An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Heaton,———.

In “The Mound,” a young man who in 1891 goes to the mound region in Oklahoma looking for treasure but returns with his mind shattered by something he has seen. He dies eight years later in an epileptic fit.

Henneberger, J[acob] C[lark] (1890–1969).

Magazine publisher who, with J.M.Lansinger, founded Rural Publications, Inc., in 1922, to publish a variety of popular magazines. Henneberger achieved great success with the magazine College Humor (begun in 1922), and now envisioned founding a line of varied periodicals in the detective and horror fields. Having received assurances from such established writers as Hamlin Garland and Ben Hecht that they would be willing to contribute stories of an “unconventional” sort to a new magazine, Henneberger started WTin March 1923; but in the end these and other wellknown authors did not submit to the magazine, leaving its early issues open to many tyros and amateurs. Henneberger installed Edwin Baird as his first editor, and the latter accepted all five of the stories HPL submitted to him in May 1923. Henneberger commissioned HPL to ghostwrite “Under the Pyramids” for Harry Houdini, paying him $100 upon receipt of the manuscript in early March 1924. By this time, however, the magazine was in serious financial trouble; it and its companion, Detective Tales,were now $40,000 in debt. For this and other reasons, HPL turned down Henneberger’s offer to be the new editor of the magazine; specifically, HPL, newly married and settled in Brooklyn, did not wish to pull up stakes and move to Chicago to edit the magazine, as would have been required. Henneberger then sold off his share of Detective Talesto Lansinger, appointed Farnsworth Wright as editor of WT, and came to an agreement with B. Cornelius, the printer of the magazine, whereby Cornelius would be the chief stockholder with an agreement that if the $40,000 owed him was ever repaid by profits from the magazine, the stock would be returned to Henneberger. This

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never happened. In the fall of 1924 Henneberger provisionally hired HPL to edit a new humor magazine that he was planning (possibly titled the Magazine of Fun) at $40 per week; HPL spent the next several weeks preparing jokes for the magazine, but it never got off the ground. Henneberger gave HPL a credit of $60 at the Scribner Book Shop; although HPL attempted to have the credit converted to cash, he was unable to do so, and so he and Frank Belknap Long selected a large number of books (see SL1.355–56). Henneberger sporadically communicated with HPL over the next few years, but to no particular effect. See Henneberger’s late memoir, “Out of Space, Out of Time,” Deeper Than You Think1, No. 2 (July 1968): 3–5.

“Herbert West—Reanimator.”

Short story (12,100 words); written from early October 1921 to mid-June 1922. First published as a serial (under the title “Grewsome Tales”) in Home Brew(February, March, April, May, June, and July 1922); rpt. WT(March, July, September, November 1942, September, November 1943); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D;annotated version in An2and CC.

The story is narrated by a friend and colleague of Dr. Herbert West; both he and West attended the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham and later went on to experience various adventures as practicing physicians. It was in medical school that West derived his peculiar theories about the possibility of reanimating the dead. These views “hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes…. my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life.” The six episodes of the story show West producing more and more hideous instances of reanimation. In the first, West injects a serum into a corpse, but it seems to produce no results; the two doctors bury the corpse in the potter’s field, only to learn later that it came to life after all. In the second, West reanimates Dr. Allan Halsey, who as head of the medical school had vigorously opposed West’s experiments and had died in the typhoid epidemic that raged through Arkham. Halsey creates havoc throughout the city before he is caught and locked up in Sefton Asylum. In the third, West and the narrator have set up practice in the small Massachusetts town of Bolton and attempt to resurrect an African American—an amateur boxer named Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke”—but seem to find that the serum “prepared from experience with white specimens only” will not work on him; later they learn otherwise. In the fourth episode the narrator, returning from a vacation with his parents in Illinois, finds West in a state of unusual excitement. He has designed an embalming fluid that will preserve a corpse in a state of freshness indefinitely and claims that a traveling salesman who had come to visit West had died unexpectedly and would therefore serve as a perfect specimen because of the freshness of the corpse. When it is reanimated, the narrator finds that West’s account of the matter is not wholly accurate. The fifth episode takes us to the horrors of the Great War, where West and the narrator have enlisted in a Canadian regi

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ment in 1915. West now seeks to put into practice still more eccentric views on the reanimation of the dead and does so in a loathsome manner. The sixth episode finds the two doctors in Boston after the war, and it ends with the various reanimated bodies returning to tear West to pieces and bear off the fragments of his corpse through ancient underground tunnels leading to a cemetery. George Julian Houtain, an amateur colleague of HPL, commissioned “Herbert West—Reanimator” for the early issues of his professional humor magazine, Home Brew. As such, it is difficult to deny that the tale is—or in the course of writing became—a parody, not only of itself but also of lurid supernatural fiction. HPL complained of his reduction to a Grub Street hack by writing a “manifestly inartistic” ( SL1.158) serial story, but he seems to have enjoyed the task. Some commentators state that HPL was not fully paid the $5 per episode promised by Houtain, but letters confirm that he received complete payment.

It has commonly been assumed that the obvious influence upon the story is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1818); but the method of West’s reanimation of the dead (whole bodies that have died only recently) is very different from that of Victor Frankenstein (the assembling of a huge composite body from disparate parts of bodies), and only the most general influence can be detected. The core of the story is so elementary a weird conception that no literary source need be postulated. The story is the first to mention Miskatonic University, although the name Miskatonic had been used in “The Picture in the House” (1920). Five of the six segments are set in New England. Bolton, the setting for the third episode, is the name of a real town in east-central Massachusetts; but it was not a “factory town” as HPL describes it, but rather a tiny agricultural community. This has led Robert D.Marten to assume that HPL did not then know of the existence of the real Bolton and coined the name independently. In the first segment the mention of the “deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill” probably alludes to “the large Chapman house” ( SL1.108) in Providence, which burned down in February 1920.

See Robert D.Marten, “Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers,” LSNo. 39 (Summer 1998): 1–20.

Herrero, Mrs.

In “Cool Air,” the slatternly landlady of the brownstone on West 14th Street in New York City where Dr. Muñoz lives. Her son Esteban brings food, laundry, medicine, and other necessities to Dr. Muñoz, but when the latter’s condition worsens, his mother refuses to permit Esteban to run errands for him.

Hiram.

In “The Tomb,” Jervas Dudley’s faithful servant, who promises Dudley that he will be interred in the Hyde family vault.

“History of the Necronomicon.”

Sketch (915 words); written in the fall of 1927 (see SL2.201). First published as a pamphlet (Oakman, Ala.: Rebel Press, [1938]) by Wilson Shepherd; rpt MW

A tongue-in-cheek “history” of the sinister book and its equally sinister author, Abdul Alhazred. HPL traces the book’s history from its writing in the eighth century to its translation into Greek, Latin, and other languages, stressing the rarity of

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surviving copies of any edition of the book. HPL drew up the history largely in order to be consistent in subsequent references to the tome in fiction.

Hoadley, Abijah.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” a Congregational minister who in 1747 delivers a sermon on “the close presence of Satan and his imps” in Dunwich.

Hoag, Jonathan E[than] (1831–1927).

Poet living in and around Troy, N.Y., who entered amateur journalism late in life. HPL wrote birthday poems to him from 1918 to 1927; they presumably corresponded, but no letters have surfaced. Hoag’s descriptions of the Catskill Mountains may have contributed to the topographical atmosphere of “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and “The Lurking Fear,” set there. HPL compiled and wrote an introduction to Hoag’s Poetical Works(privately printed, 1923); it constituted the first appearance of a work by HPL in hardcover. HPL, Samuel Loveman, and James F.Morton revised some of Hoag’s poetry in the process of editing the volume. The book was funded by Hoag (not by HPL, as has sometimes been asserted). The poems “Death” ( Silver Clarion,November 1918) and “To the American Flag” are included in the book; they were later attributed to HPL (first by Rheinhart Kleiner, who reprinted the poems in the Californian,Summer 1937), but seem clearly to be Hoag’s; possibly HPL revised them. HPL wrote an elegy, “Ave atque Vale” ( Tryout,December 1927), at Hoag’s death. Hoag may have been a partial inspiration for the character Zadok Allen in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” whose life-dates exactly match Hoag’s.

Hodgson, William Hope (1877–1918).

Weird novelist and short story writer who died in Belgium during World War I. He wrote four novels — The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”(1907), The House on the Borderland(1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and The Night Land(1912)—all written around 1902–5, probably published in reverse order (see Gafford). There is also a story collection, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder(1913), imitating Blackwood’s “psychic detective,” John Silence. HPL read Hodgson in 1934 at the urging of bibliophile Herman C. Koenig, who was circulating his Hodgson volumes among HPL’s circle. HPL wrote an enthusiastic article, “The Weird Work of William Hope Hodgson” ( Phantagraph,February 1937), and added a section on him for a putative revised version of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (this revised version was not published until its appearance in O). The cosmic terror of The House on the Borderlandand The Night Landmay have influenced “The Shadow out of Time.” Much of Hodgson’s work was collected and published posthumously. HPL’s enthusiasm for Hodgson’s work no doubt influenced August Derleth’s decision to republish much of it through Arkham House. See Sam Moskowitz, “William Hope Hodgson,” in Hodgson’s Out of the Storm(1975); William Hope Hodgson: Voyages and Visions,ed. Ian Bell (1987); Sam Gafford, “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson,” Studies in Weird FictionNo. 11 (Spring 1992): 12–15.

Holm, Axel (1612–1687).

In “The Trap,” a Danish scholar expert in both glass working and magic who designs a mirror that can draw human beings and other

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objects into a strange fourth-dimensional world within itself. He achieves a kind of immortality in this manner (so long as the mirror itself is intact), but finds existence to be extremely tiresome, enlivened only by drawing other people into the mirror-world.

Holt, Ebenezer.

In “The Picture in the House,” the eighteenth-century merchant from Salem who trades to the aged cannibal of the story a copy of Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo

“Homes and Shrines of Poe.”

Essay (2,010 words); written in July 1934. First published in the Californian(Winter 1934); rpt. Acolyte(Fall 1943); rpt. MW. A brief survey of Poe <s residences in Philadelphia, Richmond, Charlottesville, Baltimore, New York, and Fordham, all of which HPL had personally visited. Hornig, Charles D[erwin]

(1916–1999), youthful editor of The Fantasy Fan(September 1933–February 1935), the first important fanzine in weird fiction. Hornig, residing in Elizabeth, N.J., accepted HPL’s offer to serialize a revised version of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” there, but the serialization had progressed only to the middle of Chapter 8 by the time of magazine’s folding. Over much of the period he was editing The Fantasy Fan,Horning was also managing editor of Wonder Stories(1933–36). On May 25, 1935 (his nineteenth birthday), he met HPL in Providence. He edited Science Fiction(1939–41), Future Fiction(1939–40), and Science Fiction Quarterly(1940–41) but abandoned them all by 1941. “Horror at Martin’s Beach, The.”

Short story (2,410 words); written in collaboration with Sonia H.Greene, probably in June 1922. First published (as “The Invisible Monster”) in WT(November 1923); first collected in Cats;corrected text in HM.

The crew of a fishing smack kills a sea creature “fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in diameter” at Martin’s Beach (an unspecified and imaginary locale, but presumably near Gloucester, Mass., which is mentioned several times). Scientists prove the creature to be a mere infant, hatched only a few days previously and probably originating from the deep sea; the day after it is placed on exhibition, it and the vessel that caught it disappear without a trace. Some days later a terrified cry for help emerges from the sea, and the lifeguards throw out a life-preserver to assist the stricken individual; but the life-preserver, attached to a long rope, appears to have been grasped by some nameless entity that pulls it out to sea, and when the lifeguards and other individuals attempt to reel it in, they not only find themselves unable to do so, but also find that they cannot release the rope. They are inexorably dragged to their deaths in the sea. The idea is that the parent of the infant creature has not only grasped the life-preserver but also hypnotized the rescuers so that their wills no longer function. (This is why Prof. Alton’s article “Are Hypnotic Powers Confined to Recognized Humanity?” is cited early in the text.) The tale bears a striking (but accidental) similarity to the British horror film Gorgo(1961).

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“Horror at Red Hook, The.”

Short story (8,400 words); written on August 1–2, 1925. First published in WT(January 1927); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D;annotated version in An2

Thomas Malone, an Irish police detective working from the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn (near the racially heterogeneous slum known as Red Hook), becomes interested in the case of Robert Suydam, a wealthy man of ancient Dutch ancestry who lives in Flatbush. Suydam first attracts notice by “loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers.” He realizes that his clandestine activities must be masked by a façade of propriety; he foils the attempts of relatives to deem him legally incompetent by ceasing to be seen with the foreigners and marries Cornelia Gerritsen, “a young woman of excellent position” whose wedding attracts “a solid page from the Social Register.” The wedding celebration held aboard a steamer at the Cunard Pier ends in horror as the couple is found horribly murdered and completely bloodless. Incredibly, officials follow the instructions written on a sheet of paper, signed by Suydam, and turn his body over to a suspicious group of men headed by “an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth.” The scene shifts to a dilapidated church in Red Hook that has been turned into a dance-hall, in the basement of which loathsome monstrosities perform horrible rites to Lilith. Suydam’s corpse, miraculously revivified, resists being sacrificed to Lilith and somehow manages to overturn the pedestal on which she rests (with the result that the corpse sends “its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution”), thereby somehow ending the horror. All this time detective Malone merely watches from a convenient vantage point, although the sight so traumatizes him that he must spend many months recuperating in a small village in Rhode Island. HPL notes in a letter to Frank Belknap Long that the story “deals with hideous cult-practices behind the gangs of noisy young loafers whose essential mystery has impressed me so much. The tale is rather long and rambling, and I don’t think it is very good; but it represents at least an attempt to extract horror from an atmosphere to which you deny any qualities save vulgar commonplaceness” ( SL2.20). HPL records in his 1925 diary that he visited Red Hook on March 8, 1925. Sonia H.Greene in her memoir claims to supply the inspiration for the tale: “It was on an evening while he, and I think Morton, Sam Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner were dining in a restaurant somewhere in Columbia Heights that a few rough, rowdyish men entered. He was so annoyed by their churlish behavior that out of this circumstance he wove ‘The Horror at Red Hook’” ( The Private Life of H.P.Lovecraft[Necronomicon Press, 1992], p. 12). Whether it was any single incident, or the cumulative effect of HPL’s New York experience, that led to the writing of the story remains in doubt. There is much local color in the story, derived from HPL’s growing familiarity with Brooklyn. The dance-hall church is very likely modeled on a church (now destroyed) near the waterfront in Red Hook. This church was, evidently, actually once used as a dance hall. Suydam’s residence is said to be in Martense Street (very close to 259 Parkside) and near the Dutch Reformed Church (on which “The Hound” was based); probably no specific house is intended, and there does not seem to be any on Martense Street that might correspond to it.

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Another piquant reference, not relating to topography, is to the fact that some of the evil denizens of Red Hook are of a Mongoloid stock originating in Kurdistan—“and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.” This appears to be a borrowing from E.Hoffmann Price’s fine tale “The Stranger from Kurdistan,” published in WT (July 1925), where mention is made of the devil-worshipping Yezidis. HPL would, however, not become personally acquainted with Price for another seven years.

Much of the magical mumbo-jumbo in the story was copied directly from the articles on “Magic” and “Demonology” (both by E.B.Tylor, celebrated author of the landmark anthropological work, Primitive Culture[1871]) from the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,which HPL owned. Specifically, these borrowings involve the Latin quotation from the medieval writer Antoine Delrio (or Del Rio), An sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?(“Have there ever been demons, incubi, and succubi, and from such a union can offspring be born?”) from the entry on “Demonology”; and, from the entry on “Magic,” the invocation uttered at the beginning and end of the story (“O friend and companion of night…”) and the strange Graeco-Hebraic incantation that Malone finds on the wall of the dance-hall church. In a later letter (see “The Incantation from Red Hook,” in The Occult Lovecraft[1975]) HPL attempts to supply a translation of the formula, but commits several errors in the process (the encyclopedia entry provided no translation). The character of Malone may also have something to do with the genesis—or, rather, the particular form—of the story. Sometime before writing “The Horror at Red Hook” HPL had submitted “The Shunned House” to Detective Tales,the magazine that had been founded together with WTand of which Edwin Baird was the editor. But Baird rejected the story. HPL seems to have sought to make “The Horror at Red Hook” a kind of detective story by including the figure of a police detective, even though the actual narrative is supernatural. In early August 1925, HPL planned to send “The Horror at Red Hook” to Detective Tales(HPL to Lillian D.Clark, August 8, 1925; ms., JHL); whether he did so is unclear, but if so, the tale was rejected. HPL later remarked that the story was consciously written with WTin mind (HPL to August Derleth, November 26, 1926; ms., SHSW).

See Robert M.Price, “The Humor at Red Hook,” CryptNo. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 6–9. “Horror in the Burying-Ground, The.”

Short story (5,810 words); ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, c. 1933 or 1934. First published in WT(May 1937); first collected in Cats;corrected text in HM

In the rustic town of Stillwater, the village undertaker, Henry Thorndike, has devised a peculiar chemical compound that, when injected into a living person, will simulate death even though the person is alive and conscious. Thorndike attempts to dispose of an enemy, Tom Sprague (of whose sister Sophie he is fond), in this fashion, but in the course of embalming the body he is himself injected with the substance. Although Thorndike, before he lapses into immobility, pleads not to be entombed, he is pronounced dead and buried alive.

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HPL never mentions the story in any extant correspondence, so its date of composition is difficult to specify; but he seems not to have had much to do with Heald after 1934, and this is evidently the last of the tales he ghostwrote for her. Much of the story is narrated in a backwoods patois reminiscent—and perhaps a parody—of that used in “The Dunwich Horror.” The use of the names Akeley (from “The Whisperer in Darkness”), Zenas (from “The Colour out of Space”), At wood (from At the Mountains of Madness), and Goodenough (referring to HPL’s amateur colleague Arthur Goodenough) suggest that the story is meant, if not as an actual parody, at least as an instance of graveyard humor.

“Horror in the Museum, The.”

Short story (11,440 words); ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, probably in October 1932. First published in WT (July 1933); first collected in BWS;corrected text in HM

The curator of a waxworks museum in London, George Rogers, claims to have captured the deity Rhan-Tegoth on an expedition to Alaska. Rogers shows his skeptical friend Stephen Jones a photograph of the entity, and then shows him the corpse of a dog that has been sucked dry of blood, with puncture wounds all over its body; he claims that he had fed the dog to Rhan-Tegoth, who is kept locked in a crate in the basement of the museum. Irked by Jones’s disbelief of his tale, Rogers challenges Jones to spend the night alone in the museum. Jones agrees, and in the course of the night he seems to hear curious noises in the basement; but it proves to be Rogers himself, who appears to have gone mad and wishes to sacrifice Jones to his deity. Jones manages to overpower Rogers and tie him up; but then both of them hear another noise, and Jones is horrified to see “a black paw ending in a crab-like claw….crab-lik1PHe flees. Coming back a week later, he sees what appears to be a wax statue of Rogers, drained of blood and with numerous puncture wounds on his body; his horror is augmented by noting a scratch on Rogers’s cheek—one that had been made during their tussle.

