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Editor Spotlight: Cynthia Asquith & Dorothy L. Sayers

Weird Tales was not far from the sole source of weird and fantasy fiction available to readers in the 1920s and 30s. In many ways, weird pulp fiction—and reprints of the same like Christine Campbell Thomson’s Not at Night series—were seen as the lower end of popular fiction publishing. Yet there were anthologies that were often considered of a higher standard. It is notable that two of the leading editors for this sort of anthology were women, Cynthia Asquith (1887-1960) and Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957).

H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, aficionados of weird fiction that they were and on the hunt for top-class fiction, read several of Asquith’s and Sayers’ anthologies and commented on them in their letters. These were not the most detailed reviews, and that sort of reflects the spirit of the anthologies and how they were received. The idea of a collection of weird stories wasn’t new, but neither Asquith nor Sayers had set out to try and define or redefine a theory of weird fiction. These were editors who were obviously intimately familiar with the genre, but by and large were content to let their selections speak for them—with the notable exception of Sayers’ introduction to The Omnibus of Crime (1929), which may be read as a detective-fiction parallel to Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature”—especially the section on “Tales of Mystery and Horror,” within which she lumps many works that Lovecraft recognizes as weird fiction.

Cynthia Asquith and Dorothy L. Sayers were creating anthologies with staying power, the influential building blocks of many libraries of weird fiction, far beyond whatever influence they had on Lovecraft and his contemporaries; that influence should not be overlooked or forgotten. These women editors helped define the weird fiction landscape during the heyday of Weird Tales and beyond.

Cynthia Asquith

My next addition to my library is to be Niccolo Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE. After that follows THE GHOST BOOK (Machen, Blackwood, Bierce, de la Mare, and others) edited by M. Asquith.

August Derleth to H. P.. Lovecraft, 22 Jan 1927, Essential Solitude 1.66

British aristocrat Cynthia Asquith was educated, erudite, creative, and connected. When she compiled The Ghost Book in 1926, she brought together what might arguably be called the cream of the crop for contemporary British weird fiction, including Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, and L. P. Hartley—and perhaps reflecting the prominence of women ghost story writers or her own tastes, has a higher-than-average number of women contributors—including one of her own stories, “The Corner Shop,” published under the pseudonym C. L. Ray.

“The Ghost Book” sounds alluring—are the stories very new, or do they contain any familiar ones? Of course the well-known names argue semi-classics. Which of De la Mare’s is represented?

H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 2 May 1927, Essential Solitude 1.73

The Ghost Book provided all-new stories by “name” authors, not reprints from pulp magazines by virtual unknowns—and perhaps because of that, it charged more for the higher quality. At a time when More Not at Night (1926) was retailing for 2/- (two shillings, pre-decimalization, or about 50¢ in 1926 US dollars), The Ghost Book went for 7/6 (seven shillings, six pence; about US$1.82).

I’m on the Asquith anthology of ghost tales now—the best things in it so far being Blackwood’s “Chemical”, L. P. Hartley’s “Visitor from Down Under”, Walpole’s “Mrs. Lunt”, & De la Mare’s “A Recluse”.

H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 6 Sep 1928, Essential Solitude 1.156

All of these stories were included in Lovecraft’s list “Books to mention in the new edition of weird article” (CE 5.234), and worked into “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

Lovecraft appears to have missed Asquith’s next editorial effort The Black Cap: New Stories of Murder and Mystery (1927), though it contains stories by Walpole, Hartley, D. H. Lawrence, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, who had stories in The Ghost Book. In 1929, however, Asquith returned with another premier collection of supernatural fiction: Shudders: A Collection of New Nightmare Tales, published by Hutchinson.

That new Hutchinson anthology sounds good—wonder if the firm is going to specialise in the weird?

 H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 26 Sep 1929, Essential Solitude 1.216

We can only wonder if Lovecraft’s idle comment inspired Derleth a decade later to co-found Arkham House, as a publisher specializing in weird fiction. There are no other references to Shudders in Lovecraft’s letters, so it isn’t clear if he managed to read that anthology. However, it’s clear that Lovecraft and Derleth were excited when Asquith’s third effort at a purely weird anthology, When Churchyards Yawn (1931):

By the way, before I forget it, Lady Cynthia Asquith has just brought out WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN, a new anthology of new ghost and weird stoies, by Walpole, Maugham, Onions, Chesterton, and the usual group, excepting only, I think, M. R. James. I have it on order, will let you know how it is as soon as I get it. It is not yet printed in the U.S.

August Derleth to H. P. Lovecraft, 2 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.402-403

I’ll be glad to hear your report on “When Churchyards Yawn”. These anthologies come thick & fast, & some of them are excellent.

H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 6 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.404

The point about When Churchyards Yawn is that all the tales are new, haven’t even seen magazine printing before, and all by masters of writing. I order such a book posthaste without any further notice.

August Derleth to H. P. Lovecraft, 9 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.407

Keep in mind that unless a book was picked up by a US publisher and issued in a local edition, the cost of the importation would be added to the cover cost, which with an already higher-than-average book could become expensive. This is likely one of the reasons Lovecraft didn’t read more of Asquith’s anthologies.

I sent today for When Churchyards Yawn, the anthology of brand new tales by Asquith, which has just reached Chicago from England. I will let you have the report on this as soon as it reached me and I have read it through.

August Derleth to H. P. lovecraft, 17 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.412

I shall welcome your report on “When Churchyards Yawn”. The first Asquith anthology had some good stuff in it.

 H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 20 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.416

Derleth’s report does not survive, but in Lovecraft’s next letter we read that Derleth was less than impressed:

Sorry the new Asquith anthology doesn’t equal the first—but would give a good deal to see that new Machen tale!

H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 25 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.418

Perhaps because of Derleth’s report, or lack of cash, or simply lack of opportunity to pick up the book, Lovecraft didn’t read When Churchyards Yawn until 1934, when a friend lent him a copy:

Had an interesting shipment of loaned books from Koenig during my absence—before he learned I was in his town. Baring-Gould’s werewolf volume (which I’ve always wanted to see), the second & latest Asquith anthology “When Churchyards Yawn”, & a small book of short tales by Francis C. Prevot entitled “Ghosties & Ghoulies”. Hope I can get at reading them before long—though at present I am utterly submerged in the mass of accumulated work & correspondence which I found on my return. The Asquith book contains Machen & Blackwood tales which I’ve never read–though they may be old.

H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 11 Jan 1934, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 516

H. C. Koenig was a fan who opened his library to Lovecraft for borrowing, including the works of William Hope Hodgson. Lovecraft’s assessment of the new book was muted:

The Asquith anthology was fair—Blackwood’s contribution being the best.

H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 11 Feb 1934, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 525

Lovecraft also wrote of his intention to borrow Shudders from Koenig, but there is no evidence that he did so. Lady Cynthia Asquith edited no more anthologies during Lovecraft’s lifetime (he did read My Grimmest Nightmare, 1935, which is commonly though erroneously credited to Asquith), but she did not cease, following up The Ghost Book (1926) with The Second Ghost Book (1952) and The Third Ghost Book (1955). While the British Not at Night and Creeps series would be remembered as cheap, garish, and as close as one could get to pulp between hard covers (which, to be fair, is what they were), Asquith’s collections were as respectable as weird fiction could get in the 1920s and 1930s, and would be reprinted many times in various editions, ensuring a large influence on subsequent decades.

Dorothy L. Sayers

In nothing is individual fancy so varied and capricious as in its perception of the horrible.

Dorothy L. Sayers, “Introduction” in The Omnibus of Crime (1929), 45

In the 1920s, the distinction between crime, mystery, horror, and supernatural fiction was murky. While pulp magazines did a great deal to differentiate genres in popular literature, carving out sometimes incredibly narrow niches as evidence by pulps like Range Romances and Zeppelin Stories. Yet the roots of weird fiction, going back at least to Edgar Allan Poe and his detective C. Auguste Dupin, are tied up in mystery and detective fiction; through the 1930s there would be considerable overlap between detective fiction, weird crime, supernatural fantasy, and horror fiction—and it was that ambiguity and versatility of approach that defined Weird Tales and his primary contributors, including H. P. Lovecraft.

Dorothy L. Sayers was British, well-educated, and had practical experience as a novelist and copywriter, and specialized in detective fiction. In 1928, Sayers edited Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. This was a massive book (1,229 pages), prefaced by a long and thorough introductory essay, designed to take the reader through the whole history of detective and mystery fiction up to this point. Nor did Sayers neglect the supernatural horror side of the field, M. R. James, Oliver Onions, Sax Rhomer, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Majorie Bowen, May Sinclair, A. M. Burrage, Walter de la Mare, and H. G. Well, among many others. If Sayers was influenced by gender or fame, it isn’t immediately obvious; while there are many famous names among the contents, there are also stories that are rarely commented on today, like Bram Stoker’s “The Squaw” and “Proof” by Naomi Royde-Smith.

In 1929, US publishers Harcourt, Brace, & Co. brought out an American edition titled The Omnibus of Crime.

This “Omnibus of Crime” volume sounds rather good, & I find I have no read half of the items listed. I shall surely try to get hold of it. Thanks exceedingly for quoting the contents.

H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 20 Aug 1929, Essential Solitude 1.208

There is some excellent weird stuff—standard material reprinted—in the second half of the anthology called “The Omnibus of Crime”, which has lately been reprinted in a dollar edition. But perhaps you are already familiar with this.

H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 4 Nov 1931, O Fortunate Floridian 13

I intend to get “The Omnibus of Crime” (whose second half you described to me) now that it is issued for a dollar.

H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 6 Nov 1931, Essential Solitude 1.404

I have not found a dollar edition of The Omnibus of Crime (whose normal list price was $3.00); it may be that this was a marked-down remainder price, as other writers like Clark Ashton Smith write of buying the book at a steep discount (EID 91). Lovecraft did finally get the loan of a copy of the book from his friend, W. Paul Cook:

I at last have the “Omnibus”, & have read “Green Tea.” It is certainly better than anything else of Le Fanu’s that I have ever seen, though I’d hardly put it in the Poe-Blackwood-Machen class. There are many other items in the book that I am particularly glad to have on hand—indeed, it is really one of the best of all recent anthologies.

 H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 16 Jan 1932, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 342

“Green Tea” was one of Lovecraft’s unicorns; when he wrote “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the story was out-of-print and relatively scarce. Lovecraft noted to a friend:

I now have the first one, & have read “Green Tea.” The latter isn’t at all bad, & I would probably have spoken less lightly about Le Fanu had I previously read it.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 5 Feb 1932, Letters to J. Vernon Shea et al. 90

Ironically, Weird Tales would publish it as part of its weird fiction classics reprint series in the July 1933 issue.

Smith himself was more critical than Lovecraft in his assessment of the anthology:

I’ve been reading The Omnibus of Crime, which has some excellent weird stories in the latter section (I can’t read detective tales, to which the major part of the book is given.) Le Fanu’s Green Tea, Hichens’ How Love Came to Professor Guildea, The Novel of the Black Seal, Metcalf’s Bad Lands, White’s Lukundoo, and one or two others were enough to give me my money’s worth and more. I can’t see though why Bierce and M. R. James were so weretchedly represented in this collection. Moxon’s Master by the former is so obviously mediocre in comparison to real stuff such as The Death of Halpin Frayser; and almost anything of James that I remember reading would have been preferable to the somewhat tedious Martin’s Close. But I suppose my criticism proves nothing–except that Dorothy Sayers and I have different taste.

Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, 31 Dec 1931, Eccentric, Impractical Devils 92-93

Dorothy L. Sayers did not rest on her laurels. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928) was followed up by Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, Second Series (1931).

I have greatly enjoyed the “Omnibus”, & hope the second one (just announced by booksellers) is of comparable quality. Like you, though, I don’t care especially for the first or “deteckatiff” half of the book.

H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 28 Jan 1932, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 344

This second selection lacked the introductory material of the first, and when it was released in the United States as The Second Omnibus of Crime (1932), some of the weird contents were cut out of the American edition (the page count went down from 1,147 in the UK edition to 855 in the US edition, and that’s not because they printed it in a smaller font!) Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that Lovecraft read The Second Omnibus of Crime, although others in his correspondence did. Derleth judgment was fierce:

I’ve just finished the new Omnibus of Crime; Sayer[s]’s weird tale choice is abominable.

