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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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:

  1. “Feathertop” (1852) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  2. “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894) by H. G. Wells
  3. “The Bottle Imp” (1891) by Robert Louis Stevenson
  4. “Man-Size in Marble” (1887) by Edith Nesbit
  5. “The Legend of Gwendolyn Ranna” (1982?) by Frank Maltesi
  6. “The Ghost-Eater” (1924) by C. M. Eddy
  7. “The King is Dead, Long Live the King” (1928) by Mary Coleridge
  8. “The Secret of the Growing Gold” (1892) by Bram Stoker
  9. “The Gorgon’s Head” (1899) by Gertrude Bacon
  10. “The Outsider” (1926) by H. P. Lovecraft
  11. “The Stranger” (1909) by Ambrose Bierce
  12. “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.

Eldritch Witchcraft: A Grimoire of Lovecraftian Magick (2023) by Amentia Mari & Orlee Stewart

We are living in the only period in history in which it is considered fashionable to be a witch. Given this complete public acceptance, an understandable tendency towards fadism develops. The once-stigmatizing label of “witch” has become a title of positive intrigue and has attained a status never before realized.
—Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Witch (1989), 1

In his book The Triumph of the Moon (1999), Ronald Hutton traces the history of modern pagan witchcraft, and how a combination of factors and personalities in the late 19th/early 20th century—the shift to urban living which caused a romantic attitude toward nature and rural areas, the spiritual awakenings that weakened the grip of Christianity and encouraged the spread of new religious movements and ceremonial magic, the anthropological re-evaluation of myth in George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) which inspired The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret A. Murray—all came together in the mid-century as individual practitioners like Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente shaped the core practices that would characterize Wicca and other modern pagan witchcraft systems.

Lovecraftian witchcraft is an interesting concept. H. P. Lovecraft’s views on witchcraft were largely shaped by Murray’s Witch-Cult Hypothesis as set forth in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe; there’s no evidence he read her later book The God of the Witches, and while Lovecraft had some understanding of the history of ceremonial magic based on Éliphas Lévi’s The History of Magic (1922, trans. by A. E. Waite), he was never an occultist or member of any group like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. When asked by one Salem witch descendant for magical secrets hinted at in his fiction, Lovecraft had to politely confess he made it all up. While Lovecraft made much of the Salem witch diaspora in his stories, connecting characters like Keziah Mason (“The Dreams in the Witch House”), Joseph Curwen (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), and the founders of Dunwich (“The Dunwich Horror”) among others with the cult, that religion is uniformly depicted as dark, secretive, and often violent and malevolent. Keziah Mason even sacrifices children, repeating the old blood libel.

Most of Lovecraft’s contemporaries and immediate followers were not much better. Robert E. Howard’s Stregoicavar in Turkey in “The Black Stone” (1931) is a degenerate, alien, bloodthirsty religion. Henry Kuttner’s “The Salem Horror” (1937) strongly echoes “The Dreams in the Witch House,” with Abigail Prinn standing in for Keziah Mason. The image of the witch as a positive figure for female empowerment hadn’t really formed yet, though it was on its way with novels like Conjure Wife (1943) by Fritz Leiber. Over the decades, as the image of witchcraft shifted, Lovecraftian media often shifted to reflect the syntax of the time.

When exactly modern witches began to incorporate Lovecraftian elements into their work is a matter of debate. Doreen Valiente’s first book, Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), includes an invocation of the Old Ones during a full-moon ritual, which Hutton notes is nowhere in Gerald Gardner’s Writings and is very Lovecraftian (321). Any prospective witch who picked up Anton LaVey’s The Compleat Witch (1971; later reprinted as The Satanic Witch), could have used the Lovecraftian rites presented for the Church of Satan in The Satanic Rituals (1972) a year later. Kenneth Grant, one of the heirs of Aleister Crowley, threaded the needle of working references to witchcraft and Lovecraft into his system of ceremonial magick in The Magical Revival (1972). In 1977, Schlangekraft published the Necronomicon by Simon, which included a very Murray-esque witch cult into its Lovecraftian version of magical history as well.

So from the mid-to-late 1970s at least, modern pagan witches have had a vast amount of Lovecraftian occultism and lore to potentially draw on and incorporate into their own practices, if they so choose. Most of them do not. Daniel Harms and John W. Gonce in The Necronomicon Files noted that Doreen Valiente was familiar with Lovecraft and Lovecraftian occultism because she published an article on it: “Necronomicon—the Ultimate Grimoire?” that appeared in Prediction magazine (Apr 1982), which referenced a few of Lovecraft’s occult connections but gave little shrift to the Necronomicon as a genuine reality. As Harms & Gonce put it:

Most present-day Wiccans won’t give the Necronomicon (Simon or anyone else’s) the time of day. Other members of the Neopagan community also seem to give the Simon book short shift. Many of them see themselves as followers of the Light just as much as Christians do, and have no use for a “dark” grimoire. (209)

Modern pagan witchcraft in general has sometimes been derided as “cafeteria paganism” where practitioners pick and choose elements of their personal religion, and replaced any effort toward authenticity with fantasy, but the high degree of individualism and adaptability is a genuine strength for the movement as a whole. There is no hard canon for most would-be witches to get hung up on, and syncretization of Wiccan practices with other themes, or the incorporation of different magical and ceremonial practices into a Wiccan framework is fairly common.

Which brings us to Eldritch Witchcraft: A Grimoire of Lovecraftian Magick (2023) by Amentia Mari & Orlee Stewart. This slim (38 pages) POD-published workbook is relatively light on Lovecrafian lore (a 3-page essay on “Eldritch Witchcraft” that discusses witches in some of Lovecraft’s stories, and mentions influential occultist Austin Osman Spare), and the rest of the book consists of magical recipes, rituals, sigils, and illustrations divided into five chapters:

  • Rite to Become An Eldritch Witch: A Lovecraft Mythos-themed rite for solo initiation.
  • The Eldritch Candle Prayer of Chaos: A variation on a prayer candle, with Lovecraftian trappings.
  • Calling the Outer Gods: Sigils and incantations to invoke various Lovecraftian entities (Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Nahab (Keziah Mason)).
  • Spells of Yog-Sothothery: Collection of recipes and charms: a ritual to consecrate your altar and tools, creating an amulet consecrated to Nyarlathotep, compounding a “witch’s unguent” of unspecified purpose, making the incense of Zkauba, making a dream pillow associated with Keziah Mason, and brewing dream tea. Many of the materials require the information from the previous two sections.
  • Heart of Stars Meditation: A meditation intended to provide contact with alien intelligences via automatic writing; uses some of the materials in the “Spells of Yog-Sothery.” Ends with a brief personal account by Orlee Stewart of her experiences using this ritual, including contact with an entity that she speculates might be Nyogtha from “The Salem Horror.”

As a workbook for solo witches go, this book presumes a level of familiarity with the terminology and basic practices of contemporary witchcraft. Probably many Wiccans could fold it into their practice fairly easily; the gist is basic enough and familiar enough to magical practices by Austin Osman Spare, Thelemites, etc. that many occultists would have little difficulty adapting it to their own practices as well (though the Heart of Stars Meditation, it should be added, is written only for women in its current form).

Perhaps surprisingly, Eldritch Witchcraft doesn’t borrow heavily from Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, or the Simon Necronomicon; instead it takes inspiration from the Necronomicon (1978) edited by George Hay, which is presented as translations from a fictitious medieval grimoire that is claimed to be the original from which Lovecraft derived the Necronomicon in his fiction.

Right: Hay Necronomicon, showing various ritual gestures. Left: Eldritch Witchcraft, showing a subset of the same gestures.
Right: Hay Necronomicon showing the Seal of Yog-Sothoth. Left: Eldritch Witchcraft showing a very similar sigil for Yog-Sothoth.

Many elements from the Hay Necronomicon have proven popular among artists and creators and both been re-used and inspired similar depictions. While the majority of the sigils and all of the artwork in Eldritch Witchcraft is original, it’s clear that the authors were drawing on the Hay Necronomicon when developing some of their practices.

Perhaps most notably absent in Eldritch Witchcraft are the trappings and religious underpinnings commonly associated with contemporary pagan witchcraft; neither is there any extended effort to pronounce Lovecraft’s Mythos as real or his stories as representing literal truth. The direct use of fictional characters in place of more traditional deities and the prominence of Austin Osman Spare suggests the influence of chaos magick, and a certain level of pragmatism: this is a practical collection of spells and materials designed to build one on the other, not a quasi-philosophical work like Phil Hine’s Pseudonomicon or Scott R. Jone’s When the Stars Are Right: Toward An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality. Readers get the how, but not necessarily the why.

Which leaves open the question: what is the viewpoint of a Lovecraftian witch? How would a contemporary pagan witch reconcile their ideology and practice Lovecraft’s Mythos? Which tradition(s), if any, do they blend into their own practices? Eldritch Witchcraft provides one possible answer to the latter, but the other questions the reader will have to figure out for themselves.


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.

