Art
Artist Mike Bukowski has set himself the goal of drawing every one of HPL's creatures, whether described, not described, or indescribable.
Costumes
For Sacramento steampunk costume groups, his monsters are an inspiration.
Criticism
H.
P. Lovecraft (1890-1937): An Annotated Bibliography by Peter G. Epps had at the time of publishing The Criticaster been on Scribd, but has since been removed. Epps is
also author of A Knocking at the Door: Christian Hope in the Horror Fiction
of H. P. Lovecraft (see Crit' #35). *** Amy H. Sturgis has a
"Looking Back on Genre History" segment that discusses
"Supernatural Horror in Literature," "Some Notes on
Interplanetary Fiction," and "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" at
the StarShipSofa
site, where it is apparently only available to subscribers. *** Cthulhu
Fiction
A section in TV Tropes (listing story conventions for fiction) is Lovecraftian Tropes.
Letters
Google's newspaper digitization project
has been abandoned. But it did make available online a letter (7 October, 1914)
to the Providence Evening News. This
is by J.F. Hartmann, who is responding to an attack on astrology by "my critic,
Mr. Lovecraft." He begins, "It is unfortunate that the advocates of unpopular
truth must contend against the prejudice, venom and false teachings of the
influential and learned who misuse their reputation for knowledge in their
warfare against truth." Hartmann goes on to quote HPL.For context, see I Am Providence, p. 184-85.
(I dare say that a day will come when such
a work as I Am Providence will be
online, having links to various documents referred to in the work. This would
not only be the full text of Lovecraft's letters, stories, poetry, and essays
but any supporting matter in any media.)
Music
An upcoming album by Flesh Consumed has lyrics
influenced by HPL, Clive Barker, Poe, and Ray Bradbury. *** Daniel Klag's album Weird Tales "is inspired by
the writing of HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, & Lord Dunsany." *** At New York's
Terence Koh's gallery called Asia Song Society,
Rachel Mason turned "The Outsider" into an art musical.
Theatre
For July New York's RadioTheatre has "Reanimator" and "The Call of Cthulhu" on stage as the second part of the H. P. Lovecraft Festival, a year-long tribute. *** Readings of his works by the Drama Bums (from Savannah, Ga.) also included a silent auction and art exhibition.
Contemporaries
Richard Stanley's segment in the anthology
film The Theatre Bizarre shares its
title with the Clark Ashton Smith story that inspired it, "The Mother of
Toads."
Influence
Three of the five nominees for the Locus
Best Fantasy Novel have recognized the spell of HPL: China Miéville
(the winner for Kraken), Charles Stross, and Gene Wolfe. Winner of the Best Anthology was Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories (Night
Shade).
God--or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age
As I've written about the Darwinian theme
in his fiction, I'll add a few comments based on this work (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008) by Constance Areson Clark.
1. Concerning human evolution in the
1920's, "many people found references to monkeys, apes, and ape-men horrifying
or repulsive, evocative of things nasty and brutish--or of brutish potential
within humans" (p. 2). This provides context for the attitude HPL was mining in
"Arthur Jermyn." I suppose that the animal nature of the ape represented the id
or beast-self which, in terms of the Gothic tradition, was the werewolf, and
also relates to the submerged personality theme that threads throughout his
fiction. It can be an animal ("The Rats in the Walls"), one of the undead ("The
Tomb"), or an alien ("The Shadow [out of Time/over Innsmouth]").
2. "The kidnapping of women by cavemen
echoed an older popular motif of abductions of human women by apes. Gorillas began abducting women in European art almost as soon as
gorillas became familiar to Europeans, in the mid-nineteenth century" (p. 11).
The idea of sexual abductions by sub-humans is more in line with Arthur Machen
(say, "The Novel of the Black Seal") or Robert E. Howard (maybe "Spear and
Fang" and others) than HPL. In Ufology lore aliens (super-humans) perform this
function.
