Jewish characters were rare in Weird Tales. While there were some stories with Jewish characters, such as “The Devil’s Pool” (1932) by Greye La Spina, that is the exception rather than the rule. Whether this was a reflection of the stories submitted or editorial fiat is impossible to determine; we know Jean Ray’s stories in Weird Taleshad the antisemitism removed before they were published in the magazine, and that might have been part of an unofficial policy…or just good business. After all many readers, writers, artists, and publishers in the pulp field were Jewish. No need to antagonize folks, even during an era when antisemitism was rife in the United States.
If Jewish characters were rare, Jewish culture was rarer. H. P. Lovecraft was dimly aware that Judaism was not a monolithic religion or heterogenous ethnic group, that there were sectarian differences and distinctions between populations, even if he was ignorant of the exact nature of those differences. For many folks reading Weird Tales, however, the ignorance would have been more profound. White, Anglo-American, Protestant Christian would have been the default cultural syntax for most, and the vast majority of weird fiction from the early 20th century was written from, and read in, that context.
So it isn’t terribly surprising that Lovecraft didn’t include many Jewish characters in his fiction—really, only a bookseller in “The Descendent”—and most of his contemporaries likewise didn’t do much with them (though see Conan and the Shemites: Robert E. Howard and Antisemitism). Thus, the first generation of Mythos fiction was both largely devoid of Jewish representation and of Jewish stereotypes and antisemitism. This absence tended to repeat itself in later generations: there are relatively few stories that are distinctly Mythos and also prominently feature Jewish characters or cultures. There are a number of Jewish authors of Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction, but almost no Jewish Cthulhu Mythos stories to speak of.
(Although I would be remiss if I failed to mention Edward M. Ederlac’s Merkabah Rider series, where an Hasidic gunslinger deals with Mythos threats in the Old West. Those are just plain fun.)
[“]They said if I took another oath, I would be able to understand all that gibbering, but I didn’t.”
“Jew aren’t supposed to take oaths,” I told him. “They’re too powerful. Always say, ‘Maybe, maybe, maybe.'”
So what would happen if a Jew came to Innsmouth? And not just any Jew, but an Orthodox Hasidic Jew of the Chabad movement—a traditionalist bringing Judaism to other Jewish people, a young rabbi dedicated to cultural outreach? It is an interesting setup, because Jewish religion and culture is such an absolute lacuna in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The Esoteric Order of Dagon has an absolute Old Testament flavor (“Dagon an’ Ashtoreth—Belial an’ Beëlzebub—Golden Caff an’ the idols o’ Canaan an’ the Philistines—Babylonish abominations—Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin—”), but in Lovecraft’s Innsmouth before the coming of the Deep Ones there was only a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a Congregationalist church, and a group of Freemasons; no Catholic church, no African-American Methodist-Episcopalian church, no synogogue. The Deep Ones moved in on the prototypical WASP space, but with no real indication of how or why they might interact with Jews or anyone else.
Which means that Marsha Morman had pretty much a blank slate when writing “The Chabad of Innsmouth.” Return to Innsmouth stories tend to be a bit frayed and outworn, like a familiar shirt worn until threadbare—if the reader has read Lovecraft’s original, they know most of the things that the protagonist is about to discover—and there’s certainly a good bit of that shmatte feeling here. The Cthulhu Mythos aspects of it in particular are so utterly familiar that they’re almost hackneyed; not really much innovation on Lovecraft’s original in that sense.
What works is the novel approach itself. Innsmouth, eighty-odd years after the event’s of Lovecraft’s story, has a new rabbi, trying to serve a small community, and…it’s nice to see that different perspective.
It was unwholesome to find someone so visually repellant. I was taught to look to the neshama—soul—of every person instead of their outsides. I was very ashamed as we hurried back to the car, Pavel’s smelly set of keys in hand.
Judaism and the Esoteric Order of Dagon are so alien to one another that there isn’t a lot of real interaction. The rabbi and his charges, ironically, can only really categorize the cult through the lens of Christian saints, Satanic cults, and finally the stories of the old Philistine god from the tanakh. We never get the Dagonite perspective on the Chabad house at all, except as outsiders intruding into business they don’t understand. The cultural clash and failure of understanding on both sides is a bit fascinating, and it would have been nice to see more details on that…but that might have killed the pacing. The darker elements of the plot are reminicent of “Mail Order Bride” (1999) by Ann K. Schwader, and “The Chabad of Innsmouth” slides surprisingly well into the broader cycle of Innsmouth stories.
Not everything works. The ending feels more than a bit rushed, and the geography is also a bit ludicrous; Lovecraft put Innsmouth in Essex County, north of Boston, while Morman puts it south of Boston, somewhere around Cape Cod, but that’s a quibble. A few entries from the perspective of the protagonist’s wife, the shalucha, detailing her experience of Innsmouth, might have gone a long way to develop the atmosphere. It’s not really a horror story, or at least the rabbi doesn’t know they’ve stumbled into a horror story, until near the very end, so there is less tension built up before the climax than maybe there should be.
Overall, however, Marsha Morman definitely fulfilled the premise. Readers get something that they rarely, if ever, get anywhere else; the Mythos expands a little, takes on a new dimension, and maybe a new perspective gets placed on an old story. Most intruiging of all, this is ultimately the story about new beginnings, not endings. The chabad house in Innsmouth is still standing at the end, the small community is still there…and the door is open for more stories.
“The Chabad of Innsmouth” by Martha Morman was published in King David and the Spiders from Mars (2014, Dybbuk Press). It has not yet been reprinted.
Have you ever heard of the Necronomicon? No? That’s probably because you’ve led a normal life…a life in which that dreaded encyclopedia of evil has never entered…
1953. The war was over. On the magazine racks, brightly-colored comic books, eager to catch the eye and earn the dimes of children and adults alike. Romances, westerns, a scattering of super-heroes, crime, science fiction, and horror. The pulp magazines are dying, fewer of them on the stands every month, but the comic books are lurid and varied, each outfit competing with the other.
Charlton Comics was a latecomer to the field of horror comics. Their most notable entry was The Thing, a horror anthology comic consciously modeled on EC’s Tales from the Crypt, launched in February 1952 and lasted 17 issues, ending in November 1954; today most notable for the artistic talents of a young Steve Ditko in the later issues. Under the editorship of Al Fago, The Thing sought to distinguish itself in a crowded field with low page rates and relatively lax editorial oversight, with the hope this artistic freedom would provide solid stories and provocative artwork—and unfortunately for them, they succeeded in drawing attention to themselves, though not the kind they wanted. (The Charlton Companion48, 52-4)
In The Thing #11, released in November 1953. “Beyond the Past” was a short comic in the middle of the issue, only 4 pages. Artist Lou Morales signed the first page, but the writer, letterer, etc. are uncredited, which was typical. Comics in the 50s were often churned out swiftly, in workshop fashion, and individual creators were not always credited. The other stories in the issue (and many issues before and after) were written by Carl Memling, and he may be responsible for the script on “Beyond the Past” as well.
The story itself is relatively direct and minor: an old professor studies the Necronomicon, mumbles an incantation (“Xnapantha..xnapnatha..Chrtlu..xmondii…”), and accidentally calls up that which he cannot put down. Lovecraft had many fans among the early horror comics, as evidenced by “Baby… It’s Cold Inside!” in Vault of Horror #17 (1951), and “Portrait of Death” (1952) in Weird Terror #1 (1952). For the most part, this would be classed as forgettable filler, but for two things.
For one, “Beyond the Past” is an early appearance of the Necronomicon in a comic book. For two, it caught the attention of Fredric Wertham, and became a footnote in the moral panic that led, ultimately, to the institution of the Comics Code Authority and the vanishing of horror comics from the shelves in the United States and other countries.
The Thing, No. 11. Two young people cook and eat an old woman. . . a man hears his own limbs being wrenched from his body by a 30ft. octopus . . a creature called a Necronomicon drinks a man’s blood and devours his flesh.
Keith Waterhouse focused on imported American horror comics and described a handful of issues in a sensationalist style. Never mind the issues he rants about had likely been off the stands (in the United States, at least) for months; and that he could hardly have read them very carefully if he mistook the Necronomicon for the blood-thirsty monster Xnapantha the professor had summoned. No one was likely to fact-check him.
Someone in the United States, however, also read Waterhouse’s article.
Do you know what a necronomicon is? Probably not. But for thousands of children this is part of their education. They know that a necronomicon is a creature that, of course, drinks people’s blood and eats their flesh.
By 1955, Wertham had won. In April 1954 his book Seduction of the Innocent had stirred a moral panic in the United States and abroad to the highest level, he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in April and June, and in September the collective comic book publishers in the United States formed the Comics Code Authority, censoring themselves to stave off government interference. Crime and horror comics vanished from the newsstands, and would have a ripple effect around the world, starting similar moral panics in the United Kingdom and other countries.
Yet Wertham continued to campaign against the deleterious influence of comic books on the youth. Thanks to the research of Carol Tilley, we now know that Wertham faked his research, distorted facts and figures to match his narrative. What most folks don’t acknowledge is that Wertham didn’t stop. He certainly wasn’t above reusing Waterhouse’s garbled idea of what a Necronomicon was to his own benefit.
