Name
In
Los Angeles,
Lovecraft
Biofuels converts diesel vehicles so that they run on 100%
vegetable
oil. The owner formerly ran a
tattoo shop, which I believe also bore the Lovecraft handle.
Geography
“Thingless
names
and nameless things” and allusions to stories such as
“The Unnamable” are some
of the content in James Kneale’s “From Beyond: H.P.
Lovecraft and the Place of
Horror” in Cultural Geographies (2006,
13, 106-126). It passeth my
understanding.
Music
The
music
by three
composers for the silent The Call of Cthulhu
presents “quite a powerful
score.” ***
A journalist and blogger of the Kingsport Times-News
wonders if
the 1962 song “Kingsport Town” by Bob Dylan
was alluding to the HPL locale.
*** The group High On Fire has an album
song based on At the Mountains
of Madness. *** The Swedish group Crystal Eyes is to produce
an album, Dead
City Dreaming, based on “The Call of
Cthulhu.” *** A
death metal band from Chemnitz, Germany called Philosopher is
Lovecraft-influenced. Cuts include “Seven Hundred Steps of
Slumber,” “47°9'S
126°43'W” (the coordinates for R’lyeh), and
“I Am Providence.” See
a review of
its album.
Art
A
few years ago, it
appears, the original Howard Brown cover for “The Shadow out
of Time” (Astounding
Stories, June 1936) was sold for $49,279 by the auction house
MaestroNet.
*** Allen Koszowski has several
Lovecraft illustrations for sale.
Comics
Comic
book artist
Jim
Steranko created a horror story, “At the Stroke of
Midnight,” said to have
many graphic innovations. Even though the original title was
“The Lurking Fear
at Shadow House,” it was claimed that he did not know HPL.
*** Mike Mignola employs Lovecraft material in his Hellboy,
while
Richard Corben has adapted several Lovecraft stories in comics and
film. The
two have combined forces in the latest Hellboy
comic, subtitled Makoma.
*** Read the interview
with the creators of the anthology Cthulhu Tales
(Boom! Studios) and their take on HPL. *** Read the online comic
“Return
to Arkham.” *** Chick Publications, who
produce Christian comic books, has a
copyright issue with comic book artist Howard Hallis, whose parodying
website
has youths switching allegiance from Jesus to Cthulhu. See the article
“Post
and Be Damned” in New Scientist (14 Jan
2006, p. 20).
Drama
Cthulhu
has an
offstage role in the absurdist play Love Stories During the
Armageddon of a
Citrus Fruit by Daniel Hamilton.
Movies
Die
Monster Die
(1965 adaptation of “The Colour out of Space”) and The
Dunwich Horror
(1970) have been brought out on a single DVD. The former title was
scripted by
the late Jerry Sohl who, in addition to episodes of The
Twilight Zone
and The Outer Limits, also did Curse of
the Crimson Altar, a
supposed lift from “The Dreams in the Witch-House.”
This also would mean that
Boris Karloff starred in two Lovecraft adaptations. (For more on
“Colour” see
the section below on The Invisible Ray.)*** There's
a French book out
about movie-maker Roger Corman and and his film adaptations (The
Haunted
Palace, etc.) of HPL. It is Corman, Lovecraft: La
Rencontre Fantastique
[Corman, Lovecraft: The Fantastic Encounter] by
Guillaume Foresti
(Dreamland, 2002).
Criticism
He
is one of the
writers studied in the 2006 doctoral dissertation The
Modernist Undoing of
Knowledge: Implications for Student Subjectivity and the Status of
Academic
Knowledge
by James Kincaid, University of Southern California. And he
is the
subject of a 1996 paper written for partial fulfillment of a Bachelor
of Arts, Beyond
Human Senses: Describing the Indescribable in the Fiction of
Howard Phillips Lovecraft by Anthony Cain.
*** Belmont College professor Amy H. Sturgis is
giving a talk this July on Tolkien and HPL at a Tolkien convention in
Toronto.
Science
I
mentioned an
article by Jason Colavito, “Atheism’s
Mythographer,” in
Criticaster 38. Now he has a book, The
Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (Prometheus
Books, 2005). It is reviewed
at Blogcritics.org.
In the same vein you could also read his “From
Cthulhu to Cloning.” Unfortunately, the errors that one can
recognize—he calls L. Sprague de Camp a
“protégé” of HPL, who he
later says
died in 1936—harms the reliability of assertions one
doesn’t know about.
