“The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” (1946) by John Wilstach

[…] I happen to have published, as long ago as in the January, 1946, issue of Esquire, the first article about Lovecraft to appear in a general magazine. It was by John Wilstach, called “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower,” and this is how it began:

“Enthusiasts for the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft have become a literary cult. Highbrow critics pay tribute to him as a writer of horror tales. His devotees insist that his place is in a niche beside that of Edgar Allan Poe. Collectors scramble for his first editions. Yet, to one who has known literary booms and their nourishing, it is amazing that nothing has been done to acquaint the public with the personality of a man who was one of the most fantastic literary figures of modern times.”
Arnold Gingrich, “The greatest character H. P. Lovecraft ever created” in the Chicago Times, 2 Feb 1975

How do we know what we think we know about H. P. Lovecraft? Over the decades since Lovecraft’s death, many works have been published about Lovecraft—memoirs, recollections, biographies—and a great deal of his personal correspondence, autobiographical essays, and photographs. Diligent researchers have scoured archives for marriage certificates, wills, draft cards, city directories, and brief mentions in newspapers and amateur journals. The mass of data can be intimidating, difficult to sift through, and perhaps most especially interrogate.

When it comes to memoirs of Lovecraft, it can be especially difficult to sort out the veracity of various claims. Memories are tricky things, and can be skewed by age, distance, and emotion. Many of the recollections of Lovecraft contain matter which seems to be erroneous; not so much deliberately misleading as incomplete. Dates don’t line up, incidents don’t quite match with other accounts, and misunderstandings abound. These are typical problems in evaluating historical evidence…but there is an added wrinkle.

From the beginning, Lovecraft memoirs and biographies have been referential. So when W. Paul Cook wrote “In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft—Recollections, Appreciations, Estimates” (1941), he included quotes from an amateur journalism piece on Lovecraft from 1919; when Winfield Townley Scott wrote the biographical essay “His Own Most Fantastic Creation” (1944), he drew material from Cook’s “In Memoriam”; when Sonia H. Davis wrote The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft, she specifically spoke to several points in Cook’s memoir—and that’s one chain of references where the later author acknowledges drawing on the former. There are many works that borrow from other essays and memoirs on Lovecraft without acknowledgment so that you can have a number of works that have a superficial agreement—but might all be repeating the same legends and false information.

So how do you pick out fact from fiction in a Lovecraft memoir? Generally, the first task is to cross-reference the persons and events in the memoir with Lovecraft’s letters and, if possible, other sources to fix the dates and verify the contents as much as possible. There is a bit of a contradiction involved in this: if a memoir agreed 100% with all existing sources without any disagreement, it would be very easy to verify—but it wouldn’t be very useful, as there would be no information in there that wasn’t in other sources. What readers and scholars both like is new information, new data, some unique insight into Lovecraft’s life to add to our store of knowledge.

From this standpoint, “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” (1946) by John Wilstach seems at first promising: while Wilstach makes a number of errors about Lovecraft’s life and work (not uncommon in the memoirs), many details ring at least somewhat true (or at least familiar), and it contains some material not included anywhere else, including details of a meeting with Lovecraft and the gay poet Hart Crane in New York c.1925.

As background: John H. Wilstach (1890-1951) was a novelist and fairly prolific pulp-writer. He had some association with amateur journalism, publishing material in Driftwind and The Ghost, but he was mostly published in the Argosy, Top-Notch, and associated pulp magazines. His article “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” in Esquire was a very rare appearance in a “slick” magazine.

The first problem comes when trying to cross-reference dates and persons. Lovecraft and Crane did meet a couple of times, first in Cleveland in 1922 and later in New York City in 1924 and 1925. However, in no published letter does Lovecraft ever mention John Wilstach, nor is such a meeting with Crane and an unnamed third individual mentioned in Lovecraft’s diary for the period. For that matter, the published letters of Hart Crane, with their brief references to Lovecraft, don’t mention John Wilstach either. This individual, who claimed to be Lovecraft’s friend and to have met him several times in New York and Providence, RI, would appear to have fallen completely through the gaps in Lovecraft and Crane’s correspondence.

By itself, that might not be suspicious; Lovecraft’s correspondence for the New York period is not complete, and his meetings with Crane are not all well-recorded from either side. It is not inconceivable that there could be a meeting between Lovecraft, Crane, and a third man that both Lovecraft and Crane failed to record. In point of fact, there is another memoir that includes just such a meeting: Frank Belknap Long, Jr.’s “Some Random Memories of H. P. L.” published in Marginalia (1944), less than two years before Wilstach’s article. This brings us to the next problem.

Long’s memoir recounts a meeting between Lovecraft, Crane, Samuel Loveman, and himself on the street in New York in “the second year of [Lovecraft’s] New York phase”—Lovecraft had come to New York and married Sonia H. Greene at the beginning of March 1924, so the meeting would be post-March 1925. Long wrote:

Howard had never seemed more depressed—he was writing such lines as these: “My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration I found only a sense of horror and oppression. Instead of the poems I had hoped for there came only a shuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness.”
Frank Belknap Long, Jr., “Some Random Memories of H. P. L.” in Marginalia 335

The lines are part of the opening of Lovecraft’s story “He,” which was begun in August 1925, in general agreement with when Long says the meeting took place. In “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower,” Wilstach wrote:

“Hart drew a battered manuscript from his pocket and I began reading:

“My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets…in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze and annihilate me. . . .”

“Kinda turgid prose,” I waved my hand to stop him.
John Wilstach, “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” in Esquire Jan 1946, 83

What are the odds that Lovecraft and Hart Crane had not one but two otherwise unrecorded encounters, and that both of them would quote from the opening paragraphs to “He?” At this point, a scholar might be suspicious. Testing those suspicions would require comparing the content of “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” against the other sources available in 1946 when the piece was published. For the most part, this would mean Cook’s essay “In Memoriam” (1941), the first three Arkham House books regarding Lovecraft (The Outsider and Others (1939), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943), and Marginialia (1945)), the slim chapbook Rhode Island on Lovecraft (1945), August Derleth’s H. P. L.: A Memoir (1945), and some scattered essays, critical reviews, and articles, some of which were collected in Marginalia, such as the early version of Winfield Townley Scott’s biographical essay “His Own Most Fantastic Creation.” Crane’s letters mentioning Lovecraft would not be published until some years later.

As it turns out, most of the content in “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” could have been sourced directly from these existing sources; a copy of “In Memoriam” and Marginalia would have supplied nearly every “fact” (and much of the speculation) in Wilstach’s piece. Cook had not mentioned Hart Crane, but like Long he quoted from “He” to illustrate Lovecraft’s despair at the city he had come to detest. Wilstach acknowledged Cook in a way when he wrote:

W. Paul Cook tells me that Lovecraft made three poetry reputations with his rewrite method.

Unlike many Lovecraft enthusiasts, Cook insisted that, though his friend was a genius, one stout volume of stories, and another of letters, will provide his lasting work.

“Lovecraft has been compared to all the great masters of the macabre from Poet to James,” says Cook. “Only in spots can be found basis for comparison. A hint here and there of Poe—perhaps. A sign of Dunsany—possibly. Lovecraft identified his own influences as Dunsany, Poe, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood, rather than to Montague Rhode James. If we mention Machen and Blackwood we have about exhausted any color he may have unconsciously acquired from others. Since his advent, weird fiction has owed more to Lovecraft than Lovecraft owed to all the body of preceding writers.

“A friend once suggested the he stimulate dreams by means of drugs. Lovecraft exclaimed that if drugs would give him any worse dreams than he experienced without them, he would go mad. His dreams were his own It is unfair to call him equal to Poe, greater than Poe, or lacking in certain Poe qualities. Better, consider him as standing alone.”

That standing alone, for our friend, sounds very fair. And to judge him at all one must judge him as a writer, since he never was anything else. He never held any kind of a job, nor had the slightest inclination for any sport.
John Wilstach, “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” in Esquire Jan 1946, 160, 162

There is a bit of disingenuousness to this: while Wilstach is portraying this as something Cook told him personally, he is actually quoting directly from “In Memoriam” in the two middle paragraphs, and paraphrasing from there elsewhere. However, Cook and Wilstach were actually acquainted: Wilstach has an article in Cook’s amateur journals The Ghost #3 (May 1945) and #5 (Jul 1947). While neither article is about Lovecraft, their very presence confirms that the two men must have shared at least a correspondence. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that Cook himself was the source of the copy of “In Memoriam” that Wilstach must have had when writing “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower.”

If a reader were to subtract from Wilstach’s memoir all the material that was directly attributable to Cook or a copy of Marginalia, the remaining details are few and rather weak. For example:

I learned that he had worked and roamed all night, slept since dawn, and had just breakfasted upon an orange.
John Wilstach, “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” in Esquire Jan 1946, 83

Lovecraft walking the streets of New York late at night, returning early in the morning, and sleeping late into the day are all believable; many letters support this behavior, and Cook and others commented on it. However, Lovecraft breaking his fast on an orange is unusual. While there are references to him consuming grapefruit when in Florida, citrus does not appear to have been a regular part of Lovecraft’s diet. One letter from his New York period shows how rare a treat fruit was to him:

[Sonia H. Lovecraft] left a lot of provisions here last week, including a lemon—so tonight I have been emulating W. V. Phillips in his vespertine glass of the citrick beverage.
H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 22 Oct 1925, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.457

Other little details face similar scrutiny. The errors become more glaring. The words Wilstach attributes to Lovecraft become less and less believable, even granting that twenty years had passed since they were set down. For example, during the apocryphal meeting with Crane, Wilstach wrote:

Crane muttered that I might tell something about the market.

“What have you been aiming at?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Hart thinks my scripts should be typewritten.”

