The Hastur Cycle

The Hastur Cycle Tales of Hastur, the King in Yellow, and Carcosa Fiction Across Time and Space from Chaosium: The Antarktos Cycle Arkham Tales Atomic-Age Cthulhu (UPCOMING) The Book of Eibon The Complete Pegana Eldritch Chrome Extreme Planets Frontier Cthulhu The Hastur Cycle The Ithaqua Cycle A Long Way Home Madness on the Orient Express (UPCOMING) The Necronomicon Once Upon an Apocalypse (UPCOMING) Singers of Strange Songs Song of Cthulhu Steampunk Cthulhu (UPCOMING) The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson Tales Out of Innsmouth The Tsathoggua Cycle Undead & Unbound R. W. Chambers’ The Yellow Sign (his complete weird fiction) Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors & Other Tales Arthur Machen’s The White People & Other Tales Arthur Machen’s The Terror & Other Tales These, and more, can be found on our catalog at www.chaosium.com Chaosium Fiction The Hastur Cycle Second Revised Edition Tales That Created and Defined Dread Hastur, the King in Yellow, Nighted Yuggoth, and Dire Carcosa H. P. LOVECRAFT AMBROSE BIERCE JAMES BLISH JOSEPH PAYNE BRENNAN RAMSEY CAMPBELL LIN CARTER ROBERT W. CHAMBERS AUGUST DERLETH RICHARD A. LUPOFF ARTHUR MACHEN JAMES WADE KARL EDWARD WAGNER SELECTED AND EDITED BY ROBERT M. PRICE COVER ART BY VICTOR MANUEL LEZA MORENO INTERIOR ART BY EARL GEIER A Chaosium Book 2014 The Hastur Cycle is published by Chaosium Inc. This book is copyrighted as a whole by Chaosium, Inc., ©1997, 2006, 2014; all rights reserved. “Carcosa” ©1981 by Richard L. Tierney; appers by permisison of the author. “The River of Night’s Dreaming” ©1981 by Stuart David Schiff for Whispers III; appears by permission of the author. “More Light” ©1970 by James Blish; reprinted by permission of the author’s estate. “Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley” ©1982 by Mercury Press, Inc.; appears by permission of the author. “The Mine on Yuggoth” ©1964 by Ramsey Campbell; appears by permission of the author. “Planetfall on Yuggoth” ©1973 by Meade and Penny Frierson; appears by permission of Meade Frierson. “The Return of Hastur” ©1993 by April R. Derleth and Walden W. Derleth; reprinted by permission of Arkham House Publishers, Inc. “The Feaster from Afar” ©1976 by Edward P. Berglund for The Disciples of Cthulhu; appears here by permission of Susanne Thomas, agent for the estate of Joseph Payne Brennan. “Litany to Hastur” ©1965 by The Terminus, Owlswick & Fort Mudge Electrick Street Railway Gazette, “Carcosa Story about Hastur” ©1989 by Charnel House Publishers, and “The King in Yellow: A Tragedy in Verse” ©1993 by Robert M. Price; appear by permission of Robert M. Price, agent for the estate of Lin Carter. Cover art by Victor Manuel Leza Moreno. Interior art by Earl Geier. The Yellow Sign symbol by Kevin Ross. Cover design and layout by Charlie Krank. Editing and interior layout by Janice Sellers. Editor-in-chief Lynn Willis. Proofreading by James Naureckas and Tod Briggs. Similarities between characters in this book and persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. The reproduction of material from within this book for the purposes of personal or corporate profit, by photographic, digital, or other methods of electronic storage and retrieval, is prohibited. Please address questions and comments concerning this book, as well as requests for free notices of Chaosium publications, by mail to Chaosium, Inc., 22568 Mission Blvd. #423, Hayward CA, U.S.A. Also visit our web page at: www.chaosium.com SECOND EDITION 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Chaosium Publication 6020 Originally published in February 1997 Revised 2006, 2014 ISBN-10: 1568821921 ISBN-13: 9781568821924 Printed in the USA Contents INTRODUCTION Robert M. Price ............................................................vii HAÏTA THE SHEPHERD Ambrose Bierce......................................................1 AN INHABITANT OF CARCOSA Ambrose Bierce ..........................................7 THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS Robert W. Chambers ..............................11 THE YELLOW SIGN Robert W. Chambers ................................................38 THE RIVER OF NIGHT’S DREAMING Karl Edward Wagner ......................54 MORE LIGHT James Blish ......................................................................84 THE NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL Arthur Machen ................................113 THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS H. P. Lovecraft ....................................145 DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF ELIZABETH AKELEY Richard A. Lupoff ....199 THE MINE ON YUGGOTH Ramsey Campbell..........................................233 PLANETFALL ON YUGGOTH James Wade ..............................................244 THE RETURN OF HASTUR August Derleth ............................................248 THE FEASTER FROM AFAR Joseph Payne Brennan....................................271 TATTERS OF THE KING Lin Carter ......................................................282 This collection is gratefully dedicated to the memory of Fritz Lieber, now traveling through hyperspace with