August Derleth to Clark Ashton Smith, 20 May 1932, Eccentric, Impractical Devils 118

The Second Omnibus of Crime gave way to a third in 1935, though there is no reference to it in Lovecraft’s letters. As with the second omnibus, the contents of the US edition are cut down from the British, although the US publishers added A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit” and “The Head” by Manuel Komroff. Whether Lovecraft missed hearing about this book, or simply lacked the cash to pick up a copy or the time to read it, we don’t know. Given the relatively high price, the lack of interest in the non-weird material in each anthology, and considering that some of those weird stories were reprinted from author collections Lovecraft & Co. already had or read…it wouldn’t be hard to see why The Third Omnibus of Crime failed to gather significant attention.

The major importance of Sayers’ anthologies to Lovecraft & Co. was as a common touchstone; that is what omnibus editions are ideal for, providing a single book reprinting enough tales to serve as a common reference point for other authors. Yet more important perhaps was what these books represented to Weird Tales authors: a proof of the commercial viability of their work:

If there were only one or two more editors in the market for that sort of thing, I believe I could sell nearly all my weirds: Individual taste differs more in regard to horror and fantasy, as Dorothy Sayers observes, than in regard to anything else.

Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, early Mar 1932, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 352

In this, Smith was unknowingly predicting the future of speculative fiction, as anthologies would eventually overtake magazines as the primary market for weird fiction. Yet the time for cheap mass-market paperback anthologies wasn’t yet; weird anthologies were a growing field, but still predominantly hardback, expensive, and dominated by reprints rather than the first appearance of stories.

Looking at Lady Cynthia Asquith and Dorothy L. Sayers in the context of their time, outside of the particular comments and concerns of Lovecraft and his circle of correspondents, these anthologies, as well as those edited by Christine Campbell Thomson and others, showed there was a potential market for weird fiction in anthology form. Each of these women was very much experimenting with the form, and in the Americanized versions probably dealing with local publisher interference, but there was a definite inching toward the kind of anthology that editors like Ellen Datlow and Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles would be able to put together: thematically focused, expressive of the editor’s own attitudes to define the scope of the anthology as well as its contents. To make something more than the sum of its parts by giving their work a unified aesthetic or historical context.

For Lovecraft and Co., they were reading these books both as average consumers (with all their own opinions on what was fit to print or re-print), and as writers of weird fiction who were beginning to be conscious of the fact that “Hey, if there were more of these things, I bet I could sell stories to them…” Alas, it didn’t quite work out that way for Lovecraft, though he did see some of his stories reprinted in anthologies; the market just wasn’t there yet. One day, it would be; and it may be that August Derleth, who became an anthologist of note, took a few lessons from what he saw Asquith and Sayers do and not do in their books.

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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Deeper Cut: Lovecraft’s Last Christmas

Greetings—& a thousand thanks for the delightful mortuary relique! It arrived, thanks to the careful packing, in what was probably very much its condition when shipped—the upper part in two large & joinable sections, a third large section, & a sizeable array of smaller fragments. I shall have an interesting time trying to piece the latter together—a sort of picture puzzle de luxe—& wish I had the aid of a clever reconstructive expert like Barlow . . . who last summer completely reassembled & restored a cherished Chinese vase which I broke. This will certainly form a most delightful & appropriate embellishment for my ghoulish lair, & I surely appreciate your thoughtfulness ins dending it. I presume you were assisted by Howard the Baby Ghoul in excavating it—& must congratulate him on his keen scent for good specimens!

Have just finished decorating a Christmas tree.

Season’s best wishes

—E’ch-Pi-El

H. P. Lovecraft to Willis Conover, [24 December] 1936, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 406

Although he did not darken the door of any church in Providence for midnight mass on Christmas Eve; and would most likely have been happier reading a scary ghost story while huddled near the steam vents, there can be little doubt that H. P. Lovecraft enjoyed Christmas. There was no religious element to this ritual, and probably it owed much to the Christmases of his boyhood years, which were remembered and recounted well into adulthood, when his mother and grandparents were alive, when the whole household (including the servants) would gather to sing songs, and the black kitten would purr as it chased chestnuts from the fire.

Such celebrations stopped with the death of Lovecraft’s grandfather. The household was broken up, and Lovecraft’s Christmases during his teenage years were likely smaller, more intimate affairs, perhaps with only his mother, or gathering together with his aunts for a meal and exchange of presents. As the family resources spread thin, and Lovecraft traveled further afield, even these gatherings might have been briefer and less formal affairs. We know that the family did not always have a tree for Christmas, but when at last his elder aunt Lillian Clark died, financial circumstances forced Lovecraft and his surviving aunt Annie Gamwell to move in together at 66 College Street, for a few Christmases at least they did have a tree.

Such was the case for Lovecraft’s last Christmas in 1936 as well.

Our Christmas here was commendably festive—including a tree, as in ‘34 & ‘35.

H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 28 Jan 1937, Letters to Hyman Bradofsky & Others 141

As in previous years, Lovecraft sent out a stack of Christmas greetings to friends, and a scattering of cards and gifts must have arrived by post from the far-flung corners of his correspondence. At this late stage in his life, Lovecraft’s correspondence was voluminous, with regular letters to dozens of people, and probably less frequent missives and postcards to dozens more. Writing swiftly as he did and conveying much the same news, Lovecraft often took to copying the same accounts of events nearly verbatim. So we have about a dozen versions of his 1936 Christmas, many almost identical. The following may be taken as exemplary:

Our Yule in general was commendably festive—including a turkey dinner over at Spotty’s house with our hostess meandering among the tables & finally jumping-up on the window-seat for a nap. We had a tree in front of the hearth in my aunt’s living-room—its verdant boughs thickly festooned with a tinsel imitation of Volusia County’s best Spanish moss, & its outlines emphasised by a not ungraceful lighting system. Around its base were ranged the Saturnalian gifts—which (on my side) included a hassock tall enough to let me reach the top shelves of my bookcases, & (on my aunt’s side) a cabinet of odds & ends, not unlike my own filing cabinets, but of more ladylike arrangement & aspect. Of outside gifts—apart from our somnolent household panther—the most disintctive was perhaps that which came quite unexpectedly from young Conover, the editor of the new fan magazine (which is, by the way, about to absorb Leedle Shoolie’s Fantasy) in Cambridge, Maryland . . . down de Eastern Sho’. For lo! when I had removed numberless layers of corrugated paper & excelsior, what should I find before me but the yellowed & crumbling fragments of a long-interred human skull! Verily, a fitting gift from an infant ghoul to one of the hoary elders of the necropolitan clan! The sightlessly staring monument of mortality came from an Indian mound—apparently even more fruitful than those of Cassia & New Sum-myrna—not far from the sender’s home; a place distinguished by many archaeological exploits on the part of the enterprising editor & his young friends. Its condition is such as to make its reassembling a somewhat ticklish task—so that I may reserve it for the ministrations of an expert vase & calendar-stone mender upon the occasion of his next visit! Viewing this shattered yield of the ossuary, the reflective fancy strives to evoke the image of him to whom it once belonged. Was it some feathered chieftain who in his day oft ululated in triumph as he counted the tufted scalps sliced from coppery or colonist foes? Or some crafty shaman who with masque & drum called forth from the Great Abyss those shadowy Things where were better left uncalled? This we may never know—unless perchance some incantationd roned out of the pages of the Necronomicon will have power to draw strange emanations from the lifeles & centuries clay, & raise up amidst the cobwebs of my ancient study a shimmering mist not without power to speak. In such a case, the revelation might be such that no man hearing it could any longer live save as one of those hapless entities ‘who laugh, but smile no more’!

H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 27 Dec 1936, O Fortunate Floridian! 385-386

“Spotty” was Spotty Perkins, a female cat that belonged to the boarding house across the courtyard from where Lovecraft and his aunt stayed, where they sometimes took their meals. Spotty was noted as the mother of several other cats in the neighborhood, including those Lovecraft named Sam and John Perkins, and the “Earl of Minto.” For more on the boarding house and its inhabitants, see Ken Faig Jr.’s excellent book Lovecraftian People and Places.

Willis Conover Jr. (1920-1996) was all of sixteen years old, one of a number of precocious science fiction fans who had written to Lovecraft, and fell into correspondence with the writer when he wrote back. The discovery of Native American remains in the Cambridge, Maryland area is not terribly surprising: the area has been noted for its ossuaries by archaeologists, and contemporary newspaper accounts about looting of Native American burials and monuments are common, e.g.:

The Daily Times (Salisbury, Md.) 5 Aug 1936

The cavalier and disrespectful treatment of indigenous remains by average folk has to be seen as the flip side of the coin to the cavalier and disrespectful treatment of indigenous remains by scientists and museums, who often had little respect for non-white peoples and cultures when it came to the disinterment, removal, and display of remains. Lovecraft would have seen Native American remains before—in museums in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., and the newly-excavated gravesite in St. Augustine. Yet Lovecraft never actually broke into any mounds—the ones mentioned in Cassia and New Smyrna, Florida, near where R. H. Barlow lived in DeLand, were apparently shell-middens—nor did he show any inclination to do so.

Typical tourist postcard
Period photograph shows the remains as Lovecraft would have seen them.

Lovecraft himself would touch on this morbid penchant for display in “Out of the Æons” (1935), and noted in passing the naked commercial trade in indigenous remains that museums engaged in, without respect to the local cultures or the wishes and beliefs of the descendants of the bodies they exhumed and made off with. Many years later, when relaying his side of this incident, Conover would reflect:

For centuries, beyond doubt, the skull and leg-bones had marked time in the ferrous soil of Sandy Hill. If I had been older and more sensible of their origin I should not have removed them. At fifteen, however, I thought of them as no more than stage-properties.

Atop my bookcase now, the transient pieces added rusty-beige to the colors of my magazines.

A few days before Christmas, while addressing prints of a card I had designed, I happened to glance at the bookcase.

On an impulse, I took down the skull, put it in a pasteboard box, and mailed it to HPL.

Willis Conover, Jr., Lovecraft at Last 163

Lovecraft received the memento mori with grace, and wrote back to Conover to thank him for the gift:

Yours of Dec. 26 arrived while I was still admiring, with all the zest of fresh acquisition, the gruesome loot of Howard the Infant Ghoul. Don’t worry about the fractures—I’m sure a little Duco cement will work wonders when the proper skill is applied. Certainly, Chief Thunder-Under-the-Ground isn’t going into any ash-can, by a long shot! As for one of the Chief’s legs—thanks for the idea of sending it, although the dome itself forms a pretty generous quota. If any other logical claimants exist, you might supply them in preference. Otherwise, I’m sure I’d keenly appreciate such a monument of mortality at some time when its sending might prove convenient. I shall keep a careful watch on the Chief’s cranium, & will let you know of any curious agitations occasioned by resentment at the various indignities accorded his disject membra. At the moment, he seems singularly—perhaps deceptively—peaceful. Meanwhile let me thank you afresh for what is certainly my most distinctive Yuletide gift of recent years!

H. P. Lovecraft to Willis Conover, 10 Jan 1937, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 407

“Chief Thunder-Under-the-Ground” appears to be the name Lovecraft settled on for the skull, as it appears in other letters, e.g:

Haven’t yet tried to piece together Big Chief Thunder-Under-the Ground’s skull—indeed, I guess I’d better wait for your next providential sojourn & let you try your luck. Meanwhile the amiable donor offers me in addition one of the big chief’s legs—the other being promised to a local friend. Apparently quite a bit of the old boy turned up after all his centuries of repose! Alas, poor Yorick! Well—the noble sachem’s dome will always be regard with veneration around here!

H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 3 Jan 1937, O Fortunate Floridian! 392

While this basic account was copied almost verbatim, or briefly abridged, in many letters to Lovecraft’s varied correspondents, it was also his nature to tweak and individualize the contents to their respective recipients. So for example, when it came to Robert Bloch, creator of De Vermis Mysteriis:

[…] This we may never know—unless perchance some incantation droned out of the pages of old Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis will have power to draw strang emantions from the lifeless & centuried clay, & raise up amidst the cobwebs of my ancient study a shimmering mist not without power to speak. In such a case, the revelation might be such that no man hearing it could any longer live save as one of those hapless entities ‘who laugh, but smile no more’!