Wertham used the leading question about the Necronomicon more than once; a 1954 article titled “The curse of the comic books” appeared in the journal Religious Education Vol. 49, No. 6 a few months prior with essentially the same opening, and Wertham may have reused it elsewhere.
There is no surprise in this case that Wertham got the details wrong; there are numerous examples in Seduction of the Innocent where his apparent encyclopedic knowledge of comic characters and plots is shown to be superficial at best. What’s surprising is how he got ahold of a British newspaper article—possibly through a clipping service—and how swiftly and avidly he seized on the word Necronomicon, apparently in complete ignorance of its provenance.
Like a weird game of telephone, the misconception about the Necronomicon, now totally separated from its source material, continued to promulgate through the web of concerned citizens.
Dear Parents: “Do you know what a necronomicon is? Probably not.[“]
Buckley depended on Wertham’s integrity as a scholar; she took his article as fact as she clutched her metaphorical pearls and told parents to worry about what their kids might pick up down at the corner drug store or newspaper stand. Wertham depended on Waterhouse’s journalistic integrity, that the reporter had gotten his facts correct. Neither of them bothered to investigate for themselves, any more than Lou Morales picked up an Arkham House book to confirm whether it was supposed to be “Chrtlu” or “Cthulhu” in the incantation.
“Beyond the Past,” like many of the stories from The Thing, has relished in relative obscurity. Now in the public domain, it was finally reprinted in Haunted Horror #25 (2016, IDW), and in rougher form in The Giant Readers Thing (2019, Gwandanaland Comics), but the whole story can be read for free at Comic Book Plus.
Addendum: A sharp-eyed reader pointed out that while this might be one of the earliest comic appearances of the Necronomicon by name, the story “Dr. Styx” in Treasure Comics #2 (Aug 1945) includes the writings of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Read G. W. Thomas’ article on the story here. The Necronomicon also featured in “The Black Arts” in Weird Fantasy #14 (Jul-Aug 1950).
This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed. As such, please be advised before reading further.
John Cleland, immersed in the clutches of the law, under circumstances which would have extinguished the fire of genius in any ordinary man, wrote himself out of the poor debtor’s prison and into everlasting fame through his immortal romance The Memoirs of Fanny Hill.
Its extraordinary success brought the attention of the authorities to his work and while condemning it for distribution, they recognized its merit, by granting Cleland a pension, stipulating however that the payment of the pension would cease should he produce any other work of the free nature of Fanny Hill.
These circumstances being of common knowledge, few except the indefatigable bibliophile have attempted to seek out and preserve other works than the romance.
It is however a fact that he did write other works and one of his best The Amatory Adventures of a Surgeon has survived the vandalism of the censor.
In this work Cleland shows himself as the pioneer in the realms of psychology and his keen interpretation of the real impulses of the human mind, prompted all its actions as it is by the sex urge, was one of the early incentives which led to the dvelopment of the present school of writers on the sexual question.
He was one of the first to recognize the value of De Sade in the study of mental vagaries and his reference to Justine or the Misfortune of Virtue in this work, led to the first English translation and general interst afterwards awakened in Sadism.
The text in this edition follows exactly the edition of Rotterdam which is a precise reprint of the original.
A. Machen, “Introduction” in The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon (undated edition)
John Cleland was the 18th century English novelist who famously wrote Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). The author of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, however, was James Campbell Reddie, a 19th-century Scottish writer of pornography, who used the pseudonym “James Campbell.” In the 1800s, the appetite for sexually-explicit media was no less than today, but the consequences of its production and sale were more severe; pseudonyms were not unknown, and doctoring up a pornographic work as by someone else far away was a reasonable effort to throw off the police.
So why is the book attributed to John Cleland?
While the title page says “experiences,” the actual cover of the book says “experience.” A quirk of this edition.
Cleland’s notoriety as the author of Fanny Hill would seem to be one reason why he was attributed as the author; presumably an ignorant buyer might recognize that name more readily than “James Campbell.” Likewise, Fanny Hill had at least a modicum of literary cachet, so attributing the work to Cleland might have been an obtuse effort to bypass censorship, at least for those who read no further than the introduction.
So who is “A. Machen,” who learnedly pretends that this is a genuine example of erotic art and literature, rather than a literary hoax-cum-masturbation fodder?
Who it is not is Arthur Machen, the Welsh journalist, thespian, and master of the weird tale who so influenced H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and generations of aficionados of the fantastic literature. Whoever wrote this—and it is not clear exactly when it became appended onto the many illicit reprints of The Amatory Experience of a Surgeon—was trying to do for a new generation what Readie was trying to for his original audience in the 1880s: convince them that some notable literary figure had blessed this work by association.
Arthur Machen, you see, had a reputation.
Before Machen made his name as a weird fictioneer proper, his primary fame lay in a series of translations of European slightly risque or ribald stories into English. These were not erotic works in any strict sense of the term; but classical novels and collections of short stories which were slightly more daring or concerns subjects slightly inappropriate for Victorian British society. In the late 19th century rising literacy rates, British classism, public prudery, and private decadence, combined to form discrete levels of erotic content.
Readers who wished to read the 1,001 Nights in English, for example, their options might include Edward William Lane’s expurgated and bowdlerized Arabian Nights Entertainment (1848/1853), suitable for all ages and available relatively cheaply in bookstores or through libraries, or Sir Richard Francis Burton’s uncensored, unexpurgated, scholarly translation A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night which was published in 10 volumes from 1885 to 1888 by private subscription, and to which Burton famously tacked on a 10,000-word essay on pederasty.
Scholarship and academic interest in subjects like medicine, psychology, anthropology, art, and history gave a veneer of acceptability to works about sexuality or the nude form; money for private editions gave access to works not fit for the hoi polloi. Yet these works were neither hardcore erotica or complete shams, though both abounded for the unwary buyer. Rather, there was an appetite at the time that wanted something that was both of literary quality and not censored and expurgated to death. A very fine line for a translator to walk, and the end product might be politely known as curiosa or gallantia.
Machen’s first work was The Heptameron (1886), a 16th-century collection of stories from Marguerite of Navarre modeled on the 14th-century The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. As Machen later described his translation, which sought to preserve something of the style of the early modern prose:
A graceful book, but, as it strikes me now, a little faded. The Heptameron always reminds me of some embroidered, silken dress that has lain in a dark chest for many long years. It is still beautiful; but the embroidered roses have grown somewhat dim.
Arthur Machen in Arthur Machen: A Bibliography (1923) 6
An amended version of this book was issued a year later as The Fortunate Lovers (1887), and was followed up by The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), which was a collection of tales after the medieval pattern and strongly reminiscent of Balzac and Rabelais; and Fantastic Tales or The Way to Attain (1890), translated from Le Moyen de Parvenir (1617) of Béroalde de Verville. In 1894, the same year Machen published his infamous weird tale “The Great God Pan,” he also published the full twelve-volume Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (Giacomo Girolamo Casanova). If the association with the Yellow Book hadn’t sealed Machen’s reputation, Casanova probably did. Not because any of these works themselves were sexually explicit, but because they had the reputation of being books about sex—which they were, in a sense.
It’s easier to illustrate the point with an example:
In the harbour of Coulon, hard by Niort, there lived a boat-woman, who, by day and night, carried people across the ferry. And it came ot pass that two Grey Friars of the aforesaid Niort were crossing over by themselves in her boat, whereupon, seeing that the passage is one of the longest in France, they began to crave love-dalliance, to which entreaties she gave the answer that became her. But they, who for all their journeying were not aweary, nor by reason of the water were acold, nor by her rfusal ashamed, determined to have her by force, and if she made an outcry to throw her into the river. And she, whose wit was as good and sharp as their was gross and evil, said to them: “I have not so hard a heart as I seam to have, but I entreat you to grant me two things, and then you shall preceive that I am readier to obey than you to command.” So the two Grey Friars swore by St. Francis that she should ask nothing of them that they would not grant, so long as she did them the pleasure they desired. “In the first place, then,” said she, “I require of you that you advertise no man of this matter.” This they promised with great willingness. “And in second place,” she went on, “that you have your pleasure of me by turns, for this would be too great shame to have to do with the one before the face of the other. Determine, then, which shall first enjoy me.” This likewise they deemed a reasonable thing, and the younger of the two granted his companion the prerogative. So when they drew near a small island she said to the former: “Holy father, do you tell your beads and tarry here, while I am gone with your companion to yonder island, and if, when he returns, he gives a good account of me, we will lleave him, and you and I will go apart together.” The young friar leapt on to the island, and awaited there his comrade’s return, whom the baotwoman took off to another island. And when they had come alongside, the woman, making pretence to fasten her boat to a tree, said to him: “Do you go, sweetheart, and look for a place where we may dispose ourselves.” The holy man got on to the island and searched about for some nook fit for the purpose; but no sooner did she seem him on firm gorund than she pushed off, and made for open water, leaving these two holy fathers to their deservings, for all the clamour they made to her. “Wait patiently, good sirs,” said she, “for an angel to come and console you, for to-day you willhave of me no pleasuance.”
The Heptameron novel V, trans. Arthur Machen, 1924 edition.
