TITUS CROW: Vol. I

First hardcover volume of three, each holding two Titus Crow novels from Lumley's earlier days as an H.P. Lovecraft disciple. Lumley is best-known for his Harry Keogh Necroscope vampire cycle (Necroscope: Resurgence Vol. II, The Lost Years, p. 1178, etc.). The two ""adventure-horror"" novels in the present book, The Burrowers Beneath and The Transition of Titus Crow, were written back in 1974 and 1975, when fantastic elaboration and great arabesques of description spooled out like bolts of paisley were more highly prized than they are today. Lumley borrows wholesale from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, going into greater anthropological detail than the master cared to on those indescribable protoplasmic horrors with tentacled faces, the underground spawn of the gray, milelong mass of evil called Cthulhu, who swims ""into the deeper magma, against strange tides of molten-rock oceans, those oceans which hold these lily pads we call continents afloat!"" Cthulhu's children build nests, slowly multiply, and are given such names as Yibb-Tsill, Yog-Sothoth, Ithaqua, Hastur, and Lloigor. In The Burrowers Beneath, Titus Crow and Henri de Marigny join forces with a secret group pledged to fight the subterranean monsters. The telepathic creatures, it turns out, fear radiation and water, so Titus, Henri, and their comrades devise some ingenious ways to use these elements against them. At novel's end, Crow and Marigny tumble into a time-machine. In Transition, they return ten years later, looking hardly a day older. In fact, a robot culture in time-space has rebuilt Titus, turning him into a synthetic man in a considerably improved version of a human body. Transition follows Titus's adventures in time, ranging from his tour of Earth's earliest days to his trip forward to the end of time, and including his visit to Elysia, the home of the Elder Gods who were responsible for imprisoning the evil Cthulhu underground. Hideous mobile sludge, hellish dreams, babbling madness, the horror, the horror!