About Liberty
Thousands of what were known as liberty ships were built during World War II to carry goods from the U.S. to the Allies overseas.
Each of the multitude bore a name, sometimes of the famous, sometimes not. A very few names were of persons associated with the
genre of supernatural horror. Following is a list, where all the names (and their works) are mentioned in Supernatural Horror in Literature,
save for one, as will be noted.
SS Ambrose Bierce - "eccentric and saturnine journalist" who wrote "The Death of Halpin Frayser," etc.
SS Charlotte P. Gilman - "The Yellow Wall Paper"
SS Edgar Allan Poe - has his own chapter in SHiL
SS F. Marion Crawford - "The Upper Berth"
SS Hart Crane
- poet and HPL acquaintance who ironically committed suicide at sea
SS Irvin S. Cobb - humourist whose Fishhead
is an early achievement
SS Lafcadio Hearn - Fantastics and Kwaidan
SS Mary Wilkins Freeman - The Wind in
the Rosebush and The Shadows on the
Wall
SS Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of
the Seven Gables and others
SS Oliver Wendell Holmes - Elsie Venner
SS Ralph A. Cram - The Dead Valley
SS Robert Louis Stevenson - "Markheim," etc.
A list of all liberty
ships is available on Wikipedia.
Anthologies
Genrenaut reviews American Supernatural Tales (Penguin Classics, 2007) edited by S.T.
Joshi.
Audio
In the first of the Spine Chillers series, the reading of "The Outsider" by Doug Bradley includes a soundtrack and visuals of the performance.
*** Hear The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
Bibliography
Have I mentioned this online bibliography? As well as having many fewer newer items than old, it has bibliographic errors, and it is
heavily-weighted toward Lovecraft
Studies.
Biography
A children book marketer—daughter of Mad Magazine's Harvey Kurtzman—tells the New York Post how creepy and ghostly it is to live in
the Brooklyn apartment where Lovecraft wrote "The Horror at Red Hook."
Comics
Artist Don Heck (co-creator of Iron Man) and writer Mark Ellis are involved with the graphic novel The Miskatonic Project: H.P. Lovecraft's
The Whisperer in Darkness. *** Les Mondes de Lovecraft is a French comic composed of five shorts that draw on the Lovecraft world. One of
them, called "Tunguska," is set in Siberia early last century; since there was an EOD article about the Tunguska explosion by Henrik, it might
resonate with members. *** Fantasy Classics (volume 15) includes The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. *** Weird Horror Tales will be an
homage to bygone pulp magazines such as Weird Tales.
Conventions
Photos from the 1975 First World Fantasy Convention (Providence, Rhode Island) include some EODites. *** The booklet of the First Australian
Science Fiction Conviction (22 March, 1952) had for its dedicatees HPL, Robert E. Howard, A. Merritt, and Stanley Weinbaum.
At number 26, below Sauron and above Alec d'Urberville (from Tess of the d'Urbervilles), Cthulhu is on the list of London's Telegraph's
"50 Greatest Villains in Literature."
Food
Sweets to the sweet? See "Selections from
H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter" by Luke Burns.
Games
"Call of Cthulhu: The Darkness Within"
game is coming to iPhone.
Movies
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown won Best Documentary Film at Comic-Con. *** In his commentary about Hot Fuzz, movie director Edgar
Wright alludes briefly to H.P. Lovecraft as he describes a generic city where everyone is out to get you. *** Starring horror actor Paul Naschy,
the in-production The Valdemar Inheritance is inspired by the Lovecraft tales, according to its director José Luis Alemán. *** For Hallowe'en
the estimable Turner Classic Movies has four Lovecraft movies back-to-back (with an online commentary about each) along with a profile of
the author.
Music
Ungl'Unl'Rrlh'Chchch is the name of a Lovecraft-connected band (via "Possessed by Seitan" ). The name comes courtesy of de la Poer's
utterances. *** A 15-minute opera by Stephen Flanagan that is based on "The Call of Cthulhu" was featured at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
*** The death metal band Nile mixes HPL into their music. *** The album Kadath-The Dream Quest (EK Balam Records) by XCross
Name
Held in Christchurch, New Zealand,
"Lovecraft" is an alternative crafts market.
