Author: greyirish

“Re-Quest Denied” (1998) by Stanley C. Sargent

Dedicated to W.H. Pugmire, the culprit concealed behind every bush of Sesqua Valley.
—Stanley C. Sargent, “Re-Quest Denied” in Mythos Online, Vol. 1, #8 (Feb 1998)

In 1996, Stanley C. Sargent wrote “For Wilum, Gent.,” published in the obscure journal Leathered in Crimson #1. In 1997, Sargent reviewed Tales of Sesqua Valley by W. H. Pugmire; it was Pugmire’s first fiction collection. In 1999, Sargent co-edited and illustrated Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror, Pugmire’s next collection. They were friends, they were admirers of each other’s work. And in 1998, Sargent penned a small tribute to his friend.

“Re-Quest Denied” is a rare tale of Sesqua Valley written by someone other than Pugmire himself, and interestingly it parallels some of the themes expressed in “Vyvyan’s Father” (2013) by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. Both stories essentially deal with an escape into disenchantment, the refusal of the call of beauty and emotion to focus on logic, rationality, mundanity, dullness—and both ultimately come to regret that choice and embrace what they had once rejected.

There is a question as to how much of Sargent himself went into this story. Not in the exact details, but in the emotions. In his own brief bio, he wrote:

Born at high noon on the summer solstice, 1950, in Ohio, Stanley C. Sargent grew up near his grandparents’ 200 acre farm. He populated three large, abandoned gravel pits on the farm with prehistoric and mythological beasts only he could see.

At age 18, Stan pulled up stakes and moved to San Francisco, where he could live as he liked and be openly gay. He attended a conference on Mayan hieroglyphs in Guatemala City in the mid-1970’s, and he spent a month in Iran in 1979. He worked for many years for corporate law firms, as word processing department supervisor.

In 1991, Stan abandoned the business world. He continued his long-time interest in and production of art (ink pointillism and later airbrush painting); in 1999, he completely illustrated a paperback book by W.H. Pugmire. At age 44, he began writing horror fiction inspired by the style of H.P. Lovecraft.

Compare that to:

Victor had dedicated every moment of his waking life to work, to the exclusion of all else. He had never even stopped long enough to get married. Emotions, longings, and his natural romantic lean had been suppressed and ignored completely. The result had been a brilliant career as advisor to the most powerful men and women on Earth; all the world had known and honored him. Now he was retired, and none of it meant anything to him.

At age sixty-five, Victor felt his life had been wasted. Without the endless distractions he had always known, a tidal wave of emotion rose up from deep within his soul, overwhelming him with the realization that, regardless of his worldly success, his life was a total failure.

He had lived a one-sided existence devoid of love and passion. He had spent his life building a magnificent palace in which he dwelled alone; in all his years, he had never found anyone with whom to share the love or passion that resided within him. And now that he was an old man, overweight and wrinkled, loosing his hair, it was too late.

Likewise, it seems clear that “Pug” is inspired by W. H. Pugmire, even if it isn’t meant to be him. A sort of idealized Pugmire, the eternal youth that echoes the kind of masculine beauty that written about in stories like “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) by W. H. Pugmire & Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Pug is a dream, a promise, a part of Sesqua Valley made flesh, the fire the moth is drawn to.

In terms of writing, this is one of Sargent’s minor works; the prose is straightforward, a bit basic, the plotting fairly straightforward and heavy with foreshadowing. Readers might compare it to The Substance (2025), only in reverse. Perhaps wisely, Sargent doesn’t step on Pugmire’s toes, doesn’t add much to the lore of Sesqua Valley. A single legend, a couple of inhabitants. Nothing that Pugmire would have to write around or contradict in his own works, but also not much to tie it in except for Mt. Selta itself.

“Re-Quest Denied” is far from a lost work, although it remains fairly obscure. Originally published in the now-defunct Mythos Online webzine in 1998, it was reprinted in the print journals Al Azif #3 (May-Jun 1998), Dreaming in R’lyeh #1 (2003), and Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Cthulhu’s Creatures (2007), all of which are long out of print. Unfortunately, Sargent never included it in any of his own collections; even more unfortunately, the original art that accompanied this work (titled “Pug” and with the alt text: “Yet it was the nude youth of breathtaking veauty that was the true centerpiece of Victor’s dreamlike vision.”) appears to be lost, as it wasn’t captured by the Internet Archive.

Alas.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Deeper Cut: The Short Fiction of Novalyne Price Ellis

The last two or three years, we’ve dated steadily, not because we’re in love; but because we like each other and like to talk about books and writing stories. Both of us try to write; he has sold a few things, and I’m still trying.
—Novalyne Price Ellis, One Who Walked Alone 19

Writing was one of the interests Novalyne Price and Robert E. Howard had in common, and it drew them together. According to Novalyne’s memoir, Howard put her in touch with his agent Otis Adelbert Kline, who agreed to read one of her stories, and sent it back with comment—at the time, literary agents normally charged a reading fee, but Kline likely did this as a favor to Bob. Unfortunately for Novalyne, her story (and Kline’s letters) were accidentally burned (ibid. 227). Sadly, Novalyne did not appear to break into print during her time in Cross Plains, Texas.

However, in later letters, Novalyne says she was published:

Eventually, I sold a few short stories and the radio script about Bob’s look-alike or double.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to L. Sprague de Camp, 20 Aug 1977,
Selected Letters of Novalyne Price Ellis 19

Although I had to keep teaching because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to meet my monthly bills, I did sell a few stories and articles over the years.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Thomas W. Collins, 10 Nov 1988, ibid. 51

While I sold a few stories during the 1940s and 50s, I know so little about writing and what I am trying to do for Bob.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 27 Aug 1979,
Selected Letters of Novalyne Price Ellis Vol. II, 15

But I was very lucky with the sixteen to eighteen stories, articles, radio scripts, and things that I sold. My first story had two paragraphs cut. One other story had a title change, and the radio script had a title change and the first line changed—(which was a mistake.)
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 8 Dec 1980, ibid. 50-51

Glenn, the first story I sold was the result of the editor’s making a couple of suggestions about cutting it. After that I sold another group of stories because I knew more than I had a[t] first. Kline was handling my material then, too, and he made some worthwhile suggestions about individual stories.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 10 Nov 1981, ibid. 75

All my life, I wanted to write but teaching was so exciting and I put so much effort into it, I didn’t have time to devote to writing. However, the fact that I managed somehow to write and sell about 18 stories and articles encourages me to believe that I can write salable material.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Donald Grant, 19 Nov 1981, ibid. 79

I have read and re-read the stories of mine that sold, and I’ve tried for the same spontaneity of ease. It’s been hard.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 3 Sep 1986, ibid. 151

Some of this material jives with known information. The radio play, for instance, is “The Day of the Stranger” (1947) by Novalyne Price Ellis. Articles like “Lafayette Teacher Terms Public Speaking Training Vital Necessity in School System” (The Lafayette Progress 29 Aug 1959) are fairly well known. However, the assertion that she wrote and published a number of fiction stories in the 1940s and 50s, and even published them through Kline’s agency, is new. It suggests an ongoing business relationship with Kline, possibly until his death in 1946.

