Robert M. Price’s Lovecraftian collections

Robert M. Price is an interesting person. He has been a Baptist minister, has two Ph.D.s in theology, and is a New Testament scholar and author. He is also a long-time H.P. Lovecraft scholar, publishing or editing several fanzines over the years, the most notable being Crypt of Cthulhu (over 100 issues at present), editing several collections of Lovecraftian works by many authors and writing his own Lovecraftian fiction.

As it will take me some time to do the kinds of reviews of his works that I’d like, I wanted to kick things off with at least an overview article on some of the collections he has edited over the years.

First off, he has edited a quartet of collections from Fedogan & Bremer, with covers by Gahan Wilson. Only some have been reprinted in paperback. They are:

• Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (1992), paperback by Del Rey
• The New Lovecraft Circle (1996), paperback by Del Rey
• Acolytes of Cthulhu (2001), paperback by Titan
• Worlds of Cthulhu (2012)

Probably more interesting is the series of collections that I’ll call the “Lovecraft Cycle.” The idea of each of them is to introduce a Lovecraft entity or motif, present a story or two that may have influenced the creation of said entity or motif, and then present stories that followed and were influeced by Lovecraft.

This series started off at Chaosium, and some are still in print, though later volumes have been at other publishers and sometimes not using “Cycle” in their title.  Now, the most recent volume from Ramble House, The Yog-Sothoth Cycle, is the last.  Which is a little disappointing, as I have notes that a couple of other volumes were promised that I don’t believe ever appeared.

At present, they comprise:

• The Hastur Cycle (1993, Chaosium)
• The Shub-Niggurath Cycle: Tales of the Black Goat with a Thousand Young (1994, Chaosium)
• The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror (1996, Chaosium)
• The Azathoth Cycle: The Blind Idiot God (1995, Chaosium)
• The Dunwich Cycle: Where the Old Gods Wait (1995, Chaosium)
• The Necronomicon (1996, Chaosium)
• The Innsmouth Cycle: The Taint of the Deep Ones (1998, Chaosium)
• The Nyarlathotep Cycle: The God of a Thousand Forms (1996, Chaosium)
• The Ithaqua Cycle: The Wind-Walker of the Icy Wastes (1998, Chaosium)
• The Book of Eibon (1999, Chaosium)
• The Antarktos Cycle: Horror and Wonder at the Ends of the Earth (1999/2006, Chaosium)
• The Tsathoggua Cycle: Terror Tales of the Toad God (2005, Chaosium)
• Tales out of Dunwich (2005, Hippocampus Press)
• The Tindalos Cycle (2008, Hippocampus Press)
• The Yith Cycle: Lovecraftian Tales of the Great Race and Time Travel (2010, Chaosium)
• Beyond the Mountains of Madness (2015, Celaeno Press)
• The Exham Cycle (2020, Exham Priory)
• The Yig Cycle (2021, Ramble House)
• The Yog Sothoth Cycle (2022, Ramble House)

A further set of works are author-focused collections of all that author’s Lovecraftian or Mythos stories. So far we have:

• Mysteries of the Worm (stories by Robert Bloch; (1993/2009, Chaosium)
• The Book of Iod (stories by Henry Kuttner; 1995, Chaosium)
• The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter (1997, Chaosium)
• Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard (2001, Chaosium)
• Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle (2018, Celaeno Press) [Dunsany-style stories]

I had noted that Price has written his own Mythos fiction, and these have been collected recently in two volumes: Blasphemies & Revelations (2008, 2019) and Horrors & Heresies (2020). Both have been published by his own Exham Priory Press. The first one is massive, coming in at over 500 pages.

I will be posting more detailed reviews of these and other works, including one (or more) on Crypt of Cthulhu. Keep an eye out for them.