August Derleth was a prolific writer and publisher who not only kept Lovecraft’s name and fiction alive but also helped to develop the whole Cthulhu Mythos universe which today can be found in the form of plush Cthulhus, webcomics, and other such stuff. While his own work has come to be less well known, Derleth is the prism through which Lovecraft entered the popular culture. The stories collected here represent a few of Derleth’s own pastiches of Lovecraft’s writing style, expanding and formalizing his bleak, disorganized philosophical universe into something more, I guess I have to say, palatable to the masses. Consisting of "The Mask of Cthulhu," a collection of short stories playing with retellings of various Lovecraft plots, and "the Trail of Cthulhu," a novella composed of shorter chapters following a group of academic men battling to keep Cthulhu from awakening.

While arguably Derleth writes in a much more conventional, straightforward style and on occasion capable of building some nice atmosphere, much of these pot boilers are, in a word, boring. The stories themselves are very repetitive. Even the same names pop up again and again in each story, for entirely unrelated characters. I was like, oh, a bland retelling of the Dunwich Horror. Hey, another one. Oops, this one’s a bland retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. They all follow the same formula; phlegmatic protagonist inherits/rents weird old house down the road from legend haunted Arkham/Dunwich/Innsmouth once owned by a madman feared by the locals and discovers a library of dread tomes such as the Necronomicon/Culte de Goules/Pnakotic Fragments, or all of them (they must have had these books on factory discount in 1690s Massachusetts). Weird things start happening, underground rumblings, weird dreams, and/or visiting monstrosities, and in the end a bad end comes to our hapless protagonist, or he just blows the house up and rides off on a Byakhee. You can see where the influence on the later Cthulhu Mythos gaming comes from.

The later stories in "The Trail of Cthulhu" are slightly interesting, following the investigations of the super professor Laban Shrewsbury and his six younger proteges against the cult of Cthulhu and the agents of the deep ones, who are everywhere, but is written in so uninspiring a manner that even these stories, which promise excitement if nothing else, are way too slow. In the end, "fan fiction" may be an accurate description. ( )