Editor Spotlight: Helen Hoke

HELEN HOKE learned her alphabet by setting type for her father’s newspaper in a small Pennsylvania town. Later she wrote articles for the same paper, and after a period of teaching she moved to New York to launch a distinguished career in editing and writing. She is the author of more than seventy books, for both adults and young people, and has been junior-books editor at five different publishing houses.
—Back cover flap, Sinister, Strange and Supernatural (1981)

She was born Helen Jeanne Lamb (1903-1990), in California, Pa.; her father owned the California Sentinel. Helen was the youngest of four children. Much of her early life isn’t clear, though she clearly had some schooling and no doubt practical education involving her father’s newspaper. She married John L. Hoke on 20 May 1923; their son Jack was born in 1925. She did some work as a journalist, and later as a teacher; the 1930 census lists her as a clerk at a mail order company. Around 1929 or 1930, the family seems to have moved to California.

Miss Hoke entered the book trade in 1929, when she opened the book department in a Pittsburgh department store. Susbsequently she became head of the Children’s Book Department at Bullock’s, in Los Angeles, Calif. She became director of the Ford Foundation in 1934.
New York Company Establishes Children’s Book Department With Helen Hoke As Director, The Daily Herald (Monongahela, Pa), 3 Jan 1945 (3)

The Julia Ellsworth Ford Foundation was established in 1934, and promoted the creation of literature for children. Helen Hoke was very involved with the development of children’s book departments, shaping the literature aimed at the rising market. Her first published children’s book was Mr. Sweeney (1940), the first of dozens. As an editor, she influenced dozens more. Part of her emphasis was on books that appealed to both adults and young readers:

In a 1945 interview, Helen Hoke emphasized:

I look for books that will help young people to understand the time in which they live, the people with whom they have to live, and the world in which they live. Children are people, and should be addressed as people.

A few weeks later, on 31 May 1945, she married Franklin M. Watts, who owned Franklin M. Watts, Inc., publishers, and became vice-president and director of international projects. It was Watts that really launched her career as an anthologist, with books that bore distinctive title patterns like Jokes Jokes Jokes (1954), Puns Puns Puns (1958), Witches Witches Witches (1958), Alaska Alaska Alaska (1960), and Nurses Nurses Nurses (1961). While the titles might not have been super-creative, the repeated emphasis got the point across: these were anthologies that promised and delivered exactly what was in the title—and the contents, while sometimes skewing juvenile, often aimed for both young and adult readers.

Witches Witches Witches (1958) was the first of Hoke’s weird/horror fiction anthologies, of which she edited 29 between 1958 and 1986, not counting reprints. A glance at the contents shows many hallmarks of cheap anthologies: public domain stories, cheap reprints, the occasional bit of folklore. Yet the selection shows taste, and perhaps more surprisingly intermixed are plenty of stories from more contemporary authors, including well-known names like Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman, August Derleth—and H. P. Lovecraft.

Stories and poems from Lovecraft (or posthumous collaborations with August Derleth) appear in almost a third of Hoke’s horror anthologies. Readers both young and old would have thrilled to:

Notably missing are any of Lovecraft’s longer tales; Hoke wasn’t asking anyone from 8 to 80 to sit down and read through At the Mountains of Madness or The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The focus is on the shorter, punchier, read-in-a-sitting stories that are largely standalone, and utterly unobjectionable in terms of content, aside from a bit of grief and a bit of stereotyping in “Cool Air.”

Like many anthologists aiming at a general market, little of Hoke’s own personality and reasoning for choosing some of these pieces comes through in the brief (sometimes nonexistent) introductions or chapter commentaries, and the occasional back cover or book jacket flap about her, e.g.:

Helen Hoke is well known for her anthologies on children’s humor, but she is also fascinated by the esoteric, the supernatural, and the weird.
Weirdies Weirdies Weirdies (1973) back cover

As Helen Hoke says, “Terror seems the more potent if it is not too detached from reality.” Some element of realism is necessary to make the improbably, plausible.
Terrors Terrors Terrors (1979) inside front cover flap

The use of three of Derleth’s posthumous collaborations is a bit of a surprise, especially since these were all published after his death; it would have been interesting to see the correspondence between Helen Hoke Watts and Derleth’s estate. Helen Hoke definitely toed the Arkham House line when it came to Lovecraft:

The Outsider, by H. P. Lovecraft, is one of the most original monster stories ever written. Lovecraft spent his life writing fantastic stories, which were first published in a magazine called Weird Tales. The unusual nature of his stories led to his receiving many letters from strangers, especially aspiring writers. Many authors have expressed their gratitutde to him for his help and generosity; one of them, August Derleth, rescued Lovecraft’s stories from obscurity and published them in book form. Lovecraft died in 1937, leaving a sure place in the literature of the fantastic.
—”About this Book,” Monsters Monsters Monsters (1975) 9

The one collaboration story in these books, “The Horror in the Museum,” is presented as solely the product of Hazel Heald, without any mention of Lovecraft—which is not unusual for the time. Though Lovecraft fans may well have recognized the Mythos elements that emerge in the story.

The Horror in the Museum will particularly disturb those who sense the terrifying potential of waxworks and masks, quite apart from monstrous mutations. Hazel Heald writes with a disquieting plausibility so that it does seem just possible such exhibits may really be seen in London.
—”About this Book,” Terrors Terrors Terrors (1979) 9

As an editor, Helen Hoke did little to inform the readers about the history of the stories or the author; the bits and pieces of editorial drapery are there to whet the appetite of potential readers, and fulfill their function well—but we don’t really get any insight into the process. Based solely on how often she used Lovecraft, she was attracted to either his work or the recognizability of his name (perhaps both).

How much did these nine books add to the recognition of Lovecraft in the 70s and 80s (and longer, as such books can linger on school library shelves for decades)? As with Betty M. Owen & Margaret Ronan, it’s impossible to overstate how critical it can be to get a reader young and hook them in. Helen Hoke’s anthologies weren’t paperbacks on the spinner rack at the local drugstore, these were the kind of books that got reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and the School Library Journal; Hoke was selling these books to librarians as much as to the young men and women that would eventually check them out, and that might explain why the stories are a notch or two above the average horror anthology for kids. Aiming for a more literate audience, with stories that could appeal to both kids and adults, may also be why these books are still very passable horror anthologies for adults today, and collectors pay some fair prices for the scarcer titles in good condition.

Helen Hoke was one of the editors and anthologists who knew horror could be for kids—and not just silly, schlocky, comedy-horror, but serious literary terrors. She was the flip side of the coin, the librarian-approved choice for kids that might glut themselves on Famous Monsters of Filmland and see Frankenstein and Dracula without reading the novels they were based on. More than a few impressionable young minds no doubt found their first introduction to Lovecraft in the pages of Weirdies, Weirdies, Weirdies, or felt that connection to the Outsider in Monsters, Monsters, Monsters. Holt’s anthologies were another route by which the tentacles of Lovecraft and the Mythos spread and disseminated.


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 Message of Thuba Mleen” (1911) by Aleister Crowley

“Was it because of the Desert’s curse?” I asked. And he said, “Partly it was the fury of the Desert and partly the advice of the Emperor Thuba Mleen, for that fearful beast is in some way connected with the Desert on his mother’s side.”
—Lord Dunsany, “The Hashish-Man” in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910)

To properly review “The Message of Thuba Mleen” (1911) by Aleister Crowley requires a little background on Crowley’s relationship with the Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraft’s references to Crowley in his letters. Since this background is a bit long with numerous quotes, some handy links are provided above to help readers navigate to whichever section they want to go to.

Crowley & Cthulhu

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) never met H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) in life. Crowley was an English occultist, writer, poet, and artist who became notorious both for personal life and his mystical philosophy, which coalesced into the development of Thelema in the early 20th century. After his death, his systems of ceremonial magic and philosophy were developed by various successors and fed into the growing interest during the post-WWII spiritual awakening. Notably, his secretary Kenneth Grant worked to expand and integrate Crowley’s system of “magick” with other esoteric practices and even fictional material from writers like H. P. Lovecraft.

Although Lovecraft seems to have been unacquainted with Crowley’s work, it is evident that both were in touch with a source of power, ‘a prater-human intelligence’, capable of inspiring very real apprehension in the minds of those who were, either through past affiliation or present inclination, on the same wavelength. Whether this Intelligence is called Alhazred or Aiwaz (both names, strangely enough, evoking Arab associations) we are surely dealing with a power that is seeking ingress into the present life cycle of the planet.
— Kenneth Grant, “Dreaming Out of Space” in Man, Myth, and Magic (1970), vol. 23, 3215

Grant wasn’t the first to draw associations between weird fiction and magic; Le Matin des magicians (1960) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier referenced the perceived connection between Arthur Machen’s fiction and his membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (an occult organization of which Crowley was also a member). However, Grant did more than draw parallels; in his writing, he directly associated his understanding of Lovecraft’s Mythos into his exegesis of Crowley’s magick.

Fiction, as a vehicle, has often been used by occultists. Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni and A Strange Story have set many a person on the ultimate Quest. Ideas not acceptable to the everyday mind, limited by prejudice and spoiled by a “bread-winning” education, can be made to slip past the censor, and by means of the novel, the poem, the short story be effectually planted in soil that would otherwise reject or destroy them.

