THE CTHULHU MYTHOS...

What arcane horrors, dimlit landscapes, nauseating monstrosities

are conjured up by these words! The creation of H. P. Lovecraft, the
Mythos has fired the imaginations of generations of readers—and of
writers, giving rise to a fresh host of stories (some of which you will
find in THE SPAWN OF CTHULHU, edited by Lin Carter) by
innumerable authors who have added immeasurably to the original
concept.

Who was Lovecraft? What was he like? What were his sources, and
did he believe in any part of the grisly worlds he created in the
Mythos?

In clear, affectionately objective prose, Lin Carter examines the

Myth, and the man behind the Myth.
Lovecraft: A Look Behind the “Cthulhu Mythos”

Lin Carter

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

Copyright © 1972 by Lin Carter

First Printing: February, 1972

Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo

(Version 2.0)
Introduction: The Shadow Over Providence

1. The Visitor from Outside

2. Intimations of R’lyeh

3. The Thing on the Newsstand

4. The Horrors of Red Hook

5. The Coming of Cthulhu

6. Acolytes of the Black Circle

7. The Gathering of the Shadows

8. The Spawn of the Old Ones

9. The Elder Gods

10. Invaders from Yesterday5

11. The Last Incantation

12. Beyond the Tomb

13. The House in the Pines

14. End of an Epoch

15. The Last Disciple

Appendix: A Complete Bibliography of the Mythos

 A word of thanks
In researching and writing this book, I have called on many friends
and colleagues for advice and assistance. It seems only proper to
thank them here for their many kindnesses. I am most grateful to
Robert A. W. Lowndes and Frank Belknap Long for sending me
copies of certain rare and obscure items in the Mythos, the texts of
which I had else found it all but impossible to obtain; to L. Sprague
de Camp, for lending me copies of certain unpublished letters
written by Clark Ashton Smith to Lovecraft, to Donald A. Wollheim,
for sharing with me some of his memories of Lovecraft; and to
August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Frank Belknap Long, for
answering many questions and helping to resolve several difficult
problems of Lovecraftian lore.

Above all, I am particularly grateful for the help, advice,

encouragement and assistance of August Derleth, who died while
this book was being written. Although his own work schedule was
crowded, he was never too busy to answer an urgent telephone call
for his opinion or data, or reply to a lengthy letterful of detailed
questions. I particularly appreciate his kindness in supplying me with
information on yet-unpublished stories of his own, and lending me a
xerox copy of a newly-discovered Mythos story by Robert E.
Howard, and in reading and commenting critically on the first 103
manuscript pages of this book. He did not live to read the remainder
of this book, but I hope he would have approved of it.

In a rather large part, it is due to the interest and the generosity of

such men as these that this book is as complete, as authoritative,
and as accurate as it is. Without their help it would have been a
weaker book by far.

This book is a history of the growth of the so- called Cthulhu Mythos,
and it does not purport to be a biography of H. P. Lovecraft. It reflects
my own interest and enthusiasm in that curious and delightful sub-
literature, and is, therefore, rather subjective. Many of the value
judgments expressed herein are a matter of personal opinion.
August Derleth, commenting on the first half of the manuscript, took
me severely to task for the predominance of personal opinion in what
he felt should be an impersonal work of scholarship. Those who
desire impersonality in their literary histories must, I fear, seek
elsewhere for it. For better or for worse, this book has evolved out of
my personal involvement in the Mythos and out of my own
fascination for the marvelous stories therein, which were among the
chief delights of my early reading. So —caveat emptor; and read on!

—Lin Carter
Introduction:The Shadow Over
Providence

Our century has seen some of the finest craftsmen who ever worked
in the tradition of the weird tale. My own list would begin with Arthur
Machen and M. R. James, and would contain such names as
Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, and perhaps Robert W.
Chambers. But each connoisseur will have his own particular
favorites, and another enthusiast might well select A. E. Coppard,
Saki, Walter de la Mare or others to head his own list.

The fame, artistry and renown of these writers assumed, it is all the
more remarkable that, of them all, probably the best known, the most
popular, and certainly the most widely published and most frequently
anthologized writer of weird fiction in this century has been an
eccentric recluse named H. P. Lovecraft, a pulp magazine writer who
died in relative obscurity in Providence, Rhode Island, some thirty-
four years ago, and whose posthumous fame has eclipsed that of
every other weird-fiction writer since Edgar Allan Poe.

The extent of Lovecraft’s success becomes all the more amazing the
deeper you look into it. Beyond the enthusiastic acclaim of the
readership of such fiction magazines as Weird Tales, Lovecraft never
achieved a large general readership or any real recognition by the
literary establishment in his entire career. Not only did he never write
a best-seller like Rosemary’s Baby, to choose a recent example, but,
outside of a few anthology appearances, hardly anything of his
achieved the dignity of hardcovers at all; indeed, only two books of
his were published in his lifetime, and these were but slender efforts,
privately printed, of which only a few hundred copies were circulated.

Today, thirty-four years after his death at the early age of 47, virtually
every word Lovecraft ever set on paper is in print. Whole volumes of
his verse, essays, and letters have been published. As for his fiction,
everything is in print —his mature work, juvenilia, unfinished
fragments, collaborations, revisions, and even his rough notes and
commonplace book. The complete Lovecraft oeuvre is in print in
hardcover and paperback not only in this country, but in England as
well.

His work has been translated to virtually every medium, including

comic books. It has been read or dramatized on radio, television,
and even on phonograph records. At least four or five movies have
been filmed from his stories, and more are in the works. His fiction
has appeared in several foreign countries and in many languages,
including Portuguese, German and Polish. Pirated Lovecraftiana has
been printed in some Iron Curtain countries, such as Yugoslavia.

Lovecraft has won a most extraordinary following among European

intellectuals and members of the avant-garde (the two terms not
always being synonymous). Particularly in France, Italy, and Spain, a
number of translations—reportedly very good ones—have been
made. Marc Slonim, who writes the “European Notebook” feature for
The New York Times Book Review, discussed this extraordinary
literary phenomenon in one of his 1970 articles. He points out that
not; only are these translations “widely read in Paris, Rome and
Madrid, but Lovecraft is also hailed by the leading critics as superior
to Poe. The Spanish essayist Jose Luis Garcia recently included
Lovecraft in a list of 10 best writers of the world, and the French
sophisticated periodical L’Herne dedicated a special large issue to
{his ‘greatest American master of supernatural literature.’”

Also in 1970, Lovecraft virtually dominated a mammoth, 700-page

dictionary of “the marvelous, the erotic the surrealistic, the
unusual”—a book called Arcana, published by the Milanese firm of
Sugar and hailed as a literary event by Italian critics. Fifty writers
contributed to the-compilation, and the article by Sebastiano Fusco,
on H. P. Lovecraft, was the longest in the entire work.

The posthumous success of Lovecraft, and his triumph over far more
gifted writers in the genre, also comes as a surprise when you take a
clear look at his work. He has no ability at all for creating character,
or for writing dialogue. His prose is stilted, artificial, affected. It is also
very overwritten, verbose, and swimming in adjectives. His plotting is
frequently mechanical, and his major stylistic device, which becomes
tiresome, is the simple trick of withholding the final revelation until
the terminal sentence—and then printing it in italics, presumably for
maximum shock value.

In all fairness, let me point out, however, that none of the remarks in
the foregoing paragraph really means much. Thomas Wolfe was also
verbose and frequently employed a plethora of adjectives—none of
which keeps him from being a great American novelist. Faulkner
wrote an affected, artificial style, at least part of the time, and one of
his stylistic tricks—even more annoying than most of Lovecraft’s—
was the concocting of elaborate sentences running to a hundred
words and more. And as for character, dialogue, and even
plot, many respected modem writers totally dispense win these, with
no visible damage to their reputations. 1*

The secret of Lovecraft’s success, and perhaps that of his popularity

as well, lies in innovation. Where Coppard, James, and many of the
other perhaps more gifted macabre writers of the century were, in
the main, content to rework the familiar themes of ghosts, were-
wolves, vampires, hauntings, and so on, Lovecraft struck boldly into
fresh new paths. Lovecraft seems to have realized that any dreary
hack could raise a crop of gooseflesh with a tale of black-cloaked
vampires set in dim Transylvania, or a story of shaggy, flame-eyed
werewolves prowling the dark forests of the Rhine, These things had
been done, and they had been done to death. Lovecraft did not have
a particularly high estimate of his own fiction, but he refused to dd
over again what others had already accomplished.

“I refuse to follow the mechanical conventions of popular fiction or to

fill my tales with stock characters and situations,” he once wrote in a
letter to a friend. “But [I] insist on reproducing real moods and
impressions in the best way I can command.”

Since anyone could turn out horror tales in the conventional settings,
he seems to have set himself the task of making horror convincing in
the here and now. Time and time again, in the pages that follow, we
shall see Lovecraft taking the most unpromising of locales —sleepy
old Colonial New England seaports, the verdant hills of Vermont in
the 1930’s, even the brick labyrinths of modem Brooklyn—and
striving to rouse the reader to shuddersome thrills.

Lovecraft, whatever his failings as a human being and even as a

writer, possessed a first-class intelligence —cold, analytical, shrewd
—when applied to the study of weird fiction. His scrutiny of the entire
range of supernatural horror in literature, which in time resulted in
the brilliant monograph of that title, exemplifies his critical standards.
Elsewhere on the subject of “how to pull the trick off,” he wrote:

To make a fictional marvel wear the momentary aspect of exciting

fact, we must give it the most elaborate possible approach—building
it up insidiously and gradually out of apparently realistic material,
realistically handled. The time is past when adults can accept
marvelous conditions for granted. Every energy must be bent toward
the weaving of a frame of mind which shall make the story’s single
departure from nature seem credible— and in the weaving of this
mood the utmost subtlety and verisimilitude are required. In every
detail except the chosen marvel, the story should be accurately true
to nature. The keynote should be that of scientific exposition—since
that is the normal way of presenting a ‘fact’ new to existing
knowledge—and should not change as the story gradually slides off
from the possible into the impossible.

This notion of utilizing something akin to scientific exposition in

building a tale of supernatural horror was not precisely new to the
genre. Bulwer-Lytton had attempted something of that nature in his
fine tale, The House and the Brain; even Frankenstein employs
surgical and electrical information to build credibility. But Lovecraft
carried the idea to its logical extremes, and the result was a new
form of supernatural horror in fiction.

Strictly speaking, Lovecraft’s best work should not be described as

supernatural at all: stock spooks, clanking chains, ancestral curses,
and familiar monstrosities seldom enter his tales at all. In fact, his
essential themes are more closely akin to science fiction—so closely
that it might well be said that he indeed wrote science fiction,
although it is the science fiction of horror and thus, technically, a new
genre in its own right. In his letters he frequently remarked: “All my
stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental
lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another
race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were
expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this
earth again.” I submit that, excepting only the bit about “black
magic,” this is essentially a science fictional concept.

In his fiction, Lovecraft developed this theme with stories that were
very much more explicit. In the ages before the evolution of man on
this planet (his stories reiterate), the earth was visited and colonized,
conquered and ruled, by successive waves of completely alien
beings of superior intelligence and awesome longevity and other
powers, who came down to this planet from other planets or distant
stars or beyond the three-dimensional universe, the space/time
plenum itself.'

Such a theme, found in the pages of E. E. Smith’s epic “Lensmen”

series, or Olaf Stapledon’s titanic novel, Star Maker, would be
accepted as science fiction without qualm or reservation. Taken in
the mood, the style, the context of tales of horror, it is shocking and
new. It is largely in this respect that we consider Lovecraft as an
innovative writer who brought something thoroughly new to the
genre of the macabre.

For, as he began to evolve his Mythos stories, we learn that Cthulhu

and Tsathoggua and the other members of the Lovecraftian
pantheon are not really gods, not even demons—they are nonhuman
extraterrestrial invaders. One wave of this invasion came from
Yuggoth (Lovecraft’s name for Pluto, the ninth and outermost known
planet of our system), as revealed in a story called The Whisperer in
Darkness; another race gained possession of the earth in remote
geological epochs and came from a planet called Yith (as The
Shadow Out of Time tells); and as Lovecraft’s story-series now
stands, the powerful beings who were long ago expelled from this
world are not far away, and many of them lurk on the worlds of such
nearby stars as Aldebaran, Fomalhaut, and so on, while their
adversaries dwell on a planet of the star Betelgeuze Clearly these
concepts are those of science fiction, not supernatural horror.

While most of Lovecraft’s fiction is worth the reading, and much of it

has permanence, his major fame rests on those stories which we call
“the Cthulhu Mythos.” Oddly enough, while Lovecraft wrote about
fifty-three stories (not including prose poems, juvenilia, fragments,
revisions or posthumous collaborations), only a dozen or so belong
to the Cthulhu Mythos. Indeed, many of his most famous stories
have nothing at all to do with the Mythos, tales such as The Outsider,
The Rats in the Walls, Pickman’s Model, The Horror at Red Hook,
and many more.

In this book I propose to explore the Cthulhu Mythos what it is, how it
evolved, why it is so brilliant and successful an achievement. For the
Mythos has other claims to fame beyond rendering internationally
famous the obscure pulp-magazine writer who first conceived it. It is
as remarkable a literary phenomenon as this century has seen. And
this seems as good a place as any to explain precisely what we
mean by this term “the Cthulhu Mythos.” In the first place, the word
mythos does not exactly belong to the English language. Neither is it
a neologism, a coined word. Mythos is Greek and can mean “myth,
fable, tale, talk speech,” or so my Webster’s Collegiate informs me.

In discussing a certain body of interconnected stories by H. P.

Lovecraft and other writers, we use the word in a special sense,
which might be defined as: “a corpus of fictitious narratives which
share as their common background a system of invented lore.”
Lovecraft certainly did not invent the term, and he never once used it
in print, not even in his voluminous correspondence. (In fact, he
seems to have been completely unaware that certain of his stories
could be singled out as belonging to the Cthulhu sequence: As far as
he was concerned, all of his work was interconnected.)
The term came into use among Lovecraft’s correspondents as a
convenient label. No one today seems to remember who used it first.
But it was most likely August Derleth who first used the term in print;
Derleth himself thought it was first used in his biographical/critical
monograph, H.P.L.: A Memoir, published by Ben Abramson in New
York in 1945. But my researches have uncovered an earlier use of
the word “mythos” to describe the story sequence, and the actual
phrase “the Cthulhu Mythology” used in the same manner, in the
Derleth-Wandrei introduction to The Outsider and Others, which was
published in 1939.

Perhaps the most unique thing about the Mythos is the fact that it
spread beyond Lovecraft himself. Other writers became caught up in
it, wrote stories based upon it, extended and elaborated and
developed the background lore which Lovecraft invented. At first, it
was only some of Lovecraft’s closest friends and correspondents
who wrote new stories in his Mythos—writers like Clark Ashton
Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch,
August Derleth. But before long, writers like Henry Kuttner, Gardner
Fox, Hugh Cave, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert W. Lowndes, Henry
Hasse, and Robert Johnson—who had little to do with Lovecraft, in
the main—began contributing stories and poems which have been
described as belonging to, or bordering upon, his Mythos. And
today,; writers who never knew him and in some cases were not
even born until after his death, are writing new chapters in the history
of the Cthulhu Mythos: Colin Wilson, J. Ramsey Campbell, and even
myself.

Lovecraft left twelve stories in the Mythos. August Derleth alone has
by now written seventeen, not counting his posthumous
“collaborations” with Lovecraft. 2*

Indeed, a recent index to the Mythos, compiled and published by

Robert Weinberg of Hillside, New Jersey, in 1969, titled A Reader’s
Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos, lists a total of ninety stories, including
full-length novels, as belonging to the Mythos. (I disagree with Mr.
Weinberg’s judgment in many cases; my own index to the complete
Mythos to date will be found at the back of this book, as an
appendix.)

What is the power—the fascination—which the Cthulhu Mythos

exerts over an ever-expanding readership? Why has it gripped the
attention of many thousands of readers, and why does it continue to
do so three and a half decades after the demise of its founder?

It has fascinated me since my teens. I cannot help but feel that many
of Lovecraft’s contemporaries were far superior writers—Clark
Ashton Smith, A. Merritt —and certainly many of them have won
even more gigantic followings— Edgar Rice Burroughs, perhaps
Robert E. Howard —but it is Lovecraft alone who has achieved the
international popularity and the critical acclaim. Why?

Howard’s success, and the popularity of his own school of “Sword &
Sorcery” may be, probably are, transient phenomena. But
Lovecraft’s ever-widening fame has never faltered and continues to
grow. How?

The answer may perhaps be discovered in this book.

At least, to find that answer, this book was written.

Lin Carter

Hollis, Long Island, New York

March-August, 1971.

***

1* Such as William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, and Alain Robbe-

Grillet.

2* Excluding the novel The Lurker at the Threshold, which contains

fragmentary passages found among Lovecraft’s papers consisting of
about twelve hundred words and which Derleth skillfully wove into
the fabric of that novel, most of these so-called “collaborations” have
been almost wholly the work of August Derleth, although based on
story ideas left undeveloped in Lovecraft’s notebooks. This will be
gone into in greater detail further on in this book.
1. The Visitor from Outside
To begin at the beginning: Howard Phillips Lovecraft was the only
child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan (Phillips)
Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, at 194 Angell Street,

Providence, Rhode Island. This was the home of Mrs. Lovecraft’s
family; H.P.L.’s parents actually resided in Dorchester,
Massachusetts, at this time.

To place Lovecraft’s birth in perspective, I might mention that at this

date A. Merritt was a six-year-old boy living in Beverly, New Jersey,
and Edgar Rice Burroughs was a youth of fifteen, then having the
time of his life on a ranch in Idaho. Some two years after this, J. R.
R. Tolkien would be born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and the year
following, Clark Ashton Smith would be born in California.

Lovecraft was of predominantly British stock on both sides of his

family. His father was the son of an Englishman who had lost his
fortune and emigrated from Devonshire to New York in 1847 and
married a girl of British descent -an Allgood from Northumberland,
descended from a former British officer who remained in the United
States after what Lovecraft himself, ardent Anglophile that he was,
would term “the disastrous Revolution.” On his mother’s side,
Lovecraft was, in his own words, “a complete New-England Yankee,
coming from Phillipses, Places, & Rathbones.”

H.P.L.’s mother came of genteel, rather cultured’ stock. In his

excellent biographical monograph, H.P.L.: A Memoir (1945), August
Derleth described her father as “a man of modest means and a
voluminous library, which often harbored the young Lovecraft”

We may assume that Lovecraft’s father was from ; somewhat lower

level of the social strata. His profession, at least, was rather
inelegant. He was a traveling salesman.
The boy did not have a particularly happy or whole, some or even a
very normal childhood. His father was seriously ill—he was, in fact, a
paretic—and whet Lovecraft was only a child of three years, his
father’s illness had advanced to a point at which he was no
considered competent to handle his own affairs, and ht was
committed to the care of a legal guardian. Winfield Scott Lovecraft
grew progressively worse, steadily more abnormal in his behavior,
and died five years later in 1898, leaving the eight-year-old boy
fatherless.

As for Lovecraft’s mother, she appears to have been one of those

grasping creatures who smother their sons with ultra-protectiveness.
Derleth says: “Sarah Phillip Lovecraft was a psychoneurotic,
determined to sheltei her son from the rigors and dangers of life.” For
the rest of his life, Lovecraft showed the marks of this living like a
sickly semi-invalid, avoiding the everyday world around him.

Lovecraft spent his infancy in Aubumdale, Massachusetts, where the

family came to live in the home of a minor poetess, a friend of
Lovecraft’s mother, named Louise Imogen Guiney. In 1915,
Lovecraft recalled this period in an autobiographical document
(written at the request of his friend and fellow-membet of the United
Amateur Press Association, Maurice Moe of Milwaukee): “It is
around the life in Auburndale that my earliest recollections centre.
The Guiney House with its tower chamber, and the huge St. Bernard
dogs which the authoress used to keep about the place, are distinct
memories of a two-year-old. We there [get the aged Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes shortly before his death, though I admit having no
independent remembrance of seeing him.”

As a boy, Lovecraft was sickly, sensitive, bookish, preferring the

society of adults to that of other children. And he was precocious to a
fault. “I had learned the alphabet at two, and at four could read with
ease, though making the most absurd errors in the pronunciation of
the long words I loved so well.”

Having learned to read so young, he naturally turned to writing. He

wrote a lot of very mediocre verse, and some early short stories
survive, the earliest being The Beast in the Cave (written in 1905)
and The Alchemist (1908). Of course, these stories reveal the marks
of the amateur in every line, but they are a fair indication of things to
come. Regrettably, he did not pursue this direction any further for
some years; in fact, he abandoned fiction entirely. A letter dated
March 7, 1920, discusses this period: “I dropped fiction in the nine
years between 1908 and 1917. Somehow or other, I conceived the
idea that my stories were poorer even than my verse and essays,”
he wrote to his friend, Reinhardt Kleiner.

Elsewhere, speaking of his grade school and high school years,

Lovecraft wrote: “Most of my incessant, voluminous writing was
scientific and classical, weird material taking a relatively minor
place.” A juvenile enthusiasm for astronomy led him to the publishing
of a hectographed periodical called The Rhode Island Journal of
Astronomy; by the time he was sixteen he was writing a monthly
column on current developments in astronomy for the Providence
Tribune.

Lovecraft’s health as a boy did not allow him to continue on to

college. He lived at home, increasingly under the maternal influence
not only of his mother, but of fondly doting female relatives (his
aunts, Mrs, Franklin C. Clark and Mrs. Edward F. Gamwell, the latter
of whom was to survive him). Then, in 1914, his interest in such
amateur publishing ventures as the Journal of Astronomy led him to
the United Amateur Press Association, a band of kindred literary
souls among whom he found his earliest and firmest friends.
Publishing his own amateur magazine, The Conservative, and
contributing (under a variety of pseudonyms) to the magazines
printed by his new friends, whetted his writing interest and
experience. He contributed reams of verse, brief articles, and his first
few stories to these non-paying markets. It was to be some years
before Lovecraft’s writing earned him his first dollar, and in many
ways, throughout his brief career, he remained very much the
amateur writer, the dilettante, the dabbler—although a dabbler
whose strange, darkling talents bordered on a kind of genius.
It is not my intention to write a biography of H. P. Lovecraft. I have no
talent for biography, and my; interest in Lovecraft’s life and
personality is secondary to my interest in his writings. There are
others more suited to the task than I, and I gladly leave it to them.1*

But the sources of the Cthulhu Mythos lie in Lovecraft’s earliest

experiences. Some of the names and mysterious symbols that were
later incorporated into the Mythos date far back into his childhood,
even, in some cases, to his infancy. Thus some cursory biographical
treatment is required at the opening of my explorations.

Perhaps the first germ of the Mythos can be dated to 1895. Years
later, Lovecraft recalled it in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, dated
January 26, 1921. Discussing his story The Nameless City (which,
as we shall see, was the first story ever written in the Mythos),
Lovecraft wrote: “At the risk of boring you will enclose my latest—just
finished and typed—The Nameless City. This had its basis in a
dream, which in turn was probably caused by contemplation of the
peculiar suggestiveness of a phrase in Dunsany’s Book of Wonder
—“the unreverberate blackness of the abyss." The character of the
‘mad Arab Alhazred’ is fictitious. The lines are mine2* —written
especially for this story—and Abdul Alhazred is a pseudonym I took
when I was about five years old and crazy about the Arabian Nights."

Elsewhere, he expands a bit on this item of information. Amidst a

long, chatty letter, written on February 3, 1924, to Edwin Baird, first
editor of Weird Tales, Lovecraft tells: “By the time I was five… I
favoured the Arabian Nights… I formed a juvenile collection of
Oriental pottery and objects d’art, announcing myself as a devout
Mohammedan and assuming the pseudonym of ‘Abdul Alhazred’—
which you will recognise as the author of that mythical
Necronomicon which I drag into various of my tales.”

Yet another germ appeared the following year. Those weird winged
beings called “night-gaunts,” who first made their debut in Lovecraft’s
fiction in the pages of his abortive “Dunsanian period” novella, The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926),3* derive from his
childhood nightmares. “In January, 1896,” he wrote top Maurice W.
Moe, in the same autobiographical document alluded to above, “the
death of my grandmother plunged me into a gloom from which it
never fully recovered… I began to have nightmares of the most
hideous description, peopled with things which I called ‘night-
gaunts’—a compound word of my own coinage,’’ Lovecraft was only
a child of six at this time.

Quite a bit of Lovecraft’s juvenile writings have been preserved, and

from a study of these early tales, as from the contents of his
Selected Letters,4* a fairly adequate picture of how the Cthulhu
Mythos evolved can be pieced together. In certain areas of this study
I will be covering data not previously available to earlier Lovecraftian
scholars, and I will correct errors or inaccurate assumptions in those
writers from time to time. The letter quoted above, which alludes to
the invention of the name “Abdul Alhazred,” is a case in point. One
researcher pointed out, in an article published before the first volume
of the Selected Letters saw print in 1965, that among the several old
lines in Lovecraft’s ancestry is the Hazard family; thus “Alhazred”
might be a self-imposed pun of sorts. But Lovecraft makes no
mention 0f this; the genesis of the name may have escaped his
recollection.

After writing a short tale called The Alchemist, Lovecraft put aside
fiction and turned to verse. For the next nine years, he tells us, he
wrote no more stories. It is interesting to contemplate what levels his
fiction might have reached if he had only followed through on the
head start his precocity had given him; unfortunately, he did not.

Lovecraft’s verse need not concern us here. For the most part it had
nothing at all to do with the themes later developed in his fiction 5*
and the bulk of his early verse, at least, consisted of excruciating
imitations of the worse sort of poetry (to my taste, anyway); that is,
the polished, elegant “occasional” verse written by 18th Century
gentlemen. A sample followeth here:

On Receiving a Picture of Swans

With pensive grace, the melancholy Swan

Mourns o’er the tomb of luckless Phaethon;

On grassy banks the weeping poplars wave,

And guard with tender care the wat’ry grave.

Would that I might, should I too proudly claim

An Heav’nly parent, or a God-like fame;

When flown too high, and dash’d to depths below,

Receive such tribute as a Cygnus’ woe!

The faithful bird, that dumbly floats along,

Sighs all the deeper for his want of song.

Lovecraft wrote that when he was twenty-five.

It is much to his credit that Lovecraft seems not to have taken

himself very seriously as a poet. (I may, however, be reading too
much into the typical “modesty” affected by most authors, whether
sincere or not.) At least, he was nothing if not candid about; such
effusions as the swan-lyric above. Discussing the poem, and his
favorite sort of poetry in general, he wrote to Kleiner: “Impromptu
verse, or ‘poetry’ to order, is easy only when approached in the cooly
prosaic spirit. Given something to say, a metrical mechanic like
myself can easily hammer the matter into technically correct verse,
substituting formal poetic diction for real inspiration or thought. For
instance, I lately re. I ceived a post-card bearing the picture of swans
on a-placid stream. Desiring to reply in appropriate verse, I I harked
back to the classic myth of Phaethon and! Cygnus, handling it as
follows: (here he quoted the! poem I have just given, concluding)
—“This required; about 10 minutes for composition.”

At the age of twenty-seven Lovecraft returned to his experiments

with fiction. He was now living at 598 Angell Street in Providence,
Rhode Island, which would remain his address for many years.
His approach to writing was shadowed by his fondness for certain
writers. I do not feel that Lovecraft was intrinsically an original writer;
he seems basically eclectic (a polite euphemism for “imitative”), i.e.,
intensely enthusiastic over a few favorite story-tellers that he
permitted this enthusiasm to stampede him headlong into derivative
efforts of his own along similar lines.

Of course, eclecticism is not always a destructive trait in a writer,

providing the writer has the good sense, or the ability, or both, to
absorb his models, transmute them into new material, and use his
sources, rather than merely to continue copying them. Both A. Merritt
and Edgar Rice Burroughs fell under the influence of the great H.
Rider Haggard and picked up the “lost race” romance from the point
at which Haggars had left it. Both, however, transmuted their original
enthusiasm for Haggard into very original and personal creations. In
fact, most writers begin as eclectics. That is, it is very frequently a
young reader’s enormous enthusiasm over a writer or writers which
provides the original stimulus for the lifelong process of turning
himself into a writer. This would seem to be the case with Lovecraft.

“Regarding early reading,” he wrote to Kleiner in a letter dated

January 20, 1916, “when I was about twelve I became greatly
interested in science, specialising 6* in geography (later to be
displaced by astronomy), being a Verne enthusiast. In those days I
used to write fiction, and many of my tales showed the literary
influence of the immortal Jules. I wrote one story about that side of
the moon which is forever turned away from us—using, for fictional
purposes—the Hausen theory that air and water still exist there as
the result of an abnormal centre of gravity in the moon. I hardly need
add that the theory is really exploded—I even was aware of that fact
at the time—but I desired to compose a ‘thriller’… When I write
stories today Edgar Allan Poe is my model.”

Elsewhere, on the same subject, he reiterated: “I used to write

detective stories very often, the works of A. Conan Doyle being my
model so far as plot was concerned. But Poe was my God of Fiction.
I used to love the horrible and the grotesque—much more than I do
now—and can recall tales of murderers, spirits, reincarnations,
metempsychoses, and every shudder-producing device known to
literature!”

The earliest of Lovecraft’s tales demonstrate not only I this fondness

for the uncanny and the macabre, but also the slavish imitating of
Poe. The point has been much argued in articles pro and contra
Lovecraft's work, but actually the resemblances between the two
writers are several and are other than merely coinciental. Poe
perfected a style of the short story and wrote most of his prose in
briefer lengths; so did Lovecraft. Poe’s only sizable attempt at a
novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was abandoned; as
shall see, Lovecraft felt uneasy in the novel form and I never wrote
anything longer than about thirty thousand words. Lovecraft’s diction
is closely similar to that of Poe’s, but this may have been partly an
accidental result of H.P.L.’s affecting 18th century prose! style. Of
course, both wrote horror stories.

1917, the year of Lovecraft’s return to fiction, proved interesting if not

remarkably productive. He composed a brief, very Poe-esque tale,
The Tomb, followed by Dagon, an excellent short story about a sailor
who escapes from German capture in a small boat and comes
aground on an island of black mud or slime which is covered with the
reeking carcasses of decaying fish. He conjectures that the island
had been long underwater, that “through some unprecedented
volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have, been
thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable
millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths.”
He discovers a carven monolith, hieroglyphic inscriptions in an
unknown system, and titanic bas-reliefs of repellent horror.

It is an interesting prefiguring of themes later toB emerge in his

Cthulhu stories. The volcanic upheaval| that temporarily exposes
long-drowned horrors above; the waves, for example, reappears in
The Call ol Cthulhu (1926); Dagon himself, the Philistine sea-god
later became one of the minor godlings of the Lovecraftian pantheon.
The next year, Lovecraft wrote Polaris, the first of “Dreamlands”
fantasies, and properly the beginning of what we call his “Dunsanian
period.”7* This tale is languorous, dreamy, and melancholy, written in
an affected poetic diction, yet not without considerable charm. It is
the only one of his tales laid in the imaginary prehistoric polar
kingdom of Lomar, which he frequently mentions in the later
Cthulhuoid stories.

Lovecraft had not quite completely absorbed these early influences

by 1919.

In that year he made his greatest discovery—the writer who was to

influence him more deeply and basically than any he had
encountered since Poe himself.

The discovery was profound; it reshaped his directions in fiction and

left an impression that was to eventually bring about the invention of
the Cthulhu Mythos.

***

*1 I once read in manuscript an unpublished full-length biography of

Lovecraft, written as a thesis by Arthur Tao Koki, then a
postgraduate student at Columbia University. Unfortunately, I read it
many years before I conceived of this present book, and thus cannot
draw from my notes or memory for data. Until a full-scale biography
is published, August Derleth’s H.P.L.: A Memoir (Ben Abramson,
New York, 1945) will serve excellently.

*2 Lovecraft is referring to the famous couplet which reads:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

The couplet, which makes its first appearance in print in this story, is
often quoted in later tales.

3* Throughout this book you may take it for granted that a date in
parenthesis after the title of one of Lovecraft’s stories is the date the
story was actually written, and not the date of its first appearance in
print. In many cases the stories were not published until years after
they were written—as was the case of The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath, for instance; it was not published anywhere until
1943 -seventeen years after it was written.

4* Arkham House, the publishing firm founded by two of Lovecraft’s

writer friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, for the express
purpose of preserving in hardcover editions his best work has, at the
date of this writing published two volumes of the Selected Letters.
The first volume covers the period of 1911-1924, and the second, the
period 1925-1929. The publishers have yet a third volume in press,
which may become available to me before this book reaches
completion.

I have also had access to certain letters by some of Lovecraft’s

friends, letters unavailable to previous researchers, for the use of
which I am most grateful.

5* With the exception of the Fungi From Yuggoth sonnets and a few
other poems, such as the verse narrative Psychopompos.

6* Sic. Lovecraft affected English grammatical forms. In scrupulous

fairness it might be added that despite some time spent at Hope
High School in Providence, Lovecraft’s formal schooling went no
further than that, and he was largely self-educated (as was his good
friend Clark Ashton Smith). He acquired his formidable vocabulary
from extensive reading— especially English literature of the previous
century or two.

7* That is, it would have been except for the fact that Lovecraft had
yet to discover Lord Dunsany, whom he did not read until 1919.
2. Intimations of R’lyeh
There are few connoisseurs who would disagree with me when I say
that the greatest fantasy writer who ever lived was an Anglo-Irish
baron named Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the
internationally known poet, translator of the Odes of Horace,
playwright, novelist, autobiographer, and short-story writer known to
millions as Lord Dunsany.

Dunsany, eighteenth baron of his ancient house, was born in 1878.

His early short stories brought him little fame; it was the success of
his plays that earned his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.
These plays, first performed at the famed Abbey Theatre in Dublin,
or on the London stage, survived the trans-Atlantic crossing
unimpaired in their wit, their charm, their lyricism. Indeed, Dunsany
once had no fewer than five plays running on Broadway at the same
time.

Lord Dunsany was more than just a Neil Simon of the ’20s, however.
He was a fantasy writer of brilliant genius, and his influence on his
fellow fantasists of the first half of this century was decisive and
critical— probably comparable to the influence J. R. R. Tolkien will
exert on the fantasy writers of the last decades of this century.

In 1919 Dunsany was forty-one years old and at the height of his
fame. His American tour during that year was doubtless very popular
and successful, although he could not have dreamed just how
curiously significant it was later to prove.

Dunsany’s American tour included a date to speak at the Copley-

Plaza Hotel in Boston. He entered late, accompanied by Professor
George Baker of Harvard, who made the introductions. Dunsany
spoke extempore for a bit, touching on his ideals and methods; then,
hitching a chair up to his reading table, he took his seat, crossed his
long legs, and read aloud his short play The Queen’s Enemies,
drawn from the anecdote in Herodotus’ Book II about the Egyptian
Queen, Nitocris.

Listening intently from his seat in the first row, only ten feet away
from the speaker, a lantern-jawed young man of twenty-nine drank in
the mellow, cultivated British voice, completely enthralled. Finishing
the play, the baron read selections from various of his other works,
including the short story Why the Milkman Shudders When He Sees
the Dawn. The audience was large and obviously enjoyed
themselves; after the program concluded, Dunsany was surrounded
by people who wanted to meet him, speak with him, and get his
autograph. The young man in the first row—he had come all the way
from Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island, for this momentous
occasion—was too diffident to go up and shake Lord Dunsany’s
hand. But he never forgot that evening.

Dunsany’s great fantasy is contained in six or seven little books,

published in this country by the Boston firm of Luce, now long out of
business. These short stories are written in an extremely lucid,
dreamy, lovely sort of fluid prose—a prose influenced as much by
Herodotus as by the King James Bible. They are tales of quest and
magic and adventure in small imaginary kingdoms in an Orient that
never was, a gorgeous and twilit realm that lies “in the Third
Hemisphere... at the Edge of the World.”1*

Dunsany’s first book, however, was something quite oddly different.

This slender little volume, The Gods of Pegana, had been published
(at the expense of its author) in 1905; Dunsany wrote it the year
before, while staying at Rood Ashton in Wiltshire. Padraic Colum
once described this first book, and its relation to Dunsany’s later
fantasies, thusly:

His work began like an ancient literature with mythology. He told us

first about the gods of the lands where his priests and kings and
shepherds were to abide.

This is literally what Dunsany did: A sequence of brief prose-poems

or sketches presents the gods of his imaginary kingdoms, outlines
their legends, and the whole has a very Biblical flavor to it. And for
some time, in the stories he wrote after this book, Dunsany utilized
this “Pegana pantheon” in his tales; eventually, he drifted apart from
Pegana, obviously feeling too tied down by a pre-conceived mythos.

This notion fascinated Lovecraft, although it was not to turn up in his

fiction in recognizable form for some years. But the basic notion of
an invented mythology used as the background lore for fantasy
stories intrigued him greatly, and thus was planted the seed that
would eventually mature into what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos.

Lovecraft’s indebtedness to Dunsany for this essential idea is clear

from Lovecraft’s own words. In H.P.L.: A Memoir, August Derleth
quotes from one of Lovecraft’s letters 2* which states that it was
Dunsany, whom he discovered in 1919, “from whom” Lovecraft “got
the idea of the artificial pantheon and myth-background represented
by ‘Cthulhu,’ ‘Yog-Sothoth,’ ‘Yuggoth.’ ” Derleth further quotes him as
admitting that the perusal of Dunsany’s work “gave a vast impetus”
to his own weird writing.

Although the impact of his discovery of the basic seed-idea behind

the Cthulhu pantheon did not at once show up in his stories, the
influence of Dunsany’s prose upon Lovecraft’s became visible very
quickly. He had been writing brief fables, such as Polaris, before
discovering Dunsany’s fiction, and these tales were strikingly similar
to the style of Lord Dunsany. While this similarity was completely
coincidental, it made Lovecraft all the more receptive to Dunsanian
influence when he finally did encounter the work of the great Irish
master of fantasy. His discovery of Dunsany, in books like A
Dreamer’s Tales and The Book of Wonder, and their closeness to
the style and mood of his own work at this period, sent him off into a
“Dunsanian phase” that was to dominate his work until 1926.

