by August Derleth

First Edition, First Printing | Arkham House | 1962

Call, email, or visit the store to buy this book!

In 1962 Arkham House published The Trail of Cthulhu, which collected five of August Derleth’s interconnected stories into one volume for the first time. This book, its author, and its publisher are all historically significant in the genre of “weird” fiction — a difficult-to-define style of speculative writing that blends elements of horror, macabre fantasy, the supernatural, and a general suspension of the laws of nature. Think Edgar Allan Poe, Stranger Things, or H. P. Lovecraft, who is credited with popularizing the term. August Derleth, who did much to develop the genre, was a correspondent and disciple of Lovecraft; theirs was a relationship that significantly shaped the trajectory of Derleth’s life’s work.

Lovecraft’s influence is perhaps most evident in those of August Derleth’s books that feature Cthulhu, a cosmic deity that resembles part green octopus, part dragon, and part human, whom Lovecraft wrote into existence in 1928. The stories in The Trail of Cthulhu — all previously published in Weird Tales — take place in Arkham, Massachusetts, a fictional town central to Lovecraft’s writing, where one may encounter the Great Old Ones. Several writers in Lovecraft’s circle adopted Cthulhu and the rules of Arkham’s sur-reality into their own works, including Derleth, who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe this shared fictional universe. In literary dissections of this mythopoeia, Derleth’s interpretation of the world differs from Lovecraft’s — while Lovecraft’s Mythos serves to convey the meaninglessness of human supremacy, Derleth’s represents a struggle between good and evil with elements of hope for humanity.

Differences aside, the Cthulhu Mythos — and Lovecraft himself — would live in relative anonymity today if not for Derleth. In 1937, Derleth and Donald Wandrei established Arkham House explicitly for the sake of posthumously publishing Lovecraft’s writing, which hadn’t been popular during his lifetime. The publishing house went on to become a stalwart in the weird fiction landscape for the next 70 years, continuing to Lovecraft’s work alongside names such as Robert E. Howard, H. Russell Wakefield, and August Derleth himself.

Arkham House’s first printing of Derleth’s The Trail of Cthulhu produced 2470 copies. One of these has made its way, over the years, to the shelves of the Dawn Treader, where it sits next to a first edition of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, published by Arkham House in 1964. Come by the store to find these and many other weird and wonderful fictions!