Writers such as Arthur Machen, Brodie Innes, Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft are in this category. Their novels and stories contain some remarkable affinities with those aspects of Crowley’s Cult deal with in the present chapter, i.e. themes of resurgent atavisms that lure people to destruction. Whether it be the Vision of Pan, as in the case of Machen and Dunsany, or the even more sinister traffic with denizens of forbidden dimensions, as in the tales of Lovecraft, the reader is plunged into a world of barbarous names and incomprehensible signs. Lovecraft was unacquainted both with the name and the work of Crowley, yet some of his fantasies reflect, however, distortedly, the salient themes of Crowley’s Cult. The following comparative table will show how close they are:
— Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (1972), 114

Grant then followed with a table of correspondences he perceived between Crowley and Lovecraft. A similar, though distinct, table was also included in the Necronomicon (1977) written by “Simon.” This was the first commercial hoax Necronomicon which was also explicitly a grimoire, something that was intended to mimic other collections of ceremonial magic rites, sigils, lore, etc. intended for use by practicing occultists. The introduction by “Simon” leaned heavily on the supposed correspondences between Lovecraft’s Mythos and Crowley’s magick.

We can profitably compare the essence of most of Lovecraft’s short stories with the basic themes of Crowley’s unique system of ceremonial Magick. While the latter was a sophisticated psychological structure, intended to bring the initiate into contact with his higher Self, via a process of individuation that is active and dynamic (being brought about by the “patient” himself) as opposed to the passive depth analysis of the Jungian adepts. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos was meant for entertainment. Scholars, of course, are able to find higher, ulterior motives in Lovecraft’s writings, as can be done with any manifestation of Art.
— “Simon” (Peter Levenda), Necronomicon (1977) xii

The ceremonial magic presented in the Simon Necronomicon was distinct from that in Grant’s system derived from Crowley; though they shared some common references in Lovecraft and Crowley’s respective mythos & magick. This unexpected complexity invited comparison, and sometimes fusion. From a metafictional perspective, it became the beginning of a parallel body of literature alongside the growing body of Cthulhu Mythos fiction: a Lovecraftian occult scene. One that started to flower when another Necronomicon, edited by George Hay, was published in 1978:

I had also been reading the works of Aleister Crowley—collected by my friend Roger Staples of Michigan University—and found the parallels so striking that I owndered if Lovecraft and Crowley had been acquainted.

Derleth was positive that they had never met—in fact, he doubted whether Lovecraft had ever heard of ‘the Great Beast’. If he had, Derleth seemed to think, he would have dismissed him as a charlatan and a poseur.
— Colin Wilson, “Introduction,” The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names (1978), 14

Wilson refers to a meeting with Derleth in 1967; later in the same introduction, he cites Grant’s merging of Lovecraftian Mythos with Crowleyian magick. The introduction was written with all the care of a good hoax; starting from a basis of facts and gradually weaving in fictional elements, to build up to the idea that Lovecraft’s Necronomicon wasn’t just a fictional book, but had been based on a genuine occult document from the Middle East—which is what the Hay Necronomicon was presented as.

So as the 1980s dawned and the Simon Necronomicon became available in an affordable paperback edition to grace New Age shelves forevermore, would-be Lovecraftian occultists had at least three separate sources to draw upon. All of them tried to tie H. P. Lovecraft to Aleister Crowley. The two men, who had never met in life, found elements of their legends entwined posthumously.

With the advent of the internet, it became easier for misinformation to spread. Colin Law’s Necronomicon Anti-FAQ (1995) was, like Wilson’s introduction, just a bit of fun—but it fostered certain misconceptions about Crowley and Lovecraft, despite repeated debunkings:

In 1918 Crowley was in New York. As always, he was trying to establish his literary reputation, and was contributing to The International and Vanity Fair. Sonia Greene was an energetic and ambitious Jewish emigre with literary ambitions, and she had joined a dinner and lecture club called “Walker’s Sunrise Club” (?!); it was there that she first encountered Crowley, who had been invited to give a talk on modern poetry. […]

In 1918 she was thirty-five years old and a divorcee with an adolescent daughter. Crowley did not waste time as far as women were concerned; they met on an irregular basis for some months.

In 1921 Sonia Greene met the novelist H.P. Lovecraft, and in that same year Lovecraft published the first novel where he mentions Abdul Alhazred (“The Nameless City”). In 1922 he first mention the Necronomicon (“The Hound”). On March 3rd. 1924, H.P. Lovecraft and Sonia Greene married.

We do not know what Crowley told Sonia Greene, and we do not know what Sonia told Lovecraft. 

Edwin C. Walker (1849-1931) was a radical liberal who founded the Sunrise Club in 1889; this interracial club held dinner meetings at which speakers were invited to discuss on a wide range of topics. According to L. Sprague de Camp’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), Sonia joined the club c. 1917 (160-161); and there is a reference to Sonia’s membership in one of Lovecraft’s letters (LFF 1.83). I have yet to find any reference to Crowley addressing or attending the club. Given he lived in the United States from 1914-1919 and was often living in New York City at the time, it is possible, if not necessarily plausible that he could have attended some evening.

There is no reference to Crowley in any of Sonia’s surviving letters, essays, or autobiography; no mention of grimoires or the Necronomicon. The idea that Lovecraft got the idea of the Necronomicon from Crowley by way of Sonia is unsupported by any evidence and relies on the idea that the Necronomicon bears some similarity to Crowley’s The Book of the Law—the same supposition pushed by Grant and Simon, among others. It is rather telling that nothing in Crowley’s own writings supports his meeting with Sonia either, and that all references to the idea of their meeting ultimately derive from Low. For more on this and other Necronomicon-related hoaxes and occult history, see The Necronomicon Files by Daniel Harms & John W. Gonce III.

It’s easy to go on, although facts and fiction get furiously muddled. Despite Grant’s assertion that Lovecraft had never heard of Crowley and Derleth’s assertion (as related by Wilson) that Lovecraft may not have heard of Crowley and certainly never met him, fictional meetings between the writer of the weird and the prophet of Thelema have increasingly featured in books and comics, one notable example being The Arcanum (2007) by Thomas Wheeler. Yet my favorite hypothetical meeting is a 1927 chess game between Aleister Crowley and Wilbur Whateley:

If Derleth did tell Colin Wilson that he doubted Lovecraft had ever heard of Crowley and this wasn’t another part of the hoax, then he was badly mistaken and should’ve known better. Lovecraft’s letters give considerable detail on his thoughts regarding Aleister Crowley.

H. P. Lovecraft on Aleister Crowley

The Crowley cutting is interesting. What has the poor devil-worshipper been up to now? When I was in Leominster (near Athol) with Cook & Munn last month, calling on a bookseller, I saw a copy of a book by Crowley—“The Diary of a Drug-Fiend.” The merchant informed me that it has been suppressed by some branch of the powers that be—though he agreed to part with his copy for three thalers. I did not take him up—but I told Belknap about the offer.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, [8 Jun 1929], LWT 114

In 1929, French authorities deported Crowley, which led to sensationl articles (Why France Finally Kicked Out the High Priest of the Devil Cult), and a similar cutting was no doubt passed to Lovecraft. From this first reference in Lovecraft’s letters, it isn’t clear when exactly the Old Gent from Providence became aware of Aleister Crowley, but the suggestion seems to be that Lovecraft was at least passingly familiar with the magus by the late 1920s, probably from similar newspaper clippings. From Lovecraft’s comments, his friend Frank Belknap Long, Jr. had an interest in Crowley…a greater interest than Lovecraft himself had:

Aleister Crowley still keeps in the news! Don’t take any especial trouble to send the clipping unless you find it lying around, for my interest in the gent is perhaps less intense than Belknap’s.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, [7 Jul 1929], LWT 116

In 1930, Percy Reginald Stephensen’s The Legend of Aleister Crowley: Being a Study of the Documentary Evidence Relating to a Campaign of Personal Vilification Unparalleled in Literary History was published, ostensibly to ameliorate Crowley’s reputation. Lovecraft apparently caught a few reviews:

And speaking of your precious files—have you seen reviews of the new book about that suave diabolist Aleister Crowley? Belknap sent me a cutting from the Tribune. The biographer—abetted by the reviewer—(Hebert S. Gorman, who claims to have dined with Crowley) tries to depict the reputed ally of Satan as a much-wronged and basically blameless poet—whose eccentricities are merely the harmless foibles of genius!
–H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, [Sep 1930], LWT 133-134

Years passed. Crowley’s infamy was such that he served as the basis for several fictional magicians, most notably the character of Oliver Haddo in Somerset Maugham’s The Magician (1908); the black magician Oscar Clinton in H. R. Wakefield’s “He Cometh and He Passeth By” (1928) (and later, Apuleius Charlton in “The Black Solitude” (1951)); and, though Lovecraft never lived to see it, Rowley Thorne in the stories fellow Weird Tales writer Manly Wade Wellman, in one such story, “The Letters of Cold Fire” (WT May 1944), Thorne attempts to obtain a copy of the Necronomicon!

