An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Ricci, Angelo.

A thief (of Italian ancestry) who meets a bad end when, in “The Terrible Old Man,” he attempts to rob an old sea captain of his reputed hoard of Spanish gold and silver.

Rice, Professor Warren.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” a professor at Miskatonic University who, with Henry Armitage and Francis Morgan, leads the party that exterminates Wilbur Whateley’s monstrous twin brother. Rimel, Duane W[eldon] (1915–1996),

author of weird and fantasy tales and correspondent of HPL (1934–37). In his letters HPL wrote expansively to Rimel about numerous subjects, offering constant assistance in matters of literary technique. In a letter dated June 17, 1934, HPL includes a segment called “Notes on Writing a Story,” one of several different versions of the essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” (1933). HPL read many of his early stories and revised some of them, including “The Tree on the Hill” (1934; Polaris, September 1940) and “The Disinterment” (1935; WT,January 1937), and perhaps also “The Jewels of Charlotte” ( Unusual Stories,May–June 1935). Rimel published many other stories in fanzines and semi-pro magazines. His poem cycle “Dreams of Yith” ( Fantasy Fan,July and September 1934) was revised by HPL and perhaps by Clark Ashton Smith. In his so-called death diary, HPL mentions revising Rimel’s story “From the Sea” in January 1937, but the story apparently is unpublished and does not survive. Rimel briefly spearheaded the HPL fan movement in the 1940s, luring Francis T.Laney back into fandom and coediting The Acolyte(1942–46). He went on to write westerns and soft-core pornography under pseudonyms. See his memoir, “H.P.Lovecraft as I Knew Him” ( CryptNo. 18 [Yuletide 1983]: 9–11). Much of his weird short fiction and poetry has now been reprinted in The Forbidden Room(Moshassuck Press, 1988), The Many Worlds of Duane Rimel(1988), The Second Book of Rimel(1989), and To Yith and Beyond(Moshassuck Press, 1990).

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Robbins, Maria.

In “The Shunned House,” a woman from Newport, R.I., hired by Mercy Dexter in 1769 to be a servant at the house. Although her health declines markedly, she stays until 1783, when the Harris family moved out of the house.

Robinson, Buck.

In “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a semi-professional boxer (nicknamed “The Harlem Smoke”) who is killed by “Kid” O’Brien in an informal bout in Bolton, Mass. He is taken to the office of Dr. Herbert West, who hopes to revive him from the dead, but West believes he has failed, since the solution he injected into Robinson (an African American) was “prepared from experience with white specimens only.” Later West learns otherwise.

Rogers, George.

In “The Horror in the Museum,” the curator and chief artist of a wax museum in London who has a penchant for teratological monstrosities and who goes mad after he captures a strange “deity.” His latest creation in wax—a depiction of himself mutilated by the deity—proves to be no wax effigy at all.

Romero, Juan.

In “Transition of Juan Romero,” a Mexican peon who is actually a descendant of the Aztecs. When he and the narrator explore the vast cavern uncovered in the Norton Mine, where they are employed as miners, he witnesses something frightening in the great abyss, and the next day is found dead in his bunk.

Romnod.

In “The Quest of Iranon,” the boy from Teloth who helps Iranon seek his homeland, Aira. They come to Oonai, “the city of lutes and dancing,” where they stay, and there Romnod indulges in strong drink, from which he eventually dies.

Ropes,———.

In At the Mountains of Madness,a student and a member of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31.

Roulet, Etienne.

In “The Shunned House,” a Huguenot who flees from France to East Greenwich, R.I., in 1686. Roulet is somehow connected with Jacques Roulet of Caude, who in 1598 is accused of lycanthropy. The land on which the Shunned House was built had been leased to Roulet and his wife in 1697. Rufus, L[ucius] Caelius.

In “The Very Old Folk,” a provincial quaestor in the Roman province of Hispania Citerior (Spain), who accompanies a cohort of the Roman army to investigate reports of peculiar events in the hills above Tarraco. In the dream inspiring this story, HPL himself was Rufus.

Russell, John,

British amateur journalist living in Florida and infrequent associate of HPL. When HPL wrote a letter to the Argosycriticizing romance writer Fred Jackson (published in the September 1913 issue), Russell was one of many to protest—but his protest (published in the November 1913 issue) was in verse, leading HPL to respond with the Ad Criticospoems. After a year of sporadic exchanges, the editor of the Argosyasked the two writers to reconcile, and they

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did so in an item published as “The Critics’ Farewell” in the October 1914 issue, containing HPL’s poem “The End of the Jackson War” and Russell’s “Our Apology to E.M.W.” HPL must have got in touch with Russell personally around this time; he urged Russell to join amateur journalism, but Russell did not do so immediately. Russell’s poem “Florida” and HPL’s poem “New England” were published together in the Providence Evening News(December 18, 1914); Russell’s poem was reprinted from the Tampa Times. HPL’s brief article “An Impartial Spectator” ( Conservative,October 1915) consists of paragraphs prefacing and following Russell’s poem “Metrical Regularity, or, Broken Metre.” In April 1925, Russell spent a few days in HPL’s company in New York. Thereafter he disappears from the record. No correspondence between HPL and Russell survives.

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S

Sandusky, Albert A. (d. 1934?).

Amateur journalist and associate of HPL. Sandusky, a resident of Cambridge, Mass., operated the Lincoln Press, and in this capacity he printed the two issues of the Providence Amateur(June 1915 and February 1916) for HPL, as well as several issues of HPL’s Conservative(July 1915, October 1915, January 1916, April 1916, and possibly July 1916). HPL first met Sandusky on a visit to Boston on March 10–11, 1923, to attend a meeting of the Hub Club (an amateur group associated with the NAPA), of which Sandusky was a member. HPL was taken with Sandusky’s piquant use of contemporary slang, and his poem “The Feast (Hub Journalist Club, March 10, 1923),” published in the Hub Club Quill(May 1923), is dedicated to “Wisecrack Sandusky, B.I., M.B.O. (Bachelor of Intelligence, Massachusetts Brotherhood of Owls).” HPL met Sandusky again in Boston in August 1923, and Sandusky visited HPL in New York in June 1925. No correspondence by HPL to Sandusky has survived.

Sargent, Joe.

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” he drives the motor coach that takes Robert Olmstead between Arkham, Newburyport, and Innsmouth.

Sargent, Moses and Abigail.

In “The Thing on the Doorstep,” servants of Edward and Asenath Derby who, after being dismissed by Edward, appear to exact some kind of blackmail from him.

Sawyer, Asaph.

The vindictive scoundrel in “In the Vault” whose corpse was mutilated by George Birch in order to make it fit a coffin originally intended for a shorter man and who exacts vengeance on Birch even in death.

Sawyer, Earl.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” a neighbor of the Whateleys who, when selling cattle to that family, detects a horrible stench in their abandoned toolhouse. Later he tends Wilbur Whateley’s cattle while Wilbur is visiting the

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library of Miskatonic University, and still later he is among the party that exterminates Wilbur’s twin brother. His “common-law wife” is Mamie Bishop. His relationship to Sally Sawyer, housekeeper of Seth Bishop’s farm, and her son Chauncey is unspecified.

Schmidt,———.

In “The Temple,” a seaman on the German submarine U-29 who becomes violently insane and is executed by the commander, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein.

Schwartz, Julius (b. 1915),

American agent and editor. As editor of Fantasy Magazine,Schwartz commissioned HPL (along with C.L.Moore, A.Merritt, Robert E.Howard, and Frank Belknap Long) to write the weird version of “The Challenge from Beyond” for the September 1935 issue (also a science fiction version with other writers). He later became an agent. At a party in New York, probably in the fall of 1935, HPL agreed to let Schwartz market his material; Schwartz sold At the Mountains of Madnessto Astoundingfor $350 (less 10% commission). In late 1936 he contemplated marketing HPL’s tales in England, but if he did so he was unsuccessful. He became an important figure in the comic industry in the 1950s. Schwartz has now published his memoirs, Man of Two Worlds(2000).

See Will Murray, “Julius Schwartz on Lovecraft” (interview), CryptNo. 76 (Hallowmas 1990): 14–18. Scientific Gazette, The.

Juvenile periodical written by HPL, 1899–1909. Copies at JHL.

The hectographed paper was HPL’s first venture in scientific writing, initially inspired by his interest in chemistry beginning in 1898 but later expanding to cover a wider range of scientific topics. Thirtytwo issues survive: 1, No. 1 (March 4, 1899); New Issue 1, No. 1 (May 12, 1902); 3, No. 1 (August 16, 1903); 3, No. 2 (August 23, 1903); 3, No. 3 (August 30, 1903); 3, No. 4 (September 6, 1903); 3, No. 5 (September 13, 1903); 3, No. 6 (September 30, 1903); 3, Odd Number 1 (September 22, 1903); 3, Odd Number 2 (September 23, 1903); 3, No. 10 [sic] (September 27, 1903); 3, No. 11 [sic] (October 4, 1903); 3, No. 11 [sic] odd (October 8, 1903); 3, No. 9 (October 11, 1903); 3, No. 10 (October 18, 1903); 3, No. 4 odd (October 20, 1903); 3, No. 11 (October 25, 1903); 3, No. 12 (November 1, 1903); 3, No. 13 (November 8, 1903); 3, No. 14 (November 15, 1903); 3, No. 15 (November 22, 1903); 3, No. 16 (November 29, 1903); 3, No. 17 (December 6, 1903); 3, No. 18 (December 13, 1903); 3, No. 19 (December 20, 1903); 3, No. 20 (December 27, 1903); 3, No. 21 (January 3, 1904); 3, No. 22 (January 10, 1904); 3, No. 23 (January 17, 1904); 3, No. 24 (January 24, 1904); 3, No. 25 (January 31, 1904); 10, No. 11 (January 1909).

The first issue consists of two sentences: “There was a great explosion in the Providence Laboratory this afternoon. While experimenting some potassium blew up causing great damage to everyone.” HPL notes that at this time the magazine was a daily but that it “soon degenerated into a weekly” ( SL1.37). We are clearly missing any subsequent issues of Volume 1 and all issues of Volume 2. There may not have been very many of these, as HPL notes in the issue of May 12, 1902: “The Scientific Gazette, so long discontinued, has been re

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sumed.” The price is now raised from 1¢ to 2¢. HPL states ( Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy,July 30, 1905) that the paper was revived in May 1904 as a monthly, but no issues survive; the September 16, 1905, issue of the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomyannounces that the Scientific Gazetteis now discontinued. In the September 1906 issue of the Rhode Island JournalHPL states that his boyhood friend Arthur Fredlund had taken over as editor of the Scientific Gazette,but no issues produced under Fredlund’s editorship are extant. HPL’s fleeting revival of his juvenile paper when he was eighteen years old (and some months after he withdrew from high school without a diploma because of a nervous breakdown) is a poignant indication of the sense of hopelessness he felt at this setback to his intellectual and emotional maturation.

Searight, Richard F[ranklyn] (1902–1975).

Pulp writer from Michigan and correspondent of HPL. With Norman E.Hammerstrom, Searight wrote “The Brain in the Jar” ( WT,November 1924), but it was not until the 1930s that he decided to resume the writing of weird and science fiction. At the suggestion of WT editor Farnsworth Wright, whom he visited in the summer of 1933, Searight wrote to HPL asking about the possibility of revising some of his tales. HPL declined, feeling that the “occasional shortcomings” of Searight’s tales “are matters of subject-matter rather than of technique” (letter to Searight, August 31, 1933), but he continued to advise Searight in literary matters. In early 1934 Searight wrote “The Sealed Casket” ( WT,March 1935), for which he created the Eltdown Shards, which HPL cited in “The Shadow out of Time” and “The Challenge from Beyond.” HPL had no hand in revising the tale, and he altered only one word of the epigraph (purporting to be from the Eltdown Shards) that was intended to preface the story but was not published in the WTversion. (HPL quoted the epigraph in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith [c. March 1935; SL5.112], leading some to believe that he wrote it.) Searight published a few pieces in Wonder Storiesand other pulps but never succeeded in making a full-time career of writing. His historical novel Wild Empire,written in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was published in 1994. Necronomicon Press has issued two collections of his tales: The Brain in the Jar and Others(1992) and The Sealed Casket and Others(1996). HPL’s Letters to Richard F.Searight also appeared in 1992 from Necronomicon Press. All three volumes have sensitive and informative introductions by Searight’s son, Franklyn Searight (b. 1935).

Sechrist, Edward Lloyd (1873–1953),

beekeeper, amateur journalist residing in Washington, D.C., and occasional correspondent of HPL. Sechrist, a member of the UAPA, visited HPL in Providence in early 1924 (see SL1.292) then visited HPL in New York on November 3, 1924. He accompanied HPL during much of the latter’s trip to Washington on April 11, 1925, and met HPL again in Washington on May 6, 1929. HPL noted (letter to Lillian D.Clark, [May 6, 1929]; ms., JHL) that his poem “The Outpost” (1929) made use of the tales about Zimbabwe told to him by Sechrist, who had actually been to the ruins of the African city. Two late letters published in SL(April 15, 1936, and February 14, 1937) mistakenly addressed to “Arthur F.Sechrist” (HPL’s salutation is to “Ar-Eph-Ess” or RFS) are in fact to Richard F.Searight.

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“Secret Cave, or John Lees Adventure, The.”

Juvenile story (525 words); written c. 1898–99. First published in SR;corrected text in Juvenilia: 1897–1905(1985) and MW

Mrs. Lee instructs her ten-year-old son John and two-year-old daughter Alice to be “good children” while both parents are “going off for the day”; but immediately upon their departure John and Alice go down to the cellar and begin “to rummage among the rubbish.” When Alice leans against a wall and it suddenly gives way behind her, a passage is discovered. John and Alice enter the passage, coming successively upon a large empty box; a small, very heavy box that is not opened; and a boat with oars. The passage comes to an abrupt end; John pulls away “the obstacle” and finds a torrent of water rushing in. John is a good swimmer, but little Alice is not, and she drowns. John manages to struggle into the boat, clinging to the body of his sister and the small box. Suddenly he realizes that “he could shut off the water”; he does so, although how he does it—and why he did not think of it earlier—is never explained. Finally he reaches the cellar. Later it is discovered that the box contains a solid gold chunk worth $10,000—“enough to pay for any thing but the death of his sister.” “Shadow out of Time, The.”

Novelette (25,600 words); written November 10, 1934 to February 22, 1935. First published in Astounding Stories(June 1936); first collected in O;reprinted in DH;corrected and annotated text (based on recently discovered AMS): Hippocampus Press, 2001.

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor of political economy at Miskatonic University, experiences a sudden nervous breakdown on May 14, 1908, while teaching a class. Awaking in the hospital after a collapse, he appears to have suffered amnesia so severe that it has affected even his vocal and motor faculties. Gradually he relearns the use of his body and, indeed, develops tremendous mental capacity, seemingly far beyond that of a normal human being. His wife, sensing that something is gravely wrong, refuses to have anything to do with him and later obtains a divorce; only one of his three children, Wingate, continues to associate with him. Peaslee spends the next five years conducting prodigious research at various libraries around the world and also undertakes expeditions to various mysterious realms. Finally, on September 27, 1913, he suddenly snaps back into his old life: when he awakes after a spell of unconsciousness, he believes he is still teaching the economics course in 1908.

Peaslee is now plagued with dreams of increasing strangeness. He dreams that his mind has been placed in the body of an entity shaped like a ten-foot-high rugose cone, while that entity’s mind occupies his own body. These creatures are called the Great Race “because [they] alone had conquered the secret of time”: they have perfected a technique of mind-exchange with almost any other life-form throughout the universe and at any point in time—past, present, or future. The Great Race had established a colony on this planet in Australia 150,000,000 years ago. Their minds had previously occupied the bodies of another race but had left them because of some impending cataclysm; later they would migrate to other bodies after the cone-shaped beings were destroyed. They had compiled a voluminous library consisting of the accounts of all the other captive minds throughout the universe. Peaslee writes an account of his time for the Great Race’s archives.

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Peaslee believes that his dreams of the Great Race are merely the product of his esoteric study during his amnesia; but then an Australian explorer, having read some of Peaslee’s articles on his dreams in a psychological journal, writes to him to let him know that some archeological remains very similar to the ones he has described as the city of the Great Race have been recently discovered. Peaslee accompanies the explorer, Robert B.F.Mackenzie, on an expedition to the Great Sandy Desert and is stunned to find that his dreams may have a real source. One night he leaves the camp to conduct a solitary exploration. He winds through the now underground corridors of the Great Race’s city, increasingly unnerved at the familiarity of the sites he is traversing. He knows that the only way to discern whether his dreams are only dreams or some monstrous reality is to find the account he dreamed he had written for the archives of the Great Race. After a laborious descent he comes to the place and does indeed find his own record. Reflecting afterward, he writes: “No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.”

The basic mind-exchange scenario of the tale derives from at least three sources. First is H.B.Drake’s The Shadowy Thing(1928; first published in England in 1925 as The Remedy), which also influenced “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Second, there is Henri Béraud’s obscure novel Lazarus(1925), which HPL owned and which he read in 1928 (HPL to August Derleth, [February 1928]; ms., SHSW). The novel presents a man, Jean Mourin, who remains in a hospital for sixteen years (for the period 1906– 22) while suffering a long amnesia. During this time he develops a personality (named Gervais by the hospital staff) very different from that of his usual self. Every now and then this alternate personality returns; once Mourin thinks he sees Gervais when he looks in the mirror, and later he thinks Gervais is stalking him. Mourin even undertakes a study of split personalities, as Peaslee does, in an attempt to come to grips with the situation.

The third dominant influence is the film Berkeley Square(1933), which enraptured HPL by its portrayal of a man whose mind somehow drifts back into the body of his ancestor in the eighteenth century. This source in particular may have been critical, for it seems to have supplied HPL with suggestions on how he might embody his long-held belief (expressed in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”) that “ Conflict with timeseems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.” HPL first saw Berkeley Squarein November 1933. Initially he was much taken with the fidelity with which the eighteenth-century atmosphere was captured; but on seeing the film again, he began to detect some flaws in conception. Berkeley Squareis based on a play of that title by John L.Balderston (1929). It tells the story of Peter Standish, a man in the early twentieth century who is so fascinated with the eighteenth century—and in particular his own ancestor and namesake—that he somehow transports himself literally into the past and into the body of his ancestor. HPL detected two problems with the execution of the idea: (1) Where was the mind or personality of the eighteenth-century Peter Standish when the twentieth-century Peter was occupying his body? (2) How could the

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eighteenth-century Peter’s diary, written in part while the twentieth-century Peter was occupying his body, not take cognizance of the fact ( SL4.362–64)? In his story HPL seems to have striven to obviate these difficulties.

Other, smaller features in “The Shadow out of Time” may also have literary sources. Peaslee’s alienation from his family may echo Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return(1910), in which again an eighteenth-century personality seems to fasten itself upon the body of a twentieth-century individual, causing his wife to cease all relations with him. Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber(1927), in which a man attempts to recapture his entire past, is perhaps the source for the vast archives of the Great Race. Cline’s protagonist, Richard Pride, keeps an immense warehouse full of documents about his own life, and toward the end of the novel the narrator frantically traverses this warehouse before finding Pride killed by his own dog.

