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The Ithaqua Cycle (1st edition)
Introduction and Prefaces by Robert M. Price, series editor
Chaosium Fiction
ISBN 1-56882-124-7
Ithaqua has always been one of my favorite Great Old Ones; I was quite taken aback the first time someone pointed out to me that Lovecraft didn’t invent Him. Nonetheless, the notion of Ithaqua is not native to the works of H.P.L. This particular god sprang from the brow of August Derleth--or at least it was Derleth who assigned the name “Ithaqua” to a nameless Something that strode the snowy northern wastes both in Native American legend and the stories of Algernon Blackwood, enslaving wayward humans with a siren call.
I must say, it was one of Uncle Augie’s more inspired moments of Mythos engineering. Ithaqua was a necessary adjunct to Derleth’s “Elemental” scheme of the Mythos; if Cthulhu was to be an elemental god of Water and Shub-Niggurath a fertile goddess of Earth, then by extension there must be deities of Fire and Air as well. Ithaqua, then, was born to fill out the pantheon as Derleth’s God of the Winds.
The Ithaqua Cycle is the 17th book in the Mythos fiction series from Chaosium. This is a collection of canonical short stories which shape and define the legend of Ithaqua, beginning with Algernon Blackwood’s seminal “The Wendigo” and running the gamut of offerings both sublime and curious. Editor Robert Price provides an informative and readable introduction and gives a short preface to each story, niceties which I’ve come to expect from his work for Chaosium.
The overall quality of the collection is quite high, and there is nothing here that “doesn’t belong” per se…although there are definitely some stories I like better than others. I personally have a fondness for Blackwood’s writing, and “The Wendigo” has always been one of his better tales-despite the casual use of racial epithets like “nigger” and “half-breed”, which will probably make most modern-day readers extremely uncomfortable. There were also two stories from Pierre Comtois which caught my eye; I found both of Comtois’s Ithaqua tales to be a cut above the usual run of Mythos fiction. And there’s Brian Lumley’s infamous “Born of the Winds”, which isn’t too bad.
The Ithaqua Cycle contains the following stories, in the following order:
“The Wendigo”, by Algernon Blackwood
“The Thing from Outside”, by George Allen England
“The Thing That Walked on the Wind”, by August Derleth
“The Snow-Thing”, by August Derleth
“Beyond the Threshold”, by August Derleth
“Born of the Winds”, by Brian Lumley
“Spawn of the North”, by George C. Diezel II and Gordon Linzner
“They Only Come Out at Night”, by Randy Medoff
“Footsteps in the Sky”, by Pierre Comtois
“Jendick’s Swamp”, by Joseph Payne Brennan
“The Wind Has Teeth”, by G. Warlock Vance and Scott H. Urban
“Stalker of the Wild Wind”, by Stephen Mark Rainey
“The Country of the Wind”, by Pierre Comtois
“Wrath of the Wind-Walker”, by James Ambuehl
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