Undoubtedly, actually seeing and hearing Dunsany read in person

greatly added to the impact of this discovery. I myself heard Dunsany
read on his last American tour—unlike Lovecraft, I went up and met
him, shook his hand, and asked him to autograph a stack of his
books—and I can testify to the charm of Dunsany’s manner and
presence. He was a very impressive and wonderful gentleman.

At any rate, Lovecraft came back to Providence afire with

enthusiasm for things Dunsanian. His letters at this period strongly
demonstrate his admiration for the Irish baron. “There are many
highly effective points in Dunsany’s style, and any writer of
imaginative prose will be the better for having read him,” he advised
a correspondent towards the end of that year; and: “You surely must
read Dunsany—in places his work is pure poetry despite the prose
medium.”

Starting in 1919 and continuing through 1920, Lovecraft’s production

of fiction surged ahead, owing largely to the stimulus of Lord
Dunsany’s superb stories. Lovecraft still had sold nothing—his
stories appeared in various United Amateur Press Association
magazines—but at least he had returned from his sojourn among the
versifiers, and he now tackled the muse of the short story with
redoubled enthusiasm.

During those two years, Lovecraft produced a considerable body of

work. About sixteen short stories or prose poems were written then,
among them (in order) Beyond the Wall of Sleep, The Doom That
Came to Sarnath, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The White
Ship, Arthur Jermyn, The Cats of Ulthar, Celephais, The Picture in
the House, The Temple, The Terrible Old Man, and The Tree. I see
no point in synopsizing all sixteen stories here. For one thing,
Lovecraft’s early fiction is not really the subject of this book, and
need not concern us greatly; for another, most if not all of these
stories I have already put back into print 3* and are readily available
to interested readers.

But it is interesting to note the first appearance of many names,

places, personages and symbols later to be met with in the Cthulhu
Mythos tales. The Doom That Came to Sarnath contains Lovecraft’s
first mention of “Mnar” and “Sarnath” and “lb,” while “Randolph
Carter” makes his earliest appearance in The Statement of Randolph
Carter, a very Poe-esque horror tale, which had its origin in a vivid
nightmare. Celephais contains Lovecraft’s earliest reference to that
mysterious and not-quite-human high priest or lama, whose features
go ever masked in yellow silk, who dwells alone in a prehistoric
stone monastery on the cold desert plateau of Leng—later a familiar
staple of the Cthulhuoid fiction. “Arkham” and the valley of the
“Miskatonic” first appear in The Picture in the House, while the
neighboring town of “Kingsport” is introduced in The Terrible Old
Man.

More significant than these, however, is the first appearance of

“Nyarlathotep.” He appears in a story fragment (prose poem?) called
Nyarlathotep, and those already familiar with the figure of this devil
god, one of the most prominent in Lovecraft’s later pantheon, will be
surprised to see him appear in this brief tale or sketch as a sort of
traveling showman or charlatan. The story (or whatever it is) is
unfinished; it is most unsatisfactory, too, and its flawed ineptitude
seems to have haunted Lovecraft. He tinned the initial impulse
behind the yam into a sonnet (one of his Fungi From Yuggoth
sonnets) and later employed Nyarlathotep in the Cthulhu stories and
elsewhere, as if the original germ of the story, which he had left
undeveloped in his initial treatment, haunted him and would not let
him move on to other things until he had utilized it to the hilt.

Judging from his own correspondence, this seems to be more or less

the case. He discussed the matter in yet another of his letters to
Reinhardt Kleiner, this one dated December 14, 1921. Because of
the relevance I shall quote most of the letter here, despite its
considerable length:

598 Angell

December 14, 1921

Venerated Viscount:—

Nyarlathotep is a nightmare—an actual phantasm of my own, with

the first paragraph written before I fully awaked. I have been feeling
execrably of late—whole weeks have passed without relief from
head-ache and dizziness, and for a long time three hours was my
utmost limit for continuous work. (I seem better now.) Added to my
steady ills was an unaccustomed ocular trouble which prevented me
from reading fine print—a curious tugging of nerves and muscles
which rather startled me during the weeks it persisted. Amidst this
gloom came the nightmare of nightmares—the most realistic and
horrible I have experienced since the age of ten—whose stark
hideousness and ghastly oppressiveness I could but feebly mirror in
my written phantasy... The first phase was a general sense of
undefined apprehension— I vague terror which appeared universal. I
seemed to be seated in my chair clad in my old grey dressing-gown,
reading a letter from Samuel Loveman. The letter was unbelievably
realistic—thin, 81/2 x 13 paper, violet ink signature, and all—and its
contents seemed portentious. The dream-Loveman wrote:

Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is

horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful.
He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he
showed.

I had never heard the name NYARLATHOTEP before, but seemed to

understand the allusion. Nyarlathotep was a kind of itinerant
showman or lecturer who held forth in publick [sic: see previous note
on Lovecraffs affectation of obsolete English grammatical forms]
halls and aroused widespread fear and discussion with his
exhibitions. These exhibitions consisted of two parts— first, a
horrible—possibly prophetic—cinema reel; and later some
extraordinary experiments with scientific and electrical apparatus. As
I received the letter, I seemed to recall that Nyarlathotep was already
in Providence; and that he was the cause of the shocking fear which
brooded over all the people. I seemed to remember that persons had
whispered to me in awe of his horrors, and warned me not to go near
him. But Loveman’s dream-letter decided me, and I began to dress
for a trip down town to see Nyarlathotep. The details are quite vivid -I
had trouble tying my cravat- but the indescribable terror
overshadowed all else. As I left the house I saw throngs of men
plodding through the night, all whispering affrightedly and bound in
one direction. I fell in with them, afraid yet eager to see and hear the
great, the obscure, the unutterable Nyarlathotep. After that the
dream followed the course of the enclosed story almost exactly, save
that it did not go quite so far. It ended a moment after I was drawn
into the black yawning abyss between the snows, and whirled
tempestuously about in a vortex with shadows that once were men! I
added the macabre conclusion for the sake of climactic effect and
literary finish. As I was drawn into the abyss I emitted a resounding
shriek (I thought it must have been audible, but my aunt says it was
not) and the picture ceased. I was in great pain—forehead pounding
and ears ringing—but I had only one automatic impulse—to write,
and preserve the atmosphere of unparalleled fright; and before I
knew it I had pulled on the light and was scribbling desperately. Of
what I was writing I had very little idea, and after a time I desisted
and bathed my head. When fully awake I remembered all the
incidents but had lost the exquisite thrill of fear—the actual sensation
of the presence of the hideous unknown. Looking at what I had
written I was astonished by its coherence. It comprises the first
paragraph of the enclosed manuscript, only three words having been
changed. I wish I could have continued in the same subconscious
state, for although I went on immediately, the primal thrill was lost,
and the terror had become a matter of conscious artistic creation...

At this point in his career, it should be noted that Lovecraft had

already created a considerable portion of the apparatus of his
Cthulhu Mythos, although he had yet to pull the scattered and
diverse elements into coherent shape.

The key factor was the profound influence of Lord Dunsany. The
notion of writing otherwise unconnected stories linked by their
common reliance on a background mythology which the author
himself had invented evolved slowly in Lovecraft’s mind from his first
excitement over Dunsany’s innovation. As noted above, Dunsany
himself abandoned his idea quite early on, probably because it
seemed too confining. But Lovecraft must have mulled it over in his
mind, instinctively realizing what a good idea Dunsany had toyed
with.
In 1921, Lovecraft entered upon a most important new phase. He
wrote seven stories that year, and began work on a more lengthy
and ambitious story than any he had previously attempted. The first
story, The Moon-Bog, is a trivial exercise; the second, The Music of
Erich Zann, is actually a quite excellent Poe-esque little story,
frequently anthologized today, and probably the most “commercial”
story he had written up to that point.

The third story was called The Nameless City. This is now
universally recognized as the first of the stories in the Cthulhu
Mythos—although it is so recognized only in hindsight. Actually, it is
not much of a story— as a story, that is; it has only one character,
the unnamed narrator, and stylistically it derives largely from Poe.

The tale tells of a traveler from far lands who discovers the
“nameless city” amidst the sands of the Arabian desert. It has been
lost for countless ages and was forgotten before history began. Vivid
atmospheric touches swiftly build a mood of haunting terror: The
visitor discovers an ancient temple in the city, and therein he finds
the mummified remains of a prehuman race more reptilian than
mammalian. Further, antique frescos hint at hidden cities in a
subterranean abyss beneath the city. The final horror conies with his
discovery of just such an abyss, and the shocking revelation that the
unthinkably ancient race yet lives in the bowels of the earth and has
not died with the passage of incalculable eons.

The story is overwritten, over-dramatic, and the mood of mounting

horror is applied in a very artificial manner. Rather than creating in
the reader a mood of terror, Lovecraft describes a mood of terror: the
emotion is applied in the adjectives—the valley in which the city lies
is “terrible”; the ruins themselves are of an “unwholesome” antiquity;
certain of the altars and stones “suggested forbidden rites of terrible,
revolting, and inexplicable nature.” Of course, if you stop to think
about it, such terms are meaningless. A stone is a stone, a valley is
a valley, and ruins are merely ruins. Decking them out with a variety
of shuddersome adjectives does not make them intrinsically
shuddersome. Throughout most of his subsequent career, Lovecraft
had to struggle against this tendency to tell his readers that such-
and-such were horrible, loathsome and shocking, rather than making
the reader feel these qualities. It was one of the bad habits he fell
into, and, perhaps, it is a flaw of the amateur.

The Nameless City itself is essentially a trivial exercise in Poe-esque

gothica; whatever importance now accrues to it derives, as I have
said, from hindsight. But in this slight tale can be seen the first
emergence of some of the themes that were later to occupy much of
Lovecraft’s attention.

For example, the narrator refers back to certain old books and to
certain writers, not to document the historical milieu of the ancient
ruined metropolis but to echo his own emotions of gathering fear. A
line is quoted from one of Lord Dunsany’s tales; a verse from
Thomas Moore is quoted; and there are cryptic references to books
less familiar, such as “the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de
Metz” and “paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of
Damascius.” (Neither writer can be identified with ease.)

Most important of all, The Nameless City is the first tale of

Lovecraft’s to mention the name of Abdul Alhazred, who later, of
course, appears as the author of one of the most significant of all the
imaginary literary authorities for the cosmology of the Cthulhu
Mythos, the infamous Necronomicon itself. Lovecraft does not here
identify Alhazred as the author of the Necronomicon; here he is
simply referred to as “the mad Arab” and “the mad poet.” But the tale
is also the first in which is quoted that famous couplet from the
Necronomicon which goes:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Lovecraft also uses this tale to make references back to earlier

stories of his own. By way of emphasizing the antiquity of the city,
the narrator “thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land
Mnar when mankind was young, and of lb, that was carven of gray
stone before mankind existed.”

This use of his own imaginary inventions in the same breath—

actually in the same sentence—with references to known historical
kingdoms such as Chaldea is a technique Lovecraft would later
develop more fully.

For all the flaws that I have noted, the story is not without some
effectiveness. Told in the form of a monologue by a single character,
it has something of the evocative power of a coherent nightmare,
and in this it hearkens back to some of Poe’s more effective tales,
such as The Tell-Tale Heart.

Lovecraft himself was powerfully moved by an emotion of awe and

fascination when contemplating the mysterious ruins of unthinkable
antiquity. This emotion he manages to convey in a sort of dreamlike
manner, despite his coldly clinical use of adjectives. The mood is
there; it is part of the style.

This, the first story in the Cthulhu Mythos, and in retrospect, the most
important of Lovecraft’s early tales, went virtually unnoticed at the
time of its appearance. It was published in a science fiction fanzine
read by a couple hundred people at most.

The story behind its publication is an amusing anecdote, and it

underscores the essentially amateurish nature of Lovecraft as a
writer. Instead of seeking a professional market for the tale, he gave
it away, years after it was written, to a fan friend who asked for a
short story. This fan, a young man of about twenty at the time, was
named Donald A. Wollheim, and he was editing a fanzine called
Fanciful Tales. Some time during the 1920s, Lovecraft had permitted
the story to appear in a very obscure amateur magazine called
Transatlantic Circular. 4* Later, when Wollheim asked for a story of
Lovecraft’s, H.P.L. sent him The Nameless City, which Wollheim
published in the issue dated fall, 1936. A decade or more had
passed since the first publication of the tale, and in all that time
Lovecraft had not sought to sell the story professionally!
Don Wollheim later became a distinguished editor of science fiction
magazines and editor-in-chief of Ace Books, and he did not forget
the kindness Lovecraft showed towards an unknown boy scarcely
out of his teens. Years later, when he had the honor of editing the
first science fiction anthology ever published in hardcover—the
important and historically influential Novels of Science (Viking
Portable Library, 1945)— Don Wollheim repayed the favor by
including in the anthology Lovecraft’s finest story, The Shadow Out
of Time.

***

1* Thirty of Dunsany’s most brilliant and memorable short fantasies

were collected in a book entitled At the Edge of the World, published
by Ballantine in their Adult Fantasy Series in 1970. A second volume
of similar selections, to be called Beyond the Fields We Know, will
be published in 1972.

2* The quotation may be found on page 66 of H.P.L.: A Memoir, as

for the letter itself, I have not seen the complete text of it. The early
volumes of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters do not seem to include it

3* I have already edited two volumes of Lovecraft’s early Dunsanian

fiction for Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series. The first volume, The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1970), contains, besides the title
novel, which H.P.L. wrote in 1926, such stories as Celephais and
The White Ship. The second collection, The Doom That Came to
Sarnath (1971), contains, besides the title story, eleven stories
written between 1917 and 1920, plus several more.

4* So obscure, in fact, that no Lovecraft authority seems to know

even the date of the issue in which the tale appeared.
3. The Thing on the Newsstand
With the writing of The Nameless City in 1921, the Cthulhu Mythos
was launched—although no one in the world suspected at the time
that this innocuous little tale signified the birth of a rather remarkable
and long-lived literary phenomenon (least of all its author, to whom it
was but another story).

The following year was a landmark year in Lovecraft’s career for

several reasons. The first event of importance was the writing of The
Hound, which is of significance to us as it was the second story
written in the Mythos.

Here I must enter into a digression of some length to discuss the

importance of The Hound: bear with me, if you will. This minor little
tale was even slighter in substance and more slavishly Poe-esque in
style than The Nameless City. The studied effects of baroque,
decadent interior decor, in fact, are strongly suggestive of the gloomy
and luxurious interiors in The Fall of the House of Usher. The sole
importance of the tale lies in its relation to the birth of the Mythos,
and in calling it the second tale in that sequence I diverge completely
from the concerted opinion of most Lovecraftian bibliographers,
including August Derleth himself, who was generally conceded to be
the final authority on such matters.

There have been several attempts, before the writing of this book, to
catalogue or list those of Lovecraft’s stories which formed the
original nucleus of the Cthulhu Mythos and which represent his own
contributions thereto.

The earliest such list known to me is that compiled by Derleth and

given by him on page 69 of H.P.L.: A Memoir. His list runs to thirteen
titles,1* and it does not include The Hound.
The second such list known to me was compiled by Robert E. Briney
and is found at the end of his excellent bibliography of Lovecraft,
which appeared in Vol. VII of a mimeographed pamphlet series
known as “The Lovecraft Collectors Library,” first published in a
limited edition of seventy-five copies in 1955. Briney singles out
fourteen stories by Lovecraft as the original nucleus of the Mythos;
he differs from Derleth only by including the posthumous
collaboration, The Lurker at the Threshold, which was published in
the same year as H.P.L.: A Memoir. Briney also fails to consider The
Hound a Mythos story.

The third major list known to me was put together by Jack Laurence
Chalker in 1962. It subsequently was revised and appeared in the
Arkham House book, The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces, in
1966. I mention it here only because I shall be referring to it again:
while it lists the Cthulhuoid stories and poems written by most of the
other contributors to the Mythos, it neglects to single out Lovecraft’s
own tales therein, and thus need not occupy us any further in this
place.

Finally, there is A Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos by Robert

Weinberg, privately published as a mimeographed pamphlet in 1969.
This list contains twelve Lovecraft stories2* and differs considerably
from the Derleth and Briney lists. However, like them, it declines to
consider The Hound as a component of the Mythos.

There are yet other lists of Mythos stories, but these are the three
most accessible.

Now, what exactly does it mean to say a story belongs to the Cthulhu
Mythos? In order to so qualify, obviously a given tale must do more
than just mention one of the Lovecraftian gods, such as Nyarlathotep
(otherwise The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath qualifies;
Nyarlathotep is one of the characters who appears therein), or one of
the Lovecraftian place-names (otherwise The Picture in the House,
set in Arkham, qualifies). The tale must, I think, present us with a
significant item of information about the background lore of the
Mythos, thus contributing important information to a common body of
lore.

By this standard, The Hound fully qualifies for inclusion in the

Mythos, as did The Nameless City, which preceded it, and The
Festival, which followed it. If you will examine these three stories in
sequence, you will see how the Mythos began to grow, each tale
adding more background information to that established in earlier
tales. The Nameless City is the first tale to mention Abdul Alhazred;
The Hound is the first tale to mention the Necronomicon and to
identify Alhazred as its author; and The Festival sums up the
previously given information about Alhazred and the Necronomicon
and is the first tale to give a lengthy quotation from the imaginary
book and to tell us something about its history (i.e., that Olaus
Wormius translated it into Latin). It is also the first Mythos story to
use witch-haunted Arkham as a setting.

It was in this manner that the Mythos was launched, each new tale
repeating the lore given before, adding new information, and passing
the whole along to the next. Lovecraft continued in this way until the
body of his background lore became excessively complex,
whereupon he became more selective.

Like most of Lovecraft’s fiction prior to 1922, The Nameless City had
first appeared in an obscure amateur publication of uncertain viability
and very limited circulation. Had Lovecraft continued giving away his
tales to friends with printing presses involved in the amateur
journalism movement, he would never have reached his wider
audience or come to the world’s attention. What was needed was for
him to find a professional market for his stories: this he did in 1922,
which, as mentioned, was a landmark year for him in several ways.
Thus The Hound and The Festival were luckier than the tales that
preceded them, for they were first published in a genuine
newsstand-distributed, money-paying magazine, not in
mimeographed fanzines. And thus, Lovecraft finally, at the age of
thirty-two, became a professional fiction writer. In a letter written to
Frank Belknap Long, he described how this first happened:
Our mutual friend George Julian Houtain has just embarked on a
professional magazine venture, founding a piquant monthly to be
called Home Brew... for this periodical he wishes me to write a series
of gruesome tales at $5.00 each—a series of at least six.

The six-part series was called Herbert West-Reanimator, and it ran

in six consecutive issues of Home Brew during 1922. It was
Lovecraft’s first sale, and it is not really bad stuff —a sort of fast-
moving and light-handed parody on the old Frankenstein theme—
written with a delightful verve and gusto. But Lovecraft himself
professed to be most unhappy about the whole affair. As he
remarked in a letter to Long:

This is manifestly unartistic. To write to order, and to drag one figure

[i.e., the protagonist] through a series of artificial episodes, involves
the violation of all that spontaneity and singleness of impression
which should characterise short story work. It reduces the unhappy
author from art to the commonplace level of mechanical and
unimaginative hack-work. Nevertheless, when one needs the money
one is not scrupulous...

In this amusing preoccupation with his “art” and the deplorable

circumstance of having to accept an assignment, Lovecraft displays
another hallmark of the amateur.

The publication of this series in Home Brew led to the birth of his
professional career. And the following year he sold Houtain another
yarn. This one was called The Lurking Fear, and while it is a more
serious study in traditional horror, it lacks the light, almost joyous
touch of Herbert West. The Lurking Fear ran in Home Brew in four
parts, from January through the April issue.

Home Brew did not for long survive its rather shaky financial
underpinnings. However, there also occurred in 1923 an event even
more momentous than these first professional sales, and that was
the founding of the most brilliant and durable publication in the
history of horror fiction, the immortal Weird Tales. In the pages of
this, possibly the greatest of all the pulp magazines (as far as the
fantasy enthusiast is concerned), more than four-fifths of Lovecraft’s
lifework was to appear, and it was with this magazine that his name
was to be principally identified.

Weird Tales was founded in 1923, and its first issue appeared on the
newsstands dated March of that year. The magazine’s first editor
was Edwin Baird, and it was actually Baird who discovered
Lovecraft, not his more famous successor, Farnsworth Wright, as is
sometimes mistakenly repeated. The first issue, now a priceless
collector’s item, was not promising. A glance at the contents reveals
stories with such obvious titles as The Grave, The Place of
Madness, The Ghoul and the Corpse, to which are affixed the
bylines of a number of writers unknown to most connoisseurs. The
only story of any consequence in that first historic issue was the
cover story, Ooze, by Anthony Rudd, which has since not
infrequently been reprinted and anthologized. There were twenty-
four stories in that first issue, which ran to 192 pages and sold for
25c. The magazine looked, and was, shaky. Few readers could have
foreseen that it would continue for over thirty years and would
publish two hundred and seventy-nine consecutive issues.

In 1923, Lovecraft entered into his major phase. As the saying goes,
he began to come out of his shell with a vengeance. There were
several factors that contributed to a tremendous spurt of creative
activity at this time. In the first place, his jealously over-protective
mother had, over the preceding several years, gone into a serious
decline; in 1919 she had entered Butler Hospital “mentally and
physically exhausted” (as Derleth describes it in H.P.L.: A Memoir),
manifesting symptoms of considerable mental instability. For the next
two years Lovecraft strove to pay the hospital bills, renting himself
out as a professional ghost-writer and launching a literary revision
service. In May, 1921, she died.

His revision work led to a creative acquaintance with the young poet
and fiction writer, Frank Belknap Long, who would be remembered
as an early disciple of the “Lovecraft Circle” and as the first
contributor to the growing Cthulhu Mythos. Also in 1921 Lovecraft
had come into contact with a dark, vital, handsome and vigorous
widow, Sonia H. Greene, then President of the United Amateur
Press Association. Their friendship ripened throughout the year, and
repeated references to her crop up in Lovecraft’s letters thereafter.
She visited Lovecraft in Providence that September; she visited the
city again the following June, and in August of 1922 he visited her in
New York. They eventually married.

Another factor in Lovecraft’s shifting into literary high gear was his
discovery of Clark Ashton Smith. The California painter, poet and
short story writer —Lovecraft’s junior by three years—had been
discovered by Samuel Loveman, a New York poet who had known
Ambrose Bierce and Hart Crane. During the New York trip, Lovecraft
visited both Long and Loveman; Loveman showed him some of
Smith’s verse and drawings and Lovecraft was properly ecstatic. He
sensed immediately that here was a kindred spirit. In a letter dated
August 12, 1922, Lovecraft first wrote to Smith. His letter, phrased in
stiffly formal language very unlike the slangy, loquacious tone his
personal letters usually adopted, praises those of Smith’s poems and
drawings Loveman had shown him, concluding:

I should deem it a great honour to hear from you if you have the
leisure & inclination to address an obscurity, & to learn where I may
behold other poems by the hand which created such works of art as
Nero, The Star-Treader & the exquisite sonnets which companion
them. That I have not work of even approximately equal genius to
exhibit in reciprocation, is the fault of my mediocre ability & not of my
inclination.

I suspect that Lovecraft was genuinely sincere in expressing such

sentiments, rather than fashionably modest. For the poems, such as
Nero, are amazing productions, written when Clark Ashton Smith
was about 18, and are infinitely superior in every way to any of
Lovecraft’s verse, with the sole possible exception of the “Fungi from
Yuggoth” sonnets (at this point yet unwritten). And of all the writers
who were to belong to the Lovecraft Circle, Smith was the only one
whose talents were equal if not superior to Lovecraft’s own. The two
men became very good friends, although the harsh realities of
geography kept the Rhode Islander and the Californian from ever
actually meeting, and their letters depict a charming, old-fashioned
literary friendship. Smith and Lovecraft were to influence each
other’s work to a considerable degree. Moreover, in Smith Lovecraft
had finally found a friend whose aspirations lay beyond the futilities
of amateur publishing. It is very possible that the example of his
new-found friend led Lovecraft to turn his attention seriously to
professional writing, for Smith, although younger than Lovecraft, had
made influential; literary friends in the arty Bohemian set in San
Francisco, had already published three books of poems
professionally, and had even sold a couple of prose poems to H. L.
Mencken and George Jean Nathan of The Smart Set. Smith was
well on his way; Lovecraft could not fail to be impressed.

These varied stimuli spurred Lovecraft to a surge of renewed activity.

For the first time he set to work on a novel, experimenting with the
opening pages. It would be called Azathoth and would be written like
Vathek, without division into chapters. The theme, he wrote in a letter
to Frank Long, dated June 9, 1922, would be “imagination is the
great refuge.” He confided to Long that he had planned the novel
long ago but “only began work—or play—on it a few days ago.
Probably I’ll never finish it—possibly I’ll never get even a chapter
written3*—but it amuses me just now to pretend to myself that I’m
going to write it.”

He dug up some early tales and sped them off to professional

markets. Dagon went to Black Cat and was rejected; The Tomb was
sent to Black Mask, an adventure pulp; and as soon as Weird Tales
appeared on the newsstands, Lovecraft, in a fine burst of energy,
dispatched no less than five tales to Edwin Baird, the founding editor.
These five stories were The Hound, Arthur Jermyn, The Statement
of Randolph Carter, The Cats of Ulthar, and Dagon, (on the rebound
from Black Cat). In typical fashion, Lovecraft, as usual his own worst
enemy as a writer, had apparently submitted them typed, but typed
single-spaced; that is, instead of skipping a line between each typed
line (standard manuscript form which aids readability), he had simply
typed the manuscripts as one would type a personal letter. Editors
prefer to handle double-spaced manuscripts, which gives them
space to alter a phrase or to add instructions for the printer, and so
on. It was another mark of the amateur that Lovecraft either did not
know or could not be bothered with this simple professional courtesy.

Consequently, Baird sent the stories back, with a note saying that,
although he liked them, he could not I consider them unless
Lovecraft gave him doublespaced copies. Lovecraft regaled Frank
Long with this anecdote in a letter of May 13, 1923. He added a note
—which must have positively devastated Long, who aspired to
professional writing and probably knew such things and accepted
them as a matter of course— saying, “I am not certain whether or not
I shall bother. I need the money badly enough—but ugh! how I hate
typing!”

He did, however reluctantly, retype one of the five: tales—Dagon.

Baird promptly bought it and asked for more; and so Lovecraft’s first
Weird Tales story appeared during that magazine’s first year, in the
issue of October, 1923. As if the magazine somehow knew its future
was intimately bound up with Lovecraft, the issue presented him with
a bit of fanfare, devoting a whole page in its readers’ department, the
Eyrie, to the new writer, and quoting from his letters. Lovecraft, in a
fine glow of enthusiasm, fired off a letter to Long suggesting that he
submit something to Weird Tales, and another letter to Baird, replete
with samples of Smith’s verse, suggesting that the editor get some
fantastic poetry from Smith.4*

Lovecraft was such a bundle of contradictions that he will be the

despair of his eventual biographer. How does one deal with a man
so quirky and changeful and perverse that within a month after
selling his first story to Weird Tales, he turns around and writes a
piece of snobbish idiocy to Long such as the following:

I am well-nigh resolv’d to write no more tales, but merely to dream

when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to
set down the dream for a boarish Publick. I have concluded, that
Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman; and that Writing
ought never to be consider’d but as an elegant Accomplishment, to
be indulg’d in with Infrequency, and Discrimination.

In that passage you have much of what I would call the worst of
Lovecraft, his weakness and his folly: the absurd pretentions to
gentility on the part of a man who had lived barely above the level of
utter poverty for three years; the ludicrous selfdelusion of thinking
himself an “artist”—the snobbishness of spelling “literature” with a
capital L—and the silly affectation of 18th-century spelling and
grammar. What an infuriating poseur he sounds from his letters!

And within the next eleven days—such was his capacity for
changeableness!—he sat down and wrote two tales—one of them a
minor effort, The Unnameable; the other, one of the finest stories of
his entire career, The Rats in the Walls.

Despite a single mention of Nyarlathotep, Rats need not concern us

here, as it does not belong to the Cthulhu cycle. But it demonstrates
that Lovecraft was back to work again. He fired off story after story to
Weird Tales, despite much groaning over the labor of handling a
typewriter, a task with which he never bothered to familiarize himself.
Sometimes he coaxed his friends into typing up his tales for him: he
describes, in another letter to Long dated that October, how a
Providence friend named C. M. Eddy typed The Hound for him in
exchange for Lovecraft helping to revise Eddy’s story, The Ghost-
Eater. The Hound is only a couple of thousand words long; only ten
or eleven double-spaced pages in typescript. It should have taken at
most an hour or two to type.

Whatever Lovecraft’s personal affectations might have been, the

readers of Weird Tales responded with electric enthusiasm to their
first taste of his work, and Baird bought story after story from his new
discovery. Throughout 1924, Lovecraft virtually took over the
magazine. He had The Picture in the House in the January issue,
and The Hound in February; in March, Weird Tales published The
Rats in the Walls; and in the April issue Lovecraft was doubly
represented by a poem called Nemesis and by Arthur Jermyn which
Baird unsubtly retitled The White Ape, much to Lovecraft’s distress.
The next issue was a monster. Marking the first anniversary of Weird
Tales, an extra-large issue went on sale, rather confusingly dated
“May-June-July” and selling for 50 cents. Lovecraft had a story,
Hypnos, in that issue, as well as an extraordinary piece of
ghostwriting which bore the name of the celebrated stage magician
and escape artist, Harry Houdini, and the title Imprisoned with the
Pharaohs. It was actually one of the best things Lovecraft had written
up to that time, but it was not identified as Lovecraft’s work for some
years after.

Despite the fact that Baird had turned out some fine issues and had
discovered and printed some exciting talent, of which H.P.L. was
probably the best, the first year of Weird Tales was almost its last
one. Never very soundly financed, the magazine was losing money
rapidly (from a reputed $11,000 capital, the magazine had run into
debt to the tune of $40,000). Apparently in an effort to attract some
attention to the magazine, a department called “Ask Houdini” was to
be added. This led to the notion of printing a bogus supernatural
adventure, presumably a first-person narrative that was purported to
have happened to Houdini during a trip to Egypt. It seems that
something or other rather odd actually happened to the famous
magican in the land of the pharaohs, but in the form in which Houdini
had told the yarn orally to the publisher of Weird Tales, a gentleman
named Henneberger, it was unpublishable. Henneberger, who was
very impressed with Lovecraft (and went so far, in a note to H.P.L.,
as to call The Rats in the Walls the best story Weird Tales had ever
received), thought Lovecraft would be just the writer to touch the
yarn up and put it into usable form. Lovecraft, quite amused at the
whole idea and jubilant over the offer of advance payment, described
the affair to a correspondent thusly:

Weird Tales? Boy—What I told you afore was only the beginnin’! I’m
hearing damn near every day from Henneberger—the owner of the
outfit—and just had a special delivery order to collaborate on an
Egyptian horror with this bimbo Houdini. It seems this boob was (as
he relates) thrown into an antient subterraneous temple at Gizeh
(whose location corresponds with the so-called Campbell’s Tomb...
betwixt the Sphinx and 2nd pyramid) by two treacherous Arab guides
—all bound and gagged as on the Keith circuit—(him, not the
guides) and left to get out as best he might. Now Henneberger (who
is beginning to do some personal directing over Bairdie’s head)
wants me to put this into vivid narrative form... and Oh Gawd—I
forgot to tell ya that Henny has come acrost wit’ a cheque for ONE
HUNDRED BERRIES!

Having, as this bubbling letter denotes, a marvelous high time,

Lovecraft settled down with, very likely, some travel books and
perhaps a copy of Baedeker’s guidebook to Egypt and the Sudan5*
from which to mine nuggets of local color, and dashed off the
ghostwritten article/story, Imprisoned with the Pharaohs. As I
included this piece of superlative ghostwriting in the second
Ballantine collection of Lovecraft’s early work (The Doom That Came
to Sarnath, Ballantine, 1971), I will refrain from describing it here. But
no one interested in Lovecraft should overlook it: as I remarked
earlier, the mystery and romance of antiquity stirred Lovecraft
deeply, and the glamorous Egyptian setting of this fictionalized
narrative touched creative well- springs within him, producing one of
his most powerful land evocative pieces. It is a remarkable job, and
both Weird Tales and Houdini himself were impressed by it.

Henneberger (as the above-quoted letter suggests) was not only

very favorably impressed by Lovecraft, but was becoming quite
unhappy with his editor, Edwin Baird. While it is true that during his
year of editorship Baird had procured such outstanding talents as
those of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (to say nothing of
Seabury Quinn, the most durable and lasting of all the Weird Tales
writers, or Frank Owen, for that matter), it is also true that during that
same first year of his editorship, Weird Tales and its publisher lost
fifty-one thousand dollars. Baird had edited thirteen issues, his last
being that giant anniversary number; at that point Henneberger fired
him.

To replace Baird as Weird Tales’ editor, Henneberger had a brilliant

idea.
He would hire H. P. Lovecraft!

***

1* The passage reads: “The primary stories of the Cthulhu Mythos

written by Lovecraft include thirteen definite titles— The Nameless
City, The Festival, The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space,
The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Dreams in the
Witch-House, The Haunter of The Dark, The Shadow Over
lnnsmouth, The Shadow Out of Time, At The Mountains of Madness,
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Thing on the Doorstep."
I disagree with several entries given here as definitely being stories
in the Mythos, but I shall discuss each in its place.

2* They are The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the
Mountains of Madness, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Thing on
the Doorstep, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth,
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dreams in the Witch-House,
The Challenge from Beyond, The Haunter of the Dark, and The
Nameless City. This is a most remarkable list: Weinberg omits The
Colour Out of Space and The Festival, which both Derleth and
Briney accept as Mythos tales, and includes The Challenge From
Beyond, considered Cthulhuoid by neither. Challenge, incidentally, is
a round- robin story composed of segments by C. L. Moore, A.
Merritt, Robert E. Howard, H.P.L., and Frank Long. (The Weinberg
listing gives it as published in Fantastic, May 1960; Chalker says
Fantastic, July 1960.) If he means the Lovecraft segment alone, his
claim may be valid; if he refers to the whole tale, Lovecraft is not sole
author.

3* Nor did he; however, an experimental draft of these opening

pages survives in a fragment titled Azathoth, dated circa 1922, which
was found at Lovecraft’s death among his papers. The fragment
consists of about five hundred words.

4* Which, in fact, impressed Baird so much that he broke his own

rule not to publish poetry, and wrote to Smith immediately, requesting
some samples.
5* “Which my friend L. Sprague de Camp finds very useful as a
source for specific geographical data on terrain when writing
historical novels set in that corner of the globe.
4. The Horrors of Red Hook
Yes, Lovecraft had certainly come out of his reticent shell with a
vengeance!

In March of 1924, with The Rats in the Walls on the newsstand and
the manuscript of Imprisoned with the Pharaohs in his suitcase,
Lovecraft surprised his friends by moving to New York City, leaving
behind his beloved Providence. But there were even greater
surprises to come very shortly.

On March 3rd, a Monday, Lovecraft and Sonia H. Greene were

married at Saint Paul’s Chapel, at Broadway and Vesey Street, by
Father George Benson Cox. The couple took up residence in south
Brooklyn, at 259 Parkside Avenue.

I have no doubt that his most intimate friends were staggered, if not
stunned, at the news, for women had been thoroughly absent from
Lovecraft’s adult life up to this time. Now, at 34, with checks rolling in
from Weird Tales and exciting things promising for the future,
Lovecraft got married.

No one has ever seriously suggested that H. P. Lovecraft was a

homosexual (active or latent), but then, no one has ever seriously
suggested he was a Casanova (active or latent) either. He seems to
have been fairly neutral on the whole matter.

His marriage must have taken his friends by surprise. H.P.L.’s letters
frequently ranted about the virtues of the Nordic race, its clear
superiority to the “mongrel hordes” of Asia, and so forth. A typical
passage, from a May 1923 letter to Long, raves on like this:

Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry—God Save the King! I

am naturally a Nordic—a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the
Scandinavian or North-German forests—a Viking—a berserk killer—
a predatory rover of the blood of Hengist and Horsa—a conqueror of
Celts and Mongrels and founder of Empires—a son of the thunders
and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras—a
drinker of foemen’s blood from new-picked skulls—

And so on and on, like some hairy-chested barbarian warrior in one

of Robert E. Howard’s tales of rip-roaring heroica. A bulky Teuton, a
Viking sea-rover, a brother to the frosts, indeed! Lovecraft was
unnaturally pale, emaciated, and sickly; anything having to do with
the sea, even its odor, made him deathly ill; and far from being a
brother to the frosts, he wilted at the slightest touch of cold, and kept
the house uncomfortably overheated all winter.

Therefore, it was surprising, to say the least—what with this almost

Nazi-like identification with and glorification of the so-called Nordic
“race”—that the (now) Mrs. H. P. Lovecraft was a Jewess of
Ukranian stock. She was also about ten years older than Lovecraft, a
business woman, an executive with a fashionable Fifth Avenue
store, and a widow with a grown daughter.

However, they met, they fell in love, and—however improbable it

may seem, considering Lovecraft’s lifelong lack of interest in women
—they married.1*

The girl born Sonia Haft came to the United States when she was
nine years old, and described herself as “a White Russian of the old
Czarist regime” in a brief but informative memoir of her days with
Lovecraft. When she was sixteen she and a fellow-countryman who
had adopted the last name of a Boston friend, Greene, were married;
he died seventeen years later in 1916. She first met Lovecraft at a
Boston convention of the United Amateur Press Association. It was
Love- craft’s old friend and correspondent, James F. Morton, Jr., who
introduced them. Mrs. Greene tells that she admired Lovecraft’s
personality, but admits “frankly, at first, not his person.” She
describes Lovecraft’s voice as “clear and resonant when he read,”
but “thin and high-pitched in conversation, somewhat falsetto.” He
had also a great prognathous jaw and a broken nose, gotten, he
said, during a boyhood accident on a bicycle and aggravated—he
may have been joking here—because he looked at the stars every
night through his telescope.

