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Editor Spotlight: Interview with Wendy N. Wagner

“Horror is for everyone.”
—Wendy N. Wagner

The publishing game has changed a great deal since the days of C. L. Moore and H. P. Lovecraft. Pulp magazines have increasingly given way to digital-and-print magazines, crowdfunded anthologies, ebooks, and patreons. Traditional publishing isn’t dead, but like moths and butterflies, it is undergoing a painful transition from the way things used to be done to how they will be done.

One thing remains: the world still needs editors. There still needs to be someone in the editorial trenches, reading submissions, answering queries, pitching ideas, working with authors to polish a story, push the envelope of what can be done. Their work is what enables writers’ voices to be heard, and even the most scintillant and brilliant bleeding edge of cosmic horror will go unread, if an editor can’t get a story to where people can actually read it.

Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of Nightmare magazine and the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed; she was also involved with the { } Destroy { } series, including editorial duties on Women Destroy Science Fiction! (2014), Women Destroy Fantasy! (2014), Women Destroy Horror! (2014), and Queers Destroy Horror! (2015), among others. They were kind enough to answer some of our questions on editing, cosmic horror, and Lovecraft.

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How did you get into Lovecraft and cosmic horror?

Wendy N. Wagner: As a kid, I read a ton of Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice. I loved Halloween and anything with a gothic vibe. But I got busy with school and other interests, and horror fell by the wayside until my mid-twenties, when I started writing seriously. At that time, I wrote a couple of fantasy novels and realized that the parts of my work I loved best felt like horror, so I decided I was going to focus on writing horror short stories to improve my craft. I got a book by Mort Castle about horror writing, which included a list of the greatest horror writers and their work, and of course H.P. Lovecraft was on there. I had never read anything by him, but as someone living in Portland, Oregon, the birthplace of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, I recognized the name.

I checked out a collection from the library—I think it was the one edited by Joyce Carol Oates—and I was instantly in love. Every story filled me with the feelings I used to get reading horror as a kid. It was all so goth, so over the top, so deliciously dark. I felt like I had come home.

I started going to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, which includes a literary track, where I met a number of Lovecraftian and cosmic horror writers, and through them I started getting invited to write work for Lovecraftian anthologies. So I just kept reading and writing and watching Lovecraftian work, spiraling deeper and deeper into that weird and wonderful world. It really feels like home now.

As a speculative fiction writer and editor you have worked in the trenches of weird fiction and nonfiction for years. Have you faced discrimination for your gender or sexuality in that context?

WNW: Not that I know of? But I can’t know about what I’m not invited to because of my identity or my associations.

Your first editing project was Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. How did you get involved with that?

WNW: After I sold a short story to editor John Joseph Adams in 2010, I became fast friends with him and his partner, the editor Christie Yant. I started doing volunteer work for some of JJA’s projects, including working as an editorial assistant for three anthologies and then serving for a year as the assistant editor of Fantasy Magazine. When John closed Fantasy, I took an editing hiatus because I was writing tie-in fiction for the Pathfinder role-playing game while at the same time holding down a day job.

But in late 2013, I lost my job and started looking for a way to make a living as a full-time freelancer. Luckily for me, John Joseph Adams had just reached a point where he found running both Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines a little much on top of his anthology work. He hired me to manage the day-to-day operations of the magazines as well as handling the bulk of the line editing. He had also decided to oversee a Kickstarter campaign for a special issue of Lightspeed with a focus on women writers, to be edited by Christie Yant, and he asked me to assist some of the content production for that Kickstarter campaign.

The Kickstarter for Women Destroy Science Fiction! was an enormous success, and when it surpassed its fundraising goals, the three of us had a meeting to decide what to do next. We decided to expand the concept into Women Destroy Horror! and Women Destroy Fantasy! and brought on a crew of fabulous women to edit those works. I served as the managing editor of all these projects, on top of my regular managing editor duties. (Luckily, WDSF replaced the June 2014 issue at Lightspeed and WDH replaced the October 2014 issue of Nightmare.)

Because these issues were so well-received, we decided to repeat the project in 2015 with an emphasis on LGBTQIA creators. Because of my identity, my previous editorial experience, and of course my love of horror, Christie Yant suggested I serve as the editor-in-chief of Queers Destroy Horror!, and JJA thought it was a great idea. 

You were also the nonfiction editor for Women Destroy Science Fiction! and Women Destroy Fantasy! What was that experience like?

WNW: It was an absolute blast overseeing the nonfiction for those projects! And easy, too, because we got so much email from so many people who wanted to be involved with it—there were so many women who had so many exciting ideas, and it was a joy to offer them a place to share them.

I think the best part of the Destroy projects were the micro-essays about people’s personal experiences which ran in the Kickstarter campaigns and in the Destroy Science Fiction! editions. I got to wrangle the ones for Women Destroy and for Queers Destroy, and it was amazing to read them. Over and over again, people spoke of the incredible importance of representation, the way seeing someone like themself on a screen or on a page unlocked the world for them. 

It really changed something inside of me. I never set out to be an editor or a gatekeeper of any kind, but after working on the Destroy projects, I understood how important it was to make sure the world was getting a chance to read more diverse voices. I felt it in my bones: this work matters.

You joined Nightmare Magazine as managing/associate editor in 2014 and worked your way up to editor-in-chief. How has that experience been?

WNW: I’ve had so much fun at Nightmare! I was originally brought on to oversee the staff and all the production details, as well as handling the line-by-line editing of stories and articles, but I very quickly volunteered to take over the nonfiction side of things, and John didn’t mind. I’m such a giant horror fan that it was a lot more fun for me than it was for him! To this day, I think our H Word essay column is my favorite part of the magazine. We feature a different writer every month, and after all these years, I think the column is an amazing repository of thoughts on how the horror genre works and what it means to people. I am so proud of it!

In mid-2020, John asked me if I’d be interested in taking over as editor-in-chief, and it was such an overwhelmingly wonderful moment. My first issue was our 101st, and I had the cover printed up as a huge poster to hang in my office. When I got it up on the wall, I cried with happiness.

It’s been really exciting to select stories and share them with the world. My goal for the magazine is to explore the broadest possible spectrum of horror fiction, ranging from the bizarro to the cozy, from the psychological to the supernatural, to publish work that’s barely horror and to publish work that’s in the dead, scary center. I always say that our motto is “Horror is for everyone,” and I dream that the magazine’s archives contain some kind of horror that’s accessible for every kind of reader. Not because I think I can make everyone happy, but because I think horror is good for everyone, and too many people have been turned off from horror because they have this very blinkered vision of the genre. I want to help take off those blinkers. It’s basically my life mission!

In your editorial for Nightmare Magazine #132 (September 2023), you stated that “Lovecraftian” was a lazy adjective. Can you expand on that?

WNW: First because H.P. Lovecraft wrote in so many different genres and subgenres! He wrote stories of the supernatural. He wrote stories that are extremely science fictional. He wrote dark fantasy. He wrote psychological horror. I think the submissions guidelines for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival do a great job explaining how broad and wide “Lovecraftian” work can be (I have never made a Lovecraftian film, but last year I took home the Best Screenplay award from the HPLFF, so I’ve definitely studied those guidelines very closely).

However, I think most people use the word “Lovecraftian” to refer to the realm of weird and cosmic horror, the subgenres Lovecraft is probably best known for. So why not just use the term “weird and cosmic horror”? There are a lot of other creators who have done just as much for the field as HPL has. I think about Robert W. Chambers, whose novel The King in Yellow was published when Lovecraft was five years old. Or Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” published when HPL was seven. William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland was issued when Lovecraft was eight. Those three works are three of my very favorite works of cosmic horror, and were huge influences on Lovecraft’s writing. 

I suppose “Chambersian” doesn’t sound nearly as cool as “Lovecraftian,” alas.

Did you get any pushback for that editorial, or the statements you’ve made about Lovecraft in general?

WNW: I had to laugh a little at this question, because I usually feel like nobody reads the editorials! I’ve never heard a peep about any of them, at any rate.

You’re also managing/senior editor and nonfiction editor of Lightspeed. What is the difference between editing science fiction versus editing horror?

WNW: As an editor, my job is to try to put myself in the writer’s head and to strive to understand why they’ve made the craft choices they made. I’m always trying to figure out what emotions the writer is attempting to manipulate, what senses they’re hoping to stimulate, what ideas they’re trying to knit together in order to sculpt the landscape of the story. I think the two different genres tend to target different emotions, senses, and conceptual landscapes, but the job remains the same. I’m just there to make sure my writers are totally happy with their work!

Besides being an editor, you’ve written a good bit of Lovecraft-inspired and cosmic horror fiction yourself. What draws you to write it?

WNW: I grew up in a very small community in Oregon’s coast range. To get to the nearest town, we had to drive twenty-five miles on a very narrow, winding road that skirted a deep canyon and a very wide river. It rained nine months of the year, and in the summer, there was heavy fog almost every day. It might have been the West Coast, but I couldn’t have lived any closer to Innsmouth without putting a houseboat on Devil’s Reef.

I guess you could say it’s in my blood!

Do you feel that being you (female, queer) has shaped your understanding of Lovecraft and approach to body horror and cosmic horror?

WNW: When I was a young teenager, there were several ballot measures in my state that tried to limit or eliminate gay rights, and homophobia saturated the airwaves. My own father once told me he thought gay people shouldn’t even exist. I think when you grow up knowing you are hated for simply being yourself, it makes you understand horror in a whole different way. 

As for body horror, I do think people with uteruses have easy access a lot of source material! Bodies, man. They can be magically disgusting.

Has writing Lovecraft-inspired fiction changed how you relate to Lovecraft and his fiction?

WNW: When Lovecraft is your job, you definitely read more of his work. I probably wouldn’t have made it through The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath if it hadn’t been required reading!

Reading some of your fiction like “Curvature of the Witch House,” I’m reminded of when W. H. Pugmire wrote “Instead of writing formula stories, we can use Lovecraftian themes as a foundation on which to try to build our own unique fiction.” Do you feel that describes your own approach?

WNW: Oh, Pugmire, you wonderful soul. Of course Pugmire would put it so perfectly! 

Those words really resonate with me now after writing two novels (Girl in the Creek, forthcoming 2025 from Tor Nightfire, and a still-to-be-homed novel finished earlier this year) that are definitely cosmic horror novels. I think there are elements in both books that will really resonate with anyone who reads Lovecraft, but at the same time, those elements are totally spun out of my own obsessions. I didn’t set out to ape anything by the master, but I think I’ve spent so much time thinking about his work (and the work of related authors, especially Robert W. Chambers) that the way I approach story naturally shapes it into the realm of the cosmic and weird.