HPL says of the story: “My latest revisory job comes so near to pure fictional ghost-writing that I am up against all the plot-devising problems of my bygone auctorial days” (HPL to E.Hoffmann Price, October 20, 1932; ms., JHL). Elsewhere HPL says: “‘The Horror in the Museum’—a piece which I ‘ghost-wrote’ for a client from a synopsis so poor that I well-nigh discarded it—is virtually my own work” ( SL4.229). One would like to think the story a self-parody of HPL’s own mythos: the description of Rhan-Tegoth brings Cthulhu to mind, but in this case we have not merely a representation of Cthulhu but the actual god himself, trapped in the basement of a museum. The sight of the “black paw” is reminiscent of the conclusion of “Under the Pyramids.” Houdini, Harry

(pseudonym of Enrich Weiss, 1874–1926), magician and debunker of spiritualism. In early 1924 J.C.Henneberger, owner of WT,in an attempt to salvage the magazine, hired Houdini—then at the height of his celebrity—as a regular columnist. The column “Ask Houdini” appeared in the issues for March, April, and May–June–July 1924. Houdini also appeared as the author of the short stories “The Hoax of the Spirit Lover” (April 1924) and “The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt” (March and April 1924), possibly ghostwritten by Walter Gibson. Henneberger commissioned HPL to write an account of an ad

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venture that Houdini purportedly had in Egypt; but as HPL investigated the details of the incident (told to him in correspondence with Henneberger), he found that it was almost entirely mythical. HPL therefore asked Henneberger for as much imaginative latitude as possible in writing the story. The result was “Under the Pyramids” (published in the May-June-July issue as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”). Henneberger was going to print a joint byline to the story, but because HPL had written it in the first person (as if narrated by Houdini), he felt obliged to omit HPL’s name. Houdini, reading the story in manuscript, expressed great approbation of it (see SL1.328). In the fall of 1924, when HPL, now in New York, was having difficulty finding employment, Houdini asked HPL to visit him at his apartment at 278 West 113th Street in Manhattan, as he would put HPL in touch with “someone worth-while” (SL 1.354). At the meeting, in early October, Houdini gave HPL an introduction to Brett Page, the head of a newspaper syndicate; HPL met Page on October 14, but no job resulted from it. In the fall of 1926 Houdini came in touch with HPL again. He first asked HPL to write an article attacking astrology, for which he paid $75 (see SL2.76, 79). (This article apparently does not survive.) Then he commissioned HPL and C.M.Eddy (who may have done revision work for him at an earlier date) jointly to ghostwrite a full-scale book on superstition, but his sudden death on October 31 put an end to the plans, as Houdini’s widow did not wish to pursue the project. A synopsis of the book, along with the text of one chapter, survive in HPL’s papers under the title The Cancer of Superstition(in DB). Houdini gave HPL a copy of his own debunking of spiritualism, A Magician among the Spirits(1924), with the inscription: “To my friend Howard P.Lovecraft, /Best Wishes,/Houdini./‘My brain is the key that sets me free.’”

See Ruth Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini(1993); Kenneth Silverman, Houdini!!! (1996).

Houghton, Dr.

In “The Dunwich Horr or,” a physician who is summoned by Wilbur Whateley during Old Whateley’s terminal illness.

“Hound, The.”

Short story (3,000 words); written c. October 1922; first published in WT(February 1924); rpt. WT (September 1939); first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in An2and CC The story involves the escapades of the narrator and his friend St. John in that “hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.” The two “neurotic virtuosi,” who are “wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world,” can find in this loathsome activity the only respite from their “devastating ennui.” One day they seek the grave in Holland of “one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.” When they unearth this grave, they find “much—amazingly much” left of the object despite the lapse of half a millennium. They find an amulet depicting a crouching winged hound and take this prize for their unholy museum of charnel objects in England.

Upon their return, strange things begin to happen. Their home seems besieged by a nameless whirring or flapping, and over the moors they hear the “faint, distant baying” as of a gigantic hound. One night, as St. John is walking

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home alone from the station, he is torn to ribbons by some “frightful carnivorous thing.” As he lies dying, he manages to utter, “The amulet—that damned thing—.” The narrator realizes that he must return the amulet to the Holland grave, but one night in Rotterdam thieves take it. Later the city is shocked by a “red death” in a squalid part of town. The narrator, driven by some fatality, returns to the churchyard and digs up the old grave. As he uncovers it, he finds “the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.” The narrator, after telling his tale, proposes to “seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.”

The story was written sometime after HPL and his friend Rheinhart Kleiner visited the churchyard of the Dutch Reformed Church (1796) in Brooklyn on September 16, 1922. HPL remarks: “From one of the crumbling gravestones—dated 1747—I chipped a small piece to carry away. It lies before me as I write—& ought to suggest some sort of a horror-story. I must some night place it beneath my pillow as I sleep…who can say what thingmight not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb?” ( SL1.198). The character St. John is a clear nod to Kleiner, whom HPL referred to in correspondence as Randolph St. John, as if he were a relative of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

“The Hound” has been criticized for being overwritten, but it appears to be a self-parody, as becomes increasingly evident from the obvious literary allusions (St. John’s “that damned thing” echoing the celebrated tale by Ambrose Bierce; the “red death” and the indefinite manner of dating [“On the night of September 24, 19—”], meant as playful nods to Poe; the baying of the hound clearly meant to recall Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles;and, as Steven J.Mariconda has demonstrated, many nods to Joris-Karl Huysmans, particularly A Rebours).

Some autobiographical touches in the story are noteworthy. While St. John is clearly meant to be Kleiner, the connection rests only in the name, as there is not much description of his character. The museum of tomb-loot collected by the protagonists may be a reference to Samuel Loveman’s impressive collection of objets d’art( nottaken from tombs): HPL first saw the collection in September 1922 and was much impressed by it. The original typescript of the story includes a reference to a new colleague: “A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held the unknown and unnamable drawings of Clark Ashton Smith.” HPL revised this passage (on the advice of C.M.Eddy, Jr. [see SL1.292–93]) before submitting it to WT

In terms of HPL’s developing pseudomythology, “The Hound” is important in that it contains the first explicit mention of the Necronomiconand attributes it to Abdul Alhazred.

See Steven J.Mariconda, “‘The Hound’—A Dead Dog?” CryptNo. 38 (Eastertide 1986): 3–7; rpt. in Mariconda’s On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations(Necronomicon Press, 1995); James Anderson, “A Structural Analysis of H.P.Lovecraft’s ‘The Hound,’” CryptNo. 88 (Hallowmas 1994): 3–5.

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“House, The.”

Poem (36 lines in 4 stanzas); written c. July 16, 1919. First published in the National Enquirer (December 11, 1919); rpt. Philosopher(December 1920).

HPL notes ( SL1.357) that the poem was inspired by the same house (at 135 Benefit St.) in Providence that would later serve as the setting for “The Shunned House” (1924). Houtain, George Julian

(1884–1945), amateur journalist (President of the NAPA, 1915–17) who edited The Zenithand wrote a brief article, “20 Webster Street: Lovecraft,” in the January 1921 issue (rpt. LR) after meeting HPL at an amateur convention in Boston in July 1920. They met again at another amateur convention in Boston on February 22, 1921. Houtain married E.Dorothy MacLaughlin; with her, he established the humor magazine, Home Brew,with elements of mild sexual titillation, for which he commissioned HPL to write a series of six “Grewsome Tales” for $5 each. HPL complied with “Herbert West— Reanimator” (serialized February-July 1922), his first professional fiction sale. HPL later wrote a fourpart serial, “The Lurking Fear,” for Home Brew(published January-April 1923). Home Brewlater became High Lifeand folded sometime in 1924. HPL referred to it as a “vile rag” ( SL4.170). Howard, Robert E[rvin]

(1906–1936), pulp writer from Cross Plains, Tex., best known as the author of “sword and sorcery” tales of Conan, King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane, in which the supernatural, historical fiction, and adventure are mingled. When HPL’s “The Rats in the Walls” was reprinted in WT(June 1930), Howard detected in the story what he believed to be an unconventional theory regarding the early settlement of Britain; he accordingly wrote to editor Farnsworth Wright, who passed the letter on to HPL. Their correspondence lasted until the end of Howard’s life and was tremendously voluminous (an estimated 430,000 words—279,000 by Howard—survive). Much of it was devoted to lengthy, even acrimonious, disputes over the relative merits of civilization and barbarism (Howard, scion of one of the pioneer settlers of Texas, Dr. I.M.Howard, saw in barbarism a freedom and vigor lacking in modern life), and the relative merits of intellectual and physical activity. Howard’s side survives largely intact, but HPL’s letters were inadvertently destroyed by Dr. Howard some years after Howard’s death; they now exist, only partially, in extensive transcripts prepared by Arkham House. Howard’s Selected Letters(Necronomicon Press, 1989–91; 2 vols.) includes many of his letters to HPL.

Some of Howard’s horror stories are indebted to HPL; notable among them are “The Black Stone” ( WT,November 1931), “Worms of the Earth” ( WT,November 1932), and “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” ( WT,December 1936). Various items of Lovecraftian lore are mentioned in several stories. Most of Howard’s Lovecraftian tales are collected in Cthulhu(1987). HPL mentioned the serpentmen of Valusia (from Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” [ WT,August 1929]) and one of Conan’s forebears, the Cimmerian chieftain Crom-Ya, in “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35). Howard invented an analogue to the Necronomicon: Nameless Cults(or the Black Book) by von Juntz (HPL supplied the author’s first names, Friedrich Wilhelm). August Derleth then coined the putative

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German title, Unaussprechlichen Kulten.Howard is one of the central characters in the spoof “The Battle That Ended the Century” (1934). HPL was shaken by Howard’s suicide in June 1936, and he wrote a poignant tribute, “In Memoriam: Robert Ervin Howard” ( Fantasy Magazine,September 1936); a shorter version, “Robert Ervin Howard: 1906–1936,” appeared in the Phantagraph,August 1936.

See Glenn Lord, The Last Celt: A Bio-bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard(1976); L.Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, and Jane Whittington Griffin, Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E.Howard(1983); Don Herron, ed., The Dark Barbarian: The Writings of Robert E.Howard: A Critical Anthology(Greenwood Press, 1984); Marc A.Cerasini and Charles Hoffman, Robert E.Howard (1987); Robert M.Price, “Robert E.Howard and the Cthulhu Mythos,” LSNo. 18 (Spring 1989): 10–13, 29

Hutchins Family.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” neighbors of Wilbur Whateley. Wilbur shoots Elam Hutchins’s dog Jack. Elam’s relationship to “old” Sam Hutchins and Will Hutchins, who assist in exterminating Wilbur’s twin brother, is unspecified.

Hutchinson, Edward.

In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,one of Joseph Curwen’s colleagues in the pursuit of the “essential Saltes” by which human beings can be resuscitated after death. He lived in Salem-Village (i.e., Danvers) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and has survived into the 1920s: Charles Dexter Ward visits him in Transylvania, where Hutchinson has a castle and goes by the name Baron Ferenczy. Dr. Willett takes measures to destroy him.

Hyde.

In “The Tomb,” the family whose ancestral vault is haunted by Jervas Dudley. Dudley becomes convinced that he is a Hyde when he finds an old porcelain miniature with his likeness and the initials J.H., for “Jervase Hyde.”

“Hypnos.”

Short story (2,840 words); written c. March 1922. First published in National Amateur(May 1923); rpt. WT(May–June–July 1924) and WT(November 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in D The narrator, a sculptor, encounters a man at a railway station. This person had fallen unconscious, and the narrator, struck with the man’s appearance (“the face [was]…oval and actually beautiful…. I said to myself, with all the ardour of a sculptor, that this man was a faun’s statue out of antique Hellas”), takes it upon himself to rescue the man, who becomes the sculptor’s only friend. The two engage in “studies” of some nameless sort—studies “of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep—those rare dreams beyond dreams which never come to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men.” The sensations they experience in dream are almost inexpressible, but the narrator’s teacher is always “vastly in advance” in the exploration of these realms of quasi-entity. But at some point the teacher encounters some awesome horror that causes him to shriek into wakefulness. Previously they had augmented their dream-visions with drugs; now they take drugs in a desperate effort to keep awake. They re

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verse their previous reclusiveness (they had dwelt in an “old manor-house in hoary Kent”) and seek as many “assemblies of the young and the gay” as they can, but it is all for naught. One night the teacher cannot stay awake for all the efforts of his sculptor friend, something happens, and all that is left of the teacher is an exquisitely sculpted bust of “a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could yield,” with the word HYPNOS at the base. People maintain that the narrator never had a friend, but that “art, philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic life.”

There is an ambiguity maintained to the end of the tale as to whether the narrator’s friend actually existed or was merely a product of his imagination; but this point may not affect the analysis appreciably. The tale is, as with “The Other Gods,” one of hubris, although more subtly suggested. At one point the narrator states: “I will hint—only hint—that he had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his.” If the friend really existed, then he is merely endowed with overweening pride and his doom—at the hands of the Greek god of sleep, Hypnos—is merited. On a psychological interpretation, the friend becomes merely an aspect of the narrator’s own personality; note how, after the above statement, he adds harriedly, “I affirm—I swear—that I had no share in these extreme aspirations”—a clear instance of the conscious mind shirking responsibility for its subconscious fantasies. Like “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” the story features the notion that certain “dreams” provide access to other realms of entity beyond that of the five senses or the waking world.

An early entry in HPL’s commonplace book (#23) provides the plot-germ for the story: “The man who would not sleep—dares not sleep—takes drugs to keep himself awake. Finally falls asleep—& somethinghappens—” A recently discovered typescript of the tale bears the dedication “To S[amuel] L[oveman],” probably in recognition of his interest in Greek antiquity, evinced in much of his verse. See Steven J.Mariconda, “H.P.Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality,” LSNo. 29 (Fall 1993): 2–12.

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I

“Ibid.”

Short story (1,720 words); written probably in the summer of 1928. First published in O-Wash-TaNong(January 1938); rpt. Phantagraph(June 1940); first collected in Uncollected Prose and Poetry II(1980); corrected text in MW

In this “biography” of the celebrated Ibidus, the author is careful to point out that his masterpiece was not, as is sometimes believed, the Lives of the Poetsbut in fact the famous “ Op. Cit.wherein all the significant undercurrents of Graeco-Roman expression were crystallised once for all.” Ibid was born in 486 and taught rhetoric in Rome. His fortunes were mixed during the succession of barbarian invasions in Italy, and by 541 he had moved to Constantinople. He died in 587, but his remains later were exhumed and his skull began a long series of peregrinations and ended up—by way of Charlemagne, Alcuin, William the Conqueror, Oliver Cromwell, and others—in the New World, specifically in Salem, Mass., then in Providence, and finally in Milwaukee, where it rolled down into the burrow of a prairie-dog, only to be brought back to earth by a convulsion of Nature. HPL on one occasion dated this sketch to 1927 (see HPL to Maurice W.Moe, January 19, [1931]; AHT), but the first mention of it is in a letter by Moe to HPL dated August 3, 1928, so a date of 1928 seems more probable. The story was either included in a letter to Moe or was a separate enclosure in a letter to him; its epigraph (“‘…As Ibid says in his famous Lives of the Poets.’—From a student theme”) may refer to an actual statement from a paper by one of Moe’s students. HPL uses this real or fabricated piece of fatuity as the springboard for an exquisite tongue-in-cheek squib with numerous in-jokes (particularly in relation to HPL’s residence in Providence and Moe’s in Milwaukee). The target of the satire in “Ibid” is not so much the follies of students as the pomposity of academic scholarship. It is full of learned but preposterous footnotes and owlish references to real and fabricated historical events. Moe considered submitting the sketch to the American Mercuryor some such journal and asked

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HPL to revise it slightly; but later he and HPL concluded that revision for a commercial magazine was not possible and that the work “would have to be content with private circulation” (Maurice W.Moe to HPL, January 29, 1931; ms., JHL).

“Idealism and Materialism—A Reflection.”

Essay (4,310 words); written in 1919/20/21. First published in the National Amateur(“July 1919”); rpt. MW

Forceful essay presenting an anthropology of religion (derived largely from Nietzsche and from John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers[1872]), asserting that religious belief is a holdover from primitive times in which human beings invented gods as a means of explaining natural phenomena, the causes of which they did not understand. HPL mentions his “seeing” a dryad in the woods near his home at the age of seven or eight, an anecdote repeated in “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922). Its date of composition is unknown: the July 1919 National Amateurwas long delayed and did not appear until the summer of 1921; as the issue also contained HPL’s “The Picture in the House” (December 1920), the essay could have been written in 1920 or early 1921.

“In a Major Key.”

Essay (1,050 words); probably written in the summer of 1915. First published in the Conservative (July 1915); rpt. MW

A response to Charles D.Isaacson’s In a Minor Keythat seeks to refute Isaacson’s claims that Walt Whitman is a great American thinker and poet, that race prejudice is an unmitigated evil, and that pacifism is a morally upright stance to take in the face of the European war. The essay contains an untitled poem (18 lines), which in a letter HPL titled “Fragment on Whitman” ( SL1.57), condemning the sexual elements in Whitman’s poetry.

“In a Sequestered Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d.”

Acrostic poem (13 lines); written on August 8, 1936. First published in Four Acrostic Sonnets on Edgar Allan Poe(1936); rpt. Science-Fantasy Correspondent(March– April 1937; as “In a Sequestered Churchyard Where Once Poe Walked”); HPL(Bellville, N.J.: Corwin F.Stickney, 1937); WT(May 1938) (as “Where Poe Once Walked”).

The poem was written in St. John’s Churchyard in Providence, where HPL and his guests R.H.Barlow and Adolphe de Castro wrote acrostic “sonnets” (they lack one line for a true sonnet) to Poe. De Castro promptly send his to WT,where it was accepted; HPL’s and Barlow’s were rejected, as Farnsworth Wright only wished one such poem. Maurice W.Moe hectographed the three poems, along with one of his own, in Four Acrostic Sonnets on Edgar Allan Poe. Later Henry Kuttner wrote another.

See David E.Schultz, “In a Sequester’d Churchyard,” CryptNo. 57 (St. John’s Eve 1988): 26–29, which reprints all five poems.

In Defence of Dagon.

Collective title for a series of three essays: “The Defence Reopens!” (3,820 words; January 1921); “The Defence Remains Open!” (5,980 words; April 1921); and “Final Words” (2,100 words; September 1921). First published in its entirety in In Defence of Dagon(Necronomicon Press, 1985). Brief excerpts from the first two essays appeared as “In Defense of Dagon,” Leaves(1938).

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The essays were written in response to comments on HPL’s poems and stories submitted to the Transatlantic Circulator, an Anglo-American organization of amateur journalists who circulated their work in manuscript and commented on it. The essays present a strong defense of HPL’s brand of weird fiction (the weird writer is “the poet of twilight visions and childhood memories, but sings only for the sensitive”), calling upon Oscar Wilde’s critical theories to combat the notion that weird art (or any art) can be “morbid” or “unhealthy.” HPL also vigorously defends his atheistic materialism (first expressed in a letter or essay that does not now survive), maintaining that religion has been largely disproven by the sciences of physics and biology and that anthropology has accounted for the origin of religious belief. Many comments by other members of the Circulator (which included John Ravenor Bullen, who was perhaps responsible for HPL’s entry into the group) survive at JHL. “In Memoriam: Robert Ervin Howard.”

Essay (1,580 words); written in June or July 1936. First published in Fantasy Magazine(September 1936); rpt. MW

Poignant overview of Howard’s life and work, written shortly after his suicide. The essay is based largely on a letter to E.Hoffmann Price (July 5, 1936). A shorter version (probably written first) appeared as “Robert Ervin Howard: 1906–1936” ( Phantagraph,August 1936). HPL also wrote a letter to WTon Howard’s death (published in the letter column in October 1936).

“In the Editor’s Study.”