Two other “influences” can be noted if only to be dismissed. It has frequently been assumed that “The Shadow out of Time” is simply an extrapolation upon Wells’s The Time Machine. HPL read the novel in 1925, but there is little in it that has a direct bearing on his story. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men(1930) has been suggested as an influence on the enormous stretches of time reflected in the story, but HPL did not read this work until August 1935, months after the tale’s completion (see HPL to August Derleth, August 7, 1935; ms., SHSW).

Perhaps a significant literary influence can be found in HPL’s own works. The story could be thought of as an exhaustive expansion of the notion of “possession” by an extraterrestrial being as found in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). Minor allusions to other older stories appear, since many were being published only for the first time at the time HPL was writing “The Shadow out of Time.” The story’s amnesia motif makes for a provocative autobiographical connection. Peaslee’s amnesia dates from 1908 to 1913, the exact time when HPL himself, having had to withdraw from high school, descended into hermitry. The inability of the alien inhabiting Peaslee’s body to control its facial muscles may correlate to the facial tics that HPL suffered at that time.

HPL experienced considerable difficulty in writing the story. The core of the plot had been conceived as early as 1930, emerging from a discussion between HPL and Clark Ashton Smith regarding the plausibility of stories involving time travel. HPL noted: “The weakness of most tales with this theme is that they do not provide for the recording, in history, of those inexplicable events in the past which were caused by the backward time-voyagings of persons of the present & future” ( SL3.217). At that time he already envisioned the cataclysmic ending: “One baffling thing that could be introduced is to have a modern man discover, among documents exhumed from some prehistoric buried city, a mouldering papyrus or parchment written in English, & in his own handwriting.”

By March 1932 HPL had devised the basic idea of mind-exchange over time, as outlined in another letter to Smith:

I have a sort of time idea of very simple nature floating around in the back of my head, but don’t know when I shall ever get around to using it. The notion is that of a race in primal Lomar perhaps even before the founding of Olathoë & in the heyday of Hyperborean Commoriom—who gained a knowledge of all arts & sciences by sending thoughtstreams ahead to drain the minds of men in future ages—angling in time, as it were. Now

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& then they get hold of a really competent man of learning, & annex all his thoughts. Usually they only keep their victims tranced for a short time, but once in a while, when they need some special piece of continuous information, one of their number sacrifices himself for the race & actually changes bodies with the first thoroughly satisfactory victim he finds. The victim’s brain then goes back to 100,000 B.C.—into the hypnotist’s body to live in Lomar for the rest of his life, while the hypnotist from dead aeons animates the modern clay of his victims. ( SL4.25–26) This passage is quoted at length to show both that HPL made significant alterations in the finished story—the mind of the Great Race rarely remains in a captive body for the rest of its life but only for a period of years, after which a return switch is effected—and that the conception of mind-exchange over time had been devised beforeHPL saw Berkeley Square,the only other work that may conceivably have influenced this point.

HPL began writing of the story in late 1934. He announces in November: “I developed that story mistily and allusivelyin 16 pages, but it was no go. Thin and unconvincing, with the climactic revelation wholly unjustified by the hash of visions preceding it” ( SL5.71). It is difficult to imagine what this sixteen-page version could have been like. The disquisition about the Great Race must have been radically compressed, and this is what clearly dissatisfied HPL about this version. He came to realize that this passage, far from being an irrelevant digression, was actually the heart of the story. What then occurred is a little unclear: Is the second draft the version we now have? In late December he speaks of a “second version” that “fails to satisfy me” ( SL5.86) and is uncertain whether to finish it as it is or to destroy it and start afresh. He may have done the latter, for long after finishing the story he declares that the final version was “itself the 3d complete version of the same story” ( SL5.346).

HPL was highly dissatisfied with the story and was disinclined to type it. In a highly unusual maneuver (HPL never circulated his drafts) he sent the manuscript to August Derleth and then expressed irritation that Derleth apparently made no attempt to read the crabbed text. Then, while visiting R.H.Barlow in Florida in the summer of 1935, HPL asked Derleth to send him the manuscript, as Barlow wished to read it. In fact, Barlow surreptitiously typed the story. When HPL sent the typescript for circulation among his correspondents, the first recipient, Donald Wandrei, instead took the story to F.Orlin Tremaine of Astoundingafter he learned of Julius Schwartz’s sale of At the Mountains of Madnessto the magazine. Tremaine accepted it forthwith, apparently without reading it.

The manuscript of the story—formerly in the possession of Barlow, to whom HPL had given it— surfaced in 1994. Consultation of the text reveals that, in spite of HPL’s assertions to the contrary, the story was significantly adulterated in its appearance in Astounding Stories,specifically in paragraphing. Other errors appear to be the result of Barlow’s inability to read HPL’s handwriting. See Robert M.Price, “The Mischief out of Time,” CryptNo. 4 (Eastertide 1982): 27, 30; Darrell Schweitzer, “Lovecraft’s Favorite Movie,” LS Nos. 19/20 (Fall 1989): 23–25, 27; Will Murray, “Buddai,” CryptNo. 75 (Michaelmas 1990): 29–33; S.T.Joshi, “The Genesis of ‘The Shadow out of Time,’” LS No, 33 (Fall 1995): 24–29; Paul Montelone, “The Vanity of Existence in ‘The Shadow out of Time,’” LS No. 34 (Spring 1996): 27–35.

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“Shadow over Innsmouth, The.”

Novelette (22,150 words); written November-December 3, 1931. First published as a book (Everett, Pa.: Visionary Publishing Co., 1936); rpt. (abridged) WT(January 1942); first collected in O; corrected text in DH;annotated version as a separate booklet (Necronomicon Press, 1994; rev. ed. 1997) and in CC

The narrator, Robert Olmstead (never mentioned by name in the story, but identified in the surviving notes), a native of Ohio, celebrates his coming of age in 1927 by undertaking a tour of New England —“sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical”—and, finding that the train fare from Newburyport to Arkham (whence his family derives) is higher than he would like, is grudgingly told by a ticket agent of a bus that makes the trip by way of a seedy coastal town called Innsmouth. The place does not appear on most maps, and many odd rumors are whispered about it. Innsmouth was a flourishing seaport until 1846, when an epidemic of some sort killed over half its citizens. People believe it may have had something to do with the voyages of Captain Obed Marsh, who sailed extensively in China and the South Seas and somehow acquired vast sums in gold and jewels. Now the Marsh refinery is just about the only business of importance in Innsmouth aside from fishing off the shore near Devil’s Reef, where fish are always unusually abundant. All the townspeople seem to have repulsive deformities or traits—collectively termed “the Innsmouth look”—and are studiously avoided by the neighboring communities.

This account piques Olmstead’s interest as an antiquarian, and he decides to spend at least a day in Innsmouth, planning to catch a bus in the morning and leaving for Arkham in the evening. He goes to the Newburyport Historical Society and is fascinated by a tiara that came from Innsmouth: “It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.” Going to Innsmouth on a seedy bus run by Joe Sargent, whose hairlessness, fishy odor, and never-blinking eyes provoke his loathing, Olmstead begins exploration, aided by directions and a map supplied by a normal-looking young man who works in a grocery store. All around he sees signs of both physical and moral decay from a once distinguished level. The atmosphere begins to oppress him, and he thinks about leaving the town early; but then he catches sight of a nonagenarian named Zadok Allen who, he has been told, is a fount of knowledge about the history of Innsmouth. Olmstead has a chat with Zadok, loosening his tongue with bootleg whiskey.

Zadok tells him a wild story about alien creatures, half fish and half frog, whom Obed Marsh had encountered in the South Seas. Zadok maintains that Obed struck up an agreement with these creatures: they would provide him with bountiful gold and fish in exchange for human sacrifices. This arrangement works for a while, until the fish-frogs seek to mate with humans. This provokes a violent uproar in the town in 1846: many citizens die and the remainder are forced to take the Oath of Dagon, professing loyalty to the hybrid entities. There is, however, a compensating benefit of a sort. The offspring of the fish-frogs and humans acquire a kind of immortality: they undergo a physical change (acquiring “the Innsmouth look”), gaining many of the properties of the aliens, and then they take to the sea and live in vast underwater cities for millennia.

Scarcely knowing what to make of this bizarre tale and alarmed at Zadok’s maniacal plea that he leave the town at once because they have been seen talk

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ing, Olmstead attempts to catch the evening bus out of Innsmouth. But the bus has suffered inexplicable engine trouble and cannot be repaired until the next day; he will have to stay at the seedy Gilman House, the only hotel in town. Reluctantly checking in, he feels ever-growing intimations of horror and menace as he hears anomalous voices outside his room and other strange noises. He finally realizes his peril when the doorknob is tried from the outside. He attempts to leave the hotel and escape town but is almost overwhelmed at both the number and the loathsomeness of his hybrid pursuers.

Olmstead does manage to escape, but his tale is not over. After a much-needed rest, he continues to pursue genealogical research and finds appalling evidence that he may be directly related to the Marsh family. He learns of a cousin locked in a madhouse in Canton and an uncle who committed suicide because he learned something nameless about himself. Strange dreams of swimming underwater begin to afflict him, and gradually he breaks down. Then one morning he discerns that he has acquired “the Innsmouth look.” He considers suicide, but “certain dreams deterred me.” Later he comes to his decision: “I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”

The writing of the story came at a time when HPL’s spirits were at a low ebb because of the nearly simultaneous rejection, in the summer of 1931, of At the Mountains of Madnessby WTand of a collection of his stories by Putnam’s. He reports that his revisiting, in the fall of 1931, of the decaying seaport of Newburyport, Mass, (which he had first seen in 1923), led him to conduct a sort of “laboratory experimentation” ( SL3.435) to see which style or manner was best suited to the theme. Four drafts (whether complete or not is not clear) were written and discarded (HPL to Donald Wandrei, [November 27, 1931]; ms., JHL), and finally HPL simply wrote the story in his accustomed manner. He was, however, profoundly dissatisfied with it. A week after finishing it, he wrote to Derleth: “I don’t think the experimenting came to very much. The result, 68 pages long, has all the defects I deplore—especially in point of style, where hackneyed phrases & rhythms have crept in despite all precautions. Use of any other style was like working in a foreign language—hence I was left high & dry. …No—I don’t intend to offer ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ for publication, for it would stand no chance of acceptance” (HPL to August Derleth, December 10, 1931; ms., SHSW). Will Murray has conjectured that the story may have been written at least in part with Strange Tales in mind. Strange Talespaid better than WT,but it sought stories with more of an “action” slant; hence the inclusion of Olmstead’s pursuit by the Innsmouth entities. Although HPL prepared a typescript of the story and circulated it among his colleagues, he did not submit it to Strange Tales or anywhere else. August Derleth submitted the story without HPL’s knowledge to WTin early 1933; but Farnsworth Wright rejected it: “I have read Lovecraft’s story, THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, and must confess that it fascinates me. But I don’t know just what I can do with it. It is hard to break a story of this kind into two parts, and it is too long to run complete in one part” (Farnsworth

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Wright to August Derleth, January 17, 1933; ms., SHSW). HPL eventually found out about this surreptitious submission, for by 1934 he is speaking of its rejection by Wright (HPL to F.Lee Baldwin, August 21, 1934; ms., JHL).

At length HPL agreed to let William L.Crawford publish the story as a book (although previously Crawford had conceived of various other plans for the tale—submitting it to Astounding Stories; publishing it in one of his semi-professional magazines, Unusual Storiesor Marvel Tales;publishing it as a book together with At the Mountains of Madness). The book was published in November 1936 (although the copyright page gives the date of publication as April) and contained so many errors that an errata sheet had to be prepared. Numerous extant copies bear corrections in pencil by HPL. It features four interior illustrations and a dust jacket illustration by Frank Utpatel. About 400 copies were printed; 200 of these were bound, the others later being destroyed. It is the only book of HPL’s fiction published and distributed in his lifetime.

The story proves to be a cautionary tale on the ill effects of miscegenation, or the sexual union of different races, and as such can be considered a vast expansion and subtilization of the plot of “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1920).

The name Innsmouth had been coined for “Celephaïs” (1920), then clearly located in England. HPL revived the name for two sonnets (“The Port” and “The Bells”) of Fungi from Yuggoth(1929–30), where the setting is not entirely clear, although a New England locale is likely.

There seem to be three dominant literary influences on the tale. The use of hybrid fishlike entities derives from at least two works for which HPL always retained a fondness: Irvin S.Cobb’s “Fishhead” (which HPL read in the Cavalierin 1913 and praised in a letter to the editor, and which was also reprinted in Harré’s Beware After Dark![1929], where HPL surely reread it) and Robert W. Chambers’s “The Harbor-Master,” a short story later included as the first five chapters of the episodic novel In Search of the Unknown(1904). (August Derleth had given HPL a copy of the book in the fall of 1930 [ SL3.187].) But in both stories there is only a singlecase of hybridism, not that of an entire community or civilization. This latter feature may have been partially derived from Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” (in John Silence—Physician Extraordinary[1908]), in which the inhabitants of an entire small town in France all appear to practice sorcery and turn into cats at night. The character Zadok Allen seems loosely based upon the figure of Humphrey Lathrop, an elderly doctor in Herbert Gorman’s The Place Called Dagon(1927), which HPL read in March 1928 (HPL to August Derleth, March 2, [1928]; ms., SHSW). Like Zadok, Lathrop is the repository for the secret history of the Massachusetts town in which he resides (Leominster, in the north-central part of Massachusetts) and, like Zadok, he is partial to spirits. Zadok, however, has exactly the life-span (1831–1927) of HPL’s aged amateur colleague Jonathan E.Hoag.

Olmstead’s character and mannerisms reveal several autobiographical touches, especially in regard to HPL’s habits as a frugal antiquarian traveler. Olmstead always “seek[s] the cheapest possible route,” and this is usually—for Olmstead as for HPL—by bus. His reading up on Innsmouth in the library, and his systematic exploration of the town by way of the map and instructions given

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to him by the grocery youth, parallel HPL’s own thorough researches into the history and topography of the places he wished to visit and his frequent trips to libraries, chambers of commerce, and elsewhere for maps, guidebooks, and historical background. Even the ascetic meal Olmstead eats at a restaurant—“A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me”—echoes HPL’s parsimonious diet both at home and on his travels.

Olmstead’s spectacular conversion at the end—where he not only becomes reconciled to his fate as a nameless hybrid but actually welcomes it—is the most controversial point of the tale. Does this mean that HPL, as in At the Mountains of Madness,wishes to transform the Deep Ones from objects of horror to objects of sympathy or identification? Or are we to imagine Olmstead’s change of heart as an augmentation of the horror? It would appear that the latter is intended. There is no gradual “reformation” of the Deep Ones as there is of the Old Ones in the earlier novel: our revulsion at their physical hideousness is not mollified or tempered by any subsequent appreciation of their intelligence, courage, or nobility. Olmstead’s transformation is the climax of the story and the pinnacle of its horrific scenario: it shows that not merely his physical body but his mind has been ineluctably corrupted. In a way, the ending parallels the conclusion of “The Temple,” where the narrator confidently vows with a tone of triumph to enter the sunken city. Olmstead’s final utterance, incidentally, seems to be a parody of the 23rd Psalm (“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever”).

See William L.Crawford, “Lovecraft’s First Book,” in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces(Arkham House, 1959); Dirk W.Mosig, “Innsmouth and the Lovecraft Oeuvre: A Holistic Approach,” Nyctalops 2, No. 7 (March 1978): 3, 5; T.G.L.Cockcroft, “Some Notes on ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth,’” LSNo. 3 (Fall 1980): 3–4; Bert Atsma, “The Scales of Horror,” CryptNo. 18 (Yuletide 1983): 16–18; Will Murray, “Lovecraft and Strange Tales,” CryptNo. 74 (Lammas 1990): 3–11; Sam Gafford, “‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’: Lovecraft’s Melting Pot,” LSNo. 24 (Spring 1991): 6–13; Bennett LovettGraff, “Shadows over Lovecraft: Reactionary Fantasy and Immigrant Eugenics,” Extrapolation38, No. 3 (Fall 1997): 175–92.

Shea, J[oseph] Vernon (1912–1981),

correspondent of HPL (1931–37). Shea, residing in Pittsburgh, engaged HPL in numerous involved (and at times heated) discussions on politics (especially concerning Hitler and the Nazis) and society. Shea’s lifelong interest in films also seemed to rub off a bit on HPL, who discussed with Shea numerous films he saw in the 1930s, including Berkeley Square. Shea wrote some fiction at this time (HPL was much impressed with a short story called “The Tin Roof; see SL4.93–94), but it was not published. Shea published a few weird and science fiction stories in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, and still later wrote some tales imitating HPL: “The Haunter of the Graveyard” (in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,ed. August Derleth [1969]) and “Dead Giveaway” ( Outré,1976). Shea compiled two nonweird anthologies, Strange Desires(1954) and Strange Barriers(1955). He wrote a poignant memoir, “H.P.Lovecraft: The House and the Shadows” ( Fantasy & Science Fiction,

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May 1966; rpt. Necronomicon Press, 1982). See his collection, In Search of Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1991).

Shepherd, Wilson (b. 1917),

weird fiction editor and publisher in Oakman, Alabama, and associate of HPL (1932–37). HPL first heard of Shepherd indirectly from R.H.Barlow, who protested that Shepherd was trying to bamboozle him in regard to the exchange of some pulp magazines. HPL’s (unintentionally comical) piece, “Correspondence between R.H.Barlow and Wilson Shepherd” (1932; first published in LSNo. 13 [Fall 1986]: 68–71), attempts to unsnarl the misunderstanding. In 1936 HPL heard directly from Shepherd, who was now assisting Donald A.Wollheim in editing the Phantagraph . The two editors also conceived of a semi-professional magazine, Fanciful Tales,which was issued in Fall 1936 and contained a severely misprinted version of HPL’s “The Nameless City.” Shepherd was also attempting to write poetry. HPL slightly touched up an apparently unpublished poem called “Death” (see HPL to Shepherd, August 11, 1936; ms., JHL) and more exhaustively revised a poem called “Wanderer’s Return” (see HPL to Shepherd, September 5, 1936), published in the Literary Quarterly(Winter 1937). In acknowledgment, Wollheim and Shepherd printed HPL’s sonnet “Background” ( Fungi from Yuggoth30) as a broadside for his forty-sixth birthday (it purports to be Volume 47, No. 1 of The Lovecrafter). After HPL’s death Shepherd printed A History of the Necronomiconunder the imprint of the Rebel Press (1938).

Sherman,———.

In At the Mountains of Madness,the cache operator on the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930– 31, stationed at the supply cache at McMurdo Sound.

Shiel, M[atthew] P[hipps] (1865–1947).