Computers
Literature Map
has a visual space design that shows
if-you-like-this-author-you’ll-like-that-author, though the
accuracy is
questionable. To get an idea of its accuracy, near the name of HPL
there is
Aleister Crowley and Leon Trotsky, whereas Clark Ashton Smith and
Robert Bloch
are out in the boonies. It does look good, with those floating names.
Toys
See the
movie of “Cthulego.”
Cthulhu Mythos
The Temple of Dagon has
Cthulhoid fiction and other material.
Publishing
John
Gregory
Betancourt and one of the magazines that he publishes, Weird
Tales, is
the subject of an article by The Washington Post
(March 14, 2006),
“Plato's Cream Pie and Other Horror Delicacies,” by
Peter Carlson. In it we
learn–based on testimony by U.S. soldiers–that in
2003 artist Rowena Morrill’s
covers were found hanging in a palace belonging to Saddam Hussein.
Blogs
This
blog is
titled: “Chris
Perridas: H. P. Lovecraft & His Legacy,”
which has as a
subtitle: “A presentation of H. P. Lovecraft, his
contemporaries, and his
historical significance. A 'blog of references, original mini-essays
and
Lovecraft's wide reaching influences.”
Bibliography
Rather
than to
break them into various subjects in my ‘aster,
as I normally do, I am
gathering together articles about and by HPL in two groups.
The
first are
selected from a search for “Lovecraft” via OAIster,
and
can be read online:
“A
Functional
Lexematic Analysis of a Horror Short Story” by
María José Feu Guijarro, in Cuadernos
de Investigación Filológica, no. 23-24,
1997-1998, pages 99-114. The
article, breaking down “Polaris,” is in English.
“Literatura
Fantástica: Un Acercamiento desde Tolkien y
Lovecraft” by Jacob Buganza, in Sincronía,
nº. 1, 2003. This short article from a Mexican e-journal has
little to say
about HPL.
“Horreur
des Villes
Maudites dans l'Oeuvre de H.P. Lovecraft” by
Frédéric Sayer, from Belphegor.
This 2004 title about “cursed” cities (Innsmouth,
Arkham, etc.) is in French.
“Horreur,
Hyperbole
et Réticence chez Lovecraft” by Stefano Lazzarin,
is another 2004 French
article from Belphegor.
“Skygger
over
Tiden: Et Studie i Forfatteren H.P. Lovecraft Som
Oversættelsesobjekt” by
Oliver Holm, is a 2005 Danish thesis from Roskilde Universitetscenter.
It pays
particular attention to “The White Ship,”
“The Rats in the Walls,” and “The
Shadow out of Time.”
From
a Canadian
database:
Horror
and Terror:
Lovecraft's Alienated Protagonists (1985) by
Anne-Louise Gibbons. I suspect it is a thesis.
Stories
of New
England: Then & Now (Audio Bookshelf, 1996). One of
the stories among
this cassette set is “In the Vault.”
Les
Extra-Terrestres dans l'Histoire (Editions J'ai Lu, 1970) by
old-time
Lovecraft fan Jacque Bergier is apparently a non-fiction on the
intervention of
extra-terrestrials in human history.
Épitaphe
(Éditions "C't'un fait, Jim!" (1996)) by Éric
Bourguignon appears to
be a fanzine, which had a special Lovecraft issue (as well as one for
Robert E.
Howard &c).
El
Libro de los
Autores (Ediciones de la Flor, 1967) is an anthology of
stories selected by
some of the most important figures of Argentine literature. The
favorite of M.
Mujica Láinez is “El terror de Dunwich.”
Weird
Tales
(1926-1938) compiled by William Robert Gibson has stories by HPL and
his
compeers. Perhaps this is the Canadian version of Weird Tales.
Gibson,
who died in 2001, had numerous private collections.
Nel
Tempo del
Sogno: Le Forme della Narrativa Fantastica dall'Immaginario Vittoriano
all'Utopia Contemporanea [roughly, In the Time of
Dream: The Form of the
Fantastic Novel from the Victorian Imagination to the Contemporary
Utopia]
edited by Carlo Pagetti (Longo, 1988). This has papers from a 1986
conference,
with HPL one of the subjects.