Lovecraft seems to have been rather sensitive about his

appearance; or, at any rate, quite conscious of the fact that he in no
way resembled the Apollo Belvedere. He made joking references to
his “awful looks” and Mrs. Greene describes one occasion, during
Lovecraft’s initial visit to New York, when Lovecraft encountered a
beautiful Persian cat belonging to her neighbor. “When Howard saw
that cat he made love to it. He seemed to have a language that it
understood and it immediately curled up in his lap and purred,” she
recalled. “Half in earnest, half joking, I said, ‘What a lot of perfectly
good affection to waste on a mere cat— when a woman might highly
appreciate it!’ He said, ‘How can any woman love a face like mine?’”

Mrs. Greene well knew that Lovecraft was in an awkward position for
marriage. His grandfather Phillips’ estate now stood at some
$20,000. That was supposed to last the rest of the lives of himself
and the aunts with whom he had been living. Sonia was at this time
earning close to $10,000 a year at her work, and assumed—
correctly, since that was a splendid income for 1924—that they could
both live quite comfortably on her income together with his small
income from his inheritance and whatever money he earned by
writing.

She figured, as it turned out, without taking into consideration

Lovecraft’s stiff, old-fashioned Yankee pride and sense of family
position. But at first all was well. And there was that tempting offer of
the editorial job at Weird Tales in the offing....

It would seem that Henneberger was quite anxious to secure

Lovecraft for Weird Tales. For one thing, Lovecraft had already
displayed excellent editorial judgment in suggesting that Edwin Baird
solicit Clark Ashton Smith as a contributor. Smith proved enormously
popular with the Weird Tales readership, and the literary superiority
of his verse (at first) and his prose (later on) was blatantly obvious
when compared to the sort of stuff that generally came in, not only in
the slush pile, but also from the regular contributors. Lovecraft had
also recommended his Providence friend C. M. Eddy, and one of
Eddy’s stories, a piece called The Loved Dead, has since been
credited with saving the magazine and helping it to survive its first,
all-but- disastrous crisis.

The story appeared in that same giant anniversary issue which also
featured the Lovecraft/Houdini tale Imprisoned with the Pharaohs
and the Lovecraft story, Hypnos. Eddy’s tale, it seems, was
ghoulishly gruesome in the extreme—a bit too much so for some of
the more squeamish readers. There were some organized attempts
to have the issue removed from some newsstands, and it has been
claimed (by Eddy, incidentally) that the publicity generated by these
moral vigilantes may have been enough to save Weird Tales from
extinction. (What the readers did not know, but Henneberger
probably did, was that Lovecraft had played a part in this, too, as
The Loved Dead was one of those stories in which he had taken a
revisionary hand).

If perhaps not exactly a “born editor,” Lovecraft certainly had a good

eye for fiction and the rare ability to infect other writers with his own
enthusiasm, frequendy rewriting their stories (and probably
improving them considerably in the process) and on more than one
occasion passing along a valuable idea to one of his writer-friends
(as, for example, suggesting to Henry S. Whitehead the idea behind
one of Whitehead’s most masterly tales, the haunting novelette,
Cassius).

Henneberger was hot to get Lovecraft, I repeat. He tried to sell

Lovecraft on the notion of writing a short novel of some 25,000
words for the magazine. Lovecraft, who was still convinced he was
someday going to write the novel Azathoth, set that notion aside and
briefly thought about a novel-idea entided The House of the Worm; a
dilatory writer at best, he wrote neither.

Impressed with the manner in which Lovecraft had whipped the

Houdini narrative into shape (Henneberger hopped a train to
Tennessee to show the manuscript to Houdini himself; Houdini
lapped it up, and wrote Lovecraft a grateful note) he offered H.P.L.
the editorship of the magazine, suggesting that Lovecraft take it in
hand and reshape it into an entirely new publication: “He has in mind
a brand new magazine to cover the field of Poe-Machen shudders,”
wrote Lovecraft in a letter to Long on March 21. But the offer was
made with the proviso that the Lovecrafts move to Chicago, where
the editorial offices were then located.

It is fascinating to contemplate how Lovecraft’s entire life, it’s

direction and shape and impetus, might have been radically changed
had he and Weird Tales’ publisher managed to come to terms.
Imagine the sheltered, coddled, sickly semi-invalid suddenly thrust
into brawling, industrial Chicago, at the helm of a great magazine,
enjoying for the first time in his life a responsible, decently paid job
for which his literary taste and artistic enthusiasm superbly fitted him!

Cthulhu only knows what would have happened— Lovecraft might

have taken hold, delighted in his new maturity and position, and he
might have built Weird Tales into a great institution. He might, in fact,
still be alive today (Sonia Greene still is), and might even at 82, still
be writing.

But everything went wrong. Lovecraft had come out of his shell, but
not far enough: the prospect of moving to Chicago (of all places!)
shook him to the heart. “This I can hardly contemplate without a
shiver,” he wrote to Long in that same letter quoted above; “think of
the tragedy of such a move for an aged antiquarian” [he was, of
course, only 34 at the time, but one of his affectations was to write
and to think of himself as a very old gentleman] “just settled down in
enjoyment of the reliques of venerable New-Amsterdam! S. H.” [by
these initials he refers to his wife] “wouldn’t mind living in Chicago at
all—but it is Colonial atmosphere which supplies my very breath of
life. I would not consider such a move, big though the proposition
would be... without previously exhausting every sort of rhetoric in an
effort to persuade Henneberger to let me edit at long distance....”

For the next five months or so, Lovecraft dithered and Henneberger
dangled. Weird Tales hung in temporary suspension—the issue
which eventually followed that king-sized May-June-July number
bore the date of November, 1924—and then the roof fell in.

First, Sonia launched forth on a solo business venture, starting her

own hat shop. It soon foundered, and with no checks coming from
Weird Tales during its period of suspension, the money grew very
tight. Lovecraft actually went out looking for work, prowling around
publishers offices and answering advertisements, which must have
galled his sensitive, gentlemanly soul. Things went from worse to
even worser: the Lovecrafts sold Sonia’s piano, and Lovecraft
himself became so desperate for employment that he actually
applied for, and got, a job as a door-to-door salesman! Lovecraft was
about as unfit for such a job as he would have been for the
profession of dock stevedore or Arctic explorer, and he realized it
before the first exhausting and humiliating day was finished.

Mrs. Lovecraft soon found what she described as “an exceedingly

well-paid job out of town.” She, quite naturally, expected Lovecraft to
follow her out, once she was settled; he balked, saying he loathed
the midwest, and expressed the desire to remain in New York where
he had a few good friends. She acquiesced, perhaps unwisely; for
they began to drift apart, seeing each other only at intervals, when
she could make the trip to Brooklyn. Lovecraft’s aunts suggested he
store Sonia’s furniture and find a place of his own so that he could
live with the old, familiar furniture he had used back in Providence;
he amiably went along with 1 this idea, moving to a new address on
Clinton Street, where he lived quietly while she sent him weekly
checks to live on.

While New York had many fine old colonial churches and similar
landmarks he joyed in, the city began to cast a suffocating pall over
his spirits, now that he was without Sonia’s bracing presence. He
hated the subway crowds, the foreigners in the parks, the noisy
children playing in the Brooklyn streets. All through the 1920s, New
York was continually inundated with wave upon wave of new
immigrants, few of whom spoke English well. Lovecraft despised
them.
The “beady-eyed, rat-faced Asiatics,” he called them, principally
referring to the Semitic peoples. To his turn | of mind, all foreigners
were lumped under a single, unappetizing label—“mongrels.”

Forgive me if I seem to malign the dead, but it must be admitted

frankly that Lovecraft’s dislike of anyone who could be described as
a “foreigner”—and of Jews in particular—is inadequately described
by so mild a verb as dislike. Detestation or loathing describe his
emotions more accurately; hatred sounds very ugly, but it is a just
choice.

Sonia mentions an incident which occurred long before their

marriage, when, in a personal letter he remarked, concerning his
friend Samuel Loveman, for whom he had a great and genuine
admiration, that the only “discrepancy” he could find in Loveman was
that he was Jewish. Sonia replied with utter amazement at such
blatant prejudice, and reminded him firmly that she herself came of
Jewish parentage. During their friendship, and perhaps even their
marriage, she was forced repeatedly to call this to his attention, for
his revulsion at people or things Jewish evidently cropped up
frequently.

From the descriptions I have read of Lovecraft’s racial and religious

prejudices, as well as from the frequent ranting passages in his
letters which laud what he deems “the Nordic race” in terms that
would not sound out of place in the mouth of the late Dr. Goebbels,
his loathing for “Jews and foreigners” was something more than
merely the snobbery of one of “pure” English descent, soured by the
provincialism of his Rhode Island background. It was, I suppose,
nearly if not actually pathological.

Sonia Greene describes Lovecraft in one of these moods.

“Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which
characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage [the
italics are my own —L.C.] He seemed almost to lose his mind.”2*

Before long, Lovecraft felt he could no longer tolerate living in New

York. His disgust at the modern city, the vastly overgrown metropolis,
with its thronged and labyrinthine ways, its dehumanizing
atmosphere, all brick and dingy stone and dismal squalor, had
germinated in him, producing a piece of literary vitriol called The
Horror at Red Hook. Sonia was now firmly ensconced in Cincinnati.
The long-proffered editorial position at Weird Tales was now lost—
whether from his own inability to make up his mind or through the
publisher’s failure to offer proper terms, history has failed to make
clear, but anyway the job had gone to Farnsworth Wright, whom
Lovecraft disparagingly refers to as “a mediocre Chicago writer”. At
Sonia’s own suggestion (she records) he moved back home to
Providence. It split a marriage that was already somewhat divided.
Lovecraft said to her: “If I could... live in Providence, the blessed city
where I was borb and reared,... I am sure, there, I could be happy.”

She replied: “I’d love nothing better than to live in Providence... if I

could do my work there.”

And so he returned to the comfortable life of his familiar old

residence, surrounded on all sides by motherly and doting aunts.
Lovecraft seemed content with things as they were—happy, you
might say, to conduct their marriage through the medium of
correspondence. Eventually, Sonia made a final attempt to bring
them together again. “We held a conference with the aunts,” her
memoir records. “I suggested I take a large house in Providence,
hire a maid, pay the expenses, and we all live together; our family to
use one side of the house, I to use the other for a business venture
of my own. The aunts gently but firmly informed me that neither they
nor Howard could afford to have Howard’s wife work for a living in
Providence.”

To which Sonia added a succinct colophon: “That was that.”

Technically, the marriage lasted for some years more, and the final
divorce did not come until 1929. The parting was very amicable; they
continued to exchange letters, even occasional small gifts. Sonia
recalls that when she visited Europe three years after their divorce,
she wrote him from England, Germany and France, and “sent him
books and pictures of every conceivable thing I thought might
interest him.”

The marriage had probably been doomed from the start. In fact, its
very beginning was hedged about with ominous signs of trouble. The
night before he left for New York and the solemnities at St. Paul’s
Chapel, Lovecraft stayed up till dawn typing the Houdini ghostwriting
job for which Weird Tales was waiting. Then he lost it in the
cavernous, echoing bam that was the Providence railroad station, so
H.P.L. and his wife spent their first married night together, she
reading his notes which he had prudently carried with him on the
train, “while he pounded at a typewriter borrowed from the hotel in
Philadelphia where we were spending our first day and night,” her
memoir recalls. It has an ironic postscript: “When the manuscript was
finished we were too tired and exhausted for honeymooning or
anything else.”

So Lovecraft returned to Providence, to his aunts, to his old familiar

haunts, and to the way of life to which his long bachelorhood had
accustomed him. As for Sonia, she eventually married a former
professor at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

But Lovecraft, his one venture into the world a failure, went back into
his shell again. This time for keeps.

***

1* Reading the first draft of this manuscript, August Derleth

remarked that there was nothing really so surprising in all of this.
“Sonia was a magnetic, sexually and physically attractive woman of
more than average mental endowment—she was just the type of
woman who could attract H.P.L.,” he noted.

2* “In a letter to me, Derleth remarked on this point: “The key to this
dislike lies in what the foreign element did to the old quarters and
areas Lovecraft loved—it was not ethnic at base, and this should be
made clear.”
5. The Coming of Cthulhu
Once back in his beloved Providence, surrounded and coddled by
his aunts, in the environment he knew and loved so much, the noisy
outside world hidden away behind the window curtains, Lovecraft
settled down and experienced a spurt of creative activity quite
unusual for him.

In one single year, 1926, he produced a literary outpouring of

prodigious wordage and importance. During that year he wrote The
Call of Cthulhu, Cool Air, The Descendent, Pickman’s Model, The
Silver Key, The Strange High House in the Mist, and the 38,000 word
short novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

That is an impressive list of remarkable stories. Cool Air and

Pickman’s Model, neither of which belongs to the Mythos, are the
most “professional” examples of weird fiction he had yet produced;
they have both since been anthologized over and over again in
standard collections of horror fiction, and they have been extremely
popular. Unlike the Mythos tales, which draw upon and themselves
lend strength to each other, these two tales stand alone, absolutely
self-contained. They are quite good stories, although perhaps Cool
Air does somewhat too closely savor of Poe’s The Facts in the Case
of M. Valdemar.

As for The Silver Key, it is a lovely little fable in the mood and style of
Celephais, and The Strange High House in the Mist is also strongly
Dunsanian. But by this point, Lovecraft had almost gotten through
his Dunsanian period, and he would shortly thereafter have
absorbed and transmuted the influence of the great Anglo-Irish
fantasy writer whose work had for so long molded and influenced his
style. The final Dunsanian venture, the culmination of this phase of
his career, came in the writing of that extraordinary Vathek-like short
novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. As the complete text
of this little-known fantasy novel appeared in the Ballantine Adult
Fantasy series in 1971, and as it is not a part of the Cthulhu Mythos
itself, I do not feel I need to describe it at any length here. But it is
noteworthy that, having launched the Mythos and its system of
internal references whereby the stories in the Mythos are
interconnected, Lovecraft seems to have been in a “codifying” mood
and to have used Dream-Quest as a means of tying together more
or less thoroughly all of the stories of his Dunsanian period. If you
will examine the novel carefully, you will note therein references to
cities, characters, places and symbols that appear in the other
Dunsanian stories—particularly Polaris, The Doom That Came to
Sarnath, The White Ship, The Cats of Ulthar, Celephais, The Other
Gods, and The Strange High House in the Mist.

But even while writing this prodigious dream- fantasy, certainly the
most ambitious literary project on which he had yet embarked,
Lovecraft was thinking about the Cthulhu Mythos somewhere in the
back of his mind. Ideas kept occurring to him, which he inserted into
Dream-Quest rather at random, or so it looks in hindsight, and many
of them he returned to again to develop as contributions to the
background lore of the Mythos.

The personages, place names, elder texts, and symbols that are
mentioned for the first time in the pages of Dream-Quest, and which
were all later absorbed into the apparatus of the Cthulhu Mythos,
include: The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan,1* the Sign of Koth, the
dholes, the Shantak-birds, the gugs and the ghasts, the Elder Sign,
the Peaks of Throk, and the divinity Azathoth itself, later to become
the progenitor of the Great Old Ones. Azathoth enters the tale in a
superb burst of florid rhetoric that is Lovecraftian hyperbole at its
adjective-studded best (or worst), to wit:

That shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the

ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous
blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the
centre of all infinity —the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose
name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in
inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled,
maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of
accursed flutes.

What with all the Cthulhuoid nomenclature clanking around within

the interminable paragraphs of Dream-Quest, and especially
considering those names listed above which make their debut
therein, you might expect Dream-Quest to be included in my list of
the tales in the Mythos. However, it is not. Despite the criteria
established in my discussion of The Hound, we cannot consider the
dream-novel as part of the Mythos —except in a certain sense, as
being on its periphery.

Let me see if I can phrase the distinction succinctly: Lovecraft wrote

two cycles of tales; both cycles interconnect in certain places; both
cycles certainly share the same universe in common; but each cycle
is and must be considered peripheral to the other. Despite the fact
that Dream-Quest contains the first appearance of the names listed
above—to say nothing of the other Mythos names it mentions
(names first mentioned in earlier stories), such as Arkham,
Kingsport, Innsmouth, Nyarlathotep, Nodens the Lord of the Great
Abyss, the Pnakotic Manuscript, the Plateau of Leng and its silk-
masked, mysterious lama, the “hairy cannibal Gnophkehs,”2* and
Kadath in the Cold Waste itself—Dream-Quest most definitely does
not belong to the Mythos.

This is the opinion, not only of myself, but also of those other
authorities who have attempted to isolate on one list the Cthulhu
tales, such as Briney and Weinberg, and of course, August Derleth.

I have a letter from Derleth, dated January 7, 1971, discussing this

very point. It reads:

I write two kinds or two series or two sagas in my historical novels

series. One is the Sac Prairie Saga, the other the Wisconsin Saga.
Characters from both intermingle; yet one is definitely SP, the other
definitely Wisconsin. In the same way HPL’s Cthulhu Mythos is
related to the predominantly “non-Mythos” tales like Dream-Quest. In
spite of the appurtenances you list [that is, the Cthulhuoid names
and symbols used in the novella—L.Q.] we just don’t consider DQ a
Mythos tale because it relates to the Randolph Carter vein; they are
“related” tales, but DQ isn’t integrally a Cthulhu Mythos tale... DQ
was never in HPL’s mind “finished” and he never revised it. It was
early work... and the Cthulhu Mythos appurtenances were rather
lifted from it than the other way around.

If Dream-Quest really does not belong to the Mythos, another story

written that same year, 1926, genuinely and importantly does. I refer
to a 13,000 word novelette entitled The Call of Cthulhu.

This is the story from which the Mythos took its name. That is, it was
after the first magazine appearance of this story—in Weird Tales, the
issue of February, 1928—that Lovecraft’s readers began to
recognize that certain of his tales formed a connected sequence.
This became obvious in the recurrence of names and symbols
peculiar to Lovecraft—Arkham, the Necronomicon, Dunwich, Shub-
Niggurath, and (especially) Cthulhu. They became aware, say, with
the appearance of The Dunwich Horror on their newsstands in 1933,
that here was “another Cthulhu story.” Lovecraft’s correspondents,
fellow Weird Tales writers, and literary friends, began referring to
these stories as “the Cthulhu Mythos stories,” and the name caught
on.

But this was a gradual, private thing. Lovecraft himself never

mentioned the Cthulhu Mythos by name, and it was (as I have
elsewhere remarked) August Derleth who seems to have been the
first to use the term in print.

The Call of Cthulhu was the fourth story written in the Mythos, and it
was the first really major story. For these reasons, let us look at it in
some detail.

As in the previous Mythos tales, the actual plot of the story is

probably its least important element: an unnamed narrator inherits a
clay tablet bearing unknown hieroglyphs and the portrait of a hideous
monster in relief. Also in the collection he inherited the narrator finds
newspaper clippings and other documents which seem to have a
mystic relationship with the image on the tablet—among them, the
account of a New Orleans police inspector who broke up a
degenerate bayou cult that conducted human sacrifices before a
similar idol, while chanting a meaningless phrase. Yet further
evidence of a world-wide monster- worshipping cult emerges: the
same phrase the police inspector heard howled in the swamps of
Louisiana— “Ph’nglui mglw’najh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” —
had also been heard uttered by an Eskimo wizard in the frozen
Arctic. Finally the last link in this chain of incidents is found in a
newspaper clipping that tells of a mysterious tragedy at sea in which
a ship sights an unknown and unmapped island covered with
Cyclopean ruins, dripping with ooze as if just emerged from beneath
the sea, and several sailors are chased by a horrible monster
resembling the idol found in the Louisiana bayous and on the bas-
relief.

Not much plot here at all, really. But the thing that gives the story its
drama and impact is the suggestive style in which it is told and the
peculiar, almost documentary, technique used in telling it.

Lovecraft seems to have figured out that it was easy enough to give
your readers the spooky shudders with a tale laid in the spider-
haunted ruins of a crumbling castle in Transylvania, but quite
another thing to raise gooseflesh with a tale firmly set in the sunlit
world of today. In order to perform this feat, he deliberately tantalizes
the reader with mysterious hints as to exactly what is going on in the
story; the tale progresses in a broken and jumbled sequence of bits
and pieces of evidence, and Lovecraft virtually leaves it up to the
reader to piece the scattered jigsaw fragments together himself into
a coherent pattern. There is considerable fascination in this kind of
writing; it certainly jars the reader from his complacency, and
involves his intelligence in active participation in the story. In fact, it is
not unlike the technique used by certain very excellent mystery
writers—such as John Dickson Carr, the mighty master of the locked
room puzzle story.
Moreover, the peculiar documentary technique adds considerable
verisimilitude to the incredible marvels that he at the center of the
story. Lovecraft shoves detailed evidence into the reader’s hand at
every step of the way. The narrator inherits the papers and the bas-
relief from a deceased relative—now Poe, concerned entirely with
mood, would have stopped right there— but Lovecraft goes on to
document this item of data by stating that the dead man was the
narrator’s grand- uncle, “George Gammell Angell, Professor
Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence,
Rhode Island.” He even goes on with further information, saying,
“Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient
inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of
prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two
may be recalled by many.” You will observe that this is the dry,
factual tone of voice used by newspaper articles. Not only is there
nothing here for the reader to disbelieve, but much for him to
recognize: Providence, Rhode Island, is a real city; Brown University
is a real university.

The same technique is employed throughout the novelette. At every

turn the reader is supplied with precise, factual information. Consider
the clay tablet which bears the image of Cthulhu in bas-relief.
Lovecraft informs you that it is “a rough rectangle less than an inch
thick and about five by six inches in area.” At no point in the story
does Lovecraft begin to fudge on the documentation: the man who
heard the Eskimo wizard chanting the peculiar phrase is identified
with precision as “the late William Channing Webb, professor of
anthropology in Princeton University,” and so on.

As the possibility of a worldwide Cthulhu cult begins to emerge,

Lovecraft further buttresses the supposed fact of its existence by
name-dropping the titles of learned-sounding books. And here we
can see clearly the cleverness of our author, for among those books
to which the narrator refers are Scott-Elliott’s Atlantis and the Lost
Lemuria, the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred,
Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and Murray’s The Witch-Cult in
Western Europe. Of course, the Necronomicon is purely an invention
of Lovecraft’s imagination, but it gains an illusory reality by being
mentioned in context with the books by Scott-Elliott, Frazer and
Margaret Murray (which are real books and may be found in most
libraries).

When the development of the story approaches its most sheerly

fantastic element—the submerged island which is temporarily raised
to the surface, exposing its oozy shores and tumbled ruins of
Cyclopean stone to the gaze of awe-struck sailors—Lovecraft does
everything possible to convince the reader that this, too, is fact. The
incident enters the story in the form of a newspaper clipping, which
Lovecraft quotes in full, adding the information that the item
appeared in an Australian newspaper, The Sydney Bulletin, in the
issue of April 18, 1925. The circumstances surrounding the island’s
discovery are reported with an enormous effort at factual
documentation. Lovecraft gives the name of the ship, the company
to which it belonged, the port from which it sailed and the port to
which it was bound, the dates involved, the names of the individuals
concerned, and even the exact latitude and longitude at which the
island was found:

The Emma . . . was delayed and thrown widely south of her course
by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22d, in S. Latitude
49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert . . .

This kind of writing was not new to horror fiction —Dracula is given in
the form of excerpts from diaries and letters, and several of Arthur
Machen’s best stories are supported by an internal structure of
scholarly references (The Novel of the Black Seal, for example)—
but the readers of Weird Tales were not accustomed to find this kind
of writing in the pages of their favorite magazine. The story made a
great stir, and it marked the birth of a new era in the writing of
supernatural literature.

What Lovecraft actually achieved in The Call of Cthulhu was to

perfect a remarkably clever and subtle technique of exposition.
There is hardly any plot to the story at all—it is concerned almost
entirely with conveying information about this world-wide Cthulhu
cult. As the tale opens, neither the narrator nor the reader know
anything about this cult; step by step, Lovecraft leads the reader
through the jumble of seemingly isolated bits of data, until both
reader and narrator begin to perceive a frightening pattern behind
these cryptic incidents.

Lovecraft was to use this narrative technique in story after story from
this point on. His readers, by then very much on the alert for any
hints concerning “Arkham” or the Necronomicon or any of the other
tags and references, experienced the repeated thrill of discovery with
each recognized symbol. To the intellectual pleasure of the detective
work involved in putting clue and clue together was added the terrific
suspense of knowing things the narrator did not: an innocent
Lovecraft character might find a certain ancient book mouldering in
the attic; in idle curiosity he turns the pages, while (as it were) the
readers, peering over his shoulder in helpless suspense, held their
breath waiting for the shattering horrors they knew were coming. It
was very much the same sort of pleasure we took as kids watching a
film like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: poor, fat, lovable
little Lou Costello is wandering through the old, dark, spooky
mansion—he is oblivious to the fact that lumbering out of the
shadows behind him is the Frankenstein monster—which we, the
audience, can see from our particular viewpoint, but he cannot.

With the writing of The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft added considerably

to the growing system of internal lore. The tale contains the first
appearances in print of Cthulhu, R’lyeh, and also, insofar as I have
been able to discover, the first use of the term “the Great Old Ones.”

Although the story ties itself to The Nameless City and the preceding
Mythos tales with references to Alhazred, the Necronomicon, Irem
the City of Pillars, etc., you will notice that it oddly fails to utilize the
other names thus far invented in the Mythos. That is, the story takes
place in Lovecraft’s own city of Providence instead of his imaginary
Arkham, and it does not mention Azathoth or Nyarlathotep or even
the Pnakotic Manuscript. These facts clearly indicate that Lovecraft
himself was not yet aware that his works were beginning to divide
into two bodies of interrelated fiction: the Dunsanian “Dreamlands”
cycle and the Cthulhu Mythos cycle. He would simply pick up bits of
data from either cycle to mention in a new story, as in The Call of
Cthulhu, without thinking anything about it.

In the following year, 1927, he wrote two stories which display this
unawareness of exactly what he was doing. In that year he wrote the
short story The Colour Out of Space and began work on a short
novel entitled The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which he did not
complete until 1928.

Both stories demonstrate his growing mastery of the techniques of

storytelling. Colour is a real story, unlike Call, which is merely a body
of exposition disguised as a story by appearing in narrative form.

Derleth and Briney consider The Colour Out of Space to be part of

the Mythos; Weinberg does not. I agree with Weinberg. To be
considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, a story must share the
background lore given in earlier stories, and must build upon this
basis by presenting us with yet more information. Colour does not do
this at all; it is a completely self- contained story which does not rely
upon any of the background lore previously established in the
Mythos. The plot is concerned with a meteorite and the strange
infection or contamination it brings to earth. There is not a single
reference in the tale to Cthulhu or Azathoth or Nyarlathotep, to Abdul
Alhazred or the Necronomicon, to R’lyeh or Irem or the Great Old
Ones. The only point at which the tale relates at all to the Mythos is
that it is set “west of Arkham.”

Let’s be clear on this point: the mere mention of a Mythos name in

an otherwise self-contained story cannot be taken as proof that the
tale belongs to the Mythos. You will recall the many names and
symbols of the Mythos which appeared in The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath; if the mere mention of Arkham or the Miskatonic is
to be construed as sufficient reason to include a story in the Cthulhu
Mythos, then we have abundant reason to so include Dream-Quest,
which contains ten times as many Mythos names as does The
Colour Out of Space.
The obvious test for a borderline Mythos tale like Colour is, simply,
would you still consider it as belonging to the Mythos if its references
to Arkham were changed to read, say, Boston?

Of course you would not; hence I can see no reason for including
Colour in the Mythos.

The same test, when applied to Charles Dexter Ward, eliminates it,
too, from consideration as a tale in the Cthulhu Mythos.

Ward is a splendid novel. It is a real story, with a plot and characters;

it is much more than merely exposition presented in a narrative form.
But—and this is most significant—the novel develops its own internal
mythos, that of an old author named Borellus and of a secret system
of reviving the dead from the “essential salts” which remain after a
body has decomposed. The plot of the novel does not borrow from
or build upon the system of the Mythos, and neither does it
contribute a new portion of background lore to future stories in the
Mythos. Lovecraft did not return to Borellus and his grisly mode of
reviving the dead in other stories. The novel is, therefore, self-
contained.

Derleth, Briney and Weinberg all agree in considering Ward as a

Mythos story—but why? Outside of twice mentioning the
Necronomicon, and an occasional reference to Yog-Sothoth,3* the
story bears no further connection to the Mythos. In fact, it has more
internal references to the material of the “Dreamlands” stories. That
is, Randolph Carter appears herein as the friend of one of the
characters, and there are mentions of the Sign of Koth and of a
certain black tower described in The Dream-Quest of Unknown
Kadath.

The fact of the matter is that Lovecraft was not deliberately writing a
series of Mythos stories—he was just writing stories. A name or a
symbol or an imaginary book mentioned in one story might well be
mentioned again in another story very different from the first in style
or mood or setting.
Authors are a lazy tribe and frequently plagiarize their own works,
unaware or uncaring what confusion this practice may cause later
scholars who scrutinze their texts, looking for internal connections. A
good example of this is Ambrose Bierce. His famous tale, An
Inhabitant of Carcosa, introduced a passage from an ancient sage or
prophet named Hali, and also has reference to a spiritualist medium
named Bayrolles. Bierce wrote no more tales about Carcosa, but
another tale, The Death of Halpin Frayser, contains another mention
of Hali, while yet a third tale, The Moonlit Road, mentions yet again
the medium Bayrolles.

These three stories have absolutely no connection with each other,

except for this overlapping use of certain names.

Lovecraft did exactly this same sort of thing, and it is only in

retrospect that we can leaf back through his stories and see that
certain tales do indeed contribute to and share a common body of
lore, while others simply do not, even though they may at times
mention one or another name from it.

***

1* Which Lovecraft curiously prefigured five years earlier in a

reference to “the seven cryptical books of earth” in The Other Gods
(1921).

2* Much later, by a most amusing error, to be mistakenly

incorporated into the Mythos as an individual being, Gnoph-Keh, one
of the minor members of the Great Old Ones.

3* This is Lovecraft’s first use of Yog-Sothoth in a story; the name is

merely mentioned and is peripheral to the central matter of the tale.
6. Acolytes of the Black Circle
In many ways, Lovecraft was his own worst enemy. It is true that, in
his attempt to do something genuinely new and original in weird
fiction, he suffered because of the inability of others to see what he
was trying to do. But he also failed to follow up his few successes
and the opportunities they opened for him. He would expend
enormous amounts of time and energy in the creation of a story, then
would display total indifference as to whether or not it was
purchased. The Dream- Quest of Unknown Kadath, for example: he
never really finished with it, never bothered to revise it, and certainly
made no effort to get it published. (In fact, it was not published until
many years after his death.)

Furthermore, despite the fact that new magazines devoted to the

varieties of fantastic fiction were appearing on the stands, Lovecraft
remained bound to Weird Tales and to the erratic whims of its editor,
Farnsworth Wright. Wright often rejected Lovecraft’s manuscripts on
one pretext or another—for instance, incredible as it may seem, he
rejected The Call of Cthulhu —whereupon Lovecraft would simply
sulk, become despondent, and, convinced that his fiction was no
good, would write to his correspondents that his work was “a failure”
and that he was “finished for good.”

Instead of doing the sensible thing and sending the tale to other
magazines (such as Hugo Gemsback’s Amazing Stories, which
made its first appearance on the newsstands in 1926), he would just
mope and waste his time revising other people’s stories for mere
pennies 1* rather than turning out stories of his own. This was a
colossal waste of time: 1927, the year in which he wrote The Colour
Out of Space and began Charles Dexter Ward, began the last
decade of his life. Those two stories completed, he almost entirely
wasted the final ten years of his life, during which he wrote only eight
stories.
For Lovecraft to have considered Weird Tales as his only market was
a most regrettable error. Farnsworth Wright was a great editor, but
he had his blind spots, and one of them was Lovecraft. He turned
down many stories later recognized as among Lovecraft’s very best,
and his decisions were oddly facile. Sometimes he would flatly reject
a story, then, months or even years later, ask to see it again and,
occasionally, purchase it. But Lovecraft remained tied to Weird Tales
and did not like to send his tales elsewhere.

At times, he would even neglect to submit his stories to Weird Tales,

as in the case of Charles Dexter Ward. This short novel is, as I have
already pointed out, a very well done piece of. story-telling, one of
the best and most professional tales Lovecraft had yet written. There
is, however, no evidence to suggest that he ever submitted the
novella to Farnsworth Wright or, in fact, to anyone else. Even his
correspondents, to whom he circulated most of his stories in
manuscript, sometimes years before they ever appeared in print,
never saw this story and heard very littie concerning it in his letters
from this period. 2*

We have no idea why Lovecraft set this short novel aside without
seeking publication, involving such an apparent waste of his time
and effort. He may have worried that the story would be too lengthy
for Farnsworth Wright, whose most frequent reason for rejecting
Lovecraft’s stories was their extended wordage. But if so, why did he
fail to send the story elsewhere, to another magazine that did not
mind serials? The only conceivable reason is this reluctance of his to
submit his work to “commercial” periodicals.

The futility of this way of thinking becomes obvious when you

consider that the other magazines were happy to get Lovecraft
stories and bought his stuff whenever they could get it—and would
probably have taken more from him if they could have. Amazing
Stories bought the The Colour Out of Space after Farnsworth Wright
had rejected it (Wright also rejected Polaris and In the Vault at the
same time), but it never occurred to Lovecraft to send his other tales
to Amazing. In part, this was because of his innate amateurism (a
true professional does not let one rejection discourage him but sends
the manuscript around to everyone else in sight until eventually
someone buys it), and, in part, because of his snobbery. Here, that
favorite affectation of his interfered with his work.

Lovecraft was a gentleman, an aristocrat, and while it was all right

for him to “play” with literature, it could never be more than an
amusement of his leisure hours, and it could certainly never be
considered as a job. Gentlemen did not work for a living; Lovecraft
was a gentleman. Q.E.D.

This lack of any concerted effort to sell his stories, together with his
story revising work for which he charged such small fees, meant that
Lovecraft could barely subsist on his small income. And indeed, he
lived like a miser. In one of his letters he describes, with seeming
pride, his method of subsisting on the cheapest and sparsest diet
that would sustain life:

Fortunately I have reduced the matter of frugal living to a science, so

that I can get by on as little as $1.75 a week by purchasing beans or
spaghetti in cans and cookies or crackers in boxes.

How foolish all of this looks in retrospect! Other magazines, such as

Astounding Stories, which was founded a little later, not only paid
better word-rates than Weird Tales but would doubtless have been
less finnicky about buying his work than Farnsworth Wright was, if
only Lovecraft had bothered to submit manuscripts to them.

But to do so —to “hawk” his own work— would have damaged

Lovecraft’s carefully cultivated self-image as a gentleman-amateur.
Then again, he conceived of Weird Tales as being several cuts
above the other magazines in its literary excellence (and in this, for
what it’s worth, he was quite correct), and he despised similar
magazines as crude, commercial pulps for which only mass-
production hacks would write.

So he toyed with writing, vastly preferring to revise the work of

another to producing original work of his own, and what little leisure
and energy he had was expended mostly on his correspondence.
Letter-writing rapidly came to occupy a major portion of his time; I
suppose it became a substitute for the personal friendships most of
us enjoy in our everyday lives. Lovecraft, who had no normal social
life at all, poured his frustrated energies into his correspondence—
which very soon got completely out of hand. His epistolary output
became prodigious, both in the number of letters he wrote and in
their length. Derleth remarks that his “growing tide of
correspondence... steadily mounted to ten, then fifteen, and even
twenty or more letters a day,” and that these letters sometimes
“covered thirty, fifty, or seventy typewriter-size pages closely written.”
Clark Ashton Smith once said that his letters from H.P.L. averaged
40,000 words a year, and L. Sprague de Camp estimates that
Lovecraft wrote to between fifty and one hundred regular
correspondents, and that this mad craze for writing letters consumed
about half his working hours.

Any author will tell you that writing letters is an insidious temptation
and a trap into which writers all too frequently fall. A novelist myself, I
know the temptation all too well. I don’t know about my fellow writers
of fantasy or science fiction, but my own fan mail averages about two
letters a day, day after day, week after week, month after month. Left
unanswered, this soon accumulates into a hefty pile of letters.
Tackling such a mass of mail easily consumes my working day, and
yet to answer it as it comes in also cuts into my work since one
almost inevitably goes on to write a few more letters to literary
friends.

This is precisely the trap into which Lovecraft fell, and in part this
staggering epistolary production accounts for the fact that Lovecraft’s
literary output in his final decade consists of only a few stories.

In a certain sense, though, Lovecraft’s fantastic worldwide

correspondence had a very beneficial and stimulating effect on his
Cthulhu Mythos. This came about in a rather circuitous way. Many of
Lovecraft’s I closest friends were young men of literary interests who
1 were beginning to become writers and make professional sales.
The earliest of these disciples was Frank Belknap Long, whom he
had met through the United Amateur Press Association as far back
as 1920. The next of these was the gifted California poet, artist and
sculptor, Clark Ashton Smith, whom he engaged in correspondence
beginning with a letter dated August 12, 1922.

And in 1926 he encountered an enthusiastic teen-aged boy in

Wisconsin named August W. Derleth. Of his most recent discovery,
he wrote to Smith on October 12th of that year: “I have just
discovered a boy of seventeen who promises to develop into
something of a fantaisiste. He is August W. Derleth, whose name
you may have seen as author of some rather immature stories in
Weird Tales. Finding my address through the magazine, he began
corresponding with me; & turns out to be a veritable little prodigy;
devoted to Dunsany & Arthur Machen, & ambitious to excel in their
chosen field.”

