A Jewish Deadhead Looks at Lovecraft
by M.I. Black

The hi-fi system and the bean bag chair of my adolescent room were purchased with Bar Mitzvah gelt, the financial gain from the coming-of-age ritual marking the moment that thirteen-year-olds become accountable for their own actions in the Jewish community in which they are being raised. Most of my friends, visitors to my comfy chamber, were being raised Catholic or Protestant, and I understood from our dialogs that there was no precise equivalent to the Mitzvah milestone in Christianity. Religions—I was learning—were very different from each other. For example, there was no Jewish equivalent to the Christian concept of hell, other than—as the joke goes—New York City in August. As a counterpoint, ceremonies in which babies receive their names occurred in both Judaism and Christianity. Yet some have taken the ceremony’s gravity to the high heavens: my seventh-grade American history class taught me that the American Puritan Jonathan Edwards famously etched the importance of baptism when he professed, “The road to hell is paved with the skulls of unbaptized babies.”

Sounded like an image from an H.P. Lovecraft story to me.

I would discuss hell with friends, who all thought Jonathan Edwards was an idiot, and we pretty much all agreed that hell seemed like a recruitment tool to get people to become Christian, at worst, or a warning to persuade people not to do evil, at best. None of our theological debates, however, were as long or as exhilarating as our battles in our role-playing games, such as pitting a Paladin against a rattle of ten Bone Devils.

Deities and Demigods, a reference book for Dungeons & Dragons, introduced Lovecraft to me, as well as the works of Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. I still have the first edition of the now prized D&D tome; a later edition excised the Cthulhu and Moorcockian sections due to a complicated legal squabble about copyrights. To this day, the line art for Lovecraft’s section (“Cthulhu Mythos”) still lures me to read its entries. 

In high school, my friends and I began playing Dungeons & Dragons less and less and began reading books and listening to music more and more. I fell headfirst into the world of H.P. Lovecraft and fell head-over-heels for the songs of the Grateful Dead. The predominantly black and gray (with shattering reds and white) wraps of the Del Rey paperbacks called to me from the well-ordered shelves of a now-defunct chain bookstore in our shopping mall. I might have even bought Dead Set—a live, double-CD of The Grateful Dead—the same afternoon as The Doom that Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, my first Lovecraft book. To this day, I love the artwork of the album and the book, both famous for skulls and skeletons. I remain a fan of the graphical, as well as the auditory. And if what music I was listening to could somehow coalesce with what I was reading, more power to the successfully sound-tracked story.

In my bean bag chair, I soon discovered that I could not read Lovecraft and listen to the Grateful Dead at the same time. Despite the blanched bones, Lovecraft and the Grateful Dead did not sync up for me. Although lyrical in the sense of expressing deep emotions and observations, Lovecraft is not enthusiastic as, say, Ray Bradbury, whose writing could be paired up with several albums of the Grateful Dead. In contrast, Lovecraft begged for classical, to my ear, and I have heard that a few death-metal bands have been heavily influenced by his writing.

Why did I like Lovecraft’s stories? I loved how they created a universe of mythological deities and devices, not something you find in Poe, who I was also reading for pleasure way back when. The creatures of Lovecraft’s genius were indifferent to us earthlings at best, and at worst, they are malevolent with infinite, inescapable reach. His horror rang true for me.  The Romantic and romance can find no purchase in the world of Lovecraft. No one seeks out the healing power of escaping to nature, nor does any major character seem faithful to love, unlike Poe. 

Years later, while managing an independent bookstore in my twenties, I was surprised to read that Lovecraft had actually married. And in my thirties, another Lovecraft fan shared with me—as if unearthing something that should have remained buried—that H.P. was a racist and an antisemite though his former wife was a Jew. I seemed to recall stories that seemed to smack at racism, more so than the run-of-the-mill stories from that time period, but now with my new knowledge, these claims seemed more obvious in retrospect.

Soon I found myself struggling with how to handle this horrid information on Lovecraft, working through something like the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. In mild shock, I told myself that if Lovecraft had lived longer, perhaps he would have outgrown the infantile compulsion that places one member of the human race over another. That Lovecraft was a product of a time—a victim of a puritanical upbringing—in which the insulated often deluded themselves into imagining that to belong to a higher rung in an alleged hierarchy is to live a life more supreme. Perhaps his trait, this reoccurring folly birthed of unfettered fear, retarded in Lovecraft any hopeful internal spark that may have illuminated him to achieve a happier life. Yes, I told myself that he was miserable, and this was the cause of his grumbling hate. If he had lived longer, experienced more of the 20^th Century, the horrors of the Holocaust would have made Lovecraft dial back any theories he had about the Jews. And that the struggles of American Civil Rights would wrestle any bad beliefs on race.

In denial, I comforted myself by reading about Lovecraft’s mentoring and befriending a young writer, Robert Bloch, born a Jew, most famous for the novel Psycho, made more famous by the Hitchcock film. Surely, Lovecraft did not hate this Jew. Or, in Lovecraft’s eyes, it seemed a Jew could be born a Jew and then rise above whatever it was that Lovecraft did not like about the Jews. He had loved a Jew when he married his wife, right? They were happy, at least for a while. No, Lovecraft was not really an antisemite. Not a bad one. There were too many Jewish people in his life for him to be hardcore. The court of public opinion had an active imagination.

Then I read some more about Lovecraft, from his own letters.

What came next for me was the argument that art should stand alone, so who cares about the author, right?  I remembered my dad’s chestnut: “Don’t learn too much about your heroes; just concentrate on what makes them heroic.” Can we not engage the work of art as it is by itself, separating it from any intentions of the artist? There was no benefit in learning about the author, for it was the reader that created the text. Reader Response literary theory aided in my denial.

Most fans, of course, want to know a little about the creator of their affection.