3. The series of Little Blue Books by socialist
autodidact Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius was "especially
interesting in the context of the evolution debates because they reflected Haldeman-Julius's extreme antipathy to organized religion"
(p. 60). HPL was a reader of some items in this series, although whether he
knew of Haldeman-Julius' opinion--with which he felt
conditional affinity--I don't know.
4. Then there was Ernst Haeckel. A
scientist noted that in an evolutionary diagram by him "'man is for convenience
placed at the center of the tip of the tree, although Haeckel was anything but
anthropocentric in his teachings'" (p. 138). Compare this with Lovecraft's
allusions to Haeckel in his correspondence and essays as well as their
corresponding attitudes about anthropocentricism.
And Old Lace
"Arsenic, n. A kind of cosmetic greatly affected by the ladies, whom it greatly affects in turn"-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
As a Victorian lady, had you wanted to look better,
arsenic was available. There were such choices as Dr. Campbell's Safe Arsenic
Complexion Wafers that was sold by druggists everywhere;
Dr. Rose's Arsenic Complexion Wafers; and [shades of Edgar Poe] Dupin's Arsenic Complexion Tablets. The British Medical Journal (1898)
observed "arsenic was the fashionable drug and Society papers teemed with
advertisements of arsenical granules which were warranted to improve the
complexion and do many other things besides." Thanks in part to a best-selling
popular-science book "the notion that arsenic-eating is Mother Nature's great
beauty secret established itself firmly in popular imagination through the rest
of the century" (James C. Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain
was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010], p. 273). Complexion enhancement worked, according to Whorton: "In small quantities, arsenic does indeed improve the appearance of the skin,
for a time at least, creating a milk-and-roses complexion by dilating
capillaries" (p. 237-38).
By the end of the 1860's, American ladies
were generally following what was "almost a mania." This became an industry, as
"it did not take long for patent medicine manufacturers to perceive the gold
that lay buried in arsenic" (p. 274). Some people remained jittery, such as a
woman speaking "about her two daughters, who, she says, have been secretly
using arsenic wafers for their complexions, and asks if it is not against the
law for a man to advertise a poison" (New
York Times, 26 April 1887).
S.T. (brackets in the following are his)
quotes Clara Hess on Susie: "She was very pretty and attractive, with a
beautiful and unusually white complexion--got, it is said [by who?],
by eating arsenic, although whether there was any truth to the story I do not
know. She was an intensely nervous person."
Maybe the last sentence is unrelated to the former and is a new thought.
S. T.'s comment on the Hess description leans to the prudent: "What to make of
the arsenic story--and whether this had anything to do with Susie's later
physical and psychological maladies--I have no idea" (I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft [Hippocampus
Press, 2011], p. 11). Since arsenic-eating was a condoned and representative
fashion of its time, it seems as predictive of her later behavior as, say,
wearing poodle skirts showed future abnormality in the girls and women of the
1950's. The rumor repeated by Hess should be understood in this spirit.
(In much of the nineteenth century arsenic
also was an ingredient to treat "a host of maladies" [Whorton,
p. 189]. One of these was chorea, a condition of tics that some have claimed
afflicted HPL.)
Lovecraftism
In Herman Melville's great Moby Dick Ishmael talks of a colt that has never been near a buffalo, yet shies in panic from a buffalo robe.
Thou beholdest
even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the
world...
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the
festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings
of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking
of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
Though neither knows where lie
the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with
me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its
aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were
formed in fright.
The sense that behind the mask
of reality is the demonic and terrible is very Lovecraftian.
That Thing Concerning Lovecraft
and Leiber
Going by specific stories, the one by
Lovecraft that shows the most obvious influence on Frtiz
Leiber is "The Thing on the Doorstep." I've mentioned this in Cri'ster 40. In
recently first reading Leiber's "The Dead Man" (think
of Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar") I
thought that I had discovered another example--in this case the use of a rapping
code to identify the real personality--but I had totally forgotten that Stefan Dziemianowicz had already made this connection (see Critica'r 46).