Parodies
Authored by Kenneth Hite and illustrated by Andy Hopp, Where the Deep Ones Are (Atlas Games, 2008) is a thirty-two page "Shadow over
Innsmouth" that parodies
Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things
Are.
Politics
Cthulhu is used in a mock election ad for
a non-existent senator on YouTube.
Publishers and Publishing
The Sauk Prairie Eagle profiled Arkham House in "The House That H.P. Lovecraft Built" by Jeremiah Tucker. *** These fonts are contemporary
with HPL.
Radio
The La Crosse Community Theatre [Wisconsin] is adapting "The Dunwich Horror." The broadcast by WIZM-AM 1410 is to be-"was" by the time
that you read this-at 8 p.m. on Hallowe'en.
Science
In Encyclopedia of Caves and Karst Science (2004) the entry for "Caves in Fiction" refers to "The Beast in the Cave." *** J. Köhler, A. B.
Eriksson, and L. Stenmark presented "LOVECraft: Atmospheric Entry and Deployment of a Miniaturised Aerobot for Exploring the Atmosphere of
Venus", 3rd Atmospheric Reentry Vehicles and Systems Symposium, Arcachon, France, 2003. Whether the name is coincidental-Venus is the love
goddess in myth-or not, I cannot say. Then again, "In the Walls of
Eryx" took place on Venus.
Theatre
Interdimensional Vikings vs. Cthulhu is a minute or so play that lacks Cthulhu. *** Dedicated to horror, science fiction, and fantasy works,
Chicago's WildClaw Theatre has on its slate "The
Dreams in the Witch House." They've already performed "The Great God Pan."
Turkey
According to Istanbul's Pandora Book
Store, a selection of HPL's tales, Cthulhu'nun
Cagrisi (The Call
best seller list for 6 June 2000. The book was
translated by Dost Korpe and published by Ithaki Yayinevi.
Predecessors
"The Ambrose Bierce Project" is a
scholarly study of the author that has writing by and about him.
Contemporaries
Chris Perridas reports on a correspondence between Sonia Greene and Sam Loveman. *** Henry Kuttner has an entry in Encyclopedia of
American Humorists (1988).
Influence, etc.
There's a site dedicated to H.R. Giger (Necronomicon, etc.). *** "Some of [my top 40 book choices] are badly written, but unforgettable:
Lovecraft's stories, or David Lindsay's extraordinary A Voyage to Arcturus"—author Philip Pullman. *** A television show based on the work
of HPL is the premise of one story ("Horror Special" by Sano Shiro) in Straight to Darkness (Lightning Source, 2006), edited by Ken Asamatsu.
*** Fungi from Yuggoth has inspired a thirty-six sonnet sequence, In the Yaddith Time (Mythos Books, 2007) by Ann K. Schwader. *** An allusion
to Miskatonic University appears in the Steven L. Shrewsbury's story "Cain Twists" from the West Virginia -related anthology Legends of the
Mountain State 2 (Woodland Press, 2008) edited by Michael Knost. *** According to Grim Blogger, satirist Stephen Colbert has evoked the
names of
both Dagon and Cthulhu.
Predecessors of Herbert
West
"In the 1870s metropolitan newspapers such as the New York Times and the Tribune regularly chronicled episodes of body snatching and related
grisly doings in sensational language, echoing the well-established rhetoric of horror that flourished in pulp fiction" (Painting the Dark Side: Art and
the Gothic
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America by Sarah Burns, p. 191-192).
Lovecraftisms
This line from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is wonderfully Lovecraftian, with the insignificance of people scaled against an impersonal
cosmos put in evocative prose: "He leant back ... and with upturned face made observations on the stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black
hollows above, in serene dissociation from
these two wisps of human life."