Has being an editor shaped your views of Lovecraft in your own fiction?

WNW: I think being an editor has made me see how important the cosmic and the weird are to all people. That’s one of the reasons why I object to the using the term “Lovecraftian” to mean “cosmic and/or weird.” The weird belongs to everyone! I think we’re only going to see more personal and even weirder takes on cosmic horror.

From an editorial perspective, how do you handle issues of prejudice & discrimination in the submissions you receive?

WNW: As a human, I think my most important value is of ahimsa, the Hindu and Buddhist principle non-harm or nonviolence (I’m not a Buddhist, but I think that term is the best to explain my moral stance). As an editor, I think my primary job is to put stories out into the world that don’t harm people, and my next biggest job is to make sure that the writers who send me work aren’t harmed by their interactions with me. That means I don’t publish stories that encourage discrimination, and I try to publish work from a diverse population of writers. I also try to communicate with authors in a kind way. But there is always room for improvement.

The best way to fight my own prejudices and preconceptions about literature is to read widely and to think critically about my understanding of craft and language. Last year I spent a great couple of months attending a workshop presented by the Willamette Writers about the way writing workshops can be damaging for writers from marginalized communities and identities. It was very thought-provoking, and I look forward to learning more. I’m always looking for ways to expand my horizons and to be a better advocate for diversity in our genre.

How do you encourage diversity as an editor?

WNW: I’m very inspired by our publisher, John Joseph Adams, and his editorial work, particularly Lightspeed. Lightspeed has a stellar record for publishing writers from around the globe and for celebrating marginalized voices. From the very beginning of the magazine, he made sure every issue showcased an even number of male and female writers, and he’s also been hugely supportive of nonbinary and trans authors. John is my absolute hero, and he sets very high standards for all his publications. As for my own measures, I try to invite a diverse population of writers to work with me on nonfiction, an area where Nightmare has always shone, as well as soliciting fiction from marginalized voices (last year we had two themed issues, one exploring “Lovecraftian” themes and one focused on dark fantasy, whose fiction and poetry was entirely commissioned from writers of color). I’ve also experimented with having open submissions periods strictly for people of color. Some people complain about these kinds of submissions periods, but for me, they seem helpful. I like to take more care reading these submissions, which often draw from literary styles and craft techniques that are outside of my own training (I studied literature in ’90s, and it was heavily biased toward British and upper-class American writing). I know I’m still learning a lot about how to evaluate work that doesn’t jibe with the classic European canon of fiction—sometimes I feel like I have an easier time loving poetry from other cultures than I do fiction, simply because I’ve been trained to appreciate more experimental approaches to craft in that genre. But I like to think I’m learning!

What do you see as the future of Lovecraft-inspired fiction and cosmic horror?

WNW: It’s only going to get wilder and more exciting. Our culture has changed radically since Lovecraft was writing fiction, and science has transformed our understanding of both what might lie outside our terrestrial bubble and what the very nature of reality might be. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods no longer feel terrifying in the way they did in the early 20th century because we have begun to suspect the cosmos is far stranger than Lovecraft and his contemporaries ever imagined. 

But one of the central tenets of Lovecraft’s work was always that the cosmos are weirder than our simple primate brains are ready to understand. The weirder we get, the more we prove him right. In that regard, Lovecraft will always be relevant, even if his biases aren’t. 

Today’s writers stand on the shoulders of weird giants, straining toward the stars. I hope the writers of tomorrow stand on my shoulders, ready to gibber in horror at whatever is up there.

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“Horror is for everyone.” Four words to carve into your heart. Thank you Wendy for taking the time to answer these questions. Looking forward to seeing more from you in the future.

For more on Wendy N. Wagner, check out their Linktree.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“El guardian” (2010) by Enrique Balmes & Roc Espinet and “Life After Death” (2010) by David Güell

The sixth issue of the Spanish horror comic magazine Cthulhu was dedicated to Robert E. Howard, and while not every work inside the covers is derived from or in reference to the Texas pulpster, several are.

Manuel Barrero kicks things off with “Robert E. Howard, Del terror al cómic” an essay on comic adaptations of Howard’s horror stories. Luis Miguez wrote and illustrated “La Mano derecha de la fatalidad,” a very competent black-and-white adaptation of the Solomon Kane story “The Right Hand of Doom.” The regular feature El joven Lovecraft by José Oliver, Isaac Casanova, and Bartolo Torres presents an abbreviated two-page variation on “In the Forest of Villefère,” played for laughs.

Then there are two works back-to-back. “El guardian” is a colored six-page story written by Enrique Balmes and illustrated by Roc Espinet; a silent sword & sorcery piece where a nameless but familiar barbarian seeks some mystic elixir from a demonic guardian…that transitions, at the last, back to a more morbidly horrific reality.

Left literally unsaid is the idea that the failure of the fantasy barbarian is an echo of Howard’s own attitude, a prelude to what came next. There was no mystic elixir that would restore his mother to health. No matter how hard her fought, he could not save her. Only readers familiar with Howard’s life and legend would recognize the import of that transition, what was about to happen next.

Then, the reader turns the page…

…to the opening of “Life After Death” by David Güell, a 4-page black-and-white comic which picks up immediately thereafter.

Where “El guardian” is silent, “Life After Death” speaks directly to the deceased writer. “Cinezas a las cenizas, polvo al polvo” (ashes to ashes, dust to dust) the priest prays him into Hell, and his characters reproach him as they are dragged down into the grave with him. Until at last they end with “Ni los dioses ni la eternidad podrán separarnos” (Neither the gods nor eternity will separate us.)—and what echoes does that have? Does it recall the words of Valeria, in Conan the Barbarian (1982), when she claimed “All the gods, they cannot sever us”? Or perhaps the inscription on the headstone for the Howard family, which proclaims “And in death they were not divided” (2 Samuel 1:23)?

Or, perhaps, just a bit of sentiment.

Taken independently, neither of these stories is much. They are evocative little tone poems of graphic art. Each seeks to capture a certain mood, a certain aspect of Howard’s life and legend—and yet what the editors Lorenzo Pascual and Pilar Lumbreras have done, by putting these two pieces together, in this order, to get that transition, is to highlight an absolutely essential element of the personal mythology of Robert E. Howard.

Death and doom is a constant in the works of Robert E. Howard. While heroic fantasy is sometimes characterized as mindless manslaughter, all blood and thunder and no characterization, toxic masculine escapism…the fact is that while they may not die on the page in most of the stories penned by Howard, they are all doomed to die, and ultimately to fail. Kull’s Valusia and Atlantis are legend and dust by the time of Conan the Cimmerian; the Hyborian Age is a myth and its last peoples degenerated in the Bran Mak Morn tales. The Pictish empire that Bran forges collapses after his death, so that by the time of Turlough Dubh O’Brien it is a fading race among the British Isles, and by the time of the present Conrad and Kirowan know it survives only as a dim and almost-forgotten cult.

For all that Robert E. Howard’s heroes achieve, no peace is ever permanent, no legacy is everlasting, no kingdom eternal, no castle or monument uneroded by time, no legend remembered forever. Bloodlines fail, nations fall, peoples intermingle and old races are lost and replaced by new ones, constantly, forever. For all that some have considered Howard’s essay The Hyborian Age to be driven by white supremacy, it doesn’t take very close reading to realize that the “white” peoples get their asses kicked a lot. That’s part of the cyclical nature of the world in Howard’s fiction; and every conquering Aryan is boasting of their prowess, at the last, defeated or killed.

What’s more, Howard’s heroes know it. The best of them, the deepest of them, know it in their bones. It hangs on them like a shroud, it haunts their thoughts and leads to dour moods. Kull of Atlantis and Conan of Cimmeria come as outsiders to their thrones, and have to earn acceptance and legitimacy; their position is constantly threatened as neither has established an heir. Bran Mak Morn, who fought his way to kingship, sees himself the last of a degenerating race, an underdog against the mightiest empire in the world—Rome. In “Wings in the Night,” Solomon Kane, whose stories often reflect the popular Colonialist attitudes toward race in the 1920s, finds himself thrust into the role of defender one too many times, and fails—left with nothing else, he takes on the role of the avenger, and hunts the last of an ancient race to extinction.

Almost any victory won in Howard’s tales is a brief and fleeting thing, a temporary reprieve at best against the foregone conclusion that in the end, every man must die, and the price is often bloody. His characters are not, generally speaking, supermen; though many have superior strength, speed, skill, or simply a nearly inhuman ability to soak up punishment. They hurt, they bleed, they laugh, they sorrow.

Like Howard himself.

I do not hold that there is one single incident that drove Robert E. Howard to suicide. The long illness of his mother, the unexpectantly blunt words of a nurse, the break-up with his girlfriend, the financial stress of his mother’s care combined with the large amounts of money that Weird Tales owed him…these are all no doubt parts of it. Stressors that built and built until finally he put into action his plan.

Yet that it was a planned suicide seems clear. The thought appears in several of Howard’s letters over the years, it makes an appearance in a few of his stories, such as the opening to “Xuthal of the Dusk,” where Conan knows he has reached the end of his trail. After his death, his father Dr. I. M. Howard spoke somewhat more candidly about his son’s inclination, and perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, saw clearly that they were preparations for his demise. Robert E. Howard had bought the funeral plot. Borrowed a friend’s gun. Given instructions to his agent in case of his deceased.

Of all the letters that tackle this theme or philosophy, one has always stood out to me. On 19 June 1935, Robert E. Howard and his friend Truett Vinson set out for a road trip to New Mexico. They returned a scant five days later, having taken in the immense natural beauty of the Carlsbad Caverns and various sites of interest. In Santa Fe, the pair paused at the New Mexico Museum of Art.

We went through the art museum which is supposed to be very good, but I shall not pretend to try to pass on it. I know nothing about paintings, and, unless the painting portrays some sort of strenuous action, I care less. Most of the paintings were of New Mexican landscape, and I find the Witt Museum in San Antonio less monotonous, because Texas presents a greater variety of scenery than does New Mexico, and therefore a collection of Texas landscape paintings offers more different scenes. Only one painting stands out in my mind, and I studied that for a long time. It was a large painting of a half-naked Indian trudging over a desert country, leaning on a staff, and dragging behind him several horses’ heads, with portions of the vertebrae still attached; he was dragging them by means of raw-hide ropes fastened in deep gashes in the muscles of his back. At first glance I supposed it to portray a Penitente, but a description was affixed to the painting. It portrayed a scene the artist had witnessed in Montana, many years before. An old Crow chief had word that his favorite son had died in Carlisle University; he killed the boy’s horses, cut off their heads, gashed his back and fastened rawhide thongs into the raw flesh, and dragged those skulls all over the mountains all day long, to show that neither grief nor physical agony could shake his fortitude. Doubtless it did more to lessen his sorrow than anything he could have done. I was reminded of Chesterton’s lines, about the old Viking:

“And a man hopes, being foolish,
Till in white woods apart
He finds at last the lost bird dead,
But a man can still hold up his head,
Though nevermore his heart.”
[The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)]

When the world cracks under a man’s feet and the sky breaks and falls on his head, if he can clench his jaws and keep on his feet, and keep his head up, if for no other reason than the stubborn pride of fighting, then that’s something, at least; and if he can’t do that, he’d better blow his brains out, like a gentleman. The title of the picture was “The Stoic.”

