El Santo Reads Lovecraft from the Beginning

[El Santo]

Well, okay-- maybe not from the beginning. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself...



The inspiration for this project was that I finally completed my collection (haphazardly assembled with no great urgency over a period of many years) of those Ballentine/Del Rey Lovecraft paperbacks with the nifty Michael Whelan cover art, and realized that between those and a couple couple trade-paperback volumes from the same publisher, I possessed a first-order approximation of his entire catalog of published fiction. I'm still missing some juvenalia, virtually all of his poetry, a few literary parodies, and maybe a ghost-writing gig here and there, but the only thing lacking that seems really important at the moment is the "Fungi from Yuggoth" sonnet cycle. And that means that I'm at last in a position to give H.P. Lovecraft something close to a proper, stem-to-stern career retrospective. Most of this stuff I had already read at one point or another, but never in a systematic way that would reveal the evolution of the author's style, concepts, and thematic concerns over the course of his career. The Ballentine/Del Rey books collect their material thematically rather than chronologically, and if there's any rhyme or reason to the order in which a given volume presents the stories, I've never been able to discern it. So with this page as my guide, I'm going to hop my way around through the whole library, and see if any interesting, previously obscure patterns come to light. To begin, here are a couple of stories which Lovecraft wrote as a teenager:





"The Beast in the Cave" (written 1905; first published in the June 1918 issue of The Vagrant; collected in The Tomb and Other Tales, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

A foolish traveler on a guided tour of Mammoth Cave wanders away from the group to explore a labyrinthine branch-passage, and gets himself thoroughly lost. Worse yet, there is something else alive in that maze of tunnels, something that has grown mad and twisted and degenerate in its long separation from the world above.



Already we have an appearance by one of Lovecraft's major recurring tropes, people degenerating into bestial, apelike creatures, but otherwise this story is pretty far from what one usually thinks of as Lovecraftian. That said, there are some stylistic hints, insofar as "The Beast in the Cave" contains no quoted dialogue, and characterization is sketchy to the point of nonexistence. What "The Beast in the Cave" reminds me of most is a campfire tale, what with its twist ending (it isn't stated explicitly, but we're given hints that the monster here is either a descendant or the last survivor of a colony of consumptives who had set up a sanatorium in the cavern in the hope that the subterranean air would cure their affliction) and its implicit moral of "Don't do stupid shit in the wilderness." Another interesting thing about this story is that the monster's possible origin makes "The Beast in the Cave" sort of an overlooked antecedent to Raw Meat.





"The Alchemist" (written 1908; first published in the November 1916 issue of United Amateur; collected in The Tomb and Other Tales, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

The last living descendant of a French noble family seeks a way to break the death-curse which has lain over the men of his lineage since the 13th century, and ultimately comes into confrontation with the immortal wizard who imposed it in the first place.



This story also has a very traditional feel to it, but whereas "The Beast in the Cave" was like a campfire tale set down in prose, "The Alchemist" somewhat resembles a gothic novel boiled down to ten or so pages. I say "somewhat" there because "The Alchemist" features no trace of the endangered heroine who is normally the indispensable centerpiece of such stories. Instead, this is solely the tale of the kind of guy whom a typical gothic heroine would end up marrying to her lasting regret. The shift in focus seems significant, considering how hard a time I'm having thinking of a later Lovecraft story that so much as acknowledges the existence of women as a phenomenon.

[El Santo]

During his childhood and adolescence, Lovecraft wrote strictly for his own amusement, and he gave it up for most of a decade upon reaching adulthood. When he resumed at about the age of 27, in response to the favorable reception that "The Alchemist" received when it was dusted off and published in United Amateur, he initially did so as something more than a hobby, but something less than a profession. In the late teens and early 20's, there were quite a few amateur literary magazines in circulation, and Lovecraft got pieces published in approximately a dozen of them during this period. You might think of it as the old-timey equivalent to making guest posts on other people's blogs.



"The Tomb" (written 1917; first published in the March 1922 issue of The Vagrant; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Tomb and Other Tales, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

The young scion of a family with an unsavory past stumbles upon both the tomb of his accursed ancestors, and the site of the house where the worst of them was killed by lightning-set fire a century or more before. In the wake of this discovery, the youth mysteriously begins to take on the characteristics of his doomed forebear— but is this change a sign of incipient madness, or of encroaching spiritual possession?



Lovecraft has obviously been reading Edgar Allan Poe. "The Tomb" is the first-person narrative of a person of questionable sanity, who becomes obsessed with death, prefers the company of the dead to that of the living, and in the end longs to become one of them. Although Lovecraft never comes right out and says so, I think we're even meant to infer that the protagonist eventually goes all the way from thanatophilia to necrophilia— which is doubly surprising given not just the stridency of the era's censors, but also the absence of anything even faintly suggesting sex from Lovecraft's mature work. On the other hand, we can also look at "The Tomb" as an embryonic form of the possession subplot in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, written a decade later, and as a foreshadowing of Lovecraft's subsequent fascination with tying time into loops and knots.





"Dagon" (written 1917; first published in the November 1919 issue of The Vagrant; collected in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

A passenger at sea escapes from the crew of the German commerce raider that sank his vessel in the South Pacific. He survives a second disaster, too, when a freak seismic uplifting of the sea floor catches his lifeboat in the middle of a newly created plot of dry land. His subsequent encounter with one of the marine titans that inspired a hundred ancient sea gods, though? That he might not survive.



Another Poe-inflected story, in the sense that it contains echoes of both "Descent into the Maelstrom" and "The City in the Sea," but this is where Lovecraft really starts to become Lovecraft. Hidden survivals of a pre-human civilization forgotten by man? Check. Monstrous things living at the bottom of the ocean? Check. Protagonist driven mad by discovering a secret truth? Check. Still, this would remain for some years a conspicuous outlier among Lovecraft's fiction, and to call the details of the plot unconvincing would be a generous understatement.





