An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Novelist, poet, and amateur journalist residing in central Massachusetts. She was the daughter of amateur writer Jennie E.T.Dowe (about whom HPL wrote an elegy, “In Memoriam: J.E.T.D.,” Tryout, March 1919). She was the editor of The Muffin Man(April 1921), which contained a parody of HPL, “Falco Ossifracus: By Mr. Goodguile”; also of Aftermath(a paper issued after amateur conventions). She published one novel professionally, Our Natupski Neighbors(Henry Holt, 1916)—about Polish immigrants in Massachusetts—and short stories for professional magazines. HPL claimed that Miniter turned down the job of revising Bram Stoker’s Draculafor publication. Miniter first met HPL at an amateur convention held at her home at 20 Webster Street in Allston (a suburb of Boston) in July 1920, and again at amateur conventions in Allston on March 10, 1921, and in Maiden (another suburb of Boston) on April 12, 1923. She invited HPL to spend two weeks with her and her cousin Evanore Beebe in Wilbraham, Mass., at which time she told HPL about the local legendry (including the story of whippoorwills used in “The Dunwich Horror”). See HPL’s memoir, “Mrs. Miniter— Estimates and Recollections” (1934; first published in the Californian,Spring 1938). HPL also wrote an elegy, “Edith Miniter” ( Tryout,August 1934). In 1934–35 HPL was assembling material for a memorial volume on Miniter to be published by W.Paul Cook, but it never materialized; but he ended up with many of her papers and manuscripts (now at JHL). One, a letter written in 1853 by her great-uncle George Washington Tupper, a forty-niner, inspired the minor character named Tupper in “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35). Much of Miniter’s work in the

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amateur press has now been collected in Going Home and Other Amateur Writings(Moshassuck Press, 1995) and The Coast of Bohemia and Other Writings(Moshassuck Press, 2000) Mladdna.

In “‘Till A’ the Seas,’” an old woman who, in the distant future, is (along with a young man named Ull) the last surviving member of the human race. When she dies, Ull is left alone. Moe, Maurice W[inter] (1882–1940).

Teacher, amateur journalist, and longtime friend and correspondent of HPL. Moe taught English at Appleton High School (Appleton, Wis.) and later at West Division High School in Milwaukee. He came in touch with HPL no later than the end of 1914 and maintained a substantial correspondence from that time until HPL’s death; it was at Moe’s suggestion, in the summer of 1916, that he, HPL, Rheinhart Kleiner, and Ira A.Cole begin a round-robin correspondence cycle, the Kleicomolo. Later, in 1919–21, Moe, HPL, and Alfred Galpin formed the Gallomo correspondence group. For a time Moe made copies of all the correspondents’ contributions, but these copies do not appear to survive. A devout theist, Moe argued repeatedly with HPL on religion, but their discussions—at times heated but never acrimonious—appear not to have altered either individual’s viewpoints significantly. In one of these argumentative letters (May 15, 1918; SL1.60–66) HPL recounted a dream that later served as the basis for “Polaris” (1918). Moe contributed frequently to the amateur press (and also to scholarly journals on education: see “Amateur Journalism and the English Teacher,” English Journal, February 1915) but never edited a paper of his own. He did, however, establish the Appleton High School Press Club for his students; they issued a paper, The Pippin. HPL wrote two poems commemorating two issues of the paper (those for December 1918 and May 1919), although neither poem was published at the time. Through this press club HPL became acquainted, in late 1917, with Alfred Galpin, then a student at Appleton High School. In 1917 HPL also wrote a brief poem, “To M.W. M.” (in “News Notes,” United Amateur,July 1917); HPL’s play Alfredo(1918) includes Moe as a character under the guise of Cardinal Maurizio; still later HPL wrote the poem “On the Return of Maurice Winter Moe, Esq., to the Pedagogical Profession” ( Wolverine,June 1921), commemorating Moe’s move to Milwaukee. HPL’s “The Unnamable” (1923) features, in Joel Manton, a character clearly based upon Moe. HPL met Moe for the first time on August 10, 1923, when Moe came to Providence; they later went by bus to Boston, where they met Moe’s wife and two small boys, Donald and Robert. The next day HPL took Moe, Albert A.Sandusky, and Edward H.Cole on a walking trip to Marblehead, but after trudging for hours the latter three protested and refused to go any further; HPL, still spry, grudgingly relented.

For the next thirteen years their relations consisted solely of correspondence. HPL got into the habit of typing long letters to Moe recounting his various travels (the essays “Observations on Several Parts of America” [1928] and “Travels in the Provinces of America” [1929] are two such items), which Moe was to read and then pass on to other colleagues. In 1927 or 1928 HPL wrote a satirical biography of Ibid, which Moe thought of submitting to the American Mercury;

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but it was later decided that the piece was too specialized for a general readership, so it remained unpublished until it appeared in the O-Wash-Ta-Nong(January 1938). By this time HPL was assisting Moe extensively in the revision of his treatise on the appreciation of poetry, Doorways to Poetry,of which HPL thought very highly. One result of the work was HPL’s “Sonnet Study” (1929?), consisting of one Petrarchan and one Shakespearean sonnet. HPL also wrote several dozen sonnets, including Fungi from Yuggoth,and other poems after a long hiatus. Doorwayswas never published, and the manuscript does not seem to survive. A small pamphlet, Imagery Aids(Wauwatosa, Wis.: Kenyon Press, 1931), may be all that is left of this treatise. In late 1934 Moe asked HPL to contribute an article of his choice for an amateur magazine being produced by his students; HPL wrote an essay on traces of Roman architecture in America and sent it to Moe. It never appeared in the magazine, and HPL later believed it to be lost; but a transcript survives in AHT. HPL wrote the essay “Heritage or Modernism: Common Sense in Art Forms” ( Californian,Summer 1935) as an introduction to the Roman architecture piece.

Moe visited HPL for the second and final time on July 18–19, 1936, as he and his son Robert (who was working in Bridgeport, Conn.) came to Providence. HPL had been corresponding regularly with Robert since 1934. Since they had a car, they managed to visit several of the surrounding towns— Pawtuxet, Warren, and Bristol. At that time Moe and HPL participated in a final correspondence group, the Coryciani, although only two letters by HPL survive. After HPL, R.H.Barlow, and Adolphe de Castro wrote their acrostic poems on Poe on August 8, 1936, Moe himself wrote one of his own and then hectographed all four as Four Acrostic Sonnets on Edgar Allan Poe(1936). August Derleth reprinted Moe’s poem in his anthology, Poetry out of Wisconsin(1937). After HPL’s death Moe wrote the brief but poignant memoir, “Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The Sage of Providence” ( O-Wash-TaNong,[1937]; rpt. LR).

“Moon-Bog, The.”

Short story (3,430 words); written shortly before March 10, 1921. First published in WT(June 1926); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D

Denys Barry, who comes from America to reclaim an ancestral estate in Kilderry, Ireland, decides to empty the bog on his land: “For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he hated the beautiful wasted space where peat might be cut and land opened up.” The peasants refuse to assist him for fear of disturbing the spirits of the bog. Barry calls in outside workers and the project continues apace, even though the workers confess suffering from strange and troublesome dreams. One night the narrator, Barry’s friend, awakes and hears a piping in the distance: “wild, weird airs that made me think of some dance of fauns on distant Maenalus” (a curious nod to “The Tree”). Then he sees the laborers dancing as if under some form of hypnosis, along with “strange airy beings in white, half indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of the bog.” But the next morning the workers seem to remember nothing of the night’s events. The next night things reach a climax: the piping is heard again, and the narrator again sees the “white-clad bog-wraiths” drifting toward the deeper waters of the bog, followed by the mesmer

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ised laborers. Then a shaft of moonlight appears, and “upward along that pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow slowly writhing; a vague contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen daemons.” It is Denys Barry, who is spirited off and never seen again.

The story was written for a St. Patrick’s Day gathering of amateurs in Boston (although the meeting took place on March 10, a week before St. Patrick’s Day). The tale is one of the most conventionally supernatural in HPL’s oeuvre. It bears an accidental similarity of plot to Lord Dunsany’s novel The Curse of the Wise Woman(1933).

Moore, C[atherine] L[ucile] (1911–1987).

Author of weird and science fiction tales, living in Indianapolis, Indiana, and late correspondent of HPL (1934–37). HPL enjoyed her early tales, especially “Shambleau” ( WT,November 1933) and “Black Thirst” ( WT,April 1934); he came in touch with her in 1934 when R.H. Barlow wished to publish some of her tales and asked HPL to write to her about it. HPL introduced her to Henry Kuttner in 1936; they married in 1940 and collaborated on most of their works thereafter. HPL’s letters to her survive only in fragments, but he kept hers. In his letters HPL keenly discusses the current political and economic situation and the interplay of economics and artistic creation; he repeatedly advised Moore not to buckle down to hackwork for the pulps. She collaborated with HPL (along with A.Merritt, Robert E.Howard, and Frank Belknap Long) on “The Challenge from Beyond” ( Fantasy Magazine,September 1935). Moore went on to write many important works of fantasy and science fiction, including “Judgment Night” (1943) and “Vintage Season” (1946).

See Susan Gubar, “C.L.Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction,” Science-Fiction Studies7 (March 1980): 16–27; 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).

Moore, Dr. Henry Sargent.

In “Winged Death,” a Professor of Invertebrate Biology at Columbia University, author of Diptera of Central and Southern Africa,who is killed by his rival, Dr. Thomas Slauenwite.

Morehouse, Dr. Arlo.

In “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind,” a physician who finds the body of the author Richard Blake in a country cottage, along with the strange message that he (or some other entity) had left in Blake’s typewriter. Morgan, Dr. Francis.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” a man (whether a medical doctor or a professor is unclear) who, with Henry Armitage and Warren Rice, leads the party that exterminates Wilbur Whateley’s monstrous twin brother.

Morris, Daniel (“Mad Dan”).

In “The Man of Stone,” the occupant of a cabin in the town of Mountain Top (in upstate New York) whose diary constitutes the bulk of the narrative. He learns of a technique perfected by his ancestor, Bareut Picterse Van Kauran, for turning living creatures into stone, and he uses it on a man whom he suspects of having designs on his wife, Rose. He also attempts to use it on her, but she thwarts him and successfully turns the tables on him.

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Morse, Richard Ely (1909–1986).

Poet and correspondent of HPL. Morse, a graduate of Amherst College and residing in Princeton, N.J., was introduced to HPL by Samuel Loveman in May 1932 when HPL was passing through New York; a brisk correspondence thereupon ensued. At the time Morse was a librarian at Princeton University, but in 1933 he moved to Washington, D.C., to do research for his uncle at the Library of Congress. He published one book of poetry, Winter Garden(Amherst, Mass.: Poetry Society of Amherst College, 1931). His copy for HPL bears the inscription: “For Howard Lovecraft, Magnus Magister, in return for all his gracious kindness and friendship and for all the shuddering pleasure of his tales and verse with admiration and gratitude from Richard Ely Morse.” Morse also published “Some Modern Book Illustrations” ( Californian4, No. 4 [Spring 1937]).

Morton, James Ferdinand, Jr. (1870–1941),

pamphleteer, amateur journalist, and friend of HPL. Morton received a simultaneous B.A. and M.A. from Harvard in 1892. In 1896–97 he was president of the NAPA; in later years he would become president of the Thomas Paine Natural History Association and vice president of the Esperanto Association of North America. He wrote numerous pamphlets supporting free speech, free love, and the single tax and attacking religion and race prejudice; among his publications are The Rights of Periodicals(1905?), The Curse of Race Prejudice(1906?), Sex Morality, Past, Present and Future (with William J.Robinson and others) (1912), The Case of Billy Sunday(with others) (1915), Exempting the Churches(1916), and others. Early in life he was an evangelical atheist, but later he converted to Bahaism. Morton first crossed swords with HPL when he defended Charles D.Isaacson against HPL’s attack (“In a Major Key”) in “‘Conservatism’ Gone Mad” ( In a Minor KeyNo. 2 [1915]); HPL responded with a poem (unpublished at the time), “The Isaacsonio-Mortoniad” (1915). At the time the two were not acquainted. They met unexpectedly at an amateur gathering in Boston on September 5, 1920. Although HPL was immediately taken with Morton, they only became regular correspondents after HPL met Morton again in his two visits to New York in April and September 1922. Morton assisted HPL in revising Jonathan E.Hoag’s poems for The Poetical Works of Jonathan E.Hoag(1923). He visited HPL in Providence in September 1923. and HPL showed him around Marblehead, Mass., as well as the remote villages of Chepachet and Pascoag, in northwestern Rhode Island. Morton returned to Providence on December 27, 1923. He appears to have been one of the original members of the Kalem Club and met frequently with HPL at its meetings and at other times during the latter’s New York stay (1924–26). In 1924 HPL and Morton formed the Crafton Revision Service (an ad for it appeared in L’Alouette,September 1924), but evidently it did not do much business. In February 1925 Morton became curator of the Paterson (N.J.) Museum, serving there for the remainder of his life. For a time he hoped to hire HPL as an assistant, but the prospect never materialized. HPL visited Paterson on August 30, 1925, finding the city itself dismal but the nearby Buttermilk Falls picturesque. A year later HPL commemorated the visit in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), when the narrator finds an important newspaper clipping while “Visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note.”

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On July 19, 1927, Morton visited HPL (now back in Providence) along with Frank Belknap Long and Donald Wandrei; on the 23rd he, HPL, and Wandrei staged their ice cream eating contest at Maxfield’s in Warren, R.I., each of them sampling twenty-eight different flavors of ice cream. HPL also assisted Morton in securing rock specimens for his museum. On May 12, 1928, HPL visited Morton in Paterson; Morton repaid the favor by passing through Providence in June 1929 and again on July 31–August 2, 1933. Morton came to Rhode Island again on August 4–7, 1934, visiting the town of Buttonwoods in quest of genealogical data. Otherwise HPL’s and Morton’s friendship was conducted by correspondence, and HPL’s side of it is among the most scintillating and wide ranging of any of his letters. The whereabouts of most of these letters are, however, unknown, and to current knowledge they survive only in extensive extracts in AHT. After HPL’s death Morton wrote a brief memoir, “A Few Memories” ( Olympian,Autumn 1940; in LR).

Moulton,———.

In At the Mountains of Madness,a pilot on the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31. He accompanies Lake on his subexpedition and is killed by the Old Ones.

“Mound, The.”

Novelette (29,560 words); ghostwritten for Zealia Brown Reed Bishop, December 1929–January 1930. First published (abridged) in WT(November 1940); first collected in BWS;corrected text in HM

A member of Coronado’s expedition of 1541, Panfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, leaves the main group and conducts a solitary expedition to the mound region of what is now Oklahoma. There he hears tales of an underground realm of fabulous antiquity and (more to his interest) great wealth and finds an Indian who will lead him to one of the few remaining entrances to this realm, although the Indian refuses to accompany him on the actual journey. Zamacona comes upon the civilization of Xinaian (which he pronounces “K’n-yan”), established by quasi-human creatures who came from outer space. These inhabitants have developed remarkable mental abilities, including telepathy and the power of dematerialization—the process of dissolving themselves and selected objects around them into their component atoms and recombining them at some other location. Zamacona initially expresses wonder at this civilization but gradually finds that it has declined both intellectually and morally from a much higher level and has now become corrupt and decadent. He attempts to escape but suffers a horrible fate. His written record of his adventures is unearthed in modern times by an archeologist, who paraphrases his incredible tale.

Bishop’s original plot-germ for the story (as recorded by R.H.Barlow on the surviving typescript) was of the most skeletal sort: “There is an Indian mound near here, which is haunted by a headless ghost. Sometimes it is a woman.” HPL found this idea “insufferably tame & flat” ( SL3.97) and fabricated a lengthy novelette of underground horror, incorporating many conceptions of his evolving myth-cycle, including Cthulhu (under the variant form Tulu).

The story is the first of HPL’s tales to utilize an alien civilization as a transparent metaphor for certain phases of human (and, more specifically, Western) civilization. Initially, K’n-yan seems a Lovecraftian Utopia: the people have

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conquered old age, have no poverty because of their relatively few numbers and their thorough mastery of technology, use religion only as an aesthetic ornament, practice selective breeding to ensure the vigor of the “ruling type,” and pass the day largely in aesthetic and intellectual activity. But as Zamacona continues to observe the people, he begins to notice disturbing signs of decadence. Science is “falling into decay”; history is “more and more neglected”; and gradually religion is becoming less an aesthetic ritual and more a degraded superstition. The narrator concludes: “It is evident that K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed apathy and hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity which machinery had brought it during its middle period.” This comment mirrors HPL’s ruminations regarding the current state of Western civilization (see, e.g., SL2.309).

The story was far longer a work than HPL needed to write for this purpose, and its length bode ill for prospects of publication. WTwas on increasingly shaky ground, and Farnsworth Wright had to be careful what he accepted; accordingly, he rejected the story in early 1930 because it was too long and not capable of convenient division as a serial. HPL had, apparently, already been paid by Bishop for his work, but he no doubt would have liked to see the story in print.

The belief that Frank Belknap Long had some hand in the writing of the story—derived from Zealia Bishop’s declaration that “Long…advised and worked with me on that short novel” (“H.P.Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” [1953]; in LR)—is countered by Long’s own declaration that “I had nothing whatever to do with the writing of The Mound. That brooding, somber, and magnificently atmospheric story is Lovecraftian from the first page to the last” ( Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside [Arkham House, 1975], pp. xiii–xiv). Long was at this time acting as Bishop’s agent. He had apparently typed HPL’s manuscript of the tale, for the typescript seems to come from Long’s typewriter. After WTrejected the story, Bishop evidently felt that the text should be abridged in order to make it more salable. Long did this by reducing the initial typescript’s eighty-two pages to sixty-nine—not by retyping, but by merely omitting some sheets and scratching out parts of others with a pen. The carbon was kept intact. Long apparently attempted to market the shortened version, but without success. After HPL’s death, August Derleth prepared a radically adulterated and abridged text for publication in WT,which was reprinted in Arkham House editions until the unadulterated text was published in 1989.

See W.E.Beardson, “The Mound of Yig?” Etchings and OdysseysNo. 1 (1973): 10–13; S.T.Joshi, “Who Wrote ‘The Mound’?” NyctalopsNo. 14 (March 1978): 41–42 (revised in CryptNo. 11 [Candlemas 1983]: 27–29, 38); Peter H.Cannon, “The Mound’: An Appreciation,” CryptNo. 11 (Candlemas 1983): 30–32, 51; Michael DiGregorio, “‘Yig,’ ‘The Mound’ and American Indian Lore,” CryptNo. 11 (Candlemas 1983): 25–26, 38; S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft’s Alien Civilisations: A Political Interpretation,” in Selected Papers on Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1989).

“Mrs. Miniter—Estimates and Recollections.”

Essay (5,210 words); written on October 16, 1934. First published in the Californian(Spring 1938); rpt MW

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This poignant essay traces the amateur career of the recently deceased Edith Miniter, with a discussion of her household (including her cousin Evanore Beebe and numerous pets) at a rural home, Maplehurst, outside of Wilbraham, Mass., which HPL visited in 1928. The essay was intended for a booklet devoted to Miniter, to be published by W.Paul Cook, for which HPL had gathered numerous other articles, but the project came to naught. HPL also wrote an elegy, “Edith Miniter” ( Tryout,August 1934).

Müller,———.

In “The Temple,” the boatswain on the German submarine U-29 who apparently commits suicide to escape the horrors he thinks are besetting the vessel.

Munn, H[arold] Warner (1903–1981).