Lovecraft encouraged these and other writer-friends to try their

hands at selling to Weird Tales. I have already mentioned how
Lovecraft persuaded Edwin Baird to pursue young Smith, and how
Baird purchased some of Smith’s verse for the magazine. Before
long Smith began attempting fiction, and the first story he ever sold
to Weird Tales was a minor effort called The Ninth Skeleton, which
appeared in the September, 1928 issue. Smith was a slow starter,
and it was to be some years before he followed this initial sale to
Weird Tales with more of the same. However, during the next decade
he contributed scores of excellent tales to the magazine and became
one of its most popular writers, before allowing his production of
fiction to fall off —for fairly mysterious reasons still not fully explained
— whereupon he lapsed into obscurity again, save for his verse and
sculpture.

By this time Lovecraft had also made such friends as Donald

Wandrei and Zealia Bishop, perhaps the most talented of his revision
clients. Many of these friends began appearing in Weird Tales, and
before long some of them were contributing new ideas to his Cthulhu
Mythos, broadening its base, so to speak, and enriching its lore.
Donald Wandrei was a young man in the Midwest. Lovecraft found
him congenial company (through the medium of letters, mostly) and
encouraged Wandrei’s early fiction. In fact, he became largely
responsible for the sale of Wandrei’s most famous story, The Red
Brain.

Wandrei had submitted to Farnsworth Wright a manuscript entided

The Twilight of Time, which Wright rejected, as was frequently his
wont. Lovecraft admired the story and urged Wright to reconsider it.
Wright eventually did, and this time he bought it, although changing
the tide to The Red Brain. In a letter to Smith, Lovecraft jubilandy
enthused over this—as he always enthused over his friends’ good
luck—and remarked: “I am almost flattering myself that a letter of
mine in praise of Wandrei may have had something to do with the
change of attitude.”

Zealia Bishop is a case in point. Early in 1928 he revised her story

The Curse of Yig, selecting the title himself. The story was published
in Weird Tales the following year. In a letter to Donald Wandrei
written in March, 1928, he revealed that he wrote the story from Miss
Bishop’s synoptic notes, adding that “all of the writing & most of the
plot are mine.” Another letter, written that same month to Miss
Bishop, discussed his “revision,” and tells us much about Lovecraft’s
contribution to the story in question. He wrote:

The deity in question is entirely a product of my own imaginative

theogony—for like Dunsany, I love to invent gods and devils and
kindred marvellous [sic] things. However, the Indians certainly had a
snake-god; for as everyone knows, the great fabulous teacher and
civiliser of the prehistoric Mexican cultures (called Quetzalcoatl by
the Incan-Aztec groups and Kukulcan by the Mayas) was a
feathered serpent. In working up the plot you will notice that I have
added another “twist”—which I think increases the effectiveness of
the impression. I took a great deal of care with this tale, and was
especially anxious to get the beginning smoothly adjusted.

For this considerable job of writing Lovecraft asked a fee of $17.50.

This story, The Curse of Yig, is a very effective and even powerful
tale of supernatural retribution, but it finds a place in the list of
Cthulhu Mythos stories only in retrospect. That is, it mentions no
single place-name or symbol from the Mythos, but later (in 1930,
when he came to write The Whisperer in Darkness) Lovecraft
mentioned the serpent-god Yig in such a manner as to incorporate
the story into the Mythos after the fact, as it were.

Several other stories by his writer-friends which appeared in Weird

Tales became part of the growing Mythos in exactly the same
manner. The earliest published of them all was Frank Belknap
Long’s famous story, The Hounds of Tindalos (from the March, 1929,
Weird Tales), followed by Robert E. Howard’s first “King Kull” story,
The Shadow Kingdom (from Weird Tales for August of that same
year). From these three stories, the first three Mythos tales that bore
names other than Lovecraft’s in their bylines, H.P.L. selected “Yig”
and Howard’s “serpent-men of Valusia” and Long’s “Hounds of
Tindalos” for mention in The Whisperer in Darkness, thus putting his
imprimatur on these stories. He encouraged his fellow writer-friends
to add to the Mythos and gladly accepted their contributions by
referring to the newly-invented names and symbols in his own
stories.

In this way the Mythos began to grow beyond Lovecraft’s own fiction.
The process is still in action today among writers who never knew
him at all; writers who, in some cases, were not even bom until after
his death.

The same year, 1928, that saw his revisions on The Curse of Yig
saw Lovecraft produce the fifth of his Mythos tales, The Dunwich
Horror.

Dunwich is very much in the vein of The Call of Cthulhu, and it might
seem typical of Lovecraft’s perversity that he wrote another major
story—The Dunwich Horror runs to something like 18,250 words—in
the style of a story Farnsworth Wright had already firmly rejected.
However, the always-fickle Wright had in the interim asked to see
Call again, and this time he decided to purchase it.
Lovecraft was in high good humor, as his letters from this period
reflect. Wright had paid him $165 for The Call of Cthulhu —an
amount Lovecraft acknowledged as being “entirely adequate
remuneration”— and exciting things were in the offing. An amateur
friend with his own printing press was anxious to issue Lovecraft’s
story, The Shunned House, in book form. About 250 copies of this
slim little book were printed in hand-set type by the Driftwind Press in
Athol, Mass. Technically, this was Lovecraft’s first “book” 3* —
although, of course, it received hardly any distribution at all.

Perhaps more exciting was the occurrence of Lovecraft’s first

anthology sale. An anthologist named Christine Campbell Thompson
bought The Horror at Red Hook for her collection of terror tales,
which was published under the title, You’ll Need a Light, by Selwyn &
Blount in London during 1928. This editrix seems to have been
rather impressed with the little-known American master of the
macabre whom she was the first to anthologize; she bought
Pickman’s Model and The Rats in the Walls for two other
anthologies, all published that same year. And as if these triumphs
were not enough for any one year, Lovecraft also received in 1928 a
genuine literary honor when two of his tales were “triple-starred” in
the honor roll in the annual O’Brien collection of the best short
stories of the year.

Thus, it is not surprising that Lovecraft faced his writing-desk with

new enthusiasm, producing The Dunwich Horror, which he began
work on in June. The 48-page manuscript was finished by the end of
August, and Lovecraft circulated it among some of his friends for
their comments. He doubtless felt confident that “Famie” Wright
would not reject this one. Weird Tales had suffered a sort of change
of heart about Lovecraft; not only was Wright no longer capriciously
bouncing Lovecraft’s best stories, but he was searching them out
with vigor. The Lurking Fear had been resurrected from the pages of
the now-defunct Home Brew and had appeared in Wright’s
magazine.
I don’t know why Farnsworth Wright suddenly became so receptive
to Lovecraftian submissions, but he may have become just a bit
worried about losing Lovecraft. After all, Amazing Stories had taken
The Colour Out of Space, and, more recently, a brand new magazine
devoted to horror fiction—and thus a direct competitor to Weird Tales
—had recently appeared on the scene. The new magazine was
Tales of Magic and Mystery, and its editor had promptly snapped up
an unpublished Lovecraft story called Cool Air. At any rate, for
whatever reasons, Farnsworth Wright was suddenly interested in the
gentleman from Providence, and The Dunwich Horror was not
rejected; Wright bought it on the spot.

The Dunwich Horror is an excellent tale. In it Lovecraft began to

explore his mythical region of Massachusetts—which I like to call
“Miskatonic County,” although he never did—much of it set down on
paper for the first time. There had been occasional references in
earlier tales to such communities as Arkham and Kingsport, but here
we get a guided tour in depth of the “Lovecraft region” and learn
much we did not previously know about its geography.

The tale is a back-country scandal: the cretinous Lavinia Whateley is

“a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of 35, living with
an aged and half- insane father about whom the most frightful tales
of wizardry had been whispered in his youth.” This unappetizing
damsel produces a child of unknown parentage, causing the village
gossips to whisper scandalous things. The boy grows into a brilliant,
remarkably ugly and repellent young genius, and the story follows
his studies in certain forbidden subjects. In particular, his researches
center about that abhorrent and blasphemous Necronomicon, and
for the first time we learn that an English translation exists, that of an
Elizabethan scholar, Dr. Dee. We also learn of the few libraries
wherein copies of the Necronomicon are preserved in its various
translations. We hear of the Miskatonic University Library in Arkham,
for example, which crops up in most of the latter stories.

The first really major quotation from Alhazred appears in this fifth
Mythos story—some three hundred and eighty words from a single
passage is quoted—and we notice here how Lovecraft is still using
his technique of building on the lore he has given in earlier tales, for
Cthulhu is mentioned, and so is Kadath, and a new divinity, Shub-
Niggurath, makes her debut in print in this tale. But the center of the
story is occupied by Yog-Sothoth, who was first introduced in a non-
Mythos story, Charles Dexter Ward, as you will recall. Here we learn
that Yog-Sothoth is one of the Great Old Ones and that he is
considered “the key to the gate” and “the guardian of the gate,” by
which word Lovecraft obviously means to suggest some sort of
shortcut between the dimensions—a “Door to Outside.”

The librarian at Miskatonic U, Dr. Henry Armitage, begins putting two

and two together, much in the same manner as the nameless
narrator of The Call of Cthulhu—but whereas that tale was pure
exposition disguised as story, this one is all story, although
containing relevant exposition. A mood of tension and gathering
horror permeates the story, which culminates in a shattering climax
when it gradually comes to light that this oddly repulsive, overgrown,
and strangely mature youth is a half-human hybrid begotten upon
the flesh of poor Lavinia Whateley by Yog-Sothoth himself.

The ultimate horror lies in the discovery of the youth’s twin brother,
kept imprisoned and pent up from the light of day all these years. In
familiar fashion, Lovecraft reserves the full revelation for the final
sentence, italicized for maximum impact. The towering, hideous,
extraterrestrial monster thus discovered— “It was his twin brother,
but it looked more like the father than he did.”

***

1* Lovecraft seems to have considered his revisionary service as his

main work and his own stories as ephemera. When given a story to
edit, he would often completely rewrite it, using only a minimum of
the original author’s plot or idea. In effect, he became a ghost-writer
—a lamentable waste of a potentially brilliant talent!—and, even
more lamentable, he charged such low prices that he could hardly
even support himself by his revisions unless he devoted almost all of
his time and effort to them. His charges began at an eighth of a cent
per word. Eventually, he was charging a quarter of a cent a word, but
this hardly adds up to a decent wage. As late as 1933 we see
Lovecraft rewriting an 80,000 word novel—for $100.00!

2* Derleth says flatly that The Case of Charles Dexter Ward “was
never submitted to an editor during his lifetime,” and that Lovecraft
was “comparatively reticent” about the tale, “other than to refer to its
length and to his reluctance to prepare a typescript from the
manuscript.”

3* Not counting an essay in pamphlet form, The Materialist Today,

which appeared in 1926.
7. The Gathering of the
Shadows
As was ever his way, Lovecraft followed a period of renewed
creativity with a period of dithering, selfdoubts, and nonproductivity.
As though the extraordinary efforts involved in writing so major a
story as The Dutiwich Horror had for a time exhausted his
imagination, he produced nothing whatsoever in the following year,
1929.

For one thing, he worried much about what he felt was a lack of
originality in his work. He talked of his early imaginative feats by
which he had projected himself into the colonial atmosphere of New
England, and in a letter to Miss Elizabeth Toldridge, dated March 8,
1929, discussed how his romantic antiquarian interests dominated
his own talent.

My writing soon became distorted—till at length I wrote only as a

means of re-creating around me the atmosphere of my 18th century
favourites.... everything succumbed to my one intense purpose of
thinking & dreaming myself back into that world of periwigs & long
s’s which for some odd reason seemed to me the normal world.
Thus was formed a habit of imitativeness which 1 can never wholly
shake off. Even when I break away, it is generally only through
imitating something else!

And to this plaint he added a most revealing cry—

There are my “Poe” pieces & my “Dunsany” pieces —but alas—

where are my Lovecraft pieces?

As most authors will agree, this sort of doubt in one’s own powers or
in the value of one’s own work can be very self-defeating. Many an
author’s block has been bom in such moments of inner doubt. Self-
confidence is basic equipment, and part of every professional’s gear.

But Lovecraft had other problems besides this lack of confidence.

The British anthologies that had reprinted some of his stories from
Weird Tales had failed to pay for them, and Farnsworth Wright
contemplated legal action against the publishers involved and
attempted to enlist Lovecraft as a co-plaintiff. Lovecraft rather
reluctantly agreed, but he was in particularly poor financial condition
at the time and dared not risk incurring any expenses. Early in 1929
he wrote to Farnsworth Wright, agreeing to join the suit, saying:

I suppose it’s all right so long as there is positively no obligation for

expense on my part in case of defeat My financial stress is such that
I am absolutely unable to incur any possible outgo or assessment
beyond the barest necessities... Therefore—it being understood that
I am in no position to share in the burdens of defeat—you may ask
for me if you wish.

He added with the pessimism typical of this low period, “I doubt if my

profits will amount to very much in case of victory...

The creative energy he would ordinarily have poured into his own
work was diverted into other channels.

The letters he wrote during 1929 became longer and longer; one of
them, written during February and March of that year, sprawls across
twenty-eight printed pages in the second volume of the Selected
Letters. We can, I think, get a glimpse of the sort of internal
selfquestioning Lovecraft seems to have been suffering through all
that year from a phrase or two in a letter he wrote to Clark Ashton
Smith on March 22nd. Smith had sent him a sheaf of recent poems,
and Lovecraft replied:

There isn’t one which failed to charm me... your never-ending genius
& fertility are both marvelous and enviable. I can’t write except when
blessed with reposeful leisure—haven’t produced a thing since The
Dunwich Horror.
Despite his chronic state of impecuniosity, Lovecraft did a bit of
traveling that year. In early spring he ventured to Yonkers for a brief
visit with a friend named Vrest Orton. 1* The trip soon turned into an
antiquarian orgy: he visited his favorite museums and old buildings,
noting with a pang of dismay how the quaint colonial appearance of
certain portions of Greenwich Village were swiftly passing. Then,
with Orton, came a motor trip to visit W. Paul Cook in Athol,
Massachusetts.

This lengthy excursion was followed by even more extensive travels,

for in late April he went to Philadelphia and then on to Richmond,
Virginia—quite a change of pace for Lovecraft, who never spent a
single night away from his own home until he was fully thirty years
old! His letters from Virginia enthuse over the antiquarian treasures
of Williamsburg and Yorktown and their wealth of historical
associations. He becomes almost ecstatic when visiting Jamestown:

Jamestown is one of the most powerful imaginative stimuli I have

ever received. To stand upon the soil where Elizabethan gentlemen-
adventurers first broke ground for the settlement of the western
world is to experience a thrill that nothing else can give.

This he wrote to Elizabeth Toldridge on May 4. Still more travels

followed—to Washington, to Philadelphia again, and from thence
back to New York, where Frank Belknap Long and his parents drove
Lovecraft up the Hudson to Kingston, the home of his and Long’s
correspondent-friend, Bernard Austin Dwyer, whom neither he nor
Long had met. They visited Dwyer for several days, Lovecraft
digging with great curiosity into the early colonial and even Indian
history of the region. His description of the towns around Kingston
and their history filled ten full pages in another letter to Elizabeth
Toldridge, written May 29th when he was back in Providence.

Most likely, Lovecraft’s only fiction during 1929 was his lengthy and
poorly-paid revisions of the work of others. He seems to have been
sorely missed, and his absence from the pages of Weird Tales may
have fomented something in the nature of a crisis.
Farnsworth Wright had published The Call of Cthulhu in his issue for
February, 1928. Even that major piece of Lovecraftiana did not
satisfy the readers for long, and they were clamoring for more.
Wright had only two unpublished Lovecraft manuscripts on hand,
one being The Silver Key, a Dunsanian fable completed three years
before. Wright ran that minor tale in his January, 1929 issue, but that
was only a stopgap. The readers wanted more Cthulhu! So Wright
included The Dunwich Horror in his April 1929 issue. If anything, this
new tale was even more of a major work than Call, so instead of
glutting the hunger of Lovecraft’s readers, The Dunwich Horror
exacerbated it, and the demand increased.

But Farnsworth Wright had no more unpublished Lovecraft on hand,

and none seemed forthcoming from Providence. So, for his
September issue, Wright did something quite unprecedented and
reprinted The Hound. This becomes all the more unusual upon
recalling that Wright had first published this tale only a few years
before, in his February 1924 issue. I think the fact of this surprising
reprint suggests quite definitely that Weird Tales was receiving an
extraordinary spate of letters demanding more and more Lovecraft.

At any rate, the following year saw Lovecraft, his year-long

“vacation” concluded, return to work on his own fiction once again,
and that year he produced yet a third Mythos tale of considerable
length: The Whisperer in Darkness.

Lovecraft had been steadily getting further and further away from the
short story lengths he had first mastered—following Poe’s brilliant
examples of horror fiction in the shorter lengths. The Call of Cthulhu
had totaled about thirteen thousand words; The Dunwich Horror had
exceeded eighteen thousand; now, with Whisperer, Lovecraft
produced a tale of twenty-five thousand words, his longest story in
the Mythos yet. It is, I think, the opinion of most authorities that, in
achieving novella length, Lovecraft found the perfect story size to fit
his particular kind of writing. With 25,000 words to play around with,
he could not only develop plot and characterization—both of which
had from the first been his major lacks—but he also had the space to
fit in the sort of elaborate background lore and exposition he needed
for the stories in the Mythos.

Whisperer is a very good story, one of his best. As the plot goes,
Professor Wilmarth, folklorist and literature instructor at Miskatonic
University, is studying obscure superstitions in backwoods New
England. A correspondence springs up between Wilmarth and an
eccentric Vermont recluse named Akeley, whose researches along
the same lines have led him to the brink of astounding and terrible
discoveries. Through an exchange of correspondence (which
Lovecraft quotes verbatim), Akeley tantalizes Wilmarth’s curiosity
with cryptic references to certain ancient books, among them the
Necronomicon. It becomes gradually apparent that the hilly region in
which Akeley makes his home is a focal point of activity by strange
forces and even stranger beings, monstrous and shadowy things
which, legend whispers, came down from the stars in the Elder
Days, and which may have broken through the barriers again.

Lovecraft develops the subtle mood of tension beautifully, using his

now-familiar documentary technique. Akeley sends Wilmarth
photographs of his discoveries, and even a phonograph recording of
a strange ritual overheard by night in the woods. Lovecraft
reproduces a complete transcript of this recording. Names begin to
appear in the narrative, names with which Lovecraft’s readers had by
now a shuddering familiarity—Yog- Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep,
the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, Cthulhu, the Pnakotic
Manuscripts.

Wilmarth, his curiosity stimulated, travels into the ancient wooded

hills of Vermont to visit Akeley, for suddenly the note of gathering
horror that has rung through the letters from the recluse vanishes,
and is replaced by a very untypical acceptance of the mysterious
phenomena. The culminating horror comes when Wilmarth, now a
guest in Akeley’s home, discovers that his host has been done away
with and that it is one of the monsters from beyond in disguise that
he has taken for Akeley all this while.
In many ways, The Whisperer in Darkness is a tale of pivotal
significance in the history of the Mythos and its evolution. I have
already remarked that in this tale Lovecraft, by quoting names and
symbols invented by his friends, incorporated (after the fact, as it
were) several of their stories within the context of his own mythos—
such stories as Howard’s The Shadow Kingdom and Long’s The
Hounds of Tindalos and Bishop’s The curse of Yig. But in this tale he
goes further even than that. In a spate of enthusiasm he mentions
Hastur and Carcosa and Hali, inventions of Ambrose Bierce. He was
not the first to do so: before him, the turn-of-the-century American
novelist, Robert W. Chambers, had also borrowed these names from
Bierce, spinning them into the context of his own early stories,
published in book form under the title The King in Yellow. We
sometimes call these interconnected Bierce/Chambers stories the
“Carcosa Mythos.” (As I have already reprinted several of these tales
in a recent anthology called The Spawn of Cthulhu, I will not linger
over the matter here. See my notes to that anthology.)

Lovecraft also uses Whisperer to tie together most of the scattered

bits of lore he had used in earlier stories. Azathoth reappears herein;
so does that mysterious Plateau of Leng, first mentioned ten years
earlier in Celephais. New names are produced, such as Yuggoth, 2*
the dark planet on the rim of the Solar System; and a system of
subterranean cavem-worlds beneath the earth’s crust—“blue-litten
K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai”—later explained in
Zealia Bishop’s short novel The Mound, another Lovecraft revision.

Rather curiously, this story also marks the first appearance in print of
Bran and Tsathoggua, the brainchildren, respectively, of Robert E.
Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. According to Howard, Bran was a
mighty chieftain of the Caledonian Picts in ancient times, and his
name lived long in the ancestral legends of his people.3* No story in
this cycle had yet been published when Lovecraft wrote Whisperer;
the first such tale, Men of the Shadows, did not find its way to print
for many years, and the first published tale oft Howard’s to mention
Bran was thus Kings of the Night which appeared in the November,
1930 issue of Weird Tales. How, then, did Lovecraft know of Bran?
The answer is simple: just as he circulated his manuscripts among
his writer-friends for their comment, so they sent’ their stories to
Lovecraft.

The same held true in the case of Tsathoggua. This entity was
introduced in one of Smith’s gorgeous Hyperborean fantasies. The
story in which Tsathoggua made his debut was The Tale of Satampra
Zeiros, which did not appear in Weird Tales until the issue of
November, 1931 —a year after Lovecraft mentioned him in
Whisperer.

Neither Bran nor, for that matter, Tsathoggua are presented by

Howard or Smith in those initial stories as members of the
Cthulhuoid pantheon. They were “appropriated” by Lovecraft, who
mentioned them in Whisperer, as he also mentioned Yig and the
Hounds of Tindalos and others, as a sort of compliment to his writer-
friends, and also as a sort of in-joke whose point would be gotten
only by members of the Lovecraft Circle.

For although his stories are solemn and quite humorless, Lovecraft’s
letters display a delightful sense of humor and a fondness for jokes.
Most of the straight faced in-jokes he inserted into his stories went
unnoticed by the readers of the day—such as naming his character,
in The Call of Cthulhu, George Gammell “Angell” after Angell Street,
his address in Providence for so many years.

Other in-jokes were subtly worked into the texture of his Mythos
tales. In Whisperer, for example, he has Akeley toss off a pseudo-
learned reference: “It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came—
you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the
Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commorion
myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean bigh-priest Klarkash-Ton.” I
have already noted that Tsathoggua is a demon-god of elder
Hyperborea, invented by Clark Ashton Smith for his cycle of tales set
in such immemorial (and imaginary) cities as Commoriom and
Uzuldaroum. In a straight-faced manner, Lovecraft pretends these
Hyperborean stories are redactions of genuine ancient myth. But the
in-joke here is that “Klarkash-Ton” is Lovecraft’s pet nickname for
Smith. Similarly, he was later to call August Derleth “the Comte
d’Erlette” and incorporate him into the Mythos as author of the
equally imaginary Cultes des Goules, yet another of those eldritch
books of forbidden lore.

Lovecraft had nicknames for all of his correspondents: Donald

Wandrei became “Melmoth the Wandrei,” a pun on the tide of the old
Gothic masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer; Frank Belknap Long
became Romanized into “Belknapius,” and so on. Entering into the
spirit of the thing, his correspondents vied with one another to make
jokes on his own name, frequently referring to H.P.L. as “Eich-Pi-El.”
It was the young Robert Bloch, however, who topped them all: in a
shuddersome yarn called The Grinning Ghoul he refers to another
tome of nameless lore—“the grotesque Black Rites of mystic Luveh-
Keraphf, the priest of cryptic Bast.” The pun on Lovecraft’s name is a
trifle broad, but anyone who loved cats as much as Lovecraft could
aptly be termed a priest of Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess. 4*

Farnsworth Wright was still striving to satisfy the ravenous demands

of his readers for more Lovecraft. While waiting for H.P.L. to finish
puttering around with the text of Whisperer, he was forced to revive
yet another story from the recent past, and thus The Rats in the
Walls, which had appeared in Weird Tales only six years earlier,
reappeared in the pages of the June 1930 issue.

Lovecraft discovered that working in the novella length cut down his
story productivity. Always a dilettante, a putterer, a “gentleman toying
with letters,” with little ambition and no real faith in his own abilities,
Lovecraft only finished a story or two a year during his final phase.
And he did not always bother trying to sell even the few stories he
did produce.

In 1931, for example, he wrote two stories, both of them very long
tales. The first was a 26,000-word novella entitled The Shadow Over
Innsmouth, which was the seventh story he wrote in the Mythos. The
eighth Mythos tale, written that same year, was the great novella of
Antarctic horror, At The Mountains of Madness.
Shadow revives the imaginary “Miskatonic County” town of
Innsmouth, first mentioned in Celephais (1920). In it, the narrator
becomes involved in genealogical research concerning the Marsh
family, whose fortunes were founded by the South Seas merchant
captain, Obed Marsh. It gradually comes to light that the Marshes
intermarried with mysterious ocean-dwellers called “the Deep Ones,”
producing recurrent hybrid births in each generation and gradually
undermining; the town, eventuating in a decadent cult called “The
Esoteric Order of Dagon.” The rambling gossip of a half-crazy old
derelict named Zadok Allen provides some colorful, slangy dialogue
and in time reveals thel full horror of this genetic “shadow” which has
blighted the once-great Massachusetts seaport. Cthulhu and R’lyeh
are mentioned again, and “Father Dagon and mother Hydra” are
introduced as minor members of he Cthulhuoid pantheon, here
appearing in print for the first time as leaders of the Deep Ones, the
sea-dwellers who serve as Cthulhu’s minions. Also mentioned for the
first time in this tale are the submerged city of Y’ha-nthlei and the
devil-beasts Lovecraft called “shoggoths.”

Derleth has praised this story for “the powerful hold it has upon the
imagination of its readers,” calling it “a dark, brooding story, typical of
Lovecraft at his best.” Farnsworth Wright did not think so, however,
and rejected it (probably on the basis of its length, generally a point
of contention between Lovecraft and the editor of Weird Tales). An
amateur writer at heart, Lovecraft was always plunged into
despondency at a rejection, and thus he made no further attempt to
sell the story elsewhere. He gave it to an amateur printer in Everett,
Pennsylvania, a friend of his from the United Amateur Press days
who ran the so-called Visionary Press. The tale was illustrated by
Frank Utpatel and published as a slim little book in a very limited
printing in 1936, the year before Lovecraft’s death.

Only about 200 copies of the book were bound and circulated—
initially at $1.00 each—although many more copies were printed. For
some reason, they were sold without a dust-jacket, although jackets
do exist for this rare little book, which now commands fabulous
prices as a rarity among collectors of Lovecraftiana. Since only two
hundred readers saw the book at best, the impact of this major
addition to the Mythos was vitiated. In a word, when Farnsworth
Wright returned the story, Lovecraft virtually threw it away!

The second story written during 1931 was saved from sharing the
same fate by a fluke—or rather, by the efforts and devotion of one of
Lovecraft’s friends, Donald Wandrei. I refer to At The Mountains of
Madness, which must be the longest work of fiction Lovecraft ever
attempted—it totals about 39,600 words. In it he brought to bear
several interests which he seldom f utilized: his youthful enthusiasm
for geology and the history of Antarctic exploration, and his extreme
fondness for Poe’s unfinished novel of South Polar mystery, The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Lovecraft loathed cold weather, and this was more than just an
emotional aversion: he suffered violent physical reactions if exposed
to low temperatures. It has been suggested that his hypersensitivity
to cold weather was either an allergic reaction or perhaps
psychosomatic —neither allergies nor psychosomatic medicine had
moved from the textbooks into general medical practice as early as
the 1930s— but at any rate, Lovecraft flourished best at
temperatures around 90° F. Below 80° F he became increasingly
uncomfortable; at 10° F he was “stiff, sniffling, and gasping.” An
incident is related in which Lovecraft went out one evening into the
Providence streets on an errand of mercy of some sort. The
temperature, which had been around 60° F when he left the house,
dropped before long to 30° F. Lovecraft collapsed in the street and
was carried unconscious into a drugstore, where a passing physician
revived him.

The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried
over into his writing, and the pages of Madness convey the blighting,
blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way
that even Poe could not suggest.

The story is immensely complex, the plot sluggish and slow-moving

in the extreme. It tells of an expedition to Antarctica launched by
some scientists from Miskatonic University in Arkham, and their
discovery of a prehistoric city, dead for geological eons, long buried
beneath the ice fields. Lovecraft used the story to reveal a
considerable portion of earth’s prehistoric lore, working this into the
Mythos and dropping hints he would later develop when he came to
write The Shadow Out of Time. In the course of the tale he brings in
the shoggoths, first introduced in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and
develops hints from earlier tales about primordial and pre-human
races which came to this planet from distant stars and worlds before
the evolution of man.

Lovecraft thought quite highly of this short novel and sent it off to
Wright. Wright, of course, rejected it flatly, thus plunging the sensitive
gentleman-author into another prolonged fit of depression. To one of
his friends, Lovecraft wrote:

At the Mountains of Madness represents the most serious work I

have attempted, and its rejection was a very discouraging influence.

So discouraging that Lovecraft withdrew it from submission and let it

gather dust on the shelf.

But this particular incident had a happy ending. Lovecraft’s friends

admired the story and eventually pried it away from him, and it was
submitted through an agent, Julius Schwartz, to a science fiction
magazine called Astounding Stories. This was, by the way, the one
and only time Lovecraft ever used an agent to sell one of his stories.

Astounding bought the yarn and serialized it in somewhat abridged

form in the issues dated February, March, and April, 1936.

And here again we can see how Lovecraft’s lack of professionalism

hampered what little career he had. Wouldn’t you think that, having
sold a story through an agent, he would have continued to let an
agent handle his stories, thus relieving him of the drudgery of
bookkeeping and shielding him from the psychic shock of rejection?

He never used an agent again.

And wouldn’t you also think, considering how promptly Astounding
Stories bought a tale rejected as unpublishable by Weird Tales, that
Lovecraft would have sent more stories to that new market?

He never again submitted a story to Astounding.

***

1* It is a curiously ironic circumstance that the numerical Majority of

my friends live in & near New York—a town I detest so heartily!” he
wrote that April, concerning this trip.

2* Lovecraft’s name for the planet Pluto, discovered the same year
in which he wrote Whisperer and promptly snapped up by him as
part of his apparatus. Lovecraft was always interested in astronomy;
it was a favorite boyhood hobby.

3* The central stories in this cycle were collected into a book entitled
Bran Mak Morn (Dell Books, 1969).

4* Writing elsewhere, Bloch solemnly extended the joke yet another

notch by adding the information that Luveh-Keraphf was “apparently
contemporaneous with Klarkash-Ton.”
8. The Spawn of the Old Ones
Despite his occasional trips to old cities of antiquarian interest,
Lovecraft persisted in locking himself away and living in the interior
realms of his own imagination, rather fastidously avoiding the noisy,
brawling, daylit world around him.

He had so very few personal friends even in Providence that it can

truthfully be said that he was an outsider in his own home town, and
he lived and died in the Rhode Island metropolis largely a stranger to
his fellow inhabitants.

All of his frustrated friendly inclinations he poured into his

correspondence, writing thousands of affectionate, self-revealing,
chatty letters to men he would never meet in person.

Many of these correspondents were writers of weird fiction and

contributors to Weird Tales. Lovecraft had already paid small joking
compliments to some of them by considering various of their
imaginative inventions worthy of praise and making straight-faced
references to these in his Cthulhuoid stories, as mentioned earlier.
Thus, when Clark Ashton Smith invented his Hyperborean demon
god, Tsathoggua, Lovecraft gleefully adopted Smith’s creation into
the growing pantheon of the Old Ones. In fact, Lovecraft invited his
writer-friends to invent new things for the Mythos, to write stories
within it, or to utilize some of his apparatus in stories of their own.

Probably the first of his friends to do so was Clark Ashton Smith. In

the September 1931 issue of Strange Tales, Smith published a very
successful horror story called The Return of the Sorcerer. 1* The
story tells of a young scholar hired by a wealthy recluse in
Oakland/California—who prompdy sets him to work at translating
passages from the Necronomicon. And there, smack in the middle of
a story by Smith, baffled readers encountered a long passage of
ominous and enigmatic Alhazredic prose, which must have roused
questions in their minds, such as: If two different writers quote from
the same book, is it possible that the Necronomicon is a real book?

Smith followed this tale into print a couple of months later with the
earliest of his Hyperborean stories, introducing Tsathoggua as a dark
demon god worshipped in remote eons. Another tale in the same
sequence, called The Door to Saturn, which appeared in the January
1932 issue of Strange Tales, introduced Eibon, the famed
Hyperborean wizard, and presented the reader with more data on
Tsathoggua, naming the beings that had spawned him in elder eons,
the planet from which he had descended to earth, etc. In this story
Smith revealed that Tsathoggua’s worship was “incalculably older
than man,” and that he “had come down by way of other worlds from
a foreign universe, in primeval times when the earth was still no
more than a steaming morass” —all of which is very Lovecraftiani in
tone.

And only a few months later, Smith presented another story in

Strange Tales called The Nameless Offspring, which opened with a
weird, mysterious quotation, given as epigraph to the story:

Many and multiform are the dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways
from the prime. They sleep beneath the unturned stone; they rise
with the tree from its root; they move beneath the sea and in
subterranean places; they dwell in the inmost adyta; they emerge
betimes from the shutten sepulchre of haughty bronze and the low
grave that is sealed with clay. There be some that are long known to
man, and others as yet unknown that abide the terrible latter days of
their revealing. Those which are the most dreadful and the loathliest
of all are haply still to be declared. But among those that have
revealed themselves aforetime and have made manifest their
veritable presence, there is one which may not openly be named for
its exceeding foulness. It is that spawn which the hidden dwellers in
the vaults has begotten upon mortality.

This story-heading bears the solemn ascription: “from the

Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred.”
These were only the first of the ten or so stories Smith was to
contribute to the Cthulhu Mythos. In them, Smith set the pattern for
later writers, and his contributions formed the prototype of the other
non-Lovecraft tales which would be written. Rather than remain
content to merely use the apparatus of names and books and places
thought up by Lovecraft himself, Smith devised an apparatus of his
own and established his own little private comer of the Mythos. To
the central apparatus Smith contributed the several new” members
of the pantheon—first Tsathoggua, then Ubbo-Sathla, Abhoth, and
Atlach-Natcha; and, rather than merely continue to invent quotations
from Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, Smith made up a text of nameless
lore all his own called the Book of Eibon, written by that powerful
Hyperborean wizard he had I introduced in The Door to Saturn. In a
later story Ubbo-Sathla (which introduced the dark divinity of that
name and first appeared in Weird Tales of July 1933), Smith
invented two quotations from this “collection of dark and baleful
myths, of liturgies, rituals and incantations both evil and esoteric.”2*

Others among Lovecraft’s writer-friends were soon to follow Smith in

contributing to the Mythos, and, like him, they preferred to invent
their own apparatus of gods and books and symbols, rather than
merely to imitate what Lovecraft had already done.

Thus, Frank Belknap Long wrote a short novel called The Horror
From the Hills (serialized in Weird Tales, the issues of January,
February and March, 1931), the germ of which was a long,
complicated “Roman dream” that Lovecraft had experienced and
described in a lengthy letter, the text of which Long had inserted,
virtually intact, into his novella. In this story Long introduced a new
member of the pantheon called Chaugnar Faugn.

And Robert E. Howard was not long in joining in the game. The
earliest story of his that was deliberately written as a contribution to
the Mythos was a short, tale called The Children of the Night (Weird
Tales April-May, 1931). In that story he mentioned the
Necronomicon, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Tsathoggua, and invented
a minor godling called Gol-goroth and another of those ancient
books of eldritch lore, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, by a German
scholar named Von Junzt.

In writing these Lovecraftian tales, Howard and his colleagues

generally followed Lovecraft’s example. A case in point is this tome
by Von Junzt. In another Cthulhuoid story, The Black Stone (Weird
Tales, November, 1931), Howard picked up and elaborated on the
data presented in the earlier story: the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (he
tells us) was published in Dusseldorf in 1839; the title translates as
Nameless Cults; the tome is sometimes known as “the Black Book”;
a cheap and faulty English translation was pirated in London by
Bridewall in 1845; a carefully expurgated edition appeared from the
Golden Goblin Press of New York in 1909. All of this specific data —
places, dates, names of translators, bibliographical data on editions
— tends to half-convince the reader that the book in question is real.
In fact, unless you happen to be a bibliographical expert, you are
hard put to say with any certitude whether this or that book
mentioned in a Mythos story is real or was invented by the author of
the story!

Also in The Black Stone Howard invents a “mad poet” of his own, a
sort of English-speaking version of Abdul Alhazred named Justin
Geoffrey, author of a nightmarish poem entitled “The People of the
Monolith.” A versifier of considerable gifts, Howard gives us a morsel
of Geoffrey’s talent by quoting a few lines of his as the heading to
this story:

They say foul beings of Old Times still lurk

In dark forgotten comers of the world,

And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights,

Shapes pent in Hell.

Another story, The Thing on the Roof, picks up and elaborates on

both Justin Geoffrey and Von Junzt, and introduces Xuthltan, who
plays a major part in yet another tale, The Fire of Asshurbanipal, not
to be published for some years. Thus, just as Smith carved out a
niche of his own in the Cthulhu Mythos, and placed therein the Book
of Eibon, Tsathoggua, Ubbo-Sathla, etc., so did Howard make his
own niche, with the Nameless Cults of Von Junzt, Gol-goroth, the
mad poet Justin Geoffrey, Xuthltan, and so on. From this point on,
most of the members of the Lovecraft Circle who added substantially
to the Cthulhu Mythos followed this method, and it is still being
followed to this day.

As for Lovecraft’s own writing, he produced two stories during 1932.

The first of these 3* was The Dreams in the Witch-House, the ninth
story Lovecraft wrote in the Cthulhu Mythos. A minor effort, although
totaling 15,400 words, Dreams is set in “legend-haunted Arkham,
with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where
witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days,” and
concerns a student who becomes gradually affected by the residue
of ancient horrors yet clinging about the fabric of an old house.
Lovecraft used this story to mention in print—and thus give the
imprimatur of his approval to—Howard’s inventions, the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, and Smith’s Book of Eibon,
both here mentioned by Lovecraft in a story for the first time.