"Polaris" (written 1918; first published in the December 1920 issue of The Philosopher; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)

The influence of the star Polaris opens a dream link between a man's incarnation in 20th-century America and a much earlier lifetime in a prehistoric city above the Arctic Circle, in an age before the poles were buried beneath permanent sheets of ice.



This too is an important signpost for Lovecraft's future development. For one thing, it appears to be his first story to take place largely in a completely imaginary setting. For another, it introduces the concept of dreaming as a means of traveling across time and space or between parallel realities, which would become one of the primary features of his writing throughout his amateur period. Most importantly, by positing the Pole Star itself as an entity of evil, "Polaris" represents Lovecraft's first attempt at the cosmic approach to horror for which he's most famous. It's worth dwelling on the point that Lovecraft's original space monster is a star, too, rather than any comprehensibly anthropomorphic being. The central premise of his later fictional cosmology (which sailed right over August Derleth's head when he codified the egregiously misnamed Cthulhu Mythos in the 1950's) is that the universe needn't be conscious, sentient, intelligent, or personal in any way that we can understand in order for it to be inimical to humans or even actively malevolent. It's easy to miss that when the Second Law of Thermodynamics is personified as Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, and the heedless, mindless hostility of everything is personified as the Demon-Sultan Azathoth, but it comes through much more clearly in the formulation "Polaris made me do it." Another curious first in "Polaris" is the appearance of an ancient book of occult secrets too dangerous for any but the wisest of sages to possess— but it isn't the Necronomicon! Instead, we get here the first mention of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, which don't at this point appear to have been intended to be of extraterrestrial origin. They're just very, very old, even from a prehistoric perspective.

[Mayzshon]

Wow. I don't know if I could do that. Lovecraft is one of those authors where I love the concepts he created, but I find his writing overly dense.

[Billy A. Anderson]

El Santo, I remember many years ago, a Project I undertook, to read all works of H.P. Lovecraft, going back to his very first puslished work, thur the last one he completed, and continuing thru his unfinished manuscripts which August Derleth (and some others?) completed.

I finished my project as far as I could and as far as I knew, but obviously cannot say for certain that I accomplished my goad of reading everything that HPL had written.

But, that was what I attempted to do.

[Lemmy Caution]

Don't omit the many works of interest to our fearless Webmaster

[El Santo]

Winifred V. Jackson was an amateur poet whose work Lovecraft seems to have admired rather extravagantly. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, he said that she "probably possesses the greatest and most singular imagination in amateur journalism," and predicted that she "will one day be famous in the outside world." Well, sort of. In a small and very roundabout way. You see, Jackson at some point aspired to write stories as well as verse, but quickly came to recognize that she had no talent for prose. So rather than botch the job herself, she started feeding plots and premises to Lovecraft, two of which he turned into stories that made it all the way to publication. As these tales were somewhat outside either author's usual line, they both adopted pseudonyms for them, Jackson becoming Elizabeth Berkeley and Lovecraft becoming Lewis Theobald Jr. Today, they're the main thing Jackson is remembered for, when she's remembered at all,



"The Green Meadow" (1918-1919; first published in the Spring 1927 issue of The Vagrant; collected in The Horror in the Museum)

A mysterious document recovered from the core of a meteorite records the otherworldly experiences of a renegade Greek sage who got more than he bargained for from his experiments toward achieving immortality.



This is substantially the less effective of the two collaborations with Jackson. The main body of the narrative derives from one of Jackson's letters to Lovecraft, in which she described a disquieting dream, and as a consequence it is both inconclusive and unabashedly nonsensical. Lovecraft tried to get around the lack of any proper ending by remarking that the final pages of the narrator's manuscript were damaged to the point of illegibility, but it's a crude cheat and not at all a successful one. I do rather like the astronomical variation on the venerable "message in a bottle" theme, however.

[El Santo]

1919 was the year when Lovecraft began to write on a professional scale, albeit not yet in a professional capacity. It was also the year when Lovecraft discovered Lord Dunsany, the author whose influence would weigh heaviest on his writing until his own voice developed fully in the mid-1920's, and the year when his notoriously numerous and deeply-held prejudices started to become a routine aspect of his fiction.



"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (written 1919; first published in the October 1919 issue of Pine Cones; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories)

A psychiatric intern comes to suspect that the terrifying, inexplicable dreams that have driven a Catskills backwoods imbecile to madness are really thought-transmissions from a being in a parallel universe.



What's most interesting about "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is how it doesn't fit neatly into the framework of Lovecraft's more Dunsanian dream-travel stories. Although it grants that dreams are glimpses into an alternate reality, the nature of that reality is very different from what the author ultimately settled on. In this version, we only think we're human because our true selves (which are immaterial, immortal, and extra-cosmic in origin) are veiled from us by the operation of brain-based consciousness. It's also worth noting that for once the hidden truths of the universe aren't inherently destructive to sanity; Joe Slater goes mad only because his defective brain is unable to handle the strain of repeated contact with the world beyond. Meanwhile, on the prejudice front, get a load of this: "his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellant scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastness of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of 'white trash' in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of native American people." Howie was at least as much a classist as he was a racist and a xenophobe.





"Memory" (written 1919; first published in the May 1923 issue of The National Amateur; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

Two immortals discuss the vanished beings who created the great city that now stands in ruins in a valley inhabited only by animals of the swamp and forest.



The punchline, naturally, is that the vanished beings are humankind, and that the immortals can't seem to recall much about them. Not really much to say here.





