"... a studious, retiring, ineffectual man, a typical Gissing hero."
Name
In
1960's and '70's San Francisco, “H.P. Lovecraft” was "a magician whose
specialty was his name." (from Disney
Magazine) *** What's
his name in Russian? And who is "Tall chap for devil-worship"? It sounds
like an American Indian descriptor, but actually it's an anagram
of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Education
At
the Mountains of Madness
is one of the assigned texts for the course
Horror Fiction, an honors seminar at the University of Central Arkansas.
*** He's on the list of the history course Studies in American Culture:
"Mood Noir,"
at Hanover College.
Music
Winnie
the Pooh (and Cthulhu, too) get together in the lyrics "House
at Cthulhu Corner." *** An audio abstract of "The Council of
the Zoogs" and other pieces is from the album Vertiges
by the French musicians Henry Torgue and Serge Houppi. ("Zoogs" are
from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in case there was a question.)
*** Engine Days is a new CD by the group "Lovecraft." *** French
composer and theorist Claude Ballif is responsible for the 1955 orchestral
work “Lovecraft” (opus 13, appropriately) and the incidental music for
the 1964 stage work La musique d'Erich Zahn. There’s a substantial
entry about him in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Art
John
Coulthart has graphically adapted both "The Haunter of the Dark" and
"The Call of Cthulhu."
Movies
Writer/director/producer
Aaron Vanek has been responsible for several Lovecraft films, as I've noted
in previous issues, and there's an interview
with him. *** In an article
Stuart Gordon discusses the preparation for the filming of Dagon.
It is to go directly to video and will be released in 2002. Curiously,
this will be the second adaption of this story in the past few years. The
other was a short animated film by the legendary Richard Corben and was
mentioned in a previous Criticaster.
Television On
TV5 (a French television channel available in America) a daily quiz show
asked the question of who created hobbits, and gave as its three choices
J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, or Robert E. Howard. Find those choices on
an American television quiz. Quotations In
reply to a question I raised last issue, Christopher M. O'Brien has informed
me that the use of "eidolon" by HPL appears in The American Heritage
Dictionary under that entry. Text
Glocester
- The Way Up Country A History, Guide and Directory
come "with an introduction from the pen of H. P. Lovecraft" (1976) and
is for sale.
*** At
the Mountains of Madness and all other fiction is available full
text at The H.P. Lovecraft Library. The single exception is "The Shunned
House." Its cousin, The H. P. Lovecraft Audio Library, is a 45-hour
CD "containing fifty-eight audio recordings of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft."
The cost is $10. It uses a voice synthesizer with an English accent. The
sample download, "Azathoth," I found somewhat difficult to understand.
Criticism Author
in 1977 of a Monarch Notes' The Major Works of H.P. Lovecraft, John
Taylor Gatto appeared on C-Span to discuss his education book, A Different
Kind of Teacher. *** There's a general
essay on his work by J. Edward Tremlett.
*** Of three study questionsabout
him in the DISCovering Authors collection (by the reference publisher Gale
Group), one is the inconsequential, "Discuss Lovecraft's collaboration
on The Watchers Out of Time." Nor is S.T.'s biography included in
the biography portion. Update, please. *** Robert M. Price has an article,
"H. P. Lovecraft: Prophet of Humanism," in The Humanist (July 2001).
*** In “Works
Referenced in Supernatural Horror in Literature” several titles
in this index are linked to the texts themselves, such as The House
on the Borderland. Parody Advertising
Slogans Targeted at the Lovecraftian Elder Gods includes "American Express:
Don't leave R'yleth without it!" and others by Greg Knauss. Influence He's
mentioned in a poem, "Through a glass darkly," by Laurence Goldstein; it
appeared in the academic TriQuarterly (Spring-Summer 1999). ***
He's a favorite author of Nora M. Mulligan. *** Jeffrey E. Barlough's The
House in the High Wood (Berkley/Ace, 2001) has been called a cross
of Dickens and HPL, while also evoking both Wilkie Collins and Poe. One
reviewer judged it "very good" and called its conclusion "horrific." ***
In an interview Buffy author and Bram Stoker Award winner Christopher Golden
speaks appreciatively of him. *** Richard Lupoff has recently published
a collection of his stories entitled Claremont Tales (see a very
favorable review of it in the Kansas City Star, 7 October 2001).