Also from this Hardy work are the lines:
"The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn‑lands, suddenly reaches the verge
of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has
passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are
white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate
scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler
green of the grass. ..Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor
hills and
dales within the major. Such is the Vale
of Blackmoor."
Compare this with:
"When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon
a lonely and curious country.
The ground gets higher, and the brier‑bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the
frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time
the planted fields appear singularly few and
barren...Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich."
Now here's a comparison with another
writer. First HPL in "The Call of Cthulhu":
"...an accidental piecing together of separated things--in this case an old newspaper item..." "... and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New
Jersey; the curator of a local museum... Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my
eye was caught by an odd picture in
one of the old papers spread beneath the stones."
Cf. "... a chance paragraph in a newspaper caught my attention, and focussed in an instant the vagrant thoughts and half‑formed fancies of many
idle and speculative hours into a certain hypothesis..." "the very credible museum...The curator was one of my correspondents; and, as we were looking
through one of the mineral cases, my attention was struck by a
specimen..." This is Arthur Machen, "Novel of the Black Seal"
142: Not the Answer to the Universe
Danny: A weird anecdote from Australia-in 2005 I was staying at the Rocks, in Sydney. It was after dark, and I stepped onto my hotel balcony.
Flapping down the street, between the buildings, was a large, lonely bat. I immediately thought of Count Dracula. *** Congratulations on the publication
of your Richard L. Tierney: A Bibliographical
Checklist. I hope it sells out. *** It's good that you cleared up who wrote
the essay on Lovecraft's poetry.
Wilum: Your arrival in Boston after nightfall could have been an advantage. When it is dark and you are walking around a neighborhood where once
lived Henry James or HPL, you can much easier imagine yourself back in some earlier era. Additionally, what is visually modern might be hidden so as to
lend to the illusion. Your travelogue was good and affective, and I could relate to some of your experiences, having had the same. A place that you
designate as "boring" and "ugly" may have the opposite impression on some visitors and natives. Also, though you complained about the Boston subway,
mayhap you remembered its role in "Pickman's Model"? Despite your dream about being a curator of a Lovecraft home, were it to happen I'm afraid reality
would spoil it. A city is a city, whether Providence or Seattle, and experience (that child of Time) is an enemy to glamour. *** If the bookstore that had
the Lovecraft stuff belonged to Brown, then ye had much better luck than me, who found not a smidgeon of HPL there. *** While you may not like--may
hate--Brian Lumley's work and the man, remember that others do like both; and to go out of your way to make him feel uncomfortable hardly speaks well
of you. Live shalom.
Ben: Concerning your missing the Arkham House-distributed The Shunned House-in 1965 (I'm pretty sure) I first wrote for an Arkham catalog, asking
specifically about H.P. Lovecraft. I got the catalog and a short, signed note from August Derleth. In the catalog was an announcement that AH had acquired
Cook's production. Going by my unreliable memory the cost was twenty(?)-something dollars, too much for me at the time, alas. Now when I look at
AbeBooks the
prices range from $3,600 (for a forged edition) to $27,500. The price is
still too much for me. Alas.
A. Langley: Thanks for the Christmas memories. I'm a dyed in the wool sentimentalist, and I know the feeling about what was for me the happiest time
of year.
Henrik: Re Lovecraft and race--this is a "debate sink" (cf. "time sink") and a subject worth numerous books. He was not marginal in his viewpoints, but
shared them
with Ivy League professors and many members of Congress.
Martin: Recommend to your friend not to store any paper collection, etc. that he values in the basement because of the eventuality that a flood may come
there, a common menace. *** "Simian" as an adjective of Sime-a good pun that I wish I had inflicted. *** Concerning the possible influence of Dunsany's
"The City on Mallington Moor" on "The Shadow over Innsmouth" wherein drink is used to inveigle information from the shepherd as it is from Zadok Allen-
I wonder if this might be a cliche, a common vehicle to move the plot, and so less likely to be Dunsany inspired. However, I don't know, and you may have
hit on a fact. *** Re your observation that in Sweden crime and horror stories targeted women readers-this is the opposite of what I believe to have been and
remains the main audience for this fiction in the U.S.-teenage boys and men. For example, just look at the proportion of men to women in the EOD. *** The
bulletin board
that I mentioned is overseen by Gavin; and its address is E_O_D@ yahoogroups.com.