The real question is: where were Novalyne’s stories published? Her name is absent from the major pulp databases. She might have used a pen name, which was common enough during the period, and difficult to track. So too, she might have been writing primarily in the romance pulps, which are poorly attested, or in non-pulp magazines, which are likewise not well indexed. As it happens, at least two of her stories were published (or republished) in newspapers and are available through online archives, while at least two more were published in non-pulp magazines, one of which is available online.

Part of the difficulty in finding these stories is that the first three (all published in 1945) were published under the name Novalyne Price Robarts (she was briefly married to Douglas Robarts from 1942 to c.1946; she married William Ellis in 1947), and appeared in Canadian newspapers and/or magazines. Kline was known for placing his client’s work internationally, and while World War II put a serious crimp in such sales, Canada seems to have been a ready market for Novalyne’s romantic fiction.

The Bradenton Herald, 20 Sep 1942 (7)

So we have a glimpse of at least some of Novalyne’s published fiction—and we can get a glimpse of her style and themes, and a better understanding of the stories she may have shared with Robert E. Howard, Tevis Clyde Smith, Otis Adelbert Kline, and others.

“Marriage by Arrangement” (23 Jun 1945)

This short story was published in the Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Star Weekly newspaper, under the name Novalyne Price Robarts.

Jean receives a proposal from Smith Jones, the Marine buddy of her brother Carl, who was killed in action. This makes a small difficulty, as she’s expected to receive a proposal from Paul Villa, and doesn’t like being told who she will or will not marry. Initial upset at the unexpected proposal gives way, by degrees, to attraction and regret for hardheadedness.

By 5 o’clock that afternoon, she felt so sorry for Smith Jones she even cried a little. She spent most of the afternoon trying to write him a letter. But she didn’t know his address. She could run an ad. in the personal column of the newspaper.

This is not one of Novalyne’s relationships recast in fictional form; but there is a bit of an echo of One Who Walked Alone in the vacillation, the feminine independence versus the attraction. It’s a wish-fulfillment story aimed for women, an ideal romantic fantasy where the main conflict is a woman struggling with the question of what—and who—she really wants. Fortunately, in this case, Jones comes back, hat literally in hand.

Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Star Weekly, 23 un 1945 (3)

“Blueprint for Happiness” (29 Sep 1945)

This short story was published in the Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Star Weekly newspaper, under the name Novalyne Price Robarts.

Mary Ellen Carter, schoolteacher, doesn’t want to be an old maid. She wants to be a wife and mother. Handsome Greg, war vet, was in love with Gloria and building her the kind of house that Mary Ellen wanted to live in. Fat Mr. Wilkes proposes to Mary Ellen. It is a swift and perfunctory love quadrangle that ends with Mary Ellen resigning to become a housewife.

“Blueprint for Happiness” is not in any sense a progressive love story, nor does it reflect Novalyne’s own path in life—she managed to balance marriage, motherhood, and teaching—though her schoolteacher background undoubtedly inspired things. These were real considerations at the time; women were torn between the practicality of career vs. traditional homemaker expectations. The story is a kind of wish-fulfillment, a swift and happy ending to a potentially complex and knotty social quandary.

Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Star Weekly, 29 Sep 1945 (14)

“A Date with the Moon” (Sep 1945)

An advertisement for the September 1945 issue of the Canadian Home Journal includes a listing for this story, as by Novalyne Price Robarts. I have not yet been able to obtain a copy or scan of this issue to confirm the contents.

The Hamilton (Ontario, Canada) Spectator, 31 Aug 1945 (19)

“A Fellow Has To Fight” (May 1951)

This short story was published in The Country Guide (May 1951) magazine, under the name Novalyne Price Ellis.

This is a fairly treacle-sweet story of an accomplished young man named Jimmy Jones at high school who feels restrained by his mother’s attitude and expectations he refrain from fighting or sports, and eager to make time with beautiful Betty Myers—but the local bully starts accusing him of being a “mamma’s boy” and a “sissy.” Jones gets into one little fight and Betty starts dating other people…

“I don’t care to discuss it further,” she stormed. “And furthermore. I’ll give you to understand that I can have a date with anybody I want to. Just because I’ve had a few dates with you is no sign that you own me.”

“Well, ye gods!” I mumbled. (75)

That isn’t anything ripped straight from Novalyne and Bob’s relationship, but there might be an echo of it. Certainly, Novalyne went on dates with other men before, after, and during the time she dated Robert E. Howard, and didn’t feel guilty about it as there was no agreement of being exclusive with each other. Unfortunately, a few pages are missing from the scan, so we don’t see how the story ends.

The stories—two complete, one incomplete, one only a title—have some commonalities. They are mostly told from a woman’s point of view; they are concerned with romance, but also social pressures and expectations; and they are relatively light fantasies with happy endings. All of them have Novalyne’s particular style; readers familiar with her letters and One Who Walked Alone will recognize the occasional turn of phrase, certain ways of thinking. While these stories are all written probably pretty much to order for newspapers looking to publish fluffy stories that make readers feel good, they also capture echoes Novalyne’s own thoughts and conflicts.

While the stories don’t tell us much about Novalyne’s own romantic relationships, they do tell us more about Novalyne as a writer. These are passable stories. These are salable stories. Not exceptional, not groundbreakingly original, but neither are they incompetent or completely stale. They’re stories which show an understanding of the form of romance, but don’t have enough space to really develop the conflicts very far before resolution. The kind of short stories that a busy schoolteacher might churn out between grading themes and coaching kids after class.

Are these the kind of stories she might have shown to Robert E. Howard? Hard to say. The plots she describes in One Who Walked Alone include more mature elements, like a woman with an illegitimate child. Not the kind of thing that would play in your average newspaper. The sense of place is also somewhat vague; except for “Marriage by Arrangement,” which is explicitly set in New Orleans and involves a Texas suitor, the others are generic Anytown USA (or, in this case, Anytown, CAN) locales.

It will be interesting to see what other stories from Novalyne Price Ellis’ typewriter turn up, in old magazines and newspapers or online databases.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Vyvyan’s Father” (2013) by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

In H. P. Lovecraft’s body of work, the town of Innsmouth is mentioned by name only in four stories (“Celephaïs,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and “The Dreams in the Witch House”) and a couple “Fungi from Yuggoth.” The core of Lovecraft’s Mythos, which so many writers have expanded upon over the decades, tends to be fairly scanty. Lovecraft country, that literary realm where the Old Ones walk, was painted in broad strokes and a few fine details, and it is everyone else who has filled in the gaps.

Writers who came after Lovecraft have, when not playing in his sandbox, carved out their own spaces. The most famous are Ramsey Campbell’s Severn Valley stories set in and around the literary Brichester and Goatswood in the United Kingdom; and W. H. Pugmire‘s Sesqua Valley and associated towns and mountains set in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Since these writers lived much longer than Lovecraft, and had more opportunity to write and publish, it might not be surprising that they have produced correspondingly more lore for their associated locales than Lovecraft did for his.