American writer of fantasy and horror tales, and friend of HPL. His first story, “The Werewolf of Ponkert” ( WT,July 1925), was based on a remark in HPL’s letter to WT(March 1924): “Take a werewolf story, for instance—who ever wrote a story from the point of view of the wolf, and sympathising strongly with the devil to whom he has sold himself?” But it appears that Munn misunderstood the import of HPL’s remark, for he has the werewolf regret his condition. Munn wrote several more werewolf stories under the generic title “Tales of the Werewolf Clan”; some were gathered as The Werewolf of Ponkert(1958). He was introduced to HPL by W.Paul Cook in the summer of 1927; HPL visited him in Athol, Mass., in the summer of 1928, at which time (on June 28) Munn took HPL to the Bear’s Den, a remarkable forest gorge later cited in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). Cook and Munn visited HPL in Providence in June 1929; HPL returned the favor by visiting Cook and Munn in Athol the next June. HPL and Munn seemed to communicate only sporadically in the 1930s. Munn went on to write many stories for the pulps as well as fantasy and historical novels, including Merlin’s Ring(1974) and The Lost Legion(1980). Late in life he wrote a brief memoir, “H.P.L.: A Remembrance” ( Whispers,December 1976; in LR).

Muñoz, Dr.

In “Cool Air,” the doctor who treats the narrator when he has a heart attack. Since Muñoz had died eighteen years previously, he keeps his apartment refrigerated to increasingly cooler temperatures to maintain his artificially preserved body. He appears to have been based in part on a Dr. Love (see entry on “Cool Air”).

Munroe, Arthur.

In “The Lurking Fear,” he accompanies the narrator to the haunted Martense mansion, after two other searchers disappear, only to meet a loathsome fate.

Munroe, Chester Pierce (1889–1943).

Boyhood friend of HPL, residing at 66 Patterson Avenue in Providence, about four blocks away from HPL’s residence at 454 Angell Street. HPL and Munroe became acquainted around 1902, when they attended the Slater Avenue School. HPL remarks that “Chester Pierce Munroe & I claimed the proud joint distinction of being the worst boys in Slater Ave. School…. We were not so actively destructive as merely antinomian in an ar

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rogant & sardonic way—the protest of individuality against capricious, arbitrary, & excessively detailed authority” (HPL to Helen Sully, December 4, 1935; ms., JHL). At that time they and other friends formed the Providence Detective Agency and the Blackstone Military Band. It is not clear whether Chester attended Hope Street High School with HPL, but Chester did, in 1905, follow HPL’s lead in operating a hectographed paper, the East Side News,similar to HPL’s Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy;in 1905–06 they revived the Providence Detective Agency and Blackstone Military Band, which had apparently been in abeyance for some time, and also formed the Providence Astronomical Society and the East Side Historical Club. Chester also presumably assisted in building the Great Meadow Country Clubhouse in Rehoboth, Mass, (see Munroe, Harold Bateman). On August 12, 1912, Chester was a witness to HPL’s will. By 1915 Chester had established himself at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, although his occupation is unknown. HPL had persuaded him to join amateur journalism, and HPL wrote the article “Introducing Mr. Chester Pierce Munroe” ( Conservative,April 1915) welcoming him to the organization. In return, Chester apparently arranged for HPL to write the astronomy series “Mysteries of the Heavens” in the Asheville Gazette-News (February 16–May 17, 1915).

Munroe, Harold Bateman (1891–1966).

Brother of Chester P.Munroe and boyhood friend of HPL. Like his brother, Harold was a member of the various gangs or boyhood groups in which HPL was involved, such as the Providence Detective Agency and the Blackstone Military Band. HPL reports that he and Harold were “Confederates in sympathy, & used to act out all the battles of the War in Blackstone Park” (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, [May 2, 1929]; ms., JHL). Not much is heard of Harold until August 8, 1921, when Harold, now a businessman as well as a deputy sheriff, peremptorily summoned HPL to revisit the Great Meadow Country Clubhouse, just across the state line in Rehoboth, Mass., which HPL and his friends had built around 1907, with the assistance of a Civil War veteran named James Kay. Harold and HPL resolved to resume holding monthly meetings at the clubhouse, along with other boyhood friends such as Ronald Upham and Stuart Coleman, but the plan was quickly forgotten. Munroe is not to be confused with Harold W.Munro, a classmate of HPL’s at Hope Street High School and author of the memoir “Lovecraft, My Childhood Friend” (1983; in LR).

“Music of Erich Zann, The.”

Short story (3,480 words); probably written in December 1921. First published in the National Amateur(March 1922); rpt. WT(May 1925) and WT(November 1934); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in TD.

The narrator has “examined maps of the city with the greatest of care,” but he cannot find the Rue d’Auseil, where he once dwelt as an “impoverished student of metaphysics” and heard the music of Erich Zann. Zann is a mute viol-player who played in a cheap theatre orchestra and dwelt in the garret apartment of a boarding-house run by “the paralytic Blandot”; the narrator, occupying a room on the fifth floor, occasionally hears Zann playing wild tunes featuring harmo

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nies that seem to have no relation to any known style of music. One night he meets Zann in the hallway and asks to listen in while he plays; Zann accedes, but plays only ordinary music, although it is nevertheless affecting and apparently of his own composition. When the narrator asks Zann to play some of his weirder numbers, and even begins to whistle one of them, Zann reacts with horror and covers the narrator’s mouth with his hand. When the narrator attempts to look out the curtained window of the apartment, Zann prevents him from doing so. Later Zann has the narrator move to a lower floor so that he can no longer hear the music. One night, as the narrator comes to Zann’s door, he hears “the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound” and later hears an “awful, inarticulate cry which only the mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish.” Demanding entry, he is let in by a harried Zann, who manages to calm himself and writes a scribbled note saying that he will prepare “a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him.” An hour passes while Zann writes; then a strange sound seems to come from the curtained window: “…it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note….” Zann immediately stops writing, picks up his viol, and commences to play with demoniac fury: “He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out….” The glass of the window breaks, blowing out the candle and plunging the room into darkness; a sudden gust of wind catches up the manuscript and bears it out the window. As the narrator attempts to save it, he gains his first and last look out that lofty window, but sees “only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth.” The narrator runs into Zann in an effort to flee, encountering the mad player still playing mechanically even though he seems to be dead. Rushing from the building, he finds the outside world seemingly normal. But he has, from that time, been unable to find the Rue d’Auseil.

HPL always considered the tale among his best, although in later years noted that it had a sort of negative value: it lacked the flaws—notably overexplicitness and overwriting—that marred some of his other works, both before and after. It might, however, be said that HPL erred on the side of underexplicitness in the very nebulous horror to be seen through Zann’s garret window. In referring to Zann’s instrument throughout the story as a “viol,” HPL appears to mean the stringed instrument played between the legs and shaped like a cello; the term is not a poeticism for violin. HPL confirms this when he refers to Zann as a “‘cellist” (HPL to Elizabeth Toldridge, [October 31, 1931?; ms., JHL]; that is, violoncellist.

The story appears to be set in Paris. The French critic Jacques Bergier claimed to have corresponded with HPL late in the latter’s life and purportedly asked him how and when he had ever seen Paris in order to derive so convincing an atmosphere for the tale; HPL is said to have replied, “In a dream, with Poe” (Jacques Bergier, “Lovecraft, ce grand génie venu d’ailleurs,” PlanèteNo. 1 [October– November 1961]: 43–46). This story is probably apocryphal, as there is no evidence that Bergier corresponded with HPL. HPL himself stated, shortly after writing the story, “It is not, as a whole, a dream, though I have dreamt of steep streets like the Rue d’Auseil” (HPL to Frank Belknap Long, February 8,

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1922; SL1.166–7). The word Auseildoes not exist in French (nor does Zannexist in German), but it has plausibly been asserted that the place name is meant to suggest the phrase au seuil(“at the threshold”)—that is, that both Zann’s room and his music are at the threshold between the real and the unreal. HPL knew only a smattering of French, but he could have come up with such an elementary coinage.

The story was among the most frequently reprinted in HPL’s lifetime. Aside from the appearances listed above, it was included in Dashiell Hammett’s celebrated anthology, Creeps by Night(1931) and its various reprints (e.g., Modern Tales of Horror[1932]); it was reprinted in the Evening Standard (London) (24 October 1932), occupying a full page of the newspaper. It was to have appeared in an anthology from the Denis Archer firm, but HPL’s permission came too late to allow its inclusion. It was one of the first of HPL’s tales to be included in a textbook: James B.Hall and Joseph Langland’s The Short Story(1956).

See John Strysik, “The Movie of Erich Zann and Others,” LSNo. 5 (Fall 1981): 29–32; Donald R.Burleson, “‘The Music of Erich Zann’ as Fugue,” LSNo. 6 (Spring 1982): 14–17; Robert M.Price, “Erich Zann and the Rue d’Auseil,” LSNos. 22/23 (Fall 1990): 13–14; Carl Buchanan, “‘The Music of Erich Zann’: A Psychological Interpretation (or Two),” LSNo. 27 (Fall 1992): 10–13. Musides.

In “The Tree,” the sculptor who poisons his friend Kalos in order that he might win the competition they are engaged in to create a statue of Tyché for the Tyrant of Syracuse. He is killed and his sculpture destroyed by a limb from the tree at Kalos’ tomb that breaks off in a storm. The name means “son of the Muses” in Greek.

Mwanu.

In “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” he is the chief of the Kaliri tribe in the Congo. It is he who confirms to Arthur Jermyn the legends that Arthur has heard about his ancestry. “My Favourite Character.”

Poem (36 lines in 6 stanzas); written on January 31, 1925. First published in the Brooklynite(January 1926).

This comic poem—in which HPL examines numerous characters in classic and contemporary works of literature, but then decides that, in regard to determining his favorite, “I’ll frankly give myself the nomination”—was written for a Blue Pencil Club meeting, in which amateurs were asked to prepare literary contributions on a stated topic.

“Mysteries of the Heavens Revealed by Astronomy.”

Series of astronomy columns for the Asheville[N.C.] Gazette-News(February 16–May 17, 1915). The series, as published, consists of thirteen sections, some subdivided into two parts: I. “The Sky and Its Contents” (February 16); II. “The Solar System” (February 20); III. “The Sun” (February 23); IV. “The Inferior Planets” (February 27); V. “Eclipses” (March 2); VI. “The Earth and Its Moon” (March 6); VII. “Mars and the Asteroids” (March 9); VIII. “The Outer Planets” (March 13 and 27); IX. “Comets and Meteors” (March 16 and 30); X. “The Stars” (March 20 and 23); XI. “Clusters and Nebulae” (April 13 and 16); XII. “The Constella

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tions” (April 27 and May 1); XIII. “Telescopes and Observatories” (May 11 and 17). However, the first installment announced the series as consisting of fourteen sections, so it appears that section XIV and, probably, the final segment of XIII are lost. Librarians at the Asheville Public Library report that several issues following May 17 are missing, and it is likely that the missing segments appeared here. In the first installment HPL describes the series as “designed for persons having no previous knowledge of astronomy. Only the simplest and most interesting parts of the subject have here been included.” HPL’s boyhood friend Chester P.Munroe (at this time working in Asheville) probably arranged to have HPL write the articles for the local paper, although there is no documentary evidence to support this assertion. Late in life HPL unearthed the articles and remarked: “…their obsoleteness completely bowled me over. The progress of the science in the last twenty or thirty years had left me utterly behind…” ( SL5.422).

“Mysterious Ship, The.”

Juvenile story (460 words); written 1902. First published in SR;corrected text in Juvenilia: 1897– 1905(1985) and MW

A “strange brig” docks at various ports, with the result that various individuals are found to have disappeared. The ship goes all over the world and deposits its kidnapped individuals at the North Pole. At this point HPL relates a “geographical fact” that “At the N. Pole there exists a vast continent composed of volcanic soil, a portion of which is open to explorers. It is called ‘No-Mans Land.’” Some unnamed individuals find the kidnapped individuals, who then go to their respective homes and are showered with honors.

HPL has prepared this story as a twelve-page booklet, with the imprint: “The Royal Press. 1902.” He is clearly aiming for dramatic concision: some of the nine chapters of the story are no more than twenty-five words in length. A revised or elaborated version of the story has recently been found in the HPL materials collected by August Derleth at Arkham House. This version (still unpublished) fleshes out each chapter to about seventy-five to one hundred words each, so that the total comes to 780 words, almost twice the length of the original.

“Mystery of Murdon Grange, The.”

Round-robin serial tale; apparently “published” in a typewritten manuscript magazine, Hesperia, circulated by HPL in 1918–21. Apparently nonextant.

HPL first describes the item in a letter dated June 27, 1918: “My Hesperiawill be critical & educational in object, though I am ‘sugar-coating’ the first number by ‘printing’ a conclusion of the serial The Mystery of Murdon Grange. …It is outwardly done on the patchwork plan as before—each chapter bears one of my different aliases—Ward Phillips—Ames Dorrance Rowley—L.Theobald, &c.” (SL 1.68). This would seem to suggest that the serial—evidently a parody of a dime-novel mystery— was written entirely by HPL, each chapter or segment affixed with a different pseudonym; but the one segment that has actually been located suggests otherwise. This segment appeared in the amateur journal Spindrift5, No. 1 (Christmas 1917): 26–27, and contains the end of chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3; it is signed “B[enjamin] Winskill,” an amateur journalist living in Buxted, Sussex, UK. The journal was edited by Ernest Lionel McKeag of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

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What this suggests is that the story was a round-robin serial, with several different amateurs writing various segments; at best, HPL wrote one or more subsequent chapters in Hesperia,perhaps issuing them as continuations of the serial presumably begun in Spindrift. HPL never mentions “The Mystery of Murdon Grange” in any other extant correspondence, but mentions Hesperiain June 1921 as an ongoing enterprise ( SL1.136). HPL would type several carbon copies of the paper and send each copy on a designated round of circulation to amateurs; HPL appears to allude to it in “Amateur Journalism: Its Possible Needs and Betterment” (a lecture delivered on September 5, 1920): “I myself attempted to circulate [a manuscript magazine] two years ago, yet it disappeared before it could leave New England” ( MW449). No issues of Hesperiahave been found.

“Mystery of the Grave-yard; or, ‘A Dead Man’s Revenge’: A Detective Story, The.” Juvenile story (1,310 words); written c. 1898–99. First published in SR;corrected text in Juvenilia: 1897–1905(1985) and MW

Joseph Burns has died. Burns’s will instructs the rector, Mr. Dobson, to drop a ball in his tomb at a spot marked “A.” He does so and disappears. A man named Bell announces himself at the residence of Dobson’s daughter, saying that he will restore her father for the sum of £10,000. The daughter, thinking fast, calls the police and cries, “Send King John!” King John, arriving in a flash, finds that Bell has jumped out the window. He chases Bell to the train station, but Bell gets on a train as it is pulling out of the station. There is no telegraph service between the town of Mainville, where the action is taking place, and the “large city” of Kent, where the train is headed. King John rushes to a hackney cab office and says to a black hackman that he will give him two dollars (even though pounds were mentioned before) if he can get him to Kent in fifteen minutes. Bell arrives in Kent, meets with his band of desperadoes (which includes a woman named Lindy), and is about to depart with them on a ship when King John dramatically arrives, declaring: “John Bell, I arrest you in the Queen’s name!” At the trial, it is revealed that Dobson had fallen down a trapdoor at the spot marked “A” and had been kept in a “brilliantly lighted, and palatial apartment” until he rescues himself by making a wax impression of the key to the door and makes a dramatic entrance at the trial. Bell is sent to prison for life; Miss Dobson has become Mrs. King John.

The story is clearly influenced by the dime novel, a form of popular fiction widely read by unsophisticated readers from 1860 to the early twentieth century. HPL himself admitted reading several series of adventure stories in dime-novel format, including those focusing on such “heroes” as Nick Carter, Old King Brady, and Prince John. Possibly HPL’s King John is a fusion (at least in name) of Old King Brady and Prince John. (King John is presumably the hero of another lost HPL story written around this time, “John, the Detective.”) Many dime novels suggested the supernatural but explained it away at the end, as HPL’s story does, and many had frenetic, action-packed plots. HPL also attempts a rudimentary form of dialect in the speech of the hackman.

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N

“Nameless City, The.”

Short story (5,070 words); probably written in mid- to late January 1921. First published in the Wolverine(November 1921); rpt Fanciful Tales(Fall 1936) and WT(November 1938); first collected in O;corrected text in D.

An archaeologist seeks to explore the nameless city, which lies “remote in the desert of Araby.” It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred “the mad poet” dreamed the night before he wrote his “unexplainable couplet”:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

The narrator burrows into the sand-choked apertures that lead into some of the larger structures of the city. He is disturbed by the odd proportions of a temple into which he crawls, for the ceiling is very low to the ground and he can scarcely kneel upright in it. He descends an immense staircase that leads down into the bowels of the earth, where he finds a large but still very low-built hall with odd cases lining the walls and frescoes covering the walls and ceiling. The creatures in the cases are very peculiar—apparently reptilian, but in size approximating a small man. Even though it is these anomalous entities who are portrayed in the frescoes, the narrator convinces himself that they are mere totem-animals for the human beings who must have built the city and that the historical tableaux depicted in the frescoes are metaphors for the actual (human) history of the place. But this delusion is shattered when the narrator perceives a gust of cold wind emerging from the end of the hallway, where a great bronze gate lies open and from which a strange phosphorescence emerges. He then sees in the luminous abyss the entities themselves rushing in a stream before him. Somehow he manages to escape and tell his story.

HPL admits ( SL1.122) that it was largely inspired by a dream, which in turn was triggered by a suggestive phrase in Dunsany’s Book of Wonder,“The un

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reverberate blackness of the abyss” (the last line of “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men”). A more concrete source is the entry on “Arabia” in the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,which HPL owned. He copied down part of this entry in his commonplace book (#47), especially the part about “Irem, the City of Pillars…supposed to have been erected by Shedad, the latest despot of Ad, in the regions of Hadramaut, and which yet, after the annihilation of its tenants, remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-favoured traveller.” HPL mentions Irem in passing in his tale, suggesting that the nameless city was an even older city. A later entry in the commonplace book (#59) is clearly an account of the dream that inspired the story: “Man in strange subterranean chamber—seeks to force door of bronze—overwhelmed by influx of waters.”

Although the tale remained among HPL’s favorites, he said it was “rejected by all the paying editors” (HPL to Duane W.Rimel, February 14, 1934; ms, JHL). WTrejected it twice. In early 1932 the story was accepted by Carl Swanson for a new magazine, Galaxy,but it never got off the ground. The Fantasy Fanaccepted it but also failed before it could be published. Julius Schwartz’s Fantasy Magazinerejected it, and The Galleonmay also have done so. It finally appeared in the semiprofessional magazine Fanciful Tales,edited by Wilson Shepherd and Donald A.Wollheim, with “59 bad misprints” ( SL5.368).

Abdul Alhazred makes his first appearance in HPL’s work in this story, although he is not yet declared to be the author of the Necronomicon . The basic scenario of the tale was utilized, with vast expansion of depth and detail, in At the Mountains of Madness

See Dan Clore, “Overdetermination and Enigma in Alhazred’s Cryptic Couplet,” LSNo. 34 (Spring 1996): 11–13.

Narrators, Unidentified.

Many of HPL’s tales are narrated by individuals who, although not identified by name, either play an integral part in the story or serve merely as the conduit through which the events of the story are conveyed. They are described briefly below:

“The Beast in the Cave”: The narrator becomes lost exploring the Mammoth Cave. In trying to escape, he encounters and kills a denizen of the cave, who turns out to be not a beast but a man. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”: The narrator is an intern at the state (New York) psychopathic institution. It is he who cares for Joe Slater and who devises a “cosmic radio” to communicate with the “dream-soul” (actually an extraterrestrial entity) who temporarily inhabits Slater’s body. “The Book”: The narrator of the fragment obtains an ancient handwritten volume—presumably from a book dealer. He perceives that he is followed home, “for he who passes the gateways [to which the book is a “key”] always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone.” Upon reading the book, he finds he can no longer “see the world as I had known it.”