The 1880s and 1890s editions of Machen’s translations were often issued by private subscription in small numbers; their more wider influence came during the “Machen Boom” of the 1920s, when Machen’s works were reprinted in the United States by Alfred Knopf and Vincent Starrett. While it is difficult to judge when exactly the “A. Machen” introduction was affixed onto reprints of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, it would not be strange if the resurgence of Machen’s popularity in the 1920s had something to do with it. The Ethnological and Cultural Studies of the Sex Life in England(1934) makes no mention of Machen’s introduction in discussing the text, but then it’s easy to miss clandestine editions.
The reason why it is difficult to say more with any certainty is simply the nature of the reprints of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon. Being an obscene work by the standards of the 1880s, it was never copyrighted, and relatively easy to pirate; the pirated editions were themselves often later pirated, so that anyone interested in owning a copy will find a delirious range of editions in everything from fine bindings to cheap stapled reprints to print-on-demand editions. Many editions bear fictitious information about their printing, claiming to have been published (in English!) in Moscow or Paris. Some are illustrated, and some are xeroxed and stapled together crudely.
All we know for absolute certain is that some copies of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon have an introduction by “A. Machen,” some do not. Those that have the introduction we might say are of the “Machenian textual tradition,” because obviously later publishers copied the text of the Machen introduction from an earlier work, to some hypothetical first publisher who thought it would be clever, or have retail value. In circumstances such as these, each book becomes an artifact. There are several hallmarks of this particular edition, besides the size and binding:
The introduction by “A. Machen” that attributes the book to John Cleland.
While that 1925 edition had three erotic engravings, this booklet is illustrated by black-and-white sexually explicit photos which are difficult to date, but probably from the 1940s or 50s.
So the surmise is that at some point in the 20s or 30s, a publisher printed a private edition of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon with a spurious introduction by the then-popular Machen and an attribution to John Cleland as a way to drum up sales. Sometime in the 40s or 50s, a clandestine publisher photo-offset the text of that edition, and added a few exciting pictures, resulting in the underground copy above.
The 40s and 50s make sense in context because in 1952 Odalisque Press released an edition of The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon which was attributed to James Campbell, lacked the Machen introduction, and was clearly marked with Odalisque’s name and the date of publication. In other words, we now have the start of an actual datable, traceable series of publications from various publishers who decided to print this work, now in the public domain, for an audience eager for the now-scarce erotica and curiosa of yesteryear.
If there are professionally published copies of the book available, who needs cheaply-made, badly illustrated copies produced by some guy in his basement, or in a print shop after hours? As the end of Prohibition signaled the return of good liquor over bathtub gin, the loosening of obscenity standards as applied to literature made sexually explicit material more readily available through legal means. As more established publishers moved into this market, they pushed out the little guys producing crummy booklets to the edges of the marketplace.
Booklets like this, crudely conceived and executed, have become the target of collectors and scholars where once they might have been sold under-the-counter in bookstores or by shady mail-order catalogs, more important for their representation of an earlier time than their literary content. It took a certain cultural context to make it feasible and desirable to put a book like this together—and it is, if nothing else, a testament to a very odd reputation that haunted Arthur Machen, though his fantastic fiction has come to overshadow his earlier writings.
If you were thumbing through Mitchell’s excellent filmography, this dismissive reference to a film named Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden(Necronomicon – Dreamt Sins) by Jesús Franco may catch your eye and cause a moment of pause. The film does not often appear on lists of Lovecraftian cinema, did not make an appearance in that valuable tome The Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft, and generally gets short shrift in Lovecraftian cinematic scholarship. There are good reasons for this, but the lack of attention hides an interesting story.
The film’s title wasn’t Necronomicon. It was Green Eyes of the Devil.
Jesús “Jess” Franco (1930 – 2013) began making films in Spain, under Gen. Francisco Franco’s tyrannical regime. Talented, adaptable, versatile, and rebellious, Jess Franco’s film career began in the 1950s, doing black-and-white films, comedies, documentaries, and musicals. Censorship dogged Franco’s early films; the conservative Spanish regime was wary of sex or anything that could be construed as a political message.
Inspired by the British film company Hammer’s Gothic horrors such as Brides of Dracula (1960) and the success of the French horror film Les yeux sans visage (1960, Eyes Without A Face), Franco’s made the pivot to horror. His earliest horror films, Gritos en la noche (1961, translated as The Awful Dr. Orloff in English), La mano de un hombre muerto (1962, The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus), Gritos, El secreto del Dr. Orloff (1964, Dr. Orloff’s Monster), and Miss Muerte (1965, The Diabolical Dr. Z) combine a mixture of medical horror, Gothic sensibility, and a voyeuristic approach to sadism. Franco exploited the marketability of sex and violence while keeping the films from being explicitly gory or pornographic. Yet Franco still had difficulty with Spanish censors.
The key to artistic freedom was international financing. In 1966, Franco came in touch with West German production manager Karl-Heiz Mannchen.
After producing the fast-pased comic srip concotion Lucky, el intrépido (Lucky, the Inscrutable) in 1967, Franco came to Mannchen with an eight-page script for a proposed erotic horror feature that would go on to be considered one of his finest films, Necronomicon.
The 2006 Blue Underground release of the film includes “From Necronomicon to Succubus: Interview with Jess Franco” by David Gregory and Bill Lustig which delves into the development of the film. Shipka quotes from the interview:
“I started scouting locations in Spain and Belin and it’s there I met my second co-producer of the film because my partner was Adrian Hoven, but he had an associate a co-producer named Pier Maria Caminnecci. He was very rich, the main stockholder in Siemens. So he had quite a bit of money. And he had a magnificent house. And on his bookshelf, I discovered a book entitled Necronomicon.” Looking for ideas, Franco found a short story in the book that he felt could be translated to film. The problem was the story was only three pages long. Fusing it with a script from a horror movie he’d previously written, Franco came up with a complete screenplay.
There are issues with this narrative. For one, the actual interview on the DVD tells a different and much more involved story about the Necronomicon being an actual book published by the University of Vienna based on an ancient fragment by an Arab named Al Azrad. Weird Tales: Jess Franco meets the Elder Gods describes this as “bullshitting on a heroic scale,” which seems correct. Shipka was paraphrasing and left out all the blatantly myth-making bits. But assuming there is a core of truth there, what book, exactly, could Franco have supposedly found in Caminnecci’s library?
Arkham House had begun to promote translations of Lovecraft’s fiction in languages other than English after World War II; collections appeared in French in the 1950s, and in German, Italian, and Spanish in the mid-1960s (although as a caveat, it should be noted unauthorized translations of English-language Weird Tales were appearing in South America in the late 1930s and 1940s, such as the Argentinian pulp magazine Narraciones Terrorificas). The problem is that none of these collections used the title Necronomicon. Indeed, this was before the rise of the hoax Necronomicons. L. Sprague de Camp’s hoax Al Azif was published in 1973; Schlangekraft would not publish the Simon Necronomiconuntil 1977; The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Namesedited by George Hay appeared in 1978, a full decade after Franco’s film. H. R. Giger’s artbook Necronomicon would also not be published until 1977.
A clue to the puzzle may lie in the story mentioned. Based on length and relevance, the most likely piece would be Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon.” In the mid-1960s, that work was relatively obscure; while it had first seen print as a fan-made pamphlet in 1937, Arkham House did not publish it in book form until Miscellaneous Writingsin 1995, and it isn’t listed in any of the non-English collections or anthologies during the time when Franco might have seen it. However—in 1967, Mark Owings of Mirage Associates published The Necronomicon: A Study, an oversized chapbook that collected what was known about the Necronomicon from what had been published up to that point, including Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon.”
However, there is no occult grimoire to be seen in Franco’s Necronomicon, nor is one referred to in the script. No omniscient narrator conveys the action as if it were some forbidden text, magickal lore plays no part in the story, and there are no Arabs screaming curses to ward off daemonic other-dimensional monstrosities. Essentially, Franco just loved the word, although he did claim that he based the story on a genuine grimoire called “The Necronomicon” discovered in fragmentary form and kept by the University of Vienna! Some observers may put this down to Franco’s taste for teasing reviewers, or his dedication to blurring the line between fact and fiction. If it’s the latter, it’s entirely in keeping with the theme of the film, which is precisely the permeable membrane between reality and fantasy.
Thrower points to why Jess Franco’s Necronomicon is something of a black sheep of Lovecraftian cinema: regardless of where Franco picked up the name, like the hoax grimoires and Giger’s artbook listed about, it is a Necronomicon in name only. There is nothing Lovecraftian in its cinematic DNA.
Except… for about a decade or so, this was the only Necronomicon widely available. It was certainly the only film with the title until the 1993 film Necronomicon: Book of the Dead. However, this is a legacy that might easily be lost on English audiences. In the United States, the film was cut by Terry Van Tell for Titan Productions, Inc., and aside from numerous differences from Franco’s cut of the film, it was also retitled to the much more generic Succubus, negating even the label of a Lovecraftian connection.
Then Ameerican International, who bought the film for the US, Canada, and other territories wanted to change the title. They explained the title Necronomicon was not commercial enough in the US because no one knows what it means. So they adopted the title Succubus. That’s even more bizarre than the original title.
Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden helped make Jess Franco’s reputation, both in terms of controversy and appeal. Franco had successfully “dragged up” an erotic film into something like mainstream prominence by making it a nightmarish art house horror film; a water mark in the emergence of sexploitation cinema that would lead to what has been called Eurotrash or Eurosleaze in the 1970s…and, perhaps Franco’s eventual devolution, his artistic sensibilities increasingly spent low-budget and quasi-pornographic or outright pornographic efforts. While Franco would never revisit Necronomicon directly, he would sometimes reference it in later films.
In Jess Franco’s Lust for Frankenstein (1998), actress Lina Romay wears a Necronomicon t-shirt in the early part of the film. Draculina magazine published a photo-comic adaptation of the film in 1999.
Franco’s Necronomicon was ahead of the curve in another way, which doesn’t get discussed much: the 1960s was a time when Lovecraft cinema was focused on adaptations of existing works like The Shuttered Room (1966). The tangential Lovecraftian tie-in film, the kind that may have only a trivial connection to Lovecraft or his works—but whose connections, however brief and overlooked, are sometimes tantalizing—basically didn’t exist on the big screen until Franco’s Necronomicon was released. While some folks claim Caltiki, The Immortal Monster(1959) or The Quatermass Xperiment(1955) as Lovecraftian films, they speak of themes or vibes, not even a vague connection like a Necronomicon prop-book.
So Franco’s Necronomicon stands as at least a spiritual forebear to works like Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy: Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980, City of the Living Dead), …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldil (1981, The Beyond), and Quella villa accanto al cimitero (1981, The House by the Cemetery). These films have, in turn, inspired others, some without Lovecraft connections such as Saint Ange(2004, House of Voices) to those that are explicitly Lovecraftian such as L’altrove (2000, Darkness Beyond) and Maelstrom – Il figlio dell’altrove (2001, Unknown Beyond). Fulci’s films have also inspired literature like “Phantasmagore” (2021) by H. K. Lovejoy.
That is the nature of influence: an insidious chain of connections; ripples in a pond that echo out far beyond the sight or control of whoever or whatever stirred the waters in the first place. Jess Franco’s Necronomicon may not be Lovecraft’s Necronomicon—but Franco’s Necronomicon is also no less the Necronomicon than Simon’s or H. R. Giger’s, and if it hasn’t quite spawned the cult following as some of the other Necronomicons, it is no less a testament to the enduring influence of Lovecraft’s work, in all of its unexpected permutations.
In Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos, there is a section of about 11 pages tracing the thematic history of tentacles and erotica as it applies to the development of weird fiction. For those curious, go read it. There are citations for those who wish further reading and scholarly sources.
For the purposes of this review, it suffices to say that tentacles have been associated with weird fiction in general since around the turn of the century, and with the Mythos in particular since the days of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore, and August Derleth. Tentacles were depicted as alien and unnatural…especially when, as the popularity of Japanese anime and manga boomed in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States and other markets, tentacle erotica became increasingly more available and conspicuously a part of the erotic vernacular lexicon, even if it remained a niche interest.
Tentacle erotica is often mentioned with an expression of disgust, perversion, and transgression against the natural order, and the beings equipped with tentacles are typically inhuman, malign, and rapacious. Quite literally; “tentacle rape” has become a byword for the whole mode of tentacle erotica. It’s become almost a farcical joke: Tentacle Grape soda is a product that uses the nod-and-wink toward the trope of sexual violation by faceless phallic feelers as a selling point. Many later works have leaned into this and begun to play it for sexual titillation or laughs, as in Booty Call of Cthulhu (2012) by Dalia Daudelin or “Le Pornomicon” (2005) by Logan Kowalsky.
Yet what you don’t often see is a sex-positive take on tentacle sex.
Tentacles and Wedding Bells(2022) by Margaret L. Carter is a combination of two light-hearted and sexy novelettes that had previously been published at Ellora’s Cave, an early 2000s ebook publisher that focused on romance and erotica, and which shut down in 2016. While some might cheer Amazon’s dominant share of the market, this does come at the cost of less variety from smaller independent publishers like Ellora’s Cove. Yet now, they are available once again, this time collected together.
“Tentacles of Love” (2007) focuses on a wedding, where protagonist Lauren meets her future husband Blake’s family—a Mythos-inflected version of the Addams family or the Munsters, with Uncle Dexter from Innsmouth, Aunt Lavinia from Dunwich, Great-Aunt Asenath from Arkham, and of course, her fiancé’s twin brother Wilbur in the attic.
A translucent mound of rainbow-colored bubbles filled the space, emitting blue and violet sparks whenever its surface rippled. A pseudopod oozed outward for a second, then withdrew into the mass, leaving a glittery trail on the floorboards.
Wilbur, it turns out, is a shy, introverted soul who lives on the internet, listens to jazz, and enjoys Japanese anime (“Especially the giant robots and the creatures with tentacles.”) Pretty much like any NEET twenty-something. And Wilbur isn’t the only one with tentacles, as his brother soon reveals. For fans of “The Dunwich Horror” who have guessed at the purpose of Wilbur Whateley’s odd anatomy, M. L. Carter has the answers to your questions.
“Weird Wedding Guest” (2013) is the direct sequel; it’s Lauren and Blake’s wedding, and Wilbur meets bridesmaid Roxanne, who had been corresponding with Wilbur over email. In the dim and distant past of 2013 there was no internet dating service for the spawn of Yog-Sothoth, so the meet-cute is a little awkward…but it works.
Okay, so my email pal is half alien. He’s not really scary when you get past that fact.
There are two reasons that these stories work. First, Margaret L. Carter knows her Lovecraft, and all the in-jokes and even the lore is spot-on. Fans of the Mythos will enjoy the Easter eggs and attention to detail, and the imagination at play. Second, the stories are played straight as spicy romance stories with women protagonists. These aren’t Derlethian pastiches, nor outright farces. These are women who take a great deal of weirdness in stride, and slowly come to explore some novel erotic circumstances…and their emotional attachment to their odd-looking but loveable paramours grows deeper. It’s a familiar story; like Beauty and the Beast, but more domestic.
Yet that’s why it works. Carter plays the tropes of the spicy romance off of the Lovecraftian callbacks beautifully. The sex scenes are creative and original, but more important than that they feel earned. This isn’t a story of sexual assault by eldritch entities, but a sex-positive exploration of new sensations between two willing and considerate partners.
Tentacle and Wedding Bells isn’t cosmic horror, but it is fun and intelligent. Carter is very deliberately subverting expectations in this story; the references to Wilbur’s interest in tentacle porn make a lot of sense for unstable congeries of iridescent bubbles that can exude pseudopods that double as genitalia.
It is nice, after all these years, to see both parts of Tentacles and Wedding Bells (2023) together at last and relatively available, either through Amazon or other retailers.
Alice Marion Hamlet was born 24 April 1897, the only child of Lanna and Grace Hamlet, in Boston, Massachusetts, where she would live most of her life. Most of her life was devoted to music; she was a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, where she also did advanced studies. U.S. Federal census records for 1930, 1940, and 1950 list her profession as “music teacher” or “piano teacher,” and the newspapers in Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire are dotted with notices for her students’ recitals and other notices. Her obituary showed she worked as a music teacher for some 60 years, and never married or had children.
What the census and newspaper data does not show is the other side of Alice M. Hamlet. The literary side of her which found expression in amateur journalism, the reader of fantasy who became a critical influence on H. P. Lovecraft, with whom she corresponded for some years. Exact details of this side of Alice Hamlet are sketchy; none of her letters to Lovecraft or from Lovecraft to her are known to survive, so we are left with a very incomplete picture of their relationship. Yet what we can piece together, through references in Lovecraft’s correspondence and essays, paints a picture of two people who found common interests and enthusiasms.
The first notice we have of Alice M. Hamlet in Lovecraft’s works is a note in the United Amateur for March 1917:
“Pioneers of New England”, an article by Alice M. Hamlet, gives much interesting information concerning the sturdy settlers of New Hampshire and Vermont. In the unyielding struggles of these unsung heroes against the sting of hardship and the asperity of primeval Nature, we may discern more than a trace of that divine fire of conquest which has made the Anglo-Saxon the empire builder of all the ages. […]
[145] “To a Friend”, by Alice M. Hamlet, is particularly pleasing through the hint of the old school technique which its well-ordered phrases convey. The one weak point is the employment of thy, a singular expression, in connexion with several objects; namely, “paper, pen, and ready hand”. Your should have been used. The metre is excellent throughout, and the whole piece displays a gratifying skill on its author’s part.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism” in United Amateur 16, No. 7 (Mar 1917), Collected Essays1.141, 145
Lovecraft had been elected president of the United Amateur Press Association in 1917; based on these comments Alice M. Hamlet was already a member of the United, although David Whittier later claimed to have recruited her in 1919 (see Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany). The comments on her poetry are typical for Lovecraft of the period; he was a stickler for metrical regularity and language, but less expressive of the content of poetry. Perhaps this notice started their correspondence, perhaps that came later.