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, 7 Jan 1937, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 183-184

And to Clark Ashton Smith, who created The Book of Eibon:

[…] This we may never know—unless perchance some incantation droned out of the Book of Eibon will have power to draw strang emantions from the lifeless & centuried clay, & raise up amidst the cobwebs of my ancient study a shimmering mist not without power to speak. In such a case, the revelation might be such that no man hearing it could any longer live save as one of those hapless entities ‘who laugh, but smile no more’!

H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 5 Feb 1937, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 665

And to Richard F. Searight, who created the Eltdown Shards:

[…] This we may never know—unless perchance some incantation droned out of the pages of the Necronomicon, or from the most feared of the Eltdown Shards, will have power to draw strang emantions from the lifeless & centuried clay, & raise up amidst the cobwebs of my ancient study a shimmering mist not without power to speak. In such a case, the revelation might be such that no man hearing it could any longer live save as one of those hapless entities ‘who laugh, but smile no more’!

H. P. Lovecraft to Richard F. Searight, 14 Feb 1937, Letters to E. Hoffmann Price & Richard F. Searight 436

And to August Derleth, with whom Lovecraft had just been discussing the telepathic experiments of J. B. Rhone, who had established the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory in 1935 for the scientific study of psychic phenomena:

[…] This we may never know—unless perchance some incantation droned out of the pages of the Necronomicon will have power to draw strang emantions from the lifeless & centuried clay, & raise up amidst the cobwebs of my ancient study a shimmering mist not without power to speak . . . or to communicate ideas after the fashion of our friend Prof. Rhine. In such a case, the revelation might be such that no man hearing it could any longer live save as one of those hapless entities ‘who laugh, but smile no more’!

H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 17 Jan 1937, Essential Solitude 2.764

It was a mild winter in Providence, for the most part; and the trip to the boarding-house for a hot meal would not have been far for either Lovecraft or his aged aunt. Neither of them knew it would be their last Christmas feast together—but though his letters were generally cheerful, Lovecraft knew he was not well.

Since Yuletide, my annals are largely the quiet chronicles of infirmity. Despite the general mildness of the winter, I was caught in the cold two or three times in early December—& as a result have had some of my old-time foot & ankle swelling, which occasionally forces me to wear an old pair of cut & stretched shoes. This won’t wholly go until I’ve had a week or two of eighty degree weather to be outdoors & active in.. And on top of this came the pervasive & enervating malady (probably some form of intestinal grippe) which has forced me on a diet & sapped my strength to a minum. My programme, as you may well imagine, has greatly suffered—but so far I haven’t been forced wholly off my feet. Indeed, on warm days I totter forth in the afternoon for air & exercise. Were the winter so cold as to prevent these modest airings, I should be much worse off.

H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, final letter, Letters to James F. Morton 397

The extreme sensitivity to cold which caused swelling in the extremities (edema), and in one case caused him to pass out, was a condition that Lovecraft had dealt with for years; possibly Raynaud syndrome. The digestion issues, however, weren’t a case of stomach flu (grippe), but cancer. Within months, possibly weeks, of writing those words, Lovecraft was dead.

There is no record of what happened to that skull, one of Lovecraft’s last Christmas presents. R. H. Barlow may have taken it with him when, soon after Lovecraft’s death, he arrived to help Annie Gamwell put her nephew’s affairs in order. Or perhaps the shards of bone were swept into a box and passed down to some distant cousin when Annie herself died in 1941. Most likely they were simply discarded, and like most refuse of the era tossed into an incinerator—the “ash can” that Lovecraft had hoped to save it from.

Like many little mysteries about Lovecraft’s life, and the afterlife of his belongings, we don’t know.

When we look at and discuss Lovecraft’s life from a holistic view—even zoomed in close to a single event, like an exchange of presents on Christmas Eve—there is no moral here, no dark and supernatural terror. Lovecraft did not die of cancer in 1937 because he received a looted Native American skull as a gift from a well-meaning if slightly ghoulish teenage fan (who, despite this youthful bit of desecration, would go on to a long and successful life), or because he was an atheist that did not darken the door of a church on the anniversary of Christ’s birth. Lovecraft was not rewarded with this morbid token because he was particularly racist against Native Americans, whom he had rarely met and often regarded more as historical than contemporary figures.

Lovecraft spent the better part of his life looking back at what was, to him, self-evidently better times. A childhood surrounded by family, with the comforts that wealth and affluence could bring. To see his family circle shrink one by one, until only he and his aunt were left. See money and comforts slowly diminish, year after year. Feel the flagging of his strength and the pains in his stomach, and not know what exactly was wrong with him. It is easy, despite his many faults and prejudices, to see Lovecraft as a pitiable figure.

Yet what simple joys there were, Lovecraft did enjoy. To share a holiday and a meal with a loved one, to make an event out of it, to exchange gifts, and to make a few memories. It was in every sense his final Christmas, his final holiday, the last little ritual of tradition that linked him with those Christmases of years past. The few months that were left to him would increasingly be spent in pain and infirmity, with little respite. Not because of any particular evil Lovecraft had done in his life, not because he was a racist or an atheist, but because he was human, and to be human is to die. The one universal truth of human existence.

Before Lovecraft died, he lived. His last Christmas was a celebration of that life, with the aunt he loved, with the friends he wanted to share that with, writing about it in his letters and greeting cards. Their appreciation of Lovecraft is why we still know about his Christmas today, when so many holidays of so many have been lost to time and memory forever.

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.

Pre-Code Lovecraftian Horror Comics

In the years before Seduction of the Innocent and the rise of the Comics Code Authority (1954), there was an age undreamed of… Garish four-color comics of crime, horror, science fiction, the occult, and the weird filled the newsstands. The comic book had emerged as a definitive form in 1934, at first reprinting newspaper comic strips, but soon comic magazines emerged featuring original material. While the Golden Age of Comic Books is usually said to have begun with the advent of Superman in Action Comics #1 (18 April 1938), the lucrative field swiftly diversified into many different genres, not just superheroes. In the 1940s and 50s, one of the most notable and notorious genres was the horror comic.

Early comic books shared a great deal of crossover with the pulp magazines, including artists, writers, editors, and even publishers. Harry Donenfeld was the entrepreneur behind the Spicy pulp magazines that published Robert E. Howard and E. Hoffman Price—and the same magazines also published comic strips such as Olga Mesmer, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes; Sally the Sleuth; and Polly of the Plains. Donenfeld would later expand his enterprises into the burgeoning field of comics in the mid-30s with Detective Comics, Inc.—known better today as DC Comics.

Around the same time, future Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman edited horror pulps. Julius Schwartz, the science fiction fan who acted as Lovecraft’s agent for At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, became an editor for DC; Weird Tales writers Frank Belknap Long, Jr., Otto Binder, and Manly Wade Wellman, among others, all wrote comic book scripts. Weird Tales artists Virgil Finlay, Matt Fox, and Frank Kelly Freas worked in comics too. So when it came time to bring their skills to comics, many of the people involved with horror comics turned to horror pulps for inspiration.

Sometimes more than inspiration:

The one instance I remember was a very awkward one. It’s curious that I remember the name of the author who complained. It was August Derleth, a well-known horror writer. It was a story in one of our magazines, called “The Ornalean Clock,” and it involved the other staff writer. Mr. Derleth wrote in (it surprised me that he was reading these comic books) and sent us the story that he wrote which was about an Ornalean clock It was clear that it had been plagiarized.

It was very awkward. Richard [Hughes] confronted the writer, who did what plagiarists always do—that is, claimed he must have dipped into his unconscious, he wasn’t aware of it, and so forth. And perhaps the only defense he had was that it was so blatant!

Norman Fruman, assistant editor of the American Comics Group, quoted in Michael Vance’s Forbidden Adventures: The History of the American Comics Group 73

Derleth’s story was “The Ormolu Clock” in Weird Tales January 1950. Derleth’s friend Frank Belknap Long, Jr. had written the first issue of Adventures into the Unknown, the first ongoing horror comic, published by the American Comics Group. Derleth was well-known for his love of comic strips, and no doubt spotted the plagiarism because he followed the horror comics after Long had brought them to his attention. Ironically, it was Derleth who would write a letter to editor Richard Hughes encouraging them to continue to publish horror comics instead of canceling the series (Forbidden Adventures 110-111).

If ongoing horror comics began in 1948 with Adventures into the Unknown, the horror comics craze was kicked off by Crypt of Terror #17 (April/May 1950) from EC Comics—better known today under its later title, Tales from the Crypt. EC’s comic stories were, for the time, often well-written and well-illustrated; they often had a moral, but they could also feature darker twist endings, and a bit of grue. The many imitators of EC were not often as conscientious in their writing or art; much like the pulp magazines, the newcomers often leaned into gore, mutilations, eye gouging, drug abuse, and nasty ends where criminals get away with their crimes.

While individual comic book publishers had their own internal codes of censorship, there was no industry-wide limitation on content except for general statutes on obscenity. So while explicit sex and nudity were largely the province of Tijuana bibles, comic books on the stand could easily present gore, mutilations, dark and mature storylines, mouldering skeletons, vampires, voodoo, cannibalism, and all the rest. Plagiarism, either of published stories or swipes from other artists, was rife. Yet the period ended swiftly.

In 1954, a moral panic swept the United States (and was echoed in the United Kingdom and other countries around the world), spurred on by Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, his many articles in newspapers and magazines, and his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Other pearl-clutchers and parents groups added their voices, and federal oversight seemed a real possibility—so the major comic publishers came together and formed the Comics Code Authority, whose Seal of Approval would mark approved comics. Not approved? Horror.

The formation of the CCA effectively ended most horror comics publishing in the United States for a generation, and had a chilling effect on comics intended for mature audiences. They would come back—the underground comix of the 1960s and 70s especially paid tribute to EC’s horror comics, and raised a general middle finger to the censorship of the CCA, while major publishers like Marvel and DC would push back little by little with their own horror comics in the 1960s, sometimes sidestepping the CCA by publishing full-sized comic magazines. This would lead to a great flowering of horror comics magazines from publishers like Warren and Skywald in the 1970s and 80s, and lay the groundwork for comics like Heavy Metal Magazine (originally a translation of the French magazine Metal Hurlant).

Ironically, in 1954 Weird Tales also ceased publication, one of the last of the old-time pulp magazines to give up the ghost, unable to compete either against science-fiction digests or the coming men’s adventure pulps that flourished in the postwar era. An entire sub-industry was gutted almost overnight. Former pulp writers and artists who had known, talked, and corresponded to H. P. Lovecraft, who might have adapted his work to a new medium, never got that chance…well, except during the period before 1954.

While there are thousands of pre-Code comic books, there are only a handful of comics that can be positively said to be “Lovecraftian horror,” either because they directly adapt a Lovecraft story or explicitly make reference to Lovecraft’s Mythos. If one were to include other early Mythos writers like Robert E. Howard, the list would be a little longer—“Skull of Doom” in Voodoo Comics #12 (1953), for example, seems to be an adaptation of Howard’s “Old Garfield’s Heart.” But for the sake of keeping this list manageable, here are some positively identified pre-Code Lovecraftian horror comics, many of which are in the public domain and can be read for free.

A Note: Many of these early comics were completed in small studios by teams of writers and artists, working for low rates, and often without credit. As such it is not always clear who exactly worked on many of these comics, but as far as it can be determined, the names of the writers, artists, letterers, etc. will be included below.

“Captain Marvel Battles the Vampire” (March 1941)

Published in Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (Fawcett Publications), this 16-page story of Captain Marvel (now often known as Shazam) was penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Dick Briefer. The mystic hero finds himself up against one of the undead, and to better understand his foe and their weaknesses, a librarian hands him The Vampire Legend by H. P. Lovecraft. An unlikely title, but a neat homage to Lovecraft!

“Dr. Styx” (August 1945)

Published in Treasure Comics #2 (American Boys Comics Inc.), this uncredited 8-page comic presents an occult thriller whose eponymous hero is an unsung prototype to Doctor Fate, Doctor Strange, The Phantom Stranger, and John Constantine. Whoever the writer was, they must have read more than a little of the Mythos to cite Ludvig Prinn (created by Robert Bloch), Cthulhu, Abdul Alhazred, and the Necronomicon (however misspelled).

Red Dragon (Feb-Mar-Apr 1946)

Red Dragon was a mystic superhero character whose adventures ran as a back-up feature in Super-Magician Comics published by Street & Smith, better known for their pulp magazines. Whereas most of Super-Magician Comics featured stories with the fantastic adventures of real magicians like Houdini, Red Dragon could perform acts of genuine magic by reciting the mystic words of power “Po She Lo” and a bit of doggerel rhyme. Red Dragon was accompanied on his adventures by a Chinese companion, Ching Foo, and a komodo dragon.