“The Colour out of Space”: The narrator is a surveyor, working on the outskirts of Arkham where a new reservoir is to be built. He finds that those living there consider the area of the former Nahum Gardner farm to be “evil,” but no

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one will divulge any information as to why, except the aged Ammi Pierce. The narrator serves as a mouthpiece for Pierce’s story.

“The Crawling Chaos”: The narrator, who is accidentally administered an overdose of opium, tells the ensuing drug-induced vision, ending in his witnessing the destruction of the world. “The Curse of Yig”: The narrator is researching snake lore in Oklahoma, investigating the legend of Yig. The curator of an insane asylum reveals to him the only surviving half-human, half-snake offspring of Yig and a human female.

“Dagon”: The narrator, a supercargo on an unspecified sailing vessel, is captured in the Pacific Ocean by a German man-of-war. He escapes in a small boat and, after several days of drifting, finds himself run aground. He encounters first a Cyclopean monolith bearing strange marine carvings, then a hideous monster of the kind depicted on the monolith. He escapes and ultimately finds himself confined in a hospital in San Francisco. He later comes to believe that he is still pursued by the creature.

“The Disinterment”: The narrator awakens in a hospital bed to find that he was stricken with leprosy and treated for it by his friend Marshall Andrews. He learns that Andrews has unorthodoxly “cured” him of the disease by transplanting his head to the body of an African American.

“The Electric Executioner”: The narrator is an auditor with the Tlaxcala Mining Company of San Francisco. He is tasked with finding one Arthur Feldon, who disappeared in Mexico with important company papers. He finds himself on a train in the company of a dangerous maniac, who claims to have devised a hoodlike instrument for performing executions. The narrator tricks the madman into donning the device, and the man is accidentally killed by it. The narrator faints, but is later informed that he was alone in the train car.

“The Evil Clergyman”: The narrator investigates the attic chamber of an absent clergyman, whose library contains not only theological and classical books, but also treatises on magic. Somehow, the narrator invokes the clergyman, who alters the appearance of the narrator to resemble his own. Since this is not a story, but an account of an actual dream from a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, the “narrator” is HPL himself.

“Ex Oblivione”: The narrator, weary with the “ugly trifles of existence,” begins dreaming of a gate in a “golden valley,” later discovering that the gate leads to oblivion.

“The Festival”: The narrator visits his ancestral (seventeenth century) home in Kingsport because his ancestors are bidden to “keep festival…once every century, that the memory of primal secrets not be forgotten.” When the identity of the old man he encounters there—“the true deputy of my fathers”— is accidentally revealed to him, he leaps into the underground river beneath the house and is found the next day half frozen in the harbor. Those who tend to him at the hospital dismiss his account of his experiences as a “psychosis,” although he is convinced his experience was real. “From Beyond”: The narrator is the “best friend” of the crazed inventor and philosopher Crawford Tillinghast. Tillinghast demonstrates for him a weird device that reveals the existence of creatures that cannot be perceived by the five

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senses. In terror, the narrator fires his revolver at Tillinghast’s machine and destroys it, and thus is unable to prove what Tillinghast has shown him.

“The Ghost-Eater”: Traveling on foot, the narrator encounters a house in a deserted wood, where he stays for the evening, to encounter what he later learns may have been a werewolf. “The Green Meadow”: The narrator (writing in classical Greek) tells of how he finds himself near a stream on a peninsula that breaks off and floats away. He approaches an island and experiences a revelation, which is not revealed, as the concluding text of his narrative is illegible. “The Haunter of the Dark”: The narrator, perhaps a detective, is probably the most distant observer of any story by HPL—his presence hinted at only by the invitation, “let us summarise the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of [Robert Blake,] their chief actor.”

“He”: Increasingly disillusioned by his residence in New York City, the narrator seeks out the few remaining havens of antiquity in the city. He encounters an elderly man—a kindred spirit—who leads him to an out-of-the-way place where he is shown pandemoniac visions of a New York of both the past and the future. The narrator is found on the street, badly battered and unable to retrace his way back to the old man’s place. He ultimately returns “home to the pure New England lanes.” Though developed only rudimentarily, the narrator is perhaps the most autobiographical of HPL’s characters in spirit.

“Herbert West—Reanimator”: The narrator is a friend and colleague of Herbert West, first as fellow medical student, then later a partner in practice. He observes the outcome of all West’s experiments and witnesses West’s demise at the hands of West’s partially successful experiments in reanimation— a fate he himself escapes because he was merely West’s assistant.

“The Hound”: The narrator and his colleague, St. John, are graverobbers and “neurotic virtuosi,” who amass a museum of charnel trophies. After St. John is destroyed by the creature from whom they steal an ancient amulet, the narrator vows to take his own life to escape the fate that befell his friend.

“Hypnos”: The narrator, a sculptor, claims to have had a friend who led him on various dream voyages, and who perished after offending Hypnos, “lord of sleep,” leaving him a perfectly sculptured bust of marble. Quite naturally, the narrator is considered mad, the bust being thought to be his own handiwork.

“In the Vault”: The narrator is the personal physician and confidant of George Birch, the careless undertaker to whom the events of the story are told.

“The Loved Dead”: The reclusive narrator tells of the onset and progression of his necrophilia, before taking his own life as he is about to be apprehended by the police.

“The Lurking Fear”: Accompanied by two friends, the narrator seeks “the lurking fear” in the deserted Martense mansion on Tempest Mountain. His investigation reveals the presence of a race of apelike entities—the degenerate offspring of the Martense family—living in a network of tunnels beneath the house.

“Medusa’s Coil”: The narrator is a traveler in Missouri who seeks lodging as night approaches. He comes to the dilapidated home of Antoine de Russy, who reluctantly allows him to spend the night. The narrator hears from de Russy the tale of his son, Denis, and his strange wife, Marceline, both dead now and both

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buried in the cellar by de Russy. Later, as the two observe the painting of the wife, the narrator senses that the painting is animated, and in terror he shoots it with his pistol, thereby revivifying her corpse in the cellar. As de Russy and the narrator flee, the house is accidentally set afire. In town, the narrator is informed that the house had burned down some years ago.

“The Moon-Bog”: Denys Barry invites his friend, the narrator, to visit him at his new home—his ancestral estate—in Kilderry, Ireland. The narrator witnesses Barry’s demise at the hands of the vengeful spirits that inhabit the bog that Barry drains.

“The Mound”: The narrator goes to Oklahoma to investigate and corroborate a ghost-tale he had heard among the white settlers and Indians. He discovers the magnetic cylinder containing the narrative of Panfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, concerning the subterranean realm of K’n-yan. “The Music of Erich Zann”: The narrator, a student of metaphysics, takes up residence in an ancient building on the Rue d’Auseil. There he hears the unearthly music of Erich Zann, whom he tries to meet so that he may hear more of Zann’s music. One night he visits Zann, when he hears Zann call out as if in terror. Zann begins playing maniacally, and when they hear strange rattlings at Zann’s garret window, the narrator looks through it, but sees only “the blackness of space illimitable.” He flees the house, and when he tries to find it again he cannot.

“The Nameless City”: In the desert of Araby, the narrator discovers an ancient “nameless city,” which he explores only to find that it was not fashioned by men but by strange, reptilian creatures. “The Night Ocean”: The narrator, an artist, tells of the nebulous, unseen presences he senses on the beach or in the ocean during his vacation to a tourist area during the off season.

“Nyarlathotep”: The narrator confusedly recalls the coming of a mysterious Pharaoh-like individual named Nyarlathotep, who appears to be the harbinger of the collapse of the universe. “The Outsider”: The narrator knows nothing of his ancestry or origins—indeed, little at all about himself. He thinks that he lives in a castle, but when he ascends to its tower to look at the surrounding landscape, he emerges at ground level—suggesting that his dwelling had been far underground. He goes exploring and finds a home in which much revelry is taking place. Just as he attempts to meet the inhabitants, they flee in terror from a hideous creature that has entered the home simultaneously with the narrator. The narrator is shocked to learn that the creature is merely his reflection in a mirror.

“The Picture in the House”: The narrator, who is bicycling through the Miskatonic Valley seeking genealogical data, is caught in a rainstorm and seeks shelter in a ramshackle house, where he encounters a preternaturally old man who turns out to be a cannibal.

“Polaris”: In dream, the narrator is tasked with manning the watch-tower of Thapnen, to warn against a siege by the city’s foes, the Inutos. Unfortunately, the Pole Star casts a spell on him, and he falls asleep at his post. He awakens to real life, but believes he still dreams and vainly tries to “awaken” so that he can warn his fellow Lomarians of imminent attack by the Inutos.

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“The Shadow over Innsmouth”: See Olmstead, Robert (whose name is provided only in HPL’s notes for that story).

“The Shunned House”: The narrator is the nephew of Dr. Elihu Whipple; his own profession is not specified. As a youth, the narrator heard much about the mysterious “shunned house,” about which Whipple had conducted considerable research. His interest piqued by his uncle’s findings, he visits the house with increasing frequency, until he stays there overnight and observes “the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation” that he had seen there in his youth. He and Whipple attempt to eradicate the entity, but during their vigil the entity overtakes Whipple and the narrator is compelled to kill his uncle to release the old man from the grip of the entity. Finally, he pours carboys of acid into the earth to destroy the thing.

“The Silver Key”: See Phillips, Ward (who is identified as the narrator only in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”).

“The Transition of Juan Romero”: The narrator is a laborer in the Norton Mine, in the American Southwest. He and Romero investigate a strange throbbing sound emanating from the mine. Romero becomes separated from the narrator and disappears into the cave. The narrator sees something he cannot describe, nor can he be certain whether he has seen anything or merely dreamt it, but somehow he escapes the mysterious fate that befalls Romero.

“What the Moon Brings”: The narrator admits to being terrified of the moon and moonlight, because they seem to transform the known landscape into something unfamiliar and hideous. “Nathicana.”

Poem (99 lines); probably written no later than 1920, apparently in conjunction with Alfred Galpin. First published in the Vagrant([Spring 1927]).

A poem speaking in Poe-like accents of the mysterious woman Nathicana. It was meant as “a parody on those stylistic excesses which really have no basic meaning” (HPL to Donald Wandrei, [August 2, 1927]; ms., JHL). Apparently Galpin was somehow involved in the composition, as the pseudonym under which the poem was published (“Albert Frederick Willie”) alludes in its first two names to Galpin and in its last name to his mother’s maiden name, Willy.

Necronomicon.

Mythical book of occult lore invented by HPL.

The work is first cited by name in “The Hound” (1922), although its purported author, Abdul Alhazred, was cited as the author of an “unexplainable couplet” in “The Nameless City” (1921). HPL states that the name Abdul Alhazred was supplied to him at the age of five by “a family elder—the family lawyer [Albert A. Baker], as it happens—but I can’t remember whether I asked him to make up an Arabic name for me, or whether I merely asked him to criticise a choice I had otherwise made” (HPL to Robert E.Howard, January 16, 1932; AHT). The coinage was somewhat unfortunate, as it contains a reduplicated article (Abd ul Alhazred). A more idiomatic coinage would have been Abd el-Hazred.

HPL cited his book so frequently in his tales that by late 1927 he felt the need to write a “History of the Necronomicon” to keep his references consistent. At that time he noted that the work had been written by Alhazred around 700 C.E. and titled by him Al Azif(a term HPL lifted from Samuel Henley’s notes to Wil

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liam Beckford’s Vathek,referring to the nocturnal buzzing of insects). It was translated into Greek in 950 by Theodorus Philetas but subsequently banned by the patriarch Michael. HPL then attributes a Latin translation of 1228 to Olaus Wormius, mistakenly believing that this seventeenth-century Danish scholar lived in the thirteenth century (see “Regner Lodbrog’s Epicedium”). HPL notes an English translation by John Dee—a detail Frank Belknap Long provided in “The Space-Eaters” ( WT, July 1928), written earlier in 1927 and read by HPL in manuscript (see SL2.171–72). In a late letter ( SL5.418) HPL attempts a derivation of the Greek title: “ nekros,corpse; nomos,law; eikon, image=An Image [or Picture] of the Law of the Dead.” Unfortunately, HPL is almost entirely wrong. By the laws of Greek etymology, the word would derive from nekros, nemo(to divide, hence to examine or classify), and -ikon(neuter adjectival suffix)=“An examination or classification of the dead.”

How HPL came up with the idea of the Necronomiconis unclear. His first mythical book was the Pnakotic Manuscripts, cited in “Polaris” (1918); an unnamed book is mentioned in “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). Donald R.Burleson (“Lovecraft: The Hawthorne Influence,” Extrapolation22 [Fall 1981]: 267) notes that an “old volume in a large library,—every one to be afraid to unclasp and open it, because it was said to be a book of magic” cited in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks, which HPL is known to have read around 1920; but recall that among the “infinite array of stage properties” that HPL in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” identifies in the standard Gothic novel were “mouldy hidden manuscripts.” Poe’s tales are also full of allusions to real and imaginary books. Probably no single source is to be identified in HPL’s use of the mythical book.

HPL’s longest quotations from the Necronomiconoccur in “The Festival” (1923) and “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). Indeed, the book is rarely quoted elsewhere; instead, its contents are merely alluded to. Robert M.Price (“Genres in the Lovecraftian Library,” CryptNo. 3 [Candlemas 1982]: 14–17) identifies a shift in HPL’s use of the book, from a demonology (guide to heretical beliefs) to a grimoire (a book of spells and incantations). Still later, as HPL “demythologized” his imaginary pantheon of “gods” and revealed them to be merely extraterrestrial aliens, the Necronomiconis shown to be considerably in error in regard to the true nature of these entities: in At the Mountains of Madnessthe narrator notes that the Old Ones of Antarctica were “the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomiconaffrightedly hint about.”

When asked late in life by James Blish why he did not write the Necronomiconhimself, HPL noted that in “The Dunwich Horror” he had cited from page 751 of the work, making the writing of such a book a very extensive undertaking. He wisely added: “…one can never produceanything even a tenth as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hintabout. If anyone were to try to writethe Necronomicon,it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it.” This has not stopped several individuals over the past twenty-five years from producing books bearing the title Necronomicon,some of which are indeed clever hoaxes but surely very far from HPL’s own conception of the work.

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See August Derleth, “The Making of a Hoax” (in DB); Mark Owings, The Necronomicon: A Study (Baltimore: Mirage Associates, 1967); Robert M.Price, “Higher Criticism and the Necronomicon” LS No. 6 (Spring 1982): 3–13; Dan Clore, “The Lurker at the Threshold of Interpretation: Hoax Necronomiconsand Paratextual Noise,” LSNo. 42 (Summer 2001): 64–74.

“Nemesis.”

Poem (55 lines in 11 stanzas); written on November 1, 1917. First published in Vagrant(June 1918); rpt. WT(April 1924).

Using the meter of Swinburne’s Hertha,HPL notes that the poem “presents the conception, tenable to the orthodox mind, that nightmares are the punishments meted out to the soul for sins committed in previous incarnations—perhaps millions of years ago!” ( SL1.51). HPL parodies the poem in “A Brumalian Wish” (among his Christmas greetings). Alfred Galpin wrote an imitation of it in “SelenaioPhantasma” ( Conservative,July 1918). HPL used ll. 8–10 as the epigraph to “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935).

See Donald R.Burleson, “On Lovecraft’s ‘Nemesis,’” LSNo. 21 (Spring 1990): 40–42. “News Notes.”

Column in the United Amateur,customarily written by the Official Editor of the UAPA. HPL wrote the columns for July 1917; September 1918 (in part); September, November 1920; January, March, May, July, September, November 1921; January, March, May 1922; May 1924; July 1925. The articles deal with the activities of various amateurs; HPL makes sure to note several of his own colleagues, including W.Paul Cook, Maurice W.Moe, George Julian Houtain, Alfred Galpin, Winifred Virginia Jackson, Myrta Alice Little, Sonia H.Greene (discussed extensively in the columns for September 1921 and May 1924), Samuel Loveman, Clark Ashton Smith, and Frank Belknap Long. Ni, Hak.

In “Collapsing Cosmoses,” a military commander in the “intradimensional city of Kastor-Ya” who takes steps to combat the interstellar menace approaching the planet.

“Nietzscheism and Realism.”

Essay (1,680 words); probably written in the summer of 1921. First published in the Rainbow (October 1921; as “Nietscheism and Realism”); rpt. MW

The text is a series of excerpts from two letters written to Sonia H.Greene (HPL to the Gallomo, August 21, 1921; AHT). HPL offers cynical reflections on politics and society, many of them inspired (in spite of the title) not from Nietzsche but from Schopenhauer. In politics, HPL recommends an aristocracy “because I deem it the only agency for the creation of those refinements which make life endurable for the human animal of high organisation.” Democracy and ochlocracy (rule of the mob), on the other hand, merely squanders “the aesthetic and intellectual resources which aristocracy bequeathed them and which they could never have created for themselves.” HPL considerably refined these views in his later political philosophy but never wholly abandoned them.

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“Night Ocean, The.”

Short story (9,840 words); written in collaboration with R.H.Barlow, summer 1936. First published in the Californian(Winter 1936); first collected in HM

The narrator, a painter, comes to a sea resort named Ellston Beach to rest from the grueling task of completing a painting for a competition. He rents a bungalow far from the town, facing directly onto the beach and the ocean. Initially, as he wanders the beach and swims in the ocean, he appears to derive benefit from the tranquil atmosphere; but gradually he begins to feel uneasy. He hears that a few tourists had drowned inexplicably. Then he comes upon an object on the beach that looks like a rotted hand that may have been gnawed upon by some sea creature. At length, as his loneliness and unease continue, he seems to see—in the course of a furious rainstorm—a strange figure (“a dog, a human being, or something more strange”) emerging from the water, carrying something across its shoulder. For a moment the narrator thinks this creature is approaching his bungalow, but it veers away at the last minute. The narrator is left pondering the mysteries of the night ocean. The manuscript of this story has recently been discovered (it had been micro-filmed by Barlow’s literary executor, George T.Smisor), and it shows that all the plotting and most of the prose is Barlow’s, with HPL revising the language throughout but contributing perhaps less than 10% to the overall story. HPL himself told Hyman Bradofsky (editor of the Californian) that he “ripped the text to pieces in spots” (HPL to Hyman Bradofsky, November 4, 1936; ms., JHL); but in letters to others he commends the story highly, something he is not likely to have done if he had had a great deal to do with it.

The story is a finely atmospheric weird tale. It comes very close—closer, perhaps, than any of HPL’s own works with the exception of ‘The Colour out of Space”—to capturing the essential spirit of the weird, as HPL wrote of some of Blackwood’s works in “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: “Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note…. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.”

See Brian Humphreys, “‘The Night Ocean’ and the Subtleties of Cosmicism,” LSNo. 30 (Spring 1994): 14–21.

“Nightmare Lake, The.”

Poem (66 lines); probably written in the fall of 1919. First published in Vagrant(December 1919). In “distant Zan” there is an ominous lake filled with dreadful creatures—lizards, snakes, ravens, vampires, necrophagi—but the final horror comes when the narrator realizes that the lake covers over a sunken city that contains still greater monstrosities.

Nith.

In “The Cats of Ulthar,” a “lean” notary in Ulthar.

Norrys, Capt. Edward.

In “The Rats in the Walls,” he is a former member of the Royal Flying Corps and friend of Alfred Delapore. Norrys assists Alfred’s father (the narrator of the story) in the restoration of Exham Priory and helps

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him attempt to find the source of the mysterious sound of rats heard throughout the castle. Ultimately the senior Delapore kills and partially devours him.

Northam, Lord.