So, I read more about Lovecraft. I grew angry. A dead ringer for Gomer Pyle, he allowed all the women in his life—it seemed to me—to bully him. Although fairly prolific, he could not make a living stringing gloomy nouns, adjectives, and verbs together to create his signature ether of impending doom. But how signature was his cosmos? You take a gigantic octopus and stick it on the body of dragon, and—presto—you have Cthulhu, like a platypus, but scary. Oh, and don’t forget, there’s no meaning to life, the bad guys always win, and the cosmos is dead cold. A triad of existential angst! Stunningly creative! Pure genius!

My fist-clenching phase proved short-lived. I still liked his work.

What if I just read the stories I’ve read before? Or just the authors who took his mythos and ran with it in their books? Just watched the movies based on Lovecraft’s works?

Bargaining puttered by in a fleeting stage.

Should we not keep Lovecraft buried? Ignore his faults? Or numb ourselves to the sins of nasty opinions that he may never have acted upon other than to drip some poison in his stories with a random remark of rancor, the sloppiness of stereotype, the temper tantrum of a theme against the mixing of races? I can admire him at his best and ignore his worst. Lovecraft is dead. And we are all going to die. What was the point really? Art does not matter. Nothing matters. There is no fun to be had. There’s no one to look up to. I’m depressed.

The stories of the Grateful Dead soundtrack made me less depressed.

It is my experience from the first story I read of Lovecraft’s, “The Hound,” narrated by a graverobber set on his own goal of unearthing another graverobber from his grave, that a Lovecraft story is often the Grateful Dead story in reverse. In Lovecraft, if you unearth something, there will be hell to pay. Grateful Dead folklore tells another story.

While trying to name the band, guitarist Jerry Garcia lowered a blind finger into an open dictionary and came down on an entry. This entry described the folktale form of a hero coming upon an unburied corpse, giving the dead a burial, and later “going down the road” completing a difficult task with the aid of a stranger, who is the spirit of the grateful dead returning a favor.

Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, acting as the Cthulhuian Book of the Dead, shares accounts of the Old Ones—Lovecraft’s cosmological dreaded deities from space. Deadheads over the last forty years that have pointed to a passage from an uncited “Egyptian Book of the Dead” to bolster the meaning of the moniker of the band:

We now return our souls to the creator,

as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness.

Let our chant fill the void

in order that others may know.

In the land of the night

the ship of the sun

is drawn by the grateful dead.

Reading the Grateful Dead: A Critical Survey (2012), 40n6

In Lovecraft, the dead do not return to the creator to serve.  The dead or undead do not chant but moan. They do not draw the source of light but are forever drowning in darkness. Skeletons populate the worlds of both Lovecraft and the Grateful Dead, although, in one of these worlds, a skull screams as opposed to grins. Does Lovecraft now, who is still dead, scream on a level of hell that could be found in Dante’s cartographic efforts? Would he be on the Eighth Level of Hell, the realm of torment designed for Falsifiers? Maybe a part of him resides in hell. And the part of him that created a community of readers and writers, ironically through stories of dread and isolation, resides on some astral plane, high above the Inferno.

So, what is my role to play in the Lovecraft story? I will be the wandering hero, who has just found the dead body of Lovecraft, who will bury the bad thoughts of him and stated by him, and I will sing about what was truly deific in him and his work, to bring light up and to bury darkness down, to chant to all who will listen that we humans are complex creatures, given to contradictions, with a talent for winter growth, and I will eulogize that to err is human and to forgive divine. Atonement and forgiveness are not just for Yom Kippur, and someone does not need to ask for your forgiveness to receive it. And for the flawed mortal known as Lovecraft, if some essence of him is somewhere in a celestial plane and can find rest through my accepting the role as folk hero, maybe Lovecraft can be thought of as one of the grateful dead.

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M.I. Black has written for advertising agencies, managed new and used bookstores, taught creative writing and media studies, and has worked as a communications officer in libraries. Copyright 2023 M. I. Black.

A Survivor Looks At Lovecraft
by James Harvey

Lovecraft’s protagonists are usually victims of severe trauma with lasting effects on their mental health. Given the cosmic scale of Lovecraft’s fiction, they are comparatively naïve in their level of awareness; as a result, they uncover information about and experience things that they are wholly unprepared for. Traumatic events are so jarring and out of the range of normal experience that they produce an existential crisis in the victim. Trauma in the real world can even cause effects that have many similarities to the supernatural: antagonists that can transcend time and space (flashbacks), hauntings and possessions (disassociation), even the ritualistic way in which survivors can manage symptoms and heal (grounding exercises, exposure therapy, mantras and verbal reinforcement).

What appeal does Lovecraft have for a survivor of trauma? Why would such bleak and frightening scenarios be of interest? Perhaps they won’t be, for some. Trauma has too many sources and effects to have a single author that can speak to all who experience it; I speak only from my own experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and my resultant post-traumatic stress disorder. When I first began to grapple with the memories and emotions that were tearing my life apart, I happened upon Lovecraft’s writing and found things that I didn’t understand about my own feelings articulated nearly perfectly by this strange dead writer from Providence. The metaphysics of the worlds he created held an uncanny resemblance to the chaos in my mind, and in those dark, early days of my recovery I was reading stories of people who seemed to feel the way that I felt.

The only saving grace of the present is that it’s too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model”

Though I truly immersed myself in Lovecraft in my late twenties, I had heard of him before and forgotten. In high school, the abuse I had suffered for years finally at an end, I had decided to never think of it again. Almost giddy with freedom from fear for the first time, I resolved to put the years of suffering behind me and began more than a decade of avoidance. At the same time, a close friend told me about a weird story he had read in which an old man plays the “violin” at a garret window to keep “demons” at bay—”The Music of Erich Zann.” As I was already spending a great deal of time keeping certain intrusive memories and thoughts from my mind, the image resonated with me.