Well, it was unbelievable–he was actually, in person, the amateur who brought a manuscript rolled up, in handwriting, and tied with a string–and called back to find it still tied with the same string. Of course he had sought out the offices of Harper’s, Century, Scribner’s, while any tyro would know that his own chances were at the Munsey or Street & Smith’s fiction chains.
John Wilstach, “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” in Esquire Jan 1946, 83

It is unbelievable—because we know that while Lovecraft hated typing, he had learned after his first submissions of longhand manuscripts to editor Edwin Baird of Weird Tales that manuscripts had to be typed. Sonia H. Davis in her memoir of their marriage recalls how their honeymoon was spent in part with her reading out his manuscript for “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” as Lovecraft laboriously typed it out on a rented machine. Wilstach’s repeated claim that Lovecraft never typed is patently not true—but is it the case of bad information, misremembering, or something worse?

Did John Wilstach just make it all up?

Many magazines were published in the month before the cover date; newspaper journalists appeared to accept Wilstach’s piece at face value. Contemporary fans too appear to largely accept Wilstach’s article as accurate, with one writing:

In the few pages of the article he paints a very good word picture of Lovecraft as he knew him.
Jay Edwards, “Lovecraftiana” in Lethe #9 (Sep 1948)

Lovecraft’s surviving friends were less kind:

Winfield Townley Scott was fairly blunt:

*Providence Sunday Journal*, 17 Feb 1946

J. C. Henneberger wrote to Esquire saying the piece was flawed, and his letter was published in the March 1946 issue; Wilstach responded with a rebuttal in the June 1946 issue, which failed to correct any issues but cited W. Paul Cook’s piece on Lovecraft in The Ghost.

Time, no doubt, exposed more of the obvious flaws in Wilstach’s Esquire article to fans and would-be scholars alike. Lovecraft’s friend Robert Bloch would write:

My friend, the late John Wilstach, may or may not have met H.P.L. in the flesh; for the purposes of auctorial authority he laid claim to having done so in New York, during the Twenties, and penned an article for Esquire magazine, some years after H.P.L.’s death, entitled The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower.

I corresponded with Wilstach for some time before his own passing, and I can attest that his personal admiration for Lovecraft was unbounded. Nevertheless, he knowingly added his bit to the growing accumulation of Lovecraftiana which emphasizes only the legendary aspect, the “fantastic creation” rather than the whole man.
Robert Bloch, “Out of the Ivory Tower” in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959) 173

S. T. Joshi in H. P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography minces no words and simply calls Wilstach’s “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” fictitious. This makes a certain amount of sense: unlike “The Day He Met Lovecraft” (1972) by Lew Shaw, Wilstach was presumably paid for the article, and Esquire was a prominent enough market that publishing in it could raise a writer’s profile. There was a potential incentive for Wilstach to invent meetings and a friendship that maybe never took place.

When taken all together—the obvious errors, the borrowing from Cook, the absence of Wilstach from Lovecraft and Crane’s letters, the bits that just don’t line up—”The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” is ultimately a poor source. Too much doesn’t fit with other facts from Lovecraft’s life, too much feels like a fictional narrative. Not useful to Lovecraft scholars or particularly interesting for fans today. The value of “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower,” if any, is largely historiographical: this was a step toward a deeper understanding of and wider interest in Lovecraft and his work. While it might be a false step, how many thousands of readers encountered Lovecraft through this article in Esquire? Read about it in newspapers and fanzines? How many lives did Wilstach touch with this one piece?

Even though a memoir may sink out of sight and out of mind, in its passage it has left a mark on the world.

The January 1946 issue of Esquire containing “The Ten-Cent Ivory Tower” may be read for free online.

Thanks and appreciation to Dave Goudsward for his help and sanity check.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

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Her Letters To Lovecraft: Kathleen Compere Hughes

Kathleen Compere was born in Dublin, Texas on 20 June 1904, a middle daughter in large family headed by Baptist minister Edward L. Compere. She graduated high school; newspaper accounts say she attended the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, TX, and graduated from Baylor College. In 1927, Kathleen married Herald Hall Hughes, becoming Mrs. H. H. Hughes—the name by which she would sign herself in letters to Weird Tales and to Lovecraft. By 1936, the Hughes were living in Lawton, Oklahoma, with their sons Harold (age 8) and William (“Billy,” age 4). Somewhere during that bare sketch of a life, she had gained an appreciation for weird fiction:

Weird Tales has been reprinting “classics” of weird fiction and stories from earlier issues since 1928, a practice sometimes clamored for by fans who had no access to earlier issues, and sometimes derided by fans who wanted new material, not just reprints. Farnsworth Wright was no doubt glad to have a fan asking for such reprints. Presumably, it was Wright that put Kathleen Compere Hughes in touch with H. P. Lovecraft, probably forwarding a letter as he did with other fans wanting to get in touch with him.

We have scanty evidence for the actual correspondence between the two of them, one abridged letter tentatively dated c. October 1936 was copied into the Arkham House Transcripts, though the physical letter it was copied from was presumably returned and is not known to be extant. A second letter, dated 6 April 1937, survives among his papers at the Brown University Library. Sent after Lovecraft’s death and addressed “Dear Friend,” it isn’t clear if this is a letter to Lovecraft at all, although circumstantial evidence within the letter itself suggests it may be.

Taking all these facts together suggests that the correspondence of Kathleen Hughes and H. P. Lovecraft was notably brief and rather self-contained. There are no references to Mrs. Hughes by name in any of Lovecraft’s other published letters, nor is her address included in the list of his correspondents in his 1937 diary. This would not be unusual for a relatively new and minor correspondent for which there might be long gaps between letters.

Lovecraft’s letter to Hughes is published in Miscellaneous Letters, and begins much like some of his other letters to fans disabusing them of certain popular notions:

About these books on Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu—I regret to say that they all belong in the domain of charlatanry, semi-charlatanry, and self-delusion. There is absolutely no basis in fact for any of the assumptions they purvey—while on the other hand there is overhwelming evidence that none of the favulous “Vanished contiennts” ever existed since the appearance of mankind on the earth.
H. P. Lovecraft to Mrs. H. H. Hughes, c. Oct 1936, Miscellaneous Letters 369

In very typical Lovecraftian fact, this turns into a kind of mini-essay taking a materialist stance against lost continents and pre-human civilizations. Switching gears, Lovecraft then discusses travel, especially in Massachusetts (“Cape Cod is a bit overdone by tourists, and has always seemed to me somewhat overrated.” ibid 370-371), apparently in answer to a desire Hughes expressed to visit Newburyport, one of Lovecraft’s favorite towns (and, he mentions, an inspiration for “The Shadow over Innsmouth”) to which she had some family connection. He then does the typical explanation of the unreality of the Mythos:

As for the “hellish and forbidden volumes” mentioned by various Mu writers—the monstrous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the portentous Book of Eibon, the shocking Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermiss Mysteriis, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Eltdown Shards, the unmentionable Ghorl Nigral, etc. etc.—they are all purely imaginary, like some of the “terrible tomes” mentioned in Poe, Bierce, Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson, etc.
H. P. Lovecraft to Mrs. H. H. Hughes, c. Oct 1936, Miscellaneous Letters 372

A typical answer to a typical fan question. The most interesting part of the letter is the last paragraph, however, which ends:

Incidentally I’m enclosing something about my writing methods which I prepared at the request of one of the young “fan magazine” editors. Please return it some time—for I’m not sure when the printed version will appear. About those snaps of “the gang”—I’ll lend them as soon as Finlay returns them. I don’t like to hurry him up, since he’s been ill.
H. P. Lovecraft to Mrs. H. H. Hughes, c. Oct 1936, Miscellaneous Letters 373

The reference to Weird Tales artist Virgil Finlay helps date the letter to Hughes; in his letters to Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft mentions getting a letter from Finlay in September 1936 (DS 651), and in a letter to Willis Conover, Jr. dated 31 Jan 1937 is a reference to Finlay returning pictures (LRB 416). That helps give a period in which Lovecraft must have sent Hughes this letter. The reference to an enclosure is interesting because it ties in with the April 1937 letter from Hughes:

While there’s no direct evidence that this was a letter from Hughes to Lovecraft, returning manuscripts jives with Lovecraft’s known generosity in lending out copies of his stories. Elsewhere in the same letter she asks for details on books on the continent of Mu, echoing the opening passages of Lovecraft’s letter.

Without more evidence, it’s impossible to say for sure. If she did send this letter to Lovecraft or to someone else within the Lovecraft circle like R. H. Barlow. If Lovecraft was the intended recipient, she would not have heard of his death on 15 March 1937, which wasn’t announced in Weird Tales until the June 1937 issue. Such a gap might not be unusual if their correspondence was broken up, with a month or months between letters…and one can imagine Lovecraft’s aunt, opening the mail that came in after her nephew’s death, having to pen a brief note regarding his death. Or perhaps Kathleen Hughes saw the notice in Weird Tales first, and realized then she would no longer receive any letters from 66 College Street in Providence.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

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“Lady Chatterly’s Blowhole” (2022) by Beth W. Patterson

She was thrilled to a weird passion.
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1928)

In the 1920s and 30s in the United States of America, erotica was technically illegal—groups like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice worked hand in glove with the police and the government censors of the United States Post Office to crack down on anything that smacked of smut, from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) to Tijuana bibles, nudist magazines, or explicit works on birth control.

This did not stop the production or distribution of erotic works, but it drove it largely underground. Ambitious but shady individuals placed ads big and small in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, coding their books as works of medical or anthropological interest to skirt the laws. Pulp magazines with sex interest like Spicy Mystery and its sisters skated a thin line between being permissible or being deemed obscene and taken off newsstands and sometimes crossed it.

It took decades for the legal standards to loosen. Landmark cases like United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182 (SDNY 1933) and Grove Press, Inc. v. Christenberry, 175 F. Supp. 488 (SDNY 1959) opened the door for people in the United States to publish and possess such works as Fanny Hill (1748) without fear of the books being seized and burned, and the publishers fined and imprisoned. With the new legalization of erotic literature came availability, as old classics were reprinted openly to meet a curious demand.

The artificial restrictions on publication had helped to create a kind of erotic canon; works like The Golden Ass of Apuleius, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Leopold von Sader-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), and the anonymous The Way Of A Man With A Maid (1908) weren’t necessarily the most transgressive or well-written erotic works, but in the grey market of erotic books, certain titles had by dint of age, popularity, or literary quality stood out above the rest and became a part of the culture.

