A quick survey of Lin Carter’s Mythos fiction, such as I give in the chapter "The Statement of Lin Carter", in my book Lin Carter: A Look behind His Imaginary Worlds (Borgo Press), reveals that Carter was very selective in his choices of which portions of Lovecraft’s canon he would take as his chief inspirations. He did not start in the center but rather at the margins. What I mean is that his own Mythos tales often tend to be sequels to stories from particular categories of tales in which Lovecraft’s genius was diluted with the influence of others. For instance, some of the stories in this collection branch off Lovecraft’s revision tales, stories ghost-written for a client, perhaps based on some minimal plot-germ supplied him by Hazel Heald or Zealia Bishop. While the prose in these tales is usually 100% Lovecraft, one can sense a certain lack of seriousness, a tendency toward self-parody and pulp magazine extravagance, that does not characterize the stories he knew would appear under his own byline. It is this "Lovecraft on vacation", this frivolous alter-ego Lovecraft, that Carter recognized as a kindred spirit.
Another favorite Lovecraft source for Carter was “Through the Gates of the Silver Key*, the collaboration between HPL and E. Hoffmann Price. This was not something Lovecraft would ever have written by himself, and even in its finished form it contains large amounts of prose and conceptuality from Price. It is not straight Lovecraft. Since Lin was not planning to write straight Lovecraft (who could?), this collaboration appealed to him as a kind of prototype for what he did plan to do: a mix of Lovecraft and his own stuff.
"Straying" even farther into deuterocanonical territory, Lin Carter found to his liking certain of August Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft. These are stories (now available in two paperback volumes from Carroll & Graf, The Lurker at the Threshold and The Watchers Out of Time) in which Derleth did no more than to choose some idea from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book and write a tale of his own based on it. They are like a can of Slice or Sunkist: They make a great noise about being refreshing cirrus drinks, bur the label reveals that they contain but a molecule or two of actual juice. In The Lurker at the Threshold, Derleth had actually incorporated a couple of pages of Lovecraft’s prose, extended notes for three different stories he might have gotten around to writing someday. Carter was, again, much influenced by this novella. Another Derleth tale that attracted him was "The Return of Hastur", one that made no pretense of containing Lovecraft verbiage, but which was, to some degree, written under Lovecraft’s supervision, as was “The Lair of the Star-Spawn”, the title of which HPL even supplied. These foundational stories of the emergent Derleth Mythos proved seminal for Carter as well.
Remember, Lin Carter was not so much interested in Lovecraft’s work in its own right, but rather as the root of the Cthulhu Mythos. Thus when he staked his claim to mine the rich acres of Lovecraft’s texts, the section he chose was right on the border, where others had already prospected. Or to return to our earlier categories, he had his own reading of Lovecraft, to be sure (and you will be surprised to see how close it is to that of Richard L. Tierney and Dirk W. Mosig if you read Lin’s Lovecraft: A Look behind the "Cthulhu Mythos", a new edition of which, revised and corrected by yours truly, will soon be available from Borgo Press). Lin was also well aware that there were other readings of Lovecraft, such as Derleth’s, and he wanted to draw upon all of them. Lovecraft’s were not the only set of bony shoulders he stood upon, and unlike many others of whom the same is true, he knew it.
Happy Magic!
Robert M. Price
August (Derleth) 24, 1996
THIS one Lin Carter wrote especially for my magazine Crypt of Cthulhu (#7, Lammas 1982). Though “The Red Offering” leads off this collection, it was by no means the first of these tales to be written. The five stories making up the projected novel Тhe Terror out of Time had all already been written and published, but “The Red Offering” is something of a prequel, in which certain motifs occurring in other stories of the Xothic cycle are retroactively anticipated. For instance, the notion of the red offering itself is now seen to begin and to round off the Terror out of Time sequence, occurring as it does in both “The Red Offering” and “The Winfield Heritance.” The notion implicit in "Out of the Ages" that Harold Hadley Copeland was the reincarnation of the Muvian hierophant Zanchu is (implicitly) elaborated in this tale, in which the eerie archaeological delvings of both men proceed along fate-driven parallel lines.
Speaking of parallel lines, it is tempting to trace one here with Carter's Conan tale "The Thing in the Crypt" (in the Lancer/Ace collection Conan). As in Carter’s Simrana tale "The Laughter of Han" (apparently no relation to the "Dark Han" of Mythos obscurity), "The Red Offering” shows us the other side of the ethos of the sword-&-sorcery genre. In his tales of Conan and Thongor, Carter always had the steel-thewed hero triumph over skinny sorcerers and animated mummies, whereas in his horror tales set in analogous milieux, it is the Mythos equivalent of Dalendus Vool or Thuth-Ammon who wins.
The title “The Red Offering” appeared atop a surviving draft of this story, though for the Crypt of Cthulhu appearance he had shortened it to simply "The Offering." I have chosen to go back to Lin’s original, literally more colorful, title. Another difference from the published version is that, in the draft, the lost item sought by Zanthu was not the Black Seal of Iraan, but rather the ancient scripture The Rituals of Yhe. A later reference to the same book has also vanished, this time in favor of another old text, the Ygoth Records. In closing, let me conjure up Lin Carter’s shade, as eager to tell a story now as it was then, when this note was subjoined to the story:
Author’s Note: S.T. Joshi has discovered evidence in Lovecraft’s letters that H.P.L. had a hand in rewriting one of Henry S. Whitehead’s stories, "Bothon." The story is partly laid in Mu, and, comparing the text of that tale with another Muvian yarn, also one of Lovecraft's revision jobs (“Out of the Aeons” {written for Zcalia Bishop}), I feel certain that Joshi is correct. Such Muvian place names as Ghua, Aglad-Dho, Yish and Knan, and the Gyaa-Hua submen certainly sound like the place names in the Heald story (K’naa, Yaddith-Gho, etc.) and like some of the names in another Lovecraft revision job, “The Mound” (Yoth, K’n-yan, Nith)—and there is a striking similarity between the Gyaa-Yothn submen in “The Mound” and the Gyaa-Hua submen in “Bothon.” So I have written this new story, incorporating the names that seem most Lovecraftian in “Bothon,” together with previously-established place names from “Out of the Aeons” and my earlier Muvian story “The Thing in the Pit," which also purports to be a translation from the Zanthu Tablets.