British weird writer. HPL discovered Shiel in 1923, when W.Paul Cook lent him The Pale Ape and Other Pulses(1911), containing “The House of Sounds” (originally published as “Vaila” in Shapes in the Fire[1896]), which HPL deemed one of the ten best weird tales in literature. HPL also enjoyed “Xélucha” (also in Shapes in the Fire) and the “last man” novel The Purple Cloud(1901; rev. 1929), whose opening pages (describing a trip to the Arctic) may have influenced HPL’s At the Mountains of Madness(1930). Shiel’s Xélucha and Others(1975) and Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk (1977) contain most of his best short weird work.

See A.Reynolds Morse, The Works of M.P.Shiel: A Study in Bibliography(Los Angeles: Fantasy Publishing Co., 1948; rev. ed. 1980 [with John D. Squires]); A.Reynolds Morse, ed., Shiel in Diverse Hands: A Collection of Essays(Cleveland: Reynolds Morse Foundation, 1983).

“Shunned House, The.”

Novelette (10,840 words); written in mid-October 1924. First published as a booklet (Athol, Mass.: W.Paul Cook, 1928 [printed but not bound or distributed]); rpt. WT(October 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in MM;annotated version in An2

On Benefit Street in Providence, there is a peculiar house about which rumors have long been whispered. This house, occupied by several generations of the Harris family, is never considered “haunted” by the local citizens but merely

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“unlucky”: people simply seem to have an uncanny habit of dying there, or at least of being afflicted with anemia or consumption. Neighboring houses are free of any such taint. It had lain deserted— because of the impossibility of renting it—since the Civil War. The narrator had known of this house since boyhood, when some of his childhood friends would fearfully explore it, sometimes even boldly entering through the unlocked front door “in quest of shudders.” As he grows older, he discovers that his uncle, Elihu Whipple, had done considerable research on the house and its tenants, and he finds his seemingly dry genealogical record full of sinister suggestion. He comes to suspect that some nameless object or entity is causing the deaths by somehow sucking the vitality out of the house’s occupants; perhaps it has some connection with a strange thing in the cellar, “a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre…[that] bore an uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up human figure.” After telling, at some length, the history of the house since 1763, the narrator finds himself puzzled on several fronts; in particular, he cannot account for why some of the occupants, just prior to their deaths, would cry out in a coarse and idiomatic form of French, a language they did not know. As he explores town records, he seems at last to have come upon the “French element.” A sinister figure named Etienne Roulet had come from France to East Greenwich, R.I., in 1686; he was a Huguenot and fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, moving to Providence ten years later in spite of much opposition from the town fathers. What particularly intrigues the narrator is his possible connection with an even more dubious figure, Jacques Roulet of Caude, who in 1598 was accused of lycanthropy.

Finally the narrator and his uncle decide to “test—and if possible destroy—the horror of the house.” They come one evening in 1919, armed with both a Crookes tube (a device invented by Sir William Crookes that emits electrons between two electrodes) and a flame-thrower. The two men take turns resting; both experience hideous and disturbing dreams. When the narrator wakes up from his dream, he finds that some nameless entity has utterly engulfed his uncle, “who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.” Realizing that his uncle is past help, he aims the Crookes tube at him. A further demoniac sight appears to him: the object seems to liquefy and adopt various temporary forms (“He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant”); then the features of the Harris line seem to mingle with his uncle’s. The narrator flees down College Hill to the modern downtown business district; when he returns, hours later, the nebulous entity is gone. Later that day he brings six carboys of sulfuric acid to the house, digs up the earth where the doubled-up anthropomorphic shape lies, and pours the acid down the hole—realizing only then that the shape was merely the “titan elbow” of some huge and hideous monster.

The story is based upon an actual house in Providence, at 135 Benefit Street; but the writing of the story was triggered by HPL’s seeing a similar house in Elizabeth, N.J., in early October 1924. HPL describes the house as follows (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, November 4–6, 1924; ms., JHL): “…on the northeast corner of Bridge St. & Elizabeth Ave. is a terrible old house—a hellish place where nightblack deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds—with a

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blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, & an outside flight of steps leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed. It reminded me of the Babbitt house in Benefit St., which as you recall made me write those lines entitled ‘The House’ in 1920.” (HPL refers to his poem “The House,“ published in the Philosopherfor December 1920.) This house in Elizabeth is no longer standing. HPL’s aunt Lillian had resided in the Providence house in 1919–20 as a companion for Mrs. C.H.Babbitt, and HPL may well have seen its interior at that time. This house, built around 1763, has a basement, two stories, and attic built on the rising hill, with shuttered doors in the basement leading directly out into the sidewalk. In contrast to HPL’s comment in the story, it has never been unoccupied. Otherwise, much of the history of the house, as told in the story, is real. The figure of Elihu Whipple appears to be modeled upon that of HPL’s own uncle, Franklin Chase Clark.

Other details of Providence history are also authentic: the straightening of Benefit Street after the removal of the graves of the oldest settlers to the North Burial Ground; the great floods of 1815; even the random mention of the fact that “As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace.” This last point has recently been studied by Faye Ringel Hazel, who notes that several articles on this subject appeared in the Providence Journalin March 1892, and goes on to examine the vampire legendry of Exeter (in Washington County, south of Providence) and the neighboring area.

The most interesting elaboration upon history in the story is the figure of Etienne Roulet. This figure is mythical, but Jacques Roulet of Caude is real. HPL’s brief mention of him is taken almost verbatim from the account in John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers(1872), which he owned and which was a significant source of his early views on the anthropology of religion. Part of Fiske’s account of Roulet is a direct quotation from S.Baring-Gould’s A Book of Were-wolves(1865); but HPL had not read this book at this time (he would do so only a decade or so later), so his information on Jacques Roulet must have come from Fiske.

The story shifts from the supernatural to quasi-science-fiction by asserting that the existence of the vampire and its effects may be accounted for by appealing to advanced scientific conceptions: “Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action.” HPL refers to Einstein’s theory of relativity (about which, only a year and a half earlier, he had expressed considerable bafflement and perturbation [see SL1.231] because of its defiance of nineteenth-century conceptions of physics) and to the quantum theory. That the entity is killed not by driving a stake through its heart but by sulfuric acid is telling. The “titan elbow” seems an adaptation of the ending of “Under the Pyramids,” where what appeared to be a five-headed hippopotamus proves to be the paw of an immense monster.

W.Paul Cook wished to print the story as a chapbook (with a preface by Frank Belknap Long), but his financial and physical collapse in 1928 prevented the binding and distribution of the book, although 300 copies had been printed.

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In 1934 R.H.Barlow secured about 265 of those copies and over the next year bound and distributed fewer then ten; he also distributed some copies of the unbound sheets. The remaining copies (about 150) eventually ended up in the hands of August Derleth of Arkham House, who in 1959 distributed 50 unbound copies and in 1961 about 100 copies bound in black cloth. A forgery of this edition, probably emerging in England, was issued in 1965.

See Faye Ringel Hazel, “Some Strange New England Mortuary Practices: Lovecraft Was Right,” LSNo. 29 (Fall 1993): 13–18.

Silva, Manuel.

In “The Terrible Old Man,” a thief (of Portuguese ancestry) who meets a bad end when he attempts to rob an old sea captain of his reputed hoard of Spanish gold and silver.

“Silver Key, The.”

Short story (5,000 words); probably written in early November 1926. First published in WT(January 1929); first collected in O;corrected text in MM

Randolph Carter—revived from “The Unnamable” (1923)—is now thirty; he has “lost the key of the gate of dreams” and therefore seeks to reconcile himself to the real world, which he now finds prosy and aesthetically unrewarding. He tries all manner of literary and physical novelties until one day he finds the key—or, at any rate, a key of silver in his attic. Driving his car along “the old remembered way,” he goes back to the rural New England region of his childhood and, in some magical and wisely unexplained manner, finds himself transformed into a nine-year-old boy. Sitting down to dinner with his aunt Martha, Uncle Chris, and the hired man Benijah Corey, Carter finds perfect content as a boy who has sloughed off the tedious complications of adult life for the eternal wonder of childhood.

The story is a lightly fictionalized exposition of HPL’s own social, ethical, and aesthetic philosophy. It is not even so much a story as a parable or philosophical diatribe. He attacks literary realism (“He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony”), conventional religion (“It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted”), and bohemians (“their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which still held them”). The structural framework of the story at this point—Carter samples in succession a variety of aesthetic, religious, and personal experiences in an attempt to lend meaning or interest to his life— may have been derived from J.K.Huysmans’ A Rebours(1884), in the prologue to which Des Esseintes undertakes exactly such an intellectual journey.

The story is also, as Kenneth W.Faig, Jr. has determined, a fictionalized account of HPL’s visit, in October 1926, to the western Rhode Island town of Foster, the home of his maternal ancestors. Details of topography, character names (Benijah Corey is probably an adaptation of two names: Benejah Place, the owner of the farm across the road from the house where HPL stayed, and Emma [Corey] Phillips, the widow of Walter Herbert Phillips, whose grave HPL probably saw),

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and other similarities make this conclusion unshakable. In some ways, “The Silver Key” is a retelling of “The Tomb,” in which Jervas Dudley discovers in his attic a physical key that allows him to unlock the secrets of the past.

In regard to the other Randolph Carter stories, “The Silver Key” portrays Carter’s life from his childhood to the age of fifty-four, at which point he doubles back on his own timeline and reverts to boyhood. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadathis the “first” Randolph Carter tale, for Carter is presumably in his twenties at the time of its events. After he has lost the key of the gate of dreams at thirty, Carter undertakes his experiments in sampling literary realism, religion, bohemianism, and so on; finding all these things unsatisfying, he turns to darker mysteries, involving himself in occultism and more. It is at this time (his age is unspecified) that he encounters Harley Warren and has the experience described in “The Statement of Randolph Carter”; shortly thereafter, returning to Arkham, he appears to experience the events of “The Unnamable,” although they are alluded to very obliquely. Even these dallyings into the weird Carter fails to find rewarding, until at age fifty-four he finds the silver key. It was only at E.Hoffmann Price’s suggestion that HPL undertook a further account of Carter’s adventures in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932–33). WTrejected the story upon its initial submittal, which apparently did not occur until the summer of 1927. In the summer of 1928, however, Wright asked to see the tale again and this time accepted it for $70. Following its appearance in January 1929, Wright reported to HPL that readers “violently disliked” the story (HPL to August Derleth, [1929]; ms., SHSW). Wright, however, did not print any of these hostile letters in the magazine’s letter column.

See Kenneth W.Faig, Jr., “‘The Silver Key’ and Lovecraft’s Childhood,” CryptNo. 81 (St. John’s Eve 1992): 11–47.

Simes.

In “The Disinterment,” the butler of Marshall Andrews who is later killed by the narrator, a patient whom Andrews had been treating.

“Simple Speller’s Tale, The.”

Poem (56 lines); probably written in early 1915. First published in the Conservative(April 1915). An attack on simplified spelling. Its final couplet (“Yet why on us your angry hand or wrath use?/We do but ape Professor B———M———!”) alludes to the American critic Brander Matthews, a vigorous proponent of simplified spelling. See also HPL’s essay “The Simple Spelling Mania” ( United Cooperative,December 1918).

Single,———.

The narrator of “The Tree on the Hill” who discovers and photographs a strange tree in a landscape lit by three suns.

Slater (Slaader), Joe.

In “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” the vagabond hunter from the Catskill Mountain region, who is committed to the state psychopathic institution because of his peculiar behavior and supposed murder of Peter Slader, his neighbor. He is the victim of mind exchange with an unknown “cosmic entity.” In “The Shadow out of Time,” he is alluded to as an amnesia victim, like Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, who undergoes mind exchange with a member of an alien race.

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Slauenwite, Dr. Thomas (1885–1932).

In “Winged Death,” a physician who discovers an insect whose bite is fatal and that supposedly takes on its victim’s soul or personality. He uses the insect to kill a colleague, Dr. Henry Moore, but later finds that he is pursued by an insect that appears to exhibit Moore’s personality. When he himself dies, his own soul enters the body of the insect, and he tells of his plight by dipping his insect body in ink and writing his message on the ceiling.

Sleght, Adriaen.

In “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” a man of Dutch ancestry who marries Trintje van der Heyl (daughter of Dirck van der Heyl) and thereby establishes a genealogical link with the narrator of the story. Smith, Charles W. (1852–1948),

amateur journalist and friend of HPL. Smith, residing at 408 Groveland Street in Haverhill, Mass., edited the Tryout(a NAPA paper) for more than three decades (1914–1946); it contained many poems by HPL, along with prose articles as well as the first appearances of some of HPL’s fiction (“The Cats of Ulthar” [November 1920]; “The Terrible Old Man” [July 1921]; “The Tree” [October 1921]; “In the Vault” [November 1925]). HPL came in touch with Smith by correspondence as early as 1917, when Smith urged HPL to join the NAPA, which HPL did. HPL visited Smith in Haverhill on June 9, 1921, being charmed by Smith’s naïveté and devotion to the “boy printer” ideal of the NAPA (Smith had a printing press in a shed behind his house). HPL wrote of his visit in the essay “The Haverhill Convention” ( Tryout,July 1921; rpt. as “‘408 Groveland Street,’” Boys’ Herald,January 1943). He visited Smith again on August 25, 1921. Smith supplied the central suggestion for “In the Vault”; in gratitude HPL dedicated the story to him. Smith’s return to Haverhill from a trip is commemorated in HPL’s poem “The Return” ( Tryout,December 1926). On August 30, 1927, HPL visited Smith again, recording the visit in a rather dry and compressed travelogue, “The Trip of Theobald” ( Tryout,September 1927). HPL met Smith for the last time on August 24, 1934, in Lawrence, Mass. In 1932 HPL and Smith jointly published a booklet of poems by Eugene B.Kuntz, Thoughts and Pictures;the title page states that it was “Cooperatively published by H.P.Loveracft and C.W.Smith”—representative of the typographical errors (which HPL called “tryoutisms”) that riddled the Tryoutand other of Smith’s publications. Smith was for a time the owner of the C.W. Smith Box Co.; his writings were published in Youth’s Companionand other magazines. Smith, Clark Ashton (1893–1961),

poet, fantaisiste, artist, sculptor, and correspondent of HPL (1922–37). Born in Long Valley, Calif., and residing for most of his life in the small town of Auburn in the Sierra foothills, Smith read precociously as a child and began writing fantastic tales and poems at an early age. In 1911 he came in touch with George Sterling, the reigning poet of San Francisco, who found tremendous promise in Smith’s poetry. With Sterling’s aid Smith published The Star-Treader and Other Poems(1912) at the age of nineteen, causing a sensation on the West Coast and eliciting comparisons to Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne. Other volumes of poetry followed: Odes and Sonnets(published in 1918 by the prestigious Book Club of California), Ebony and Crystal(1922), and Sandal

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wood(1925). In the summer of 1922 some of HPL’s associates gave HPL copies of these volumes; HPL was so taken with them that he wrote a “fan” letter to Smith on August 12, 1922. Thereupon ensued a voluminous correspondence that lasted until HPL’s death, although the two men never met. HPL persuaded WTeditor Edwin Baird to rescind the magazine’s “no poetry” policy and accept Smith’s verse. In late 1926 Smith put Donald Wandrei in touch with HPL, thereby initiating an association that would last to the end of HPL’s life.

Possibly from HPL’s example, Smith resumed the writing of fiction in the mid- to late 1920s, first producing “The Abominations of Yondo” (1925) and then, in the fall of 1929, “The Last Incantation,” the first of more than 100 stories he would write in the next six years. HPL was greatly taken with “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (written November 16, 1929; published WT,November 1931), and he borrowed Smith’s invented god Tsathoggua for both “The Mound” (1929–30) and “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930); as the latter story appeared in WTin August 1931, HPL’s mention of the entity achieved print first, so that Smith appeared to have borrowed from HPL. Smith also invented The Book of Eibonas an analogue to HPL’s Necronomicon . “The Epiphany of Death” (written January 25, 1930; Fantasy Fan,July 1934) is dedicated to HPL. Most of Smith’s tales fall into various cycles: Zothique (a continent of the far future); Hyperborea (a continent in mankind’s early history); Averoigne (a province in medieval France); Atlantis; Xiccarph (a planet); Mars. Smith’s stories emphasize fantasy more than horror, although “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” ( WT,June–July 1932) is a powerful horror tale set on Mars. More representative is “The City of the Singing Flame” ( Wonder Stories,January 1931), an exotic science fiction/fantasy hybrid. Relatively few of Smith’s tales bear any direct influence from HPL: he admitted that “The Statement of Randolph Carter” inspired “The Epiphany of Death,” and “Pickman’s Model” inspired “The Hunters from Beyond” ( Strange Tales, October 1932). However, both Smith and HPL influenced each other’s fiction by discussing, in correspondence, various plot ideas and offering suggestions for revision.

Smith was frustrated at the lack of recognition of both his scintillating poetry (some of the finest formal poetry written by any American writer of the twentieth century) and his weird fiction. In 1933 he self-published The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,consisting of six stories rejected by WT Smith appeared widely in science fiction and weird fiction pulp magazines—WT , Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories,and others—and was more willing than HPL to revise his tales for the sake of a sale, as he had two aging parents, both in poor health, to look after. By 1935 his enthusiasm for writing fiction began to wane, and he turned to the carving of weird sculptures; several of them were inspired by HPL’s invented gods and monsters (a photograph of some of them was used as the dust jacket illustration for HPL’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep[1943]). HPL expressed great enthusiasm for these carvings, as well as for Smith’s paintings and drawings, hundreds of which he had seen in the collection of Samuel Loveman and also on loan from Smith.

Upon HPL’s death, Smith wrote the poignant elegy “To Howard Phillips Lovecraft” ( WT,July 1937). A later poem, “H.P.L.” (1959), is less effective. Arkham House published most of Smith’s story collections— Out of Space and

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Time(1942), Lost Worlds(1944), Genius Loci(1948), The Abominations of Yondo(1960), Tales of Science and Sorcery(1964), Other Dimensions(1970)—as well as Smith’s later poetry collections, The Dark Chateau(1951) and Spells and Philtres(1958), and his Poems in Prose(1965). Smith had assembled his immense Selected Poemsin 1944–49, but it was not published by Arkham House until 1971. His relatively few essays were collected in Planets and Dimensions(1973). His Letters to H.P.Lovecraftappeared from Necronomicon Press in 1987. HPL’s letters to Smith were sold piecemeal by Smith’s literary executor; some are in public institutions, but most are in private hands. See Donald S.Fryer, “Klarkash-Ton & Ech Pi El: Or the Alleged Influence of H.P.Lovecraft on Clark Ashton Smith,” Mirage1, No. 6 (Winter 1963–64): 30–33; Nyctalops(August 1972: Special Clark Ashton Smith Issue); Donald Sidney-Fryer, The Last of the Great Romantic Poets(Silver Scarab Press, 1973); Donald Sidney-Fryer, Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography(Donald M.Grant, 1978); Steve Behrends, “CAS & Divers Hands: Ideas of Lovecraft and Others in Smith’s Fiction,” CryptNo. 26 (Hallowmas 1984): 30–31; Steve Behrends, Clark Ashton Smith(1990). Smith, Eleazar.

