Elysia

The Coming of Cthulhu

By: Brian Lumley

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

The Titus Crow novels are full of acts of nobility and heroism. Titus Crow and his faithful companion fight the forces of darkness - the infamous and deadly Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft - wherever they arise. The powerful Cthulhu and his dark minions are bent on ruling the earth - or destroying it, yet time after time, Titus Crow drives the monsters back into the dark from whence they came.

Elysia is the sixth book in the Titus Crow series.

©1989 Brian Lumley (P)2017 David N. Wilson

An explosive end to Lumley's epic

The Great Old Ones finally rising from their aeons-long slumber. The stars are right and all of the cosmos is feeling something evil in the wind. Though the Elder Gods defeated them a billion years ago, they have forgotten the secrets for doing so and are helpless with their current rising. Titus Crow is then given the impossible choice to mislead his friend Henri in hopes of using him as bait to lead the monstrous Cthulhu Cycle into a trap. This results in almost everyone finding themselves trapped on a cross-temporal journey through multiple realities as well as times.

Elysia ends the series with a bang rather than a whimper, having a catastrophic ending which nicely brings to close Lumley's saga of science-heroes and occultists versus godlike aliens. Unfortunately, the book is not without flaws as an entire section of it is taken up by recounting a story from his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stand-ins versus the actual heroes. Still, we have a story which consists of visiting a sentient gas cloud, skimming a black hole, visiting a gigantic robot in the Dreamlands, dueling with a wanton airship pirate queen, and finally visiting an ancient Pre-Hyborian Age realm of wizard kings.

Lumley has an imagination he allows to run wild and it works well here with this being, along with Spawn of the Winds and The Burrowers Beneath, one of my three favorite Titus Crow stories. Lovecraft aficionados aren't going to find some last minute, "The Great Old Ones show up and kill everyone" but they're allowed more dignity here than they had in some of the volumes. Whole worlds are destroyed when the wrath of Cthulhu is unleashed and the final confrontation with him is epic in a Jack Kirby-meets-Doctor Who sort of way.

The book's ending actually moved me just a wee bit and gives the right sense of sacrifice as well as power for the defeat of the Great Old Ones. While Lovecraft purists will rail at the fact the Great Old Ones can be defeated at all, it isn't the case of Hawkgirl smacking Cthulhu around with her mace either. I felt this was a satisfactory wrap-up to all of the series mysteries and left me feeling like I'd spent my time well traveling with such an eccentric cast of oddballs.

Finally, an actual sequel to Burrowers Beneath...

This book finally brings the series back to what it should have been - a story about Titus Crow and the Great Old Ones.

Simon Vance is, as always, an excellent narrator. His voices are varied and distinct. His tempo shifts are effective. And if somewhat less (accurate to the text) than I'd like, his inflections are skillful.

In this book we find de Marigny (still/again) scouring the universe in search of Elysia and Titus Crow.

I'm still not clear on this "Riding a Great Thought" business and the idea of it kind of throws me out if the story.

But apart from that and the seeming randomness of this book, I quite enjoyed the directions it went.

I get that Kthonid basically made de Marigny his errand boy with a false promise. That was clear from the start. But the way it was approached seems beneath a god to me.

I just don't see why a god would need him, a being with such power should be able to handle his own affairs.

But I digress.

I enjoyed the interstellar adventure. And although I still was not fond of the dream sequence, at least it was better (and shorter lived) than in previous books.

And we did, at last, get something if the epic battle I was hoping for from the start, if on a smaller scale and with much less time devoted to it than I would have liked.

I think my biggest complaint is the same problem I had with the whole series. They're too short with far to little time devoted to the climax.

Which I believe stems from the fact that Lumley came up as a short story writer. I don't think longer form work comes naturally to him. That's also why, in my opinion, there is such a dramatic shift in tone between his short Mythos stories and this series.

When we come right down to it, the ending was well presented but once again, as in all six of these, I think it would have made for a much better story from Crow's perspective.

The ending does a fantastic job of bringing things full circle and goes a long way toward explaining Lumley's version of the Cthulhu Mythos, for all that parts of it smack of nonsense.