"The Transition of Juan Romero" (written 1919; first published in the 1944 Arkham House collection Marginalia; collected in The Tomb and Other Tales, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

Workers at the Norton Mine blast open a new passage and discover a literally unfathomable abyss in the ground beneath their own excavations. Soon thereafter, a miner of Aztec descent called Juan Romero yields to an irresistible, unexplainable summons from the cavern, with fatal, impossible results.



I can see why this one wasn't published until after Lovecraft's death. Although I'm always somewhat irritated by Lovecraft's tendency to dodge any forthright description of his biggest horrors, it's at least clear enough most of the time that he had a firm conception of whatever he was verbally dancing around. In "The Transition of Juan Romero," though, I don't think he could have explained what's really supposed to be happening even if he'd wanted to. Maybe if he'd bothered to learn anything about native Mexican mythology instead of just treating it as another generic Primitive Non-White Diabolism, he'd have been able to come up with something better. I mean, even on their own terms, the Aztecs had possibly the most terrifying religion of any people on Earth!





"The White Ship" (written 1919; first published in the March 1927 issue of Weird Tales; collected in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

A lighthouse keeper embarks upon a dream-voyage through the metaverse of the subconscious aboard a mysterious galley that appears to him each night of the full moon.



And here comes the Dunsany. "The White Ship" feels more like an attempt at creating a synthetic mythology than a story in the ordinary sense. The various countries of the dream world are all explicitly keyed to particular states of mind ("Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and are then forgotten," "Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained"), and there's an obvious moral-allegorical aspect to the lighthouse keeper's journey from one to the next. I recall having a pronounced "What the fuck even is this?" reaction the first time I read "The White Ship," but now I quite enjoy it.





"The Doom that Came to Sarnath" (written 1919; first published in serial form in the March and April 1935 issues of Marvel Tales of Science and Fantasy; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)

A thousand years to the day after the people of Sarnath destroyed the city of Ib and slaughtered its inhuman inhabitants, Sarnath itself is annihilated in an invasion from the moon by beings like those that once dwelled in Ib.



I can readily understand why someone who could write this story, and then watch it languish unpublished for sixteen years, would recognize Robert E. Howard as a kindred spirit, even though their writing styles and literary influences resembled each other barely at all. It reads a bit like fantastical take on the Book of Judges, albeit greatly condensed, and with just one climactic supernatural comeuppance. I rather like that it's never entirely clear whether the setting is supposed to be some era of the forgotten, prehistoric past; a distant, post-apocalyptic future; or some other world altogether.





"The Statement of Randolph Carter" (written 1919; first published in the May 1920 issue of The Vagrant; collected in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)

Randolph Carter, apprentice to paranormal researcher Harley Warren, describes for the skeptical authorities how his mentor disappeared while searching for occult secrets in a cave system beneath a forgotten crypt.



One of the curious things about Lovecraft, in the context of the pulp fantasy writers whose ranks he would later join, is that he didn't deal much in recurring characters. He built a group of recurrent settings that gradually coalesced into one huge fictional universe, but Lovecraft never really had a Sherlock Holmes or a John Carter or a Jules de Grandin or a Solomon Kane. The closest thing he had was Randolph Carter— but Carter is peculiar, because he never seems to be quite the same person twice, even as successive stories make explicit reference to his previous adventures. Here in his first appearance, he's the sidekick who survives an attempt to challenge the unknown precisely because he's been deemed too big a wimp to risk involving in it directly.

[Killer Goldfish]

As to Randolph Carter: hey, people change!

Life is just iterations of Rashomon, after all...

[El Santo]

Some interesting developments in 1920, mostly involving the introduction of places that will crop again and again throughout Lovecraft's later writing.



"The Terrible Old Man" (written 1920; first published in the July 1921 issue of The Tryout; collected in The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

Three ruffians, new in town, attempt to rob one of Kingsport's best-known, if least-liked, residents, the retired sea captain generally known as the Terrible Old Man. They wind up hacked to pieces by the ghosts of their intended victim's former pirate crew, which he stores in an array of curious bottles on his mantelpiece.



"The Terrible Old Man" contains the first mention of Kingsport, one of the recurrent towns in Lovecraft's fictional New England. If you'll excuse the anachronism, it's sort of Lovecraft's Castle Rock, insofar as Kingsport isn't an overtly sinister place, but weird things tend to happen there. In any case, this story is extremely atypical of Lovecraft, even in this early, experimental phase of his career, although it oddly prefigures the non-Lovecraftian work of later writers who went through phases of Lovecraftolatry. It's the kind of story that Robert Bloch might have written in the early 50's, and it would need just a slight tweaking of cultural sensibility to fit in with Ramsey Campbell's work of the early 70's or Caitlin R. Kiernan's of the late 2000's. It would have made a terrific second-season episode of "Thriller," too.





"The Tree" (written 1920; first published in the October 1921 issue of The Tryout; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

In the Greek city of Tegea, a disturbingly humanoid olive tree marks the grave of a brilliant sculptor who was poisoned by his colleague and dearest friend when they were both enrolled by the Tyrant of Syracuse in a contest to carve a statue of Tyche to stand atop the roof of his palace.



I'm actually not 100% certain that I'm interpreting this story correctly. Like a few of M.R. James's late tales, it's a shade too oblique and ambiguous for its own good. I do like the setting, though; Classical Antiquity is seriously underutilized as a venue for horror stories.





"The Cats of Ulthar" (written 1920; first published in the November 1920 issue of The Tryout; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)

In Ulthar, it is illegal for anyone to kill a cat. It has been so ever since a young boy traveling with a caravan from Egypt invoked the gods to grant cats power to wreak terrible and mysterious vengeance against humans that harm them.



