Pleasure Planet (1974) by Edward George

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work of adult literature. Reader discretion is advised.

Around November 1923, H. P. Lovecraft sent a letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird, commenting on the contents of the magazine during its first year of existence. The letter was published in the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales, and included a challenge to writers of weird fiction:

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and ‘different’ as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace. Take a werewolf story, for instance—who ever wrote a story from the point of view of the wolf, and sympathising strongly with the devil to whom he has sold himself? Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated?
—H. P. Lovecraft to Edwin Baird, c. Nov 1923

This inspired H. Warner Munn, a weird fiction enthusiast from Athol, Massachusetts, to write a story and submit it to the magazine. “The Werewolf of Ponkert” (WT Jul 1925) and earned the coveted cover spot. It was Munn’s first professional publication, the start of a long career in science fiction and fantasy, and perhaps most importantly the start of a long series of tales. Subsequently in the pages of Weird Tales, Munn published “The Return of the Master” (WT Jul 1927), “The Werewolf’s Daughter” (WT Oct–Nov–Dec 1928), and a series of Tales of the Werewolf Clan published as “The Master Strikes” (WT Nov 1930), “The Master Fights” (WT Dec 1930), and “The Master Has A Narrow Escape” (WT Jan 1931).

Munn also became friends and correspondents with Lovecraft, who referred to the whole work in one letter as the “master” cycle—much as he referred to his own mythos as the “Arkham” cycle. Yet for Lovecraft, Munn had missed the mark:

It is my constant complaint that allegedly weird writers fell into commonplaceness though reflecting wholly conventional & ordinary perspectives, sympathies, & value-systems; & in this instance (as in others) I sought to escape from this pitfall as widely as I could. It pleases me that you grasp this matter so spontaneously—for some persons seem unable to understand what I mean when I bring it up. For example—I once said that a werewolf story from the wolf’s point of view ought to be written. H. Warner Munn, taking me up, thereupon produced his “Ponkert” series; in which, however, he made the werewolf an unwilling one, filled with nothing but conventionally human regrets over his condition!
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 19 Jun 1931, LJS 16

The series also suffered from a relative lack of overt weirdness, as Lovecraft put it:

The trouble with Munn’s tale is that it subscribes too much to the conventional tradition of swashbuckling romance—the Stanley J. Weyman cloak & swordism of 1900.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [17 Oct 1930], DS 245

Yes—Munn does get into arid and sterile regions when he tries to hitch his romantic-adventure mood and technique to the domain of the weird. He is drawing the poor Master out to such lengths that one cannot keep track of the creature’s nature and attributes—indeed, the impression is that he merely retains the supernatural framework as a matter of duty—or concession to Wright—whereas he really wants to write a straight historical romance. But the kid’s young, and we can well afford to give him time. Let him get Ponkertian werewolves out of his system, and see what he can do with a fresh start!
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, [Dec 1930], ES1.305

“Romance” in this case doesn’t refer to stories about love or lust, but the older sense of romance as a fictional prose narrative of heroic adventure, in the traditional of medieval romances. The sentiments echo some thoughts by Lovecraft with regard to Robert E. Howard, whose weird fiction often contained a strong action-adventure element, sometimes with the monster or magic a bit of an afterthought. Still, Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was impressed enough to consider the publication of Munn’s werewolf tales as a standalone volume:

Munn’s effort—I read the whole tale in MS. a year ago—has romantic facility, but to my mind he seldom achieves real weirdness. He is, though, a very capable writer, & ought to have quite a future ahead of him. Wright tells him that his collected “Ponkert” tales will form the third book of a W.T. series beginning with “The Moon Terror”—my own tales forming the second. Personally I’d wager that much time will elapse before W.T. publishes any more volumes.
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, [6 Sep 1928], ES1.155-156

Unfortunately, Lovecraft was correct: The Moon Terror failed to sell, and the idea of Weird Tales publishing collections or anthologies was largely abandoned. The Werewolf of Ponkert series would finally be collected in 1958, and when Munn expanded the series with additional tales in the 1970s and 80s was reprinted and recollected again. Of his friend, Lovecraft wrote:

Frank B. Long, Jr., Donald Wandrei, Wilfred B. Talman, H. Warner Munn, August W. Derleth, & Clark Ashton Smith are indeed all friends of mine, but it would hardly be fair to their own talents & initiative to call them my “proteges”. I have tried to encourage the younger ones & help them with their style whenever such help seemed in order, but they all succeed on their own merits. I am proud, though, to have been the first to persuade Long & Talman & Munn to send stuff to W.T.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 19 Jun 1931, LJS 18

So what does this have to do with Pleasure Planet (1974) as by Edward George (pseudonym for Robert E. Vardeman and George W. Proctor), an erotic science fiction novel? Well…read the back cover copy:

Step aboard the sex-computer equipped Intergalactic Vessel Werewolf along with Captain Chad Ponkert and his very horny co-pilot, Janet. Their mission—to find a planet to be used as a sex playground—a place where creatures from all over the galaxy can come together and get it on!

Chad Ponkert, I. V. Werewolf. Yes, it does appear that Lovecraft’s innocent suggestion in 1924 had, fifty years later, inspired a sleazy erotic novel, by way of one H. Warner Munn (who was probably utterly unaware of the borrowing).

The novel itself is almost a parody, although it might be more accurate to call it a pastiche. The oversexed everyman Chadwick Ponkert the Third is a spaceship pilot with a raging libido and a black belt in karate, who plays a few BDSM games with his co-pilot Janet where she refers to him as ‘Master.’ Their ship crash lands on a planet called Keller, which is like medieval Europe if there were no Christian church, a rather open and eager attitude toward sex, and the occasional alien beast. Which is to say, not much like medieval Europe, but not unlike a thousand sword & planet stories that ran in the pulps. Ponkert and Janet quickly establish themselves as lords and ladies in the oversexed land, happily screwing pretty much anyone and everyone they encounter page after raunchy page.

The girl was a veritable wealth of information about Keller. During their endless hours of bouncing on the backs of their sturdy steeds, he had never tired of her explanations of various sights they passed. She had also provided a history of Keller’s development. From what Ponkert could make of the various legends and myths she told, Keller had grown from the remnants of a derelict colonial rocket from Earth. The lost voyage had long been forgotten by the mother planet, which was to his advantage. If the Earth’s residents had known about Keller, they would have come in the teeming millions.
—Pleasure Planet 113

Aside from the names mentioned, Vardeman and Proctor make no overt reference to Munn’s werewolf stories, nor are they parodying them. It is, rather, a rather basic and straightforward sword & planet tale fluffed out with a lot of hardcore sex. The difference between this and a mainstream science fiction novel is a matter of degree rather than kind, although there really isn’t anything to recommend it as science fiction. The story hits most of the weaknesses that Lovecraft noted about interplanetary stories in the 30s, following the Edgar Rice Burroughs model of a strong Earthman arriving at an Earth-like planet, rescuing a very human princess, etc.

As with many erotic novels, Pleasure Planet went through a number of titles and author pseudonyms. While it may be of interest to some folks for its place in the history of erotic science fiction, it also demonstrates the ripple-effect that Lovecraft had on science fiction and fantasy—how inspiration spreads out, from one little letter, to a series of werewolf tales, to an erotic novel—and who knows where it might end?

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.

“Shethulhu: The Elder Goddess Returns” (2017) by T. G. Cooper

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work of adult literature. Reader discretion is advised.

The work of H. P. Lovecraft hints at weird sex. Generations of incest in “The Lurking Fear” lead to a rapid devolution among the fecund family; Arthur Jermyn in “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” is the byproduct of an ancestor not quite human; Audrey Davis in “The Curse of Yig” killed the children of Yig, and bore them in return; the men and women of Innsmouth in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” take on Deep Ones as their mates to spawn the next generation; Lavinia Whateley gives birth to the childer of Yog-Sothoth in “The Dunwich Horror.” The common theme that runs through these stories is one of procreation; these are stories of the aftermath of sex for the purpose of reproduction.

So what if a character is infertile? Asexual? Gay?

After 1921, Lovecraft was aware that homosexuality was a sexual practice and preference in the present day, as well as in ancient historical accounts. Specifics were not something he went into in his letters in any great detail; and because of the mores and censorship at the time, homosexual characters or acts in fiction could often only be alluded to obliquely, if at all. Lovecraft could mention the decadence of the people of K’n-yan in “The Mound” or the delvers in “The Hound” and let readers fill in the blank with their imaginations, but that was about the limit of how explicit he could go in Weird Tales.