In “The Descendant,” an eccentric, aged scholar, of a family whose ancestral line reaches back to Roman Britain, who, as a younger man, had explored both formal religions and occult sciences (much like Randolph Carter in “The Silver Key”). When Williams, a young friend, brings him a copy of the Necronomicon,Northam first reacts with horror and then tells a tale of horrors in Roman Britain. Notes on Weird Fiction.

Written c. summer and fall 1933. First published (b, c, and d only) in The Notes & Commonplace Book(Futile Press, 1938). Erroneously published as part of HPL’s “commonplace book” in BWSand SR

In 1933, HPL began to keep notes in a pocket calendar from his concentrated rereading of the classic works of weird fiction, in an attempt to reinvigorate himself for fiction-writing. The notebook contains four items: (a) “Weird Story Plots” (unpublished) consists of brief plot summaries primarily of the works of Poe, Blackwood, Machen, and M.R.James. From those summaries he compiled (b) “A list of certain basic underlying horrors effectively used in weird fiction” and (c) “List of primary ideas motivating possible weird tales,” a further distillation, giving likely motives for weird occurrences. He then composed the rough draft of (d) “Suggestions for writing weird story (the ideaand plot being tentatively decided on)” and “Elements of a Weird Story & Types of Weird Story,” an instructional piece for turning plot ideas into effective stories. HPL eventually polished (d) into “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.”

“Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.”

Essay (1,490 words); probably written in 1933. First published in Amateur Correspondent(May–June 1937); also in Supramundane Stories(Spring 1938) and in Marginalia;rpt. MW.

Presumably written during HPL’s revaluation of the weird classics in the summer and fall of 1933, the essay propounds HPL’s evolved theory of weird fiction as the attempt to “achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law.” It also presents a summary of HPL’s own methods for writing stories, in which he advises the creation of two synopses, one listing events in order of absolute occurrence, the other in order of their narration in the story. The first three publications of the essay derive from three slightly differing manuscripts; the first appearance is probably preferable.

Noyes,———.

In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” he is sent to the railroad station to retrieve Albert Wilmarth to the Akeley farmhouse. His is the “cultivated male human voice” heard on the recordings Akeley sent to Wilmarth. Unknown to Wilmarth, he is an agent of the aliens from Yuggoth.

“Nyarlathotep.”

Prose poem (1,150 words); probably written in November or December 1920. First published in the United Amateur(dated November 1920,

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but issued at least two months later); rpt. National Amateur(July 1926); first collected in BWS; corrected text in MW;annotated version in CC

In a “season of political and social upheaval,” the people “whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat.” It was then that Nyarlathotep emerged out of Egypt. He begins giving strange exhibitions featuring peculiar instruments of glass and metal and evidently involving anomalous uses of electricity. In one of these exhibitions the narrator sees, on a kind of movie screen, “the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun.” The world seems to be falling apart: buildings are found in ruins, people begin gathering in queues, each of them proceeding in different directions, apparently to their deaths. Finally the universe itself seems to be on the brink of extinction.

HPL notes that the piece not only was based largely on a dream, but also that the first paragraph (presumably following the very brief opening paragraph) was written while he was still half-asleep ( SL1.160). As with “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” the dream involved Samuel Loveman, who wrote HPL the following note: “Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.” HPL states that the peculiar name Nyarlathotep came to him in this dream, but one can conjecture at least a partial influence in the name of Dunsany’s minor god Mynarthitep (mentioned fleetingly in “The Sorrow of Search,” in Time and the Gods) or of the prophet Alhireth-Hotep (mentioned in TheGodsofPegāna). -Hotepis of course an Egyptian root, befitting Nyarlathotep’s Egyptian origin. The fact that Nyarlathotep “had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries” places him in the 22nd Dynasty of Egypt (940–730 B.C.E.).

Will Murray has plausibly conjectured that Nyarlathotep (described in the prose poem as an “itinerant showman”) was based upon Nicola Tesla (1856–1943), the eccentric scientist and inventor who created a sensation at the turn of the century for his strange electrical experiments. Nyarlathotep recurs throughout HPL’s later fiction and becomes one of the chief “gods” in his invented pantheon. But he appears in such widely divergent forms that it may not be possible to establish a single or coherent symbolism for him; to say merely, as some critics have done, that he is a “shape-shifter” (something HPL never genuinely suggests) is only to admit that even his physical form is not consistent from story to story, much less his thematic significance.

See Will Murray, “Behind the Mask of Nyarlathotep,” LSNo. 25 (Fall 1991): 25–29.

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O

O’Brien, Edward J[oseph Harrington] (1890–1941).

Anthologist and literary critic. HPL admired his annual series, The Best Short Stories…(1915f), believing it to be superior to another series, Blanche Colton Williams’s O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories(1919f), which HPL felt reflected commercial rather than literary values. O’Brien cited HPL in the volumes for 1924 (“The Picture in the House” [one star]), 1928 (“The Colour out of Space” [three stars]), and 1929 (“The Dunwich Horror” [three stars], “The Silver Key” [one star]); he published HPL’s “Biographical Notice” in the 1928 volume (it was not repeated in 1929, as such biographies were published only for first-time recipients of three-star ratings). HPL admired O’Brien’s The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age(1929), which HPL deemed “a splendid expose of the vulgar shallowness, insincerity, and worthlessness of American commercial fiction under the false-standarded conditions of the present” ( SL4.91). O’Brien, “Kid.”

In “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a semi-professional boxer (presumably Irish but with “a most unHibernian hooked nose,” suggesting that he may actually be Jewish) who inadvertently kills Buck Robinson, an African American, in an informal bout in Bolton, Mass.

“Observations on Several Parts of America.”

Essay (9,700 words); probably written in the fall of 1928. First published in Marginalia(as “Observations on Several Parts of North America”); rpt. MW.

The first of HPL’s several travelogues, which cover his annual spring and summer voyages; written in the form of an open letter to Maurice W.Moe and meant to be circulated to HPL’s other colleagues (hence it exists as a typescript rather than as an autograph ms.). It deals with HPL’s arrival in Brooklyn in the spring of 1928, progressing through his travels to the Hudson River region, Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Vt. (Vrest Orton’s home near Brattleboro), Athol (W.

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Paul Cook) and Wilbraham (Edith Miniter), Mass., Baltimore, Annapolis, Alexandria and Mt. Vernon (home of George Washington), Washington, D.C., and the Endless Caverns near New Market, Va. Moe excerpted the section on Sleepy Hollow as “Sleepy Hollow To-day” and published it as a signed article in Junior Literature: Book Two,ed. Sterling Leonard and Harold Y.Moffett (New York: Macmillan, 1930). (Moe had served as an assistant editor.)

“Old Bugs.”

Short story (3,010 words); probably written just prior to July 1919. First published in SR;rpt. MW In the year 1950 an old derelict, Old Bugs, haunts Sheehan’s Pool Room in Chicago. Although a drunkard, he exhibits traces of refinement and intelligence; no one can figure out why he carries an old picture of a lovely and elegant woman on his person at all times. One day a young man named Alfred Trever enters the place in order to “see life as it really is.” Trever is the son of Karl Trever, an attorney, and a woman who writes poetry under the name Eleanor Wing. Eleanor had once been married to a man named Alfred Galpin, a brilliant scholar but one imbued with “evil habits, dating from a first drink taken years before in woodland seclusion.” These habits had caused the termination of the marriage; Galpin had gained fleeting fame as an author but eventually dropped from sight. Meanwhile Old Bugs, listening to Alfred Trever tell of his background, suddenly leaps up and dashes the uplifted glass from Trever’s lips, shattering several bottles in the process. Old Bugs dies of overexertion, but Trever is sufficiently repulsed at the whole turn of events that his curiosity for liquor is permanently quenched. When the picture of the woman found on Old Bugs is passed around, Trever realizes that it is of his own mother: Old Bugs is the erstwhile Alfred Galpin. The story was written to dissuade Galpin—who wished to sample alcohol just prior to its being made illegal in July 1919—from engaging in such an activity. It is not nearly as ponderous as it sounds, and is in fact a little masterpiece of comic deflation and self-parody. The name Eleanor Wing is that of a girl in the Appleton High School Press Club; possibly Galpin was attracted to her. Galpin, in a brief introductory note to the first publication, states that at the end of the piece HPL had written: “Now will you be good?!”

“Old Christmas.”

Poem (322 lines); written in late 1917. First published in the Tryout(December 1918); rpt. National Enquirer(December 25, 1919).

HPL’s single longest poem, telling of the genial pleasures of an old English Christmas. HPL sent the poem through the Transatlantic Circulator, a group of Anglo-American amateur journalists; John Ravenor Bullen spoke highly of it: “…the ever-growing charm of eloquence (to which assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeic sound and rhythm, and tone colour contribute their entrancing effect) displayed in the poem under analysis, proclaims Mr. Lovecraft a genuine poet, and ‘Old Christmas’ an example of poetical architecture well-equipped to stand the test of time.”

“Old England and the ‘Hyphen.’”

Essay (1,140 words); probably written in the fall of 1916. First published in the Conservative (October 1916); rpt. MW

England should not be regarded as a foreign country to the “genuine native

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stock” of America, so that it is right that Americans should support the English in the European war. Olmstead, Robert (b. 1906).

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the young man who, on a sight-seeing and genealogical excursion to Newburyport, takes a detour in search of antiquarian sights to the shunned town of Innsmouth. While there, he learns the town’s blighted history, but having learned too much, he barely escapes with his life. In the aftermath of his harrowing experience, he finds through further genealogical study that he shares the ancestry of the hated citizens of Innsmouth; but he decides not to kill himself as others in his family had done when they learned the dreaded secret, but to accept and embrace his fate as one of the hybrid amphibian-people. His great-grandmother is Alice Marsh (not named specifically in the story), daughter of Capt. Obed Marsh and the sea-thing, Pth-thya-l’hi. She married Joshua Orne of Arkham; their daughter Eliza Orne married James Williamson of Cleveland, and their daughter, Mary Williamson, married Henry Olmstead of Akron (neither parent is named specifically in the story). Robert Olmstead is their son. This genealogy is explicitly spelled out only in HPL’s notes to the story (published in Cats[1949]).

Like Olmstead, HPL was an antiquarian and amateur genealogist, inclined to frugality. HPL well recognized the strong influence of heredity in his own life. Photographs of his family show a striking resemblance between HPL and ancestors of generations past. Olmstead was eight years old when his uncle Douglas Williamson committed suicide upon discovering his tainted ancestry. HPL surely was mindful of the madness of his own parents—he was eight years old when his father died in a madhouse.

Olney, Thomas.

In “The Strange High House in the Mist,” a philosopher who “taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay” (Brown University?), who comes with his family to Kingsport, ascends to meet an unnamed bearded man at his house perched atop a lofty cliff, and comes down curiously changed. “Omnipresent Philistine, The.”

Essay (890 words); probably written in the spring of 1924. First published in the Oracle(May 1924); rpt. MW

Largely a response to fellow amateur Paul Livingston Keil, the essay maintains that art should be judged only by aesthetic, not moral, standards, and that the censorship of art is more dangerous than the potential moral or social problems caused by radical art. HPL declares, rather surprisingly, that James Branch Cabell’s Jurgenand James Joyce’s Ulyssesare “significant contributions to contemporary art” (although he later confessed that he never actually attempted to read Ulysses). Orabona.

In “The Horror in the Museum,” the mysterious assistant of George Rogers in Rogers’s Museum in London who helps Rogers capture a god or monster in Alaska and bring it back to the museum. Later it appears that Orabona has allowed the god to feed upon Rogers, with the result that Rogers has been turned into a wax statue.

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Orne, Benjamin.

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the husband of Alice Marsh and the father of Eliza Orne, the maternal grandmother of the narrator, Robert Olmstead.

Orne, Capt James P.

In “The Horror at Martin’s Beach,” the captain of the fishing smack Alma,whose crew captures and kills an enormous sea creature, but is in turn overwhelmed by the creature’s much larger parent. Orne, Simon/Jedediah.

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. Living in Salem, he leaves the town in 1720 after attracting suspicion by failing to grow visibly old. Thirty years later a person named Jedediah Orne, claiming to be his son, returns to Salem and claims his property. Dr. Willett later discovers that Simon and Jedediah are the same person and that Charles Dexter Ward very likely visited him (now living in Prague) as late as 1924. Willett takes measures to destroy Orne. Orton, [Kenneth] Vrest [Teachout] (1897–1986).

Man of letters and friend of HPL. W.Paul Cook introduced HPL to Orton in late 1925. At this time he worked in the advertising department of the American Mercury;later he became an editor of the Saturday Review. He first met HPL on December 22, 1925, and became a member of the Kalem Club, although his attendance was very sporadic. In June 1928 Orton, living outside Brattleboro, Vt, invited HPL to visit for an extended period; HPL stayed from June 10 to June 24. Numerous individuals whom he met during this time were later adapted for use in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), including Orton’s neighbors, the Lees (whose name was used for “Lee’s Swamp” in the story); Charles Crane, who ran “The Pendrifter,” a column in the Brattleboro Daily Reformer;and Bert G.Akley, a self-taught painter and photographer whose name (and, in part, personality) was used for the character Henry Wentworth Akeley. Orton contributed an article on HPL to “The Pendrifter,” entitled “A Weird Writer Is in Our Midst” (June 16, 1928; rpt. LR). HPL visited Orton and his family (then residing in Yonkers) for a short time in April 1929. In late 1931 Orton, now operating the Stephen Daye Press in Brattleboro, arranged for HPL to copyedit and proofread Leon Burr Richardson’s History of Dartmouth College(1932). HPL hoped to do more work for the Stephen Daye Press, but apparently no more assignments were offered to him. Orton published the first bibliography of Theodore Dreiser, Dreiseriana: A Book about His Books(New York: Stratford Press, 1929); among his other works are And So Goes Vermont: A Picture Book of Vermont as It Is(editor) (Weston, Vt.: Countryman Press; New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937) and Goudy, Master of Letters (Chicago: Black Cat Press, 1939). He became celebrated as the founder of the Vermont Country Store. Late in life he wrote a brief memoir, “Recollections of H.P.Lovecraft” ( Whispers,March 1982; in LR).

Osborn, Joe.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” one of the party that exterminates Wilbur Whateley’s twin brother. It is likely that he runs Osborn’s General Store, although HPL does not state this explicitly in the story.

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“Other Gods, The.”

Short story (2,020 words); written on August 14, 1921. First published in the Fantasy Fan(November 1933); rpt. WT(October 1938); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D.

The “gods of earth” have forsaken their beloved mountain Ngranek and have betaken themselves to “unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no man treads”; they have done this ever since a human being from Ulthar, Barzai the Wise, attempted to scale Mt. Ngranek and catch a glimpse of them. Barzai was much learned in the “seven cryptical books of Hsan” and the “Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar,” and knew so much of the gods that he wished to see them dancing on Mt. Ngranek. He undertakes this bold journey with his friend, Atal the priest. For days they climb the rugged mountain, and as they approach the cloud-hung summit Barzai thinks he hears the gods; he redoubles his efforts, leaving Atal far behind. But his eagerness turns to horror. He thinks he actually sees the gods of earth, but instead they are “The othergods! The othergods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!’” Barzai is swept up (“‘Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!’”) and is never seen again.

The story is a textbook example of hubris, similar to many written by Dunsany (see, e.g., “The Revolt of the Home Gods,” in TheGodsofPegāna,1906). The seven cryptical books of Hsan are mentioned again in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath;in the first appearance of this story, “Hsan” was erroneously rendered as “Earth.”

See Robert M.Price, “‘The Other Gods’ and the Four Who Erected Paradise,” CryptNo. 15 (Lammas 1983): 19–20.

Oukranikov, Vasili.

In “The Ghost-Eater,” a Russian who had built a house in the woods between Mayfair and Glendale who is discovered to be a “werewolf and eater of men.” After a Russian count is found with his body mangled, the townspeople kill the wolf; but his ghost returns every May Eve to reenact the murder. “Out of the Æons.”

Short story (10,310 words); ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, probably in August 1933. First published in WT(April 1935); first collected in BWS;corrected text in HM

An ancient mummy is housed in the Cabot Museum of Archaeology in Boston, with an accompanying scroll in indecipherable characters. The mummy and scroll remind the narrator—the curator of the museum—of a wild tale found in the Black Bookor Nameless Cultsof von Junzt, which tells of the god Ghatanothoa, “whom no living thing could behold…without suffering a change more horrible than death itself. Sight of the god, or its image…meant paralysis and petrification of a singularly shocking sort, in which the victim was turned to stone and leather on the outside, while the brain within remained perpetually alive.” Von Junzt goes on to speak of an individual named T’yog who, 175,000 years ago, attempted to scale Mount Yaddith-Gho on the lost continent of Mu, where Ghatanothoa resided, and to “deliver mankind from its brooding menace”; he was protected from Ghatanothoa’s glance by a magic formula, but at the last minute the priests of Ghatanothoa stole the parchment on which the for

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mula was written and substituted another one for it. The antediluvian mummy in the museum, therefore, is T’yog, petrified for millennia by Ghatanothoa.

HPL was working on the story in early August 1933 (see SL4.222). Heald’s contribution is indicated in a letter: “‘Out of the Æons’ may be regarded as a story of my own. The only thing supplied by the alleged authoress is the idea of an ancient mummy found to have a living brain” (HPL to R.H.Barlow, April 20, 1935; ms., JHL). Elsewhere he says: “Regarding the scheduled ‘Out of the Æons’—I should say I didhave a hand in it… I wrotethe damn thing!” ( SL5.130). The story—probably the best of those ghostwritten for Heald—unites the atmosphere of HPL’s early “Dunsanian” tales with that of his later “Mythos” tales: T’yog’s ascent of Yaddith-Gho bears thematic and stylistic similarities with Barzai the Wise’s scaling of Ngranek in “The Other Gods,” and the entire subnarrative about Mu is narrated in a style analogous to that of Dunsany’s tales and plays of gods and men.

See William Fulwiler, “Mu in ‘Bothon’ and ‘Out of the Eons,’” CryptNo. 11 (Candlemas 1983): 20–24. “Outpost, The.”

Poem (52 lines in quatrains); written on November 26, 1929. First published in Bacon’s Essays (Spring 1930); rpt Fantasy Magazine(May 1934).

The subject of the poem is a king of Zimbabwe who “fears to dream.” WTrejected the poem because of its length. HPL probably derived some of the plot and imagery from accounts of Zimbabwe told to him by Edward L.Sechrist, who had actually explored the ruins of the African city. “Outsider, The.”

Short story (2,620 words); probably written in spring or summer 1921. First published in WT(April 1926); rpt. WT(June–July 1931); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in CC A mysterious individual has spent his entire life virtually alone except for some aged person who seems to take care of him. He resides in an ancient castle that has no mirrors. At length he decides to forsake the castle and seek the light by climbing the tallest tower of the edifice. With great effort he manages to ascend the tower and experiences “the purest ecstasy I have ever known: for shining tranquilly through an ornate grating of iron…was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.” But horror follows this spectacle, for he now observes that he is not at some lofty height but has merely reached “the solid ground.”Stunned by this revelation, he walks dazedly through a wooded park where a “venerable ivied castle” stands. This castle is “maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me”; but he detects the sights and sounds of joyous revelry within. He steps through a window of the castle to join the merry band, but at that instant “there occurred one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived”: the partygoers flee madly from some hideous sight, and the protagonist appears to be alone with the monster who has seemingly driven the crowd away in frenzy. He thinks he sees this creature “beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room” and finally does catch a clear glimpse of it. It proves to be a loathsome monstrosity—“a compound of all that is unclean,

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uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.” He seeks to escape the monster, but inadvertently falls forward instead of retreating; at that instant he touches “the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.”It is only then that he realizes that that arch contains “a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.”