When I took Lovecraft up again years later, I came to blame myself rather less for not processing my trauma. Who could, knowing that inconceivable horror exists, think that any good could come from interacting with it? I don’t think Danforth dared to take a second look as he flew away from the Plateau of Leng in At the Mountains of Madness, and the “pledges of secrecy” he and Dyer took seemed like prudent measures.

In my worst times, I constantly feared I was losing my mind. Even after I broke my silence on what had happened to me, I had no words to explain the kind of places I went to in my nightmares. In the years when I could do nothing but keep my head above water, Lovecraft’s writing told me that someone else knew the same kind of fear as I. While I was in a place that could know little relief, there was at least understanding. I know now that there are many ways to connect with fellow survivors—SNAP and 1in6, to name only two—but being able to simply pick up a book and see something of my own experience was an easy and comforting way that I felt less alone in my pain.

As I read Lovecraft’s correspondence and heard more discussion of his worldview, I also felt that there was a place for my burgeoning sense of nihilism. I was afraid of and unused to the concept of a universe with no benevolent god or gods at first. To a devout believer in a benevolent god, the terrifying shifts precipitated by trauma can be particularly damaging. My parents had placed all of their faith in the wrong people and raised my brothers and I accordingly. I had built up a child’s sense of identity and self around religious concepts that would be hideously taken advantage of. 

For me, the horror comes from the destruction of self, not only through direct trauma but by the existential crisis that arose from realizing that the universe contains forces that are malevolent or at best uncaring. During the healing process I came to a happy peace with my new understanding of the universe, enjoying the “whimsical sentimentality” that Lovecraft spoke of: 

For my part—as a realist beyond the age of theatricalism and naive beliefs—I feel quite certain that my own known last hour would be spent quite prosaically […] I’d probably spend the residual minutes getting a last look at something closely associated with my earliest memories—a picture, a library table, an 1895 Farmer’s Almanack, a small music-box I used to play with at 2 ½, or some kindred symbol—completing a psychological circle in a spirit half of humour and half of whimsical sentimentality. Then—nothingness, as before Aug. 20, 1890.

H. P. Lovecraft to the Coryciani, 14 Jul 1936, Lovecraft Annual 11.144-145

While Lovecraft used his talent for writing to make beautiful compositions on the theme of cosmic nihilism, his intense fear of the Other manifested in racism and xenophobia throughout his life.

The negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races, and the Northern people must occasionally be reminded of the danger which they incur in admitting him too freely to the privileges of society and government.

H. P. Lovecraft, “In A Major Key,” Collected Essays 1.57

While his descriptions of helplessness and despair can evoke sympathy from survivors, his misplaced antipathy towards people of color is a bitter reminder of the many poor coping mechanisms trauma can encourage. Characters like Zadok Allen in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and the sailor from “Dagon” turn to substance abuse, but fail to escape their trauma-filled pasts and meet poor ends. Using the metaphor of cosmic horror to cope with my own trauma, I see these as cautionary tales for survivors to not lose ourselves entirely in our efforts to escape.

The question of whether or not Lovecraft personally suffered from a trauma-related mental illness is not at all clear. Even if Lovecraft had gotten professional medical care on a regular basis, the mental health resources of his lifetime were very limited. However, it is known that he experienced intense nightmares as a child and suffered from a nervous breakdown serious enough to prevent his graduation from high school, despite his obvious intelligence, enjoyment of learning, and stated intention to attend Brown University (I Am Providence 1.34-35, 126-127). I will refrain from attempting any posthumous diagnoses, but familiarity with fear, depression, and the overwhelming anxiety Lovecraft described could only make his writing more resonant to those suffering from PTSD; perhaps too much so, for some.

From the view of a survivor, I will say this about Lovecraft and the wondrous, terrifying, weird mythos that has sprung from him: it creates a rare sense of camaraderie to find someone who knows that the greatest magnitudes of fear are those that shatter your illusions and defy your ability to describe them. The oppressive role that trauma plays in a survivor’s life is softened by encountering someone else who has seen fear in a handful of dust… Or perhaps, essential salts. Lovecraft is a lifeline and a warning, a rare kindred spirit to the broken, and a solemn reminder that no matter the pain one feels, it is always possible to create works of beauty that can inform and inspire.

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James Harvey is a playwright and academic writing tutor living and working in New Brunswick, Canada. His published plays can be found at https://www.lazybeescripts.co.uk/

Copyright 2022 James Harvey

A Jewish Poet Looks at Lovecraft
by Norman Finkelstein

I

H. P. Lovecraft always seems to have been part of my literary imagination, but I must have begun reading him somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen. I still have my first paperback editions: the Lancer Books with exceptionally cheesy covers (“H. P. Lovecraft summons you to The Colour Out of Space…), the Beagle Horror Collection volumes (including stories by later Mythos writers), and the Ballantine Books Adult Fantasy series, with their charming but perhaps overly whimsical covers by Gervasio Gallardo. I read Lovecraft devotedly for a few years, while also reading a number of other fantasy and science fiction authors. Then I stopped, and began reading “serious” literature—Pound and Eliot, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Pynchon and Roth. My interest in Lovecraft lay dormant for a long time, but looking back over a period of some fifty years, I realize that his stories provided me with my first, and still one of my most intense, experiences of what I now understand to be the uncanny [das Unheimlich]. 

I refer specifically to the concept as delineated by Freud in his phantasmagoric essay “The Uncanny,” a text which, as some commentators have pointed out, is itself an instance of what it seeks to explain. In regard to Lovecraft, I would stress three qualities of Freud’s uncanny that I believe I recognized even when I read him at an early age: (1) “intellectual uncertainty”; (2) a sense of that which “ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light”; and (3) the pervasive influence of “silence, darkness and solitude.” Mark Fisher, who refines and extrapolates from Freud’s Unheimlich in his book The Weird and the Eerie, observes that Lovecraft is the preeminent author of weird fiction because his:

stories are obsessively fixated on the question of the outside: an outside that breaks through in encounters with anomalous entities from the deep past, in altered states of consciousness, in bizarre twists in the structure of time. (16)

Furthermore, “it is not horror but fascination—albeit a fascination usually mixed with a certain trepidation—that is integral to Lovecraft’s rendition of the weird” (17). The fascination with the weird which protagonists in Lovecraft’s fiction experience is mirrored by that of the reader of his work: in “The Dunwich Horror,” for instance, Armitage and his colleagues cannot take their eyes off the body of the dead Wilbur Whateley, and likewise, we cannot stop reading their increasingly compelling story. That was certainly the case for me, though my fascination with Lovecraft seemed relatively short-lived. But that proved not to be the case.