In a three-act adventure (“The Kingdom of Evil!” v.4 #10 Feb 1946, 8 pages; “Where Time Is Not” v.4 #11 Mar 1946, 8 pages; and “End of Evil!” v.4 #12 Apr 1946, 8 pages), Red Dragon and his companions run afoul of a cult of fish-men who worship Dagon and “Chthtlu”—an entity who dwells outside of normal space and time and is a giant green malevolent interdimensional worm with a humanoid face, a bit reminiscent of Mister Mind, and possibly inspired by him. The Lovecraftian influence is scant but noticeable. Sadly, no writer or artist is credited.

“The Thing At Chugamung Cove!” (May 1949)

Marvel Comics’ first foray into horror was Amazing Mysteries #32 (May 1949), which continued on the numbering from Sub-Mariner Comics #31, and the first story in that issue was “The Thing at Chugamung Cove!” (11 pages)—which is, in effect, a highly abridged and transformed version of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where a writer goes to the legendary deserted town and uncovers some frightful family history. No artist or writer is credited for this adaptation.

“Experiment … In Death” (May-June 1950)

Published in Weird Science #12 (EC Comics), this 6-page story co-scripted by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, and illustrated by Jack Kamen with letters by Jim Wroten, is clearly strongly inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator”; but the lengthy six-part narrative has been largely scrapped to get at the core idea of a reagent that reanimates the dead, two doctors performing experiments to do just that, and how the degradation of the brain renders them violent. In ditching the plot, so too is ditched most of the gore, making this more of an intellectual horror.

“The Black Arts” (July-August 1950)

Published in Weird Fantasy #14 (EC Comics), this 7-page story by written and inked Harry Harrison, penciled by Wally Wood, and lettered by Jim Wroten is a fairly generic tale of a young man that uses a recipe for a love potion from the Necronomicon to get a young woman to fall in love with him. Nice guys don’t use the black arts to date-rape young women, so the hint of a grisly comeuppance looks like karmic justice. The standout character here is the Necronomicon itself; which features prominently in the story.

“Fitting Punishment” (December-January 1951)

Published in The Vault of Horror #16 (EC Comics), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “In the Vault” was written by Al Feldstein, penciled and inked by Graham Ingels, and lettered by Jim Wroten. While stripped of much of Lovecraft’s prose and compressed to its bare essentials, Feldstein and Ingels manage to capture the essence of this very Poe-esque tale, whose climactic ending offers a vivid visual little less gruesome than Lovecraft’s original.

“Baby…It’s Cold Inside” (February-March 1951)

Published in The Vault of Horror #17 (EC Comics), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” was co-written by Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines, penciled and inked by Graham Ingels, and lettered by Jim Wroten. As with “Fitting Punishment,” this isn’t a Mythos story and is very much in the Edgar Allan Poe vein, but even stripped bare to the essentials it gets the message across. “Cool Air” has been one of the more popular of Lovecraft’s stories to adapt to comics, having been adapted at least five times over the decades, perhaps because of its rather straightforward plot—and the gruesome climax.

“Prisoner on Charon’s Ferry” (March 1952)

Published in Whiz Comics #143 (Fawcett Comics), this 6-page comic of Ibis the Invicible briefly features a grimoire called the Necromicon as a prop during a lecture, which an unscrupulous attendee uses to summon Charon (and later, a vulture). No artist or writer is credited, though the Grand Comic Book Database credits Bill Woolfolk with the script.

“Portrait of Death” (September 1952)

Published in Weird Terror #1 (Comic Media), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” was illustrated by Rudy Palais. As an adaptation, it’s interesting to compare “Portrait of Death” to “Fitting Punishment” and “Baby…It’s Cold Inside!” The line work and anatomy is a little cruder, the coloring a bit sloppier, and the writing takes many more liberties with the source material. Yet it is very much in the same spirit as the EC Comics adaptations.

“The Corpse That Wouldn’t Die!” (January 1953)

Published in Web of Evil #2 (Quality) this 6-page story is largely adapted from Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Return of the Sorcerer,” though the eponymous sorcerer is not dismembered and the unnamed grimoire is in Sanskrit rather than the Arabic of the Necronomicon. The story was re-worked for Eerie Publications in the 1970s.

“Beyond the Past” (November-December 1953)

Published in The Thing #11 (Charlton Comics) this brief 4-page original story illustrated by Lou Morales is a definite homage to Lovecraft and the Necronomicon, albeit slightly garbled. The story had an odd afterlife, as newspapers—and then Frederic Wertham himself—mixed up the plot and thought that the Necronomicon a blood-drinking monster, not a tome of eldritch lore!

“Invitation to Your Wake” (December 1953)

Published in The Hand of Fate #21 (Ace Magazines), this 7-page original story has no credits, although the Grand Comics Database suggests it was penciled and inked by Sy Grudko, probably because of similarities of style. Like EC’s Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, the stories in The Hand of Fate are narrated by a mysterious cloaked figure—by the stories tend to be more serious and less darkly humorous. Once again, the major Lovecraftian element is the appearance of the “Necromonicon,” as the rest of the monsters in this story are typical vampires, werewolves, etc.

There are no doubt many more pre-Code Lovecraftian horror comics out there—for a certain value of Lovecraftian. For example in “The Fish-Men of Nyarl-Amen” in More Fun Comics #65 (DC, March 1941) by Gardner Fox (writer) and Hal Sherman (art), mystic hero Doctor Fate defeats an army of prehistoric fish-men from beneath the sea. Chris Murray in Kevin Corstorphine in “Co(s)mic Horror” in New Critical Essays on Lovecraft argue this is a definite Lovecraftian influence:

The similarity to stories such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” with the sunken city of R’lyeth [sic], and also the Deep Ones who appear in “Dagon” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) is obvious. Indeed, the name Nyarl-Amen seems reminiscent of Y’Ha-nthlei, the name of the undersea cyclopean city referred to in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and is certainly related to Nyarlathotep. However, the potential for horror in the tale is undercut, as is so often the case in comics of the time, by some rather clunky dialogue.

Murray & Corstophine, New Critical Essays on Lovecraft 166

Is it really? Hard to say. Gardner Fox in particular was well-known for riffing off of material from Weird Tales, both in prose and comics. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian was a definite influence on Fox’s character Crom the Barbarian who debuted in Out of this World #1 (Avon, June 1950), and Fox’s Kothar the Barbarian Swordsman novels (some of which were later adapted into Conan comics by Marvel!) So it wouldn’t be surprising if Fox was riffing off of Lovecraft in the 1940s. Yet, at the same time, Lovecraft didn’t hold a monopoly on fish-people either.

Another edge case is “The Last of Mr. Mordeaux,” penciled and inked by Joe Sinnott, which ran in Astonishing #11 (Atlas, Spring 1952). The 5-page story definitely seems to have taken inspiration from Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”: to prove his aristocratic lineage, the American Mr. Mordeaux travels to his ancestral castle in Hungary, and finds the remains of his family—driven underground centuries ago and degenerated into reptilian creatures, yet still bearing the hallmark bulging eyes and lack of eyebrows that Mr. Mordeaux still bears. Is this any looser of an adaptation than the other pre-Code horrors listed above? Where does the line fall between inspired-by and loose adaptation? In part, “Mordeaux” seems inspired-by because the premise is so broadly evocative of Lovecraft’s stories, but not directly evocative of any particular story. “The Lurking Fear” comes closest, but even that is a loose fit.

We get into the perennial question of: “What does Lovecraftian even mean, anyway?” Defined broadly enough, any terrible entity with tentacles or dark cult might look like stepped-on Lovecraft. In some cases, that’s probably true. With the publication of Lovecraft’s stories in hardback starting in 1939 by Arkham House, and the paperback editions that followed—including an Armed Services edition during World War II—Lovecraft’s fiction was more available than many of his contemporary pulp writers. Still, the Necronomicon didn’t appear in hundreds or even dozens of comics during these decades. It was an in-joke for dedicated fans—and perhaps that is how pre-Code Lovecraftian horror should best be understood. Something for the weird connoisseurs of the horror comic book and weird fiction.

The influence of Weird Tales and its circle of writers and artists on the early comic book industry could be a book in itself, ranging from Manly Wade Wellman’s work on Will Eisner’s The Spirit to the absolute sensation that was (and is) Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian. Yet there was a certain magic to that Wild West period before the Code came down like a heavy lid, shutting down entire comic lines. While the Lovecraftian comics above aren’t particularly gruesome even by today’s standards, certainly not among the most notorious offenders of the 1940s and 50s, they were lost to time…and while the EC Comics have been collected and reprinted, many of the others remain virtually unknown.

With the arrival of the Comics Code Authority, comic books in the United States shifted ever more toward a younger audience, and toward superheroes. Unable to publish explicit horror comics, it may be unsurprising that the next Lovecraftian comics published were superhero comics like Justice League of America #10 (DC, March 1962), where the Necronomicon makes an appearance—but that would change. Underground comix creators, Marvel’s 1960s horror comics adaptations, the success of Conan the Barbarian (1970), Warren’s horror comics magazines, and Metal Hurlant’s Lovecraft special issue in 1979—the world of Lovecraftian horror comics was only groing to grow bigger and weirder.

Yet it started here, with a handful of pre-Code horror comics, many of which have never been reprinted. While these might not be the roots from which later Lovecraftian comics would grow, they were definitely precursors, part of that flood of sometimes dark, gory, and trashy four-color horror that scared parents and publishers into censorship. The first faltering steps to bring Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror into a new medium.

Thanks to Will Murray for help and assistance.

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

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

Where Black Stars Rise (2022) by Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger

I’ve always loved horror, particularly eldritch horror. Despite the deeply racist and misogynistic roots of these works, primarily the violent xenophobia of its creators, there’s an existential understanding of what it feels like to be powerless. While these men grappled with the horror of an uncaring universe, marginalized individuals grapple with the horror of a system specifically designed not to care about us. We are born into something larger, something malevolent, something we have no power to stop. Similarly, in The King in Yellow itself, there is no reason why our unfortunate narrators are chosen.

Nadia Shammas & Marie Enger, Where Black Stars Rise

On 15 December 1973, the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. This reversed a course of accepted practice that had run through the 19th and 20th centuries, including during the lives of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert W. Chambers, and other formative voices in what has come to be known as eldritch or cosmic horror. Popular understanding of mental illness and sexuality would take a few decades to catch up; some roleplaying games in the 1980s still listed homosexuality among the mental illnesses a character could have.

To say that Lovecraft et al. were products of their time is not an excuse for their bigotries and prejudices, yet it must be at least an explanation for some of the attributes of their lives and fiction. Lovecraft lived and died in an era when combat-related trauma was categorized as shell shock; the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder wasn’t coined until 1980. It would be inaccurate to fault Lovecraft and company for working within the limits of knowledge of their own time—and even then, Mythos fiction often treats mental health with more of a Gothic, Victorian, or pulp sensibility. Lovecraft speaks of alienists more often than psychologists, and those who experience breaks from reality or accepted behavior (such as Nathan Peaslee in The Shadow Out of Time, or Delapore in “The Rats in the Walls”), or simple physical or mental abnormality (the errant cousin in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”) are more likely to be institutionalized than diagnosed and treated.

Sanity often seems a fragile, precarious state to many of these characters.

Despite the prevalence of talk of mental health in the works of Lovecraft and co., relatively few of the stories experience sharp breaks with reality—the infamous snap of the last thread that sends them from rationality into incoherence. The sight of Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu” is a terrible shock, but very few characters in the works of Lovecraft or his contemporaries go mad just from the sight of an eldritch entity. More than a few characters who read from the Necronomicon do not lose touch with reality from the revelations therein. Even in Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, the eponymous play acts more as a catalyst for mental illness than a source of it.

Which is a long way to get to the point: as our cultural and scientific understanding of mental health changes, so too must the literature of horror shift to reflex that new syntax. What Lovecraft and Chambers wrote made sense within their context, but today we look on mental health very differently. This doesn’t invalidate the older stories, but it does open up vast new realms of possibility for new ones. With new understanding comes new ways to think about the Mythos.