And yet, these places often feel smaller, because the voices associated with them tend to be singular. While anybody can write a tale of Innsmouth, it is generally considered uncouth to poach a living author’s copyrighted creations without permission. Some of them have consented to letting other writers splash in their ponds—Ramsey Campbell, for instance, consented to Made in Goatswood (1996), a tribute anthology; and in 2013 the Lovecraft eZine #28 did a similar tribute to W. H. Pugmire.

These tales represented a first step at a wider Sesqua Valley Mythos. New ideas, new perspectives, new angles. Pugmire was never dogmatic about his Sesqua Valley lore, preferring to expand it in hints and suggestions, a tale at a time, and there has not yet been an effort to correlate all the contents of his fiction into a single concordance or wiki. Perhaps, in the future, there will be more. For now, one particular tale from Lovecraft eZine #28 is worth discussing, because it does something different than the rest. Something very Pugmire-like in its approach to the Sesqua Valley tales.

“Vyvyan’s Father” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy does not mention Sesqua Valley. Simon Gregory Williams and William Davis Manly do not appear on the page. Uniquely of the tribute stories in the eZine, Satyamurthy chose to write a story that is definably set in the world of Sesqua Valley—for anyone who is familiar with Pugmire’s work, at least, it is obvious from the clues and details as much as the context of the issue—without falling into the same trap of Mythos pasticheurs who load up a story with familiar names. It is an approach that echoes Pugmire’s own insistence that writing Lovecraftian fiction should echo the aesthetics of Lovecraft, not just pay lip-service to Arkham and Innsmouth, Dunwich and Kingsport, Cthulhu and the Necronomicon.

His eyes beguiled me, being slightly slanted and of a silver hue that seemed to contain particles of other shades in their pale irises.
—W. H. Pugmire, “The Horror on Tempest Hill” in An Imp of Aether 142

If his eyes were open, they would startle you with their timeless, silvery-grey depth.
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, “Vyvyan’s Father” in Lovecraft eZine (2013)

There is something very appropriate in how Satyamurthy’s tale is a bridge between India and Sesqua Valley; the lost child, the orphan of the Valley, is caught between two worlds in a way that echoes something of India’s own history as a crossroads of empires, with those who fall outside the established social orders caught like nuts in a pulau: a part of the whole, yet apart from the rest. This between-two-worlds tension defines Vyvyan’s character, but it also echoes the story as a whole: instead of just playing in Pugmire’s backyard, Satyamurthy builds a bridge between the setting of many of his own stories and Pugmire’s. Instead of submitting himself to Pugmire’s aesthetic, he shows how their themes can connect. Like New World tomatoes incorporated into a quintessentially Indian paneer gravy.

The slow expansion of Sesqua Valley beyond the bounds of Pugmire’s fiction is not the trauma-driven diaspora that marks much of contemporary Innsmouth tales. It is a different kind of cultural diffusion, spread by wanderers and their children, artifacts and ideas that spread out and draw strangers in. Where it goes from here…who can say?

“Vyvyan’s Father” by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy can be read online at Lovecraft eZine #28, and print edition is also available.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“In Their Own Voices” (2025) by Lavie Tidhar

Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn fits its cup.
—Irvin S. Cobb, “Fishhead” (1913)

She remembered college well. It was so different to junior high, when the kids used to push her, gathered round in a circle so that she couldn’t escape. Fishhead! Fishhead! they’d cry.
—Lavie Tidhar, “In Their Own Voices” in New Weird & Decadent (2025) 29

The 21st-century story of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is the diaspora. It is a very post-colonialist idea; the concept of identity and ethnicity, which has been forcibly divorced from geography. The people of Innsmouth were forced from their homes by government violence, military force. Arrested, imprisoned, murdered.

Yet they survived.

“The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys, “Legacy of Salt” (2016) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts” (2016) by Sonya Taaffe, and Winter Tide (2017) by Ruthanna Emrys are some of the stories that deal with the way the survivors of the government raid on Innsmouth scattered, and how their descendants connected, formed their own groups, attempted to preserve and reclaim their legacy.

Glad your collaborator found my Massachusetts atmosphere convincing.
The plot I am now experimenting on concerns another fictitious Mass.
town—“Innsmouth”—which is vaguely suggested by the ancient & almost
dead city of Newburyport. Of course, there is no sinister, un-human shadow
over poor old Newburyport—but then, there never was a festival of worms
at Marblehead (Kingsport)!
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 14 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.411

One of the biggest parts of the diaspora mythology is the return to Innsmouth itself. The town that Lovecraft described takes its real-life inspiration from his visit to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and while its literary antecedents include Irvin S. Cobb’s “Fishhead,” Herbert S. Gorman’s “The Place Called Dagon,” and Robert W. Chambers’ “The Harbor-Master.” This is not portrayed as irredentism, however; the return is not a military re-conquest, violence meeting violence, but a peaceful reoccupation. Innsmouth is portrayed as ground of little to no value aside from those who are bound there by ties of ancestry and memory.

Lavie Tidhar’s “In Their Own Voices” is about such a return. It is not a horror story, though horror is part of its history and heritage. This is about the healing that comes after the horror, about reunion, self-acceptance, and finding your tribe. Tidhar has done well to ground the story in the genuine Massachusetts geography, much as Lovecraft himself did.

Silvia linked hands with her sisters; and when she smiled she tasted salt on her tongue, and it took her a moment to realize she had been crying.
—Lavie Tidhar, “In Their Own Voices” in New Weird & Decadent (2025) 29

Readers could easily imagine the Silvia of “In Their Own Voices” and Aphra of Ruthanna Emrys’ “The Litany of Earth” meeting together, stranger cousins at a family reunion—and that’s part of the game. Writers like Tidhar are surfing the same wave that August Derleth, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sonya Taaffe, and so many others have ridden, but they are all on their own journey, and the emphasis is different for each writer. The legacy of Innsmouth is both horror and acceptance, monsters and orphans. That speaks across generations.

“In Their Own Voices” by Lavie Tidhar was published in New Weird & Decadent (2025), also available on Amazon.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Under an Arkham Moon” (2014) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire

(To the memory of Robert Bloch)
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire, “Under an Arkham Moon” in
Black Wings III (2014) 57

Teratophilia is the love of monsters and the monstrous. This can be love of any sort, the fondness of familiarity or a sibling-like bond of friendship to sexual desire or even some unchangeable, devoted, and obsessive agape. There are many forms of teratophilia on display in this short tale by Salmonson and Pugmire. The love of human oddities, so often misconstrued as monsters; the love of Arkham, that fictional town that is so steeped in evil it corrupts the dreams of those within it; and a hot, burning physical desire for the monster in the attic…but above all, there is the love for that very human monster H. P. Lovecraft, and the story is written in such a way to pay homage to his creations, while taking them a step or three further.

