“Herbert West and the Mammaries of Madness” (2015) by Dixie Pinoit

I cannot bring myself to speak of it, so of course I must. It is with terror and that utmost thrill of lust-filled despair that I write of my wedding night, that night that wouldst,—for any average couple, be filled with so much innocent discovery, so much joy in the uncovering of what a lifetime of connubial bliss is meant to be.
—Dixie Pinoit, “Herbert West and the Mammaries of Madness” in Lovecraft After Dark 144

The soundtrack to this review is “Move Your Dead Bones” (2003) by Dr. Reanimator (Jordi Cubino).

Parody is one of the great underappreciated modes of Lovecraftian erotica. All of the factors that make it so easy to pastiche Lovecraft’s fiction—the emphasis on surface features of purple prose and melodrama, the tendency to riff off of existing elements of the mythology, and the emphasis on taboo topics—are easy to twist into parody, usually by exaggerating the already over-exaggerated until the emotional language becomes just absurd. Once you cross the line from serious pastiche into parody, adding sex is pretty natural, given how many parallels there are. “Forbidden literature,” for example, can apply equally well to pornography as it can to eldritch tomes like the Necronomicon:

Doris didn’t like the Necronomicon, although she considered herself an emancipated and free-thinking young woman. There was something sinister, or to be downright honest about it, perverted about that book—and not in a nice, exciting way, but in a sick and frightening way. All those strange illustrations, always with five-sided borders just like the Pentagon in Washington, but with those people inside doing all those freaky sex acts with those other creatures that weren’t people at all.
—Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid (1975), 93

“Herbert West—Reanimator!” has for whatever reason been an unusually prolific target for parody and pastiche, both erotic and otherwise, as shown by such diverse works as “Kanye West—Reanimator” (2015) by Joshua Chaplinsky vs. “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon, “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” (2012) by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, “Herbert West in Love” (2012) by Molly Tanzer, Re-Animator (1985) with its infamous head-giving-head scene and its various sequels, and the hardcore adult film Re-Penetrator (2004, Burning Angel). So Dixie Pinoit in “Herbert West and the Mammaries of Madness” is in good company.

As it happens, Pinoit blends a few details between Lovecraft’s original opus and the 1985 film: where Jeffrey Combs (the actor for Herbert West) is brunet, Lovecraft had West as blond in the original novella, and Pinoit has West as a blond; where Lovecraft had West’s partner as a nameless protagonist, the 1985 film gives him the name Dan Cain, so Pinoit uses Dan Cain as the name for West’s assistant. It is the kind of detail that rewards the detail-oriented Mythos enthusiast, though easy to miss when the narrative lens turns to some of the other action:

Noticing that one of Elena’s awe-inspiring breasts had somehow freed itself from its restraints, I stroked it plaintively before restoring it to what could indeed become its burial shroud unless the doctor was simply premature in his determination of death.
—Dixie Pinoit, “Herbert West and the Mammaries of Madness” in Lovecraft After Dark 145

Chekov’s corpse. There is something wonderfully straightforward about Reanimator media, in that all you really need is a body at or rapidly cooling toward room temperature for the fun to start, and there’s a great deal of fun to be had in various scenarios about how the corpse came to be and what happens when it is eventually reanimated. A great deal of Reanimator adaptations can riff on this concept pretty much nonstop, but what makes it really work is not the practice of revivifying the dead—any Frankenstein-derived or zombie story can give you the thrill of the dead coming back to life—it’s Herbert West himself, with all of his quirks and monomania, which drives the plot. A good Reanimator story is about the Reanimator as much as the reanimated.

My beloved’s corpse now stripped of the ivory lace and silk wedding dress that had once adorned her curvaceous form, stripped bare under the yellow lights to make it easier for Dr. West to inject things into her delicious upper arms while her ample breasts and small tuft of pubic hair glistened and juggled from the force of his ministrations.
—Dixie Pinoit, “Herbert West and the Mammaries of Madness” in Lovecraft After Dark 148

Readers that think they know where this is going are still in for a surprise or two; the protagonist surely was. Pinoit by this point plays a little fast and loose with the “rules” of reanimation—murderous bloodlust is out, and certain other types of lust are very much in—but the subversion of expectations, especially when transgressive and exaggerated for comedic effect, are common techniques in all parody.

Yet for all the surprises, one of the most notable is that Pinoit is obviously a fan as much as a pornographer. The nameless Lovecraftian protagonist is actually a Lovecraftian protagonist, inspired by the events of Lovecraft’s life and so the characterization—a parody of Lovecraft’s style—is really an affectionate tribute to the Old Gent himself.

Sales plummeted until the hat shop could no longer support us.

Eventually she moved away to start over. A larger town, where her curious predilections were less likely to be remarked upon amongst a larger populous, and would perhaps even be welcomed by an adventurous few.

I did not go with her.
—Dixie Pinoit, “Herbert West and the Mammaries of Madness” in Lovecraft After Dark 154

Lovecraft as the star of an erotic story might seem odd, or even off-putting at first glance, but Pinoit is far from the only one to do it; Edward Lee has used Lovecraft (or a character based on him) in several of his “Hardcore Lovecraft” novels and novellas, especially Pages Torn from a Travel Journal (2013) and Trolley No. 1852 (2010). These depictions are often exaggerated for humor as much or more than erotic value, but there is a real amount of effort put into some of these stories to embed aspect of Lovecraft’s life, style, fiction, and just plain character into the fictionalization. These are homages—and speak as much to how Lovecraft himself has become a part of his own artificial mythology.

Considering how much interest has been devoted to Lovecraft’s sex life after his death by fans and scholars alike, this aspect of his character—his sexuality and sexual experiences, real or imagined—present what might be one of the more ultimate taboos to transgress. If you as a reader are at all squicked out at the thought of H. P. Lovecraft having sex, then the author has succeeded at their goal. If you’re excited at the idea of your literary idol getting laid, then the author has also succeeded! The whole point of using a character that is such an obvious version of Lovecraft is to evoke some visceral or emotional reaction from the reader. This effect can only be achieved because of the degree of posthumous fame that Lovecraft has achieved.

While there are few people that might write the Lovecraftian equivalent to Rachel Bloom’s “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” (2010), the same basic idea has found expression in the Mythos. H. P. Lovecraft may be dead, but as a fictional character he can do things he never did in life; he has been in many ways reanimated himself—and the interest is not necessarily in what the literary corpse of Lovecraft does, but in why the reanimator has brought them back, and how. In many cases, like this one, it is little more than an in-joke—a nod and a wink to the dedicated Lovecraftian that found themselves coming to the end of this erotic tale—but it is also a tribute to the lasting appeal of H. P. Lovecraft as a character, that he can be inserted into a story such and expect to be recognized, without his name ever being given.

“Herbert West and the Mammaries of Madness” appeared in the erotic Cthulhu Mythos anthology Lovecraft after Dark (2015).

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

“The Artist’s Retreat” (2011) by Annabeth Leong

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of erotic content, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected passages with descriptions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be included.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

Do you crave intellectual tentacle porn?
—Ad copy, Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica (2011)

What is “Lovecraftian erotica?” If you rule out erotic works that directly parody or refer to the stories Lovecraft wrote, such as “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon or “The Ape in Me: A Tale of Lovecraftian Lust” (2016) by Raine Roka; his creations such as Cthulhu and the Necronomicon in works like “Le Pornomicon” (2005) by Logan Kowalsky or Mother Hydra in “Pages Found Among the Effects of Miss Edith M. Teller” (2005) by Caitlín R. Kiernan; those rare erotic works that refer to or depict Lovecraft directly as a character—as in Edward Lee’s Trolley No. 1852 (2010)—then what you have left is a very vaguely defined body of erotic materials which that take more nebulous inspiration from Lovecraft’s ideas of cosmic horror and the tropes of Mythos fiction that came later, but don’t directly attempt to incorporate the man or the Mythos.

For many Lovecraftian erotic works, the tropes and set dressing are usually as far as the author cares to take things. Tentacles often make their appearance, ancient gods or eldritch entities come when summoned, sacrifices are usually less than virginal and surprisingly enthusiastic, and the whole pornographic scenario often reads like a bootleg X-rated session of the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game. Lindsey Purl’s erotic triptych Tentacles of the Elder Gods (2013), which involves “Kum-Shaggurath” is an exemplar of this kind of fiction. Quality and creativity varies; few works are erotic classics, but are often packaged and sold as disposable literature. Intended as flash entertainment, they answer to a momentary need, often as part of a brief zeitgeist, and then quickly sink out of sight into online back catalogs or other form of obscurity.

Then you have works like Annabeth Leong’s “The Artist’s Retreat.”

The dreams were confused and irresolute, but there was nothing vague about the position in which I work. I snatched my hand from where it lay nestled between my legs and tried to ignore the throbbing there. Sweat soaked the pillows and bed beneath me, and the sheets were tangled around my legs as if I’d been rolling from one side of the bed to the other all night. Sometime, I’d managed to yank my nightshirt up and off one arm, leaving one breast free to the chill air of my dark and silent room. Shivering, I pulled the garment down and fathered my blankets more tightly around me.
—Annabeth Leong, “The Artist’s Retreat” in Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica (2011)

The distinction between “The Artist’s Retreat” and any other work of Lovecraftian fiction, like say “From the Cold Dark Sea” (2016) by Storm Constantine, is one of degree rather than kind. Leong’s work is in an anthology of erotic Lovecraftian fiction, and the erotic element appears early and grows more intense throughout; it is a central part of the plot, where in most other Lovecraftian works sex is usually not the primary focus of the narrative lens. That aside, the work is really nothing less than an original story that draws obvious inspiration from Lovecraft and the Mythos without feeling the need to directly invoke or squeeze itself into the framework of the Mythos.

The distinction shifts the reader’s focus from looking for tie-ins or how the story might into the bigger picture of Mythos lore and instead the reader might begin to see “The Artist’s Retreat” as something that fits into Lovecraft’s milieu, and pursues some of his themes, yet in a way that Lovecraft and most of his co-creators in the Mythos would never have put together. There are the same-gender heterosexual friends, one of them an artist; very much a Lovecraftian pairing…until they become something more. There is the setting, in a rural Massachusetts that Lovecraft might find familiar, but not in any named and denoted part of his Lovecraft Country. There is the tricky distinction of that thing, seen and unseeable, which invokes Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned” thing…yet what it does under Leong’s direction is nothing like what any of those authors would have their creations do.