Where Black Stars Rise (2022) by Nadia Shammas (script) and Marie Enger (art) is a graphic novel focused on mental health and the King in Yellow, the eponymous play that acts as a metatextual touchstone for the first half of Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 collection of the same name. In the course of dealing with her own life issues and mental health, therapist Amal Robardin loses a patient—and goes to find her. The journey takes her over the metatextual threshold to Carcosa itself, led by a changeling psychopomp that alternately takes on aspects of Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft (August Derleth and D. J. Tyrer, perhaps fortunately, didn’t make the cut).

If there’s a point of criticism, it might be in casting those three as the closest thing the story has to a villain—Lovecraft barely used The King in Yellow or its mythos in his work, and Bierce’s original creation bears little resemblance to what Chambers made of it—but having a straw man psychopomp is barely a speed bump in the enjoyment of a dream quest re-cast in terms of therapy.

…you’re wrong

I’m deserving of love. I’m capable of love without fear, and of doing better.

I am capable of more than this. I’m not a monster, and I’m no lost cause.

Nadia Shammas & Marie Enger, Where Black Stars Rise

One of the benefits of eldritch horror is that, very often, there is an external force involved in whatever the characters are dealing with. Dealing with mental health is often a long and involved process, and individuals are rarely “cured” in the sense that a broken bone heals or an infection runs its course. Nor can people overcome trauma or brain chemistry issues simply by lying on the couch and talking about their dreams. You might not be able to punch Cthulhu in his stupid face, but at least you know Cthulhu exists and isn’t just a figment of your imagination. Flip Cthulhu off if it makes you feel better.

There is a moment, after the visual climax, when it looks like Where Black Stars Rise is going to go the full John Milton (“The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”) It is to the credit of the creators that the story steps away from this, to something sadder, perhaps more horrific, yet ultimately more real, more in line with “The Book of Fhtagn” (2021) by Jamie Lackey. Happily ever afters are for fairy tales; in the real world, not everyone can be saved, or wants to be. Sometimes you have to respect that.

A panel from Where Black Stars Rise by Nadia Shammas & Marie Enger.

For this graphic novel, Marie Enger presents a somewhat grungy, Mike Mignola-esque style. Stark shadows and bright yellows, stipple give more of the texture than hatching; there’s a lovely clutter to some scenes, and others where the curtain is dropped for effect; and the lettering and framing both fit the mood. Like the eponymous play, the graphic narrative is split into two acts, the first relatively normal and almost banal, while the second act is where things go fantastic and metaphysical.

Shammas and Enger’s work makes for an interesting contrast with I. N. J. Culbard’s graphic adaptation of The King in Yellow. Culbard is at pains to be accurate to Chambers’ original story, but as with his Lovecraft graphic adaptations, his restrained style and dedication to the original often misses the opportunity to do something extraordinary, to go beyond the text. That’s not meant as a knock on Culbard, who is meticulous with regard to authenticity, but it illustrates some of the possibilities of reworking old ideas in a new context, of offering up details the original authors had not given, of going beyond traditional interpretations and lore.

The graphic realization of Shammas’ story is a true collaboration, Enger’s art complements and expands on the text, and vice versa. Without the words, Where Black Stars Rise would still work, like Masreel or Lynd Ward’s novels in woodcuts; without art, Shammas’ script would still be a good story. Together, the result is a gem of a graphic novel, reminiscent of Black Stars Above (2019) by Lonnie Nadler & Jenna Cha but representing a distinct and novel approach to the material.

A look at the King in Yellow and its themes from a very different perspective. Not that of a white, heterosexual Anglo-American who grapple with an uncaring universe with outmoded ideas of sanity and madness; but from marginalized folks for whom an uncaring universe is something they deal with on a daily basis.

Where Black Stars Rise by Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger was published in 2022 by Tom Doherty Associates, and won the Ignyte Award for best comics team.

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 House of Rothschild (1934)

Antisemitism

The following article deals explicitly with antisemitism in a historical context. Frank discussion of these matters requires the reproduction of at least some samples of antisemitic speech from historical sources (e.g. Lovecraft’s letters). As such, please be advised before reading further.

In early May of 1934, H. P. Lovecraft was in DeLand, Florida, soaking up the sunshine. His young friend and correspondent R. H. Barlow had invited Lovecraft to stay with his family for a few weeks—and after Lovecraft had overcome his shock at finding out that Barlow was only a teenager, he had enjoyed the generous hospitality of the host family. One day, Lovecraft and Barlow were driven into town and took in a new film playing at the Athens Theatre: The House of Rothschild.

Advertisement in the DeLand News, 5 May 1934

Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933 and immediately moved to put his antisemitic rhetoric into effect. Hollywood’s response was slow; antisemitism was rife in the United States as well, and any film dealing with Jewish subjects risked censure from the Anti-Defamation League on one hand, and feeding fuel to bigots on the other. It was in this atmosphere that The House of Rothschild began production. For more details on the background of the film, check out The American Jewish Story Through Cinema.

Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson adopted George Hembert Westley’s play of the same name, interjecting the Prussian Count Ledrantz (played by Boris Karloff) into the picture to give a face to the antisemitic bigotry that the Rothschilds would contend with. George Arliss, in the lead roles of Mayer Rothschild and Nathan Rothschild, had already played prominent Jewish characters such as Benjamin Disraeli in the play Disraeli and the 1921 silent film of the same name. The result was that the 1934 film, while definitely cinema, had a strong theatricality to the staging, shooting, and performances. In 1935, looking back at the films he had seen over the last year, Lovecraft noted:

I saw the Rothschild film—which was smooth, but obviously theatrical.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 10 Feb 1935, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 244

Lovecraft had a noted fondness for historical dramas, and while he did not address the issue in his letters, likely appreciated the attention to detail in historical costumes and settings. Likewise, Lovecraft did not comment on one of the technical achievements of the film: while most of it is shot in black-and-white, the final scenes were shot in Technicolor, rendering a vibrant finish to culminate with the Rothschild’s triumph over adversity.

One detail that Lovecraft did notice was an odd emblem mounted on the wall outside the door of the Rothschild house, which each member would touch as they come in or leave throughout the film. Neither he nor Barlow knew what this was, but back in Providence Lovecraft’s aunt took it upon herself to find out, and so Lovecraft wrote back to his young friend:

Also—to be returned—an echo from the recent past in the form of an explanation of that queer door-post thing that the Jews kissed in the Rothschild cinema. My aunt saw the film & was as curious as we were—& at her request a friend connected with the public library looked it up (& had a helluva time finding it!) & made a transcript of the information for her. So here you have it all at your finger-tips…mezuzah….sounds like a name out of Klakaksh-Ton!

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert H. Barlow, 21 Jul 1934, O Fortunate Floridian 153

The mezuzah is a parchment with verses from the Torah, affixed to the doorposts of homes in Rabbinical Judaism. One can imagine a rather confused Providence librarian, working only from a description of something half-glimpsed on screen, consulting the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia or equivalent source and copying out the relevant article.

The House of Rothschild (1934); the mezuzah is first seen a little over five minutes into the film.

The film was a commercial and critical success. While it did not shake the stereotype of “the Greedy Jew,” it was generally received as a positive portrayal with an emphasis on the discrimination that the Rothschilds and other Jews in the film had suffered. It emphasized that even relatively wealthy and successful Jews were, at best, pariah capitalists whose wealth could be taken away because of prejudicial laws, and emphasized the threat of violence that all Jews lived under. A timely message considering Nazi Germany’s enactment of antisemitic laws, pushing Jews out of various occupations, stripping them of rights and citizenship, and finally coming for their lives and property, had just begun.

The ambiguity of The House of Rothschild—the way it both plays to the stereotypes of Jewish greed and financial influence and to the real discrimination that Jews faced in Europe—and its critical and commercial success left it open to exploitation. Director Fritz Hippler and Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels pirated two scenes from The House of Rothschild in the antisemitic Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew,” 1940), co-opting the same imagery presented in The House of Rothschild to deliver the entirely opposite message. The Nazis also made their own, openly antisemitic version of the story as Die Rothschilds (“The Rothschilds,” 1940).

By the time The Eternal Jew came out, Lovecraft was long dead, so it cannot be said whether he would have recognized the scenes that the Nazis stole from The House of Rothschild. It can be said with some certainty that Lovecraft would have recognized the stereotypes of Jewish prejudice that the Nazis presented. This can be said because Lovecraft’s letters give a fairly detailed account of his own antisemitic prejudices and how they changed over time; he even recorded encounters with Jewish media such as The Dybbuk (1925) by S. Ansky and Jewish characters and themes in fiction such as The Golem (1928) by Gustav Meyrink.

What Lovecraft’s letters do not show, perhaps surprisingly, is any specific prejudice against the Rothschild family, or any general belief in Jewish conspiracy theories. The fabricated text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and related conspiratorial works find no mention in Lovecraft’s letters, even during those letters where Lovecraft wanders into the idea of Jewish control of newspapers in New York City, e.g.:

I didn’t say that Jews own all the papers, but merely that they control their policies through economic channels. The one great lever, of course, is advertising. Virtually all the great department stores of New York (except Wanamaker’s) are solidly Jewish even when they deceptively retain the names of earlier Aryan owners; & a clear majority of the large shops of other sorts are, as well. These Semitic merchants are clannish & touchy to the very limit, & will arrange to withdraw all their advertising at once whenever a newspaper displeases them. And, as Mencken has pointed out, their grounds of displeasure are limitless. They even resent the frequent use of the word “Jew” in the news, so that papers speak of “East Side agitators”, “Bronx merchants”, “Russian immigrants” &c. Let any N. Y. paper try to refer to these people in the frank, impartial, objective way a Providence or Pittsburgh or Richmond paper would, & the whole pack of synagogue-hounds is after it—calling down the vengeance of heaven, withdrawing advertising, & cancelling subscriptions—the latter a big item in a town where 1/3 of the population is Semitic in origin & feelings. The result is, that not a paper in New York dares to call its soul its own in dealing with the Jews & with social & political questions affecting them. The whole press is absolutely enslaved in that direction, so that on the whole length & breadth of the city it is impossible to secure any public American utterance—any frank expression of the typical mind & opinions of the actual American people—on a fairly wide & potentially important range of topics. [(in margin:) P.S. Better not quote any of this to Bloch (who I discover is of Jewish extraction). While of course this question does not involve any aspersion on the Jewish heritage as a whole, it nevertheless makes embarrassing reading for anybody having more than an academic connexion with Semitism. One would handle it differently with a Jewish correspondent.] Only by reading the outside press & the national magazines can New Yorkers get any idea of how Americans feel regarding such things as Nazism, the Palestine question (in which, by every decent standard, the Arabs are dead right & both England & the Jews intolerably wrong), the American immigration policy, & so on. This is what I mean by Jewish control, & I’m damned if it doesn’t make me see red—in a city which was once a part of the real American fabric, & which still exerts a disproportionately large influence on that fabric through its psychologically impressive size & its dominance both in finance & in various opinion-forming channels (drama, publishing, criticism &c.). Gawd knows I have no wish to injure any race under the sun, but I do think that something ought to be done to free American expression from the control of any element which seeks to curtail it, distort it, or remodel it in any direction other than its natural course. As a matter of fact, I don’t blame the Jews at all. Hell, what can we expect after letting them in & telling them they can do as they please? It is perfectly natural for them to make everything as favourable for themselves as they can, & to feel as they do.

H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 8 Nov 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 170-171

This is about as close as Lovecraft gets to outright Jewish conspiracy theories in his letters. Lovecraft’s particular prejudice in this instance is colored by his antipathy toward New York City in general, which he had left seven years prior, to return to his native Providence.

The sticky question: is this absence of evidence or evidence of absence? It is entirely possible that in some lost letter that has not come down to us, Lovecraft went all-in on some antisemitic tirade that recapitulated Nazi propaganda wholesale. When Robert E. Howard made a few dog whistles about “international capital” causing wars for profit (MF 2.819), we don’t know what Lovecraft’s response was because his next letter is non-extant. On the other hand, there are hundreds of letters where, even when airing his worst antisemitic prejudices, Lovecraft never brings up the issue. Hugo Gernsback, for instance, is never depicted as part of a conspiracy. So it is not entirely clear if Lovecraft had heard of these conspiracy theories and did not credit them, or if he did credit them but we simply don’t have those letters anymore.

