After this I may have finally reached my limit. I will probably still collect the Cycle books but I honestly do not know if I will continue my attempts to read them as they come out. The release date was, what, a year ago? Of course I had pre-ordered it ages before and it only came out eight years (!!) after it was compiled for Chaosium. I think Chaosium went through a rocky patch a while back and their entire fiction publishing schedule is off kilter. Anyway, I was trying to think what things in Cthulhu mythos fiction have me most aggrieved (not that I have anyone to blame but myself). I came up with an author/editor who will remain nameless who owes me $150 I paid for a limited edition of The Cthulhian Singularity, a book which will never be published. I came up with Edward Lee who keeps attaching HPL as a character in his terrible, tedious and tawdry rape porn, forcing me as an inveterate collector to buy such dross. And I keep coming back to Robert Price’s editing tenure at the Chaosium cycle series.

My objection is not the editing or typographic errors or use of a less than definitive edition of The Shadow out of Time. Honestly, I don’t read that assiduously. I sort of mentally fix any minor typos, word substitutions or punctuation changes and promptly forget about them. My problem is the fiction in this book mostly stinks or is irrelevant to a mythos fiction fan. I think Mr. Price has a very different view of what a compiler of such an anthology should do than what I think he should do. He was one of the purveyors of fan fiction way back before the mythos boom, and now he views it as his duty (or maybe as his great pleasure) to present stories that are essentially lousy fan fiction as though they are historical artifacts, or to present stories that may have influenced HPL in the writing of a specific tale, regardless of whether there is any concrete evidence for this. Now recently we have had Dead But Dreaming 2, Cthulhu Unbound 1 and 2, Cthulhurotica, Historical Lovecraft, Cthulhu’s Reign and The Book of Cthulhu where the editors tried their very best to serve up high quality fiction for Lovecraft and mythos fans. Compared to this, The Yith Cycle is an albatross. I swear it took me more than 10 months to slog through it. Great books have been released and grace my shelves unread because I have been struggling with this.

The book is a very handsome trade paperback with 512 pages, although of course there is space for Price’s introduction, his introduction to each story and some advertising. The cover is a masterful depiction of a member of the Great Race by Stephen Gilberts. It may be one of my favorite covers by Mr. Gilberts. For the size, the $16.95 list seems very reasonable, especially if you consider Amazon’s discount. Here are the contents a few brief impressions.

Emanations from Yith by Robert Price. Mr. Price sure can write an introduction. In fact he waxes on about the substance behind the stories in a way that can become tedious. I would consider reading his introductions to the individual stories after you have read them to avoid spoilers.

The Purple Sapphire by John Taine. Well. We start off with a thud. Why this was included I have no idea. It has nothing to do with Yith or Lovecraft, and Mr. Price’s assertions to the contrary strike me as completely bogus. It is a decent loooooonnnngggg pulp novella, with the usual overtones of how white people are so much more competent than the people native to Asia. I kept wondering what it was doing in this book.

Dreams of Yith by Duane W. Rimel. These sonnets are pleasant reading but the only reason they are here is because they share the name Yith with HPL’s story, not because they are particularly memorable or have any bearing on the Great Race.

The Jewels of Charlotte by Duane R. Rimel. This story is boring, has nothing to do with the mythos and could have been omitted. I’d have been happy to never know it existed.

The Sealed Casket by Richard F. Searight. This story is the first one that mentions the Eltdown Shards, a volume in the Eldritch Library that HPL was pleased to adopt. It was not a bad story of a reclusive antiquarian meeting a now stereotypical end but it certainly did not knock my socks off.

The Warder of Knowledge by Richard F. Searight. I guess it is of interest to mythos completists but all the tropes in it seem tired by today’s standards.

The Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft. Mr. Pugmire goes on about how the edition here is a bit of a misstep by the editor. I’d go further to say that this story spans 60 pages that could have been put to other use. I mean, I can’t even count how many copies of The Shadow Out of Time I have in my library. Needless duplication because I sincerely doubt anyone will use this book to introduce themselves to Lovecraft.

The Challenge from Beyond by H. P. Lovecraft. This is a chapter in a round robin story; in this book we do not get to see the other writers’ contributions. Of the entire contents so far, about 300 pages, this is the first thing I enjoyed reading, mainly because I had never seen it before.

The Shadow out of Space by August W. Derleth. Price immediately reverts to type by including a Derleth pastiche that completely apes The Shadow Out of Time. Years ago in my early mythos phase I would have lapped it up. Now I was wondering why I was subjecting myself to such drudgery.

The Dark Brotherhood by August W. Derleth. This was a better effort by Derleth, where aliens attempt to infiltrate human society by nefarious means. It’s not GOOD, mind you, just better than most of the rest of this book.

The Horror from Yith by Alan D. Gullette, Walter C. deBill Jr., and Ted C. Pons. These authors wrote a round robin pastiche using HPL’s themes from The Shadow Out of Time and at this point I found it nearly unendurable, being derivative and not especially well written.

The Changeling by Walter deBill. Mr. deBill has had a sizeable collection of his mythos fiction see print in The Black Sutra. Mostly I was disenchanted with it as being derivative Lovecraft pastiches but I have to say while reading that book you could tell he was constantly improving. In fact his later stories have been quite good. The Changeling is not bad, using mind transfer and deep time themes from The Shadow out of Time, although I may be saying that because at this point in the book I was pretty beaten down.

The Sands of Time by P Schuyler Miller. Mr. Miller wrote this story of time travel and created the idea of time existing in coils to explain time travel. Otherwise there is no Great Race, no Yith, no mythos and nothing else relevant. It wasn’t bad but it sure didn’t knock my socks off.

Countdown for Kalara by Richard L. Tierney. Of all the stories in the book this was of greatest interest to me because it featured the introduction of one of Tierney’s major characters, John Taggart, who will later be featured in The Drums of Chaos. I have had great difficulty finding the Taggart stories, and Price says some of the rarer ones will be included in the upcoming Yog Sothoth Cycle (oh, joy). Even after looking for years I have not found an affordable copy of The Winds of Zarr. Anyway, here we meet Taggart and find out about Tierney’s take on the war between the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones. For fun, he ties together the previous story, The Sands of Time with The Shadow Out of Time. Very neat. Alas Tierney is a great poet but most of his prose is pedestrian. While this story was absorbing to me, I think a reader with no particular interest in the world Tierney is developing would be bored to tears.

The Winds of Yith by Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire. Well, read what Mr. Pugmire says about his own story in a previous review. I always like dancing in the moonlight beneath Mount Selta but over the years Mr. Pugmire’s protagonists tend to have a much more ambiguous fate.

So…if I sound bitter it’s probably because I am a little. Mostly reading this was arduous, unenjoyable and not enlightening. Fans new to the mythos should give it a wide berth. Collectors can buy a copy and promptly keep it at the bottom of their to-be-read stack. A select group of readers who like old fashioned mythos pastiches will be happy with it as well as fans of Robert Price’s historical take on the mythos. I am relieved to be done with The Yith Cycle and can finally turn to something better. ( )