So it has been up to other creators to wonder how homosexuality fits into the Mythos.

There have been several different attempts at this. Grant Cogswell & Daniel Gildark and Cthulhu (2007) use the absence of overt homosexuality in the Mythos to essentially tell a story of being gay in a very restrictive social environment that is focused on heterosexual relationships and procreation; it’s a familiar story with a weird twist. Widdershins (2013) by Jordan L. Hawk, “Moonshine” (2018) by G. D. Penman, and “Cthulhu for Christmas” (2023) by Meghan Maslow all depict rather straightforward homosexual romances in settings with real-world prejudices, with no focus on the cultural issue of reproduction within a Mythos milieu. “Le Pornomicon” (2005) by Logan Kowalsky and Strange Bedfellows (2023) by Caroline Manley (Raph) ditch the reproductive and heterosexual angle entirely, focusing on homosexual characters and relationships.

All of the above stories involve cisgender male/male relationships where neither partner is capable of being impregnated through any normal sexual action (an important caveat). Lesbians and transgender relationships are also present in the Mythos; such as in “Pages Found Among the Effects of Miss Edith M. Teller” (2005) by Caitlín R. Kiernan and “The Artist’s Retreat” (2011) by Annabeth Leong; for some of these characters, the reproductive theme rears its head again, simply by virtue of a functionary womb. However, in general there seem to be relatively fewer lesbians, transwomen, and transmen in Lovecraft country than homosexual men.

Weird and erotic literature can blur issues of gender, sexuality, and reproduction to play to various kinks. The Invitation (2017) by InCase depicts with characters that exhibit different combinations of genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics (all functional); Dagger of Blood (1997) by John Blackburn uses some weird surgery to swap the genitalia of two characters; Devil’s Due: A Transgender Tale (2021) by Diane Woods uses magic to effect a gender transition. These kinds of gender-bending play to specific sexual fantasies, and while these examples don’t deal with pregnancy, there is an entire mode of gender-bending weird fiction that does.

“Shethulhu: The Elder Goddess Returns” (2017) by T. G. Cooper (who also writes as Cooper Kadee) stars Charles Ward Dexter as a private detective hired to find the Femnomicon—and who is dealing with personal issues:

Back in his room, he crawled back onto his damp, smelly bed, and lay on his back, staring at the full moon outside his window. As he did so, he felt a thump inside his belly and put a hand on his tummy, grimacing. He didn’t want to sleep. Didn’t dare, really, and so he just lay there, staring at the moon and waiting for the dawn.

In his dream he’d been a woman, again, and that memory disturbed him. He’d always been a dude, a bro, a man’s man, and he didn’t know what it meant in his dreams now, which came every night, he always found himself in a woman’s body, helpless and afraid.

T. G. Cooper specializes in gender-bending fiction, and this particular story is pretty typical of the genre, adapted as a Lovecraftian pastiche. This is not a politically correct tale of an individual coming to an awareness of themselves as trans. There’s magic and tentacles involved, and the tongue is firmly in cheek:

“You should get yourself a real dog,” Ward said, pausing to scratch the white poodle under the chin.

“She was a Pitbull named Butch when I read that damn book,” the girl said. “We both got turned into girls.”

The pace flows quickly as Cooper runs through some familiar feminization tropes—including a marriage to Dexter’s former secretary, Asenath Waite. The Lovecraftian references are a bit basic; instead of the Necronomicon it’s the Femnomicon; instead of Miskatonic University, it’s Chthonic College; instead of Cthulhu it is Shethulhu. The erotic content is slight; there is no traditional humping and pumping; the eroticism is bound up in Ward’s situation, their transformation, their strong sense of gender identity and powerlessness as it is changed, and above all the pregnancy itself.

The kink aspect of “Shethulhu” plays up the crisis of masculinity that characters feel during the unwanted transition, the helplessness and despair at finding themselves in their new body; and in this case the shock and terror at being pregnant. The crisis—and, as in the end of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the final acceptance—is all-important; it is the arc that Charles Ward Dexter completes, the ultimate submission to the new self which is so terribly taboo in toxic masculinity. Not that gender-bending and pregnancy need always play to those specific ideas, but that’s the set-up here.

It is important to distinguish that there is a difference between erotic fiction starring trans characters vs. gender-bending erotic fiction that is firmly grounded in and plays to cisgender sexual mores and ideology. This is less Emilia Pérez (2024) and more Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971). This is not a positive depiction of transition as much as it a vehicle for a specific set of kinks.

The Lovecraftian names and setting are played mostly for laughs, and we don’t get any deep meditation on the reproductive themes in Lovecraft’s work. Rather, it is played straight: horror is what a man would feel to suffer through what Lavinia Whateley did.

There are many permutations of pregnancy, birth, and gender-bending as kinks in Mythos fiction, this is just a relatively scarce example that puts them all together. It is especially scarce because it is less available than it once was: the story was previously available on Amazon Kindle, but is no longer purchasable through the store. T. G. Cooper’s DeviantArt page for the story indicates that it is available on their Patreon, for anyone interested in reading it.

E-books, unfortunately, are often subject to the whims of corporations and hosting services. “Shethulhu” and the Femnomicon may well be lost entirely someday.

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.

Her Letters to August Derleth: Lilith Lorraine

Lilith Lorraine was the pseudonym of Mary Maude Dunn Wright (1894-1967), a prolific poet, pulp fiction writer, editor, publisher, and early science fiction fan. It isn’t clear when exactly Lorraine and Derleth became aware of each other, though they shared interests in common, particularly fantastic poetry. If Derleth did not see any of her stories that were published in the 1930s, he would have heard of Lilith Lorraine at least in late 1943, when Clark Ashton Smith mentioned her to him in a letter (EID 341). Derleth would also probably have noticed her poems “The Acolytes” (1946) and “The Cup-Bearer” (1951), but they do not appear to have had direct contact with one another, since as late as 1950 Clark Ashton Smith was still offering to act as a go-between (EID 417). For her own part, based on Smith’s letters Lorraine was clearly aware of Derleth as the editor and co-founder of Arkham House.

The file of correspondence at the Derleth Archive of the Wisconsin Historical Society is a bit thin: 11 pieces of correspondence, mostly notes and postcards, most undated, in Box 32, Folder 9. There may well have been other bits of correspondence over the years that was lost or misfiled, but based on the contents this correspondence seems to have covered roughly 1959-1963, which coincides with the latter years of publication of Lorraine’s poetry magazine Flame (1954-1963), which later merged with another ‘zine to become Cycle*Flame. At the same time, Derleth was trying to promote his own poetry ‘zine Hawk & Whippoorwill (1960-1963) and publish the anthology Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (1961, Arkham House), and the crux of the correspondence seems to cover their mutual selling of poems to each other and promoting their respective magazines.

Sample of Lilith Lorraine’s postcards to August Derleth.

The “article on the ‘little magazines'” that Lilith Lorraine mentions might be “Hawk & Whippoorwill: Poems of Man and Nature,” a form letter that was sent out to advertise Derleth’s new poetry magazine; curious readers can find it reproduced as Item 65 in Arkham House Ephemera.

It is not clear how many poems Derleth actually placed in Flame, as there is neither a complete index to the magazine nor a complete index to Derleth’s poetry. Three poems were definitely published: “Moon and Fog” (Summer 1959), “Fox by Night” (Spring 1960), and “Satelite” (Winter 1961). The letters and notes suggest the acceptance of “Lantern in the Winter Woods,” but if that was published in Flame, I have not yet located the issue.

For his part, Derleth solicited and accepted five of Lorraine’s poems for his poetry anthology Fire and Sleet and Candlelight, including “Case History,” with the correction she noted:

※
CASE HISTORY
by Lilith Lorraine

When all his seas with serpents were aflame
And he was God trapped in his universe,
A dark and shadowed loneliness, whose name
Wavered like plumes above a phantom hearse,

The hearse moved on and six phantasmal steeds,
Pawed the gray emptiness of outer space.
And scattered all his comets and his creeds,
With muted thunder and malignant grace.

His mind constricted to the planet’s core,
Dissolved to fire mist and virgin night,
Until upon a sea without a shore,
He stood ungarmented, a naked light,
Alone once more upon the terrible coasts,
And desperately tired of gods and ghosts.