In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a tavern companion of Ezra Weeden who assists his friend in collecting information regarding Joseph Curwen and participates in the 1771 raid on his farmhouse that results in his apparent death.

Smith, Preserved.

In “The Shunned House,” a man who is hired by Mercy Dexter to be a servant at the house. He complains that something “sucked his breath” at night and departs abruptly.

“Some Causes of Self-immolation.”

Essay (4,290 words); written on December 13, 1931. First published in Marginalia;rpt. MW This curious essay on psychology, written as by “L.Theobald, Jun., N.G., A.S.S.,” begins with a potted history of theories of human behavior from the Greeks through Descartes and Hobbes to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and modern psychologists and philosophers. It identifies eleven “instincts” (nutrition, flight, repulsion, etc.) and their corresponding emotions (hunger, fear, disgust, etc.). (The list is taken from William McDougall’s Introduction to Social Psychology[1908].) HPL then adds one of his own, symmetry. Various motives for human behavior are then discussed. That HPL may have written the essay as a parody of psychological obscurantism is indicated by its subtitle (“Motives for Voluntary Self-Subjugation to Unpleasant Conditions by Human Beings”) and by the fact that L.Theobald, Jun. is cited as “Professor of Satanism of Applied Irreverence in Philistine University, Chorazin, Nebraska; Mencken Lecturer on Theology in Holy Roller College, Hoke’s Four Corners, Tennessee.”

“Some Dutch Footprints in New England.”

Essay (1,420 words); probably written in July 1933. First published in De Halve Maen(October 18, 1933); rpt. MW

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Written at the behest of Wilfred B.Talman, editor of De Halve Maen( The Half Moon,published by the Holland Society of New York), the essay somewhat routinely discusses traces of Dutch architecture and folkways in Rhode Island. In his memoir in The Normal Lovecraft(1973), Talman admits that he engaged in a lengthy debate over stylistic niceties in the essay as a kind of revenge for what Talman felt was HPL’s heavy-handed revision of “Two Black Bottles” (1926).

“Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction.”

Essay (2,360 words); originally written in July 1934 for publication in one of W.L.Crawford’s magazines. First published in the Californian(Winter 1935); rpt. MW

Incorporating passages from “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” the essay laments the generally low quality of pulp science fiction but looks to such writers as H.G.Wells and Olaf Stapledon to raise the aesthetic level of the field. HPL urges writers to regard with great seriousness the colossal emotional impact of being off the earth and in general recommends an approach that eschews conventional characters and settings, the taking for granted of marvels, and a slipshod style. HPL’s tenets surely were unknown by the next generation of “Golden Age” science fiction writers, but their work appears to embody many of his principles.

“Some Repetitions on the Times.”

Essay (6,270 words); written on February 22, 1933. First published in LS(Spring 1986); rpt. MW. An essay fervently urging the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (two weeks prior to his inauguration), to take immediate and radical action to relieve economic hardship caused by the depression, specifically by adoption of old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and an artificial reducing of working hours so that all able-bodied persons can find work. In the political realm, the franchise should be restricted to those who can pass certain examinations (stressing knowledge of “civics”) so that capable leaders can be elected to deal with the immensely complex political and economic issues created by a technological society.

This is one of HPL’s strongest later essays; it is curious, therefore, that he made no effort to secure its publication, even in an amateur paper, or even to type it to circulate among his colleagues. Many of the central points of the essay are, however, found in HPL’s later letters.

Sophonisba.

In “Medusa’s Coil,” a servant—a “very old Zulu woman”; a “witch-woman”—in the household of Denis de Russy and Marceline Bedard. She recognizes the strange heritage of Marceline and worships her as a goddess.

Sorcier, Charles Le.

In “The Alchemist,” the son of Michel Mauvais and an alchemist who exacts vengeance on the Comtes de C———for six hundred years for the killing of his father at the hands of Henri, Comte de C———, in the thirteenth century.

Sprague, Tom.

In “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” the enemy of Henry Thorndike, the village undertaker, and brother of Thorndike’s sweetheart, Sophie. Thorndike injects Sprague with a chemical that simulates death, but in

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the course of embalming Sprague, he accidentally injects himself with the chemical. St. John,———.

In “The Hound,” the narrator’s partner in the search for decadent thrills. Like some of HPL’s early characters (e.g., Harley Warren, Herbert West), he is the leader of various occult expeditions or activities, the narrators (typically somewhat autobiographical characters) being passive followers. St. John is killed by the ghoul from whose tomb the two stole an exotic amulet for their charnel museum.

Stanfield, Kenton J.

The narrator of “In the Walls of Eryx,” whose diary of his entrapment in an invisible maze on Venus constitutes most of the story. His initials are those of the story’s coauthor, Kenneth J.Sterling. Starrett, [Charles] Vincent (1886–1974),

American bookman, journalist, and brief correspondent of HPL. Starrett was put in touch with HPL by Frank Belknap Long. Starrett was passing through New York in the spring of 1927, and Long gave him two of HPL’s stories to read. Starrett was a well-known journalist (he wrote a weekly column on books for the Chicago Tribunefrom 1942 until his death) and the American advocate of Arthur Machen (he wrote the short treatise Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin[1918] and edited two collections of Machen’s miscellaneous work, The Shining Pyramid[1923] and The Glorious Mystery[1927]). Starrett was impressed with HPL’s tales and wrote to him about them. Starrett also found much merit in HPL’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” as published in the Reclusein the summer of 1927. The correspondence ceased by the end of the year. Starrett also published a few weird tales, some in WT;they are collected in The Quick and the Dead(Arkham House, 1965). After HPL’s death Starrett took note of several of HPL’s volumes in his Tribunecolumn, reviewing Beyond the Wall of Sleep(January 2, 1944), Marginalia(March 4, 1945), Something about Cats(December 18, 1949), and The Shuttered Room(January 10, 1960); the first two of these are reprinted in his Books and Bipeds(1947). In the first of these reviews he made the memorable, if not entirely accurate, comment: “he was his own most fantastic creation—a Roderick Usher or C. Auguste Dupin born a century too late.”

See Peter Ruber, The Last Bookman: The Life and Times of Vincent Starrett(1968). “Statement of Randolph Carter, The.”

Short story (2,500 words); written in late December 1919. First published in the Vagrant(May 1920); rpt. WT(February 1925) and WT(August 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in MM;annotated version in CC.

Randolph Carter tells a police investigation what happened one night when he and Harley Warren entered an ancient cemetery and only Carter returned. Warren, a learned mystic, had been intrigued by an ancient book that led him to wonder “why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years.”So Warren and Carter walk along the Gainesville pike toward Big Cypress Swamp and approach a particular tomb in an old cemetery,

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equipped with spades, lanterns, and other paraphernalia—including a portable telephone set with an extremely long cord. After opening the tomb, they see stone steps leading down. Warren refuses to let Carter go down with him because of his “frail nerves,” but promises to stay in touch by means of the telephone set. Carter protests, but Warren is adamant and proceeds down into the crypt. After a time Warren begins making increasingly frantic utterances through the telephone— “God! If you could see what I am seeing!…Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”Carter anxiously asks Warren what he sees, but Warren does not specify. Finally Warren cries: “Beat it! For God’s sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!”Carter tells Warren he is coming down to help him, but Warren says it is no use. Finally, after a long silence, with Carter crying, “Warren, are you there?”, another voice —“deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied”—is heard: “YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”

HPL stated the story was a nearly literal transcript of a dream he had, probably in early December 1919, in which he and Samuel Loveman make a fateful trip to an ancient cemetery and Loveman suffers some horrible but mysterious fate after he descends alone into a crypt. HPL’s account of the dream, in a letter to the Gallomo (December 11, 1919), is strikingly similar in many points of language and plot to the finished story; he must have kept a copy of the letter and later rewritten it. But there are also some interesting differences between the two accounts. In the dream the setting is clearly in New England; in the story the setting is unspecified, but the mention of Big Cypress Swamp and the Gainesville pike (spelled “Gainsville” in the surviving typescript) leads one to suspect a setting in Florida, near the city of Gainesville. (In later stories Warren is said to be a man from the South.) In the dream, HPL had no true idea of the purpose of the cemetery visit; in the story, HPL must have felt that some hint of motivation had to be provided, so he introduced the point about undecaying corpses. Warren’s exhaustive collection of esoteric books was probably inspired by Loveman’s impressive collection of first editions.

The name Randolph Carter is of some interest. HPL knew that Carter was a Rhode Island family of long standing (John Carter was the founder of Providence’s first newspaper in 1762); but he also knew that this family itself had come to Rhode Island from Virginia. In a 1929 letter HPL remarks: “This transposition of a Virginia line to New England always affected my fancy strongly—hence my frequently recurrent fictional character ‘Randolph Carter’” ( SL2.353). Carter is HPL’s most frequently used recurring character, appearing in “The Unnamable” (1923), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath(1926–27), “The Silver Key” (1926), and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932). The book that impels Warren to explore the cemetery has been thought by some to be the Necronomicon,but this is unlikely. Carter declares that he had read every book in Warren’s library in the languages known to him; this must mean that Carter is at least versed in the common languages (Latin, Greek, French, German, English), and he even mentions that some books were in Arabic. But of the “fiend-inspired book” Carter declares that it was “written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere,” which suggests that the book was notin Arabic or any other common language; later Carter states that the book came from

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India. Since, according to HPL’s later testimony, the Necronomiconexists only in Arabic, Greek, Latin, and English, Warren’s book cannot be that volume.

See Robert M.Price, “You Fool! Loveman Is Dead!” CryptNo. 98 (Eastertide 1998): 16–21. Sterling, Kenneth J. (1920–1995),

science fiction fan and late correspondent of HPL (1935–37). In early 1935 Sterling’s family moved to Providence, where he attended Classical High School. A fan of the science fiction pulps and a member of the Science Fiction League, Sterling boldly called on HPL at 66 College Street in March 1935 and introduced himself. HPL was much impressed with Sterling’s precocity and continued the association. In January 1936, Sterling produced a draft of the story “In the Walls of Eryx” (for details on the composition of what would prove to be HPL’s last acknowledged collaborative tale, see entry on that story). It was rejected by various science fiction and weird magazines but finally landed with WT,appearing in October 1939. Sterling wrote little other fiction, but the title of one story—“The Bipeds of Bjhulhu” (Wonder Stories,February 1936)—is presumably a tribute to HPL’s Cthulhu. Sterling began attendance at Harvard in the fall of 1936, graduated from there in 1940, received a medical degree at Johns Hopkins and later became a clinical professor of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He wrote a brief memoir of HPL, “Lovecraft and Science” (in Marginalia;in LR), then a much more substantial one, “Caverns Measureless to Man” ( Science-Fantasy Correspondent,1975; in LR), in which he urged that HPL be “remembered as a scholar and thinker as well as an author.”

See obituary, New York Times(January 27, 1995).

Stof, Oll.

In “Collapsing Cosmoses,” the President of the Great Council Chamber of the “intra-dimensional city of Kastor-Ya,” who urges the commander Hak Ni to take steps to combat the interstellar menace approaching the planet.

“Strange High House in the Mist, The.”

Short story (3,800 words); written on November 9, 1926. First published in WT(October 1931); first collected in O;corrected text in D.

North of Kingsport “the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a grey frozen wind-cloud.” On that cliff is an ancient house inhabited by some individual whom none of the townsfolk—not even the Terrible Old Man—has ever seen. One day a tourist, the “philosopher” Thomas Olney, decides to visit that house and its secret inhabitant; for he has always longed for the strange and the wondrous. He arduously scales the cliff, but upon reaching the house finds that there is no door on this side, only “a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion”; the house’s only door is on the otherside, flush with the sheer cliff. Then Olney hears a soft voice, and a “great black-bearded face” protrudes from a window and invites him in. Olney climbs through the window and has a colloquy with the occupant, listening to “rumours of old times and far places.” Then a knock is heard—at the door that faces the cliff. Eventually the host opens the door, and he and Olney find the room occupied by all manner of

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wondrous presences—“Trident-bearing Neptune,” “hoary Nodens,” and others—and when Olney returns to Kingsport the next day, the Terrible Old Man vows that the man who went up that cliff is not the same one who came down. No longer does Olney’s soul long for wonder and mystery; instead, he is content to lead his prosy bourgeois life with his wife and children. But people in Kingsport, looking up at the house on the cliff, say that “at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly.”

HPL admitted that he had no specific locale in mind when writing this tale: he states that memories of the “titan cliffs of Magnolia” ( SL2.164) in part prompted the setting but that there is no house on the cliff as in the story; a headland near Gloucester called “Mother Ann” ( SL3.433) also inspired the setting. HPL may have had in mind a passage in Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguezabout the home of a wizard on the top of a crag.

In regard to the strange transformation of Thomas Olney, which is at the heart of the tale, the Terrible Old Man provides a hint: “somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney.” The body has returned to the normal round of things, but the spirit has remained with the occupant of the strange high house in the mist; the encounter with Neptune and Nodens has been an apotheosis, and Olney realizes that it is in this realm of nebulous wonder that he truly belongs. His body is now an empty shell, without soul and without imagination: “His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for it.” This tale could be read as a sort of mirrorimage of “Celephaïs”: whereas Kuranes had to die in the real world in order for his spirit to attain his fantasy realm, Olney’s body survives intact but his spirit stays behind.

HPL had submitted the story to WTin July 1927 but it was rejected. In 1929, he let W.Paul Cook have it for the second number of The Recluse(it had even been typeset), but when it became clear in the spring of 1931 that the issue would never appear, HPL resubmitted the story to WT,which accepted it and paid Lovecraft $55.

See Donald R.Burleson, “Strange High Houses: Lovecraft and Melville,” CryptNo. 80 (Eastertide 1992): 25–26, 29; S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft and Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguez” CryptNo. 82 (Hallowmas 1992): 3–6; Cecelia Drewer, “Symbolism of Style in ‘The Strange High House in the Mist,’” LSNo. 31 (Fall 1994): 17–21; Nicholaus Clements, “‘The Strange High House in the Mist’: Glowing Eyes and the Prohibition of the Impossible,” LSNo. 40 (Fall 1998): 11–15. Strauch, Carl Ferdinand

(1908–1989), literary scholar and brief correspondent of HPL (1931–33). Strauch received a B.A. from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and was put in touch with HPL by his friend Harry K.Brobst, who at the time also lived in Allentown. Strauch visited HPL in Providence in September 1932, not long after he published a book of poetry, Twenty-nine Poems(1932). He conveyed to HPL much of the “hex” legendry of the Pennsylvania Dutch region. HPL reports in a letter to Robert Bloch ([c. late June 1933])

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that Strauch was working on a “realistic novel,” but this evidently came to nothing. Although cordial, the correspondence came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1933: it appears that Strauch was discouraged at the sharp criticism that HPL, Brobst, and E.Hoffmann Price delivered upon a story of Strauch’s during a session in Providence in August 1933. Strauch went on to receive a Ph.D. from Yale (1946) and to become a leading scholar on Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was on the editorial board of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson(Harvard University Press, 1971f.) and wrote Characteristics of Emerson, Transcendental Poet(1975) and other monographs, as well as many articles in scholarly journals. He taught at Lehigh University from 1934 to 1974.

“Street, The.”

Short story (2,250 words); written in late 1919. First published in the Wolverine(December 1920); rpt. National Amateur(January 1922); first collected in The Lovecraft Collectors Library,Volume 2 (1953); corrected text in D

The narrator wishes to tell of The Street, which was built by “men of strength and honour…good, valiant men of our blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea.” These were grave men in conical hats who had “bonneted wives and sober children” and enough courage to “subdue the forest and till the fields.” Two wars came; after the first, there were no more Indians, and after the second “they furled the Old Flag and put up a new Banner of Stripes and Stars.” After this, however, there are “strange puffings and shrieks” from the river, and “the air was not quite so pure as before”; but “the spirit of the place had not changed.” But now come “days of evil,” a time when “many who had known The Street of old knew it no more; and many knew it, who had not known it before.” The houses fall into decay, the trees are all gone, and “cheap, ugly new buildings” go up. Another war comes, but by this time “only fear and hatred and ignorance” brood over The Street because of all the “swarthy and sinister” people who now dwell in it. There are now such unheard-of places as Petrovitch’s Bakery, the Rifkin School of Modern Economics, and the Liberty Café. There develops a rumour that the houses “contained the leaders of a vast band of terrorists, who on a designated day are to initiate an “orgy of slaughter for the extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which The Street had loved”; this revolution is to occur, picturesquely, on the fourth of July. But a miracle occurs: without warning, the houses for some reason implode upon themselves, and the threat is gone.

HPL supplies the genesis of this manifestly racist story in a letter: “The Boston police mutiny of last year is what prompted that attempt—the magnitude and significance of such an act appalled me. Last fall it was grimly impressive to see Boston without bluecoats, and to watch the musket-bearing State Guardsmen patrolling the streets as though military occupation were in force. They went in pairs, determined-looking and khaki-clad, as if symbols of the strife that lies ahead in civilisation’s struggle with the monster of unrest and bolshevism” (HPL to Frank Belknap Long, November 11, 1920 [AHT]). The Boston police had gone on strike on September 8, 1919, and remained on strike well into October. The story was probably written shortly after the strike concluded. “The Street” restates the anti-immigrant message of such early poems as “New England Fallen” (1912?) and “On a New-England Village Seen by

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Moonlight” (1913). There may be an influence from Dunsany, as the stories in Tales of War(1918) have somewhat the same allegorical flavor (but without the racism).

Stubbs, Ermengarde.

In “Sweet Ermengarde,” the daughter of Hiram Stubbs, a bootlegger in Hogton, Vt, whose hand in marriage is sought by two swains, ‘Squire Hardman and Jack Manly. After a variety of adventures, she chooses the ’Squire.

Sully, Helen V. (1904–1997),

friend of Clark Ashton Smith (daughter of Genevieve Sully, a married woman with whom Smith carried on a longtime affair) and correspondent of HPL (1933–37). She visited HPL in Providence in early July 1933; HPL also took her to Newport, R.I.; Newburyport, Mass.; and elsewhere. HPL told her an impromptu ghost story one night in the churchyard of St. John’s Episcopal Church, frightening her so badly that she ran from the cemetery (see her memoir, “Memories of Lovecraft: II” [1971; rpt. LR]). After Providence, she went to New York, where HPL’s associates were captivated by her (Frank Belknap Long and Donald Wandrei threatened to fight a duel over her). She began corresponding with HPL after her return to California. Some of HPL’s replies suggest that Sully was despondent, perhaps even suicidal. He attempted to cheer her up by telling her his own situation was much worse but that he nevertheless found enough interest in life to continue. HPL’s biographer L. Sprague de Camp interpreted these remarks as displaying HPL’s own depressive and suicidal tendencies at the time, but such an interpretation seems wide of the mark.

“Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

Essay (28,230 words); written November 1925–May 1927 (revised in the fall of 1933, August 1934). First published in The Recluse(1927); revised version serialized (incomplete) in the Fantasy Fan (October 1933–February 1935); first complete publication of revised text in O;first separate publication: Ben Abramson, 1945; corrected text in D;critical edition (by S.T.Joshi): Hippocampus Press, 2000.

