Arc Dream Publishing, $10.99, ISBN 978-0-9853175-2-2
Fiction Tie-In, 2012

I’m sure I may have mentioned somewhere some time before that I’m a big fan of cosmic horror and HP Lovecraft. However, I won’t go as far as to embarrass myself by proclaiming to be some kind of scholar in that kind of horror – I’d leave that to folks like Daniel Harms, whose third edition of The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia is my kind of light read while I’m passing time on the toilet or something.

Now, I know, in times like this, there will be people – who have never read a single story by Mr Lovecraft, naturally – shrieking at me that I must be a racist to like this fellow’s stories. Sadly, I don’t live in a bubble and I can see more colors than black and white, plus I don’t chase after dopamine highs by canceling other people. The author wasn’t well in the head – he wasn’t just a racist, he hated practically every race, including his own. Mr Lovecraft was neurotic on a good day and just plain crazy on his not-so-good days, which explained why he could come up with some twisted, dark stories that hinted at terrors lurking behind every mundane aspect of life – terrors that he could neither contain nor control.

So was his stories racist? Actually, they were misanthropic, if we want to be accurate, but that’s the point. We are talking about horror, stories that brutally expose the darkness in human beings as well as terrors in the shadows. Mr Lovecraft’s fractured psyche made these stories what they are. If you think that it makes me a racist to be fascinated by the darkness revealed in these stories, then you probably need to learn to look a little beyond your window – stay on the path that is most true to you, but don’t be so quick to condemn everything that you don’t understand to be morally inferior to you.

Now, back to this book. It’s certainly complete enough to my non-scholarly eyes, with the Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, locations, and more in the stories by Mr Lovecraft and other authors recognized to be part of the Cthulhu mythos. I am glad that I bought the digital copy, because I can just click on the title of the entry listed in left column of my reader to be taken straight to the entry itself. It’s fun to revisit the terrors and locales of the stories I’ve read, and to discover those in stories that I haven’t. So yes, I get to look up more cosmic horror stories thanks to this encyclopedia, and there can never be too much of that in my life! Of course, that’s before I find out that quite a number of the books mentioned have been out of print for a long while now, but oh well, that’s not Mr Harms’s fault and I really appreciate the effort.

The entries are pretty detailed too, and I find myself discovering new things about things that I thought I already knew enough of.

The one downside is the lack of illustrations. In a way, I understand that this may be done to keep the production cost to be low. I’m also not too disappointed by this as I’m purchasing a digital copy, not a coffee table book. If this had been the latter, the lack of images would be unforgivable. As a reasonably cheap reference and fun read, though, this one more than fits the bill. Hence, I can overlook the absence of pictures.

The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia is a great starting point for folks that are just discovering cosmic horror, I feel, as well as casual fans such as myself that may like to take a quick trip into the darkest recesses of the terrifying unknown now and then. It’s also a window that shows just how much horror and fantasy owe their inspiration to the Cthulhu mythos, and how richer the genres had been as a result.