A regular column of commentary in issues of the Conservative(1916–23); rpt. The Conservative: Complete(Necronomicon Press, 1976, 1977).

The column appeared in seven issues of the paper. In October 1916 there were three subsections: “The Proposed Author’s Union” (a satirical squib on unionization of authors); “Revolutionary Mythology” (on extravagant praise of the heroes of the American Revolution); and “The Symphonic Ideal” (on the need to remain “childlike and contented” in the modern age). In January 1917 there were two subsections: “The Vers Libre Epidemic” (an attack on free verse) and “Amateur Standards” (on a political feud in the UAPA). In July 1917 there was one subsection: “A Remarkable Document” (on a temperance article by Booth Tarkington). In July 1918 there were six subsections: “AngloSaxondom” (on the need for America and Great Britain to unite against immigrants); “Amateur Criticism” (on the criticism of amateur writing; specifically directed at Prof. Philip B.McDonald); “The United 1917–1918” (on the accomplishments of the UAPA during the past year); “The Amateur Press Club” (on a new international organization of amateur journalists); “Ward Phillips Replies” (a paragraph prefacing HPL’s poem “Grace,” responding to a poem written by Rheinhart Kleiner); and “Les Mouches Fantastiques”(on a literarily radical amateur journal edited by Elsa Gidlow and Roswell George Mills). In July 1919 there was one subsection: “The League” (a jaundiced look at the inability of the League of Nations to stop war). In March 1923 there were two subsections: “Rursus Adsumus” (on HPL’s revival of the Conservative) and “Rudis Indigestaque Moles” (a condemnation of the literary radicalism of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land). In

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July 1923 the column appeared without any subsections, discussing the need to take cognizance of recent developments in art and philosophy.

“In the Vault.”

Short story (3,430 words); written on September 18, 1925. First published in Tryout(November 1925); rpt. WT(April 1932); first collected in O;corrected text in DH

George Birch is the careless and thick-skinned undertaker of Peck Valley, somewhere in New England. He finds himself trapped in the cemetery’s receiving tomb where eight coffins are being stored for the winter by the slamming of the door in the wind and the breaking of the neglected latch. Birch realizes that the only way to escape the tomb is to pile the coffins like a pyramid and squeeze through the transom. Although working in the dark, he is confident that he has stacked the coffins in the sturdiest manner possible; in particular, he believes that he has placed the well-made coffin of the diminutive Matthew Fenner on the very top, rather than the flimsy coffin initially built for Fenner but later used for the tall Asaph Sawyer, a vindictive man whom he had not liked in life. Ascending his “miniature Tower of Babel,” Birch finds that he has to knock out some of the bricks around the transom in order for his large body to escape. As he does so, his feet fall through the top coffin into the decaying contents within. He feels horrible pains in his ankles—as from splinters or loose nails—but manages to crawl out the window and drop to the ground. He cannot walk—his Achilles tendons have been cut—but drags himself to the cemetery lodge where he is rescued. Later Dr. Davis examines his wounds and finds them very unnerving. Going to the receiving-tomb, he learns the truth: Asaph Sawyer was too big to fit Fenner’s coffin, so Birch had phlegmatically cut off Sawyer’s feet at the ankles to make the body fit; but he had not reckoned on Sawyer’s inhuman vengeance. The top coffin was not Fenner’s but Sawyer’s, and the wounds in Birch’s ankles are teeth marks.

The plot of the story was suggested to HPL sometime in August 1925 by C.W. Smith, editor of Tryout . It is spelled out in a letter: “…an undertaker imprisoned in a village vault where he was removing winter coffins for spring burial, & his escape by enlarging a transom reached by the pilingup of the coffins” ( SL2.26). HPL has, of course, added a supernatural element. But the story remains a commonplace tale of supernatural vengeance. As in “Pickman’s Model,” HPL attempts unsuccessfully to write in a more homespun, colloquial vein.

HPL dedicated the story to C.W.Smith, “from whose suggestion the central situation is taken.” HPL submitted it to Farnsworth Wright of WT,but it was rejected in November 1925; Wright gave as a reason the fact that (in HPL’s words) “its extreme gruesomeness would not pass the Indiana censorship” (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, December 2, 1925; ms., JHL). The reference is to the banning of C.M. Eddy’s “The Loved Dead.” HPL then sent it to the Tryout,where it appeared in the issue for November 1925 (the issue was published in early December). Later, in August 1926, the story was submitted to Ghost Stories,a very crude pulp magazine that specialized in purportedly “true” confession-style stories involving the supernatural; possibly HPL felt that the plain style of the tale would pass muster with the editors, but it was rejected. Finally, in late 1931, after August Derleth prepared a new typescript to replace HPL’s tattered original, HPL resubmitted the story to WTat Derleth’s urging. It was accepted, and HPL was paid $55.

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“In the Walls of Eryx.”

Short story (12,000 words); written in collaboration with Kenneth J.Sterling, January 1936. First published in WT(October 1939); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D.

Kenton J.Stanfield, of the Venus Crystal Company, is exploring for the valuable crystals—used for power both on Venus and back on earth—near the company’s post of Terra Nova when he sees an immense crystal sitting in a field on the plateau (the “Erycinian Highland”) of Eryx. (In Greek mythology, Eryx is the son of Aphrodite [Venus].) Approaching the object at a run, Stanfield is startled to encounter an invisible obstruction. He gradually realizes that the object is an invisible maze, made of some glasslike substance that is preternaturally hard. He finds an entrance and begins to approach the crystal, which appears to be in the very center of the maze. He continually seems to make progress but is always halted by an unexpected barrier. Stanfield begins to crack under the strain and is half convinced there is something supernatural about the maze. Then the “manlizards” native to Venus surround the maze and seem to mock Stanfield by waving their feelers at him. Days pass; Stanfield’s supply of oxygen and food dwindle; every attempt to find the right passageway to the crystal fails, nor can Stanfield find his way out of the maze. Finally he collapses and dies. His body, and the diary he had kept, is found by another operative of the Venus Crystal Company, who realizes that Stanfield could easily have emerged from the maze by proceeding through the opening behindhim.

Sterling has stated that the idea of the invisible maze was his and that this core idea was adapted from Edmond Hamilton’s story (which HPL liked), “The Monster-God of Mamurth” ( WT,August 1926), which concerns an invisible building in the Sahara Desert. Sterling wrote a draft of 6,000 to 8,000 words; HPL rewrote the story (“in very short order,” Sterling declares) on a small pad of lined paper, making it considerably longer in the process (see Sterling, “Caverns Measureless to Man” [1976]; in LR,pp. 375–78). Sterling’s account suggests that the version as we have it is entirely HPL’s prose, and indeed it reads as such; but one suspects (Sterling’s original draft is not extant) that, as with the collaborated tales with Price and Lumley, HPL tried to preserve as much of Sterling’s own prose, and certainly his ideas, as possible.

The authors have made the tale amusing with in-jokes on certain mutual colleagues: Kenton J.Stanfield’s initials are those of Sterling; sificlighs=Science Fiction League, to which Sterling belonged; farnoth-flies=editor Farnsworth Wright of WT;ugrats=Hugo the Rat, HPL’s name for editor Hugo Gernsback of Wonder Stories;effjay weeds and wriggling akmans=Forrest J.Ackerman; tuckahs=Bob Tucker; darohs=Jack Darrow, these latter three being wellknown fans. Some jokes are probably HPL’s, since they resemble the punning names he devised for “The Battle That Ended the Century.”

The hackneyed use of Venus as a setting for the tale is perhaps its one significant drawback. The notion of a human being walking without difficulty (albeit with an oxygen mask and protective suit) on the surface of Venus was not preposterous in its day. There was much speculation as to the surface conditions of the planet, some astronomers believing it to be steamy and swampy like our own Palaeozoic age, others that it is a barren desert blown by dust storms; still others thought the planet covered with huge oceans of carbonated water or even

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with hot oil. It was only in 1956 that radio waves showed the surface temperature to be a minimum of 570° F, while in 1968 radar and radio observations at last confirmed the temperature to be 900° F and the surface atmospheric pressure to be at least ninety times that of the earth. HPL’s handwritten draft was presumably typed by Sterling, since the existing typescript is in an unrecognizable typewriter face. The byline reads (surely at HPL’s insistence) “By Kenneth Sterling and H.P.Lovecraft.” Sterling reports that the story was submitted to WTshortly after it was written but was rejected. It apparently was then submitted to Astounding Stories, Blue Book, Argosy, Wonder Stories,and perhaps Amazing Stories(all these names, except the last, are crossed out on a sheet prefacing the typescript). Finally it was resubmitted to WTand accepted. Sterling received $120, half of which he gave to HPL’s surviving aunt, Annie E.P.Gamwell.

Innsmouth.

Fictitious city invented by HPL. Innsmouth was first mentioned in “Celephaïs” (1920), but clearly set in England. It was revived for two sonnets (“The Port” [VIII] and “The Bells” [XIX]) of Fungi from Yuggoth(1929–30), where the setting is unspecified, although New England seems likely. In “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) it is unequivocally set on the North Shore of Massachusetts. HPL states in letters that it was inspired by his revisiting of the decaying town of Newburyport (see SL 3.435), although that city has now been much restored as a haven for tourists. Innsmouth is briefly cited again in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933). Iranon.

In “The Quest of Iranon,” the bard who seeks his far-off home of Aira where he is a prince. In Teloth, the inhabitants have no use for his “profession,” and they force him to work as a cobbler. Iranon does not age. He later sets out on a voyage, with a young friend, Romnod, to seek Aira. After many years he learns that he is no prince at all, but only a beggar’s son. He dies an old man. Isaacson, Charles D[avid] (1891–1936).

Amateur journalist who edited In a Minor Key,the first issue of which (undated, but published in early 1915) advocated pacifism, condemned prejudice against African Americans and Jews, and praised Walt Whitman; HPL responded with a hostile attack, “In a Major Key” ( Conservative,July 1915). Isaacson shot back with “Concerning the Conservative” ( In a Minor KeyNo. 2 [1915]), as did James F.Morton in another article in the same issue. HPL promised to write a devastating rebuttal, but aside from a poetical squib, “Gems from ‘In a Minor Key’” ( Conservative,October 1915), he published nothing; later in the year he wrote a long satirical poem, “The Isaacsonio-Mortoniad,” attacking both Isaacson and Morton, but did not publish it. Isaacson visited HPL briefly when passing through Providence on July 1, 1916. He later wrote several books on music: Face to Face with Great Musicians(1918–21; 2 vols.) and The Simple Story of Music(1928).

“Isaacsonio-Mortoniad, The.”

Poem (136 lines); written no later than September 14, 1915. First published in Saturnalia and Other Poems(1984).

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Part of HPL’s feud with Charles D.Isaacson and James F.Morton, who had responded to HPL’s attacks on Isaacson’s amateur paper, In a Minor Key(see HPL’s “In a Major Key,” Conservative,July 1915) with attacks of their own in the second issue of In a Minor Key(undated, but probably dating to September 1915). The pungent satire claims to reveal the absurdities and inconsistencies in Isaacson’s defense of Walt Whitman and his appeals for racial tolerance, and Morton’s evangelical atheism. HPL apparently decided against publishing the poem in the amateur press. Iwanicki, Father.

In “The Dreams in the Witch House,” a Catholic priest at St. Stanislaus’ Church in Arkham who gives a crucifix to one of Walter Gilman’s friends, Joe Mazurewicz, who then gives it to Gilman to protect him from Keziah Mason. Iwanicki had first been cited in the so-called “discarded draft” of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (written in late 1931, a few months before “The Dreams in the Witch House”), but was excised from the final draft. See MW65.

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J

Jack.

The narrator of “The Man of Stone,” who accompanies Ben Hayden on a trip to see the celebrated sculptures of Arthur Wheeler.

Jackson, Henry.

In “The Man of Stone,” a man who is treated for tuberculosis near Lake Placid, N.Y., where he hears of the tale that constitutes the narrative of the story and which he passes on to his friend, Ben Hayden, who then goes to investigate the story.

Jackson, Winifred Virginia (1876–1959).

Amateur poet living in the Boston area and friend of HPL. HPL was extensively involved with Jackson in amateur journalism during the period 1918–21. He wrote a brief biographical sketch of her, “Winifred Virginia Jordan: Associate Editor” ( Silver Clarion,April 1919; as by “El Imparcial”), followed by a lengthy critical analysis, “Winifred Virginia Jackson: A ‘Different’ Poetess” ( United Amateur, March 1921); he published several of her poems in his amateur journal, The Conservative;he contributed a poem on Jonathan E.Hoag to her amateur journal, Eurus(February 1918); he served as Official Critic for another journal edited by Jackson, The Bonnet,for whose only known issue (June 1919) he contributed a poem (“Helene Hoffman Cole: 1893–1919: The Club’s Tribute”) and an unsigned editorial (“Trimmings”); he joined her in editing The United Co-operative,three issues of which were published (December 1918, June 1919, April 1921). On a more personal level, he wrote a poem to her (“On Receiving a Portraiture of Mrs. Berkeley, ye Poetess”) on Christmas Day 1920, after receiving her photograph; the title refers to the pseudonym (Elizabeth Berkeley) under which she widely appeared in the amateur press. The poem was evidently not published at the time. By this time HPL had collaborated with her on a story, “The Green Meadow,” based upon a dream by Jackson; later, probably in 1921, they collaborated on “The Crawling Chaos”; both were published as by “Elizabeth Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jun.”

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Their relations may have been somewhat more personal. According to research by George T.Wetzel and R.Alain Everts, HPL and Jackson were widely regarded in amateur circles as being romantically involved. Evidence for this assertion is somewhat indirect, the strongest coming from HPL’s wife Sonia, who purportedly stated, “I stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson.” There is also a photograph of HPL and Jackson at the seaside (probably in Massachusetts). But since HPL stated to Sonia in the summer of 1922 that he had not been kissed since he was a boy, the “romance” must have been somewhat lacking in passion. Also, Wetzel and Everts claim that Jackson married an African American, Horace Jackson, in 1915 (hence her appearance in earlier amateur journals as Winifred Virginia Jordan); she had divorced him by early 1919 and then carried on a longtime affair with the African American poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962). If HPL had known of either involvement, he presumably—given his severe prejudice against African Americans—would have ceased all relations with Jackson. HPL met Jackson on several occasions, but always at amateur gatherings in the company of others: July 4–5 and September 5, 1920, in Allston, Mass., and (probably) at the NAPA convention in early July 1921 (the same convention at which he first met Sonia). There is no evidence that HPL met or corresponded with her after July 1921. Jackson’s poem “Insomnia” ( Conservative,October 1916) may have influenced the opening quatrains of HPL’s “Psychopompos” (1917–18). That issue contained “The Unknown,” as by “Elizabeth Berkeley”; the poem is actually by HPL. He later stated that this poem and another (“The Peace Advocate,” Tryout,July 1917) had appeared under Jackson’s pseudonym “in an effort to mystify the [amateur] public by having widely dissimilar work from the same nominal hand” (HPL to the Gallomo, September 12, 1921; AHT). Jackson published only two books of poetry, Backroads: Maine Narratives, with Lyrics(1927) and Selected Poems(1944).

See George T.Wetzel and R.Alain Everts, Winifred Virginia Jackson—Lovecraft’s Lost Romance (Strange Co., 1976).

Jacobi, Carl (1908–1997).

Minnesota author of over 100 stories in pulp magazines including WT, Terror Tales, Amazing Stories, Short Stories, Galaxy, Fantastic Universe, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Thrilling Adventures,and Thrilling Mystery. HPL enjoyed Jacobi’s “Mive” (originally a prize-winning story in Fall 1928 issue of Minnesota Quarterly,the student magazine of the University of Minnesota) in WT(January 1932) and wrote to Jacobi about it (see SL4.24–25). Two stories show Lovecraftian influence: “The Tomb from Beyond” ( Wonder Stories,November 1933) and “The Aquarium” (in August Derleth’s Dark Mind, Dark Heart[1962]). Jacobi published three collections with Arkham House: Revelations in Black(1947), Portraits in Moonlight(1964), Disclosures in Scarlet(1972); a final collection of tales, Smoke of the Snake,appeared in 1994.

See R.Dixon Smith, Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi(1985). James, M[ontague] R[hodes] (1862–1936).

British author of four celebrated volumes of ghost stories— Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary(1904), More Ghost

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Stories of an Antiquary(1911), A Thin Ghost and Others(1919), and A Warning to the Curious (1925)—all of which HPL owned and spoke of enthusiastically in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” (James also wrote a children’s fantasy, The Five Jars[1922], which HPL read but did not own.) HPL came upon James at the New York Public Library in December 1925, when he began research for his essay. At that time he ranked James as one of the four “modern masters” (along with Machen, Blackwood, and Dunsany), but in later years he complained that James had no sense of the “cosmic,” and by 1932 he referred to him as “the earthiest member of the ‘big four’” ( SL4.15). Nevertheless, James’s structural complexity may have influenced HPL, especially in his longer tales. Richard Ward has made a good case for the influence of James’s “Count Magnus” upon HPL’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.James’s ghost stories were collected in the much-reprinted volume, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R.James(1931). In his own day, James was better known as an authority on medieval manuscripts and a Biblical scholar. His edition of the Apocryphal New Testament(1924) long remained standard.

See S.G.Lubbock, A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James(1939); Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood(1978); Richard William Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James(1980); Michael Cox, M.R.James: An Informal Portrait(1983); Richard Ward, “In Search of the Dread Ancestor: M.R.James’ ‘Count Magnus’ and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” LS No. 36 (Spring 1997): 14–17.

Jermyn, Arthur.

In “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” a poet and scholar who sets fire to himself after examining a boxed object from Africa. The entire Jermyn line is marked by a strange history. In the eighteenth century, Sir Wade Jermyn, Arthur’s great-great-great-grandfather, explored the Congo, bringing back with him a mysterious wife. Sir Philip Jermyn, Wade’s son and Arthur’s great-great-grandfather, though a baronet, joins the navy as a common sailor and disappears one night as his ship lay off the coast of the Congo. Sir Robert Jermyn, Arthur’s greatgrandfather, kills his entire family except for a two-year old grandson, when he learns certain information about his past. Philip’s second son, Nevil, marries a commoner and sires a son, Sir Alfred Jermyn, who is Arthur’s father. He joins the Barnum & Bailey circus (never explicitly named, but alluded to as “The Greatest Show on Earth”) but is killed by a gorilla with whom he was conducting a boxing match.

Johansen, Gustav.

In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the Norwegian second mate of the schooner Emma. He is the sole survivor of the ship’s crew and is rescued, on board the Alert,which his crew had boarded after their own vessel was sunk in a melee with that ship’s crew. Thurston, the narrator, learns of his experience in a chance newspaper article, and when Thurston seeks him in Oslo, he finds that, like Prof. Angell, he has died under mysterious circumstances. Johansen’s diary describes his crew’s encounter with Cthulhu.

Johnson, Dr. Richard H. (d. 1933).

In “Out of the Æons,” the curator of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology in Boston. The story is a manuscript prepared by

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him before his mysterious death by heart failure. It is he who obtains the strange living mummy for the museum.

Jones, Algernon Reginald.

In “Sweet Ermengarde,” a “city chap” who seeks to seduce Ermengarde Stubbs but is rejected. Jones, Dr.

In “The Last Test,” the jealous assistant of Dr. Alfred Clarendon at San Quentin Penitentiary, who contrives to have Clarendon removed from his post and himself appointed in his place. Jones, Stephen.

In “The Horror in the Museum,” the doubting friend of George Rogers, who spends a night in Rogers’s Museum. When he glimpses a monstrous creature there, he flees; upon returning a week later, he finds that Rogers has been destroyed by the creature.