Despite all that this story has going for it, it remains singularly one-
dimensional, curiously unsatisfying. Lovecraft did not really have his
heart in it, and it shows.

That same year he also produced a story called Through the Gates
of the Silver Key, written in collaboration with his old friend and
fellow Weird Tales veteran, E. Hoffman Price. A sort of sequel to one
of the last of the Dreamlands stories written during his Dunsanian
period (The Silver Key, 1926), it is not properly speaking a part of the
Cthulhu Mythos, although it does present the reader with some new
Cthulhuoid data.

It seems that Price became intrigued with the loose ends of the plot
Lovecraft had left dangling in The Silver Key and urged H.P.L. to
write a sequel to that tale. Well past his Dunsanian period and
deeply into developing the Mythos, however, Lovecraft never got
around to doing so. Finally, Price wrote a sequel himself and showed
it to Lovecraft.

Price recalls the events leading up to this collaboration in a memoir

of his friendship with Lovecraft which first appeared in a fanzine
called The Acolyte in 1944. “One of my favorite HPL stories was, and
still is, The Silver Key,” he wrote. “In telling him of the pleasure I had
had in rereading it, I suggested a sequel to account for Randolph
Carter’s doings after his disappearance. My interest in the story
stimulated him, and his appreciative response in turn stimulated me,
so that before the session was over, we had seriously resolved to
undertake the task. Some months later, I wrote a six thousand word
first draft.”

Rarely able to leave another writer’s story untouched, Lovecraft

began playing around with Price’s tale, eventually revising and
expanding it thoroughly. “Thoroughly” may perhaps be an
understatement— “completely” is more like it, for, as Price tells the
anecdote, “he mailed me a 14,000 word elaboration, in the Lovecraft
manner, of what I had sent him. I had bogged down, of course. The
idea of doing a sequel to one of his stories was more fantastic than
any fantasy he has ever written. When I deciphered his manuscript, I
estimated that he had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original
words: one passage which he considered to be not only rich and
colorful in its own right, but also compatible with the style of his own
composition.”

Having myself collaborated with another writer on a few short stories

and a couple of novels, I know that few professionals would accept
with equanimity a revision so drastic. Price was the exception,
however, as his generous comments indicate: “He was right of
course in discarding all but the basic outline. I could only marvel that
he had made so much of my adequate and bungling start. What I
had done, in effect, was to prod him, by that start, into creating
something. Today, I like to tell myself that that one short passage of
mine which he incorporated into the script must have been good;
and that without doubt, I fared better than any of those others whose
botched beginnings he rewrote bodily.”

The story appeared two years later in Weird Tales under a dual
byline as a genuine collaboration—the only time, in fact, that any of
Lovecraft’s revisions were openly admitted to be the work of two
writers. Without exception, the other tales, such as those written with
Hazel Heald or Zealia Bishop, were published without public
acknowledgement of Lovecraft’s share in the task.

Through the Gates of the Silver Key has the most confused plot
imaginable, and since it is not really a part of the Cthulhu Mythos,
but only a borderline tale, we need not linger over it here with any
lengthy synopsis. But I must add a note about the amusing origin of
two of the characters in the story—one of them “the distinguished
Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent
de Marigny,” the other, “an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode
Island” named Ward Phillips.

De Marigny was invented by Price and Lovecraft as a sort of pen-

name. They had decided at one point in their friendship that it would
be a good idea to collaborate on many stories—to capitalize on what
Lovecraft called Price’s speed of composition. Rather than; use a
dual byline, they planned to create a joint nom-de-plume, “Etienne
Marmaduke de Marigny,” and in this mood of grandiose whimsy (as
Price calls it), they decided that de Marigny’s output would
“conservatively estimated, amount to a million words a month.” This
plan eventually fell through, but the name itself, slightly altered, was
preserved as that of a character in the one fiction upon which they
did collaborate.

The other name, Ward Phillips, which is, of course, drawn from the
middle of “Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” is a very early pen-name of
Lovecraft’s own devisal. Several pieces of his amateur work were
signed with that name, such as the poem “Astrophobos,” first
published in 1918. 4*
This collaboration is primarily of interest to us as it gives a new
quotation from the Necronomicon, mentions the Elder Sign, and
refers to the otherwise unknown “Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of eon-
old Leng.” Also, recalling the planet Yuggoth which Lovecraft
introduced in Whisperer in Darkness, this yarn cuts loose with a
slather of new planets—enough to fill a medium-sized solar system
—“Kythamil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus,”
“trans- galactic Stronti,” as well as “Yaddith, Mthura, Kath, the triple
star Nython, Kynarth,” and other worlds in “the twenty-eight galaxies
accessible to the light-beam envelopes of the creatures of Yaddith.”

Price, something of an amateur Orientalist, used a lot of Eastern lore

and mysticism in his own stories, and some of this sort of thing
seeped over into Through the Gates of the Silver Key. Price also
knew quite a bit about modern occult literature—far more than
Lovecraft, anyway—and some of the terms from this wide reading
got into Gates and, through Gates, into the Mythos proper—such
terms, for example, as “the primal Naacal language,” which came
from Churchward’s “Mu” books, or the reference to “the Children of
the Fire Mist [who] came to Earth to teach the Elder Lore to man,”
which Price got from Madame Blavatsky, it being part of the rather
gaudy and spectacular cosmogony of the Theosophical system.
Thus, tainted with mysticism, a confused jumble of complex plot,
Gates is a weak, even a bad, story.

All in all, then, 1932 was not a good year as far as Lovecraft’s writing
went.

***

1* The story has since been reprinted and anthologized a number of

times, and during the 1940s it was dramatized on a radio program
called The House of Mystery. Lovecraft’s own story, The Rats in the
Walls, was once performed on another program, called Suspense,
by a cast headed by Ronald Colman.

2* Another Hyperborean story, The Coming of the White Worm,

which was not published until 1941, was actually sented as an entire
chapter from the Book of Eibon!

3* Happily for us long-suffering Lovecraft scholars, in the last year of

his life Lovecraft set down in a letter to a friend a list of his completed
stories (fifty in all), with the date of the writing of each story; so we do
not have to comb his correspondence in an effort to establish the
correct dating of his tales.

4* Years after Lovecraft’s death, when August Derleth came to

compose the novel The Lurker at the Threshold, which was
published in book form by Arkham House as a posthumous
collaboration, he used “the Rev. Ward Phillips” as the author of one
of those imaginary tomes wherewith the Lovecraftian library is so
richly filled: Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan. It
reads rather like a work of Cotton Mather, from the few quotations
from it we possess.
9. The Elder Gods
Although Lovecraft himself was writing fewer and fewer stories in the
Cthulhu Mythos, his writer-friends, and in particular his younger
proteges, became more and more fascinated by the wealth of
background lore the Mythos contained, and by the plot potentials it
offered them.

I get the feeling that they contributed new stories, new symbols, new
books and demons to the Mythos rather in a sense of play. Some of
the members of the Lovecraft Circle to whom I have written assure
me of this. Nobody, they tell me, took the Mythos seriously (least of
all Lovecraft), and they began to vie with one another to build up the
pantheon and add to the gradually evolving mythology. This they did
very much as a sort of game, and it is quite significant that after
Lovecraft’s death the game lost its savor for many of them. The
Mythos stories written when he was no longer alive to enjoy them
were done more in a spirit of commemoration than in fun, Robert
Bloch tells me. But we shall look into this later on.

Among the younger proteges of Lovecraft, the first to make a major

contribution to the Mythos was August Derleth. He began
collaborating on short stories with Mark Schorer during the summer
of 1931. The two had first become friends during their high-school
years, and the friendship persisted and began to bear fruit as each of
the young men became apprentice writers. An entire book of
Derleth/Schorer tales has recently been published by Arkham
House.1*

In their preface to that book, August Derleth and Mark Schorer

recalled the circumstances that led to their decade of collaboration:
“That summer,” they wrote, “one of us was home from a year of
teaching at a military academy in Missouri and preparing for
postgraduate work at Wisconsin and Harvard,” while “the other was
back to stay in Sauk City, Wisconsin, having resigned an editorial
position with Fawcett Publications in order to do or die as a writer.”
Both young men had their homes in Sauk City, but, as Derleth
recounted it, “we chose not to work in them but to rent what had
once been a summer cottage on the village’s main street... Into this
cottage we moved typewriters and all the paraphernalia incidental to
writing, and got to work.”

One of the first of the collaborative efforts produced in this manner

was a story in the Cthulhu Mythos—Derleth’s first, so far as he was
able to recall. The Lair of the Star-Spawn was its title, and it
appeared in the August 1932 issue of Weird Tales. In it the two
authors introduced some innovations. An explorer named Eric Marsh
penetrates the hidden depths of jungled Burma and discovers the
mysterious Plateau of Sung, when dwell the legended “Tcho-Tcho
people” in the age-old lost city of Alaozar. “Not without base do
ancient legends of China speak of the long-lost city on the Isle of
Stars in the Lake of Dread,” as a character in the tale remarks; and
Marsh soon discovers that this is the dominion of two of the Great
Old Ones —Lloigor and Zhar, “the Twin Obscenities,” who came
down from the stars ages before, with Cthulhu and other beings, this
tale is the first in all the Mythos to recount how the Elder Gods
battled against and overwhelmed the Great Old Ones, with the result
that “Hastur was exiled to Hali in the Hyades, Cthulhu was banished
to the lost sea kingdom of R’lyeh, while Lloigor and Zhar were buried
alive in the inner fastnesses of Asia—beneath the accursed Plateau
of Sung!”

This rather slender and seemingly innocuous little story, which went
unreprinted, completely neglected, and virtually forgotten for
decades until revived in book form in 1966, is actually one of the
most overwhelmingly important of all the tales that comprise the
Mythos.

It was the first story to introduce Lloigor and Zhar, and also the first
story in which “Hastur the Unspeakable” is set forth as a member of
the pantheon. 2* It was also the first tale to mention the Tcho-Tcho
people, here given as minions of Lloigor and Zhar, just as the Deep
Ones are minions of Cthulhu.

Star-Spawn also merits our attention as being August Derleth’s initial

effort in the growth of the Mythos. Derleth, in the years that followed,
became the most indefatigable of Lovecraft’s disciples, reshaping
and guiding the development of the Mythos after the death of
Lovecraft, and eventually becoming the second most important writer
to contribute thereto. In the light of his later significance, this story is
feeble and confused.

Derleth did not keep his terminology straight; he used such phrases
as “the Old Ones,” “the Elder Gods,” and “the Ancient Ones”
interchangeably, creating a bit of a mix-up. In later stories, of course,
he resolved his name system and established his terms firmly.

Lovecraft, of course, must have seen Star-Spawn, but no record is

extant of what he thought of it or of his opinion of what Derleth had
done to the Mythos. Derleth himself cannot recall H.P.L.’s reaction,
which is a great pity. Lovecraft, as we have seen, frequently set his
seal of approval on some of his friends’ contributions to the
apparatus of the Mythos by using the new additions in one of his
own Mythos stories: It may, or it may not, be significant that he did
not in any future story mention this theme of the Elder Gods v. the
Great Old Ones; neither did he incorporate references to Hastur,
Zhar or Lloigor in any story of his, although he did pick up the Tcho-
Tcho people. I think it rather likely, though, that this failure to use
Derleth’s then newly-coined apparatus in one of his stories was just
an oversight on Lovecraft’s part. Lovecraft did not take the Mythos at
all seriously and vigorously encouraged his friends to use it as they
liked in their own stories, so it can be safely assumed that whether or
not he approved of Derleth’s simplistic cosmic war theme, he really
did not care.

The following year, 1933, Lovecraft wrote only one story, The Thing
on the Doorstep. This low rate of production seems inexplicable, but
we must keep in mind that, to Lovecraft, his own stories were of
minimal importance: he continued to regard his revisions of the
stories of others as his prime work.

He had at this time just finished revising a story called Out of the
Eons by a new client, Hazel Heald. It was a delightful story, and as it
stands, I imagine it is at least 60 percent Lovecraft. He poured into it
any number of references to the staples of the Mythos—the
Necronomicon, “black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled
Cthulhu,” the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, the Book of
Eibon, and so on. He also used the opportunity afforded by this
revision to add to the canon Long’s devil-god from The Horror from
the Hills in a reference to “proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn,” which, in
context, indicates that this entity was a member of the Great Old
Ones. In the same tale appears a reference to the Derleth/Schorer
story Lair of the Star-Spawn, confirming that Lovecraft had in fact
seen it: “Do you remember what I told you about that ruined city in
Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived?” asks one of the characters.
There is also a reference to “Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the
Greenland ice,” which hearkens back to Polaris of many years
before.

Out of the Eons concerns the discovery of a dead city frozen under
the Arctic ice, forgotten for three million years, and thus forming a
rather amusing counterpart of the lost ice-buried city in the Antarctic,
the setting for At the Mountains of Madness. The story is chiefly
significant in that it adds a new divinity to the pantheon: Rhan-
Tegoth, a member of the Great Old Ones who came down to this
earth from Yuggoth.

Yet another new devil-god made his debut, in the January 1933
issue of Strange Tales, in a new story by August Derleth (a solo
performance, this time) called The Thing That Walked on the Wind.
This tale marks the first appearance of Derleth’s Ithaqua the Wind-
Walker, a variation on the familiar Wendigo myth popularized by
Algernon Blackwood in his famous horror tale, The Wendigo,3*
Derleth established here, for the first time in the Mythos, the notion
that the various members of the pantheon, or some of them at least,
are elementals; Ithaqua is referred to as an air elemental. Derleth
later developed this theme more fully, References to Leng, the Tcho-
Tcho people of Burma, and “accursed R’lyeh, where slumbering
Cthulhu is waiting to rise and destroy the world,” anchor the story
firmly within the context of the Mythos.

But to return to Lovecraft. His tale, The Thing on the Doorstep, is,
again, curiously minor and somehow unsatisfying. Perhaps we
readers had been spoiled by such superlative stories as The Call of
Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, and The Whisperer in Darkness: we
expected each new tale in the cycle to be even bigger and better
than the one before. At any rate, Thing fails to electrify the
imagination. From themes of cosmic horror and cataclysmic
(impending) doom, the scope here has dwindled to a sordid little
domestic tragedy that might be dismissed as the tale of a man with
an overdomineering wife, if one wished to sound facetious.

Some amusing things crop up in this tenth Mythos tale, however.

Lovecraft’s protagonist is a young poet of near genius named
Edward Derby, and we are told that “in his eighteenth year his
collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under
the title of Azathoth and Other Horrors.” Then, remembering Robert
E. Howard’s mad poet in The Black Stone and other stories,
Lovecraft adds with a straight face: “He was a close correspondent
of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The
People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926
after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.”

Although a grisly shocker in the approved tradition the tale is

insignificant and wholly lacking in the sort of cosmic vision that
makes Lovecraft’s best stories so memorable. It is less than ten
thousand words long.

Otherwise not very important, as far as things Lovecraftian go, 1933

is worthy of note because of a new friend H.P.L. made that year. This
was a fifteen-year- old boy in the Midwest, with whom Lovecraft
began a correspondence that was to continue steadily throughout
the final four years of his life.
His new correspondent was named Robert Bloch.

Bloch was, at this time, just a high-school boy living in Milwaukee.

He had been born in Chicago in 1917, but he grew up in Milwaukee.
He began to correspond with the older writer when he was about
fifteen, and this provided the stimulus and encouragement he
needed to begin seriously working towards a professional career in
fiction, just as similar correspondence had for Long and for Derleth
himself. Lovecraft’s friendship seems to have done this sort of thing
for lots of young beginners.

At any rate, young Bloch became in time another Lovecraft

discovery, and one of prime importance. Like Derleth, Robert Bloch
sold his first story to Weird Tales while he was still in his teens, and
he eventually became a member of Farnsworth Wright’s “stable,”
contributing scores of tales to the magazine over decades.

Sometime after young Bloch first became acquainted with Lovecraft

through the medium of letters, his family moved to upstate
Wisconsin, and he thus came into much closer contact with Derleth,
due to their proximity. Lovecraft had “introduced” the two budding
authors, Bloch tells me, by mail, as was his usual fashion. The
Providence writer also performed the same service on Bloch’s behalf
with Clark Ashton Smith, J. Vernon Shea, Jr., and several other
members of Lovecraft’s private literary salon. But it was Derleth with
whom Bloch formed the closest friendship. “Since Derleth lived just a
few hours’ bus-ride away from me,” Bloch informed me in a recent
letter, “I visited him at his home and he in turn met with me in
Milwaukee.”

Bloch and Derleth, in fact, planned at one point to get Lovecraft out
to Wisconsin—which is not really as far-fetched as it might seem, for,
even considering his sedentary and almost hermitlike mode of life,
Lovecraft did some extensive traveling in his last years. He visited
Robert H. Barlow in Florida, and Barlow has left us a memoir of the
visit. And he was visiting friends in New Orleans—of all places!—
when he first met E. Hoffman Price. In fact, it was during his visit to
New Orleans that Lovecraft and Price first discussed the notion of a
sequel to The Silver Key, a meeting which, as mentioned earlier,
resulted in their collaboration on Through the Gates of the Silver
Key.

But the Wisconsin trip was never to come to pass, and although
Bloch was to exchange many letters with Lovecraft during the older
writer’s last few years, the two were never to meet in person, which
Bloch deeply regrets to this day.

***

1* I refer to Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People which

Arkham House published in 1966. The collection includes seventeen
stories, first published between 1930-1939 in Weird Tales, Strange
Stories, and similar magazines.

2* In The Whisperer in Darkness, written two years before the

publication of Star-Spawn, Lovecraft had first mentioned Hastur,
Carcosa and Hali in passing, but had done nothing further with the
names. He listed them in a sequence of names which included some
borrowed from Dunsany, Howard and other writers -he, himself, had
gotten them from Bierce and Chambers- but it was Derleth and
Schorer who firmly fixed Hastur’s place as a member of the Great
Old Ones and explained Carcosa and Hali as the places of his
banishment.

3* This is doubtless where Derleth got the idea. At least, he knew the
tale, for in this story he has one of his characters remark,
“Blackwood has written of these things.”
10. Invaders From Yesterday
As he came nearer to the end of his life, Lovecraft’s production of
stories, never exactly prodigious, slowed almost to a standstill. In
1934, for example, he toyed with a story called The Book but set it
aside languidly and never returned to it. He also sketched out a little
tale called The Thing in the Moonlight, whose origin can easily be
traced to the horribly vivid dreams from which he suffered all his life.
This sketch, too, he set aside and did not try to sell—did not even
finish, in fact.1*

But that same year he shrugged off the feeling of lassitude or futility
and produced his eleventh and next-to-last story in the Cthulhu
Mythos—The Shadow Out of Time.

Not only is this one of the longest of his stories— running to about
24,600 words—but it is one of the very best. In my opinion, for what
it’s worth, The Shadow Out of Time is, in fact, his single greatest
achievement in fiction. The form and substance of this extraordinary
novella, its amazing scope and sense of cosmic immensitude, the
gulfs of time it opens, the titanic sweep of the narrative—these
elements convince me that here is one of the most tremendously
exciting imaginative experiences I have yet found in fantastic fiction,
and the story has haunted me for years.

The tale is intricately and carefully plotted and includes an element

of suspense seldom found in Lovecraft. Quite literally, the tale is
constructed in the style of a detective story—like one of those
intellectual puzzles John Dickson Carr puts together with such
enormous skill. Both the reader and the narrator are ignorant of what
has happened; piece by piece the evidence fits together until the
final shattering revelation. As an exercise in plotting ingenuity alone,
the tale would be a delight; as a glimpse of the cosmic horrors that
may lie hidden in the remoteness of time, geological epochs from our
own day, and of the un- guessable and terrible secrets earth’s
unknown past conceals, the story is a thing of mounting horror and
tension screwed to the last notch of suspense.

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, an instructor in political economy at

Miskatonic University in Arkham, Mass., was struck by a sudden and
inexplicable attack of total amnesia while in the midst of a lecture.
Five years later he regained his memory, lacking the slightest hint as
to events during this lengthy period. His own memory of that time is
a confused jumble of chaotic dreams —vivid and detailed dreams, to
be sure, but dreams of such bizarre and monstrous surroundings
and such strange beings that they must be the illusions conjured up
by a disordered brain.

He discovers that his behavior during this five-yearlong bout of total

amnesia was bizarre in the extreme. He had collapsed on the
podium during a lecture, fallen into deep unconsciousness, and was
gradually aroused by physicians. However, when he was brought
back to consciousness, the doctors were amazed to discover that
their patient seemed to be unfamiliar with the uses of his own body.
His speech was awkward, as if his use of his vocal organs was a
new experience to be carefully mastered; his diction was stilted and
foreign, as if he had learned the English language from books alone.
Even his expressions and gestures were clumsy and untrained, and
he seemed almost to require re-education in the use of his arms,
legs and hands. Once up and around, Peaslee began studying
subjects oddly at variance with his earlier pursuits of history, science,
art, language, folklore. Never in the slightest having evinced any
interest in the occult “sciences” or mystical subjects, he began
exploring strange old books, consorting with the most unlikely
cultists, and, in time, he embarked on a series of travels seemingly
at random— to the Himalayas, where he spent a month, through the
unexplored desert wastes of Arabia, even to the remote Arctic and
the vast limestone caverns of Virginia— travels without apparent
purpose. Eventually, as if disappointed at the lack of results from
these studies and journeys, Peaslee was observed to fall into a sort
of ennui; he spoke vaguely (and, many thought, insincerely) of
flashes of returning memory. Then followed his construction in secret
of an odd mechanism, which later vanished quite mysteriously. And,
just as mysteriously, Peaslee suddenly regained his memory—
except for any knowledge of his activities during die period of
amnesia.

Gradually the full truth emerges, and the reader is treated to one of
Lovecraft’s most spectacular creations: “the Great Race of Yith,”
nonhuman entities of pure mind who migrate across the ages,
inhabiting the bodies of race after race. Centered in a prehistoric city
in the wastes of inner Australia, one of these mental invaders had
stolen Peaslee’s body in order to research his particular era. During
the interim, Peaslee’s own intelligence was housed in one of the
cone-shaped host- bodies possessed by the Race.

Lovecraft exposes the full impact of this discovery in a sequence of

tantalizing hints; it adds up to a sensational work of imagination—so
sensational that Farnsworth Wright (by this time one could almost
add, “of course—”) rejected it.

In all fairness to the memory of a great editor, however, there may

have been extenuating circumstances. Derleth has recorded (in
H.P.L.: A Memoir) that Lovecraft often submitted manuscripts in a
state of very unprofessional sloppiness:

It must be pointed out that Lovecraft, burdened with his revision

work, often sent out manuscripts in a bad state of disrepair. I saw In
the Vault after its rejection by Wright, and found it all but unreadable;
I retyped it, I sent the new copy off to Wright, and in a short time
Lovecraft had Wright’s letter of acceptance. Donald Wandrei did the
same thing with other manuscripts and I arranged for their sale to
Astounding Stories. Rejection of a tale which had involved
considerable creative energy was a harsh blow for Lovecraft; he had
none of the ego, so necessary to writers, to sustain him in the face of
rejection; however much he assailed the judgment of the editor in
question, everything he said and did goes, to show that secretly he
believed the editor might very well be right, because this was what
he himself thought.
Wright may have rejected The Shadow Out of Time because the
manuscript was all but illegible, or because; of its extreme length (at
nearly twenty-five thousand words, it is one of Lovecraft’s longest
stories). At any rate, this would seem to be one of the stories
rescued from oblivion through the kind offices of Donald Wandrei, for
it eventually wound up in Astounding Stories two years later.

The evidence suggests that Lovecraft had a lot of fun with this story;
at least, more of his playful in-jokes and complimentary references to
the members of his salon appear therein. He refers again to
Howard’s Valusian serpentfolk, and to Smith’s Hyperborean devil-
god, Tsathoggua, and to the Vnaussprechilichen Kulten of Von Junzt.

He also seems to have used this story to give his imprimatur to the
Derleth/Schorer collaboration, The Lair of the Star-Spawn, which
was, as mentioned in the preceeding chapter, the story that
introduced the concept of the Elder Gods v. the Great Old Ones.
That story also introduced the dreaded Tcho-Tcho people, and it is
the Tcho-Tchos that Lovecraft mentions here.

He also added a new book to the ever-growing library of nonexistent

tomes so frequently cited in Mythos yams, in his passing reference
to “the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules.” This is a rather
complicated in-joke, the point of which was probably lost on most
readers. It is not so much a pun on Derleth’s name as a reference to
Derleth’s family history: Derleth was descended from French
aristocracy (there really were Comtes d’Erlette before the storming of
the Bastille). The family fled the country to avoid the wholesale
slaughter of the aristocrats that occurred with the French Revolution;
they took refuge for some time —generations, I gather—in Bavaria,
and there the name became Germanicized into “Derleth.” So, by
using the obsolete form of the name for the author of an imaginary
book of eldritch lore, and the extinct title, Lovecraft was making a
joke few readers outside of actual members of the Circle could
possibly have understood.

In the same story Lovecraft mentioned two other books: Ludvig

Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis and “the disturbing and debatable
Eltdown Shards.” Both Ludvig Prinn and his Mysteries of the Worm
were the inventions of young Robert Bloch. Bloch introduced Prinn
and his book in a story first published in Wright’s magazine the
following year, 1935, which means that he had either discussed his
contributions to the Mythos with Lovecraft in advance, or showed
him the manuscript of the story a year or more before it finally got
into print.

While working up my research notes for this book, I became curious

as to the exact process used by members of the Lovecraft Circle in
making their additions to the lore of the Mythos. I wrote to some of
them asking just how they had gone about inventing the imaginary
books, authors and devil gods, and to what extent they had
discussed their innovations in advance with Lovecraft.

Derleth replied that, in general, “We usually showed him our stories
before they were printed.” He recalled seeing a lengthy exchange of
correspondence between Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, in which
the two worked out the details of the latter writer’s
Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt. (The Lovecraft side of this
particular sequence of letters will probably be included in the third
volume of the Selected Letters, not yet available as I write this.)
However, as Derleth recalled it, Smith did not do this. He felt that
Smith’s contributions to the Mythos were not seen by Lovecraft in
advance, and that Lovecraft was not consulted during their creation.

Robert Bloch, however, had a different story to tell. In a letter dated

June 7, 1971, he wrote to me on this point as follows:

As I recall, I came up with Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm and

HPL quickly supplied me with the Latinized title; we had some minor
discussion of the volume’s publishing history, I believe' but it was
tongue- in-cheek.

Bloch adds that it is rather hard to recall these things in any detail
after a span of something like thirty-six years, admitting that “such a
time-span tends to dim one’s flashes of recall.” But, continuing on
the subject of Ludvig Prinn and De Vermis Mysteriis, he remarks that
both Kuttner and Earl Peirce 2* also picked up Prinn and his eldritch
tome, mentioning them in some of their stories. (Henry Kuttner, then
a young fan, began corresponding with Bloch from California in early
1936; before long he, too, moved into the Lovecraft Circle. Derleth
was of the opinion that Henry Kuttner corresponded with Lovecraft
very slightly, perhaps only during “the last eighteen months or so of
Lovecraft’s life”)

Bloch himself was only eighteen years old at this point; he eventually
became one of the most prolific of the important writers who
contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, and between 1935 and 1951 he
published no less than eleven tales which are firmly a part of the
literature of the Mythos, together with a number of borderline stories.
In time, his complete contribution to the literature of the Mythos
proved larger than either that of Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton
Smith, and much larger than that of Long. In fact, only August
Derleth wrote more Mythos stories then he.

As for those “disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards,” they first

made their appearance in this story, if my chronology is correct.
However, they also appear in one of the Lovecraft revisions, The
Diary of Alonzo Typer, by William Lumley, published in Weird Tales
for February, 1938. Since it sometimes took Farnsworth Wright a
year or two, or even three, to get around to publishing a story he had
purchased, it is altogether possible that the Shards were invented by
Lumley. Anyway, they made yet a further appearance a year after
this in The Challenge From Beyond.

While The Shadow Out of Time languished unpublished, Lovecraft

turned his attention to an amusing idea suggested by a prominent
fanzine of the period called Fantasy Magazine.

This was one of the more ambitious of the fan productions, and it
was printed in hand-set type, featuring articles, poems and stories by
both amateur and professional writers in the related fields of fantasy
and science fiction. To highlight their third anniversary issue, the
editors of Fantasy Magazine suggested a round-robin story. Each
author would write a segment and pass it along to the next. The
same sort of thing had been done with considerable success with a
science fiction epic called Cosmos, to which eighteen writers had
contributed, among them such famous names as A. Merritt, E. E.
Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and Otis Adelbert Kline.

The new story would be called The Challenge from Beyond, and for
it the editors of the fanzine had coaxed contributions from a
staggering array of the more celebrated authors of the Weird Tales
group—A. Merritt, 3* H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore,
and Frank Belknap Long. It was Miss Moore who opened the story,
followed by Merritt. Lovecraft’s segment is a bit more rounded than
the other contributions and could perhaps be published as a short
story in its own right.

The story as a whole is not only remarkably brief for a round-robin

yarn spun done by five writers—it is only about 6,400 words long—
but, it also hangs together remarkably well. Lovecraft’s contribution
to it is rather interesting; he wrote the central portion of the story, and
his episode is about three times longer than that of any of the others.
He obviously wrote his portion while at work on The Shadow Out of
Time, because he goes into the history of the Great Race (left
unnamed in his text, but obviously that) and tells quite a bit more
about “those debatable and disquieting clay fragments called the
Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in southern
England thirty years before.” Because it embroiders on Mythos lore
established elsewhere, I cannot help but consider that The
Challenge from Beyond qualifies as a Mythos story.

It seems to me rather odd that Clark Ashton Smith was not invited to
contribute a segment to this famous round-robin story. But perhaps
he was, and declined. By 1935, by his own count, Smith had written
about one hundred short stories and was very near the end of his
interest in this form.4* From the partial list of dates, it looks to me as
if he wrote no stories at all between 1933 and 1937. This falling off of
production may have been why he declined to contribute a segment
to The Challenge from Beyond (if indeed he had been asked to do
so, which is probably the case).
Most of Smith’s contribution to the Mythos appears in his
Hyperborean story cycle, which introduced such demonic entities as
Tsathoggua, Abhoth, Ubbo-Sathla, and Atlach-Natcha to the
pantheon, and the Book of Eibon to the library. By 1935, Smith had
completed the entire cycle, save for a last story, The Theft of Thirty-
nine Girdles, which was a late tale, not published until 1958.
(Unfortunately, we do not have the date of composition for this tale.)

Smith did a lot of his work in story cycles, such as his several tales
about Poseidonis—his name for the last isle of foundering Atlantis—
and the Zothique stories. Neither of these utilized the Cthulhuoid
apparatus. But Smith also wrote a sequence of tales set in
Averoigne, an imaginary province of Medieval France. Most
amusingly, he decided to include some of his Hyperborean material
in these stories, making one of his characters, Gaspard du Nord, the
translator of the elder Book of Eibon from Latin (in which tongue it is
known as the Liber Ivonie) into 13th-century French, as the Livre
d'Eibon.

A number of the characters in Smith’s Averoigne tales are Medieval

wizards, and it is amusing to hear them invoke “Zhothaqquah,” “Yok-
Zothoth,” and “Kthulhut”—which I assume are the French
“translation” of Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

As for the other writer-members of the Lovecraft Circle, Derleth had

published his second Mythos tale, The Thing that Walked on the
Wind, in 1933, and it would be some years before he returned to
take up his work in the Lovecraft vein. Long was busied with other
affairs, too.

Howard had just about exhausted his ideas for Cthulhuoid stories
and had moved on to other and undoubtedly better things. I refer, of
course, to his Conan stories. The first of these, a rip-roaring
swashbuckler entitled The Phoenix on the Sword, had seen the light
of print only three years before, in the December 1932 issue of
Weird Tales. The response from readers had been wildly
enthusiastic. Earlier, Howard had dabbled rather unsuccessfully in
the field of the heroic fantasy tale set in imaginary prehistoric
kingdoms with a couple of yarns about an Atlantean savage named
Kull, who single-handedly invaded the mainland and usurped the
throne of the ancient and wealthy realm of Valusia. Possibly inspired
by certain very similar stories of his friend, Clark Ashton Smith—
who was doing much the same sort of thing with his Hyperborea and
Zothique yarns—Howard had belted off a bundle of these “King Kull”
adventure stories to Weird Tales. In typical fashion, Farnsworth
Wright had looked them over with a sour eye and belted them right
back—all but two, which he eventually printed. One of the lucky two
was The Shadow Kingdom, and you will recall how Lovecraft
borrowed the serpentfolk of Valusia from that yarn to add to his
growing corpus of Mythos lore.

I have seen the bundle of rejected King Kull stories —in fact, I
edited, rewrote and finished some of them when the complete saga
was eventually published (the book was called King Kull, published
by Lancer in 1967; there have been a couple of printings since then,
and I believe the book is still in print). They are not bad at all; a
couple of them are superb vintage Sword & Sorcery tales, as good
as anything Howard ever wrote. I am at a loss to understand why
Farnsworth Wright refused them.

Howard evidently felt much the same way. He took one of the better
yarns, By This Axe I Rule!, and rewrote it, keeping most of the
names and much of the plot but introducing into the turmoil of the
story a certain burly Cimmerian adventurer named Conan. Then he
retitled it and shot it off to Farnsworth Wright, and this time it was
snapped up. And that is how the first Conan story came to be
written!

With Howard busily creating his world of the Hyborian Age and the
saga of its mightiest hero, only Robert Bloch was left to work in the
Lovecraftian vein. Bloch was corresponding very steadily with
Lovecraft, and under the stimulus of the older writer’s
encouragement, he was turning out stories for Weird Tales at a
furious rate. The very first story he wrote which at all used the
apparatus of the Cthulhu Mythos —or at least the very first one to
get into print— was a comparatively minor effort called The Secret in
the Tomb, which Wright ran in his May 1935 issue. This was followed
by The Suicide in the Study, another Mythos tale, in the June issue.
By this time, not only had Bloch invented Ludvig Prinn, author of the
hellish Mysteries of the Worm, but he had picked up and was using
Lovecraft’s newest addition to the Cthulhuoid library, d’Erlette’s
Cultes des Goules.

1935 had yet some months to go, and Bloch got one more Cthulhu
Mythos story into print in Weird Tales that year—a story called The
Shambler from the Stars, which Wright printed in his September
1935 issue.

For that story, Bloch had the amusing idea of using Lovecraft himself
as the main character. As Derleth described the incident, Robert
Bloch, having proposed to have a little weird fun at Lovecraft’s
expense, wrote asking his permission to annihilate him in a story
entitled The Shambler from the Stars. Lovecraft’s fine sense of
humor brought forth permission not only signed by Lovecraft, but
also by his prime creation, the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, and by
others of the Cthulhu Mythos —von Junzt, du Nord, and the Tcho-
Tcho lama of Leng.

This “document” was reproduced in 1944 from the original Lovecraft

letter and served as one of the illustrations in a book called
Marginalia, an omnibus; volume of odds and ends of fiction, verse
and articles by and about Lovecraft. The letter reads like this:

Providence, R. I., April 30, 1935

To Whom it May Concern:

This is to certify that Robert Bloch, Esq., of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,

U.S.A.—reincarnation of Meinheer Ludvig Prinn, author of De Vermis
Mysteriis—is fully authorised to portray, murder, annihilate,
disintegrate, transfigure, metamorphose, or otherwise manhandle
the undersigned in the tale entitled The Shambler from the Stars.
(signed) H. P. LOVECRAFT

Attest:

Abdul Alhazred

Gaspard du Nord (translator, Le Livre d’Eibon)

Fvindvuf von Junzt (Author: Unaussprechlichen Kulten)

Tcho-Tcho Lama of Leng

These signatures (which, unfortunately, I cannot reproduce here) are

also quite amusing. Alhazred’s name is signed in what looks to me
like decent Arabic, and Gaspard du Nord’s signature is written in
flowing swash characters that would not look out of place on a
Medieval document. As for the signature of that mysterious Lama of
Leng, whose features, you will recall, are ever hidden behind a
mask-like veil of yellow silk, and who dwells alone in a prehistoric
stone monastery, it is written in what appears to be Sanskrit
characters, insofar as I can judge.

I can imagine with what delight Bloch received this tongue-in-cheek

document. He sat right down to “annihilate” Lovecraft in his story.
And thereby hangs a tale.

In fact, come to think of it, thereby hang three of them.

***

1* Four years after his death, this story found its way into print in a
fantasy fanzine called Bizarre, dated January, 1941. It was the very
last of his amateur press appearances.

2* In later years to become one of Bloch’s discoveries, a young

Milwaukee protege of his own.

3* It is not generally remembered that A. Merritt was indeed a Weird

Tales writer. Although the bulk of his stories and novels appeared in
the mass-market adventure pulps of larger circulation, like Argosy
and All-Story Weekly, one of the loveliest of his rare short stories,
The Woman of the Wood, appeared in the August 1926 issue of
Weird Tales. I say “rare” because Merritt wrote only six finished short
stories, not counting the opening segments of a couple of his novels
which appeared separately, with the continuation of the novel
published as a sort of “sequel.”

4* Smith kept a careful list of his stories, with the day, month and
year of the writing of each tale, and the date of later revisions, if any.
This document, two sheets of paper titled “Completed Stories,” was
found among his papers after his death by Roy A. Squires of
Glendale, California, who had known Smith, and who for a time after
the writer’s demise took care of the Smith papers. Squires, who has
passed a copy along to me, has numbered the stories in
chronological order by date of composition; with a few holes, the list
totals 111 titles.
11. The Last Incantation
Actually, The Shambler from the Stars is three kinds of fiction at
once: a horror story, a pastiche on Lovecraft’s style, and an
elaborate joke. Bloch later became known as one of the very few
fantasy or horror or science fiction writers who knew how to use
humor; this tale demonstrates his talents superbly. The tone of voice
is solemn enough, but the Lovecraftian hyperbole and rhetoric is
ever so slightly overdone; almost, but not quite, to the point of
caricature, as the following passage suggests:

I yearned to know the terrors of the grave; the kiss of maggots on my

tongue, the cold caress of a rotting shroud upon my body. I thirsted
for the knowledge that lies in the pits of mummied eyes, and burned
for wisdom known only to the worm...

