Review of “The Recurring Doom” (1980)
S. T. Joshi (writer).
Read in 2025.
In WW2, three scholars in England collaborate to understand a glowing crystal found in an archaeological expedition to Arabia.
This piece of fan fiction is written in the style of Lovecraft’s early years as a Poe fanboy pretending to erudition and wealth. When the 22-year-old Joshi means “criminal”, he writes “criminous”, because that’s archaic. When he means “explanation”, he writes “explication”, because he had not yet become a scholar himself, and did not know how the two concepts differ. When he writes that “Yuggoth lines up perfectly”, he doesn’t know what he means at all.
It is true, as the character Coler says in this story, that the orbital period of Pluto (Yuggoth) is 248 years, but that is just the length of a year on Pluto. Due to Pluto’s inclined, eccentric orbot, a “Line of Nodes” alignment of the Earth, the Sun and Pluto occurs in 87- and 161-year intervals, not 248. There was such an alignment in the year 1931, the year that Lovecraft got “The Whisperer in Darkness” published in Weird Tales. Lovecraft, in retrospect, got it right by chance. The real alignment was nine years too soon for Joshi’s 1940 setting of this story. There is no sense in adding the length of a year on Pluto to the 1692 date of the Salem witch trials—a perfectly mundane panic—in order to produce the year 1940, and no connection from there to the crystal or the stereotypically evil cult. Joshi, with the advantage of another 50 years of astronomical research, did worse than Lovecraft in every way, and not just in astronomy.
Joshi’s attempt to extrapolate from Lovecraft’s work and connect its loose ends is good-natured and charming in its simplicity, but flat. When Coler and his buddy take on the 20-man cult in battle, it reads like a trivial, moralistic game of pen-and-paper CoC, without any of Lovecraft’s core ideas and no new ones.