The dedication to the memory of Robert Bloch is a nod to his story “The Mannikin” (WT Apr 1937), and this story shares a character with a similar conjoined twin and a connection to De Vermis Mysteriis, and may owe itself to a certain idea from Lovecraft. The plot is essentially a sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable” (1925), evident from its references to “The Attic Window” in Whispers (albeit with a nod toward the Indiana Magazine War), and the thing with the blemished eye. However, for the most part this is a story that reveals in the decadent Lovecraftian aesthetic. That really soaks in the sensuous language, the dark atmosphere, the terrible hints and lore.

This was a story written by a pair of monster kids that grew up into adults still in love with a world of dark delights and evil that was something more than the banal of canceling school lunches or denying health care claims to the sick. A story that tells how someone might be drawn back to old haunts to, as Conan the Cimmerian once put it in “The People of the Black Circle”: “like a crippled snake to soak up fresh venom from some source of sorcery.”

Sometimes, we return to Arkham for renewal.

I had returned to Arkham from the “real” world with fewer victories than I expected. I had been defeated, I of noble blood, noble of its kind. I needed Ambrose’s familiariaty, even that part of him that could slip from poetry to venom in a single heartbeat.
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire, “Under an Arkham Moon” in
Black Wings III (2014) 59

The twist in this story, when teratophilia proves both sexual and reciprocal, is a delicious one of its kind. Lovecraft always left the nature of the Unnamable deliberately ambiguous, and Salmonson & Pugmire have kept it so here. The terrible truth behind Lovecraft’s original story was very different, but this is still a fine sequel. A return to Lovecraft country, a refreshing dip for dark spirits who remember when Lovecraftian fiction was less hung up in the trappings of the Mythos and evoked more of the strange, decadent mood of Lovecraft’s early fiction, when friends scared each other to look into a house haunted by something they could not give a name to.

“Under an Arkham Moon” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson & W. H. Pugmire was first published in Black Wings III (2014); it was reprinted in Pugmire’s collection An Ecstasy of Fear (2019, Centipede Press).

The Terrible Truth Behind The Unnamable

The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair grey.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable”

Lovecraft gets a bit of a ribbing for “unnamable,” “unspeakable,” or “indescribable” critters – which he never had a monopoly on and was never so addicted to as a lot of critics like to think; the story in question in fact begins by making fun of the tendency in stories like Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” or Guy de Maupussant’s “The Horla.”

Beyond that though, Lovecraft would take his inspirations where he found them, and this includes the family copy of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), which purports to be a religious history of New England but manages to cram in so many weird bits and pieces that you’d be amazed—witchcraft narratives, ghost stories, sea monsters, the works. The bit which inspired Lovecraft’s story is a very obscure bit of gossip about a “thing with a blemished eye”:

At the Southward there was a Beaſt, which brought forth a Creature, which might pretend unto ſomething of an Humane Shape. Now the People minded that the Monſter had a Blemiſh in one Eye, much like what a profligate Fellow in the Town was known to have. This Fellow was hereupon examin’d; and having upon his examination, conſeſ’d his inſandous Beſtialities; for which he was deſervedly Executed.
—Mather, MCM Book VI, Chapter V, Tenth Remark

Which was a hard go, the worse so because while Mather names no names, we know what actually inspired the anecdote.

George Spencer, an ugly balding man with one “pearle” or false eye, had probably been whipped in Boston for receiving stolen goods, and had also been punished in New Haven for botching an attempt to escape to Virginia. He admitted that he had gained no spiritual benefit from the ministry of the famed John Davenport, that he had not said a single prayer during his five years in New England, and that he read the Bible only when ordered to do so by his master. In February, 1642, Spencer’s life took a cruel turn when a sow gave birth to a dead deformed piglet. The “monster” was completely bald and had “butt one eye in the midle of the face, and thatt large and open, like some blemished eye of a man.” Out of its forehead “a thing of flesh grew forth and hung downe, itt was hollow, and like a mans instrum’ of genration.”

The magistrates arrested Spencer and put him in prison. New Haven had not yet tried a capital crime. Spencer had seen enough of the colony’s system of justice to know that the magistrates expected offenders to confess and repent. He had recently seen a man merely whipped for molesting a child, and as Spencer made clear, he thought that child molestation was a more disgusting crime than bestiality. Yet he denied his guilt until one magistrate “remembered him of thatt place of scripture, he that hideth his sin shall not prosper, butt he yt confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall finde mercie.” Spencer then “answered he was sory and confessed he had done itt,” only to learn that his confession would get him hanged and that mercy would come only from the Lord, not the Colony of New Haven. He retracted and repeated his confession several times in a desperate attempt to find a formula that would save his life. But on April 8, 1642, two months after the birth of the monster, the sow was put to the sword in front of the unrepentant Spencer, and he was hanged, “a terrible example of divine justice and wrath.”
—John M. Murrin, “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Bestiality in Colonial America”

Lovecraft was no doubt taken by the layers of obfuscation in Mathers’ account, which only really hinted at the appearance of the unfortunate piglet. Stripped of this mystery and romance, we are left with a man who was wrongly accused and ultimately was executed for an accident of nature by an intolerant society of religious fanatics. A much more banal but frighteningly very real moment in history that served as the seed for some very strange stories.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Room Party Fit for an Elder God” (2025) by Elizabeth Guizzetti

Elder Gods liked cupcakes, right? The text said ritual sweet bread.
—Elizabeth Guizzetti, “Room Party Fit for an Elder God” in Cthulhu FhCon 255

The cuddlification of the Cthulhu cult did not happen overnight. It took a few steady years of fanfiction and pastiche for some of the tropes to gel. Cultists in robes, human sacrifices, silly titles, and wavy daggers did not start out as standard parts of Lovecraft’s Mythos, but became familiar over time. With familiarity came the jokes, cartoons, limericks, and funny stories.

The Cthulhu Mythos is old enough that the cult-trope-driven stories are older than some entire genres of science fiction and fantasy. You can draw a line from “Lights! Camera!! Shub-Niggurath!!!” (1996) by Richard Lupoff through “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015) by Valerie Valdes. Increasingly, there is a trend toward examination of the prosaic side of Mythos cult activities. Some are relatively serious tales that try and get into the psychology of Mythos cults like “The Book of Fhtagn” (2021) by Jamie Lackey, while others include things like bake sales and potluck dinners a la Innsmouth (2019) by Megan James, but there is that mingling where the extraordinary becomes grounded in the disturbingly mundane.

Cthulhu FhCon (2025) is an odd anthology that rather embraces the cuddlification and tropes by postulating a convention for eldritch entities and their mortal servitors. The convention tale is an outgrowth of SFF culture, and there have been Mythos versions before, such as Strange Stones (2025) by Edward Lee & Mary SanGiovanni. This is the first time there’s been an entire anthology of such stories…and of course, at least one writer had to address the idea of the room party.