It includes the Lovecraftian “Discovery
of the Ghooric Zone,” whose complete text is available at Infinity
Plus. Science There
is a mystifying acknowledgement to HPL at the end of the article "Relative
Importance of Abiotically Induced Direct and Indirect Effects on a Salt-Marsh
Herbivore" by Daniel C. Moon and Peter Stiling.(Ecology,
Feb 2000 v. 81 no. 2). Replying to me, Dan writes "My acknowledgement of
him wasn't really based upon relevance to the subject matter of the article,
but rather to inspiration.Lovecraft
was a constant companion during that project, and much of the time that
I was not working on the research, I was reading his work.I
could also count on Lovecraft to get me past any writer's block I suffered,
as after I read some of his work, I always felt like writing myself." ***
"As a public outreach effort, over 1 million names
were collected and placed on the STARDUST spacecraft, which will visit
Comet Wild 2 in 2004." HPL appears three times on the microchip, as LOVECRAFT;
HOWARD P LOVECRAFT; HOWARD P. LOVECRAFT. *** I came across a book
(in French) entitled Réanimation Médicale, fortunately
not authored by someone called Herbert West. The word réanimation
means
"resusitation." Computers There's
a computer-related skit
"in honor of Halloween, and in memory of Massachusetts's [sic] classic
horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft" at the publishing site of Oreilly, known
for its programming works. Publishers This
Fedogan
and Bremer page describing each of their publications comes with enlargeable
thumbnails of the front (and sometimes back) covers.
Contemporaries
Forerunners From
Banned
Books Online: “In 1918, the US War Department told the American Library
Association to remove a number of pacifist and ‘disturbing’ books, including
Ambrose Bierce's Can Such Things Be? from camp libraries, a directive
which was taken to apply to the homefront as well.” Victoriana Spring-Heeled
Jack was a character who could jump over twenty feet in the air and wore
a skin-tight suit, and so reminds me of a Victorian superman. He as well
as the Beetle, Sexton Blake, Sergeant Cuff, Four Just Men, Arsène
Lupin, Varney the Vampyre, Prince Zaleski, and many others are at a wonderful
site entitled Fantastic,
Mysterious, and Adventurous Victoriana. It has impressive background
information and some contemporary illustrations. HPL is alluded to in an
entry concerning Robert W. Chambers' The Maker ofMoons. Pulps Ofian
Mike Ashley has authored The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction
Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool University Press,
2000). This 3 volume set is a revision and expansion of his History
of the Science Fiction Magazine. Says
I Ben,
your cover for Ibid 114 reprints the first page of “The Dreams in
the Witch-House,” and it identifies HPL as "the author of 'The Rats in
the Walls’." This allusion also appeared in the introduction to "In the
Vault" in The Other Worlds, the first horror anthology I read as
well as the first HPL story I read. Was "Rats" HPL's signature story, the
way that Robert Bloch was identified with Psycho? *** It’s on their
most recent flyer. Congratulations on being blurbed for an Arkham House
book. Stanley:
Your fascinating rundown on Margaret Murray had a section that led me to
think about "The Rats in the Walls." This is where you quote the summary
of The Divine King in England--that every English king up to James
I, "was a secret witch and that many of the country's statesmen had been
killed in ritual deaths." Ben
S.: Your collection of HPL on e-Bay was very intriguing. Although I would
not have bid on anything, in case I ever change my mind I know that the
stuff is obtainable, for a price. I wish I knew who the sellers were--if
they were names in the field. I wonder how they came into possession of
the titles. (There's a Elizabethan novel based on this idea.) Maybe there
is still a Lovecraft history of fans that needs to be told. *** If I understand
you, out of 50 Hellboys, these are the only ones with Lovecraft
connections?--and of these some are marginal HPL? *** I'd never have thought
of your idea that the variora(?) of HPL should be collected. It would require
first locating other versions--if they exist--then reassembling them. The
reassembler would have to determine what the document should look like. John:
Another big thanks for the pleasure I've had in reading your Arkham House
biography. *** You summer cover states “ASE is really a PBO.” For the un-initi(al)ated,
what do those letters signify? *** I think I agree with your observations
that HPL was a writer of outside, rather than inside, horror. *** Maybe
there are more sightings of UFO’s over water because of how water reflects
light. *** Huzzah for your honoring Marc Michaud. Around 1980 the New
York Times had a feature article with him among several people interviewed.