Lovecraft had not read Maguham’s novel, but was aware of its association with Crowley:

I’ve never seen the Ramuz & Maugham items. Poor old Crowley figures more than once in fiction—for I believe it is her upon whom the villain in Wakefield’s “He Cometh & He Passeth By” is modelled.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 22 Mar 1932, LHB 42

“Ramuz” may be a reference to C. F. Ramuz La Regne de l’esprit Malin (1917) tr. by James Whitall as The Reign of the Evil One (1922). The novel seems to draw no direct inspiration from Crowley, being about a stranger (who might be the devil himself) who comes to a small Swiss town and turns it into hell.

Lovecraft did read Wakefield, however, and was appreciative.

Wakefield’s stuff is generally very good, & I’m glad you’ve had an opportunity to read it. Of the tales in the first book my favourites are “He Cometh & He Passeth By” (the villain in which is a sort of caricature of the well-known living mystic & alleged Satanist Aleister Crowley), “The Red Lodge”, “The 17th Hole at Duncaster[“], & “And He Shall Sing”.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, [22 Jul 1933], LRBO 62

Glad to see the item about Crowley. What a queer duck! He is the original of Clinton in Wakefield’s “They Return at Evening.”
– H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [14 Dec 1933], DS 507

Wakefield is pretty good—I’ll enclose “They Return at Evening” as a loan in the coming shipment. You’l probably find at least four of the tales especially absorbing—“The Red Lodge”, “He Cometh & He Passeth By” based on Aleister Crowley), “And He Shall Sing”, & “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster.”
–H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [Jan 1934], DS 515

Clark Ashton Smith, when he read the “He Cometh and He Passeth By,” gave his own opinion to Lovecraft:

I read one of the Wakefield stories last night—“He Cometh and he passeth by—” and found it excellent, especially in the suggestion of the diabolic Shadow. Crowley is surely a picturesque character, to have inspired anything like Clinton! I know little about Crowley myself, but wouldn’t be surprised if many of the more baleful elements in his reputation were akin to those in the Baudelaire legend . . .  that is to say, largely self-manufactured or foisted upon him by the credulous bourgeoisie.
– Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, [Jan 1934], DS 520

Lovecraft’s reply reveals something new—an acquaintances of his had actually met Crowley:

As for Aleister Crowley—I rather thought at first that his evil reputation was exaggerated, but Belknap says that Harré has met him & has found him indescribably loathsome in mind, emotions, & conduct. This from Harré is quite a damning indictment, for Belkanp tells me that T. Everett himself is far from squeamish or fastidious in his language & anecdotes when amidst the sort of company that dissolves inhibitions. But Crowley was too much for him. He didn’t relate particulars—but said that the evil magus made him so nauseated that he left abruptly. I guess Crowley is about as callous, unclean-minded, & degenerate a bounder as one can often find at large—though he undoubtedly has talents & scholarship of a very high order. It seems to me I heard that he is in New York now—London won’t stand him any longer. And this reminds me that I forgot to return that old cutting of yours which mentions him—permit me to repair the omission now.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [11 Feb 1934], DS 525

In 1933-1934, Crowley appears to have primarily been in London, dealing with a libel suit (which he lost). I have not discovered anything to suggest he went to New York at this time. However, Harré’s papers contain a folder associated with Aleister Crowley, so they may well have met or interacted at some point. It is also known that Harré and Crowley were published together in The International in 1915, so possibly the meeting occurred over a decade and a half earlier, when Crowley was in New York, and Lovecraft misunderstood.

Smith responded:

Judging from Harré’s reactions, it would appear that Aleister Crowley is a pretty hard specimen. I had discounted the legends on general principles, knowing nothing whatever about the mysterious magus.
–Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, [Mar 1934], DS 536

At this point, Crowley became a reference point for diabolists and occultists of all stripes.

The case of the Boer lady—Mevrouw van de Riet—certainly offers dark food for the imagination. She seems to be a sort of female Aleister Crowley—or a striga, lamia, empusa, or something of the sort.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [18 Nov 1933], DS 479

The subject would next come up when Lovecraft began corresponding with the young fan Emil Petaja in 1935, when the subject turned toward the Black Mass, Satanism, and the occult. Lovecraft was an atheist and materialist, but he had read something of the occult for research purposes over the years, and picked up other tidbits:

In the 1890’s the fashionable decadents liked to pretend that they belonged to all sorts of diabolic Black Mass cults, & possessed all sorts of frightful occult information. The only specimen of this group still active is the rather over-advertised Aleister Crowley . . . . who, by the way, is undoubtedly the original of the villainous character to H. R. Wakefield’s “He Cometh & He Passeth By.”
–H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 6 Mar 1935, LWP 414

Petaja apparently pursued the subject with Lovecraft, who responded at greater length, apparently still under the misconception that Crowley was in New York:

Regarding the Black Mass & its devotees—it is really even more repulsive than fascinating. The whole thing is described minutely in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ “Las Bas”—which was posthumously translated into English in 1923 & promptly suppressed. The Black Mass consisted in general of a malevolent & incredibly obscene parody on the Catholic Mass—involving public actions & natural substances almost impossible to describe in print. It originated in the Middle Ages, & has [ev]er since been secretly celebrated by groups of half-crazed, psychologically degenerate sensation-seekers—largely in the great metropolitan centres. Paris, Berlin, London, & New York are probably its greatest centres today. It seems to draw its devotees almost equally from the decadent artist class & from the general run of over-sophisticated psychopathic personalities. Aleister Crowley is a now-elderly Englishman who has dabbled in this sort of thing since his Oxford days. He is really, of course, a sort of maniac or degenerate despite his tremendous mystical scholarship. He has organised secret groups of repulsive Satanic & phallic worship in many places in Europe & Asia, & has been quietly kicked out of a dozen countries. Sooner or later the U.S. (he is now [in] N.Y.) will probably deport him—which will be bad luck for him, since England will probably put him in jail when he is sent home. T. Everett Harré—whom I have met & whom Long knows well—has seen quite a bit of Crowley, & thinks he is about the most loathsome & sinister skunk at large. And when a Rabelaisian soul like Harré (who is never sober!) thinks that of anybody, the person must be a pretty bad egg indeed! Crowley is the compiler of the fairly well-known “Oxford Book of Mystical Verse”, & a standard writer on occult subjects. The story of Wakefield’s which brings him in (under another name, of course) is in the collection “They Return at Evening”, which I’ll lend you if you like.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 5 Apr 1935, LWP 420-421

The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1918) was compiled by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee; but the book contains three poems by Crowley. The reference to “phallic worship” suggests that Harré may have confided something to Lovecraft about Crowley’s practice of sex magick, but this is as close as Lovecraft would ever come to mentioning the subject. Lovecraft apparently lent Petaja a cutting about Crowley:

Keep the review of the O’Donnell book—& here’s another from the Times. I’d like to see the Crowley one again—though there’s no hurry.
– H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 31 May 1935, LWP 433

Elliott O’Donnell was a well-known collector of ghost and haunted house stories.

As it turned out, Lovecraft wasn’t the only one who knew someone that knew Crowley:

Conversation with one who has known the fabulous Aleister Crowley must surely have been interesting! I’ve seen several articles on this curious & repulsive entity, & am familiar with the portrayal in “He Cometh & He Passeth By”—though I have not read Maugham’s “Magician.” One other side-light comes from the amiable & picturesque source T. Everett Harré—editor of “Beware After Dark.” Harré has met Crowley; & although himself something of a specialist in corpological diction & anecdote, avers that the Hellish Archimage actually sickened him with the tone & subject-matter of his conversation. And anything or anybody capable of sickening the hard-boiled & perpetually pickled T. Everett must be—in the language of Friend Koenig—pretty strong meat! Crowley is evidently a tragic example of diseased & degenerate development in certain lines. Whether such a mass of psychological putrescence ought to be allowed at large is a sociological question too tough for a layman to tackle. The answer would really depend upon just how much social effect he has. But in any case he is obviously one of those “gamey” specimens who are much pleasanter to read & speculate about than to meet! Of his genius—of a sort—there can be no doubt. I believe he is an important contributor to a standard anthology which I’ve never read—“The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse.”
–H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 25 Apr 1936, LHB 125

This is Lovecraft’s final published letter on Aleister Crowley—and it’s interesting to note that Lovecraft’s information is entirely second- or third-hand. At no point does he give any indication of having read any of Crowley’s prose or poetry, much less any of his magickal writings. To Lovecraft, Crowley was already essentially a living legend. There is no indication that any information passed between them.

Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection between Aleister Crowley and the Lovecraft Mythos.

“The Message of Thuba Mleen” (1911)

Many believe that it was a message from Thuba Mleen, the mysterious emperor of those lands, who is never seen by man, advising that Bethmoora should be left desolate.
—Lord Dunsany, “Bethmoora” in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910)

In 1911, Aleister Crowley was in France, writing prolifically as he finished the books of Thelema, a considerable body of poetry, and the occasional review. One work that particularly caught his imagination was A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) by Lord Dunsany. This was the fourth collection of Dunsany’s fantasies, and a strong influence on H. P. Lovecraft. Crowley was inspired by the book to write a review titled “The Big Stick,” published in his own magazine The Equinox in 1911. Appended to the review is Crowley’s poem “The Message of Thuba Mleen.”