Elizabeth Guizzetti’s “Room Party Fit for an Elder God” is very much a Lovecraftian convention story from a cult-trope point of view. Cult membership is falling off, and if one of the Elder Gods makes an appearance, it’ll grow again. If the priestess is lucky, the God will like the chocolate sardine cupcakes and she might even get her deposit back. As such, it fits well into the ongoing cuddlification of the Cthulhu cult. The collateral damage of the room party is a punchline, not unlike an Addams Family cartoon. What’s a little death and madness when the Elder God really liked your cupcakes?

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025) by Melissa Yi & Sara Leger

Why not mash up H.P. Lovecraft with poetry and art that reflects the diversity of the 21st century?

One poem for each month of the year, as an ebook, a book, a calendar, or a day planner, accompanied by nine pieces of art and this note from the artist herself.
—Melissa Yi & Sara Leger, Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025)

The work and person of H. P. Lovecraft has been inspiring poetry for a long time (e.g. “H. P. Lovecraft” (1937) by Elizabeth Toldridge, “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman, etc.) and the form and nature of those works have been diverse, covering nearly every style and format of poem, from Cthulhu on Lesbos (2011) by David Jalajel to “Lovecraft Thesis #5” (2021) by Brandon O’Brien, from reflections on Lovecraft’s racism to new stories set in Lovecraft’s Mythos.

Melissa Yi (also published as Melissa Yuan-Innes) and artist Sara Leger bring their skills together for this small art project, which consists of 12 original poems in various styles (from Shakespearan sonnet to Japanese haiku), 10 of the poems that inspired those poems, and 9 original illustrations that capture something of the feel and aesthetic of the poems. The nature of these poems might be best illustrated by a side-by-side comparison of a poem and its source:

What happens to those interned?
Is she tucked in a
Straightjacket at night?
Or dunked in ice water—
If he puts up a fight?
Do you extract her lady parts
Plus her frontal lobe—
Or electroshock him and restart?
Perhaps seclude them in cells
’til they do what they’re told.
Or do they grow bold?		What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
“Arkham” (November) by Melissa Yi“Harlem” by Langston Hughes

Hughes’ “Harlem” (1951) is one of the most recognized and influential poems of the 20th century, not in least because it inspired the title to Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The metaphor of the raisin in the sun speaks to the social and psychological forces that Black Americans and communities have, and continue, to face in a culture and society that holds high ideals of freedom while continuing to perpetuate prejudice and inequality at every level.

By taking “Harlem” as her model for “Arkham,” Yi is implicitly drawing on both the familiar poem’s form and its imagery by inference. Her “Arkham” is not the witch-haunted city, as Robert E. Howard wrote about in his poetic tribute, but the sanitarium, the good-bye-box where people who don’t fit in are locked away and subject to treatments and mistreatment, deprived of liberty and rights, subject to physical and psychological efforts to get them to conform to what society wants them to be.

“Arkham” doesn’t quite have the rhythm of “Harlem,” even though it is an obvious echo of Hughes’ trumpet blast. The imagery is pointed, but the target is hazy; lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy weren’t a feature of mental health treatment in Lovecraft’s time, and ice-dunking and clitorectomies suggest still older institutions. So “Arkham” isn’t referencing a single institution at a given place or time, but the idea of the mental asylum, the sanitarium, the Bedlam of all times and places, the institutional limbo where a few of Lovecraft’s characters have ended up (which has become a literary trope).

It is a fun experiment. Not every poem works well on its own, but pairing them up with the originals does help show the work. Sara Leger‘s artwork is fun, though the print-on-demand publication doesn’t show it off to its best effect. The single best piece is the cover, with the eponymous Cthulhu’s Cheerleader striding forward, bloody pomp-poms in hand, wings spread, as the Big C looks on. While some folks might argue that Cthulhu doesn’t need a cheerleader, if he is to remain relevant into the 21st century and beyond, I think Cthulhu will need every cheerleader he can get.

Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025) by Melissa Yi & Sara Leger was published by Windtree Press.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” (1979) by Janice Arter & “To the Shade of HPL” (1981) by Margaret Carter

Dr. Jeanne Keyes Youngson founded the Count Dracula Fan Club in 1965 after a trip to Romania; this was before the publication of McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972), but after the first full biography of Stoker, Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Bram Stoker: Creator of Dracula (1962). It was the beginning of a serious opening-up of Dracula scholarship, serious scholarship that had fans and researchers scouring archives, uncovering Stoker’s original notes and manuscript, critically annotating and comparing different editions of the text. The work was international, and the fan club contained both enthusiastic vampire fiction fans and literary historians, and it published official journals and other publications.

In 1985, the Count Dracula Fan Club published an annual, a special Lovecraft-themed collectors issue. The highlight of the issue might be Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s brief article “The Revision of Dracula”—the first real address of the Lovecraft/Miniter Dracula revision anecdote from the Lovecraftian scholar’s point of view. However, it was full of more than that, including two neat little Mythos poems by women authors, “The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter and “To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter

Published for the first time in The Further Perils of Dracula (1979), a Count Dracula Fan Club poetry anthology, Arter’s 18-line poem is a lyric poem, opening with the invitation “Come live with me and drink my blood,” and working through a list of familiar activites, including:

Come live with me and we shall learn
The power to make the oceans burn,
The secrets of the Scroll of Thoth,
The chant to summon Yog-Sothoth,
And we shall be as one.

This is a poem for lovers in multiple senses of the term. It is a very romantic invitation, of one horror fan to another, inviting activities that would be horroric to anyone except another horror fan. By the 70s, Lovecraft’s Mythos was being woven into the pantheon of familiar horrors, and Yog-Sothoth could comfortably rub shoulders next to vampires and witches. It is the kind of opening-of-the-heart that would only really work from one true horror fan to another, someone who will both get the references and the appeal of going to the Sabbath or dwelling in unimagined space with someone else who gets it.

“To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter

Published for the first time in Daymares from the Crypt (1981), a chapbook collection of Carter’s poetry, and was re-released in an ebook of the same-name in 2012. Carter’s verse takes the form of an ode in 12 lines, a tribute to Lovecraft and the Mythos he had spawned, which Carter herself had contributed to over the years, and would continue to do so in the years to come. Some of the imagery is in the same vein as Arter’s poem, emphasizing the Mythos experience and aesthetic:

The hand that traced those tales of nameless lore
Never lent its grave-chilled touch to me—
Yet I have groped my way down Arkham’s hills
To watch the rites of Innsmouth by the sea.

The difference is, Carter isn’t just evoking Lovecraft’s Mythos, but Lovecraft himself. The Old Gent had already become a part of his own Mythos, his growing legend entwined with the stories he had written, and the artificial mythology being slowly expanded by fans and pros alike. Carter isn’t directly inviting the reader to participate in nameless rites or to dance with ghouls, but is expressing her own experience of doing so, made possible only by H. P. Lovecraft.

