Before there was Doctor Who, and before there were horror movies, there were the tales of the Cthulhu mythos. Here, for those interested in making the Cthulhu mythos fit into the world of Doctor Who, is an introduction to the genre:

American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), inspired by the works of such classic authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen and Ambrose Bierce, chose to weave a web of horror stories whose purpose, it seems, was to emphasise the utter insignificance of the human species in the grand scheme of things. His stories would invariably involve ancient horrors - thousands, even millions of years old - which had come to Earth from the stars and the spaces between them. These creatures were never evil - merely alien - often obliviously unaware of the existence of the human species, and as caring towards us as we are to the flies we swat or the ants we drown in boiling water.

Further emphasis on the frailty of humanity came from Lovecraft's treatment of his protagonists who, often as fragile as the author considered himself to be, would suffer some grisly fate - either driven insane by the sight of a nameless horror or at the uncovering of some secret revelation, or else torn limb from limb by unholy creatures from beyond Euclidean space.

The scale of Lovecraft's creations was beyond the scope of many writers that came before him. Some entities were planet or even galaxy-sized, whilst even his smaller creatures - Great Cthulhu, Dagon and the Dunwich Horror - could tower tens or even hundreds of feet above the average human. Precursors, perhaps, to such cinematic monsters as King Kong or Godzilla.

Despite these cosmos-spanning abominations, Lovecraft never strayed too far from his New England home when setting his stories (indeed, he never strayed far from his Providence home during his entire life), although he did create something called the Dreamlands, whose chief protagonist was able to travel through time and space in an Ormolu Clock (some 40 or more years before a similar device took the form of an old blue Police Box).

Although much of his fiction touched upon the mythos, his friend and peer August Derleth cited only 13 genuine mythos tales - At the Mountains of Madness, The Call of Cthulhu, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Colour Out of Space, Dreams in the Witch-House, The Dunwich Horror, The Festival, The Haunter of the Dark, The Nameless City, The Shadow Out of Time, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Thing on the Doorstep and The Whisperer in the Darkness - as canon.

Besides this body of work, Lovecraft also spread his ideas about the mythos by letter - he wrote incredibly long letters of up to 70 pages, and produced at least 100,000 of them!

But the mythos was not solely the creation of Lovecraft. During his years as a writer he built up a large circle of friends with whom he would almost exclusively communicate with by letter. Many of these writers came to respect Lovecraft, who would offer constructive criticism and helpful suggestions, as well as rewriting or amending the works of those he considered to be lesser writers desperate to break into the field.

To Lovecraft there was no greater picture - no coherent amalgam which comprised 'the mythos'. He and his friends merely borrowed each other's ideas and made in-jokes and references in their writing (a prime example is when he killed off fellow writer Robert Bloch, under the name of Robert Blake, in his novella The Haunter of the Dark, which was a reprisal for Bloch having killed him off in the tale The Shambler from the Stars). Only in later years was an attempt made to unify these stories.

Those who formed the 'inner circle' of Lovecraft's group included a number of writers still popular today - Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian, whose own adventures occasionally borrowed elements from the Cthulhu mythos), Clark Ashton Smith (a true writer of weird tales whose strange stories of Averoigne, Hyperborea, Atlantis, Xiccarph and Zothique easily provided homes for creatures as gruesome as those Lovecraft had created), Frank Belknap Long and the young Robert Bloch, writer of Psycho and countless other latter-day horror stories.

Beyond Lovecraft - The Expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos

The phrase 'Cthulhu Mythos' is not one ever used by Lovecraft himself, whose stories should perhaps be seen as the Lovecraft Mythos. This distinction is necessary because the growth of Lovecraft's popularity was largely posthumous. Though a regular contributor to Weird Tales, it was not really until one of the later members of Lovecraft's circle - August Derleth - with the assistance of Donald Wandrei - set up his own publishing organ Arkham House in 1939, to specifically propagate both Lovecraft's work and that of his 'successors', who included Derleth himself (the company was kept afloat by Derleth's own, more profitable, fiction).

Taking it upon himself to complete many of Lovecraft's unfinished works (posthumous collaborations include The Lurker at the Threshold and The Survivor), Derleth attempted to shape and redefine the mythos into almost Christian terms. Derleth created a race of beings known as the 'Elder Ones' whose actions in imprisoning Lovecraft's 'Great Old Ones' millennia ago was portrayed as something 'good'. In earlier stories such creatures were synonymous with each other - any 'Elder Ones' would have imprisoned the 'Great Old Ones' for selfish rather than altruistic reasons.

Derleth also introduced elemental associations to the creatures of the mythos - for example Great Cthulhu was referred to as being linked to the element of water (Rather unusual since Cthulhu was actually imprisoned 'in his House at R'lyeh' at the bottom of the sea).

As the guiding hand behind Arkham House, Derleth attempted to mould other horror writers, creating a new 'inner circle' which came to include T.E.D. Klein, Richard L. Tierney, J. Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and even a young Stephen King - all fans who made good.

When Derleth died in 1971, things fell quiet on the mythos front (although Arkham House continued to flourish), and it wasn't until the early to mid-eighties that people started to 'rediscover' Lovecraft. The greatest contribution to this genre has, beyond all doubt, been the development of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game by Chaosium Inc.

Sandy Petersen, principal creator of the game, has been particularly keen to expand its horizons without compromising Lovecraft's (and not Derleth's) vision. Since it first appeared in 1982 Call of Cthulhu has been one of the most consistently popular roleplaying games of all time (second only to Dungeons and Dragons, which at one time attempted to incorporate the Cthulhu Mythos into its own universe). Six editions and two variant rules systems have been produced for the game, and supplements/adventures set in the 1890s, 1920s, 1930s and present day continue to be published, setting the game up as a shining example for others to follow. Chaosium has also branched out into the realm of fiction, reprinting the old mthos masterpieces in new volumes aimed specifically at those who were introduced to Lovecraft through their roleplaying game.

This material originally appeared in the fanzine Apocrypha Presents: A Dr Who fan's guide to the Cthulhu Mythos © Adrian Middleton 1993, and is reproduced with permission.