Titus Crow, Volume Two

by Brian Lumley

Book Overview

Titus Crow and his faithful companion and record-keeper fight the gathering forces of darkness-the infamous and deadly Elder Gods of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Cthulhu and his dark minions are bent... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312863470
• ISBN13: 9780312863470
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 2 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Cleaning the Clocks of the CCD

After having slogged through Volume One of the Titus Crow series, complete with lisping dragons, green haired space princesses, and a narrative riddled with ellipses, I steeled myself for Volume Two. With the prototypical pulp hero Titus Crow and his trusty sidekick Henri de Marginy cleaning the clocks (pun intended) of the Cthulhu Cycle Deities (CCD, ugh), there wasn't much left for them to do. But like every good epic series, when the heroes become gods among men in the mortal realm...they leave the mortal realm behind to find adventure. The Clock of Dreams begins with a rather peculiar scenario: Crow and Tiania have been captured in the Dreamlands. How this happened is hand waved; basically, Crow and Tiana are drugged and enslaved by the Men of Leng. Given that Crow is a cyborg that is highly resistant to damage, it seems unlikely that poisoning him would work...but perhaps that's because this is the Dreamlands and not Earth's reality. The first half of the novel involves de Marginy's quest to find Crow in the Dreamlands. Once there, Crow takes up the second half as he seeks to rescue Tiania. What's interesting is that Clock of Dreams is one of the first to posit that Cthulhu's dream sendings actually infect the Dreamlands. Here, great nightmarish factories corrupt the land, guarded by three foul guardians: the worm-like Flyer, its tentacle-armed Rider, and a three-legged Runner. Overseeing the entire operation is a deathly titanic Keeper, who in turn servers Nyarlathotep. Overall, this is book is an improvement over the first volume, if only because there's more for Titus to do. Unlike the previous books, it's told in the present tense, which lends much urgency to the narrative. There's plenty of combat, skullduggery, and a hilarious moment where the only way de Marginy can return to the Dreamlands is to get roaring drunk. With guest appearances by Randolph Carter and King Kuranes, flying airships, and shields that shoot laser beams, this is pulp Cthulhu at its wackiest. But it's juicy and satisfying, especially when Nyarlathotep shows up at the end to put our heroes in their place. Spawn of the Winds, on the other hand, is a different breed of pulp. Crow and de Marginy are nowhere to be found in this book; its inclusion is primarily because of Ithaqua, who is assigned a peculiar set of personality traits here. Ithaqua, you see, lusts after human women (as all pulp villains inevitably do) because he seeks to spawn terrible progeny who will walk among the winds with him. The winds, as defined by Lumley, are the spaces between worlds, and occasionally Ithaqua kidnaps people and carries them across dimensions to the world of Borea. Borea is a wind-swept frozen world filled with every snow land cliché imaginable: Vikings, Eskimos, white wolves, polar bears, ski-boats, and lots and lots of snow. I kept waiting for Santa Claus to show up. Ithaqua's penchant for turning people into wendigos is turned on its ear here - instead, Ith

Enjoyable read; hard review!

It is hard to review this twofer. Although they take place in the same universe, the two books are vaguely connected. "The Clock of Dreams" ends Lumley's first Titus Crow trilogy, while "Spawn of the The Winds" begins his second trilogy. It would have been better for Tor to publish the three twofers as two three-in-ones, thereby keeping the trilogies separate. If they needed to have three books, then the should have published "The compleat crow," the short-story collection, as a third volume. I see The Vortex Blaster Problem in play here: the six official Lensman books are frequently republished, but uniformly "The Vortex Blaster" is dropped from the series. Admittedly, it does not follow the main story line, but neither does "The Horse And His Boy" follow the main Narnia storyline. And in Adam's Hitchiker's Guide omnibus, they include the fragment "Young Zaphod Beeblebrox." It seems to be incomplete, but it is still included because it is relevant to the overall series. The point being that in all cases, we should include all the relevant books in the series. End of rant; now to the books. THE CLOCK OF DREAMS Five stars for the title alone. This magic coupling of the words--"clock" and "dreams"--was the reason why I began reading the series! This story tightens the connection between HPL's universe and Lumley's elaboration. We meet the Dreamer Carter (Dreams of Terror and Death: The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft) and also Etienne-Laurent de Marigny from "Out of the Aeons" (The Loved Dead: Collected Short Stories Vol II (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural)). I would have liked an appendix showing where Lumley got his characters. But I guess I will have to bone up on my Lovecraft on my own. This story abandoned the archival format, and had a detached storyteller format. So we resume a third-person narrative. The first person is always engaging, and makes the story seem real. The distance diminished the emotional impact of the horror. And this is no longer a horror series, but fantasy-adventure. This is fine--series need to evolve to keep things fresh. Also, since this is the third in a trilogy, we also have the phenomenon of winding down. The loose ends are tied up, the "marrying and the burying" as Twain put it. I'm not sure if the ending is a Deus Ex Machina. It is close, but since Lumley knows how to end a book with force and power, I forgive him. Lumley compensates for three of Lovecraft's weaknesses. 1. Courage: There are no victims of horror, but people who fight back. 2. Romance: These courageous people fall in love. 3. Balance: The evil is balanced by a present good that is bold and impressive. It is this last one--good that is bold and impressive--that fascinates me. Bold and impressive is how I would describe Kthanid, Cthulhu's goody-two-shoes brother. As a God-figure He rivals C. S. Lewis' Aslan (The Chronicles of Narnia Movie Tie-in Edition (adult) ). If we can forgive Christ for being depicted as a lion, we