While both of these poems are fairly minor in the grand scheme of fantasy and horror literature, they are examples of the growing acceptance of Lovecraft and the Mythos in the 1980s, even in Dracula fandom, which was only tangential to Lovecraft.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi (최재훈) trans. Janet Hong

THE CALL OF THE FRIEND is part of the Lovecraft Reanimated project, where leading Korean speculative fiction writers reimagine the works of horror master H.P. Loveccraft, while honoring his eerie, grotesque imagery and the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, they update his ideas for a global audience.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), inside cover flap

The Call of the Friend (친구의 부름) is a standalone black-and-white graphic novel by Korean comic artist and writer JaeHoon Choi (최재훈), first published in 2020. The English translation by Janet Hong was published in 2025 by Honford Star. The story is set in contemporary urban Korea, where university student Wonjun checks in on his friend Jingu, whose sister (a K-pop idol) has recently committed suicide, implicitly because of a scandalous affair. It is in Jingu’s apartment that Wonjun spots a strange idol.

The story that unspools is not a straightforward linear narrative. It is intimate, focused on Wonjun, with everyone other than Jingu essentially faceless. Readers get pieces of the puzzle, but the full story isn’t spelled out for them, readers are forced to interpret the evidence as best they can. In this, they are given a single helpful hint in a short essay at the end of the book:

Some live a life of violence, while others make every effort to avoid stepping on an insect. But no matter the severity or type of sin, the moment we realize we have sinned, we experience fear. The fear isn’t so much the dread of punishment or retribution. It stems from the knowledge that we’ve hurt someone or caused their unhappiness, and the sin manifests as fear. Depending on the intensity of this fear, we can either be liberated from our guilt or ensnared by it.

While I don’t want the theme to be too obvious in this story, I hope readers might be able to tangibly experience Wonjun’s guilt. These long, nocturnal reflections on our current human condition, set against H. P. Lovecraft’s world of unexplained fears, have prompted me to contemplate the words we’ve spoken, the conflict and guilt we’ve endured, as well as the subsequent death and feat they cause.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), 104-105

As an essay, it is slightly reminiscent of Arthur Machen’s prologue to “The White People” on ‘sorcery & sanctity.’ The idea of fear as a fundamental response to a transgression—an instinctive response to some imbalance caused by action or inaction—and that this fear can liberate or ensnare guilt, has its attractions. Yet how does this philosophical approach jive with Lovecraft’s famous proclamation that “the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”?

When you don’t know what the sin was. When the only way you have to measure how badly you’ve hurt someone is the measure of the fear you feel in response to it. Whether this is what JaeHoon Choi intended with The Call of the Friend I cannot say, but the presence of the Cthulhu Mythos in this story is suggestive of something that goes beyond tawdry K-pop star drama and the suicide of the sister of a friend. It suggests that there’s something much bigger at work here, something unseen and unknowable, and it threatens to ensnare Wonjun entirely.

The Call of the Friend is somewhat reminiscent of Minetaro Mochizuki’s Hauntress (1993) in general outline—both of them deal with young university students living on their own, the one checking in on the other to whom something has happened, and with a supernatural horror creeping into their lives—and more importantly, that sensation of an urban legend unfolding in a space of familiar, contemporary surroundings. These are characters ill-equipped to deal with the psychological terrors of their experiences. They have no strong faith, no occult skills or leanings. They are regular people, with limited resources, facing the uncanny.

That works. JaeHoon Choi takes advantage of the prosaic setting and characters to make the distortions of perception all the more disturbing for taking place in setting of absolute reality. Readers will question how much of this is in Wonjun’s head, will wonder when we slip into dream, hallucination, or twisted memory. The idol forms a locus of manifestation, a central image to embody what it is happening, but even until the end, readers have to decide how much of this is really happening.

The comic ends like an unresolved chord. Readers don’t get answers. Only the impression that they have witnessed something. Perhaps that is the answer itself.

Janet Hong’s translation of the graphic novel into English is very readable and smooth. While most of the graphic novel itself has relatively sparse dialogue, the essay at the end is very clear and easy to understand, and a valuable key to understanding the work.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi and translated by Janet Hong is available at the Honford Star website as an ebook or softcover.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Deeper Cut: C. L. Moore Early Career Retrospective

The writing life of Catherine Lucille Moore (24 Jan 1911 – 4 Apr 1987) can be roughly divided into five periods, dominated by major life events:

  • C. L. Moore Before The Pulps (1911-1930): Her juvenilia and early amateur work that ran from her childhood through her second year at Indiana University, when she had to withdraw and begin working to support her family.
  • Early Career (1933-1940): C. L. Moore’s first professional publication, from her first appearance in Weird Tales through her marriage with Henry Kuttner in 1940.
  • Professional Writer (1940-1958): C. L. Moore and Kuttner as a prolific writing team, for pulps, novels, fanzines, and television, all through World War II and afterward into Kuttner’s teaching career, only ending with his death in 1958.
  • Late Career (1958-1963): C. L. Moore’s late career was dominated by scriptwriting for television. It ended with her marriage to Thomas Reggie in 1963.
  • Twilight years (1963-1987): With C. L. Moore’s second marriage and her early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, output practically ceased. The period saw the consolidation and republication of her work, as well as interviews and biographical materials. It ended with her death.

Of all the periods of Moore’s work, her early career gets the most attention. It is dominated by her output at Weird Tales, and to a lesser extent at Astounding, and follows her transition from weird fiction to the characteristic fantasy and science fiction that marked Unknown in the 1940s. This retrospective takes a look at what C. L. Moore was writing and publishing, and why and how the events of that period shaped the writer she was—and would become.

1933

[…] it was a rainy afternoon in the middle of the Depression, I had nothing to do—but I really should’ve looked busy because jobs were hard to get! I didn’t want to appear that I wasn’t earning my daily keep! To take up time, I was practicing things on the typewriter to improve my speed—things like ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” That got boring, so I began to write bits of poetry I remembered from my college courses…in particular, I was quoting a poem called “The Haystack in the Flood.” […] The poem was about a woman in 13th century France who is being pursued by enemies of some kind…she was running across a field and these men were after her. I had misquoted a line in my mind, as well as on the typewriter, and referred to a “Red, running figure.” […] At the time I thought, “Ha! A red, running figure! Why is she running? Who is she running from and where is she running to? What’s going to happen to her? Strangely enough, I just swung from that line of poetry into the opening of “Shambleau.”
⁠—“Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (1976), 26

The Great Depression had ended C. L. Moore’s attempt at college, and with it her opportunities to publish her stories. She worked as a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in Indianapolis, where her fiancé also worked as a teller. Her spare dimes and quarters went to issues of Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Astounding, and Weird Tales, and at last she mustered up the courage to submit a story unlike anything else on the stands. The effect on the fans was electric, the effect of the check for the story no less so on C. L. Moore—it was her first professional sale and publication. By the time “Shambleau” hit stands, there are indications she was already writing sequels:

I trust your revisions may make Mrs. Moore’s second story as striking and interesting as this one.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, 21 Nov 1933, Letters to Woodburn Harris 86

Moore would, from her reading, be aware of the possibilities of a series character like Northwest Smith. Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, was willing to work with new writers. So it is not surprising that following stories followed Smith’s adventures, with little continuity but often featuring the same vivid imagery and ideas that marked “Shambleau.”