This is HPL’s most significant literary essay and one of the finest historical analyses of horror literature. W.Paul Cook had commissioned HPL to write “an article…on the element of terror & weirdness in literature” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, November 11–14, 1925; ms., JHL) for his nowlegendary one-shot amateur magazine, The Recluse. HPL simultaneously refreshed himself on the classics of weird fiction and began writing parts of the text; most of it was completed before HPL left Brooklyn for Providence in April 1926, but HPL continued to discover new authors and works (e.g., Walter de la Mare in June 1926) and made numerous additions both to the final typescript and, as late as May 1927, to the proofs. The Recluseappeared in August, with HPL’s essay occupying nearly half the issue. It comprises ten chapters: I. Introduction; II. The Dawn of the Horror-Tale; III. The Early Gothic Novel; IV. The Apex of Gothic Romance; V. The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction; VI. Spectral Literature on the Continent; VII. Edgar Allan Poe; VIII. The Weird Tradition in America; IX. The Weird Tradition in the British Isles; X. The Modern Masters.

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Almost immediately upon completing his essay, HPL began taking notes for works to mention in a putative revised edition. These notes (largely a list of works), entitled “Books to mention in new edition of weird article,” are found at the back of his commonplace book. The chance to revise the text did not come until the fall of 1933, when Charles D.Hornig offered to serialize the text in the Fantasy Fan. HPL revised the essay all at once, sending a marked-up copy of The Recluseto Hornig; but the magazine folded with the serialization only having progressed to the middle of Chapter VIII. Although numerous faint prospects for the continuation of the serialization in other fan magazines emerged over the next two years, the essay was never republished in full until after HPL’s death. In August 1934 HPL’s discovery of William Hope Hodgson impelled him to write the essay “The Weird Work of William Hope Hodgson,” which was to be inserted into Chapter X. In April 1935 HPL read Gustav Meyrink’s novel The Golemand found that his description (based upon the early silent film version) was inaccurate, so he revised the passage accordingly.

The value of the essay is manifold. It is one of the first to provide a coherent historical analysis of the entire range of weird fiction from antiquity to HPL’s day. Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction(1917) is a thematic study, and Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror(1921) —upon which HPL relied for much of the information in the first five chapters of his treatise—restricts its attention to the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. HPL’s discussions of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and Hodgson are particularly acute. His identification of the four “modern masters” of weird fiction—Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M.R.James—has been vindicated by subsequent research; the only likely addition to this list is HPL himself.

The work is also of great importance regarding HPL’s own theory and practice of weird fiction. The Introduction enunciates HPL’s mature reflections on the nature and purpose of weird fiction (refined from such earlier texts as In Defence of Dagon[1921]) as “a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space”—something HPL restated once more in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.” Throughout the text there are clues as to works that inspired HPL’s own earlier and later works, from Maupassant’s “The Horla” to M.R.James’s “Count Magnus.”

It appears that The Reclusewas sent to the following authors and critics (see HPL to August Derleth, [January 6, 1928; ms, SHSW]), most of whom are mentioned in the article: Algernon Blackwood, Irvin S.Cobb, A.Conan Doyle, Lord Dunsany, Mary E.Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M.R. James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Machen, Carl Van Vechten, and H.G.Wells. (M.P.Shiel was an intended recipient, but could not be reached.) James discusses the essay (he calls HPL’s style “most offensive”) in a letter dated January 12, 1928.

See Fred Lewis Pattee, [Review], American Literature18 (May 1946): 175–77; E.F.Bleiler, “Introduction to the Dover Edition” of Supernatural Horror in Literature(1973); Jack Adrian, “An M.R.James Letter,” Ghosts and Scholars8 (1986): 28–33.

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Surama.

In “The Last Test,” the clinical assistant to Dr. Alfred Clarendon, whom Clarendon brought back with him from a trip to North Africa. He is actually an evil Atlantean mage who is developing a powerful disease to overwhelm humankind.

Suydam, Robert.

In “The Horror at Red Hook,” a wealthy man of ancient Dutch ancestry who lives in Flatbush and engages in cabbalistic activities. He is the literary precursor to Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Swanson, Carl,

would-be magazine publisher and brief correspondent of HPL. In early 1932 Swanson, residing in Washburn, N.D., conceived the idea of a semi-professional magazine, the Galaxy,that would use both original stories and reprints from WT. Swanson wrote to HPL, asking for contributions; HPL sent him “The Nameless City” and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” both rejected by WTand still professionally unpublished. Swanson accepted them. HPL also wished to send Swanson some WTstories for which he owned second serial rights and asked Farnsworth Wright about the matter; but Wright, believing Swanson’s magazine a potentially serious rival, informed HPL that he would not allow Swanson to reprint those stories (published in WTdown to April 1926) for which WTowned second serial rights and would not look with favor upon the resale of other stories for which HPL owned second serial rights. HPL responded heatedly to this attempt to limit the sale of his work (see SL4.27), although other writers (like Frank Belknap Long) who contributed more regularly to WTwere sufficiently cowed by Wright’s threats not to send anything to Swanson. Swanson, however, never managed to secure sufficient capital to begin his magazine; later in 1932 he considered publishing the magazine in mimeograph, but even this never occurred. He disappeared from the pulp fiction field shortly thereafter.

“Sweet Ermengarde; or, The Heart of a Country Girl.”

Short story (2,740 words); date of writing unknown (probably 1919–21); as by “Percy Simple.” First published in BWS;corrected text in MW

Ermengarde Stubbs is the “beauteous blonde daughter” of Hiram Stubbs, a “poor but honest farmerbootlegger of Hogton, Vt.” She admits to being sixteen years old, and “branded as mendacious all reports to the effect that she was thirty.” She is pursued by two lovers who wish to marry her: ’Squire Hardman, who is “very rich and elderly” and, moreover, has a mortgage on Ermengarde’s home, and Jack Manly, a childhood friend who is too bashful to declare his love and unfortunately has no money. Jack, however, manages to find the gumption to propose, and Ermengarde accepts with alacrity. Hardman in fury demands Ermangarde’s hand from her father lest he foreclose on the mortgage (he has, incidentally, found that the Stubbses’ land has gold buried in it). Jack, learning of the matter, vows to go to the city and make his fortune and save the farm.

Hardman, however, takes no chances and has two disreputable accomplices kidnap Ermengarde and hide her in a hovel under the charge of Mother Maria, “a hideous old hag.” But as Hardman ponders the matter, he wonders why he is even bothering with the girl, when all he really wants is the farm and its buried

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gold. He lets Ermengarde go and continues to threaten to foreclose. Meanwhile a band of hunters strays on the Stubbses’ property and one of them, Algernon Reginald Jones, finds the gold; not revealing it to his companions or to the Stubbses, Algernon feigns snakebite and goes to the farm, where he instantly falls in love with Ermengarde and wins her over with his sophisticated city ways. She elopes with Algernon a week later, but on the train to the city a piece of paper falls from Algernon’s pocket; picking it up, she finds to her horror that it is a love letter from another woman. She pushes Algernon out the window.

Unfortunately, Ermengarde fails to take Algernon’s wallet, so she has no money when she reaches the city. She spends a week on park benches and in bread-lines; she tries to look up Jack Manly, but cannot find him. One day she finds a purse; finding that it has not much money in it, she decides to return it to its owner, a Mrs. Van Itty. This aristocrat, amazed at the honesty of the “forlorn waif,” takes Ermengarde under her wing. Later Mrs. Van Itty hires a new chauffeur, and Ermengarde is startled to find that it is Algernon! “He had survived—this much was almost immediately evident.” It turns out that he had married the woman who wrote the love letter, but that she had deserted him and run off with the milkman. Humbled, Algernon asks Ermengarde’s forgiveness. Ermengarde, now ensconced as a replacement for the daughter Mrs. Van Itty lost many years ago, returns to the old farmstead and is about to buy off the mortgage from Hardman when Jack suddenly returns, bringing a wife, “the fair Bridget Goldstein,” in tow. All this time Mrs. Van Itty, sitting in the car, eyes Ermengarde’s mother Hannah and finally shrieks: “You—you—Hannah Smith— I know you now! Twenty-eight years ago you were my baby Maude’s nurse and stole her from the cradle!!” Then she realizes that Ermengarde is in fact her long-lost daughter. But Ermengarde is now doing some pondering: “How could she get away with the sixteen-year-old stuff if she had been stolen twenty-eight years ago?” She, knowing of the gold on the Stubbses’ farm, repudiates Mrs. Van Itty and compels ‘Squire Hardman to foreclose on the mortgage and marry her lest she prosecute him for last year’s kidnapping. “And the poor dub did.”

This is the only work of fiction by HPL that cannot be dated with precision. The manuscript is written on stationery from the Edwin E.Phillips Refrigeration Company, which was a going concern around 1910 or so, but since the story alludes to the passage of the 18th Amendment it must clearly date to 1919 or later. Since Phillips (HPL’s uncle) died on November 14, 1918, perhaps the stationery came into HPL’s possession shortly thereafter; but it is by no means certain that he wrote the story at that time.

Of possible relevance is a P.S. to HPL’s letter in the Argosyfor March 1914: “I have a design of writing a novel for the entertainment of those readers who complain that they cannot secure enough of Fred Jackson’s work. It is to be entitled: ‘The Primal Passion, or The Heart of ’Rastus Washington.’” It is possible that Jackson is a subsidiary (or even primary) target for attack here. Several of Jackson’s novels have exactly the sort of implausibility of plot and sentimentality of action that is parodied in “Sweet Ermengarde.” With “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” and “Ibid,” it forms a trilogy of HPL’s comic gems.

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Sylvester, Margaret (b. 1918),

correspondent of HPL (1934–37). She had written to HPL in care of WT,asking him to explain the origin and meaning of the term Walpurgisnacht . She later married and became Margaret Ronan, writing the preface to a school edition of HPL’s tales, The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror(Scholastic Books, 1971).

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T

Talman, Wilfred Blanch (1904–1986),

friend and correspondent of HPL (1925–37). Talman, while attending Brown University, subsidized the publication of a volume of his poetry, Cloisonné and Other Verses(1925), which he sent to HPL in July 1925. (No copy of this volume has been located.) The two met in New York a month later, and Talman became an irregular member of the Kalem Club. In the summer of 1926 Talman sent HPL a draft of “Two Black Bottles,” which HPL exhaustively revised (chiefly in regard to the Dutch dialect in the tale); it appeared in WT(August 1927). Talman chafed at the extent of HPL’s revision of the tale, but nonetheless expressed his gratitude by designing HPL’s bookplate in the summer of 1927. He published a few other stories and poems in WT,these not revised by HPL. Talman visited HPL in Providence in September 1927. HPL in return visited Talman’s estate in Spring Valley, N.Y., on May 24, 1928; Talman then drove HPL to Tarrytown, where HPL took a bus to Sleepy Hollow. The two met again when HPL came to New York in April 1929, at which time Talman offered to try to get HPL a job with a New York newspaper. HPL declined, of course. At a gathering at Talman’s apartment in Brooklyn on July 6, 1931, HPL met Seabury Quinn for the first time. For a time Talman was a reporter for the New York Times;later, around 1930, he became editor of the Texaco Star,a trade paper operated by the Texaco oil company. Talman suggested that HPL write a series of travel articles for the paper, but HPL did not feel that the plan was practicable, given the idiosyncratic nature of his travel writing. Talman, a pronounced genealogist, encouraged HPL to research his own genealogy, even as he diligently pursued his own New York Dutch roots. For a time he also edited De Halve Maen (The Half Moon),the magazine of the Holland Society of New York, and commissioned HPL to write “Some Dutch Footprints in New England,” which appeared in the issue of October 18, 1933. In late 1936, on his own initiative, Talman approached William Morrow & Co. about the possibility of a novel by HPL; Morrow seemed inter

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ested, but HPL had nothing to offer, and by that time was too ill to write one afresh. Long after HPL’s death Talman wrote a memoir, included in the booklet The Normal Lovecraft(1973; rpt. LR), as well as a historical treatise, Tappan: 300 Years, 1686–1986(Tappantown Historical Society, 1989). Tchernevsky, Count Feodor.

In “The Ghost-Eater,” a Russian nobleman who comes to visit Vasili Oukranikov in his house in the woods and is killed by Oukranikov (who has transformed himself into a werewolf). “Temple, The.”

Short story (5,430 words); written sometime after “The Cats of Ulthar” (June 15, 1920) but before “Celephaïs” (early November). First published in WT(September 1925); rpt. WT(February 1936); first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in TD.

A German submarine commanded by a Prussian nobleman, Karl Heinrich, Graf von AltbergEhrenstein, sinks a British freighter; later a dead seaman from the freighter is found clinging to the railing of the submarine, and in his pocket is found a “very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth’s head crowned with laurel.” The German crew sleep poorly, have bad dreams, and some think that dead bodies are drifting past the portholes. Some crewmen actually go mad, claiming that a curse has fallen upon them; Altberg-Ehrenstein executes them to restore discipline. Some days later an explosion in the engine room cripples the submarine, and still later a general mutiny breaks out, with some sailors further damaging the ship; the commander again executes the culprits. Finally only Altberg-Ehrenstein and Lieutenant Klenze are left alive. The ship sinks lower and lower toward the bottom of the ocean. Klenze then goes mad, shouting: “ Heis calling! Heis calling! I hear him! We must go!” He voluntarily leaves the ship and plunges into the ocean. As the ship finally reaches the ocean floor, the commander sees a remarkable sight: an entire city at the bottom of the ocean, with various buildings, temples, and villas, mostly built of marble. “Confronted at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth,” Altberg-Ehrenstein notices one especially large temple carved from the solid rock; later he sees that a head sculpted on it is exactly like the figurine taken from the dead British sailor. The commander, finishing his written account of his adventure on August 20, 1917, prepares to explore the temple after he sees an anomalous phosphorescence emerging from far within the temple. “So I will carefully don my diving suit and walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine; that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years.”

This is the first of HPL’s stories not to have been first published in an amateur journal; possibly its length was a factor, as most amateur journals could not accommodate so long a tale. Like “Dagon,” it uses World War I as a vivid backdrop, although HPL mars the story by crude satire on the protagonist’s militarist and chauvinist sentiments. There also seems to be an excess of supernaturalism, with many bizarre occurrences that do not seem to unify into a coherent whole. But the story is significant in postulating (like “Dagon”) an entire civilization antedating humanity and possibly responsible for many of the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of humanity. In a letter HPL remarks that “the flame that the Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein beheld was a witch-fire lit by spirits many mil

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lennia old” ( SL1.287), but no reader could ever make this deduction based solely on the textual evidence. In a late letter ( SL5.267–69) he discusses the ancient sources for the myth of Atlantis (in which, of course, he did not believe).

Terrible Old Man, The.

In “The Terrible Old Man,” the aged and eccentric former sea captain in Kingsport who is rumored by the townsfolk to be fabulously wealthy. A band of robbers who attempt to despoil the feeble old man of his supposed treasure are mysteriously and viciously despatched. He is also briefly mentioned in “The Strange High House in the Mist.”

“Terrible Old Man, The.”

Short story (1,160 words); written on January 28, 1920. First published in the Tryout(July 1921); rpt. WT(August 1926); first collected in O;corrected text in DH.

Three thieves—Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva—plan to rob the home of the Terrible Old Man, who is said to be both fabulously wealthy and very feeble. The Terrible Old Man dwells in Kingsport, a city somewhere in New England. In the “far-off days of his unremembered youth” he was a sea-captain, and seems to have a vast collection of ancient Spanish gold and silver pieces. He has now become very eccentric, appearing to spend hours speaking to an array of bottles in each of which a small piece of lead is suspended from a string. On the night of the planned robbery, Ricci and Silva enter the Terrible Old Man’s house while Czanek waits outside. Screams are heard from the house, but there is no sign of the two robbers. Czanek wonders whether his colleagues were forced to kill the old man and make a laborious search through his house for the treasure. But then the Terrible Old Man appears at the doorway, “leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously.” Later three unidentifiable bodies are found washed in by the tide.

The tale is reminiscent of many stories in Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder(1912), several of which similarly deal with attempted robberies that usually end badly for the perpetrators. Probably the closest analogy is with “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men.” The three thieves represent the three major non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic groups in Rhode Island (Italian, Polish, and Portuguese).

The location of Kingsport is unspecified; only later, in “The Festival” (1923), did HPL identify it with the town of Marblehead and situate it in Massachusetts.

See Donald R.Burleson, “‘The Terrible Old Man’: A Deconstruction,” LSNo. 15 (Fall 1987): 65–70; Carl Buchanan, “The Terrible Old Man’: A Myth of the Devouring Father,” LSNo. 29 (Fall 1993): 19– 31.

Theunis, Constantin.

In “The Tree on the Hill,” a scholar who suffers a seizure after examining a strange photograph through a special viewing apparatus he has invented.

“Thing on the Doorstep, The.”

Novelette (10,830 words); written August 21–24, 1933. First published in WT(January 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An2and TD.

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The narrator, Daniel Upton, tells of his young friend Edward Derby, who since boyhood has displayed a remarkable aesthetic sensitivity toward the weird, in spite—or perhaps because—of the overprotective coddling of his parents. Derby attends Miskatonic University and becomes a moderately recognized fantaisisteand poet. He frequently visits Upton, using a characteristic knock— three raps followed by two more after an interval—to announce himself. When he is thirty-eight he meets Asenath Waite, a young woman at Miskatonic, about whom strange things are whispered: she has anomalous hypnotic powers, creating the momentary impression in her subjects that they are in her body looking across at themselves. Even stranger things are whispered of her father, Ephraim Waite, who died under very peculiar circumstances. Over his father’s opposition, Derby marries Asenath—who is one of the Innsmouth Waites—and settles in a home in Arkham. They seem to undertake very recondite and perhaps dangerous occult experiments. Moreover, people observe curious changes in both of them: whereas Asenath is extremely strong-willed and determined, Edward is flabby and weak-willed; but on occasion he is seen driving Asenath’s car (even though he did not previously know how to drive) with a resolute and almost demonic expression, and conversely Asenath is seen from a window looking unwontedly meek and defeated. One day Upton receives a call from Maine: Derby is there in a crazed state, and Upton has to fetch him because Derby has suddenly lost the ability to drive. On the trip back Derby tells Upton a wild tale of Asenath forcing his mind from his body and going on to suggest that Asenath is really Ephraim, who forced out the mind of his daughter and placed it in his own dying body. Abruptly Derby’s ramblings come to an end, as if “shut off with an almost mechanical click.” Derby takes the wheel from Upton and tells him to pay no attention to what he may just have said.