“The Artist’s Retreat” is, after all, Lovecraftian erotica.

Many writers appear to find it difficult to pursue both weird and erotic themes simultaneously. Lovecraft in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” emphasized:

The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.

It is a rare story that can both scary and erotic; that can work that atmosphere of the sense of outside contact with the intensely grounded sensations of physical eroticism. Not impossible, because for all their differences, there are points of commonality: the sense of heightened awareness brought about by sexual arousal and the fear-response, the titillation and excitement when it comes to approaching and then violating some taboo, the psychological impact and physical consequences that may result from such sudden violations, with all their long-term ramifications…these are the building blocks of erotic horror, as shown in works like Ramsey Campbell’s “The Faces at Pine Dunes” (1980) and his exquisite novel The Darkest Part of the Woods (2003).

Part of what makes “The Artist’s Retreat” successful is the atmosphere. The pacing is steady, but takes its time setting up each scene, providing small climaxes for each chapter, letting the protagonist Edie sink deeper and deeper into the mystery and the renewed friendship with her painter friend Olivia. there aren’t any huge surprises; the plot might almost be called formulaic in how the Lovecraftian protagonist is compelled to leave their familiar surrounds for an isolated local, where they sink into strangeness—it worked for Lovecraft in “The Festival,” and it worked for Silvia Moreno-Garcia in Mexican Gothic (2020), and it works for Annabeth Leong here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing a familiar plot straight, so long as it is done well…and it helps that the weird parts are refreshingly weird, not just a priapic Cthulhu.

The cryptic images did not depict any shaps or beings I know—still, they stirred me. I got to my knees beside Olivia, and together we explored the contours of the boulder. I could not piece together an overall image of the design. Neither could I decode any individual piece. But the longer I ran my fingers over it, and the longer I knelt beside her and stared, the more I began to see flashes of meaning. Two coiled appendages, wound around each other and rubbing their undersides together obscenely; what could have been a thousand tiny fingers caressing a swollen, monolithic shaft; a long and muscular tongue, curved into a suggestive question.
—Annabeth Leong, “The Artist’s Retreat” in Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica (2011)

Leong’s story fits well into an anthology of Lovecraftian erotica, but it could fit just as well into a mainstream Lovecraftian anthology. Nothing of the weird atmosphere is sacrificed for the erotic, and nothing of the erotic is sacrificed for the weird. They work together, hand in hand, and while they echo the ways sex was used as an entry point for beings from outside in Lovecraft’s fiction—think of “The Dunwich Horror”—the way that it works is ultimately original, fresh, and well done.

“The Artist’s Retreat” by Annabeth Leong was published in Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica (2011) by Circlet Press. Her other Lovecraftian works include “Our Child” in Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2014) by Martian Migraine Press.

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

“Under the Keeper of the Key” (2015) by Jaap Boekestein

Eldritch Fappenings

I have never read the famous “Justine” of de Sade, or the equally famous “Venus in Furs” of von Masoch. Both are undoubtedly significant in the history of psychology, though perhaps less so as works of art. Probably they can be obtained at any time from dealers in so-called “curiosa” like the Falstaff Press or Esoterika Biblion of New York.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Lee McBride White, 12 Sep 1932, Letters to J. Vernon Shea, &c. 353-354

The term BDSM (Bondage Domination Sadism Masochism) did not exist when Lovecraft was writing his Mythos, though he would have recognized parts of it from his cursory knowledge of psychology and sexology, and would have been familiar with aspects of its depiction in pulp magazines—Weird Tales among other pulps included vivid scenes of men and women being bound, whipped, and tortured, or forced into subservience, sometimes in a sexual manner (though never explicitly). Indeed, Robert E. Howard’s early Mythos fiction such as “The Black Stone” (1931) contain scenes of flagellation (for more on which, check out Charles Hoffmann’s “Elements of Sadomasochism in the Fiction and Poetry of Robert E. Howard”).

This early influence of BDSM literature on Howard’s Mythos tales is part of a complicated collision of censorship, psychology, and economics. Sadomasochism and physical punishment were commonly understood as psychological deviations rather than sexual kinks, since the acts themselves were adjacent to sex, but didn’t necessarily include intercourse or masturbation. As such, works which presented themselves medical, legal, anthropological, or historical treatises could sometimes pass censors—Robert E. Howard had a small library of such volumes—and more importantly for pulp publishers, meant that they could be more freely advertised in magazines, and that dramatized aspects of these practices could add some sexual titillation to encourage sales. This in turn encouraged some pulp writers to work such elements into their stories; including Weird Tales favorites like Seabury Quinn and Robert E. Howard, who vied for cover art by Margaret Brundage for their stories.

These early BDSM-inflected pulp stories should be understood as fantasy, strongly influenced by erroneous understandings of sexuality, gender, and relationships, not a reflection of real-life practice. This can be clearly seen in, among other things, Robert E. Howard’s complicated depiction of lesbianism in his fiction. The whole stereotype of the “sadistic” villain may not owe itself to the pulps, but the pulps definitely helped build and promote such stereotypes. It would take considerable time for the “scene” to build up, and for knowledge and philosophy of BDSM as a safe, consensual adult activity to become more open, established, and move away from the stark depictions of utter depravity showcased in pulp fiction.

As understanding of sexual kinks has spread and grown in acceptance in society at large, that understanding has rarely fed back into Cthulhu Mythos fiction. While there are occasional characters that engage in obviously sadistic or masochistic practices, and bondage in various forms has never gone out of fashion, BDSM is rarely a key feature of Mythos fiction, especially BDSM of the consensual sexual activity between adults variety. For example, in the Delta Green roleplaying game (an offspring of the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game), the Shan (Insects from Shaggai) that originated in the fiction of Ramsey Campbell display masochistic tendencies when they take a host. Another notable example is “Necrophallus” by Makino Osamu (牧野修), which focuses on the sadistic element and body horror as its primary theme—again, emphasizing the deliberate fantasy rather than consensual bloodplay or body modification play.

One of the most interesting overt uses of BDSM themes and imagery in a Lovecraftian work is the film adaptation of From Beyond (1986), which occupies an interesting middle ground between pulp sadism and consensual BDSM practice. BDSM equipment and imagery is used both to show the character’s increasing desire for more intense experiences, and the sado-masochistic depths that the villainous Dr. Pretorius had descended to in the search for some new sensation.

Weird as it might be to think about, erotic Mythos fiction and pornographic materials also rarely broach BDSM territory, especially consensual activity. While it is relatively common to have a sacrifice to Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu tied up so that the Mythos entity can sexually assault them, it is much rarer to see ropeplay, or the “sacrifice” an elaborate sexual roleplaying scenario featuring consenting adults.

There are several reasons why might we don’t see more a more elaborate BDSM Mythos. For one, it’s kink-stacking; the subset of your audience that enjoys both BDSM and Lovecraftian erotica is likely going to be smaller than the audience that enjoys both separately. For another, the intensely personal relationships between the players in a BDSM scenario—especially a consensual one—can be difficult to square with the often very impersonal nature of Lovecraftian horrors. While Cthulhu might bind you with its mighty tentacles, it’s not clear that Cthulhu is getting off on the act. Yet there are a couple of stories which tread this rare territory and do interesting things with it.

“Sub-space,” said Machteld. “Pain is a key that can open doors. It begins with fear, followed by anger, resistance, resignation, and finally surrender. Deeper and deeper down into the warm red sea until you reach the core Down there are no desires, no thoughts, just the primal void. In that place the universe is waiting, a blank slate, ready to be filled with its latent destiny. And there the worthy will find the answers they seek.”
—Jaap Boekestein, “Under the Keeper of the Key” in Lovecraft after Dark 17

The idea of achieving a different state of consciousness is an old one in magical and religious practice. Some choose to use drugs, and drug-fiction is a staple of early fantasy and weird fiction, including H. P. Lovecraft’s “Ex Oblivione” and Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Hashish Eater.” Other methods might include fasting, chanting, drumming, and dancing; in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” Lovecraft wrote:

For the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed the keenest contrition, and explained that the conversation later heard was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a certain mental atmosphere.

There are parallels in Lovecraftian occultism too; Donald Tyson in Grimoire of the Necronomicon parrots Aleister Crowley’s rite of eroto-comatose lucidity, where the altered state of consciousness is achieved by excessive sexual activity:

On the day prior to the attempt to open the Gate of the East upon the path to the black throne, the follower of this way should rely on the aid of a partner to sustain his arousal without interruption continuously. This can be done with the aid of caresses, embraces, erotic art, sensual music, incense, sensual baths, and oils for the skin. If necessary, the aspirant may sustain his own arousal, but this is more difficult as it divides concentration. Always the image of Shub-Niggurath should be held in the imagination, but in a form of the goddess that is attractive and seductive to the aspirant for her favor. Female disciples will choose to conceive her in her masculine aspect, unless they favor the love of women. (148)

Richard Gavin in his entry for The Starry Wisdom Library outlined another such procedure:

The method employed to accomplish this was a ritual entitled “Alimenting the Ghul (or Ghoules).” In preparation for this ritual, the aspirant would neither sleep nor consume food for three days, all the while conducting a repetitive series of darkly meditative chants while sitting cross-legged within a “place of death,” presumably a mausoleum, a catacomb, or other large tomb. At the conclusion of the three-day preparation period, the aspirant’s naked body would be rubbed with various salves before he was wrapped in a funerary shroud and buried alive within a coffin made of oak. (127)

Scott R. Jones wrote in When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality:

The Black Gnosis may be triggered in the moment of orgasm, or at any moment during the sexual act (or indeed at any moment at all, sexual or otherwise) by allowing the Being-Strangeness of the act itself manifest fully in the consciousness. This awareness is brought forth through a meditation on fear. (108)

There are other examples, different paths. Different authors working at different purposes to express similar ideas: that there are different states of consciousness, that can be arrived at through various means (which may resemble magic, or sex), and which unlock…something for the individual. Sometimes a particular occult knowledge, in others a transformation of self. All of which has its clear parallels with BDSM as it is understood in the contemporary consciousness.