※

There is a printed biographical flyer in the folder of correspondence, and Lorraine may have sent this to Derleth in response to a request for biographical data for the back pages of Fire and Sleet and Candlelight, which includes the entry:

LILITH LORRAINE was born in Texas and still lives there, where she edits Flame and manages the Different Press. She has written extensively in the field of science-fiction, and is an active proponent of the best in poetry, at the same time serving as an exponent of the traditional in verse as opposed to obscurantist and incoherent experimentation. She is founder-director of Avalon. She is the author of several books, among them Wine of Wonder, Not for Oblivion, The Lost Word, and Character Against Chaos, and has for several years edited the annual Avalon anthology She has been distinguished for her activity all her life in behalf of poetry.
—August Derleth, Fire and Sleet and Candlelight 232

For the most part these brief letters and notes are cordial, but largely impersonal. Friendly, but not revealing great details of each other’s lives. These missives were written with a specific purpose, the horse-trading of poetry editors who are also poets themselves, and they seemed to get along well with one another.

Why did the correspondence cease? Perhaps time and energy in their personal and professional lives just led to a drop-off, since Derleth was no longer publishing a poetry journal or anthology, and Flame had gone on to its new incarnation. We are left with only a brief glimpse into the lives of two poets and editors, who ironically wrote little to each other of art or aesthetics, but who apparently appreciated one another’s work. After all, they each published the other.

Thanks to David E. Schultz for his help with this one.

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.

“Wicked Walter” (1981) by Mark Bloodstone

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work of explicit adult literature. Reader discretion is advised.

Men’s adult magazines emerged during the 1950s. Titles like Modern Man (1952) and Playboy (1953) featured softcore nude pictorials of women models, intermixed with a combination of editorials, articles, interviews, advertisements, cartoons, letters from readers, and quite a bit of fiction. The relative success of Playboy in particular inspired numerous imitators of various degrees of sophistication and quality. Loosening censorship restrictions in the United States and other countries in the 1970s saw some magazines become more explicit, directly depicting genitalia, sex acts (including penetration), and sexual fluids, but every magazine publisher and editor had to find the right balance for the time and place—to sell the magazine to readers, and not to get thrown in jail if they went too far.

Weird fiction has a surprisingly long history in men’s adult magazines; Playboy published William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” in the July 1954 issue, and various other publications have published articles on pulp magazine art, Robert E. Howard’s Conan character, H. P. Lovecraft, and related subjects. Even a revised version of “The Rats in the Walls” (1956) by H. P. Lovecraft first appeared in a minor men’s magazine. So it might not come as too big of a surprise that there’s a small body of Cthulhu Mythos fiction which has appeared first—and only—in men’s adult magazines.

Such is the case of the “Wicked Walter” series by grandmaster of horror Brian McNaughton (under his pseudonym Mark Bloodstone), which ran in the magazine Beaver from 1981 to 1983, and are comprised of “Wicked Walter” (July 1981), “The Panty Demon” (October 1981), “They Don’t Write Them Like They Used To” (November 1981), “Glamour Puss” (February 1982), “The Enchanted Dildo” (July 1982), “The Great Cat-House Raid” (January 1983), “How Are They Hanging?” (February 1983), “I’ll See You In My Dreams” (May 1983), and according to Robert M. Price a final unpublished story “Her Night to Howl.”

The eponymous “Wicked Walter” is about an Arkham cop and Miskatonic University graduate named Walter Finn, a hereditary witch who uses his powers to solve other magical crimes.

You don’t expect a red-blooded American cop to pack every room of his partment from floor to ceiling with mouldy old books, some of them in Latin and Greek. Nor do you expect him to have a pet crow named Dr. Dee who squawks that he’s a raven when you call him a crow, and whose favorite perch is a human skull on Walter’s desk. Walter didn’t even have a television set. She would have laid odds that he didn’t have a bowling ball in his closet or a six-pack in his icebox, either, like every other guy on the force. But he did have a bed, and once he got her into it she forgot everything else.
—Brian McNaughton (as Mark Bloodstone), Beaver July 1981, 66

Wicked Walter came along at an odd time and place for McNaughton.

McNaughton began his career in the fanzines of the 1950s while in high school; he attended Harvard but did not take a degree, and for a decade worked as a newspaperman at the Newark Evening News until the paper folded, and he turned to other work, including a decade as night manager of a motel. In 1971 he began writing adult fiction with In Flagrant Delight (1971) by Olympia Press. Under his own name and pseudonyms he would go on to write at least twenty erotic novels and a couple dozen short stories published between 1971 and 1983. The vast majority of these works have no reference to the Mythos, nor does McNaughton’s thriller Buster Callahan (1978; also released as The Poacher).

McNaughton’s breakthough came in the late-1970s, when he convinced longtime publisher Carlyle Communications to print a series of non-erotic horror novels. Although stuck with editorially mandated titles by Carlyle, the novels Satan’s Love Child (1977), Satan’s Mistress (1978) and its sequel Satan’s Seductress (1980), and Satan’s Surrogate (1982) proved successful enough to help relaunch McNaughton as a writer of dark fantasy and horror fiction. Aside from the middle two books, the Satan novels are not part of the same series as the titles would indicate, and the share little with one another besides a common writer and certain common themes. However, the success of these novels signaled McNaughton’s transition (or return) to weird and horror fiction, including contributions to Weirdbook (1968–97) and Lore (1995–98), and culminated in such masterpieces as The Throne of Bones (1997).

Brian McNaughton also wrote a number of pornographic “romance” novels under the pen names Sheena Clayton and Mark Bloodstone as well as his own, mainly for Carlyle Communications under imprints like Beeline, Tigress, and Pandora. The exact number and titles of his books I have been unable to determine, but the ones written as Sheena Clayton include Love and Desire (1982), The Aura of Seduction (1982), Tide of Desire (1983), Danielle Book Two (1983), There Lies Love (1983), and Perfect Love (1983)—all of which to greater or lesser extent contain supernatural elements and references to the Mythos. It was during this same time frame that McNaughton wrote his Wicked Walter stories.

In the first story, Walter Finn encounters a new cult in Arkham, run by a woman who calls herself Isobel Gowdie. Finn takes a magical precaution before he confronts Gowdie, and once inside her office he confirms she’s up to no good.

He hadn’t needed more proof, but it was all here in the decor of her office. One of the supposedly modern paintings on her wall was in fact the very old and awesome Yellow Sign. The tapestry on the opposite wall incorporated secret symbols of Nodens and Magna Mater, whose worshippers had been driven underground by the horrified pagans of ancient Rome. The paper-weight on her desk was a statuette of the dread Cthulhu. Few people would recognize the significance of these clues, but they alerted Walter that he was in the presence of a power darker and more terrible than he had suspected.
—Brian McNaughton (as Mark Bloodstone), Beaver July 1981, 70

The language is very pulpy, with lots of straightforward action and declarations, not getting too bogged down into details but offering enough details to tantalize, titillate, and even assure readers that they’re reading about consensual sexual encounters and not rape or coercion…this time.

Walter seldom used his occult powers to overcome a girl’s resistance, partly from masculine pride and partly because it took some of the spontaneity out of it. He was glad he hadn’t done that with Isobel. Apart from taking her dress off, everything she’d done had been done of her own free will. Maybe she was hoping to con him in some way, but she sure as hell wasn’t faking her responses.
—Brian McNaughton (as Mark Bloodstone), Beaver July 1981, 70

The character of Walter Finn very much falls into a certain male archetype of the period; a guy who is confident, amiable, willing and able to have sex at nearly any opportunity, but who isn’t extraordinarily strong, good-looking, rich, intelligent, cruel, or overly moralistic. A kind of hypersexual everyman, not unlike many characters in period films like Animal House (1978), Stripes (1981), Police Academy (1984), or Revenge of the Nerds (1984).

It isn’t a very long story, and McNaughton sets things up and wraps them up quickly, with two very explicit sex scenes taking up a considerable chunk of the word count. Yet “Wicked Walter” is, without a doubt, a bit of fun. McNaughton had no need to build up Walter Finn’s character as well as he did, didn’t need to add in the Mythos references. Yet they don’t come across as padding, either. McNaughton was finding a happy middle ground between erotic fiction and what today we might call urban fantasy. The series as a whole makes entertaining light reading, if the mandatory sex scenes often throw the pacing off a little.

