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Synopsis:
A load of hacks can't be arsed to think of their own plots.
Review:
The book contains one Lovecraft story (logically enough, 'The Call of Cthulhu'), which I already had, and which I suspect was only included so that his name could be smacked across the front, in 17mm high letters, where the title is only 10mm high for upper case...
Reading pale imitations drives home how good Lovecraft really was. And it was a sneaking, insidious kind of goodness - you read along quite happily, finding the outdated and overenthusiastic prose loveable and quietly amusing, and feeling smug and secure in your post-modern, densensitised enlightened way. But then, after a while, you start jumping at little noises and staring intently at the corners...
Anyway, as to the others - the various assorted elder gods and so forth seem to have diminished to a series of demons (in the christian sense of the word) which can be summoned at will (or by mistake) and then sent back from whence they came with a handy elixer and incantation. I can't see any of these creatures, as Lovecraft wrote them, taking a blind bit of notice of the summonings of mere motal men. Also Lovecraft didn't need graveyards and witches and other such paraphenalia, he made it scary for his characters even to come across the long-abandoned remains of one of his ancient beings' settlements because of the complete alienness of the whole thing, not because you might accidentally spill a bit of blood on the wrong temple alter and abruptly have a shoggoth or two rip your lungs out.
Also, the characters were mostly of the kind that you find inhabiting horror movies - dumb and rabidly sceptical. A Lovecraft character would go nosing into the unknown, but he (and it would be a he - none of your new-fangled huge breasted women, not mentioning any names, Henry Kuttner) would take two huge guys with guns, a pickaxe for himself, and a book of spells just in case. In Henry Kuttner(him again...)'s 'The Salem Horror' the main character comes across a secret passageway in his house (shunned by the locals as haunted by a long-dead powerful witch) leading to a strange and fearful underground room - and decides it would be a wonderful place for a study.
Having said all that, Frank Belknap Long's stories I liked very much. I'd almost recommend this book just for him.
Another thing that never quite sat right with me is introducing the Lovecraft stories as part of the mythos itself. In several of these stories, characters who came across Cthulhu and his ilk would promptly go out and buy themselves the complete reference set - a copy of the Necronomicon, the R'lyeh text, HP Lovecraft's 'the Outsider and others' etc. It doesn't work. The Necronomicon isn't real. There are no human-skin-bound copies lurking in ancient eldritch libraries. To present these fictional volumes of text alongside a work which actually exists, but is a work of fiction, and using it together with the non-existant books to find stuff out really stretches the whole willing suspension of disbelief thing. At least, for me it does.
Bad cover art abounds once again. Surprisingly enough, there's a picture of Cthulhu, looking like the result of an octopus and a tortoise's passionate love affair, and also like he's having some bowel trouble. But behind him there is what one can only assume is the artist (Bruce Pennington, by the way)'s impression of R'lyeh. The angles do not frighten me.
Conclusion - sod this, buy some Lovecraft.
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