You don’t need to build a dungeon, elaborate set-pieces of torture devices, and a wardrobe of latex and leather gear to have a little bondage fun, or to engage in some hearty spanking. Domination is an attitude and game that need not be confined to a bedroom. While we often get fixated on the outward trappings of BDSM play, there is a deeper psychology at work. Sexual submissives in the BDSM scene are not psychologically stunted or damaged individuals who are dominated by more powerful personalities, they are fully conscious human beings who feel the need to submit, and derive something from the act—or ritual—of submission.

Which is not as easy as it sounds. Yet subspace is the essential bridge that Jaap Boekestein uses to connect BDSM to the Cthulhu Mythos. Where Robert E. Howard and the From Beyond film were using the striking imagery of flagellation, and BDSM’s props and costumes to titillate the reader or viewer, Boekestein goes into the psychology of the individual that would willing subject themselves to such rites as Robert E. Howard described in “The Black Stone”—and very specifically, why someone seeking out the Cthulhu Mythos might do this.

The whip hit the exact same spot. A groan escaped his lips, bright flames shot through his leg. Is this an initiation or sadistic torture? What has this to do with the secrets of the ancients?

Whap. Whap.

She kept hitting Without mercy, Machteld thrashed him. He could not see anything but he felt her moving around, hitting his chest, his stomach, his cock. Burning strokes of pain as she hit him everywhere. Nothing was safe. Nothing was sacred.
—Jaap Boekestein, “Under the Keeper of the Key” in Lovecraft after Dark 21

It is a process that the reader themselves goes through with the protagonist. His questions are their questions, but in the end…well, a vicarious flagellation session will never equal the real experience. The result will be familiar to many readers of the Mythos; Lovecraft wrote about another protagonist who achieved the same state, albeit through a different path. Boekestein wrote about this:

What kind of people, I wondered, wouldn’t have much of a problem with the Mythos Universe? People who were different from the norm, was my conclusion. People who perceived reality differently. “Transformation is the key. Transformation of both the body and the mind.” If you live in a non-mundane world, you don’t feel mundane fears. The monsters might even welcome you in as one of their own.
—Jaap Boekestein, “Afterword” in Cyäegha #8 (Spring 2013)

Many of the people that read and write the Cthulhu Mythos identify as outsiders. Weird fiction attracts weird people. Those with an interest or affinity in BDSM are outsiders too. While the communities are separate, there are individuals who have a foot in both worlds…and for those who have such an inclination, maybe they will be happy to know that they too can trace their roots back to the beginnings of the Mythos.

Jaap Boekestein is a Dutch writer who has written several Mythos stories, which have been published in English and Dutch, and editor of Waen Sinne and Wonderwaan. Some of his Mythos fiction appeared under the pseudonym Claudia van Arkel. “Under the Keeper of the Key” appeared in the erotic Cthulhu Mythos anthology Lovecraft after Dark (2015).

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

Illustration Portfolio No. 1 (1925) by The Arthur Wesley Dow Association

There’s no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify. There was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model”

When fans think of the artwork most associated with the literary works of Lord Dunsany, the first and last name is Sidney H. Sime, whose fantastic illustrations graced The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and most of Dunsany’s other fantasies. Sime also contributed art to illustrate works by Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson, and Lovecraft held him up in his fiction and letters as an artistic genius. Today, when fantastic art is so widely available online, and of such a high quality due to the proliferation in books and courses of technique and the availability of tools and materials, readers might lose sight of how rare and precious really good fantasy art was back in Lovecraft’s time…yet even in 1925, when Weird Tales was only a couple of years old and still finding its feet, Lord Dunsany’s fantasies inspired a group of women artists…and found publication.

The Arthur Wesley Dow Association was founded at the University of California, Southern Branch (now UCLA) in 1922. Materials related to this portfolio (presumably the original art or proofs) are still held at the UCLA library. This portfolio appears to have been begun as early as 1923, and was published in 1925. Compiled by Helen C. Chandler, a professor of arts at the University of California.

In form, this is ten unbound black-and-white plates—seven plates by five artists illustrate two stories drawn from Lord Dunsany’s collection Time and the Gods (1906). They represent interpretations of Lovecraft’s work. Not copying Sime, but presenting their own interpretations, in their own medium and style.

All the gods were sitting in Pegāna, and Their slave, Time, lay idle at Pegāna’s gate with nothing to destroy, when They thought of worlds, worlds large and round and gleaming, and little silver moons. Then (who knoweth when?), as the gods raised Their hands making the sign of the gods, the thoughts of the gods became worlds and silver moons. And the worlds swam by Pegāna’s gate to take their places in the sky, to ride at anchor for ever, each where the gods had bidden. And because they were round and big and gleamed all over the sky, the gods laughed and shouted and all clapped Their hands. Then upon earth the gods played out the game of the gods, the game of life and death, and on the other worlds They did a secret thing, playing a game that is hidden.
—Lord Dunsany, “When the Gods Slept”

Today, artwork like this might be classified by some as “fanart.” The term is often somewhat derogatory, regardless of the skill, imagination, or time put into the piece. The distinction between “art” and “fanart” grew up in the organized science fiction fandom of the 1930s, at the same time when lines were drawn between “fan” and “pro”—those writers and artists who were good enough to graduate from amateur efforts to actually sell their work professionally to magazines. At the time these works were made, the distinction did not exist. There were, certainly, amateur writers and artists in abundance—but the hallmark of the work was its quality, not necessarily who or why it was made.

Thus the Yozis became gods, having the power of gods, and they sailed away to the earth, and came to a mountainous island in the sea. There they sat upon the rocks, sitting as the gods sit, with their right hands uplifted, and having the power of gods, only none came to worship. Thither came no ships nigh them, nor ever at evening came the prayers of men, nor smell of incense, nor screams from the sacrifice. Then said the Yozis:

“Of what avails it that we be gods if no one worship us nor give us sacrifice?”

And Ya, Ha, and Snyrg set sail in their silver galleons, and went looming down the sea to come to the shores of men.
—Lord Dunsany, “When the Gods Slept”

It is significant that the artists in this portfolio were women, because women were generally underrepresented as artists in fantasy and weird fiction at this time (and would continue to be for decades after), prominent exceptions like Margaret Brundage not withstanding. Yet the art itself is not distinctly “feminine” any more than it is “fanart.” These are labels that we as readers, trying to fix this art into a familiar framework, might hang on these pieces, but by themselves they are starkly beautiful, with the vast solid expanses of black still vivid after nearly a century, even though the cover of the portfolio has faded and some of the page-edges are soiled and torn.

But as the gods slept, there came from beyond the Rim, out of the dark and unknown, three Yozis, spirits of ill, that sailed up the river of Silence in galleons with silver sails. Far away they had seen Yum and Gothum, the stars that stand sentinel over Pegāna‘s gate, blinking and falling asleep, and as they neared Pegāna they found a hush wherein the gods slept heavily. Ya, Ha, and Snyrg were these three Yozis, the lords of evil, madness, and of spite. When they crept from their galleons and stole over Pegāna‘s silent threshold it boded ill for the gods.
—Lord Dunsany, “When the Gods Slept”

In creating his own mythology, moving outside of the established gods and monsters of familiar myth and legend, Dunsany was breaking some of the rules and conventions. He is often very nondescriptive of the entities in his stories, letting the reader fill in the blanks. The Yozis in their different incarnations do not attempt to directly map to any traditional form of stock evil; they are not pitchfork-carrying devils with horns and bifurcated tails in their literary descriptions, nor do the artists attempt to render them as such. Left without much traditional guidance, each artist is forced to imagine and depict them in her own way.

And Night spoke of the forest and the stirring of shadows and soft feet pattering and peering eyes, and of the fear that sits behind the trees taking to itself the shape of something crouched to spring.
—Lord Dunsany, “Night and Morning”

Free of restriction to normal conventions of what such fantastic scenes might look like, some of the artists experimented with depictions of scale and contrast. There is an exaggeration of the human form in the crouched figure staring out of the page that recalls Aubrey Beardsley.

And Night spoke of the forest and the stirring of shadows and soft feet pattering and peering eyes, and of the fear that sits behind the trees taking to itself the shape of something crouched to spring.
—Lord Dunsany, “Night and Morning”

Look at the trees, how the different artists defined their bark and roots. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that each chose her own means of expression; they were not collaborating on a single narrative, but each offering their own interpretations. If Lord Dunsany wrote the myth, then these artists were each storytellers, presenting the stories in their own way.

And Night spoke of the forest and the stirring of shadows and soft feet pattering and peering eyes, and of the fear that sits behind the trees taking to itself the shape of something crouched to spring.
—Lord Dunsany, “Night and Morning”

Different is good. While many fans such as H. P. Lovecraft sincerely appreciated the combination of Lord Dunsany and S. H. Sime, that is still only one possible combination—other artists, working on their own, might find their own way to express what visions Dunsany’s prose gives to them, and it detracts nothing from Sime to say that some other artist might find something in their own work that lacks from his. They are only different points of view, not in competition.

Once in an arbour of the gods above the fields of twilight Night wandering alone came suddenly on Morning. Then Night drew from his face his cloak of dark grey mists and said: “See, I am Night,” and they two sitting in that arbour of the gods, Night told wondrous stories of old mysterious happenings in the dark. And Morning sat and wondered, gazing into the face of Night and at his wreath of stars.
—Lord Dunsany, “Night and Morning”

Michi Hashimoto is the only Japanese-American in this portfolio; she had graduated from UCLA in 1924. Her interpretation draws deliberately on both Japanese and Western aesthetics—fitting, given how extensively Dunsany himself drew on traditions of exoticism and Orientalism to lend an air of the exotic to his stories. There is some irony there, almost, in an artist capturing something of the “authentic” exotic to this scene.

Compare this scene, with the hero of the Nibelunglied (a Western fantasy if there ever was one), encountering a three-headed dragon that obviously draws on depictions of Chinese dragons. This kind of correspondence and amalgamation can work—compare with the Monster Girl Encyclopedia II (2016) by Kenkou Cross (健康クロス)—but there is definite juxtaposition of incongruous elements in having the Western hero/knight facing an Eastern dragon in this interpretation.