Lovecraft, in a typical burst of florid prose, might well have penned

the first phrase of the above, but I believe even he would have
refrained from yearning for “the kiss of maggots” on the tongue!

As Bloch’s story progresses, his narrator, a writer of weird fiction in

the manner of Poe and Machen (whose name is not given in the
tale), makes a friend of “a mystic dreamer in New England,” which is
very obviously meant to be Lovecraft. “It was from the latter that I
learned of the ancient books that hold strange lore,” says Bloch, very
straight-faced, through the voice of his narrator. “He quoted
guardedly from the legendary Necronomicon and spoke timidly of a
certain Book of Eibon that was reputed to surpass it in the utter
wildness of its blasphemy. He himself had been a student of these
volumes of primal dread, but... he had heard many strange things...
in witch-haunted Arkham, where the old shadows still leer and
creep.”

Then Bloch has his character go on a search in the local second-

hand bookstores, trying to find the Necronomicon —a rather droll
idea, if you have ever done much hunting through such
establishments (you are more likely to find Volume VII of Motley’s
The Rise of the Dutch Republic than the works of the mad Arab). He
does, in fact, turn up a mouldering copy of Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis
Mysteriis, tucked in between a couple of volumes of Shakespeare.
(He remarks that the proprietor was “obviously unaware of its
nature.” Equally obvious is the fact that the poor man was unaware
of its value, for Bloch’s character buys the ancient tome for $1.00!)

Bloch’s character can make nothing of this trove of hideous and

blasphemous Elder Wisdom, so he zips off to Providence—a dead
giveaway, of course—to consult his friend, who is more learned in
the “dark knowledge” than he. Together they pore over the crumbling
book. Bloch solemnly informs us that even before opening it they
knew... that it was evil. The musty scent that rose from those antique
pages,” he records, “carried with it the reek of the tomb. The faded
leaves were maggoty at the edges, and rats had gnawed the
leather.” Still using delicate, unobtrusive touches of exaggeration for
the subliminal lampoon effect, he adds at this point, “rats which
perchance had a ghastlier food for common fare.”

As you might expect, Bloch’s character and his Providence pal

translate some of the loathsome rituals in the book—and with the
usual dire results. An invisible entity enters the room, and the
hapless Providence scholar has his blood drained by a vampiric
thing while dangling in mid-air before the horrified eyes of the
narrator. People in such tales who dabble in the forbidden lore very
generally come to a somewhat gory end. And thus Bloch annihilated
Lovecraft in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales.

Lovecraft found the story quite funny, and hastened to return the
favor by annihilating Bloch in a manner even grislier, if possible.
During the latter months of 1935 he wrote his twelfth and last
Cthulhu Mythos story, The Haunter of the Dark, a minor effort which
ran to under ten thousand words.

The Haunter of the Dark is an amusing reply to Bloch’s pastiche. The

protagonist of the tale is, in fact, the identical character of whom
Bloch had written, and Lovecraft supplies him with an obvious name
—“Robert Blake.” Lovecraft’s story picks up after the close of The
Shambler from the Stars, which finished with the death of the
Providence scholar, whereupon Bloch had his horrified and soul-
shaken writer-hero bum down the house to eradicate all trace of the
blood-drained corpse.

Lovecraft opens his tale with “Blake’s” return to Milwaukee after his
Providence visit to “a strange old man as deeply given to occult and
forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame.” Blake is
the author of some splendid short stories of weird honor —with vast
aplomb, Lovecraft follows this statement by inventing five imaginary
stories, whose titles (The Burrowers Beneath, The Stairs in the
Crypt, Shaggai, In the Vale of Pnath, and The Feaster from the
Stars) are deliciously straight-faced parodies of the typical
Cthulhuoid title. He tells how Blake is drawn back to Providence by
his continuing interest in the forbidden lore, becomes interested in
the curious history of a queer, now-extinct cult called “the Starry
Wisdom sect,” and explores its deserted church, finding a library
filled with the usual books—Von Junzt, Eibon, Alhazred, Prinn, the
Pnakotic Manuscripts, and a newcomer called the Book of Dzyan. 1*

Up in the attic, or the steeple, or whatever it is, “Robert Blake” finds a

curiously-angled stone pillar and a metal box “of peculiarly
asymmetrical form.” Within the box is an egg-shaped crystal of some
kind. Documents turn up which relate the strange rise and peak of
the Starry Wisdom sect and its collapse in scandal. The crystal is
called “the Shining Trapezohedron,” and it has an odd, colorful
history:

It was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought
it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the
crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-
men of Valusia, and peered at eons later in Lemuria by the first
human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank
with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to
swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka
built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which
caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records.
Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the
new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver’s spade once more brought it
forth to curse mankind.

The Shining Trapezohedron, as it turns out, is associated with the

worship of Nyarlathotep, and by fiddling around with it, poor Blake
releases the Haunter of the Dark, which is supposed to be an avatar
of the Crawling Chaos, and comes to the usual sticky end reserved
for characters in a Lovecraftian tale—if anything, an end even
stickier than that of the “old gentleman of Providence,” who was, you
recall, drained of blood while dangling in mid-air in the clutches of
the Shambler from the Stars. Blake goes reeling off in mad terror, his
mind crumbling as the Haunter of the Dark comes clawing in through
the window—

I am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the

tower—I am it and it is I... There is a monstrous odor... senses
transfigured... boarding at that tower window cracking and giving
way... Ia... ngai... ygg... I see it com- coming here—hell-wind—titan
blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning
eye...

The story is an excellent one, and the elements of the in-joke are
mostly too subtle to be easily seen. But when Lovecraft gives
“Robert Blake’s” address, “620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee,
Wisconsin,” he is of course giving Bloch’s address at that time. He
also slips in several references to Bloch’s stories. For example, the
stuff about the Pharaoh Nephren-Ka, whose “evil fane” was
destroyed by the priests, is a sly reference to one of Bloch’s best
Mythos stories, Fane of the Black Pharaoh, which is all about
Nephren-Ka.2* Further references to the Blochian canon may be
seen in the query, “Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique
and shadowy Khem even took on the form of man?” which refers to
a cycle of Egyptian stories Bloch was writing, borderline Mythos
material, centering around the place of Nyarlathotep in Egyptian
history. The last stories in this cycle did not reach print until 1938.

Just to make sure his readers got the joke, Lovecraft dedicated The
Haunter of the Dark to Robert Bloch.

Bloch retaliated some years later in a final story called The Shadow
from the Steeple, which forms a direct sequel to The Haunter. This
time he turned the joke on himself.

In Bloch’s story Edmund Fiske is investigating the death of his friend,

Robert Blake, whom Bloch describes as “a precocious adolescent
interested in fantasy-writing.” Tracing the events surrounding his
friend’s demise, Fiske goes to Providence, digs into the history of the
Starry Wisdom cult, and learns that the Shining Trapezohedron itself
was carried off after Blake’s death by a certain Dr. Ambrose Dexter.
Fiske tracks down this Doctor Dexter and visits his home (finding his
library filled, as one might suspect, with the usual run of “fabulously
rare” ancient tomes). They talk, and here Bloch quite openly brings
not only himself, Robert Bloch, into the story, but also Lovecraft as
Lovecraft; among other things they discuss the Nyarlathotep legend,
and Fiske even quotes from Lovecraft’s sonnet, “Nyarlathotep”—one
of his “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence—a delectable bit of macabre
versifying which includes the ominous lines:

And at the last from inner Egypt came

The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;

Silent and lean and cryptically proud,

And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.

Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,

But leaving, could not tell what they had heard:

While through the nations spread the awestruck word

That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Fiske is not deceived by the suave physician. He pulls a gun on him

—an unwise move—and Fiske drops dead of what seems to be a
heart attack. As for the Doctor, who is far more than just a Doctor, he
goes out into the moonlit garden, where two escaped black panthers
are roaming about; they spot him and advance, “eyes aglow, jaws
slavering and agape.” Bloch concludes the tale neatly:

Doctor Dexter turned away. His face was turned in mockery to the
moon as the beasts fawned before him and licked his hands.

Lovecraft wrote The Haunter of the Dark in 1935; it was the last of
his Cthulhu Mythos stories. That same year he performed some
extensive revisions on a science fiction horror tale a young
correspondent named Kenneth Sterling had written. The story was
called In the Walls of Eryx, and it appeared in Weird Tales as by
“Kenneth Sterling and H. P. Lovecraft.” It was the only one of his
revisions to appear under a dual byline (not counting Through the
Gates of the Silver Key, which is really a collaboration, not a
revision).

Lovecraft wrote no more stories, The Haunter of the Dark being the
last completed story to come from his hands.

The next year, 1936, members of the Lovecraft Circle were shocked
and saddened to learn of the sudden death of Robert E. Howard.
“Two-Gun Bob,” as Lovecraft jokingly called him, was a hardy and
robust Texan, but he had an unusually strong emotional attachment
to his mother. Howard was capable of enormous effort—he created
the mighty saga of Conan the Cimmerian in just four years 3*—but
he was not able to sever this relationship. Mother and son were just
too close. After a lingering illness, Mrs. Howard died, and her son fell
into a deep mood of despondency. Unable to endure the thought of
life without her presence, Howard put a pistol to his head and blew
his brains out at eight o’clock on the hot summer morning of July
11th, 1936. With his untimely death, Weird Tales lost one of the
greatest writers ever to fill its pages with his surging narrative and
glorious gusto.

Robert E. Howard was a writer of enormous verve and energy, and

his production of stories was truly amazing. Between 1925 and 1936
he wrote something like 91 weird or fantastic tales, some of them
book-length novels, mostly for Weird Tales. And this was only a
fraction of his total output; it does not include his historical adventure
stories, mysteries, sports and westerns, and other fiction. He also
produced enough verse to fill at least two small volumes. Today he is
chiefly remembered as the founder of the Sword & Sorcery school of
heroic fantasy, whose members have included Henry Kuttner, C. L.
Moore, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, Jack
Vance, Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, and others.

His death was a major loss to Weird Tales. Had it not been for his
one fatal flaw—this unhappy emotional relationship with his mother
—Howard would probably be very much alive today, and very likely,
at only 65, would be still writing. Lord—I wonder what sort of thing he
would be writing today, with all those years of experience behind
him!

Lovecraft, who greatly admired Howard, despite the vast difference

in temperament and life-style that existed between the two-fisted
Texan and the sickly Rhode Island recluse, was very deeply moved
by Howard’s tragic death. For Julius Schwartz’s Fantasy Magazine
he composed a tribute, entitled Robert Ervin Howard: A Memoriam.
It was a serious, thoughtful, appreciative study of Howard’s writing,
and it ran to around two thousand words. He noted Howard’s “skill
and zest in depicting sanguinary conflict” and observed that his
stories possessed “a vitality found in few of his contemporaries.” In a
shrewd analysis, he delved into the very heart of Howard’s power as
a writer: that he was, purely and simply, a story-teller. He wrote:

It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand

out so sharply. But the real secret is that he himself is in every one of
them, whether they were ostensibly commercial or not. Even when
he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and
commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke
through the surface and put the imprint of his personality on
everything he wrote. Seldom, if ever, did he set down a lifeless stock
character or situation and leave it as such. Before he concluded with
it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality in spite of
popular editorial policy—always drew something from his own
experience and knowledge of life. Not only did he excel in pictures of
strife and slaughter, but he was almost alone in his ability to create
real emotions of spectral fear and dread suspense. That such a
genuine artist should perish while hundreds of insincere hacks
continue to concoct spurious ghosts and vampires and space-ships
and occult detectives is indeed a sorry piece of cosmic irony.

An even greater loss was to follow in the space of a very few

months.

Lovecraft and his remaining aunt, Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, lived

quietly in the old house at 66 College Street in Providence, which
was Lovecraft’s last home. He was fond of writing during the
nighttime hours, and he took to drawing the window shades down by
day and working by electric light. Although he wrote no new stories
in the last two years of his life, he kept up a tremendous
correspondence with about one hundred regular pen pals all over the
world. Among these, towards the last, was a young fan in California
named Henry Kuttner, who was only twenty-three in that year of
1937. Although Kuttner only corresponded with Lovecraft during the
last eighteen months or so of his life, he felt the same stimulation
from the older writer’s friendly encouragement that had helped
August Derleth and Robert Bloch move into the ranks of professional
writers while still in their teens.

And there were two other fledgling writers who joined the ranks of
Lovecraft’s innumerable correspondents during his last year or so.
One was a young woman of 26 named Catherine Lucile Moore, or
“C. L. Moore,” as she signed her stories. She had been working in a
bank in Indianapolis when she sold her first story to Weird Tales. It
had appeared only four years before, in the November 1933 issue.
Called Shambleau, the story had been a big hit with the readership,
and C. L. Moore was well on her way to becoming one of the most
popular of the new crop of Weird Tales writers.

Also among the last of Lovecraft’s correspondents was Fritz Leiber,

jr., the son of the celebrated Shakespearean actor (who can still be
seen on the Late Late Show in such fine films as the Charles
Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Anthony
Adverse). Leiber, who was 27 in Lovecraft’s last year, was to
become very popular as a contributor, not to Weird Tales, but to its
forthcoming (and, unfortunately, short-lived) fantasy competitor,
Unknown, as well as to Unknown's, science fiction companion
magazine, Astounding Stories, both under the creative editorship of
John W. Campbell, jr.

I suppose C. L. Moore and Fritz Leiber corresponded too briefly with

Lovecraft to fall under his spell as completely as had Bloch, Derleth,
and the others. They never wrote anything that is, strictly speaking,
part of the literature of the Mythos. Leiber, in fact, has written very
little weird or horror fiction, and what few pieces he has done in the
genre show no traces of Lovecraftian influence. Indeed, that very
fact is probably what makes his few weird stories so remarkable: the
finest of them, the short novel Conjure Wife,4* is as un-Lovecraftian
as you can get—a bright sunlit, everyday sort of horror story which
takes place in the mundane atmosphere of a college campus. Un-
Lovecraftian or no, it is a brilliant and exciting piece of fiction—all the
more noteworthy in that it avoids the typically Lovecraftian excesses
of using stock adjectives to suggest a mood of spectral terrors.

Writing letters filled the days; the nights Lovecraft loved to spend
strolling the moonlit streets of Providence on solitary expeditions—
the same streets that Poe had walked before him. Increasingly
dissatisfied with his stories, he wrote less and less of them, and
none at all came from his hand during the last two years of his life.

He lived like a hermit, a recluse, in self-imposed exile from his own

world and his age, neither of which he enjoyed. Far rather would he
have been born a cosmopolitan Roman of the late Empire, or an
English squire in his beloved 18th century, or a colonial gentleman of
the days before the Revolution. Alas, he was none of these things,
except in his extraordinarily vivid dreams.

As time went on his health gradually worsened, although his letters

to his friends reflect little of this. It was not in Lovecraft’s nature to
complain about his health any more than it was to complain about
the low ebb of his finances, but one cannot sustain bodily health on
the sort of diet of beans and other cheap foods his slender income
could afford. His letters during 1936, said August Derleth,
occasionally mentioned “little disabilities and annoying infirmities,”
but there was never a mention of the very serious nature of his
illness, although he must have been aware that he was in truth
seriously ill; Derleth mentions, in H.P.L.: A Memoir, how in a letter
dated February 17, 1937, Lovecraft wrote, discussing a renewed
interest in his old boyhood hobby of astronomy, “Funny how early
interests crop up again toward the end of one’s life.” Twenty-six days
after writing those words, H. P. Lovecraft died in the Jane Brown
Memorial Hospital in Providence, from a combination of Bright’s
disease 5* and intestinal cancer.

In simple language, August Derleth quietly described the end of the

story. I cannot hope to improve upon his words, so I shall repeat
them here:

He was buried three days later, in his Grandfather Phillips’ lot in

Swan Point Cemetery, of which he had increasingly written in the last
decade of his life, “where I shall someday repose.” Though his name
is inscribed on the central shaft, no stone marks his grave.

***

1* Since these mouldering tomes of ancient lore turn up, in just

about every Mythos story, in the collection of this or that eccentric
recluse, cult or institution, I wonder why the members of the
Lovecraft Circle keep telling us how fantastically rare they are!
2* Few of Lovecraft’s readers could possibly have gotten the point of
the joke, unless they were fortunate enough to have access to a time
machine. The Bloch story, which Lovecraft doubtless read in
manuscript, was not published until 1937.

3* So well did he do the job that the famous barbarian is still very
much alive and kicking today, thirty-five years after Howard’s death.
At the time of this writing, a new novel, Conan the Buccaneer, has
just been published: It is a Howardian pastiche, written by L.
Sprague de Camp and myself, who have picked up and continued
the saga of the Cimmerian from the point at which Robert E. Howard
left him.

4* Which has not only been adapted—and quite well adapted too—
into a television drama, but also has been made into a feature
movie. The movie, oddly enough, was titled (for some reason known
only to those students of abnormal psychology who have delved into
the innermost psyche of film producers) Burn, Witch, Burn—which
must have greatly confused any devotees of A. Merritt who
happened to be in the audience.

5* A disease characterized by the presence of albumin in the urine

and heightened blood pressure; it is named after the English
physician who was the first to describe it.
12. Beyond the Tomb
When Howard Phillips Lovecraft died, early in the morning of March
15, 1937, he was only forty-six years and seven months old. I
suppose it would be somewhat inaccurate to say that those who
knew him I were shocked and surprised to hear of his death at so I
early an age, although of course they were deeply saddened at the
death of their dear friend and comrade. But Lovecraft had always
been sickly and had lived much of his life like a semi-invalid. Donald
A. Wollheim, who knew Lovecraft, tells me that it was quite obvious
to anyone who met him during his last years that something was
seriously wrong with his health. His sickly pallor, his thinness, and
his “air of an invalid” all suggested that he was not at all a well man.

The news, however, caught most of his friends unawares. August

Derleth had gone into the country for the day; there, in the marshes
below his home in Sauk City, Wisconsin, he had strolled with his
morning’s mail and a copy of Thoreau’s Journal, heading for a
favorite spot where it was his custom to sit in the sun and read.
Among the day’s mail was a letter from Donald Wandrei’s brother,
Howard, who was then in New York and who was one of the first to
hear that Lovecraft was dead. Derleth recalled that he read the letter
during his walk into the marshes; stunned, his book set aside and
forgotten, he sat down at a railroad trestle beside a brook and
thought of his friend and mentor. It occurred to him then that
Lovecraft’s best stories should be rescued from the oblivion of old
pulp magazines and preserved in the dignity of a hardcover book. He
could not have dreamed at the time how this thought was to grow
into a publishing enterprise that was to occupy much of his time for
the rest of his life.

In Chicago, word of Lovecraft’s death came to Farnsworth Wright,

who was putting together his June issue. The two men had had their
differences, surely, and it may have rankled Wright for a long time
that Lovecraft had been Henneberger’s first choice for the editorial
chair of Weird Tales. But Wright sat down at his desk deeply moved
and wrote a eulogy that ran to a column and a half:

Sad indeed is the news that tells us of H. P. Lovecraft’s death. He

was a titan of weird and fantastic literature, whose literary
achievements and impeccable craftsmanship were acclaimed
throughout the English-speaking world. He was only forty-six years
of age, yet had built up a following such as few authors ever had.

Wright went on to describe what he knew of Lovecraft’s childhood

and life interests, and to discuss his many accomplishments,
concluding sadly:

His death is a serious loss to weird and fantastic fiction, but to the
editors of Weird Tales the personal loss takes precedence. We
admired him for his great literary achievements, but we loved him for
himself; for he was a courtly and noble gentleman, and a dear friend.
Peace be to his shade!

I suppose the most deeply stricken of Lovecraft’s friends were the

younger writers, those still not quite beyond the neophyte phase.
Some, like Derleth, were beginning to find broader recognition of
their talents than even the pages of Weird Tales could offer.1* One
such writer, just getting started, was Robert Bloch. Years later, Bloch
was asked how much of an influence Lovecraft had been on his own
work. He replied, “A tremendous influence. I consciously imitated
him for several years, as did Henry Kuttner and a number of other,
then-neophyte, writers. He criticized my writing and helped direct it
through correspondence.” Elsewhere, Bloch wrote that, had he
known how serious Lovecraft’s condition really was towards the end,
he would if necessary have crawled on his hands and knees to have
been at his bedside.

Letters from Lovecraft’s fellow writers, both those whom he had

known personally and those who had merely shared a contents page
or two with him, began to pour into the office of Weird Tales—there
being no better forum than the letters column of the magazine to
which he had contributed so many stories. From New York City,
Manly Wade Wellman wrote, sadly remarking: “I had hoped to meet
Mr. Lovecraft, and mourn my ill luck in not doing so; I can say, at
least, that he was my early inspiration and constant study in this
field, as he must have been for many younger writers ... let me
express my shocked feeling of sorrow and loss at the passing of this
consistently fine artist.”

From California, Clark Ashton Smith wrote: “I— alas! —never met
him, but we had corresponded for about seventeen years, and I felt
that I knew him better than most people with whom I was thrown in
daily intimacy... there are few tales of his that I have not read and re-
read many times... I am profoundly saddened at the news of [his]
death after a month of painful illness. The loss seems an intolerable
one, and I am sure that it will be felt deeply and permanently by the
whole weird fiction public. Most of all it will be felt by the myriad
friends who knew Lovecraft through face-to-face meeting or
correspondence.”

Edmond Hamilton wrote from Pennsylvania: “I just heard the news of

H. P. Lovecraft’s recent death. This is quite a shock, coming so soon
after the death of Howard. While I never met either of them, I have
been appearing with them in Weird Tales for so long that I had a dim
feeling of acquaintance... It is too bad that he is gone—there will
never be another like him.”

Henry Kuttner, then living in Beverley Hills, California, wrote: “I’ve

been feeling extremely depressed about Lovecraft’s death. Even
now I can’t realize it. He was my literary idol since the days of The
Horror at Red Hook, and lately a personal friend as well. The loss to
literature is a very great one, but the loss to HPL’s friends is greater.
He seemed, somehow, to have been an integral part of my literary
life—and the shock was more severe because I had not known that
his illness was serious.”

From Brooklyn, New York, Seabury Quinn wrote: “Lovecraft, whom I

had the pleasure of knowing personally, was both a scholar and a
gentleman, and his writings disclosed both his scholarship and his
gentility, as well as a genius which has not been observable since
the death of Poe and Hawthorne. We who knew him personally shall
miss his quiet humor and his always-interesting conversation;
thousands of those who bad never met the man will join with us in
deploring the loss of his contributions to a field of literature which he
had made peculiarly his own. God rest his soul.”

These are selections from only a few of the letters that came pouring
into Weird Tales from famous writers and unknown readers alike,
each letter filled with shock and sorrow and with the certain
cognizance of the very great importance of Lovecraft’s contribution
to the literature of the macabre.

I think the most moving of all the tributes and eulogies was one
written by Clark Ashton Smith.

Smith, himself rather frail and much of a recluse in those days, was
living alone in a small rustic cabin in the wooded hills just outside of
Auburn, a small California town, when the news of Lovecraft’s death
reached him. Because he was alone, we have no record of the
emotion that shook him, but I feel certain that his fine aristocratic
features saddened and that his eyes misted as he thought of the
friend, only three years his senior, who now was gone.

He sat down at his desk and wrote:

Lover of hills and fields and towns antique,

How hast thou wandered hence

On ways not found before,

Beyond the dawnward spires of Providence?

Hast thou gone forth to seek

Some older bourn than these—

Some Arkham of the prime and central wizardries?

Or, with familiar felidae,

Dost now some new and secret wood explore,

A little past the senses’ farther wall—

Where spring and sunset charm the eternal path

From Earth to ether in dimensions nemoral?

Or hath the Silver Key

Opened perchance for thee

Wonders and dreams and worlds ulterior?

Hast thou gone home to Ulthar or to Pnath?

Has the high king who reigns on dim Kadath

Called back his courtly, sage ambassador?

Or darkling Cthulhu sent

The sign which makes thee now a councilor

Within that foundered fortress of the deep

Where the Old Ones stir in sleep

Till mighty temblors shake their slumbering continent?

Smith completed the poem, with seventeen additonal lines, and

mailed it to Farnsworth Wright.

Weird Tales published it in the July 1937 issue.

There were also tributes in verse from Emil Petaja and Francis
Flagg, August Derleth and Henry Kuttner, Frank Belknap Long and
Vincent Starrett.

But ultimately the most lasting and important of memorials to

Lovecraft’s memory was that created by Derleth and Donald
Wandrei. It grew from the idea that crossed Derleth’s mind as he sat
there by the railroad trestle in that Wisconsin spring morning, holding
Howard Wandrei’s letter in his hand.

Years later Derleth recalled the thoughts that had run through his
mind that day:

I had no illusions about the difficulty of persuading a New York

publisher to bring out such a collection, for, in the broadest sense,
Lovecraft was relatively obscure, he wrote in a vein for which there
has never been any very large audience in the United States, and all
his previous submissions of book manuscripts to publishers like
Putnam, Knopf and others had been futile—though it should be said
in favor of the publishers and their readers that Lovecraft, negative in
his attitude about his work, customarily submitted dog-eared, hardly
legible, single-spaced manuscripts, which were certainly enough to
discourage the most hardy readers and editors.

Derleth returned home and later in the day wrote to Donald Wandrei
suggesting that something should certainly be done to keep
Lovecraft’s better stories in print. Wandrei replied to the effect that
not only the stories but the poems as well, and even the
“marvelously instructive and entertaining letters” Lovecraft had
written to his many friends, should be preserved.

Derleth swiftly compiled the manuscript of a book of the better

Lovecraft stories. The title was an obvious choice: The Outsider and
Others—obvious not only because The Outsider was an all-time
favorite among Weird Tales readers, but also because Lovecraft
himself had been an outsider in his own time.

In his memoir of this incident Derleth neglected to record yet a third

reason, which he may have forgotten—that Weird Tales at one time
had briefly considered bringing out a Lovecraft book under the title
The Outsider. This notion probably had been allowed to lapse
because of Weird Tales’ unfortunate experience with the one book of
stories reprinted from early issues which they did publish. This
volume, entitled The Moon Terror, included stories by Vincent
Starrett and A. G. Birch, and that famous story, Ooze, by Anthony M.
Rud, which was the only memorable tale in the historic first issue.
(The book also included a story called An Adventure in the Fourth
Dimension, by none other than Farnsworth Wright.)

Looking back on the event, I get the impression that The Moon
Terror was one of the most resounding flops in the history of book
publishing. The book is advertised in the earliest copy of Weird Tales
in my collection, the issue of August 1928, and flipping through the
years I notice those early ads vigorously hail the book as (variously)
“The Popular Book of the Year” (1928), “While They Last! The Book
Requested by Thousands” (1929), and “Tremendously Popular!”
(1930).

By 1934, Weird Tales was getting a bit desperate, and offered the
thing free if you bought a subscription to the magazine for $1.50. In
1935 poor Farnsworth Wright was pushing it in his December issue,
obviously with an eye on the Christmas shopper, as “A Valuable
Gift.” By 1937 he was back to charging hard cash for it, with the
headline “While They Last! At Special Close-out Price—50c.” They
continued to “last” into 1939, and by 1940 Wright was warning his
book- hungry horde of readers that “supplies are strictly limited,” and
I sometimes wonder if they ever did manage to unload the thing.

At any rate, you can readily understand why Weird Tales thought
twice about bringing out another book.

Derleth sent the manuscript of The Outsider and Others to his own
publisher: Scribners. “They were sympathetic to the project and
recognized the literary value of Lovecraft’s fiction; but in the end they
were forced to reject the manuscript because the cost of producing
so bulky a book, combined with the public’s then sturdy resistance to
buying short story collections and the comparative obscurity of H. P.
Lovecraft as a writer, made the project financially prohibitive,”
Derleth later recalled. The book went to Simon & Schuster next, and
drew much the same response.

As Derleth told the tale:

It was at this point that the idea of publishing the omnibus under an
imprint of our own occurred to me. I wrote again to Donald Wandrei,
setting forth my plan. Both of us were impecunious writers—and how
rare is the writer who is not!—but I was at that time building a home
for which a local bank had advanced a considerable sum (not,
however, without four times the amount of the loan in mortgage and
insurance policies collateral, as is the invariable custom of banks),
and it seemed to me that one manifest course was open to a Would-
be publisher—to advertise for advance prepaid orders, and to pay off
the printer from the sum of my loan. To this, Donald Wandrei added
what small sum he could scrape together at that time, at great
personal sacrifice, amounting to 20% of the production cost; and,
with the full co-operation of Lovecraft’s surviving aunt, Mrs. Annie E.
Phillips Gamwell, and Robert H. Barlow, whom Lovecraft had named
his literary executor... the project took shape.

The two neophyte publishers chose “Arkham House” as the name of

their newly-launched enterprise, which at that time they envisioned
at lasting only long enough to publish three large-sized volumes of
Lovecraftiana. Derleth recalled: “There was never any question
about the name of our publishing house. Arkham House suggested
itself at once, since it was Lovecraft’s own well-known, widely-used
place-name for legend-haunted Salem. It seemed to us that this was
fitting and that Lovecraft himself would have approved it
enthusiastically.”

And so plans were underway to publish the first major collection of

Lovecraft in hardcover. A printer and binder had to be located,
money had to be raised to finance the project, advertising had to be
planned—there were many things to be done.

But it was started....

The young Florida poet and fantasy connoisseur, Robert H. Barlow,
was the person named by Lovecraft to assume control over his
literary properties. Barlow made the long trek up from Florida to pack
up Lovecraft’s voluminous papers, of which he was now in charge.

For months after Lovecraft’s death the letters column of Weird Tales
reverberated with his name, as readers and fellow-writers expressed
their anguish at his death. Farnsworth Wright was anxious to
preserve in print any unpublished material Lovecraft might have left.
During Lovecraft’s last year, he had published, in his January issue,
The Thing on the Doorstep; in his March issue he had reprinted The
Picture in the House. In the issue that followed the announcement of
Lovecraft’s death—July—Wright published a sonnet that H.P.L. had
written to Virgil Finlay. Obviously, he could reprint more stories from
past issues—but he was hungry to get new, unpublished stories with
the Lovecraft byline.

Weird Tales, at this point, seems to have been having another bout
of financial troubles of the sort that plagued the magazine off and on
throughout its entire career. Trouble was again cropping up; the
magazine had been sold to Short Stories, Inc., and the offices were
moved to 9 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Farnsworth Wright
retained his position, even moving to New York himself, but he was
an old man now, and beginning to fail. With a new management to
satisfy, Weird Tales had to show some comfortable profits.

One thing that would help was new Lovecraft material, for not only
had Lovecraft been one of Wright’s most popular writers, with a
large, devoted and enthusiastic following, but the grief of his loss
was still fresh in the minds of the readers. Derleth and Wandrei were
obviously the people to talk to, for, although Barlow had the
manuscripts, it was the two older men who were actively engaged in
preserving the work of their friend. Derleth obligingly sent Wright the
text of a few of the early Dunsanian stories that Lovecraft had
published decades before in some of the amateur magazines, and a
batch of poems. Wright did not pass them up, but rushed them into
print. Perhaps now he wished he had not so capriciously rejected all
of those stories...

Throughout that year, 1938, Wright published a Lovecraft poem in

five different issues, besides reprinting The Tree and The Nameless
City, which were the tales Derleth had sent him. Poems were all right
—they kept Lovecraft on the contents page—but it was stories he
really wanted. There was no telling what unpublished manuscripts
lurked undiscovered among the Lovecraft papers which Barlow had
carted home to Florida.

Barlow proved uncommunicative and uncooperative. He never

catalogued the manuscripts, never seems to have even gone
through them, and had no idea what was there. His distant manner
and the time-lag in his replies to a letter alienated both Wright and
Wandrei, who found him impossible to work with; Derleth, on the
other hand, carefully maintained a friendly relationship with the aloof
Floridian and occasionally got some cooperation from him. But not
much.

Early in 1939, Wright must have been delighted to receive in the mail
an unpublished manuscript with the Lovecraft byline. It came from an
old friend and correspondent of Lovecraft’s and it was called The Evil
Clergyman. Neither Derleth nor Wandrei had ever heard of it. While
the story was so markedly inferior to the Master’s later
accomplishments as to rouse grave doubts of its authenticity in the
mind of anyone but an editor, Wright snapped it up and rushed it into
the April issue, changing the title to The Wicked Clergyman, for
some Wrightish reason, and hailing it as “a brief posthumous tale by
a great master of eery fiction.” I get the impression that the tale was
included in that April issue at the last moment—too late even to get
Lovecraft’s name on the cover. I may be wrong here, but significantly
the story was not announced as forthcoming in the previous issue,
which implies that it was a last-minute arrival.

The readers were probably puzzled at this inconsequential,

unpolished little tale, which read so unlike the last few stories they
had seen from Lovecraft’s hand. There may even have been a few
suspicions of a fraud; as it eventually came out, however, the story
was genuinely the work of Lovecraft. Only—it was not a story at all,
but a lengthy excerpt from one of Lovecraft’s letters, describing a
fantastic dream.

While Farnsworth Wright was struggling along with Weird Tales,

Derleth and Wandrei were moving towards a momentous event, the
publication of the very first book to bear the imprint of Arkham
House. They selected “the nearest, most widely-known printer who
could do a complete operation,” the Collegiate Press of the George
W. Banta Company of Menasha, Wisconsin. His plant was a trifle
over a hundred miles northeast of Derleth’s home town of Sauk City,
which he was shortly to put on the map. For the jacket designer, they
selected the distinguished and popular magazine illustrator and
gallery artist, Virgil Finlay, whose work had appeared for so many
years in Weird Tales that he was an intrinsic part of the magazine in
the minds of the fans.

The Outsider and Others was a whale of a book; they packed thirty-
six of Lovecraft’s stories into it, and his famous essay “Supernatural
Horror in Literature,” plus an introduction. The text ran to five
hundred and sixty-six pages of type, and rather small type at that.
(For The Outsider, they used a linotype Caslon typeface, although
later books under the Arkham House imprint generally employed a
Garamond face. The paper selected was White Winnebago
Eggshell, which continued to be used throughout the history of the
House; the binding was Bancroft Arrestox black natural finish, soon
to be replaced with Holliston Black Novelex. Once the format was
established, Arkham House books did not vary through the years;
today the House still employs the same printer and uses the same
typeface, paper and binding, which lends a remarkable air of
continuity to its publications.)

Derleth and Wandrei began running large ads in Weird Tales,

soliciting advance prepaid orders, using for incentive a reduced
price. Copies ordered before publication cost only $3.50; copies
ordered subsequent to publication would cost $5.00. In the last days
of 1939, the books arrived at Derleth’s home and shipments began.

Orders trickled in with astonishing slowness, considering the high

regard Weird Tales readers had for Lovecraft, and the foofaraw
resulting from his untimely demise. And depressingly small orders
they were. Only 1,268 copies were bound in all, according to Derleth,
and the fans were so dishearteningly uneager to purchase the
volume that it took four solid years to sell out. The reader reaction to
the birth of Arkham House must have been a genuine blow to
Derleth and Wandrei, especially to Derleth, who had sunk a
considerable sum in the venture and would have been in serious
financial trouble if he failed to recoup his expenses. He has recorded
that, by publication time, a mere one hundred and fifty advance
orders had come trickling in; nor did post-publication orders exactly
flood the local mails, despite good publicity and generous notice
given the launching of the new venture in Publishers’ Weekly and
other trade media.

Hindsight usually gives an amusing perspective to events: Derleth

recalls that some purchasers complained loudly over the price (and
$3.50, for a book of such size and wordage, was a remarkably
decent price even by the standards of 1939). Doubtless such
parsimonious souls winced in horror years later, when copies of The
Outsider and Others became scarce and much sought-after, often
commanding prices many times the decent sum asked by Derleth
and Wandrei in the beginning. Derleth laughingly remembers one
would-be purchaser who wrote him a vituperative letter after
publication, when Derleth returned his check for $3.50, explaining
the post-publication price was $5.00. This particular gentleman,
clutching his purse with an iron grip, stoutly swore he would never
pay so inflated a price... yet ten years later, according to another
letter, he felt fortunate to have found a copy on sale at only $25.00!

The rarity and value of The Outsider continued to climb steadily, until
by now it has become one of the most sought-after collectors’ items
in the history of fantasy. Copies regularly go for $100 and even for
$150; indeed, a recent article by collector-bookdealer Gerry de la
Ree claims that by 1971, copies of The Outsider command prices
such as $175—and even prices as high as $250 are not unheard of.
Many the impecunious collector and bibliophile have yearned for a
time machine, if only to go back to 1939 and buy a dozen or so
copies of The Outsider at pre-publication prices, and then return to
the present time, in which the lot would be worth several thousand
dollars.

***

1* Derleth had turned, at least in part, from weird fiction to the writing
of regional mainstream fiction, and he recalled that at the time of
Lovecraft’s death he was midway through the first draft of one of his
most distinguished novels, Wind Over Wisconsin. His publishers
were the famous firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons, who became
celebrated as the publishers of Thomas Wolfe and Ernest
Hemingway. At an astonishingly youthful age, Derleth had already
passed beyond the meagre accomplishments Lovecraft had
achieved.
13. The House in the Pines
Discouraging as the slow sales of the first Arkham House book were,
Derleth and Wandrei felt committed to the task of preserving the best
work of their friend and mentor in the dignity of hardcovers, and so
persevered. They had discovered an interesting fact: there were just
possibly enough enthusiasts of the macabre in the forty-eight states
to make a small publishing program pay for itself (in time, anyway),
so long as press runs were limited to something less than fifteen
hundred copies and prices were held back to $3.50 a copy or less. It
way possible to run a small publishing house on mail orders alone.