Antología
de
Cuentos e Historias Mínimas, Siglos XIX y XX
[roughly, Anthology of
Short-Short Stories, XIX and XX Centuries] (Espasa Calpe,
2002). Poe,
Dunsany, Lovecraft, and Bradbury are among the many.
Lovecraft,
Lovecraft! (Edicions 62, 1981) by Ofèlia Dracs is
in the Spanish language.
H.P.
Lovecrafts
Mythologie : "Bricolage" und Intertextualität,
Erzählstrategien und
ihre Wirkung [i.e., H.P. Lovecraft’s
Mythology: "Bricolage"
and Intertextuality, Narrative Strategies and Their Effect]
(Aisthesis
Verlag, 1997) by Susanne Smuda.
Les
Monstres
Familiers de H. P. Lovecraft: Une Analyse des Images Teratologiques
dans la Vie
et l'Oeuvre de H. P. Lovecraft [i.e., The Familiar
Monsters of H.P.
Lovecraft:An Analysis of the Monstrous Images in the Life and Work of
H.P.
Lovecraft] (1995) is a thesis by William Tobin Schnabel.
Howard
Phillips
Lovecraft (Nuova Italia, 1979) by Gianfranco de Turris and
Sebastiano Fusco is in
Italian. The former wrote about HPL in a book on horror (see my
‘aster
27).
Howard
Phillips
Lovecraft (1890-1937): A Catalog of 187 Items (Carl's
Bookstore, 1970).
This is 20 pages.
20th
Century
American Novel: Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft (Everett
Edwards, 1975) is a
cassette with lecturer Warren G. French, who has written elsewhere
about HPL.
Houdini
et Sa
Légende: Les Secrets du "Roi de l'Évasion"
[i.e., Houdini and
His Legend: The Secrets of the “King of Escape”]
(Editions Techniques du
Spectacle, 1982) by Roland Lacourbe is a life of Harry Houdini that
includes a
translation of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.”
The
Shadow over
Innsmouth (Heavenly Monkey, 2005) has wood engravings by
Shinsuke
Minegishi, based on drawings by Hieronymus Bosch.
Os
Mortos Podem
Voltar [roughly, The Dead Can Return]
(Livros do Brasil, 19--) by
H.P. Lovecraft is in Portuguese. (Part of The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward
according to H.P. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism,
which guesses the
year is 1958 (p. 200); but according to the website “H.P.
Lovecraft: A
Pictorial Bibliography–Works in Translation: 1954-1976" the
year is 1955.)
Les
Infrequentables : Jacques Benoist-Mechin, Luc Dietrich, John Fante,
Jean
Lorrain, H.P. Lovecraft, Siouxie Sioux, Edith Sitwell, Vauvenargues,
Otto
Weininger (Editions du Rocher, 1989) is a French work that
appears to be
about authors who are recluses.
Contemporaries
Among
relevant
publications are M.P. Shiel and the Lovecraft Circle: A
Collection of
Primary Documents Including Shiel's Letters to August Derleth, 1929-1946 edited with notes by John
D. Squires
(Vainglory Press, 2001). Also, Shiel has
online an article about Arthur Machen. *** Correspondent
Alfred Galpin
collected material about Hart Crane and Samuel Loveman. It was left at
New
York’s Columbia University, where there are also letters from
two Crane
biographers. *** In Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature
(Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2005) by Lewis M. Dabney, Bowden Broadwater, Harvard
aesthete and
former copy editor of The New Yorker,
“tried to make Wilson interesting
and funny rather than fearful, substituting
‘Monstro,’ out of H.P. Lovecraft’s
horror stories, for the Minotaur,” a nickname given him by
his wife, Mary
McCarthy (p. 296). This was probably in 1943, before Wilson’s
notorious New
Yorker essay on HPL. *** Until recently I didn’t
know of the existence of An
August Derleth Reader (Prairie Oak Press, 1992). ***
There’s an interesting
newspaper
account of a genealogical researcher attempting to establish
the
actual birth place of Ambrose Bierce.
Influence
The
University at
Buffalo (New York) has an archive of poet Robert Kelly—who
reviewed Mark
Danielewski’s Lovecraft-tinged House of Leaves
in the New York Times—with
poems mentioning HPL in the title: “With HP Lovecraft the
First Time He Makes
Love,” which has a variant title; “Shaggy Lovecraft
Shadow”; and “The
Lovecraft Version.” *** I’ve mentioned
Gregory Galloway’s As Simple as Snow,
where a Goth girl has an interest
in Lovecraft and others. It has won an Alex Award as one of ten adult
books
that would be of interest to teen readers.