Some months later Derby visits Upton again. He is in a tremendously excited state, claiming that Asenath has gone away and that he will seek a divorce. Around Christmas of that year Derby breaks down entirely. He cries out: “My brain! My brain! God, Dan—it’s tugging—from beyond—knocking— clawing—that she-devil—even now—Ephraim….” He is placed in a mental hospital and shows no signs of recovery until one day he suddenly seems to be better; but, to Upton’s disappointment and even latent horror, Derby is now in that curiously “energised” state such as he had been during the ride back from Maine. Upton is in an utter turmoil of confusion when one evening he receives a phone call. He cannot make out what the caller is saying—it sounds like “glub…glub”—but a little later someone knocks at his door, using Derby’s familiar three-and-two signal. This creature—a “foul, stunted parody” of a human being—is wearing one of Derby’s old coats, which is clearly too big for it. It hands Upton a sheet of paper that explains the whole story: Derby had killed Asenath to escape her influence and her plans to switch bodies with him permanently; but death did not extinguish Asenath/Ephraim’s mind, for it emerged from the body, thrust itself into the body of Derby, and hurled his mind into Asenath’s corpse, buried in the cellar of their home. Now, with a final burst of determination, Derby (in the body of Asenath) has climbed out of the shallow grave and is now delivering this message to Upton, since he was unable to communicate with him on the phone. Upton

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promptly goes to the madhouse and shoots the thing in Edward Derby’s body; this account is his confession and attempt at exculpation.

The story was written as part of HPL’s campaign, in the summer and fall of 1933, to rejuvenate his writing (and his entire literary outlook) by a renewed reading of the classics of weird fiction. The autograph manuscript was typed by a “delinquent revision client” ( SL4.310). This might be Hazel Heald, although it cannot be the same person who typed “The Dreams in the Witch House” for HPL: firstly, the typewriter faces on the existing typescripts are very different; secondly, the typescript for this story is extremely inaccurate, to such a degree that HPL’s chapter divisions have been overlooked, resulting in only five chapters instead of seven. These errors were not corrected until DH (1984 ed.).

The story appears to have two significant literary influences. One is H.B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928; first published in England in 1925 as The Remedy), a novel about a man who displays anomalous powers of hypnosis and mind-transference. An entry in HPL’s commonplace book (#158) records the plot-germ: “Man has terrible wizard friend who gains influence over him. Kills him in defence of his soul—walls body up in ancient cellar—BUT—the dead wizard (who has said strange things about soul lingering in body) changes bodies with him…leaving him a conscious corpse in cellar.” This is not exactly a description of the plot of The Shadowy Thing,but rather an imaginative extrapolation based upon it. In Drake’s novel, Avery Booth exhibits powers that seem akin to hypnosis, to such a degree that he can oust the mind or personality from another person’s body and occupy it. He does so on several occasions, and in the final episode he appears to have come back from the dead (he had been killed in a battle in World War I) and occupied the body of a friend and soldier who had himself been horribly mangled in battle. HPL has amended this plot by introducing the notion of mind-exchange:whereas Drake does not clarify what happens to the ousted mind when it is taken over by the mind of Booth, HPL envisages an exact transference whereby the ousted mind occupies the body of its possessor. The notion of mind-exchange between persons of different genders may have been derived from the other presumed literary influence, Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls(1911), which HPL owned. Here a scientist persuades his wife to undergo an experiment whereby their “souls” or personalities are exchanged by means of a machine he has built; but in the course of the experiment the man’s body dies and the machine is damaged. The rest of the novel is involved in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the woman (now endowed with her husband’s personality but lacking much of his scientific knowledge) to repair the machine. “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35) takes the notion a step further, describing the exchange of minds between a human being and an alien creature.

Some features of Edward Derby’s life supply a twisted version of HPL’s own childhood. But there are some anomalies in the portrayal of the youthful Edward Derby that need to be addressed. Upton refers to Derby as “the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known.” It is unlikely, given his characteristic modesty, that HPL would have made such a statement about a character modeled upon himself. Derby may be instead an amalgam of several of HPL’s associates. Consider this remark about Alfred Galpin: “He is intellectually exactly

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like mesave in degree. In degree he is immensely my superior” ( SL1.128); elsewhere he refers to Galpin—who was only seventeen when HPL first knew him in 1918—as “the most brilliant, accurate, steel-cold intellect I have ever encountered” ( SL1.256). Galpin never wrote “verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast” as Derby did as a boy, nor published a volume of poetry when he was eighteen. But Clark Ashton Smith created a sensation as a boy prodigy when he published The StarTreader and Other Poemsin 1912, when he was nineteen. And Smith was a close colleague of George Sterling, who—like Justin Geoffrey in the tale—died in 1926 (Sterling by suicide, Geoffrey of unknown causes). HPL’s mention that Derby’s “attempts to grow a moustache were discernible only with difficulty” recalls his frequent censures of the thin moustache Frank Belknap Long attempted for years to cultivate in the 1920s.

But if Derby’s youth and young manhood are an amalgam of HPL and some of his closest friends, his marriage to Asenath Waite clearly brings certain aspects of HPL’s marriage to Sonia Greene to mind. Sonia was clearly the more strong-willed member of the couple; it was certainly from her initiative that the marriage took place at all and that HPL uprooted himself from Providence to come to live in New York. The objections of Derby’s father to Asenath—and specifically to Derby’s wish to marry her —may dimly echo objections of HPL’s aunts to his marriage to Sonia. (Such objections can only be inferred from the tenor of some of HPL’s letters to his aunts.)

In one sense the story is a reprise of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:the attempt by Asenath (in Derby’s body) to pass herself off as Edward in the madhouse is precisely analogous to Joseph Curwen’s attempts to maintain that he is Charles Dexter Ward.

One glancing note in the story that has caused considerable misunderstanding is Upton’s remark about Asenath: “Her crowning rage…was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers.” This sentiment is clearly expressed as Asenath’s (who, let us recall, is only Ephraim in another body), and need not be attributed to HPL. A decade earlier HPL had indeed uttered some silly remarks on women’s intelligence: “Females are in Truth much given to affected Baby Lisping…They are by Nature literal, prosaic, and commonplace, given to dull realistick Details and practical Things, and incapable alike of vigorous artistick Creation and genuine, first-hand appreciation” ( SL1.238). But by the 1930s he had come to a more sensible position: “I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences…. The feminine mind does not cover the same territory as the masculine, but is probably little if any inferior in total quality” ( SL5.64).

HPL was so dissatisfied with the story upon its completion that he refused to submit it anywhere. At last, in the summer of 1936, when Julius Schwartz proposed to HPL to market some of his tales in England, HPL reluctantly submitted the story, along with “The Haunter of the Dark,” to Farnsworth Wright of WT,who promptly accepted both.

See S.T.Joshi, “Autobiography in Lovecraft,” LSNo. 1 (Fall 1979): 7–19 (esp. 12–15); Donald R.Burleson, “The Thing: On the Doorstep,” LSNo. 33 (Fall 1995): 14–18.

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Thorfinnssen, Georg.

In At the Mountains of Madness,the captain of the barque Miskatonic,one of the supply ships for the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31.

Thorndike, Henry.

In “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” the village undertaker who invents a chemical that can simulate death in a person who remains alive and conscious. He accidentally injects himself with his chemical and is buried alive.

Thornton,———.

In “The Rats in the Walls,” a “psychic investigator” brought in by Delapore to investigate the crypt beneath Exham Priory.

“Through the Gates of the Silver Key.”

Novelette (14,550 words); written in collaboration with E.Hoffmann Price, October 1932–April 1933. First published in WT(July 1934); first collected in O;corrected text in MM

Several individuals gather in New Orleans—Etienne Laurent de Marigny, Ward Phillips, the lawyer Ernest B.Aspinwall, and a strange individual named the Swami Chandraputra—to discuss the disposition of the estate of Randolph Carter. The Swami opposes any action, because he maintains that Carter is still alive. He proceeds to tell a fabulous story of what happened to Carter after his return to boyhood (as noted in “The Silver Key”).

Carter passed through a succession of “Gates” into some realm “outside time and the dimensions we know,” led by a “Guide,” ’Umr at-Tawil, the Prolonged of Life. This guide eventually led Carter to the thrones of the Ancient Ones, from whom he learned that there are “archetypes” for every entity in the universe and that each person’s entire ancestry is nothing more than a facet of the single archetype; Carter learned that he himself is a facet of the “SUPREME ARCHETYPE.” Then, somehow, Carter found himself in the body of a fantastically alien being, Zkauba the Wizard, on the planet Yaddith. He managed to return to earth but must go about in concealment because of his alien form. When the hard-nosed lawyer Aspinwall scoffs at the Swami’s story, a final revelation is made: the Swami is Randolph Carter, still in the monstrous shape of Zkauba. Aspinwall, having removed Carter’s mask, dies immediately of apoplexy. Carter then disappears through a large clock in the room. The story is based on a draft, entitled “The Lord of Illusion,” written by Price. Price had become so enamored of “The Silver Key” that, during HPL’s visit with him in New Orleans in June 1932, he “suggested a sequel to account for Randolph Carter’s doings after his disappearance” (Price, “The Man Who Was Lovecraft,” in Cats,p. 281). Sending “The Lord of Illusion” to HPL in late August, he expressed hope that HPL might revise it and allow it to be published as an acknowledged collaboration.

“The Lord of Illusion” (first printed in CryptNo. 10 [1982]: 46–56) tells the story of how Randolph Carter, after finding the silver key, enters a strange cavern in the hills behind his family home in Massachusetts and encounters a strange man who announces himself as “’Umr at-Tawil, your guide,” who leads Carter to some other-dimensional realm where he meets the Ancient Ones. These entities explain the nature of the universe to Carter: just as a circle is pro

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duced from the intersection of a cone with a plane, so our three-dimensional world is produced from the intersection of a plane with a figure of a higher dimension; analogously, time is an illusion, being merely the result of this sort of “cutting” of infinity. It transpires that all Carters who have ever lived are part of a single archetype, so that if Carter could manipulate his “section-plane” (the plane that determines his situation in time), he could be any Carter he wished to be, from antiquity to the distant future. In a purported surprise ending, Carter reveals himself as an old man among a group of individuals who had assembled to divide up Carter’s estate.

HPL, upon reading the draft, stated that extensive changes would need to be made in the story to bring it in line with the original tale. In the letter in which he evaluates Price’s work, he specifies several faults that must be rectified: (1) the style must be made more similar to that of “The Silver Key” (Price’s version, devoid of his usual action and swordplay, is generally flat, stilted, and pompous); (2) various points of the plot must be reconciled with that of “The Silver Key”; (3) the transition from the mundane world to the hyperspace realm must be vastly subtilized; and (4) the atmosphere of lecture-room didacticism in the Ancient Ones’ discussions with Carter must be eliminated.

Price has remarked that “I estimated that [HPL] had left unchanged fewer than fifty of my original words” (“The Man Who Was Lovecraft,” p. 282), a comment that has led many to believe that the finished version of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” is radically different from Price’s original; but, as we have seen, HPL adhered to the basic framework of Price’s tale as best he could. The quotations from the Necronomiconare largely Price’s, although somewhat amended by HPL. Price submitted the story to WTon June 19, 1933, both praising the story and minimizing his own role in it. Wright’s response was not unexpected: “I have carefully read THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY and am almost overwhelmed by the colossal scope of the story. It is cyclopean in its daring and titanic in its execution…. But I am afraid to offer it to our readers. Many there would be…who would go into raptures of esthetic delight while reading the story; just as certainly there would be a great many—probably a clear majority—of our readers who would be unable to wade through it. These would find the descriptions and discussions of polydimensional space poison to their enjoyment of the tale…. I assure you that never have I turned down a story with more regret than in this case” (Farnsworth Wright to HPL, August 17, 1933; ms., JHL). But by mid-November 1933 Wright was asking to see the story again, and he accepted it a week later. It in fact elicited a hostile response from the young Henry Kuttner, published in the letter column of WT(September 1934).

See Norm Gayford, “Randolph Carter: An Anti-Hero’s Quest,” LSNo. 16 (Spring 1988): 3–11; No. 17 (Fall 1988): 5–13.

Thurber,———.

The narrator of “Pickman’s Model.” At first, he is one of Richard Upton Pickman’s staunchest supporters. Following Pickman’s disappearance, he refuses to venture into the subway system or the cellars of Boston after viewing a photograph of the subject of one of Pickman’s paintings.

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Thurston, Francis Weyland.

“The Call of Cthulhu” is Thurston’s written dissertation of his piecing together various accounts of the Cthulhu cult from the research of his uncle, George Gammell Angell (in “The Horror in Clay”); his uncle’s encounter with police inspector John Raymond Legrasse (“The Tale of Inspector Legrasse”); and the diary of Gustav Johansen, the Norwegian sailor who encounters Cthulhu firsthand (“The Madness from the Sea”). His name is cited in full in the subtitle of the story; in earlier editions, this subtitle was frequently omitted.

“‘Till A’ the Seas.’”

Short story (3,300 words); written in collaboration withR. H.Barlow, January 1935. First published in the Californian(Summer 1935); first collected in HM(1970 ed.); corrected text in HM Humanity finds himself in dire straits as the earth gradually approaches closer and closer to the sun. Drought ravages the planet “for unnumbered aeons,” and towns, cities, and entire countries are deserted as the few struggling remnants of mankind seek the final traces of water near the poles. At length all the oceans dry up. Finally humanity is reduced to hundreds, then tens. A young man named Ull is compelled to leave his dwelling when his companion, an old woman named Mladdna, finally dies. In search of both water and companionship, he seeks out a colony that he has heard dwells over the mountains; but when he reaches the huts of the colony, he realizes that everyone is dead. Then, in the middle of the town, he sees a well. Groping for the chain and bucket in the well, Ull slips and falls into it, dying. He is the last man on earth.

Barlow’s typescript, with HPL’s revisions in pen, survives, so that the exact degree of the latter’s authorship can be ascertained (see the article by Joshi, in which the text is reproduced with HPL’s words placed in brackets). HPL has made no significant structural changes, merely making cosmetic changes in style and diction; but he has written the bulk of the concluding section, especially the purportedly cosmic reflections when the last man on earth finally meets his ironic death. The title is from Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” (1796): “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear….” See S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft’s Contribution to ‘Till A’ the Seas,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 33–39. Tillinghast, Crawford.

In “From Beyond,” the mad scientist who invents a machine that reveals creatures and worlds perceptible to the five senses. He dies, ostensibly of “apoplexy,” after demonstrating his machine to his unnamed colleague. (In HPL’s original draft of the story, the character was named Henry Annesley.)

Tillinghast, Dutee.

In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a ship-captain who is in the employ of Joseph Curwen in eighteenth-century Providence. Evidently under some terrible compulsion, he is forced to permit Curwen to marry his only daughter, Eliza, so that Curwen can repair his reputation in Providence society. Eliza and Curwen have a daughter, Ann. After Curwen’s apparent death, Eliza resumes her maiden name; Ann Tillinghast later marries Welcome Potter, Charles Dexter Ward’s great-greatgrandfather.

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Tilton, Anna.

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the curator of the Newburyport Historical Society who shows Robert Olmstead the strange marine-motif jewelry associated with Innsmouth, which he later recognizes among jewelry that belonged to his great-grandmother.

T’la-yub.

In “The Mound,” a noblewoman in Panfilo de Zamacona’s “affection-group” who attempts to escape the underworld realm with Zamacona but fails hideously: captured by the mound denizens, she is tortured in the amphitheatre and becomes a half-dematerialized corpse-slave who is stationed as a guard at the entrance of the mound. It is her occasional appearance aboveground that leads to rumors of a ghost haunting the mound.

“To a Dreamer.”

Poem (24 lines in quatrains); written on April 25, 1920. First published in the Coyote(January 1921); rpt. WT(November 1924).

The narrator scans the features of a nameless dreamer and wonders where his “dream-steps” have led him. The poem contains the first mentions of such terms (used later in HPL’s stories) as the “peaks of Thok” and the “vaults of Zin”; the “vale of Pnath” is also mentioned, although Pnath had first been coined in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1919). HPL notes in a letter to Frank Belknap Long (June 4, 1921; AHT) that the poem was founded on an idea occurring among Baudelaire’s notes and jottings (presumably from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry,ed. T.R.Smith [Modern Library, 1919], which HPL owned and which was the source of the epigraph in “Hypnos”). “To a Sophisticated Young Gentleman, Presented by His Grandfather with a Volume of Contemporary Literature.”

Poem (82 lines); written on December 15, 1928. First published in SL2.255–57.

The poem was written to accompany a copy of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way,which HPL presented to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas. In the course of the poem HPL delivers telling blows on the freakishness and extravagance of much modern literature and the culture that produced it. In the first published appearance (a letter to James F.Morton, [January 1929]), the poem bears a variant title: “An Epistle to Francis, Ld. Belknap….”

“To Charlie of the Comics.”

Poem (32 lines in 4 stanzas); probably written in late September 1915. First published in the Providence Amateur(February 1916).

A poem on Charlie Chaplin. It was written in response to Rheinhart Kleiner’s poem “To Mary of the Movies” ( Piper,September 1915), about Mary Pickford. HPL professed enjoyment of Chaplin’s films, many of which he saw (see SL1.18, 50–51). For another poem on films, see the satire “To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema” (written August 1917; first published in the United Amateur, November 1919), a reply to Kleiner’s “To a Movie Star,” published in the same issue of the United Amateur

“To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures.”

Poem (sonnet); written in December 1936. First published in WT(April 1938) (as “To Clark Ashton Smith”).

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A tribute to HPL’s longtime colleague, the poem bears at least one variant title (“To Klarkash-Ton, Lord of Averoigne”) alluding to the fictitious region in medieval France invented by Smith in some of his tales. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” and other tales, HPL alludes to Smith (as he does repeatedly in his letters to him) as Klarkash-Ton.

“To Mr. Finlay, upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch’s Tale, ‘The Faceless God.’” Poem (sonnet); written on November 30, 1936. First published in the Phantagraph(May 1937); rpt. WT(July 1937).

HPL composed the poem while writing a letter to Finlay, who had lamented the decline of the tradition of dedicatory poems. “The Faceless God” had appeared in WT(May 1936), and Finlay’s illustration is generally considered the finest ever published in the magazine.

“To Zara.”

Poem (42 lines); written on August 31, 1922. First published in SL1.164–65 (in a letter to Maurice W.Moe, [September] 1922).

The poem is a hoax: it is purportedly written by Poe (in one ms. HPL dates it to 1829) and is an imitation/parody of Poe’s numerous and extravagant poems to women (this one is dedicated to “Miss Sarah Longhurst”). HPL wrote it as a joke on Alfred Galpin, who generally regarded HPL’s poetry with disdain. HPL and Frank Belknap Long claimed that they had found the poem in the possession of an ancient Maine man who had known Poe. Galpin, although not believing this story, thought the poem was copied from the work of some obscure nineteenth-century poet, perhaps Arthur O’Shaughnessy. Tobey, William.

In “The Lurking Fear,” he and George Bennett accompany the narrator to the Martense mansion in search of the entity that haunts it. They spend the night, but Tobey and Bennett mysteriously disappear.

Toldridge, Elizabeth [Anne] (1861–1940),

poet and correspondent of HPL (1928–37). Toldridge published two collections of verse, The Soul of Love(New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1910) and Mother’s Love Songs(Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911), long before she ever came in touch with HPL. She was also widely published in amateur and semi-professional magazines and anthologies. She got in touch with HPL in 1928, some years after HPL had served as a judge for a poetry contest (otherwise unknown) in which Toldridge had participated. She was disabled in some unknown manner and was unable to leave her apartment in Washington, D.C. HPL visited her there on May 6, 1929; in 1936 R.H. Barlow visited her while traveling from Florida to Providence. Her discussions of poetry with HPL may have been instrumental in HPL’s shift away from archaistic verse in theory and practice.

