Titus Crow: The Clock of Dreams ; Spawn of the Winds
Second hardcover volume of three, this one reprinting two ``adventure horror'' novels written in Lumley's Lovecraft-struck youth. Titus Crow: Vol. One (published in January of this year) describes Titus Crow's discovery of the Cthulhu monsters, who have been exiled to Earth by the Elder Gods of Elysia and who swim in molten stone below the mantle and have spread nests about the planet. Titus joins with Henri de Marigny to fight these telepathic subterranean horrors, and the two speed about in a grandfather clockshaped time machine created by the Elder Gods. Crow journeys to far-off Elysia, where he is rebuilt as an android, his human mind lodged in a body with perfect synthetic organs. Now, in The Clock of Dreams, the first of the two novels collected here, de Marigny, contacted by Kthanid the Elder in Elysia by dream telepathy, learns that Titus and his beloved Tiania are prisoners of Earth's dreamworld, trapped by their enemies in hideous nightmares. Through mental communication with the time-clock, de Marigny leaves the waking world and contacts Grant Enderby of Ulthar, who alone knows where in the dreamworld of Dyleth-Leen Titus and Tiania have been imprisoned. Thanks to de Marigny's efforts, Titus is finally freed to stand up to some ectoplasmal, abyss-spawned horrors. In Spawn of the Winds, it falls upon the telepathic Texan Hank Silberhutte to track and battle the Cthulhu Cycle Deities. Silberhutte knows that Ithaqua, the abominable Force of Evil also known as the Wind-Walker, has been exiled to the Arctic region. He goes in search of him only to have Ithaqua appear as a great smoke-like blot in the sky that assaults and downs his plane over the McKenzie Mountains. Hank disappears but later begins telepathic transmissions to the medium Juanita Alvarez, telling her of his battle with Ithaqua. Carmine prose from the very pits of hell as Lumley blends Lovecraft's demons and gods with Edgar Rice Burroughs's wild sense of adventure. --Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.