Chaosium Mythos Fiction: Shub-Niggurath Cycle: She Who Is To Come, edited by Robert M. Price

It's been a long time since Lin Carter killed my interest in reading and reviewing Chaosium's Cthulhu Mythos fiction series, but it's Halloween, so what the heck (I actually wrote this several Halloweens ago, but, hey, sometimes things work out). The fourth installment in the series, Shub-Niggurath Cycle, edited by series editor, Robert M. Price, is a mixed bag. Like in other volumes, Price attempts to show Lovecraft's mythology as an evolution of already existing horror themes. This time around, I found the stories written outside of HPL's influence better than the majority of those explicitly inspired by his mythos.

Pt. I

According to Price's lengthy and informative introduction, Lovecraft first introduced Shub-Niggurath, her name inspired by "Sheol Nugganoth", a god in Lord Dunsany's story, "Idles Days on the Yann." Lovecraft's creation is just a name at first, appearing  in the revision, "The Last Test" (1928).  It's only later that she garners the classic epithet  "the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young" (added in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1932)).

In the revision story, "The Mound," she's described as the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named-One and called a "sophisticated Astarte." The latter description, Price believes, in linking Shub-Niggurath to the Semitic mother goddess she's implicitly connected to the Anatolian mother goddess, Cybele, the Magna Mater mentioned in "The Rats in the Walls" (1924). And that's pretty much it. Lovecraft rarely went in for the sort of systematizing and specification of his extra-solar entities like August Derleth and Lin Carter would do after his death.

Price has this to say:

Though the precise nature of the link Lovecraft intended between the name Shub-Niggurath and the epithet Goat with a Thousand Young is not quite clear (see below), the goat image is at least often associated with Shub-Niggurath, an we may believe that here Lovecraft was inspired by the traditional depiction of the Baphomet Goat, an image of Satan harking back to the pre-Christian woodland deity Pan, he of the goatish horns and shanks. The Satanic goat is a device of much spectral fiction, as when in Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out the Archfiend's epiphany takes goat-headed form

I don't think it's a bad take and it does give Price a jumping-off point for this collection.

Pt. II

The first three stories in the collection are good examples of the demonic goat motif and I like them all to varying degrees.

Lewis Spence, a founding figure of modern Scottish nationalism and author of numerous books on assorted occult topics (ex. The Evidence For Lemuria From Myth And Magic, Occult Causes of the Present War), penned "The Horn of Vapula" in 1932. The narrator rents a house in an isolated moorland village to study its folklore and finds himself confronting a goatish entity haunting an ancient Norman church.

"The Demoniac Goat" (1947), by M.P. Dare, finds a pair of intrepid investigators of the supernatural traveling to Derbyshire in search of an Anglican priest and the Anglo-Saxon hoard he discovered. Again, badness ensues when a goat makes its appearance. Of non-Mythos stories, this is my favorite.

J.S. Leatherbarrow, an Anglican canon inspired by M.R. James' ghost stories, took to writing his own. In "The Ghostly Goat of Glaramara" (1979), presented as a tale within a tale, an Anglican canon runs into the titular beast and its evil mistress. I like this one well enough, but it feels less at home in the book than either of its two predecessors. The story feels distinctly Jamesian, unlike the more weird and creepy vibe of its two predecessors. As such, despite liking it, it feels a bit of a stranger in the collection.

Lovecraft's influence makes its first appearance in Ramsey Campell's "The Moon-Lens" (1964). One of his early pastiches, it manages to be more than just a crazy monster story (though it's definitely that). I've written before, what separates Campbell's pastiches from those of Lin Carter and other less-than-stellar writers is his understanding that it's the atmosphere, a sense of unease, that makes this stuff work.

The Moon-Lens
by Randy Boecker

In the years since I started this article, I reviewed Campbell's The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants at Black Gate in 2023. I still like "The Moon-Lens" and wrote these additional words about it.

The concluding story, “The Moon-Lens” is the most over-the-top, insane, and wild in The Inhabitant of the Lake. Again, Campbell took his inspiration from Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book. It opens with one Roy Leakey seeking help from Dr. James Linwood, a man best known for advocating for euthanasia. Leakey is hoping the doctor can help him die before his life gets any worse. It seems he had the misfortune to get stranded in the town of Goatswood, Campbell Country’s Innsmouth analogue.

To give himself time to think, Leakey left the station and went for a meal at the Station Cafe opposite. The meal — sausage, egg, and chips, all over-raw — were barely palatable, but he would not have enjoyed a better meal. The faces of the other customers were too grotesque, and he felt that under the bulky suits and long dresses might lie the most revolting deformities. More, for the first time he was served by a waiter wearing gloves — and by what he could make out of the hands under them Leakey thought they were deservingly worn.