“Tomb, The.”

Short story (4,190 words); written in June 1917. First published in the Vagrant(March 1922); rpt. WT (January 1926); first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in TD.

Jervas Dudley tells of his lonely and secluded life. He discovers, in a wooded hollow near his home, a tomb that houses the remains of a family, the Hydes,

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that dwelt in a mansion nearby. This mansion had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground, although only one member of the family had perished in the flame. The tomb exercises an unholy fascination upon Dudley, and he haunts it for hours at a time. It is locked, but the door is “fastened ajarin a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago.” Dudley resolves to enter this tomb at any cost, but he is too young and weak to break open the lock (he is only ten years old at this time). Gradually he begins to display various odd traits, in particular a knowledge of very ancient things that he could not possibly have learned from books. One night, as he is lying on a bower outside the tomb, he seems to hear voices from within: “Every shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in that shadowy colloquy….” He does not say what the colloquy was about, but upon returning home he goes directly to a rotting chest in the attic and finds a key to unlock the tomb.

Dudley spends much time in the tomb. But now another peculiar change takes place in him: hitherto a sequestered recluse, he begins to show signs of “ribald revelry” as he returns from the tomb. In one instance he declaims a drinking song of Georgian cast. He also develops a fear of thunderstorms. Dudley’s parents, worried about his increasingly odd behavior, now hire a “spy” to follow his actions. On one occasion Dudley thinks that this spy has seen him coming out of the tomb, but the spy tells his parents that Dudley had spent the night on the bower outside the tomb. Dudley, now convinced that he is under some sort of supernatural protection, frequents the tomb without fear or circumspection. One night, as thunder is in the air, he goes to the tomb and sees the mansion as it was in its heyday. A party is under way, and guests in powdered wigs are brought in by carriage. But a peal of thunder interrupts the “swinish revelry” and a fire breaks out. Dudley flees, but finds himself being restrained by two men. They maintain that Dudley had spent the entire night outside the tomb and point to the rusted and unopened lock as evidence. Dudley is put away in a madhouse. A servant, “for whom I bore a fondness in infancy,” goes to the tomb, breaks it open, and finds a porcelain miniature with the initials “J.H.”; the picture could be of Dudley’s twin. “On a slab in an alcove he found an old but empty coffin whose tarnished plate bears the single word ‘Jervas’. In that coffin and in that vault they have promised me I shall be buried.”

HPL noted that the genesis of the story occurred in June 1917, when he was walking with his aunt Lillian Clark through Swan Point Cemetery and came upon a tombstone dating to 1711. “Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me? I looked long at that grave, and the night after I returned home I began my first story of the new series—The Tomb’” (HPL to the Gallomo, [January] 1920). The tombstone is evidently one in the Clark plot—one Simon Smith (d. March 4, 1711), apparently a distant ancestor of Mrs. Clark.

William Fulwiler points out that the use of the name Hyde is a nod to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,suggesting that both works involve a double. There may also be an influence from Poe’s “Ligeia.”

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The so-called “Drinking Song from ‘The Tomb’” was written separately, perhaps years before the story itself. The manuscript of the poem survives at JHL as part of an unfinished letter to an unknown correspondent. There the song is titled “Gaudeamus,” and HPL evidently wrote it as a response to another poem (apparently by an amateur journalist) of the same title, which HPL considered inferior. Will Murray has conjectured that the song may have been inspired by a similar song contained in Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan or New Canaan(1637), but a likelier source may be a song in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal(1777).

See William Fulwiler, “‘The Tomb’ and ‘Dagon’: A Double Dissection,” CryptNo. 38 (Eastertide 1986): 8–14; Will Murray, “A Probable Source for the Drinking Song from The Tomb,’” LSNo. 15 (Fall 1987): 77–80.

Torres, Dr.

In “Cool Air,” a physician in Valencia, Spain, who was the colleague of Dr. Muñoz in their quest to defeat death.

“Transition of Juan Romero, The.”

Short story (2,710 words); written on September 16, 1919. First published in Marginalia;corrected text in D.

The narrator, an Englishman who because of nameless “calamities” has migrated from his native land (after spending many years in India) to work as a common laborer in America, tells the story of an incident occurring in 1894 at the Norton Mine (presumably somewhere in the Southwest). The narrator becomes friendly with a Mexican peon named Juan Romero, who exhibits a strange fascination for the Hindu ring he owns. One day dynamite is used to blast a cavity for further mining; but the result is the opening up of an immeasurable cavern that cannot be sounded. That night a storm gathers, but beyond the roar of the wind and rain there is another sound, which the frightened Romero can only deem “ el ritmo de la tierra—THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!” The narrator also hears it—some huge rhythmical pounding in the newly opened abyss. Possessed by some fatality, they both descend down ladders into the cavern; Romero then dashes off ahead of the narrator, only to plunge into a further abyss, screaming hideously. The narrator cautiously peers over the edge, sees something— “but God! I dare not tell you what I saw!”—and flees back to the camp. That morning he and Romero are both found in their bunks, Romero dead. Other miners swear that neither of them left their cabin that night. The narrator later discovers that his Hindu ring is missing. There is some suggestion that Romero is not in fact Mexican but is descended from the Aztecs, a suggestion enhanced by his crying the name “Huitzilopotchli”as he descends into the abyss. The narrator remarks of this word: “Later I definitely placed that word in the works of a great historian— and shuddered when the association came to me.” HPL explicitly footnotes Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico,which contains a vivid passage on the Aztec god and the sacrifices practiced in his name. HPL, clearly unsatisfied with this story, refused to allow it to be published in his lifetime, even in the amateur press. He disavowed it relatively early in life, and it fails to appear on most lists of his stories; he does not even seem to have shown it to anyone until 1932, when R.H.Barlow persuaded HPL to send him the manu

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script so that he could prepare a typescript of it. Aside from the revisions “The Curse of Yig” and “The Mound,” it is HPL’s only tale set in the Southwest.

“Trap, The.”

Short story (8,570 words); written in collaboration with Henry S. Whitehead, probably in the summer of 1931. First published in Strange Tales(March 1932); first collected in Uncollected Prose and Poetry II(1980); corrected text in HM.

Robert Grandison, one of the pupils at the Connecticut academy where Gerald Canevin teaches, comes upon an anomalous mirror in Canevin’s house that sucks hapless individuals into a strange realm where colors are altered and where objects, both animate and inanimate, have a sort of intangible, dreamlike existence. The mirror had been devised by a seventeenth-century Danish glassblower named Axel Holm who yearned for immortality and found it, after a fashion, in his mirrorworld, since “‘life’ in the sense of form and consciousness would go on virtually forever” so long as the mirror itself was not destroyed. Grandison manages to bring his plight to Canevin’s attention, and Canevin contrives to release Grandison from his “trap.”

HPL and Whitehead probably worked on the tale, or at least discussed it, during HPL’s three-week visit to Whitehead’s home in Dunedin, Fla., in May– June 1931. He says in one letter that he “revised & totally recast” the tale (HPL to August Derleth, December 23, 1931; ms., SHSW) and in another that he “supplied] the central part myself (HPL to R.H.Barlow, February 25, 1932; ms., JHL). Judging purely from the prose style, it can be conjectured that the latter three-fourths of the story is HPL’s. Nevertheless, HPL clearly did not wish to share a byline with Whitehead for the story, maintaining that his help was simply a courtesy. The story appears in the second of Whitehead’s two posthumously published collections of tales, West India Lights(1946); HPL’s contribution to the story only came to light in the late 1970s.

Trask, Dr.

In “The Rats in the Walls,” the anthropologist who attempts to classify the human and subhuman bones found beneath Exham Priory.

Travels, Lovecraft’s.

In 1915 HPL wrote: “I have never been outside the three states of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut!” ( SL1.10). HPL was born in Providence, R.I., but shortly thereafter his parents returned to their home in Dorchester, Mass.; they also visited Dudley, Mass, (in the south-central part of the state) in the summer of 1892 and resided (according to HPL’s unverified testimony) with Louise Imogen Guiney in Auburndale in the winter of 1892–93; then, upon the illness of HPL’s father, they returned to Providence. HPL (and, presumably, his mother) went to Foster, R.I., in 1896, visiting ancestral sites ( SL3.409), perhaps as a way of relieving the gloom attending the death of HPL’s grandmother earlier that year. HPL also spent the summer of 1899 with his mother in Westminster, Mass., in the north-central part of the state ( SL2.348). The trip to Connecticut may have been the visit of 1901 that HPL mentions on several occasions (e.g. SL1.298), although he never specifies the locale of the visit. HPL also visited his cousin Phillips Gamwell on numerous occasions in Cambridge in the 1910–16 period.

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But HPL’s hermitry ended in 1919–20, when developing ties to amateur writers impelled him to take trips of increasing breadth; not coincidentally, the illness of his mother and her removal from 454 Angell Street also freed HPL to roam farther than he had done previously. Among his several trips to the Boston area at this time, the most memorable was a trip to the Copley Plaza in Boston in October 1919 to hear Lord Dunsany lecture ( SL1.91–93). He traveled to Boston several more times in 1921, as well as visiting C.W. “Tryout” Smith and Myrta Alice Little in Haverhill, Mass. (June 1921); he wrote of the visit in “The Haverhill Convention” ( Tryout,July 1921). The NAPA convention in Boston saw HPL in attendance; it was on this occasion that he first met his future wife, Sonia H. Greene. He wrote of the gathering in an unpublished essay, “The Convention Banquet” (ms., JHL). At Sonia’s urging, HPL made a six-day trip to New York in April 1922. He went with Sonia to Gloucester and Magnolia, Mass., in late June and early July, then returned to New York in late July prior to heading the farthest west he would ever venture—Cleveland, Ohio—in August to visit Alfred Galpin and Samuel Loveman. He returned to New York, staying there until late September. In midSeptember his visit with Rheinhart Kleiner to the Dutch Reformed Church in Brooklyn led to the writing of “The Hound” (1922). Late in 1922 HPL made his ecstatic first visit to the colonial haven of Marblehead, Mass., later the site for “The Festival” (1923). Further trips to New England—chiefly Salem, Marblehead, and Newburyport, Mass. (April), and Portsmouth, N.H. (August), and areas in western Rhode Island with James F.Morton (September) and C.M. Eddy (November)—occupied much of 1923.

HPL’s most momentous voyage was his two-year stay in Brooklyn (March 1924–April 1926). Initially thrilled at being in the vibrant metropolis, HPL later came to hate the place for its gigantism, its general absence of colonial landmarks, and its legions of “foreignerss of “5P who teemed at every street corner. HPL sought as best he could to explore nearby antiquarian landmarks: Elizabeth, N.J. (October 1924, June and August 1925), Philadelphia (seen briefly during his honeymoon and explored more exhaustively in November 1924), Washington, D.C. (April 1925), Paterson, N.J. (August 1925), Yonkers and Tarrytown, N.Y. (September 1925), Jamaica, Mineola, Hempstead, and Garden City, Long Island (September 1925). These visits provided much-needed respite from the clangor of the metropolis and from his unproductive life of poverty in Brooklyn.

HPL returned ecstatically to Providence in April 1926, but as early as September he was back in New York (evidently at Sonia’s bidding), staying for two weeks and briefly visiting Philadelphia. In October he revisited the ancestral sites in Foster, with Annie E.P.Gamwell. In the summer of 1927, HPL initiated what would become an annual and ever-widening series of jaunts up and down the eastern seaboard in quest of antiquarian havens. In July, he went with Donald Wandrei to Boston, Salem, Marblehead, and Athol, Mass., and Newport, R.I. The next month he visited Worcester, Amherst, and Deerfield, Mass., detouring briefly into Vermont (described in “Vermont—A First Impression” [1927]); Portland, Me; Portsmouth, N.H.; and Newburyport and Haverhill, Mass, (described in a compressed travelogue, “The Trip of Theobald,” Tryout,September 1927).

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In 1928 HPL’s travels began unexpectedly early, as in April he was summoned to Brooklyn by Sonia, who was setting up a hat shop and requested HPL’s assistance. He took the occasion to go on an expedition by car with Frank Belknap Long up the Hudson River and (on a later trip with Long) to Stamford and Ridgefield, Conn. In May he visited James F.Morton at his museum in Paterson, N.J., and visited Wilfred B.Talman in Spring Valley (Rockland Co.), N.Y., returning via Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow. Then Vrest Orton invited HPL to visit him in Brattleboro, Vt, and HPL spent two weeks there in June. Later that month he proceeded to Wilbraham, Mass., where he visited Edith Miniter; the impressions he derived from that visit were incorporated into the topography of “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). In July he headed south, passing through New York and going on to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Annapolis, Alexandria, George Washington’s residence at Mt. Vernon, and the Endless Caverns in New Market, Va. This series of travels was described in one of his finest travelogues, “Observations on Several Parts of America” (1928).

HPL’s travels of 1929 began at the very start of the year, as Samuel Loveman came to Providence and went with HPL to Boston, Salem, and Marblehead. In April HPL came to New York and then spent several weeks in Vrest Orton’s home in Yonkers. In May he headed south, visiting Washington and exhaustively exploring Richmond, Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Fredericksburg, and Falmouth, Va. Later he spent a few more days in Washington, returned to New York, and was driven by the Longs to West Shokan, N.Y., the residence of Bernard Austin Dwyer. HPL explored the abundant Dutch colonial remains of the nearby towns of Kingston, Hurley, and New Paltz. HPL wrote of these travels in “Travels in the Provinces of America” (1929). In August he took a trip to the Fairbanks house (1636) in Dedham, Mass., writing of the visit in an unpublished essay, “An Account of a Trip to the Fairbanks House” (1929). Later that month the Longs took HPL on a visit to New Bedford and Cape Cod. It was on this occasion that HPL, for the first and last only time, flew in an airplane (a $3 ride over Buzzard’s Bay). Late in August HPL and his aunt Annie Gamwell revisited sites in Foster.

In late April 1930 HPL headed directly from Providence to Charleston , S.C., whose colonial remains entranced him. It came to be his second favorite town, after Providence, and he wrote of it in “An Account of Charleston” (1930). In May HPL returned north through Richmond, New York City, and Kingston, N.Y., returning home in mid-June. The next month he attended the NAPA convention in Boston, and in August the Longs took him again to Cape Cod. Then, in late August, he took a cheap excursion to Quebec, whose colonial relics impelled him to write A Description of the Town of Quebeck(1930–31), his single longest literary work.

HPL’s travels of 1931 reached the widest extent they would ever achieve. In May he left for New York, spent much time in Charleston, visited Savannah, Ga., and spent two weeks in St. Augustine, Fla. He also visited Henry S.White-head in Dunedin, briefly visited Miami, and then spent several days in Key West. He returned north via St. Augustine, Charleston, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia, and New York. The Longs took him for a weekend to the beach resort of Asbury Park, N.J., and he spent a week with Talman

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in Brooklyn. He returned home in mid-July. In October he went with W.Paul Cook to Boston, Newburyport, and Haverhill; in November to Boston, Salem, Marblehead, Newburyport (which inspired the writing of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”), and Portsmouth. He wrote no travelogue of these visits, but they are chronicled extensively in his letters.

In May 1932 HPL left Providence for New York, then went south to Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Memphis, Tennessee, and Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi. He then proceeded to New Orleans, spending time with E.Hoffmann Price. HPL subsequently explored Mobile and Montgomery, Ala., and Atlanta, returning north via Fredericksburg, Annapolis, Philadelphia, and New York. He was called home abruptly in early July by the illness of his aunt Lillian, who died on July 3. In late August HPL visited Cook in Boston; they went to Newburyport to see a solar eclipse, after which HPL spent several days in Quebec. HPL revisited Salem and Marblehead in October. Toward the end of the year HPL initiated a new tradition of spending New Year’s Day in New York City, visiting his many friends there; on these occasions he usually stayed with the Longs.

HPL visited Hartford, Conn., in March 1933, seeing his ex-wife Sonia for the last time. Following his move to 66 College Street in May, HPL visited sites in Narragansett County, R.I., in a car driven by E.Hoffmann Price. The Longs came through Providence in late July and took HPL to Cape Cod, and he later visited Newport in the company of James F.Morton. HPL’s third trip to Quebec occurred in September; he also spent one day in Montreal. He again visited New York for New Year’s celebrations.

In mid-March 1934 HPL’s young friend R.H.Barlow invited HPL for an extended stay at his home in De Land, Fla. HPL accepted the offer, heading south the next month, spending time in New York and Charleston, and reaching De Land on May 2. He stayed until mid-June, after which he visited St. Augustine, Charleston, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York; the Longs then took him to Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, N.J. In August HPL went with Cook and Edward H.Cole to Boston, Salem, and Marblehead. Later that month HPL visited Nantucket for the first time, being enchanted by the antiquities there and writing of his visit in “The Unknown City in the Ocean” ( Perspective Review,Winter 1934). HPL again spent New Year’s in New York City. HPL returned to Boston and Marblehead with Cole in May 1935. The next month HPL returned to Barlow’s Florida home, staying from June 9 to August 18. HPL then visited St. Augustine, Charleston, Richmond, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, reaching home on September 14. It would prove the last of HPL’s extensive summer travels, although he did visit various sites (including Cape Cod) with Cole in September, and New Haven, Conn., and Boston (with Samuel Loveman) in October. The end of the year saw HPL’s last New Year’s visit to New York City.

Most of 1936 was full of illness (both for HPL and for his aunt Annie), poverty, and grueling revision work, so HPL did little traveling. In July HPL managed to get to Newport; and when Maurice W.Moe and his son Robert visited later that month, they took HPL to Pawtuxet and other sites in Rhode Island. HPL visited an area called Squantum Woods, on the east shore of Narragansett

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Bay, in October, and later that month visited the Neutaconkanut woods three miles northwest of his home; but thereafter he became too ill to travel.

HPL’s travel writings—whether in letters or in formal travelogues—are some of his most engaging documents. Aside from the meticulousness with which he records the history and topography of his chosen sites, the thrill he experienced at visiting antiquarian havens from Quebec to Key West is infectiously transmitted to the reader. It is possible, with HPL’s travelogues of Charleston, Quebec, and other locales in hand, to follow his footsteps exactly. On one occasion HPL wrote out a detailed itinerary from memory of the antiquarian sites in Newport for his aunt Annie (letter dated September 1927; ms., JHL). The impressions HPL derived from his travels enter extensively into his fiction from as early as “The Festival” to such important tales as “The Silver Key,” “The Colour out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; these tales (as well as those set in his native Providence—“The Shunned House,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,and “The Haunter of the Dark”) establish HPL as a significant New England regionalist as well as a master of the horror tale.

“Travels in the Provinces of America.”