So they began, in a small, cautious way, to experiment. Two years

after The Outsider launched the House, Derleth assembled a smaller
book, a collection of his own supernatural fiction entitled Someone in
the Dark, and they published it in a printing of 1,415 copies, priced at
a mere $2.00 per copy. The following year, 1942, the partners put
together a splendid first collection of Clark Ashton Smith’s best
fantasies and horror tales called Out of Space and Time. The book
was a random sampling of Smith’s work, covering the spectrum of
his fiction, and included a few tales from each of his major story
series, those of Zothique, Hyperborea, Averoigne, and Poseidonis,
as well as some of his unaligned supernatural tales and a few pieces
of his peculiar science fiction. The jacket was designed by the young
Hannes Bok, a weird artist of extraordinary gifts whose talents had
been brought to the attention of Farnsworth Wright by a then-
teenaged, enthusiastic fan named Ray Bradbury. (Bok rapidly had
come to rival even Virgil Finlay in the esteem of Weird Tales
readership, as we shall shortly see.)

In the beginning, at least, the new Arkham House was on shaky

financial footing. The first printing and binding bills had been paid for
through cash supplied by Donald Wandrei and through funds lifted
from a large bank loan Derleth had secured in order to build his
home. It was to be some years before The Outsider paid for itself,
but Derleth paid back the loan through his own personal income from
his writing. And in time he built his house, a gracious two-story
wooden frame building set well back from the road and nestled
under old pines on a country road some miles outside of Sauk City.
The house had a thatched roof, a fieldstone chimney, and was
paneled throughout in knotty pine; Derleth’s office-cum-study was a
long, low, slant-ceilinged room on the second floor, lined with his
collection of Smith’s sculptures, with a huge stone fireplace and
French doors that opened to a vista of thick green pines and rolling
prairie. He called his new home Place of Hawks, because of a hawk
nest discovered when the contractors were clearing the land.

The big, cool, shady house in the pines was, in effect, Arkham
House itself. Books were at first stockpiled in the finished basement,
where Derleth kept his excellent collection of mystery and horror
fiction; in time a special outbuilding had to be constructed to serve as
the Arkham House warehouse. No one, back at the beginning, could
have foreseen that the House would grow to such proportions as to
require its own warehouse; the venture had first been proposed
merely to preserve Lovecraft’s work in book form. But very soon, as
we have seen, this limitation was wisely abandoned and the scope of
Arkham House widened broadly.

The experiment of widening their first conception of the purpose of

Arkham House to include not just Lovecraft’s work alone, but the
work of a broad range of the more popular contributors to Weird
Tales was a happy one. The originator of the idea was neither
Derleth nor Wandrei, as it happened, but William C. Weber, then an
editor at Scribner’s, who had been handling Derleth’s own work.
Derleth apparently had submitted the manuscript of Someone in the
Dark to Scribner’s (as was and is customary, his contracts with
Scribner’s doubtless contained a clause to the effect that they were
to have first refusal of his next book-length manuscript). Weber
suggested the collection might best be published under the Arkham
House colophon, since a small publishing house specializing in, and
identified with horror fiction could probably do better at the task of
reaching the right readership than could a large, unspecialized
publisher like the big New York firm.

Over the years from that day to this, Derleth has frequently been
accused—by innuendo, at least—of running Arkham House as “The
August Derleth Vanity Press”; it is a pleasure to help scotch this
allegation by explaining where the idea of the first non-Lovecraft
book to be published by the House originated. Derleth himself had
considerable qualms over the notion, as he noted in his memoir,
Thirty Years of Arkham House (published in 1969).

I had some soul-struggling to do about this proposal; for one thing, I

disliked anything that smacked of vanity publication, but it was soon
pointed out to me that the difference between sound business and
vanity in publishing was the profit motive—and publication of
Someone in the Dark did indeed prove profitable in the end, much
more so for me than if a New York publisher had done the book, for it
was not necessary to share reprint earnings. Publication of this
second book had the effect of keeping the Arkham House imprint
before the public eye while other Lovecraft books were in
preparation.

Shortly after Arkham House published its third book, the Clark
Ashton Smith collection, Derleth lost the assistance of his partner
and co-founder, Donald Wandrei. The United States had gone to war
by this time, and Wandrei had been inducted into the Army, where he
would be far too busy for the next four years or so, battling the Axis
or whatever, to share in the publishing work. He ended up in the
artillery and eventually became a sergeant; thereafter he limited his
participation to work on the Lovecraft letters.

With the sales of Out of Space and Time rolling in a bit more briskly,
perhaps, than Derleth had dared to hope, the experimental venture
had become a pleasurable and demanding and even rewarding
business. Derleth had learned by now, from hard facts and figures in
his ledger, that $2.00 per book was too low a price for a comfortable
ratio between costs and profits and $5.00 was too high a price for
most readers—although, even at $5.00, The Outsider sold out to the
very last copy. (In time, that is.) Derleth had learned an important
fact of life in this kind of small specialty publishing: His books, unlike
those issued by the major publishers, had no “season.” They sold
slowly, but steadily, all year round; and they kept on selling, year
after year, until they sold out to the last copy. Derleth did not have to
worry, as did major publishers, about the seasonal competition, the
reviewers, the distributors. Nor, so long as he held a tight rein on his
publishing schedule, did he have to worry about over-extending
himself to the point where he owed more money than was coming in;
by limiting his program to a book a year, on the average, and by
using a little patience, he managed to keep the House not only in the
black, but also in business.

And so, in 1943, after the Smith book was a year old, Derleth
published Beyond the Wall of Sleep, a second gleaning of
Lovecraftiana which had been edited with Wandrei’s help, even
though the latter was now in khaki. BTWOS (as Arkhamophiles refer
to it) was even slightly bigger than The Outsider and also sold at
$5.00, but this time without the prepublication offer. Derleth had
learned by then that if he simply waited long enough, such a book
would sell out, and he would have ordered a print run totaling even
more copies than were printed of The Outsider if he could have, but
the wartime paper shortage was beginning to bite into the publishing
business, and restrictions forced him to cut back his order to only
1,217 copies.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep was a mammoth book and represented a

well-chosen sampling of what was left of Lovecraft. It covered the
range of his work from some of his all-but-unknown marginalia, such
as “Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity,” and his
Commonplace Book, wherein he jotted down a lengthy compilation
of unused story-ideas (which Derleth was, years later, to plunder for
his “posthumus collaborations”), to a deliciously tongue-in-cheek
spoof of serious bibliographical writing called “History and
Chronology of the Necronomicon.” There were also no fewer than
twenty-seven tales, including three short novels. These ran the
gamut from Lovecraft’s early Dunsanian fiction, such as The Quest
of Iranon and The Doom that came to Sarnath, through prose
poems, such as Ex Oblivione and What the Moon Brings, to straight
horror tales like The Unnamable and The Hound. Also included in
that total were some of his revisions, collaborations with Hazel Heald
and Zealia Bishop. The collection was rounded out with two or three
dozen of his poems, including the excellent and evocative Fungi
from Yuggoth sonnet sequence. The jacket art was a photograph of
some of the weirder and more grotesque of the sculptures
Lovecraft’s friend Clark Ashton Smith bad done.

With BTWOS on sale, the following year saw Derleth well in control
of the publishing game, at least as far as the genre of the macabre
went. He had succeeded in reaching the hard-core readership of
Weird Tales, and had begun to cultivate thereamong a cult of
devotees who could be counted on to purchase each and every
Arkham House title. He also saw quite clearly that library sales and a
certain percentage of “general” readers in bookshops could be
counted on to squander a few dollars for some good supernatural
fiction. A market for the macabre was there, all right, and no other
publisher had ever bothered even to try to tap its sales potential. The
larger publishing houses went after the big money, the best sellers,
and, outside of an occasional anthology, and an even more
infrequent original novel of the supernatural, did not think the horror
fans worth bothering about. Here, in this neglected area of
publishing, Derleth saw his chance. In his memoir on Arkham House
he wrote:

Since the general domain of the macabre was so limited, I felt that it
would be necessary, if I meant to enter serious publishing, to effect
as much of a “corner” of the market as possible. And to that end I
signed to contracts the foremost authors on both sides of the
Atlantic... modeling our contracts on those I had signed with Charles
Scribner’s Sons.

Derleth began cautiously and gradually stepping up his program. In

1944, the House released four books, collections by Donald Wandrei
and Henry S. Whitehead, another Smith collection and a third
volume of Lovecraft’s odds and ends, aptly entitled Marginalia. In
1945, building his publishing program by small increments, he went
up to five titles, including a first collection of Robert Bloch’s stories, a
second Derleth collection, an original unpublished novel, Witch
House, by Evangeline Walton. In 1946 he published eight books.
Arkham House was off and running.

It soon became evident to fans, readers, and collectors that in

Arkham House they had a unique and invaluable publishing venture
—a publisher who specialized completely in fantastic literature. And,
even more rare, a publisher who knew the good stuff from the bad
stuff, and whose taste could be trusted.

Gradually, Derleth’s overall conception of the purpose of Arkham

House settled into a path from which it never diverged. His selection
of books and authors became fairly evenly divided into two major
groups. On the one hand, he created hardcover collections of the
better work of most of the more popular and gifted authors in the
Weird Tales stable, with considerable preference shown for those
writers who had been friends and associates of H. P. Lovecraft.

In this area, before Arkham House had rounded out its first full
decade with its forty-second publication, Derleth put into hardcover
H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Donald
Wandrei, Henry S. Whitehead, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long,
Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Carl Jacobi, and Seabury Quinn—
eleven writers closely associated with the history of Weird Tales.
(Derleth told me privately that he had very much wished, in those
days, to preserve the best early work from WT of C. L. Moore and
Henry Kuttner but could not get them to agree to his terms.)

To these writers, primarily pulp fiction writers, he added a few others

who were not so firmly identified with Weird Tales. In particular, he
published a fine collection of stories by Fritz Leiber, most of which
had first appeared in WTs only main competitor of any quality, John
W. Campbell, jr.’s Unknown. Derleth also, in 1946, ventured briefly
into the burgeoning field of science fiction, which was then just
beginning to come to the attention of the New York publishers, by
bringing out an historic first edition of A. E. Van Vogt’s sf classic,
Sian, from Campbell’s other magazine, Astounding Science Fiction.
Derleth had extensive plans for broadening the scope of Arkham
House to include science fiction as well as weird fantasy. He
injudiciously announced as forthcoming Fritz Leiber’s novel Gather,
Darkness! (also to have been a reprint from Astounding). With other
books he planned to get an early comer on the rising popularity of sf;
in this aim he was frustrated, however, since the New York
publishers got Gather, Darkness! away from him.

The other major classification into which Arkham House authors fell
during that first decade in the House’s history was somewhat more
literary. Along with the popular Weird Tales crew, Derleth
approached the most distinguished of living weird fiction writers on
the other side of the Atlantic. He was not rebuffed: his entry into
those literary strata (a bit more elegantly rarified than the steamy
pulp magazine lowlands) was eased by his own reputation and
accomplishments, for Derleth was by now an internationally
recognized author and poet; a regionalist, in the sense that Thomas
Hardy was a regionalist.

Some of the writers he signed to contract did, however, tend to be a

bit sniffy, dealing with a mere American. Especially those authors
with titles. Derleth recently discussed this period with me and
assured me that while Lord Dunsany was a delightful gentleman, as
friendly and cooperative as one could have wished, other of the
British gentry were a bit tough to bear, such as Lady Cynthia
Asquith, who was not exactly over-cooperative—at first, anyway. “As
soon as I caught on to the nature of the problem,” Derleth told me
with a smile, “I made certain that she understood that my great-
grandfather had been a French count. We got along famously
thereafter!”

Such problems quickly resolved, Arkham House launched a series of

books by many of the most celebrated of living writers, and before its
first decade was concluded the House catalogue sparkled with such
distinguished names as Algernon Blackwood, J. Sheridan Le Fanu,
L. P. Hartley, William Hope Hodgson, A. E. Coppard, H. Russell
Wakefield, Lord Dunsany, and S. Fowler Wright, to say nothing of
Lady Asquith. Derleth has subsequently followed these names with
those of Colin Wilson, Arthur Machen and Walter de la Mare, and
has long since announced at least two books by M. P. Shiel.

As Arkham House grew and became increasingly a full-time

occupation for Derleth, he did not neglect Weird Tales, where
everything had begun. Wright’s readers still yearned for more
Lovecraft, and a poem or two now and then was not sufficient to still
their cries. In desperation, Wright continued to turn to August
Derleth, and Derleth continued to search out Lovecraftiana for the
magazine.

Whenever possible, Derleth came up with a Lovecraft story; when

such were not forthcoming, Derleth hearkened back to the days
when he and Mark Schorer had ventured briefly into Lovecraftian
territory with the writing of The Lair of the Star-Spawn, and
concocted some Cthulhuoid fiction of his own for Weird Tales. The
first of these was a quite respectable yam called The Return of
Hastur, which introduced a new divinity into the pantheon (new, that
is, to the Mythos; Hastur had been invented more than forty years
earlier by Ambrose Bierce). The tale appeared in the issue of Weird
Tales dated March, 1939. It was followed by another, called The
Sandwin Compact, in November, 1940.

These pastiches—rather good pastiches, in fact, although Derleth

was to write very much better ones before long—helped to satisfy
the readership a little (and, incidentally, helped to keep the memory
of Lovecraft fresh in the readers’ minds—a fact certainly not
overlooked in the mind of the publisher of The Outsider and Others!).
But what was really needed was a good, solid work of Lovecraft’s
Cthulhuoid fiction.

And Derleth and Wandrei were hot on the track of just that: a lost
Lovecraft masterpiece few eyes had ever seen and few people had
ever heard of. I refer to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which
Lovecraft had written a dozen years before but which had not ever
been submitted anywhere, and which was presumed still extant. A
careful going-through of the Lovecraft papers, which Barlow still
held, turned up a chunk of the manuscript; desperate queries were
fired off to all known Lovecraft correspondents; piece by piece a
complete manuscript was painstakingly assembled and eventually
dispatched to the Weird Tales offices at 9 Rockefeller Plaza.

I imagine Farnsworth Wright would have been delighted beyond

words to receive The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for as readers of
that tale know well, it is a splendid work of fiction; one of the best
things Lovecraft ever wrote. But it was a young woman named
Dorothy McEwraith who guided the tale through press, for
Farnsworth Wright was dead. The old man who had commanded the
helm of the magazine since Edwin Baird fell from favor in 1924 had
long been failing. Now he was gone.

A moving eulogy by longtime Weird Tales contributor Seabury Quinn

announced his death in the issue of November, 1940.1* Quinn wrote:

There is today hardly a writer of fantasy whose success does not

date from the encouragement he received from Mr. Wright, and there
is certainly no one engaged in creative work who ever dealt with
Farnsworth Wright who does not think kindly of him. To those of us
who were privileged to know him personally, the loss is even greater.
We knew him as a cultured gentleman, a charming host, an
incomparably congenial companion, and a true and loyal friend... as
for his abilities, his work provides the finest monument possible. In
the old files of Weird Tales can be read the biography of a man
whose genius made possible a magazine which was and is truly
unique. As to his epitaph: if it is true that in imitation lies the sincerest
form of flattery, Farnsworth Wright has been eloquently acclaimed.
When he assumed the editorial chair of Weird Tales almost twenty
years ago he was a lone adventurer setting out to bring a highly
specialized form of entertainment to the reading public. A recent
issue of Author & Journalist lists twenty-two magazines devoted
exclusively to fantasy of pseudoscientific fiction. Could any greater or
more sincere compliment be paid his vision or his work?
Wright’s health had been failing him for some time, and eventually
he had been forced to resign his post and turn the magazine over to
another hand to guide it The last issue which carried his name on the
contents page was dated March, 1940. As for the new editrix, Miss
Mcllwraith, she was a diminutive blonde Scotswoman with a wry,
puckish sense of humor, and she took up her new executive tasks
swiftly and professionally. If the readers, long familiar with the style
and taste of Farnsworth Wright, had any qualms about what might
happen to their favorite magazine under the aegis of a newcomer—a
stranger; and a lady, to boot! —she soon laid their fears to rest. The
magazine continued to print the same authors and the same kind of
stories as it had during Wright’s sixteen-year regime.

A few changes, unobtrusive ones, did soon emerge-The new artist

Hannes Bok had done a cover or two for Farnsworth Wright, indeed,
one of his most gorgeous canvases adorned the last issue which
bore Wright’s name. Bok began to appear much more frequently
thereafter. Another of his covers appeared on the first issue which
carried Miss Mcllwraith’s name as editor, and he rapidly became the
most popular cover artist of the magazine’s new era. Miss Mcllwraith
seemed quite fond of his particular kind of art; he began to dominate
the interior illustrations. As Margaret Brundage and Virgil Finlay
began to dwindle, Bok was on the rise. With the third Mcllwraith
issue, the editrix had Bok design a colophon for the “Shape of Thrills
to Come” page on which the stories in the next issue were plugged.
For the fifth Mcllwraith issue, he designed a new colophon for the
contents page; the colophon was to head the contents page for the
next ten years. The number of Bok illustrations in each issue rose
rapidly. Under Wright he had been doing an average of three interior
illustrations per issue; by the seventh Mcllwraith issue, dated May,
1941, he was all over the magazine, and besides doing the cover
and the headings for the contents page and the “Thrills to Come”
blurb, he had no fewer than six interior illustrations.

Having just taken over the magazine, Miss Mcllwraith was doubdess
delighted to secure the “new” Lovecraft novel. It was a major coup
for Weird Tales, and she was quick to capitalize on it to the fullest
possible degree.

The magazine had always shunned the pulp practice of blurbing

forthcoming yarns in bottom-of-the-page items, reserving such blurbs
for a dignified page advertising the next issue. Breaking with this
tradition,

- Miss Mcllwraith ran a special half-page news item in her March

issue, under a thundering headline that read

LOVECRAFT MANUSCRIPT DISCOVERED

Will Be Published for First Time

in WEIRD TALES

That was on page 45; on page 102, the regular “Shape of Thrills to
Come” page, the news about Lovecraft shoved everything else in the
next issue into a smallish box and most of the page was filled with
headlines like

THE RETURN OF THE GREAT LOVECRAFT

—and so on. The excitement continued with a brief capsule interview

with Derleth and Wandrei (reproduced below), which was featured
under a headline that ran—

THE LAST OF THE LOVECRAFTS

As far as is known, this is the “Last of the Lovecrafts” —although

there is a bare possibility that Weird Tales may be able to present
just one more at some future date. August W. Derleth, discoverer of
Charles Ward, writes: “A year ago Donald Wandrei and I learnt that
there existed two unpublished HOWARD LOVECRAFT novels, The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dream-Quest of Unknown
Kadath. We found the first fifty-one pages of Kadath, and all of Ward
last summer. To the best of our knowledge the remainder of Kadath
has been lost, though we are still searching. There is no other
Lovecraft story—and the possibility of Kadath turning up is remote.”

Here, then, is a chance that you cannot afford to miss —for this
novel is the very last of the LOVECRAFT works... unless, of course,
August Derleth’s quest for The Dream-Quest should be successful.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward certainly dominated the May, 1941
issue. The name LOVECRAFT stretched across the top portion of
the cover in heavy block lettering, an incandescent canary yellow
against a greenish black background, in letters three-eighths of an
inch high—the largest type ever used on a Weird Tales cover to
blazon forth the name of an author—any author. Even Algernon
Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson never had it so good, when
they appeared in the august pages of WT.2*

The amusing upshot of all the publicity was that The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath was eventually discovered and rescued from
oblivion—and Weird Tales rejected it!

The novella did not vanish again, despite this rebuff. Derleth ran it in
consecutive issues of The Arkham Sampler, a short-lived periodical
which the House published during 1948 and 1949; and the complete
text was preserved in the second of the two big omnibus volumes of
Lovecraftiana, Beyond the Wall of Sleep.

While Weird Tales moved forward under new leadership, back in

Sauk City in his big house amid the pines on a lonely country road,
Derleth was hard at work building a publishing venture that was to be
unique in the history of that enterprise. But his work with Lovecraft
was not merely limited to the issuance of H.P.L.’s oeuvre in
hardcover. Beginning in 1944 with Sleep No More, published in New
York by Farrar & Rinehart, Derleth began an ambitious program of
editing anthologies of science fiction and weird literature. In his first
anthology, he included Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls. In 1946 he
included The Shunned House in another Rinehart anthology entitled
Who Knocks?; in 1947 came an anthology of macabre verse, Dark of
the Moon, with a hefty selection of Lovecraft’s verse; and in swift
succession there followed The Night Side, The Sleeping and the
Dead, Strange Ports of Call, The Other Side of the Moon, Nights
Yawning Peal, Worlds of Tomorrow, and Dark Mind, Dark Heart.
Each of them contained a tale by Lovecraft. Anthology after
anthology rolled from Derleth’s assembly-line—twenty-four
anthologies are known to me, and there may well be others—and the
effects of this kind of “public relations” on the growth of Lovecraft’s
fame and popularity is incalculable.

It is to the indefatigable efforts of August Derleth, more than any

other influence in the world, that the credit for making H. P. Lovecraft
an internationally known writer belongs. In 1926, when he casually
sent off a friendly reply to a fan letter from a seventeen-year- old
reader in Sauk City, Wisconsin, Lovecraft could hardly have guessed
that he had made the friend who was in time to make him famous.

***

1* This book has not discussed Quinn, since he had little or nothing
to do with Lovecraft and never wrote anything in the Mythos. But I
must remark that Quinn was no stranger to the fine art of composing
eulogies, and that he came by his interest in ghoulish fiction most
legitimately. Quinn, you see, was Profession editor of Casket and
Sunny side, a trade journal for morticians; he had been writing tales
for WT on the side, moonlighting all those years!

2* And that goes for Tennessee Williams, Sax Rohmer, Ray

Bradbury, and A. Merritt, too; each at one time or another contributed
to Weird Tales.
14. End of an Epoch
By the early 1940’s the Cthulhu Mythos had dwindled and very little
new material was being written. Lovecraft’s example and
encouragement had stimulated several of his friends and fellow
writers into adding new stories to the growing literature more as a
sort of a private game between a small circle of colleagues than as a
major literary movement. Now Lovecraft himself was dead, and
Howard as well; Smith had completely stopped writing fiction years
before; Long and Wandrei had never actually written stories in the
Mythos, but had authored a tale here and there influenced by the
Mythos. As for Robert Bloch, he had by the 1940s blossomed into a
very popular pulp fiction writer, but his last Mythos story had been
published in the year Lovecraft died. Bloch has told me that, for him
at least, working in the Mythos was a sort of playful game—at least
while Lovecraft himself was alive to appreciate it; once Lovecraft was
no longer there, it became more solemn and less fun. The fun, the
sense of play was gone. And, anyway, Bloch’s career was rapidly
expanding, bringing him further away from the Pulps and towards his
eventual fame in radio, movies, and television. By 1939 he was
doing radio dramas, solicited from him by a Milwaukee advertising
agency, and in 1945 he was approached by a Chicago producer
named John Neblett, who wanted him to adapt thirty-nine of his
Weird Tales stories into radio plays for a new series called Stay
Tuned for Terror.

But Derleth had, by now, a vested interest in keeping Lovecraft’s

name alive, and in keeping the Mythos in the public eye, so to speak.
He began writing Lovecraftian pastiches for Dorothy Mcllwraith, and
they were quite popular with the readers. He wrote Beyond the
Threshold for her September 1941 issue; a novelette entitled The
Trail of Cthulhu followed. He used his new series of pastiches to
rework the scattered data of the original Lovecraftian Mythos into a
formal system. This had never really been attempted; Lovecraft had
simply invented new data, new books and demon-gods, and new
settings as each particular story needed.

Bloch wrote to me recently concerning this point. He explained how

Lovecraft had assisted in the creation of the data about Ludvig Prinn
and his De Vermis Mysteriis, and how other young writers on the
edges of the Circle were just beginning to get into the swing of the
game. “But by then HPL was gone,” he said sadly. “I’m sure we
would have, inevitably, worked out some sort of mutually-agreed-
upon bibliography of books of evil wisdom. Probably we’d have set
up a definitive pantheon, as well, had not Lovecraft’s death taken
such associational items out of the ‘fun’ category for those of us who
mourned him. After his passing, I think most of us who continued
briefly to use some of the Lovecraftian references did so in the spirit
of commemoration more than anything else.”1*

Derleth began shaping the Mythos anew. It was Derleth who

imposed the classification system upon the various members of the
Lovecraftian pantheon. Based at first on hints and conjectures in the
Lovecraftian stories, Derleth’s own stories described Cthulhu as a
water elemental, Shub-Niggurath as a fertility myth, Hastur as an air
elemental, and so on, giving the data of the Mythos an overall flavor
of formal anthropological relevance straight out of The Golden
Bough. Much more so than had Lovecraft, Derleth built each new
story on the data structure introduced in previous stories; new books
or mythological entities mentioned in one yam reappeared in fuller
detail in the next. The Dweller in Darkness (November, 1944) had
new things to say about Nyarlathotep; The Watcher from the Sky
(July, 1945) took those things for granted. Derleth’s pastiches were
solidly constructed stories, not merely exercises in the Lovecraftian
style; in fact, with rare perception, he chose not to attempt to imitate
the convoluted and adjectival Lovecraftian prose, but to tell his own
stories in his own quiet and understated prose.

Lovecraft’s last surviving aunt died; Robert H. Barlow, the nominal

executor of the estate, moved to Mexico and died under rather
curious circumstances. Derleth eventually became both the legal
executor and the owner of the estate itself, which greatly facilitated
his work in this field from then on. Now that he had possession of the
Lovecraft papers, he went through them and found fragments of
stories as well as outlines and notes. Derleth explored these and
was particularly attracted to a piece of writing, entitled The Round
Tower, probably based on that minor enigma of American
archaeology, the so-called “Round Tower” of Newport. Another
fragment, bearing no obvious or textual relationship to the Tower
fragment, discussed a curious “rose window.” The two fragments
together totaled about twelve hundred words. As Derleth recounted
this incident, which was the genesis of The Lurker at the Threshold:
The possibility exists that the two sets of fragments were for different
stories; yet they appealed to me as manifestly related and as
possible to connect, and out of them I constructed and wrote The
Lurker at the Threshold, which had nowhere been laid out, planned,
or plotted by Lovecraft, but was evoked from his fragments and
notes.

Lurker was published as a full-length original novel, by Arkham

House in 1945, under the dual byline of Lovecraft and Derleth. To my
taste, is is certainly the best of all the several “posthumous
collaborations” which have appeared since under the shared
byline.2*

Most of Derleth’s new Cthulhu Mythos stories appeared in Weird

Tales: between 1939 and 1949, Derleth contributed no fewer than
ten stories to the growing Mythos, not counting Lurker, most of them
novelette length, and all but one of them for Weird Tales. During that
decade his was the name most intimately associated with
Lovecraft’s, and the two became virtually indistinguishable in the
mind of the readers. In 1950, Bloch returned briefly to the Mythos
with a new story called The Shadow from the Steeple, a nostalgic
sequel to Lovecraft’s last story, The Haunter of the Dark. That year
and the year following, he contributed a couple of new Mythos
stories, his last being Notebook Found in a Deserted House, which
appeared in the issue dated May 1951. (Bloch was then becoming a
familiar name on television, but as “a sort of permanent guest
panelist,” not as a writer quite yet. For six years during the decade of
the ’50s he appeared every week on a Milwaukee-based quiz show
called It’s A Draw.) During the same period, Derleth continued
appearing in Weird Tales with new Mythos stories, such as
Something from Out There in the January 1951 issue, The Keeper of
the Key in the May issue, and The Black Island in the issue dated
January 1952.

Weird Tales, then about twenty-eight years old, was in its final
decade. During the late ’40s and early ’50s, the magazine had sunk
into the doldrums, largely due, I suppose, to the decline in quality of
its contributors. Over its long life Weird Tales had published an
enormous number of writers, but it was Howard and Smith and
Lovecraft, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Quinn and Hamilton
and Derleth, who set the tone and style and flavor of the magazine;
in a sense they were the magazine. By 1950, the great triumvirate of
Howard, Smith and Lovecraft—Edwin Baird discoveries all—were
gone. Edmond Hamilton had moved on to science fiction years
before, and had become very popular in that field, eschewing the
sort of weird fantasy he had long written for Weird Tales, stories
based on the backgrounds of myth; he eventually had a whole
science fiction magazine built around his continuing series of lead
novels, Captain Future.

While Quinn and Derleth continued as faithful and steady

contributors, they were not enough to carry the whole weight of the
magazine. And none of the major writers that had been discovered
by Farnsworth Wright —Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore,
Henry Kuttner, and so on—stayed with the magazine long enough to
become as completely identified with it as had their great
predecessors.

Moore and Kuttner first met in California back in 1937, when Bloch
made the trek out to stay with Kuttner in Beverly Hills for an
extended six weeks’ visit two months after Lovecraft died. Catherine
L. Moore came out to California at about the same time for a
vacation, and dropped around to meet Kuttner and Bloch. Moore and
Kuttner were married in 1940 and stayed in California, making their
home in South Laguna. Both writers, under their own individual
names and under a number of pseudonyms, became very popular
and highly regarded science fiction writers for Campbell’s
Astounding, and both before long ceased writing for Weird Tales
entirely.

This was to be the peculiar doom of Weird Tales, and, in a word, it

could be called “over-success.” WT was the first of scores of pulp
magazines devoted to one or another branch of fantastic literature;
but in the days when Howard, Smith and Lovecraft dominated the
magazine, WT had no real competition. You either sold your story to
Weird or you put it back on the shelf to gather dust, as Howard
retired all those unsold “King Kull” yarns that had been bounced by
Farnsworth Wright. But by the 1940s there were plenty of other
magazines around you could write for, and some of them, such as
Astounding, paid better money. Weird Tales simply could not keep its
authors: Bloch, for example, discovered that Amazing Stories and
Fantastic Adventures would take humorous, weird, or sf short stories
written in a slangy Damon Runyon style, and he began turning out
dozens of such for them. Fritz Leiber was lured away by Campbell,
and sold the first of his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” tales to
Campbell’s prestigious Unknown; these were Sword & Sorcery tales,
more or less in the vein of Robert E. Howard, and would have
naturally found a home in the pages of WT; but Unknown got them,
and Astounding got the bulk of the rest of his early work, which was
science fiction. Many more Weird Tales writers found no point in
limiting their sales exclusively to that magazine. Frank Belknap Long
began selling heavily to such science fiction pulps as Thrilling
Wonder Stories, and a bit later, when Ray Bradbury came along, he
found a steady demand for his stories and could sell them to just
about any magazine in sight—Startling, Thrilling, Famous Fantastic
Mysteries, Planet Stories—every magazine, in fact, except for those
edited by John Campbell, who evidently found Bradbury’s poetic
style a bit hard to swallow. Weird Tales got mostly his earliest work
and he, too, left them before long.
Ray Bradbury and Manly Wade Wellman were probably the last
important writers Weird Tales discovered; Wellman could sell
science fiction if he wanted to, but his heart really belonged to Weird
Tales and the best of his early work appeared therein, a series of
linked stories about a sort of occult detective of the Jules de Grand
in and John Silence variety called Joyn Thunstone. Such tales
enlivened the last issues of Weird Tales, but the magazine was
foundering by then, a victim of its own startling success. In proving
there was a pulp magazine market for fantasy fiction, Weird Tales
had encouraged a host of similar and competing publications which
were to survive it.

As Weird Tales celebrated its thirtieth birthday with an anniversary

issue featuring many famous names from earlier issues, the end was
in sight. One by one the science fiction magazines were going into
the smaller, more popular, digest size; the age of the old- fashioned
pulp magazine was over. Towards the last, Weird Tales, too, adopted
the smaller size, and by 1953 the magazine was in such sad straits
that it had begun reprinting stories and even illustrations and cover
art from earlier issues in an obvious attempt to economize. It limped
along for a year or so longer and towards the end a few new writers
of talent began to emerge, such as Joseph Payne Brennan and
Manly Bannister, but they arrived a bit too late to save the doomed
magazine.

Derleth had just begun a new series of stories with The Survivor,
which appeared in the issue of July, 1954. This was the first of nine
short stories or novelettes in the Cthulhu Mythos which were based
on story ideas left undeveloped by Lovecraft. It was an exciting idea,
and it makes me wonder why Derleth had don’t done it years before;
but it was really too late to help Weird Tales.

The next issue was dated September, 1954. It had a lovely Finlay
cover, one of those reprint covers the magazine relied on in its last
year or so, and the magazine was curiously shrunken. It had only six
stories and two poems in it, and two of the stories were old ones
from earlier issues. But that was the end. Weird Tales had published
two hundred and seventy-nine issues, and now had published its
last. The best, the greatest, the most important and beloved of all the
fantasy magazines was gone forever.

But in those two hundred and seventy-nine issues, Weird Tales had
started something too big and too exciting to die with it, for the world
of weird and fantastic literature had grown immeasurably in the
thirty-one years since Weird Tales had been born, and many Weird
Tales alumni had gone on to greater things. By 1954, August Derleth
was the author of seventy-four books, a highly respected Wisconsin
poet, regional novelist and anthologist, and a publisher of
considerable repute (Arkham House issued its forty-eighth
publication that year). Throughout its history, Arkham House
continued to keep the memory of Weird Tales alive, by issuing
collections of tales and poems by the great Weird Tales writers, even
including the more recent discoveries, such as Fritz Leiber, Ray
Bradbury, Joseph Payne Brennan and Manly Wade Wellman.

By 1954, Robert Bloch was approaching major success. He had

made the easy transition from horror fiction to psychological
suspense and mystery novels, and some of his books were
beginning to go to Hollywood (such as The Scarf, which became a
film starring Mercedes McCambridge—low-budget, black and white,
but very effective). He was to hit the top of his profession in a rather
ironic way, through a novel called Psycho which he published in
1959. Film rights to Psycho were purchased, at an unexciting sum,
by one of those faceless firms of go-betweens; in the case of
Psycho, however, they were representing one of the greatest and
most popular of all filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock, who turned the film
into a masterpiece which was to make more money than any other
black and white film ever made.

Bloch, of course, had no share in the enormous profits; however, his

agents quickly capitalized on the extraordinary success of the film,
and something like twenty of his novels and collections of stories
came pouring out of the paperback publishing houses, each labeled
“By the author of PSYCHO,” in prominent letters. Bloch himself
began writing for the movies and television but not, as is often
erroneously said, because of the phenomenal success of
Hitchcock’s Psycho. The fact of the matter is that Bloch was already
in Hollywood writing scripts when Psycho was premiered. On this
point Bloch is most insistent:

I secured an agent, the agent secured me several additional

assignments, and on the strength of all this I determined to make the
move West with my family. A Writer’s Guild strike forestalled writing
—so I stayed on the Coast and didn’t bring the family out until July,
shortly after the strike was settled. By this time I’d also received my
first screen assignment at Warner Brothers, plus more television... I
go into this in detail, because most people think I was brought out to
the Coast as a result of Psycho. Such was far from the case—and
while this “by the author of Psycho” label did assuredly open doors in
the years ahead, it really had nothing to do with my breaking into TV
and films—I was already out here almost a year before the picture
was released!

Bloch, in some cases, began writing movies based on his own

stories, in others he wrote original screenplays —for such films as
The Cabinet of Caligari (1962), The Night Walker (1964), and Torture
Garden (1968). He went on to become one of the few screen writers
truly adept at psychological horror and suspense. Far from bearing a
grudge against Hitchcock for purchasing Psycho so obliquely (and
so inexpensively), Bloch subsequently sold twenty scripts or stories
to the television series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” His most recent
movie is called The House That Dripped Blood (1971), a deliciously
shuddersome screen anthology of Bloch’s short stories, with an
added attraction for nostalgic fans such as myself—for I remember
reading these stories many, many years ago... in Weird Tales!

***

1* Letter from Robert Bloch dated June 7, 1971.

2* I count eleven of these posthumous collaborations as definitely

belonging to the Mythos (see this book’s Appendix p. 192), although
there are several others.
15. The Last Disciple
Derleth’s tireless championing of H. P. Lovecraft eventually paid off
in some rather surprising ways. All those weird fiction anthologies he
edited served not only to keep Lovecraft’s name alive, but to spread
his fame among somewhat more literate circles than those of the
readership of Weird Tales.

The anthologies were handsomely produced, containing stories of

obvious quality and authors of known repute, and they were very
well received. There had always been a small, select group of
influential literary people who retained a connoisseur’s affection for
well- crafted tales of the macabre—gentlemen like Basil Davenport,
a judge of the Book of the Month Club, and critic Vincent Starrett. By
bringing Lovecraft to their attention, in the company of Algernon
Blackwood and A. E. Coppard and “Saki” and other known writers,
Derleth performed an invaluable service. Between the end of World
War II and the present time, scores of paperback and hardcover
anthologies of the macabre were published, and there is hardly a
one of them that does not contain a story by Lovecraft. This is almost
entirely due to August Derleth.

Even Hollywood, which is very far away from Arkham,

Massachusetts, in most ways, discovered H. P. Lovecraft. A
comparatively new British movie company, Hammer Films, proved in
the 1960s that the grand old Hollywood horror classics like
Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf-Man and The Mummy could be
remade anew in color and earn their keep. Homegrown competition
emerged in a firm called American-International, which tried to reach
the same market and found that just about every fantasy or horror
classic from King Kong to She already was being refilmed. A director
of considerable talents named Roger Corman turned to the works of
Edgar Allan Poe and signed up Hollywood character actor Vincent
Price, who appeared in swift succession as a Poesque villain-hero in
such movies as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the
Pendulum, and The Masque of the Red Death. When he found
himself scraping the bottom of the bucket (Poe-wise), Corman was
advised to turn to H. P. Lovecraft as the nearest next best. Five or six
Lovecraft films have been made thus far, and not all of them are
completely awful, although most of them sadly neglect the
Lovecraftian mood and atmosphere, even those laid in “crumbling,
witch-haunted old Arkham.” Perhaps the best of the lot, certainly the
closest to the real Lovecraftian vein, was scripted by magazine writer
Richard Matheson, himself a Weird Tales alumnus; it actually
mentioned Cthulhu by name, and showed briefly on screen a copy of
the Necronomicon. (In typically klutzy Hollywood style, the film was
released —so help me!—as “Edgar Alan Poe’s The Haunted
Palace.”)