130
Wilum:
To some
people, undoubtedly, an overwhelming motivation is monetary, and so
this is how
they will define human behavior. In their case, August Derleth used the
Lovecraft name in order to maximize profits and make money. I say no.
While in
part it may have been a business decision, it was to keep the Lovecraft
name
alive before the public and expand his readership. Rightly or wrongly,
I
suspect that Derleth may have made more money writing if he had not
taken up
his time “co-authoring” with HPL. *** I wish you
had indicated from what source
(fanzine?) you reprinted the Mary Elizabeth Counselman reminiscence.
Ben:
In Mongolia,
while the tents (gers) in which I stayed were comfortable, roomy, and
round as
circus tents, they had no tv’s, and just a little
electricity. Their wooden
doors, on hinges, were highly decorated; one I remember had a swastika,
though
its presence had nothing to do with its infamous incarnation, a result
of
cultural hijacking. *** You speak of Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea as a science fiction masterpiece. I note with pride that
I read an
unabridged version completely through in its original French. Its main
fault
are its large swaths of textbook-like material about the sea, material
you
might find in a sixth-grade science book. The non-fictional inserts
gave a
creaky quality to the story, for whose sake it could be omitted from
the
reading. However, didn’t Hugo Gernsbach feel science
education uplifting should
be incorporated in scientifiction?
Ken:
In S.
Baring-Gould’s John Herring (on which
your reported) you apparently were
not reminded–by the sections on the
“primitives” and the burrows in which they
lived–of degenerate humanity from “The Lurking
Fear” or “The Rats in the
Walls.” *** You don’t have to depend on any of
B-G’s titles being in print to
read them. There is always inter-library loan to get any of his
published
works. *** The library at the University of Madison sounds like the
proper fit
for the amateur journalism collection–I see they already have
8500 British
amateur journalism titles. *** HPL has had a number of alternate,
might-have-been existences thanks to fiction by yourself, Peter Cannon,
and
others.
Alan:
I enjoyed
reading your reviews of Clark Ashton Smith’s juvenilia.
However, The New
American Cyclopaedia is not, as you call it,
“fanciful,” but actual, having
been published 1857-1863.
Scott:
In reading
your informative pieces that you wrote for World Supernatural
Literature,
I have a question about your entry for Walter de la Mare’s
“The Return.” After
noting that the physical appearance of the protagonist has changed
completely,
you say, in your description of the story, “Mr. Bethany, an
old friend, assures
him that he will soon be better, but takes off his glasses.”
Whose glasses are
being taken off, and what is the significance of that?
131
Fred:
Cunctator
Press is a great name. And you don’t need an excuse if you
are delayed in
putting something out. *** I believe you are the first member to have a
contribution with a Greek title. *** I don’t know what makes
a “bona-fide
religion.” I suppose a sincere belief system in the
supernatural shared by
others, plus ceremonial trappings. Maybe such religions are always
springing up,
but since they lack staying power, they expire. *** I probably disagree
that
witch persecution significantly involved, for example, Protestants
denouncing
Catholics. What I’ve read implies that, in addition to heated
superstition,
denunciation might be prompted by unpopularity, jealousy, covetousness,
etc.
You seem to use the word “witch” metaphorically
rather than in its Hallowe’en
sense, the one that most has to do with Lovecraft. *** Could you expand
on the
definition of “anthropological science fiction” and
its relation to HPL? As I
understand it, someone like Chad Oliver wrote
“anthropological science
fiction,” so I don’t know if you have an author
like this in mind. *** I had
heard of the legendary anecdote about the infiltration of a Necronomicon
entry
card into a card catalog, and here is someone acquainted with the
perpetrator.
*** Unless you happen to hit on a hot button issue, the responses that
you get
to a fanzine submission will likely be none to slight, with the
exception of
the occasional garrulous codger. You are lucky if a fifth of the
current
members comment, and those that do will be the same ones, as those that
are mum
will also be the same. *** Please don’t belittle your own
contributions while
praising “the professional caliber” of other
members. Nobody is that good, and
for the twenty years I have been a member, maybe no one has been that
inconsequential. *** You make several errors re HPL in issue two.