Since we know that Lovecraft saw The House of Rothschild (1934), we can definitely say that Lovecraft was at least introduced to the idea of the influence of Jewish bankers and financiers, and their influence on European conflicts. We also know that in the limited context of New York newspapers, Lovecraft felt Jewish economic influence amounted to suppression of speech on certain topics. Yet for all that, Lovecraft’s prejudices do not seem to have extended so far as to believe wholesale in conspiracy theories about Jews. Even considering how much Nazi propaganda Lovecraft did swallow, several points of Nazi antisemitism went too far even for Lovecraft:

It is amusing to think of the thoroughly Aryan people who would be placed outside as aliens if the strict Nazi test were made worldwide. Palgrave, compiler of the Gold Treasury (whose sire was born Cohen), the present Lord Rosebery (whose mother was a Rothschild), the aristocratic Belmont family of America (whose forebear change his name from Schönberg), the Hamiltons of Philadelphia (Andrew Hamilton, the lawyer famous in the Zenger freedom-of-the-press case of 1735 & the designer of Independence Hall, married a Jewess named Franks) & so on! Indeed—since the Nazi ban is not merely on Jews but on all non-Aryans, it would come down heavily upon all who bear a trace of Indian blood—such as the descendants of Pocahontas, famous throughout Virginia & including men as eminent as John Randolph of Roanoke! Plainly, then, the present attitude of the Nazis on this point is an extreme & unscientific one….. although, as I have said, I certainly believe that actual members of the Jewish culture-group ought to be kept from securing a grip on the legal, educational, artistic, & intellectual life of any Aryan nation. They had gone too far in Germany, & they have gone too far in America—where so much literary & critical material is either of Semitic origin or (through Jew-owned publishing houses) Semitic selection. It is certainly time that the Aryan people everywhere made sure that they are not being led by fundamentally antipathetic aliens, & that they are not permitting such aliens to serve as their mouthpieces of opinion.

H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 25 Jul 1934, Letters to Alfred Galpin 209-211

Prejudice has to be seen as a spectrum of ignorance and discrimination; while it is common to label historical figures as antisemitic or not, the truth tends to be more nuanced. Antisemitic stereotypes were common in the United States in the 1930s, but it does not follow that every antisemite believed exactly the same things, or even agreed with one another on the exact details of their prejudices.

How much of the message of The House of Rothschild did Lovecraft actually take in? Films are both a product of their time and actors in it; they present ideas that already exist and they also shape them. It does not seem likely that Lovecraft’s beliefs in Jewish conspiracies were strengthened by watching George Aldiss on screen say: “Money is the only weapon that the Jew has to defend himself with.” Yet we have to wonder if he was at all moved by the sentiment: “To trade with dignity, to live with dignity, to walk the world with dignity.”

Again, we have no evidence either way. Certainly, Lovecraft was not often driven by sentiment in his arguments. It cannot be said with any certainty that Lovecraft’s slow turn against the Nazis in his letters was driven, at least in small part, by popular media that depicted the historical persecutions of Jews. Yet we cannot say that didn’t play its part either. On the balance, we are left only with Lovecraft’s two neutral comments on the film, and an awareness of the social and historical context in which he watched it. Lovecraft and Barlow sat in that darkened theater and saw on screen the naked prejudice which was being enacted half a world away in Nazi Germany…and came out, no doubt, blinking in the Florida sunlight, with some questions about what they saw.

Beyond that, we can only reflect on what The House of Rothschild means for us today, as a piece of cinematic history. It is worth watching.

The House of Rothschild (1934) can be watched for free.

Thanks to Dave Goudsward for his help.

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: Christmas Greetings

H. P. Lovecraft spent most of his adult life in genteel poverty, slowly diminishing the modest inheritance that had come down to him from his parents and grandparents. He had no cash to spare on expensive gifts for his many friends and loved ones. So Lovecraft was generous with what he had—time, energy, and creativity. While not religious or given to mawkish displays, when it came to Christmas, Lovecraft poured his time and energies into writing small verses to his many correspondents, a body of poems collectively known as his “Christmas Greetings.”

Yesterday I wrote fifty Christmas cards—stamping & mailing them before midnight. Only a few, of course, had verses—& these were all brief and not brilliant.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 23 December 1925, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.511

Most of these verses do not survive. They would have been written on cheap Christmas cards, which were seldom preserved. Those that survive are mostly attested in drafts that survive among Lovecraft’s papers, or more rarely in a letter where he copied a few verses to share with someone else (LFF 1.511-515). Most of them are not pro forma verses, the same rhyme copied for each recipient, but are uniquely tailored for their recipient, a reflection of their shared history and correspondence with Lovecraft.

In looking at Lovecraft’s Christmas Greetings to his women correspondents, we catch a glimpse at Lovecraft’s thoughtfulness. Their response, unfortunately, is often lost to us; though some few of them certainly responded in kind. We know Elizabeth Toldridge, for example, wrote her own Christmas poems to Lovecraft, because at least one survives.

To Lillian D. Clark

Enclos’d you’ll find, if nothing fly astray,

Cheer in profusion for your Christmas Day;

Yet will that cheer redound no less to me,

For where these greetings go, my heart shall be!

The Ancient Track 330

Six poems to Lovecraft’s elder aunt survive. Probably he began writing these to her as a child. Probably too this was one of the later verses, when an adult Lovecraft spent Christmases in New York, and his Christmas greetings would be sent by mail instead of delivered by hand. Though Lovecraft might travel as widely as his finances permitted, and visit friends far away, yet his heart was ever in Providence, Rhode Island—and his family there.

To Mary Faye Durr

Behold a wretch with scanty credit,—

An editor who does not edit—

But if thou seek’st a knave to hiss,

Change cars—he lives in Elroy, Wis.!

The Ancient Track 314-315

One poem survives to Mary Faye Durr, president of the United Amateur Press Association for the 1919-1920 term, and refers to amateur journalism affairs. The “knave” in this case was E.E. Ericson of Elroy, Wisconsin, who was the Official Printer for the United.

To Mr. and Mrs. C. M. Eddy, Jr.

Behold a pleasure and a guide

To light the letter’d path you’re treading;

Achievements with your own allied,

But each the beams of polish shedding.

Here masters rove with easy pace,

Open to all who care to spy them,

And if you copy well their grace,

I vow, you’ll catch up and go by them!

The Ancient Track 328

One poem survives to the Eddys. They were friends from Providence before Lovecraft eloped to New York in 1924, and Lovecraft would revise or collaborate with Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr., and his wife Muriel E. Eddy would write several memoirs of Lovecraft in later years, chiefly The Gentleman from Angell Street (2001). While it isn’t certain, this letter probably refers to C. M. Eddy, Jr.’s efforts to embark on a career as a writer (“the letter’d path”).

To Annie E. P. Gamwell

No false address is this with which I start,

Since the lines come directly from my heart.

Would that the rest of me were hov’ring night

That spot where my soul rose, and where ’twill die.

But since geography has scatter’d roung

That empty shell which still stalks on the ground,

To Brooklyn’s shores I’ll waft a firm command,

And lay a duty on the dull right hand:

“Hand,” I will broadcast, as my soul’s eyes look

O’er roofs of Maynard, Gowdy, Greene, and Cook,

Past Banigan’s toward Seekonk’s red-bridg’d brook,

“To daughter Anne a Yuletide greeting scrawl

Where’er her footsteps may have chanc’d to fall,

And bid her keep my blessings clear in view

In Providence, Daytona, or Peru!”

The Ancient Track 327

Five poems survive to Lovecraft’s younger aunt, of which this is the longest—a Christmas greeting sent from New York, because Lovecraft was not in Providence to spend Christmas with her. The reference to “Daytona” references Anne Gamwell’s own trips to Florida.

To Sonia H. Green

Once more the greens and holly grow

Against the (figurative) snow

To make the Yuletide cheer;

Whilst as of old the aged quill

Moves in connubial fondness still,

And quavers, “Yes, My Dear!”

May Santa, wheresoe’er he find

Thy roving footsteps now inclin’d,

His choicest boons impart;

Old Theobald, tho’ his purse be bare,

Makes haste to proffer, as his share,

Affection from the heart.

The Ancient Track 326-327

Four poems to Sonia H. Greene, who in 1924 became Lovecraft’s wife, survive. This one dates from after their marriage, but during a period when they were separated and unable to have Christmas together (“Thy roving footsteps now inclin’d”). Broke (“his purse be bare”), Lovecraft offers the only thing to Sonia he can: his love.

To Alice M. Hamlet

May Christmas bring such pleasing boons

As trolldom scarce can shew;

More potent than the Elf-King’s runes

Or Erl of long ago!

And sure, the least of Santa’s spells

Dwarfs all of poor Ziroonderel’s!

The Ancient Track 326

Three poems to Lovecraft’s fellow-amateur journalist Alice M. Hamlet survive. She is best-known for introducing H. P. Lovecraft to the works of Lord Dunsany, and this Christmas Greeting contains explicit references to Dunsany’s novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), such as the witch Ziroonderel and the land of Erl—and there is a slight joke comparing Santa in this context, as Clement Clarke Moore had famously described him as “a right jolly old elf” in “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823).

To Winifred Virginia Jackson

Inferior worth here hails with limping song

The new-crown’d Monarch of Aonia’s throng;

And sends in couplets weak and paralytick,

The Yuletide greetings of a crusty critick!

The Ancient Track 317

Two poems to Winifred Virginia Jackson, Lovecraft’s fellow amateur-journalism and literary collaborator, survive. The Aonian was an amateur journal, while Lovecraft was serving as head of the department of public criticism.

To Myrta Alice Little

Tho’ Christmas to the stupid pious throng,

These are the hours of Saturn’s pagan song;

When in the greens that hang on ev’ry door

We see the spring that lies so far before.

The Ancient Track 317

Not every Christmas Greeting was unique; in some cases Lovecraft sent identical (or near-identical) verses to multiple correspondents. So for Myrta Alice Little only one Christmas greeting survives, which was also sent to Winifred Virginia Jackson, Verna McGeoch, and Alfred Galpin—and the sentiments echo the opening to “The Festival,” where Lovecraft is less interested in the Christian ideology than the pagan roots of the holiday.

To Sarah Susan Lovecraft

May these dull verses for thy Christmastide

An added ray of cheerfulness provide,

For tho’ in art they take an humble place,

Their message is not measur’d by their grace.

As on this day of cold the turning sun

Hath in the sky his northward course begun,

So may this season’s trials hold for thee

The latent fount of bright futurity!

Yr aff. son & obt Servt., H.P. L., The Ancient Track 311

One Christmas poem to Lovecraft’s mother survives, though there are other examples of poetry he wrote to her on other occasions. These were likely some of his earliest Christmas Greetings, written during childhood and early adulthood, until his mother’s passing in 1921.

To Verna McGeoch

Tho’ late I vow’d no more to rhyme,

The Yuletide season wakes my quill;

So to a fairer, flowing clime

An ice-bound scribbler sends good will.

The Ancient Track 314

Two poems survive to Verna McGeoch, who was Official Editor of the United Amateur Press Association during Lovecraft’s term as president (1917-1918). The 1920 census shows McGeoch lived in St. Petersburg, Florida (“a fairer, flowing clime”), while Lovecraft froze in Providence. We know this poem was sent before 1921, because in the autumn of that year, Verna married James Chauncey Murch of Pennsylvania, and thus became Mrs. Murch and moved to that state.

To S. Lilian McMullen

To poetry’s home the bard would fain convey

The brightest wishes of a festal day;

Yet fears they’ll seem, so lowly is the giver,

Coals to Newcastle; water to the river!

The Ancient Track 318

One poem to Susan Lilian McMullen survives; she also published poetry under the pseudonym Lilian Middleton. A prominent poet in amateur journalism, Lovecraft wrote an essay praising her work, “The Poetry of Lilian Middleton” (CE 2.51-56), which would not be published during his lifetime. The two met at a gathering of amateurs in 1921. Their relations appear to have been cordial, though tempered by some of his criticisms of her poetry, and their correspondence was likely slight.

To Edith Miniter

From distant churchyards hear a Yuletide groan

As ghoulish Goodguile heaves his heaps of bone;

Each ancient slab the festive holly wears,

And all the worms disclaim their earthly cares:

Mayst thou, ‘neight sprightlier skies, no less rejoice,

And hail the season with exulting voice!

The Ancient Track 320

Five Christmas poems survive from Lovecraft to Edith Miniter, the grand dame of Boston’s amateur journalists. Miniter, among all of Lovecraft’s correspondents and fellow amateurs, was able and willing to take the piss a little with him, and wrote the first Lovecraftian parody, “Falco Ossifracus” (1921)—hence Lovecraft’s adoption of her nickname “Goodguile” for him.