In my late twenties and early thirties, having finished a dissertation on modern poetry and begun my teaching career at Xavier University, I experienced a desire to return to my Jewish roots. Raised in a somewhat observant but mainly secular and assimilated Jewish family in New York City, I had drifted away from Jewishness. Literature had become my religion, and writing poetry (and criticism) was the practice of my faith. My “return” to Judaism was not primarily religious—it was literary. As I read intensely in modern Jewish literature, certain authors stirred up a vaguely familiar sense. These authors, such as Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and I. B. Singer, brought hidden things to light for me. Hardly Lovecraftian, they nevertheless summoned a distinct sense of an outside, twisting my personal experience of time in strange but fascinating ways, and above all, challenging a sense of stable identity. In the modern world, Jews are themselves insiders and outsiders; their sense of history is simultaneously continuous and full of traumatic ruptures. For me, Jewishness began to entail a feeling of the uncanny; Jewishness, as I experienced it, was both familiar and unfamiliar, heimlich and unheimlich, ancient and contemporary.

Add to this my discovery of Kabbalah through the work of Gershom Scholem, and Jewish history and culture became much more mysterious than I had been previously taught. Reading Scholem and other scholars of Kabbalah, I discovered that the rituals and customs I had taken for granted while growing up suddenly became portals through which I could enter other times and places. I began to see a deeper Jewish vision of cosmology, while at the same time learning that Judaism was as suffused with myth as any other faith. The question of belief, always problematic for me, was further cast in doubt. In his magisterial The Uncanny, Nicholas Royle notes that the concept, as delineated by Freud: 

demands or presupposes a new way of thinking about religion….The experience of the uncanny, as [Freud] seeks to theorize it, is not available or appropriate to, say, a Jewish or Christian ‘believer.’ (20)

This accounts in part for the poems I began writing, poems that are also (in proper Jewish fashion) darkly ambivalent commentaries on the texts that proved so fascinating to me. Was I inside or outside of these texts? They blurred my sense of time and self, even as I wrote about them. These poems found their way into my first collection, Restless Messengers. However comfortable, however pleased I was with my “return,” it had also proved to be a little…weird.

Fast forward once again, this time another twenty or twenty-five years. I published a number of books of poetry and of literary criticism. I have written about Jewish literature, and about various other religions and belief systems as they are manifested in modern poetry. I spent years studying psychoanalysis at the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute. Increasingly interested in gnosticism and hermeticism, I began teaching works that engage the sacred and the transgressive, and, while still writing recognizably Jewish poetry, I incorporated elements of the magical and fantastic in my work as well. In an inevitable return of the repressed, my interest in Lovecraft came back to life, as I observed academic criticism engaging popular genres and authors with greater seriousness.

Reading Lovecraft with the same enthusiasm as my fourteen-year-old self, but now equipped with an array of critical tools, I have to acknowledge and come to terms with the ideologically unsavory aspects of his work, his neurotic prejudices and tragic life history. Needless to say, his racism and antisemitism are painfully troubling to me, though in some respects, no more or less troubling than the cases of Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Jack Spicer, to name the modern poets about whom I’ve written, and who have unquestionably shaped my own poetry.

In my reading experience, Lovecraft’s case is closest to that of Pound, but the sheer quantity of Lovecraft’s hateful rhetoric exceeds even that of Pound’s correspondence and notorious radio broadcasts. Thus the question now arises, as it has for many writers in the past:  what does it mean to admire and to acknowledge the influence of an author who detests and vituperates the beliefs, behaviors, and customs that have, to a great extent, made you who you are? Who excoriates your “race” and denigrates its history and culture? Who might well find you personally unlikeable if not downright loathsome? And—here is the heart of the problem—who expresses his feelings in language that is often so hyperbolic, and yet so closely intertwined with his most remarkable literary achievements, that it calls upon you to engage with it. We return to that moment when we stare down at the body of Wilbur Whateley, horrified but inescapably fascinated by something repellent and wrong. But in this case, we are looking not at a half-human monster, but at a human, all too human body of morally reprehensible prejudices. Both are equally malevolent.

II

“I am an anti-Semitic by nature,” writes Lovecraft in 1915; he continues: 

The Jew is an adverse influence, since he insidiously degrades or Orientalizes our robust Aryan civilization. The intellect of the race is indisputably great, but its nature is not such that it may be safely employed in forming Western political & social ideas. Oppressive as it seems, the Jew must be muzzled.