This atypical (per-Marvel Comics, at least!) interpretation of Thor underscores the overall theme of this portfolio: these are myths. Some old, some contemporary, but for all that just stories to be told and retold—and they aren’t set in stone. How we look at a Mythos can change based on the syntax of our lives. There is no one true canon depiction of Thor, or the Yozis, or Cthulhu.

Illustration Portfolio No. 1 needs not have any particular moral or lesson. The artists of this volume were producing art, and left no particular comment on how it should be interpreted or understood. Yet by its very existence, and looking at these works, readers might do well to reflect on the nature of art and interpretation in the Mythos. Sometimes, there is no one right answer, no single truth.

There are only many different people working out their vision, in their own styles and with their own influences, and the different combination of art and text can sometimes mean more than either does separately.

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

The White People (2015) by Ibrahim R. Ineke

I agree with what you say about suggestion as the highest form of horror-presentation. The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. In Machen, the subtlest story—”The White People”—is undoubtedly the greatest, even though it hasn’t the tangible, visible terrors of “The Great God Pan” or “The White Powder”. But the mob—including Farnsworth Wright—can never be made to see this; hence W.T. will always reject work of the finest and most delicate sort.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 4 Oct 1930, A Means to Freedom 1.52

Comics and graphic novels (and increasingly film and television shows) which seek to adapt Lovecraftian concepts onto the page often face an immediate difficulty: not just how to balance the words and pictures, but how much not to show and not to tell. It isn’t just the question of whether the entity should appear, or only be glimpsed in part, or revealed in full. It’s a question of how far do you admit that there is an entity at all, how and when do you bring up the concept. How far can you get the reader’s imagination to run, and in which direction? How do you establish and maintain that horror-mood which pervades such stories as Arthur Machen’s “The White People”?

For Machen, much of the success of his “The White People” was in being very specific in many details, and very circumspect in others. He avoided proper names; gave few physical descriptions; yet the diary entries are detailed, vivid. The discussions around them are weighty and philosophical, the people discussing what has happened see more in what is going on than the individual who purportedly wrote them. There is more going on than it seems…

In print, an author might write out “indescribable.” How does an artist actually draw or paint that? Ibrahim R. Ineke in the 48-pages of this graphic novel shifts presentation and technique in a very Machenesque way. Stark blacks give great detail, except where they disappear into shadow; white gives terrific definition, until they became great blank swathes where bright sunlight has blinded the reader to all detail. The chiaroscuro gives way to color, kaleidoscopic in intensity and combination; pen-and-ink linework gives way to xerography. Style and medium both work to conceal many things, while throwing others in sharp relief. Like Machen, Ineke is feeding the reader details, while letting our imagination fill in the blanks, both light and dark.

It is all in service to the story. Not a pleasant story, but a disturbing one, laid out with all the care of a detective story. Ineke’s “The White People” is not a straight adaptation of Machen’s “The White People,” it inspired by, it carries some of the same energy, the same ideas, but it isn’t a retread of any particular story. It stands as a testament to what an artist can do in the medium—something between Bruce Jones and Berni Wrightson’s “Jenifer” and Jeffrey Jones’ Idyl I’m Age, and comparing very favorably to Black Stars Above (2019) by Lonnie Nadler & Jenna Cha.

Yet what makes Ineke’s “The White People” really effective is that like with Machen’s “The White People” it is essentially a kids story. Not a story for kids by any means (due to some graphic nudity), but about kids. Innocent, playful, not knowing what horrors are out there. That’s the essence of “The White People” as Machen wrote it, and it is in essence what Lovecraftian horror is like for all readers. To look where you shouldn’t, and have a bit of innocence stripped away.

Wherever there is horror, secrets are revealed. Ineke states this most directly when he writes “It’s always the woods, isn’t it?” Despite our continuous advances in science and reason, education and culture, the woods remain an untamable place—a site that is the very definition of nature, yet which continuously unleashes “unnatural” evidences. Despite Machen’s warnings, Ineke has found it necessary to re-enter this territory and present his findings to us.
—Amelia Ishmael, introduction to The White People (2015)

Ibrahim R. Ineke’s The White People (2015) was published in regular hardcover and deluxe hardcover editions by Sherpa. A preview of the contents can be seen on Issuu.

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

Helen’s Story (2013) by Rosanne Rabinowitz

Helen Vaughan did well to bind the cord about her neck and die, though the death was horrible. The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witness, surprises me but little. What you say the doctor whom you sent for saw and shuddered at I noticed long ago; I knew what I had done the moment the child was born, and when it was scarcely five years old I surprised it, not once or twice but several times with a playmate, you may guess of what kind. It was for me a constant, an incarnate horror, and after a few years I felt I could bear it no more, and I sent Helen Vaughan away. You know now what frightened the boy in the wood. The rest of the strange story, and all else that you tell me, as discovered by your friend, I have contrived to learn from time to time, almost to the last chapter. And now Helen is with her companions…
—Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1890)

There had been an unfounded report of my own death many years ago. However, I continue to survive and thrive. I’ve gone by other names—Herbert, Raymond and Beaumont among them. Now there’s no reason I can’t call myself Helen Vaughan again.
—Rosanne Rabinowitz, Helen’s Story (2013) 11

“The Great God Pan” was first published in The Whirlwind in 1890. This was the beginning of the Yellow Nineties; the Decadent movement was gaining ground in literature and art, and to the Victorians of the day, the serialized story was condemned. Many years later, Arthur Machen would collect some of his favorite unfavorable reviews in a volume title Precious Balms (1924), and some of the critiques will be familiar to fans of Lovecraftian literature:

His art has been hampered by the limitations imposed upon it through his having to leave his ingenious horror “indescribable” and “unutterable” from first to last. (2)

There are nameless horrors hinted at in every other page, which make other people turn green and sick, but it is beyond the power of the most susceptible reader to shudder at the shudders of these fictional people. (3-4)

If we may believe Mr Machen, those doings are of the most horrible character; but as he omits to tell us what they are, and leaves us merely with the impression that she is “a bold, bad woman” of a very ordinary description, we are compelled to take her special horrors upon trust. (5)

But note the sex-mania in it all. It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained. (10)

So on and so forth. Time has been kinder to Machen’s weird fiction than to his critics, in no small part because “The Great God Pan” was reprinted and anthologized, and provided inspiration for both H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” and Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Nameless Offspring.” Mary became the archetype for Lavinia Whateley, and all the Lavinias that followed her; Helen Vaughan the model for Wilbur Whateley, and Hester Sawyer of “The Devil’s Hop Yard” (1978).

It took a century and change for Helen Vaughan’s side of the story to be told.

Though she appears on the page in “The Great God Pan” only briefly, Machen’s story is focused on Helen Vaughan, her whole life from conception in sin to taking her own life. Read as a serial, we can only imagine what the turn-of-the-century Victorians took of the many unspoken horrors at play…because the supernatural in the story is very implicit, until the end. It’s not a story to titillate, exactly. Helen’s mother Mary is an orphan with a too-intimate relationship with the scientist who “adopted her.” There are direct parallels to the conception of Christ, with a diabolic turn. As a child her features are “of a somewhat foreign character,” and plays strange games. Then as an adult Helen Vaughan is the femme fatale, the model for the mad artist, the wife that ruins her husband. All in one Helen Vaughan is layer on layer all these Victorian taboos, and is at last realized as a sexual woman who is not fixed in class, who exists outside the control of any male family member or husband.

…then she dies. Which is the probably the weakest part of the plot:

“No. I shall offer a choice, and leave Helen Vaughan alone with this cord in a locked room for fifteen minutes. If when we go in it is not done, I shall call the nearest policeman. That is all.”
—Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1890)

It is a very weird build-up to the final climax of the novel because throughout the story, Machen has given no indication that Helen Vaughan is bound by conventional Victorian ideas of morality and propriety and reputation. Why should she fear the police? Why would she commit suicide?

Well, in Rosanne Rabinowitz’ Helen’s Story, she doesn’t. While Rabinowitz keeps most of the essential plot details of Machen’s tale, she also doesn’t attempt to copy his prose. Machen was borrowing the style of Robert Louis Stevenson, with Dr. Raymond made in the mold of Dr. Henry Jekyll of “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886). The chain of evidence style works for the atmosphere that Machen was building, the moralities and assumptions that he was building to. Yet Helen Vaughan in Rabinowitz’ depiction is the embodiment of that Victorian horror of the independent, sexually confident woman. It’s her story, told in her words, and told in later days. It shouldn’t be told in as a Machen pastiche, so it isn’t.

Which is really part of what makes the story work so well. Helen Vaughan becomes something beyond the Victorian imagination’s ability to classify; she doesn’t fit into the roles assigned for her as monster, succubus, or slut. Helen’s Story is that of an artist, an outsider that looks for family, that tries to achieve a particular effect through her work. The kind of individual whose spirituality cannot be contained by any church, whose morality is too fluid for any system of law, who flits in between the systems of the world. Which is very much in the spirit of what Machen sought to convey to his Victorian readers, but done in a way which Machen because of the conventions of the time could not, except through hint and intimation (cf. “Unseen” (2020) by Claire Leslie).

“Ah, mother, mother, why did you let me go to the forest with Helen?” Mrs. M. was astonished at so strange a question, and proceeded to make inquiries. Rachel told her a wild story. She said—
—Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” (1890)

Of course I got into trouble. After Rachel left, there was an almighty row in the village.
—Rosanne Rabinowitz, Helen’s Story (2013) 11

There is a lot to be said for how women are often depicted (or not depicted) in both fiction and real life. In some cases, they can give their own accounts, set the record straight. In Lovecraft studies we remember The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis and One Who Walked Alone (1986) by Novalyne Price Ellis; readers of wider literature might recognize a precursor to Helen’s Story in Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) by Gregory Maguire. In all these cases, the accounts of the women have to be taken together with and against that of the other narrative which they are responding to. They tell their stories, but in telling those stories they are instinctively or intentionally shaping them around the stories that are already out there.

Which raises the question: how reliable is Helen Vaughan as a narrator?

The mere existence of Helen’s Story sheds a bit of doubt on Machen’s “The Great God Pan.” If you accept the narrative conceit that Helen Vaughan is alive and well, then the ending at least is a fabrication. That calls into question the events of the rest of Machen’s story: how much of this “really happened” versus being a narrative construction by the people telling the story—Clarke and Raymond. How much is Helen being honest, in painting herself as this misunderstood woman, raised by an uncaring scientist and constantly discriminated against for being different?