To Anne Tillery Renshaw

Madam, accept a halting lay

That fain would cheer thy Christmas Day;

But fancy not the bard’s good will

Is as uncertain as his quill!

From the Copy-Reviser, The Ancient Track 311

Two poems survive to Anne Tillery Renshaw, teacher, editor, and amateur journalist. Lovecraft’s sign-off as “the Copy-Reviser” suggests their positions in amateur journalism at that time; Lovecraft had a tendency to correct metrical irregularities in poems of amateur journals he edited, and sometimes worked to revise the poetry of others. A Christmas card from Renshaw to Lovecraft survives.

To Laurie A. Sawyer

As Christmas snows (as yet a poet’s trope)

Call back one’s bygone days of youth and hope,

Four metrick lines I send—they’re quite enough—

Tho’ once I fancy’d I could write the stuff!

The Ancient Track 316

A single poem survives to amateur journalist Laurie A. Sawyer, whom Lovecraft described as “Amateurdom’s premier humourist” (CE 1.258). Sawyer was also president of the Interstate Amateur Press Association in 1909, and a leading figure of the Hub Club in Boston, moving in the same circles as Edith Miniter. She is known to have met Lovecraft at amateur conventions in Boston, and she helped issue the Edith Miniter memorial issue of The Tryout (Sep 1934).

To L. Evelyn Schump

May Yuletide bless the town of snow

Where Mormons lead their tangled lives;

And may the light of promise glow

On each grave cit and all his wives.

The Ancient Track 316

A single poem survives to amateur journalist and poet L. Evelyn Schump. She graduated from Ohio State University in 1915 and apparently took up the teaching profession in Ohio. The Church of Latter-Day Saints was established in Kirkland, Ohio during the 1830s until major schisms rent the church, whose members moved on to Missouri. Presumably there is some correspondence, now lost, behind this reference. Given how lightly Lovecraft touches on the issue of polygamy (officially rescinded in 1904), it isn’t likely she was a member of the congregation. As an amateur journalist, Lovecraft called her “a light essayist of unusual power and grace” (CE 1.224).

There are undoubtedly many Christmas Greetings that have been lost over the years, and what remains is little more than a sample of the whole. Yet it is clear that Lovecraft put his time and effort into crafting these verses, no matter how slight or silly, and even if he could afford no more than a card and a stamp, perhaps they spread a little cheer on long winter nights.

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.

Becoming a Cthulhuian Overlord: Episodes 1-20 (2023) by Yi Jian San Lian (一键三连)

Becoming a Cthulhuian Overlord (成为克苏鲁神主) began as a novel by Yi Jian San Lian (一键三连) published on China Literature, which was then adapted in 2020 into a manhua by An Zhu (渚谙, writing) and Na Ti Maeo (拿铁猫, illustration), produced by Kaite Dongman(凯特动漫, Cat Comics), which has been translated into English by Sangria and is now being serialized online at Tapas.

This serial work falls into the genre of isekai: a very broad and currently popular genre in many media that involves an individual who becomes displaced from the real world to another world. The nature of the displacement and the other world are major flavors for the genre; the protagonist might die, for example, and be reincarnated into a fantasy world that follows rules like a tabletop roleplaying game such as Dungeons & Dragons or an equivalent video game like World of Warcraft. Or they might fall through a portal and be lost in the distant past, transported to an alien world, etc.

If this sounds a bit overbroad, it’s because isekai is a term for a mode of fantasy fiction that existed long before the term itself existed. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a blow to the head sends the Boss back to the Dark Ages Europe; in A Princess of Mars (1912) former Confederate soldier John Carter is transported bodily to a fantastic version of Mars. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others were familiar with the basic idea; one might consider The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath a kind of isekai, and in “The Challenge from Beyond” George Campbell is transposed into the body of an alien worm—and decides to conquer the alien planet, which is a very appropriate approach for a typical isekai protagonist. These portal fantasies bridge a gap between low fantasy (fantasy fiction set in the mundane world or realistic setting) and high fantasy (fantasy fiction set in a world separate from the real world).

Which is all meat for argument for those who like to argue labels. In Becoming a Cthulhuian Overlord, the premise is that the unnamed protagonist dies in a car accident with his pregnant wife, and has a mysterious supernatural encounter with a certain messenger…

…and reincarnates as Qi Su, an orphaned high school student in Lua City, which superficially looks much like the mundane world. Except now he can see a variety of shadowy and horrific phantoms that he has to pretend not to see, or else they’ll eat him.

If that doesn’t sound very Lovecraftian—it is not, at least at first. Serialized graphic fiction are often paced relatively slowly at first, and this has all the hallmarks of a slow-burn comic. There isn’t a lot of exposition to begin with, and a great deal of the storytelling takes place through the art, which takes advantage of the format to do long-scrolling dynamic shots in odd perspectives. Some of the art is quite effective, even if it obviously draws inspiration from works like Parasyte.

The odd tentacled entity aside, the first few chapters of Becoming a Cthulhuian Overlord are very by-the-numbers stuff, drawing strongly on the basic ideas of Yu Yu Hakusho and similar works, riffing off of Buddhism and traditional exorcism practices, with a few twists and turns. Our protagonist is back in high school, dealing with supernatural threats, teenage romances, etc. However, Qi Su doesn’t know the rules of this new world, and that ignorance helps to build a bit of tension as he learns the ropes.

Readers expecting something more overtly Lovecraftian from the title should pause and reconsider their assumptions. Just as many American and European writers attempt to assimilate the Cthulhu Mythos into a fundamentally Christian worldview, associating Cthulhu and co. with Satanism, non-Western cultures tend to fold the Mythos into their own mythopoetic framework. So for Ultraman Tiga, Ghatanathoa is interpreted as a kaiju of great power; for Soul Eater, the Great Old Ones are extremely powerful beings of madness with great spiritual powers. Becoming a Cthulhuian Overlord, working as it does within a very broadly Buddhist and Chinese folk religion framework, is centered around ghosts and exorcism, with the ghosts tending to have a particular Lovecraftian flavor…but it also develops its own unique metaphysics on top of that, tossing in pop culture borrowings to create a kind of a la carte occultism.

For example, in chapter 13 Qi Su gets Gordon Freeman‘s crowbar.

Which is a long way to say: don’t get too hung up on how Lovecraft wrote things. Different creators incorporate or reference his material differently, and sometimes in minimal or unexpected ways.

John Constantine makes an unofficial cameo in Episode 12!

As of the time of this writing, the whole manhua (over 200 episodes) has not yet been translated and released in English, so it continues to be a very slow burn, building up its world, introducing new characters, etc. Hopefully, the translation will actually be completed; some translations of serial works tend to stop before the end if the interest isn’t there for it, leaving the work incomplete, as happened with Apocalypse Zero.

For readers interested, the first chapters are free to read on Tapas, with updates every Monday.

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 Cthulhu Helix (2023) by Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文)

The novel The Cthulhu Helix (2023) by Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文) was originally published in Japanese in 1993 as 二重螺旋の悪魔 (“Double Helix Devil”); it has been translated into English by Jim Hubbert and published by Kurodahan Press, whose other publications include the Lairs of the Hidden Gods series of Japanese Cthulhu Mythos short fiction translated into English and West of Innsmouth: A Cthulhu Western (2021) by Kikuchi Hideyuki (菊地 秀行).

When H. P. Lovecraft wrote weird fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, the walls between science fiction and fantasy were practically non-existent. While a few arch-fans like Forrest J. Ackermann argued the point, in practice the supernatural and super-science were, from a narrative perspective, utterly interchangeable and compatible. C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith fought alien gods on Mars; Robert E. Howard’s Conan wandered through ancient cities lit by radium-lamps; and H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth raised their buzzing voices in worship to Shub-Niggurath and the Black Goat of the Woods. There is no hard delineation between Lovecraft’s fantasy and science fiction stories.

If viewed through the lens of pulp fiction of his day, the science fiction elements in Lovecraft’s stories are exactly in tune with the kinds of pulp sci fi that showed up in Weird Tales. “From Beyond” is ultimately a gadget story and a gland story, brain-stealing crustacean aliens featured in Edmond Hamilton’s “The Shot from Saturn” (WT October 1931) not long after Lovecraft’s own “The Whisperer in Darkness” (WT August 1931) introduced the Mi-Go and their brain canisters. What differed with Lovecraft was his approach—Hamilton leaned into the adventurous interpretation of an alien invasion from another planet, but Lovecraft’s extraterrestrials were profoundly weirder, less explicable, not exactly less hostile but less prone to the even-then hackneyed tropes which H. G. Wells had covered so well with The War of the Worlds (1898).

Post-Lovecraft, science fiction and fantasy continued to grow and diversify, sometimes locking themselves into genre cages and sometimes breaking out. The early ideas of science fiction as gadget stories and space opera—The Gernsback Continuum as William Gibson put it—gave way over time to different ideas. Science-fantasies like the Star Wars and Star Trek novels and the Man-Kzin Wars anthologies played with psychic powers in far futures and galaxies far away where space travel was the norm and multiple intelligent species and cultures interacted in an intergalactic community; others focused on sociological changes, dystopic futures, future wars. The science may have been hard or soft, but the emphasis generally shifted from bright shiny new tech and worn old plots to more human stories on the effects of technology on people, the social impact and implications of new ways to communicate and interact, the question of what it was to be human.

Which, in the late 80s, gelled into Cyberpunk—the ultimate forebear of all the dizzying array of “-punk” suffixes which would be affixed to many speculative fictions to come. Broadly, cyberpunk was high tech and low life, continuing many of the same fundamental speculative technologies and advancements that came out of previous science fiction, but seen through the lens of contemporary societal issues—megacorporations, pollution, the alienation that came with technology and greater bureaucratic control of life, global computer networks, personal augmentation with cyberware raising the question of what it meant to be human, etc.

H. P. Lovecraft had written about what might, in hindsight, be called a megacorp in “In the Walls of Eryx” with Kenneth Sterling, but there was no down-and-out protagonist, no career criminals, no street to find its own uses for things. The Mi-Go perfected putting a brain in a canister, but there was no global Matrix to plug those brains into, to play out the games of the Matrix films. The ingredients for cyberpunk fiction using elements of the Mythos were there from the start—but it took a while for Cthulhupunk to manifest itself.

The Cthulhu Helix is one of the first Cthulhu Mythos biopunk novels (The Queen of K’n-yan (2008) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) was published around the same time in Japan, but made it into English translation first). It is very much a 90s product: fast-paced, set in a near future where corporate greed overcomes moral considerations, with a strong militaristic sci-fi undercurrent, and media-savvy some otaku-grade Easter eggs in reference to popular culture:

Things got weird. The monkey started ripping the cage apart. There was s ound of metal tearing. The Star of the show uttered a strange cry. His hairy body was channeling the spirit of Hercules.

“What the hell did you do to him?”

“That lead in the back of his skull is an on/off switch. The main players are micro-robots implanted in his hypothalamus. NCS-131 microbots.” She pointed to the macaque. “His name is Son Goku.”

Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文), trans. Jim Hubbard, The Cthulhu Helix (2023) 125

The media-savviness is at the heart of the novel. While the aesthetic is something like Resident Evil (1996) or anime like Lily C.A.T. (1987), the Lovecraftian flavor is consciously a metaphor for the horror that’s been uncovered lurking in human DNA. There are no Necronomicons for these territories, just an awareness of the tropes as they are being applied:

Until now we’d been using C—for Cthulhu—as a basket term for all of these monsters. But we’d been getting flak about the single letter, so they’d decided to switch to what everyone else was using: Great Old Ones. GO1 for short. Bureau C was still Bureau C. C for clean, as we told people who didn’t have clearance.

There was another new term for the Cthulhu mythos, for a new entity: the Elder God. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods have been the lords of the Great Old Ones. They had imprisoned the Great Old Ones in this and other dimensions after they rebelled against their masters.

Lovecraft’s characters were not what we were facing. The Cthulhu Mythos was fiction, and any resemblance between it and the creatures we were battling was coincidence. No one knew anything about DNA or the intron regions in Lovecraft’s day. Still, he would’ve been astonished if he had known how close to reality his stories had come.

Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文), trans. Jim Hubbard, The Cthulhu Helix (2023) 112-113

Using Lovecraft’s terminology and ideas without making his stories canon opened up a world of possibilities to reimagine and rework Lovecraft’s ideas into a contemporary syntax. In his day, Lovecraft had government agents raid Innsmouth, but 70+ years later the government response needed to shift to meet the needs and expectations of a new generation. Bureau C parallels the development of Delta Green for the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, the Laundry from Charles Stross’ The Laundry Files, and the Agency in Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan and the rest of her Tinfoil Dossier series.

Which is why The Cthulhu Helix works as a Lovecraftian novel. The characters are all conscious of Lovecraft’s legacy, but for them it’s all shorthand and metaphor, a way to frame and discuss these complex ideas and relationships without getting bogged down in Elder Signs and other minutiae. The particular approach Umehara took is fairly Derlethian, but that’s not surprising considering when and where it was published.

A word on the translation: Jim Hubbert has done great service here in rendering very smoothly-flowing prose. It’s not always easy to keep a narrative comprehensible and moving in translation, but this reads very well, especially considering the occasional breaks in format and the potential for alphabet soup. Kudos on a job well done.

The Cthulhu Helix (2023) by Umehara Katsufumi (梅原克文) can be purchased through Kurodahan Press.

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.

“Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” (2017) by Lucy Sussex

Dear How,

I meant to write Howard, but got interrupted, as happens. When I came back ‘How’ looked just fine on the page. it summed us up. Like: How did we ever get married? Blame the words, what we said and wrote to each other, the only thing we had in common. How did we ever think we would work it out? Those words again, mixed with pure blind optimism. How did we part? Without pain, as it should be.

I meant to write you before my news, but time just runs away sometimes. You did file the divorce papers? [crossed through]. I am now Mrs Doctor Nathaniel Davis.

Lucy Sussex, “Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” in Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol. 1 (2017), 51

She was born Sonia Haft Shafirkin to a Jewish couple in 1883 in the Russian Empire, modern-day Ukraine. At the age of 7, she immigrated to the United States of America. At age 16, she married another immigrant, Samuel Seckendorff, who changed his last name to Greene. By 1920 she was divorced, her first husband dead; she had given birth to a daughter and a son, the latter who died in infancy. Skill and hard work brought her success in her business, and amateur journalism had become a hobby and a way to improve her mind. In 1921, Sonia H. Greene met H. P. Lovecraft at an amateur journalist convention in Boston. Contact sparked correspondence, further meetings, collaboration on stories and amateur journals, and then, in 1924, she married again.

The Lovecrafts’ marriage did not last long, and only Sonia gives a full account of their relationship. They separated, and finally filed for divorce…though Howard did not sign the papers in the end, either out of ignorance or some other unguessed reason, so that when Sonia married for a third time, to Dr. Nathaniel Davis in 1936, she thought she was free to do so.

Sonia’s marriage to H. P. Lovecraft has become part of his myth. It was during a brief but incredibly formative and important part of his life, and he spoke so little of her afterward that knowledge of his marriage was scanty among many of his correspondents. Details about their married life, and the mysterious Mrs. Lovecraft, did not begin to emerge into the public consciousness until many years after his death, when journalist Winfield Townley Scott finally made contact with her after publishing a lengthy biographical piece on Lovecraft.

The life story of Sonia H. Davis neither began nor ended with H. P. Lovecraft; and her full life story is given in her own words in her forthcoming autobiography Two Hearts That Beat As One, edited by Monica Wasserman. Yet the relative lack of information on her, the focus on her marriage with Lovecraft, and the way biographers like L. Sprague de Camp have presented Sonia in their works on Lovecraft have strongly skewed the image of who Sonia was as a person.

Arcade #3 (Fall 1975) – George Kuchar

In Arcade #3 (Fall 1975) for example, George Kuchar’s biographical comic on Sonia drew heavily on L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (19750. Sonia’s portrayal shows her as sexually aggressive compared to the timid Lovecraft, obsessed with money, a brief whirlwind romance in the life a neurotic and impractical horror-writer. While Kuchar is conscientious to reproduce some of Lovecraft’s words and feelings, with Sonia he takes more liberties, putting words and ideas into her mouth she never uttered.

Very few writers think to present matters from Sonia’s point of view.

In this tradition, “Wife of Mr. Lovecraft” by Lucy Essex is a bit different than most. The short story takes the form of a series of postcards Sonia sent to her ex-husband while on a cruise (no dates are given, but we can assume this was meant to be a honeymoon trip to the South Pacific that never happened in real life). Told from Sonia’s perspective, it shows more than a modicum of research, even with the occasional touch of invention and the odd omission or two. The story is more wistful than weird, although it flirts with weirdness.

It had tentacles, or stubs of limbs, and one staring gold eye, with a slot of a pupil, like a goat’s. […] There was something weirdly cute about it, like you get with kittens or pups. When I thought that, I remembered our baby, that story we wrote together, about horror on Martin’s Beach. I said: “Throw it back, it’s a juvenile.”

Lucy Sussex, “Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” in Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol. 1 (2017), 53

Many writers and artists have portrayed Sonia in one form or another. Nearly every biographical comic of Lovecraft includes her at some point, and some biographical stories written after her memoir of their marriage came out, like Lovecraft’s Book (1985) by Richard Lupoff, include her as a character. Yet rarely is Sonia fleshed out. Relateable. There’s something refreshing about the portrayal of Sonia as someone…human.

Not a stereotype of a Jewish emigre or domineering wife, nor a fantastic succubus out to drain Lovecraft dry. Not someone defined by Lovecraft at all. Sonia had her own life, before and after Lovecraft, and she lived that life. The tide of their lives drew them together, and eventually bore them apart. Sussex seeks a kind of closure here which we mere readers never really got. After Sonia returned from Europe, the references in Lovecraft’s letters just peter out…and Sonia’s own account of events after that has long been unpublished. The publication of Sonia’s autobiography will, hopefully, go a long way to rectify that oversight.

“Wife to Mr. Lovecraft” by Lucy Sussex was published in Cthulhu Deep Down Under Vol. 1 (2017). It has not yet been reprinted.

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: Edna “Vondy” Hyde McDonald

From The Fossil #368

She was born Edna Freida von der Heide in Manhattan on 15 September 1891, to Edward and Freida (Schler) von der Heide; her sister Eleanor came along two years later. By the time of the 1900 Federal census, her father was dead. By 1910, the small family had moved in with their uncle and aunt, William and Caroline Sprouls. It is not clear if Edna completed high school (later census records indicate only three years of high school), and at 18 she was already working as a “typewriter” (later census records gave her profession as typographer or stenographer) and she began what would be a decades-long career as an amateur journalist, publishing her own amateur journals such as Inspiration.

Edna von der Heide could write. She appears to have been recruited for amateur journalism in 1909, and for the next five decades won a bouquet of laureateships and held most of the offices at the National Amateur Press Association. In 1914 she was appointed as Official Editor for NAPA, only the third woman to hold that office, and was elected to that office in 1915; although she resigned almost immediately, details unclear as to why—amateur politics tend to be opaque from a distance of years.

In 1917, the United States declared war against Germany; a wave of anti-German sentiment swept the United States. Perhaps prudently, Edna and Eleanor changed their names from von der Heide to a more English-sounding “Hyde.” Friends in amateur journalism, however, continued to refer to Edna affectionately as “Vondy” until the end of her days.

By the way–I haven’t any feud with her, as you seem to have gathered. Whatever strafing there is, is all on her side—she cherishes a subtle dislike based on antipathetical temperament. I ceased hostilities when political expediency forced her to apologise for the nasty digs in Giddy Gazette & Inspiration. Her verse is, as you say, very good—though it isn’t the sort that interests me.

H. P. Lovecraft to Samuel Loveman, 29 Apr 1923, Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others 497

In 1921, Edna Hyde ran for President of the National Amateur Press Association against Elsie Dorothy Grant, Lovecraft’s preferred candidate; Edna and her faction lost. To Lovecraft, Edna was his “literary enemy” (LFF 1.139), but in all of his mentions of Vondy in his letters or editorials in amateur journals, there tended to be a great deal more respect than there was animosity.

Incidentally—the work of “Vondy” is of vastly greater merit; many of the lyrics in her book being as close to poetry as anything published in amateurdom. The trouble with her in old amateur days was that she published so much casual & mediocre verse in addition to the solid body of poignant specimens. Many critics—including myself—saw so much of these trivial items that they tended to underestimate her general output.

H. P. Lovecraft to Helm C. Spink, 19 Aug 1930, Letters to Hyman Bradofsky and Others 171-172

Miss Hyde’s reputation as a poet has caused her few stories to receive less attention than they deserve. In point of fact, they are among the best in the amateur press—the supply never being abundant. In this particular story the realism is the salient thing.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Vivisector” in Wolverine #9 (March 1921), Collected Essays 1.275

On Hallowe’en 1924, Edna married fellow amateur Philip B. McDonald, and was known thereafter as Edna Hyde McDonald. They lived in the Bronx, at first on their own, and then later Eleanor joined them. Lovecraft and his wife Sonia may have seen them socially during the brief few years that they lived in New York together, at amateur gatherings or Blue Pencil Club meetings, but the evidence is a bit scanty.

In fact, there is relatively little information about Lovecraft and Vondy corresponding directly with one another, though we know they must have, either in public capacity when each held offices at NAPA, or conducting private amateur business like arranging memorial issues for fallen amateur journalists. However, there are two bits of data that support there was a correspondence.

The first is a quote from a letter from Lovecraft to Edna Hyde, undated but probably circa 1924:

Albert [Sandusky] has taken the trouble to dig out Lovecraft. And he has made me jealous of his findings. And to have Howard Lovecraft write me and say ‘Bless the child. He wields a curious influence over me, for who else could have taught me to chant with jocose abandon, the contemporary shortage of the noble banana’, is to have an admission of the feat that Albert has achieved with natural-selfness, what the rest of us have never taken trouble to attempt.

Miscellaneous Letters 497

Lovecraft was referring to the popular song “Yes! We Have No Bananas” (1922), which he famously tried to play on the pipe organ at the First Baptist Church of America in Providence. So that is one instance where Vondy claimed Lovecraft wrote to her, but later on she would add that they carried on an entire correspondence.

Brown Digital Repository

This was one of several notes from the amateur journal Belette, where Vondy quipped and ruminated on memorials for her dead frenemy. This and much more on Vondy’s life, as well as some of her laureate-winning poetry and fiction, can be read in The Fossil #333, a special issue dedicated to her memory and with considerable research by Ken Faig, Jr. into her life and work. You can really see why Lovecraft was taken by some of her work, even if her poetry wasn’t always in his line.

Piqua Daily Press, 18 Dec 1916

That is, unfortunately, “it” as far as the Lovecraft-Vondy correspondence is concerned. No actual letters between the two are known to survive, there are almost no direct references to letters to Edna in Lovecraft’s published letters, and her address is not listed in Lovecraft’s 1937 diary. So we are left with Vondy’s own insistence that they did write to one another…and there’s not really any reason to doubt her word on the matter. As much as we may wish it, Lovecraft didn’t keep every scrap of paper that came his way, and rarely spoke of his correspondence with amateurs to his pulp friends, and vice versa, except in the rare instances when someone showed an interest. Edna herself fell into that category once…

I duly received the envelope which you forwarded from Mrs. McDonald, & which contained a cutting from the N. Y. World  in which teh celebrated William Bolitho, discussing the cheap “pulp” magazines, chanced to allude to my W.T. effusions in not too patronising a manner. It was kind of Mrs. M. to send the thing—but I can’t resist enclosing the note which accompanied it, & which wound up with the perfect Hydeian touch of brooding hostility!

H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 14 Jan 1930, Letters to James F. Morton 218-219

The piece was “Pulp Magazines” in the New York World (4 January 1930); Edna had recognized Lovecraft’s name and forwarded it on through Morton because she lacked Lovecraft’s address in Providence, but apparently couldn’t resist a witty note to go along with it. This might encapsulate the nature of their correspondence as it probably was: intermittent over the years, a combination of mutual respect and good-natured ribbing. Whatever else she was in her life, Edna was one of Lovecraft’s peers in amateur journalism—and they both knew it.

Addendum: Sean Donnelly, with access to Edna’s surviving correspondence, has uncovered more about her correspondence and relationship with Lovecraft: Edna Hyde McDonald: Her last letter to Lovecraft.

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.