There has been virtually no activity for months and months.
Leigh: Re Chris Sequeira being deprived of due payment from a publisher-it might help to consult in the future the "Writer Beware" section of the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website. *** Your mention of It Goes on the Shelf led me to locate it online. Issue 29 has a number of Lovecraft-related
mentions, such as Ah! Sweet Laney (edited by Robert
Lichtman; Corflu Quire, 2007), about the erstwhile Cthulhu Mythos essayist and
sf fan.
S.T.: Heterodox as it may be, I have no particular enthusiasm to hear that there is going to be an omnibus of Lovecraft's original fiction. This seems so much
of the same old. True, the Barnes and Noble is to have your notes, but so do the Penguin volumes. What with Arkham House, Library of America, Del Rey,
Harper Perennial Modern Classics, etc. (as well as Kindle editions), there doesn't appear much need for yet another collection. *** What you call "a curious
coherence" that formed the Mythos has also been its undoing by turning it into a formula, which mitigates the effect of terror, in part by making things familiar.
A misty background is the best, where the pattern doesn't become too obvious. *** So far that HPL "never used such conventional tropes as the vampire, the
ghost, or the werewolf"-I think that, rather, he used them, though unconventionally. *** I hope that the "Introduction" is a draft whose typo(s) will be corrected.
*** I wish you would name the "highbrow critics" for whom
Lovecraft commands respect.
John G.: Of Hemingway I can speak with very little knowledge. He has been so often waved in my face in a school teacherishly-way by critics and writers,
that I accept his talent grudgingly. Consequently, I find him over-rated.
T.R.: Re your quote of Tierney's "... a misconception as being somehow more 'aesthetic' than the truth." To paraphrase The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,
if there has to be a decision betwixt the aesthetic and the truth, print the aesthetic. HPL was not writing a treatise but creating a condition of verisimilitude. Few
would catch his errors, though of course if the artistic effect was the same, then from our perspective it would've been better that he not have made them. ***
That the importance of Earth to HPL changed with his realization that planets were relatively rare and so affected premises of the Cthulhu Mythos is an inspiration
of yours that deserves a lot of reflection and is at least ingenious. Likewise there is much food for thought when you state "Lovecraft had found the language of
the indescribable in the language of
relativity." Alas, relativity is foreign to my understanding.
If I could raise one objection about your paper, it is that it ignores the fictional influences that also informed the scope of his imagination, such as the 1930
Last and First Men by W. Olaf Stapledon. That is a good, big bibliography that you have appended. *** As a recommendation for disambiguation, I suggest that
you include the mailing number with your comments. It is not clear to me which mailing that you are answering unless I do some background checking. *** Who
wins in the U.S. election process does not require an overall popular vote-only a majority in certain swing states. I think that my point was that only those who
actively participate-or voters who vote-get counted in polls (and elections), and so polls are valid so long as one believes that the active voter is a proportion that
represents the whole (i.e., those who don't openly express an opinion). I'm unclear how the census counting system (as you state) overcounts the wealthy and
undercounts the impoverished. Your remark about "using scientifically proven statistical methods" reminds me of Mark Twain's observation about the three
categories of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. :)
Gavin: Re "the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred" being a kind of racial slur perpetrated by HPL, since Arabs (you suggest in HPL's view) "are somehow predisposed
to madness." I'd say a major reason for this character is that in HPL's days Arabs were exotic, Arabs of long ago more so, and one that was "mad" more, more so.
Those who are exotic are likelier to have esoteric knowledge-and so being an Arab adds supernatural verisimilitude. Too, the name Hazard is a New England family,
and the word "hazard" can be traced to Arabic (meaning "the dice"), allowing Lovecraft to combine two impulses-by which I mean his interest in New England
history and the fantastic/exotic.