—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, c. July 1935, A Means to Freedom 2.872-873

It is not clear how many biographical details of Howard’s life, how many of his letters in English or in translation, that the creators of “El guardian” and “Life After Death” had when they put their work together. Yet they had the gist of it, the essence of the ending that helped catapult Howard from a popular pulp writer to a legend. In the flip of a page, the reader gets the shock of that transition, that supreme moment…and then Howard was gone.

It was up to his friends and loved ones to carry on without him.

Cthulhu #6, back cover
“Ustedes no conocen lo queue significa la palabra “miedo”. No, yo sé lo queue me digo. Ustedos son soldados, aventureros. Han conocido las Cargas de Los regimenientos de dragons, El frenesí de Los mares azotados por Los vientos. Pero El miedo, else miedo queue pone los pelos de punta, see queue os estremece de horror, ése no lo han conocido. Yo sí he conocido semejante miedo… Pero no será hasta queue las legions de Las tinieblas salgan en torbellino por las puertas del inferno y el Mundo se consuma entre llamas queue ése miedo vuelva a ser conocido por Los hombres.”“FEAR? Your pardon, Messieurs, but the meaning of fear you do not know. No, I hold to my statement. You are soldiers, adventurers. You have known the charges of regiments of dragoons, the frenzy of wind-lashed seas. But fear, real hair-raising, horror-crawling fear, you have not known. I myself have known such fear; but until the legions of darkness swirl from hell’s gate and the world flames to ruin, will never such fear again be known to men.”
Back cover text of Cthulhu #6Original English-source, from the opening to “Wolfshead” by Robert E. Howard

If you are considering suicide or self harm, please get help now.

The International Association to Prevent Suicide offers contact information for 24-hour assistance.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Plant-Thing” (1925) by R. G. Macready

R. G. Macready, of Durant, Oklahoma, writes to the editor: “You are to be commended on the determined stand you, as well as the great majority of WEIRD TALES readers, have taken against those who protest at the weird quality of the stories printed in your periodical. Why do not these people, who are trying to wipe out of existence the only magazine of its kind, turn their artillery upon the sex-exploiting magazines that are crowding the best magazines out of place on our news stands? Anyway, a mind that can go undiseased through that so-called literature should be able to survive the pleasantly exhilarating ‘kick’ of a good horror tale. There can be no question as to the literary status of WEIRD TALES. In it have appeared stories worthy of Kipling himself, to say nothing of Poe.”
—Weird Tales June 1925

The cover of the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales was dedicated to “The Werewolf of Ponkert” by H. Warner Munn, a story that had spun out of Lovecraft’s suggestion that no story had yet been written from the perspective of a werewolf. Lovecraft himself was present in the issue with “The Unnamable.” E. Hoffmann Price’s “The Stranger from Kurdistan,” which Lovecraft later lauded, also graced the issue; another entry in Seabury Quinn’s series “Servants of Satan,” Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Wonderful Thing,” a classic translation/reprint in “The Three Low Masses” by Alphonse Daudet—and a story from a bright newcomer, “Spear and Fang” by Robert E. Howard, his first story in the magazine.

Against all these well-known names are a handful of other stories, but readers may be forgiven for overlooking “The Plant-Thing” by R. G. Macready. It is a minor effort, as weird tales go, and Farnsworth Wright did Macready no favors by announcing at the start “A Frightful Tale of a Carnivorous Tree,” because that quite gives the game away. In other ways, the story is too short, too full of stereotypes. Of course the Doctor has a beautiful daughter. Of course things end with one bloody and violent clash.

There are some other curious parallels with other weird stories: the Malay employees of Doctor Carter echo a certain trend of doctors or scientists having exotic servants; Lovecraft used an identical tactic in “The Last Test” (Weird Tales Nov 1928), which also coincidentally involved the sacrifice to science of a large number of animal specimens. The inhuman appetite and emphasis on farm stock to feed it was also a feature of “The Dunwich Horror” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Whether Lovecraft ever took any inspiration from “The Plant-Thing” must remain speculation, however; there are no mentions of the story or author in Lovecraft’s letters or notes.

It was, as it turns out, to be the only story that Macready would ever publish in Weird Tales. That wasn’t unusual either; Weird Tales had a higher percentage of writers whose only credit was a single story in its pages than nearly any other pulp magazine. Editors Edwin Baird, Farnsworth Wright, and Dorothy McIlwraith might have their quirks and shortcomings, but they were all of them open to new talent.

So too, the British editor Christine Campbell Thomson must have thought it a good shocker, for she bought the reprint rights for the 1925 Not at Night anthology. When editor Herbert Ashbury brought out the American Not at Night anthology in 1928, Macready again found himself reprinted—and sharing a table of contents with H. P. Lovecraft again, as well as August Derleth, Seabury Quinn, and Frank Belknap Long, Jr., among others. Macready could honestly claim that he had rubbed shoulders with some of the giants of weird fiction.

There is one thing that makes Macready himself stand out from most of the other authors of Weird Tales, though you would have to go beyond the pages of that magazine to know it:

R. G. Macready was deaf.

Reginald Goode Macready was born 18 April 1905 in Silo, Oklahoma, and grew up (according to census reports) as part of a large family; his father a teacher and newspaper publisher. At the age of 7, R. G. Macready suffered an attack of meningitis; and though he survived, it left him “hopelessly” deaf (the exact degree of deafness is never specified, and may have been total). The young Macready thereafter attended the Oklahoma School for the Deaf, which had been founded in 1908, and did very well scholastically, graduating as class president and valedictorian. He was offered a scholarship to attend Gallaudet  College (now Gallaudet University), a private university that specialized in higher education for the hearing-impared. (Durant Daily Democrat 3 Oct 1922).

It isn’t entirely clear if Macready attended Gaudelet, or if he did attend whether he graduated. The dates fall in between the federal census. In 1927, his father died, which may have interrupted his studies; by the 1930 census he was back in Durant, Oklahoma, working as a printer (according to the census; more likely a linotype operator), and probably helped to support his mother. In the 1940s he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, from which he graduated with a B.A. in Journalism in 1944, and a M.A. in 1945. A newspaper article on his achievement proudly notes his publication in Weird Tales.

Sooner State Press 28 July 1945

If Macready taught at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf in Sulphur, Oklahoma, it wasn’t for long; by 1946 he was the telegraph editor at the Galveston Daily News. Numerous bylines attest to Macready’s career as a journalist, which continued until his death in Texas in 1977 (Findagrave).

The ableness, race, gender, and sexuality of a writer, can all be invisible to the reader. They know only as much as the writer chooses to reveal. Macready made no point of it, and his last contribution to the Unique Magazine was a letter in the July 1925 issue. The average reader would have no idea that Macready had any disability at all—and many writers with disability pass through history, without leaving any trace of the difficulties they had faced and overcome in their life. How many other writers at Weird Tales might have been part of this oft-underrepresented group?

“The Plant-Thing” by R. G. Macready may be read online for free.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Orcs et Gobelins T11: Kronan (2021) by Jean-Luc Istin, Sébastien Grenier, and J. Nanjan

Antarya traverse une crise des plus graves depuis que la reine Nawell a perdu la raison. Lors d’une trahison de haut vol, elle fait exécuter ses soldats. L’orc Kronan, capitaine de sa garde en réchappe. Pour lui, celle qui dit se nommer Nawell est une usurpatrice et il compte bien le prouver mais aussi se venger. Et quand Kronan se venge, il trace toujours un sillon de sang sur son chemin.Antarya is going through a serious crisis since Queen Nawell lost her mind. In a high-level betrayal, she has her soldiers executed. The orc Kronan, captain of his guard, escapes. For him, the woman who says her name is Nawell is a usurper and he intends to prove it but also take revenge. And when Kronan takes revenge, he always leaves a trail of blood in his path.
Back cover copy for Orcs et Gobelins T11: KronanEnglish translation

The publication of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), and The Silmarillion (1977, with Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay) fundamentally changed the landscape of contemporary fantasy. Not just because of what J. R. R. Tolkien created and its enduring popularity, but because his approach to fantasy races and world-building set a high standard which many writers then took as a template for their own works. While Tolkien was not alone in creating fantasy worlds—Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegāna (1905), E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922), and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954) all preceded The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien’s conception of elves, dwarves, hobbits, ents, orcs, goblins, et al. strongly influenced the public imagination. This can especially be seen in tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer Fantasy, computer games inspired by those works such as World of Warcraft, and novels such as Dennis L. McKiernan’s Mithgar series.

Robert E. Howard’s fantasy in the pages Weird Tales in the 1920s and 30s represents a very different kind of fantasy. There are fewer distinct fantasy races in Howard’s work; there are no elves and goblins per se. The Children of the Night from “Worms of the Earth” (Weird Tales Nov 1932) and other tales are inspired by the Little People stories of Arthur Machen, but shaped by Howard’s correspondence with Lovecraft, have taken a very different form. They are not servants of a Satanic Morgoth or Sauron, nor are they corrupted elves or even inherently evil in a purely good-and-evil sense. The morality of Howard’s tales is always murkier, the racial politics more complicated, and that tarnished air, that hardboiled sensibility where there is no true good and evil, no ultimate victory for the forces of light or darkness, just men and women and things beyond human ken interacting according to their own needs and desires is part of what sets Howard’s fantasy distinctly apart from Tolkien.

Whether you call it sword & sorcery, heroic fantasy, or something else, Howard’s bloodier, grimier, but very approachable brand of fantasy had an equal influence with Tolkien on later writers. Tolkien may have helped define orcs, elves, and dwarves for a few generations, but Howard helped define the thief, barbarian, and mercenary man-at-arms as iconic roles. They both had their own contributions in terms of magic rings and magic swords, and they had a penchant for taverns and themes of kingship. While their ethos and style sometimes clash, their joint influence on fantasy is undeniable…and sometimes more strongly felt together.