The Message of Thuba Mleen

I.

Far beyond Utnar Véhi, far beyond
The Hills of Hap,
Sits the great Emperor crowned with diamond,
Twitching the rosary in his lap—
The rosary whose every bead well-conned
With sleek unblinking bliss
Was once the eyeball of an unborn child of his.

II.

He drank the smell of living blood, that hissed
On flame-white steel.
He tittered while his mother’s limbs were kissed
By the fish-hooks on the Wheel
That shredded soul and shape, more fine than mist
Is torn by the bleak wind
That blows from Kragua and the unknown lands behind

III.

As the last flesh was flicked, he wearied; slaves
From bright Bethmoora
Sprang forward with carved bowls whose crimson craves
Green wine of hashish, black wine of datura,
Like the Yann’s earlier and its latter waves!
These wines soothed well the spleen
Of the Desert‘s bastard brother Thuba Mleen.

IV.

He drank, and eyed the slaves “Mwass, Dagricho, Xu-Xulgulura,
Saddle your mules!” he whispered, “ride full slow
Unto Bethmoora
And bid the people of the city know
That that most ancient snake,
The Crone of Utnar Véhi, is awake.”

V.

Thus twisted he his dagger in the hearts
Of those two slaves
That bore him wine ; for they knew well the arts
Of Utnar Véhi—what the grey Crone craves!—
Knew how their kindred in the vines and marts
Of bright Bethmoora, thus accurst,
Would rush to the mercy of the Desert’s thirst.

VI.

I would that Māna-Yood-Sushāī would lean
And listen, and hear
The tittering, thin-bearded, epicene.
Dwarf, fringed with fear,
Of the Desert’s bastard brother Thuba Mleen!
For He would wake, and scream
Aloud the Word to annihilate the dream

Thuba Mleen appeared in two of the stories in A Dreamer’s Tales: “Bethmoora” and “The Hashish Man.” Lovecraft never used the mysterious emperor directly, but Bethmoora appeared in a long list of names and places:

I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum—and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931)

So it was that Crowley and Lovecraft shared at least one influence; and in Lord Dunsany they both found inspiration, and they both created new works that tied into his dreamer’s tales—and by extension, because they were both building off Dunsany’s Dreamlands, so did their own dreams touch, or were in communion, all unknowing. “The Message of Thuba Mleen” stand easily with any of the other dream cycle stories and verses inspired by Dunsany and Lovecraft, with their strange names and dark, suggestive hints.

Many occultists looked for a common source between the two, and sought to create a shared origin for the Necronomicon and the Book of the Law; to tie Crowley to Cthulhu, and Magick to Mythos. Yet the shared Mythos was there all along, in a half-forgotten poem. The two were not tied together by any dark secret or occult truth, but by an appreciation for the great fantaisiste, Lord Dunsany.

And always will be, ’til wakes Māna-Yood-Sushāī.


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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Her Letters to August Derleth: Dorothy McIlwraith

From 1926 to January 1940, Farnsworth Wright was the editor with whom August Derleth dealt at Weird Tales. Wright had bought Derleth’s first story, and while Derleth would never have the acclaim and popularity of Seabury Quinn, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, or Edmond Hamilton, he was dependable and productive. While much of Derleth’s weird fiction consisted of workmanlike potboilers that lacked the delicacy and character development of his regional fiction, he seemed to almost always have something suitable to fill space in the Unique Magazine—and through diligence and competence, placed more work in Weird Tales than almost any other writer.

When Farnsworth Wright was fired, Dorothy McIlwraith (1891-1976) moved into the editorial chair, assisted by her secretary D. Lyn Johnson and associate editor Lamont “Monty” Buchanan. For the last fourteen years of Weird Tales‘ existence—and a little while after—August Derleth corresponded with Dorothy McIlwraith. While Wright had known Derleth as a tyro and help shape him as a pulp writer, McIlwraith would know him as a mature writer and businessman. Not just as a writer submitting stories, but as the publisher of Arkham House (who bought ad space in Weird Tales), an anthologist republishing stories from Weird Tales (which required permission to use, since Weird Tales had bought the rights), and as the unofficial agent for H. P. Lovecraft’s estate and Henry S. Whitehead.

During Dorothy McIlwraith’s tenure as editor, she published 63 stories by August Derleth, plus a couple of reviews and letters, and not counting the stories from Lovecraft and Whitehead. The file of correspondence at the Derleth archive at the Wisconsin Historical Society is relatively sparse and incomplete: 62 letters from Dorothy McIlwraith (at least one other letter exists in private hands), plus a handful of letters to Johnson and a dozen or so to Buchanan, and 3 copies of letters from Derleth to McIlwraith. Overall, about 101 pages of correspondence, which doesn’t cover nearly everything; notably there’s a massive gap between 1948 and 1954. What happened to this correspondence is unknown.

What correspondence we do have, covering 1940-1948 and 1954-1955 gives good insight into a professional working relationship between a pup editor and one of her most important writers/agents: cordial, polite, sometimes deeply insightful into Weird Tales‘ business practices, but also generally impersonal, succinct, and not afraid to reject Derleth on occasion. The first extant letter gives a good overview of the content:

Dear Mr. Derleth:

I was exceedingly glad to receive your letter of June 19th, and should like to think that we are going to see something of yours again as a possibility for WEIRD TALES. We all feel that it is unfortunate that we have had to make the magazine a bi-monthly, and we are all hoping that that condition is only temporary. Times are very difficult, of course, in the pulp paper field, and we are feeling it in every direction. We do hope to keep the magazine continuing however, on its present basis, and for better conditions before too long a time.

We plan to use “The Sandwin Compact” in the next issue which will be made up – that is, Novemeber, published September first. Meanwhile, if you have something else which you could send along for us to read, we should be very glad indeed to see it. We very definitely do not plan to make any great change in the magazine’s editorial policy, and most emphatically we do not plan to make it a horror magazine. Indeed, all our editorial selections have tended to be in the opposite direction.

Yours sincerely
WEIRD TALES
Dorothy McIlwraith
Editor
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 25 Jun 1940, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The comment on “we do not plan to make it a horror magazine” was with regard to the direction of Weird Tales. Under Farnsworth Wright, Weird Tales had published a broad range of “off-trail” stories that wouldn’t fit in most other magazines, including stories of fantasy, the supernatural, science fiction, etc.—and while there were many ghost stories and the occasional weird crime tale, the magazine was never solely dedicated to horror, and it never catered solely to the more gruesome blood-and-bones, torture-heavy fair of the shudder pulps. McIlwraith was reassuring Derleth that Weird Tales wasn’t going to lower its standards or cater to the lowest tier of pulp reader.

In truth, there were changes coming. McIlwraith had neither Farnsworth Wright’s long experience with weird fiction, nor the leeway to chase trends which Wright sometimes did to try and attract new readers. With the sudden competition that had blossomed in the field, McIlwraith found herself unable to pay for the top talent, devoid of some of the biggest names in Weird Tales (Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft), and stuck on a bi-monthly schedule which made it difficult to run serials—a three-part serial would take six months to complete.

With magazines like Famous Fantastic Mysteries focusing on reprints, Unknown on the more contemporary style of fantasy, and Astounding focusing on science fiction, McIlwraith chose to center Weird Tales on what she perceived as its core audience and focus: Edgar Allan Poe-style tales of supernatural horror and the macabre. All original, with no reprints (at least at first). She invited some of the big name authors from her other magazine, Short Story, to submit; she wrote to past authors like August Derleth asking them to submit; she sought to develop new authors like Ray Bradbury and Manly Wade Wellman—and, to give readers what they wanted, she sought to publish Lovecraft. Which meant going through Derleth.

We have been much interested in reading the Lovecraft story “The Case of Charles Dexet Ward”, and certainly agree that it belongs in WEIRD TALES. It will constitue a problem, but we feel that it is one which can be solved. First of all the question of length is to be consdiered. And will you please tell us – are there likely to be other Lovecraft unprinted stories turn up, which might lessen the value of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” as a unique feature, and also be shorter – thereby being less of a makeup problem?

