Cthulhu mythos n.

the fictional universe used as the setting for a range of works by H.P. Lovecraft, later used as a shared world

Wikipedia

H.P. Lovecraft Wiki


SF Criticism

  • [1933 A. Derleth Letter to H.P. Lovecraft in D.E. Schultz & S.T. Joshi Essential Solitude (2013) II. 589 August Derleth

    His chief tendency right now is toward imitation…. I’m trying to steer him away from this, and also from the use of the Cthulhu mythology, until he is capable of doing the material justice.]

  • 1942 A. Derleth Letter in Weird Tales Jan. 125/1 page image August Derleth

    It was written before The Haunter of the Dark, The Dreams in the Witch-House, and The Thing on the Doorstep, and only At the Mountains of Madness apart from The Shadow Out of Time followed it in the Cthulhu Mythos.

  • 1944 ‘A. Boucher’ in Acolyte (#7) Summer 29 page image Anthony Boucher

    The Cthulhu Mythos is one of the extraordinary imaginative achievements of our times, and I want to know everything I can about it. But I don’t care much what HPL thought about life and manners and things. It is as the transcriber of the Myth that he looms incomparable.

  • 1953 D. Hammond Letter in Future Science Fiction Jan. 94/2 page image

    What is she trying to do—start another Cthulhu Mythos?

  • 1966 L. Carter Handy Phrase-Book in Fannish in Worlds of If Oct. 66/2 page image Lin Carter bibliography

    Suppose your fan activities are confined to writing scholarly treatises on the Sources Used by H.P. Lovecraft in creating his Cthulhu Mythos.

  • 1979 R. Torgeson in Science Fiction Review (#32) Aug. 43/3

    The first three titles in the series will be JOHN SILENCE by Algernon Blackwood, PHRA THE PHOENICIAN by Edwin Lester Arnold and a collection of Robert Bloch’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ stories, tentatively titled WHEN SHADOWS LENGTHEN.

  • 1997 Spinoffery in Interzone (#121) July 65/4 page image

    It consists of pastiche Lovecraftiana, in the shared ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ orchestrated after Lovecraft’s death by August Derleth.

  • 2005 Locus Feb. 32/1 page image

    Lovecraft is big in the first-novel horror books, with the Cthulhu mythos featured in Mamatas’s Move Under Ground, where Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, and William S. Burroughs battle Old R’luyeh, and in Wheeler’s The Arcanum where a secret society with A. Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and Harry Houdini battle nameless horrors in early 20th-century New York.

  • 2014 P. Simpson Brief Guide to Stephen King xiv. 201 page image Paul Simpson bibliography

    Creatures from the Cthulhu mythos arrived in the London suburb of ‘Crouch End’, and the Bradbury children get some help from ‘The House on Maple Street’ to deal with their hated stepfather.


Research requirements

antedating 1942

Earliest cite

August Derleth

Research History
Suggested, and many cites submitted, by Bill Mullins.
Bobby Derie submitted a 1933 cite from "Essential Solitude" (the Derleth – Lovecraft letters) for the form "Cthulhu mythology".

Last modified 2023-10-05 20:22:47
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.