McNaughton’s “Wicked Walter” stories, with their occasionally dated references and language, are artifacts of erotic fiction from an age before shaving pubic hair was commonplace, and practically unique for their content at the time of publication. Unfortunately, unless you’re a collector of vintage men’s adult magazines, you will probably never read them. “Wicked Walter” and its sequels have never been reprinted since their original publication, and anyone who did desire to do so would probably have an interesting time sorting out who owns the rights and getting the correct permissions to do so.

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.

Monstrous Lust: The Cat of Ulthar (2017) by E. M. Beastly

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work of explicit adult literature. Reader discretion is advised.

There is an old legen in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, that no person can kill a cat. The legend speaks of a caravan full of strange wanderers. Some say they brought with them a blessing, others say a curse. From that day when a little boy lost his previous black kitten to an old cotter and his wife, the people of Ulthar did not dare kill a cat.

In Ulthar the cat became revered, cherished and praised. His the kind of the jungle’s lords, and heri to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

As time went by, visitors to Ulthar said the cat became a powerful symbol.
—E. M. Beastly, Monstrous Lust: The Cat of Ulthar (2017)

According to Rule 34 of the Internet, there is porn of it. No exceptions. Strictly speaking, this is not true. It would be more accurate to say that the potential for erotic art and literature exists for every human conception. Diligent researchers would struggle to find, for example, a more explicit re-telling of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Sweet Ermengarde,” or lovingly rendered erotic fan-art of “Winged Death” (1934) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft. There’s no reason for those adult works to not exist, but searchers after erotic horror will find vastly greater numbers of images dedicated to Cthulhu, Deep Ones, and shoggoths, shoggoths, shoggoths.

If porn of everything exists, it isn’t very evenly distributed. Some works and ideas attract more erotic attention and creativity than others.

Erotic works derived from Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar” exist in a relative minority compared to the erotic library spawned by “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Lovecraft’s Dunsany-esque fantasy, part of the Dreamlands cycle, has no named characters, and as the name implies is primarily concerned with an episode involving domestic felines, told with the distinct style of a fable or just-so story. The erotic potential isn’t absent, but how to best adapt the themes and characters of the story to adult entertainment.

Well, there are the cats…

Erotic fanworks involving animal characters (expressive, talking animals, or fully anthropomorphic) have been around since at least the 1930s/1940s, when Tijuana bibles depicted erotic episodes of popular comic strip (e.g. Napoleon) and cartoon characters (e.g. Donald Duck). The emergence of an organized furry fandom from science fiction and comic book fandom would come in the 1970s and 80s, as a result of a convergence of factors, including the increased prevalence of fur-clad aliens in science fiction, the increase in shapechangers in fantasy, the success and sophistication of anthropomorphic characters in comics, cartoons, and animated films especially Disney’s Robin Hood (1973), and the late 60s/early 70s underground comic movement which included strong currents of parody, satire, and explicit sexuality that gave birth to characters like Fritz the Cat.

Technically speaking, Lovecraft got into the talking animals game in the 1920s when he wrote “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” where the cats of the Dreamlands are not just intelligent but conversant with Randolph Carter. While Lovecraft isn’t usually seen as a precursor to contemporary furry fandom, it is clear that he was drawing from the idea of talking animals stories from stock collections of fairie tales and fables, and that he conceived the cats of Ulthar as capable of being characters in their own right. So when E. M. Beastly decided to riff off of Lovecraft for another entry in their Monstrous Lust series, the step from talking animal to anthropomorphic animal was less of a stretch than it might seem at first glance.

“Monstrous Lust: The Cat of Ulthar” is at once a sequel to and continuation of Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar,” and an erotic novella that takes the basic premise of the story in unexpected directions. While Lovecraft’s tale is horrible in the sense of Poe or Dunsany, Beastly takes things in a direction that seems to owe more to “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where the cat-friendly law of Ulthar leads to more profound cultural changes, the rise of a dark cult, and finally physical expression in the bodies of the people of Ulthar. Until at last they disappear entirely, leaving behind a monstrous creature…the Cat of Ulthar.

While the concept is interesting, the execution is the real key. Here, the actual plot and writing of the story may disappoint readers. While the set-up of an Ulthar haunted by a sexy creature caught between human and cat with aspects of both has promise, in personality the eponymous Cat has a personality not unlike a sexually promiscuous version of the Cheshire Cat, and the two human characters who go to confront the creature are seduced and corrupted with a bare minimum of conflict. The stakes are low-to-nonexistent, the characters barely sketches, and the premise a bit weak. If you’re interested in passages discussing furry breasts and sexually explicit encounters between humans and a mystical cat-human hybrid, the story checks those boxes—but it doesn’t go far beyond that.

It is important to emphasize that there’s nothing inherently more taboo, weird, or perverted about anthropomorphic literature than any other kind. Nearly everyone has seen or read talking animal stories in some format, from Bambi to Br’er Rabbit, and anthropomorphism can apply to inanimate objects as easily as animals, as shown by the Transformers and Cars (2006). The same standards and good storytelling principles which apply to other literature also apply to anthropomorphic lit. As one reviewer put it:

On the surface, Bambi’s story is just what the subtitle says: A Life in the Woods. Yet one can find so much more in the story. The entire novel can be read as an existentaist parable, suggesting how one might make meaning in one’s own life. The novel is often seen as a disatribe against hunting, or more generally, a warning of the danger human beings pose to the natural world. The story can be read as castigating any system where the powerful exploit the weak, whether aristocracy or capitalism.

Yet Bambi is not a sermon. Salten’s beliefs and values are suggested on every page, but he doesn’t beat the reader over the head with them. He’s created characters that we as readers care about. Seeing them go through their struggles better enables us to contemplate our own lives. It is a story about its characters, not about issues; the issues become important to us because of the characters.
—Donald Jacob Uitvlugt, “Re-Reading a Classic: Bambi for the Furry Writer” in
A Glimpse of Anthropomorphic Literature (2016), 85-96

This is where “Monstrous Lust: The Cat of Ulthar” tends to fall flat; the characters fail to engage emotionally, and the story scenario doesn’t make sufficient use of the Lovecraftian setting and premise—which is, in Lovecraftian lit., a character in its own right. There’s humping and pumping, but without characters we care about. The setting is nominally Ulthar, but an Ulthar twisted into a Lovecraftian pastiche of itself, warped, twisted, depopulated, and barely present during the sexytimes. It is a fantasy sexual encounter that might easily be moved into any generical medieval setting with minimal effort.

Which is not to say that E. M. Beastly’s story is a failure, if that is exactly what the reader wants.

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 Invitation (2017) by InCase

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work of explicit adult art and literature, and will touch on aspects of historical pornographic works, including NSFW images. Reader discretion is advised.

By the way—Cthulhu isn’t a she but a he. He’d feel deeply enraged if anyone regarded him as sissified!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Willis Conover, Jr. 29 Aug 1936 Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 389

In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft defaults to referring to Cthulhu as male. Whether human gender binaries can encompass Great Cthulhu is something for later writers in the Mythos to decide. Lovecraft, for his part, only addresses it in his letters in a joking matter, with the typical cultural disdain toward “sissies”—men who display effeminate manners or dress, often misconstrued as homosexuals; Lovecraft had made another comment about the “sissy” Gordon Hatfield.

Throughout human history, in pretty much every culture, there has existed a minority who do not fit into rigid gender or sexual binaries. Whether this was a physical condition such as being intersex, or an individual’s identification with a different gender than assigned at birth, or taking on cultural attributes and attire associated with different genders—there is a broad range of physical, psychological, social, and sexual aspects involved. Each culture and language has their own nomenclature involved. In English in the 20th century, terms like hermaphrodite have fallen out of use in favor of words like intersex; the term transvestite, once identified largely as a sexual fetish or mental disorder, has largely fallen away from use in favor of transgender.

The rich vocabulary includes both contemporary efforts to define identities (e.g. genderqueer, gender fluid), pejorative terms (e.g. tranny, cross-dresser), and a grey middle ground of terminology most often associated with sex work, erotic literature, and pornography (e.g. ladyboy, shemale). Loanwords from other languages also enrich the language, e.g., futanari, from the Japanese ふたなり. The term futanari has come to be a pornographic genre unto itself, both in adult comics and literature, with its own specific tropes, and generally presents a fetishized ideal: an individual that possesses (sometimes exaggerated) sexual traits of both male and female.