It interests me to hear of your first perusal of “A Dreamer’s Tales.” Mine was in the fall of 1919, when I had never read anything of Dunsany’s, though knowing of him by reputation. The book had been recommended to me by one whose judgment I did not highly esteem, & it was with some dubiousness that I began reading “Poltarnees—Beholder of Ocean.” The first paragraph arrests me as with an electric shock, & I had not read two pages before I became a Dunsany devotee for life.
By the fall of 1919, Hamlet and Lovecraft were apparently corresponding and such good friends that she began to recommend or lend books to him. An envelope from Hamlet to Lovecraft postmarked 12 October 1919 survives, which attests to the correspondence. Perhaps it was that letter when she informed him that Lord Dunsany was coming to Boston, and invited Lovecraft to come hear him speak.
Lovecraft would recount the adventure in some detail in a letter:
At 7:00 a party consisting of Miss H., her aunt, young Lee, & L. Theobald set out for the great event. Arriving early at the Copley-Plaza, we obtained front seats; so that during the address I sat directly opposite the speaker, not ten feet from him. Dunsany entered late, accompanied & introduced by Prof. George Baker of Harvard. […]
[146] Egged on by her aunt, Miss Hamlet almost mustered up courage enough to ask for an autograph, but weakened at the last moment. Of this more anon. For mine own part, I did not seek a signature; for I detest fawning upon the great. […] Of course, I could have taken the Prov. train at the adjacent Back Bay, but I hate that bleak barn, & wished to get in the train as soon as it was made up; enhancing myself in a seat & beginning to read Dunsany’s “The Gods of Pegãna”, which Miss H. had kindly lent me. The H.’s invited me to stay all night, but I am a home-seeking soul & the hour was not late. […]
[147] The one sequel to the lecture does not concern me, but deserves narration (an unconsciously egotistical sentence!). Mss H. could not quite give up the idea of an autograph, so on the following day wrote a letter to Dunsany, enclosing several tokens of esteem for him & for his wife; the greatest of which was a genuine autograph letter of Abraham Lincoln. Soon afterward she received a most courteous reply from His Lordship, written personally with his celebrated quill, & containing a pleasant enclosed note from Lady Dunsany! Of this letters from so great an author, Miss H. is justly proud in the extreme; & she will doubtless retain it as a treasure of priceless worth. I will here present a verbatim transcription!
“My dear Miss Hamlet:—
Thank you very much for your kind letter & present, & for the charming little presents to my wife. I had not seen the Lincoln letter before, & I am very glad to have it. It is a stately letter, & above all, it is full of human kindness; & I doubt if any of us by any means can achieve anything better than that.
The aunt was Eva Thompson, who lived with Alice and her parents in Dorchester; “young Lee” is unidentified; and “L. Theobald” was one of Lovecraft’s pseudonyms. As well as the Lincoln letter, Alice M. Hamlet had sent Dunsany a copy of the Tryout (Nov 1919) that contained Lovecraft’s poem “To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany.” Dunsany replied graciously to this poetic dedication with a letter that was published in the Tryout (Dec 1919). The episode also produced an unexpected sequel:
Well, I got news this trip, fellas! EDWARD JOHN MORETON DRAX PLUNKETT, 18th BARON DUNSANY, is the 1920 Laureate Judge of Poetry for the United Amaeur Press Association! Yep—’s true! I thought of the thing a month or two ago, but did not dare write Ed. THen I decided that he might prove kind if he letter came from one with whom he had previously corresponded, so I asked Miss Hamlet to write him, which she did ℅ the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau. For a long time no answer came, and we gave him up for lost. Miss Durr asked asked me to find another judge, and I wrote a Capt. Fielding-Reid of Baltimore, one of the Bookfellows. But Friday Miss Hamlet received a telegram from Ed accepting the post!!!
Miss Durr is Mary Faye Durr, president of the UAPA for the 1919-1920 term. Alice Hamlet later gave her impressions of Lovecraft and the Dunsany lecture:
From then on I was one of the “amateurs”. Eventually I put out a little mimeographed paper in conjunction with a John Smith of Orondo, Washington. It was probably through that little literary effort that Mr. Lovecraft became interested in my work. He was very helpful and friendly in his criticisms and suggestions and I greatly appreciated it. But on to Mr. Lovecraft himself: As I remember him he was tall and large-boned—with a long jaw—or perhaps I should say chin—from the lower lip downward. He was rather dark complexioned and was extremely pale. Evidently he was not in very good health. He had severe headaches and never was known to go far from his home—except to hear Lord Dunsany at my invitation. Mr. Lovecraft’s style of writing was highly imaginative as was Dunsany’s and I thought Mr. Lovecraft would greatly enjoy hearing the Irish poet. There was this difference between the writers’ literary output—Lovecraft resembled Edgar Allan Poe, with his stark and wild imaginings: Dunsany wrote in almost Biblical style, with prose that was almost poetry. Mr. Lovecraft’s vocabulary was very extensive, at times Johnsonian, and his letters were long and examples of a skilled writer who knew what he wanted to say and how to say it. The attendance at the Dunsany lecture was surely a milestone in his life—and a great inspiration to me and one of my treasured memories. The young man who went with us was Ed Lee. He was not “literary” and probably Mr. Lovecraft and I were both a sort of gentle amusement to him!
As far as I can remember, he (Lovecraft) went back to Providence the night of the Dunsany lecture. He was immensely impressed and I can well imagine the occasion was a spur to his writing professionally. I never considered Mr. Lovecraft handsome and I am sure he was never interested in me as a girl! We merely had similar tastes which made for a congenial acquaintance. He was always courteous—“the old school gentleman”—although he must have been in the early thirties (his age) when I knew him.
This lecture and its aftermath were not the end of Lovecraft and Hamlet’s association, which continued through their mutual involvement in the United. Hamlet herself was one of the manuscript managers for the association, along with Olga Zeeb. When Lovecraft addressed a recruit to the amateur organization, he wrote:
I trust you will call upon our MS. Managers, Misses Hamlet & Zeeb, whenever you need copy.
The culmination of their growing friendship occurred 4-5 July 1920, when Lovecraft came to Boston to attend a gathering of amateurs who could not attend that year’s national convention in Cleveland. It was the first time since 1901 that he had slept under someone else’s roof away from home (LWH49-50)—as a guest of Alice M. Hamlet (chaperoned by her aunt); Edith Miniter amusingly referred to the arrangement in her coverage of the get-together:
I was tucked up in my crib hours before the house was still. Mrs. THompson and her niece, Miss Hamlet, took Mr. Lovecraf with them to Dorchester, ’cause he said he’d just go[t] to have a “quiet room to himself,” and there’s no such thing here, though there’s 18 rooms and 6 halls in this establishment.
Edith Miniter, “Epgephi Maisuings” in Epgephi (Sep 1920)
Perhaps the book was a gift on this occasion, or soon after as thanks for her hospitality. By the end of the year, Lovecraft noted:
Our new Second Vice-President, Miss Alice M. Hamlet, is taking a post-graduate course at the New England Conservatory of Music, and bids fair to become one of Boston’s most accomplished musical instructors.
H. P. Lovecraft, “News Notes” in United Amateur 20, No. 2 (November 1920), Collected Essays 1.264
Despite her studies, Hamlet was apparently still active in amateur journalism, and even worked to recruit new members such as Myrta Alice Little, who would also become one of Lovecraft’s correspondents.
For securing Miss Little as a member, credit is due to our energetic Second Vice-President, Alice M. Hamlet.
H. P. Lovecraft, “News Notes” in United Amateur 20, No. 3 (January 1921), Collected Essays1.268
On 17 August 1921, Lovecraft made another trip to Boston to visit his amateur friends. At this point, political divisions between the United and National Amateur Press Associations had risen (and within the United itself), which made for a bit of awkwardness when visiting. Lovecraft wrote of the trip:
The Hub Club meeting was yesterday, but on account of the increasing political gap betwen the (Nationalite) Hub element & the United, she set Wednesday as the day for conferring at length with the United element—W. V. Jackson, Miss Hamlet, Mrs. McMullen, &c. Naturally, the United Day was my day! The conference was to be held at 3 p.m. at the Curry School of Expression on Huntington Ave. near the village square—just across the street from Mr. Copley Plaza’s boarding house where I heard Dunsany lecture in 1919. This hour would have been very convenient for me; but Miss Hamlet, who had also been notified, asked me to precede the event with a Dorchester call—since she did not care to attend the session for fear of meeting some of the National members whom she detests so thoroughly. Alas for the complexity of local feuds! […]
Reaching Back Bay at 1:44, I proceeded to Dorchester for a brief call of courtesy—when lo! I found that my tardiness had set awry a disconcerting amount of preparation which had been made, all unknown to me, in my honour. It seems that the Hamlets had arranged a flying motor trip to Quincy to see poor Mrs. Bell the impoverished invalid, & that they had waited for me until just six minutes before my belated arrival; finally departing lest they disappoint their aged hostess. As a matter of prosaic fact, my loss of this trip caused me no very profound grief; but the Dorcastrians seemed amazingly disappointed. The aunt, Mrs. Thompson, insisted on calling up Miss H. at the Quincy City Home, & Miss H. appeared to view the exploded schedule as little short of calamitious. Considering my insignificance, such concern was of course flattering—but I could not politely leave the telephone & proceed to Copley Square till I had consumed to make another Boston trip before Labour Day, for which the Hamlets wish to prepare some picnic or special event to make up for the present fiasco. Such super-hospitality is very pleasingvbut it does not pay any railway fares! Incidentally—Miss H. has taken upon herself the humane task of trying to rescue Mrs Bell from the institution which so humiliates her. She is trying to look up Bell relatives—the family is old & prominent—& to interest the Uniterian church to which Mrs. B. belongs. A worthy task, though possibly a futile one.