Master List of Members of
the Esoteric Order of Dagon—Annotations
In Nuclear Chaos 143 S.T. published a list of all past and current EOD members, courtesy of Ben. I'm republishing it. I've sharpened the alphabetical order,
hopefully corrected name spellings in brackets when I discovered them, and added a little about the contribution or identity of members when I could give an
educated guess. I've also inserted a few names, but they may have not been members, though they were contributors. I have also occasionally put in name
variants. A large amount of information comes from "A Chronology of the Cthulhu Mythos 1974-1983." Another useful site was Ben's history of the EOD.
I've repeated the practice of putting an asterisk for each member of the
original group.
*Fred C. Adams—author of Cthulhu Mythos fiction
Mark Alessio—author?
James Ambuehl (aka Lew Cthew)—author of Cthulhu Mythos fiction
Douglas A. Anderson—scholar, anthologist
Martin Andersson—criticism
Reed Andrus
Lance Arney—criticism of Lovecraft, M.R. James
Mike Ashley—anthologist, Algernon Blackwood biographer
Jonathon [Jonathan] Bacon—editor
Lawrence A. Baker—Stephen King fan
Frank Bambara—artist
David Bass
James T. Bass
Michael Beasley
*Claire Beck—fanzine editor from HPL's time
Edward Paul Berglund—anthologist
Massimo Berruti—criticism
Eddy C. Bertin—fiction author
Cliff Biggers—comic book writer and journalist (Wikipedia)
Mike Blake
Leigh Blackmore—Australian horror writer, critic, editor, and occultist (Wikipedia)
R. Boerem—criticism
Bernadette Bosky—EOD editor and writer of criticism
[G.] Sutton Breiding—author
Scott Briggs—criticism
*Roger Bryant—first editor of EOD
John Buettner—criticism
Rusty Burke—Robert E. Howard expert
Donald Burleson—criticism
Mollie Burleson (formerly Mollie Werba)—EOD editor, poetry
Crispin Burnham—editor of Eldritch Tales
Lawrence C. Bush-author of Asian Horror Encyclopedia
Tom Campbell
Peter Cannon-scholar and author of Scream for Jeeves, etc. (Wikipedia)
Eric Carlson—criticism
Steven Chaput
Michael H. Cline—Cthulhu fiction writer
Frank [aka D. Franklin] Coffman [Jr.]—Robert E. Howard expert
Tom Collins—editor of A Winter Wish and Other Poems, publisher of IS
Andy Conder
Scott Connors—Clark Ashton Smith expert
Walter Coslet (had zines in 12 and 13 but did not join)—collector and fanzine publisher (Wikipedia)
Lew Cthew (aka James Ambuehl, which see)
Robert C. Culp—Cthulhu fiction writer
*Scott A. Cupp—-sf short story writer
Jim Dapkus
Charles Di Donato
Edward Dorn
David Drake—author
Howard J. Duerr—writer and collector
Robert M. Eber—fiction and criticism
Jason Eckhardt—artist
Phillip A. Ellis—poetry
*R. Alain Everts—research
*Ken Faig, Jr.—research
Mike Feinberg
John Finkbeiner
Melanie E. Fischer [not on #143 list]
Todd F. [i.e., H.] C. Fischer—Mythos fiction
Gramme [i.e., Graeme] Flanagan—author of Robert Bloch: A Bio—bibliography
*Meade Frierson III—creator of HPL
Capt. Frogmarsh (pseudonym of Wilum Pugmire)
William Fulwiler—criticism and fiction
Sam Gafford—reviews, criticism
John Gates
Peggy Gemignani
David F. Godwin—author of Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia
John Goodrich—criticism and fiction
Perry M. Grayson—editor, fiction
Jay Gregory (no submissions)-reader of Lovecraft taped story?
