Well, I finished
The Dunwich Cycle, and here are my responses, in brief:
"The Shuttered Room" -- having something of a "Chesterfieldian sense of honor" about such things, I reread this one. Actually, Derleth builds quite a nice atmosphere in the earlier portions, and the writing there is rather good. It is when he starts throwing around too much of the "Mythos" lingo that things begin to go incredibly wonky; and that ending! How on earth a professional writer could possibly have thought that was any sort of ending...
Price's "The Round Tower", though not a work of great art, is one heck of a lot better than the original ending to
Lurker which Derleth wrote. At least he doesn't completely jettison everything which has been built up before that point for a vastly different set of circumstances and conclusions, with an extremely annoying pontificating professor/psychic detective to lay it all out for dummies.... He even weaves a decent atmosphere and makes up for the two "catalogues" of mythos info from Derleth's second section....
Lupoff's "The Devil's Hop-Yard" isn't entirely successful either, though it is an interesting piece; the "mirroring" of the original "Dunwich Horror" (here the progeny is female; where Wilbur becomes a giant, she remains nearly the size of a week-old infant, though fully mature, etc.) is taken a bit too far, but the realization of the Dunwich country as a character in its own right is handled quite well; and there is a hint of eeriness here and there about Hester as well.
"The Road to Dunwich", by Ben Indick, is actually very effective, in large part because it creates a sense of inevitable familial tragedy and pathos, with the narrator and his son both powerless, though for differing reasons, to prevent the loss they suffer. It has its poignancy and horror well blended and, though one can see where it is going early on, that only adds to that sense of an ancient pattern working itself out in human lives, giving it a touch of Grecian gravitas.
"The Tree-House" by W. H. Pugmire and Bob Price is also not entirely sucessful, though it only misses by a hair. It, too, has its elements of pathos and the grim inevitability, with Wilum's pungently dark humorous twist -- not humor in the usual sense, but the ironic humor Lovecraft was so fond of, in particularly Pugmirian terms.
"You Can't Take It with You", by C. J. Henderson, blends HPL and the hard-boiled detective tale -- something which has been done at various times with surprising success -- in a tale which does credit to both; it, also, has its very human element, and a resolution of mixed tragedy and revelation.
Price's "Wilbur Whateley Waiting" rather turns the entire trope on its ear, and finally presents the overpowering presence of Wilbur as ultimately helpless and impotent in the face of the modern world's tendency to accept the very myths from which he springs. It is also somewhat darkly humorous in its pointed marking of Wilbur as, finally, less of a grotesque than the world in which he finds himself when brought back; a statement which takes Lovecraft's work in a vastly different direction than the original, but which, given some of his statements in letters, I think he would have appreciated quite well.
What, to me, makes such anthologies so interesting is how varied the response to the Lovecraftian materials is among the different writers; and how each picks up on a particular thread or idea and then develops it in their own individual fashion, rather than attempting to imitate HPL in any way. Not all are successful, but a surprising number are, by dint of avoiding the very strictures which created this sub-genre by identifying its boundaries. Now it has become a thing of its own, with identifiable links to Lovecraft, but a healthy growing branch of literature not confined to what has gone before. Those with a taste for the strict Derlethian view of the Mythos are likely to be sadly disappointed; those who recognize the open-endedness of the original are more likely to enjoy the variety offered therein.