There is also a trace of the concept of a male personality commandeering a
woman's body in "Adept's Gambit," summarized by the line that the Grey Mouser
"believed that [the woman] Ahura was a man." A
supplement to my contention comes from a Lovecraft letter to Leiber: "'The
Thing on the Doorstep' is, contrary to my usual practice, more of a character
study than a geographical study. I'll be interested to learn of the reason for
your particular interest in it" (quoted p. 46, Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark [Wildside Press, 2005]).
Of course, Leiber pays tribute to other
Lovecraft stories. In "The Sunken Land" Fafhrd is
forced to accompany some piratical gentlemen through a passage that appears
when a fabled land has uplifted from the ocean. It is as though the sailors in
"The Call of Cthulhu" had gone through the entrance that leads to R'lyeh. (However, if you're a Clark Ashton Smith fan, you
might think of "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis.")
Mail Call of Cthulhu
Ken:
Re: "Tyson believes that Lovecraft (while he never acknowledged it himself) was
a gifted psychic 'receptive,' and that his dreams reflected other-dimensional
realities." Maybe HPL was psychic,
for he preemptively answered this notion in a 1933 letter to Clark Ashton
Smith, where 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--serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and
other pleasant Outside gentry." Also, granting the truth of your statement that
"we really know much less of our universe than mainline scientists believed in
Lovecraft's day" makes occultism no more likely than it does the reality of a Santa
Claus.
John
N.: I hope that someone at the Massachusetts Historical Society is aware of
that detailed essay about Danvers State Hospital by Michael Ramseur.
Martin:
I had no luck at trove.nla.gov.au in locating that 1906 letter about
trans-Neptunian planets that was a response to an HPL message to Scientific American. What keywords would
produce it? *** You state that you discovered Heinlein at 10, post-Tolkien and
pre-Lovecraft. I wonder if there is a typical pattern in discovering such
writers, i.e., most readers move from Tolkien to Heinlein to HPL. Or perhaps it
is just serendipitous. A sub-consideration--does the reading level for each
author play into the sequence in which they are read? I guess the solution is
unanswerable. *** I also liked Sky
Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and wish there were more movies like
that. It would make a good double bill with The
Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (and if it were a
triple feature, I'd vote for Doc Savage:
The Man of Bronze).
Fred:
While Cthulhu does not represent Satan, as Fritz Leiber wrote the "immense loss
of prestige for Satan and his hosts, left the emotion of supernatural fear
swinging around loose, without any well-recognized object. Lovecraft took up
this loose end and tied it to the unknown but possible denizens of other
planets." *** I suspect that the number of people who make a living at poetry could
be counted on one hand (with the standard four fingers and a thumb).
John
C.: Thanks for The Dunwich Horror
posters. One of the posters "quotes" HPL, but as Don G. Smith observes (H.P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture), this
is really a paraphrase.
Chris: Hackles is a fine title; along with the erstwhile TerraBytes, this
shows that you have a talent for double meanings. *** Re "Does a devout
believer simply ignore HPL's own atheism?" That can be answered in a number of
ways. For examples, a devout believer may be much more tolerant of other views
than one who is not. Likewise, if a reader cannot separate an author's personal
views from his product, he'll have a very contracted
field of what he reads. Also, I am unaware where a "shocking revelation" shows
"religion is powerless against prehuman survivals."
What stories are you thinking of?
Laurence:
Thanks for introducing me to the word "nympholepsy,"
which I had to look up.
Randy:
That August Derleth was a man of gargantuan appetite reminds me of a parallel
with Orson Welles. Derleth was mega-talented, able to write prolifically as
well as help found and run a specialty publishing house that was the pioneer in
putting out quality weird fiction. His alleged practice of nudity and his
sexual proclivities in some ways parallels that of Robert A. Heinlein (see the
Patterson biography). You leave the impression that in vices Derleth would have
given Satan a run for his money. You paint him so black on black that I
question not only your interpretation but also the ostensible facts you offer.
T.E.:
You're too hard on your young self. Naiveté is not a crime, nor is failure to
meet your aspirations. It is better to have them and try, then to lack them.
