I was an English Lit major at Brown when Providence's H.P. Lovecraft was rediscovered by the literary community. His elaborate fiction deals with cruel monsters inhabiting weird mental universes and who would soon reduce the world to chaos. Others, including Stephen King, have developed this myth. The present book of stories is about the antichrist (Nyarlathotep, "the crawling chaos") whose appearance will herald the end times. The book is most interesting for Price's essays. Price actually styles himself "Heirophant of the Crawling Chaos". He equates Nyarlathotep's return with the familiar postmodernist stuff. The white-Western-male paradigm of rational science is about to collapse and be replaced with something finer (doesn't say what, he likes to cite Thomas Kuhn's stuff), Nyarlathotep is the tantric Siva expanding your consciousness beyond rational categories, and so forth. Except for Price's ridicule of today's Wiccans (competitors?), it's the current Left Wing campus ideology. But in contrast to postmodernist make-believe, tales like "The Snout in the Alcove" hardly present a vision of a better world. Lovecraft created his "mythos" as an extended joke. After reading Price's essays, I cannot decide whether Price, too, is kidding.

As stories go, these 'cycles' collections are not so bad, but the ramblings of Robert M. Price need badly to be divided off from Lovecraft's beliefs. Were these tales presented in a manner utterly unconnected with Lovecraft, the danger would not be so great, but the danger is rearing its head again, of the pollution of Lovecraft's thought, first by Derleth and now by others, leading to readers who have conceptions of Lovecraft that are entirely false. Lovecraft's pseudo-mythology was intended as plot devices that helped evoke and serve as stand-ins for his philosophy of cosmicism. There is no good and evil, no Hindu connections, or anything of that sort. Read these stories for the stories themselves. If you want to know about Lovecraft and his pseudo-mythology, read S.T. Joshi's masterful biography of HPL.

This book will teach you all you need to know about Nyarlathotep, from his creation to his role as Messenger of the Outer Gods. Robert M Price's introduction is full of information relating Nyarlathotep with various dieties around the world. A must have for anyone interested in the God of a Thousand Forms.

this book opens with blackwood's great story: the wendigo. B is the master of the setting, noone can create the background and atmosphere like him. a very well written story from Brennan here. and Meloff's story is also an interesting read. derleth is at his best here. i don''t care that much for the guy, have never considered him to be HPL's great successor or anything, but he knows how to write, and i have always considered his story about Ithaqua to be his best contribution. the rest of the stories are well written. i don't think any of chaosium's anthologies contains of so much good writing than this. but good is not great. and the rest of the stories never turns out to be really good. the suspence killed by irrelevant writing going on for too long, mostly. sad. but the book is still wort reading

You need to know that there are NO color pictures in this guide. This book has small b&w photos of what must be nearly all of R.A. Fox's prints with a price guide. It's great to know all the names of the pictures that I have, and the one's that I've seen that I would like to have. However, this book is better for someone with better eyes than I have. For me, the b&w photos are too small to distinguish much of the detail.

In the Cthulhu Mythos, Clark Ashton Smith's The Book of Eibon ranks up there with Lovecraft's Necronomicon and Derleth's De Vermis Mysteriis; imaginary works of such soul-searing occult horror that readers put their own sanity and salvation at risk to peruse them. They form the basis of several story cycles and Mythos writers "quote" from them regularly. Chaosium's newest book in their Mythos series is an attempt to recreate The Book of Eibon using stories and poems written by Clark Ashton Smith, Lin Carter, Richard L. Tierney and others. At the bottom line, the attempt is courageous, but sadly, a failure for several reasons:

First, trying to create a legendary work of cosmic horror is impossible. Though many of the stories in the book are worthy of the Mythos label, reality cannot compete with the imagination. I wanted a good read to keep me up at night, not just a few hours of amusement.

Second, there is too much of Lin Carter in the book. Like Derleth, Carter was a rabid Mythos fan in love more with the idea than the atmosphere and thought it sufficient to make a story unearthly through simply listing a long litany of Mythos terms and names. Though some of Carter's stories are worth reading, such as From The Archives of the Moon, most are quickly forgettable.

Third, Price, who has edited most of the Chaosium works stumbles for the first time. His introductions to the stories give too much away, the worst example being his introduction to Lin Carter's In the Vale of Pnath where he reveals the ending, ruining what is probably one of the few actually disturbing stories in the collection. Also unnecessary to the point of distraction are the innumerable comparisons of the literary creation of The Book of Eibon to the formation of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Yes, Price is a seminary professor, but not every reader is interested in lectures in the questionable science of Biblical Higher Criticism.

Readers who are collecting the Chaosium Mythos series will want to purchase The Book of Eibon and there are a few gems between its covers,...

scymanski has an ok story here. price has a good one about the gorgon. that one was very enjoyable, and had some lovely details. otherwise, this was dreary read. so many of these stories were not only badly invented, but seemed so uninspired to. i almost felt sorry for the writers, for making so bad stories. i think this is chaosium's worst.