In 2013, French comics publisher Soleil began producing a series of bandes dessinées: Elfes Tome 1: Le Crystal des Elfes Bleus was published in 2013, and became popular enough to become an ongoing series. These were set in a very generic Dungeons & Dragons-derived fantasy world called Arran. The series was popular enough to merit several spin-off series of various levels of popularity: Nains (Dwarves, 2015), Orcs & Gobelins (Orcs and Goblins, 2017), Mages (2019), Terres d’Ogon (Lands of Ogon, 2022), and Guerres d’Arran (Wars of Arran, 2023). As with D&D itself, this is very specifically riffing off of the popular conception of fantasy races derived from Tolkien, but the world is grimier, more visceral, a bit more hardboiled—Tolkien as filtered through Howard, in a sense.

Jean-Luc Istin is a veteran of the series, having written several of the preceding volumes of Elfes and Orcs & Gobelins, and for the 11th tome in the O&G series, he partnered up with Sébastien Grenier (artist) and J. Nanjan (colorist) to produce something kind of special: a re-telling of Robert E. Howard’s “A Witch Shall be Born” (Weird Tales December 1934) set in the world of Arran, and starring not Conan the Cimmerian, but Kronan the Orc.

Copyright law in France works a little differently than in the United States. During Robert E. Howard’s lifetime, the Berne Convention would guarantee his works would remain under copyright for at least 50 years after his death (since Howard died in 1936, that would mean 1986); in France, the general term is 70 years after the author’s death (i.e. 2006). Either way, Howard’s works are generally considered in the public domain in France (although international trademarks may still apply). Even if copyright was an issue, Kronan might still pass as an homage…but not a parody.

While the concept of Conan as an orc might sound silly, the creative team between Kronan plays it very straight. Kronan is a hulking, musclebound figure that takes very strong artistic influence from the fantasy bodybuilder culture that Frank Frazetta’s paperback covers, John Buscema’s comic book Conan for Marvel, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s turn as Conan in Conan the Barbarian (1982) all helped to inspire, and readers can clearly see in the absolutely ripped muscles, the deep-set eyes, and long hair various influences from all three mashed together. Yet this is not just Conan with tusks and green face paint.

While Kronan follows the general outline of Howard’s story, and includes adaptations of many of the famous scenes—including Kronan on the cross, which was borrowed into the 1982 film—in adapting the story from Hyboria to Arran, the creators have shifted many of the details to fit the new setting. Instead of Crom, Kronan swears by the Orc deity Gor, for one example. In adapting the prose text to comic format, they’ve also veered away from some of the hallmarks of Howard’s narrative style in this story.

It is a weird penchant in Howard’s works that in several of the Conan stories, Conan himself takes a while to appear. The first chapter of “A Witch Shall Be Born” doesn’t mention Conan at all; it features Queen Taramis in her bed chamber, confronted by her twin sister. When Conan is first mentioned in chapter two, it is just that—a mention. The soldier Valerius is telling his sweetheart what happened. So we don’t actually see Conan in the story proper until he is crucified and on the cross.

In Kronan, by contrast, the narrative device is shifted: it is an older orc on a throne that is telling the story. We skip the bedroom scene with the queen (Nawell in place of Taramis) and see her attack her loyal army and citizens, and has Kronan crucified (as seen in a flashback-within-a-flashback). Where Howard had chapter 3 as a letter written to Nemedia about what all has happened, in the comic Kronan meets someone who tells him some these things, and we get a glimpse of Kronan doing some investigations of his own, breaking into a library to learn a bit of eldritch lore at knife-point.

Some aspects of the story are removed or simplified; we don’t actually see Kronan pull the nails out of his own flesh, as we did when Roy Thomas and John Buscema first adapted “A Witch Shall Be Born” to comics in Savage Sword of Conan #5 (1975); the crystal ball and acolyte by which the witch surveys the battle doesn’t feature either. Much of the architecture and landscaping is, for lack of a better term, more generically fantasy in aspect, with huge towers and walls, vast arched libraries carved into the solid earth, huge domed chambers like pagan cathedrals, etc. Arms and armor are likewise much more generic fantasy in design, less realistic than Howard’s descriptions, but more in keeping with the setting of Arran.

Eldritch entities are decidedly less toad-like.

However, we do get some rather inspired artistic decisions. Kronan is the only Orc in the entire book, much as Conan was the only Cimmerian in Howard’s series; the one greenskin among a group of otherwise human characters makes him stand out all the more. Also, the occasional epic page-spread that really gives a sense of scale worthy of the series.

Taken together, the changes streamline the story and focus it more on Kronan himself. A lot of the exposition where a character talks about Conan become tales told to Kronan, or scenes that the reader sees directly; Kronan takes a more active and central role in unraveling the central mystery of the witch in the narrative, and there are fewer secondary characters to keep track of. The bones of Howard’s story are there, but Kronan is much more the focus, and the world is much more one familiar to gamers and Tolkienian fantasy fans than the Hyborian Age.

Yet for all that, it’s fun. There’s never been an adaptation quite like this, and never one that didn’t veer into winking at the reader or lapsing into parody, as when Mark Rogers adapted Howard’s Conan tale “Beyond the Black River” (Weird Tales May-Jun 1935) as “Beyond the Black Walnut” in The Adventures of Samurai Cat (1984). It is faithful to the mood and tone of Howard’s story, and Howard’s conception of Conan, while also making allowances for the different medium, the different setting, and the artistic allowance where a fantasy orc barbarian can ride a massive horned ox into battle while wielding a fifty-pound sword one-handed.

To the memory of Robert E. Howard.

Perhaps needless to say, this is also fun. Sébastien Grenier’s art hits that sweet spot between the almost self-parody of Warhammer Fantasy and the more realistic tone or the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition Player’s handbook. J. Nanjan’s coloring work is solid; while I might like to see what a black & white version looks like some day, the vividness of the colors used on the cover really makes the banners pop, and the use of light and darkness on the interiors in muted tones really works. I think a different colorist would have been tempted to make things brighter or darker, which would have ruined the effect and made the whole work much too cartoonish.

While the series has begun to be translated into English, Orcs & Gobelins Tome 11: Kronan is still available primarily in French.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Listen, World!” (31 December 1937) by Elsie Robinson

In the annals of weird fiction, the name Elsie Robinson (Elsinore Justina Robinson) does not loom large. During her lifetime, Robinson’s fame came mostly as a syndicated columnist for the Hearst newspapers, and at the height of her fame millions read her column “Listen, World!,” that often featured a flippant, sarcastic tone; dealt seriously (if cynically, and often humorously) with issues of marriage, romance, and daily life; and were sometimes illustrated with her own cartoons or poems.

Which is why the column for “Listen, World!” for 31 December 1937 (or 1 January 1938, or 3 January 1938, depending on when the syndicated material was run) stands out a bit from the corpus of her work, because the bulk of the article is an severe (and somewhat humorous) abridgement or synopsis of Edward Lucas White’s bizzare classic of weird fiction, “Lukundoo”—a story first published in Weird Tales November 1925, and then in White’s collection Lukundoo and Other Stories (1927), Dorothy L. Sayers‘ The Omnibus of Crime (1929), and many other places. White’s story also served as the direct inspiration for Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Lips” (Weird Tales September 1929).

This New Year’s recapitulation shows the odd ways weird fiction gets out into the world, the different forms it takes and the odd influence it can have, even on such an aggressively mainstream and popular journalist as Elsie Robinson.

※
LISTEN, WORLD
by Elsie Robinson
LUKUNDOO!

New Year’s Day!

So many desires, so many resolutions, springing again in your tired, suspicious spirit! So much furious hope that you’ll “get your break at last!”…

Yet, tucking in beside the resolutions, ready for instant use—the same old score of excuses and alibis!

New Year ahead! What will it bring? And whose fault will it be if it doesn’t? The Other Fellow’s? Some outer circumstance over which you had no control…bad breaks you couldn’t buck…will these cause your failure and frustration in the year that opens today? Will defeat come from OUTSIDE? Or is there another danger you need to face? Think…listen…

* * *

Stone was dying. Dying a hideous mysterious death.

(You’ll find the story in Dorothy L. Sayers’ “Omnibus of Crime.”)

What lay behind that closely guarded tent in the black heart of the African jungle? Nobody knew. Dusky Zanzibar and Mangbattu bearers might come slinking through thr night, peering, sniffling—their great nostrils quivering like curious beasts. But no one knew. Not even Etcham, the Englishman, Stone’s devoted friend, could tell the meaning of the thing he had seen.

Panting, exhausted, Etcham rested after a five days’ incredible trek for help. And the other Englishmen—their hunting trip interrupted—listened. Stone dying? But why? What were the symptoms? Coma…fever…some strange and frantic urge which forced him to hide within his tent, forbidding anyone to follow. And carbuncles—only they weren’t carbuncles. But whatever they were, Stone was dying of them.

A crazy explanation. But there was agony in Etcham’s eyes. So the others had followed. Come at last to the camp. Seen Stone, lying in a stupor, his huge, collapsing body bound in bandages.

The wounds? They told nothing. Strange bulgings, here and there, on the body, “as though something hard and blunt were being pushed up through the healthy flesh.”

Nothing to do but wait. So the night had come…and with the night the two voices, as Etcham had said there would be…two voices speaking together, pleading, sneering, arguing, screeching, out of the tent where only one man lay in deadly stupor.

Two voices speaking out of Stone’s body! They could not believe it! But they had crept nearer…then they had seen.

The bulgings had broken, one after another. And out of them had come—incredible awfulness!—little heads! Little savage heads…low browed, beastial…gibbering, screeching! Heads that, at first, Stone had tried to cut off with his razor. but they had come again…and again…and again. Heads, arms, clawing hands…forming within, bursting out of Stone’s body. Secret horror—long concealed—bursting at last through the haunted flesh.

So this was it! This ws the secret horror that was killing the man they had loved! Someone had wished it on him…some foul devil! But he should not conquer! His friends would save him!

Eagerly they rushed forward—knives in hand. But even as they slashed at the horror, Stone spoke… “Let me be! Let me die in my own way…You can cut off ten, a hundred, a thousand heads, but the curse you cannot take off… The curse is not put on me; it grew out of me. Even now I go!”

And with that admission, he wrenched—twisted to his side—was dead.

* * *

New Year’s day. So many dreams…so many dreads—so many excuses if your dreams do not come true.

But the excuses will be in vain. There is only one reason for weakness, and the failure that follows weakness. Like Stone’s curse, it is “not put on you, it grows out of you.” Grows out in all its vicious horror…out of your hidden savagery, your cowardice and greed, your fear and dishonesty.

New Year’s day!

What will come out of it?

WHATEVER YOU PUT INTO IT.

