Pyramid Review: A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult

Pyramid Review

A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult

Published by Armitage House

Written by Fred L. Pelton

$9.95

First off, just so we know the players, Armitage House is an arm of Pagan Publishing (the coolest little game company on the planet), specializing in limited editions and specialty books covering, in general, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

The book itself, A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult, purports to have been written in 1946, but not published until 50 years later as a 100-copy limited edition by Armitage House. This new, just-released edition is available everywhere. Except for a few touches of squiggly tentacles and strange glyphs on an occasional page, the 148-page trade paperback book is mostly text, laid out like an academic treatise.

And that's exactly what A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult claims to be -- an academic study of the still-thriving cult of Cthulhu, who lays dead but dreaming in his sunken city of R'lyeh. Of course, nearly all the sources lovingly cited and endnoted (288 of them!) are what we know as the "fiction" of the Cthulhu Mythos -- by Lovecraft, August Derleth, and many, many others -- along with the occasional bit of antiquarian writing from other sources and even a few Bible verses. So it's not like the author is on solid academic ground as he spins his thesis.

Oh, but what spinning! And what a thesis! The author sets out to prove that today, in hidden, secret places, there are insane, degenerate groups of pure evil worshiping Great Cthulhu, . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: April 9, 1999

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