Brian Lumley Review: Beneath the Moors

The titular story of the collection, “Beneath the Moors,” is by far the longest, 111 pages of 384. The cover of the book describes “Beneath the Moors” as a short novel. Some people might write it out as Beneath the Moors but as part of a larger work (even a larger work of the same name), my interpretation of MLA guidelines is to use quotation marks.

Normal people don’t care about this, but a few years of teaching grammar warps your standards.

Lumley returned to the Cthulhu mythos with this story, although not concentrating on Cthulhu but on several lesser deities and races.

I just read Clark Ashton Smith’s “Ubbo-Sathla” who is mentioned here. Although in the first collection of Lumley’s stories, House of Cthulhu, I criticized him for changing established mythos canon, here he works Ubbo-Sathla into the Lovecraftian timeline better than Smith did himself.

He also used excerpts of Smith’s poetry which I thought was a good touch.

The main Lovecraftian creatures are the Bokrug and the Thuun’ha from “The Doom That Came to Sarnath.” They are different than how they were portrayed in Lovecraft’s version but Lumley went into extreme detail to explain why (the Bokrug were conning the Thuun’ha which caused multiple misconceptions).

In the story, Professor Ewart Masters set out to study ancient myths and corresponding artifacts. His research took him to dangerous terrain where he was thought to be swept away and killed. A year later, he was discovered, claiming to have lived under the moors with inhuman creatures.

The story was composed of many documents and psychiatric evaluations, similar to the way Lovecraft composed “The Call of Cthulhu” and the way Arthur Machen put together “The Great God Pan.” This technique has been used often since but Lumley still does it effectively.

Due to the multiple points of view, it can get confusing who is doing what (in full disclosure, I had many distractions while I was reading). It’s not like James Joyce, more like Ramsey Campbell where you need to turn back a few pages to figure out what’s happening.

With most writers focusing on Cthulhu, Yog-Soggoth, Dagon, or other top tier members of the Cthulhu mythos, Beneath the Moors may be the best novel written about Bokrug. The lizard god might not be Lovecraft’s most beloved deity but Lumley fleshed out his place in the pantheon.