Despite the term futanari coming from the Japanese language and popularized by Japanese erotic comics, the basic idea is not unique to Japan. In the 1980s, for example, U.S.-born adult artist Eric Stanton created his “Princks” or “Ladyprinckers” or “Princkazons,” women with Amazonian physiques who also possessed penises (often of exaggerated proportions) and used their great strength and sexual organs to dominate and emasculate men. For example, in Stantoons #49 (“Makeover”), he presents a scenario where the men, unable to resist, are forcibly transformed and feminized. Stanton takes this idea to its cartoonish limit, and plays it for body horror and black humor as much as sexual titillation.

For the most part, however, “Princks” died with Eric Stanton. By the 1990s and 2000s, gender transition surgery and hormone replacement therapy had progressed substantially from the gland stories of early science fiction (see The Hormonal Lovecraft); the legal recognition of homosexuality and rights led to greater awareness of different LGBTQ+ identities outside of fetishized pornographic stereotypes. Besides this, futanari proved to be a more popular fetishized pornographic stereotype.

More importantly, the increasing acceptance of transgender individuals and the process of gender transition opened up literature for more positive stories of gender transition. While feminization as a sexual fantasy, voluntary or involuntary, will always remain, the acceptance and embrace of such a change as a positive metamorphosis instead of body horror gained more traction (see Seabury Quinn’s “Lynne Foster is Dead!” (1938): A Mistaken Gender Identity by Sophie Litherland).

Which doesn’t mean that a clever and skilled creator couldn’t combine the two. Lovecraft in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” presented a narrator who, at first horrified at the changes happening to their body, comes to accept their metamorphosis and the new identity that comes with it. For Lovecraft, the reader is allowed a peak as someone that fear and hated the alien and other becomes the other—and in fact, was one of them all along. The completeness of their change is indicated by how thoroughly they embrace who they are now, and reject who they thought they were.

In 2017, erotic comic artist InCase began producing “The Invitation,” a sexually explicit webcomic. The second chapter was published in 2019. At first glance, “The Invitation” shares many hallmarks with feminization and futanari adult comics. Part of what sets it apart, however, is the framing and development of the story.

William Loving III starts out as a very Lovecraftian protagonist, an obsessive delver in the obscure and occult, who had finally found an artefact that promises to put him in touch with a strange, eldritch entity…and he goes a little mad with the revelations.

As their transformation progresses, William’s priorities and attitudes shift, their old mores fall away as they embrace a broader and more inclusive attitude toward gender and sexuality attraction. Above all, the Master who brought these changes to body and mind is imprisoned, and members of their cult, like William, seek to free them. Idol, old one, madness, cult…while InCase is not using Lovecraft’s Mythos directly, there are some clear parallels to aspects of Lovecraft’s work and the broader genre of stories inspired by the Mythos.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

In the second half of the first chapter, InCase shifts the focus away from William pursuing the transformation on their own to interacting with the Master and their other servants. Sexual activity slowly grows more transgressive, with rougher action, bigger penetrations, more and less human (and more tentacular) participants…and the wonder of transformation and the bliss of sex is juxtaposed against the cosmic horror of the Master’s true face, and a glimpse of their true nature.

For a story about transformation and sex, and the gorgeously rendered artwork that conveys both sexuality and teratophilia, corruption and indulgence, these two characters are essentially character-driven. William is obsessed with magic, and having followed that obsession it consumes them utterly. What he left behind was his fiancé Annie, who becomes the protagonist of the second chapter.

In the Victorian milieu of The Invitation, Annie more than William represents a character whose body and identity are repressed by society; she is bound up in expectations of behavior (social and sexual) that she strains again; a woman of science at a period when women are not widely tolerated in science. A woman whose social standing is in peril from a broken engagement. A person who is, like William, innately curious.

There is a strong fantasy element to InCase’s work, both in The Invitation and in their other erotic comics. Without going into clinical detail, many of their characters fall into the spectrum of the sexualized fantasy of intersex characters rather than the reality. There are rarely true hermaphrodites, but there are often characters who appear to be women in every aspect save for having a penis and testes, which is fully functional (often incredibly so). Characters don’t undergo costly top and bottom and facial surgeries, they don’t take regimens of hormones their entire lives to achieve some semblance of the body they desire, that matches their gender identity. In real life, things are messy and imperfect; in comics, they can be idealized.

It is the fantasy that allows the exploration of these ideas. What would a Victorian woman do if she suddenly had a penis? If she was no longer restricted to the sexual role that biology and society had deigned for someone of her sex and gender? If you grew gills in Innsmouth, would you avoid the sea?

The Invitation is not a body-positive story about gender transition. It is an erotic horror story with themes of body horror and cosmic horror. William and Annie are not individuals who seek transition as a means to express and assert their gender identity. They are cultists who reject the world that they feel has rejected them; they are the outsiders who having finally given up on belonging to the world around them, with all the repressive mores, have turned to a being for whom all laws and mores are oppressive. Even natural laws.

It is important to distinguish between the reality of being transgender and the fantasy. Not everyone who is trans undergoes surgery or takes hormones; nor are trans folk mere sexual objects for others to fetishize and covet. InCase is drawing specifically on the tropes of trans and intersex characters as they have developed in erotic comics art over the last several decades; Annie and William are not Stanton’s Princks, but they are conceptual cousins. Where the Princks’ purpose is entirely driven by kink, the transition of Annie and William is much more moral.

Stanton’s Princks are domineering and cruel; they degrade and make fun of the men they transform, they revel in their strength and the men are helpless to resist. The suffering of the Princks’ victims is the point; that’s the relationship that Eric Stanton often pursued, regardless of whether it was Princkazons vs. men, or women vs. men, or women vs. women. The Master never taunts her victims, never degrades them, never says a cruel word; the Master’s inhuman hunger is frightening, but what really breaks Annie at the end is the realization that it is entirely voluntary. Like the Cenobites in Clive Barker’s “The Hellbound Heart” (1986), the Master does not seek out new victims—they find her. Drawn in by curiosity, they find a moral universe at odds with what they know.

A universe both horrific and addictive. Twisted, unnatural, and yet utterly freeing. Is it any wonder why some folks have embraced it as a positive example of gender transition, at least in jest?

In the end, it isn’t about whether or not William has a vagina or Annie has a dick. Their final acceptance of each other was to move beyond their conceptions of sex and gender, to discard all labels. This is presented as both horror…and a short of transcendence. As old de Castro said in “The Call of Cthulhu,” they had become like the Master themselves, they had moved beyond the need to define themselves in human terms, and had come at last into a more complete marriage, through and within the Master.

Which is about as Lovecraftian an ending as one could hope for.

InCase’s work can be found on their website and their Patreon account.

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.

All images copyright their respective owners.

Rainbringer (2021) by Edward M. Erdelac

If you stay in Haiti long enough and really mingle with the people, the time will come when you hear secret societies mentioned. Nobody, of course, sits down and gives lectures on these dread gatherings. It is not in any open way that you come to know. You hear a little thing here and see a little thing there that seem to have no connection at first. It takes a long time and a mass of incidents before it all links up and gains significance.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (1938)

William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) was the book that launched the craze for Haitian Vodun and zombies in the United States, the direct inspiration for the film White Zombie (1932) and stories in pulp magazines like Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror such as August Derleth’s “The House in the Magnolias” (ST Jun 1932). Lovecraft read Seabrook’s book on a visit to Florida, and seems to have largely lost interest in voodoo, though he praised tales like “Mother of Serpents” (1936) by Robert Bloch.

Seabrook, however, was not the only one writing about African diaspora religions or African-American folklore. Zora Neale Hurston seems to have completely missed Lovecraft and his immediate contemporaries. In part, this was just a matter of timing; Lovecraft was dead by ’38 when Hurston’s book on Haitian Vodun, Tell My Horse, was finally published. In part, it was a reflection of segregation: as a Black woman, Hurston struggled seemingly her whole life against the prejudices of white editors and white audiences. Voodoo as a theme for Mythos fiction did not die off after the ’30s, but the Hollywood tropes of pins in dolls and zombies as reanimated corpses tended to overshadow authentic anthropology and folklore research.

Zora Neale Hurston never really got a chance to go up against the Mythos. Not until 2021, when Edward M. Erdelac, author of the Merkabah Rider series, published Rainbringer. In this episodic novel, Erdelac wears together fact and fiction, interpolating encounters with the Mythos into Hurston’s already busy and adventurous life. Her particular career of poking her nose into hoodoo, Vodun, and other systems of belief provide a good excuse for her to stumble across the much weirder cults and entities of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the stories are inflected in their interpretation and depiction of the Mythos to reflect Hurston’s own writings.