Brown Jenkin. The Mythology of Hastur Carcosa I sense, on crystal winter evenings When constellations gleam through black-branched trees, A night-dark star no earthly gazer sees To which some dread malevolently clings. No star-chart shows it—no—yet slumber brings Its vision from the clustered Hyades— Black waters over which a leaden breeze Wafts the sad song that dead Cassilda sings. No darker vision greets the sleeper than That lake, from which the coiling cloud-waves pour To break upon the long basaltic shore Beneath the rays of red Aldebaran— The lake whence dreamers flee in nameless dread As Hastur rises from his slimy bed. —Richard L. Tierney AD August W. Derleth, coiner of the famous term “the Cthulhu Mythos”, fol- Hlowed his first inspiration, we might be speaking today of “the Mythology of Hastur.” This bit of nomenclature young Augie suggested to H. P. Lovecraft, whose bemused response (Hastur hardly figured in any of the stories!) punctured the disci- ple’s balloon. Derleth was at work on one of his earliest Lovecraftian pastiches, “The Return of Hastur”, and we may suspect, having elevated Hastur to the status of a major player in the pantheon of the Old Ones, Derleth was trying to secure the cen- trality of his new favorite by naming the whole game after him. Petty and self-serving and inappropriate it might thus seem to us, but in what follows I want to suggest that Derleth, as he often did, had glimpsed an insight into Lovecraft’s work and its sources that later critics would take generations to see for themselves. Indeed it is not clear that Derleth himself saw the implications of his own momentary insight. Derleth once remarked that Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, “with the work of Poe and Bierce, shares the distinction of having contributed to the famed Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.” Note Derleth’s implicit assumptions. For him Lovecraft and his Mythos are central. Chambers, Poe, and Bierce are lucky to be able to take the modest roles of precursors, way-pavers, John the Baptists to the Mythos Messiah, Lovecraft. This, it seems safe to say, would have been no less true had Derleth persisted in calling the whole myth system the Mythology of Hastur. But the discarded term “Mythology of Hastur” points with an implicit logic in another direction altogether. Lovecraft shot it down because Hastur had so little to do with the myth-pattern as it was developing in his own stories and those of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and others. Yet this is precisely the merit of the term. For I will contend, as Derleth seemed to see for one fading moment, that Lovecraft’s stories make more sense, seen not in the context of his own viii The Hastur Cycle evolving Mythos, but as links in a larger chain forged by other writers, pre- and post-Lovecraftian. The issue here is whether we make Lovecraft and his Mythos central or whether we place HPL in orbit about some other central sun. The present collection is an experiment which takes the latter option as its working hypothesis. We are seeing Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” as one link in a chain beginning with Bierce and Arthur Machen and continuing on through Derleth, James Blish, Lin Carter, Karl Edward Wagner, and other contemporary writers. Let me put it this way. We have learned from Lovecraft and Derleth to view the tales of Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth as parts of a cycle of myth. Lovecraft always explained to correspondents that he did not achieve perfect consistency in his vari- ous stories, say, in what each said about Cthulhu or the Necronomicon, for the very good reason that he wanted his shuddery allusions to these eldritch items to reflect the inconsistencies, duplications, and redundancies of actual ancient myth cycles, where, e.g., we find two or three origin tales for the same goddess or shrine. Another implication of the mythic character of the Mythos made clear by the recent studies of A. Lord and others is that it is meaningless to speak of an “original” of a given tale or myth or epic. When we find variant versions, abridged or com- posite epics, or whatever, there is no way to choose one and declare it the “true” original, the definitive version. Each tale is a link in a chain, part of an evolving cycle. Each performance of the myth is a new “original”, so to speak. In the same way, it seems to me highly misleading to take Lovecraft’s stories and myth-concepts as the definitive version and to view Chambers and the others as lead- ing up to it, Derleth and the others as representing a declension from it. Each has its own integrity, its own priority. Lovecraft has his moment upon the stage, but then he is replaced by a new teller of a new version. The upshot of this way of looking at things is that we will most profitably judge Lovecraft’s achievement, as well as understand him in new ways, if we will understand his text as a retelling of older literary myths, and if we will see the later tales of others as new originals with a genetic relation to HPL’s: dependent, yes, but not neces- sarily derivative.

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