Extended Review
Lumley, Brian: Titus Crow, Volume 1
Fritz Leiber, creator of the best-known pair of adventurers in all of fantasy literature (and no stranger to the Lovecraftean pastiche) was no great fan of Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath, the first of the two novels collected in Titus Crow, Volume 1. This is not just science fiction,
wrote Leiber in an essay published in Fantastic, June 1975 (and reprinted in Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark). It is science fiction of the cosmic-war-of-the-gods sort which Lovecraft most detested.
And while Leiber certainly makes his point, he misses what The Burrowers Beneath actually aspires to be, a Haggardian adventure, completely over the top, utilizing the tropes and inventions of Lovecraft's cosmic horror as if they were the animatronic ghouls and goblins hopping up and down in the path of a careening ghost train.
Told primarily in an epistolary style, The Burrowers Beneath is the tale of Titus Crow, an occult adventurer comprised of equal parts Abraham Van Helsing, Sherlock Holmes, and Dr. Who, and his Watson, frequent narrator (through journal entries) Henri-Laurent de Marigny, as they take on the Elder Gods (known here as the CCD, or "Cthulhu Cycle Deities") in mano-a-mano combat, the stakes being the universe itself. It's silly, sure, but a good enough ride that one is inclined to forgive the sort of arch-silliness that comes when Crow's home, Blowne House, is literally blown apart by wind elementals at the conclusion of The Burrowers Beneath. References to Lovecraft's locales, stories, and characters abound, as do evil, squid-headed (and no-headed) alien monsters intent on unleashing cosmic destruction.
Leiber may have been more entertained by the second half of Titus Crow, Volume 1, the novel The Transition of Titus Crow, which derives as much from Lovecraft's Dunsany-inspired dream fantasies as The Burrowers Beneath did his pullulating pantheon. With The Transition of Titus Crow, Titus is elevated to a sort of fantasy superman: he flies through space and time in a coffin-shaped clock, fights dinosaurs, is reassembled by robots, rides dragons, and makes love to a beautiful goddess. It is a kitchen sink approach to fantasy, one that works almost in spite of itself. While nowhere near as engaging as The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow effectively raises the stakes, introducing a pantheon of good deities to balance Cthulhu's evil, and bridging the first novel with the four which follow. [2/2009]