1934

I hope you will not be too much disappointed in the stories that follow. Perhaps, when you have read those appearing in the April and May issues, you will write again to tell me what you thought of them.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 8 Mar 1934, MSS. Brown Digital Repository

Both Farnsworth Wright and the fans of Weird Tales were pleased with Moore’s work, and 1934 became a busy year, with three further adventures of Northwest Smith appearing in quick succession ( “Black Thirst,” “Scarlet Dream,” and “Dust of the Gods”). Through Weird Tales, Moore also came in touch with pulp fans like R. H. Barlow and Forrest J. Ackerman. Her “secret” identity was swiftly revealed in the May 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan, though many pulp readers would not learn this for years.

Yes, I do much more revising that I care about. Have to, tho it simply sickens me, and I hate everybody in sight while laboring away at the disgusting job. A story of mine which I’ve just sold to ASTOUNDING and which will appear in Oct. is really a third of one original N.W.Smith tale. I had that almost finished when I saw that it was two stories, and split it apart. Then the half I got to work on began to show amoeba-like tendencies toward division, and the third attempt resulted in THE BRIGHT ILLUSION, which I’ve sold, to Astounding. The other two nuclei are still simmering gently in the back of my mind, and may emerge some day.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 5 Jul 1934, MSS Brown Digital Repository

While it may have looked like Moore was selling everything she could write to Weird Tales, the truth was more complicated. Some stories didn’t work out, and Farnsworth Wright apparently rejected some stories and sent others back for revision. This was the unglamorous work of pulp writing, and Moore was learning the ropes of the trade, including rewriting stories to send to other magazines, which is how she splashed Astounding.

Near the end of the year, feeling that the Northwest Smith stories were growing stale, Moore tried another character on Farnsworth Wright: Jirel of Joiry. The character arose from some of Moore’s pre-pulp world-building, given a new life in Weird Tales:

Long, long ago I had thoughts of a belligerent dame who must have been her progenitor, and went so far as to begin a story which went something like this: “The noise of battle beating up around the walls of Arazon castle rang sweetly in the ears of Arazon’s warrior lady.” And I think it went no farther. So far as I know she stands ther eyet listening to the tumult of an eternal battle. Back to her Jirel of Joiry no doubt traces her ancestry.
—C. L. Moore, “An Autobiographical Sketch of C. L. Moore,” Echoes of Valor 2, 37-38

As with Northwest Smith, the fan response was extremely positive. More swiftly followed up “Black God’s Kiss” with a direct sequel, “Black God’s Shadow,” that was published before the end of the year.

1935

Now a fairly well-established author at Weird Tales, Moore began correspondence with other authors, including E. Hoffmann Price, Robert E. Howard, and H. P. Lovecraft. From the surviving correspondence, we can see that all of these individuals had their influence on Moore’s writing practice: Lovecraft’s considered criticism, Price’s practical pulp-writing advice, and Howard’s encouragement and sharing of his own swordswoman stories all entered into consideration.

From a publication viewpoint, 1935 was probably a letdown, Moore only sold and saw published four professional tales: two Northwest Smith yarns (“Julhi,” “The Cold Gray God”), including one with an illustration by Moore, and a Jirel story (“Jirel Meets Magic”) to Weird Tales, and another “thought-variant” story for Astounding (“Greater Glories”). Reading between the lines, the implication is that Wright was getting more selective about what he bought from Moore. For her own part, Moore’s interest in fandom and the pulp community was increasing, as marked by a collaboration with arch-fan Forrest J Ackerman (“Nymph of Darkness”) and taking part in a round-robin tale with A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long (“The Challenge from Beyond”) for Fantasy Magazine.

These were Moore’s first collaborations with other writers since childhood, and were, perhaps, important lessons in what worked and what didn’t. In “The Challenge from Beyond,” it was clear how each writer was working the parts on their own, often with drastic shifts in style and tone, not making a cohesive whole. With “Nymph of Darkness,” Moore was working from Ackerman’s ideas—but even if they shared the brainstorming, she was clearly doing all the actual work of writing.

1936

Glad you liked “The Dark Land”. I made the drawing a long time ago, and wrote the story so I could bring it in, with the addition of a cadaverous head and a swirl of vagueness.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 30 Jan 1936, Letters to C. L. Moore 108

The year started out well—the new issue of Weird Tales was on the stands with a Jirel story (“The Dark Land”), with a drawing by C. L. Moore to boot. The next month would see another Ackerman collaboration on a Northwest Smith tale (“Yvala”), and two more would be published by the end of the year (“Lost Paradise”, “Tree of Life”). Tragedy, however, would quickly mar the year.

On 13 February 1936, Moore’s fiancé (Herbert) Ernest Lewis died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head; the newspapers presented it as an accident while cleaning his rifle, which was stored in the bank vault, Lewis being part of a shooting club that used a nearby range. Moore was desolate and took some weeks off work to mourn, traveling by bus with her mother to Florida. Lovecraft kept up a steady stream of letters to keep her mind occupied during the period of mourning. Only a few months later, on 11 June 1936, her friend Robert E. Howard took his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Moore spread the news to Lovecraft, who spread it to others.

At this time, Moore was in contact with the literary agent Otis Adelbert Kline (former agent for Howard and Price), and was trying to expand her writing markets, but neither was quite to her tastes and apparently came to nothing.

My recent writings seem to have bogged down completely. In the last five months I have produced one trashy horror which Kline ages ago asked me to rewrite, thinking he could sell it in a revised form and which I haven’t touched since, and a drippy love-story which languished away and ceased half-finished some six weeks ago. The weather is partly responsible, but I must admit a sort of mental vacuum which shows no promise of change. I devote seven and a half hours daily to my secretarial duties and spend the rest of the time sewing desultorily, knitting a very handsome afg[h]an, attending about three movies weekly, induling in endless gossip with friends. How long this cloistered and nun-like seclusion will continue I wish I knew. I suspect that if my brain were functioning I would find myself bored to a horrible death, and rather dread the awakening. A few non-commercial attempts which I mentioned I should be very happy to have you read if I could ever get them finished to my satisfaction. I am writing and rewriting them over and over, in moments of comparative consciousness, and am far from satisfied even yet. However, to quote Mr. Penner once again, There’ll come a day.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 24 Jun 1936, Letters to C. L. Moore 143

She did manage a sale to Astounding (“Tryst in Time”), which may have begun as a rejected Northwest Smith yarn, Wright apparently still being more critical about which stories he would accept.