※

There are a few quirks of presentation in different papers, as different folks laid out portions of the text with bold, italics, all caps, or just plain type, presumably as need or aesthetics demanded. At least one paper substituted “You Make Your Own ‘Breaks.'” in place of “LUKUNDOO!” for a sub-header. The text above combines a features from different iterations of the article.

Robinson’s synopsis is judicious; while she encapsulates most of the essential characteristics of the horror, she leaves out many critical details. Her quotations from the text are approximate, not exact; perhaps she worked from memory. Perhaps she had picked up the Omnibus of Crime around Christmastime, in search of a ghost story, and was inspired; perhaps it was simply odd reading that struck her as meat for an article. Either way, Robinson put her own characteristic interpretation on the material. She was a self-made woman who had struggled as a divorced single mother in the early 20th century, and had succeeded as a writer and journalist by dint of her own effort—she very much made her own breaks, often out of necessity (see Famous Author To Write Daily Column in NEWS for a brief biography).

I can’t help but wonder how many readers shuddered over Robinson’s abbreviated story—and how many later sought out White’s “Lukundoo” to read the full story, with all of its hints and added details. We will never know; while Elsie Robinson encouraged readers to write in, I haven’t found any sequels to this episode in her syndicated columns.

For anyone interested in learning more about Elsie Robinson, check out Listen World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman (2022) by Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Barbarian Kids 1: La Torre del Elefante (2023) by Nacho Golfe & Dani Peña

When Robert E. Howard sat down at his typewriter to pound out another adventure of Conan the Cimmerian, there is no indication that he had any explicit age range in mind for the audience. Weird Tales was not an all-ages magazine by any stretch of the imagination, but anecdotes show its readers ran from young teens to college students, to grown men and women well into their professional lives. The artistic and literary content leaned toward a more mature audience, what with the occasional nudity, graphic violence, scary monsters, and dabbling in blasphemy and the occult, sometimes even torture and guarded references to more salacious fare such as incest and castration.

Conan the Cimmerian was right at home in Weird Tales, his adventures seldom as spicy as the Spicy pulps, or as gruesome as the Shudder pulps, but definitely at the upper limit of what was deemed acceptable by editor Farnsworth Wright—who sometimes censored stories that went too far over the line in some particular. It can be fairly said that whomever Conan was for in the 1930s, he was not explicitly aimed at kids.

The general audience for Conan remained somewhat ambiguous in the decades after Robert E. Howard’s death. The Gnome Press hardback collections of Conan’s adventures in the 1950s were priced above what the average kid could afford; the paperback reprints and collections put out in the 1960s and 70s were more affordable and accessible, but while the Frank Franzetta covers no doubt caught a few eyes and won a few converts among the younger audience, the paperbacks weren’t explicitly marketed to children.

Then in 1970, Marvel Comics published Conan the Barbarian #1. The formation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 substantially altered the comics landscape in the United States over the subsequent decades; where before comics had been written, illustrated, and marketed for many audiences, some for children and others for adults, the blanket censorship of the CCA meant that nearly all of the comics sold on newsstands and to the direct market were now aimed almost exclusively at children and teenagers. While Conan the Cimmerian didn’t run around in body-hugging spandex fighting Communists, he still had to conform to a code that resigned in the gore, the sex, and sometimes the morality.

It was the beginning of the kidification of Conan.

Not that the Cimmerian went down without a fight. Marvel launched The Savage Sword of Conan in 1974 through its Curtis Magazines imprint, which allowed it to bypass the CCA and tell stories with more nudity and gore. The 1982 film Conan the Barbarian was given an R rating for nudity and violence—despite the fact that Mattel, who was trying to develop a Conan toy line, asked them to ease up:

Kalinske also worried that the Conan film might be too violent or sexually suggestive to merit an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, and he proposed that they “discuss how we might deal with that.”
—Conan Properties, Inc. v. Mattel, Inc., 712 F. Supp. 353 (S.D.N.Y. 1989)

Conan the Destroyer (1984), cut down on both sex and violence, and was able to secure a PG rating. The success of the films led to a Universal Studios attraction, The Adventures of Conan: A Sword & Sorcery Spectacular (1983-1993, video), and an animated show Conan the Adventurer (1992-1993), a highly bowdlerized version of the character far removed from Howard’s original conception. The follow-up animated series, Conan and the Young Warriors (1994) was aimed even more directly at younger viewers.

No gore, no sex, and not much in the way of moral ambiguity or complex plotting.

All during this same period, plenty of Conan material was being published for older audiences, from New pastiche novels to reprints of Howard’s original. Conan’s career in the comics waxed and waned with the decades, but has fairly consistently remained aimed primarily for more mature readers, without slipping into either outright pornography (except through bootleg productions like the Red Sonja & Conan: Hot and Dry Tijuana bible) or the more gory excesses of some small press comics like Crossed from Avatar Press.

The question might be asked: so why was Conan kidified at all?

We might as well ask why Norse mythology was bastardized into the blonde, blue-eyed Thor of Marvel Comics, or why Count Chocula wears an opera cape in the style of Bela Lugosi. The writers and artists that shape these works are drawing freely from the original source material, but without excessive concern for accuracy—they’re recycling and repurposing the material for their own ends. As with any adaptation, the end result may barely be recognizable. The Cthulhu plushies sold, cute and cuddly and green as they are, share little more than a name with H. P. Lovecraft’s hulking mountain of an extraterrestrial High Priest of the Old Ones in sunken R’lyeh.

These new works have to be read on their own merits. There’s no point in comparing Lovecraft’s original works to Howard Lovecraft and the Three Kingdoms or Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters: La Llorona in the Machine; the intended audiences and implicit sensibilities are completely different. So it is with Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant” and Barbarian Kids 1: La Torre del Elefante.

¡¡¡Descubre la leyenda de CONAN y su pandilla de amigos, los BARBARIAN KIDS!!!

En unas tierras repletas de acción, magia oscura ya hechicería, un joven guerrero llamado CONAN se alía con ATALI, la hija del gigante de hielo, y TAURUS, el príncipe de los ladrones, para correr la aventura más extradorindaria de todas: entrar en la legendaria Torre del Elefante y hacerse con su tesoro.

¿LO CONSEGUIRÁN?		Discover the CONAN legend and his gang of friends, the BARBARIAN KIDS!!!

In a world full of action, dark magic and sorcery, a young warrior called CONAN teams up with ATALI, the frost giant’s daughter, and TAURUS, the prince of thieves, to run the most extraordinary adventure of all: enter the legendary Tower of the Elephant and get their hands on its treasure.

WILL THEY SUCCEED?
Back cover copyEnglish translation

Barbarian Kids is an illustrated novel in Brazilian Portuguese by Nacho Golfe (writing) & Dani Peña (illustrations) which tells a highly bowdlerized version of Howard’s epic tale of a young Conan in Shadizar. In this story, Conan is adolescent, and his partners-in-crime are Taurus (from the original story) and Atali (very loosely adapted from “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” but with powers reminiscent of Elsa in Frozen, and prefers to generate ice daggers). The trio successfully brave the tower’s difficulties, encounter the elephant-headed Yag-Kosha…and then overcome Yara, the evil wizard who imprisoned Yag-Kosha. In a duel of magic, the evil wizard is vanquished into a gem, the Heart of the Elephant…and everyone lives happily ever after.

The 144-page book switches between mostly text with illustrations, to full-on comic pages. The script is fairly dialogue-heavy.

For a fantasy adventure aimed at the younger market, it’s easy to see why “The Tower of the Elephant” was chosen: this is the story with one of the chronologically youngest Conan (“The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” is presumably younger), and is as close to a traditional dungeon crawl adventure as Conan ever went on. Many of the changes made are sensible. Making Conan younger makes him more identifiable to younger readers; adding Atali to the mix makes it more attractive to girls; there is very little blood, and nobody dies. This is supposed to be a fun adventure for impressionable little minds, not a horror story to scare them.

Golfe and Peña do their jobs; the story moves along at a quick pace, the text is designed to be engaging, the more action-packed sequences are rendered as comic panels in a half-graphic novel layout, there’s a puzzle involving gems, a lesson about teamwork is learned, and the heroes are rewarded for saving Yag-Kosha and overcoming the wizard.

Rather than human guards, Conan & Co. face mechano-magical guardians, a lion, a snake, a giant venomous spider, and a puzzle involving various gems.

What they have achieved is fine. Kids will no doubt love it. Yet they have also robbed the story of any depth. There’s no reason for this to be a Conan story anymore. When Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith adapted “The Tower of the Elephant” in Conan the Barbarian #4 (1971), comic book readers used to seeing heroes defeat and slay evil monsters were confronted with a tragic figure, broken on the rack. A creature that had flown through space, now confined to its tower in a crippled body. There was only one escape possible, and the stroke that Conan gave was one of mercy—and vengeance.

Like many artists, Yag-Kosha is depicted as having a literal elephant’s head.

Roy Thomas notes in Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian Vol. 1, that in the latter half of the story, Conan is little more than a spectator, first as Yag-Kosha recounts how he came to this place, and then as a witness as the Cimmerian brings the Heart of the Elephant to Yara. This was not an uncommon device of Howard’s; many of his stories begin with a stirring opening, but feature a long and evocative historical narrative, vision, or dream that fills the expository needs of the story, explaining or hinting at some of the vast and shadowy background, so that the conclusion of the story is often the conclusion of a historical epic.

Yag-Kosha’s backstory is dealt with briefly.

In Barbarian Kids 1, the epic of Yag-Kosha’s backstory is about four pages. The confrontation with Yara is not the foregone conclusion it is in Howard’s story; the three principals fight Yara in a duel of swords and sorcery. There is no mercy-stroke, no sacrifice. The idea of Conan as a witness to the end of some great history has vanished. The grandeur and cosmic sweep of Howard’s story are gone…and there is something inexpressibly sad about that, because that was what made “The Tower of the Elephant” so special.

It is a different story. Not a bad story, it is entertaining enough, the art is lively, the mix of fonts and lettering is eye-catching and probably perfect for younger readers. Perhaps, when the kids who read it get a bit older, they’ll read Howard’s original story and find out what they’ve been missing. I hope so.

Coming soon: volume 2: Red Nails and volume 3: The Phoenix on the Sword.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Mummy’s Jest” (1931) by Edward Podolsky

Did Black people read Weird Tales during its golden age (1923-1940)?

At least some Black people in the United States wrote and read science fiction and weird fiction. W. E. B. DuBois published “The Comet” in his 1920 collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk” (1925) appeared in Opportunity, A Journal of Negro Life, and George S. Schuyler’s novella Black Empire (1936-38) was serialized in the Pittsburgh Courier, to give just three examples. Black people’s quarters spent as well as anyone else’s at the newsstands.