Lovecraft did manage to visit the Hamlets later on the trip:
And speaking of bores—as I puffed out of Haverhill the Hamlet call still lay ahead of me. I had given a forewarning that I might be “unavoidably” delayed till evening, and hoped my prospective hosts would not do anything elaborate—but Gawd ‘elp us! When I finally reached there via B. & M., elevated, and surface car, I found that they had a near-conventions tagged for me! There was an ambitious dinner of lamb and sundry fixings, and many reproaches at my “unavoidable” tardiness. As a local delegate Miss Hamlet had unearthed a literary proteged of hers—the Mildred LaVoie whose name has lingered inactively on our lists since 1916, and who is a young person of undistinguished aspect and ancestry; not uncomely, but more suggestive of the artless nymph than of the fictional titan. This quiet and unassuming individual writes stories, but is afraid to send them anywhere—even to TRYOUT—for publication; hence has remained an amateur nonentity for five years despite the efforts of Miss Hamlet to bring her genius to the world’s notice. I was not vey enthusiastic about the process of LaVoian assimilation till after the maid in question had departed, and Miss H. produced a story of hers which she had secured surreptitiously. Then I perceived that the work was not half bad in its way—shewing at least clear observation, command of detail, and a keener picture of the subject matter than mere words. It is surely with printing, and I shall accommodate Miss Hamlet by placing it somewhere where its appearance will duly surprise its over-modest creator—Lawson’s WOLVERINE ought to stand for it. But after all, I was paid for my politeness in making the Dorcastrian detour. Just before I beat it for the 11:45 I was given the loan of a new book which I am told is the msot horrible collection of short stories recently issued! It is called “The Song of the Sirens” [1919], and is by one Edward Lucas White, who claims he dreamed all the ghoulish things described.
No overnight stay this time around—and this was effectively the final direct reference to Alice M. Hamlet in Lovecraft’s letters, though there are a few oblique references to her having introduced him to the works of Lord Dunsany. Why their friendship seems to peter out at this point is uncertain, although it has to be pointed out that Lovecraft met his future wife Sonia H. Greene at an amateur convention in Boston in 1921, and the rise of that relationship seemed to spell the dwindling of Lovecraft’s connections with women amateur journalists such as Winifred Virginia Jackson.
Rumors have connected Lovecraft romantically to nearly every female amateur journalist of approximately his own age he ever interacted with, but Alice M. Hamlet’s connections with him have been too vague to suggest anything concrete in that direction. They must, at the least, have appreciated one another, as the exchange of books showed a remarkable taste for fantasy and weird fiction, rare enough in amateur circles. Whether the friendship continued in letters for a while, or drifted apart as their lives took different directions, we just don’t know.
It is difficult to overstate the impact Hamlet had on Lovecraft, however unintentionally: Lord Dunsany was a powerful and formative influence on his fiction, one which Lovecraft would emulate, and then work diligently to not emulate and find his own voice, throughout his life. She helped draw him further out of his reclusive shell that he had fallen into after his failure to attend college or find a job as an adult. Amateur journalism put him in touch with people he had never met, exposed him to ideas he had never heard of, challenged his views in many ways—and Alice M. Hamlet was a part of that. With that experience, with that encouragement, Lovecraft would ultimately travel further, experience more, think harder, and write better than he ever had before.
Alas, there is too little to say much more about their friendship. The letters are lost to us.
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.
H. P. Lovecraft was an antisemite. To go into exact detail about the nature of his antisemitic biases and views, the influences from the books he read and people he met, and how those encounters changed the shape and expression of his prejudices over the course of his life, is beyond the scope of this article. It is sufficient to say that from an early age and extending throughout his life Lovecraft held to common stereotypes regarding Jews as an ethnicity and Judaism as a religion, both of which he was largely ignorant about, and largely considered them a people racially and culturally apart from Anglo-Americans like himself. This general antipathy did not extend to friends and loved ones such as Samuel Loveman or his wife Sonia H. Greene, and was rarely made public, but is well-documented in his private letters and influenced views of his peers such as Hugo Gernsback. Lovecraft was not unique in these beliefs, but has left a deep record of personal correspondence which allows more insight into his thoughts on such topics than most of his contemporaries.
We despise people—like the Jews—who purchase life at the price of a resigned heritage, and consent to live in a world which has stamped out their culture as a geographic reality.
For the first 30 years of H. P. Lovecraft’s life, the territory of Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, which supported a primarily Arabic population of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. During the 19th century private efforts to encourage Jewish immigration to the Biblical lands had gained some headway, a movement referred to as “Zionism” (Zion being a Hebrew word for the historical Jerusalem and territory of the Israelites). During World War I, the Ottoman Empire’s alliance with Germany and Austria against France, Britain, and Russia led the British in 1917 to issue the Balfour Declaration, voicing support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The United States echoed this support with the Lodge-Fish Resolution in 1922.
Following the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the British-administered Mandate of Palestine was established in 1920, and Jewish immigration to the region increased—as did opposition from autochthonous Arabic Muslims, Jews, Christians, and other peoples of varied religion and ethnicity who were already living in the region. Immigration and conflict in the region would continue until long after Lovecraft was dead, and eventually lead to the creation of the contemporary state of Israel, but during his life it was an ongoing international issue that cropped up occasionally in his letters. Lovecraft earliest views on the subject are from April 1918, before the end of WWI:
I hope, as you do, that the Jews can be rehabilitated as a nation in Palestine. I doubt their capacity for full self-government, for their physical courage & national (as distinct from religio-cultural) sense has been broken by long dispersal & Aryan contempt; but I fancy they will do very well under British protectorate.
Lovecraft’s normal approach to colonialism was conservative. He acknowledged the fundamental unfairness of the forceful takeover of a territory from the indigenous inhabitants with a general might-makes-right narrative, as when he discussed the European invasion and colonization of North and South America:
It is true that our ancestors ruthlessly pushed the redskin aside—but after all, this is no more than one tribe had always been doing to another. If the English brutally displaced the Iroquois in New York State, so must the Iroquois themselves have displaced the earlier Algonquin tribes when they occupied the region. And so on . . . and so on . . . . Of course, the greater strength and superior weapons of the white man made his case a good deal different—but the general idea is not to be forgotten.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lovecraft was also critical of reparations of territory to dispossessed peoples or of allowing colonies self-governance:
To try to go back and theoretically right all the wrongs of history is simply fantastic. On that basis the Aryan race has no business in Europe at all, since it probably took it by force from Neanderthalers and Mongoloids. When a region is inhabited by its own race and unwillingly held in subjection, there is legitimate ground for revolt; but the idea of dispossessing long-adjusted present populations in favour of remote historical claims—however just in theory—is chimerical to the point of downright criminality.
H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 21 Jan 1933, A Means to Freedom2.531
In effect, Lovecraft might not have encouraged wars of conquest, but once a region had been conquered he was unwilling to change the status quo. With regard to Palestine, this leads to a bit of a philosophical conundrum: one of Lovecraft’s criticisms and stereotypes of Jews was as a people dispossessed of a homeland (e.g. Letters to J. Vernon Shea94) which Lovecraft attributed essentially to cowardice, a stereotype fundamental to his distinction between Jews and “Aryans” like himself:
What we can’t forgive in the Jew is not the tone of his prayers or the size of his nose, but the fact that he is willing to survive under the conditions he accepts. Being weak may not have been his fault—but it is his fault that he is alive & not free & dominant. If we were as weak as he, & could not fight our way to self-respect, we would perish utterly—taunting our foes, virile & unbroken, as the last man fell. That unbrokenness is all that matters to us.
One would think that Lovecraft might then admire any effort by the Jews to re-establish themselves in Palestine, but after the establishment of the Mandate of Palestine, he instead described Jewish revaunchism as a “sentimental claim of the Zionist Jews to essentially Arab-Moslem Palestine” (Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 10 Nov 1932, A Means to Freedom1.484). This is the only direct reference to Zionism in Lovecraft’s letters, although he alludes to it elsewhere as “Palestine” or “the Palestine question.”
Lovecraft favoring Arabic Muslim Palestinians in this matter is not surprising; it was a combination of his long-held antisemitic beliefs coupled with his previously stated anti-revanchist stance—and perhaps a touch of pro-Arabic/Muslim sentiment, as Lovecraft once wrote:
It’s because the Jews have allowed themselves to fill a football’s role that we instinctively hate them. Note how much greater is our respect for their fellow-Semites, the Arabs, who have the high heart—shewn in courage and a laughing sense of beauty—which we emotionally understand and approve.