Juvenile Works: Fiction.

Aside from HPL’s surviving juvenile fiction—“The Little Glass Bottle,” “The Secret Cave,” “The Mystery of the Grave-yard,” “The Mysterious Ship,” “The Beast in the Cave,” and “The Alchemist” (see entries on these tales)—we know of several other nonextant tales written prior to 1908.

HPL’s first work of fiction was “The Noble Eavesdropper” (1897), which concerned “a boy who overheard some horrible conclave of subterranean beings in a cave” (HPL to J.Vernon Shea, July 19– 31, 1931; ms., JHL). It may have been inspired by the Arabian Nights,with its frequent citation of caves. Other stories written prior to 1902 were “The Haunted House” and “John, the Detective.” The latter presumably focused on HPL’s dime-novel detective, King John (featured in “The Mystery of the Grave-yard”). HPL also cites a tale called “The Secret of the Grave,” but this may be the same as “The Mystery of the Graveyard.” In 1905 he wrote a tale called “Gone—but Whither?” Late in life he discovered the composition book containing the title of the story and remarked: “I’ll bet it was a hellraiser! The title expresses the fate of the tale itself ( SL5.140).

HPL also notes writing “several yarns” about Antarctica around 1899, inspired by W.Clark Russell’s The Frozen Pirate(1887). HPL was also devoted to Jules Verne, noting that “many of my tales showed the literary influence of the immortal Jules”; he goes on to describe one of them: “I wrote one story about that side of the moon which is forever turned way from us—using, for fictional purposes, the Hansen theory that air and water still exist there as the result of an abnormal centre of gravity in the moon. I hardly need add that the theory is really exploded—I was even aware of that fact at the time—but I desired to compose a ‘thriller’” ( SL1.19).

HPL also claimed to have written detective stories “very often, the works of A.Conan Doyle being my model so far as plot was concerned.” In describing one he writes: “One long-destroyed tale was of twin brothers—one murders the other, but conceals the body, and tries to live the life of both— appearing in one place as himself, and elsewhere as his victim. (Resemblance had been remarkable.) He meets sudden death (lightning) when posing as the dead man—is identified by a scar, and the secret is finally revealed in his diary. This, I think,

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antedates my 11th year” ( SL1.20). As late as September 1934, he still contemplated developing a story along similar lines ( SL5.33–34).

HPL’s fascination with ancient Rome led to the writing of at least one tale: “The idea of a Roman settlement in America is something which occurred to me years ago—in fact, I began a story with that theme (only it was about Central America & not U.S.) in 1906 or 1907, tho’ I never fmish’d it” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, November 14–19, 1925; ms., JHL).

Of “The Picture” (1907) HPL remarks: “I had a man in a Paris garret paint a mysterious canvas embodying the quintessential essence of all horror. He is found clawed & mangled one morning before his easel. The picture is destroyed, as in a titanic struggle—but in one corner of the frame a bit of canvas remains …& on it the coroner finds to his horror the painted counterpart of the sort of claw which evidently killed the artist” ( Letters to Robert Bloch[Necronomicon Press, 1993], p. 15). The story seems to anticipate “Pickman’s Model” (1926).

Juvenile Works: Poetry.

HPL’s earliest surviving work is a poem: “The Poem of Ulysses: Written for Young People.” The extant manuscript is labeled a “second edition” and dated to November 8, 1897; the first edition presumably dates prior to August 20, 1897, since HPL states that the work was initially written at the age of six (“A Confession of Unfaith” [1922]). It is a retelling of the basic plot of the Odysseyin 88 lines, based upon HPL’s readings in Bulfinch’s Age of Fable,Pope’s translation of the Odyssey,and a work that HPL refers to as “Harpers Half Hour Series” (presumably a paraphrase of the Odysseyfor juveniles). The meter is derived from HPL’s early favorite, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was first published in Juvenilia: 1897–1905(1984).

There are four other surviving juvenile poetical works. “Ovid’s Metamorphoses” is a fairly literal verse translation of the first 88 lines of Ovid’s poem (HPL’s version takes 116 lines) and shows that HPL had learned Latin well enough by this time to perform the task. It probably dates to around 1900, as it is listed in a catalogue of works found at the back of Poemata Minora, Volume 2(September 1902). “H.Lovecraft’s Attempted Journey betwixt Providence & Fall River on the N.Y.N.H.H.&H.R.R.” (1901) is a comic poem that speaks of HPL’s first ride on a trolley car through Providence and adjoining suburbs. “C.S.A.: 1861–1865” (1902) is a work supporting the South (Confederate States of America) during the Civil War. HPL notes (letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, November 16, 1916; AHT) that he placed it on the desk of Abbie E.Hathaway (principal of the Slater Avenue School), whose father was a Union soldier. Poemata Minora, Volume 2consists of five short poems: “Ode to Selene or Diana,” “To the Old Pagan Religion,” “On the Ruin of Rome,” “To Pan,” and “On the Vanity of Human Ambition.” The text is profusely illustrated by HPL’s drawings. HPL published three of the poems (under pseudonyms) in the Tryout,April 1919: the first as “To Selene,” the second as “The Last Pagan Speaks,” and the fourth as “Pan.” Poemata Minoraas a whole was first published in Juvenilia: 1897–1905 . There is no indication of the contents of Volume 1, which apparently dates to 1901. We know of several other nonextant poetical works: “The Iliad” and “The Aeneid” (presumably paraphrases of the ancient epics), “The Hermit,” and “The

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Argonauts” (presumably a retelling of the voyage of the Argoas recounted by Apollonius Rhodius and other writers).

One last surviving poem is “De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Ignorance over Northern Ignorance” (July 1905). This viciously racist work is based upon (and dedicated to) William Benjamin Smith, author of the tract The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn(1905), which asserted, among other things, that freed African Americans will eventually die out because of their inherent biological inferiority and their physiological and psychological weaknesses. HPL’s poem is a poetical encapsulation of the idea.

All extant works are included in AT

Juvenile Works: Science.

Aside from The Scientific Gazette, The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy,and Astronomy/The Monthly Almanack,HPL wrote numerous other periodicals and treatises on chemistry, astronomy, and other subjects prior to 1908.

Of chemical treatises, four survive: Chemistry, Chemistry, Magic & Electricity(presumably Chemistry II), Chemistry III,and Chemistry IV . In a catalogue of his works at the back of Poemata Minora, Volume 2(1902), HPL noted a series of chemistry books in six volumes; these are presumably the first four. There are also two separate treatises, The Art of Fusion Melting Pudling & Castingand A Good Anaesthetic.Nonextant treatises include: Iron Working; Acids; Explosives;and Static Electricity Of astronomical treatises, there is one issue of The Planet(1, No. 1, August 29, 1903); My Opinion as to the lunar canals(dated 1903); Annals of the Providence Observatory, Vol. 1: Observations of a General Character During 1903(1904); and Providence Observatory: Forecast for Providence & Vicinity Next 24h(a forecast for April 4–5, 1904). There are three surviving volumes of a series of monographs under the general title “The Science Library”: 1. Naked Eye Selenography;2. The Telescope;5. On Saturn and His Ring.The six missing volumes are: 3. Life of Galileo;4. Life ofHerschel (revised);6. Selections from Author’s “Astronomy”;7. The Moon, Part I;8. The Moon, Part II;9. On Optics.

Several early treatises (nonextant) testify to HPL’s devotion to geography, specifically his fascination with Antarctica: Antarctic Atlas, Voyages of Capt. Ross, R.N.,and Wilkes’s Explorations. The last treatise was extant as late as 1936, as HPL sent it to C.L.Moore, who returned it to HPL after seeing it (see SL5.237).

Of miscellaneous treatises there is extant one issue of The Railroad Review(1, No. 1, December 1901). Nonextant are such works as Mythology for the Young(possibly a condensation of Bulfinch’s Age of Fable,which HPL read around the age of five), Egyptian Myths,and two historical treatises: Early Rhode Islandand An Historical Account of Last Year’s War with SPAIN(1899). In 1905 HPL produced one of his most substantial juvenile works: A Manual of Roman Antiquities . In the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy(July 30, 1905) HPL gives an outline of the work, stating that it will also contain “biographies of certain great Romans”; but a notice in the Rhode Island Journalof August 13, 1905, states that the volume is ready but that the biographies could not be included. The work does not survive.

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Also nonextant is A Brief Course in Astronomy—Descriptive, Practical, and Observational; for Beginners and General Readers(1906), of which HPL states: “it got as far as the typed and handillustrated stage (circa one hundred and fifty pages)” ( SL5.141). One part of the work appears to be extant in AHT, under the title Celestial Objects for All. Its preface declares that “The greater part of this work is also printed in ‘A Brief Course in Astronomy’ by the same author.”

HPL’s juvenile scientific work culminates in A Brief Course in Inorganic Chemistry(1910), written during his “recluse” phase of 1908–13, when he was taking correspondence courses in chemistry. HPL only describes it as a “bulky manuscript” ( SL1.75), and we know nothing more about it.

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K

Kalem Club.

Informal band of friends in New York City, of which HPL was the central figure. According to Rheinhart Kleiner, the club existed in a rudimentary form prior to HPL’s advent to New York in March 1924, its original members including Rheinhart Kleiner, Everett McNeil, and perhaps James F.Morton. When HPL arrived, he introduced several more members, notably Frank Belknap Long, George Kirk, and Arthur Leeds. The club initially met on Thursday nights, but later shifted to Wednesdays because Long attended night classes at New York University. Still later there were separate “McNeil” and “Leeds” meetings because of a dispute between these two members over a small loan that the former had made to the latter; many members did not go to the McNeil meetings (held at Everett McNeil’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen) because they found McNeil tiresome. HPL always attended both meetings. The club was not named until February 1925; Kirk provides an account of the event: “Because all of the last names of the permanent members of our club begin with K, L or M, we plan to call it the KALEM KLYBB” (George Kirk to Lucile Dvorak, February 1925; quoted in Hart, “Walkers in the City” [see under George Kirk]). HPL, however, never refers to it under this name in his correspondence, making mention only of “the gang” or “The Boys.” The club achieved its heyday in 1925, especially with HPL largely unemployed and living by himself. HPL took pride in being a solicitous host for the meetings held at his apartment, purchasing an aluminum pail for 49¢ to fetch coffee from the neighboring delicatessen; he would serve it and various desserts on his best china. In late 1925 Wilfred B. Talman and Vrest Orton were enrolled as members, but it was decided that the name would not be changed; these two were very sporadic participants in any event. By the spring of 1928, however (two years after HPL’s departure from New York), HPL notes that the club had “almost dissolved” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, April 29–30, 1928; ms., JHL), leading one to suspect that he had been the driving force behind it.

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See Rheinhart Kleiner, “After a Decade and the Kalem Club,” Californian4, No. 2 (Fall 1936): 45–7; rpt. LSNo. 28 (Spring 1993): 34–35.

Kalos.

In “The Tree,” the sculptor, erstwhile friend of Musides, who competes with him in creating a sculpture of Tyché for the Tyrant of Syracuse. Musides poisons Kalos that he may take the prize, but Kalos exacts revenge from beyond the grave. The name means “fair” or “beautiful” in Greek. Kingsport.

Fictitious city in Massachusetts invented by HPL. Kingsport first appeared in “The Terrible Old Man” (1920) but was not then based upon any specific site; only in “The Festival” (1923) was it identified with Marblehead, a living museum of colonialism, which HPL visited in December 1922. It is cited briefly in “The Silver Key” (1926), used extensively in “The Strange High House in the Mist” (1926), and mentioned glancingly in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath(1926–27), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward(1927), “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931), “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932–33), and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933). A Kingsport Head (presumably a headland near the town) is cited in At the Mountains of Madness(1931) and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Kirk, George Willard (1898–1962).

Bookseller, publisher, and friend of HPL. Born in Akron, Ohio, he entered the book trade at an early age. He spent the years 1920–22 in California, where he became acquainted with Clark Ashton Smith. In early 1922 he published his only book: Samuel Loveman’s edition of Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce . He met HPL when the latter came to Cleveland in August 1922; at that time Kirk gave HPL a copy of Smith’s Odes and Sonnets(1918), thereby encouraging HPL to get in touch with Smith. In August 1924 Kirk came to New York to establish a bookshop. By this time he was engaged to Lucile Dvorak but did not have enough money to support her. His numerous letters to her provide vivid descriptions of HPL and his friends in New York. He participated in numerous all-night walks around New York with HPL and other members of the Kalem Club. In early 1925 Kirk moved into the same apartment house at 169 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, where HPL was residing (prompting HPL’s poem, “To George Kirk, Esq., Upon His Entertaining a Company in His New-Decorated Chambers, 18th January 1925”), but stayed only a few months. On April 11–12, 1925, Kirk and HPL undertook a whirlwind excursion to Washington, D.C., seeing all the sights in a few hours (with assistance from amateur colleague Anne Tillery Renshaw, who had a car). From August to October 1925 Kirk resided at 317 West 17th Street in Manhattan; HPL in fact helped him move both his personal possessions and his books for his bookshop. HPL later used the building as the setting for “Cool Air” (1926). HPL wrote a birthday poem to Kirk on the occasion of his twenty-seventh birthday, November 25, 1925 (“To George Willard Kirk, Gent., of Chelsea-Village, in New York, Upon His Birthday”; published in the National Amateur,May 1927, as “George Willard Kirk”). HPL occasionally helped Kirk address envelopes for catalogue mailings, and in exchange for this help Kirk gave HPL an enormous quantity of envelopes with the obsolete return address of Kirk’s bookshop; HPL used them

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until they finally ran out in the mid-1930s. During HPL’s visit to New York in September 1926, Kirk introduced HPL to Howard Wolf, a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal;sometime during the following year Wolf wrote an article on HPL in his column, “Variety” (exact date not known, as only the clipping survives; rpt. LR). Kirk married Lucile Dvorak on March 5, 1927, setting up the Chelsea Bookshop at 58 West 8th Street (which is not in fact in Chelsea), remaining there for more than a decade. He and his wife visited HPL in Providence in early September 1929. HPL continued to meet Kirk on his visits to New York in the 1930s, but otherwise their contact appears to have been slight. See Mara Kirk Hart, “Walkers in the City: George Willard Kirk and Howard Phillips Lovecraft in New York City, 1924–1926,” LSNo. 28 (Spring 1993): 2–17 (abridged version in LR).

Kleiner, Rheinhart (1892–1949).

Poet, amateur journalist, and one of HPL’s oldest associates. He came in touch with HPL in early 1915, when he received the first issue of HPL’s Conservative(April 1915). With Maurice Moe and Ira A. Cole, they formed the round-robin correspondence circle, the Kleicomolo (Kleiner was probably the author of an unsigned article, “The Kleicomolo,” in the United Amateur,March 1919). He frequently commented upon HPL’s activities in his amateur journal, The Piper;HPL’s “The Allowable Rhyme” ( Conservative,October 1915) is a defense of his views against Kleiner. HPL’s poem “The Bookstall” ( United Official Quarterly,January 1916) is dedicated to Kleiner. The two poets frequently wrote poems to each other, including Kleiner’s “To Mary of the Movies” ( Piper,September 1915) and HPL’s “To Charlie of the Comics” ( Providence Amateur,February 1916), on Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, respectively; Kleiner’s “John Oldham: 1653–1683” and HPL’s “John Oldham: A Defence” (both in the United Co-operative,June 1919); Kleiner’s “To a Movie Star” and HPL’s “To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema” (both in the United Amateur,November 1919); Kleiner’s “Ethel: Cashier in a Broad Street Buffet” and HPL’s “Cindy: Scrub Lady in a State Street Skyscraper” (both in Tryout,June 1920). In October 1919 HPL and Kleiner jointly wrote several short squibs on fellow amateurs, collectively titled “On Collaboration.”

Kleiner wrote the first analysis of HPL’s poetry, “A Note on Howard P.Lovecraft’s Verse” ( United Amateur,March 1919). He first met HPL on July 1, 1916, while passing through Providence; he returned for visits in 1917, 1918 (after which he wrote a poem, “At Providence in 1918,” Conservative,July 1919) and 1920. HPL met him when he came to New York on two occasions in 1922; during the latter visit, on September 16, HPL and Kleiner visited the churchyard of the Dutch Reformed Church in Brooklyn, inspiring HPL to write “The Hound” the next month. Kleiner appears in the story as “St. John,” referring to HPL’s nickname for him, “Randolph St. JohnRandolp (a purported descendant of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke). HPL and Kleiner met frequently during HPL’s years in New York (1924–26), as members of the Kalem Club. During this time Kleiner worked for the Fairbanks Scales Co. Kleiner wrote several memoirs of HPL after the latter’s death, including “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” ( Californian,Summer 1937) and “A Memoir of Lovecraft” (in HPL’s Cats). He edited a series of extracts of HPL’s letters to him, concentrating on amateur affairs, titled “By Post

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from Providence” ( Californian,Summer 1937). After HPL left New York in 1926, he lost touch with Kleiner for nearly a decade, but they resumed correspondence in 1936–37. Although a prolific poet, Kleiner published only a small number of his poems in book form, mostly in scarce small-press editions: Metrical Moments(1937), Nine Sonnets(1940), Pegasus in Pasture(1943), and so on. Klenze, Lieutenant.

In “The Temple,” the next to last surviving crew member of the disabled German submarine U-29. In his confinement, he believes he is being summoned by the dead man from whom he confiscated an ivory amulet and then exits the stricken vessel to his death.

Knockout Bernie.

In “The Battle That Ended the Century,” one of two antagonists who engage in a boxing match in the year 2001. The character (nicknamed “the Wild Wolf of West Shokan”) is a parody of HPL’s friend Bernard Austin Dwyer, of West Shokan, N.Y.

Koenig, H[erman] C[harles] (1893–1959).

Bibliophile and late associate of HPL. Koenig, employed in the Electrical Testing Laboratories in New York, came in touch with HPL in the fall of 1933 when he asked HPL how to procure the Necronomicon. In the summer of 1934 Koenig began circulating books by William Hope Hodgson among HPL’s circle, leading to HPL’s enthusiastic article “The Weird Work of William Hope Hodgson” ( Phantagraph,February 1937). HPL met Koenig on several occasions during his visits to New York in the Christmas seasons of 1934 and 1935; on January 2, 1935, HPL, R.H.Barlow, and Frank Belknap Long visited the Electrical Testing Laboratories, a place where electrical appliances were tested. In early 1936 Koenig was planning a trip to Charleston and, knowing that HPL had visited it, asked him for some tips on the sights there. HPL dusted off his unpublished 1930 essay, “An Account of Charleston,” and revised and abridged it in a letter to Koenig. Koenig was so taken with the account that he ran off about twenty-five mimeographed copies in March, titling it Charleston. Koenig had made several mistranscriptions of HPL’s handwriting, and he also asked HPL to rewrite the beginning so that it read as an essay; HPL complied, and Koenig ran off about thirty to fifty copies of the revised version, enclosing it in a paper folder and reproducing as photostats some of HPL’s drawings of Charleston sites. After HPL’s death Koenig edited the small-press magazine The Reader and Collector,reprinting HPL’s Hodgson essay (June 1944) and publishing a lengthy article, “Modern Mythological Fiction” by Robert Butman (October 1945, January 1946, and April 1946), which discussed HPL in part (Fritz Leiber’s response, “Butman’s Essay,” appeared in October 1946). Koenig worked with August Derleth to reprint Hodgson’s four novels with Arkham House ( The House on the Borderland and Other and Other Novels,1946).

Kranon.

