Re-reading Cthulhu Mythos fiction is not something I am apt to do. After reading literally hundreds of stories, ranging from canon tales to fanzine pastiches, I find little call to go back and experience it again. A pleasant exception is The Great White Space (1975) by Basil Copper. I read it probably twenty-five years ago, back in my Call of Cthulhu days, when my biggest concern was research for playing the RPG. My impression then was: Not a lot of monsters and it is long.
I re-read the novel recently and am happy to say it was like reading an entirely different book. Copper’s words haven’t changed in 38t years, so obviously I have. I think one of the big reasons is that I have read the books that may have inspired Copper outside of the Mythos, adventure novels like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) , H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1913), as well as the novels of imitators like Ian Cameron with The Lost Ones (AKA Island at the Top of the World) (1961) and The Mountains at the Bottom of the World (AKA Devil Country) (1972).
Read the rest:
Enjoyed this novel quite a bit until the conclusion. There’s a big twist and it shocks the reader both because it’s a huge and horrible surprise and… because it makes no sense whatsoever. I poured over the book trying to render that climactic twist sensible but it could not be done.
So this is a mythos tale I won’t be giving a second reading.
I thought that way too, the first time.