It is this loose canon that many writers continue to call back to. Pluto in Furs (2019) and Pluto in Furs 2 (2022), anthologies of weird explicit fiction, is a deliberate reference to Venus in Furs. Peter H. Cannon’s jocular short story “Asceticism and Lust: The Greatest Lovecraft Revision” (1988) imagines a collaboration between Lovecraft and Henry Miller that results in “Tropic of Cthulhu”—a tongue-firmly-in-cheek reference to Miller’s censored novels Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Lovecraftian erotica, by the way, took a few decades to really get going in no small part because of the legal restrictions outlined above. The freedom to read Ulysses also brought with it the freedom to appreciate all the further extrapolations of sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

So when a reader picks up the Nookienomicon and leafing through those austere pages reads the title of one story is “Lady Chatterly’s Blowhole” by Beth W. Patterson, there is a certain expectation that they will get the reference, even if they haven’t read the book. Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Shakespeare’s plays, a certain amount of cultural osmosis is assumed to have occurred.

The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There’s lots of good fish in the sea…maybe…but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1928)

The intention of “Lady Chatterly’s Blowhole,” however, is not to be a pornographic episode along the lines of “The Flower of Innsmouth” (2011) by Monique Poirier or an erotic paranormal romance novel like Tide of Desire (1983) by Sheena Clayton. The Nookienomicon promises “Bawdy Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,” and Patterson delivers in a double-entendre-laden comedy that is more sizzle than steak. Working in the tradition of the period works that often had to couch any eroticism in euphemism to get past the censors, this honeymoon in Innsmouth tiptoes the fine line between discussing marital relations—and Innsmouth lore—openly and hinting at it as strongly as possible.

The tone is deliberately light, and Patterson manages to hit a certain comedic line that marks the spoof rather than the farce, although it’s damn close. This is a story that could sit fairly next to “At the Mountains of Murkiness, or From Lovecraft to Leacock” (1940) by Arthur C. Clarke or the Innsmouth episode from Mark E. Rogers’ The Adventures of Samurai Cat (1984). The puns come fast, furious, and often in an unrelenting stream. To give just the barest flavor of the narrative:

[“]Such is the way of people touched by the Old Ones.”

“Touched by the Old Ones?” Fannly looked delightedly aghast. “In what way? Can you show me on a doll?”
Beth W. Patterson, “Lady Chatterly’s Blowhole” in the Nookienomicon 71

To spoof something properly, you have to love it, and there’s a lot of love on display here. Patterson doesn’t just make the obvious jokes (although the stream of sexual innuendos and nautical euphemisms is relentless), and does more than just tease eldritch revelations.

“Is it normal for men to have five of those?”

“Not human men,” replied her husband. “His trousers must fit him like a glove…darling, are you disappointed?”
Beth W. Patterson, “Lady Chatterly’s Blowhole” in the Nookienomicon 68

Aficionados of the Cthulhu Mythos will have read any number of escapes, successful or attempted, from Innsmouth that have been published over the decades, but I can fairly guarantee that they haven’t read one quite like “Lady Chatterly’s Blowhole.”

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

“In the Name of Cavities” (2021) by Rajeev Singh

Eldritch Fappenings
This review deals with works of erotica, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected passages involving sexually explicit activites will be included.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

The nature of the said delights was a mystery that was sealed off with a picture of a nude, big-breasted woman lying prone on a greenish stone slab, her butt lifted up by an imposing figure in shadows, who seemed to be wearing some kind of costume and a cape that spread out like wings. A themed orgy? It had intrigued her to no end, the goblet of her unmet desires begging to be filled with a wine she had never tasted.
Rajeev Singh, “In the Name of Cavities” in Lustcraftian Horrors (2021) 239

Lovecraftian erotica is the fiction of transgression. Folks generally don’t write about the perfectly normal sex life of Edward Pickman Derby and Asenath Waite, or the raunchy but otherwise unremarkable wet dreams of Walter Gilman and the coeds he spied in the shower. When Innsmouth and R’lyeh come into play, people expect—not unfairly—for things to get properly weird. What qualifies as “weird” depends on your starting point. How much pornography and erotic fiction have you already consumed, how many sexual encounters have you had? What exactly is left that will shock you? What boundaries do you have left to transgress?

In that respect, the quest for greater titillation parallels and can overlap the quest for knowledge that marks much of Lovecraftian fiction. Protagonists draw closer to the central mystery, led there by an insatiable curiosity. Libido sciendi, the desire to know. Jaded seekers of the ultimate thrill who stumble onto the Mythos are an entire mode of Lovecraftian erotica. In that respect, “In the Name of Cavities” is part of a literary tradition with Robert M. Price’s “A Thousand Young” (1989). Except instead of a jaded libertine seeking greater carnal desires, it’s a bored housewife answering an internet advertisement for some excitement in a sexless marriage.

Any road up, as the saying goes. Rajeev Singh’s premise and characterization work in large part because they do start out very much with the starting point of utter mundanity: the neglected housewife decides to cheat. Yet this isn’t a morality play on the consequences of adultery; by chance, Anaïs has stumbled onto something more than the Eyes Wide Shut-style party she’d maybe hoped for.

Which is an aspect of the story that Singh doesn’t dwell upon: how much contemporary media has shaped our idea of what transgressive erotica really is. When we see the BDSM playroom in From Beyond and Barbara Crampton dawns her leather apparel, the audience is supposed to recognize that as a corruption of the character, or at least an awakening of darker sexual desires than missionary position with the lights off. Real bondage play, and the communities that develop around those desires, are strange and alien by comparison to those depicted in works like Fifty Shades of Grey, dealing as they do with issues of consent, safety, and roleplay.

So how much of what Anaïs saw should she have recognized? How much should the readers have recognized? When you read a passage like:

At first, she couldn’t say for sure but yes, the business end of each arm or tentacle did resemble a hard penis. And they weren’t just showpieces, those erections. Many of the feelers were busy plunging in and out of cavities all over a woman’s body as she lay flat on a green stone slab, similiar to what Anaïs had seen on the internet, only butt-downward.
Rajeev Singh, “In the Name of Cavities” in Lustcraftian Horrors (2021) 239

Anaïs does not make the immediate connection to Japanese hentai, works like La Blue Girl or Urotsukidoji. Naughty tentacles have become a trope in some circles for so long that the shock value has largely worn off…but the idea still has legs. Readers already familiar with works like Booty Call of Cthulhu (2012) by Dalia Daudelin and “The Flower of Innsmouth” (2011) by Monique Poirier probably won’t be shocked, but they might still be appreciative of the execution. Jaded sensibilities mean there are very few erotic impossibilities that haven’t shown up somewhere, in some media, and that is reflected in the frustrated Lovecraftian sex-quest.

It is very difficult to come up with something completely new and original.

To take another example from the story, Singh’s use of “cavities” is strongly reminiscent of Graham Masterton’s short story “Sex Object” (originally published in Hottest Blood, and then adapted to comics in Verotika #7), or even of the comic series Stranger Kisses. It’s hard to point out these works as inspirations, many writers stumble upon the same ideas completely independently of one another.

As a work of Lovecraftian fiction, “In the Name of Cavities” lives in a little universe of its own, relatively self-contained…but that’s okay because the last few pages take that idea and run with it, projecting the lusty present out into a post-apocalyptic future. That extension of the idea far beyond the length of the encounter, the duration of a climax, is a pleasant surprise…and a possibility that works within a Lovecraftian premise better than it does with most other erotic works.

“In the Name of Cavities” by Rajeev Singh was published in Lustcraftian Horrors: Erotic Stories Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (2021).

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

A Short History of the LGBTQ+ Mythos

This is a brief history of Mythos fiction by and about LGBTQ+ people. “Mythos” in this context refers specifically to the artificial mythology created by H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, popularly known as the Lovecraft Mythos, and then extended by subsequent authors as the Cthulhu Mythos. To a much lesser degree, it touches on Lovecraftian fiction and cosmic horror by LGBTQ+ authors, but this is focused much more narrowly on Lovecraft, Cthulhu, & the associated Mythos.

[…] and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”

LGBTQ+ folks have existed throughout history, though changing gender and sexual norms, and shifting understanding of human biology, psychology, and sexuality, have changed how LGBTQ+ folks were historically understand and identified. H. P. Lovecraft, for example, never used the term “transgender” because it hadn’t been coined until several decades after his death, and when he used the term “queer” he meant odd, strange, or weird.

Yet even if Lovecraft didn’t have the same vocabulary to describe LGBTQ+ folks that people do today, they still existed. He met and interacted with them. LGTBQ+ folks had their part to play in his life and the development and dissemination of the Lovecraft Mythos, and after his death LGBTQ+ authors have played an increasing part in the expansion and redefining of the Cthulhu Mythos.

This brief history is primarily a quick history of the involvement of LGTBQ+ folks with the Mythos; it cannot be and does not pretend to be comprehensive, but aims to provide a quick overview of the last century and change.

Lovecraft, Homophobia, & LGBTQ+ (1914-1937)

I guess it is true that homosexuality is a rare theme for novels—partly because public attention was seldom called to it (except briefly during the Wilde period) until a decade ago, & partly because any literary use of it always incurs the peril of legal censorship. As a matter of fact—although of course I always knew that paederasty was a disgusting custom of many ancient nations—I never heard of homosexuality as an actual instinct till I was over thirty…which beats your record! It is possible, I think that this perversion occurs more frequently in some periods than in others—owing to obscure biological & psychological causes. Decadent ages—when psychology is unsettled—seem to favour it. Of course—in ancient times the extent of the practice of paederasty (as a custom which most simply accepted blindly, without any special inclination) cannot be taken as any measure of the extent of actual psychological perversion. Another thing—many nowadays overlook the fact that there are always distinctly effeminate types which are most distinctly not homosexual. I don’t know how psychology explains them, but we all know the sort of damned sissy who plays with girls & who—when he grows up—is a chronic “cake-eater”, hanging around girls, doting on dances, acquiring certain feminine mannerisms, intonations, & tastes, & yet never having even the slightest perversion of erotic inclinations.
H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 14 Aug 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 146

Homosexuality, bisexuality, transgender and queer identities were publicly, scientifically, and often legally seen as a sexual perversion and mental illness during H. P. Lovecraft’s lifetime (1890-1937), and for some time beyond that. Lovecraft’s experiences with LGBTQ+ folks reflect the social norms, taboos, and medical stigmas that were attached to any sexuality or gender identity that veered away from the heterosexual cisgender norm, and consequently the understanding of these sexualities, identities, and issues was often very poor.