To use this story it will be necessary for us to break our policy of all stories complete – which we have felt to be wise for a bi-monthly magazine – and before we go to that length we should want to feel that this was indeed “the last of the Lovecrafts”. That point out of the way, our decision is that we can use “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” on a basis of 40,000 words, in two parts – that would be at a price of $400.00. This will require some cutting but that actually will help the story – especially the early part. We should expect to use it in the May and July issues of WEIRD TALES next year. You see how difficuly it is to issue a bi-monthly!
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 8 Nov 1940, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

While the idea of cutting a Lovecraft story for length to fit might seem sacrilegious, it was business as usual in the pulp field; Farnsworth Wright was no less hesitant when dealing with Lovecraft himself, and it was Wright who began the process of buying and publishing Lovecraft stories from Derleth after Lovecraft’s death, for the aid of Lovecraft’s surviving aunt Annie Gamwell. As it happened, this was not “the last of the Lovecrafts”—not be a long shot. The unearthing of “new” material Lovecraft’s papers or old amateur journals fed into his posthumous fame, although it did mean the Weird Tales editorial team sometimes had to make excuses:

We are getting ready to use “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, and in view of the fact that we talked last time a bit about “the last of the Lovecrafts”, we are going to have to do some covering. We shall say that we “discovered” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in a rare volume, and knowing that it had never had magazine publication we decided to withould no linger from our public this H. P. L. gem. I wonder if you wouldn’t give me some notes on the story to add to this statement – which we shall make in the Eyrie? If you would give me, perhaps, some of your impressions of this particular yarn in connection with other Lovecraft’s, I think it would be a good note.
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 7 Aug 1941, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

This was not technically a lie; the 1936 Visionary Press publication of The Shadow over Innsmouth was rare enough, and few of the readers would have known the story had previously been rejected by Farnsworth Wright, in part because of its length. McIlwraith actually managed to give Lovecraft his first cover illustration for Weird Tales. Derleth, for his part, provided the spiel that McIlwraith asked for:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth has never before seen publication in any magazine, or in any general form whatever, with the exception of once having been produced in book form in a privately printed and extremely limited edition. This tale is one of the best, the most exciting of the longer tales belonging to the Cthulhu Mythology. Reference to it was made in at least two of my WEIRD TALES stories ( The Return of Hastur, Beyond the Threshold), which more than anything I can say testifies to the powerful hold it has upon the imagination of its readers. The precise place of The Shadow Over Innsmouth in the Cthulhu Mythology is not certain, but Donald [Wandrei] and I have placed it between The Whisperer in Darkness and The Shadow Out of Time. It was written before The Haunter of the Dark, The Dreams in the Witch-House, and The Thing on the Doorstep, and only At the Mountains of Madness apart from The Shadow Out of Time followed it in the Cthulhu Mythos. That means that it followed closely in sequence upon some of the most successful of Lovecraft’s stories — The Dunwich Horror, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Colour Out of Space. It is a dark, brooding story, typical of Lovecraft at his best.
Weird Tales Jan 1942

In addition to the Lovecraft stories, Derleth sold his own pulpy Mythos and non-Mythos tales. As Arkham House ran through Lovecraft material, he turned to Weird Tales—and Lovecraft’s revision clients—for further material. As Weird Tales had the habit of buying all rights to stories when it could, that often meant reprint rights would be requested through McIlwraith, who appeared happy to grant them. While asking the original author for permission was polite, it legally wasn’t necessary unless they had retained reprint rights.

I should think you would be quite safe in assuming that the authors would be willing for you to use “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” by William Lumley, “The Mound,” “The Curse of Yig,” Medusa’s Coils” [sic] by Zealia Brown Reed (Bishop)[,] “The Horror in the Museum” and “Out of the Eons” by Hazel Heald even if you don’t hear from them direct.
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 14 May 1943, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

This permission paved the way for these stories to be included in Beyond the Walls of Sleep (1943), the second Lovecraft collection from Arkham House. Not all of Derleth’s projects necessarily came to fruition, however. In one letter, McIlwraith wrote:

Inasmuch as WEIRD TALES never bought any book rights, as far as I can make out, there would be no question about your being able to use the material in a book—”The Best From Weird Tales.” Of course we still hold the copyright, but your acknowledgement would take care of that.
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 27 May 1943, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The idea of a “best of” collection of Weird Tales had been in circulation for a long time. The publishers of Weird Tales had tried it themselves with The Moon Terror & Other Stories (1927), a poor selection of tales that took over a decade to dispose of. The British Not at Night series edited by Christine Campbell Thomson did much better, and in the 1930s Weird Tales writers E. Hoffmann Price and Kirk Mashburn convinced Lovecraft, Howard, Derleth, and other writers to submit stories for a best-of anthology—Farnsworth Wright even appears to have given his blessing, but they failed to find a publisher that would take a risk on such a weird volume, and the project died.

Derleth mentioned The Best From Weird Tales in The Acoylte (Summer 1943), and described it as “20 to 30 tales representing the best from 1933 to 1943 ($3.00).” However, things didn’t work out. Wartime paper shortages, a lack of credit with the printer, some hold-up with the rights—the details aren’t available in the Derleth/McIlwraith letters. It wouldn’t be the last “Lost Arkham House” book, but it might have been the first. A glance at many of the other anthologies that Derleth had a hand in during the 1940s shows many stories from Weird Tales, perhaps the stars simply weren’t right yet for such a collection. One of the few copies of Derleth’s letters to McIlwraith preserved in the collection gives a prospective list of stories he wanted to use:

THE NIGHT WIRE, by H. F. Arnold
THE THREE MARKED PENNIES, by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
THE WOMAN OF THE WOOD, by A. Merritt
HERE LIES, by Howard Wandrei
THE SULTAN’S JEST, by E. Hoffmann Price
DEAF, DUMB, AND BLIND, by C. M. Eddy, Jr.
THE WIND THAT TRAMPS THE WORLD, by Frank Owen
THE WEIRD OF AVOOSL WUTHOQQUAN, by Clark Ashton Smith
THE HOUNDS OF TINDALOS, by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
THE SPACE EATERS, by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
IN AMUNDSEN’S TENT, by John Martin Leahy
REVELATIONS IN BLACK, by Carl Jacobi
MASQUERADE, by Henry Kuttner
THE PHANTOM FARMHOUSE, by Seabury Quinn
THE CANAL by Everil Worrell
THE TSANTSA OF PROFESSOR VON ROTHAPFEL, by Alanson Skinner
THE WAY BACK, by Paul Ernst
THE GHOSTS OF STEAMBOUT COULEE, by Arthur J. Burks
WAXWORKS, by Robert Bloch
BEETLES, by Robert Bloch
IN THE TRIANGLE, by Howard Wandrei
THE EYES OF THE PANTHER, by Howard Wandrei
WHEN THE GREEN STAR WANED, by Nictzin Dyalhis
INVADERS FROM OUTSIDE, by J. Schlossel
THE CHAIN, by H. Warner Munn
SHAMBLEAU, by C. L. Moore
THE TREADER OF THE DUST, by Clark Ashton Smith
THE THING IN THE CELLAR, by David H. Keller
—August Derleth to Dorothy McIlwraith, 3 Feb 1944, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Several stories on this list are included among Lovecraft’s list of the the best stories from Weird Tales in his letters; notably absent are any stories from Lovecraft or Derleth—presumably Derleth figured he had those permissions covered. Many of these stories would show up in future anthologies by Derleth, but not all of them; it could be that the Best From Weird Tales was effectively spread out over several anthologies, interspersed with other material.

Not every interaction resulted in permission give or a sale made. When Derleth offered his first “posthumous collaboration” with Lovecraft, The Lurker at the Threshold, to Weird Tales for serialization, McIlwraith politely balked:

I just don’t see how we could manage it for WEIRD. I don’t feel serials in an every other month magazine are good, anyway, and such long installments are out for the durations–of the paper restrictions. Too bad from our standpoint.
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 17 Jan 1945, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Over the years, the tone of the letters softens a little; “Dear Mr. Derleth” becomes “Dear August”; full signatures become replaced with a quickly scrawled “McI” or “Mac.” Yet there is always a reserve; this was business correspondence, first and foremost, and neither Derleth or McIlwraith ever raise a harsh word toward the other to spoil the relationship. On rare occasions, we get notice of some more personal sentiments and deeper insight into the philosophy of Weird Tales under McIlwraith:

Dear August:

Thank you very much for your letter of January 2nd about WEIRD. I certainly appreciated your interest and trouble in writing; also I most certainly agree with you that we do not want WEIRD to have a consistently flippant tone. We shall be careful on that score in lining up future issues.

Naturally, we have felt the magazine needs new blood from time to time, and are gratified that you agree with us that [Ray] Bradbury is a good addition to the list. [Harold] Lawlor is not such a consistent performer, but does seem popular with our readers; one thing which has always interested me is the fact that WEIRD TALES readers write us very much more frequently than those of SHORT STORIES. This holds true for the new people we are reaching in the present sellers’ market, as well as for the very vocal small body of self appointed fans.

Your friendship for the magazine is one of our most valued assets, so again thanks for your comments on the current issue.

With all best wishes for 1945, I am,

Yours sincerely,

WEIRD TALES
[Mac]
Doroth McIlwraith
Editor
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 10 Jan 1945, private collection

The November 1944 issue of Weird Tales was maybe a little more fun-oriented than most, but never reached the level flippancy of Unknown. Derleth presumably was afraid the two lead novelettes were a bit too unserious. At the other end of things, McIlwraith was still unclear about the community nature of Weird Tales fanbase—her changes to ‘The Eyrie’ distanced readers from writers and editor, and the implementation of the Weird Tales Club didn’t quite make up for the lack of direct feedback which made such a close and dedicated readership.