1937

Glad to hear that you & C L M are collaborating on a dual masterpiece. The result certainly ought to be powerful enough! Staging a meeting betwixt the mediaeval Jirel & the future Northwest Smith will call for some of your most adroit time-juggling—but with two keen imaginations at work no obstacle is likely to be unsurmountable. Good luck to both of you aesthetically & financially!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Henry Kuttner, 8 Feb 1937, Letters to C. L. Moore 262

In May 1936, Lovecraft had introduced Moore and Kuttner through mail. Their correspondence developed, and eventually led to collaboration. At this point, one of our best sources on C. L. Moore (her letters with Lovecraft) dries up, due to Lovecraft’s death on 15 March 1937. So too, Moore’s publications in the pulps dry up. She was, very probably, busy with work, caring for her family, and managing a burgeoning romance with Kuttner.

It was in 1937 that Moore made her first trip to Los Angeles, California, where she and a friend met Kuttner in person—and another Kuttner collaborator, Robert Bloch (Fanscient #8).

Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction 142

CA: You met Mr. Kuttner, then, through your writing?

MOORE: Yes. We corresponded for a while, and then I came out with a friend for my first visit to California and we met. He moved to New York shortly after that. Then He made several trips to Indianapolis, where I was living, and eventually he persuaded me that it would be a good idea to get married. He was perfectly right. We had a fine marriage.
—Interview with C. L. Moore in Contemporary Authors vol. 104, 326

1938

No, I haven’t yet beaten my typewriter into knitting needles—I have beaten it much more lucratively in the process of hammering out a tale for Astounding in my usual vein, to be known as GREATER THAN GODS and to be published—sometime. They just accepted it the other day. And a new story about a maiden—well, a female—named Jirel of Joiry has just gone off to Wright in the hope that he realizes as well as I do how badly he needs it.

[…] I look forward to LEAVES, not for Werewoman’s sake but for the pleasure I expect to derive from reading it.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 13 Jul 1938

Moore appears to have done little writing in 1938; or at least, nothing that was published. “Werewoman” was an early, rejected Northwest Smith story. It was published, finally, in her friend R. H. Barlow’s amateur journal Leaves. E. Hoffmann Price’s memoir Book of the Dead also recalls Moore traveled to California in 1938 (262).

We can presume that she hadn’t given up writing, but was probably still busy with her job, Henry Kuttner, and possibly her mother’s growing illness.

1939

Farnsworth Wright was not yet out as editor at Weird Tales, but the magazine had been sold and relocated to New York. Moore’s last contributions to the Unique Magazine appeared in 1939: her final Jirel of Joiry tale (“Hellsgarde”), and an expurgated version of a Northwest Smith tale previously published in a fanzine (“Nymph of Darkness”).

If Moore’s relationship with Weird Tales was coming to an end, however, she was pursuing new opportunities with other magazines (“Miracle in Three Dimensions,” “Greater Than Gods”). These stories mark a definite shift in style, possibly due to unspoken collaboration with Henry Kuttner—or at least, from his influence. She was moving into the lighter style of science fiction that would become a hallmark of their work in the 1940s.

Maude Moore, mother of Catherine, died of colon cancer on 8 Oct 1939.

1940

Moore’s job at the Fletcher Trust Company was implicitly dependent on her remaining single; in the sexist environment at the time, married women were expected to be supported by their husbands. In 1940, Moore took a tremendous plunge—she left her job, left Indianapolis, and moved to New York City, where on 7 June 1940 she married Henry Kuttner. It was the start of a new chapter in her life and her professional career, one where the “C. L. Moore” byline largely disappeared, as she and her husband wrote almost everything together, but published largely under his name or shared pseudonyms.

The final Northwest Smith tale (“Song in a Minor Key”) appeared in the fanzines Scienti-Snaps; Farnsworth Wright was no longer editor of Weird Tales, and would soon be dead, and the new editor Dorothy McIlwraith had no relationship with Moore and was moving the magazine in a different direction from interplanetary stories or sword & sorcery. Instead, Moore and Kuttner turned their attention to a new fantasy magazine, Unknown, which pointed the way to the future (“All Is Illusion,” “Fruit of Knowledge”).

Escape #7 (Jan 1940)

The hallmarks of Moore’s early career were stories that straddled genres. Northwest Smith’s tales have an interplanetary setting, but he often faces alien gods, sorcerers, and psychic vampires of various stripes. The Jirel of Joiry stories are nominally sword & sorcery, but there is little swordplay and many of the strange worlds she encounters are better seen as other dimensions. Her early protagonists regularly face experiences that pass beyond the normal sensory experience, dealing with beings and sensations that strain their minds and senses to their hilt—yet the characters themselves have an almost hardboiled aspect to them, adventurers and outlaws.

Over the course of those seven years, Moore received feedback from editors, agents, fans, and fellow writers. Some of them, like Lovecraft and Barlow, encouraged Moore’s artistic creativity; others like E. Hoffmann Price emphasized the practical necessities of pulp fiction. Moore absorbed all of this influence, and when the initial spate of her stories falters in 1936 after the tragedies of her fiancé and Robert E. Howard’s death, one gets the sense that Moore had realized her own limitations. Even her non-series stories in Astounding were, ultimately, developed from initial ideas intended for Northwest Smith.

The lack of published work in 1937 and 1938 should not be taken as evidence that Moore wasn’t writing. More likely, she had ceased selling. When she does emerge back into professional publication in 1939 and 1940, her work shows a definite maturity in plotting and characterization—her last tales of Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith are some of her best of the series.

The end of Moore’s early career dovetails into her next period. The collaboration with Kuttner that began with “Quest of the Starstone” did not lead immediately to a slew of new stories, but Kuttner’s influence on her style and thinking are obvious in the 1940 stories, and while not often quite as recognized, some of Moore’s style is evident in a few of Kuttner’s stories from the same period. Their marriage may have formalized their writing partnership, but it seems clear that Moore and Kuttner were working together, unofficially at least, during 1937-1940—and perhaps some of the stories normally attributed to Kuttner alone are possibly collaborations as well.

The seven years of Moore’s early career mark her journeyman period. She had emerged from writing just for herself and stepped into the professional arena, where she learned both discipline and disappointment; she had to suffer rejection and revision; made friends and lost them; worried over her creativity and received tremendous encouragement from people she admired and respected. Hard financial necessities and the social mores that bound single women in society shaped some of her decisions, but the voice she found was her own—even if, as desires and circumstances dictated, her own byline was largely lost as she focused on collaboration with Kuttner.

C. L. Moore was not just another pulpsmith, churning out endless variations on the same story—though she definitely ran her own themes through several variations as she learned the business of pulp fiction writing. Her early attempts at series characters, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry, were incredibly well received by fans, but the series were not really written as a series of connected episodes, and that may be why Moore ultimately abandoned her early creations to focus on new characters and different stories. Others might have given up; Moore embraced the changes she needed to make. First, for the sake of her family and financial well-being, and then for love and the chance at a new life.

It was Moore’s early career that laid the groundwork for acclaimed stories like “The Twonky” (1942), “Mimsy Were the Borogroves” (1943), “No Woman Born” (1944), “Vintage Season” (1946), “Daemon” (1946), “Two-Handed Engine” (1955), and novels like Judgment Night (1952).

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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