In “The Cats of Ulthar,” a burgomaster in Ulthar.

Kuntz, Eugene B[asil] (1865–1944).

Prussian-born poet, Presbyterian minister, and amateur journalist. HPL edited Kuntz’s slim collection of poems, Thoughts

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and Pictures(Haverhill, Mass.: “Cooperatively published by H.P.Loveracft [sic]and C.W.Smith,” 1932), probably revising the poems in the process. Later he wrote a plug for the volume, “Dr. Eugene B.Kunz [sic]” ( Hodge Podge,September 1935).

Kuranes.

In “Celephaïs,” the dream identity of an unidentified but once-wealthy person in the waking world. His “real” self, through dreams and drugs, escapes his mundane existence as a writer in London to find the city of Celephaïs, of which he had dreamt as a child. When he awakens, he cannot return to Celephaïs, although he dreams of other wondrous realms; but finally he is able to return forever as its king, although his body is later found washed up on the shore. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,Kuranes greets Randolph Carter, who has voyaged in dream to Celephaïs. It now appears that Kuranes, although a king in dreamland, longs to return to his real life in Cornwall. He warns Carter that his “sunset city” may not be as wondrous as he imagines it to be.

Kuttner, Henry (1915–1958).

Science fiction writer from Los Angeles and correspondent of HPL. Early in his career Kuttner wrote in various genres of pulp fiction, including horror; see “The Graveyard Rats” ( WT,March 1936), which some of HPL’s colleagues thought he had written or ghostwritten. Kuttner, however, came in touch with HPL only after the story had been accepted for publication. The correspondence lasted from February 1936 to February 1937 (see Letters to Henry Kuttner,ed. David E.Schultz and S.T.Joshi [Necronomicon Press, 1990]). HPL assisted on the topographical background for “The Salem Horror” ( WT,May 1937), a story clearly influenced by “The Dreams in the Witch House.” Other Lovecraftian tales by Kuttner have now been reprinted in The Book of lod,ed. Robert M.Price (Chaosium, 1995). Kuttner created numerous additions to HPL’s myth-cycle. In late 1936 Kuttner wrote an acrostic poem on Poe (“Where He Walked”) after he learned that HPL and his colleagues had done so earlier in the year. In May 1936 HPL asked Kuttner to pass on some photographs to C.L.Moore, thereby introducing the two authors to each other. They married in 1940 and collaboratively wrote some of the most imaginative work in the “Golden Age” of science fiction. See The Best of Henry Kuttner (1975).

See Shawn Ramsey, “Henry Kuttner’s Cthulhu Mythos Tales: An Overview,” Crypt No. 51 (Hallowmas 1987): 21–23, 14; Gordon R.Benson, Jr., and Virgil S.Utter, C.L.Moore and Henry Kuttner: A Marriage of Souls and Talent: A Working Bibliography(Albuquerque, N.M.: Galactic Central, 1989).

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L

Lake,———.

In At the Mountains of Madness,a professor of biology on the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition who leads an exploration party that is destroyed by the Old Ones, whom his group unwittingly resuscitates from suspended animation.

“Last Test, The.”

Novelette (19,330 words); ghostwritten for Adolphe de Castro, in October–November 1927. First published in WT(November 1928); first collected in Cats;corrected text in HM

Dr. Alfred Clarendon, a renowned physician and medical researcher, is appointed to the post of medical director of the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin by his old friend, Governor James Dalton. (Dalton’s father had been ruined on Wall Street by Clarendon’s father, but the younger Dalton held no grudge.) Clarendon’s home in San Francisco is run by his sister Georgina, with whom Dalton has long been in love. Clarendon is working on an antitoxin for black fever. In the course of his work he has had to travel to exotic places, and he has brought back a band of Tibetan servants, over whom Clarendon has placed an enigmatic figure named Surama.

Shortly after Clarendon’s arrival at San Quentin, one of the inmates comes down with black fever; Clarendon places the man in a separate ward so that he can study the case himself, thereby enraging his assistant, Dr. Jones, who wishes to assist. The inmate dies, and later several other prisoners contract the disease. News of the epidemic spreads throughout San Francisco, causing a panic that drives many citizens from the city. Eventually the panic subsides, but Clarendon is criticized for his handling of the matter; he pays no attention, however, to the bad press he receives. Governor Dalton continues to defend Clarendon, in spite of the latter’s curt refusal to allow him to marry Georgina.

Dr. Jones then contrives to change the manner of institutional appointments, with the result that Clarendon is fired from his position and Jones installed in his

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place. Clarendon lapses into depression and rarely stirs from his home. With Surama, he continues experiments of various sorts in his own laboratory, but Georgina is horrified when she overhears a conversation between the two men that suggests their intention to use human patients for their experiments. She asks Dalton’s help in a situation that seems to be growing increasingly tense, especially after she overhears further bizarre conversations that cause her to fall in a faint. Clarendon revives her, and in the process contemplates using her in some nameless experiment. But before he can do so, Dalton arrives and demands an explanation. Clarendon collapses, injecting himself with the serum he was planning to give his sister. He then confesses the truth: he was not even on the track of an antitoxin for black fever but was under the spell of Surama, an evil Atlantean mage who has developed a disease that “isn’t of this earth” to overwhelm mankind. Clarendon urges Dalton to burn the clinic and everything in it, including Surama. Presently Dalton sees the clinic going up in flames: apparently Clarendon had set the fire himself, destroying Surama before he himself succumbed to his self-inflicted disease.

The story is a radical revision of a tale entitled “A Sacrifice to Science” in de Castro’s book, In the Confessional and the Following(1893); in his letters HPL refers to it as “Clarendon’s Last Test.” He received $16 for this work, while de Castro received $175 from WT. It should be pointed out that de Castro’s original tale is not at all supernatural. It is merely a long drawn-out melodrama or adventure story in which a scientist seeks a cure for a new type of fever (never described in detail) and, having run out of patients because of the bad reputation he has gained as a man who cares only for science and not for human life, seeks to convince his own sister to be a “sacrifice to science” in the furtherance of his quest. HPL has turned the whole scenario into a supernatural tale while preserving the basic framework—the California setting, the characters (although the names of some have been changed), the search for a cure to a new type of fever, and (although this now becomes only a minor part of the climax) Clarendon’s attempt to persuade his sister to sacrifice herself. But—aside from replacing the nebulously depicted assistant of Dr. Clarendon (“Dr. Clinton” in de Castro) named Mort with the much more redoubtable Surama—he has added much better motivation for the characters and the story as a whole. HPL made the tale about half again as long as de Castro’s original; although he remarked of the latter that “I nearly exploded over the dragging monotony of [the] silly thing” ( SL2.107), his version is not without monotony and prolixity of its own. For his own amusement, HPL has added glancing references to his own developing myth-cycle, including, oddly enough, the first mention of Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb in his work.

Lawton, Captain George E.

In “The Mound,” a pioneer who had come to the Oklahoma Territory in 1889 and in 1916 investigates the mound region; he comes back a week later with his feet neatly cut off at the ankles and strangely youngerin appearance.

Lazare, Edward (1904–1991)

Brief associate of HPL. The two first met in Cleveland in August 1922, when Lazare was a member of Hart Crane’s literary circle. They met again in September 1924, at Samuel Loveman’s apartment in

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Columbia Heights; at that time HPL thought that Lazare would become a “fitting accession to our select circle of The Boys [i.e., the Kalem Club]” (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, September 29–30, 1924; ms., JHL), but Lazare dropped out shortly thereafter. He later became the editor of American Book-Prices Current(1940–65).

Leavitt, Robert.

In “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a traveling salesman from St. Louis whom Herbert West kills in order to test a revivifying solution he has invented.

Leeds, Arthur (1882–1952?).

Friend of HPL in New York. Leeds was something of a rolling stone, having been with a traveling circus as a boy and performing odd jobs throughout his career; during the time HPL knew him in New York (1924–26) he was a columnist for Writer’s Digestand an occasional contributor to the pulp magazines (he had one story, “The Return of the Undead,” in WT,November 1925). He became a member of the Kalem Club, although his dispute with Everett McNeil over a small amount of money the latter had lent him led to separate “Leeds” and “McNeil” meetings. In the spring of 1925 Leeds urged HPL to do freelance work for a man named Yesley in writing advertising copy; HPL wrote several pieces (R.H.Barlow gave them the collective name “Commercial Blurbs”), but the venture did not pan out. HPL appears to have continued to keep in sporadic touch with Leeds after he left New York, but few letters have surfaced. In March 1932 Leeds recommended to an editor at Vanguard that he consider a collection of HPL’s tales, but the editor wished a novel; nevertheless, the editor looked at some of HPL’s stories, but eventually turned down the collection.

Legrasse, John Raymond.

In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Inspector of Police for the city of New Orleans. In 1908, he visits with George Gammell Angell at the annual meeting of the American Archaeological Society, in St. Louis, to discuss his findings concerning the Cthulhu cult.

Leiber, Fritz [Reuter] (1910–1992).

Writer, editor, actor, and teacher. He first discovered HPL when he read “The Colour out of Space” in Amazing Stories(September 1927). He and his wife Jonquil corresponded with HPL during the last six months of his life. HPL read a draft of Leiber’s “Adept’s Gambit” (the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story), and in a lengthy letter of December 19, 1936, suggested numerous alterations. The story originally contained Cthulhu Mythos elements, but Leiber excised them before publication. It was first published in Night’s Black Agents(1947), which contains several stories influenced by HPL. HPL also read Leiber’s poem cycle, “Demons of the Upper Air” (first published as a booklet, 1969). Leiber began a full-fledged Mythos tale, “The Terror from the Depths,” in 1937; it was completed in 1975 and published in Edward P.Berglund’s Disciples of Cthulhu(1976) and in the revised edition (1990) of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos . Another novella written at this time, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (published 1997), has strong Lovecraftian elements. Conjure Wife(1953) was perhaps inspired in part by “The Dreams in the Witch House.” “To Arkham and the Stars” (in HPL’s DB) is a kind of parody

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homage to HPL. Leiber was the author of many articles on HPL, including “A Literary Copernicus” (in Cats;rpt. FDOCand LR), “My Correspondence with Lovecraft” ( Fresco,Spring 1958; rpt. LR),“The ‘Whisperer’ Re-examined” ( Haunted,December 1964), “Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin” (in DB;rpt. FDOCand LR), “The Cthulhu Mythos: Wondrous and Terrible” ( Fantastic,June 1975), and “Lovecraft in My Life” ( Journal of the H.P.Lovecraft Society,1976). Leiber wrote some of the most distinguished science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature of the century and is perhaps the only one of HPL’s colleagues who can rival him in literary substance.

See Stefan Dziemianowicz, “Dead Ringers: The Leiber-Lovecraft Connection,” CryptNo. 76 (Hallowmas 1990): 8–13; Bruce Byfield, Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber (Necronomicon Press, 1991); Nicholaus Clements, “Lovecraft and the Early Leiber,” LSNo. 41 (Spring 1999): 23–24; S.T.Joshi, “Passing the Torch: H.P.Lovecraft’s Influence on Fritz Leiber,” Studies in Weird FictionNo. 24 (Winter 1999): 17–25.

Letters, Lovecraft’s.

Shortly after his death, HPL’s longtime friend Maurice W. Moe wrote: “If there is ever a survey to determine the greatest letter-writer in history, the claims of Lovecraft deserve close investigation” (“Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Sage of Providence,” O-Wash-Ta-Nong,[1937]). While it is unlikely that HPL will soon attain celebrity solely or largely on the basis of his letters, it is now abundantly clear that his correspondence ranks among the pinnacles of his literary achievement. The number of letters written by HPL has been a matter of debate. L.Sprague de Camp ( Lovecraft: A Biography[1975]) casually estimated a figure of 100,000, but this is probably too high. HPL stated in 1936 that he wrote 5 to 10 letters per day ( SL5.369); if we assume that he maintained this ratio over his literary career (1914–36), we arrive at 42,000 to 84,000 letters. Given that HPL was probably not considering the vast numbers of postcards he wrote during his travels, the total figure is probably closer to the higher than the lower amount. But mere numbers do not tell the whole story. What makes HPL’s letters remarkable, beyond their sheer quantity and size, is their extraordinary candor; their abundance of wit, humor, satire, and persiflage; and their exhaustive and penetrating discussions of a wide range of topics including philosophy, literature and literary theory, history, art and architecture (especially of colonial America), and the contemporary political, economic, cultural, and social trends of the nation and the world. His letters are, in this regard, far more interesting and perspicacious than many of his essays on the same subjects.

HPL remarked that “Not until I was twenty years old did I write any letters worthy of the name.” He attributed his enthusiasm for letter-writing at this time to his cousin Phillips Gamwell, who, although only twelve, “blossomed out as a piquant letter-writer eager to discuss the various literary and scientific topics broached during our occasional personal conversations” ( SL3.370). HPL gained his initial celebrity (or, rather, notoriety) by the letters in prose and verse to the Argosyattacking the sentimental fiction of Fred Jackson, which aroused a storm of protest on the part of Jackson’s supporters. It was, however, when HPL joined the amateur journalism movement in 1914 that he first began writing letters

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regularly and voluminously. No doubt many of these letters concerned routine matters of amateur business and were correspondingly short; few of these have survived. The letters that do survive are those to his earliest colleagues in amateur journalism—Maurice W.Moe (1914f), Edward H.Cole (1914f), Rheinhart Kleiner (1915f), and Alfred Galpin (1918f). No letters to W.Paul Cook, who was instrumental in HPL’s resumption of fiction-writing in 1917, survive. HPL came in touch with Samuel Loveman in 1917, but very few letters to him are extant, most of them being of much later date. There is a small batch of letters to John T.Dunn (a member of the Providence Amateur Press Club) of 1915–17, mingling amateur affairs and controversial political topics (especially the Irish question); they have been published in Books at Brown(38–39 [1991–92]: 157–223). Some letters to Winifred Virginia Jackson of 1918–21 survive, but they do not settle the question of whether HPL and Jackson were romantically involved. Early letters to Anne Tillery Renshaw supply hints of HPL’s employment in the Symphony Literary Service. In 1920 HPL came into epistolary contact with Frank Belknap Long, who had just joined the amateur movement. Long was a lifelong friend of HPL, but HPL’s letters to him after the spring of 1931 have been lost. Only two letters to HPL’s mother (1920–21) survive; they were both written while she was confined in Butler Hospital. No letters to other members of HPL’s family, with the exception of a few letters to his aunt Annie Gamwell, survive prior to 1924, although a few letters by HPL’s grandfather Whipple Van Buren Phillips to HPL, dating to as early as 1894, survive at JHL and in private hands.

Two distinctive groups of letters are the round-robin cycles, the Kleicomolo and the Gallomo. In these cycles, the various members (Kleiner, Ira A.Cole, Moe, and HPL in the first; Galpin, HPL, and Moe in the second) would sequentially write letters discussing one or more controversial topics; as the batches of letters circulated to each member, he would remove his previous contribution and write a fresh letter, commenting on the letters of the others. In an unsigned article (probably by Kleiner), “The Kleicomolo” ( United Amateur,March 1919), it was noted that “One of the members [Moe?] was desirous of keeping a complete copy of the correspondence, and began by copying the letters as they went through his hands. This task soon became so great as to be impracticable, and the rest elected him librarian and promised to send him carbon copies of their instalments.” But only the letters by HPL survive, and not many of these: only three to the Kleicomolo (1916–17) and four to the Gallomo (1919–21).

HPL’s involvement with his future wife, Sonia H.Greene, could presumably be traced in the many letters he wrote to her from 1921 to their marriage in 1924; Sonia herself reports that for two years HPL wrote letters to her almost daily, “sometimes filling 30, 40 and even 50 pages of finely written script” ( The Private Life of H.P.Lovecraft[Necronomicon Press, 1985 (rev. ed. 1992)], p. 18). But around 1935, two years after their last meeting, Sonia went out into a field and burned all the letters, so that only a few postcards now survive in private hands. In 1922 HPL came in touch with Clark Ashton Smith, to whom he would write 160 letters and 60 postcards. James F.Morton also became a close if argumentative colleague in 1922, and HPL’s letters to him are among the most remarkable he ever wrote for their breadth of subject and pungency of style.

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HPL’s solitary letter to the first editor of Weird Tales,Edwin Baird (February 3, 1924), and many letters to his successor, Farnsworth Wright, allow glimpses of HPL’s conflicted involvement with that pulp magazine.

HPL’s two years in New York (1924–26) are exhaustively chronicled in letters to his aunts Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell; the letters to Lillian alone for this period total about 200,000 words. They allow nearly a day-to-day record of HPL’s activities and fluctuating temperament during this critical period in his life. Few letters to members of the “Kalem Club” (James F.Morton, Everett McNeil, Arthur Leeds, Long, George Kirk, Wilfred B.Talman, and others) survive for this period, since HPL saw them frequently in person. Letters to Talman are abundant for a later period. Upon his return to Providence, HPL came into contact with August Derleth and Donald Wandrei; his correspondence with these two writers survives almost intact. His letters to Derleth—more than 380—may represent the greatest number of letters to any of his correspondents. In 1930 HPL received a letter from pulp writer Robert E.Howard, and there began a sporadic but extremely voluminous correspondence that lasted until Howard’s suicide in 1936; the letters total roughly 200,000 words by HPL and 300,000 by Howard. HPL’s single longest surviving letter—70 handwritten pages (35 pages written on both sides) and totaling 33,500 words—was written to the little-known Vermonter Woodburn Harris in 1929. HPL’s work as revisionist caused him to come into contact with would-be writers, but only letters to Zealia Bishop (1928–30) and Richard F.Searight (1933–37) survive in any quantity. The letters to Adolphe de Castro (1928–36) are very scattered, and there are none to David Van Bush or Hazel Heald.

By the 1930s HPL had become a fixture in the worlds of pulp fiction and fantasy fandom, and he accordingly began corresponding with a great many fellow writers (notably E.Hoffmann Price [1932– 37] and Henry S.Whitehead [1931–32]) and disciples (R.H.Barlow [1931–37], Robert Bloch [1933– 37], Duane W.Rimel [1934–37], F.Lee Baldwin [1934–35], Donald A.Wollheim [1936–37], Wilson Shepherd [1936–37], C.L.Moore [1936–37], Fritz Leiber [1936–37], and Willis Conover [1936–37]). The letters to Whitehead were, however, evidently destroyed.

HPL preserved relatively few letters he received over a lifetime of correspondence; not only because of restricted space in his usually cramped quarters, but because most of these letters probably did not seem to him of enduring interest. Exceptions are the early letters of Donald Wandrei (later ones were kept only sporadically) and the letters from Robert E.Howard, E.Hoffmann Price, C.L.Moore, and the amateur writer Ernest A.Edkins (1932–37). None of HPL’s letters to Edkins survive. Frank Belknap Long’s and James F.Morton’s letters survive in fair numbers but with many gaps and omissions; there are few letters by August Derleth. A fair number of Clark Ashton Smith’s letters are extant; substantial extracts have been published as Letters to H.P.Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1987). Late in life HPL admitted that he had 97 regular correspondents (HPL to R.H.Barlow, January 3, 1937 [ms., JHL]). On the purpose of maintaining such a far-flung correspondence HPL wrote: “As a person of very retired life, I met very few different sorts of people in youth—and was therefore exceedingly nar

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row and provincial. Later on, when literary activities brought me into touch with widely diverse types by mail—Texans like Robert E.Howard, men in Australia, New Zealand, &c., Westerners, Southerners, Canadians, people in old England, and assorted kinds of folk nearer at hand—I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge. Only correspondence could have effected this broadening; for it would have been impossible to have visited all the regions and met all the various types involved, while books can never talk back or discuss” ( SL4.389). It can thus be seen that, aside from all questions of courtesy and gentlemanliness, HPL’s correspondence was vital to his intellectual and aesthetic development, putting the lie to those critics who assert that he “wasted” his time writing so many letters.

