Imagine, if you can, a play so terrible that all who read it are reduced to gibbering lunatics. Or a sign from some mysterious entity that shatters the minds of anyone unfortunate enough to set eyes on it. Or, worse still, a distant planet on which exist some kind of hideous creatures called “shoggoths”. What do you make of all that?

Well, I don’t know either. But apparently the folks at Chaosium, a company dedicated to spreading the writings and memorabilia of H.P. Lovecraft and writers like him, felt they were onto something when they pulled together the thirteen tales that make up The Hastur Cycle. My own personal feeling is that series editor Robert Price, who assembles and contributes stories to many of these “cycle books”, didn’t really know what he was doing when he started this machine. To say that these pieces are connected by the thinnest of threads is a masterpiece of understatement.

Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu “cycle books” typically zero in on a specific concept and pull in writings by various authors that are somehow related to it. There are tomes devoted to such creepy deities as Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, and Nyarlathotep, and they’re about as uneven as one might expect. The earlier tales about these strange beings by guys like Lovecraft, August Derleth and Robert Bloch are pretty good, but many of the inclusions by more recent writers come across as fan boy hack efforts, and ones that frequently dilute the masters’ works with their lack of subtlety and atmosphere. Lovecraft knew that partially-nude horror is the most effective, but many of his disciples approach the Mythos with all the inhibitions of a coked-up stripper.

The problem with The Hastur Cycle is that it’s an arm of Mythos fiction that’s built on extremely vague concepts. “Hastur”, “the Dread City of Carcosa”, and “the King in Yellow” are nebulous things that first appeared in the writings of Ambrose Bierce and a relatively unknown author named Robert Chambers. Lovecraft wove some of their ideas into his tales of extradimensional terror (like “The Whisperer In Darkness”) and could sometimes be extraordinarily effective while saying very little. “Whisperer”, Arthur Machen’s creepy Welsh tale “Novel of the Black Seal”, and Chambers’ pieces (“King in Yellow”, “Repairer of Reputations”) are all standout stories that make the book a worthwhile purchase if you can’t find them in better company elsewhere. It’s hard to summarize these freaky stories, but tales of humans mating with supernatural creatures, people being stalked by ominous hearse drivers with puffy wormlike faces, and forbidden writings driving people loony are always worth investigating.

It’s the more modern stuff by guys like James Blish and James Wade that bogs the book down, especially considering that there’s really nothing connecting a sci-fi-heavy yarn like “Planetfall On Yuggoth” to the sinister occult visions of Bierce and Chambers. August Derleth, a Lovecraft correspondent/follower of notoriously inconsistent ability, delivers a thoroughly unsatisfying stew of walking dead and terrible knowledge in “The Return of Hastur”, and Joseph Payne Brennan’s “The Feaster From Afar” is predictable and entirely unsubtle. Whereas the older masters (Bierce, Machen, Chambers, and Lovecraft) would make the reader’s intellect squirm with hints of horrible things, these newer cats leave nothing to the imagination. Foreplay, to me at least, is the essence of the most effective horror stories.

Only Karl Edward Wagner’s “The River of Night’s Dreaming” captures something of the older frightfulness, and that has much to do with a slightly incomprehensible conclusion. The others are either lazy extensions of better tales (Richard Lupoff’s “Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley” hijacks Lovecraft’s “Whisperer” for no good reason), really stupid attempts to do what can’t be done (were Lin Carter and James Blish really arrogant enough to think they could create a satisfactory “The King in Yellow”, a play that Chambers tells us is so horrifying that merely glancing at page one of the second act is like inviting madness?), or entirely forgettable. There’s little thematic continuity between the tales, regardless of what the editor would like us to believe.

As I said, The Hastur Cycle has some really cool pieces. The good news is that Bierce, Machen, Chambers, and Lovecraft are all fairly easy to find online or in any bookstore worth its paper, so there’s really no reason to get this unless you’re just collecting all the Chaosium Call of Cthulhu Fiction titles. Anybody hoping for a series of stories that’ll tie together the intriguing notions of Carcosa, the Yellow King, Hastur, the Black Stone, and Yuggoth will be utterly disappointed.

A great intro to Lovecraft and his entourage of imitators:

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos http://www.epinions.com/review/Tales_of_the_Cthulhu_Mythos_by_Lovecraft/content_438849408644