There is no reason to believe that Black people did not read Weird Tales during the period. Proving that, however, is a bit tricky. Weird Tales never ran a demographic survey of readers. When researchers want to get a glimpse at who was reading the Unique Magazine, they need to look at more indirect data: who was writing letters that appeared in The Eyrie, and (after the departure of editor Farnsworth Wright in 1940, when Dorothy McIlwraith took the editor’s chair) whose names were listed as members of the Weird Tales Club? Unfortunately, names don’t generally give any hint of race—at best, it might give an overview of the gender balance of the readership (which are interesting in itself, see They Were Always Here on Turnip Lanterns).

Lacking the data to answer the question adequately, a deep dive into the archives of pulpdom suggests that while we can’t say how many Black people made up Weird Tales‘ readership, we can say that they certainly read weird fiction by some of Weird Tales‘ writers. A case in point is Edward Podolsky and “The Mummy’s Jest.”

Dr. Edward Podolsky (1902-1965) was a doctor and pulp writer whose early work included two stories in Weird Tales: “The Figure of Anubis” (WT Feb 1925) and “The Masters from Beyond” (WT Sep 1925). Both of these were fairly slight potboilers that failed to catch the reader’s attention; even Lovecraft doesn’t refer to them in his surviving letters, even though he had stories in both issues. Later, Podolsky would write science fiction stories and essays for science fiction pulps, and like his fellow weird tales writer Dr. David H. Keller, made money writing sex education books for an eager audience.

Among Podolsky’s fiction in the ’30s is “The Mummy’s Jest” (1931) for Abbott’s Monthly. Robert Sengstacke Abbott was a Black lawyer and newspaper publisher who founded The Chicago Defender in 1905; and later Abbott’s Monthly (1929-1933, changed name to Abbott’s Monthly Illustrated News, folded in 1934), a magazine combining a combination of news, fiction, and illustrations. This was a magazine primarily intended for a Black audience, and this shows in several of the topics addressed, the figures of the illustrations, etc. The illustrations for “The Mummy’s Jest,” for example, are by frequent Chicago Defender artist Jay Jackson and show a Black protagonist:

As it turns out, “The Mummy’s Jest” is well-named, and here’s the joke: give or take the occasional word, “The Mummy’s Jest” is “The Figure of Anubis,” reprinted almost verbatim from the pages of Weird Tales. Whether editor Lucius C. Harper knew he was buying an old story, or if Podolsky pulled a fast one and sold the same story twice to two different magazines isn’t clear, but I suspect the latter.

There is nothing about the text of the story to suggest a Black protagonist; Podolsky changed barely a word besides the title—and those changes that do exist between the two stories could reflect the different editorial choices of Farnsworth Wright and Lucius C. Harper in how they ran their respective magazines. So there is that sleight-of-hand there which the editor accomplished: by adding Jackson’s illustrations to Podolsky’s story, he could suggest and imply things to his presumably mostly-Black audience that aren’t in the story.

It is particularly notable that the figure of the mummy in both recensions of the story is described as having, when the bandages fall away, “skin as pale as beautiful marble.” In Weird Tales, where the default audience might expect the protagonist to be white, the discovery of a beautiful Caucasian princess from Egypt is a matter of course; it happens all the time, such as in Seabury Quinn’s “The Jewel of Seven Stones” (WT Apr 1928). In Abbott’s Monthly, however, this adds a certain frisson: the suggestion that the Black protagonist’s lost love was also white, and that they were in an interracial relationship.

It is difficult to express, at this remove, the degree to which the legal and social discrimination influenced science fiction and weird fiction in the United States during the Jim Crow period. No law expressly forbid people of one race from buying Weird Tales or Abbott’s Monthly, but the inherent biases of editors, writers, artists, and readers all factored in to influence how weird fiction was written, read, and received. “The Figure of Anubis”/”The Mummy’s Jest” is a good example of how with a little change of context, the whole reading of the story can change.

At the very least, however, while we can’t say whether anyone who picked up Abbott’s Monthly also read Weird Tales, we can definitely say that they read at least one story from the pages of the Unique Magazine.

“The Figure of Anubis” can be read here, and “The Mummy’s Jest” can be read here.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Her Letters To Lovecraft: Mary Faye Durr

Mary Faye Durr was born on 17 May 1893, the youngest of three children born to Abraham and Mary Durr. Like many women of the period, details of her early life are sketchy. Is it known that she graduated high school and then college, graduating from the University of Ohio in 1915.

Durr’s entry from the 1915 University of Ohio yearbook.

In the same year, the young woman first pops up in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, showing that she had at some point joined the ranks of amateur journalism, and in particular the United Amateur Press Association:

“A Best Book”, by Mary Faye Durr is a brief but delightful essay which reveals a just appreciation of the broader functions of literature.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Dec 1915, Collected Essays 1.87

Durr continues to appear sporadically in Lovecraft’s reviews of amateur journals, and much of what he says is relatively positive, speaking to her technical skill and taste, if not exactly praising Durr’s creativity, and tracing her taking on positions within the UAPA:

“At the End of the Road”, by Mary Faye Durr, is graphic and touching description of a deserted schoolhouse. The atmosphere of pensive reminiscence is well sustained by the judiciously selected variety of images and allusions. […][120] “The Melody and Colour of ‘The Lady of Shalott'”, by Mary Faye Durr, is a striking Tennysonian critique, whose psychological features, involving a comparison of chromatic and poetic elements, are ingenious and unusual. Miss Durr i[s] obviously no careless student of poesy, for the minute analyses of various passages give evidence of thorough assimilation and intelligent comprehension.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Jun 1916, Collected Essays 1.119, 120

“Beyond the Law”, by Mary Faye Durr, is a light short story of excellent idea and construction, whose only censurable point is the use of “simplified” spelling.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur May 1917, Collected Essays 1.153

Miss Mary Faye Durr of Mount Sterling, Ohio, has accepted appointment as Secretary, her occupancy of that important office ensuring an efficient and business-like handling of the records.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Sep 1917, Collected Essays 1.172

“The Village”, a delightful study by our Secretary, Miss Durr, is replete with vividness of atmosphere and delicacy of touch; though it is closely rivalled by the masterly bit of psychology from the hand of the editor, entitled “An Interpretation”.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Jan 1918, Collected Essays 1.183

Mary Faye Durr first appears in Lovecraft’s private letters in 1918, and it seems as if they were about to come into correspondence—through a typically Lovecraftian 22-page letter—if they had not already come into contact:

Ye Gods! For ‘Eaving’s sake abstain from sending my “mission in life” letter to Mistress Durr. I recall saying in it that I thought she was minding other people’s business! I have given her a 22-page broadside, calculated to demolish any pragmatical notions which may still becloud her mentality, but have not gone into personal excuses for idleness beyond saying that my constitution does not permit of systematic endeavour, else (of course) I should be doing something the same as any other rational human being. What does she think I am—a corner loafer? She might know better—for if I were, the “work or fight” law would have “got” me long ago, and I should be toiling in some munition factory or shovelling sewers at some content. I am not particularly anxious to discuss my affairs with relative strangers—my letter was for you, not her.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 21 Aug 1918, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 202

Lovecraft says nothing of Durr’s personal life, and probably knew as little to nothing about her activities beyond amateurdom as she did about his. While Lovecraft was unemployed at this period, it appears that after graduating from university Mary Faye Durr became a schoolteacher; yearbooks and newspaper records track a long career in public education in Ohio that would last for decades. During the earliest part of her career (according to the Federal 1920 and 1930 census) she was apparently still living at home with her parents, a not-unusual situation for an unmarried young woman.

No letters survive from Lovecraft to Durr or Durr to Lovecraft, so the shape and extent of their correspondence is difficult to evaluate, but apparently Lovecraft lent one of her letters to James F. Morton:

I am glad Father Mo found Miss D’s epistle so interesting. She has a sort of pert, laconic humour or smartness, of which she is evidently fairly proud, & which she is not at all reluctant to employ.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 29 Aug 1918, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 208

Speaking of clients—you & Miss Durr will be satisfied at last. I am a real labouring man! In other words, I have undertaken to make a thorough & exhaustive revision of Rev. D. V. Bush’s long prose book—now called “Pike’s Peak or Bust”, though part of my job is to find another name.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 14 Nov 1918, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 222

Given Lovecraft’s correspondence with others, the start of their letter-exchange was probably fairly formal, slow to build a rapport.

Mary Faye Durr, 1919 Marietta (Ohio) Yearbook

Mary Faye Durr was secretary of the UAPA 1917-1918, elected treasurer for 1918-1919, and at the 1919 convention, was elected President of the United Amateur Press Association for the 1919-1920 term, only the third woman in that office. The popular history of amateur journalism marks this period as sort of the beginning of the end of the UAPA:

The poet Rheinhart Kleiner, of Brooklyn, N. Y., was chosen President in 1918, and another woman President in 1919, Miss Mary Faye Durr, of Marietta, Ohio. But its members began to relax, recruiting was not carried on, interest waned, and this branch of the United, though seeming to have the best claim to lineal descent from the original body, gradually ceased to function, and in 1926 it passed out of existence.
—Truman J. Spencer, The History of Amateur Journalism 92 (online edition)

The truth is a little more complicated. Early in the year, Durr apparently realized that the UAPA desperately needed new members and set up an amateur journal specifically to do so, The Recruiter. Lovecraft reviewed it with high praise:

The Recruiter for January marks the advent to amateurdom of a new paper, which easily takes its place among the very best of recent editorial enterprises. Edited by Misses Mary Faye Durr and L. Evelyn Schump in the interest of the United recruits whom they are securing, its thoroughly meritorious quality speaks well for the new members thus added to our circle. […]

“Winter”, a brief poem by Hettie Murdock, celebrates in a pleasant way an unpleasant season. The lines are notable for correctness, spontaneity, and vitality, though not in the least ambitious in scope. […]

“Shades of Adam”, by Mary Faye Durr, is an interesting and humorously written account of the social side of our 1918 convention. Miss Durr is exceptionally gifted in the field of apt, quiet, and laconic wit, and in this informal chronicle neglects no opportunity for dryly amusing comment on persons and events. […]

The Recruiter’s is brief and business-like, introducing the magazine as a whole, and its contributors individually, Amateurdom is deeply indebted to the publishers of this delightful newcomer, and it is to be hoped that they may continue their efforts; both toward seeking recruits as high in quality as those here represented, and toward issuing their admirable journal as frequently as is feasible.

—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Mar 1919, Collected Essays 1.224

Hettie Murdock was a fellow schoolteacher in Ohio; she and Durr would share a close friendship, to be detailed later, but Murdock’s involvement here may suggest that Durr recruited her for the UAPA around this time.