Somehow I always assumed that Lovecraft's "Cats of Ulthar" would be cats only in approximately the same sense that Frank Belknap Long's "Hounds of Tindalos" were hounds. I was delighted to discover that they were instead just regular old cats that had a wee bit of divine intervention dropped on them. Ulthar is another location we'll be seeing again, but with an interesting difference. Later, Lovecraft would decide that Ulthar was a city in the dream world of "The White Ship," but here in its first appearance, there's no reason to imagine that it's situated anywhere but Earth, within perhaps a week's trek on camel-back from the Nile Valley.





"The Temple" (written 1920; first published in the September 1925 issue of Weird Tales; collected in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

The captain of a German U-boat crippled during a mutiny is the last man alive aboard his vessel when it drifts to the bottom amidst the ruins of a sunken ancient city.



This one is a bit of a spiritual successor to "Dagon," since it turns out that something is alive in that city on the seafloor. But since we never actually meet those living things, it's impossible to say for certain whether they're humans, ghosts, mer-people, or something in between. "The Temple" is also notable on the prejudice front, because it turns out the author fell hard for the Teutonophobia that swept the United States after the sinking of the Lusitania and the American entry into World War I. Will anyone be surprised to learn that Lovecraft writes from a foreigner's point of view about as convincingly as John Norman writes from a woman's?

[El Santo]

"Arthur Jermyn" aka "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The White Ape" (written 1920; first published in the March 1921 issue of The Wolverine; collected in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

The high-strung last scion of a lineage notorious for eccentricity, madness, and bizarre physical appearance unwittingly discovers that his ancestry is less than fully human.



It would have been less accurate, but at least equally true, if I had summarized this story as, "Racist flips out when 23 and Me informs him that he's actually an ocatroon." The back-story, which comes together one dissociated fragment at a time, has it that one of Arthur Jermyn's ancestors traveled to Africa, where he not only discovered a lost city inhabited by a remnant population of primitive hominids (I'm tempted to call them Australopithecines based on Lovecraft's description, although the type specimen of Australopithecus hadn't been discovered yet when "Arthur Jermyn" was written), but also fell in love with their queen. Considering that the surrounding narrative features more "Darkest Africa" cliches than even H. Rider Haggard would have stood for, it's very difficult to read the story without concluding that we're supposed to interpret the ape-woman as at least subliminally symbolic. That's frustrating, because I'd really like to be able to recommend "Arthur Jermyn" as a model for this style of jigsaw-puzzle story construction. Even at the very end, we don't have all the pieces, but we have enough of them, in enough of the right places, to extrapolate the rest of the picture.





"The Street" (written 1920; first published in the December 1920 issue of The Wolverine; collected in The Tomb and Other Tales, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

A street in an unnamed American East Coast metropolis develops a spirit as bigoted and reactionary as Lovecraft's own as the descendants of its original, English colonial inhabitants are gradually displaced by immigrants from Eastern Europe. Then one day, this architectural Archie Bunker caves itself in so as to destroy the cell of anarcho-communist revolutionaries who have taken up residence there before they can launch their planned insurrection.



You know what? I'm just going to hand this one over to Lovecraft scholar Daniel Harms, author of The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana: "If someone came up to me and said, 'Hey, Daniel, I think H.P. Lovecraft was a wordy, overly sentimental bigot whose stories don't make much sense,' this would be the last story I would hand him to convince him otherwise."





"Poetry and the Gods" (written 1920, with Anna Helen Crofts; first published in the September 1920 issue of The United Amateur; collected in The Tomb and Other Tales, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

A woman who can find no solace in modern life except for the art of poetry dreams that Hermes escorts her to Parnassus, where Zeus assures her that the Ultimate Poet, whose works will call the ancient gods back out of hiding to usher in a new Golden Age, has recently been born. Zeus then charges her with the duty to seek out and to nurture this messiah of verse so that he may fulfill his mission.



This is a similar situation to "The Green Meadow," but the product of Lovecraft's collaboration with Anna Helen Crofts is much more interesting than either of the stories he wrote with Winifred V. Jackson. "Poetry and the Gods" is too clunky and strident for me to call it good, exactly, but I also can't recall ever encountering another story quite like it. It's also noteworthy for featuring the only explicitly female Lovecraft protagonist I've ever encountered (although for some reason, I always envision the unnamed, undescribed narrator of "The Crawling Chaos" as a woman, too).





"Celephais" (written 1920; first published in the May 1922 issue of The Rainbow; collected in The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)

A discontented dreamer turns to hallucinogenic drugs in order to spend ever more of his time in the realm of the subconscious, which he considers to be realer and more vital than his unhappy waking life.



With "Celephais," Lovecraft began to get serious about converting the explicitly allegorical dreamscapes of "The White Ship" into a fictional world capable of supporting a variety of fantastical adventure stories. Before long, Lovecraft's Dreamlands would begin gobbling up his imaginary Ancient World locales, too, but at this point the two settings still seem relatively distinct. Also worth pointing out is the real-world home of the protagonist, a coastal town in Massachusetts by the name of Innsmouth, where the main social and political power-broker is a crooked beer baron. We'll be seeing that place again, too, one day.

[Killer Goldfish]

Dec 10, 2019 14:39:55 GMT -5 El Santo said:

"Arthur Jermyn" aka "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family," "The White Ape" (written 1920; first published in the March 1921 issue of The Wolverine; collected in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)

The high-strung last scion of a lineage notorious for eccentricity, madness, and bizarre physical appearance unwittingly discovers that his ancestry is less than fully human.