Essay (19,800 words); probably written in the fall of 1929. First published in MW

The second of HPL’s great travelogues (after “Observations on Several Parts of America” [1928]), covering his travels of the spring and summer of 1929. It covers HPL’s visits to Yonkers (Vrest Orton) and New Rochelle, N.Y.; Richmond, Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, and Fredericksburg, Va.; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; West Shokan (Bernard Austin Dwyer), Kingston, Hurley, and New Paltz, N.Y.; Athol (W.Paul Cook) and Barre, Mass.

“Tree, The.”

Short story (1,640 words); written in the first half of 1920. First published in Tryout(October 1921); rpt. WT(August 1938); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D

The “Tyrant of Syracuse” proposes a contest between the two great sculptors, Kalos and Musides, to carve a statue of Tyché. The two artists are the closest of friends, but their lives are very different: whereas Musides “revelled by night amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea,” Kalos remains home in quiet contemplation. They begin working on their respective statues, but Kalos gradually takes ill and, despite Musides’ constant nursing, eventually dies. Musides wins the contest by default, but both he and his lovely statue are weirdly destroyed when a strange olive tree growing out of Kalos’ tomb suddenly falls upon Musides’ residence.

It is evident that Musides, for all his supposed devotion to his friend, has poisoned Kalos and suffers supernatural revenge. HPL says as much in a discussion of the story in In Defence of Dagon( MW 156). Although generally considered a “Dunsanian” tale, the story had been conceived no later than 1918, a year before HPL ever read Dunsany. He outlines the plot in a letter to Alfred Galpin (August 1918), saying that it had by that time been “long conceived but never elaborated into literary form”; he postponed writing the story because he evidently felt that

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Galpin’s own tale “Marsh-Mad” ( Philosopher,December 1920) had preempted him by utilizing the “living tree” idea.

This early plot synopsis did not suggest that the tale was set in ancient Greece, as it manifestly is. HPL’s knowledge of Greek history and literature was put to good use. The names of the artists— Kalos (“handsome” or “fair”) and Musides (“son of the Muse[s]”)—are both apt although not actual Greek names. Tyché means “chance” (or sometimes “fate”), and actual cults of Tyché were established in Greece sometime after 371 B.C.E. Other allusions in the story establish that the events must take place in the period 353–344 B.C.E., when Dionysius II was Tyrant of Syracuse. See S.T.Joshi, “‘The Tree’ and Ancient History,” Nyctalops4, No. 1 (April 1991): 68–71. “Tree on the Hill, The.”

Short story (4,280 words); written in collaboration with Duane W.Rimel, May 1934. First published in Polaris(September 1940); first collected in HM.

Near the town of Hampden, Idaho, the narrator, named Single, stumbles upon a strange landscape whose central feature is a peculiar tree with round leaves. He manages to photograph the site and brings the developed photographs to his friend Constantine Theunis, a writer of esoteric books. Theunis, usually languid and bored, is startled by the photographs, as he realizes that the landscape must be from a planet that has three suns. Theunis then remembers that Rudolf Yergler’s Chronicle of Nathmentions some such landscape. The passage in question speaks of a “shadow that should not be on Earth,” and it bodes ill for humanity unless a “Gem” can be found to drive the shadow back into the cosmic realm from which it came. Theunis knows where the Gem is housed, and he manages to borrow it. Some weeks later Single is asked to come to a hospital where Theunis is placed, suffering from some seizure. Theunis tells Single that he has saved the world, but he must destroy the photographs and any sketches that Theunis may have made; but before doing so, Single sees a sketch that suggests that the peculiar tree is in reality the gnarled, twisted hand of some hideous entity.

Clearly HPL revised the tale from a draft by Rimel. HPL says in a letter: “I read your ‘Tree on the Hill’ with great interest, & believe it truly captures the essence of the weird. I like it exceedingly despite a certain cumbrousness & tendency toward anticlimax in the later parts. I’ve made a few emendations which you may find helpful, & have tried a bit of strengthening toward the end. Hope you’ll like what I’ve done” (HPL to Duane W.Rimel, May 13, 1934; ms., JHL). Of the three sections of the story, the final one—as well as the citation from the mythical Chronicle of Nathin the second section—is certainly by HPL. Some have believed that much of the rest of the second section is also HPL’s, but this is an open question that must be decided merely from internal evidence, as no manuscript survives. The title Chronicle of Nathis probably Rimel’s invention, as he mentions it in several of his stories.

See Donald R.Burleson, “Lovecraftian Branches in Rimel’s ‘Tree,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 3– 4; Peter Cannon, “Who Wrote ‘The Tree on the Hill?’” Crypt No. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 5; William Fulwiler, “Some Comments on ‘The Tree on the Hill,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 6; S.T.Joshi, “On

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‘The Tree on the Hill,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 6–9; Steven Mariconda, “Lovecraft’s Role in ‘The Tree on the Hill,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 10–12, 24; Will Murray, “Examining ‘The Tree on the Hill,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 13–14; Robert M.Price, “A ‘New’ Lovecraft Revision,” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 15–19; David E.Schultz, “Regarding Lovecraft’s Hand in ‘The Tree on the Hill,’” CryptNo. 17 (Hallowmas 1983): 19–21.

Tremaine, F[rederick] Orlin (1899–1956),

American author and editor. Tremaine was editor of Astounding Stories(1933–37); he accepted HPL’s At the Mountains of Madness(sold by Julius Schwartz) and “The Shadow out of Time” (sold by Donald Wandrei), apparently without reading them; but he permitted both tales to be severely abridged and edited by copyeditors, although HPL complained vociferously only about the former (it was on this occasion that HPL referred to Tremaine as “that god-damn’d dung of a hyaena”: HPL to R.H.Barlow, June 4, 1936; ms., JHL). Tremaine later edited Comet Stories(1940) and became editor at Bartholomew House, which published the first paperback editions of HPL, The Weird Shadow over Innsmouth(1944) and The Dunwich Horror(1945).

See Will Murray, “The Man Who Edited Lovecraft,” CryptNo. 48 (St. John’s Eve 1987): 3–5. Trever, Alfred.

In “Old Bugs,” the son of Eleanor (Wing) Trever, who enters a tavern in search of liquor but is repulsed by the actions of a crazed drunkard, Old Bugs, who he realizes is the former lover of his mother.

“Two Black Bottles.”

Short story (4,870 words); written in collaboration with Wilfred Blanch Talman, June–October 1926. First published in WT(August 1927); first collected in HM(1970 ed.); corrected text in HM The first-person narrator, a man named Hoffman, comes to examine the estate of his uncle, Dominie Johannes Vanderhoof, who has just died. Vanderhoof was the pastor of the small town of Daalbergen in the Ramapo Mountains (located in northern New Jersey and extending into New York State), and strange tales were told of him. He had fallen under the influence of an aged sexton, Abel Foster, and had taken to delivering fiery and daemoniac sermons to an everdwindling congregation. Hoffman, investigating the matter, finds Foster in the church, drunk and frightened. Foster tells a strange tale of the first pastor of the church, Dominie Guilliam Slott, who in the early eighteenth century had amassed a collection of esoteric volumes and appeared to practice some form of demonology. Foster reads these books himself and follows in Slott’s footsteps—to the point that, when Vanderhoof dies, he takes his soul from his body and puts it in a little black bottle. But Vanderhoof, now caught between heaven and hell, rests uneasily in his grave, and there are indications that he is trying to emerge from it. Hoffman, scarcely knowing what to make of this wild story, now sees the cross on Vanderhoof’s grave tilting perceptibly. Then seeing two black bottles on the table near Foster, he reaches for one of them, and in a scuffle with Foster one of them breaks. Foster shrieks: “I’m done fer! That one in there was mine! Dominie Slott took it out two hundred years ago!” Foster’s body crumbles rapidly into dust.

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Judging from HPL’s letters to Talman, it seems clear that HPL has not only written some of the tale— especially the parts in dialect—but also made significant suggestions regarding its structure. Talman had evidently sent HPL both a draft and a synopsis—or, perhaps, a draft of only the beginning and a synopsis of the rest. HPL recommended a simplification of the structure so that all the events are seen through the eyes of Hoffman. In terms of the diction, HPL writes: “As for what I’ve done to the MS.—I am sure you’ll find nothing to interfere with your sense of creation. My changes are in virtually every case merely verbal, and all in the interest of finish and fluency of style” ( SL2.61). In his 1973 memoir Talman reveals some irritation at HPL’s revisions: “He did some minor gratuitous editing, particularly of dialog… After re-reading it in print, I wish Lovecraft hadn’t changed the dialog, for his use of dialect was stilted” ( The Normal Lovecraft[Gerry de la Ree, 1973], p. 8). This may have led Talman to downplay HPL’s role in the work, for there are many passages beyond the dialect parts that clearly reveal his hand.

Two-Gun Bob.

In “The Battle That Ended the Century,” one of two antagonists who engage in a boxing match in the year 2001. The character (nicknamed “the Terror of the Plains”) is a parody of HPL’s friend Robert E.Howard, of Cross Plains, Tex.

T’yog.

In “Out of the Æons,” the millennia-old petrified mummy housed in the Cabot Museum of Archaeology in Boston. The curator of the museum, Richard H.Johnson, thinks that the mummy is that of a man spoken of in Von Junzt’s Black BookThis man, T’yog, attempted to scale Mount Yaddith-Gho on the continent of Mu 175,000 years ago to free the people from the tyranny of the god Ghatanothoa, but was turned to stone (with his brain still living) by the god.

Typer, Alonzo Hasbrouck.

In “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” an occult explorer from Kingston, N.Y., who investigates the spectral van der Heyl house near Attica. Typer is in fact related to the van der Heyls and has been summoned to the home for some unknown purpose.

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U

Ull.

In “‘Till A’ the Seas,’” a young man who, in the distant future, becomes the last surviving member of the human race. After tending to Mladdna, an old woman, until she dies, he seeks out what he believes to be another colony of human beings beyond the mountains, but finds it full of decaying skeletons. He dies shortly thereafter by falling into a well.

“Under the Pyramids.”

Novelette (10,950 words); ghostwritten for Harry Houdini in February 1924. First published (as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”) in WT(May–June–July 1924); rpt. WT(June–July 1939); first collected in Marginalia;corrected text in D;annotated version in TD.

The escape artist Harry Houdini narrates in the first person an account of a peculiar adventure he experienced in Egypt. Some Arabs—led by a man who uses the name Abdul Reis el Drogman—bring Houdini to witness a boxing match on the top of the Great Pyramid; but after the fight is over the Arabs seize him and cast him, bound tightly by rope, down a spectacularly deep chasm in the Temple of the Sphinx. After awaking, he struggles not merely to escape from the temple but to answer an “idle question” that had haunted him throughout his stay in Egypt: “what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?”As he seeks an exit, Houdini encounters an immense underground cavern—“Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight…mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance”—peopled with hideous hybrid entities. Houdini ponders the curiously morbid temperament of the ancient Egyptians, in particular their notions of the spirit or ka,which can return to its body or other bodies after it had “wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible way.” There are “bloodcongealing legends” of what “decadent priestcraft” fashioned on occasion—“ composite mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods.” Considering all this,

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Houdini is dumbfounded to come upon living embodimentsof such entities: “their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns…. Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches… men should not have the heads of crocodiles….”But an even greater horror is revealed by Houdini’s discovery of the answer to that “idle question” he had asked himself earlier. The composite creatures appear to be laying down huge amounts of food as offerings to some strange entity that appears fleetingly out of an aperture in the underground cavern: “It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk… Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively greatquantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture.” What could it possibly be? “The five-headed monster that emerged…that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus…the five-headed monster— and that of which it is the merest fore paw….”

HPL recounts at length in letters how he came to write the tale. WTwas struggling financially, and the owner, J.C.Henneberger, felt that Houdini’s affiliation with the magazine might attract readers. Houdini was the reputed author of a column (“Ask Houdini”) that ran in a few issues, as well as of two short stories probably ghostwritten by others. In mid-February Henneberger commissioned HPL to write “Under the Pyramids.” Houdini was claiming that he had actually been bound and gagged by Arabs and dropped down a shaft in the pyramid called Campbell’s Tomb; but as HPL began exploring the historical and geographical background of the account, he came to the conclusion that it was complete fiction, and so he received permission from Henneberger to elaborate the account with his own imaginative additions. Henneberger had planned to publish the story as by “Houdini and H.P.Lovecraft,” but was disconcerted that HPL had written the account in the first person; he thought readers would be confused by a first-person story with a joint byline, so HPL’s name was omitted. (His role in the story was acknowledged in an editor’s note accompanying the 1939 reprint of the story.) HPL received $100 for the tale, paid in advance. He wrote the tale hastily in the last week of February, but then left the typescript in the train station in Providence while leaving to go to New York to marry Sonia H.Greene. (The ad HPL placed in the lost-and-found section of the Providence Journalsupplies his original title to the story.) Accordingly, he and Sonia spent much of their honeymoon preparing a new typescript of the story from HPL’s autograph manuscript, which fortunately he had brought with him.

The tale is surprisingly effective and suspenseful, with a genuinely surprising ending for those reading it for the first time. HPL’s Egyptian research was probably derived from several volumes in his library, notably The Tomb of Perneb(1916), a volume issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had seen many Egyptian antiquities firsthand at the museum in 1922. Some of the imagery of the story probably also derives from Théophile Gautier’s nonsupernatural tale of Egyptian horror, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”; HPL owned Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances(1882). The writing is somewhat florid, but deliberately so; and there must be a certain

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tart satire in the fact that Houdini—one of the strongest men of his day—faints three times in the course of his adventure.

“Unknown, The.”

Poem (12 lines in quatrains); probably written in the fall of 1916. First published in the Conservative (October 1916) (as by “Elizabeth Berkeley”).

A weird vignette in which the narrator finds something horrifying in the face of the moon. HPL notes in a letter to the Gallomo (September 12, 1923; AHT) that the poem was published under Winifred Virginia Jackson’s pseudonym “in an effort to mystify the [amateur] public by having widely dissimilar work from the same nominal hand.” HPL also published “The Peace Advocate” ( Tryout,May 1917) under this pseudonym.

See Donald R.Burleson, “Lovecraft’s ‘The Unknown’: A Sort of Runic Rhyme,” LSNo. 26 (Spring 1992): 19–21.

“Unnamable, The.”

Short story (2,970 words); written September 1923. First published in WT (July 1925); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D

In an old burying ground in Arkham, the first-person narrator, “Carter,” and his friend Joel Manton discuss Carter’s horror tales. Manton enunciates his objections to the weird—as contrary to probability, as not based on “realism,” and as extravagant and unrelated to life. In particular, he scoffs at the idea of something being termed “unnamable”; but later that evening the two men encounter just such an entity in the burying ground.

Although Carter’s first name is never mentioned, one assumes that he is Randolph Carter of “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). But because of the uncertainty of his identity, “The Unnamable” has frequently not been considered part of the sequence of stories involving Carter. Only the most glancing reference to the incident related in this story appears in “The Silver Key” (1926): “Then he went back to Arkham,…and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows, and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor.”

In part, the tale is a satire on the stolid bourgeois unresponsiveness to the weird tale. Carter’s observation that “it is the province of the artist…to arouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment” signals HPL’s absorption of the literary theory of Arthur Machen (whom he was first reading at this time), specifically the treatise Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature(1902). The tale might have been directly inspired by the opening of Machen’s episodic novel The Three Impostors(1895), in which two characters debate as to the proper function of literature, one of them (analogous to Manton) remarking that “one has no business to make use of the wonderful, the improbable, the odd coincidence in literature…that it was wrong to do so, because as a matter of fact the wonderful and the improbable don’t happen….” In HPL’s story, the satire becomes more pointed because the character of Manton is clearly based upon HPL’s friend Maurice W.Moe (Manton is “principal of the East High School,” just as Moe was an instructor at the West Division High School in Milwaukee). Carter points out that Manton actually “believ[ed] in the supernatural much more fully than I”—an allusion to Manton’s (and Moe’s) religious beliefs.

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The story also explores the sense of the lurking horror of New England history and topography. It is set in Arkham, but the actual inspiration for the setting—a “dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb” and, nearby, a “giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab”—is the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem, where just such a treeengulfed slab can be found. Later in the story HPL records various “old-wives’ superstitions,” some of which are taken from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana(1702), of which he owned an ancestral copy.

Upton, Daniel.

The narrator of “The Thing on the Doorstep” and a close friend of Edward Derby. He shoots Derby to liberate him from the decaying corpse of Asenath Waite, into which Derby’s personality had been cast following his murder of Asenath.

Utpatel, Frank (1905–1980),

artist and late correspondent of HPL (1936–37). Utpatel, a Wisconsinite, was a friend of August Derleth, and in 1932 Derleth asked Utpatel to prepare some illustrations to HPL’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” even though that tale had not been accepted for publication. The whereabouts of these illustrations are unknown; but HPL, remembering them, urged William L.Crawford of the Visionary Press to commission Utpatel to make illustrations for the upcoming book publication of The Shadow over Innsmouth(1936). Utpatel prepared four illustrations, one of which appeared on the dust jacket. HPL professed to like them, even though the bearded Zadok Allen was portrayed as cleanshaven. In later years Utpatel became a distinguished fantasy illustrator, doing much work for Arkham House; he took many years to draw illustrations for HPL’s Collected Poems(Arkham House, 1963) but produced some of his best work there. He also drew the dust jacket for DBand for Frank Belknap Long’s Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside(Arkham House, 1975).

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V

Van Allister, Prof. Arthur.

In “Ashes,” a scientist who discovers a chemical compound that can reduce any substance to mere ashes. He later dies when thrown into a large vat of his own formula by his assistant, Malcolm Bruce. van der Heyl, Claes (d. 1591).

In “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” a member of a strange Dutch family who lived in Holland in the later sixteenth century and kept a diary between 1560 and 1580 telling of his strange delvings into the supernatural. His descendant, Hendrik, came to New-Netherland (i.e., New York state) in 1638 in search of a nameless “Thing.” Dirck, now settled in Albany, N.Y., built a house near Attica around 1760. He married a woman from Salem, Mass., and was the father of Joris (b. 1773), “that frightful hybrid,” and of Trintje, who would later marry Adriaen Sleght.

Vanderhoof, Johannes.

In “Two Black Bottles,” the recently deceased pastor (“dominie”) and uncle of the narrator, Hoffman. Vanderhoof’s soul is entrapped in a little black bottle by his sexton, Abel Foster.

Van Itty, Mrs.

In “Sweet Ermengarde,” a wealthy society woman who adopts Ermengarde Stubbs and later discovers that she is her long-lost daughter.

Van Keulen, Dr. Cornelius.

In “Winged Death,” a coroner’s physician who discovers the dead body of Dr. Thomas Slauenwite in a hotel room in Bloemfontein, South Africa, as well as Slauenwite’s strange diary. Verhaeren, M.

In “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” a Belgian agent at a trading post in the Congo who sends Arthur Jermyn a box containing a curious specimen he has found among the N’bangus—a specimen that impels Jermyn to kill himself.

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“Vermont—A First Impression.”

Essay (1,630 words); probably written in the fall of 1927. First published in Driftwind(March 1928); rpt. MW