The publication of HPL’s letters was a high priority with Derleth and Wandrei as they were founding Arkham House to preserve HPL’s work in book form. Wandrei in particular was determined to preserve HPL’s correspondence, and Derleth wasted little time in contacting HPL’s colleagues and urging them either to transcribe the letters themselves or to send the letters to him so that his secretary, Alice Conger, could transcribe them. In this way Derleth and Wandrei produced the socalled Arkham House Transcripts—nearly 50 volumes of single-spaced typescripts of letters (each volume averaging about 100 pages) upon which the long-delayed Selected Letters(published in 5 volumes in 1965–76, and largely edited by Wandrei) were based. These transcripts contain texts of many letters that may no longer survive in manuscript, as well as full (or, at any rate, more extensive) versions of letters published in abridged form in the Selected Lettersor not published at all. Otherwise, most of HPL’s letters now survive at JHL; the letters to Derleth are at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and a few other letters are scattered in other institutions or in the hands of collectors. The letters in the Selected Lettersare in almost every instance abridged, and occasionally the abridgements result in incoherence or a misleading impression of HPL’s meaning. Numerous typographical errors also mar the edition, as well as the absence of an index. S.T. Joshi has supplied the latter (Necronomicon Press, 1980 [rev. ed. 1991]). Joshi and David E.Schultz have prepared annotated editions of unabridged letters to individual correspondents, all published by Necronomicon Press: Letters to Henry Kuttner(1990); Letters to Richard F.Searight(1992); Letters to Robert Bloch(1993); Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett(1994). Also of note is Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters(Ohio University Press, 2000), in which Joshi and Schultz have arranged published and unpublished letters in the form of an autobiography, covering many aspects of HPL’s life, work, and thought.

See S.T.Joshi, “A Look at Lovecraft’s Letters,” in Selected Papers on Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1989).

Libo, P[ublius] Scribonius.

In “The Very Old Folk,” the proconsul of the Roman province of Hispania Citerior (Spain) who orders a cohort to investigate reports of peculiar events in the hills above Tarraco.

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Liddeason, Eli.

In “The Shunned House,” a man who is hired by William Harris to be a servant at the house, but who dies about a year later, after marrying another servant, Mehitabel Pierce.

“Life and Death.”

Short story or prose poem; evidently published in an amateur journal (c. 1920), but text not currently available.

This is one of the few authentically “lost” stories by HPL, but its existence and whereabouts remain in doubt. In his commonplace book (entry #27) HPL records the title and plot germ of the story: “Death—its desolation & horror—bleak spaces—sea-bottom—dead cities. But Life—the greater horror! Vast unheard-of reptiles & leviathans—hideous beasts of prehistoric jungle—rank slimy vegetation—evil instincts of primal man—Life is more horrible than death.” The entry probably dates to early 1920; in contrast to other used entries, HPL has not crossed out this entry or otherwise indicated that it was used. He never mentions or alludes to the story in any extant correspondence. After HPL’s death, R.H.Barlow wrote to August Derleth that he thought he once saw “Life and Death” (Barlow to Derleth, June 14, 1944; ms., SHSW). Around this time W.Paul Cook told Derleth that he thought the story had appeared in the United Amateur,but this is not the case. George T.Wetzel, in describing the research for his bibliography of HPL, stated that he saw the story as published in an amateur journal, but he subsequently lost the reference and was unable to locate it (see “The Research of a Biblio,” in Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Memoirs, Critiques and Bibliographies[1955]). Wetzel’s research on HPL’s amateur publications was conducted largely at the Fossil Collection of Amateur Journalism, then at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia; but the collection was subsequently vandalized, as many published works by HPL were cut out of the journals with a razor. Examination of many other amateur journalism collections by several scholars has failed to turn up the item.

One wonders, then, whether HPL actually wrote and published “Life and Death.” The plot germ above could in fact refer to the prose poem “Ex Oblivione” ( United Amateur,March 1921), and the rather vague recollections of Barlow, Cook, and Wetzel may refer to it or to some other work altogether.

“Life for Humanity’s Sake.”

Essay (710 words); probably written in the summer of 1920. First published in American Amateur (September 1920); rpt. MW

The essay is a plea to reject both hedonism and theism in the face of the probable meaninglessness and inconsequence of the human race within the boundless cosmos. HPL asserts that a “real ethical philosophy can be founded only on practicalities” and urges that “the goal of mental evolution and the subordination of pain stands so conspicuously before us.”

Lillibridge, Edwin M.

In “The Haunter of the Dark,” the inquisitive reporter for the Providence Telegram(a real newspaper) who disappears in 1893—as it turns out, inside the Free-Will Church, where the Starry Wisdom sect holds its services. His remains are discovered by Robert Blake when he investigates the abandoned building.

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Little, Myrta Alice

(1888–1967), friend and correspondent of HPL (1921) residing in Hampstead, N.H.Little joined the UAPA in the spring of 1921, and HPL planned to visit her in late May, but the death of HPL’s mother postponed the plans, and he visited her only on June 8–9; the two of them also went to see “Tryout” Smith in Haverhill. HPL returned to New Hampshire in August 25–26, exploring the Haverhill Historical Society with Little. HPL describes her as a former college professor who was attempting to become a professional writer, but her only known published work is a Christmas pageant for children, Sweet Christmas Time(1929), published under her married name, Myrta Little Davies. HPL’s one surviving letter to her was published in LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 26–30.

“Little Glass Bottle, The.”

Juvenile story (460 words); written c. 1898–99. First published in SR;corrected text in Juvenilia: 1897–1905(1985) and MW

A ship commanded by a Captain William Jones comes upon a bottle with a message in it (probably suggested by Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle”). This note—written in a very wild and hasty hand on HPL’s autograph manuscript—announces the writer as John Jones (no relation to the captain, one imagines) and says that there is a treasure to be found on the spot marked with an asterisk on the reverse of the note (here we find a crude map of the Indian Ocean, with a nebulous land mass labeled “Austrailia” [sic]at the bottom left). This note is dated January 1, 1864.

Captain Jones decides that “it would pay to go” to the spot, and the crew do so. There they find another note from John Jones: “Dear Searcher excuse me for the practical joke I have played on you but it serves you right to find nothing for your foolish act…” But John kindly defrays their expenses with an iron box containing “$25.0.00,” whatever that is. After reading this note (inexplicably dated December 3, 1880) Captain Jones delivers the one funny line in the entire story: “I’d like to kick his head off.”

The story is an early attempt at humor. For later tales of this sort, see “Ibid,” “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson,” and “Sweet Ermengarde.”

“Living Heritage: Roman Architecture in Today’s America, A.”

Essay (12,760 words); written in December 1934; unpublished in this form.

The essay was written at the request of Maurice W.Moe, who asked HPL to write an essay of his choice for an amateur magazine being produced by his students. HPL wrote a rather routine account of traces of Roman architectural principles in American cities (much of it based upon first-hand observation of sites in New York City and elsewhere). HPL sent Moe the essay without typing it; he later thought Moe had lost the manuscript (the student magazine never materialized). The essay, however, survives in AHT. HPL apparently retained the prefatory section of the essay, which appeared as “Heritage or Modernism: Common Sense in Art Forms” in the Californian(Summer 1935). This article lambastes modern art and architecture for being consciously theoretical and too radically divergent from the artistic traditions of the past.

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Lockhart, Andrew F[rancis] (1890–1964),

amateur journalist from Milbank, South Dakota, and author of the first article on HPL, “Little Journeys to the Homes of Prominent Amateurs” ( United Amateur,September 1915), a biographical sketch; the information for it was surely derived exclusively from correspondence with HPL. HPL responded with a biographical sketch of Lockhart in the series, “Little Journeys to the Homes of Prominent Amateurs” ( United Amateur,October 1915), written under the pseudonym “El Impartial.” Lockhart edited the professional temperance journal Chain Lightning,which HPL wrote about in “More Chain Lightning” ( United Official Quarterly,October 1915). HPL also wrote the poem, “To Mr. Lockhart, On His Poetry” ( Tryout,March 1917); its appearance in a South Dakota newspaper has not been located. Long, Frank Belknap, Jr. (1901–1994).

American short story writer, novelist, and poet, and one of HPL’s closest friends. Long, a lifelong New Yorker, was not quite nineteen when he first came in touch with HPL in early 1920; he was about to enter New York University to study journalism but would later transfer to Columbia, leaving without a degree. His father was a prosperous dentist, and the family resided at 823 West End Avenue in Manhattan. Long developed an interest in the weird by reading the Oz books, Jules Verne, and H.G.Wells in youth, and he exercised his talents both in prose and in poetry. He discovered amateur journalism when he won a prize from The Boy’s Worldand received an invitation to join the UAPA; he seems to have done so around the end of 1919. His first published tale was “Dr. Whitlock’s Price” ( United Amateur,March 1920), a mediocre mad scientist story. It was followed by a powerful prosepoetic tale, “The Eye Above the Mantel” ( United Amateur,March 1921). HPL found Long a stimulating correspondent, especially in regard to his aesthetic tastes, focusing on the Italian Renaissance and French literature. HPL published some of Long’s work in his Conservative(e.g., “Felis: A Prose Poem” [July 1923], about Long’s pet cat) and paid tribute to Long in a flattering article, “The Work of Frank Belknap Long, Jun.,” published anonymously in the United Amateur(May 1924) but clearly by HPL. HPL also wrote a birthday poem to Long: “To Endymion” ( Tryout, September 1923). (HPL wrongly believed that Long was born in 1902; Long himself in later years gave his birth year as 1903, but Peter Cannon’s consultation of New York City birth records confirm that his year of birth was 1901.) They first met when HPL visited New York in April 1922. In the summer of 1923 Long did HPL the great favor of introducing him to the work of Arthur Machen, which profoundly influenced HPL’s later tales. He may have been a significant influence in HPL’s adoption of a “Decadent” aesthetic in the early 1920s, which represented a major shift in his previous classicist aesthetic. The two authors met with great frequency during HPL’s stay in Brooklyn (1924–26), at which time they were the chief members of the Kalem Club. Long contributed to stories to early issues of WT,notably “Death Waters” (December 1924) and “The Ocean Leech” (January 1925), both of which convey Long’s fascination with the sea.

Perceiving the depression and despair HPL was feeling in New York, Long apparently wrote to HPL’s aunts in Providence in early 1926, recommending that they invite HPL to return home. (Long has supplied varying accounts of this

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incident; in one version he states that he himself wrote the letter, in another he claims that his mother did so.) In 1926 W.Paul Cook published Long’s first book of poetry, A Man from Genoa. In 1927 Long wrote the story, “The Space-Eaters,” in which HPL is featured as a character (referred to only as “Howard”; the other major character is named “Frank”). The story contains, as an epigraph, a quotation from the Necronomiconas translated by Dr. John Dee (the epigraph was omitted in the story’s first appearance in WT,July 1928); it constitutes the first “addition” to HPL’s pseudomythology. A year later Long (whose family had moved to 230 West 97th Street) wrote “The Hounds of Tindalos” ( WT,March 1929), an explicit imitation of HPL and a brief preface to the stillborn edition of HPL’s The Shunned House(1928). HPL, in turn, ghostwrote for Long the preface to Mrs. William B.Symmes’s Old World Footprints(W.Paul Cook/The Recluse Press, 1928), a slim poetry collection by Long’s aunt.

In 1929 Long wrote the short novel, The Horror from the Hills( WT,January and February-March 1931; published in book form 1963), which incorporates verbatim a letter by HPL recounting his great “Roman dream” of Halloween 1927. At this time Long—who had teamed with HPL in a revision service (an advertisement for this service appeared in WT,August 1928)—was working with Zealia Bishop and also Adolphe de Castro, whose memoir Portrait of Ambrose Bierce(Century Co., 1929) Long revised after HPL refused to do so; it contains a preface, signed “Belknap Long.” Long’s parents frequently brought HPL on various motor trips: to various spots in upstate New York and Connecticut in April 1928; to Kingston, New York, in May 1929; to Cape Cod in August 1929, August 1930, and July 1933; and to Asbury Park, N.J., in July 1930. The Longs’ spacious apartment also served as HPL’s base of operations during his Christmas visits to New York in 1932–33, 1933–34, 1934–35, and 1935–36.

By the early 1930s Long had turned to science fiction or science fantasy, writing voluminously for Astounding Storiesand other pulps. HPL began to feel that Long had sold himself out (see SL5.400). At this same time, paradoxically, Long was espousing Bolshevism, engendering vigorous debates in their letters. His most notable story, “Second Night Out” (originally published as “The Black, Dead Thing”), appeared in WT(October 1933). In 1935 HPL participated in the round-robin story “The Challenge from Beyond,” persuading Long to write the final segment after he had left the project. When visiting R.H.Barlow that summer in Florida, HPL helped set type for Long’s second poetry collection, The Goblin Tower(Dragonfly Press, 1935), correcting some of Long’s faulty meter in the process. HPL’s letters to Long are among the richest and most wide-ranging of all his correspondence; however, the letters after April 1931 have been lost, and even the letters up to that date exist primarily in transcriptions prepared by Arkham House.

Long learned of HPL’s death when he read the brief obituary in the New York Timeson March 16, 1937. He wrote only three times about HPL, aside from brief letters published in magazines: “Random Memories of H.P.L.” (in Marginalia;rpt. LR), “H.P.L. in Red Hook” (in The Occult Lovecraft, ed. Anthony Raven [1975]), and Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside(Arkham House, 1975). The book-length memoir was written in considerable haste as a direct result of Long’s reading of the manuscript of L.Sprague de Camp’s

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Lovecraft: A Biography(1975), which Long felt to be a biased portrait of HPL; it was exhaustively revised by Arkham House’s editor, James Turner. Long also wrote a brief preface to a collection of HPL’s tales, The Colour out of Space(Jove, 1978 [inadvertently omitted from the first printing]). His introduction to The Early Long(Doubleday, 1975), a collection of his best stories, provides illumination on his own life and work, as does his brief Autobiographical Memoir(Necronomicon Press, 1985). In his later years he lived in great poverty with his wife, Lyda, in an apartment in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

Long wrote prolifically in the fields of horror and science fiction. His best tales are collected in two Arkham House volumes, The Hounds of Tindalos(1946) and The Rim of the Unknown(1972). Among his science fiction tales, the most notable are John Carstairs, Space Detective(1949) and Mars Is My Destination(1949). Odd Science Fiction(1964) contains The Horror from the Hillsand two other tales. The best of his poetry, as selected by himself, was gathered in In May an Splendor (Arkham House, 1977); his uncollected poetry has been assembled by Perry M.Grayson in The Darkling Tide(Tsathoggua Press, 1995).

See Tom Collins, “Frank Belknap Long on Literature, Lovecraft, and the Golden Age of ‘Weird Tales,’” Twilight Zone1, No. 10 (January 1982): 13–19; Ben P.Indick, “In Memoriam: Frank Belknap Long,” LSNo. 30 (Spring 1994): 3–4; Peter Cannon, Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long (British Fantasy Society, 1997); S.T.Joshi, “Things from the Sea: The Early Weird Fiction of Frank Belknap Long,” Studies in Weird FictionNo. 25 (Summer 2001): 33–40.

“Looking Backward.”

Essay (7,680 words); probably written in late 1919 or early 1920. First published in the Tryout (February, March, April, May, and June 1920); rpt. as a booklet (Haverhill, Mass.: C.W.Smith, [1920]); rpt. Aonian(Autumn and Winter 1944); rpt. as a booklet (Necronomicon Press, 1980). This discursive essay on the “halcyon days” of amateur journalism (1885–95) was based on a sheaf of amateur journals given to HPL by C.W.Smith, editor of the Tryout. HPL remarks on the general naïveté and unsophistication of many of the contributions; notes that the amateurs of the period generally divide into three categories, “the literati, the plodders, and the politicians”; and discusses contributions by several amateurs, including Joseph Dana Miller, Brainerd Emery, Finlay Aaron Grant, Thomas G. Harrison, and Ernest A.Edkins (later a colleague of HPL).

“Lord Dunsany and His Work.”

Essay (3,910 words); delivered as lecture to an amateur journalists’ group in Boston, December 1922. First published in Marginalia;rpt. MW

This somewhat superficial survey of Dunsany’s work concludes with HPL’s declaration that modern science has destroyed traditional moral and aesthetic responses and that the “Dresden-china Arcadia” of Dunsany, and the creation of a deliberately artificial world of the imagination, may be a solution to the problem of art in the modern world. As such, the essay represents a significant stage in HPL’s evolution from classicism through Decadence to his final stage of cosmic regionalism.

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Lovecraft Family.

HPL records an elaborate family history for his paternal ancestors, most of it deriving from records copied from his great-aunt Sarah Allgood (d. 1908) in 1905. The Lovecraft family line in England as given by HPL in his letter to Frank Belknap Long ( SL2.182) is unproven, even to the extent of identifying his alleged great-great-grandfather, Thomas Lovecraft (1745–1826), who HPL claimed was forced to sell his seat at Minster Hall near Newton-Abbot in Devonshire in 1823 to pay off a debt, resulting in the scattering of his family. His great-grandparents, Joseph S.Lovecraft (1775– 1850) and Mary Fulford Lovecraft (1782–1864), emigrated from Devonshire to New York state, together with six children (John, William, Joseph, Aaron, George, and Mary), arriving in Rochester, N.Y., in 1831. (The difficulty in locating immigration records concerning the Lovecraft family at probable ports of entry in the United States suggests that there may be some validity to the tradition preserved by HPL that the emigrants first settled in Ontario, Canada, in 1827.) Although HPL stated that his great-grandfather died on an experimental farm in upstate New York shortly after emigrating, Joseph S.Lovecraft, the patriarch of the American Lovecraft line, actually survived to die in Rochester in 1850 at an advanced age. In the 1850 census of Rochester, all Joseph and Mary’s sons, with the exception of Aaron, may be found listed as tradesmen; HPL’s grandfather, George Lovecraft (c. 1818–1895), for example, is listed as a harness-maker. However, the brothers were listed as property owners and fairly prosperous. George Lovecraft and his wife Helen Allgood (1821– 1881) removed from Rochester to Mt. Vernon, N.Y., in the 1860s; they had three children who survived to adulthood: Emma Jane Lovecraft Hill (1847–1925), Winfield Scott Lovecraft (1853–1898), and Mary Louise Lovecraft Mellon (1855–1916). HPL appears to have had very little contact with his aunts Emma and Mary. He was almost certainly the last of the male Lovecraft line on the North American continent, although there are still living descendants of Joseph S.Lovecraft and Mary Fulford Lovecraft in the female line.

See R.Alain Everts, “The Lovecraft Family in America,” Xenophile2, No. 6 (October 1975): 7, 16; Kenneth W.Faig, Jr., “Lovecraft’s Ancestors,” Crypt No. 57 (St. John’s Eve 1988): 19–25; Richard D.Squires, Stern Fathers ’Neath the Mould: The Lovecraft Family in Rochester(Necronomicon Press, 1995).

Lovecraft, Sarah Susan Phillips (1857–1921).