It would have been less accurate, but at least equally true, if I had summarized this story as, "Racist flips out when 23 and Me informs him that he's actually an ocatroon." The back-story, which comes together one dissociated fragment at a time, has it that one of Arthur Jermyn's ancestors traveled to Africa, where he not only discovered a lost city inhabited by a remnant population of primitive hominids (I'm tempted to call them Australopithecines based on Lovecraft's description, although the type specimen of Australopithecus hadn't been discovered yet when "Arthur Jermyn" was written), but also fell in love with their queen.

I feel compelled to point out here that he wrote and published "The Colour Out Of Space" in 1927, well before the discovery of radiation sickness.  Man was ahead of his time.

[El Santo]

"From Beyond" (written 1920; first published in the June 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories)



An obsessed scientist invents a device that enables him to perceive an invisible world overlapping but seemingly not contiguous with our own. Unfortunately, the machine also allows the inhabitants of that world to perceive him.



I'm not sure why the editors of the Ballentine/Del Rey Lovecraft series classify "From Beyond" as a dream cycle story, since at no point in it does anyone dream about anything. Rather, this is a straight-up mad science tale, drawing heavily on Lovecraft's own unease over the accelerating pace of momentous developments in fields ranging from biology to cosmology to applied physics. For all that he was a staunch materialist, Lovecraft found all the new vistas being opened up by modern science as disturbing as any William Jennings Bryan, and for much the same reason-- they all seemed to point to a universe so ancient, vast, and strange that humanity could barely be considered relevant to it, let alone master of it all.





"Nyarlathotep" (written 1920; first published in the November 1920 issue of The United Amateur; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)



Out of Egypt comes a man claiming to have lived 2700 years ago, who proceeds to travel the world putting on exhibitions in which a fantastical machine projects images of the far-flung future. These images show the Earth and its inhabitants succumbing to inevitable entropy— and the most unfortunate of Nyarlathotep's audiences are physically transported to that era of ultimate collapse.



Speaking of Lovecraft's unease with modern science, I can't read "Nyarlathotep" without imagining that he lost a lot of sleep thinking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics around this time. That law wouldn't be stated in quite its modern form for a few more years yet in 1920, but the relationship between energy and entropy in closed systems was something of a hot topic in mechanics at the time, and the heat death of the universe was recognized as a theoretical possibility as early as the 1850's. All that said, this is an extremely strange story to arrive at from there, so it isn't altogether surprising that there's also a nightmare in back of it. In a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, Lovecraft described a dream in which another friend wrote to him, exhorting him to see some kind of traveling showman by the name of Nyarlathotep, who put on performances much like the one in the finished story. What's most striking about "Nyarlathotep," however, is that at least in this story, there's no indication that the title character is anything more exotic than another of Lovecraft's immortal and/or resurrected wizards. Thematically speaking, Nyarlathotep may be a personification of entropy here, but he doesn't yet seem to be its literal avatar, like he would become later on.





"The Picture in the House" (written 1920; first published in the July 1921 issue of The National Amateur; collected in The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre)



While bicycling through the Miskatonic Valley to Arkham for research purposes, a genealogist gets caught in a thunderstorm, and seeks shelter in a shack which he mistakenly assumes to be abandoned. There he meets a strange old man who was inspired to take up cannibalism by one of the engravings in an antique book on the Congo which he got in trade from a sea captain many years before.



Oh man... it's The Miskatonic Valley Has Eyes! This is the oldest tale included in the Ballentine/Del Rey "best of" book, and by far the most atypical of the author's work as a whole. I don't have occasion to say this about Lovecraft very often, but I love this story. It's one of the most unapologetically nasty things he ever wrote, and one needn't share a single one of his phobias, prejudices, or neuroses in order to get full value from it.

[Killer Goldfish]

I recently read "The Picture In the House" for the first time myself. I concur entirely with your take on it. I would like to add that this is so prescient of him to write a story like this. It seems as if now we hear routinely about people inspired to do terrible things by something they read or saw in a movie. "Silly Eddie" Gein turned 14 the year this story was written, and dang if he didn't get some of his best ideas -- the ones that made him famous -- from reading about the activities of headhunters in the South Pacific. I rather wonder if he and Lovecraft were using similar pulptastic sources.

[El Santo]

"The Crawling Chaos" (written 1921, with Winifred V. Jackson; first published in the April 1921 issue of The United Co-Operative; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Horror in the Museum, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)



A plague victim dreams, under the influence of an opium overdose, of the Earth's demise in a global cataclysm of rising seas, raging winds, and wrenching geologic disturbances.



Experienced Lovecraft readers will recognize the title of this story as the epithet whereby Nyarlathotep is alternately known in most of his later appearances. Such readers may therefore be surprised to find not even a cameo appearance by that being in "The Crawling Chaos"-- although that very absence would seem to confirm my interpretation of the character in "Nyarlathotep" itself. Anyway, "The Crawling Chaos" reads very much like "The Green Meadow," except that this time Lovecraft and Jackson have gone to the bother of constructing a complete narrative on which to hang their imagery. That's a major step up, although this is still pretty weak work all in all. William Hope Hodgson (of whom Lovecraft was a known reader) concocted a much more vivid and compelling vision of impersonal, inevitable apocalypse in the out-of-body segment of The House on the Borderland-- and even that was by far the most tedious part of the book.





"Ex Oblivione" (written 1921; first published in the March 1921 issue of The United Amateur; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)



Another of Lovecraft's depressive dreamers cloaks a fatal drug overdose in imagery of otherworldly adventure.



Far and away the bleakest treatment of Lovecraft's recurring dream-quest theme, "Ex Oblivione" feels like it was written for the benefit of people found "Celephaïs" insufficiently depressing. This time even the wonders of the dream world don't do it for the protagonist, who seeks to go beyond the world beyond, and reunite with primordial nothingness.