As I recall, the article ended with the question as to whether or not he
would become a publisher. S.T.:
Your Blackwood piece intrigued me enough that I am willing to re-read some
of the work I have and certainly purchase the volume that you've edited.
*** Congratulations.
David:
Welcome, and congrats on your first zine. I wonder if intelligence and
the willingness to believe in what I'll call "para-science" (channeling
the dead, etc.) are usually correlated, or is it education rather than
mental brightness which makes the difference? For my money, most of the
people who write this material up for publication have consulted their
imagination for their facts. Alan:
I see your zine has been struck by Azazoth, also known as the stapleless
god. Without staples there is Chaos. Orwell In
earlier quoting George Orwell I brought what he said to bear on the person
of HPL. I'm using this method again: "The mental connexion between pessimism
and a reactionary outlook is no doubt obvious enough. What is perhaps less
obvious is just why the leading writers of the 'twenties were predominantly
pessimistic. Why always the sense of decadence, the skulls and cactuses,
the yearning after lost faith and impossible civilisations? Was it not,
after all, because these people were writing in an exceptionally
comfortable epoch? It is just in such times that 'cosmic despair' can flourish."
("In the Whale") If one were obliged to categorize, from an average man's
view, whether Lovecraft's work were optimistic or pessimistic, the latter
would win. One may trippingly talk of "cosmic indifferentism," but in normal,
actual life, this is a bleak, depressing view--though, to my mind, in Lovecraft’s
fantasy it is sweetened by a majestic imagination and other qualities.
The force of Orwell's pronouncement is to attach HPL into the milieu in
which he lived and wrote, to make him a representative and a sharer
of the twenties with other "leading writers." Providence provided him with
a comfortable nest, with Boston a mostly unacknowledged re-enforcement.
Think of his remarks about wanting to voyage far, and yet have Providence
always reliably near. Think of the ending of The Dream-Quest of Unknown
Kadath. Chabon A
finalist both for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel is not a comic book, but
is about the world of comic books. Its author is Michael Chabon, who I
have referred to in a previous issue. He stated in an interview (Kansas
City Star, 9 September 2001, p. I-10) that HPL was "often a very terrible
writer. But it's that power of the imagination." Chabon notes that there's
a figure like HPL in his novel
Wonder Boys. He
has generously allowed me to ask him “two or three” questions about Lovecraft. 1.
SW: What way, if any, has Lovecraft influenced your writing career? MC:
I am and have always been drawn to the image of the solitary voyager in
the imagination; the writer who retreats to a drab room in a drab town
(let's say) and, pen in hand or at the keys of his Macintosh, goes sailing
off into the limitless void, visiting places and times that he can never
hope to see in 'real life.' The less likely it is that he can or will leave
his room, his house, his town or his little corner of the world, the more
attractive this figure becomes.Robert
E. Howard, dreaming away his life in Cross Plains, is one example; Lovecraft
is another. When I go out to my little office behind the house, I invoke
the memories of those other imaginative adventurers. (Post-interview
comment by me. This, so it seems, is not attributing a writer-to-writer
influence but a man-to-writer, and the man (Howard or HPL) is made to conform
to a romantic vision that I’ll call the Dreamer.) 2.
