The Xothic Legend Cycle

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THE PRESENT collection provides a generous portion of Lin Carter’s work in the Cthulhu Mythos. What it excludes in the main is his considerable body of stories written in the form of chapters from the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, and the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Most of these should appear either in the Chaosium or in a projected volume, The Book of Eibon by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter. What The Xothic Legend Cycle includes is the set of his Mythos stories set in the modern day, usually contemporary with the Lovecraft and Derleth stories upon which they are based.

Of these Lin had segregated a group of five (“The Thing in the Pit”, “The Dweller in the Tomb”, “Out of the Ages", “Zoth-Ommog", and “The Winfield Heritance") to comprise the chapters of an episodic novel resembling Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu (available again from Carroll & Graf). These stones appeared in the mid-seventies in a handful of anthologies, and it was not easy for the interested reader to sit down and read them together. This novel he eventually submitted to Arkham House under the collective title The Terror Out of Time, a title that Lovecraft neglected to choose from the paradigmatic table, bur just as easily might have. (The title did appear, however, on a collection of some of the pulp stories of Lovecraft's collaborator/revision client Clifford M. Eddy, Jr.) This was a doomed effort, since following the passing of August Derleth, Arkham House seemed to repeat the fate of poor Amos Tuttle, undergoing a horrific transformation after death. Arkham House, it seemed, was no longer very keen on publishing, or even tolerating, that Cthulhu Mythos stuff. It was as if the American Bible Society had kept their name bur decided to quit wasting their time publishing scripture!

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