While no letters from Durr to Lovecraft (or vice versa) survive, one letter survives from Durr to Anne Tillery Renshaw among Lovecraft’s papers; Renshaw was at the time Official Editor for the UAPA under Durr. While the letter is only dated “Thursday, P.M.” it appears to have been during Durr’s period as president, and mentions that Halloween is the next day—and October 31st fell on a Friday in 1919. The letter deals in part with Durr’s correspondence with Lovecraft, and recruiting:

I supposed Recruiting committees were announced in Sept. no., but Lovecraft says not. If the two vice presidents have not notified their committees I will see what I can do about it.

I don’t remember if I told you about application blanks in my last, but this is the situation. Eddie told me in August that he was having Lovecraft look after them, and only last week I discovered that none had ever been ordered. Cook is getting them out now as fast as possible.
—Mary Faye Durr to Anne Tillery Renshaw, Thursday [30 Oct 1919], Brown Digital Repository

Renshaw presumably forwarded this letter to Lovecraft, who later used it to compose some Christmas greetings (let us all be thankful for parsimonious packrats!)

With this letter and The Recruiter, it is clear that Durr was conscious of difficulties in recruiting…but she was still a working woman, with limited time to devote to amateur affairs. It also shows she must have been in semi-regular contact with Lovecraft for various duties related to amateurdom, such as the hunt for a laureate judge which netted Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft for his point appeared to point potential recruits at Durr:

Your failure to hear from the association officially is due to the negligence of the new Secretary, a rather eccentric elderly woman who was given the post merely because she happens to live in the next convention city. You might speak about it to the President—Miss Mary F. Durr, 526 Third St., Marietta, Ohio.
—H. P. Lovecraft to James Larkin Pearson, 19 Sep 1919, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 320

The secretary was Ida C. Houghton, who would herself be president of the UAPA during the 1921-1922 term, where she would butt heads with Lovecraft, who had taken on the position of Official Editor. At the 1920 convention where she handed off the office of president to Alfred Galpin, Durr gave a memorable speech riffing on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (Fossil 341); her friend Hettie Murdock also attended the convention.

The last mention of Mary Faye Durr by Lovecraft is a brief review in 1921:

Miss Durr’s “As Ye Judge” is marked by distinguishable sanity and good sense—the ideal liberalism of a thoughtful mind—and lacks only originality of presentation to be remarkable. Not that it is in any sense unoriginal, but that it states in unornamented way truths which are universal among progressive students today.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Vivisector,” The Wolverine #10 (June 1921), Collected Essays 1.288

Without access to more amateur journals of the period, it is impossible to trace Mary Faye Durr’s career in that field much further; she never again seems to have sought or held office in the UAPA, and may have dropped out of amateurdom altogether after a time; at the very least, that would seem to be the end of any regular communication with Lovecraft, as there are no further mentions of her in his letters after this date.

A little bit more information is available about Mary Faye Durr’s personal life—and this is where Hettie Murdock comes back into the picture.

Mary Faye Durr’s parents both died in 1936; in the 1940 Federal census, she is listed as living with Hettie Barton Murdock as a boarder. In the 1950 Federal census, Durr and Murdock are both living together, and one transcriber has Murdock listed as “wife”—although a look at the actual record establishes this was probably an error that was scratched out.

1950 Federal Census

Newspaper accounts offer additional details. Both Durr and Murdock were single, never married, working as teachers at West High in Akron, Ohio, and may have both been members of the Unitarian Universalist Church. In 1943, they appear to have shared a vacation cottage in Cape Cod.

Akron Beacon Journal, 29 Aug 1943
Akron Beacon Journal, 30 Nov 1952

What happened to the Cape Cod cottage isn’t clear, but in 1956-1957, Mary and Hettie built a small home in Stuart, Florida in 1956 (St. Lucie News Tribune, 3 Oct 1956; The Palm Beach Post, 9 Feb 1957). The articles state that Murdock and Durr were “retired schoolteachers,” but Durr’s obituary claims she didn’t retire from teaching in Akron until 1965, so possibly only one of them was retired, or they were semi-retired but still teaching in some capacity. Murdock was still active in the Akron social scene as part of the Quota Club through the 1950s, with Durr sometimes involved as well, according to newspaper accounts, and it seems likely that the pair were snowbirds (cf. The Stuart News, 28 Nov 1957). Hettie B. Murdock would pass away in Florida on 28 Dece 1965 (The Stuart News, 30 Dec 1965).

Were they just housemates? Was this a Boston marriage? That they must have been great friends is undoubted; the women cohabited for at least 16 years, not just in Ohio but in Massachusetts and Florida as well, and were active in each other’s hobby-groups to some extent. But was there more? Were they actually lesbians?

The framing every same-sex relationship as necessarily heterosexual, chaste, and platonic is a form of queer erasure; a popular internet trope where archaeologists and historians look at any same-sex couple and declare they were roommates or were otherwise not evidence of homosexual relationships. Reality is a lot messier. We have only impersonal data to go by. We have no intimate documentation on Mary and Hettie’s relationship—no letters, diaries, poems, or stories that might give hints of lesbianism. We know Elsa Gidlow was a lesbian because she declared it, but such open announcements were rare.

What we do have is context. Mary and Hettie were public school teachers; one of the few occupations readily available to educated women. The job came with a degree of public scrutiny and high expectations for standards of behavior. Married women were often forced out of the workforce, so it wasn’t unusual for women teachers to remain single, and any sexual scandal or impropriety would also have seen their dismissal. Novalyne Price Ellis recalled the strictly regimented lifestyle expected of single women teachers when she was hired at Cross Plains, Texas in 1934 in One Who Walked Alone (1986), and while Akron isn’t small-town Texas, some of the same expectations were probably in place.

In the economic atmosphere of the early-to-mid 20th century, two women who shared the economic burden of a household together wouldn’t be too unusual. A pair of spinster teachers who lived together would be relatively inconspicuous, whether they were in a closeted romantic relationship or simply platonic life-partners. While a rare few LGBTQ+ folks were open about their sexuality, they were outliers; the majority of such people could not afford the social or legal discrimination that came from being “out.” Even if Mary and Hettie were in love, and shared their life together, they could not openly acknowledge such love without serious ramifications.

All of this speculation is far and away from Mary Faye Durr’s correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft—but that is in itself kind of the point. Neither Lovecraft or Durr revealed all of themselves to each other in their letters, based on what scanty evidence we have of their correspondence, and neither would be expected to. Amateur journalism was the crux and driving point of their relationship, but their lives outside that were closed books. We always have to remember that there is more to Mary Faye Durr than just the words on the page, more to the lives of Lovecraft and his correspondents than what is just in their letters to each other.

More than we will ever know.

Unusually for one of Lovecraft’s correspondents, because Mary Faye Durr was in so many school yearbooks, as a student or a teacher, we have many more photos of her publicly available than others, so here’s a little gallery showing her over the years. There are probably many more in yearbooks yet unscanned.

1915
1919
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1940
1941

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Harlem Hellfighters Never Die (2023) by Queen’s Court Games

Tabletop roleplaying has always had a performative aspect; the players and gamemasters were encouraged to embody their characters to some extant, and to be able to interact in character. The early community spaces around roleplaying games like Dragon Magazine (1976-2013) and Gen Con (1968-) were built on the shared experiences of gaming in small groups, and much of the early humor in gaming periodicals and associated media dealt with the peculiar quirks of players and rules interacting during a live session—as well as recounting the epic adventures characters underwent at those tables. This has been the basis of a good deal of media surrounding gaming, including comics like Knights of the Dinner Table (1990-) and Dork Tower (1997-), and the Japanese phenomenon of the replay, or transcripts of a gaming session packaged and sold for entertainment.

This performative aspect has been especially notable when gaming was done in public, before an audience, such as when participating in a tournament at a gaming convention or when doing live-action roleplay in any public space. There have been various efforts over the years to expand this practice in different media; for example some of the Knights of the Dinner Table strips were animated and voice actors brought in to provide short episodes like “Scream of Kachooloo,” based on the popular Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game. With the advent and popularity of YouTube (2005-), Twitch (2011-) and other streaming services, video and audio became increasingly popular media for gaming of all stripes, from video game let’s plays to various efforts to dramatize and/or capture the performance of a gaming session, which gelled into a format called actual play.

At its most basic, this can be as simple as group with a webcam and a cheap microphone recording a session at the kitchen table; at its most sophisticated, talented gamers/actors from around the world with their own high-end recording set-ups can collaborate on a gaming session together, and the whole professionally edited, produced, and with music or visuals into a viable product. The more high-end actual plays tend to have associated websites, social media, patreons, tipjars, and maybe even advertisements or sponsors to help defray the cost of production or run a modest profit for the gamers/actors involved. Shows like Critical Role (2015-) and its episodes CelebriD&D (2015-2020) have effectively migrated the concept from amateur or semi-professional to professional productions, but the community that generates and watches actual play primarily remains, first and foremost, dedicated hobbyist gamers who want to share the roleplaying experience.

While many actual plays focus on popular game systems like Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition or particularly popular and notable published campaigns like Horror on the Orient Express, the format is democratic and allows for diverse gaming groups to run through any scenario or campaign, published or homebrew. This sometimes gives the rare opportunity to see, for example, a group of Black gamers play through roleplaying game designed for primarily Black player characters.

Queen’s Court Games (web, YouTube, Twitch, Bluesky, Patreon, etc.) is an award-winning actual play web series with a diverse cast; their byline is “Character-focused. Rules-light. Banter-free. Never D&D.” and they deliver. In 2023, the group (Noir Enigma, Jas Brown, Robert Madison II, Christian McKinzie, and Laura Tutu) played through the scenario Harlem Hellfighters Never Die by Chris Spivey, a scenario that came with Harlem Unbound (2017) by Darker Hue Studios (2nd edition). The actual play is spread out over six sessions/episodes, each of which is 2-3 hours long, with Noir Enigma playing the Keeper and the five gamers each as a single player character as they play through the scenario.

The performative aspect of actual play sometimes lends a scripted air to most proceedings, but the Queen’s Court Games group feels much more natural in their delivery. There is a conscientiousness to the performance, because the players all give each other space to talk, rarely trying to talk over one another, getting into little asides, etc. The Keeper, Noir Enigma, gets an oversized amount of attention because the Keeper is the driver for the scenario, the one which all the players have to interact with regularly and who has to set the pace and maintain the flow of the session for hours on end. Of the cast, Laura Tutu stands out as the most dramatic of the players. While they did practice some of their lines before play, there’s very much an improv group feel to the whole production, and the cast plays off each other well.