On the level of plot, “The Outsider” makes little sense and in fact reads as if a transcription of a dream. It appears, from the Outsider’s various remarks regarding his puzzlement at the present shape of the ivied castle he enters, that he is some long-dead ancestor of the current occupants of the castle. His emergence in the topmost tower of his underground castle places him in a room containing “vast shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size”—clearly the mausoleum of the castle on the surface. Even if the Outsider is some centuried ancestor, there is no explanation for how he has managed to survive—or rise from the dead—after all this time. Whether that castle exists in reality (in which case it is difficult to imagine how it could have an “endless forest” surrounding it) or is merely a product of the Outsider’s imagination is left unclear. Many commentators have attempted to speculate on a literary influence for the concluding image of the Outsider’s touching the mirror and seeing himself. Colin Wilson ( The Strength to Dream,1961) has suggested both Poe’s classic story of a double, “William Wilson,” and also Wilde’s fairy tale “The Birthday of the Infanta,” in which a twelve-year-old princess is initially described as “the most graceful of all and the most tastefully attired” but proves to be “a monster, the most grotesque monster he had ever beheld. Not properly shaped as all other people were, but hunchbacked, and crooked-limbed, with huge lolling head and a mane of black hair.” George T.Wetzel (“The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study,” in FDOC) has put forth Hawthorne’s curious sketch, “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man,” in which a man dreams that he is walking down Broadway in a shroud, only discovering the fact by seeing himself in a shop window. There is also a celebrated passage in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1818) in which the monster sees his own reflection for the first time in a pool of water. This influence seems more likely in view of the fact that the earlier scene, where the Outsider disturbs the party by stepping through the window, may also have been derived from Frankenstein:“‘One of the best of [the cottages] I entered, but I had hardly placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted.’”

Preeminently, however, the story is a homage to Poe. August Derleth maintained that “The Outsider” could pass as a lost tale of Poe’s; but HPL’s own later judgment, expressed in a 1931 letter to J.Vernon Shea, seems more accurate: “Others…agree with you in liking ‘The Outsider’, but I can’t say that I share this opinion. To my mind this tale—written a decade ago—is too glibly mechanicalin its climactic effect, & almost comic in the bombastic pomposity of its language. As I re-read it, I can hardly understand how I could have let myself be tangled up in such baroque & windy rhetoric as recently as ten years ago. It represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height” ( SL3.379). Specifically, the tale’s opening paragraphs closely echo the opening

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of “Berenice,” while the scene in the brilliantly lit castle brings to mind the lavish party scene in “The Masque of the Red Death.”

In 1934 HPL provided an interesting sidelight into the composition of the story. As recollected by R.H.Barlow, HPL stated: “‘The Outsider’ [is] a series of climaxes—originally intended to cease with the graveyard episode; then he wondered what would happen if people would see the ghoul; and so included the second climax; finally he decided to have the Thing see itself!”

The autobiographical implications of the story have perhaps been overstressed by critics. The Outsider’s concluding remark—“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men”—has been thought to be prototypical of HPL’s entire life, but this is clearly a considerable exaggeration. The Outsider’s early reflections on his childhood—“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness”—manifestly contradict HPL’s own accounts of his generally happy and carefree childhood. In a very general way “The Outsider” may possibly be indicative of HPL’s own self-image, particularly the image of one who always thought himself ugly and whose mother told at least one individual about her son’s “hideous” face. See David J.Brown, “The Search for Lovecraft’s ‘Outsider,’” Nyctalops2, No. 1 (April 1973): 46–47; Dirk W.Mosig, “The Four Faces of ‘The Outsider,’” Nyctalops2, No. 2 (July 1974): 3–10 (rpt. with revisions in Mosig’s Mosig at Last[West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press, 1997]); William Fulwiler, “Reflections on ‘The Outsider,’” LSNo. 2 (Spring 1980): 3–4; Robert M.Price, “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider,’” CryptNo. 8 (Michaelmas 1982): 11–13; Mollie L.Burleson, “The Outsider: A Woman? ” LS Nos. 22/23 (Fall 1990): 22–23; Donald R.Burleson, “On Lovecraft’s Themes: Touching the Glass” (in ET); Mollie L. Burleson, “Mirror, Mirror: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mirror’ and Lovecraft’s ‘The Outsider,’” LS No. 31 (Fall 1994): 10–12; Carl Buchanan, ‘“The Outsider’ as an Homage to Poe,” LS No. 31 (Fall 1994): 12–17; Robert H.Waugh, ‘“The Outsider,’ the Terminal Climax, and Other Conclusions,” LSNo. 34 (Spring 1996): 13–24; Paul Montelone, “The Inner Significance of ‘The Outsider,’” LSNo. 35 (Fall 1996): 9–21; Robert H.Waugh, “Lovecraft and Keats Confront the ‘Awful Rainbow,’” LS No. 35 (Fall 1996): 24–36; No. 36 (Spring 1997): 26–39; Robert H.Waugh, “The Outsider, the Autodidact, and Other Professions,” LSNo. 37 (Fall 1997): 4–15; No. 38 (Spring 1998): 18–33.

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P

Pabodie, Frank H.

In At the Mountains of Madness,the professor of engineering who devises the special drill used to conduct geologic borings on the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition.

Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner,Astronomy Articles for.

Seventeen known articles, published in 1906; rpt. First Writings: Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner (Necronomicon Press, 1976; rev. ed. 1986).

The articles appeared as follows: “The Heavens for August” (July 27); “The Skies of September” (August 31); “Is Mars an Inhabited World?” (September 7); “Is There Life on the Moon?” (September 14); “An Interesting Phenomenon” (September 21); “October Heavens” (September 28); “Are There Undiscovered Planets?” (October 5); “Can the Moon Be Reached by Man?” (October 12); “The Moon” (October 19); [untitled] (October 26); “The Sun” (November 2); “The Leonids” (November 9); “Comets” (November 16); “December Skies” (November 30); “The Fixed Stars” (December 7); “Clusters-Nebulae” (December 21); “January Heavens” (December 28).

These are—aside from HPL’s letter to the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal(June 3, 1906)— the earliest published works by HPL, although contemporaneous with the astronomy articles for the [Providence] Tribune(1906–08), which commenced only a few days after the first of the Gleaner articles. The paper was a rural weekly published in the village of Phenix, R.I. (a community now incorporated into the town of West Warwick); HPL remarks of it: “The name ‘Phillips’ is a magic word in Western Rhode Island, & the Gleanerwas more than willing to print & feature anything from Whipple V.Phillips’ grandson” ( SL1.40). The articles range from surveys of the celestial phenomena for the coming month to discussions of provocative questions regarding the heavens: HPL here maintains that Percival Lowell’s belief in the artificiality of the Martian “canals” is “not only possible, but probable,” although in later columns

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he heaped ridicule upon the idea; he claims that the most plausible way to get to the moon would be to send off a projectile by electrical repulsion. Some of the columns are revised versions of articles first “published” in HPL’s hectographed paper, The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy HPL remarks ( SL1.40) that the articles continued through 1907 and 1908; but no issues of the paper have been found after December 28, 1906. Evidence suggests, however, that the paper continued until at least the end of 1907 and probably into 1908, so that a whole series of articles by HPL may be lost.

Peabody, E. Lapham.

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the curator of the Arkham Historical Society, who assists Robert Olmstead in his genealogical research, pointing out that Olmstead’s uncle Douglas Williamson had preceded him on a similar quest.

Peaslee, Nathaniel Wingate.

He is a professor of political economy at Miskatonic University and the narrator and protagonist of “The Shadow out of Time.” He is married to Alice Keezar and father of Robert K. (b. 1898), Wingate (b. 1900), and Hannah (b. 1903). On May 14, 1908, Peaslee suffers a breakdown while lecturing, appearing to be stricken with amnesia until his memory suddenly returns on September 27, 1913. His restored self has no memory of the five-year period of amnesia. Even as he attempts to determine his activities over that period, he is plagued by dreams (which seem vividly like actual memories) and “pseudo-memories” of bizarre creatures in an equally bizarre setting. He thinks the dreams and pseudo-memories are related to the studies he engaged in during his amnesia, but the accounts he publishes in a psychological journal are corroborated by a mining engineer, who says the scenes he described in fact exist in the Great Sandy Desert of Australia. Peaslee accompanies the engineer to the site to investigate it. The creatures no longer exist, but the ruins there are astonishingly familiar to him. In his dreams, he believed himself to have been the victim of mindexchange with an incredibly alien creature living in the earth’s ancient past; while the alien occupied his own body, he himself had been tasked with writing a history of the era to which he had belonged. Peaslee finally wends his way through the ruins of an ancient library, seeking the evidence that would prove his dreams to be actual memories. He finds, but loses, the proof he desires and fears—a document in his own handwriting that could not be less than 150,000,000 years old. Peaslee may be the most thoroughly developed of HPL’s characters. His demeanor and attitude are much like HPL’s. HPL’s period of reclusiveness in 1908–13, following his abrupt departure from high school without a diploma, coincides with the duration of Peaslee’s amnesia. HPL’s description of Peaslee’s reemergence in the present is remarkably similar to his famous account of his emergence from his “New York exile” of 1924–26. And yet Peaslee himself seems to be modeled somewhat on HPL’s father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft. Peaslee’s eccentric behavior during his amnesia resembles Winfield’s own during the period of his madness, both of which last five years. Of course, Winfield never did recover, but Peaslee did. Eight-year-old Wingate “held fast to a faith that [Peaslee’s] proper self would return,” as one might imagine young HPL felt

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about his father’s condition. The revelation about Peaslee’s past occurs on July 17–18; HPL’s father died July 19.

Peaslee, Wingate (b. 1900).

In “The Shadow out of Time,” the son of the story’s narrator, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and the only one of Peaslee’s children to return to him after his “amnesia” of 1908–13. Wingate becomes a professor of psychology and accompanies his father on his fateful expedition to the Great Sandy Desert in Australia.

Petaja, Emil (1915–2000).

Science fiction fan and writer of Finnish ancestry residing in Montana, and correspondent of HPL. Petaja came in touch with HPL in late 1934. The next year he proposed teaming with Duane W.Rimel to form a fan magazine, The Fantaisiste’s Mirror,that would resume serializing HPL’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” from the point it had left off in the defunct Fantasy Fan,but the magazine never materialized. He and HPL continued corresponding until the latter’s death. In later years Petaja contributed to Amazing Storiesand WT,and wrote several science fiction and fantasy novels, some based upon Finnish legendry.

Phillips, Edwin E[verett] (1864–1918).

HPL’s maternal uncle; the only son of Whipple V.Phillips and Robie A.Place Phillips. He was associated with Whipple in the Snake River Co. and the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Co. in the 1890s. He married Martha Helen Mathews on July 30, 1894, divorced her, and remarried her on March 23, 1903. He was variously employed as rent collector, real estate agent, operator of the Edwin E.Phillips Refrigeration Co., etc. According to HPL, he “lost a lot of dough for my mother and me in 1911” ( SL3.367). HPL never mentions his uncle’s death in any surviving correspondence, leading one to suspect that he was not close to him.

Phillips Family.

HPL was descended from Asaph Phillips (1764–1829) and his wife Esther Phillips (1767–1842). HPL visited the site of their homestead on Howard Hill in Foster, R.I., in 1929. Asaph’s descent from Michael Phillips (d. 1686), Newport freeman of 1668, is not proven but is given by Henry Byron Phillips in his Phillips genealogy at the California State Genealogical Society. HPL’s late claim that Michael was the youngest son of the Rev. George Phillips (d. 1644), a 1630 emigrant who became minister of Watertown, Mass., is unsupported by any authority and almost certainly specious. Asaph and Esther had eight children, the youngest of whom was Captain Jeremiah Phillips (1800–1848), who married Robie Rathbun (1797–1848) in 1823. During the 1820s Jeremiah served in the militia. His political persuasions can be inferred not only from his profession and background but from the fact that he gave his son Whipple (1833–1904) the middle name Van Buren in honor of Martin Van Buren, who had been inaugurated as Andrew Jackson’s vice president on March 4, 1833. Jeremiah purchased the Isaac Blanchard grist mill on the Moosup River in 1833 and was tragically crushed to death when his long coat accidentally got caught in its gearing. Their mother Robie having died the previous July, the four surviving children (two sons and two daughters) were left as orphans. One of these, Whipple V.Phillips,

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was HPL’s grandfather. HPL also had some contact with his grand-uncle, James Wheaton Phillips (1830–1901).

See Kenneth W.Faig, Jr., Some of the Descendants of Asaph Phillips and Esther Whipple of Foster, Rhode Island(Glendale, Ill.: Moshassuck Press, 1993).

Phillips, James Wheaton (1830–1901).

HPL’s grand-uncle; elder brother of Whipple V.Phillips. He married Jane Ann Place on November 6, 1853. He owned a farm on Johnson Road in Foster, R.I., where HPL and his mother stayed for two weeks in 1896 and again in 1908. HPL and Annie Gamwell visited the site in October 1926. Phillips, Robie Alzada (1827–1896).

HPL’s maternal grandmother; wife of Whipple V.Phillips, whom she married on January 27, 1856. They had five children (see entry for Whipple Van Buren Phillips below). Her death and subsequent mourning by the family terrified young HPL and inspired dreams of “night-gaunts,” which he would much later use in fiction (e.g., The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath[1926–27], the “Night-Gaunts” sonnet of Fungi from Yuggoth[1929–30], etc.). Her collection of astronomy books served as the nucleus of HPL’s own collection after he became interested in the science in late 1902. HPL spells her name as “Rhoby,” but her tombstone (at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence) gives her name as “Robie.”

Phillips, Ward.

In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” an old man from Providence, R.I., and a correspondent of Randolph Carter who argues against the dispersal of Carter’s estate because he believes him to be still alive. Although not so identified in “The Silver Key,” he is the first-person narrator of that story. “Ward Phillips” was a pseudonym that HPL used for various of his poems as published in amateur journals.

Phillips, Whipple Van Buren (1833–1904).

HPL’s maternal grandfather; son of Capt. Jeremiah Phillips (1800–1848) and Robie Rathbun (1797– 1848). He was educated in Foster, R.I., and the East Greenwich Academy. He spent 1852–53 in Delavan, Ill. (a temperance town), on the farm of his uncle, James Phillips (1794–1878). He married Robie Alzada Place on January 27, 1856. They had five children: Lillian Delora (Phillips) Clark, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, Emeline Estella (1859–1866), Edwin Everett, and Annie Emeline (Phillips) Gamwell. Whipple moved the family to Coffin’s Corner, R.I., around 1859; he quickly made a fortune from real estate and other business and was able to purchase all the land in the town, which he named Greene after the Rhode Island Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene. He served as postmaster at Greene (1860–66) and as representative for Coventry in the Rhode Island General Assembly (1870–72). He joined the Masonic order and built a Masonic hall in Greene. Whipple suffered a financial collapse in 1870, but recovered sufficiently to move to Providence in 1874; after residing for some years at 276 Broadway on the West Side, he built a large house at 194 (later numbered 454) Angell Street in 1881. He went to the Paris Exposition in 1878 and traveled widely around the Continent, especially to Italy. In 1884 he

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formed the Snake River Company to pursue land interests in Idaho; he also named the town of Grand View, building a large Grand View hotel there. In 1889 he formed the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company. Its chief object was the building of a dam over the Bruneau River (not the Snake River, as HPL notes in his letters), but it was washed away in 1890; although later rebuilt, the expense of building and maintaining the dam and other properties contributed to the collapse of the company in 1901. An irrigation ditch was washed out in 1904; a few days later, Whipple suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died on March 28. Subsequent mismanagement of his estate caused HPL and his mother to move from 454 Angell Street to 598 Angell Street. His estate was valued at $25,000, of which $5,000 went to Sarah Susan and $2,500 to HPL. Whipple Phillips wrote to HPL sporadically from Idaho and told him oral weird tales in the Gothic mode. He proved to be an admirable replacement for HPL’s stricken father. His death, and the removal from 454 Angell Street, impelled HPL to give serious consideration to suicide (see SL4.358–59).

See Kenneth W.Faig, Jr., “Whipple V.Phillips and the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company,” Owyhee OutpostNo. 19 (May 1988): 21–30.

Pickman, Richard Upton.

In “Pickman’s Model,” a painter, of Salem ancestry, whose paintings of outré subjects are assumed to be the fruits of a keen imagination, but are ultimately found to be from real life and from firsthand knowledge of forbidden subjects. He is compared to Gustave Doré, Sidney Sime, and Anthony Angarola. He disappears mysteriously, after emptying his pistol at an unseen monster lurking in the basement of his studio in the North End of Boston during a visit by the narrator of the story. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,Pickman becomes a ghoul, like the subject of many of his paintings in “Pickman’s Model.”

HPL describes Pickman not as a fantaisiste, but as a realist—a term HPL came to feel best described himself following his shift toward cosmic fictional themes around 1926.

“Pickman’s Model.”

Short story (5,570 words); probably written in early September 1926. First published in WT(October 1927); rpt. WT(November 1936); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An2 and TD.

The narrator, Thurber, tells why he ceased association with the painter Richard Upton Pickman of Boston, who has recently disappeared. He had maintained relations with Pickman long after his other acquaintances had dropped him because of the grotesqueness of his paintings, and so on one occasion he was taken to Pickman’s secret cellar studio in the decaying North End of Boston, near the ancient Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Here were some of Pickman’s most spectacularly demonic paintings; one in particular depicts a “colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes” nibbling at a man’s head as a child chews a stick of candy. When a strange noise is heard, Pickman maintains it must be rats clambering through the underground tunnels honeycombing the area. Pickman, in another room, fires all six chambers of his revolver—a rather odd way to kill rats. After leaving, Thurber finds that he had inadvertently taken a photograph affixed to the canvas; thinking it a mere shot of scenic background, he is horrified to find

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that it is a picture of the monster itself— “it was a photograph from life.”

HPL portrayed the North End setting quite faithfully, right down to many of the street names; but, less than a year after writing the story, he was disappointed to find that much of the area had been razed to make way for new development. HPL’s comment at the time (when he took Donald Wandrei to the scene) is of interest: “the actual alley & house of the tale [had been] utterly demolished; a whole crooked line of buildings having been torn down” (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, [July 17, 1927]; ms., JHL). This suggests that HPL had an actual house in mind for Pickman’s North End studio. The tunnels mentioned in the story are also real: they probably date from the colonial period and may have been used for smuggling.

The story is noteworthy in that it expresses many of the aesthetic principles on weird fiction that HPL had just outlined in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Thurber notes: “…only the real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.” This statement is HPL’s ideal of weird literature as well. And when Thurber confesses that “Pickman was in every sense—in conception and in execution—a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist” one thinks of HPL’s allusion to his recent abandonment of the Dunsanian prose-poetic technique for the “prose realism” ( SL3.96) that would be the hallmark of his later work. The colloquial style of the story (as with “In the Vault”) is unconvincing; Thurber, although supposedly a “tough” guy who had been through the world war, expresses implausible horror and shock at Pickman’s paintings: his reactions seem strained and hysterical. Pickman recurs as a minor character in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. “Pickman’s Model,” perhaps because it is relatively conventional, has proved popular with readers. It was anthologized in HPL’s lifetime, in Christine Campbell Thomson’s By Daylight Only(1929) and again in Thomson’s Not at Night Omnibus(1937).

See Will Murray, “In Pickman’s Footsteps,” CryptNo. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 27–32; James Anderson, “‘Pickman’s Model’: Lovecraft’s Model of Terror,” LSNos. 22/23 (Fall 1990): 15–21; K.Setiya, “Aesthetics and the Artist in ‘Pickman’s Model’” (one of “Two Notes on Lovecraft”), LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 15–16.

“Picture, The.”

