Posted: August 23, 1999 at 02:39:51: by James Russell
As Lovecraft himself said of Lord Dunsany, his style is "dangerous to imitate". The problem I've always had with Lovecraft's posthumous pasticheurs is that very few to none of the ones I've read have ever really come close to the tone of Lovecraft, very few of them have been really up to the task. The results often wind up being rather more conventionally and prosaically styled. Some of August Derleth's stories are particularly bad for this sort of thing, reducing Lovecraft's conceptions to a far more ordinary and Earthbound fantasy/adventure thing. Not everything is bad news in the realm of latter-day "Mythos" fiction, some of it isn't bad, but a fair bit of it is. Yet over 60 years after Lovecraft's death people are STILL writing "Mythos" stories. There are plenty of people still doing it. So it must say something for the tenacity of Lovecraft's original idea that it's survived the attempts of far lesser writers and continues to inspire.Having said all of the above, I will give an honourable mention to Brian Lumley's short story "The Sister City", because it draws on a less obvious Lovecraftian source, being inspired by the early "The Doom That Came To Sarnath" rather than one of the later post-"Cthulhu" stories. What I've seen of his longer "Mythos" novels seem to descend more to the common adventure level, but this story deserves notice for being a little bit different.
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