*** Speaking of naïveté or simplicity, I must wonder that since Cameron is a
billionaire, why couldn't he afford to fund on his own the $150 million At the Mountains of Madness; why need a
studio be involved when it comes to funding?
Kennett:
Missouri weather is not a patch compared with New England's, but this winter
was the snowiest in my decades' experience. An early February snow measured (by
me) was 13 inches deep. The University where I work was for the first time
closed for three days. I don't know much about global warming, but one scenario
is that it is responsible for putting more precipitation into the atmosphere.
Others:
As is my wont, I've read all contributions, but having nothing cogent to remark
(beyond generally enjoying them), I've not singled the
others out.
A Series of Commentaries on I Am Providence
Unlike the earlier version, I find I am
not reading this with the same relish and precipitancy. Reasons: I am older; I
have read it before, in an "abbreviated" version; other things get in the way;
etc. Yet so far as I have read, this version seems more polished, probably more
judicious, and less typographically suspect as well as being more complete.
There is one editing lulu--on the "Abbreviations" page (x), the definition of
the most ubiquitous that is later used, "SL," is omitted. *** What to me is a
stylistic defect throughout the book is a kind of prolepsis, as (p. 23) "I
shall have more to say on the racist content of one of his hallucinations
later." These promises to say more about a subject are superfluous and do nothing
to cohere the narrative.
*** Quoting Susie's doctor (in 1919) that
her "abnormality had existed at least twenty-six years" S. T. concludes "that
the onset of her 'abnormality' dates to 1893" (p. 24). This overlooks the
conditional "at least," for that wouldn't fit in the convenient scenario where
Winfield's derangement engendered his wife's.
*** The biography quotes Lovecraft stating
time was "some especial enemy of mine" (p. 30). This is from a 1933 letter.
Could he have been paraphrasing a Yeats poem, "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and
Con Markiewicz," written in 1927 and published in
Yeats' 1933 collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems? The
line runs "The innocent and the beautiful / have no enemy but time." HPL looked
favorably on Yeats, with whom Dunsany had a kinship, and in Supernatural Horror in Literature
described him as "today perhaps the greatest living poet."
*** S. T. coins the term "nightmarer" to describe him as a dreamer. Some of his
dreams were nightmares, or at least nightmarish, but a number were mixed with
the fantastic and wondrous, so "dreamer" remains a satisfactory term for him.
*** S. T. writes that "the battleship Maine was blown up" (p. 72). Better
would have been "the battleship Maine
blew up" because (a) the alternative phrase is active rather than passive and
(b) there is disagreement whether the ship was attacked or had an accident, and
"blew up" covers both contingencies.
The Dunwarf
Horror
Due to some intriguing reviews on Amazon I
read Geoffrey Household's Dance of the
Dwarfs (Little, Brown, 1968), where the action takes place in a South
American jungle. The beginning is classic. Skeletons are found at a research
station, but no one knows how the people died until a journal reveals the all.
The narrative begins as though it will follow the Arthur Machen route of
dealing with the "little people," but it loses its way in romance and politics,
though the Gothic atmosphere occasionally sputters through. What I thought
would be a supernatural horror story at about the last third switches to the cryptozoological, as the dwarfs are revealed to actually be
a new kind of aggressive and carnivorous otter (or something similar). Though
Household tries to make them scary, I didn't buy either their
credibility nor superbeast behavior. I wish it
had worked.
I was reminded of the novel upon reading
its summary in Fantasy and Horror: A
Critical and Historical Guide to Literature, Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and
the Internet (Scarecrow Press, 1999). I commend this title as a way of
learning about many classics or what is worth reading, but with a caveat. In
the instance of Dance of the Dwarfs,
the menace is described as a human type, which is wrong. There are other errors
I picked up on as I jumped around the book. The worst error was the omission of
any mention of Machen's The Three Imposters, which includes "The Novel of the Black Seal"
and "The Novel of the White Powder." Even if The Hill of Dreams and "The Great God Pan" made it in, how can one
exclude such major works?