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 10 Aug 1915, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 39

Here, Lovecraft establishes the pattern for over twenty years of epistolary invective, though as has been observed by many readers, his racism and antisemitism grow increasingly vicious (and his prose grows more extravagant) after his sojourn in New York City and his firsthand experiences with the teeming streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In many respects, Lovecraft’s writing on race and ethnicity is an instance of the pseudo-biological and anthropological discourse that was prevalent from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries in both the U.S. and Europe, culminating in Nazism. He observes that: 

It is now definitely known that many allegedly Semitic types of today are not in reality Semitic or even white at all, but derived from Asiatic Tatar-Mongoloids who were Judaised by missionaries before their entrance into Central Europe from the Thibetan plateaux in the 8th or 9th century A.D. Of these are the queer-eyed, yellow-red, thick-lipped flat-nosed types seen in Providence’s North End and in many parts of New York.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 29 Sep 1924, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.168

Like other American antisemites (again, I think of Pound in his correspondence), he sometimes affects a fake Yiddish accent, writing of Jewish merchants selling gentiles “ah nize pair uff $5.00 pents for $10.00” (A Means to Freedom 1.134). He maintains the longstanding belief, as prevalent today as it was then, that Jews control the media through their great wealth: 

I didn’t say that Jews own all the papers, but merely that they control their policies through economic channels. The one great lever, of course, is advertising.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 8 Nov 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea et al. 170

This power, in turn, leads to an undue Jewish influence on the nation’s literary culture: 

But the Jews manage to get money and influence without losing a particle of their hard realism and unctuously offensive rattiness. They push brazenly ahead—in the intellectual and aesthetic as well as the practical field. Right now their control of the publishing field is alarming—houses like Knopf, Boni, Liveright, Greenberg, Viking, etc. etc. serving to give a distinctly Semitic angle to the whole matter of national manuscript-choice, and thus indirectly to national current literature and criticism.

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 30 Jan. 1931, A Means to Freedom 1.134

And though he eventually came to disagree with Hitler and the Nazis in regard to antisemitic policy, and died before the Final Solution, he once unknowingly foreshadows the Holocaust. Writing of “the stinking Manhattan pest zone” full of “squint-eyed, verminous kikes,” he declares:

I’d like to see Hitler wipe Greater New York clean with poison gas—giving masks to the few remaining people of Aryan culture (even if of Semitic ancestry). The place needs fumigation & a fresh start. (If Harlem didn’t get any masks, I’d shed no tears… & the same goes for the dago slums!)

H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 12 June 1933, Letters to James F. Morton 324

The complex historical and psychological reasons behind racial and ethnic prejudice vary for every individual; in Lovecraft’s case, his racism and antisemitism appear to arise from a combination of a deeply-seated sense of the superiority of the (increasingly threatened) New England “aristocracy” from which he believed he had arisen, which was exacerbated by personal circumstances, especially, as I noted previously, his precarious circumstances while living in New York. Simple ignorance of the ways of other cultures is always a contributing factor as well, and where there is ignorance there is usually fear. Lovecraft himself admits in his letters that he has no knowledge of Jewish customs or of the Talmud (Letters to F. Lee Baldwin et al. 117); instead, what he observes in New York are: 

assorted Jews in the absolutely unassimilated state, with their ancestral beards, skull-caps, and general costumes—which make them very picturesque, and not nearly so offensive as the strident, pushing Jews who affect clean shaves and American dress.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian Clark, 29 Sep 1924, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.168

“Picturesque” Jews (Lovecraft is almost certainly describing Hasidim) versus “strident, pushing Jews who affect clean shaves and American dress”: this is the extent of Lovecraft’s vision of modern Jewish American life, except when he is raving about “squint-eyed, verminous kikes.” Sonia Greene, the Russian Jewish immigrant to whom he was briefly married during his New York sojourn, is described as “so volatile a Slav” when she first visits him in Providence; he refers to her as “Mrs. Greenevsky” and “Mme. Greeneva” (Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 186-187,).  According to S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, in Lovecraft’s mind: 

Sonia was a properly ‘assimilated’ Jew, like his friend Samuel Loveman: she had adopted the mores of the prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture, so that her ethnic background was not an obstacle.

S. T. Joshi & David E. Schultz, Lord of a Visible World 13

The one area of Jewish culture which Lovecraft engages without prejudice and stereotyping—but still with a great deal of ambivalence—is that of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. Bobby Derie has recently examined Lovecraft’s fascination with S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, which he saw onstage in New York in 1925, and with the film of The Golem, based on Gustav Meyrink’s novel, which had not yet been translated into English. Lovecraft mentions both works in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and has this to say about Jewish culture: 

A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world, of which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet—a circumstance which has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable influence on weird fiction.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

Broadly speaking, Lovecraft’s understanding of Kabbalah as a complex mystical tradition that is both emanational and linguistic is fairly accurate, based on his readings in the tradition of Christian Kabbalah and Hermetic magic—as well as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Then again, there’s also something rather silly in his typically portentous “dark glimpses” and “spectral glamour.” This stereotypically dark and mysterious view of Kabbalah, which had already been studied carefully by non-Jews since at least the Renaissance, reinforces both Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and his antisemitism. For Lovecraft, Jewish magic (and some Kabbalistic rituals are unquestionably magical in their intent) is dark magic.

III

Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” is an overt example of his prejudice regarding Jews and Jewish magic. The evil Robert Suydam, the subject of Thomas Malone’s ill-fated investigation, is known as the author of an “out-of-print pamphlet…on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend.” Indeed, Suydam is something of a Faust figure. In the first part of the story, when Suydam is presented as old and decrepit, he is seen: 

loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words or names as ‘Sephiroth’, ‘Ashmodai’, and ‘Samaël.’

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook”

Later, at the time of Suydam’s wedding, when his youth and vigor seem to have been restored, Malone takes part in a raid of one of Suydam’s Red Hook properties, where horrifying paintings and words are found on the walls:

The paintings were appalling—hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read much of it, but whathe did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a sort of Hebraised Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian decadence:

HEL • HELOYM • SOTHER • EMMANVEL • SABAOTH • AGLA • 

TETRAGRAMMATON • AGYROS • OTHEOS • ISCHYROS • 

ATHANATOS • IEHOVA • VA • ADONAI • SADAY • HOMOVSION • MESSIAS • ESCHEREHEYE.

Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook”

What Lovecraft calls “Hebraised Hellenistic Greek” is in some instances Hellenized Hebrew, or simply Hebrew. Without unpacking all the terms, we can note that “Sephiroth” are the emanations of the Kabbalistic Etz Hayyim (the Tree of Life), “Adonai” is Hebrew for Lord, frequently appearing in Jewish prayers; “Saday” is a corruption of “Shaddai,” Hebrew for “Almighty”; and “Heloym” is probably a corruption of “Elohim,” another designation of divinity, in the plural. “Iehova” (Jehovah) is an Anglicized pronunciation of the “Tetragrammaton,” in Jewish belief the unpronounceable four-letter name of God  (יהוה), and “Emmanvel” (Emmanuel) is a name associated with the Messiah, that is, “Messias.” “Samaël” and “Ashmodai” are indeed prominent figures in Kabbalistic demonology. 

Suydam’s associates, we are told, “were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan,” which Malone notes “is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.” The Yazidis are hardly devil-worshippers; their faith combines elements of Christianity and Islam, and they have been subject to genocidal persecution in recent years by the Islamic State in Iraq. Be that as it may, the black magic in “The Horror at Red Hook” seems primarily to be drawn from Kabbalah, despite Lovecraft having picked up these references from the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

The figure of Lilith arises during the crisis of “The Horror at Red Hook,” when Malone experiences what the “specialists” later call a “dream,” a dream that forces him to resign from the police force and leaves him with what today we would term PTSD. In a Tor blog post on Lovecraft’s story, the horror writer Anne M. Pillsworth flippantly but I think accurately comments on Lilith’s role: 

Lilith, supposedly Adam’s first wife and the consort of archangels! Here she’s sexuality in its most terrifying and least sensuous guise—she has become it, not even female, a naked and leprous thing. That titters. A lot. And paws. And quaffs virgin blood. And hauls male corpses around with insolent ease. Plus phosphorescent is so not the same as radiant or beaming, as a bride should be. Phosphorescence is what mushrooms put out, or rotting things, a fungal light.

The magically reanimated corpse of Robert Suydam flees from what appears to be his “wedding” with Lilith, destroying her golden pedestal (which Pillsworth accurately calls “phallic”) and dissolving into “jellyish dissolution”—whereupon Malone mercifully faints.

In his comprehensive article on Lilith (which appears in his compendium volume simply called Kabbalah), Gershom Scholem traces her origins to Babylonian demonology, and then on through thousands of years of biblical, Talmudic, midrashic, and kabbalistic texts. The common belief that she was Adam’s first wife, who insisted on her equality with him during sexual intercourse, is related in turn to her being regarded as a threat to women in childbirth and a strangler of infants. In Kabbalah, she eventually came to be seen “as the permanent partner of Samael, queen of the realm of the forces of evil (the sitra ahra). In that world (the world of the kelippot) she fulfills a function parallel to that of the Shekhinah (“Divine Presence”) in the world of sanctity: just as the Shekhinah is the mother of the House of Israel, so Lilith is the mother of the unholy folk who constituted the ‘mixed multitude’ (the erev-rav) and ruled over all that is impure.”

Lovecraft’s corrupt but essentially accurate understanding of Jewish concepts informs his sensational narrative, though it is Kabbalah itself, as a demonic set of figures, beliefs, and practices that comes to rule “over all that is impure.” Thus, the antisemitism which pervades his attitudes and correspondence insinuates itself into his fiction as well.

IV

Having briefly surveyed Lovecraft’s views of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish mysticism, and considered how these play out in one of his stories, I want to make a few observations about my engagement with Lovecraft in my own poetry. Lovecraft’s presence is different from that of other antisemitic writers who have had an impact on my work. Like most poets, I am in part an echo chamber, in which one hears the voices of those who have come before me, including such great but vexing modernists as Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. This is a matter of form or style: tone, cadence, turns of syntax, charged words, conscious or unconscious gestures and allusions. For me, Lovecraft’s poetry, with its eighteenth-century rhyme schemes and skillfully handled but deliberately antiquated rhetoric, is much less engaging than his fiction. Rather, I return again and again to his fascinating inventions, which means that it is the stuff of Lovecraft’s stories that I like to play with—selectively, gingerly, and no doubt due to its very loaded themes.

These occasional games coincide with my move, in recent years, to more narrative poetry. Unlike any number of recent writers in the Lovecraft tradition, I have not been inclined to directly revise his work in order to undermine and deconstruct his prejudices. But this is not to say that my appropriations have neglected to address his faults entirely. Irony is my mode, though there is always an underlying sense of transcendental desire. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, including its morbidities regarding race, ethnicity, and gender is turned inside out.  

One episode in my book From the Files of the Immanent Foundation involves Emma, an Afro-Caribbean psychic who is sent by the Foundation to a conference in the “Summerland.” There, in her astral form, she has a one-night stand with a handsome fellow who may or may not be related to Wilbur Whateley. When Emma, whose handler is none other than Armitage (now retired from his post at Miskatonic University), discovers how she was set up, she creates a computer virus that wreaks havoc with the workings of the entire Foundation. In my poem The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust (in the collection In a Broken Star), Pascal, an androgenous adventurer and sorcerer-for-hire, has a disturbing vision:

…So Wanderlust ascends—

“Past Midnight! Past the Morning Star!” Her Voice

rushes by in the wind. The tzinorot beckon.

Each Face gazes outward as Wanderlust approaches.

These are the boundaries of the infinite spaces,

the non-Euclidean forms, studied in Antarctica

and Provence. Elder Things hanging with Shimon

bar-Yochai among the hills of Galilee. L’cha Dodi!

The throbbing in Pascal’s temples is more painful

now as the Book opens, floating in the silent void.

The Zohar, aka The Necronomicon. Sacred fantasy.

Drawings by Steve Ditko. Story by Stan Lee.

Later, Pascal, depressed, will take a walk on the beach and meet up with an old friend:

Wanderlust takes the new express from Innisfree

to Innsmouth. Settles into the cushy seat. Please

enjoy our complimentary Wi-Fi. Old-fashioned

Pascal prefers telepathy, tunes in expecting messages

from the beyond. Comes up with nothing but static.

The maggidim have been strangely silent. They have

nothing to say in the face of self-doubt. Negative

capability? Magic, they insist, is an art of the will.