Mother of HPL; second daughter of Whipple V.Phillips and Robie A.Place Phillips, born in the PlaceBattey house on Moosup Valley Road in Foster, R.I. She spent one academic year at the Wheaton Seminary (Norton, Mass.) in 1871–72; she was otherwise educated in Providence, where she presumably met her friend, the poet Louise Imogen Guiney. It is not known how she met her future husband, Winfield Scott Lovecraft. They married on June 12, 1889, at St. Paul’s Church (Episcopal) in Boston. The couple resided initially in Dorchester, Mass., but Sarah returned to her father’s home in Providence to give birth to HPL on August 20, 1890. According to Sonia H.Davis (“Memories of Lovecraft: I” [1971]; in LR), Sarah had wanted a girl and had started a hope-chest for that eventuality; she dressed HPL in frocks until he was about four, and kept him in long, golden curls until he demanded at the age of six that they be cut. The family apparently lived in vari

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ous Boston suburbs, renting quarters in the Auburndale home of Louise Imogen Guiney and her mother during the winter of 1892–93 (according to HPL’s testimony); they also spent a vacation in Dudley, Mass., in the summer of 1892. They purchased a home lot in Auburndale, but Winfield’s illness in 1893 forced the sale of the lot and the return of Sarah and her son to her father’s home in Providence. She indulged HPL in many of his youthful interests, purchasing books and toys for him (she gave him Andrew Lang’s translation of the Arabian Nightsfor Christmas 1898), as well as a chemistry set when he became interested in that science in 1898. She vacationed with HPL in Foster at the home of Whipple Phillips’s brother James Wheaton Phillips in 1896 (probably as a relief from the death of HPL’s grandmother earlier that year) and in Westminster, Mass., in 1899. By necessity, she and HPL moved from 454 Angell Street to smaller quarters at 598 Angell Street in 1904 after the death of Whipple Phillips and the subsequent mismanagement of his estate. Sarah and HPL lived alone in this house from 1904 to 1919. A neighbor, Clara L.Hess, in comments written to August Derleth (see Derleth, “Lovecraft’s Sensitivity” [1949]; rpt. LR), says that the house had a “strange and shut-up air” and that Sarah said HPL had a “hideous face.” This is likely to have been around 1908. Sonia H.Davis states that HPL once admitted that his mother’s attitude toward him had been “devastating” (see “Memories of Lovecraft: I”). Appalled by HPL’s attempt to enlist in the R.I. National Guard in May 1917, she pulled strings with the family doctor to have HPL declared unfit to serve. The death of her brother, Edwin E.Phillips, in November 1918 probably increased her feelings of insecurity. Hess reports that Sarah once told her about “weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark” and that once when riding a trolley Sarah did not seem to know where she was. This was probably shortly before her nervous breakdown during the winter of 1918–19; she was removed to Butler Hospital on March 13, 1919. HPL was initially stunned by her absence from home but eventually grew accustomed to it. He wrote her a few letters (those dating to February 24 and March 17, 1921, survive), as well as short poems on Christmas and on her birthday. It was only during her hospital stay that HPL began traveling modestly, attending amateur gatherings in Boston and elsewhere. Sarah died unexpectedly on May 24, 1921, after undergoing a gall bladder operation. HPL’s initial reaction was shock and even incipient inclinations toward suicide (see SL1.133), but he rapidly recovered his spirits. HPL’s feelings about his mother can be inferred from the opening pages of “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933), in which the young Edward Derby is said to have been prevented from playing unconstrainedly with other children and was “kept closely chained” to his parents’ side. When he is thirty-four, Derby’s mother dies: “for months he was incapacitated with some odd psychological malady…. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage.” True enough, HPL’s emergence from hermitry—as well as his association with Sonia—only began after his mother’s death. HPL frequently made remarks such as “My health improved vastly and rapidly, though without any ascertainable cause, about 1920–21” ( SL3.370), not acknowledging (publicly, at any rate) that his mother’s death was a key to his subsequent emotional maturation.

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See Kenneth W.Faig, Jr, The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1990). Lovecraft, Winfield Scott (1853–1898).

Father of HPL; the only son to survive to adulthood of George Lovecraft (c. 1818–1895) and Helen Allgood (1821–1881), of Rochester, N.Y. HPL states that his father attended a military school and made modern languages his specialty, but the identity of the school is unknown. Richard D.Squires has discovered that Winfield worked as a blacksmith from 1871 to 1873; thereafter he disappears from the record for more than fifteen years. He married Sarah Susan Phillips in Boston on June 12, 1889. He was apparently employed (as was his father for a time) as a “commercial traveler” (i.e., selling to the trade, not door-to-door), probably for Gorham & Co. (Silversmiths) of Providence. The only testimony for this employment comes from Sonia H.Davis’s 1948 memoir (in LR); presumably it was told to her by HPL. Winfield lived in the Boston metropolitan area in 1889–92. He made a business trip to Chicago in the spring of 1893 but had to be returned to Providence under restraint following an incident in his hotel room in which (as noted in his medical records) he claimed that the chambermaid had insulted him and that “certain men were outraging his wife” (who was back in Providence). He was admitted to Butler Hospital on April 25, 1893, remaining there for five years, until his death on July 19, 1898. Some scholars have conjectured that HPL visited his father in the hospital, but HPL repeatedly denies that he did so. He states that Winfield was “never conscious” ( SL 1.6) during his hospital stay, but that clearly was not so; possibly this was the reason HPL was given by his family to explain why he could not visit his father in the hospital. His death certificate lists “general paresis” as cause of death; he probably died of tertiary neurosyphilis, which he had probably been contracted as early as 1871 but no later than 1881, years before he met Sarah. (The negative result of the Wassermann test performed on HPL during his final illness at Rhode Island Hospital in 1937 makes it extremely unlikely that HPL suffered from congenital syphilis, as was once conjectured by David H.Keller.) Winfield left an estate of approximately $10,000. A family portrait, dating to 1892 (printed as the frontispiece to SR), is the only known photograph of Winfield. HPL had few memories of his father: he remembered slapping his father on the knee and saying, “Papa, you look just like a young man!” ( SL4.355) and said that his father warned him not to “fall into Americanisms of speech” ( SL3.362). HPL notes some of Winfield’s clothing—“his immaculate black morning-coat and vest, ascot tie, and striped grey trousers” (ibid.) and says that he wore some of the ascots and wing collars himself (the photograph of HPL on the cover of the September 1915 United Amateurshows him wearing these items). A family friend, Ella Sweeney, once called Winfield a “pompous Englishman.”

See Kenneth W.Faig, Jr, The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1990); M.Eileen McNamara, M.D., “Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s Final Illness,” LSNo. 24 (Spring 1991): 14; “Medical Record of Winfield Scott Lovecraft,” LSNo. 24 (Spring 1991): 15–17; Richard D.Squires, Stern Fathers ’Neath the Mould: The Lovecraft Family in Rochester(Necronomicon Press, 1995).

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“Loved Dead, The.”

Short story (4,000 words); written in collaboration with C.M.Eddy, Jr., probably in October 1923. First published in WT(May–June– July 1924); rpt. Arkham Sampler(Summer 1948); first collected in DB; corrected text in HM

A man living in the rural village of Fenham becomes, as a result of a repressive upbringing, a necrophile; accordingly, he works for one undertaking establishment after another so as to achieve the desired intimacy with corpses. He then begins to commit murders, after which he secures “an ecstatic hour of pleasure, pernicious and unalloyed.” On one occasion, however, an employer catches him embracing a corpse and dismisses him. He then enlists in the army during World War I as an opportunity to be near corpses. Returning to Fenham, now a city of some size, he again works for an undertaker and again begins committing murders. At length he arouses the suspicions of the police, and they begin tracking him down as he flees from one hiding place to another. Ending up in a cemetery, he writes an account of his crimes before committing suicide.

The story reads as if HPL had written it from beginning to end, although it clearly was based on a draft by Eddy. The tale is manifestly a self-parody and in its florid language brings to mind “The Hound.” Some passages are remarkably explicit for their day: “One morning Mr. Gresham came much earlier than usual—came to find me stretched out upon a cold slab deep in ghoulish slumber, my arms wrapped about the stark, stiff, naked body of a foetid corpse! He roused me from my salacious dreams, his eyes filled with mingled detestation and pity.”

When the tale was published in WT,it elicited a protest from authorities in Indiana, who sought to have the issue banned. Subsequently, editor Farnsworth Wright became hesitant to accept any stories from HPL that featured explicitly gruesome passages of the kind found in “The Loved Dead,” and as a result several of HPL’s later tales were rejected.

See David E.Schultz, “On ‘The Loved Dead,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 25–28. Loveman, Samuel (1889–1976),

poet, playwright, and longtime friend of HPL. Loveman, a native of Cleveland, joined amateur journalism around 1905 and published much of his verse—most of it of a classicist, fin-de-sièclecast —in the amateur press and, later, in little magazines. He wrote to Ambrose Bierce in 1908 and later sent him his first book, the slim self-published volume Poems(1911). He published Bierce’s letters to him as Twenty-one Letters of Ambrose Bierce(Cleveland: George Kirk, 1922), with a preface that HPL quoted extensively in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” He later got in touch with George Sterling (1869–1926) and Clark Ashton Smith. HPL had been reading Loveman’s poetry in old amateur papers since at least 1915; at that time he wrote the poem, “To Samuel Loveman, Esq., on His Poetry and Drama, Writ in the Elizabethan Style” ( Dowdell’s Bearcat,December 1915). In 1917 HPL wrote to Loveman (then stationed in Fort Gordon, Georgia) expressing admiration for his verse. At HPL’s urging Loveman began contributing again to the amateur press, publishing three issues of his own little magazine, The Saturnian(June–July 1921, August–September 1921, March 1922), containing his own poems as well

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as his translations from Heine, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. In December 1919 HPL had a dream involving himself and Loveman, which he wrote almost verbatim into the story “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). About a year later Loveman figured in another dream, which HPL wrote as the prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920). HPL first met Loveman in April 1922 in New York. In August 1922 HPL visited him and Alfred Galpin in Cleveland; by this time Loveman had become a close friend of the young Hart Crane, and he introduced HPL to Crane’s friends, including William Sommer, William Lescaze, Edward Lazare, and Gordon Hatfield, whose homosexuality offended HPL. The manuscript of HPL’s “Hypnos” (1922) bears a dedication “To S.L.” In 1922–23 Loveman assisted HPL in editing The Poetical Works of Jonathan E.Hoag(1923). Loveman appeared occasionally in later issues of HPL’s Conservative,notably with the controversial poem “To Satan,” printed on the front page of the July 1923 issue. HPL had anonymously praised Loveman’s poetry effusively in the “Bureau of Critics” column of the National Amateur(March 1922); this review served as the springboard for an attack on Loveman himself by the amateur critic Michael Oscar White in an installment of his series “Poets of Amateur Journalism” ( Oracle,December 1922). In turn, White was attacked and Loveman defended by Frank Belknap Long (“An Amateur Humorist,” Conservative, March 1923) and Alfred Galpin (“A Critic of Poetry,” Oracle,August 1923). HPL himself responded to White in the “In the Editor’s Study” column of the Conservative,July 1923.

In September 1924 Loveman came to New York, following Hart Crane and settling at 78 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights. For the next year and a half he and HPL were closely in touch as members of the Kalem Club. They met Hart Crane on several occasions in late 1924. By September 1925 Loveman had secured a job at Dauber & Pine bookshop (Fifth Avenue and 12th Street) and worked there for the next several years. In March 1926 he arranged for HPL to be paid to address envelopes for three weeks, one of the few remunerative positions HPL secured during his New York stay. Loveman later made the spectacular claim (unsupported by documentary evidence) that HPL was so depressed during the latter stages of his New York stay that he carried poison on his person so that he could commit suicide if he felt unduly depressed (see Joshi, H.P.Lovecraft: A Life,pp. 388– 89). In 1926 W.Paul Cook published Loveman’s long neo-Grecian poem, The Hermaphrodite,which HPL had read and admired years earlier. The July 1926 United Amateurincluded a poem by Loveman about HPL, “To Mr. Theobald.”

After HPL returned to Providence, he and Loveman communicated chiefly by correspondence; but Loveman did come to Providence in January 1929, after which the two of them visited Boston, Salem, and Marblehead for a few days. Loveman advised Adolphe de Castro and Zealia Bishop to approach HPL for revision work. On December 31, 1933, HPL attended a New Year’s Eve party at Loveman’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights, at which time he met Hart Crane’s mother. On this occasion Loveman alleges that his friend Patrick McGrath spiked HPL’s punch, so that HPL began speaking very volubly (see “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist”). HPL gives no indication of such a thing and probably would have detected alcohol in his drink. Loveman and HPL spent two days in

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Boston in October 1935. In 1936 the Caxton Press issued Loveman’s The Hermaphrodite and Other Poems,the only substantial volume of his poetry to be published.

After HPL’s death Loveman wrote two memoirs, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (in Cats) and “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist” ( Fresco,Spring 1958); both are in LR. Gradually—in part perhaps because of correspondence with Sonia H.Davis around 1947, when she revealed to him the depth of HPL’s antiSemitism—Loveman began turning against HPL. In a vicious article, “Of Gold and Sawdust” (in The Occult Lovecraft,ed. Anthony Raven [1975]), Loveman accuses HPL of being a racist and a hypocrite. It appears that Loveman destroyed his letters from HPL, as almost none survive (in “Lovecraft as a Conversationalist” he claims to possess 500 pages of HPL’s letters). The few that do survive were published in HPL’s Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett(Necronomicon Press, 1994). Loveman is now perhaps best known as a friend of Hart Crane. He wrote numerous articles about Crane and assisted in Brom Weber’s Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study (1948); an interview with him about Crane was published as a pamphlet, Hart Crane: A Conversation with Samuel Loveman(New York: Interim Books, 1964). His play The Sphinx(which HPL read and admired) was published by W.Paul Cook in 1944.

Lowndes, Robert A[ugustine] W[ard] (1916–1998).

Author, editor, and late correspondent of HPL. HPL wrote Lowndes two letters, dated January 20 and February 20, 1937 (published in CryptNo. 62 [Candlemas 1989]: 39–47), encouraging Lowndes in his early literary ventures. Lowndes became very active in science fiction fandom in the 1940s, writing numerous science fiction tales as well as stories of many other types. He edited Future Fiction (1941–60), Science Fiction(1943, 1953–60), and other magazines but became best known as the editor of the magazines of the Health Knowledge chain: Magazine of Horror(1963–71), Startling Mystery Stories(1966–71), Weird Terror Tales(1969–70), Bizarre Fantasy Tales(1970–71), and others; they contained numerous reprints of HPL’s work.

“Lucubrations Lovecraftian.”

Essay (4,570 words); probably written in early 1921. First published in the United Co-operative(April 1921); rpt. MW

The essay is divided into four parts. “The Loyal Coalition” concerns an organization in Boston designed to counteract anti-English propaganda sponsored by Irish-Americans; “Criticism Again!” deals with criticisms directed toward him by John Clinton Pryor and W.Paul Cook about HPL’s opinionated reviews of amateur journals in the Department of Public Criticism; “Lest We Forget” is a brief diatribe on the need for military preparedness against foreign aggression; and “A Conjecture” is a very short but pungent attack on Elsa Gidlow, who had written derisively of HPL in an unspecified amateur journal. The essay as a whole contains some of HPL’s most forceful—and, on occasion, unrestrained—polemical writing.

Lumley, William (1880–1960).

Eccentric friend of HPL, born in New York City but residing most of his life in Buffalo, N.Y. In late 1935 HPL revised his

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“The Diary of Alonzo Typer” from a draft prepared by Lumley (the original draft was published in CryptNo. 10 [1982]: 21–25). HPL also revised Lumley’s “occasional bits of verse,” perhaps including “The Elder Thing” ( Fantasy Fan,January 1935). Lumley, a nearly illiterate would-be author, was occupied as a watchman for the Agrico Chemical Company in Buffalo for most of his career. An occultist, he claimed to have voyaged to various mysterious lands such as China and Nepal, and asserted that the myth-cycle written by HPL and his colleagues was based upon the truth. “We may thinkwe’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves” ( SL4.271). He came in touch with HPL around 1931, and they seemed to remain in contact to the end of HPL’s life, but only a few of HPL’s letters to him survive.

“Lurking Fear, The.”

Short story (8,170 words); written in mid- to late November 1922. First published in Home Brew (January, February, March, and April 1923); rpt. WT (June 1928); first collected in O;corrected text in D.

In the first episode, the narrator is searching for the unknown entity that had wreaked havoc among the squatters of the Catskills near the Martense mansion. He is convinced that the haunted mansion must be the locus of the horror, and he takes two colleagues, George Bennett and William Tobey, with him to the place one night. They all sleep in the same bed in one room of the mansion, having provided exits either through the door of the room or the window. Although one of the three is to stay awake while the others rest, a strange drowsiness affects all three. The narrator wakes and finds that the thing has snatched both Bennett and Tobey, who were sleeping on either side of him. Why was he spared?

The second episode finds the narrator coming upon another associate, Arthur Munroe, to assist him in his endeavors. They know that the lurking fear customarily roams abroad during thunderstorms, and during one such storm they stop in a hamlet to wait it out. Munroe, who has been looking out the window, seems anomalously fascinated by something outside and does not respond to a summons. When the narrator shakes his shoulder, he finds that “Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.”

In the third episode the narrator realizes that he must explore the history of the mansion to come to terms with its lurking horror. The mansion had been built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy Dutchman who hated the English; his descendants similarly shunned the people around them and took to intermarrying with the “numerous menial class about the estate.” One descendant, Jan Martense, seeks to escape this unhealthy reclusiveness and is killed for his pains. The episode ends with a cataclysmic sight of a “nameless thing” in a subterranean tunnel he stumbles upon as he digs in Jan Martense’s grave.

In the final episode the truth is finally learned: there is not one monster but a whole legion of them. The entire mountain is honeycombed with underground passageways housing loathsome creatures, half apes and half moles. They are the “ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk

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behind life.” In other words, they are the degenerate descendants of the house of Martense. The story was, like “Herbert West—Reanimator,” commissioned for Home Brewby George Julian Houtain; but in this case, Houtain provided synopses of the previous segments at the head of the final three episodes, so that HPL need not summarize them in the text itself. At HPL’s request, Clark Ashton Smith was commissioned to illustrate the text. Smith had a bit of fun by drawing trees and vegetation obviously in the shape of genitalia, but he may not have been paid for his work. (The Home Brewtext was reprinted in facsimile by Necronomicon Press in 1977.)

The tale continues the theme of hereditary degeneration found in “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” and continuing through “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; indeed, “The Lurking Fear” could be thought of as a trial run for “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

There are some minor autobiographical touches in the story. Arthur Munroe’s name is probably borrowed from HPL’s boyhood friends, the Munroe brothers. The name Jan Martense may have been taken from the Jan Martense Schenck house (1656) in Flatbush, the oldest existing house in New York City. HPL did not see this house during either of his 1922 New York visits and may not, in fact, have learned of it until after writing “The Lurking Fear”; there is, however, a Martense Street very near Sonia Greene’s apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn, and this may be the origin of the name.

See Bennett Lovett-Graff, “Lovecraft: Reproduction and Its Discontents,” Paradoxa1, No. 3 (1995): 325–41.

Lyman, Dr.

In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a Boston physician who is one of several experts brought in to assess Charles Dexter Ward’s mental condition.

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M

Macauley, George W[illiam] (1885–1969).