"The Nameless City" (written 1921; first published in the November 1921 issue of The Wolverine; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)



A lone archaeologist explores the ruins of a city in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, built millions of years ago by a race of intelligent reptiles unknown to modern science.



There's a case to be made that the "Cthulhu Mythos" begins with this story. At the very least, "The Nameless City" contains both the first mention of Abdul Alhazred* and the first quotation of his famous paradoxical couplet, "That is not dead which can eternal lie/And with strange aeons death may die." The Necronomicon still has yet to appear, however. Also, "The Nameless City" has just as strong a claim to inclusion among the "Elder World" cycle, since the narrator refers to the events of "The Doom that Came to Sarnath." I've read that Lovecraft didn't care much for rewrites, and "The Nameless City" certainly seems to bear that out. The whole thing is constructed so as to treat the city's ante-human origins as a SHOCKING REVELATION, but Lovecraft starts telegraphing it in the fifth fucking paragraph. It's an especially serious mistake in context, because the ghosts of the lizard-people don't and apparently can't actually do anything; the horror of the story is supposed to lie in their very existence.





"The Quest of Iranon" (written 1921; first published in the July/August 1935 issue of Galleon; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)



A wandering minstrel, his youth preserved by the magic of his hopes and dreams, travels from one settlement to the next in search of the lost city where he spent his earliest childhood.



Another Elder World story (and the only one I've read so far to use that appellation directly) rivals "The White Ship" as an example of pure Dunsany pastiche. That's what I like most about it, though. Like "The White Ship," it's overtly a synthetic pagan myth, complete with an allegorical moral a few degrees out of alignment with modern Western values. (That said, it aligns rather neatly with postmodern Western values. I wonder what Lovecraft would have made of that, had he lived to see it?)













*The name originated in Lovecraft's childhood. He went bonkers for all things Arabian after reading One Thousand Nights and a Night for the first time, proclaimed himself a convert to Islam, and adopted "Abdul Alhazred" as his Muslim name. The phase didn't last long, but its delayed pop-culture ramifications surely did!

[El Santo]

Alright, let me get back on this. I imagine there will be similar pauses in this project every so often, because frankly there's only so much Lovecraft I can stand in one go. To close out 1921, we have:



"The Moon-Bog" (written 1921; first published in the June 1926 issue of Weird Tales; collected in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)



An Irishman who got rich in America returns to his homeland intending to restore and improve his long-neglected ancestral estate to a condition commensurate with his new wealth. But when he conceives a plan to drain the bog on his property, the Naiads who dwell there take it upon themselves to ensure that the project never reaches fruition.



And here come the flutes.  As early as "The Transition of Juan Romero," Lovecraft developed fairly early on a tic of setting his ceremonies of blasphemous worship to discordant, grotesque music, and especially to discordant, grotesque music played on various forms of flute and pipe. But it's more than just a tic in this story (the first flutes specifically are added to the Orchestra of the Damned) because the Eldritch Abominations defending their territory are nature spirits out of Greek mythology; of course beings subordinate to Pan would play flutes and pipes during their rituals. He didn't do it very often, and I gather that he pretty much stopped once his own fictional cosmology was fully developed, but I quite enjoy it when Lovecraft goes Hellenic on us like this. I've loved Greek legends and mythology ever since I encountered a kiddified version of the Odyssey in kindergarten, and it seems to me that their horrific potential has been sadly underutilized in modern times. Another thing I like about "The Moon-Bog" is that the Naiads aren't portrayed as evil or monstrous. They're just protecting their home, and they do so in an apparently non-lethal manner. But since they seem to have learned a few tricks from the local Unseelie Court over the centuries, it's definitely going to suck to be the loved ones of the squire and his work crew just the same.





"The Outsider" (written 1921; first published in the April 1926 issue of Weird Tales; collected in The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories)



An amnesiac who has lived alone since before he can remember in a grim, lightless castle escapes at last by scaling the interior of what he believes to be the ruins of its highest tower. In fact, he has ascended a shaft sunk deep below a subterranean crypt, and he emerges to his astonishment on the Earth's surface. This will not occur to him until later, but perhaps his presence in a vault beneath a tomb provides a clue as to what exactly it is that he doesn't remember?



Here we have something that, so far as I know, is completely unique in Lovecraft's fiction-- a story told from the monster's perspective. There's a fair bit of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus in "The Outsider," although the creature's origin and nature are far different, and Lovecraft doesn't bother recapitulating Mary Shelley's theme of parental obligation and the shirking thereof. Also, "The Outsider" keeps the protagonist's monstrousness under wraps until the climax, making for a twist ending that now feels like something out of "The Twilight Zone" or an EC horror comic. And the very final paragraph looks ahead in a very surprising way to Clive Barker, of all writers, because the protagonist eventually finds a home among a whole society of monsters-- one which we'll be seeing again soon in the product of Lovecraft's most famous ghost-writing gig.





"The Other Gods" (written 1921; first published in the November 1933 issue of The Fantasy Fan; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)



Barzai and Atal, two priests of Ulthar, journey to the mountain Hatheg-Kla, where the Gods of Earth once dwelled, in the hope of spying on them when they make one of their occasional nostalgic returns to the place. Barzai does indeed catch a glimpse of the terrestrial deities, but learns to his fatal disadvantage that there are other gods, greater and more terrible than Earth's, who are willing and able to keep all divine secrets veiled from human eyes.



Something I'd never fully appreciated before is how deeply the Cthulhu Mythos stories are rooted in the Ancient World/Dreamlands cycle. "The Other Gods" is a crucial piece of that puzzle, because although the titular beings have yet to be distinguished as Azathoth, Yog Sothoth, and the rest of that lot, this story creates the conceptual framework within which the evil star of "Polaris" and the prophet of entropy in "Nyarlathotep" were able to mature into such entities.