So what will you do now? Wanderlust walks along

the strand, looking out to Devil Reef. An old friend

swims in for a brief visit. Stares at Pascal coldly.

“Nice to breathe the air of upper earth now and then.”

“Pascal Wanderlust is nothing but trouble! Sorry,

but that’s what great-great-grandmother said to me

before I left. Tries to right the balance and upsets it

every time. I told them the design was flawed ten

thousand years ago, but why listen to us? We dwelt

in the Abyss before the Beginning. What do we know?

And honestly, Pascal, all those Miskatonic researchers

following your last visit. Former Foundation agents,

every one. Take some advice from an old school chum.

You were a goth with eyeliner and your first pair of Docs.

I was a rich kid from Ohio obsessed with my ancestry.

I learned I could change—the hard way. You can too.”

Looking at these verses now, it occurs to me that Pascal, a sweet Jewish boy-girl who had a Bar/Bat Mitzvah attended by Deep Ones and Elder Things—and about whom I’m still writing—is in one respect Lovecraft’s spiritual descendent. This does not make Wanderlust, or Wanderlust’s author, altogether happy. But as the aquatic being that was once Robert Olmstead says to his old friend Pascal, “I learned I could change—the hard way. You can too.”

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Norman Finkelstein is a poet and literary critic. His most recent book of poems, co-authored with Tirzah Goldenberg, is Thirty-Six / Two Lives: A Poetic Dialogue. He edits and writes the poetry review blog Restless Messengers.

Copyright 2022 Norman Finkelstein.

An Australian Woman looks at Lovecraft
by Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer

My involvement with Lovecraft scholarship goes back some twenty-seven years. At one stage I was a huge Stephen King fan, and I found a reference in King’s non-fiction work Danse Macabre to Lovecraft (see King, 1982:132-5). I was studying English literature at Master’s level, around 1992/3, and in the realm of academia, historical writers were more acceptable research subjects than contemporary writers, so I approached the department about a project. The project was approved, but the resident Gothic expert was unable to provide supervision, and I struggled along against a curtain of institutional resistance regarding texts associated with popular culture. My assumption that as a ‘dead white male’ to quote the cliché, Lovecraft would be respected academically was incorrect, and instead he proved to be a controversial and polarizing figure. 

One thing that appealed to me about Lovecraft was his evocative ability which appeared to tap into Jungian archetypes. Motifs such as mysterious civilizations to be found under the sea in “The Temple”; forbidden underground activity in “The Rats in the Walls”, together with long-lived/reincarnated sorcerers in “The Alchemist” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” all fascinated me. I felt that these tales remained in the imagination long after the first reading and tapped into something in the collective unconscious. Lovecraft’s letters appeared to support my case, declaring: “There are certain standard stories invented before the dawn of history or later, which generations whisper about” including “Man changed to animal, diseases miraculously cured… vampire, dead man moving, ghost, premonitory warning of death &c.” (Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja, 435).

Another thing that appealed to me was Lovecraft’s references to women in his stories. Hold on–you are going to say–Lovecraft is known for having very few female characters! Remember, I was enclosed by academic conventions at the time, and the majority of the lauded writers were male, with their female characters being stereotypes and/or love interests. Moreover, some of Lovecraft’s contemporary writers, such as the popular Arthur Conan Doyle, had created dynamics where the “homosocial” friendship of males was the entire frame for the story. (McLaughlin 2013:11) Charming though some of these pairings were, the implications were that intellect was a male characteristic and women unwitting domestics.

Lovecraft’s women were different. Not represented in abundance, but with an astuteness and sympathy which biographically speaking, could have come from living much of his life with his mother and aunts. His letters recount his profound admiration of his older aunt, Lillian Delora Phillips Clark, and his dedication to caring duties when she became ill.

Let us look at a couple of examples of Lovecraftian references to women that I haven’t had the opportunity to explore elsewhere. In The Shadow Out of Time (which incidentally journeys to Australia) the narrator includes the names of a mother, wife, and daughter as identifying features in his brief biography. 

I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor.
–H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time

In this passage, possessing a wife, mother, and daughter receive equal acknowledgement with an education and career. The account contrasts sharply with patriarchal genealogies such as those found in the Bible (e.g. Genesis 5, Matthew Chapter 1, NKJV) that are only concerned with the male line.

A few pages later, we find that the wife has a mind of her own and astute judgment. “From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband.” The wife demonstrates independent agency by obtaining “a legal divorce”, then the “elder son” and “small daughter” also reject the father. The story will show the wife’s interpretation holds truth, receiving confirmation when Peaslee finds an ancient scroll written in his own hand.

The story then begins to detail the narrator’s occult research, travel, and descent into madness. One of the main points of interest in this section is the role female presence plays. At the height of alien possession, even female domestics are denied access to the house. “On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid.” For a brief time, only a policeman, “a foreign-looking man” and “Dr. Wilson” are allowed entry. On “Sept. 27” Peaslee’s consciousness reappears “just after noon” with “the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned.” Thus, the metadata places madness and alien possession in the realm of the masculine, with normality and health in the realm of the feminine. It is a division of the genders, but it is one I don’t mind, as the mad-woman stereotype has had more than its fair share of exposure elsewhere.

Lovecraft is condemned for his racism. The period before the First World War and especially the years leading up to World War II were times of deplorable social prejudice; and I find in Lovecraft’s letters a record of societal attitudes that are both regrettable and cautionary. I also subscribe to the theory that Lovecraft’s extreme expressions of repugnance might have been products of mild Asperger’s or Autism Spectrum. I know this could upset some fans, but Gary and Jennifer Meyers Lovecraft’s Syndrome: An Asperger’s Appraisal of the Writer’s Life makes interesting reading.