This is the kind of textual complexity which is shared by H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys. The conflicts and correlations between the stories force the reader out of the passive role of just absorbing information; now with two conflicting narratives to keep track of, the reader has to decide for themselves how much of each is “true” or accurate. The real story is neither the one or the other, but somewhere in between. The effect is not unlike a historian dealing with different accounts of a battle, or a Bible scholar who has to evaluate a canonical gospel and a newly-uncovered apocryphal gospel.

It’s the kind of approach that the Cthulhu Mythos is built on. Stories written not just as sequels, but as commentary and expansion, to correct old ideas and add new ones. In the case of Helen’s Story, the effect is especially appropriate as Helen’s narrative in Machen’s “The Great God Pan” is always told in someone else’s words. It’s the kind of historical narrative that is built around scraps of evidence and hearsay, and represents the prejudices of the man who compiled and presented the facts of the story to the audience, who were also presumed to be mainly men and to share the same prejudices. Helen’s Story is like a female scholar came along a century later, dug up an account of the woman herself that all the other scholars had overlooked, and presented it to explode the orthodoxy.

The combination of re-examining the essential gender bias in Machen’s “The Great God Pan” and the textual questions that can be raised by this kind of narrative is great. Rabinowitz knocks it out of the park in how she interweaves flashbacks that reflect on the narrative of events in “The Great God Pan” (and another Machen story, “The White People”) with the continuing narrative of what Helen Vaughan is doing in the present day. However, in basing Helen’s Story on “The Great God Pan” in this way, Rabinowitz does inherent a particular narrative necessity: how to end it.

Helen’s Story starts off by negating the ending of “The Great God Pan,” that means that this story has to provide a new conclusion. The ending which Arthur Machen wrote contains the only blatant supernatural elements in the entire story; there are hints and intimations, but nothing like the sudden appearance of “a mountain walked, or stumbled” in “The Call of Cthulhu.” Readers up until that point could have considered that Dr. Raymond had molested Mary, that Helen Vaughan was his child, that “seeing the Great God Pan” was cover for the terrible failure of his experiment that lobotomized his adopted-daughter-in-all-but-name. So without that ending…Rosanne Rabinowitz not only needs to find a fitting conclusion, but a fitting revelation.

What is the Great God Pan in Helen’s Story?

The final sentiment, the last revelation, the apotheosis or ipsissimus that Helen experiences…is utterly apt. It is both an homage to ending in “The Great God Pan” and a negation of it; because it is not an ending at all but a beginning. The crux of possibilities that bridges dream and reality in works like Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), Lord Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann” (1910), and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” (1929). Sex without guilt, art without compromise, love without jealousy, freedom without boundaries…but with still those roads back to the old fields we know.

Helen’s Story by Rosanne Rabinowitz was first published as a hardback by PS Publishing in 2013, and reprinted as a paperback by Aqueduct Press in 2017, it is also available as an ebook.

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

“Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” (2011) by Naomi Novik

In September [1917] I went to the 7th 8th Battalion of the Inniskilling Fusiliers. we used to be in front of Croisilles, when we were in the line, and in a sunken road through the village itself when we were in reserve. When we were out of the line we lived at a place that had been Ervillers, four miles back, where the bombing planes used to call us every morning, but never hit us. That was in the desert of the Somme. We never saw any animals there except mice, and an army horse or two; and, when the rooks flew over at evening, they passed out of our sight before they could find trees. There was something melancholy in watching this flight over a land that for centuries had been fertile: it was pleasanter to look at our aeroplanes returning at about the same hour, like adventurous mountaineers descending cloud-mountains. Sometimes we met American soldiers there, who for some while had been arriving in large numbers, men with red healthy faces.
—Lord Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight (1938) 296

The success of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (2003) led to a sequel: The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011). The first book is essentially a standalone volume similar to The Starry Wisdom Library (2014): a collection of short fictional works done in the style of a reference guide, with all the fantastic, science fiction, weird, and supernatural ailments and symptoms pretending to co-exist in the same setting. The Cabinet of Curiosities is nominally framed along the same lines, as items in the fictional Thackery T. Lambshead’s eccentric collection, but the guidelines on what constitutes an “entry” are less rigid…so what it really turns out to be is a collection of disconnected pieces of various lengths and styles. Some resemble actual write-ups like one might find in a good SCP wiki entry, and others are simply short stories with, perhaps, a note at the end that explains how it got to be part of Lambshead’s collection. Some of them don’t even have that.

The trench had scarcely been dug. Dirt shook loose down upon then, until they might have been part of the earth, and when the all-clear sounded at last out of long silence, they stood up still equals under a coat of mud, until Russel bent down and picked up the shovel, discarded, and they were again officer and man.

But this came too late: Edward trudged back with him, side by side, to the more populated regions of the labyrinth, still talking, and when they had reached Russell’s bivouac, he looked at Edward and said, “Would you have a cup of tea?”
—Naomi Novik, “Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities 118

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, was one a writer’s writer. Never a bestseller, he was still highly esteemed by many as one of the greatest fantasists to ever live, and one of the most influential. His stories of “beyond the fields we know,” written briefly around the turn of the century, would provide the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands and for “The Call of Cthulhu.” During his service in the British Army during World War I, the 39-year old Anglo-Irish peer was appointed a Captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusilliers, and spent time in the trenches in France, where this story is set.

After the war was over, Lord Dunsany would travel on a tour of the United States. In Boston in 1919, a 29-year old H. P. Lovecraft would be too self-conscious to ask his idol for an autograph.

You come to the trenches out of strangely wasted lands, you come perhaps to a wood in an agony of contortions, black, branchless, sepulchral trees, and then no more trees at all. The country after that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium—or whatever it be—is all gone away, and there stretches for miles instead one of the world’s great deserts, a thing to take its place no longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and the Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named the Desert of Wilhelm. Through these sad lands one goes to come to the trenches. Overhead floats until it is chased away an aëroplane with little black crosses, that you can scarcely see at his respectful height, peering to see what more harm may be done in the desolation and ruin. Little flashes sparkle near him, white puffs spread out round the flashes: and he goes, and our airmen go away after him; black puffs break out round our airmen. Up in the sky you hear a faint tap-tapping. They have got their machine guns working.
—Lord Dunsany, “A Walk to the Trenches” in Tales of War (1918)

For all that Dunsany’s fiction has been lauded by the likes of Lovecraft & co., the writer himself never quite developed the same mythology about him. There are fewer stories about Dunsany the man than there are about Lovecraft. This may in part be due to the fact that Lord Dunsany himself was around for quite a bit longer: his writing career of 50+ years was longer than Lovecraft himself was alive, and Dunsany produced several volumes of autobiography…much of which, perhaps strangely, failed to touch on his inner life. He had been a sportsman, who hunted game big and small all over the world; chessmaster; heir to an old title in the British peerage; a soldier, a husband and father, a writer of poetry, fiction, wartime propaganda, plays…he corresponded with a young Arthur C. Clarke, and if her didn’t invent the club story with his Jorkins tales, he may well have perfected it.

There’s been quite a bit written about Dunsany, and he himself wrote quite a bit, but he failed to really make that leap into myth that had others write about him in the same way as Lovecraft. Which is one of the things that makes Naomi Novik’s story stand out in the second Lambshead anthology. That rare story that touches on Dunsany the myth.

He lifted off the lid and showed Edward: a lump fixed to the bottom of the post, smooth, white, glimmering like a pearl, irregular yet beautiful, even with the swollen tea-leaves like kelp strewn over and around it.
—Naomi Novik, “Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities 122

The magic of the teapot to me is more that it offers dreams, fantastical ones, and for both of them, in the midst of that dreadful war, to be able to dream and for a little while escape the reality of the grinding machinery of death, that was what brought them both peace.
—Naomi Novik, Year’s Best 2012: Naomi Novik on “Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” (Erin Stocks)

Ironically, if there is a problem with “Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” as a story, it’s not nit-picks about army life or the state of the Somme in the fall and winter of 1917, or any other fact of the real world or Dunsany’s life. It’s the implications of the teapot itself. As totemic artifacts go, 1917 is a bit late in Dunsany’s career to come into possession of the thing. Lord Dunsany had written nearly all of his fantasy fiction before his service in World War I, and relatively rarely ventured back there afterwards. If it had come to him during the Second Boer War (1899-1902), before he wrote The Gods of Pegāna (1905), it would be more fitting to explain his fantasy output.

Of course Novik never suggests that the teapot at all inspired Dunsany’s fantasies—his writing is never actually mentioned in the story itself—and that’s kind of its own little oddity too. It definitely feels like a story where the reader is expected to shoulder a good bit of the narrative heavy lifting: and that is sort of characteristic with many of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional appearances—Lovecraft works as a character because of the familiarity of his image with fans. Lord Dunsany doesn’t quite have that much exposure. Readers are presumably supposed to recognize the name in the title (Lord Dunsany) and then know or intuit that Edward is Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany. Anything beyond that is presumably getting into the weeds.

Then again, the real hardcore Lord Dunsany fan knows that it should probably have been not a teapot, but a hat:

He cannot explain a flight of fancy, save to call it what it is, and thus can’t tell the “source” for Pegāna, which is probably just as well. But he does put forth a wealth of information about his writing methods,* his artistic credo, his early experiences in the theatre, and his interests in literature.

* One, which he doesn’t bother to mention, but which Lady Dunsany related to Sprague de Camp, was that he always sat on a crumpled old hat while composing his tales. Perhaps it had magical properties; but, alas, some visitor to Dunsany Castle made off with it, so we’ll never know.
—Darrell Schweitzer, Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany 139

This is one of those anecdotes that is almost impossible to source, but L. Sprague de Camp does mention his friendly relationship and correspondence with Lord Dunsany’s wife (and later widow) Beatrice, Lady Dunsany, so there’s no reason to discount it out of hand. Like Tolkien’s ashtray, it’s one of those odd real-life artifacts about which the speculation is probably much more fun and interesting than the reality.

“Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” is illustrated with a single picture, which bares a curious caption:

Yishan Li’s depiction of Lurd Dunsany’s Teaport, from the forthcoming Novik-Li graphic novel “Ten Days to Glory: Demon Tea and Lord Dunsany.”
—The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities 119

Said graphic novel never came out, although Naomi Novik and Yishan Li did collaborate on another graphic novel, Will Supervillains Be On The Final? (2011). Publishing projects fall apart all the time, but despite the nitpicks above, it’s unfortunate that this didn’t happen. At longer length, with such a talented artist, “Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” could have been a really interesting work—and if there is a paucity of good stories about Lord Dunsany as a fictional character, he and his works are hardly ever adapted to comics or graphic novels.

“Lord Dunsany’s Teapot” was first published in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011) and was reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition (2012).

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

HPL 1920 (2020) by Nick O’Gorman & Tales from the Cthulhuverse #1 (2020) by Zee Romero & Luca Cicognola

I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind—that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1920)

The Lovecraft Mythos was written in a particular cultural syntax. H. P. Lovecraft never tells the reader, for example, that the characters in “The Statement of Randolph Carter” are white. Caucasian heterosexual male was the default state for pulp fiction, and for much of the popular fiction of the 20th century. Once a writer or artist realizes that this is the framework in which the Mythos was set during the time of Lovecraft and his contemporaries, it is easier to imagine how those same stories might look differently within a different context. So it is that adaptation can often remain relatively faithful to the original story in term of plot, characters, narrative, and dialogue, and yet add to the story by providing a different context which changes how the story is read and understood.

In comic books, two examples of this kind of adaptation are Nick O’Gorman’s HPL 1920 (2020) and Tales of the Cthulhuverse #1-3 (2020, Mythx Media). Both are indie horror comics that adapt three stories from H. P. Lovecraft—O’Gorman was specifically adapting stories from 1920, to be published on their centenary, while Tales of the Cthulhuverse aimed for more of an update on the classic Lovecraft tales by setting them in the 21st century. In both cases, the authors remained very faithful overall to the original story—but in both cases simple, subtle changes to presentation can drastically affect how the story is read and understood.

HPL 1920 adapts “The Statement of Randolph Carter”—except now Randolph Carter isn’t an older white male, he’s an African-American teenager. This puts an entirely different perspective on talking with the police in any contemporary American context, and yet it doesn’t require any substantial change to how the story works—two people, searchers after horror, go into a graveyard and one descends while the other waits behind. The basic idea of “The Statement of Randolph Carter” is not particular to any particular race or culture; curiosity and breaking taboos are universal human traits. What changes the story is how we receive it when the person relating it is someone other than “the default”—African-American teenagers are subject to systemic bias by the justice system in the United States, which adds a layer of tension to the story…and O’Gorman plays with that, at least a little bit:

Does a white male Randolph Carter in this exact same situation affect the reader in the same way—or is there a part of the story unspoken here, just in these two panels, because people of today can fill in the unwritten details? How would this scene have played out differently if it wasn’t two white cops? We can ask these questions because we’ve stepped outside of the cultural syntax which Lovecraft was writing in…and there are more possibilities to explore the Lovecraft Mythos than just changing up race.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”

Where HPL 1920 changes the race of the principal characters, Tales of the Cthulhuverse #1 changes the gender. Daniel Upton becomes Danielle, Edward Derby becomes Eve, Asenath Waite becomes Asa—there are a few other changes, since the setting is now contemporary Massachusetts (2020s) and the Danielle & Eve are college roommates of a similar age and unmarried; the plot is condensed down considerably—but the main change is simply a what if scenario:

How would “The Thing on the Doorstep” have changed if the genders had been reversed?

As with “The Statement of Randolph Carter” and HPL 1920, the initial response would be: not by much. Lovecraft’s original story already involves gender change due to body-swapping; in a literary shell game, it is largely irrelevant what the writer uses for shells, as long as the same relationships are in place. So it is in Tales of the Cthulhuverse #1, where much the same events as Lovecraft’s story play out despite changing the genders of the main characters. If that was all there was too it, the adaptation would be boring.

Lovecraft’s frame for “The Thing on the Doorstep” is minimal: it’s a statement, but unlike “The Statement of Randolph Carter” it’s not to any particular party. Daniel Upton isn’t explicitly talking to the police; Danielle Upton in Tales of the Cthulhuverse #1 is. So like HPL 1920, there’s a specific dynamic of interaction being invoked—the police procedural dynamic, only this time a little more sympathetic. After all, Danielle Upton is a white woman…and so was Eve Derby.

Domestic violence is not usually the first thing that springs to mind when reading Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep”—not because men aren’t subject to domestic violence and abuse, but because the audience is generally not used to thinking about his marriage in that context. Because Daniel Upton wasn’t talking to the police, they weren’t trying to fit two dead bodies and a bad romantic relationship into a context they understood in Lovecraft’s narrative. Change the genders, though, and suddenly this becomes a much more logical leap for the cops to make…and maybe another one.

Daniel Upton has a weird angle in Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep.” He is Edward Derby’s closest male friend, and Derby then marries Asenath, so Derby is caught between Daniel and Asenath. It isn’t explicitly a lover’s triangle because there are no indications that Daniel is homosexual (and if he is, being married and with a son indicates he’s at least in the closet), but the close relationships between men in some of Lovecraft’s stories have inspired homosexual interpretations of those stories (as explored in depth in Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos).

The exact same dynamic still applies in the Tales of the Cthulhuverse adaptation, and Zee Romero plays it as straight as can be (no pun intended)—there’s no explicit idea given that Danielle Upton is a lesbian or in love with Eve Derby in any kind of romantic sense. The story can be read as a perfectly platonic tale of shooting the bastard that stole the body of your best friend. That said, there’s also definitely enough subtext here to read it as a genuine lover’s triangle too—unlike Lovecraft, who gave Daniel a wife and baby to at least imply a heterosexual relationship, Romero doesn’t give Danielle any romantic interests at all. It is definitely an interesting way to re-imagine Lovecraft’s story…and that’s before the final revelations come out.

Ultimately, HPL 1920 and Tales of the Cthulhuverse are two parallel approaches with the same aim: contemporary writers and artists seeking to remain faithful to the core of Lovecraft’s narratives while also finding new things to say about those narratives in the way they present them. By and large they both succeed. If there’s a flaw in these comics, it’s not the approach, but sometimes the execution. Indie comics can’t always afford the most polished art, and it shows—the production values aren’t bad on either of these, but for Tales of the Cthulhuverse in particular the lack of detail in the gore and nudity feels like a misstep, or at least a missed opportunity. O’Gorman and Cicognola definitely know their material, because there are little allusions to the Gate sigil from the Simon Necronomicon and August Derleth’s version of the Elder Sign as popularized by the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, but a lot more could have been done with these same scripts if Jacen Burrows, Kelly Jones, or Laci had been handling the material.

HPL 1920 was written, drawn, and colored by Nick O’Gorman, and funded through Kickstarter. Copies of the comic are available through his Etsy shop.

Tales of the Cthulhuverse #1 was written by Zee Romero, pencils and inks by Luca Cicognola, colored by Sean Burres, with a cover by Jeff Chapman, and published by Mythx Media. They are currently available for purchase on Comixology.

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

Black Stars Above (2019) by Lonnie Nadler & Jenna Cha

At length we observed a total change in their demeanour. From absolute stupor they appeared to be, all at once, aroused to the highest pitch of excitement, and rushed wildly about, going to and from a certain point on the beach, with the strangest expressions of mingled horror, rage, and intense curiosity depicted on their countenances, and shouting, at the top of their voices, Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
—Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

Of course common reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign region’s core. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mist—that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.
—H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

Black Stars Above was published as a five-issue series from Vault Comics in 2019-2020, and collected in a trade paperback in 2020. The creative team was Lonnie Nadler (writer), Jenna Cha (artist), Brad Simpson (colorist), and Hassan Ostmane-Elhaou (letterer).

They tread rare territory.

Canada, 1887. Eulalie Dubois, a young Métis woman living on the edge of things with her family, trading moccasins and skinning muskrats. Yet at night she reads The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and hopes one day to escape this life. There’s fascinating intersectionality there—youth and gender and race, all mixed up and coming together. Then it gets weird.

There were Canadian pulp magazines. Not just the Canadian edition of Weird Tales, but home-grown pulps by Canadian artists, writers, and publishers, set in Canada. Where the United States had Westerns, there was also a market for Northerns, pulp stories and novels set in Canada’s Northwest Territories, often investigated by Mounties as in Tales of the North-West Mounted Police (Sep 1933). Like the Westerns, the Northerns were concerned with Canada’s frontier—the extremes of climate and survival that comprised man vs. nature, the stress on human relationships that added frisson to man vs. man, and out at the edge of the known world…sometimes things slip over into man vs. supernature.

There are a few “Weird Westerns” out there. Not so many “Weird Northerns.”

Contrast Jack London’s “To Build A Fire” (1902), which is a straight survival story with shades of psychological horror, and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” (1910), where the extremes of the environment is only the beginning of the horror, the prelude to things. There are stranger things in the Northern woods, and plenty of mundane horrors—Nadler and Cha give us a taste of that in the opening chapter. A grandfather whose leg was cut off by Mounties. A mother discriminated against for being First Nations. A daughter sold into marriage, as long as she passes for white…

One of the key aspects of frontier fiction—Western, Northern, Sword & Planet, etc.—is the primary motivation for going into that frontier. Sometimes it is altruistic: Star Trek went on a mission to explore and investigate, to scribble in the borders of the map. Often, it’s meaner: people want to exploit the resources and indigenous peoples, make their fortune, and get out, as in H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling’s “In the Walls of Eryx” (1939).

Black Stars Above plays with motivations very strongly and with great intent. Not just Eulalie Dubois in her mission, but everyone else in the story has some reason to be there, some hope or need or order that drove them beyond where they should have gone. Which drives them still, far past where they should have turned back. That is part of what makes the story work, above and beyond the weirdness that is very Lovecraftian but which does not make any attempt to tie in explicitly to the Cthulhu Mythos or any other; despite the reference to “black stars” and the obvious influence of Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow there’s no other direct connection to the Yellow Mythos as with “Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars” (2012) by Gemma Files or “While The Black Stars Burn” (2015) by Lucy A. Snyder. It borrows the weird cry from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but that is exactly all that it is: the cry of the weird. Out beyond the unknown, signifying something that can’t be deciphered.