SW: Do you believe Lovecraft has anything worth saying to mainstream writers? MC:
I think the central predicate of much of Lovecraft's work--that beneath
the extremely thin and frangible skin of 'reality' there lies another reality,
at once dangerous and transcendent, that is always on the point of breaking
through --is a point of view that many modern writers of short stories,
for example, would not feel at all uncomfortable with. 3.
SW: Why do you continue to read him, if you do, and do you have a favorite
Lovecraft tale? (Sorry, I piggybacked one question on another.) MC:
I read him for the same reason I read all my favorites--for pleasure. I
guess my favorite is "At the Mountains of Madness." I'm a sucker for Antarctic
horror. (In
the KC Star interview Mr. Chabon made some remarks I took as a critque
of HPL’s style—imagine that!—and so after my questions I added, gratuitously,
that a dislike of HPLesque grammar may mean also a dislike of “similar”
styles, like that of Henry James. At any rate, he continued.) MC:
By the way, I LOVE long sentences, and adjectives, and use both freely
in my work. Proust, James, Nabokov,
are crucial writers to me.It's rather
Lovecraft's creaky abstractions, his deliberate dusty anachronisms, and
his reliance on dashes and exclamation points to convey unspeakable unnamable
horror--and his reliance on words like 'unspeakable' and 'unnamable'--that
I have a problem with. He's a clumsy
writer, and let's his narratives get too overwrought. When it comes to
horror I much prefer a cool hand (no less elegant) like M. R. James'.
The
Ancient Track:
A Superficial Review I
received his book of complete poetry, trebly swaddled in today's version
of Styrofoam. After filling my room with its wrapping I pulled out this
sturdy volume, in pristine condition. There's a big wrap-around cover.
What it wraps around is all the poetry, categorized in four subject sections
by expert S.T.
Of
late, in particular, reading as a sensuous experience has often been remarked
about in a way to contrast it with text on computers. There needs no computers
to show, here, that reading can be a bummer with the wrong design. If
there is a want of comparison, consider the slim Collected Poems,
an Arkham House of the sixties. Its jacket shows a figure--whom I always
associate with HPL—at rest on a wooded hill, a book in his hand. This catches
the Lovecraftian spirit as good as anything of the macabre. The woodcut
illustrations within add to the poems' luster. Their type is neat and appropriate.
I don't know that poetry books have to be slim, as if reflecting an innate
view that poetry is delicate, but it certainly works in this package. Whereas
whatever the intrinsic value of completeness and textual correctness of
TheAncient
Track, the physical presence is--sausage. Review:
Arkham's
Masters of Horrors It
has been noted that the most engaging part of this work are the introductions
to each of the authors, which in many instances fills in what have heretofore
been shadowy figures and in all instances reveal something new about the
relationship between August Derleth, publisher, and the people who have
had books or stories for Arkham House. Some of their allure is gossip,
which blackens several individuals, such as H. R. Wakefield and Mark Schorer.
The weakness of this is that editor Peter Ruber is a Derleth booster, by
which he is also a taker of sides against some of these writers. The picture
one gets is in enormous contrast to R. Alain Everts' characterization,
and I suspect that Ruber has left out certain features that would explain
Derleth's relationships in a few instances. Be
that as it may, it is the stories that are to be reviewed. I'll omit the
inclusion of HPL's letters and begin with "Prince Alcouz and the Magician"
by Clark Ashton Smith. It is early Smith and slight Smith, and as a story
it merits no discussion. "Man-Hunt" is a conte cruel by Donald Wandrei.
Given a choice of being shot or blown up, what is one to do? "The Valley
of the Lost" by Robert E. Howard is a supernatural western; there's a feud,
the hero's discovery of a villainous underground race, and its destruction
of his human enemies; a formula told with typical Howardian flourish."The
Bat Is My Brother" by Robert Bloch is a vampire story told from the perspective
of an initiate vampire; it moves along pretty well.