In the quote above, for example, it can clearly be seen that Lovecraft was confusing sexuality and gender identity, and conflating homosexuality with pedophilia (as many bigots continue to do today). Lovecraft was raised in a culture that praised masculinity and masculine identity, and often deprecated undesirable individuals as “effeminate.” To Lovecraft, it was perfectly in keeping to assume that gay men would desire to have sex with other men because they were effectively women in men’s bodies (Uranian). This perceived deviation could be the subject of mockery, and even violence:

Have you seen that precious sissy that I met in Cleveland? Belknap says he’s hit the big town, and that he’s had some conversation with him. When I saw that marcelled what is it I don’t know whether to kiss it or kill it! It used to sit cross-legged on the floor at Elgin’s and gaze soulfully upward. It didn’t like me and Galpin—too horrid, rough and mannish for it!
H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 8 Jan 1924, Letters to James F. Morton 63

Lovecraft met relatively few individuals that were “out” during his lifetime, because individuals who weren’t closeted faced violence and/or legal persecution, as was the case of Oscar Wilde. Lovecraft is not personally known to have acted on this information beyond a few brief passages in his letters. When critics and biographers talk about Lovecraft’s homophobia, this is what they are talking about. It isn’t entirely clear if Lovecraft was even aware of the sexuality of his gay friends and colleagues, and it is worth mentioning the most prominent and important ones briefly.

Samuel Loveman (1887-1976) was a gay Jewish poet, bookman, and amateur journalist. Lovecraft stumbled across Loveman’s work in 1917 and admired his poetry, and the two began a long correspondence and friendship, with Lovecraft often praising and boosting Loveman’s work. The two finally met in 1921 in New York City, both of them invited there by Sonia H. Greene (Lovecraft’s future wife). In 1922 Lovecraft visited Loveman in Cleveland, where he met Loveman’s friend the gay poet Hart Crane (1899-1932), and others in their circle, including composer Gordon Hatfield, the “precious sissy” in the above letter. In 1924 Lovecraft and Greene eloped to New York; Loveman and Crane moved there as well, with Loveman as Lovecraft’s upstairs neighbor for a period. In time, the marriage failed, and Lovecraft moved back to Providence, RI.

Lovecraft never directly referenced Loveman’s homosexuality, and may have been ignorant of it; Loveman would go on to write “To Satan” (1923) dedicated to Lovecraft, and “To Mr. Theobald” (1926). They remained friends until Lovecraft’s death. It is also unclear if Lovecraft knew of Crane’s sexuality, although there are hints in Lovecraft’s letters that suggested he knew, and Frank Belknap Long wrote in a memoir: “Howard and the rest knew of it, but that didn’t affect their friendship with Crane” (Long Memories and Other Writings 56). Ultimately, Lovecraft and Crane were only passing acquaintances.

Amateur journalism also included several other LGBTQ+ numbers, most eminently lesbian Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986) and her gay associate Roswell George Mills (1896-1966). Gidlow and Lovecraft were presidents of rival factions of the United Amateur Press Association, and while they had little direct contact, his letters give evidence that Lovecraft was certainly aware of them and their publication of the amateur journal Les Mouches Fantastiques, which he was critical of. Whether Lovecraft was aware they were homosexuals is not clear. In any event, these too were brief contacts that had little effect on Lovecraft.

The most substantial LGBTQ+ friends Lovecraft had were August Derleth (1909-1971) and Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951). They shared a love of weird fiction and an appreciation of Weird Tales, and were regular correspondents for the rest of his life. Together, both men would have a profound impact on the life and legacy of H. P. Lovecraft, and shape Mythos fiction for decades to come.

August Derleth began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in 1926. In her biography Derleth: Hawk…and Dove (1997) by Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky made the claim that Derleth was a closeted bisexual and had carried on affairs with both men and women. The evidence to support the claim of Derleth’s sexual relationships with men is a bit scanty, but Derleth’s letters with Lovecraft (Essential Solitude) and Ramsey Campbell (Letters to Arkham) show Derleth was at least more cognizant of and conversant with homosexuality than Lovecraft.

R. H. Barlow was younger than Derleth when he began corresponding with Lovecraft in 1931. In 1934, on one of his trips to Florida, Lovecraft was invited to stay with Barlow and his family—where Lovecraft found out his friend’s true age. Lovecraft would visit the Barlows again in 1935, and young Barlow would visit Lovecraft in New York in 1935 and Providence in 1936. If Lovecraft was aware that Barlow was homosexual, he gave no hint in his letters, although Derleth appears to have suspected Barlow’s orientation since 1936.

Before his death in 1937, Lovecraft had left instructions naming the teenage Barlow his literary executor; and Barlow’s efforts to have Lovecraft’s papers deposited at Brown University’s John Hay Library preserved letters, manuscripts, and other materials that would form the core of Lovecraft scholarship to the present day. August Derleth worked with his friend Donald Wandrei to preserve Lovecraft’s literary legacy by bringing his work to print; and when major publishing houses turned them down they founded Arkham House in 1939 to publish Lovecraft’s fiction and letters. As an author, editor, publisher, biographer, and critic, Derleth worked tirelessly to promote Lovecraft’s work and promote his legend.

Given the stigma attached to LGBTQ+ issues during his lifetime, it’s no surprise that early Mythos fiction contains almost nothing directly pertaining to sexuality or gender issues during Lovecraft’s lifetime. The major exception is “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937), the last of his stories published in Weird Tales during his lifetime.

From Lovecraft to Stonewall (1937-1969)

Lovecraft met and was influenced by many people in his life, and that no doubt included more LGBTQ+ folks than just those mentioned above. Suggestions that fellow-writers and correspondents like Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932) and Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) were gay generally lack evidence, but the very fact those claims are put forward showcases an awareness of and interest—some would say an obsession—with identifying closeted homosexuals as part of the Lavender scare moral panic. Nor was Lovecraft immune from speculation about his sex life and sexuality:

His stories are sexless and one supposes the man was nearly so, all but mothered into impotency. One can say that almost all of his adult relationships were homosexual, if the word is intended in the blandest sense: there is no sign of strong sexual impulse of any kind. He was “not at ease” with women. His marriage was a mistake and a quick failure. He was disturbed by even mildly sexual writing.
Winfield Townley Scott, “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944) in Lovecraft Remembered 26

Nearly every word of that is factually incorrect, but it showcases the thinking of the time. The decades after Lovecraft’s death were not good ones in which to be LGTBQ+, as persecution and discrimination heightened after World War II. R. H. Barlow committed suicide in Mexico at the beginning of 1951; one of the possible reasons he took his own life was an attempt to blackmail him over his homosexual lifestyle. We may never know if that is true, but it emphasized the duress under which LGBTQ+ folks lived.

Derleth continued tirelessly with Arkham House. Working with Wandrei and Barlow, Derleth worked to shape Lovecraft’s literary legacy with collections of his fiction, letters, and essays, as well as memoirs about him. With Barlow’s absence or compliance on most matters related to Lovecraft and an agreement with Lovecraft’s surviving aunt, Arkham House had de facto control of the Lovecraft copyrights—and Derleth used that to bluster, sometimes threatening legal action, to squash publication of material antithetical to Lovecraft’s image (e.g. James Warren Thomas’ masters thesis H. P. Lovecraft: A Self-Portrait, 1950) and any Mythos fiction produced outside Arkham House (e.g. C. Hall Thompson’s fiction such as “The Spawn of the Green Abyss,” 1946).

Mythos fiction under Derleth’s aegis largely consisted of reprinting Lovecraft’s published and unpublished fiction, and the related Mythos fiction of his friends and colleagues such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and himself—the latter of which consisted of both original fiction and so-claimed “posthumous collaborations.” In the 1960s, Derleth began to publish more Mythos fiction from other writers, notably Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. This new generation began to bring differing attitudes of what was acceptable in horror fiction, and Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” (1969) is the first English-language Mythos story to address homosexuality.

Despite these efforts, Derleth did not have complete control of publishing, and some Mythos fiction became published outside his purview (and perhaps without his knowledge). For example, “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (1958) by Jacques Janus, published in France, revisited the gender-bending issues raised by “The Thing on the Doorstep”; and “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) by Joanna Russ is probably the first Mythos fiction written by a lesbian, although Russ was not out about her sexuality at the time. The first Mythos parody published by a gay writer might be “At the Mountains of Murkiness, or From Lovecraft to Leacock” (1940) by Arthur C. Clarke, but again, Clarke was not open about his sexuality at the time. Many fans might have been reading fiction from LGBTQ+ writers for decades and never known it, as the consequences of being outed could be severe.

So there wasn’t exactly an LGBTQ+ Mythos underground sticking it to the man in the form of August Derleth. What was happening is that a new generation of LGBTQ+ writers was coming of age and ingesting Lovecraft and Mythos fact and fiction. Paperback publication in the 1960s and a handful of film and comic book adaptations were bringing Lovecraft and the Mythos to a wider and wider audience…and in 1969 the Stonewall riots became the spark for the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

It was, in other words, increasingly okay to be gay and a Lovecraft fan.

Beyond the Derleth Mythos (1969-2015)

August Derleth died in 1971, and with his passing came a shift in Mythos publishing. The legal bluster that Derleth had used to try and exert influence over Lovecraft’s posthumous image largely died with him; and critical assessments of fiction (“The Derleth Mythos,” 1972) sparked a pushback against Derleth’s interpretation of Lovecraft and his Mythos. The fanzine and newspaper articles of yesteryear began to give way to scholarly and academic essays and hardbound books. Many of these still evinced the lavender scare hangups; in the first full Lovecraft biography, L. Sprague de Camp summarized the issue so far as HPL was concerned:

The question of Lovecraft’s sexuality has stirred much interest. Some writers have called him “sexless.” Others have surmised that he might have been a homosexual or at least a latent one. They have cited his indifference to heterosexual relationships; the lack of women in his stories, whose leading characters are often a single male narrator and one close male friend; and his many friendships with younger men, some of whom either were overt homosexuals or had tendencies in that direct.