Nonextant juvenile story; written in 1907. Described in HPL’s commonplace book as concerning a “painting of ultimate horror.” In a letter to Robert Bloch (June 1, 1933) he says of it: “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 was possibly influenced by Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” in which a painter, in painting a portrait of his wife, insidiously sucks the life from the woman and transfers it into the portrait.

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“Picture in the House, The.”

Short story (3,350 words); written on December 12, 1920. First published in the National Amateur (“July 1919” [not released until summer 1921]); rpt. WT(January 1924) and WT(March 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An2and CC

The narrator, “in quest of certain genealogical data,” is traveling by bicycle throughout New England. One day a heavy downpour forces him to take shelter at a decrepit farmhouse in the “Miskatonic Valley.” When his knocks fail to summon an occupant, he believes the house to be uninhabited and enters; but shortly the occupant, who had been asleep upstairs, makes an appearance. The man seems very old, but also quite ruddy of face and muscular of build. His clothes are slovenly, and he seems to have just awoken from a nap. The old man, seemingly a harmless backwoods farmer speaking in “an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct” (“‘Ketched in the rain, be ye?’”), notes that his visitor had been examining a very old book on a bookcase, Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo,“printed in Frankfort in 1598.” This book continually turns, as if from frequent consultation, to plate XII, depicting “in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques.” The old man avers that he obtained the book from a sailor from Salem years ago, and as he babbles in his increasingly loathsome patois he begins to make vile confessions of the effects of that plate: “‘Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin ’ gits a holt on ye—As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—.’” At that point a drop of liquid falls from the ceiling directly upon the plate. The narrator thinks at first it is rain but then observes that it is a drop of blood. A thunderbolt conveniently destroys the house and its tenant, but the narrator somehow survives.

The tale contains the first mention of the term “Miskatonic” and the fictional city of Arkham. The location of Arkham has been the source of considerable debate. Will Murray conjectured that the Arkham of “The Picture in the House” was situated in central Massachusetts, but Robert D.Marten concludes that HPL had always conceived of Arkham (as he did explicitly in later tales) to be an approximate analogue of Salem, hence on the eastern coast of Massachusetts. The name Arkham may (as Marten speculates) have been coined from Arkwright, a former village (now incorporated into the town of Fiskville) in Rhode Island. “Miskatonic” (which Murray, studying its Algonguin roots, translates approximately to “red-mountain-place”) appears to be derived by analogy from Housatonic, a well-known river running from central Massachusetts through Connecticut. HPL makes numerous errors in his description of Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo,since he derived his information secondhand from an appendix to Thomas Henry Huxley’s essay “On the History of the Man-like Apes,” in Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays(1894). The story is the first to make exhaustive use of a backwoods New England dialect that HPL would employ in several later tales for purposes of verisimilitude. Jason C.Eckhardt has plausibly conjectured that its use here derives largely from James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers(1848–62), where a slightly different version of the dialect is used. Eckhardt notes that Lowell himself de

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clares the dialect to be long extinct in New England; its use by HPL thereby enhances the suggestion of the old man’s preternatural age.

HPL’s brooding opening reflections on the unnatural repressiveness of early New England life and the neuroses it produced are echoed in his analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (see also SL3.175).

HPL revised the tale somewhat for later appearances; one alteration was particularly significant. At the conclusion of his initial portrayal of the old man, HPL had written: “On a beard which might have been patriarchal were unsightly stains, some of them disgustingly suggestive of blood.” This catastrophically telegraphs the ending, and he wisely omitted it for subsequent appearances. See Peter Cannon, “Parallel Passages in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Picture in the House,’” LSNo. 1 (Fall 1979): 3–6; S.T. Joshi, “Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo” CryptNo. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 13–17; Will Murray, “In Search of Arkham Country,” LSNo. 13 (Fall 1986): 54–67; Jason C.Eckhardt, “The Cosmic Yankee” (in ET); Robert H.Waugh, “‘The Picture in the House’: Images of Complicity,” LSNo. 32 (Spring 1995): 2–8; Robert D.Marten, “Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers,” LSNo. 39 (Summer 1998): 1–20; Scott Connors, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” LSNo. 41 (Spring 1999): 2–9; J.C. Owens, “The Mirror in the House: Looking at the Horror of Looking at the Horror,” LSNo. 42 (Summer 2001): 74–79.

Pierce, Ammi

(born c. 1842, as was Ambrose Bierce, whose name his own resembles). In “The Colour out of Space,” he is the only person who will tell the narrator of the events that befell his neighbors, the Nahum Gardner family, which he witnessed largely at first hand.

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849),

American author and predominant literary influence on HPL, who read him beginning at the age of eight. Poe pioneered the short story, the short horror tale, and the detective story; he was also an important poet, critic, and reviewer. In 1916 HPL referred to Poe as “my God of Fiction” ( SL1.20); only the subsequent influence of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen diluted the Poe influence on HPL’s early work. As late as 1929 HPL was lamenting: “There are my ‘Poe’ pieces & my ‘Dunsany’ pieces— but alas—where are any ‘Lovecraft’ pieces?” ( SL2.315, where “any” is misprinted as “my”). HPL’s “The Outsider” draws on “Berenice” and “The Masque of the Red Death”; “The Hound” is very Poesque in style; “The Rats in the Walls” shows the influence of “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “Cool Air” was perhaps influenced by “Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar,” although HPL believed Machen’s “Novel of the White Powder” to be a more central influence. At the Mountains of Madness draws slightly upon The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket(1838). Poe’s poetry also influenced HPL (mostly in terms of metrical schemes) in such poems as “Nemesis,” “The City,” “The House,” “The Eidolon,” “The Nightmare Lake,” “Despair,” “Nathicana,” and others. HPL echoes Poe’s doctrine of the unity of effect in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and exemplifies it in his tales. HPL saw Poe as the central figure in the development of horror fiction, modifying the moribund Gothic conventions so that they became capable of revealing psychological realities; accordingly, he devoted a substantial chapter to Poe in

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“Supernatural Horror in Literature.” HPL also wrote “Homes and Shrines of Poe,” a discursive survey of Poe’s residences in Virginia, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere (nearly all of which he had visited in person), for Hyman Bradofsky’s Californian(Winter 1934). In August 1936, he wrote an acrostic “sonnet” on Poe’s name, titling it (in the original ms.) “In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d” (first published in Science-Fantasy Correspondent,March–April 1937).

See T.O.Mabbott, “Lovecraft as a Student of Poe,” Fresco8, No. 3 (Spring 1958): 37–39; Robert Bloch, “Poe and Lovecraft” (1973; rpt. FDOC); Dirk W. Mosig, “Poe, Hawthorne and Lovecraft: Variations on a Theme of Panic,” RomantistNos. 4–5 (1980–81): 43–45; Robert M.Price, “Lovecraft and ‘Ligeia,’” LSNo. 31 (Fall 1994): 15–17.

“Poe-et’s Nightmare, The.”

Poem (303 lines); written in 1916 (see SL1.59). First published in the Vagrant(July 1918); rpt. WT (July 1952) (central section only; titled “Aletheia Phrikodes”).

One of HPL’s longest poems, and perhaps his most ambitious single weird poem. It recounts (in rhyming couplets) how Lucullus Languish, a “student of the skies” but also a “connoisseur of rarebits and mince pies,” overate and had the nightmare related in the central section of the poem, written— unusually for HPL—in Miltonic blank verse (whose Greek title, “Aletheia Phrikodes,” means “the frightful truth”). Here Lucullus is taken by a nameless guide on a voyage through the universe and shown the insignificance of humanity within the boundless reaches of space and time. Horrified, Languish wakes up and (in a resumption of the rhyming couplets) resolves never to mix food and poetry again.

The work is perhaps HPL’s first enunciation of cosmicism, predating even his early stories (e.g., “Dagon”). In later years HPL found the rhymed framework dissatisfying, thinking that it detracted from the seriousness of the cosmic message; accordingly, when R.H.Barlow was contemplating issuing HPL’s collected verse, HPL instructed Barlow to omit that part. HPL revised a small part of the blank verse section (“Alone in space, I view’d a feeble fleck…”) and included it in “May Skies” ([Providence] Evening News,May 1, 1917).

See R.Boerem, “A Lovecraftian Nightmare” (in FDOC).

“Poetry and the Gods.”

Short story (2,540 words); written in collaboration with Anna Helen Crofts, probably in the summer of 1920. First published in the United Amateur(September 1920) (as by “Anna Helen Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe”); first collected in The Lovecraft Collectors Library,Volume 1 (1952); corrected text in D.

Marcia is a young woman who, though “outwardly a typical product of modern civilisation,” feels strangely out of tune with her time. She picks up a magazine and reads a piece of free verse, finding it so evocative that she lapses into a languid dream in which Hermes comes to her and wafts her to Parnassus where Zeus is holding court. She is shown six individuals sitting before the Corycian cave; they are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Keats. “These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men.” Zeus tells

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Marcia that she will meet a man who is “our latest-born messenger,” a man whose poetry will somehow bring order to the chaos of the modern age. She later meets this person, “the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world,” and he thrills her with his poetry.

Nothing is known about the origin of this story (which HPL never mentions in any extant correspondence) nor about HPL’s coauthor, aside from the fact that she resided at 343 West Main Street in North Adams, Mass., in the far northwestern corner of the state. Probably the impetus for writing the story came from Crofts; she may also have written the tidbits of free verse in the story, since HPL despised free verse (and actually comments in the story that “It was only a bit of vers fibre,that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers…”). The prose of the rest of the story appears to be HPL’s.

Poetry, Lovecraft’s.

HPL wrote more than 250 poems from 1897 to 1936. The great majority of these were written in imitation of the occasional verse of Dryden and Pope, with extensive use of the heroic couplet. In 1914 HPL, responding to Maurice W.Moe’s urging to vary his metrical style, wrote: “Take the form away, and nothing remains. I have no real poetic ability, and all that saves my verse from utter worthlessness is the care which I bestow on its metrical construction” ( SL1.3–4). HPL’s devotion to verse may perhaps have been augmented by his mother, who reportedly considered him a “poet of the highest order” ( LR16). Accordingly, for at least the first seven years of his mature literary period (1914–21), HPL attempted to achieve mastery in verse.

HPL’s surviving juvenile poetry consists largely of imitations or translations of Greek and Latin epics, although one specimen, “H.Lovecraft’s Attempted Journey betwixt Providence & Fall River…” (1901), is a delightful comic poem on a modern theme—his initial ride on an electric trolley. Other early work is marred by racist sentiments (“De Triumpho Naturae” [1905]; “New-England Fallen” [1912]; “On the Creation of Niggers” [1912]). His first published poem, “Providence in 2000 A.D.” ([Providence] Evening Bulletin,March 4, 1912), is a satire directed against Italian-American residents in his native city.

HPL’s entry into amateur journalism in 1914 was triggered by his writing of several pungent satires in the Augustan mode published in the Argosy(1913–14). In the amateur press, he found ready venues for a great quantity of his verse. The poems fall roughly into a variety of nonexclusive categories: occasional verse, seasonal and topographical poems, poems on amateur affairs, political poems, satires, and (beginning in 1916) weird poetry. On the whole, only the last two categories reveal consistent competence. Some of the satires are themselves on political subjects (e.g., “To General Villa” [ Blarney Stone,November–December 1914]) or on amateur affairs (e.g., “On a Modern Lothario” [ Blarney-Stone,July–August 1914]). His first separately published work was the poem The Crime of Crimes(1915), on the sinking of the Lusitania

HPL wrote poetry with great facility. He noted that the ten-line poem “On Receiving a Picture of Swans” took about ten minutes to compose ( SL1.13). “A Mississippi Autumn” ( Ole Miss’,December 1915) was signed “Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Metrical Mechanic.” HPL had no illusions as to the quality of much of

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his verse. In 1918, after making an exhaustive list of his published poems, he noted: “What a mess of mediocre & miserable junk. He hath sharp eyes indeed, who can discover any trace of merit in so worthless an array of bad verse” ( SL1.60).

HPL’s weird verse does, however, deserve some special attention, if only because it comprises an interesting appendage to his weird fiction. “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” (1916) is one of the earliest expressions of his distinctive brand of cosmicism, speaking apocalyptically in blank verse: “Alone in space, I view’d a feeble fleck/Of silvern light, marking the narrow ken/Which mortals call the boundless universe.” Many other poems are metrical and stylistic imitations of Poe’s verse: “The Rutted Road” (1917); “Nemesis” (1917); “The Eidolon” (1918); “Despair” (1919); “The House” (1919); “The City” (1919). “Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme” (1917–18) is a long poem on the werewolf theme; HPL curiously included it in several lists of his prose tales. Later verse begins to show greater distinctiveness and originality, such as the pungent “The Cats” (1925) and the pensive “Primavera” (1925) and “The Wood” (1929). In late 1929, after several years in which he wrote relatively little verse, HPL experienced a remarkable outburst of poetic inspiration, producing “The Outpost,” “The Ancient Track,” the flawless sonnet “The Messenger,” and the sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth(1929–30) in short order. After several more years of quiescence, HPL produced finely crafted sonnets to Virgil Finlay and Clark Ashton Smith in late 1936.

Of the satires, “Gryphus in Asinum Mutatus” (1915) is an amusing take-off of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; “Ye Ballade of Patrick von Flynn” (1915) is a skewering of Irish-Americans’ support of Germany during World War I; “The Isaacsonio-Mortoniad” (1915) is a long and piquant send-up of Charles D.Isaacson and James F.Morton, who had attacked HPL in the amateur press; and “The Dead Bookworm” (1917) and “On the Death of a Rhyming Critic” (1917) are delightful parodies of himself. In a letter to Alfred Galpin (August 21, 1918) HPL wrote several satires of love poetry, as he had done earlier with “Laeta; a Lament” (1915). “Amissa Minerva” (1919) is a sharp attack on modern poetry, with several poets cited by name. HPL’s most unrestrained satire is “Medusa: A Portrait” (1921), a vicious lampoon of Ida C.Haughton, an amateur writer with whom HPL was feuding. But his greatest satire departs as completely as possible from the Augustan mode: “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance” (1922?), a parody of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land,written entirely in free verse. His satiric poetry was the theme of the first critical article on HPL’s verse, Rheinhart Kleiner’s “A Note on Howard P.Lovecraft’s Verse” ( United Amateur,March 1919).

Not much can be said of other aspects of HPL’s poetry. T.O.Mabbott remarked that “his poetry seems to me mostly written ‘with his left hand’” (“H.P. Lovecraft: An Appreciation” [1944], FDOC43), while Winfield Townley Scott delivered the most severe indictment, referring to the bulk of HPL’s verse as “eighteenth-century rubbish” (“Lovecraft as a Poet” [1945]), although speaking kindly of “The Messenger” and Fungi from Yuggoth. HPL’s poetry still receives relatively little critical scrutiny, although the Fungihas been analyzed from numerous perspectives. As HPL’s complete verse has now been gathered in The

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Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works(2001), one may hope that this body of his work will now be the subject of further study.

See Winfield Townley Scott, “Lovecraft as a Poet,” in Rhode Island on Lovecraft,ed. Donald M.Grant and Thomas P.Hadley (rev. ed. as “A Parenthesis on Lovecraft as Poet” in Scott’s Exiles and Fabrications[1961] and in FDOC;S.T. Joshi, “A Look at Lovecraft’s Fantastic Poetry,” Aklo,Summer 1991, pp. 20–30.

“Polaris.”

Short story (1,530 words); probably written in late spring or summer 1918. First published in the Philosopher(December 1920), an amateur paper edited by Alfred Galpin; rpt. National Amateur(May 1926), Fantasy Fan(February 1934), and WT(December 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in D

The narrator appears to have a dream in which he is initially a disembodied spirit contemplating some seemingly mythical realm, the land of Lomar, whose principal city Olathoë is threatened with attack from the Inutos, “squat, hellish, yellow fiends.” In a subsequent “dream” the narrator learns that he has a body, and is one of the Lomarians. He is “feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships,” so is denied a place in the actual army of defenders; but he is given the important task of manning the watch-tower of Thapnen, since “my eyes were the keenest of the city.” Unfortunately, at the critical moment Polaris, the Pole Star, winks down at him and casts a spell so that he falls asleep; he strives to wake up and finds that when he does so he is in a room through whose window he sees “the horrible swaying trees of a dream-swamp” (i.e., his “waking” life). He convinces himself that “I am still dreaming,” and vainly tries to wake up, but is unable to do so.

The story is not a dream-fantasy but rather—like “The Tomb”—a case of psychic possession by a distant ancestor, as indicated by the poem inserted in the tale, which the narrator fancies the Pole Star speaks to him: “Slumber, watcher, till the spheres/Six and twenty thousand years/Have revolv’d, and I return/ To the spot where now I burn.” This alludes to the fact that Polaris’s position is not fixed above the North Pole, and that, as the earth wobbles on its axis, it takes twenty-six thousand years for Polaris to return to its position above the Pole. (When the Pyramids of Egypt were built, Alpha Draconis was the Pole Star; in thirteen thousand years, Vega will be.) In other words, the man’s spirit has gone back twenty-six thousand years and identified with the spirit of his ancestor. “Polaris” was in part the result of a controversy over religion between HPL and Maurice W.Moe. In a long letter to Moe (May 15, 1918; SL1.62) HPL notes that “Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city—a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills…. I was, as I said, aware of this city visually. I was in it and around it. But certainly I had no corporeal existence.” (HPL cites the dream in the course of discussing the importance of distinguishing between dream and reality.) The story was presumably written shortly after this date. HPL himself frequently remarked on the story’s apparent stylistic similarity to the work of Lord Dunsany, which HPL would read only a year or so later; but possibly the style of the tale was derived from Poe’s prose poems, which themselves partly influenced Dunsany’s style.

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See S.T.Joshi, “On ‘Polaris,’” CryptNo. 15 (Lammas 1983): 22–25; Ralph E.Vaughan, “The Horror of ‘Polaris,’” CryptNo. 15 (Lammas 1983): 26–27.

“Power of Wine: A Satire, The.”

Poem (80 lines); written in late 1914. First published in the [Providence] Evening News(January 13, 1915); rpt. Tryout(April 1916); rpt. National Enquirer(March 28, 1918).

HPL satirizes the ill effects of liquor and intoxication. For other poems on this theme, see “Temperance Song” ( Dixie Booster,Spring 1916), “Monody on the Late King Alcohol” ( Tryout,August 1919), and other untitled poems included in AT. See also the humorous story “Old Bugs” (1919). Pratt, Dr.

In “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” an old physician who, summoned to the Sprague house after Tom Sprague has suffered some kind of fit, pronounces Sprague dead and hands the body over to Henry Thorndike, the undertaker. Later Pratt is disturbed by suspicions that Sprague is not in fact dead. Shortly thereafter he declares Thorndike dead after the latter suddenly takes ill at Sprague’s funeral.

“President’s Message.”

Published in the United Amateur(September 1917, November 1917, January 1918, March 1918, May 1918, July 1918). Routine reports of amateur activity written by HPL during his presidency of the UAPA.

“President’s Message.”

Published in the National Amateur(November [1922]– January 1923, March 1923, May 1923, July 1923, September 1923 [as “The President’s Annual Report”]).

Reports on amateur activity issued by HPL upon his taking over the presidency of the NAPA after the resignation of William J.Dowdell.

