For anyone who would like to get in touch with me about the article, here's a suggestion: join (if you are not already a member) the Science Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles community:
[
www.sffchronicles.com]
There's no fee.
You can then send me, Extollager, a private message there, to which I can reply.
But, in any event, I would like to come back to my question to the present community, about whether or not it makes sense to identify the four HPL stories ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Whisperer in Darkness," At the Mountains of Madness, and "The Shadow Out of Time") as those that provide what counts for assessment of Lovecraft *as creator of a "secondary world" mythology*. It seems to me that these do. The element of imagined worlds, entities, books, locations, and so on is so strong in them, that they are the basis for a claim about Lovecraft as a "mythopoeic" writer.
To agree with me about this is not to sign on to some implication that would say the other stories are not worth bothering with on any account. (In fact, "The Colour Out of Space," which is not a Mythos story, seems to me HPL's best. The outstanding Tolkien scholar John Rateliff, who also relishes Lovecraft, regards "The Strange High House in the Mist" as Lovecraft's best short story, and surely that is marginal if it's a "Mythos" story at all.)
I'm among those who has reservations about the idea of "the Cthulhu Mythos," I should say. I don't believe it was HPL's term, and I take it that he was -- most of the time -- *not* all that serious about elaborating a secondary world of geography, history, cosmology, etc. I do think that, in the four stories mentioned above and perhaps in "The Mound," he was evidently drawn into a rather prolonged engagement with the construction of a "legendarium," to use a word from Tolkien studies. He might have been influenced by Olaf Stapledon.
It would be interesting to see some more discussion here.
Also, if the moderator can correct my mistyping of "Mythos" in the thread title, that would be appreciated.
Dale Nelson