“The House of the Worm” by Gary Myers

"The House of the Worm" by Gary Myers

"It is with special pride the publisher offers this first book by the young California writer Gary Myers. The imperially slim volume is an episodic novel, a collection of ten tales each a masterpiece of macabre fantasy structured to present the author’s own special insight into the Cthulhu Mythos – what Mr. Myers calls “an interesting heresy.” Brevity is the soul of Gary Myers’ style; his viewpoint is mordant, ironic and always perfect for striking a note of chilling terror. Whether he is being ocularly descriptive as with “The House of the Worm” and “The Maker of Gods,” in which the unrelenting terror is established as if a report from the pupil of the eye transferred from pen to paper, or creating an abstraction of eerie strangeness as in “Hazuth Kleg,” Myers capture perfectly with few words the mood of cosmic horror.

Gary Myers fell under the shadow of Lovecraft at the tender age of sixteen and never completely escaped it. His first Cthulhu Mythos story was purchased by August Derleth in 1969. The House of the Worm, his first collection, was published by Derleth's Arkham House in 1975. The book is a stylistic pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, and may be seen as an expansion of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle. While presented as a novel of the Cthulhu Mythos, it is, in fact, a collection of linked stories.

This ebook has all of the original artwork by Allan Servoss, plus Jack Gaughan's Dreamland map from de Camp's The Fantastic Swordsmen (1967). It has been proof-read, with a working TOC and chapter breaks. "