“I have trouble relating to people who faint at the hint of a bad smell. A meep or glibber doesn’t cut it with me. (I love meeps and glibbers, don’t get me wrong, but I go looking for what made them!) That’s the main difference between my stories…and HPL’s. My guys fight back. Also, they like to have a laugh along the way.” – Brian Lumley to Crypt of Cthulhu magazine.
I began my journey with the Cthulhu Mythos a bit sideways. For many modern day readers, they do not start with the original H.P. Lovecraft stories but with one of the many spinoffs of his work. The Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG by Sandy Petersen, Bloodborne by FromSoft Games, or perhaps the Justice League cartoon “The Terror Beyond” where Icthulhu fought against DC’s heroes. For me, my first encounter with the Cthulhu Mythos was The Real Ghostbusters episode, “Collect Call of Cathulhu” when I was seven.
However, despite being a dedicated gamer and getting the references to things like The Dunwich Building in Fallout 3, I did not become a true Cthulhu Mythos fan until my college years when I became acquainted with the fantastic author…Brian Lumley. Yes, the author of the Necroscope series and a lifetime fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work back when it was only available via the reprints by August Derleth. I was interested in writing a book at this time and thinking of doing fantasy novels or perhaps even cyberpunk when I decided to try out The Burrowers’ Beneath (1974) for fun.
Oh, wow, how could I describe the experience of being introduced into the wild, wacky, world of Titus Crow? Effectively an occultist version of Sherlock Holmes, Titus Crow is an amateur occultist and detective that has been investigating the supernatural for decades at the start of the novel. Notably, everything he knows up until this point is complete hogwash (which I thought was a clever touch). Titus is teamed up with his very own Doctor Watson-esque figure with Henri-Laurent de Marigny, the son of a minor character from Lovecraft’s writing.
In simple terms, Titus Crow does everything wrong about how purist Lovecraft fans want to do the Mythos. It is not cosmic horror but pulp horror, occult mystery, and science fiction adventure. Titus and Henri spend The Burrowers Beneath traveling across the globe, investigating mysteries, and piecing together a larger conspiracy involving the sinister Chthonians that are basically what you get when you insert Dune‘s Sandworms into the Mythos and make them intelligent.
It’s basically like The Shadows of Yog-Sothoth or Masks of Nyarlathotep campaigns for Call of Cthulhu but predates the tabletop RPG by about seven years (1981). Lovecraft himself dabbled in adventure versus cosmic horror with The Dunwich Horror, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Dreams in the Witch House. That’s not even bringing up the Dream Cycle where our protagonist, Randolph Carter, has a series of John Carter-esque adventures facing down Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth themselves.
If you enjoy these kind of adventures then you absolutely will enjoy The Burrowers Beneath and The Compleat Crow anthology. However, the stories proceed to go utterly off the wall after this and shift from being Call of Cthulhu to Doctor Who soon after. If you think I’m exaggerating, a mild spoiler is Titus Crow gains a time and space-traveling magic coffin that includes a planet-destroying death ray. It’s a gift from Cthulhu’s good brother, Kthanid, that lives on a heavenly psychedelic planet called Elysia with the other Elder Gods. Titus becomes a magitech gets together with Cthulhu’s niece and that’s just The Transition of Titus Crow (book two!).
The Clock of Dreams, Spawn of the Winds, In the Moons of Borea, and Elysia bring the series to seven books. They include everything from psychic cowboys, the demonic Ithaqua, world displaced Vikings, and crazy treks across the Dreamlands. In addition to many more traditional Mythos stories he wrote short stories for, Lumley would also write two other series called Dreamlands and Primal Land.
Brian Lumley has some interesting low level critiques of Lovecraft’s mythos with a full embrace of the strange and bizarre rather than fear of it. Transformation from humanity is transcendental rather than horrific and there are countless homages ranging from Conan to John Carter. Lumley also has a encyclopediac knowledge of HPL’s creations that are woven together into the Cthulhu Cycle. It may not be for everyone, certainly its as far from cosmic horror as you can get, but it is a treat for those who prefer their Mythos more Arkham Horror than existentially depressing. After all, philosophical nihilism is that nothing matters as a matter of cosmic forces but that just means that the only thing that matters is what you decide it does.
I doubt I would have written Cthulhu Armageddon without Brian Lumley’s influence and got to pay homage to his creation with the help of David Niall Wilson. Titus Crow made his last authorized appearance in Tales of Nyarlathotep‘s “All the Way Up”, a short story that I edited. With Brian Lumley’s passing in 2024, it has become a tribute to someone who showed me a fantastic and wonderful world of tentacled adventures. I recommend the audiobook versions by Simon Vance over the Kindle due to a dispute with the Lumley estate (why the Kindle version doesn’t have covers).
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