"The Music of Erich Zann" (written 1921; first published in the March 1922 issue of The National Amateur; collected in The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre)



An elderly German violinist, living in Paris and supporting himself as a player in a cheap theater's orchestra, is doomed by some terrible occurrence of his secret past to perform nightly duets in his garret apartment with lethal otherworldly beings.



This is, for me, among the most frustrating of Lovecraft's pre-professional stories. It has a terrific, virtually unique premise and a wonderfully atmospheric setting, and Lovecraft's prose has rarely been less obnoxious than this. But "The Music of Erich Zann" is fatally compromised by the most pernicious idea in all of horror fiction, that the scariest scares occur offstage. Indeed, this time Lovecraft takes it so far that the explanatory manuscript which the title character spends most of the climax silently writing in the prose equivalent of real time gets destroyed before the narrator can take so much as a glance at it! I suspect that Lovecraft had recently got his hands on A Thin Ghost and Others, the third collection of ghost stories by M.R. James, because some of those tales (I'm thinking especially of "Two Doctors" and "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance") share this one's counterproductive coyness about what the hell even happens in them. 

[El Santo]

"Herbert West, Reanimator" (written 1922; first published in the February 1922 through July 1922 issues of Home Brew; collected in The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)



A brilliant but unscrupulous doctor spends seventeen years seeking mastery over death, leaving a trail of hideous crimes against both nature and humanity behind him.



"Herbert West, Reanimator" marked the second major turning point of Lovecraft's career, for it was the first story that he got paid to write. Late in 1921, George Julian Houtain, a friend of Lovecraft's from the amateur journalism scene, approached the author about writing a succession of tales to headline the new magazine that he was planning to launch the following year. As the title-- Home Brew-- ought to imply, this was going to be another amateur press operation, but Lovecraft's prominence within those circles was such that Houtain was prepared to bend the rules and treat him (if perhaps only him) as a professional. Lovecraft agreed, but rather than writing six individual stories as Houtain seems to have envisioned, he gave him a six-part serial, with each chapter of comparable bulk to one of his shorter tales. Of course, since Home Brew would be a brand new magazine, it was absolutely not safe to assume that anyone picking up, say, the April issue would so much as have seen February or March, so from the second chapter on, Lovecraft began each installment with a paragraph or three outlining the story so far. This becomes somewhat obtrusive if you encounter the story all in one piece, as I did.



From what I've read, it seems that Lovecraft didn't think much of "Herbert West, Reanimator" in his later years. Perhaps that accounts for why it took Ballentine/Del Rey until 1996 (which is to say, well after Lovecraft's friend, literary executor, and principal cheerleader August Derleth was safely dead) to include it in one of their collections, and also for why it seems to have been anthologized only rarely. Heaven knows those phenomena need to be accounted for, because this story is terrific. It's fast, nimble, nasty, and easily 50 years ahead of its time (except for a volcanic eruption of racism in the third chapter, of a sort that was pretty retrograde even in 1922), incorporating among other highlights Lovecraft's only really successful attempt to unite the fantastical horrors that were his stock in trade with the real-life horror of the First World War.



Of course, nowadays, "Herbert West, Reanimator" is remembered primarily as the source material for Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and its sequels. Those are some of the least Lovecraftian horror movies you'll ever see, so it's rather surprising that the first film is remarkably faithful to the story. Gordon and his cowriters dropped a few incidents, merged a few others, and most conspicuously added Barbara Crampton's character, but most of Lovecraft's version is there in some form or other, and vice versa. Equally remarkably, although Jeffrey Combs doesn't look a thing like West as Lovecraft described him, his performance perfectly captures what Lovecraft wrote of his behavior, mannerisms, and personality; read the story, and I think you'll very quickly start picturing Combs, no matter what the author might say about West's baby-fine blond hair and so forth. I have to wonder, too, if maybe Jimmy Sangster might have read "Herbert West, Reanimator" prior to 1956. I'd always assumed that Gordon's West recalled Sangster's Victor Frankenstein as a tribute to the Hammer films, but it turns out that Sangster's Frankenstein already recalled Lovecraft's West!

[El Santo]

"Hypnos" (written 1922; first published in the May 1924 through June 1924 issues of Weird Tales; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)



A neurotic sculptor's drug-fueled dream-quest for the ultimate secrets of the cosmos is permanently derailed when his paranoid, megalomaniacal mentor is killed by some sinister force that lurks among the stars of the Corona Borealis. Or maybe he was just batshit crazy all along, and his mentor was a figment of his imagination.



All the weaknesses of "The Music of Erich Zann" without any of the countervailing strengths. Hard pass.





"What the Moon Brings" (written 1922; first published in the 1943 Arkham House collection, Beyond the Wall of Sleep; collected in The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death)



A dreamer follows a flotilla of fallen lotus blossoms downstream to the drowned ruins of an unfathomably ancient city of colossi.



And here I thought Lovecraft had learned his lesson about just writing down his (or anybody else's) dreams as-is after "The Green Meadow." Apparently not.





"Azathoth" (written 1922; first published in the winter 1938 issue of Leaves; collected in The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, The Tomb and Other Tales)



A sensitive man, disgruntled with the sordid materialism of the 20th century, embarks on a psychic journey in search of the world's lost dreams.