“Latent homosexuality,” however, is a vague, slippery concept. Moreover, the charge of “latent homosexual tendencies” has become such a fad that it is leveled at almost any notable whose love life is at all unusual.
L. Sprague de Camp, H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography 189

De Camp (1907-2000), however, was of the older generation, and the newer scholars, fans, and writers attracted to the Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction were more open to new and accepting interpretations of sexuality and gender identity and fresh takes on Lovecraft and the Mythos. What’s more, without Arkham House throttling production, other publishers could publish their own Mythos fiction by new writers. While there are far too many Mythos writers during these decades to name them all, some stand out as helping to shape a more inclusive Mythos literary landscape, writers who by their work and by their lives stand out from the rest.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) became a leading postmodernist and member of the Beat Generation; his explicit writings on homosexuality shocked audiences, but also helped expand the possibilities of science fiction. The influence of Lovecraft on Burroughs can be seen in works like Cities of the Red Night (1981).

Richard A. Lupoff (1935-2020) broke ground when he wrote “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” (1977), re-interpreting an homage to Lovecraft in the form of New Wave science fiction, explicitly including the first explicit transgender and bisexual characters in Lovecraftian fiction.

Stanley C. Sargent (1950-2018) broke ground in Mythos fiction in the 90s with stories like “The Black Brat of Dunwich” (1997), offering far different readings and interpretations of Mythos classics. Stan also authored what is probably the most coherent argument for Lovecraft as a closeted homosexual in a 1997 interview with Peter A. Worthy. Whether or not readers agree, it shows how openly LGBTQ+ people could now become in discussing their lives, and how they felt their experiences were reflected in the Mythos—which had its scholarly counterpart in work like Robert M. Price’s essay “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider'” (1982).

W. H. Pugmire (1951-2019) grew up in the era of punk rock and Boy George, and became the self-declared “Queen of Eldritch Horror.” While mostly remembered today for his sensual, evocative prose, including his re-workings of familiar Mythos entities (e.g. “An Imp of Aether,”1997) and his own personal corner of Lovecraft country in the Pacific Northwest called Sesqua Valley (e.g. “Some Distant Baying Sound,” 2009), Pugmire was also influential as an editor. While a good deal of Mythos publishing in the 90s was focused on pastiche, Pugmire emphasized the importance of Lovecraft’s themes and atmosphere over his eldritch tomes and unspeakable names. He also collaborated with similar-minded writers like Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950-) with works like “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) that explored these themes.

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964-) has sometimes been called “Lovecraft’s spiritual granddaughter,” and it shows. Kiernan’s Mythos and Lovecraftian stories often feature strong female characters, including several prominent depictions of lesbians in stories such as “Paedomorphosis” (1998) “Paedomorphosis” (1998), and sometimes broaches transgender themes such as in “Pages Found Among the Effects of Miss Edith M. Teller” (2005). These people are not caricatures but realistic depictions of LGBTQ+ folks as flawed human beings, often struggling with themselves and their relationships.

Billy Martin (1967-) who wrote as Poppy Z. Brite, also pushed boundaries in the Lovecraftian milieu with stories like “His Mouth Will Taste Of Wormwood” (1990) and “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” (1998). Like Kiernan and Pugmire, they were part of a 90s generation that pushed the limits of what Lovecraftian was and could be.

Writers whose work post-2010 stand out for their inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters and themes include Jordan L. Hawk, who writes the Whyborne & Griffith series, a homosexual romantic fantasy with Lovecraftian elements begging with Widdershins (2013); Molly Tanzer whose works include “Herbert West in Love” (2012) and “In the Garden of Ibn Ghazi” (2021); Ruthanna Emrys with “The Litany of Earth” (2014) and Winter Tide (2017).

While some of the work of the above authors verged on or crossed the line into erotica, actual pornographic material has also included LGBTQ+ characters and creations, from the lurid Teenage Twins (1976) to the often-overlooked hardcore bisexual comics of John Blackburn (1939-2006) such as Dagger of Blood (1997), and Logan Kowalsky‘s (1971-) Le Pornomicon (2005). While these and other works may seem n the tawdry side, they’re important examples of the increasing acceptance of non-heterosexuality; while some folks may look on porn as exploitative of sexuality, others find freedom in being able to explore their sexuality through sex work, or just to enjoy porn that matches their interests.

In that vein, you might compare the salacious depiction lesbian characters in Mystery of the Necronomicon (黒の断章, 1999) with the more developed, conflicted gay characters in Cthulhu (2007); while the feature film obviously has more to say about LGBTQ+ folks finding their role in the Mythos, even bad representation is representation—which is more than LGTBQ+ Mythos fans got for decades after Lovecraft’s death.

Which is not to say that all depictions of LGBTQ+ folks and non-heterosexuality/cisgender identity were positive. Far from it. Homophobic and transphobic biases run deep and sometimes pop up in unexpected places, like “The Curate of Temphill” (1993) by Peter Cannon & Robert M. Price. However, the dawn of the internet has substantially widened access to information on sexuality and gender identity; communities have formed to help and support LGBTQ+ folks and connect writers, publishers, and audiences together, and social media often provides a panopticon for intolerance almost inconceivable in the past. Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband continued her abuse for years despite serious allegations, but J. K. Rowling‘s transphobia received immediate pushback on social media.

Revolution & Reimagination (2015-2022)

The Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction scene of today is profoundly different than it was even a decade ago. While intolerance and bigotry are still with us and still very real issues that LGBTQ+ folks face, the Mythos publishing environment is more open and diverse than ever before. This is in part due to a publishing revolution fueled by desktop publishing software, affordable print-on-demand technology, and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Small press publishers continued to grow and diversify in the 2010s, often using crowdfunding to raise awareness and investment in their products, including an increasingly diverse range of Mythos books. Ebooks also provide a new niche for LGBTQ+ authors, such as “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters.

The impact of this publishing shift is still being felt, but one thing that seems clear is that there is increasingly a market for more diverse Mythos fiction, and writers willing to cater to that need. In 2016, publisher Tor shifte focus on publishing a more diverse array of Mythos fiction, including Hammers on Bone (2016) by Cassandra Khaw and its follow-up A Song for Quiet (2017), The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) by Kij Johnson, and Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan. While the days of photocopied Lovecraftian fanzines may not be completely over, it’s become clear that these works are more than just a fad. It’s also increasingly become clear LGBTQ+ folks aren’t just writers and artists, but editors and publishers as well, as interviews with folks like Carrie Cuinn (Cthulhurotica), Lynne Jamneck (Dreams From the Witch House), and Erica Ciko Campbell and Desmond Rhae Harris (Starward Shadows Quarterly).

What the future holds for the LGBTQ+ Mythos is hard to say—there has been so much progress in the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights in the decades since Lovecraft’s death, and the reactionary political and cultural efforts to claw back those rights and discriminate against folks based on their sexuality or gender identity, whether they want to play a sport or transition, is a terrible ongoing challenge. Yet it helps to look back and see how far the genre has come. The Mythos has long outgrown the ignorant homophobia that Lovecraft expressed in a few of his letters, and many of the LGBTQ+ fans his works inspired have become some of the best and brightest creative voices we now have.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

Booty Call of Cthulhu (2012) by Dalia Daudelin

Joanne Lagrasse is a newly graduated college student living the life. Well, if the life is sitting in your apartment all day trying to research monsters for a novel. The strange book her favorite professor gave her is full of ramblings by what must be a mad man, which makes for uneasy reading and a loner lifestyle.

She pushes herself to go out to the beach, though the takes the tome with her. When she decides to not heed her professor’s warning and reads a chant out loud, she finds herself faced with a giant monster and its lewd tentacles, each one eager to fill her holes.
Booty Call of Cthulhu, back cover copy

Before the internet, erotic literature often left a literal paper trail. It wasn’t enough to write a story or book, if you wanted to sell it you had to advertise—small ads in appropriate adult newspapers or magazines (or, for erotic fanfiction, fanzines), mail-order catalogs or lists of other publications in the backs of books, and for particularly notable works perhaps even a published review in some suitable medium. By the early 2010s, the game had fundamentally changed: the cheap adult paperbacks of previous decades had largely fallen off with the rise of more readily-available pornography, and self-publishing became feasible thanks to print-on-demand publishing and ebooks. The internet was a great leveler, doing away with much of the traditional advertising—and with it, much of the traditional paper trail which historians and smuthounds alike relied on.

Now, scholars have to rely on search engines and internet archives, hoping for social media posts, blogposts, and the occasional interview:

ED: I see you write tentacle erotica, which has a soft spot in my heart as an anime geek. How did you get into that sub-genre?

DD: I love H. P. Lovecraft! I’ve been a member of 4chan’s /x/ for, well, probably 6 years now. That’s their paranormal board. Horror and tentacles are both very fun to write, especially when you can make them sexy.
EROTICA AUTHOR INTERVIEW: DALIA DAUDELIN, AUTHOR OF BOOTY CALL OF CTHULHU by Ellen Dominick

Booty Call of Cthulhu by Dalia Daudelin is a good example of the works of the period. Originally released as a Kindle ebook under the nom de plume Roxy Feurouge in 2012 (and as by Mia Lust on Barnes & Noble’s website), then as a thin print-on-demand softcover in 2013 (still available), the story is straightforward and geared toward specific, clearly indicated kinks: monsters, tentacles, dubious consent—and it delivers on all counts.

My jaw went slack. My mouth opened just enough for the tentacle to slide in. It went from a wool texture to something more slimy, a bit like another tongue.
Dalia Daudelin, Booty Call of Cthulhu 14

Readers hoping for an erotic re-telling of “The Call of Cthulhu” or a Cthulhu Mythos pastiche with a bit more explicit sex than usual will be sorely disappointed. While not quite Porn Without Plot, most of the twelve print pages are devoted to a detailed array of sexual acts, most involving tentacles. Comparisons with tentacle-themed Japanese adult animation like La Blue Girl fall a bit short: while the sex scenes cover much of the same material (penetrations anal, oral, and vaginal, etc.), there is quite a bit more story and character development in the Japanese manga and its anime adaptation. Booty Call of Cthulhu is written like a typical pornographic feature film, with the brief non-sexual interludes providing the set-up for the next carnal scene, with an abrupt finish after the final climax.