H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Jr., 21 Aug 1926, Selected Letters2.66
This led Lovecraft to some odd territory in actually disagreeing with the British government, a very rare thing for the anglophile Lovecraft:
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. […] [172]I think the (probably) 100,000 Yankees in Providence ought to be able to say what they choose about Italy without making apologies to Federal Hill (our local Nuova Napoli), & that the (perhaps) 1,000,000 Americans in New York ought to be able to discuss Hitler & Palestine & pork chops without glancing fearfully over their shoulders at a horde of fortune-seeking Yiddish newcomers.
It is notable that this issue of Palestine comes up in Lovecraft’s letters c.1933, which is when Hitler and the Nazis also come to the fore. The rise of the Nazis largely coincides with when Lovecraft begins emphasizing a conspiracy theory of Jewish control of newspapers in New York; this comes up as Lovecraft addresses the point of anti-Nazi articles published in New York papers, which he attributes to Jewish influence in opposition to the rabidly antisemitic Nazis. So this reference to Jewish media influence in his letters, and Lovecraft’s stance on it, is not something he’s volunteering as a general antisemeitc rant, but in answer to a specific point to Shea, who was anti-Nazi. The reference to Palestine is Lovecraft identifying a subject he associates with a pro-Jewish bias.
The British support for Zionism was partially supported by the idea of British Israelism, a belief that the peoples of the British Isles were biologically and/or culturally descended from the Jewish people. The claims gained currency in the 19th century through works like Our Israelitish Origin (1840) and Lost Israel Found in the Anglo-Saxon Race (1886). Lovecraft was aware of the idea, and once joked “[David Van Bush] fondly believes our Saxon stock to be descended from the twelve [sic] lost tribes of Israel!” (Letters to James F. Morton179), but his antisemitism did not permit him to share this belief:
Your theory that Anglo-Saxons are lost Israelites can be punctured in an instant by the facts of ethnology. Semitic races like the Jews & their kindreds have distinctive ethnic traits, none of which appear in the Englishman. The English, on the other hand, are most obviously and positively related to the Aryan Teutonic races of Northern Europe. The anthropological gulf between Jew & Saxon is so great as to be utterly impassable. No common ancestry this side of the Quaternary age is conceivable. They are as different as two white races can possibly be.
Ironically, Lovecraft’s prejudice in this matter and his general atheism led him away from 1930s white supremacist organizations like the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. While some of Lovecraft’s antisemitic and white supremacist prejudices parallel that of the Christian Identity movement of the time, Lovecraft never attempted to provide a theological rationale for his antisemitism, white supremacist beliefs, or Zionism.
The question may be asked how Zionism impacted Lovecraft’s relations with his wife Sonia, who was herself a Jewish immigrant to the United States. The short answer is, we don’t know; their letters do not survive, and Sonia’s memoir of the marriage does not mention it. Perhaps it never came up or played little role in their relationship. However, we know Sonia was at least nominally in favor of Zionism, because of a letter to the editor that was published:
By 1930, Sonia and Howard were long separated, but it gives an indication that Lovecraft was at least intimately acquainted with someone who held opposite views on the subject than himself.
Jewish immigration to the Mandate of Palestine is an exceedingly minor topic in Lovecraft’s vast corpus of letters, which reflects his general lack of knowledge or interest in the subject. His few thoughts in his letters do not express any particularly unusual argument or exceptional insight. Nor did it find any expression in his fiction. Lovecraft did not live to see the horrors of the Holocaust, the formation of the state of Israel, the struggle for Palestinian statehood, or the immediate beginnings of hostilities currently ongoing in the region.
For readers today, the relevance of Lovecraft’s comments on the subject is as a representative slice of history—like a tree ring from a fossilized stump that shows the effects of a distant volcanic eruption. How these events, long ago and far away for so many, still touch the lives of so many, and continue to be leave scars that can be seen and felt down into the present day. So while many readers might be interested in Lovecraft’s specific thoughts, it may help to think of this as an expression of how an average person of Lovecraft’s day thought and expressed themselves on this topic. Lovecraft not as an important historic personage, but only as a core sample into a historic period.
In literature, as in life, there are two motifs: love and death. Everything else is an offshoot of one or the other; and, Oscar Wilde to the contrary, death is surely stranger than love. All over the world the vampire legend—the sotry of the dead who will not die—is found, varied in setting and circumstances, but basically the same. This book is comprised, with a few exceptions, of tales of the dead who return, animated by an unnatural and unhallowed life. No mere apparition can chill in quite the same fashion as the very corpse itself, now an alien and a stranger, but continuing in its old habit, clinging to its old existence.
There are one or two vampires included herein not as yet of the undead. Montague Summers notes cases of the living vampire, and Hans Ewers writes of a vampire suffering from a disease of the blood whereby the victim is forced to seek living blood to sustain herself. One of these stories is, possibly, of such a case. There is included, also, a plant vampire. Other stories are of the dead who return with a definite purpose, a wrong to avenge, or a mission to fulfill.
Most of these stories satisfy the M. R. James condition that the apparition should be “purely malevolent and odious.”
Elinore Blaisdell is not well-remembered today, and when she is recalled it is often as an artist and a poet. Douglas A. Anderson has put together a sketch of her life from genealogical sources, and there is little to add to the basic facts. Her apparent sole venture as an anthology editor is Tales of the Undead: Vampires and Visitants (1947), which at a glance appears to be a somewhat unremarkable theme anthology—but context is important.
Weird Tales had bad luck with anthologies. Their initial effort, The Moon Terror and Other Stories (1927), compiled by editor Farnsworth Wright from the execrable first years of the magazine, failed to sell and even now reading copies can be had quite affordably. The British firm of Selwyn & Blount began publishing the Not at Night series under editor Christine Campbell Thomson in 1925, with the contents largely culled from Weird Tales. The last volume (an omnibus) published in 1937, further volumes apparently cut off by World War II, though it inspired many imitators.
Weird Tales writers E. Hoffmann Price and W. Kirk Mashburn enlisted the aid of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and Henry S. Whitehead to pitch their own Weird Tales reprint anthology in the early 1930s, but this effort too came to naught. Arkham House began publishing collections and anthologies drawn from Weird Tales in 1939, and co-founder August Derleth found a niche as an anthologist of weird and science fiction as well, with collections like Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1946), Dark of the Moon (1947), The Night Side (1947), and The Sleeping and the Dead: Thirty Uncanny Tales (1947). Those anthologies have been printed and reprinted, often re-issued in affordable paperback editions, which themselves have become collectible.
By contrast, Tales of the Undead is a one-off. It came from nowhere, had a single edition, and apparently was never resurrected in paperback or in any cheap reprint edition. More than that, it was an early example of the themed anthology; Blaisdell’s preface is clear that she had chosen stories that were about vampires or vampirism in some fashion—and that is a different approach than either Thompson or Derleth, who may have been looking for creepiness or excellence, but were not trying to put together a book of just werewolf stories or the like. The closest one could get to that would be rather dry “non-fiction” books like Montague Summer’s The Vampire, His Kith and Kin (1928).
Contemporary readers noted the difference:
Her book features a special brand of supernatural horror, the vampire and the undead. Count Dracula might well be pleased at the advances his tribe has made in a few decades; for there are no less than 20 short stories, two longer tales, and one novelette on this single macabre theme. But the reader need not fear plot-limitations. Some striking variants have been made on the gruesome motif, and it is not every vampire that stalks the streets at night in a long black cape. For example, there is a tale of a vampire plant, Clark Ashton Smith’s “Seed from the Sepulchre,” which will cause more than one uneasy ripple up and down the spine, and others of rare additions to an unholy brotherhood we pray must always be confined to the realm of fiction.
Arthur F. Hillman, “A Volume of Vampires” in Fantasy Review #6 (1947)
Not everybody understood the advantages of a themed anthology. One contemporary newspaper account complained:
Miss Blaisdell has limited her subject too much. In doing this she has omitted the best horror stories of all. “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W. W. Jacobs belongs in a collection of this kind. Surprisingly enough, there is nothing by Poe or Hawthorne here, nor are there any contributions by the Romantic Gothic novelists, notably Mary Shelley and Mrs. Radcliffe.
That the reviewer was probably not up to date on their weird anthologies is pretty clear; he was expecting a collection of old familiar horrors, not a themed selection.
Hillman also noted that there were “many gems from Weird Tales,” and this is true. Of the 23 tales in the book, 10 originally appeared in Weird Tales. A few others such as Washington Irving’s “The Adventure of the German Student” (1824) and “Amour Dure” (1887) by Vernon Lee were in the public domain and free to use without permission, so really more than half of the more recent tales in the book come directly from the pages of the Unique Magazine. Which is no doubt why in the acknowledgments Blaisdell added:
The editor wishes to thank Dorothy McIlwraith and Lamont Buchanan of Weird Tales for their gracious cooperation.