Erdelac took pains to present a period-accurate but not discriminatory view of Black people during the period; the word “Negro” was in common use at the time, without any pejorative association. Gullah speech is presented with fair accuracy. Most of Hurston’s investigations into insular African-American communities are played straight, and the joy of exploration and discovery, the use of her wits and charisma, her respect for the people she meets and their beliefs all lend verisimilitude to the stories. Then things get a little Lovecraftian.

“An Old One?” I said, folding my arms, and thought to myself, Lord God and Papa Yig, not these motherfuckers again.
—Ed Erdelac, “Ekwensu’s Lullaby” in Rainbringer 57

Yig, in the context of the fictional Zora Neale Hurston’s career, is cast as her hoodoo patron, the figure who presided over her initiation into the occult. Yet stories like “Ekwensu’s Lullaby” are not an effort to cast African diaspora beliefs into a Mythos mold; rather, it is a story about African diaspora religion and strange survivals in an out-of-the-way place, in a universe that is Mythos-inflected.

This is much more believable, and therefore more interesting, than if Zora Neale Hurston were trying to fight Cthulhu by her lonesome. The approach is reminiscent of “Jeroboam Henley’s Debt” (1982) by Charles R. Saunders, “Hairwork” (2015) by Gemma Files, and Ring Shout (2020) by P. Djèlí Clark in that the stories are very much grounded in the African-American and African-Caribbean experience, the echoes of slavery and discrimination that have left their mark on bodies, minds, souls, and cultures. In a system of belief that already accepts the supernatural, the existence of Yig & co. doesn’t have the same sanity-blasting effect.

Erdelac was strongly inspired by Hurston’s fieldwork in writing these stories, as he mentioned in his interview Cthulhu in the Deep South on Tentacle Talk, but there is a second vein trying to balance out in these stories, and that’s weaving Zora’s adventures into the Mythos with the skill of a pasticheur. If the whole book had only been about Hurston’s dealings with Yig as her patron, that might have been interesting but slight from a Mythos perspective. However, she also encounters the Dreamlands, the “King in Yeller,” Tsathoggua, and other eldritch entities. Which sometimes adds spice to the gumbo, and sometimes is a bit of an overpowering flavor.

The strength of each episode is really in how well the story hangs together more than how many references to Hurston’s work of Lovecraft’s Mythos he can stir in. The more spiritual and dream-like episodes are balanced out with shoot-’em-up pulp action sequences, and the balance of elements shifts from episode to episode, reflecting changes in both Hurston’s real life and whatever Mythos threat Erdelac wants to put her against next. The result isn’t an exhaustive Mythos biography of Zora Neale Hurston, by any means. I could easily see Erdelac writing another story that fits in between the existing episodes, as the plot occurs to him.

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.

Her Letters to August Derleth: Everil Worrell

Everil Worrell (1893-1969) and August Derleth (1909-1971) were peers at Weird Tales, familiar names whose stories appeared in issues under both editors Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith. However, Worrell was never a member of Lovecraft’s circle of correspondents, never a player in the literary game that gave birth to the Cthulhu Mythos. As a consequence, it isn’t surprising that their correspondence seems to have been relatively sparse, and primarily involved business rather than personal matters.

The extant correspondence at the Derleth Archive in the Wisconsin Historical Society is relatively brief and incomplete: 8 letters, for a total of 15 pages, spread across two folders (Box 36, Folder 2 under her married name Everil Worrell Murphy; and Box 62, Folder 5 as simply Everil Worrell), covering the years 1947-1969, and all letters from Worrell. The sole 1947 letter concerns her story “The Canal,” which appeared in the Derleth-edited anthology The Sleeping and the Dead: Thirty Uncanny Tales (1947):

Dear Mr. Derleth:

Thank you for your most prompt reply. Of course I shouldn’t dream of reselling THE CANAL until after your stipulated period, since you are using it. The fact is that I thought maybe it had just gotten indefinitely pushed aside and you might not have any plans for it and might yourself be glad to resell it if I could not.

Thanks for the tip on cleaing with W.T., in case. Miss MacIlwraith’s manner both of acceptance and rejection is so extremely warm, that I imagine she will lean over backward to accommodate me in a small matter like that, should it come to that. Still on the other hand, since she and I are not in very close communion, she probably wouldn’t care what I did with it.

Of course, I am much more pleased to have THE CANAL come out in your anthology than in a paperback, and look forward to seeing it with the deepest pleasure. | By the way, the old girl I once spoke of as having porbably put in an oar vs. The Canal with Farrar & Rinehart (with which she claims the closest and tenderest ties, I’m told) is named Lillian McM. Meyer—believe it or not. I referred to her as Agnes Meyer, thus confusing her with a fine woman columnist here. Mrs. Lillian tells her name so frequently and with so much stress that one forgets what it is.

I must insist, however, that some of our Washington writers’ clubs are rather nice institutions. The Society of Free Lance Writers, of which I have been president these last two years, gets its members some pretty nice contacts—including for me some nice collaboration on my second try at a novel. Mr. Seabury Quinn gave us a very fine talk last week. I wish you were ever in Washington at a time when I could impose on your good nature; if ever you are and feel willing to be a martyr to a good cause, do please let me know.

Sincerely and cordially—
Everil Worrell Murphy

—Everil Murphy to August Derleth, 4 Mar 1947,

Worrell’s praise for the Society of Free Lance Writers is understandable; she was the president for some years.

There is a question about the first anthology appearance of “The Canal,” as the ending was substantially changed and abridged in The Sleeping and the Dead versus the original 1927 publication—and the 1927 text was also used in the 1935 reprint in Weird Tales, the 1948 Avon Fantasy Reader reprint, and most others that I’ve been able to lay hand or eye on. In The Weird Tales Collector #1 (1977), Robert Weinberg said that “August Derleth asked for a rewrite of the ending of ‘The Canal'” (14); the surviving letters do not mention a rewrite, but possibly some correspondence has been lost or was filed elsewhere. Derleth had a reputation for sometimes altering stories in some of his collections and anthologies; and suspicion has fallen on him for the severe abridgment. However, there are no answers in this or any other letter in the Worrell/Derleth correspondence, scanty as it is.

One more mystery.

The next chronological letter from Worrell to Derleth is dated 18 Feb 1963. The timing makes sense for a renewed correspondence; The Sleeping and the Dead: Thirty Uncanny Tales (1947) was split into two paperback reprint volumes: The Sleeping and the Dead: 15 Uncanny Tales (1963) and The Unquiet Grave: 15 More Uncanny Tales of Terror (1964), which included a reprint of “The Canal” (in its abridged form).

Several of the letters are Worrell submitting short fiction, novellas, or poetry, presumably for Derleth’s anthologies. Some of these works (“Last Return,” “The Jungle” (a poem), “The Liger,” “Believe in Tangibles,” “Woman from Peak Town,” “Hell is Murky,” “Magic Casements,” and “Night Should be Black”). None of these works are known to be published; it isn’t clear if any of the manuscripts survive, although the full text of “The Jungle” is included in one letter. Some of the synopses she provides are interesting, however:

Believe in Tangibles.
About 7-8,000 words (similar length to Canal). It has no vampire, but a demon doctor who is betrayed by his shadow on the wall, just in time to save the hero from a lobotomy because he has contacted extraterrestrial anti-demonic entities.

Woman from Peak Town.
About 20,000 words I have this labeled, but it is a straight story line uncomplicated enough to cut drastically at cost of “atomosphere” and mood stuff. This is a straight (and gruesome) vampire story, narrated by an observant slightly elderly doctor.

Hell is Murky.
20,000 words. I seem to have sent this to Fawcett’s Gold Medal Books, God knows why, becauseI have this comment which I enclose for info.

This has a vampire (male) at the core of a Hellish Empire in a worn out part of the Capital of our Nation in which gangsters, voodoo worshippers, et al, cooperate.—There is so much cooperation it would not cut.

Magic Casements.
20,000 words, but could be much cut (not so much as Woman from Peak Town)—at same cost of atmospehre and mood. The story line would stand it.

Spaceways Mag wanted to publish this but failed, and returned it. Said if he reopened would ask for it back, but didn’t ever reopen—to my knowledge at least.