Short, sweet, and to the point—and when compared to similar works of the period like I Was Impregnated by Cthulhu! (2012) by Penny P. Zahn, The Tentacles of the Elder Gods (2012) by Lindsey Purl, Cthulhu’s Carresses (2013) by Amy Morrel, Uhluhtc’s Sacrifice (2013) by Grace Vilmont, I Fucked Cthulhu! (2013) by Deliah Fawkes, Cuckolded by Cthulhu (2013) by Lillian Jacobs, and Cthulhu Comes (2014) by Sandy Laws—Booty Call of Cthulhu isn’t particularly poorly written. If there’s a real criticism to be made, it’s that it is no more than it set out to be, and a much more engaging erotic narrative could have come from the same premise.

What differentiates Booty Call of Cthulhu from most of its contemporaries is that it was either popular enough or sufficiently tickled the imagination to elicit two sequels: Booty Call of Cthulhu 2 and Booty Call of Cthulhu 3 by Wren Winter—and neither of which is currently available (Wren has also written My Night With Cthulhu, which is not either of those two books under a new title).

Whether this is a licensing issue or Amazon removed the ebooks for violating one of their policies is unclear, and probably will remain so…because as with internet fanfiction, the internet’s archive is imperfect and there is no paper trail. Neither 2 or 3 ever received a hardcopy printing, at far as I’ve been able to determine, and unless you were fortunate enough to buy them during the window of opportunity they were available, those texts are essentially impossible to obtain. Should the files be corrupted or Amazon stop supporting them, they may well be lost forever.

Several of Booty Call’s contemporaries, including I Was Impregnated by Cthulhu! and Cuckolded by Cthulhu have already suffered the same fate. It’s not just that these works exist only on a handful of Kindle accounts, but unless you were aware they existed already it is exceedingly difficult to find out they ever existed. Posting an ebook to Amazon and letting the search engine handle discovery for a public apparently starved for sexually explicit Mythos-flavored content was often enough to sell a few copies…and then, for one reason or another, the ebooks were no longer sold, and there might not even be a page to point at to show where it had been for sale.

Given the ephemeral nature of pornography and the quality of the writing, few folks will lament this as a great loss to our shared cultural heritage—most erotica is treated as eminently disposable, to be enjoyed in the moment but not necessarily saved for posterity as with so many other books. Yet works like Booty Call of Cthulhu certainly represent a certain moment in time, and a literary trend which, in its perennial reflowering, means critics and fans of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos need to acknowledge two truths:

Some people want to read about having sex with Cthulhu, and a body of work has grown up to meet that demand.

The question that remains to be seen is how, if at all, these works might be preserved. It is fair to say that Booty Call of Cthulhu was not the first and will not be the last sexually explicit story about an amorous eldritch entity, but it is disturbing how easily such works can effectively fall off the face of the internet, perhaps never to be read again. Because it has a print edition, Booty Call of Cthulhu will probably linger on longer than most—and it is weird to think that in generations to come, a furtive Mythos fan may enter into a dusty bookshop and find among the dross of the 2010s an ancient example of Lovecraftian smut…

I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap
Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through,
Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep
Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.
Then, looking for some seller old in craft,
I could find nothing but a voice that laughed.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Book” from Fungi from Yuggoth

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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“The Day He Met Lovecraft” (1972) by Lew Shaw

Sir: As if it were yesterday, I remember meeting H. P. Lovecraft on the corner of Benefit Street and College Hill about noon on a very warm, sunny day.

College Hill is a rather steep climb, but on that day, a friend of mine and I, both attending Classical High at the time, were climbng up it oward the campus. At the base of College Hill on Canal Street, a new courthouse had been built. By taking the elevators to the fifth floor, we could have emerged on Benefit Street and eliminated the climb. However, despite the warm day, we walked.

As we got to Benefit Street, my friend greeted a passerby and introduced me to him. It was H. P. Lovecraft.
Lewis Shaw, “The Day He Met Lovecraft” in Brown Alumni Monthly 72, No. 7 (Apr 1972)

Memoirs and anecdotes of H. P. Lovecraft tend to come from familiar names: his correspondents, friends like Clifford & Muriel Eddy (The Gentleman from Angell Street), and his wife Sonia H. Greene (The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft) most prominent among them. Even the few unfamiliar names like Dorothy Tilden Spoerl (“Cosmic Horror”) prove to have some connection to Lovecraft with a little digging. The very few memoirs that don’t have any provable connection to Lovecraft are thus a little suspect; they are extraordinary, and extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence to prove them.

The geography of Providence is real, and while Lovecraft often kept late hours, he was also more active during the warmer months and went out of doors to write in the sunlight. So at least some of the details given are plausible. Yet the most interesting part of Shaw’s account is the least believable:

On that sunny afternoon, H. P. Lovecraft told us the strange story he wrote about a hotel on Benefit Street, a building which stands there no longer.

Lovecraft had written a story about a true incident. At one time there was a young woman, a chambermaid in the hotel on Benefit Street, who left and married into wealth. Sometime afterward, she returned to visit the hotel as a guest. When she found herself discourteously treated and snubbed, she departed but put a “curse” on the hotel, on all those who had humiliated her, and on everything concerned with the hotel. In short order, ill luck apparently befell all and the hotel itself burned down. Furthermore, it had never been possible, somehow, for anyone to rebuild on the site. Even on the day H. P. Lovecraft told us the story, the place where the hotel had stood was still a vacant lot.

Lovecraft had finished the story and, without making his usual carbon copy, made only one draft, which he then mailed to the publisher. His story never appeared in print. It was lost in the mails.
Lewis Shaw, “The Day He Met Lovecraft” in Brown Alumni Monthly 72, No. 7 (Apr 1972)

Lovecraft is not known to have written any story about a cursed hotel, nor is there a mention of a Lew Shaw in his voluminous published letters. Scholars might be suspicious—an account of a lost Lovecraft story by an unfamiliar name, decades after Lovecraft’s death, during the early 70s when paperback publication was raising Lovecraft’s public profile? It sounds a bit too good to be true. S. T. Joshi certainly was not convinced:

There is much reason to suspect this entire account. In the first place, the story sounds like nothing Lovecraft would have written—the idea is hackneyed, and the protagonist would uncharacteristically have been a woman. Secondly, it is inconceivable that Lovecraft would have prepared a story without his usual two carbons. In the case of his essay on Roman architecture in late 1934, he wrote the piece by hand and sent it to Moe without typing it at all. Lew Shaw claims to have actually met Lovecraft on the street, in the company of a friend “who was interested in science-fiction” and knew Lovecraft; this might conceivably have been Kenneth Sterling, but Sterling never mentions this matter in either of his two memoirs. Shaw also claims to be of the Brown Class of 1941; but there is no one of that name in that class listed in the Brown University alumni directory. There is a Lewis A. Shaw in the Class of 1948, and a Lew Shaw who received a Ph.D. in 1975, but that is all. My feeling is that Lew Shaw (probably a pseudonym) is perpetrating a hoax.
S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence (2010) 2.1001

Joshi’s arguments are well-reasoned—but there are a few counter-arguments. While none of Lovecraft’s surviving letters mention a cursed hotel story, the account does not mention when the story was written or sent out; so it could conceivably fall into a gap in the correspondence, especially if the story was an early one or written for a revision client. A story set in Providence on Benefit St. isn’t out of the question either, “The Shunned House” was based on a real-life house (the Stephen Harris House, 135 Benefit Street). Likewise, while it would be uncharacteristic for Lovecraft to write a story with a woman protagonist, it was not unknown: “The Man of Stone” (1932) for Hazel Heald and “The Curse of Yig” (1929) for Zealia Bishop are primarily focused on female characters, or told in part from their perspectives, so it isn’t entirely out of the question. The postal service has lost many manuscripts and typescripts, so that by itself isn’t unbelievable either. The most obvious evidence of a hoax appears to be the absence of Lew Shaw himself…

Lewis Irwin Schwartz attended Classical High School in Providence, RI and graduated from Brown University in the class of 1941 (listed on page 72 of the Liber Brunensis for 1941). “Lew Shaw” was his stage name (“He Crashed The ‘Crewcuts’,” Brown Alumni Monthly Jan 1962). So, Joshi was correct that there was no “Lew Shaw” among the names in the Class of 1941, and that the name was a pseudonym—but didn’t have access to the bits of the puzzle that would show that Lew Shaw really did exist; those parts of the narrative at least match what we know of his background.

Joshi was also likely correct in identifying Shaw’s unnamed friend interested in science fiction as Kenneth Sterling. In Providence, Sterling attended Classical High School. They were both born in 1920, but Shaw was born in November, so he would probably have been a year behind Sterling. That gives us time as well: Sterling met Lovecraft in March 1935, and in the autumn of 1936 began attending Harvard, so the encounter with Lovecraft could only have happened in the summer of 1935 or 1936. Lovecraft doesn’t mention Shaw/Schwartz in the surviving letters to Kenneth Sterling, but on the other hand, those surviving passages are all excerpts, not complete letters, and there are gaps of months in the correspondence.

Kenneth Sterling wrote two memoirs about Lovecraft: “Lovecraft and Science” (1944) and “Caverns Measureless to Man” (1975). The first is slight, and doesn’t go into detail about how they met; the second is substantial, and more personal and biographical, going into considerable detail. Some of these jive with Shaw’s account:

During the academic year, excepting Christmas and spring recesses, the Science Club met weekly. That meant I had a schedule of one scientist a week—all, with two exceptions, from the Brown University faculty—and every time I walked up College Hill toward the Brown campus I visited Lovecraft for several hours. The total number of hours I conversed with him was huge.
Kenneth Sterling, “Caverns Measureless to Man” in Ave Atque Vale 406-407

This would have been the path Shaw describes. Sterling doesn’t mention the cursed hotel story; the one anecdote Sterling tells about bringing a friend to meet Lovecraft doesn’t jive either, since it was at a gathering in New York City. Again, this doesn’t immediately rule out Shaw’s story, but it doesn’t fully confirm it either. Shaw’s account is shifted from obvious hoax to doubtful…and there’s one final bit of evidence to consider: was there a hotel, cursed or not?