McIlwraith and the rest of the Weird Tales editorial team, however, was never driven by nostalgia, never backward-looking. Their vision of Weird Tales was always looking toward the future:

Miss McIlwraith and I were pleased to see the Robert E. Howard collection, “Skull Face and Others.” It is a pleasure to again read some of these yarns. One wonders, occasionally, where the Howards and Lovecrafts of the future will develop from. WEIRD TALES, of course, is always interested in new people and yet I find a story, for instance like [“]Mr George[“], just isn’t produced by the new boys but some of our old stand-bys.
—Lamont Buchanan to August Derleth, 30 Aug 1946, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The post-war years saw Weird Tales struggle on, almost to the end of the pulp era. There is a gap in the archive that covers much of this period, as Weird Tales‘ competitors dropped out one by one, and the magazine struggled to retain readers and relevance. Despite the readers’ fondness for Lovecraft, McIlwraith wasn’t willing to buy any and all of Derleth’s Cthulhu tales.

Frankly, we like this latest Cthulhu the least of all our problem material, so it would seem logical to pass it up for WEIRD TALES. In any event, we couldn’t use it till well on in next year, and that is planning too far ahead for good magazine publishing practice. We don’t feel that we should so definitely commit ourselves on your own or sponsored material that we have no chance for future flexibility.
—Dorothy McIlwraith to August Derleth, 30 Jul 1946, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Which is why there’s nearly a three-year gap between the publication of “The Watcher from the Sky” (Jul 1945) to “The Testament of Clairborne Boyd” (Mar 1949), which were the second and third parts of the “Trail of Cthulhu” series. Near the end, however, both Derleth and McIlwraith must have been willing to do what they could to shore up readership—and if that meant Lovecraft, then they would give them Lovecraft.

Dear Mac,

[…] Meanwhile, I’ve heard nothing from you about my proposal for a new series of Lovecraft-Derleth collaborations in Weird Tales. You already have THE SURVIVOR, which I hope can appear in the July or Septemeber issue. Three others are now ready—

WENTWORTH’S DAY, at 4500 words
THE GABLE WINDOW, at 7500 words
THE PEABODY HERITAGE, at 7500 words

There will be at least two more—or enough for an entire year of Weird Tales. And we might be able to turn up more thereafter, if the use of them has any noticeable effect on the sales of the magazines.

Do let me know about this as soon as you can, will you? I’ll send on the new stories whenever you’re ready for them; I’m not sending them along herwith because I’ve no assurance you want them.
—August Derleth to Dorothy McIlwraith, 24 Feb 1954, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

McIlwraith did want them. She was still looking ahead past the lean times. Yet of these stories, only “The Survivor” made it into print in Weird Tales July 1954—in what turned out to be its penultimate issue under Dorothy McIlwraith’s editorship. The Unique Magazine, which had run from almost the beginning of the pulp era to its end, finally shut its doors. As editor, and Derleth’s friend, it was McIlwraith’s sad duty to share the news:

Dear August:—

As a matter of fact, I am writing this at home, not from the office, the sad fact being that we have gone into receivership. As one of our editorial creditors, I think you will receive official notice to this effect, but am not quite sure of the procedure. It is a very sad time for us all; what the fate of the magazines—SS and WT—will be, we, of course, don’t know.

I have here: The Gable Window, The Ancestor, Wentworth’s Day, The Peabody Heritage, Hallowe’en for Mr. Faulkener * Also the Seal of R’leyh. It might be that whoever takes over WT might see the value of the Lovecraft tie-in, but I don’t know, and anyway you probably would be a better salesman than I, so let me know if I’ll return all the manuscripts. Personal mail will be forwarded.

I can’t tell you how sorry and grieved I am, so there’s no use trying—or crying.

Yours,
Mac
—Doroth McIlwraith to August Derleth, 15 Nov 1954, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Sometimes, when a pulp magazine went bankrupt, the new owners would see the potential in the company and reinvest in the magazine. That had happened with Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in 1929, and Wonder Stories in 1936. However, it was the end of the pulp era. Pulp publisher Leo Margulies would end up buying both Weird Tales and Short Stories, but any attempt at revival was far in the future. McIlwraith’s last extent letter to Derleth is just an effort to pick up the pieces:

Dear August:—

I find that no sort of notification has gone out from the Receiver’s office to any author. I am sending on to them your last letter, and suggest that you write to the company at our last address—200 West 57th street—from which all mail not addressed personally is being forwarded to the proper authorities. Such a mess, and I am so sorry.

Yours,
Mac
—Doroth McIlwraith to August Derleth, 7 Jan 1957, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

As sparse as this correspondence may seem, it highlights several key aspects of the last phase of the original run of Weird Tales—McIlwraith’s efforts to produce a quality magazine of weird fiction, some of the restrictions she faced doing that, how Derleth fed her both his own work and that of Lovecraft and others, and in turn mined Weird Tales for material for his anthologies. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, and if McIlwraith did not always buy everything that Derleth was selling, that was just part of the pulp game and Derleth seems to have taken it in stride.

Would we have a Cthulhu Mythos if Weird Tales had ended up under another editor or ceased publication in 1940? While Derleth’s pulp Mythos tales weren’t up to the best of Lovecraft, they did keep Lovecraft’s name alive in a wide-circulating print magazine in a way that Arkham House’s expensive hardbound volumes could not. It certainly seems that McIlwraith’s initial unwillingness to serialize The Lurker at the Threshold led to Derleth to put off “posthumous collaborations” for several years—until the end, when they were desperate for anything to draw readers. Ironically, Derleth ended up with a number of stories and nowhere to publish them, so that most of the posthumous collaborations first saw print in the collection The Survivor and Others (1957).

Some of the gaps in the archive are unfortunate. We know C. Hall Thompson published two Mythos stories in Weird Tales: “The Spawn of the Green Abyss” (Nov 1946) and “The Will of Claude Ashur” (Jul 1947); we know Derleth put a stop to it, probably threatening legal action. It seems unlikely Derleth could have avoided mentioning the subject to McIlwraith, but there’s no letters about it in the archive, and the correspondence that does mention the affair is from years after the fact (cf. A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos 267-268, Letters to Arkham 201).

Since most of Derleth’s correspondence remains unpublished, any hints of his correspondence with McIlwraith in his letters to others is patchy at best. Comments in his letters with Clark Ashton Smith are about typical for pulp writers and editors—praising her when she buys something, bitter when she doesn’t. At one point, Derleth wrote:

Which reminds me that I’ll give Miss McIlwraith a line pushing your work, and hope it will stimulate her out of that peculiar lethargy which inevitably marks a woman who has for most of her active adult life edited an adventure stories magazine (SHORT STORIES).
—August Derleth to Clark Ashton Smith, 27 Apr 1943, Eccentric, Impractical Devils 328

Derleth would have been hard-pressed if Smith had challenged him to name any other women editors that fit that remark. Being editor of a pulp magazine wasn’t only a man’s game, but it was rare enough for a woman—and only Dorothy McIlwraith saw Weird Tales through its last 14 years, to the bitter dregs of its first run.


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.

Earth is a Breeding Ground For Monstrous Creatures (2024) by Starbound HFY & Chikondi C

Darwinism is older than space opera. The epic scales and timelines of interstellar travel and alien worlds with their own unique forms of life gave writers and artists the opportunity to depict different evolutionary paths than life took on Earth. How different environments shaped and nurtured these extraterrestrial forms of life. From the rubber-forehead aliens of Star Trek and Star Wars to more non-humanoid lifeforms of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973).

Social Darwinism and eugenics are also older than space opera, and the idea emerged that survival-of-the-fittest and particularly challenging environments would lead to hardier organisms. The thinking went that the harsh conditions would weed out the weak and force the survivors to be toughened up. To many, this might seem self-evident: wild animals are often leaner and more ferocious than domesticated pets and farm animals; rural people who work physically demanding jobs are often stronger and physically fit than city folk working office jobs. In practice, this is a misconception: survival of the fittest doesn’t necessarily mean the strongest or the toughest, and the forces that shape an individual over their lifetime aren’t necessarily passed down to the next generation (Lamarkism).

However, the idea had legs in science fiction.

“But every report on Salusa Secundus says S.S. is a hell world!”

“Undoubtedly. But if you were going to raise tough, strong, ferocious men, what environmental conditions would you impose on them?”
—Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

Earth is a diverse world with many biomes, and evolution has made plenty of weird stuff on our own planet. Some of them are harsher than others, and the same basic idea that science fiction authors applied to “hell worlds” in their space opera could also be applied (jocularly) to, say, Australia.

POSSIBLY IT WOULD BE SIMPLER IF I ASKED FOR A LIST OF THE HARMLESS CREATURES OF THE AFORESAID CONTINENT?

They waited.

IT WOULD APPEAR THAT—

“No, wait, master. Here it comes.”

Albert pointed to something white zigzagging lazily through the air. Finally Death reached up and caught the single sheet of paper.

He read it carefully and then turned it over briefly just in case anything was written on the other side.

“May I?” said Albert. Death handed him the paper.

“Some of the sheep,” Albert read aloud.
—Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent (1998)

The ideas came together online in a series of Tumbr posts in 2016 in a thread titled “Humans Are Weird,” which started out with unusual traits of human beings as a species and then transitioned to Earth is Australia. The basic idea is a Star Trek or Star Wars-style universe with multiple intelligent, technologically advanced species, and they come across Earth…and compared to the rest of the inhabitable planets in the universe, Earth is a deathworld.

Which would make humans, as those who survive and thrive on said deathworld, incomparably awesome compared to the rest of the galaxy.