As the movies brought Lovecraft’s name before the film-going public,

Arkham House continued to keep his work alive and in print. All of
his stories, even his notebooks and juvenilia, have been preserved in
hardcover by now, as have his poems. To date, three volumes of his
Selected Letters have been published, with several more to come.
And the fame of Lovecraft has been spread by such ways into most
unusual areas, such as that of contemporary rock music. A rock
group from Chicago, calling itself “The H. P. Lovecraft,” has been
rather popular, and albums of their music have been issued. The
group knows what it’s doing and did not merely pick the name at
random or from idle whim. One of their songs is entitled “The White
Ship,” and the group’s company is known as “Dunwich Productions,”
while their music publishing affiliate is named “Yuggoth”—with, it
should be pointed out, the amused permission of August Derleth.

Unfortunately, even as Lovecraft himself was, the group seems to

have been somewhat ahead of its time, and disbanded as recently
as August, 1969. A new group is now recording for Warner Brothers
under the name of “Lovecraft,” a correspondent informs me, but it is
not composed of the same people.

Through a unique combination of practical business acumen and

inspired editorial taste, August Derleth guided Arkham House past
every storm and shoal from 1939 to the present. He lost his “corner”
on the market in the late 1940s when flocks of fantasy fans, then
mature men with several years’ back pay socked away in stateside
banks, came back from the war to launch short-lived publishing
ventures comparable to Arkham House. One- or two-man firms with
such names as Gnome Press, Fantasy Press, Shasta Press,
Fantasy Publishing Company, Hadley Publishing Company, Prime
Press, Carcosa House, etc., sprang up all over the place. Some of
them lasted for years, and while most of the small specialty houses
dipped more into the science fiction classics than into the pages of
Weird Tales for their material, there was more than one occasion on
which Arkham House lost an author —as when Gnome Press carried
off Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore. One by one, however, all
these publishing houses went under from a combination of bad luck,
bad distribution, and want of sufficient funds. Only Arkham House
has weathered the storm unimpaired. Today a new crop of more-or-
less competing houses has arisen, including Advent, a Chicago
publisher which has thus far limited its program to science fiction
criticism, bibliography and memoirs, and Jack Chalker’s recently
founded Mirage Press, which operates out of Baltimore. In time, I
have no doubt, still other small firms specializing in science fiction,
fantasy and weird literature or critica will arise; Arkham House (in
1972 in its thirty-second year) has shown that it can be done.

Derleth wrote a bookful of his posthumous collaborations with

Lovecraft and issued it under the Arkham House imprint as The
Survivor and Others in 1957. The readership for books with
Lovecraft’s name in the byline continued unappeased. Derleth had
published various odds and ends of Lovecraftian criticism, memoirs
and tributes for years, beginning with Marginalia in 1944, and
continuing with Something About Cats in 1949. There was enough
material around for several more of these, so he assembled The
Shuttered Room and Other Pieces for publication in 1959; a last
collection of miscellanea, The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces
came out some years later. Early in 1962, or shortly before, he got
the idea of editing an anthology for Arkham House of all-new stories
by “Arkham authors,” and solicited tales from Robert Bloch, Carl
Jacobi, David H. Keller and H. Russell Wakefield for a book to be
called Dark Mind, Dark Heart. He was also lucky enough to locate
unpublished stories by Robert E. Howard, William Hope Hodgson
and M. P. Shiel.1*

Derleth added to the contents the eighth of his posthumous

Cthulhuoid collaborations with Lovecraft a tale with the distinctly
unLovecraftian title of Witches’ Hollow, and also included a brief tale
of his own, written under his “Stephen Grendon” pseudonym. The
book appeared in 1962. The most notable among the seventeen
stories in the book, if not exactly the best of the lot, was a first story
by an otherwise unknown young British writer named J. Ramsey
Campbell, called The Church in High Street, which teemed with
references to such familiar matters as the Necronomicon, Yog-
Sothoth, the forbidden plateau of Leng, dark Yuggoth on the rim,
Azathoth, Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep. It was surely a story in the
Cthulhu Mythos; the first Mythos story by a brand new writer. No new
writer had entered the Mythos since Henry Kuttner published The
Salem Horror in the May 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

This was no mere one-shot appearance; two years later Arkham

House published a whole bookful of Campbell’s Mythos stories
called The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964).
J. Ramsey Campbell became the first of a whole new school of
Mythos writers.

J. Ramsey Campbell—or Ramsey Campbell, as he now likes to sign

his stories—is a young British Lovecraft fan, born in Liverpool in
1946. He began to write at the tender age of seven and sent Derleth
some of his first stories in the Mythos when in his early teens; when
Derleth published The Church in High Street in 1962, Campbell was
only sixteen. Derleth told me that in those early stories Campbell
made the mistake of attempting to use the familiar Arkham, Dunwich,
Innsmouth locales without any real understanding or knowledge of
the American landscape. Derleth sent them back with the suggestion
that Campbell invent a British milieu for the stories, and this
Campbell promptly did, inventing a mythical Severn Valley region
which served as his own British version of the “Miskatonic County”
invented by Lovecraft.

Campbell also began making additions of his own to the lore of the
Mythos, and his next few tales introduced new divinities to the
Lovecraftian pantheon, such as Glaaki and Daoloth, and a new tome
of eldritch horrors, the Revelations of Glaaki. The young writer also
picked up Bloch’s inventions, Han and Byatis, embroidering the
scanty lore concerning them with new information of his own, and
even gave a new quotation or two from De Vermis Mysteriis and the
Necronomicon itself. His collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake
(1964), was a major addition to the literature of the Mythos, as it
contained nine tales, all of them new and none of them available
elsewhere.

Derleth published a second “all new” anthology that same year; it

was titled Over the Edge and contained the tenth Campbell Mythos
story, as well as the usual roster of old-time Arkham authors,
Hodgson, Howard, Long, Wakefield, Leiber, Derleth, and so on, plus
a new H.P.L./A.D. collaboration, The Shadow in the Attic, and a story
by Clark Ashton Smith. That last was a bit of a surprise. It had been
far too many years since Smith had written any new stories to speak
of, and in 1961, after a long, storyless period devoted largely to
poetry and sculpture, he died at the age of sixty-eight.

Another anthology of new tales of the macabre appeared a couple of

years later under the title of Travellers by Night (1967), with a new
story by Campbell and another Lovecraft/Derleth, The Horror from
the Middle Span, which was to be the last of all the Derlethian
posthumous collaborations, save only for Innsmouth Clay (although
no one could have known it then).

Other young hopefuls were rising, inspired by the example of

Ramsey Campbell, and when in 1969 Derleth published an
ambitious omnibus under the title of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, the
volume contained not only Campbell’s eleventh Mythos tale, a chiller
called Cold Print, but the first Mythos tale of another new writer,
Brian Lumley.2* In fact, not only did that book contain Lumley’s first
Mythos story, The Sister City, but also his second, Cement
Surroundings, as well. Lumley, too, carved out new territory of his
own in the Mythos, and those two tales introduced several bits of
newly-invented lore, such as the city of Ephiroth, which Lumley
presents as the long-lost “sister city” to lb, a Lovecraftian invention
from The Doom That Came to Sarnath. The second of his two
stories in the book introduced another tome of eldritch horror, the
G’harne Fragments, plus two new additions to the ever-growing
pantheon, Shudde-M’elle and Yibb-Tstll.

This particular collection, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, marked the

beginning of a new era in the history of the Mythos for many
reasons, and one of the most important was that it introduced an
extraordinary number of new writers in the Mythos. We have already
discussed the two first Mythos tales of Brian Lumley, but have yet to
mention J. Vernon Shea, whose first Mythos story—a sort of modern
parody on the Lovecraftian style—also appeared therein, under the
title of The Haunter of the Graveyard (certainly a title with a
traditional Lovecraftian ring to it.)

Shea was not exactly a new writer, having begun to produce stories
as far back as 1926, but this was his first Mythos story. Unlike the
rest of the “New Lovecraft Circle,” he actually had known H.P.L. very
well and had corresponded with him for some years. I have seen no
further stories under his byline, so it is impossible to tell whether or
not his contribution to the literature of the Mythos will be significant.

The third of the new Mythos writers who made his first appearance in
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was James Wade, a 42-year-old Illinois-
born writer, resident for the past decade or so in Seoul, South Korea.
His first and only Mythos tale, a novelette entitled The Deep Ones,
was possibly the best of the new stories in the book. It made quite a
clever and very topical use of the recent experiments in the study of
the extraordinary intelligence of dolphins.

As for Cold Print, the Ramsey Campbell story in the same volume, it
adds new lore to his developing sub-Mythos, presenting some
interesting new information on his main additions to the pantheon,
Y’golonac and Glaaki, and a lengthy new quotation from his
Revelations of Glaaki.

But Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is perhaps most significant because

a brilliant young “philosophical writer” or novelist of ideas, whose
reputation is by now secure on both sides of the Atlantic, made his
first appearance with a Mythos tale therein. The tale was a novella
entitled The Return of the Lloigor and its author was the celebrated
British novelist, critic and intellectual, Colin Wilson. It is a complex,
interesting tale—a sort of intellectual puzzle mystery involving Mu,
Churchward’s “Naacal tablets,” Lovecraftian divinities such as
Ghatanothoa and Nug, Arthur Machen and Lewis Spence—and it’s
fun to read. Wilson is a writer of considerable power and his fiction
generates as much excitement as his non-fiction; but he certainly
plays fast and loose with the pattern of the Mythos. The tale is, at
best, a borderline Mythos story.

Wilson tells an amusing anecdote to explain how he became

embroiled in Lovecraftiana. His initial impact on the literary world
was made through a book called The Outsider; somewhile after this
he discovered The Outsider and Others, and was impelled to read it
because of the similarity in titles. The character of Lovecraft
fascinated him to the extent of writing a book called The Strength to
Dream which was a study the creative imagination, particularly in
writers of fantasy and horror stories. The book dealt in a very large
part with Lovecraft. Wilson did not deny that the eccentric
Providence recluse possessed “gloomy imaginative power that
compares with Poe,” but his innate taste forced him to admit he
found Lovecraft “an atrocious writer.” The Strength to Dream, of
course, came to Derleth’s attention, and he wrote a mildly reproving
letter—but, as Colin Wilson recently noted:

In due course, a copy of my book fell into the hands of August

Derleth. And Derleth wrote to me, protesting that my judgement on
Lovecraft was too harsh, and asking me why, if I was all that good, I
didn’t try writing a “Lovecraft” novel myself.
A couple of years later an idea occurred to him and engendered a
novel.

I cast it in the Lovecraft tradition, and it became The Mind Parasites,

which was published in due course by August Derleth. Its reception
by English critics was unexpectedly good; I suspect this is because I
didn’t sound as if I was serious.

Arkham House published The Mind Parasites in 1967; although it

discusses Lovecraft and borrows some of the terminology of the
Mythos, it is really an independent story and thus does not figure in
our present study. But The Return of the Lloigor comes close enough
to the Mythos to be admitted to at least the borderline of the canon,
in the same sense that Henry Hasse’s The Guardian of the Book is a
borderline Mythos story.

In 1969, Wilson wrote another novel which closely borders on the

Mythos, a book which shares the continuum of the Lloigor tale. This
novel is called The Philosopher’s Stone and it was published in an
American edition in 1971. It discusses the Necronomicon and the
Great Old Ones and Mu, but again it violates too much the
established lore to be other than a marginal work (although a very
interesting novel, immensely entertaining in its own right).

As if the new talents of Ramsey Campbell, J. Vernon Shea, Brian

Lumley, James Wade, and Colin Wilson, were not enough to launch
the “new” Cthulhu Mythos, Derleth did not long delay before
introducing his readers to yet other writers who were to contribute to
the ever-growing literature.

After the war, Derleth had briefly experimented with a periodical

called The Arkham Sampler, of which seven issues appeared during
1948 and ’49. Towards the end of 1967 he tried it again, by issuing a
smallish magazine of Arkham House news and notes called The
Arkham Collector. Publishing at the rate of four issues a year,
Derleth soon increased the size of the magazine to include short
stories and verse largely by new writers, although some familiar
names did make occasional appearances therein, such as Clark
Ashton Smith and Carl Jacobi.

The sixth issue, dated “Winter, 1970,” gave us a new Lumley tale,
and yet another followed in #7, but that same seventh issue
introduced a new writer named Gary Myers, with a story called The
House of the Worm. I suppose this unusual little tale has to be
considered a Mythos story for want of any other category wherein to
lodge it; but what Myers actually did with that first story was to go all
the way back to the Dunsanian “Dreamlands” fiction of Lovecraft’s
first period, and write new stories in the bejewelled style of those
early yarns—stories utilizing many of the same characters and much
of the same scenery of the Lovecraft tales, but stories written in full
knowledge of the later Cthulhuoid fiction. The blend of styles and
plot-material is deft and the stories themselves most attractive—so
attractive, that I cannot help but consider Myers the best of the “New
Lovecraft Circle” writers.

The following issue, #8, contained a second Mythos story from Gary
Myers, Yohk the Necromancer, in the same style and setting, and he
had a third, Passing of a Dreamer, in the issues that have appeared
since then, giving him three stories thus far into 1971. Derleth told
me fairly recently that he had plans to issue a slim little book of
Myers’ tales, with delightful illustrations by a new artist

All such plans came to an abrupt and shocking end on the fourth of
July, 1971.

Derleth was by then 62 years old: a burly, hearty, robust man with
enough drive and energy for three lesser men. As a writer and
anthologist, he had produced about one hundred and fifty books. His
output was truly prodigious; only Isaac Asimov, in our field, seems
likely to have equaled his enormous production.

In 1969 he fell ill, seriously ill. He was hospitalized for a straight

eighty-seven days and underwent four operations, including open
heart surgery. But with his enormous, driving energy and will to five,
he seemed to make an amazing recovery, and was soon back at
work. However, he had received the sort of warning no man can
easily ignore, and thus was forced to cut down somewhere. A young
local Wisconsonian named Roderic Meng, who had worked for
Derleth as a sort of shipping clerk during summer vacations during
high school years before, joined the staff of the House as general
manager, thus relieving Derleth of many tiresome routine chores.

During June, my wife and I stopped over at Sauk City to visit Derleth
for the day, on our way back to Long Island following a science
fiction convention in Minneapolis to which I had been invited as
guest of honor. Derleth and I had exchanged letters for something
like seventeen years, and during the six months in which this present
book was researched and written, I had been in touch on an almost
day-to-day basis, for Derleth was never too busy to fire off a letter full
of answers to my questions, or to give me information on the spot
over the telephone. But we had never before met face to face, and I
had long looked forward to that event. I found him genial and affable,
a delightful host, a stimulating conversationalist.

Thirteen days later he was dead.

He had seen the first 103 pages of this book in manuscript, and had
given me a very detailed, almost page-by-page critique. He was not
overly pleased at some of the things I had said about Lovecraft as a
writer, but he respected my point of view, and was most gratified to
see someone like myself write a book on the Mythos and all its
writers, not just on Lovecraft alone.

With the death of August Derleth, the future of Arkham House is

thrown into question. It is far too early to be able to say how the loss
of Derleth will affect Arkham House which he founded and guided so
ably all those years. Perhaps it will not long outlast its founder; on
the other hand, perhaps somewhere there can be found an editor of
similar taste and knowledge in the field to carry it on through the
years to come.

One thing is certain, anyway. The death of August Derleth is a far

more serious event in the history of the macabre in America than
were any of the events thus far depicted in this book. Popular weird
fiction survived the demise of Weird Tales unimpaired; it will not so
easily survive the death of August Derleth.

And now I come to the point in my story where, with some

embarrassment, I must talk about... myself. For, the most recent
addition to the growing ranks of Mythos writers is none other than Lin
Carter.

I first got the idea of writing this book in March, 1971, and almost
immediately signed a contract for it with Ballantine Books. It has not
been an easy book to write, despite my knowledge of the subject
and my enthusiasm for the stories and the writers discussed herein.
Writing fiction is much more to my taste, for I am most at ease when
writing a story laid in a world of my own imagination, where my
imagination itself is the only authority; non-fiction is ever so much
more difficult to write. If this book is entertaining—if it is even
readable—it is due to immense effort. The problem is not so much
the lack of reference materials, as the plethora of them. I have
several pounds of information on Lovecraft, Weird Tales, Lovecraft’s
fellow writers, Arkham House, and so on. The problem has been not
to find such data, but to boil it down and digest it into concise and
perhaps even enjoyable form.

From time to time over the last six months I have found myself
turning away briefly from the grueling task of writing non-fiction to
amuse myself by turning out a small morsel of fiction. Because I was
soon up to my earlobes in data on the Cthulhu Mythos, I thought it
would be fun to write some stories in the Mythos. I found myself
attracted to what Clark Ashton Smith had done with a story called
The Coming of the White Worm. (That droll and sparkling little gem
of a tale he pretended was a translation from the Book of Eibon, an
imaginary book he had himself invented.) At the same time I
discovered in the text of The Haunter of the Dark Lovecraft’s last
story in the Mythos, a list of the titles of imaginary stories written by
an equally imaginary writer, “Robert Blake.” You may recall this list —
Shaggai, In the Vale of Pnath, The Burrowers Beneath, and so on—
a delicious passage in which Lovecraft indulged in self-parody,
inventing titles which were if anything, over-typically Lovecraftian. I
thought it would be amusing to write a short tale of the style and
substance of Smith’s little joke, and use for a tide Lovecraft’s little
joke. So I “translated” from the Book of Eibon a thousand-word story
called Shaggai, and, a bit later, a second such tale called In the Vale
of Pnath. Since I was by this time writing long lists of questions about
Lovecraftiana to Derleth about twice a week, I included copies of
these brief stylistic pastiches for his amusement; and when next the
ennui of composing non-fiction began to get me down, I tried my
hand at a few more “translations”— this time from the venerable
Necronomicon itself—two stories called The Doom of Yakthoob and
The City of Pillars, which purported to be drawn from the first pages
of the Necronomicon and which were told in the first person by Abdul
Alhazred himself. To my delight, Derleth liked them and purchased
them for eventual use in The Arkham Collector and a forthcoming
anthology of new stories he was then assembling under the title of
Dark Things.

Shortly after this I got interested in the fascinating glimpse into elder
and shadowy Mu given in the Heald/Lovecraft revision, Out of the
Eons. Atlantis and Hyperborea had been done virtually to the point of
exhaustion by Mythos writers, but Mu had scarcely been touched
upon. So I conceived of a linked series of tales which would expand
on this Muvian lore, and because my study of the Mythos had by
now revealed annoying lacunae in the myth-patterns, I resolved to
write new Mythos stories of my own which would answer some of the
questions my research had raised. I wrote two short stories, The
Dweller in the Tomb and The Thing in the Pit, and a ten-thousand-
word novelette called Out of the Ages in which I expanded the
Muvian lore to include two new additions to the Cthulhuoid pantheon,
Zoth-Ommog and Ythogtha, who were the brothers of Ghatanothoa
and the sons of great Cthulhu himself (this last datum was inserted
with the advance approval of August Derleth). I also added a couple
of new books to the library of forbidden tomes, namely the Zanthu
Tablets and the Ponape Scripture. Derleth bought these as well,
setting aside Out of the Ages (in consideration of its length) for an
anthology, then in the planning stage, which he intended to call New
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Since Derleth passed away, I have written a new Eibon story, The
Descent into the Abyss, and a first tale drawn from the Pnakotic
Manuscripts, called Acolyte of the Flame, and I hope to eventually
conclude my Muvian sequence with two more stories whose working
titles are The Burrowers Beneath and The Horror in the Gallery.
There will most likely be one more story from the Pnakotic
Manuscripts as well. Derleth’s death has cast the future of his
publishing program in doubt, so it cannot be said for certain whether
or not all of these tales will appear in print under the aegis of Arkham
House. That, only time will tell.

I have dealt with my own modest additions to the canon of the

Mythos at such length not because I believe my contributions to be
of any particular importance, but simply because I have all die facts
at hand. I very much doubt if I will for long remain the most recent
addition to the “New Lovecraft Circle.” It is most probable that young
writers will continue to arise in the Mythos, as Ramsey Campbell,
Brian Lumley, James Wade, Colin Wilson, Gary Myers and I have
recently arisen. In all likelihood, Lovecraft’s last disciple has yet to
emerge.

So this book really has no ending. The story of the Cthulhu Mythos,
that thoroughly fascinating and completely unique literary
phenomenon, extends from this point into the future. It is now forty-
six years since The Call of Cthulhu was written, and the curious
school of macabre fiction launched by that excellent story is still alive
and still growing, still entertaining new generations of readers and
still attracting new generations of writers who, like myself, never
knew Lovecraft personally, and either were small children during his
lifetime or, in some cases, were not even born until after he died.

It would be nice if I could end this book with a succinct and final
appraisal of Lovecraft the writer, and could neatly and finally
pigeonhole him in an appropriate niche. But this cannot be. For
Lovecraft himself is still on the move, and his reputation and
influence are still growing. The last word on this subject cannot be
written at this time.

And may never be.

***

1* Shiel was an old friend of Derleth’s and had especially revised his
story, Xelucha, for publication; it was to appear as the title story in an
Arkham House collection of his macabre tales; the book has yet to
be published.

2* He does not seem to be related to Lovecraft’s one-time revision

client, William Lumley, whose only Mythos story, Diary of Alonzo
Typer, appeared in 1938.
Appendix: A Complete
Bibliography of the Mythos
There have been numerous attempts by various Lovecraftian
scholars to list “all” the stories in the Cthulhu Mythos; generally I
have found that such lists agree only in disagreeing with each other.
The most authoritative known to me are those assembled by Robert
E. Briney in 1955 and Jack L. Chalker in 1966 —those being the
dates of the final definitive versions. There is also a pamphlet guide
to the stories in the Mythos only, ignoring Lovecraft’s other work,
produced by Robert Weinberg in 1969.

While it is not my intention to denigrate the valuable work of these

gentlemen, I must confess that in writing this book I have discovered
their bibliographical studies almost completely unreliable. Chalker,
for instance, fails to recognize Howard’s The Fires of Asshurbanipal
and Bloch’s Fane of the Black Pharaoh as Mythos stories, and
seems unaware that Derleth’s The Seal of R’lyeh had a magazine
appearance prior to its publication in book form. He is one month off
in dating the first Weird Tales printing of The Nameless City, makes
an error of twenty years in dating the magazine printing of Derleth’s
House in the Valley, and, incredibly, somehow manages to ignore
the existence of The Thing on the Doorstep in his list of Lovecraft’s
published stories.

Briney’s list is about the same as far as accuracy goes. He is two

years off in dating the first Weird Tales printing of H.P.L.’s The
Temple, fails to recognize Bloch’s The Mannikin and Howard’s The
Children of the Night as Mythos stories, is wildly inaccurate in dating
the appearance of H.P.L.’s At the Mountains of Madness (which was
a three-part serial in Astounding’s issues of February, March and
April, 1936—Briney says it appeared in May, 1935!), makes an error
of four years on the first appearance of The Dunwich Horror, and,
incredibly, overlooks the existence of The Dreams in the Witch-
House in his list of Lovecraft’s professional fiction.

If anything, the Weinberg list is even more haphazard. He makes

absurd errors, such as ignoring The Curse of Yig in his list of Mythos
stories by various authors; he lists erroneous dates for the first
magazine appearances of Medusa’s Coil and The Mound; he
overlooks such Mythos stories as the Derleth/Schorer collaboration,
The Horror from the Depths, Derleth’s Ithaqua, three Mythos stories
by Kuttner and six by Smith. His date for the magazine serialization
of At The Mountains of Madness omits the issue which included Part
I, and so on.

I do not single out these mistakes, omissions, and errors for the
purpose of ridiculing my predecessors, but to explain why I found it
absolutely necessary to compile my own Lovecraftian bibliography,
which has been checked and double-checked for accuracy and
completeness. I might also point out that my list, compiled three
years after publication of the Weinberg pamphlet, is therefore more
complete, including mention of those tales and poems in the Mythos
which have been published subsequently. I must admit that no one is
perfect, least of all the present writer, and that by the time this list
leaves my desk and passes through the hands of copyeditor,
typesetter, proofreader and printer, an error or two will undoubtedly
have crept in. For this I apologize in advance.

Earlier in this book I have detailed my personal criteria for judging

this or that story to be an integral part of the Mythos. I cannot
realistically expect every Lovecraft scholar to agree with my
opinions; many will not. However rigorously I have applied my
standards to Lovecraft’s own stories, excluding The Colour Out of
Space and Charles Dexter Ward from the canon, and including The
Hound (these being the items on which I am chiefly at variance with
my predecessors), it should be noted that I have somewhat relaxed
my criteria when considering the stories by the other contributors to
the Mythos. I have, at times with reluctance, admitted to the fold
such borderline cases as The Challenge from Beyond and Henry
Hasse’s The Guardian of the Book. And I have, at times ruthlessly,
eliminated from my list those tales generally considered as
“influenced” by Lovecraft, when it does not seem to me that they
present a valid case for their inclusion here.

I have personally read every item here listed, with the sole exception
of certain tales yet unpublished (such as the forthcoming
Lovecraft/Derleth collaborative novel, The Watchers Out of Time). In
certain cases, such as the recently-discovered Howard manuscript,
The House in the Oaks, I have examined these tales in galley proof
or in manuscript in advance of publication.

Knowledgeable students of Lovecraft will notice certain curious

lacunae in this list, for example in the sequence of the posthumous
Lovecraft/Derleth collaborations. I have discovered that not all of the
collaborative stories Derleth has published relate to the Mythos: this
is true, for instance, of Wentworth’s Day, The Ancestor, and The
Dark Brotherhood. I can find in these tales no evidence to connect
them to the Mythos, other than the occasional reference to “Arkham”
and so on. (And the mere mention of a Mythos name does not make
a Mythos tale.) I have also not listed The Peabody Heritage and The
Shadow in the Attic; these tales seem to me merely on the periphery
of the Mythos and not integral to it. They also are related to each
other in that they list in common a number of imaginary books
otherwise not mentioned in Mythos stories. I note this simply so that
my reader will not think I have overlooked or forgotten about these
posthumous collaborations.

You will notice that I have numbered each item consecutively. The
Lovecraft stories are numbered in the order in which they were
written; all other stories are numbered in the order in which they
were published (with the exception of my own contributions to the
Mythos, which are given in the order they were written).

In the light of my criticisms of Briney, Chalker and Weinberg at the

beginning of this appendix, it might initially seem a trifle hypocritical
that I here pay tribute to their pioneering work, but I am in fact very
grateful to them. Their research has spared me many, many hours of
work, and for this I am most appreciative. Factual errors can never
be justified or forgiven in scholarly work, but we are all fallible. And
on this note, let me add one final word: it is quite possible that
genuine Mythos stories exist which I have not included on the list
which follows. In order to be absolutely certain of this, one way or
another, I suppose one would have to read carefully every single
story in every one of the two hundred and seventy-nine issues of
Weird Tales, to say nothing of every issue of Strange Tales, Strange
Stories, Black Cat, Tales of Magic and Mystery, and all of the other
fantasy or horror magazines ever published in America and England
and all of the other countries in the world. Let me confess that I have
not done this; I doubt if anyone has ever done this, or will, or even
could.

I have, however, done as much research in compiling the following

list as was possible. I have carefully sought out every single story
listed by each of my predecessors and perused it. Many of these
tales were not easily available to me, and to obtain copies of them I
had frequently to call upon the kindness of others. Robert A. W.
Lowndes and August Derleth and Frank Belknap Long and Roy A.
Squires were most helpful in procuring and/or lending me copies of
such stories to read. You may rest assured than none of the stories
below is here listed merely because it appears on other, earlier lists.

The bibliography would have been more complete than it is, had
Derleth not passed away so abruptly during my writing of this book.
He had announced for publication several stories and a couple of
new books which may or may not be legitimate stories in the canon
of the Mythos, and he had promised to send me i galleys of these;
but died before that promise could be I kept. So the list below can
only be considered as complete as of the date of its compilation
(August, 1971), and may soon be out of date.

One final note concerning my own stories listed below. At this time,
only the first three of them have actually been published. I have,
however, listed them all, since most of them have already been
accepted for publication by Arkham House, and all of them will
eventually find their way into print. You will also notice that I have
included two Lovecraft/Derleth stories on my list which have yet to
appear in print; I refer to the short story, Innsmouth Clay, and the
new novel, The Watchers Out of Time. Both are included here
(although I have not read them) because they have already been
announced for publication by Arkham House. I assume Derleth
completed his work on them, but at the time of the writing of this
manuscript, and its delivery to my publishers, I do not know for
certain.

A Complete Bibliography of the Mythos

by H. P. Lovecraft:

1. “The Nameless City,” Weird Tales, November, 1938.

2. “The Hound,” Weird Tales, February, 1924.

3. “The Festival,” Weird Tales, January, 1925.

4.“The Call of Cthulhu,” Weird Tales, February, 1928.

5. “The Dunwich Horror,” Weird Tales, April, 1929.

6. “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Weird Tales, August,1931.

7. The Shadow Over lnnsmouth, Visionary Press, Pa.,1936.

8. “At the Mountains of Madness” (3 part serial), Astounding Stories,

February, March, April, 1936.

9. “The Dreams in the Witch-House,” Weird Tales, July, 1933.

10. “The Thing on the Doorstep,” Weird Tales, January, 1937.

11. “The Shadow Out of Time,” Astounding Stories, June, 1936.

12. “The Haunter of the Dark,” Weird Tales, December, 1936.

13. History and Chronology of the ‘Necronomicon,’ (brochure), The
Rebel Press, Ala., 1936.

14. Fungi from Yuggoth (brochure), F.A.P.A., Cal., 1941.

by H. P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and

Frank Belknap Long:

15. “The Challenge from Beyond,” Fantasy Magazine, September,

1935.

by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth:

16. The Lurker at the Threshold, Arkham House, Wisc., 1945.

17. “The Survivor,” Weird Tales, July, 1954.

18. “The Gable Window,” Saturn, May, 1957.

19. “The Lamp of Alhazred,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science

Fiction, October, 1957.

20. “The Shadow Out of Space,” in The Survivor and Others,

Arkham House, Wisc., 1957.

21. “The Shuttered Room,” in The Shuttered Room and Other

Pieces, Arkham House, Wisc., 1959.

22. “The Fisherman of Falcon Point,” in The Shuttered Room and

Other Pieces, Arkham House, Wisc., 1959.

23. “Witches’ Hollow,” in Dark Mind, Dark Heart, Arkham House,

Wisc., 1962.

24. “The Horror from the Middle Span,” in Travellers by Night,

Arkham House, Wisc., 1967.

25. “The Watchers Out of Time,” in The Watchers Out of Time and
Others, Arkham House, Wisc., (scheduled for winter 1971/spring
1972).

26. “Innsmouth Clay,” in The Watchers Out of Time and Others,

Arkham House, Wisc., (scheduled for winter 1971/spring 1972).

by Zealia Bishop (revised by H. P. Lovecraft):

27.“The Curse of Yig,” Weird Tales, November, 1929.

28. “Medusa’s Coil,” Weird Tales, January, 1939.

29. “The Mound,” Weird Tales, November, 1940.

by Hazel Heald (revised by H. P. Lovecraft):

30. “The Man of Stone,” Wonder Stories, October, 1932.

31. “The Horror in the Museum,” Weird Tales, July, 1933.

32. “Out of the Eons,” Weird Tales, April, 1935.

by William Lumley (revised by H. P. Lovecraft):

33. “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” Weird Tales, February, 1938.

by Frank Belknap Long:

34. “The Space Eaters,” Weird Tales, July, 1928.

35. “The Hounds of Tindalos,” Weird Tales, March, 1929.

36. “The Horror from the Hills,” (2 part serial), Weird Tales, January
and February-March, 1931.

37. “When Chaugnar Wakes” (poem), Weird Tales, September,

1932.

by Robert E. Howard:
38. “The Shadow Kingdom,” Weird Tales, August, 1929.

39. “The Children of the Night,” Weird Tales, April- May, 1931.

40. “The Black Stone,” Weird Tales, November, 1931.

41. “The Thing on the Roof,” Weird Tales, February, 1932.

42. “Arkham” (poem), Weird Tales, August, 1932.

43. “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” Weird Tales, December, 1936.

44. “Dig Me No Grave,” Weird Tales, February, 1937.

45. “The House in the Oaks,” in Dark Things, Arkham House, Wisc.,
1971.

by Clark Ashton Smith:

46. “The Return of the Sorcerer,” Strange Tales, September, 1931.

47. “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” Weird Tales, November, 1931.

48. “The Door to Saturn,” Strange Stories, January, 1932.

49. “The Nameless Offspring,” Strange Tales, June, 1932.

50. “Ubbo-Sathla,” Weird Tales, July, 1933.

51. “The Holiness of Azederac,” Weird Tales, November, 1933.

52. “The Seven Geases,” Weird Tales, October, 1934.

53. “The Coming of the White Worm,” Stirring Science Stories, April,
1941.

by August Derleth and Mark Schorer:

54. “Lair of the Star-Spawn,” Weird Tales, August, 1932.

55. “Spawn of the Maelstrom,” Weird Tales, September, 1939.

56. “The Horror from the Depths,” Strange Stories, October, 1940.

by August Derleth:

57. “The Thing that Walked on the Wind,” Strange Tales, January,
1933.

58. “The Return of Hastur,” Weird Tales, March, 1939.

59. “The Sandwin Compact,” Weird Tales, November, 1940.

60. “Ithaqua,” Strange Stories, February, 1941.

61. “Beyond the Threshold,” Weird Tales, September, 1941.

62. “The Trail of Cthulhu,” Weird Tales, March, 1944.

63. “The Dweller in Darkness,” Weird Tales, November, 1944.

64. “The Watcher from the Sky,” Weird Tales, July, 1945.

65. “Something in Wood,” Weird Tales, March, 1948.

66. “The Whippoorwills in the Hills,” Weird Tales, September, 1948.

67. “The Testament of Claiborne Boyd,” Weird Tales, March, 1949.

68. “Something from Out There,” Weird Tales, January, 1951.

69. “The Keeper of the Key,” Weird Tales, May, 1951.

70. “The Black Island,” Weird Tales, January, 1952.

71. “The House in the Valley,” Weird Tales, July, 1953.

72. “The Seal of R’lyeh,” Fantastic Universe, July, 1957.

by Robert Blocb:
73. “The Secret in the Tomb,” Weird Tales, May, 1935.

74. “The Suicide in the Study,” Weird Tales, June, 1935.

75. “The Shambler from the Stars,” Weird Tales, September, 1935.

76. “The Mannikin,” Weird Tales, April, 1936.

77. “The Faceless God,” Weird Tales, May, 1936.

78. “The Grinning Ghoul,” Weird Tales, June, 1936.

79. “The Dark Demon,” Weird Tales, November, 1936.

80. “The Secret of Sebek,” Weird Tales, November, 1937.

81. “Fane of the Black Pharaoh,” Weird Tales, December, 1937.

82. “The Shadow from the Steeple,” Weird Tales, September, 1950.

83. “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” Weird Tales, May, 1951.

by Henry Hasse:

84. “The Guardian of the Book,” Weird Tales, March, 1937.

by Henry Kuttner

85. “The Salem Horror,” Weird Tales, May, 1937.

86. “The Invaders,” Strange Stories, February, 1939.

87. “Hydra,” Weird Tales, April, 1939.

88. “The Hunt,” Strange Tales, June, 1939.

by J. Ramsey Campbell:

89. “The Church in High Street,” in Dark Mind, Dark Heart, Arkham
House, Wisc., 1962.
90. “The Room in the Castle,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less
Welcome Tenants, Arkham House, Wisc., 1964.

91. “The Horror from the Bridge,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake,
Arkham House, Wisc., 1964.

92. “The Insects from Shaggai,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake,

Arkham House, Wisc., 1964.

93. “The Render of the Veils,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake, Arkham
House, Wisc., 1964

94. “The Inhabitant of the Lake,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake,

Arkham House, Wise., 1964.

95. “The Plain of Sound,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake, Arkham

House, Wisc., 1964.

96. “The Mine on Yuggoth,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake, Arkham

House, Wisc., 1964.

97. “The Moon-Lens,” in The Inhabitant of the Lake, Arkham House,

Wisc., 1964.

98. “The Stone on the Island,” in Over the Edge, Arkham House,
Wisc., 1964.

99. “Cold Print,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham House,

Wisc., 1969.

by J. Vernon Shea:

100. “The Haunter of the Graveyard,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,

Arkham House, Wisc., 1969.

by Brian Lumley:

101. “The Sister City,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham

House, Wisc., 1969.
102. “Cement Surroundings,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,
Arkham House, Wisc., 1969.

103. “Billy’s Oak,” The Arkham Collector, #6, Winter, 1970.

104. “An Item of Supporting Evidence,” The Arkham Collector, #7,

Summer, 1970.

by James Wade:

105. “The Deep Ones,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham

House, Wisc., 1969.

by Colin Wilson:

106. “The Return of the Lloigor,” in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,

Arkham House, Wisc., 1969.

107. The Philosopher's Stone, (book) Crown Publishers, N. Y., 1971.

by Gary Myers:

108. “The House of the Worm,” The Arkham Collector, #7, Summer,
1970.

109. “Yokh the Necromancer,” The Arkham Collector, #8, Winter,

1971.

110. “Passing of a Dreamer,” The Arkham Collector, #9, Spring,

1971.

by Lin Carter:

111. “The Doom of Yakthoob,” in The Arkham Collector, #10,

Summer, 1971.

112. “Shaggai,” in Dark Things, Arkham House, Wisc., 1971.

113. “The Dweller in the Tomb,” in Dark Things, Arkham House,
Wisc., 1971.

114. “In the Vale of Pnath,” The Arkham Collector, forthcoming.

115. “The Thing in the Pit,” The Arkham Collector, forthcoming.

116. “Out of the Ages,” in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham
House, Wisc., forthcoming.

117. “The City of Pillars,” The Arkham Collector, forthcoming.

118. “Acolyte of the Flame,” The Arkham Collector, forthcoming.

119. “The Descent Into the Abyss,” The Arkham Collector,

forthcoming.