There are great and terrible hints, but this is a narrative that does some of its best work by choosing to show rather than tell. Jenna Na’s art works well because when things are real, the panels are sharp and defined, close and intimate; and when she pulls back for the wider shots…when the gutters fade away…the dreamlike quality is stark and beautiful but somehow more epic in perspective.

Brad Simpson’s colors add depth to the artwork. It would have been easy to leave this black-and-white, let the chiaroscuro hit the reader between the eyes, but the colors make the “real” portion of the story seem more real, and the “unreal” portions more strongly bizarre by contrast. There are a lot more shadows of darkness that can be shown with blues and reds than just white and black.

With the handwritten journal pages and Lovecraftian focus, it’s tempting to compare Black Stars Above with Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow’s Providence (2015-2017), and Lonnie Nadler does acknowledge the influence:

And just in terms of trying to do similar things, Alan Moore’s Providence. It’s definitely an influence on Black Stars Above, but I think it does different things, and more powerful things with responding to Lovecraft, in that it’s a direct response to Lovecraft and only to Lovecraft. (Well, I guess Chambers, too). I love that book. It doesn’t get enough credit in Alan Moore’s body of work. He said what he was trying to do was what Watchmen did with superheroes, Providence was trying to do for Lovecraft. And I think he very much accomplished that. And anyone who is a fan of Lovecraft, I think should read it, because it’s, it’s densely intelligent and rich. And I might like it more than Watchmen. And I say this, like, as someone whose favorite comic is Watchmen. I don’t know why, but people didn’t seem to latch on to that one like they do some of his other work. Maybe because Neonomicon was so off-putting to people.
—Robert Secundus, “Lonnie Nadler Part II: On ‘Black Stars Above,’ Margaret Atwood and why trains are weird” (28 Jul 2020)

Black Stars Above does do different things than Providence. For one, Eulalie Dupois does not follow Robert Black in suicide after the final revelations. Both of them faced the choices of simply going with the flow, to continue to exist without making waves. Neither of them could face that. Simply existing on the edge of things is not winning, even if the heart is beating and blood is pumping. Settling for a life of quite desperation on the end of everything, trapped in a life you don’t want…

For so many characters in such narratives, death is the only escape from the frozen hell.

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

“H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” (1953) by Zealia Bishop

Some of Lovecraft’s friends remonstrated with him and regretted that he spent so much time as a revisionist. There is no evidence, however, that Lovecraft chafed at this means of making an extremely meagre living. He was generous with his astounding sapience and derived a genuine sense of pleasure and satisfaction out of giving his wisdom and erudition to help others.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 253

As much as scholars of H. P. Lovecraft’s life and work rely on the rich trove of letters that he has left behind, they do not cover all of his life—and his many friends, family, acquaintances, and revision clients left their own record of his life, in letters and diaries and memoirs. The sources are valuable accounts, but as new information becomes available, they are also subject to new scrutiny, and what might have been considered rock-solid “facts” about Lovecraft in the 1950s and ’60s is sometimes subject to reinterpretation and change.

“H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” was published in 1953 as part of The Curse of Yig (Arkham House). The author was Zealia Bishop, who from roughly 1927-1937 was one of Lovecraft’s correspondents and revision clients. From her synopses Lovecraft produced three weird tales (“The Curse of Yig,” “Medusa’s Coil,” and “The Mound”) and had a hand in several of her unpublished stories. This memoir was for many years was essentially the only information that most fans and scholars had on this part of Lovecraft’s life.

It was not until the Selected Letters II was published, containing fourteen abridged letters from the Lovecraft/Bishop correspondence and scattered references about Zealia Bishop by Lovecraft in letters to others that there was anything to verify or compare her account…and it would not be until 2015, when a trove of recently-found letters from the Lovecraft/Bishop correspondence was published as The Spirit of Revision (H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society) that a fuller picture of their professional and personal relationship could be established.

Even before The Spirit of Revision, however, scholars questioned parts of Bishop’s essay. For example, her account of how she came into contact with Lovecraft:

It was in 1928 in a small bookstore in Cleveland that I first learned of Lovecraft. The bookstore was managed by Samuel Loveman, a bibliophile and writer of verse who had achieved some minor fame as friend of the poet, Hart Crane. […] Bookstore proprietors are always being asked by amateurs to recommend publishers, teachers and critics. I was no exception. At my inquiry, in the course of our conversation, Mr. Loveman told me about Lovecraft.

“Write to him,” he advised. “He can help you, if anyone can.”
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 253-254

The problem was, Samuel Loveman was not in Cleveland in 1928, but in New York City, where he had moved in 1924; the earliest letter from Lovecraft to Zealia is dated 10 May 1927 (SOR 29). While she might well have gotten in contact with Lovecraft via his friend Sam Loveman, it almost certainly could not have happened the way she said it did. Nor is this the only discrepancy that can be pointed out in Zealia’s memoir.

To understand some of the problems in “A Pupil’s View,” it might help to know how and when it was written. August Derleth wrote to Zealia Bishop shortly after Lovecraft’s death in 1937, asking for any letters she could contribute to what would become the Selected Letters and about the stories that R. H. Barlow had said Lovecraft had revised/ghostwritten for her. In one of her answering letters, Zealia promised:

I shall prepare an article or—data—on what I think may be of general interest in regard to Howard’s revision work—and send you within the next week—but shall await your reply and if I have anything which you can use I shall compile it for you—and do all in my power to assist you in every way.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 8 Apr 1937, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

There is no evidence that Zealia actually produced an article in 1937, and the subject come up again in the Bishop/Derleth correspondence in 1950:

I hope you won’t find too many things wrong with the Lovecraft article. If that passes, then I shall not worry about the others, for he is not an altogether easy subject about whom one can write, yet a very interesting one. Thank you for sending me Cats etc. I shall send you a check for same…but you are always hitting me between the eyes, it seems, as being the only one who was really indebted to Lovecraft as a “client”, paying him for revision! Do you think that is all quite “cricket” as hard as I’ve worked for so many years? Remember, it was Loveman who first sent me to Lovecraft (when he was living in Cleveland) and I sometimes wonder if he remembers about it, however, it was Howard who had me take a course at Columbia University and also study privately with Thomas Uzzell—while I was in New York and it was then we found out I could gain much more by my own efforts with Howard guiding me along the way when I needed it…but I never should have followed the path of the weird tale despite all the material I gathered from the people in the south and in Mexico and Latin America. My yet unfinished tale is one with Aztec mythology woven through it and I think Howard was well pleased with the progress I made without his supervision…even as he was with three of my novels. Sometimes I shall send you the letters he wrote about them…telling me how I had progressed with structure and the choice of words.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 13 Jan 1950, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Cut to two years later:

You’re wrong, fellow, I haven’t fallen down on the job about the articles on you and H. P. L. I finished them two years ago, but kept rewriting them, unable to throw off that damnable self-consciousness instilled in me by Lovecraft. Now, however, I’ve developed more positiveness and will send them to you for approval and corrections where you feel necessary.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 12 Aug 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Far from being the fresh recollections of a Lovecraft just recently passed in 1937, then, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” was really written some 13-15 years after his death. A few allowances for memory might be made in such a span of time, but there are other key factors in the composition of “A Pupil’s View” to consider. The first of these is August Derleth’s quiet role in the production.

Would you prefer that I send on the Lovecraft and Derleth articles for you to groan over, and cut, augment and suggest in person?
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 15 Sep 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

At last here is the article. I hope that it does not fall far short of my opinion of you and that you will see some improvement in my writing. Feel free to augment and delete as you see fit. […] At the time I began the article on you I started one on Lovecraft this should be finished for your approval before I get there—you understand I will need photographs for both? […] In the event my short stories are published as a collection I plan to include both articles. Does that meet with your approval? If only the weird are selected for one book then both articles—DERLETH-LOVECRAFT—would be most appropos—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 15 Oct 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

At this point, Zealia had committed to writing two profiles, one on Lovecraft (“A Pupil’s View”) and one on Derleth himself (“A Wisconsin Balzac”). Bishop’s letters to Derleth continue to talk about re-writing these articles into 1953, when Zealia Bishop signed a contract for Arkham House to publish The Curse of Yig. Whatever the final product that Zealia delivered after years of re-writing, she apparently did not think it adequate, and instructed Derleth:

Evidently you misunderstood me that day at lunch in Madison. I thought I was very explicit—as well as Helen—that I told you “everything was ready to go except I wanted to rewrite the DERLETH and LOVECRAFT articles. And that I would positively have to rewrite the LOVECRAFT article entirely.”

I have done what I could on it and am sending it as is, “but I am not in the slightest pleased with it and feel that I should be the one to rewrite it.”

The material is here and could be redone beautifully but it would take me at least another two weeks so I am sending it so that you may pass judgement edit it and then if you think I should rewrite it return or bring it.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 25 Apr 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

If necessary “brush up” the Eschutcheon [sic] as well as the Derleth & Lovecraft articles
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, n.d. (1953?), MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Looking at “A Pupil’s View” with an eye toward a possible Derlethian influence, several parts of the memoir jump out immediately. The first few glowing paragraphs of “A Pupil’s View” do not sound like Zealia Bishop; they discuss Lovecraft’s rise in prominence in American letters (which Zealia does not seem aware of), his devoted followers and fellow pulpsters (including several she never mentions in any other letter and probably never heard of, such as Robert E. Howard and Henry Kuttner); and references to overseas sales, the Arkham House collections of Lovecraft’s fiction, and “magazines containing his work command equally high premiums” which sound very much like the standard Derlethian sales line.