“The Call of
Cthulhu” was not published in 1924, the Derleth family still
have a connection
with Arkham House, and your remarks are actually about “The
Statement of
Randolph Carter” and not “The Tomb.”
Ben:
Would critics
like Laura Miller and Daniel Handler receive credence if they published
their
pap in a fanzine? They have a big platform from which to hurl, and so
some of
the reading population will take them seriously. I enjoyed your fantasy
about a
possible punishment for Edmund Wilson, who did have a lot of thoughtful
things
to say in other writing, so I hope what you suggest–he would
be in a place with
only Lovecraft and Tolkien to read or view at the
movies–remains unfulfilled.
On the other hand, that might make a good short story. *** Part of the
problem
with those, like HPL, who indulge in “anti-Semitic
outbursts” is that they
fantasize what a Jew is, and then react to that fantasy. Or, to quote
at length
from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend,
"’For it is not in Christian
countries with the Jews as with other peoples," Mr. Riah reflects.
"Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a
bad
Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad
among
us easily enough -- among what people are the bad not easily found? --
but they
take the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us
as
presentations of the highest; and they say 'All Jews are
alike.'"” *** You
caught me. I did write “whose more
popular”–a typical instance where I know
better but don’t do better.
Sean:
Missouri–An
Illustrated History has not yet appeared. Do you know its
publication date?
Jim
D.: The source
from HPL’s letters refuting that his fiction is based on
occult themes is on p.
271, volume IV of Selected Letters. He writes that
client and
occult-believer William Lumley “is firmly convinced that all
our gang ... are
genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark and
profound for
human conception or comprehension. We may think we’re
writing fiction,
and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom
we are
telling the truth in spite of ourselves.” For a related
argument, see volume V,
p. 285, where Lovecraft states, “As for seriously-written
books on dark,
occult, and supernatural themes–in all truth they
don’t amount to much.” I’ll
add that I have no paper on the topic.
Brown
Jenkin’s Gender
Watching
a
Lovecraft adaptation often entices me to read the original. In this
instance I
keenly watched, “The Dreams in the Witch-House,”
where the hyperspace stuff was
thrown out, thereby warping the narrative.
When
re-reading a
Lovecraft story I usually notice something I have previously
overlooked, or not
thought about. In this instance, there was a line about Brown Jenkin. I
preface
the line with Fritz Leiber’s offhand comment about
“a resourceful little
rat-man,” in which Leiber is perhaps thinking how Lovecraft
described “its
sharp-toothed, bearded face.” The word
“bearded” suggests a masculine
character, though nonetheless throughout the story Lovecraft calls the
rat
familiar an “it.” (The television adaptation had a
male actor in rather
ridiculous-looking rat get-up.)
But
in “Dreams”
then comes an enriching detail typical of HPL’s fiction. This
is where Walter
Gilman “saw the fanged, bearded little face in the
rat-hole–the accursed little
face which he at last realized bore such a shocking, mocking
resemblance to old
Keziah's.” Since Keziah is a witch, is Brown Jenkin then a
“rat-woman”?
In
Macbeth,
Banquo addresses the witches, “You should be women, / And yet
your beards
forbid me to interpret / That you are so.” Beyond reminding
the audience that
men are playing the roles of women (a given when Shakespeare wrote for
the
stage), there is also the Macbethian theme that the world is
topsy-turvy, “foul
is fair.” More prosaically, according to Thomas Alfred
Spalding in Elizabethan
Demonology (Chatto and Windus, 1880),
“The beard was in Elizabethan times the
recognized characteristic of the
witch.”
A
possible
inference is that the familiar, with a beard and the witch’s
face, is neither
rat-man nor rat-woman, but androgynous, something that transgresses
gender.
Maybe Keziah Mason herself participates in a role that goes beyond the
female
gender.
The
pre-name
“Brown” is not a gender definite label, which adds
to the witch’s identity
ambiguity. As to her secret name, “Nahab,”by
coincidence or not, it may mean
“hidden” in Zoroastrian (see
“Mînô nahab”). Or
maybe it is a neologism or semi-anagram based on a
Biblical name, such as that of bad king (n)Ahab.
Bernard Herrmann
In
reading the
biography of one of my favorite composers, Bernard Herrmann, I came
across the
following 1931 entry from his diary, when his career was yet to be:
“From now
on I have decided that my compositions will be governed by the
following idea.