Amateur journalist and colleague of HPL. Macauley coedited The New Member(a magazine for recent recruits to the UAPA) when HPL first joined amateur journalism and accordingly accepted HPL’s earliest amateur contribution, the essay “A Task for Amateur Journalists” (July 1914). He received his first letter from HPL on October 23, 1914, and continued to correspond regularly until about 1920, after which their correspondence was reduced to Christmas cards; but it revived in 1932. In 1915 HPL wrote to him: “I wish that I could write fiction, but it seems almost an impossibility.” After HPL’s death Macauley published several works by and about HPL in his amateur journal, The O-Wash-Ta-Nong,including “Perverted Poesie or Modern Metre” (December 1937), “Ibid” (January 1938), and “Extracts from H.P.Lovecraft’s Letters to G.W.Macauley” (Spring 1938; rpt LSNo. 3 [Fall 1980]: 11–16).

Machen, Arthur [Llewellyn Jones] (1863–1947).

Welsh author of horror stories, journalist, autobiographer. Machen gained early notoriety for “The Great God Pan” (1890; collected in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light[1894]), The Three Impostors(1895), and other works that were accused of being the outpourings of a diseased and licentious imagination. HPL discovered Machen in late spring 1923, evidently at the urging of Frank Belknap Long (see SL1.250); at that time HPL actually considered Machen “the greatest living author” ( SL1.234). Machen was temperamentally very different from HPL: an Anglo-Catholic and mystic, he bitterly resented the increasing authority of science over human affairs. HPL’s “The Dunwich Horror” seems clearly a borrowing of the central idea of “The Great God Pan” (a god impregnating a human being), while that of “Cool Air” is (by HPL’s own admission) derived in part from “Novel of the White Powder” (a segment in The Three Impostors). “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Whisperer in Darkness” owe something to “Novel of the Black Seal” in the same volume, which conveys horror by the “documentary approach” of slow and me

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ticulous accumulation of physical evidence. HPL also appreciated the sensitive aesthetic novel The Hill of Dreams(1907) and the short horror novel The Terror(1917), as well as Machen’s autobiographies, Far Off Things(1922), Things Near and Far(1923), and The London Adventure (1924), which speak poignantly of his impoverished life in London and his walks around that city. “The Unnamable” (1923) may reflect Machen’s critical theories as expressed in Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature(1902). HPL also read Machen’s late novel, The Green Round(1933), but found it disappointingly vague and unfocused. Machen’s best short tales are collected in The House of Souls(1906), which contains “The White People,” considered by HPL the second greatest weird tale in all literature; see also Tales of Horror and the Supernatural(1948).

See Wesley D.Sweetser, Arthur Machen(1964); S.T.Joshi, “Arthur Machen: The Mystery of the Universe,” in The Weird Tale(1990); Mark Valentine, Arthur Machen(1995).

Mackenzie, Robert B.F.

In “The Shadow out of Time,” the mining engineer who points out to Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee that the scenes Peaslee describes from his disturbing dreams match exactly those found in the Great Sandy Desert in Australia. Mackenzie meets Peaslee in Arkham to plan an expedition to explore the Australian ruins.

Malkowski, Dr.

In “The Dreams in the Witch House,” a physician in Arkham who attends to Walter Gilman during the latter’s final days.

Malone, Thomas F.

In “The Horror at Red Hook,” a New York police detective who follows the case of Robert Suydam. The case proves so unsettling that he must take a leave of absence in Pascoag, R.I. “Man of Stone, The.”

Short story (6,460 words); ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, probably in summer 1932. First published in Wonder Stories(October 1932); first collected in Marginalia;corrected text in HM Daniel “Mad Dan” Morris finds in his ancestral copy of the Book of Eibona formula to turn any living creature into a stone statue. Morris admits that the formula “depends more on plain chemistry than on the Outer Powers” and that “What it amounts to is a kind of petrification infinitely speeded up.” He successfully turns the trick on Arthur Wheeler, a sculptor who he believes had been making overtures to his wife Rose. He then attempts the same procedure on Rose herself, locking her in the attic and feeding her large amounts of salty meat along with water containing the solution; but she secretly manages to catch rain water from the window and does not drink the water. When Morris is asleep, Rose forces the lock on her door, ties up her husband in his chair (using the same whip with which he had repeatedly beaten her), and, with a funnel, forces him to drink his own solution. He is turned into stone. Rose, weakened and depressed over Wheeler’s death, then takes the solution herself. Morris’s diary, with a final entry by Rose, is found later by two visitors to the remote cabin. In a letter to August Derleth (September 30, 1944), Heald wrote: “Lovecraft helped me on this story as much as on the others, and did actually rewrite para

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graphs. He would criticize paragraph after paragraph and pencil remarks beside them, and then make me write them until they pleased him” (note in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions [1970 ed.], p. 27). This would seem to suggest that HPL revised a draft by Heald, but the evidence indicates that he wrote the entire text himself, presumably from her plot outline. The story appears to be the first of the five Heald revisions.

Manly, Jack.

In “Sweet Ermengarde,” a handsome but impoverished young man who hopes to marry Ermengarde Stubbs. He seeks a fortune in the city, but in the end his quest for Ermengarde’s hand is unsuccessful.

Manton, Joel.

In “The Unnamable,” the principal of East High School and a believer in “old wives’ superstitions” although skeptical of the existence of anything so horrible as to be “unnamable.” At the end of the tale he learns differently. Manton is based on HPL’s colleague, the high school teacher and amateur journalist Maurice W.Moe.

Marcia.

In “Poetry and the Gods,” a dreamy young woman who writes free verse and later encounters the Greek gods and the shades of several of the great poets of the world.

Marigny, Etienne-Laurent de.

In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” the “distinguished Creole student” of Eastern antiquities, who served with Randolph Carter in the French Foreign Legion and is one of the four individuals who attempt to settle Carter’s estate. Carter had named de Marigny his executor. De Marigny is also mentioned as the author of a scholarly article published in The Occult Reviewin “Out of the Æons” (Heald) concerning the hieroglyphics on the mysterious cylinder. He is loosely modeled after HPL’s collaborator on the story, E.Hoffmann Price.

Marsh, Barnabas (Old Man) (b. 1862).

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the owner of the Marsh refinery in Innsmouth. He is grandson of Capt. Obed Marsh (1790–1878), who, in the 1840s, brought back to Innsmouth from his travels in the South Seas a wife who was in fact a monstrous amphibian hybrid, in exchange for treasure. Onesiphorus Marsh was Old Man Marsh’s father; his wife was a woman (actually a hybrid monster) never seen in public.

Marsh, Frank.

In “Medusa’s Coil,” a painter and friend of Denis de Russy, who tries to warn de Russy of the true background of his wife. Marsh begins to paint Marceline’s portrait, but de Russy suspects them of having an affair. (Marceline does, in fact, attempt to seduce Marsh, but he resists.) When Antoine de Russy finds Marceline slain, he suspects Marsh. However, Denis de Russy has killed her and cut off her sinister hair.

Martense, Jan.

In “The Lurking Fear,” a member of a Dutch family that built the Martense mansion atop Tempest Mountain. The mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy New Amsterdam merchant. Jan, returning to the

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mansion in 1760 after several years in the army, is later killed, probably by his own family, because he has discovered the family’s horrible secret: their unwholesome inbreeding has caused them to decline on the evolutionary ladder.

Mason, Keziah.

In “The Dreams in the Witch House,” the witch who once lived in the old Witch House in Arkham during the celebrated witch hunts in Essex County, occupying the room now inhabited by the student Walter Gilman. The witch plagues Gilman’s troubled dreams, and her ratlike familiar kills him. “Materialist Today, The.”

Essay (1,210 words); probably written in the summer of 1926. First published in Driftwind(October 1926); also as a separate pamphlet (Driftwind Press, 1926); rpt. MW.

A brief exposition of materialist metaphysics and ethics, the essay asserts that “ mindseems very clearly not a thing,but a mode of motion or form of energy” and that “all matter is in a state of balance betwixt formation and disintegration.” HPL states that the “essay” was part of a letter to Walter J.Coates, editor of Driftwind,prepared for publication at Coates’s insistence (HPL to August Derleth, October 19, 1926; ms., SHSW).

“Matter of Uniteds, A.”

Essay (1,720 words); probably written in the spring of 1927. First published in Bacon’s Essays (Summer 1927); rpt. MW

This substantial essay discusses the split in the UAPA following the disputed election of 1912, leading to the formation of the United Amateur Press Association of America, a group based in Seattle and led by F.Roy Erford, and the UAPA. HPL also wrote of this matter in an unsigned editorial, “The Pseudo-United” ( United Amateur,May 1920). In both articles, HPL suggests that the UAPA of A was the “rebel” organization, but historians generally conclude that HPL’s UAPA was largely responsible for the split.

Mauvais, Michel.

In “The Alchemist,” a wizard who is killed by Henri, comte de C———, who suspects him of making away with his son Godfrey. Michel’s son, Charles le Sorcier, exacts vengeance on the subsequent comtes de C———for the next 600 years.

Mazurewicz, Joe.

In “The Dreams in the Witch House,” a loomfixer who resides in the Witch House in Arkham and attempts to help Walter Gilman cope with his bizarre dreams and sleepwalking. At one point he gives Gilman a crucifix, which assists in temporarily warding off the witch Keziah Mason during one of Gilman’s dreams.

McNeil, [Henry] Everett (1862–1929).

Author of sixteen boys’ books and friend of HPL. He first met HPL in New York in September 1922; he was a member of the Kalem Club during 1924–26. McNeil was one of the first to urge HPL to contribute to the newly founded WT(see HPL to James F.Morton, March 29, 1923; AHT). He was the author of Dickon Bend the Bow and Other Wonder Tales(1903), The Lost Treasure Cave; or, Adventures with the Cowboys of Colorado(1905), In Texas with Davy Crockett: A Story of the Texas

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War of Independence(1908; rpt. 1937), The Cave of Gold: A Tale of California in ’49(1911), Tonty of the Iron Hand(1925), Daniel Du Luth; or, Adventuring on the Great Lakes(1926), The Shores of Adventure; or, Exploring in the New World with Jacques Cartier(1929), and others, many of them published by E.P.Dutton (HPL believed that Dutton’s stingy contracts contributed to McNeil’s poverty). He lived mostly in poor parts of New York City, notably Hell’s Kitchen; because of this, and because of a feud within the Kalem Club that caused separate “McNeil” and “Leeds” meetings, many members avoided coming to McNeil’s apartment, but HPL always came. He appreciated McNeil’s childlike naïveté; George Kirk described him as “an oldster—lovely purely white hair, writes books for boys and does not need to write down to them, he is quite equal mentally” (the comment was not meant derogatorily). Late in life, suffering from poor health, he moved to Tacoma, Washington, to live with his sister but died shortly after arriving there. HPL wrote an unaffected tribute to him in a letter to James F.Morton ( SL3.92–94; see also 3.112–15). “The Pigeon-Flyers” of Fungi from Yuggothwas inspired by McNeil’s death.

McNeill, Dr.

In “The Curse of Yig,” the curator of an insane asylum in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He informs the narrator of the story of the legend of Yig, the snake-god. His asylum houses the half-human, half-snake offspring of Audrey Davis and Yig.

McTighe,———.

In At the Mountains of Madness,a radio operator on the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31 who takes down shorthand accounts of the discoveries of Lake’s subexpedition and relays them to the operator on board the brig Arkham.

“Medusa’s Coil.”

Novelette (16,950 words); ghostwritten for Zealia Brown Reed Bishop, May–August 1930. First published in WT(January 1939); first collected in Marginalia;corrected text in HM A traveler in Missouri finds himself in a deserted region with night coming on. He then spots a decaying mansion set back from the road and approaches it, hoping to find shelter for the night. The place is occupied by an old man, Antoine de Russy, who expresses alarm at the prospect of the traveler spending the night at his place. He finally agrees to house the traveler, and in the course of the evening he tells his tale:

His son, Denis de Russy, had gone to Paris and had fallen in love with a mysterious Frenchwoman, Marceline Bedard. Without his father’s permission or knowledge, Denis marries Marceline and brings her back to Missouri to live. In Paris, Marceline had practiced what seemed to be relatively innocuous occultist rituals for the apparent purpose of increasing her tantalizing allure, but when she comes to Missouri she is looked upon with awe and terror by the black servants, especially one “very old Zulu woman” named Sophonisba.

Then, in the summer of 1916, Denis’s longtime friend Frank Marsh, a painter, comes to visit the de Russys. He wishes to paint Marceline, thinking that her exoticism will revive him from the aesthetic rut in which he finds himself.

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He begins the portrait, but tensions rise as Denis believes that Marsh and Marceline are having an affair behind his back. To relieve the situation, Antoine contrives to send Denis to New York to attend his business affairs; but he is disturbed when he overhears Marceline clearly trying to seduce Marsh, who resists her advances.

At last Marsh’s painting is done, but horror is in the offing. Antoine awakes one day to find Marceline in a pool of her own blood, her long, luxurious hair hacked off. Marsh must be the culprit; but when Antoine follows a bloody trail to an upstairs room, he finds Marsh dead, with his son Denis crouching next to him, “a tousled, wild-eyed thing.” Denis maintains that he killed Marceline because “she was the devil—the summit and high-priestess of all evil.” He had come back home because he continued to suspect that Marsh and Marceline were lovers; but as he saw Frank’s painting, he realized that Marsh was trying to warn him about his wife, conveying by means of his painting that she was a “leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia.” After he had killed Marceline, her hair continued to exhibit signs of animation, and as he hacked off her hair it wrapped itself around Marsh and choked him to death. After telling his tale to his father, Denis dies.

Antoine buries the bodies of Marsh (with Marceline’s coils still around him), Marceline, and his son in the cellar. He has, however, preserved Marsh’s painting, and reluctantly he takes the traveler up to the room where it is kept. As the two are looking at it, the strands of hair begin to lift themselves from the painting and seem about to strike Antoine. The traveler draws out his automatic and shoots the painting, but Antoine curses at the traveler: the painting has to be kept intact, otherwise Marceline and her coils will revive and come out of their grave. Sounds from the basement seem to confirm that this is happening, so the two men flee; the house in any event is ablaze from a candle that Antoine had dropped in the studio. The traveler makes it to his car, but he sees Antoine overtaken by a “bald, naked figure,” and also dimly perceives some large snake-like form among the tall weeds and bushes. As he drives to the nearest town, he learns that the de Russy mansion had in fact burned down five or six years ago. The traveler then informs us of the ultimate horror of the matter: Marceline was, “though in deceitfully slight proportion,” a negress.

Notes for the story survive (in AHT), including both a plot outline and a “Manner of Narration” (a synopsis of events in order of narration); here too it is made clear that the final racist revelation —“woman revealed as vampire, lamia, &c. &c.—& unmistakably (surprise to reader as in original tale) a negress”—is meant to be the culminating horror of the tale. The mention here of an “original tale” may suggest that there was a draft of some kind by Bishop, but if so, it does not survive. WTrejected the story. Later in 1930 HPL discussed with Frank Belknap Long (Bishop’s agent) the possibility of sending it to Ghost Stories(HPL to Frank Belknap Long, [November 1930]; AHT), but if it was sent there, it was again rejected. As with “The Mound,” the tale was heavily altered and rewritten by August Derleth for its magazine appearance, and he continued to reprint the adulterated texts in book form until the corrected text appeared in 1989.

See Marc A.Cerasini, “Dark Passion: ‘Medusa’s Coil’ and ‘Black Canaan,’” CryptNo. 11 (Candlemas 1983): 33–36.

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“Memory.”

Prose poem (350 words); probably written in the spring of 1919. First published in the United Cooperative(June 1919), an amateur journal coedited by HPL, Winifred Jackson, and others. First collected in BWS;corrected text in MW

A Daemon of the Valley holds a colloquy with “the Genie that haunts the moonbeams” about the previous inhabitants of the valley of Nis, through which the river Than flows. The Genie has forgotten these creatures, but the Daemon declares: “I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, for it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man.”

Poe’s influence dominates this very short work: there is a Demon in Poe’s “Silence—a Fable”; “the valley Nis” is mentioned in Poe’s “The Valley of Unrest” (whose original title was “The Valley Nis,” although HPL may not have been aware of the fact); and “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” which features a dialogue like that of HPL’s tale, speaks of the destruction of all earth life by means of a fire caused by a comet passing near the earth.

See Lance Arney, “The Extinction of Mankind in the Prose Poem ‘Memory,’” LSNo. 21 (Spring 1990): 38–39.

Menes.

In “The Cats of Ulthar,” the little boy whose kitten disappears following the arrival of “dark wanderers” in Ulthar. He elicits supernatural intervention in exacting vengeance for the loss of his kitten.

Merritt, A[braham] (1884–1943).

American author and longtime editor of American Weekly(the magazine supplement to the Hearst papers). HPL considered the novelette “The Moon Pool” ( Argosy,June 22, 1918) one of the ten best weird tales in literature; he disliked the later novel version ( The Moon Pool,1919), and came to believe that Merritt sold himself out to the pulps when he could have been the equal of Machen and Blackwood as a weird writer. Some images in “The Moon Pool,” as well as the setting on Ponape, may have influenced “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926). The Dwellers in the Mirage(1932) may be a homage to HPL in its use of extra-dimensional octopus demon Khalk’ru (an analogue to Cthulhu?). Other novels: The Metal Monster(serialized 1920; book form 1946), The Ship of Ishtar(serialized 1924; book form 1926), Seven Footprints to Satan(serialized 1927; book form 1928), The Face in the Abyss(1931), Burn, Witch, Burn!(serialized 1932; book form 1933), Creep, Shadow!(1934). The Fox Woman(1949) is a short story collection. HPL met Merritt in New York on January 8, 1934, when Merritt took HPL to dinner at the Players Club in Gramercy Park. At that time HPL noted: “He knows all about my work, & praises it encouragingly” (HPL to Annie E.P.Gamwell, [January 8, 1934]; ms., JHL). They collaborated (with C.L. Moore, Robert E.Howard, and Frank Belknap Long) on “The Challenge from Beyond” ( Fantasy Magazine,September 1935).

See T.G.L.Cockcroft, “Random Notes on Merritt and Lovecraft,” Telepath1, No. 2 (October 1954): 2– 4; Sam Moskowitz, A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool: A Biography(Philadelphia: Oswald Train, 1985).

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“Messenger, The.”

Poem (sonnet); written at 3:07 A.M., November 30, 1929. First published in the Providence Journal (December 3, 1929), in B.K.Hart’s column “The Sideshow”; rpt. WT(July 1938).

Hart had read “The Call of Cthulhu” and expressed mock outrage at the fact that HPL had set the tale in part in a boarding-house at 7 Thomas Street in Providence, where Hart himself had once lived. He threatened (in a “Sideshow” column of November 30, 1929) to send a “large and abiding ghost” to HPL’s residence at 3 A.M. HPL accordingly wrote the poem shortly after the designated time of the ghost’s arrival. Winfield Townley Scott (“A Parenthesis on Lovecraft as Poet” [1945]; rpt. FDOC) believed the poem to be “perhaps as wholly satisfactory as any poem [HPL] ever wrote.” See Donald R.Burleson, “On Lovecraft’s ‘The Messenger,’” CryptNo. 57 (St. John’s Eve 1988): 15–18. Mevana.

In “Winged Death,” an African from Uganda who, when he develops an unusual illness after being bitten by an insect, is brought to Dr. Thomas Slauenwite to be healed. Slauenwite cures him with antitoxin, whereupon Mevana leads Slauenwite to the lake where he was bitten so that the latter can capture the insects that caused the strange malady.

Miller, Wesley P.

In “In the Walls of Eryx,” the superintendent of Group A of the Venus Crystal Company. He writes the report about the discovery of the body of Kenton J.Stanfield in the invisible maze. Miniter, Edith [May Dowe] (1869–1934).