A Readers' Guide to The Hastur Cycle

Chaosium's The Hastur Cycle is a classic in the field of Robert W. Chambers-inspired media.  When it was published in 1993, it was the only such anthology, and made classics like James Blish's More Light and Karl E. Wagner's The River of Night's Dreaming widely available, where they were otherwise only in out-of-print paperbacks in a pre-Abebooks world in which those paperbacks might be cheap, but you had to physically hunt for them.  

Back then, The Hastur Cycle was a lifeline for us Chambers nerds who wanted to expand out to the legacy he'd inspired.  

Today, however, it's hard to recommend. 

It is out of print, and commands challenging prices on the used market.  And for its price, it contains quite a bit of public domain material, material that is otherwise available online and in less expensive books, and material only very tenuously related to Chambers' work.  Several items are included just for being connected to H. P. Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness, which itself has barely anything at all to do with Chambers.  In this post, I'd like to provide a readers' guide to alternative sources for the stories and poems in The Hastur Cycle.  

• Robert M. Price's introduction is, as far as I'm aware, unique to the book.  It does include as a header Richard L. Tierney's poem Carcosa, which first appeared in the Summer 1969 edition of The Arkham Collector, available in PDF here (page 150 - PDF page 14).  
• Ambrose Bierce's Haïta the Shepherd and An Inhabitant of Carcosa are both from his collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, which is in the public domain. The collection is a classic of American literature, and is worth having in your library in any case.
  
• Chambers' The Repairer of Reputations and The Yellow Sign are of course from The King in Yellow, which is also in the public domain.  
• Karl E. Wagner's The River of Night's Dreaming was collected in the excellent In a Lonely Place, which was a sought-after collectible paperback for some time, but is now in print in an edition by Valancourt Books.  I strongly recommend it even absent the Chambers connection; Wagner's horror work is outstanding and underappreciated.  
• More Light by James Blish was originally printed in the anthology Alchemy and Academe edited by Anne McCaffrey.  It is long out of print, but went into so many editions that it's available affordably on the used market. 
• Arthur Machen's The Novel of the Black Seal is a tenuous inclusion.  I'm not entirely certain why it was included, but the introduction suggests it may be because it's an early "lost race" story which makes it influential on The Whisperer in Darkness.  It's possible I'm missing something.  But in any case, it's a good read in its own right.  It originated in Machen's The Three Impostors, which is in the public domain.  
• The Whisperer in Darkness is the story people are thinking of when they say Lovecraft incorporated Chambers' mythos into his fiction.  This is somewhat overstating the case.  Whisperer namedrops concepts from Chambers in Lovecraft's characteristic "parade of Yog-Sothothery" strings, but does not develop or build on them.  If you want just the Chambers material, here it is:  "I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum..."  If you want the full story (and again, it's a very good one on its own merits), it too is in the public domain.  
• Richard A. Lupoff's Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley is related only in the sense that it is a sequel to The Whisperer in Darkness.  It has, as far as I can tell, no references to Chambers.  It is currently in print in Lupoff's collection The Doom That Came to Dunwich: Weird mysteries of the Cthulhu Mythos. 
• Ramsey Campbell's The Mine on Yuggoth is, again, only included because it references the events of The Whisperer in Darkness.  It has no Chambers connection.  Still, it's Ramsey Campbell and is worth a read for its own sake.  It is available in his classic collection The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants.
•  James Wade's Planetfall on Yuggoth is, once again, included only for the Whisperer connection.  It's a very short (two and one-third pages in my copy) story of a future human astronaut making the first landing on Pluto.  It was reprinted in the late E. P. Berglund's magazine Nightscape, and like so many pieces he published, he was kind enough to mirror it on his website.
•  August Derleth's original "Hastur as kaiju god" story, The Return of Hastur is the ultimate reason so much King in Yellow fanart has tentacles.  It was originally published in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales, and like all Weird Tales it is available on Archive.org.
•  Joseph Payne Brennan's The Feaster from Afar is in a sense yet another take on Whisperer, but this one does at least include an entity called "Hastur."  It has no significant connection beyond that to the works of Robert W. Chambers, except that a character takes a wander in the woods with a fowling piece.  If you're really dedicated to completeness you can get it in the anthology The Disciples of Cthulhu, but that costs around thirty bucks used at time of writing, and you'd be pushing "just buy The Hastur Cycle" territory at that point.  
• The final "story" in the book is called "Tatters of the King" by Lin Carter.  This is in fact an assemblage of Carter's Carcosa work collected from different places.  It begins with a cycle of four sonnets collectively called the "Litany to Hastur."  They may originate a family of "dark pulp fantasy" Carcosa stories and poems that are inspired by Derleth but take it in a different direction, as later developed by writers like Michael Summerleigh and Thomas M. Egan.  These are entirely out of print as far as I know.  At this precise moment, the least expensive source I see is Carter's collection Dreams from R'lyeh, which is another thirty-something dollar book.  The remaining parts of this section are Carter's notes for an unfinished "Carcosa Story About Hali," and The King in Yellow: a Tragedy in Verse, a stab at a text of the fictional play.  Neither is, as far as I can tell, readily available outside this anthology.  

So there you are.  The Hastur Cycle was extremely influential and important in its time, and if it were still in print it would be an automatic recommendation from me.  But today it's a hard sell for the prices it commands, particularly if you want it specifically for a Chambers-inspired library.  If you're looking into that field and want to spend your money wisely, it may be worthwhile to source the Chambers-inspired work elsewhere and put your budget into other anthologies.