There were title mistakes I caught. Magical Realism should have been Magical Realist Fiction. Mary Elizabeth Counselman's "Paradise Mansion" should have been "Parasite
Mansion."
Brian Stableford
and Stefan Dziemianowicz are among the authors of individual
chapters--some on fantasy or horror books that appeared within a time span, and
there are author studies, teaching the topic, etc. References to Lovecraft and
the Lovecraftian are many.
"The Time Machine"
I'm rereading the H. G. Wells' story (Ben Indick's favorite science fiction), and parts here and
there remind me of Lovecraft tales.
"The Shadow out of
Time." The Time Traveler describes by analogy his bewilderment at being
in a future world. "Suppose you found an inscription, with sentences here and
there in excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith, others made up of
words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you?" Compare with "the queerly
pigmented letters . were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth.
They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the
words of the English language." In Wells the letters are of the future, in
Lovecraft the past.
"The Beast in the Cave."
The paleness of the underground Morlocks reminds the
Traveler of "the outcome of a long-continued underground look common in most
animals that live largely in the dark--the white fish of the Kentucky caves, for
instance." The Lovecraft story takes place in Kentucky's Mammoth Cave where the
narrator believes that the beast "doubtless obtained as food the eyeless fish,
bats, and rats of the cave." Evolution or adaptation shaped both the type (Morlock) and the individual (man).
"Pickman's Model."
The Traveler has seen what he takes to be shafts scattered about the future
world and deduces of the Morlocks that "Beneath my
feet, then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously,
and these tunnellings were the habitat of the new
race." He also states that they live in "burrows." A Pickman
painting shows "a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-like armies of
the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that honeycombed the
ground." Also, wells (no author pun intended) lead to a "network of tunnels
that used to undermine the hill." (Speaking of puns, maybe there could be a
story called "Pick-man's Mor-locks.")
"The Rats in the Walls."
The Traveler goes to the Morlocks underground. "I
came to a large open space, and striking another match, saw that I had entered
a vast arched cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of
my light." He also sees "a little table of white metal, laid
with what seemed a meal" (later revealed to be human flesh). The explorers of
the realm beneath the de la Poer house find "that
apparently boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the
cliff could penetrate." They find evidence of cannibalism. As the Morlocks breed the Eloi ("These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon--probably saw to the
breeding of"), so are the various humans and semi-humans bred by the de la Poers. Wells calls the Morlocks
"human rats," while HPL similarly draws a parallel between the rats and the
cannibals.
Obviously the theme of time is big in "The
Time Machine" and throughout the Lovecraft corpus, but another Lovecraftian
element is not explicit, nor does it relate to the episodes of the Morlocks and Eloi. It is the atmosphere that Wells evokes when the
Traveler goes to the far future of the dying earth. That is where the story is
at its best, where an eerie sense of wonder materializes, and you think of the
cosmic and your own smallness.
(Finally, to shift gears a bit, that
description of the earth's far future also reminded me
of another work, The House on the
Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. I shall have to re-read it to make
mental comparisons.)
Famous Monsters of Filmland 34 (August 1965)
FJA mentions Boris Karloff's And the Darkness Falls (it contains "The
Thing on the Doorstep"). *** Announced for filming: "The Dunwich Horror and The
Color of Space [sic]." Also,
Karloff is to be a monster in The House
at the End of the World (this would be released as Die, Monster, Die, based on "The Colour
out of Space"). *** There's an ad for the first issue of the horror comic
magazine Creepy, which in 1968 would
feature an adaptation of "The Rats in the Walls."
QR
A QR code is a bar code that can embed
images or text. For example, below is the first line from a Lovecraft story.
You'll need a smart phone to read it.
Thanks for
reading the 4025 words of the 69th issue of The Criticaster (Summer 2011, mailing 155th
for the Esoteric Order of Dagon) by Steve Walker.
Eventually published on the Net as The
Limbonaut (no 40). (N.B., last issue was mis-yeared as 2010; mea culpa.)