Like in Innsmouth, in Goatswood, the citizens are terrible human-monster hybrids and worship an alien god. Poor Leakey, a man who only got off at Goatswood to change trains, has the terrible misfortune to encounter that deity in all its terrible and transformative power.

In "The Ring of the Hyades" (1989) by John Glasby, trans-dimensional explorers go out "beyond the gulfs," and run into wicked things that serve Shub-Niggurath. While nothing special, I like the way the story conveys a titanic sense of scale to the spaces traveled by its protagonist.

Robert Price's own "A Thousand Young" tackles just what the horrid rites alluded to by Lovecraft in his stories might actually look like. I didn't love the story, but I think he succeeded in reaching his goal; a terrible mess of appendages and tentacles entwined in places you'd rather not see them.

I'm on record not liking Richard Tierney's Simon of Gitta stories (see my review of The Scroll of Thoth). About this collection's included tale, "The Seed of the Star-God," I wrote:

"The Fire of Mazda" and "The Seed of the Star-God" are both around forty pages of a confounded Simon, long, dry exposition, followed by a dull plodding, determined Simon.

Remembering that, I did not read it this time around. Nonetheless, the stories are very popular among the S&S cognoscenti, so you might like them.

Glen Singer's "Harold's Blues" takes us down into the Deep South and the world of juke joints. Instead of the Devil, a wannabe blues guitarist sells himself to Nyarlathotep. Shub Niggurath figures in the background. Not a bad story at all, but nothing especially special.

"Dreams in the House of Weir" is the best Mythos story by Lin Carter that I've read. On top of that, it's actually a decent bit of work. Price says it serves as a sequel to "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by HPL and Frank Belknap Long.

An American couple move to an old mansion in England that was built on top of the obligatory pre-Roman construction. It's well-trod material, but Carter actually manages to build an unpleasant feeling of unavoidable doom.

A central element of the previous story is a mysterious document titled Visions from Yaddith. Price discovered Carter had actually written out a version of it when he was going through his papers after his death. It's no worse than any of the poetry Carter wrote included in The Xothic Legend, but it isn't any better. You should probably take that as a warning.

In "Prey of the Goat" by Margaret L Carter, an Episcopal priest and his wife fall victim to a very bad inherited talisman. No surprises, but it is unsettling. The story had been purchased by Lin Carter for a planned publication, but he died before completing it. Price thought the story was too good to be forgotten.

"Sabbath of the Black Goat" by Stephen M. Rainey feels like one of those evil cultist movies from the  seventies like "Race With the Devil." That's a good thing, if you're not sure.

"The Curate of Temphill" by Peter H. Cannon and Robert M Price is set in Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley and is an unsavory brew where it's shown the Templars were really as bad as their enemies claimed. 

I'm furious that I only learned last night that David Kaufman's "Grossie" is not a standalone tale, but the finale to a short cycle about the town of Garlock's Bend. Furious also because of all the newer stories I've read in the Chaosium books, it is my favorite. 

The problem with too much Mythos fiction is that it sucks. It leans into monsters and worn-out tropes instead of doing something different, if not downright original. This story, the recollection of an old woman about the disappearance of one of her friends when they were young, is very unsettling. Despite having read it several times, each reread still leaves me feeling like something uncomfortable could be just on the other side of things.

The finale, "To Clear the Earth" by the late Will Murray, is the first of Cryptic Events Evaluation Section and one of his first Mythos stories. It serves as a parallel tale to his other story, "Black Fire," which is in the later Price-edited The Cthulhu Cycle. He collected all his Mythos stories in a series called 

Members of the CEES, including one with the surname Pickman, are sent to investigate a terrible event in Antarctica. On its own, it's a good little story. The way it ends is perfect.

Pt III

The Shub-Niggurath Cycle: She Who Is To Come is not a bad book, and most of the stories are decent to good, with two, "The Curate of Temphill" and "Grossie," being excellent. The problem is it never feels as coherent or as Lovecraftian as The Hastur Cycle or some of the others in the series. It's not Price's fault. Even he say regarding one of the stories of dubious Mythos merit, Shub-Niggurath stories are easy to come by. 

For the most part, what connects the early stories is the goat motif and what connects the later stories is the name Shub-Niggurath. Only Price's two stories and Margaret Carter's story really play into the idea of the Black Goat With a Thousand Young as some sort of warped fertility figure. They're the most 

physically unsettling stories and left me like something unpleasant had entered the room with me. As much as I like "Grossie," there's nothing to it that links it to the rest. 

So, not one of the outstanding volumes in the series, but not a bad collection to have. Most of the stories are worth reading and Price's foreword and story notes are all valuable to any Mythos student.

Next Time: The Book of Iod: The Eater of Souls & Other Tales by Henry Kuttner