What sticks out the most is how much the players seem to enjoy the Harlem Unbound setting, and to inhabit those characters. It is not unusual to see Call of Cthulhu gaming groups that are all white people playing white characters and going through scenarios where anybody described as “dark” or “swarthy” is likely to wear a robe and wave a sacrificial dagger, so there is a different dynamic to having an all-Black group playing Black characters, the kind of humor they can bring (Christian McKinzie and Enigma Noir in particular get many of the funnier interactions, which have the other players in stitches with McKinzie’s self-deprecating humor and animated style). It is a playstyle that is conscious of and avoids the worst expressions of racism during the period, without playing down that racism and discrimination were prevalent at the time.

Spread out as Queen’s Court Games is over different channels, it is difficult to get a handle on viewership numbers and how well-received it was, but it is notable that the NZ Web Fest selected Harlem Hellfighters Never Die among its 2024 video actual plays.

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

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Colour Out of Space (2016) by H. P. Lovecraft & Amy Borezo

In 2016, artist Amy Borezo published a very limited illustrated edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out of Space.” To quote from Shelter Bookworks’ original page:

This hybrid artist’s book/contemporary fine press edition of the 1927 horror/sci-fi story by HP Lovecraft includes an introduction by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi and 14 color images by Amy Borezo. The artist lives near the supposed site of this fictional tale and frequently walks the old roads of the towns written about in this story. In creating the imagery for this work, the artist is interested in evoking the complexity of the local landscape in abstract form with the construction of the reservoir overlaid visually through geometric blocks.

The text for this edition was provided by S.T. Joshi from his recent publication, H. P. LOVECRAFT: COLLECTED FICTION: A VARIORUM EDITION [Hippocampus Press, 2015] and is derived from a typescript at Brown University, evidently prepared by F. Lee Baldwin for a proposed reprint of the story (c. 1934) that never happened. It has some revisions in pen by Lovecraft, so presumably it represents his final wishes for the story.
_____________________

Relief printing on Zerkall Book paper from photopolymer plates on a letterpress. Body text set in Caslon, titles in Futura. Pages sewn onto a shaped concertina. Paste paper over boards with a buffalo suede spine. Housed in a presentation box. Special thanks to Lisa Hersey who assisted in printing and binding.

The edition, despite the relatively high cost (US$500 + shipping in 2016), sold out. It arrived in an attractive clamshell box, with a paper label. Inside, the colors on the paper are bright and vivid in a way that the light and the camera don’t really catch, the backstrip soft, the paper creamy and the text sharp. In your hands, the brilliant orange seems to leak through around the edges of the pages. A title page, a brief introduction by S. T. Joshi. The text and illustrations are on alternate pages, distinct, the images vivid but abstract. A word on the artist, a colophon and numbering page, and then the book is at an end.

Amy Borezo’s illustrated edition is, in a very real sense, a piece of art that you can read. The text itself is meticulous in its accuracy, but you can read the same text in Hippocampus Press’ variorum edition, you can read the same text for free online. If you must have a physical copy of a book in your hand, you are spoiled for choice: “The Colour Out of Space” is one of Lovecraft’s most reprinted works, and there are innumerable illustrations for the story from various artists, from J. M. de Aragon in the pages of Amazing Stories in 1927 and Virgil Finlay in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1941 to many others of the current day.

This massive plurality of choice, the sheer number of editions, touches on an issue that many readers and would-be readers of Lovecraft deal with: where do you start? What is the best edition? What if you want a really nice copy of a book? Which one of all the hundreds of titles should you go for, and why, and how much will it cost?

If that sounds like more of a collector’s issue than a reader’s issue, then congratulations, you’ve hit on one of the fundamental problems facing not only Lovecraft, but most popular authors in the contemporary period.

When Lovecraft was alive, he was primarily published in the amateur press, pulp magazines, some reprint anthologies like the British Not at Night series, and a couple of very small privately printed editions of The Shunned House (never bound or formally released during his lifetime) and The Shadow over Innsmouth (which was, but the binding was shoddy). There were no finely bound editions of Lovecraft with the embellishments of the bookmaker’s art available to the general public, no leather covers, no gilt lettering, no raised bands (caveat: one copy of The Shunned House was specially bound by R. H. Barlow as a gift for Lovecraft).

Early collectors of Lovecraft often focused on posthumous publications, like the first publications of Arkham House, and little obscurities like the edition of Lovecraft’s commonplace book put out by the Futile Press in 1938. Even ultra-small press editions were typically not “fine” in the sense of lavish materials, artwork, or presentation, but were often considered valuable simply because of the small size of their edition, the ease with which copies perished, and subsequent rarity in the face of growing demand. That demand came from Lovecraft’s own growing popularity; the mass market paperback reprints of Arkham House collections, the armed services editions, and foreign reprints in hardback and paperback vastly increased the audience for Lovecraft’s work.

Until quite recently, fancy fine press editions were not normal for living authors. Before mass literacy, books were often bought unbound and then the author could bind them however they liked; really rich people could commission books that were themselves works of art in every sense of the word, involving whatever costly materials or decorations they cared for. As the commercial basis of book reading and publishing became more egalitarian, fancy editions often became more about the skill of the bookmaker and/or any associated artist, for fine press editions, and the materials shifted.

So when you look at what constituted a really nice Lovecraft edition in, say 1980, you’re likely looking at the output of Roy A. Squires’ press. These were meticulously crafted letterpress editions, usually on high-quality handmaid paper, sometimes featuring tipped-in photographs or other illustrations. Where a normal chapbook from Necronomicon Press or a fan press might be published on an Apple II printer and stapled together, everything about Squires’ production was done by hand.

The slightly bourgeoisie desire for something fancier still nagged the science fiction and fantasy market. Arkham House paved the way in the late 1930s and 40s by showing that a small press publisher specializing in genre books was viable (the presses they inspired apparently didn’t know how often Arkham House founder August Derleth was running in the red, or how long it took for his small, relatively expensive books to sell). Most of these products weren’t fine press; they were solid books, aimed and priced at a select market. Very few of them produced anything that might be described as a luxury edition of Lovecraft; the choicest example might be the 1976 edition of Démons et Merveilles by French publisher Opta, which came bound in leather, with slipcase, and illustrations by Philippe Druillet. The translation has its issues (Lovecraft’s “ghouls” is rendered as “vampires,” to give one notable example), but compared to the rather plain but sturdy Arkham House editions, it’s gorgeous.

Easton Press (founded in 1975 as a division of MBI, Inc.) took up the gauntlet of producing, for lack of a better term, what not-rich people think of as rich people’s books: bound in letter, embossed in 22k gilt, very snazzy to look at. In practice, while Easton Press has consumed many acres of cowhide, the actual books they produce tend not to be very special: they’re reprints of existing books, often not anything particularly rare or obscure, with no additional editorial guidance or notes (and sometimes bad misprints). The books themselves are usually solid, but less than beautiful; their editions of Lovecraft show evidence of corner-cutting and mass production.

There is a niche market for really nice editions of books, at a price affordable to middle-class bibliophiles. Over the last twenty years or so, that niche market has exploded. Centipede Press, Subterranean Press, the Folio Society, etc. are names that are familiar now for deluxe editions of Lovecraft and/or other authors, typically reprinting older works instead of presenting anything original, and typically publishing in limited editions of a few hundred copies. Quality and presentation vary, although are generally pretty high—not quite the same production value as, for example, letterpress outfits like Pegana Press which continue the fine press tradition, but for high-end versions of books that you might otherwise buy at Barnes & Nobles…

…and that is kind of the rub. While there are some exceptions, most of these presses aren’t gambling on producing anything new. There might be new artwork, there might be a new introduction by Alan Moore or S. T. Joshi, but there is no experimentation, there is often nothing unique about these particular editions. There are some exceptions; Centipede Press has produced some original compilations like Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle that collects many rare, obscure, and out-of-print materials; and the art book A Lovecraft Retrospective is pretty much unparalleled. Helios House Press has published some original scholarship among the reprints (full disclosure: they’ve paid me for a few essays and other work).

For most of these companies, however, the text itself isn’t special. The production quality might not be much better than any other mass-produced hardcover. They might be pretty, but from a strictly objective standpoint they don’t offer much new or exciting. They’re just very expensive.

So what exactly are you, the reader, paying for?

Which is what you need to answer for yourself. If you’re a scholar or academic looking for a text that’s pure Lovecraft, you’re probably better off buying the Hippocampus Press variorum editions. If you’re a casual reader, the Penguin paperbacks are cheap and almost as good. If you’re a poor student, stick to the online editions at https://hplovecraft.com. If you want a fancy edition…well, you’ve got options. Lots of them, for every price point. Handmade Japanese paper, bound in leather, with silk bookmarks, signed in blood.

It’s all available for the right price.

So what sets Amy Borezo’s book apart? Normally, based on the materials, the quality of the printing and craftsmanship, I would qualify this as a fine press product. However, in the marketing, the presentation, this is a little different. It is a book, and can be read as a book, but it is also a work of art, and can be experienced and appreciated like buying a lithograph print from a series. If you’re a fan of Lovecraft, you know the words, you’ve read the story a hundred times. Many artists have tried to capture a colour that lies beyond human perception, to depict the events of the story in some fixed form. Only Borezo has gone to such effort to capture that feel in an entire book production, not just as isolated images.

The beauty of Borezo’s art is that it is abstract; it doesn’t try to impose meaning on the text, readers have to stare at it for themselves. Some might not like it, others might get it but not care for the idea, but for me there’s a certain tactile experience with that nearly radioactive orange that seems to seap through and around the pages at times. Yes, it could just be the collector in me, trying to justify the hundreds of dollars this book cost, but in a real way that is the experience we buy with every book, above and beyond the text itself. The feel of it in your hands, the smell of the paper, the crackle of the spine. It’s different, when you’re holding an old pulp whose brittle and yellowed pages are as fragile as a papyrus from a mummy’s tomb, or an old worn paperback whose tanned pages are as soft as toilet paper, or a crisply printed new edition with ink that almost looks still wet.

From a scholar’s perspective, from a historian’s perspective, the focus is usually on the text, not necessarily the visceral experience surrounding how the text is read and received. Yet it is important not to lose touch with that. In an age where Lovecraft is in the public domain, generative AI, and print-on-demand publishing, we are going to see a vast proliferation of books—many of which are going to be strictly hypothetical until someone orders them—and our eyeballs will see cover art generated by some pseudointellectual property theft engine and with text scraped off of somewhere online (errors and all), and pre-packaged to try and appeal to someone that wants to read Lovecraft—and whatever the end product is, the one thing I can guarantee is that it is not going to be anything like Amy Borezo’s edition of The Colour Out of Space.

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

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