‘Art should be an adventure into the unknown’
(Secret Glory of Arthur Macken [sic])”
(A Heart at Fire’s Center, p. 26). The sic
is missing in the
quote, but the author is actually Arthur Machen, natch, whose Secret
Glory
concerns the quest for the Holy Grail. Machen refers in the text
(at
horrormasters.com)
to a “Celtic
Mythos” that is a “Christianity which was not a
moral code ... but a great
mystical adventure into the unknown sanctity” (p. 65). The
work was filmed in
2001 under the premise that an SS officer is on a quest for
the Grail, which
ties it in a way with Raiders of the Lost Ark and
its kith.
Herrmann
had other
genre affiliations. Several paragraphs in the biography discuss his
scoring for
the radio dramatization of Dunsany’s Gods of the
Mountains, and he also
supplied music for Dracula and the notorious
broadcast of Wells’ War
of the Worlds. Poe was a favorite author.
Relevant
to this
audience, he did theme music for the radio show, Suspense,
which put on
“The Dunwich Horror.” Whether he did any for that
particular program, I know
not.
In
the photograph section is one with him and
Ray Bradbury, two stories of whom he scored for “The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour,”
“The Life Work of Juan” and “The
Jar,” both of which I recall seeing and
wishing that the latter was weirder; this anthology show was not a home
to
fantasy, unfortunately. For this same series Herrmann did a score for
Robert
Bloch (“A Home Away from Home”). Better known are
Herrmann’s movie scores for
novels by both authors, Fahrenheit 451 and Psycho,
concerning
which the Richard Band score for Re-animator is
“too reminiscent” (Leonard
Maltin’s Movie Guide). So in a removed way,
Herrmann did do a Lovecraft
film.
The Invisible
Ray
After
several
decades I finally re-saw this 1936 movie. Half of it is a good story,
something
that might be appreciated by a Lovecraft fan, especially those who
enjoy “The
Colour out of Space.” It begins with the written
“claimer”(i.e., the opposite
of a disclaimer) that scientists credit the theory of what the audience
is
about the see, something of a dodge used by Lovecraft (as in
“Such a thing was
surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a
newer
science”).
There’s
a cosmic
and temporal scope at the beginning when, thanks to an invention by
Janos Rukh
(Boris Karloff, who would later play another meteor-inflicted victim in
the
first dramatization of “Colour”), on a screen we
are swept past the Moon, then
Saturn, and beyond, in order to watch, through the aeon-old light of
the Sun as
seen from another star, a meteor as it plummets to Earth, striking what
looks
to be Angola in Africa. (There is both anachronism and inconsistency.
The globe
shows today’s continental topography; and the search for the
meteor, the
audience is told, is in Nigeria, though later the search group heads
for Lake
Nyanza, which is actually in the Congo!). The idea that one could look
back in
time through ancient star light really piqued my imagination when,
perhaps a
pre-teen, I first saw the movie on television.
Before
the
expedition the scientist’s mother warns that man was not
meant to know certain
things, the closest it may come explicitly to the universe of HPL.
Eventually,
the Karloff character finds the meteor, then chips rocks from it as he
dangles
in a pit (perhaps an echo of the well in “Colour”),
and is infected by it–so
that his touch is lethal. An outward sign of this condition is that in
the dark
he glows (a
“colour” out of space?). The
rest of the movie deteriorates into a melodrama of a mad scientist
getting
revenge. However, (spoiler alert) his demise is memorable, as he jumps
through
a window and burns up, like a falling meteor consumed by the atmosphere.
(For
an
astronomical article about “Colour,” see
“Meteor Beliefs Project: Meteoric
Imagery in SF, Part II - H. P. Lovecraft's The Colour out of
Space” by Alastair
McBeath and Andrei Dorian Gheorghe in WGN, Journal of the
International
Meteor Organization (v. 33, no. 6 (Dec 2005), p. 167-170)).
The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward
The
first stanza of
a poem by 19th-century poet Robert Southey seems
that it would be an
appropriate epigraph for some of HPL’s work, in particular The
Case of
Charles Dexter Ward:
“My days
among the Dead are passed;
Around me I
behold,
Where'er
these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty
minds of old:
My
never-failing friends are they,
With whom I
converse day by day.”
This
has been the 48th issue of The Criticaster
(April 2006, mailing
134) by SWalker
. Eventually published on the Net as a The
Limbonaut (no
19).