Weird Stuff......

Volume Two of Tor's three-volume omnibus reprints two books, The Clock of dreams and Spawn of the Winds. Much like Volume One, this book is a 50/50 affair....While the first half of Book One was GREAT, and the second half awful, we split the difference here: Part one is pretty good, if somewhat ridiculous, and part two is a vast improvement on what has gone before. The Clock of Dreams presents us with the laughable image of two middle-aged men tooling around Dreamland in a flying GRANDFATHER CLOCK.......This is just too ridiculous to get past. The story takes place in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamland, home of my most hated Lovecraft stories, so already I have a predjudice against this chapter, but Lumley actually manages to deliver a brisk story with a few great moments; He does especially well with Lovecraft's turbaned Denizens of Leng.... Spawn of the Winds fares better, because we're spared the boring presence of Titus Crow and his snooze-inducing crony, Henri. Spawn finds a team of psychics, mentioned briefly in Book One, who are abducted by Ithaqua, The Walker On The Winds, and taken to far-off Borea. From there we get a Robert E. Howard pastiche, as our two-fisted texan hero and his buddies are drawn into a war between Ithaqua's forces and the opposing army of his daughter, Armandra. The book is reminisicent of territory Lumley would cover later (and better...) in the Blood Brothers books. Spawn is a rip-snortin' action story, and together Clock and Spawn are a not bad read, if a tad predictable.

Cthulhu Mythos: 1930's Pulp Style

Concerning the Cthulhu Mythos, Brian Lumley is a writer of the August Derleth school. While Lovecraft and others had the total meaninglessness of the universe as their cosmological base, Derleth wrote the Mythos as a battle between good and evil between ultimate forces. Lumley takes this further, stripping the Mythos of its supernatural aspects and putting it solidly into the realm of science fiction. What were supernatural aspects of the mythos stories are now an alien science as the forces of good personified in the Elder Gods struggle with mankind to keep the evil beings of the Cthulhu Mythos trapped within their eternal prisons and foil the attempts of those who would release them.Lumley's style is also reminiscent of the pulp genre popular in the 1930's with black-and-white heroic protagonists aided by beautiful heroines in a story of non-stop, bigger-than-life struggles and battles. So, if your taste goes toward the more amoral, often pornographic splatterpunk tales that pass for Mythos stories today, you're going to be disappointed.In the first book, The Clock of Dreams, Lumley takes us on a tour of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands adding a consistency and logic that was missing in Lovecraft's Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but retaining much of the wonder and magic. Like Derleth, Lumley is not fond of loose ends and ties up a lot of threads left by Lovecraft for others to repair. This time, Henri-Laurent de Marigny takes the role as main protagonist as he rescues his friend Titus Crow and his Elder God wife from the dream traps of Cthulhu himself.In Spawn of the Winds, Crow and company are left behind and we are told the story of Hank Silburhutte, a two-fisted Texan with a striking resemblance to author Robert Howard. A story true to its 1930's pulp roots, Silburhutte and his friends are captured by Ithaqua aka the Wendigo and transported to the planet Borea which may or may not be in our galaxy, let alone our dimension. Be prepared for lots of descriptions of big burly men with rippling muscles and bulging sinews, beautiful alien women, and bloody battles. It's a lot of fun.

A good continuation

This two-part sequel to Titus Crow Volume 1 should certainly satisfy Lumley fans. I began with reading his recent Necroscope books and found his earlier work such as this to be just as entertaining. The first novella in the volume, Clock of Dreams, continues the story of Titus Crow and his sidekick, Henri Laurent De Marigny. It takes a change from its predecessors method of telling the story in the form of notebook entries and tape recordings and is written more like a conventional book. It takes place mostly in the Dreamlands, with Crow and Marigny battling Cthulhu and his evil minions, to prevent them from seizing control of the dreams of Mankind. The second novella (which is not quite as good since Marigny and Crow are never even mentioned and is not quite as engaging or original) features hot-headed Texan Hank Silberhutte battling the evil Ithaqua. I have yet to read the next installment of this series, but I'm sure Crow and Marigny will return! If you are a Lumley or Lovecraft fan, this book is a must-have.