Price, E[dgar] Hoffmann

(1898–1989), pulp writer and correspondent of HPL (1932–37). HPL may have been influenced by Price’s work years before he ever met him: “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925) makes reference to a devil-worshipping sect, the Yezidis, which was probably borrowed from Price’s “The Stranger from Kurdistan” ( WT,July 1925). HPL’s first encounter (indirect) with Price was unfavorable: “after due deliberation & grave consultation with E. Hoffmann Price, [Farnsworth] Wright has very properly rejected my ‘Strange High House in the Mist,’ as not sufficiently clear for the acute minds of his highly intelligent readers” (HPL to Donald Wandrei, [August 2, 1927]; ms. JHL). HPL first met Price in New Orleans on June 12, 1932, when Robert E. Howard telegraphed Price of HPL’s presence there. HPL spent at least another week in New Orleans, much of it in Price’s company. (A curious myth has emerged that Price took HPL to a brothel, whereupon HPL was purportedly amused to discover that several of the women were readers of his stories in WT. This story—apocryphal or not—applies to Seabury Quinn.) An extensive correspondence, mostly dealing with pulp fiction, ensued. Price, having lost a regular job in May 1932, was compelled to write all manner of work for the pulps and defended the practice against HPL’s condemnation of pulp fiction as formulaic

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hackwork. HPL thought enough of Price’s letters to preserve them in full (they are now at JHL). In late August 1932 Price wrote a sequel to “The Silver Key,” entitled “The Lord of Illusion” (first published in CryptNo. 10 [1982]: 47–56), hoping that HPL would revise it and allow it to be published as a collaboration. HPL was reluctant to undertake the task, but finally, in April 1933, completed his extensive revision of it, retitling it “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” In a letter to Price (October 3, 1932; SL4.74–75) HPL spoke of the need to revise the story radically to bring it in line with the original “Silver Key,” but in the end he kept as many of Price’s conceptions as possible, as well as some of his language. The story was initially rejected by WTbut later accepted, appearing in July 1934. Price visited HPL in Providence in June–July 1933; it was on this occasion that Price and Harry Brobst brought a six-pack of beer, prompting HPL to query, “And what are you going to do with so muchof it?” Price went on to write many stories for the pulps; late in life he wrote several novels. His best tales were collected in Strange Gateways(Arkham House, 1967); another selection of his tales is found in Far Lands, Other Days(Carcosa, 1975). Price wrote a substantial memoir, “The Man Who Was Lovecraft” (in Cats;rpt. LR), along with several slighter pieces, including “The Sage of College Street” ( Amateur Correspondent,May–June 1937), “H.P.Lovecraft the Man” ( Diversifier,May 1976), and several astrological analyses of HPL.

“Primavera.”

Poem (72 lines in 9 stanzas); written on March 27, 1925. First published in the Brooklynite(April 1925).

The springtime causes the narrator to reflect on the mystic realms he has known in the past; he has been “haunted by recollections/Of lands that were not of earth.” As with most of the poems of 1924– 26, “Primavera” was written for a meeting of the Blue Pencil Club, an amateur organization in Brooklyn whose meetings HPL grudgingly attended to please his wife.

“Professional Incubus, The.”

Essay (1,210 words); probably written in early 1924. First published in the National Amateur(March 1924); rpt. MW

HPL avers that the lack of good fiction in amateurdom is a result of the amateurs’ quest to ape the false standards of professional popular fiction.

“Providence.”

Poem (52 lines in quatrains); written on September 26, 1924. First published in the Brooklynite (November 1924); rpt. Brooklynite(May 1927); rpt. Californian(Summer 1937).

The poem was written for a meeting of the Blue Pencil Club on the topic “The Old Home Town”; HPL took occasion to speak longingly, from Brooklyn, of his devotion to the scenic and historic beauties of his hometown. HPL notes (letter to Lillian D.Clark, November 17–18, 1924; ms., JHL) that the poem was also published in the [Providence] Evening Bulletinin early to mid-November, but this appearance has not been found. The appearance in Collected Poems(1963) omits three stanzas. [Providence] Evening News,Astronomy Articles for.

Series of fifty-three astronomy articles (1914–18).

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The articles appeared as follows: “The January Sky” (January 1, 1914); “The February Sky” (January 31, 1914); “The March Sky” (March 2, 1914); “The April Sky” (March 31, 1914); “May Sky” (May 1, 1914); “The June Sky” (May 29, 1914); “The July Sky” (June 30, 1914); “The August Sky” (August 1, 1914); “The September Sky” (September 1, 1914); “The October Sky” (September 30, 1914); “The November Sky” (October 31, 1914); “The December Sky” (November 30, 1914); “The January Sky” (December 31, 1914); “The February Sky” (January 30, 1915); “The March Sky” (February 27, 1915); “April Skies” (April 1, 1915); “The May Sky” (April 30, 1915); “The June Skies” (June 1, 1915); “The July Skies” (June 30, 1915); “The August Skies” (July 31, 1915); “September Skies” (September 1, 1915); “October Skies” (October 1, 1915); “November Skies” (November 1, 1915); “December Skies” (November 30, 1915); “January Skies” (December 31, 1915); “The February Skies” (February 1, 1916); “March Skies” (March 1, 1916); “April Skies” (April 1, 1916); “May Skies” (May 3, 1916); “June Skies” (June 1, 1916); “July Skies” (July 1, 1916); “August Skies” (August 1, 1916); “September Skies” (September 1, 1916); “October Skies” (October 2, 1916); “November Skies” (October 31, 1916); “December Skies” (December 1, 1916); “January Skies” (January 2, 1917); “February Skies” (February 1, 1917); “March Skies” (February 28, 1917); “April Skies” (April 2, 1917); “May Skies” (May 1, 1917); “June Skies” (June 1, 1917); “July Skies” (July 2, 1917); “August Skies” (July 31, 1917); “September Skies” (August 31, 1917); “October Skies” (October 2, 1917); “November Skies” (November 5, 1917); “December Skies” (December 1, 1917); “January Skies” (January 2, 1918); “February Skies” (February 1, 1918); “March Skies” (March 1, 1918); “April Skies” (April 1, 1918); “May Skies” (May 2, 1918).

HPL’s most extensive and detailed astronomy columns, the articles averaged 1,750 words in length. As with his other articles, they somewhat mechanically cover the major celestial phenomena of the coming month, but as time passes they are enlivened with explanations of the classical names for the stars and constellations, original bits of poetry by HPL himself (usually presented anonymously), and other diversions. Their greatest significance, however, may be biographical, indicating that HPL had begun to emerge from his five-year-long hermitry several months before he joined amateur journalism in April 1914. The series came to an end because “the request of [the paper’s] editor for me to make my articles ‘so simple that a child might understand them’ caused me to withdraw from the field” (HPL to Alfred Galpin, May 27, 1918; ms., JHL).

“Providence in 2000 A.D.”

Poem (70 lines); probably written in early 1912. First published in the [Providence] Evening Bulletin (March 4, 1912).

HPL’s first published poem is a satire in which a man in the future returns to Providence and finds all the place names changed to reflect the foreign immigrants in the city. The poem was inspired by a petition by the Italian residents of the city to rename Atwell’s Avenue (the chief thoroughfare in the Italian district, Federal Hill) to Columbus Avenue.

[Providence] Tribune,Astronomy Articles for.

Series of 20 astronomy articles (August 1, 1906–June 1, 1908).

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The articles appeared variously in the Morning Tribune[MT], Evening Tribune[ET], and Sunday Tribune[ST], as follows: “In the August Sky” (MT, August 1, 1906; ET, August 1, 1906); “The September Heavens” (MT, September 1, 1906; ET, September 1, 1906); “Astronomy in October” (MT, October 1, 1906; ET, October 1, 1906); “The Skies of November” (MT, November 1, 1906; ET, November 1, 1906); “The Heavens for December” (MT, December 1, 1906; ET, December 1, 1906); “The Heavens in January” (MT, January 1, 1907; ET, January 1, 1907); “The Heavens in February” (MT, February 1, 1907); “The Heavens in March” (MT, March 2, 1907; ET, March 2, 1907); “April Skies” (ET, April 1, 1907); “The Heavens in May” (MT, May 1, 1907; ET, May 1, 1907); “The Heavens in June” (MT, 1 June 1907); “Astronomy in August” (MT, August 1, 1907; ET, August 1, 1907); “The Heavens for September” (ST, September 1, 1907); “The Skies of October” (MT, October 1, 1907; ET, October 1, 1907); “The Heavens in November” (MT, November 1, 1907; ET, November 1, 1907); “Heavens for December” (ST, December 1, 1907); “The Heavens in January” (ET, January 1, 1908; MT, January 2, 1908); “February Skies” (ET, February 1, 1908); “The Heavens in the Month of March” (MT, March 2, 1908; ET, March 3, 1908); “Solar Eclipse Feature of June Heavens” (MT, June 1, 1908; ET, June 1, 1908).

The articles are somewhat mechanical accounts of celestial phenomena for the coming month, made interesting by the fact that all except those for August and September 1906, June 1907, and June 1908 feature hand-drawn star charts by HPL, the first (and virtually the last) time that any artwork of his was published in his lifetime. (In the article for March 1908, only the illustration appeared in ET, under the title “The Evening Sky in March.”) The articles end abruptly because a nervous breakdown caused HPL to withdraw from high school.

Pseudonyms, Lovecraft’s.

HPL used pseudonyms frequently, but almost exclusively during his years in amateur journalism and mostly for poems. In part, the pseudonyms were a means of disguising the fact that HPL was contributing more than one item to a given issue of a paper; in other cases (e.g., the religious poem “Wisdom”), HPL may have been wishing to conceal his identity in a work whose subject matter would have been considered anomalous for readers who knew his work. Some pseudonyms (e.g., Henry Paget-Lowe, Ward Phillips) did not well conceal his identity. His first pseudonym was “Isaac Bickerstaffe,” used in late 1914; and this Augustan nom de plumepaved the way for numerous other pseudonyms derivative or suggestive of eighteenth-century poetry. HPL never used pseudonyms for his major works of weird fiction. Below is an alphabetical list of HPL’s pseudonyms and the works under which they appeared in his lifetime (listed chronologically), followed by brief explanations of their use or origin.

“Lawrence Appleton” was used for the poems “Hylas and Myrrha: A Tale” ( Tryout,May 1919) and “Myrrha and Strephon” ( Tryout,July 1919). The name reflects the college where Alfred Galpin studied (Lawrence College in Appleton, Wis.), as these poems deal whimsically with Galpin’s schoolboy romances.

For the use of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s pseudonym “Elizabeth Berkeley” for HPL’s poems “The Unknown” ( Conservative,December 1916) and “The Peace Advocate” ( Tryout,May 1917), see entry for Jackson.

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“Isaac Bickerstaffe, Jr.” was used for HPL’s satirical attacks on the astrologer J.F.Hartmann in the [Providence] Evening News:“Astrology and the Future” (October 13, 1914), “Delavan’s Comet and Astrology” (October 26, 1914), [letter to the editor] (December 21, 1914). For the name see Astrology, Articles on.

“Jeremy Bishop” was used for the poem “Medusa: A Portrait” ( Tryout,December 1921). “Alexander Ferguson Blair” was used for “North and South Britons” ( Tryout,May 1919), a poem urging unity between England and Scotland, hence the Scottish-sounding pseudonym. “El Imparcial” (“the impartial one”) was used for the essays “What Is Amateur Journalism?” ( Lake Breeze,March 1915), “Consolidation’s Autopsy” ( Lake Breeze,April 1915), “New Department Proposed: Instruction for the Recruit” ( Lake Breeze,June 1915), “Little Journeys to the Homes of Prominent Amateurs” ( United Amateur,October 1915 and July 1917), “Among the New-Comers” ( United Amateur,May 1916), and “Winifred Virginia Jordan: Associate Editor” ( Silver Clarion,April 1919), all on amateur subjects. Of the two “Little Journeys” articles, the first is a biography of Andrew Francis Lockhart (who had previously written a “Little Journeys” biography of HPL) and the second is a biography of Eleanor J.Barnhart.

“John J.Jones” was used for the self-parodic poem “The Dead Bookworm” ( United Amateur, September 1919).

“Humphry Littlewit” was used for the story “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” ( United Amateur,November 1917), the poem-cycle “Perverted Poesie or Modern Metre” ( O-Wash-Ta-Nong, December 1937; including the poems “The Introduction,” “Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea,” “The Peace Advocate,” and “A Summer Sunset and Evening”), and possibly for the unlocated newspaper publication of the satiric poem “Waste Paper” (the manuscript has the Littlewit pseudonym affixed to it). The name is suggestive of eighteenth-century satire (cf. the line in “He”: “look, ye puling lackwit!”).

“Archibald Maynwaring” was used for the poems “The Pensive Swain” ( Tryout,October 1919), “To the Eighth of November” ( Tryout,November 1919), and “Wisdom” ( Silver Clarion,November 1919). The name is probably derived from Arthur Mainwaring, one of the translators of Sir Samuel Garth’s edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses(1717), which HPL read as a boy (see SL1.7).

“Michael Ormonde O’Reilly” was used for the juvenile poem “To Pan” ( Tryout,April 1919; as “Pan”). “Henry [or H.] Paget-Lowe” was used for the poems “January” ( Silver Clarion,January 1920), “On Religion” ( Tryout,August 1920), “On a Grecian Colonnade in a Park” ( Tryout,September 1920), and “October” ( Tryout,October 1920), and the collaborative story “Poetry and the Gods” ( United Amateur,September 1920), with Anna Helen Crofts.

“Ward Phillips” was used for the essay “Ward Phillips Replies” ( Conservative,July 1918; containing the poem “Grace”), the poems “Astrophobos” ( United Amateur,January 1918), “The Eidolon” ( Tryout,October 1918), “Ambition” ( United Co-operative,December 1918), “In Memoriam: J.E.T.D.” ( Tryout,March 1919), “The City” ( Vagrant,October 1919), “Bells” ( Tryout,December 1919), “The House” ( Philosopher,December 1920), “Sir Thomas

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Tryout” ( Tryout,December 1921), and “To Mr. Hoag, on His Ninetieth Birthday” ( Tryout,February 1921), and a letter to the Bureau of Critics published in the National Amateur(January 1919) as by “Ned Softly and Ward Phillips.” The name seems used chiefly for HPL’s weird poetry. Phillips is also a character in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932–33).

“Richard Raleigh” was used for the poem “To a Youth” ( Tryout,February 1921). In a ms. of the poem (JHL), HPL notes: “How is this for an Elizabethan pseudonym?” HPL refers to the celebrated Elizabethan courtier Sir Walter Ralegh (1554?–1618), formerly spelled “Raleigh.”

“Ames Dorrance Rowley” was used for the poems “Laeta; a Lament” ( Tryout,February 1918), “The Volunteer” ( Tryout,April 1918), “To Maj.-Gen. Omar Bundy, U.S.A.” ( Tryout,January 1919), and “To the Old Pagan Religion” ( Tryout,April 1919; as “The Last Pagan Speaks”). The name is a parody of the amateur poet James Laurence Crowley. Only one of the poems (“Laeta; a Lament”) is itself satirical, and does not appear to be a parody of any poem by Crowley.

“Edward Softly” was used for the poems “Damon and Delia, a Pastoral” ( Tryout,August 1918), “To Delia, Avoiding Damon” ( Tryout,September 1918), “Ode to Selene or Diana” ( Tryout,April 1919; as “To Selene”), “Tryout’s Lament for the Vanished Spider” ( Tryout,January 1920), “The Dream” ( Tryout,September 1920), “Christmas” ( Tryout,November 1920), and “Chloris and Damon” ( Tryout, June 1923). The name is probably meant to augment the satirical intent of the several poems here that spoof romantic love poetry. See also “Ward Phillips” above.

“Lewis Theobald, Jun.,” HPL’s most frequently used pseudonym, was used for the two stories cowritten with Winifred Virginia Jackson, “The Crawling Chaos” ( United Co-operative,April 1921) and “The Green Meadow” ( Vagrant,[Spring 1927]), the essays “The Convention” ( Tryout,July 1930 [as by “Theobald”]) “Some Causes of Self-immolation,” and the poems “Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea” ( Providence Amateur,February 1916; as “The Bride of the Sea”), “Ye Ballade of Patrick von Flynn” ( Conservative,April 1916), “Inspiration” ( Conservative,October 1916), “Brotherhood” ( Tryout, December 1916), “The Rutted Road” ( Tryout,January 1917), “The Nymph’s Reply to the Modern Business Man” ( Tryout,February 1917), “Pacifist War Song” ( Tryout,March 1917) “Sonnet on Myself ( Tryout,July 1918), “Damon—a Monody” ( United Amateur,May 1919 [as “Theobaldus Senectissimus”]), “Monody on the Late King Alcohol” ( Tryout,August 1919), “To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema” ( United Amateur,November 1919), “To Phillis” ( Tryout,January 1920), “Cindy: Scrub-Lady in a State Street Skyscraper” ( Tryout,June 1920), “The Poet’s Rash Excuse” ( Tryout,July 1920), “Ex-Poet’s Reply” ( Epgephi,September 1920), “To Alfred Galpin, Esq.” ( Tryout,December 1920), “On the Return of Maurice Winter Moe, Esq., to the Pedagogical Profession” ( Wolverine,June 1921), “To Mr. Galpin, upon His 20th Birthday” ( Tryout,December 1921), “On a Poet’s Ninety-first Birthday” ( Tryout,March 1922), “To Rheinhart Kleiner, Esq., upon His Town Fables and Elegies” ( Tryout,April 1923), “To Damon” ( Tryout,August 1923), “To Endymion” ( Tryout,September 1923), “To J.E.Hoag, Esq.: On His Ninety-second Birthday” ( Tryout,November 1923), and “The Wood” ( Tryout,January 1929). A brief biography of Theobald ap

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peared in “News Notes” ( United Amateur,March 1918); it is unsigned, but is presumably by the Official Editor of the UAPA at the time, Verna McGeoch. The name is derived from Lewis Theobald (1688–1744), the Shakespearean scholar whom Alexander Pope made the “hero” of the first version of his satirical poem, The Dunciad(1728). (See R.Boerem, “The First Lewis Theobald,” in Discovering H.P.Lovecraft,ed. Darrell Schweitzer [1987].) HPL’s use of the name cannot be entirely systematized, but it appears that he used it most frequently for poems written to friends (Alfred Galpin, Rheinhart Kleiner, Maurice W.Moe, Jonathan E.Hoag, Frank Belknap Long), or other personal poems. HPL pronounced it in the eighteenth-century manner, as a dissyllable (TIB-uld), and frequently referred to himself in correspondence as “Grandpa Theobald.”

For “Albert Frederick Willie,” used for the poem “Nathicana” ( Vagrant,[Spring 1927]), see the entry on Alfred Galpin.

For “Zoilus” see “The Vivisector.”

“Augustus T.Swift” was formerly thought to be a pseudonym of HPL’s for two letters (one of which contains lavish praise of the pulp writer Francis Stevens) published in the Argosy(November 15, 1919, and May 22, 1920); but recent research has ascertained that Swift was a real individual living in Providence. See S.T.Joshi, ed., H.P.Lovecraft in the Argosy(Necronomicon Press, 1994). Some have mistaken “Perrin Holmes Lowrey” to be a pseudonym of HPL’s because of the initials of his name, but he is an actual person—an amateur journalist of HPL’s day. HPL’s sonnet “St. Toad’s” appeared in WT(Canadian; September 1945) as by “J.H.Brownlow,” but this is not a pseudonymn. See Willametta Keffer, “Howard P(seudonym) Lovecraft: The Many Names of HPL,” FossilNo. 158 (July 1958): 82–84; George T.Wetzel, “The Pseudonymous Lovecraft,” Xenophile3, No. 4 (November 1976): 3–5, 73; S.T. Joshi, “The Rationale of Lovecraft’s Pseudonyms,” CryptNo. 80 (Eastertide 1992): 15–24, 29.

“Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme.”

Poem (310 lines); begun in late 1917 but not completed until the summer of 1918. First published in Vagrant(October 1919); rpt. WT(September 1937).