The idea has legs, and has inspired several memes, microfiction on social media sites, fanart, and entire novels and audiobooks. Variations and spinoffs include “Humans Are Space Orcs,” “Space Australia,” and “HFY” (Humanity, Fuck Yeah!). While initially light-hearted and at least mildly grounded in real-world science, as the ideas have developed and spread different themes have emerged—often involving environmentalism, military conflicts, morality, ethics, and above all human ingenuity and determination. Strong insirpirations from military science fiction are evident, with humans often being depicted with unshakeable resolve, peaceful unless provoked, relentless when provoked, and alternately surprisingly passionate or unstoppable horrors depending on the tone of the story.

Enterprising creators are commercializing these themes; one such endeavor is Starbound HFY, which might be most politely described as a fiction factory. Writers are solicited to submit stories that meet certain guidelines, get paid for their work; the stories are then read by voice actors, who are also paid; and the resulting audiobooks are posted online, usually accompanied by AI-generated artwork to lend some visual clutter to the production.

The use of generative AI has led to speculation about whether the audio productions use AI-generated text or are read by AI, or whether they plagiarize the stories of other creators. Part of the problem is that the titles for the stories are very clickbait-y, authors are rarely credited (although this has been getting better lately), and the voice actors who read the stories are often completely uncredited, although they usually appear at the beginning of the videos to confirm that yes, real human beings were involved in this production (though it appears they might have used narration software on the early videos). Competition in the field for clicks and views has led to a lot of imitation; how often this results in actual plagiarism or bots scraping content and repackaging it on different channels isn’t clear.

The whole process reminds me weirdly of the ultra-competitive nature of science fiction pulp magazines circa 1940, when there was an explosion of titles on the stands, all competing for the same dimes and quarters, often using the same writers or riffing on the same themes. Robots, bug-eyed aliens, women in distress, etc. were the order of the day. In the 2020s, the HFY-themes tend toward militarism, cultural exchange, and an elevated sense of how badass and cool humans are. In that respect, it reminds me of the men’s adventure fiction magazines of the 1950s. The emphasis on human strength, durability, and ingenuity over extraterrestrials—and the humans almost always being well-meaning, peaceful unless provoked, and utterly terrifying when not—tends to put human failings and weaknesses in the past tense, as cultural traits that have been overcome.

To be fair, this isn’t exactly a new idea. Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars that began in 1966 and David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers in 1979 was almost exactly this kind of quasi-hard-sci fi where humanity turns out to be very good at war and is surprisingly effective against alien species when conflict breaks out. Unlike those works, humans are usually depicted in HFY stories as possessing innate advantages thanks to evolving on a deathworld, including greater strength, ability to sustain and heal injuries, and quick reflexes—although sometimes the ability to metabolize oxygen and liquid water or exist at room temperature is enough to impress some alien species.

Starbound HFY publishes both stand-alone stories and has multiple separate canons which follow a particular setting or characters. On 1 August 2024, they published Earth Is A Breeding Ground For Monstrous Creatures—which is not to be mistaken for Earth is a Breeding Ground For Fearsome Creatures (12 Aug 2024, Galaxy’s Sci-Fi Story) or Earth is a Breeding Ground For Monstrous Creatures (23 Nov 2024, HFY Sci-Fi Story)—which is an interesting departure from the norm as it is a crossover between HFY and the Cthulhu Mythos.

The story itself is very much Delta Green or the SCP Foundation in a space opera setting. The HFY setting elements are a balance between popular conceptions of the Mythos (e.g. looking at a shoggoth or other Mythos entity drives someone insane). There very little taken directly from Lovecraft in the script compared to other Mythos-inflected space operas like the Boojumverse series by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette (“Boojum” (2008), “Mongoose” (2009), “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” (2012)) or La Planète aux Cauchemars (2019) by Mathieu Sapin & Patrick Pion, but the emphasis of the danger and difficulty of dealing with the Mythos does balance out the “humans are awesome” elements a little bit, which can get ludicrous at times.

A large part of the effectiveness for the audio narration is due to the voice actor, Chikondi C, who does an admirable job of trying to render R’lyehian as well as the different voices of the characters and the over all narration. The emphasis and emotion that come through in his reading goes a long way to bring alive a competent story. I highly doubt that the prose story by itself would be nearly as effective without Chikondi’s careful and clear narration and effective emoting.

“Earth is a Breeding Ground For Monstrous Creatures” (2024) is, effectively, a contemporary pulp story. In an era when print magazines are increasingly less relevant in the fiction publishing landscape, the edge of popular publishing has moved online, into spaces like Tumblr, Reddit, TikTok, and Youtube. Listen to it like that and you might know what it was like, back in the 40s or 50s, when a sci fi fan picked a magazine off the rack of the local newsstand, never know what might be a silly potboiler with bug-eyed aliens—or an early work by a writer destined to be a big name in science fiction in the future.

Update (15 Jan 2025): As of this writing the StarboundHFY Youtube channel has been removed and their content banned from the r/HFY subreddit following claims of stealing content, using generative AI when they claimed they weren’t, and basically unethically content farming. When or if it ever returns is ever unknown.


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.

“Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” (2024) by Molly Tanzer

“You have succeeded today;” it said, “but you have lost yourself, Jirel, once of Joiry.[“]
—Molly Tanzer, “Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #3

Jirel of Joiry appeared in Weird Tales with “Black God’s Kiss” (1934) by C. L. Moore. That style of story had no name yet, and very few peers to compare it to. Readers immediately saw in Jirel a warrior akin to Conan the Cimmerian and Kull of Atlantis, embattled against wizards and stranger foes that blended adventure and horror, might thews and magic, swords and sorcery.

As a consequence, the initial spate of adventures from C. L. Moore’s typewriter were a bit raw. There was little continuity and less worldbuilding. Jirel herself was a boldly sketched character, and her personal trials shaped her development—yet Moore never tried to portray her at different ages as Robert E. Howard had done with Conan, never sought to reconcile her fantastic France with the real world, and the adventures she went on were the definition of episodic. Where readers could look forward to Conan as a king and know he spent a varied career as a thief, pirate, and mercenary soldier, Jirel was little different in her last adventure than she was at her first.

Jirel of Joiry had no destiny, no future, almost no past to speak of.

So when Molly Tanzer received permission from C. L. Moore’s heirs to do a new authorized Jirel story, she had some decisions to make. Ninety years of steady development has refined heroic fantasy fiction far from its roots in pulp fiction. There have probably been a hundred stories about mystic Mirrors of Truth, not least because Robert E. Howard had a go at the idea with “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” (1929), and the pages of at least ten thousand paperback novels is stained with the blood of cunning wizards and magical gewgaws who learned, far too late, what the tip of the blade feels like as it cleaves their liver (or black heart, or festering brain, etc.) in two.

In this respect, “Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” reads like a fairly competent and well-written sword & sorcery story in a fairly old-school mode. If the heroine wasn’t Jirel, readers would still have no doubt that Jirel’s literary DNA was in the mix, much as most barbarians in fiction have a little bit of Howard’s Cimmerian in them. If it lacks something of the raw and sensual language of C. L. Moore, that’s because Tanzer is a smart enough writer not to fall in the trap of trying to pastiche Moore’s prose style. Better, it shows a solid understanding of one of Moore’s central themes: the Jirel stories are always about a contest of spirit as much (or more) than flesh.

It doesn’t take much genre savviness to glance at the title and decide the question will emerge, sooner or later, “Who is Jirel of Joiry?” The answer, however, might surprise a few folks. Molly Tanzer doesn’t regurgitate bits of old Moore stories, though she draws on elements of them; she illustrates who Jirel is through her actions and interactions with others, especially her new companion, Thevin Galois. Less a girlfriend and more than a sidekick, Thevin is a kind of Enkidu to Jirel’s Gilgamesh; the two are alike, but they complement each other. Perhaps they reflect one another’s strengths and weaknesses, their potentialities. Thevin is what Jirel might have been; Jirel is what Thevin might yet be.

When it came to amorous matters, Thevin preferred the company of women, and did not give much notice to men’s attentions.
—Molly Tanzer, “Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #3

Tanzer likes LGBTQ+ characters in her stories, and in this respect Thevin as a lesbian works well. Her sexuality is stated, there’s a hint of tension and attraction with Jirel, but this isn’t Thirsty Sword Lesbians or Dagger Kiss where the question is whether they’ll kiss. If anything, it’s nice to just see the representation of a character where their sexuality is relevant to their character but not the main focus of the story or present just to fulfill a lurid scene or two—there is actual porn out there for folks that want erotic tales of lesbian swordswoman. Tanzer is focused on telling Jirel’s story.

For readers who start with “Black God’s Kiss” and read through the whole C. L. Moore-penned Jirel of Joiry saga to “Hellsgarde” (1939), “Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” might be a bit of a jolt in style. There’s a bit more of Michael Moorcock and Joanna Russ in the style than Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore. Yet it is a well-written story, and a cut above the pastiche of yesteryear. With a little luck, Jirel’s new adventures may have just begun.

“Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” by Molly Tanzer was published in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #3 (Summer 2024).


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.