Alan Gullette—poetry, prose, criticism
John Haefele—writing about August Derleth and Arkham House
Loay Hall—fiction
Henrik Harksen—criticism
Chuck Harman [Harmon]—Cthulhu fiction
Bill Hart (listed twice)—writer for Dungeons and Dragons?
John Heitner
Lawson W. Hill—editor of Myrddin
John Hitz (Ralph Wollstonecraft Hedge, pseudonym) [name from the Ron Goulart short story] —compiled glossary of Clark Ashton Smith vocabulary
George S. Howard—fiction?
Brian Humphries [Humphreys]—criticism
Barry Hunter-author of "Baryon Online Magazine"
Derrick Hussey—publisher of Hippocampus Press
James Bradley Hutchinson
*Ben Indick—author, book reviewer, historian of EOD
Chris Jarocha—Ernst—author of A Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance
S.T. Joshi—Lovecraft authority, bibliographer, critic, EOD editor
Patrice Joubert—criticism
Donald Eric Kessler—criticism
Gary Kimber
Charles Korbas
Randall Larson—film music criticism
Jeff Leach
T.R. Livesey—research
Bruce Lord-criticism
Glenn Lord-"world's Number One Robert E. Howard aficionado"
Oliver Lottman [Lottmann]
Sean McLachlan—history and travel writer
Steve Mariconda—criticism
Ron Marshall
Arthur Metzger—fiction
Susan and Marc Michaud—publisher of Necronomicon Press
Marc Mielke—fiction
*Harry Morris, Jr.—illustration
*Dirk W. Mosig—criticism
Sam Moskowitz—sf historian, anthologist
Joe Moudry—EOD editor
Doug Nathman—fiction
John Navroth—art, poetry
Linda Navroth—criticism, fiction
Kennett Neily—general gatherings about HPL
Andy Nukes—illustration?
Christopher O'Brien—criticism
William [aka Dave or David?] Oreno—fiction
Harry Pearson—fiction
Margaret A. Pearson (Peg Angley—Pearson)—fiction
Fred Phillips—criticism, poetry
James Piatt—fiction
Rob Preston [not on #143 list]
Robert M. Price—editor, fiction, theology
David Pudelwitts—fiction
Wilum Pugmire—fiction
*Joe Pumilia—under own name and M. M. Moamrath has published humorous fiction
Juha-Matti Rajala—criticism
Dirk Rausch
Peter Reichenspenger [Reichensperger?]—mathematics?
John S. Richter
*Bruce Robbins (never contributed a mailing)—compiler of David H. Keller non—professional writings
Michael Roden—art
Lewis Sanders—poetry
Stanley Sargent—fiction
*Ken Scher
*Stuart David Schiff—editor and publisher of Whispers
Larry Schroeder
*David E. Schultz—editor, research
Mike Scott—illustration
A. Langley Searles—criticism, editor of Fantasy Commentator
J. Vernon Shea—HPL correspondent
Chris Sherrnan [Sherman]—search engine consultant
Richard Small
David C. Smith—novels
Gavin Smith—book selling
Reg Smith—writing about Weird Tales
Ward Smith—fiction
Maryanne K. Snyder—poetry
Fran Sprague
Mark Sprague
*Randall Spurgin—art
Frank Stauf
Wally Stoelting—fiction
Cathy Swidzinski
Ben Szumskyj—criticism, editor
Mick Taylor
Hubert Van Calenburgh [aka Calenbergh?]—criticism, translation
James Wade—fiction
Steve [aka Stephen] Walker—collection of websites, criticism
*Bill Wallace—under own name and M. M. Moamrath has published humorous fiction
*Jim Webbert—fiction
Robert E. Weinberg—author, collector, editor
Mollie Werba (see Mollie Burleson)
George Wetzel—research
C.D. Whately [Whateley]
*Bob Williams
Chet Williamson—fiction
James A. Woodruff
Thanks for
reading the 58th issue of The
Criticaster (Hallowe'en 2008, mailing 144) by Steve (aka Stephen) Walker.
Eventually published on the Net as The
Limbonaut (no 29).