The Hotel Lorraine was on 18-28 Aborn Street, on the other side of the Providence River from Benefit Street, a geographic detail that Lovecraft would not have missed, but I’ve yet to find a notable hotel fire on Benefit St. during Lovecraft’s lifetime—and the 18 Aborn St. lot was still vacant according to the 1935 Providence City Directory, which does jive with Shaw’s story. No mention of a curse has turned up yet, but a lot of century-old folklore probably wasn’t written down, much yet made it onto the internet, where searches about cursed hotels in Providence point toward the Biltmore (now The Graduate).

The question then becomes: is this an error with Shaw’s memory, or did he fabricate the whole anecdote? The former might be understandable: a couple of decades can erode the details of many memories, or add details that weren’t there before. If the latter, why? As far as is known, Shaw never attempted to pass the anecdote off to a paying magazine or publisher or profit from the supposed association. It was of the nature of a brief letter to the editor to a college alumni journal about a local writer with ties to the college whose posthumous star had lately been on the rise and who had ties to Brown (Lovecraft’s papers are archived at the university library). In the Feb 1972 issue of Brown Alumni Monthly there had been an article on “Lovecraftmania at Brown” which probably suggested the letter.

Without any further evidence in Lovecraft’s letters to support the idea that the meeting actually took place, “The Day He Met Lovecraft” will have to remain classified as somewhere between doubtful and apocryphal. We have no absolute evidence that Shaw/Schwartz actually met Lovecraft, as there are no details in the incident that can be independently corroborated with sources that weren’t already published at the time. As Joshi noted, the plot sounds fairly hackneyed and un-Lovecraftian; not something he would write for himself, even with the local angle.

However, we also cannot entirely rule out that Shaw did not meet Lovecraft; we know Sterling had brought at least one friend to meet Lovecraft according to his later memoir. The plot of the apocryphal tale sounds un-Lovecraftian, but Lovecraft was willing to bend his artistic scruples a bit for revision clients. Is a lost revision story plausible? There’s evidence to suggest Lovecraft revised more stories than saw print, such as “In the Gulf of N’Logh” (193?) and “Lair of Fungous Death” (193?) by Hazel Heald, and his letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop. By 1935, Lovecraft had largely stopped revising fiction, but it is possible he was talking about an earlier story—Lovecraft didn’t discuss much of his revised fiction that didn’t get published.

While Lovecraft’s life is extraordinarily well documented by his letters, there are still little gaps in which things happened for which we have no record…and, perhaps, in which a clever fiction might be woven. Shaw’s account cannot be entirely ruled out, but neither can it be proved, unless more information comes to light.

Thanks and appreciation to Dave Goudsward for all of his help and assistance.

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 Lovecraft: Henriette Ziegfeld

“The Blind Prince,” by Henriette Ziegfeld, is an excellent juvenile tale involving a fairy story. The only serious objection is the undercurrent of adult comment which flows through the narrative. Particularly cynical is the closing sentence: “‘And here’s Mother,’ finished poor Auntie with a sigh of relief.” The ordinary fairy stories told to children are bits of actual Teutonic mythology, and should be related with a grave, absolute simplicity and naivete. However, as a psychological study of the typical childish auditor, the sketch as a whole is highly meritorious. We are inclined to wonder at the possible meaning of the strange word “alright,” which appears more than once in Miss Ziegfeld’s tale. It is certainly no part of our language, and if it be a corruption of “all right,” we must say that we fail to perceive why the correct expression could not have been used.
“Department of Public Criticism,” The United Amateur 15, no. 2 (Sep 1915), in Collected Essays 1.72

This was, as far as can be determined, Lovecraft’s first notice of the existence of Henriette Ziegfeld (1894-1976), an amateur journalist from Columbus, Ohio. According to census data, Henriette was the child of immigrant parents, her father Dutch and mother German, and one of 11 children that survived to be recorded. “The Blind Prince” was published in The Woodbee, the amateur journal of the Woodbee Press Club of Columbus, which was associated with the faction of the United Amateur Press Association that H. P. Lovecraft had joined the previous year.

Amateur journalism appears to have been something of a family affair for the Zeigfelds. Lovecraft’s editorials and a letter mention her brothers Arthur (1901-1971; CE 1.267, 302, 307-8) and Florenz (1888-1951; CE 1.88, 124; LRKO 87); a 1920 convention report also lists as voting members their siblings Emelie (Emily), Hilda, Alma, Oscar, and Mrs. Ziegfeld—presumably their mother, Pauline Ziegfeld (1859-1929). A 1921 accounting of officers of the Woodbees lists Arthur F. Ziegfeld as President and his sister Henriette as the Secretary and Treasurer (CE 1.267).

By coincidence, Florenz Ziegfeld shared his name with the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1869-1932), who staged the famous revue Ziegfeld’s Follies (1906-1930s), which featured dozens of elaborately costumed showgirls (popularly called “Ziegfeld Girls”) in an elaborate musical and visual tableau. Inspired by the coincidence, in 1921 Arthur F. Ziegfeld began producing his own amateur journal titled Ziegfeld’s Follies.

The only surviving correspondence between the two is a single letter dated 6 Nov 1920 from Lovecraft to Ziegfeld, thanking the Woodbee Club for the generous donation of $25 toward the United Amateur Press Association’s fund for the publication of The United Amateur. Presumably, Henriette was acting as treasurer and had sent the money and an accompanying letter or note, so this was Lovecraft’s official thank-you. He also included an official notice in The United Amateur, which contains another relevant detail:

The Woodbee Club, now doubly prominent in amateurdom through its possession of both the Presidency and the Secretary-Treasurership, continues to be the most active of local bodies. On Labour Day, September 5, a successful corn roast was held on the Frazier Farm, whilst on September 24 the third annual rummage sale took place. Of the proceeds of the latter, $25.00 will be very generously donated to the Official Organ Fund in five-dollar instalments. The latest event is a farewell party to Miss Henriette Ziegfeld on the eve of her departure for India.
“News Notes,” The United Amateur 21, no. 1 (Sep 1921) in Collected Essays 1.300

Whether she replied is unknown; but possible—someone had to have informed Lovecraft that Henriette was leaving for a teaching mission in India, and in subsequent issues Lovecraft offered brief updates of her progress, so someone was keeping him appraised:

Miss Henriette Ziegfeld of the Woodbee Club on November 12 sailed for India, where she will be engaged in missionary work at Nagercoil, Travancore, in the southernmost part of the peninsula.
“News Notes,” The United Amateur 21, no. 2 (Nov 1921) in Collected Essays 1.303

On December 24th the Club received the pleasing news that Miss Henriette Ziegfeld had safely reached her destination in India, despite two threatened onslaughts of mal de mer during the voyage; onslaughts which were cleverly defeated by means of judicious pedestrianism.
“News Notes,” The United Amateur 21, no. 3 (Jan 1922) in Collected Essays 1.308

Henriette Ziegfeld’s 1921 passport photo

Henriette Ziegfeld in India, 1923, Concordia Historical Institute

That is the last word in Lovecraft’s amateur journalism essays or letters on Henriette Zeigfeld. No doubt a good example of many brief correspondences with women in various positions of amateur journalism, most of which do not survive.

The letter from Lovecraft to Henriette Ziegfeld has been published in Miscellaneous Letters (2022). While the date given on the letter is 1920, the notice of the $25 donation occurred in 1921—either the Woodbee Club made two such donations, or the letter is from 1921 and was misdated or mistranscribed.

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.

“On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” (1773) by Anna Laetitia Aikin & John Aikin

In England one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called “Sir Bertrand”, in which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o’-the-wisps lead up mysterious staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto—The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld’s fragment; and though less crude than Walpole’s novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

Anna Laetitia Aikin was born in 1743; her father was a Presbyterian minister and the headmaster of a boy’s school, and both Anna and her brother John Aikin received solid educations, which led to their careers in letters—Anna being noted for working in multiple genres, and earned a reputation as a poet and author. One of her earliest publications was Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773), published jointly with her brother. Among the contents of this volume is “On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.”

The essay is one of the early English works on the subject of the horror story, and much of it is as insightful today as it was two and a half centuries ago:

A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of “forms unseen, and mightier far than we,” our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy co-operating, elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.
“On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror”

This essay is a literary forebear of Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1925). At the end of the essay proper is given several examples of books and stories which exemplify this philosophy:

In the Arabian Nights are many most striking examples of the terrible, joined with the marvellous: the story of Aladdin, and the travels of Sinbad, are particularly excellent. The Castle of Otranto is a very spirited modern attempt upon the same plan of mixed terror, adapted to the model of Gothic romance. The best conceived, and the most strongly worked-up scene of mere natural horror that I recollect, is in Smolett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom; where the hero, entertained in a lone house in a forest, finds a corpse just slaughtered in the room where he is sent to sleep, and the door of which is locked upon him. It may be amusing for the reader to compare his feelings upon these, and from thence form his opinion of the justness of my theory. The following fragment, in which both these manners are attempted to be in some degree united, is offered to entertain a solitary winter’s evening.
“On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror”

What follows is “Sir Betrand, a Fragment.” The fast-moving fantasy owes much to the medievalisms of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto—A Gothic Story (1764), the latter of which is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. Other influences may have included the 1,001 Nights or Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; the story has the style of an episodic adventure in that mode, like a loose couple of pages taken from a longer narrative. In the context of the essay, however, it becomes clear that the fragment is a heaping-up of horrors, image after image piled up one after another in a kind of breathless chain of wonder and terror. The purpose of the fragment was to provide an example for Aikin’s idea of how a horror story worked.