Many people have negative attitudes that constitute racism, but Lovecraft’s reactions to crowded and dirty conditions were so extreme that he saw the stain embodied in visages, prompting ugly outbursts I prefer not to reproduce here. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, August 21, 1926, Lovecraft wrote:

The city is befouled and accursed—I come away from it with a sense of having been tainted by contact, and long for some solvent of oblivion to wash it out! (Selected Letters 2.68) 

This nauseated attitude does appear close to the level of disability. High intelligence and creative output are quite possible for some persons, while large-scale social interactions may remain stressful.

I was challenged to look deeper into Lovecraft’s racism and compare it to the Australian situation. In this country around 1930, significant minority groups included Italian, Greek, and Chinese immigrants. Lovecraft admits admiring the Greek and Roman civilizations more than his own “biological lines” in a letter to Robert Barlow dated 1936. (O Fortunate Floridian! 347) In a letter to Natalie Wooley he refers to “a Chinese gentleman”, and also calls Japan “one of the greatest and most influential nations in the modern world” (Letters to Robert Bloch and Others 200-2001). It appears that when a nation had produced significant cultural artifacts, Lovecraft became an admirer, at least in theory.

The remaining problem is his prejudice regarding Australian Aborigines. This attitude does appear irredeemable: “Equally inferior—and perhaps even more so—is the Australian black stock […] This race has other stigmata of primitiveness, such as great Neanderthal eyebrow ridges.” (Letters to Robert Bloch and Others 199)

This sort of talk is ignorant, reprehensible, and based on outmoded science. Lovecraft ought not to have been disseminating it. However, he by no means originated the heresy, and I would like to respectfully point out the harm similar beliefs have done when espoused by persons of influence and the ability to create policy.

The colonisation of Australia, which commenced in 1778, was largely motivated by the British Empire’s need to acquire space for its subjects. Eckermann (2006:17) suggests that there was a subsequent need to “rationalise and justify” supplanting the Indigenous inhabitants. Borch (2001:225) ) reports that according to Calvinist reasoning, countries ought to be ruled by Christian people. Moreover, following Darwin’s theories, the Aborigines represented a lower stage of the evolutionary scale than the European settlers. These theories and prejudices were solidified into pervading scientific and Institutional racism (Eckermann 2006: 8-12).

The Aboriginal people, who had maintained a complex custodial relationship with the land for thousands of years, were incorrectly perceived as unsophisticated “hunter-gatherers.” According to Locke’s beliefs property rights depended upon working the land, and the colonial government felt this justified applying a doctrine of “Terra Nullis” which violated Indigenous possession (Borch 2001: 231). Initial amiable relations involving trade soured, and conflict resulted in large-scale massacres of Indigenous people (Eckermann 2006: 14-15, 19).

Ramsland (2006:50-51, 55) observes the surviving Indigenous people were considered “a child race incapable of handling their own affairs.” Their autonomy was removed, and decisions were made for them by the so-called “Aboriginal Protection Board.” Between 1900 and 1950 Indigenous families were deliberately taken from their home areas and settled in remote regions, where they lived in overcrowded conditions. The policy of forced relocation failed to acknowledge the Indigenous spiritual connection to their traditional land, causing identity loss and emotional trauma (McMurray and Param 2008: 168; Crespigny et al 2006: 278).

Moreover, the residents of missions and reserves were denied the right to vote or own real estate. They also had limited access to medical attention (Forsyth 2007: 35-38). At an extreme, institutionalised abuse was performed, with Aurukun women reporting children separated from their parents and put into gender-specific dorms. Adults were also chained to trees, flogged and starved (Slater 2008: 6). The practice of “exclusion on demand”, which meant white families could request Indigenous children not attend community schools, resulted in the loss of educational opportunities (Tatz 2001: 32).

A change of government tactic led to policies of “assimilation and integration” being applied between 1950 and 1972. However, Indigenous savings accounts were controlled by the government, effectively quarantining any money they received. The living conditions on reserves continued to be poor, with disease sweeping through camps. An extreme administrative imposition required Indigenous people to seek permission to marry (Forsyth 2007: 38-40; Eckermann 2006: 27; Stolen Wages). In another scandalous social engineering program, Indigenous children were removed from their birth families and placed in foster homes in an attempt to ‘bring them up white’, so as to speak. Wilson (1997:177) details some of the detrimental effects of this program.

In 1967 a national referendum granted the Aboriginal people citizenship (Dugdale & Arabena 2008: 156). Some key improvements include the recognition of native title and land rights through the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976, and the 1992 High Court Decision, Mabo v. Qld (Healey 2007: 2-5). On 13 February 2008 the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the Indigenous people regarding the “stolen generation” (The National Museum of Australia 2021).

Unfortunately, Indigenous people continue to experience high levels of unemployment, poor living conditions, and vulnerability to disease. The infant mortality rate is high, and Aboriginal persons have a significantly lower life expectancy than the general Australian population. (See Einsiedel et al 2008: 568; Healey 2010: 6, 8-14; Mathews et al 2008:613-614, 621-622) All this was sadly brought to reality to me a few years ago when an Aboriginal friend died prematurely, becoming another statistic.

So my point is, repeating prejudicial statements can lead to belief, and belief can lead to bigoted action—but let us ask ourselves honestly—are we still at risk of perpetuating things which ought not to be disseminated?

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Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer lives in Adelaide, South Australia. She has written a Masters paper on H.P. Lovecraft, and M. Lett. Dissertation on “Fairy Tale Motifs” in Nineteenth Century English novels. Cecelia’s poetry has been published in Spectral Realms (edited by S.T. Joshi) and PS: It’s Poetry compiled by the Poetry Soup community. Micro-fictions have appeared in the “Dark Drabbles” series published by Black Hare Press, and the “Scary Snippets” series produced by Nocturnal Sirens. Cecelia’s research interests include Gothic horror, fantasy and popular culture: including film & television.

Amazon: https://amazon.com/Cecelia-Hopkins-Drewer/e/B071G968NM  

Copyright 2022 Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer.