I’m still digging up newly-encountered stuff which appeared 2015-2017.
Such as the £1.99 Kindle ebook of The Lurking Chronology: A Timeline of the Derleth Mythos (2015). Only 46 pages (Amazon says 44), but I can imagine that new Mythos writers will probably want this sitting alongside the old Chronology out of Time pamphlet (which laid out the interior chronology of the Lovecraft stories) and the latest edition of the 400+ page Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia which puts it all in a handy A-Z format.
The Lurking Chronology is so short that the 10% Kindle sample includes none of the actual Chronology, so I don’t know how telegraphed or fulsome the dated entries are. Given the apparently large size of the Derleth Mythos, I imagine it’s a fairly brisk canter through the dates. There’s only one brief review worth having, and even that only says it’s a “useful tool” in “40 pages of text”, with no details of the format of the entries.
Anyway, finding this vague item spurred me to plug “Derleth” into Amazon, to see what’s out there in 2019. It appears that there’s still no ‘Best of the Derleth Mythos’ in audiobook, sadly. I prefer good audiobooks for fiction, these days. If there was such a thing, and ideally from a reader of Wayne June or Phil Dragash quality, then it might persuade me to consider spending some time revisiting the Derleth Mythos. I had read him way back when I first discovered Lovecraft, via some of the UK’s Panther 1970s paperback reprints of the ‘collaborations’, but I don’t really recall his tales now.
But my search for “Derleth” on Amazon did pop up a new affordable £3.86 Kindle ebook of the A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos (2015) which is stated by the Amazon page to be a “3rd edition”. I knew there were two editions, the hardback and then the revised paperback, and that much of the “academic apparatus” was said to have been jettisoned for the paperback.
Amazon’s 10% free sample, sent through to my Kindle, proved to be very substantial. It also gave me the element I most wanted, which is the opening section. This usefully collates evidence for Lovecraft’s attitudes to: i) his own use of small elements and hints gleaned from previous writers, ii) his comments on the unfixed nature of his own evolving backdrop of story-lore, iii) the tacit encouragement he gave to fellow writers to make occasional passing mention of his story-lore, and iv) Hugh B. Cave, who Lovecraft evidently felt had ‘overstepped the mark’. The chapter doesn’t also look to the poetry for evidence, as it might, in poems such as “On the Thing in The Woods”.
As a text the sample for A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos is extremely slick. But I’m not inclined to pick through the rest of its twists and turns re: Derleth. I’m really not that interested in post-1945 Mythos stories, as none I’ve tried make me think “I’m reading a lost Lovecraft story”. But I may well get the full book for review at some point in the future, and skim some of the sections which appear to painstakingly assess and categorise Derleth’s output. I’d focus instead on any biographical elements related to Lovecraft’s estate, such as the precise details of Derleth’s relations with and shunning of Barlow shortly after Lovecraft’s death — I assume the book examines that key historical pivot in detail.
The 10% free sample confirms the “3.0” or third edition, and that it’s “revised”, but the sample has no details of what’s been fixed or changed. Perhaps there’s a changelog at the back of the full book, but that’s just my guess.
