Robert M. Price

Robert M. Price
Full Name	Robert McNair Price
Connection to the Mythos	Editor Contributor
Birth Date	July 7, 1954
Birthplace	Jackson, Mississippi
Nationality	United States
Website	http://robertmprice.mindvendor.com/

Robert M. Price is an American theologian and writer. He has written extensively within the Cthulhu Mythos, and created a podcast discussing the Lovecraft Mythos which ran to more than a hundred episodes.

He is known for arguing against the existence of a historical Jesus (the Christ myth theory). He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus.

H. P. Lovecraft scholarship

As editor of the journal Crypt of Cthulhu (published by Necronomicon Press) and of a series of Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, Price has been a major figure in H. P. Lovecraft scholarship and fandom for many years. In essays that introduce the anthologies and the individual stories, Price traces the origins of Lovecraft's entities, motifs, and literary style. The Cthulhu Cycle, for example, saw the origins of the octopoid entity in Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Kraken" and particular passages from Lord Dunsany, while The Dunwich Cycle points to the influence of Arthur Machen on Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."

Price's religious background often informs his Mythos criticism, seeing gnostic themes in Lovecraft's fictional god Azathoth, and interpreting "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" as a kind of initiation ritual.

Most of the early Call of Cthulhu Fiction books by Chaosium were overseen by Price; his first book was The Hastur Cycle (1993), an anthology of short stories which traced the development of a single Lovecraftian element, and this was followed by Mysteries of the Worm (1993), a collection of Robert Bloch's Mythos fiction.

Selected Works

Editor

Periodicals

• Crypt of Cthulhu (1981-2019)
• Chronicles of the Cthulhu Codex (1996-1998)
• Midnight Shambler (1996-1998)

Anthologies

• The Hastur Cycle (1993)
• Mysteries of the Worm (1993)
• The Shub-Niggurath Cycle: Tales of the Black Goat with a Thousand Young (1994)
• The Azathoth Cycle: The Blind Idiot God (1995)
• The Book of Iod: Ten Tales of the Mythos (1995)
• The Dunwich Cycle: Where the Old Gods Wait (1995)
• The Tindalos Cycle (2008)

Writer

Collections

• Blasphemies & Revelations (2008)

Short Fiction

• "Dope War of the Black Tong" (1976)
• "Beneath the Tombstone" (1984)
• "Saucers from Yaddith" (1984)
• "Black Eons" (1985, with Robert E. Howard)
• "Wilbur Whateley Waiting" (1987)
• "The Deprogrammer" (1989)
• "A Thousand Young" (1989)
• "The Dweller in the Pot" (1990)
• "Exham Priory" (1990)
• "The Strange Fate of Alonzo Typer" (1991)
• "Behold, I Stand at the Door and Knock" (1994)
• "The Transition of Zadok Allen" (1995)
• "The Round Tower" (1995)
• "Down in Limbo" (1995)
• "The Beard of Byatis" (1995)
• "Under the Mound" (1995)
• "Young Goodwife Doten" (1995)
• "The Soul of the Devil-Bought" (1996)
• "The Burrower Beneath" (1997)
• "The Transition of Abdul Alhazred" (1997)
• "Feery's Original Notes" (1997)
• "The Green Decay" (1997)
• "Annotations for the Book of Night" (1998)
• "The Elephant God of Leng (2002)
• "Eibon Saith: The Apophthegmata of Eibon" (2002)
• "The Horror in the Genizah" (2008)
• "Aquadingen" (2008)
• "The Thing from the Trenches" (2008) [with James Ambuehl]
• "The Grey Rite of Azathoth" (2014)
• "The Sea Nymph's Son" (2014)
• The Doom That Came to Providence (2015) [round-robin, contributor]
• "The Seven Thunders" (2015)
• "The Shining Trapezohedron" (2018)

Non-Fiction

• "HPL and HPB: Lovecraft's Use of Theosophy" in Crypt of Cthulhu (1982) (archive)