The scientist hero of Casements married a mysterious lady who turned out to be from Venus. On Venus, higher forms of life retain some of the fluid protean quality of our lowest forms of life. Sandra wears sari-like cover-all garments; she turns out to have a slight problem of tiger fur on her body. In Earth’s malefic magnetic field, she has only three months before going killer-tiger. This causes Horror to raise its ugly head, and calls for drastic measurs. Actually, a were-tiger with our Earth serving here as the full moon serves to change the were-man to were-wolf.

Night Should be Black.
20,000 words. Could be cut—some—but it might cut out the author’s heart.

Gwen, nine years old, is left in a select boarding home when her mother is off to Europe to write a column for her paper. The lady proprietress is a witch. The visiting doctor is head of the coven. Two servants are cannibals from new Guinea (tribe of Mundogumors). They transfuse blood both in and out of the kids and have cannibal feasts, and select a few for training for witchcraft, and Gwen is one of the chosen lucky ones. The murdered mother of a boy of her age works a little white magic, and Gwen is a smart little girl and a nice child at heart, and she and the boy escape. (But the menace is still loose in the world.) There is a touch of medieavalism in this story.

—Everil Worrell to August Derleth, 1 Mar 1963

Given how relatively little we have from Worrell on her writing and unpublished works (a few letters published in Weird Tales and a short biographical essay written by her daughter Eileen), the letters to Derleth are an invaluable insight into what else she wrote.

There is another gap; after 1963 the letters jump to 1967. These letters seem a bit more personal, or at least conversational. In one, she describes a meeting of the League of American Pen Women, which concludes:

At the end of this meeting, I found myself trying to give them a slight glimpse into the Cult of Chulthu [sic]! Although I was never much more than a “Square” observer on the C of C, I did my best—since there seemed to be a “Need to Know.” I’m more at ease with ordinary witchcraft, vampirism and demonology—perhaps. But, leave us all hang together. (And now I’m one of the Old Ones myself, chronologically speaking.)

N’Gai ? ?
—Everil Worrell to August Derleth, 12 Mar 1967

Another letter that same year consoled Derleth on his divorce and having to raise his two children as a single parent (“a note of sympathy and understanding, on this deal of being father and mother both”), the death of her husband after only a few years of marriage (“Only 8 years later […] did I learn that he might have been murdered. The theory was it had to do with foreign cartel patents.”), her bad luck with magazines and publishing after Weird Tales ended in 1954 (“I’m sure I brought the curse on them. I even folded an English publishing house which was going to bring out the first of my two novels”), and memories of happier days:

When I think of things “gone with the wind,” we had in our NY apartment, all over the walls those sketches for the WT covers when you had the cover story, which F.W. let me have. When we brought the baby home we took them down—not wanting to over-weirdize her infantile sub-conscious.
—Everil Worrell to August Derleth, 17 May 1967

Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, apparently often gave authors the cover painting or sketch, according to Seabury Quinn and others. She also recalled a less happy case of impersonation:

It was only an anti-climax when a man who had written for WT told a lot of people here that he had written all my stories anyway and, wanting a pen name for variety had begun using “Everil Worrell” when I was just a little girl, to give me a childish thrill.
—Everil Worrell to August Derleth, 17 May 1967

I haven’t been able to pinpoint this impostor in any period fanzines or convention reports; there was some speculation that O.M. Cabral was one of Worrell’s pseudonyms, which appeared in a couple of places, and this might have contributed to a general misconception. Terence E. Hanley touches on this in his excellent overview of her career at Weird Tales at the Tellers of Weird Tales blog.

Everill Worrell’s final letter to August Derleth is undated, little more than a note scrawled on a printed copy of “The Jungle,” a poem that is spiritually a successor to Lovecraft’s “Providence in 2000 A. D.” and depicts a Washington, D.C. overrun with Black people. A note in brackets says “[1969],” and Worrell’s note includes the phrase “Black is beautiful” (though she does not agree with the sentiment), which suggests she may have been reacting against the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that removed segregation in housing.

A sour note on which to end, but it must be remembered that such prejudices were all too common, and for all that we laud the progress achieved by the decades-long struggle of the Civil Rights movement, every legislative victory faced a reactionary backlash.

During the later part of her life, she became increasingly lame, the result of a fall when she was 17. When she reached the point where she needed two canes to walk, she left office work and settled down to full retirement. She missed Weird Tales very much then because she had plenty of time to write but no one to write for. She was always an enthusiastic reader and had become interested in the suspense story. At the time of her death, she was just getting into her third novel.
—Jeanne Eileen Murphy, “Everil Worrell” in The Weird Tales Collector #1 (1977), 14

Everil Worrell’s correspondence with August Derleth ended with her death on 27 November 1969. While she was one of the most prominent women in Weird Tales during its heyday, her difficulty placing later stories shows how difficult it was to catch and hold the zeitgeist, or perhaps how little relative name recognition she had outside of Weird Tales during the period. The synopses of her stories sound a bit old-fashioned by the standards of the 1960s, very pulpish plots—but also surprisingly dark and lurid. Who knows what lost diamonds in the rough readers might have missed, since they were never published?

These letters to Derleth, in the ultimately vain hope of further publication, show Everil Worrell as she was, warts and all—and with the resurgence of interest in her life and fiction, they should form a part of the understanding of her life and work.

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.

Ghosts and Monsters (1982) by Mark Falstein & Tony Gleeson

Ghosts and monsters have long been favorite topics for many children, so this Getting Into Literature set has a real built-in motivation factor. The art aids understanding, and the text is set in type (rather than hand-lettered in the traditional comic-book style). These features make GHOSTS AND MONSTERS enjoyable and easy to read.
—Teacher’s Guide: Ghosts and Monsters

Imagine yourself in a public middle school in the United States of America, circa the 1980s or early 1990s. A genuine chalk board, rows of desks, an old-style projector. It’s the fall; leaves are falling from the trees, t-shirts are giving way to long sleeves and jackets. The classroom might be decorated with black and orange chains of paper, a cut-out of a witch, a pumpkin with a crooked smile drawn on in sharpie. The teacher passes out a stack of worksheets—but what is this? Comics? Horror comics?

Ghosts and Monsters was published by Educational Insights in 1982. The kind of boxed set of teaching materials that found there way easily into hundreds or thousands of classrooms across the country. The contents were pretty basic: a book of spirit masters for duplicating worksheets (crosswords, etc.) in an age before photocopying became ubiquitous; a brief teacher’s guide with suggested questions and activities; and a package of comic booklets which adapted a dozen tales of horror and weird fiction to comics:

“Feathertop” (1852) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894) by H. G. Wells
“The Bottle Imp” (1891) by Robert Louis Stevenson
“Man-Size in Marble” (1887) by Edith Nesbit
“The Legend of Gwendolyn Ranna” (1982?) by Frank Maltesi
“The Ghost-Eater” (1924) by C. M. Eddy
“The King is Dead, Long Live the King” (1928) by Mary Coleridge
“The Secret of the Growing Gold” (1892) by Bram Stoker
“The Gorgon’s Head” (1899) by Gertrude Bacon
“The Outsider” (1926) by H. P. Lovecraft
“The Stranger” (1909) by Ambrose Bierce
“The Crewe Ghost” after Oscar Wilde [based on “The Canterville Ghost” (1887)]

It’s an odd mix. Many of these works were in the public domain, while the others were largely drawn from the pulps or (more likely) horror anthologies. “The Legend of Gwendolyn Ranna” by Frank Maltesi is a bit of an enigma, though the name is associated with several other brief legendary tales that have popped up in other educational materials; this may well be its first (and only) publication.

Most of the interest is on the comics themselves. The Teacher’s Guide credits Mark Falstein (well-known author of fiction for young adults) for selection and adaptation, and freelance artist Tony Gleeson for the illustrations. Each comic booklet is basically one large folded page, which gives four pages to tell and illustrate a complete story—a not-inconsiderable task!

The results tend to less grue and taboo than young horror fans might hope for. These were the last generation of “monster kids” that might pick up Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-1983) on the stand, but they might still find a Helen Hoke-edited horror anthology in the school library, or pick up something from Scholastic involving vampires, werewolves, or bug-eyed aliens at the school book fair. Yet I have to wonder how many kids sat down one day and read Lovecraft for the first time as part of a school assignment—

And then fill out the worksheet afterwards!