Necronomicon
The Dan
Clore Necronomicon Page has links to Lovecraft's"History of the Necronomicon,"
J. Vernon Shea's "The Necronomicon," and other related sites.
I won't tread further into traditional
review matters. Rather, I ’m putting down my objections to the clunky typography,
whose style of lettering is better suited to instructions found on plumbing
drainer bottles. In this book of poetry it’s a disaster. It's abetted
by the constipated layout, for the spacing of the poems is about as variedas
link sausages. One poem ends, another begins with an indifference to how
this looks from one page to the other.
"The
Latch-Key" by H. Russell Wakefield is a non-supernatural story of crime
and revenge. Derleth was right in holding a high regard for Wakefield,
who did some excellent horror tales, and I wish something in this genre
had been included."Dyak Reward"
by Carl Jacobi is notable for its exotic locale (Borneo) and is another
story about revenge."Sea-Tiger"
by Henry S. Whitehead features the jaws of dangerous barracuda, but this
demonizing of nature has been done much better since then. "The Dog-Eared
God" by Frank Belknap Long is a slight "mummy-comes-alive." "The Beautiful
Lady" by David H. Keller deals with another of Keller's lethal people (remember
"Tiger Cat"?). “Sweetheart from the Tomb" by E. Hoffmann Price is an Egyptian
tale of the seemingly supernatural told from the (third person)
viewpoint of the imposed-upon victim. It's the old-fashioned crime story
masquerading as a supernatural work. "Wolf of the Steppes" by Greye La
Spina is formula and ranks with the Quinn piece as the most unoriginal
of the stories here--or maybe I find werewolves trite."Rhythmic
Formula" by Arthur J. Burks recounts the usage of jungle magic by a money-digging
cad and his (of course) comeuppance.
"The
Small Assassin" by Ray Douglas Bradbury shows Bradbury's strength
as a storyteller in exploring the conviction that a baby is a natural-born
killer.“George is All Right” by
Howard Wandrei is, like the Wakefield, a weird crime story. It has a Chandleresque
style, and with the Bradbury is the best told story in this collection.
Mary Elizabeth Counselman's "Something Old" is a Babylonian ring that transforms
a young, innocent bride into a servant of the old powers, which at least
keeps her young. "Property of the Ring" (non-Babylonian) by John
Ramsey Campbell--why the name expansion, as with Bradbury?--typically drowns
in its original polish of words and figures of speech. Also typical, the
story never solidifies, so I am not sure what the story is about.
"Bon voyage, Michele" by Seabury Quinn is a work I had to force myself
through, so undistinguished and commonplace is it, though at least it improves
toward the end. I like (or liked) Quinn's de Grandin stories, but not this."The
Master of Cotswold" by Nelson Bond is the most successful story of the
collection. This chiller relates the events of a well being opened, which
lets in some pagan force. "The Open Window" by Vincent Starrett is intriguing
in its development of a mystery, but the solution is a letdown. This is
black humor, so a macabre mood does not succeed. A Visitor from Outside”
by August Derleth & Mark Schorer is mechanical in its supernatural
mystery; why are Persians being burnt to death? To
avoid the plot holes and logic jumps and unanswered questions?
Schorer
perhaps is the "master of horror" most damned by the editor, who makes
it clear he was guilty of coopting the work of Derleth. Since Schorer was
both an anthologized writer and a winner of accolades (for his Sinclair
Lewis biography), the supporting evidence against him is weak. More seriously,
Ruber's praise for several bad stories, and his aesthetic values in general,
mark him as an unsatisfactory editor in this genre. If it were not for
the eminence afforded through his Arkham House "pulpit" or his access to
the Arkham back files that reveal all kinds of factual goodies about the
pulpsters, I doubt if he--his judgement--would rate any more attention
than a typical criticaster in an average fanzine. When I read some of his
evaluations I wonder if this man is serious. As
an anthology most of the stories represent pulp values and suggest a bygone
era of writing. On the plus side, they get down to the weirdness and feel
no compulsion for soap-opera gymnastics, though there are the conventional
gooey romances in a few works.
"And wrote a golden story
--Lord Dunsany