Later in the narrative, Zealia Bishop goes into a very atypical reference to the Cthulhu Mythos—in accordance with Derleth’s interpretation:

[…] our conversation naturally turned to Lovecraft and his fantastic story themes, especially those of the Cthulhu Mythos, which were based on a curious pantheon of Gods and Elder Beings with a marked basic similarity to the Christian Genesis story of the struggle between good and evil.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 261

It is conceivable that Bishop had absorbed this point of view from Derleth’s introductions in Arkham House books and his various Cthulhu Mythos stories. The conversation is supposed to have happened in June 1928, and “The Call of Cthulhu” had been published in the February 1928 Weird Tales, so the timing for talking about Cthulhu isn’t necessarily off—but the phrase “Cthulhu Mythos” wasn’t coined or popularized until some years later by Derleth. The last paragraphs too are very Derlethian in tone, especially:

But in this rather specialized field, undoubtedly Lovecraft’s own attitudes about sex and love (capably discussed in H.P.L.: A Memoir, by August Derleth) got in his way when he revised the work of his pupils. These were experiences not entirely within his ken.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 263

Without access to the original manuscript that Zealia Bishop submitted to August Derleth, it is speculative to guess at his how much or any of this was material he wrote. To play devil’s advocate: If Derleth did have a large hand in this piece, or at least did a proper editorial pass on the the manuscript, we might expect certain little details to have been quietly edited out that were left in. For example, Zealia’s rather hyperbolic claims about Lovecraft’s ability with languages:

He was well versed in the language of the Kaffirs, Damoras, Swahilhi and the Chulhu and Zani—who are extremely tenacious of their ancient religion. […] He wrote as fluently in Greek and Latin as in English and when he began his strict instructions in Aztec Mythology he often wrote to me in Spanish.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 254, 255

While Lovecraft was proficient in Latin, and had some rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Spanish (the latter at least for the Spanish phrases in “The Mound”), he had no knowledge of African languages. It’s possible that Lovecraft had written something about these language (probably referencing from an encyclopedia article) in a letter which does not survive, but you’d think Derleth would have caught this error…but, we can only speculate. Taken together, a Derleth editing/partial re-write and aged memory might explain a few of the parts of the “A Pupil’s View” that don’t fit what we know of Lovecraft from other sources.

The second key factor to consider in “A Pupil’s View” is why Zealia wrote it, and her motives were not restricted to praising Lovecraft and preserving his memory. She wanted to make it absolutely clear who actually wrote the stories in The Curse of Yig:

There in Oklahoma, doubting more and more that I would ever become a writer, let alone a successful one, I sat one evening with a group of old Oklahoma settlers who had driven out to my sister’s ranch. We sat around the kitchen fire and talked. Finally the conversation rambled on to folklore. Grandma Compton, my sister’s mother-in-law, told a horror story about a couple who pioneered in Oklahoma not far from where we were. This story was a spark to me. I wrote a tale called “The Curse of Yig,” in which snakes figured, wove it around some of my Aztec knowledge instilled in me by Lovecraft, and sent it off to him. He was delighted wit this trend toward realism and horror, and fairly showed me with letters and instructions.

Now at least I really went to work. I rewrote the story and together we revised and injected erudition into it about the Aztec Snake God, Yig. Finally, under his careful direction, I had a decent and I felt salable weird-horror story.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 258

So on with “Medusa’s Coil” and “The Mound.” Zealia Bishop would not admit to Lovecraft’s authorship, or even of his editing. Even the name of her memoir “A Pupil’s View” shows how she wanted the relationship to be perceived: she was Lovecraft’s student, paying him for his writing advice, not a client paying him to ghost-write stories for her. So above and beyond all else, “A Pupil’s View” was written specifically to convince readers and critics that these were not Lovecraft revisions or collaborations—which is what Derleth and Arkham House had been selling the Bishop/Lovecraft stories as in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943) and Marginalia (1944).

Lovecraft told a different story in his letters, including to August Derleth and his friend and future literary executor R. H. Barlow. August Derleth had written to Zealia Bishop on Barlow’s advice, with the specific aim of publishing the Lovecraft collaborations. So Derleth was certainly well aware of what Zealia Bishop was doing, and why she was doing it. One late letter makes this perfectly clear:

Remember, August, in Howard’s new book—His Letters etc., please don’t let it appear that I was never able to do anything for myself. Is it your opinion that in these anthologies all credit goes to Howard? Was that your intention or what?
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, n.d., MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Selected Letters II was published in 1968, the same year that Zealia Bishop passed away.

Taking it as a given then what Zealia Bishop was trying to accomplish with “A Pupil’s View” was primarily to preserve her reputation as a writer—that writing in 1952-1953 should would be trying to recall events from about 25 years prior when she first began to correspond with Lovecraft—and that August Derleth appears to have had at a quiet hand in amending and editing the document—is there anything of value to be extracted from it? Can we trust anything that Zealia Bishop wrote?

Surprisingly, more than you think. While some of her claims are farcical (Lovecraft wasn’t an expert on Aztec mythology either), the correspondence in The Spirit of Revision actually supports Zealia Bishop’s general narrative of the relationship. In the absence of more of her letters to Lovecraft, which are long gone at this point, it is her only account of her side of the relationship, including her frustrations at their different tastes in writing. In addition to this, “A Pupil’s View” is the only first-person account of Zealia’s brief meeting with Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long, Jr. in New York City on 29 May 1929.

The most difficult question remains Zealia’s account of the actual conception and background behind “The Curse of Yig,” “Medusa’s Coil,” and “The Mound.” Lovecraft’s letters make it pretty clear that he ended up writing most of “The Curse of Yig,” and basically all of “Medusa’s Coil” and “The Mound” from synopses provided by Bishop. So what, if anything, can we trust of her account?

In our conversation we discussed among things my short novel, “The Mound”—an outgrowth of another tale told by the Comptons from their recollections of two old Indians living near Binger, Oklahoma—and my stories, “The Curse of Yig” and “Medusa’s Coil,” which I had picked up as an idea from a Negress who did some housecleaning for me and expanded into a story similar in treatment to my earlier horror tale.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 259-260

The sources of inspiration given seem plausible. “Grandma Compton” appears as a character in both “The Curse of Yig” and “The Mound,” and Zealia Brown Bishop’s sister was Grace Brown Compton—so there is no reason to doubt that Grace Compton’s mother-in-law was the original for “Grandma Compton.” The locale of “The Mound” is reasonably accurate to the mound-legends around Binger, Oklahoma. “Medusa’s Coil” is not tied to the Grandma Compton mythos, but an African-American housekeeper telling the story of a mixed-race woman “passing” as white is not far-fetched.

Serious cracks in the Zealia Bishop’s narrative don’t appear to have been seriously appeared until after her death. In “A Pupil’s View,” she alleges that at Lovecraft’s advice, Frank Belknap Long worked with her on “The Mound”:

In the ensuing conversation we took up the subject of “Medusa’s Coil.” It was decided that I should continue working on that under Lovecraft’s direction. “However,” he said, “I would like Belknap to work with you on your new story ‘The Mound.’ He may have something fresher and more interesting to offer.[“] […]

At Lovecraft’s gentle insistence, I left “The Mound” with Frank Belknap Long, and it was Long who advised and worked with me on that short novel. Lovecraft’s instructions were negligible; he merely advised both Belknap and myself when we felt we were not following his guidance.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 260

In his own memoir of Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long refuted this:

I had nothing whatever to do with the writing of The Mound. That brooding, somber, and magnificently atmospheric story is Lovecraftian from the first page to the last.
—Frank Belknap Long, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (1975) xiii-xiv

The truth appears to have been somewhat more complicated, at least according to the surviving correspondent and typescripts. Lovecraft certainly appears to have written “The Mound” based on the Binger mound legends provided by Zealia Bishop; when it failed to sell, he advised her to let Belknap market it, and he had abridged the novella and tried to do so, but failed:

You perhaps did not remember that I sent The Mount to Sonny Belknap over two years ago—in fact immediately after the old Boston lady—I’m grieved to learn of her death—returned it.) I wired him just not to send the unabridged copy to Mr. Barlow at once […]
—Zealia Bishop to H. P. Lovecraft, 26 May 1934, The Spirit of Revision 177

As to the matter of the Bishop MSS.—of course, it’s only fair to Mrs. B—in view of what she’s paid for ghosting or revision—to let her try the stuff on any possible markets. I assumed that Sonny Belknap, as her literary agent, had done so; & am astonished to find that any stone was left unturned.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 26 Jun 1934, O Fortunate Floridian! 143

R. H. Barlow was able to eventually cobble together a complete version of the manuscript, which he then bound with letters from Zealia Bishop and Frank Belknap Long relevant to its provenance.

In 1978, S. T. Joshi launched a more serious criticism at Bishop’s narrative in his essay “Who Wrote ‘The Mound?'” in Nyctalops #14. Joshi’s careful picking through the available evidence (Lovecraft’s published and unpublished letters, and manuscript material in the Lovecraft collection at John Hay Library at Brown University) reconstructed the convoluted textual history, and dismissed Bishop’s claims of authorship.

Others were coming more-or-less to the same conclusion and articles like “The Mound of Yig?” (1973, Etchings & Odysseys) by W. E. Baardson, “In Search of Yig” (1974, Nyctalops #9) by John J. Koblas, “‘Yig,’ ‘The Mound’ and American Indian Lore” (1983, Crypt of Cthulhu #11) by Michael DiGregorio all looked for the genuine lore underlying “The Curse of Yig” and “The Mound,” taking Bishop’s basic claims of inspiration from regional folklore as true—and unfortunately spending a lot of time looking in the wrong places for a bit of lore that Lovecraft had invented.

Joshi would edit the corrected third printing to The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989, Arkham House), and in his “A Note on the Texts” referenced the abridgement, mistranscription, and editing of Bishop’s stories by Long and Derleth. The book also reprinted August Derleth’s 1970 introduction (“Lovecraft’s ‘Revisions'”), where the Arkham House founder quoted from “A Pupil’s View”:

The stories I sent to him always came back so revised from their basic idea that I felt I was a complete failure as a writer.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 257

There is a certain pathos to this statement, because it is probably true. It is rather sad in many ways that we cannot take more of “A Pupil’s View” as the unvarnished truth. It would be easier to read and believe Zealia’s account of her struggles with the difference between where she wanted to go in her writing versus the direction that Lovecraft direction if it wasn’t necessary to put each statement under the critical microscope. Her affection for her “mentor” certainly seems genuine, even if she sometimes disagreed with him, and the occasional overblown claim about his linguistic abilities seems to be more a sign of admiration than a deliberate effort to mislead. Errors like Lovecraft’s age (she gives his age as 35 in 1928, he was actually 38) appear to be honest mistakes, the kind of thing Derleth should have caught.

“H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” was first published in The Curse of Yig (1953, Arkham House) and has been reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered (1998, Arkham House) and Ave Atque Vale (2018, Necronomicon Press).

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