Actually, there were two bits of Lovecraft tucked away in this package. C. M. Eddy, Jr.’s “The Ghost-Eater” (Weird Tales Apr 1924) was one of the stories that Lovecraft had somewhat revised for Eddy, and sold to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird. As Lovecraft put it:

I have, I may remark, been able to secure Mr. Baird’s acceptance of two tales by my adopted son Eddy, which he had before rejected. Upon my correcting them, he profest himself willing to pint them in early issues; they being intitul’d respectively “Ashes”, and “The Ghost-Eater”.
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 28 Oct 1923, Letters to James F. Morton 57

How much of it Lovecraft actually wrote is a matter for debate; S. T. Joshi in Revisions and Collaborations notes the plot and some of the dialogue seems very typical of Eddy, while much of the prose reads like Lovecraft. In any event, it’s a genuine rarity. While many of Lovecraft’s tales have been adapted to comics, his revisions and collaborations are much less likely to receive the same treatment. This is certainly the first, and possibly the only adaptation of “The Ghost-Eater” to comics.

Given the limitations of space, the monochromatic printing, and the incredibly tight scripts, credit has to be given to Tony Gleeson for doing a very decent job on the art. Stuck with a very boxy framing setup, he nevertheless manages to use perspective shots and shadowed silhouettes to hint and convey something of a horror-mood. While the Teacher’s Guide suggests that the typeset text will make it easier to read, I suspect the real issue was that the budget for this project didn’t extend to hiring a letterer.

When we consider Lovecraft as something more than a cult figure, but as a writer who has entered the canon of world literature—this is a good example of what that looks like. Not necessarily fancy, expensive editions that can only be seen and enjoyed by a few, but stories that penetrate into common educational materials, hitting the masses when they’re young and becoming part of the foundation of reading. Ghosts and Monsters is a core sample of how Lovecraft came to the masses.

It’s a bit of history easily overlooked and easily lost. These were sold for classroom use, not to the public, and not preserved in libraries. How many classes went through Ghosts and Monsters before the comics were too worn for further use, or lost and displaced? Who preserves old worksheets from childhood days? These are deliberately ephemeral products, designed to last a few seasons and then be replaced as educational guidelines shift or a company needs to sell a new product. Edutainment marches on.

(Here are the answer keys to the worksheets if you need them.)

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.

Requiem for a Siren: Women Poets of the Pulps (2024) ed. Jaclyn Youhana Garver & Michael W. Phillips, Jr.

Dorothy Quick was one of almost three hundred women who published fiction and poetry in sci-fi and horror pulp magazines before 1960.

Have you heard of her?
—”Introduction: A Place for Wild Women” in Requiem for a Siren (2024) 1

The pulp reprint anthology has long had a place in genre fiction. In the 1920s and 30s, the Not at Night series and its imitators mined Weird Tales to package pulp stories for audiences in hardback. In the 1960s and 1970s, as fantasy and science fiction boomed, authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith found a strange afterlife alongside the paperback reprints of The Lord of the Rings and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels. Editors like Helen Hoke, Margaret Ronan, and Betty M. Owen were not above reprinting pulp tales to fill out their anthologies for youngsters, and as copies of pulps decayed and rose in price, anthologists like Sam Moskowitz and Peter Haining saw a market in reprinting classic tales from the pulps.

They were right. There was a market for repackaging the best of Weird Tales from the 30s in hardback or paperback, and readers were eager to read the science fiction of the 40s, or themed anthologies of evil plants, drug use, vampire tales. Anthologies proliferated, and continue to proliferate—because now many of the contents of those original pulps have entered the public domain, their text has been scanned, transcribed, and posted online. Every laptop is capable of word processing, layout, and desktop publishing work that used to take an entire office, or at least a some dedicated space in the garage; print-on-demand publishing and ebooks mean it has never been easier for free content to be collated, packaged, and presented for sale at prices that range from the bargain-basement for a cheap ebook with content pulled from Wikipedia to a substantial sum for a high-end hardback, like Weird Tales: The Best of the 1920s (2024, Centipede Press).

The question presented is one of value: what have the editors and publishers provided in their anthology that makes it worth the reader’s hard-earned dollars? Does it save them time or effort? Is there some unique insight provided in the way of explanatory essays? Or is it merely a luxury good, designed to be enjoyed as an aesthetic experience for its own sake, and priced accordingly?

Personally, I tend to be leery of cheap pulp reprints in the print-on-demand era. The return on investment for the cheapest work seems to be low, so the folks attracted to that market are either bottomfeeders or rank amateurs, and the products reflect that. Aim a little higher, however, at the level of some of the self-published scholars and small independent presses, however, and some much more interesting books start to emerge.

Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation (2023, Paradise Editions), edited by Eric Williams, is a collection of the non-English weird fiction that was translated and published in Weird Tales during the 20s and 30s, with explanatory essays and notes on the works. While you could go out and find the individual stories, these aren’t works that were ever published together before, and the essay adds history and context to why and how they appeared in the Unique Magazine.

So too, the women of Weird Tales, who so often never got collections of their own during their lifetimes when their male counterparts did, are finally getting some posthumous recognition in print. Today, those who want to read Francis Stevens can pick up The Citadel of Fear (2022, Flame Tree) with scholarly introduction by Melanie R. Anderson; Everil Worrell’s The Canal and Other Weird Stories (2023, Weird House) with introduction by S. T. Joshi; Greye la Spina’s Fettered and Other Tales of Terror (2023, From Beyond Press), with introduction by Michael W. Phillips, Jr.; Dorothy Quick’s The Witch’s Mark and Others (2024Sarnath Press), also introduced by Joshi.

Collecting these disparate stories from half-forgotten authors and bringing them together with a bit of information about their lives and works produces a whole that is more than the sum of the parts, because it effectively presents these women authors of weird fiction in the same way that their male counterparts have often been presented. In effect, it gives readers a chance to get to know an entire body of work by an author, instead of randomly running across a story or two, often presented without context.

Requiem for a Siren: Women Poets of the Pulps (2024, From Beyond Press) is representative of the best of this impulse to not just reproduce the work of women pulpsters in danger of being forgotten, but to arrange and comment on them in a way that highlights both the publishing history of poetry in pulp magazines and the lives of these women. While many of the poems are taken from Weird Tales, including “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman and “The Eldritch One” (1948) by Pauline Booker, the collection also includes science-fiction poetry from the pages of Amazing Stories and other pulps. Much of the background information for the women is credited to Terence E. Hanley’s Tellers of Weird Tales blog, which is good as Hanley has put in tremendous work into his biographies of the authors and artists of Weird Tales.

Full disclosure at this point:

I would like to thank Bobby Derie, proprietor of the blog Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein (deepcuts.blog), for his invaluable assistance in researching the introduction to this chapter, and Timaeus Bloom for reading an early draft.
—Requiem for a Siren (2024) 1

My help consisted solely of a few brief discussions on social media, to try and help provide a few sources; I had no input into the selection or editing process. The final product is due to the hard work of the editors Haclyn Youhana Garver & Michael W. Phillips Jr., who made an effort to present a representative core sample of poetry by women in the fantastic pulps, covering not just multiple genres and themes, but tone and mood. The black humor of Lilith Lorraine’s “Mutation” to the fey rhythms of Frances Elliott’s “The Hill Woman,” the utter silliness of Julia Boynton Green’s “Radio Revelations” to the somber antique mystery of Alice I’Anson’s “Teotihuacan.” The brief biographies and introductory essays in between sections are functional and sometimes insightful.

Is it a perfect volume? I would have preferred an index of titles and/or first lines, to assist in finding a particular poem again without having to flip through the whole book. The selection is overall solid, but certain names predominate—as was the case in Weird Tales. Poets like Leah Bodine Drake, Dorothy Quick, and Cristel Hastings dominate a bit. If I had my druthers, I would have included more fan poetry, include Virginia “Nanek” Anderson, and perhaps Lilith Lorraine’s “The Acolytes” (1946) or “The Cup-Bearer” (1951)—but that would have been going outside of their own self-circumscribed ambit. This was a look at the women pulp poets, not all genre poetry from the period.

Requiem for a Siren: Women Poets of the Pulps provides value for the money. More than just saving the reader the time of flipping through thousands of pages of pulp magazines and reading a vast amount of dross, this curated collection of poetry is presented in a way to highlight not just some of the best weird and science fiction poetry of the period, but to highlight the women poets as well.

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.