The title means “Conveyer of souls [i.e., to Hades],” a somewhat peculiar title for a poem about werewolves. The story concerns Sieur and Dame de Blois, who seem merely to be reclusive nobles but are in fact werewolves. When a citizen kills Dame de Blois (in the form of a snake), the Sieur besieges the house of his wife’s murderer with a band of other wolves, but he is himself killed. HPL apparently was influenced by Winifred Virginia Jackson’s poem “Insomnia” ( Conservative, October 1916) in the two quatrains that open the poem. The final two lines as originally written —“For Sieur de Blois (the old wife’s tale is through)/Was lost eternally to mortal view”—were changed at the instigation of John Ravenor Bullen of the Transatlantic Circulator, who maintained that “through” as used here was impermissibly colloquial (see MW156). HPL included the work in lists of his fiction.

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Pth’thya-l’hi.

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” she is the wife of Obed Marsh and great-great-grandmother of Robert Olmstead. According to HPL’s notes, she was born 78,000 B.C. Olmstead meets her in the dream that convinces him to join his forebears and to live forever in Y’ha-nthlei under the ocean. Purdy, Marjorie.

In “Ashes,” the secretary of the scientist Arthur Van Allister. Her lover, Malcolm Bruce, thinks she has been reduced to ashes by a formula invented by Van Allister, but in fact she is merely locked in a closet.

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Q

“Quest of Iranon, The.”

Short story (2,800 words); written on February 28, 1921. First published in the Galleon(July–August 1935), edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach; rpt. WT(March 1939); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D;annotated version in TD.

A youthful singer named Iranon comes to the granite city of Teloth, saying that he is seeking his faroff home of Aira, where he was a prince. The men of Teloth, who have no beauty in their lives, do not look kindly on Iranon and force him to work with a cobbler. He meets a boy named Romnod, who similarly yearns for “the warm groves and the distant lands of beauty and song.” Romnod thinks that nearby Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, might be Iranon’s Aira. Iranon doubts it, but goes there with Romnod. It is indeed not Aira, but the two of them find welcome there for a time. Iranon wins praises for his singing and lyre-playing, and Romnod learns the coarser pleasures of wine. Years pass; Iranon seems to grow no older, as he continues to hope one day to find Aira. Romnod eventually dies of drink, and Iranon leaves the town and continues his quest. He comes to “the squalid cot of an antique shepherd” and asks him about Aira. The shepherd looks at Iranon curiously and states that he had heard of the name Aira, but that it was merely an imaginary name invented by a beggar’s boy he had known long ago. This boy, “given to strange dreams,” provoked laughter by thinking himself a king’s son. At twilight an old, old man is seen walking calmly into the quicksand. “That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.”

“The Quest of Iranon” is among the best of HPL’s Dunsanian imitations, although there is perhaps a hint of social snobbery at the end (Iranon kills himself because he discovers he is of low birth). HPL wished to use it in his own Conservative(whose last issue had appeared in July 1919), but the next issue did not appear until March 1923, and HPL had by then evidently decided against

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using it there. It was rejected by WTand does not appear to have been submitted elsewhere until HPL sent it to the Galleon

See Brian Humphreys, “Who or What Was Iranon?” LSNo. 25 (Fall 1991): 10–13; Donald R.Burleson, “A Textual Oddity in ‘The Quest of Iranon,”’ LS No. 34 (Spring 1996): 24–26. Quinn, Seabury [Grandin] (1889–1969).

American writer and editor; prolific author of tales about psychic detective Jules de Grandin in WT HPL enjoyed his early tale, “The Phantom Farmhouse” ( WT,October 1923), but felt other tales to be formula-ridden hackwork, as evinced in a delightful parody of Quinn’s work (see SL4.162–63). HPL first met Quinn at Wilfred B.Talman’s apartment in New York City on July 6, 1931 (see SL3.382); they met again in early January 1936, during HPL’s last New York visit. Quinn is parodied as “Teaberry Quince” in “The Battle That Ended the Century” (1934). His best Jules de Grandin stories were collected in The Phantom-Fighter(Arkham House, 1966); another collection is Is the Devil a Gentleman?(Mirage Press, 1970).

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R

“Rats in the Walls, The.”

Short story (7,940 words); written late August or early September 1923. First published in WT(March 1924); rpt. WT (June 1930); first collected in O; corrected text in DH;annotated version in An1and CC

A Virginian of British ancestry, a man named Delapore (his first name is not given), decides to spend his latter years in refurbishing and occupying his ancestral estate in southern England, Exham Priory, whose foundations extend to a period even before the Roman conquest of the first century C.E. Delapore spares no expense in the restoration and proudly moves into his estate on July 16, 1923. He has reverted to the ancestral spelling of his name, de la Poer, despite the fact that the family has a very unsavory reputation with the local population for murder, kidnapping, witchcraft, and other anomalies extending to the time of the first Baron Exham in 1261. Associated with the house or the family is the “dramatic epic of the rats—the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent.”

All this seems merely conventional ghostly legendry, and de la Poer pays no attention to it. But shortly after his occupancy of Exham Priory, odd things begin to happen; in particular, he and his several cats seem to detect the scurrying of rats in the walls of the structure, even though such a thing is absurd in light of the centuries-long desertion of the place. The scurrying seems to descend to the basement of the edifice, and one night de la Poer and his friend, Capt. Edward Norrys, spend a night there to see if they can discern the mystery. De la Poer wakes to hear the scurrying of the rats continuing “ still downward,far underneath this deepest of sub-cellars,” but Norrys hears nothing. When they come upon a trapdoor leading to a cavern beneath the basement, they decide to call in scientific specialists to investigate the matter. As the explorers descend into the nighted crypt, they come upon an awesome and horrific sight—an enormous expanse of bones: “Like a foamy sea they stretched, some fallen apart, but others wholly or

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partly articulated as skeletons; these latter invariably in postures of daemoniac frenzy, either fighting off some menace or clutching some other forms with cannibal intent.” When de la Poer finds that some bones have rings bearing his own coat of arms, he realizes the truth—his family has been the leaders of an ancient cannibalistic witch-cult that had its origins in primitive times—and he experiences a spectacular evolutionary reversal: speaking successively in archaic English, Middle English, Latin, Gaelic, and primitive ape-cries, he is found crouching over the half-eaten form of Capt. Norrys.

In a late letter HPL states that the story was “suggested by a very commonplace incident—the cracking of wall-paper late at night, and the chain of imaginings resulting from it” ( SL5.181), but this specific image does not occur in the story. HPL recorded the kernel of the idea in his commonplace book: “Wall paper cracks off in sinister shape—man dies of fright” (#107). And yet, an earlier entry (#79) is also suggestive: “Horrible secret in crypt of ancient castle—discovered by dweller.” HPL first submitted the tale to Argosy All-Story Weekly,a Munsey magazine whose managing editor, Robert H.Davis, rejected it as being (in HPL’s words) “too horrible for the tender sensibilities of a delicately nurtured publick” ( SL1.259).

The name de la Poerhas been seen to be an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe; but, as John Kipling Hitz points out, the name is a slight alteration of an actual name, Le Poer, which Poe and his erstwhile fiancée Sarah Helen (Power) Whitman believed to be in both their ancestries. HPL would have known this from reading Caroline Tinknor’s biography of Whitman, Poe’s Helen(1916), which he owned. Although the English atmosphere is depicted deftly in the tale, HPL appears to commit some errors. The town nearest to Exham Priory is given as Anchester, but there is no such town in England. HPL must have been thinking either of Ancaster in Lincolnshire or (more likely) Alchester in the southern county of Oxfordshire. Perhaps this is a deliberate alteration; but then, what do we make of the statement that “Anchester had been the camp of the Third Augustan Legion”? Neither Alchester nor Ancaster were the sites of legionary fortresses in Roman Britain; what is more, the Third Augustan Legion was never in England, and it was the Second Augustan Legion that was stationed at Isca Silurum (Caerleon-on-Usk) in what is now Wales.

Certain surface features of the tale—and perhaps one essential kernel of the plot—were taken from other works. As Steven J.Mariconda has pointed out, HPL’s account of the “epic of the rats” appears to be derived from a chapter in S.Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages(1869). The Gaelic parts of de la Poer’s concluding cries were lifted directly from Fiona Macleod’s “The Sin-Eater” (1895), which HPL read in Joseph Lewis French’s anthology, Best Psychic Stories(1920). (This borrowing would have a curious sequel. According to a now discredited historical theory, Gaelic was thought to have been spoken in the north of England rather than the South, where Cymric was spoken. When the tale was reprinted in WTfor June 1930, Robert E.Howard noticed the discrepancy and sent a letter to the editor, Farnsworth Wright, pointing it out; Wright passed the letter on to HPL, thereby initiating an intense six-year correspondence between the two writers.)

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The idea of atavism or reversion to type seems to have been derived from a story by Irvin S.Cobb, “The Unbroken Chain,” published in Cosmopolitanfor September 1923 (the issue, as is customary with many magazines, was probably on the stands at least a month before its cover date) and later collected in Cobb’s collection On an Island That Cost $24.00(1926). HPL admits that Frank Belknap Long gave him the magazine appearance of this story in 1923 (see HPL to J.Vernon Shea, November 8–22, 1933; ms., JHL), and he alludes to it without title in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” This tale deals with a Frenchman who has a small proportion of negroid blood from a slave brought to America in 1819. When he is run down by a train, he cries out in an African language— “Niama tumba!”—the words that his black ancestor shouted when he was attacked by a rhinoceros in Africa. The story was reprinted in HPL’s lifetime in Christine Campbell Thomson’s Switch On the Light (1931). Its appearance (with “The Dunwich Horror”) in Herbert A.Wise and Phyllis Fraser’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural(Modern Library, 1944) was a significant landmark in HPL’s literary recognition.

See Barton Levi St. Armand, The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft(Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1977); Steven J.Mariconda, “Baring-Gould and the Ghouls: The Influence of Curious Myths of the Middle Ageson ‘The Rats in the Walls,’” CryptNo. 14 (St. John’s Eve 1983): 3–7 (rpt. in Mariconda’s On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations[Necronomicon Press, 1995]); CryptNo. 72 (Roodmas 1990) (special issue on “The Rats in the Walls”); Hubert Van Calenbergh, “The Roots of Horror in The Golden Bough,” LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 21–23; Paul Montelone, “‘The Rats in the Walls’: A Study in Pessimism,” LSNo. 32 (Spring 1995): 18–26; John Kipling Hitz, “Lovecraft and the Whitman Memoir,” LSNo. 37 (Fall 1997): 15–17; Mollie L.Burleson, “H.P.Lovecraft and Charles Dickens: The Rats in Their Walls,” LSNo. 38 (Spring 1998): 34–35; John Kipling Hitz, “Some Notes on ‘The Rats in the Walls,’” LSNo. 40 (Fall 1998): 29–33. “Regner Lodbrog’s Epicedium.”

Poem (68 lines in 7 stanzas); written in late 1914. First published in the Acolyte(Summer 1944). The work is an English translation of a Latin translation of an eighth-century Runic poem printed in Hugh Blair’s A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian(1763), dealing with the military exploits of Regner Lodbrog. HPL relied heavily on an English paraphrase supplied by Blair of the final six stanzas; this is why the first stanza contains more deliberate gaps than the others. HPL quotes some lines of the Latin version as an epigraph to “The Teuton’s Battle-Song” ( United Amateur,February 1916). HPL misconstrued Blair’s remarks on Wormius (Ole Wurm, 1588–1654) and assumed that he dated to the thirteenth century; he is so mentioned when HPL attributes to him the Latin translation of the Necronomicon(see “History of the Necronomicon”).

See S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft, Regner Lodbrog, and Olaus Wormius,” CryptNo. 89 (Eastertide 1995): 3– 7.

Reid, Dr.

In “Pickman’s Model,” a physician who, as a student of comparative pathology, ceased his acquaintance with the artist Richard Upton Pickman,

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claiming (in Pickman’s indignant words) that the artist was “a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution.”

“Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson, A.”

Short story (2,060 words); probably written in the summer or fall of 1917. First published in the United Amateur(September 1917) as by “Humphry Littlewit, Esq.” First collected in Writings in the United Amateur(1976); corrected text in MW

The narrator, Littlewit, is entering his 228th year, having been born on August 20, 1690. He provides some familiar and not-so-familiar “reminiscences” of Johnson and of his literary circle—Boswell, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and others—all written in a meticulous re-creation of eighteenth-century English. Littlewit is the author of a periodical paper, The Londoner,like Johnson’s Rambler, Idler,and Adventurer,and—like HPL—he has a reputation for revising the poetry of others. He undertakes a revision of a poetic lampoon that Boswell directs toward him (this lampoon is actually found in the Life of Johnson). Much of the other information in the sketch is derived from Boswell’s biography or from Johnson’s own works.

Renshaw, Anne (Vyne) Tillery,

amateur journalist from Mississippi, instructor, and associate of HPL. Renshaw was a well-known figure in amateur journalism in the 1910s, publishing many poems (whose radicalism HPL chided in “Metrical Regularity” [ Conservative,July 1915] and “The Vers Libre Epidemic” [ Conservative,January 1917]) and editing The Pinfeather(for which HPL wrote “To the Members of the Pin-Feathers…,” November 1914), Ole Miss’(for which HPL wrote the essay “Systematic Instruction in the United” and the poem “A Mississippi Autumn,” both in the December 1915 issue), The Symphony(which published HPL’s poem “The Smile” [July 1916] and about which HPL wrote in the essay “Symphony and Stress” [ Conservative,October 1915]), and other papers. HPL was assistant editor for The Credential,a paper designed to publish the work of new amateurs, edited by Renshaw; only one issue (April 1920) is known to have been published. In late 1916 HPL, Renshaw, and Mrs. J.G.Smith (about whom nothing is known) teamed up to form the Symphony Literary Service, apparently a professional revision service; this appears to be the first time HPL engaged in such an enterprise, but the service does not seem to have lasted for very long. In 1919 HPL supported Renshaw’s successful candidacy for Official Editor of the UAPA (“For Official Editor—Anne Tillery Renshaw,” Conservative, July 1919). HPL met Renshaw for the first time in Boston on August 17, 1921. At that time she was teaching at the Curry School of Expression; some time previously she had been head of the English department at Research University in Washington, D.C. On April 11, 1925, Renshaw, back in Washington, drove HPL, George Kirk, and Edward L.Sechrist around the city on a sightseeing tour. Some evidence suggests that HPL may have been doing further work for Renshaw in a revisory capacity during the late 1920s. Little is heard of her until early 1936, when Renshaw, now running her own school of speech, proposed to HPL the revision of a manual on speech and grammar, entitled Well-Bred Speech. HPL undertook an exhaustive revision of Renshaw’s very crude draft, writing entire chapters (including those on “Words Frequently Mispronounced,” “Bromides

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[i.e., clichés] Must Go,” and a substantial concluding chapter, “What Shall I Read?”). Because HPL was so slow in getting the book to her (partly because of increasingly bad health, partly because of R.H.Barlow’s month-long stay with him that summer), Renshaw had to rush the book into print and omit much of HPL’s work. The volume appeared late in the year as Well Bred Speech: A Brief, Intensive Aid for English Students(Washington, D.C.: Standard Press, [1936]). She paid HPL only $100 for his work. HPL’s chapters and other revisions survive at JHL. The final chapter was published under the title “Suggestions for a Reading Guide” (in DB). Renshaw published another book early the next year— Salvaging Self Esteem: A Program for Self-Improvement(Washington, D.C.: Renshaw School of Speech, [1937])—which HPL owned. In her early amateur journalist days, Renshaw wrote a brief article on HPL, “Our Friend, the Conservative,” Ole Miss’No. 2 (December 1915): 2–3. “Revelation.”

Poem (56 lines in 7 stanzas); probably written in early 1919. First published in Tryout(March 1919); rpt. National Enquirer(April 24, 1919).

The narrator finds himself in a pleasant valley, but as he looks upward to the skies, he finds himself “Ever wiser, ever sadder”; looking back downward, he finds only “terror in the brooklet’s ride” as his realm has become a “lost, accursed land.”

Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, The.

Juvenile periodical written by HPL, 1903–9. Copies at JHL.

The hectographed paper survives in 69 issues: 1, No. 1 (August 2, 1903); 1, No. 2 (August 9, 1903); 1, No. 3 (August 16, 1903); 1, No. 4 (August 23, 1903); 1, No. 5 (August 30, 1903); 1, No. 6 (September 6, 1903); 1, No. 7 (September 13, 1903); 1, No. 8 (September 20, 1903); 1, No. 9 (September 27, 1903); 1, No. 10 (October 4, 1903); 1, No. 11 (October 11, 1903); 1, No. 12 (October 18, 1903); 1, No. 13 (October 25, 1903); 1, No. 14 (November 1, 1903); 1, No. 15 (November 8, 1903); 1, No. 16 (November 15, 1903); 1, No. 17 (November 22, 1903); 1, No. 18 (November 29, 1903); 1, No. 19 (December 6, 1903); 1, No. 20 (December 13, 1903); 1, No. 21 (December 20, 1903); 1, No. 22 (December 27, 1903); 1, No. 23 (January 3, 1904); 1, No. 24 (January 10, 1904); 1, No 25 (January 17, 1904); 1, No. 26 (January 24, 1904); 1, No. 27 (January 31, 1904); 3, No. 1 (April 16, 1905); [Extra] (April 17, 1905); 3, No. 2 (April 23, 1905); 3, No. 3 (April 30, 1905); 3, No. 4 (May 7, 1905); 3, No. 5 (May 14, 1905); 3, No. 6 (May 21, 1905); 3, No. 7 (May 28, 1905); 3, No. 8 (June 4, 1905); 3, No. 9 (June 11, 1905); 3, No. 10 (June 18, 1905); 3, No. 11 (June 25, 1905); 3, No. 12 (July 2, 1905); 3, No. 13 (July 9, 1905); 3, No. 14 (July 16, 1905); 3, No. 15 (July 23, 1905); 4 [sic], No. 1 (new series) (July 30, 1905); 3, No. 2 (August 6, 1905); 3, No. 3 (August 13, 1905); 3, No. 5 (August 27, 1905); 3, No. 6 (September 3, 1905); 3, No. 7 (September 10, 1905); 3, No. 8 (September 17, 1905); 3, No. 9 (October 8, 1905); 3, No. 10 (October 22, 1905); 3, No. 11 (November 12, 1905); 3, No. 6 [sic] (January 1906); 3, No. 7 (February 1906); 3, No. 8 (March 1906); 3, No. 9 (April 1906); 3, No. 10 (May 1906); 3, No. 11 (June 1906); 4, No. 1 (Special Anniversary Number) (August 1906); 4, No. 2 (September 1906); 4, No. 3 (October 1906); 4, No. 4

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(November 1906); 4, No. 5 (December 1906); 4, No. 6 (January 1907); 4, No. 9 (April 1907); 6, No. 6 (January 1909); 6, No. 7 (February 1909).

The paper was HPL’s most ambitious and longest-running juvenile periodical. An average issue would contain several different columns, features, and charts, along with news notes, advertisements (for works by HPL, for items from his collection, and for outside merchants or friends), and fillers. Numerous serials appeared in the paper; the issue for September 20, 1903 lists the “original & complete MS.” of these: “The Telescope” (12 pp.); “The Moon” (12 pp.); “On Venus” (10 pp.); “Atlas Wld.” (7 maps); “Practical Geom[etry]” (34 pp.); “Astronomy” (60 pp.); “Solar System” (27 pp.). The issue for November 1, 1903 notes that HPL has now begun to use the telescope at Ladd Observatory of Brown University; HPL elsewhere states that Prof. Winslow Upton, professor of astronomy at Brown, was a family friend and allowed HPL access to the obser-vatory ( SL1.38). Several early drafts of HPL’s columns for the Pawtuxet Valley Gleanerand [Providence] Tribunefirst appeared here.