The thing to bear in mind about "Azathoth" is that it is not, and never was intended to be, a short story. Rather, it's a few pages of notes, in prose form, for Lovecraft's first stab at a novel, which seems never to have progressed any further than this in its original form. The inspiration for the unwritten book was William Beckford's The History of the Caliph Vathek, an Orientalist gothic novel about a Faustian character loosely based on the Abbasid caliph, al-Wathiq, but there's little in the fragmentary notes to suggest that Lovecraft intended Azathoth to have an Arabian setting. There's also nothing in the notes to suggest who or what the title refers to, although Lovecraft's papers from 1919 include a pair of cryptic notes: "AZATHOTH-- hideous name" and "A terrible pilgrimage to seek the nighted throne of the far daemon-sultan Azathoth." It seems likely, in any event, that many if not most of Lovecraft's ideas for the stillborn Azathoth ended up in other, later works-- most especially The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.





"The Horror at Martin's Beach" aka "The Invisible Monster" (written 1922, with Sonia H. Greene; first published in the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales; collected in The Horror in the Museum)



The discovery and slaying of a huge and mysterious sea creature off the coast from a popular beach resort yields tragic results when one of the monster's parents comes looking for it.



Various Lovecraft enthusiasts have speculated over the years about whether or not Howie might have been romantically involved with Winifred V. Jackson and/or Anna Helen Crofts. Those still seem to be open questions, but he certainly was so connected to Sonia H. Greene. In fact, he married her in 1924, and although they split up two years later, Lovecraft never got around to signing the papers to formalize their divorce. Lovecraft revised Greene's story, "The Horror at Martin's Beach," about a year after they first met at an amateur press convention in Boston; it isn't clear whether they were dating yet at that point.



As for the story itself, it appears to be loosely based on the 1817 Gloucester Sea Monster case, in which several reported sightings of some big, weird animal off the Massachusetts coast coincided with the capture of a deformed blacksnake near one of the beaches. The latter was widely taken to be the spawn of the former, and the Linnaean Society of New England beclowned themselves by publishing a pamphlet on the hitherto-undescribed species, Scoliophis atlanticus, using the snake as the type specimen before a more cautious naturalist correctly identified the thing. "The Horror at Martin's Beach" should be of particular interest to kaiju fans, because there's a strong between-the-lines hint of Gorgo and Monster from a Prehistoric Planet to it. It's also unusual among sea monster stories for implying that the creature is not only intelligent and purposeful, but also possessed of psychic abilities.

[El Santo]

"The Hound" (written 1922; first published in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales; collected in The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories)


Two bored young men pursue ever more extravagant extremes of decadence until eventually they settle upon grave-robbing as their preferred form of art-crime. But when they loot the tomb of a Dutch mystic who shared their proclivities, they learn that they have much greater things to fear than discovery by their fellow mortals.



This has been for many years my favorite Lovecraft story. Indeed, it was one of a small group of tales (including a couple not written by Lovecraft) that finally enabled me to get what he was trying to do after several fruitless grapples with the more famous Cthulhu Mythos stuff. There a certain irony in that, too, because despite "The Hound" being only the slightest bit Cthulhu-y, it happens to contain the very first mention of the Necronomicon, retroactively attributing it to the Abdul Alhazred mentioned in passing in "The Nameless City." As seems usually to be the case with these things, the Necronomicon here in its debut gives little indication of being any rarer or more formidable than any other old grimoire, and the implication in "The Hound" is that it deals very specifically with cultic observances related to death, undeath, and aspects of the spirit world pertaining to each-- which frankly is a lot more sensible an interpretation of a book with that title than what it would become later on. What most attracted me to "The Hound" when I first encountered it in 2001 or thereabouts was the way its two antiheroes prefigure various modern-day countercultures; it was the kind of horror story that I could envision acquaintances of mine blundering into, given just a bit of exaggeration and the necessary departures from reality as we know it. (Indeed, I've since discovered that Poppy Z. Brite gave "The Hound" virtually a beat-for-beat rewrite in 1989, under the title "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," resetting it within the New Orleans goth scene. I actually read her version [or his, if we want to backdate Brite's current pronouns] first, although I had no conscious memory of that until a few months ago, when I revisited the collection in which it appears for the first time in decades.) I would recommend "The Hound" without hesitation to anyone who's curious about Lovecraft, but can't see any reason to be afraid of time, space, fish, or black people in and of themselves.





"The Lurking Fear" (written 1922; first published in the January 1923 through April 1923 issues of Home Brew; collected in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)


A self-described "connoisseur of horrors" investigates the unexplained slaughter of an entire village in the Catskills, which the locals attribute to a fabled monster said to haunt the abandoned Martense mansion near the peak of Tempest Mountain. In so doing, he discovers that the Martenses aren't extinct after all— they've merely evolved.



"The Lurking Fear" was the first Lovecraft story I ever read-- and it was very nearly the last one, too. The prose manages to be at once pitched to the height of hysteria and about as fluent as cold porridge. The story is two or three times as long as it has any reason to be, and spends many of those pages attempting to spin mystery around things that the reader has already figured out. Worst of all, there's a vast gulf separating the expectations that Lovecraft builds up around the monsters and their actual horrific power once they've been revealed. Seriously, check this out. The moment of the monsters' climactic emergence is described thusly: "a loathsome, night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of egress-- streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests and strew fear, madness, and death." Pretty scary, right? But then in the next paragraph, we get this: "dwarfed, deformed, hairy devils or apes-- monstrous and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe." Oh. Nevermind. It is rather interesting, in light of Lovecraft's other writing, that the things turn out to be the hyper-inbred descendants of precisely the kind of New Netherlands patroons that he's otherwise constantly praising as the best sort of people from America's colonial era. Juniper likes quip that Lovecraft's stories often boil down to, "Do you want fish-people? Because letting Jews into the country is how you get fish-people." But here it's precisely the Martneses' insistence upon keeping the bloodline pure at all costs that degenerates them into neo-simian cannibals.