The individual contributions of Anne and John are not signed in Miscellaneous Pieces, but Horace Walpole wrote:

Miss Aikin flattered me even by stooping to tread in my eccentric steps. Her ‘Fragment,’ though but a specimen, showed her talent for imprinting terror.
Horace Walpole to Robert Jephson, 27 Jan 1780, The Letters of Horace Walpole (1880) 318-319

While Walpole (and many others) assert that “Sir Bertrand, a fragment” was Anna’s contribution, as mentioned in the Analytical Review (Dec. 1798) 612-613 (“We are inclined to think, that Dr. D. has erroneouſly attributed the fragment of Sir Bertrand to the pen of Mrs. Barbauld; we believe Dr. Aikin is the author of it.”); her niece Lucy Aikin in The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1825) clarifies that Anna was not the author of the fiction that accompanied the essay. This misattribution has continued down through the centuries. Luke R.J. Maynard did an excellent job detailing the convoluted history in “A Forgotten Enchantment: The Silenced Princess, the Andalusian Warlord, and the Rescued Conclusion of ‘Sir Bertrand'” (2010), including pointing out that a completed text of the fiction fragment was published as “Sir Bertrand’s Adventures in a Ruinous Castle” in Gothic Stories (1797).

In 1774, Anna married Rochemont Barbauld; subsequent publications of “Sir Betrand, a Fragment,” with or without the original essay that it served as an example for, were often published as by Anna Barbauld or Mrs. Barbauld. “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” thus entered the corpus of English horror-story lore, albeit as a small, incomplete, but influential piece. This is the prose fragment which Lovecraft succinctly summarizes in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and one of the few works by women authors he praises.

Unfortunately, he probably never actually read “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.”

None of Lovecraft’s published letters contain a reference to either Miss Aikin (or Barbauld), or “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.” None of the books he is known to have read or were in his library include the tale. While it is not impossible that Lovecraft read the story at the library during his research into weird fiction while writing “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the lack of any reference to the author or the tale outside that essay is thus suspicious—and we know for a fact that Lovecraft had at hand an easy reference:

When Walpole wrote disparagingly of Clara Reeve’s imitation of his Gothic story, he singled out for praise a fragment which he attributes to Mrs. Barbauld. The story to which he alludes is evidently the unfinished Sir Bertrand, which is contained in one of the volumes entitled Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, published jointly by J. and A. L. Aikin in 1773, and preceded by an essay On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror. Leigh Hunt, who reprinted Sir Bertrand, which had impressed him very strongly in his boyhood, in his Book for a Corner (1849) ascribes the authorship of the tale to Dr. Aikin, commenting on the fact that he was “a writer from whom this effusion was hardly to have been looked for.” It is probably safe to assume that Walpole, who was a contemporary of the Aikins and who took a lively interest in the literary gossip of the day, was right in assigning Sir Bertrand to Miss Aikin, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, though the story is not included in The Works of Anne Letitia Barbauld, edited by Miss Lucy Aikin in 1825. That the minds of the Aikins were exercised about the sources of pleasure in romance, especially when connected with horror and distress, is clear not only from this essay and the illustrative fragment but also from other essays and stories in the same collection—On Romances, an Imitation, and An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations. In the preliminary essay to Sir Bertrand an attempt is made to explain why terrible scenes excite pleasurable emotions and to distinguish between two different types of horror, as illustrated by The Castle of Otranto, which unites the marvellous and the terrible, and by a scene of mere natural horror in Smollett’s Count Fathom. The story Sir Bertrand is an attempt to combine the two kinds of horror in one composition. A knight, wandering in darkness on a desolate and dreary moor, hears the tolling of a bell, and, guided by a glimmering light, finds “an antique mansion” with turrets at the corners. As he approaches the porch, the light glides away. All is dark and still. The light reappears and the bell tolls. As Sir Bertrand enters the castle, the door closes behind him. A bluish flame leads him up a staircase till he comes to a wide gallery and a second staircase, where the light vanishes. He grasps a dead-cold hand which he severs from the wrist with his sword. The blue flame now leads him to a vault, where he sees the owner of the hand “completely armed, thrusting forwards the bloody stump of an arm, with a terrible frown and menacing gesture and brandishing a sword in the remaining hand.” When attacked, the figure vanishes, leaving behind a massive, iron key which unlocks a door leading to an apartment containing a coffin, and statues of black marble, attired in Moorish costume, holding enormous sabres in their right hands. As the knight enters, each of them rears an arm and advances a leg and at the same moment the lid of the coffin opens and the bell tolls. Sir Bertrand, guided by the flames, approaches the coffin from which a lady in a shroud and a black veil arises. When he kisses her, the whole building falls asunder with a crash. Sir Bertrand is thrown into a trance and awakes in a gorgeous room, where he sees a beautiful lady who thanks him as her deliverer. At a banquet, nymphs place a laurel wreath on his head, but as the lady is about to address him the fragment breaks off.
Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (1921), 28-30

Lovecraft acknowledged leaning on Birkhead’s study when it came to the Gothics (see The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) by Dorothy Scarborough & The Tale of Terror (1921) by Edith Birkhead). Likewise, “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” might not have been readily available in the 1920s. It seems likely, comparing that section of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and Birkhead’s entry that Lovecraft largely condensed and summarized Birkhead’s account of both Anna (Aikin) Barbauld and her fragment.

Which is a pity, because there is a thematic vein that runs straight from “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” through William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) to works like Machen’s “The White People” (1904) that Lovecraft likely would have recognized and appreciated. Lovecraft may not have had the time or opportunity to read every work he mentioned in his essay—his original assessment of The Golem (1928) by Gustav Meyrink, for example, was based on the film and not the book, an error which he worked to resolve once he had read the original. Perhaps Lovecraft would have a more genuine appreciation for Anna (Aikin) Barbauld if he could have read her essay on terror…but, as he never mentions this essay either, it seems likely he did not.

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.

A Song for Quiet (2017) by Cassandra Khaw

Blues is about wanting and not having, about putting that need into someone else’s hands for a little while so you can pause and breathe.
Cassandra Khaw, A Song for Quiet 35

In Hammers on Bone (2016) by Cassandra Khaw, an eldritch abomination walks around in a human suit, playing hardboiled private detective John Persons, a monster who works against other monsters, working for its own inscrutable reasons against Lovecraftian incursions. A Song for Quiet is a standalone novella in the same setting, though a continent away and decades prior, with Persons relegated to an ambiguous supporting role as the narrative shifts to focus on rambling bluesman Deacon James.

Any more detail would give away the plot of the story, and it has little to spare.

In terms of theme and content, A Song for Quiet is a distant literary descendent of “The Music of Erich Zann,” the essential theme reworked and woven with considerable skill and imagination into a new context, a cousin to stories like “The Opera Singer” (2015) by Priya J. Sridhar and “While The Black Stars Burn” (2015) by Lucy A. Snyder—in part because music is the language and the medium by which the weirdness from Outside penetrates this reality, but because music doesn’t just happen. You need a figure on the threshold, like Erich Zann, who has the skills to play and faces the choice to do so. That places a very human conflict in the midst of what might otherwise be a very impersonal cosmic struggle. Ultimately, the musician on the threshold has to decide if to play.

Khaw’s choice to center the narrative on one such threshold-character, Deacon James, comes with advantages and drawbacks. The advantage is that Khaw is a skillful writer who really gets into James’ head, and the world seen through his eyes is a part of the world in stories like The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle, Lovecraft Country (2016) by Matt Ruff, and Ring Shout (2020) by P. Djèlí Clark—where Black people, even in a relatively unsegregated northern city like Arkham, have to step carefully, watch their words and actions, because any wrong step could mean violence and death. Jim Crow America was an ugly place with its very mundane horrors, without adding any Lovecraftian horrors to the mix.

The downside is, James knows nothing about the Lovecraftian aspect of the setting and doesn’t learn much of anything by the book’s end. Hammers on Bone worked so well in part because John Persons was an insider on the occult world of the Mythos, readers got their point of view and many things could be explained or accepted because of that. A Song for Quiet, seen mostly through the bluesman’s eyes, is like much in life a puzzle for which many pieces are missing and which will never be complete. John Persons in this book is one piece that doesn’t seem to fit (unless the reader has read Hammers on Bone at some point); he appears from nowhere, does things, explains almost nothing, and this is all perfectly in keeping with how the character might appear to James, but it’s as damnably frustrating as a poorly-played non-player character in a session of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, enigmatic to a fault.

Another piece that doesn’t quite fit is Arkham itself. As a setting, Khaw does a tremendous job of expressing the unease a Black man might feel traveling to and being in a relatively unknown northern city; used to the more openly segregated South, Deacon James is only really at ease in Black spaces. Why it features in the story is another question entirely: Arkham is the backdrop, but it could almost as easily have been Boston, New York, or even London. While an American city makes sense, since blues music is an African-American creation, by the 1940s the geographic remit of blues music and players had gone global. There’s nothing special about Arkham in this regard—it is the place name to cement a Lovecraftian connection, but Deacon James isn’t playing to an audience of hip Miskatonic University students or anything like that. So the setting feels a bit superfluous; like a film that drops a few Lovecraftian place names but doesn’t really connect to Lovecraft’s stories about those places.

This isn’t a damning criticism: many stories have only peripheral connections to the wider Mythos, and that’s fine. The first and most important thing is whether or not the story is good, the amount of Mythos lore dropped is not a primary measure of story quality. The lament here is that it could have been better. Khaw’s take on Arkham through James’ POV is intriguing, it’s something that the novella could have used more of, and if that setting had tied more strongly into the plot it would have been smashing…or perhaps it would have turned a tightly written and fast-paced novella into a bloated short novel.

There is a lot to like about this story; Khaw’s prose is alternately poetic and grounded, using music metaphors to give shape and texture to things seen and unseen, and the characters are well-defined. As another episode of the Persona Non Grata series, it expands the world of Hammers on Bone without stepping on any toes, far enough away in time and space so that the two stories can work independently, but taken together suggesting a wider, more complex world. Thematically, the ending is a strong focus on the human conflict of the musician on the threshold, but the missing pieces of the puzzle leave a bit of tension, like a chord that refuses to resolve.

Cassandra Khaw’s A Song for Quite (2017) was published as part of Tor.com’s Lovecraftian novella series including Hammers on Bone (2016) by Cassandra Khaw, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) by Kij Johnson, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle, and Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

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.