miraculously of a virgin, fleeing persecution by repairing to Egypt, entertaining magi from Parthia who have timed his birth from their star charts, etc. All this is built upon a subtext, a substructure of scripture citations ("This happened so as to fulfill the scripture, saying, 'Out of Egypt I have called my son' {Hosea 11:1}"). These fictive events would have sounded scarcely more credible to the ancients than they do to us, except that Matthew undergirded them with a subtext layer of scripture-citation. Did those Old Testament texts really foretell the gospel events? Hell, no! It’s a trick! Literary sleight-of-hand. Lovecraft’s tales work the same way. They lay a groundwork of ancient myths (of Cthulhu, etc.) of which glimpses surface in the story once present-day events start to seem to correspond to them. The air of menace in "The Call of Cthulhu" would dissipate quickly if we were to remove all the references to the ancient cult of the Old Ones, the Necronomicon, the Eskimo diabolists, the theosophical Masters in Tibet, etc. If all we knew was that some castaway on Gilligan’s Island suddenly had a big green octopus-man chasing him, it would look as stupid as that idiot flick Yog, the Terror from Beyond Space. Mythos tales work best when the Mythos is seen but nor heard. It stays a subtext. It does its indispensable work behind the scenes. Bur if we drag it our on stage, it ceases being the subtext. If the subtext becomes the story, we are in trouble, because the Mythos can no longer be taken for granted as hoary and ominous background. In the foreground it will be seen for what it is, like the Great Oz once he is forced to emerge from behind his curtain. With the Mythos on stage, it finds itself dangling in the air, twisting in the wind, because it has no subtext of its own on which to rely. Or does it?
August Derleth brought the Mythos into the spotlight in his Mythos tales, with Laban Shrewsbury and Seneca Lapham giving windy disquisitions on its details and conundrums. Derleth seemed to know he had to try to set the Mythos against some subtext of its own, and to serve this purpose he invoked genuine mythology, usually ancient Greek, biblical, and Polynesian. He hoped the Mythos, which was now itself the great bogey, would ring true against the ancient tales of the Titans, Satan’s fall, and a bunch of frog totems. Famously, this failed. He sank the Titanic, because all these myth cycles were already so familiar to the reader that, far from lending exotic and esoteric ambiance to the Mythos, they tended to reduce the Mythos to the contemptuously familiar, to make it mundane textbook fodder. Derleth played taxidermist and taxonomist: He killed and stuffed the Mythos so as to install it safely and motionlessly in its place in the museum exhibit.
Lin Carter, too, has flipped the boat over. He has, like Derleth, made the Mythos the protagonist of the story (at least sometimes), and for his new substitute subtext Carter employs the previous Mythos fiction of Derleth and Lovecraft. If the story rings true, it is ringing off the bell of the stories it is retelling. As Tzvetan Todorov says, all parodies, pastiches, and plagiarisms, to be understood and appreciated for what they are, must be seen as translucent to their source material. If not, then it’s like an in-joke that you happen not to be in on. “I guess you had to be there.” Thus, Lin Carter’s stories strike readers in one of two ways: You think, "This story was a lot better when Derleth wrote it!" or “Hey, this is the real thing! Just like Derleth!” It’s like a mystery story when someone is searching for a secret panel in the wall by tapping against one section of the wall, then another. When the echo sounds thick, immediate and pat, you know your cap is just resonating through the solid wall going away from you. When it sounds hollow, like an echo, it means your tap has passed through intervening air and is coming back as an echo from a farther, inner wall. Voila! If you like Carter’s Mythos pastiches, you’re measuring the distance between Carter’s story and its Lovecraftian or Derlethian source/subtext, and it rings true. If Carter’s story seems flat and pat, it is likely because it seems to lie directly atop its source, like a layer of sheet rock.