McIlwraith took over as editor of Weird Tales in 1940. Buchanan was associate editor under her. It’s worth considering whether either of those two had any influence on the story selection, but a glance at the table of contents notes that none of the stories were published in Weird Tales under McIlwraith. In truth, there was a bit of a changing of the guard at Weird Tales with the death of Robert E. Howard (1936), Lovecraft (1937), and then Farnsworth Wright (1940), and Weird Tales had difficulty attracting talent. In one letter dated 30 August 1946, Buchanan wrote to August Derleth:
Blaisdell must have dealt with August Derleth too, since several of the stories were reprinted by permission of Arkham House; unfortunately, those letters don’t appear to survive. Still, it goes to show the lengths that Blaisdell went to get good stories for her collection, including both prominent authors of an older generation (J. Sheridan LeFanu, Vernon Lee, Washington Irving, Theophile Gautier, Lafcadio Hearn, etc.) and masters of the early 20th century weird tale (M. R. James, Edith Wharton, H. R. Wakefield, E. F. Benson, H. P. Lovecraft, F. Marion Crawford, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, Seabury Quinn, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, etc.). Some of them, like Robert Bloch, have gone on to enduring fame, while others like Chandler W. Whipple have languished in relative obscurity.
Despite having a relatively formidable roster of authors and getting several newspaper reviews, I suspect that Tales of the Undead sank out of sight largely because the field of the hardbacked horror anthology was already getting crowded—three of Derleth’s anthologies were also published in 1947—and Tales was an all-reprint anthology, and at that not always the most notable reprints. While Blaisdell displayed excellent taste, it has to be wondered if picking some of the more prominent and popular vampire stories from Weird Tales like Edmond Hamilton’s “The Vampire Master” might have led to greater popularity. Then again, perhaps not.
The final thing that sets Blaisdell’s anthology apart is that she illustrated it herself—and many of these scratchboard illustrations are absolutely gorgeous, stark and detailed, similar in some ways to Lynd Ward’s illustrations for The Haunted Omnibus(1937) or Illustration Portfolio No. 1 (1925) by The Arthur Wesley Dow Association, and worth in many ways the price of Tales of the Undead. A few of these, just to give just a taste:
Tales of the Undeadis ultimately a monument to both Elinore Blaisdell’s good taste in weird fiction, and her artistic skill and sensibility. She stepped away from the idea of a weird fiction collection as a kind of horrific miscellany and attempted to show the variety and depths of a particular theme—decades before we would get collections like Rivals of Dracula: A Century of Vampire Fiction(1978) or Weird Vampire Tales: 30 Blood-Chilling Stories From The Weird Fiction Puklps(1992). In an era when an avid reader could fill shelves with anthologies specifically about vampires or other specific flavors of the undead, it is important to recognize one of the innovators among the anthologists of her day.
The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake.
Lovecraftian literature is often transgressive by literary standards. Many works are not stories or plot-driven narratives in any conventional sense, and individual works have sometimes been called prose poems or mood pieces. This is fitting when you think of Lovecraft’s assertion that the weird phenomenon was the center of the story, rather than any central character—something that can be seen in “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Call of Cthulhu.”
“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus is little more than a single scene, like the prelude to a post-apocalyptic film. Like many Lovecraftian tales, there isn’t much to the plot, characterization is limited, and the focus is on the weird phenomenon more than anything else. Yet there is also something Lynchian in its construction, the establishment of that “American weirdness” that Lovecraft noted in Poe, the buried emotions and resignations that underlay everyday life.
August was always hot as sin, and Bea had been disappointed to discover that the heat would redden her skin on the Nebraskan prairie even more than it did back in Boston
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
There is that sense of loss and regret in Bea, who if not our main character is at least our prime witness for what is about to happen. The establishing shot of Bea is reminiscent of Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth, with its vast open sky and unspoken longings. The setting, a sod house on the Nebraskan prairie, is as much part of the story as Dunwich is for “The Dunwich Horror.”
“Get in the cellar! It’s a tornado!”
James dragged her towards the house. Bea kept her eyes on the sky and allowed her gaze to drift, just in time to see the cloud over town extend a long, dark finger towards the ground. When it touched, a puff of dust exploded into the air.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
While the characters in the story grope toward rational explanations, like the characters in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” it doesn’t really work when what’s going on is inherently irrational. The reactions of characters in a horror movie only occur because they do not know they are in a horror movie; it is the audience who knows going in that the situation is not normal, who has seen films and read books like this before and is familiar with the tropes.
In other hands, “One Night in August” could have been extended in any number of ways. Like a low-budget film that quickly corrals all of its characters into a single room, an entire long drama could have been played out in the cellar as Bea and her family wait for things to pass and the sun to shine again. Tensions could rise, long-buried emotions could come to the surface, the seedy underbelly of the family could have been exposed and brought to light like a vivisected frog, its limbs pinned, guts on display for curious children to poke at. Instead, Daucus opts for a swifter ending, a more overt horror, a swifter destruction. Nothing wrong with that, it’s an artistic choice.
If there’s a criticism to be made about the story, it’s that some of the tropes are a little too familiar. For much of the story, Bea is framing things through her own perspective, but near the end of the tale things shift into a kind of gear normally only seen in Italian horror movies in the 1970s and 80s. While it is weird to think of it this way, we as a culture have developed a thematic language for cosmic sin. The idea that something from outside wants or needs a sacrifice, that it requires a priest or cult to serve those wants and needs…it would have been been more horrific in many ways if it had the raging, uncaring, impersonal destruction of a tornado. Something that couldn’t be bargained with, or fought, too alien to be cruel.
But all she could do was feel it happen.
Cassandra Daucus, “One Morning in August”
What works about this story is that it is a cut gem. While it may tie in thematically to a whole corpus of Lovecraftian literature, it stands on its own quite well as an effort to define a single mood in a single scene. Complete unto itself.
“One Morning in August” (2023) by Cassandra Daucus was published by Psychotoxin Press, and can be purchased here.
Possibilities hinted from under the jaded metropolitan certainties in his mind; old and eldritch ancestral memories, back when beautiful virgins were wrapped in glorious robes and set out on a rock in the sunlight to be cheered by the people—and to await the dragon. The beastling was no dragon, he knew. He was a brief scrawl of hideous calligraphy write on the world, a blunt and blasphemous word.
Erin Brown, “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022), 27
Today, Cthulhu can be quaint. Even snuggly. The majesty and fantasy of the vast, alien horror has been worn away by decades of merchandising, diluted by endless pastiches, a multitude of jokes. Hundreds of artists have tried their hands at depicting the supposedly undepictable, and the general consensus is “giant squid guy.” Often with a crotch as smooth and featureless as a Ken doll. After all, a vast, ancient entity may be one thing, but a penis? Utterly unacceptable. There may be children present. You can’t put that on a plushy.
(You absolutely can. Some people have. I digress.)
Cthulhu doesn’t have to be neutered. Like every mode and genre of horror, there are folks who say Lovecraftian horror isn’t scary anymore, if it ever was. It is ridiculous, it isn’t real, doesn’t raise a bead of cold sweat, no feces exits the rectum without permission, etc. etc. Most of these reactions are to the sanitized, Ken doll version of Cthulhu; the safe version they’ve seen a thousand times in comics and on stickers and t-shirts. Scratch that surface, and in truth, the shudders were largely always metaphorical. Few folks had nightmares about Cthulhu when the ink was still fresh on the pulp paper of Weird Tales, just as few folks died of fright when they read Dracula in the 1890s, or saw it i movie theaters in the 1930s. The idea that horror is supposed to scare the reader is essentially misguided.
At its best, weird fiction gives the reader’s imagination the tools so they can scare themselves. The realization of something, either from a dry but technically accurate description or an elaborate and expensive computer-generated image, can never approach the power of suggestion. In the case of Lovecraftian literature in particular, the suggestion is that there is something unknown and perhaps unknowable, that is so much weirder and worse than whatever familiar horrors we’re used to dealing with.
In one age, the epitome of horror may have been the vampire or werewolf; a few movies and dozens of shorts stories and novels later, and folks can confidently talk about silver bullets and crucifixes, blessed swords and fire, lasers and giant mirrors. The fun may still be there, but familiarity robs these creatures of the element of surprise. Of course, there are always exotic horrors—from other cultures, other subgenres. Crossing mythologies, crossing genres, is an old trick. How does a European exorcist deal with a penanggalan or yōkai? Oooh, what happens if a Sumerian vampire invades medieval Japan?
This is the philosophical underpinning of Erin Brown’s “A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” in FIYAH #22 (2022). On the surface, an urban fantasy predator stumbles into a different genre, and it takes them a while to figure that out. The beastling’s ignorance is almost self-destructive, but for the audience, it’s instructive. Readers equate “eldritch” with “scary thing with tentacles” all too often; they snicker and make jokes about Japanese anime, hentai, and naughty schoolgirls. Silver bullets are to werewolves what naughty schoolgirls are to Cthulhu; albatrosses around their necks. Ideas that serve to lessen and diminish the original horror by making their limits and habits more defined, more rational…more knowable.
Brown gets it. What’s better, Brown can write it. While Lovecraftian horror started out in a rather prudish period, and Lovecraft himself asserted that “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,” etc., more recent generations tend to remember that bloody bones can serve a purpose. There is nothing wrong with gore, or a little body horror, especially if they serve the needs of the story and are carried off with sufficient skill. There is a certain grounding that comes with the very frank reminder that people may piss themselves when they’re scared, that murders are very rarely clean events that leave a neat and bloodless corpse.
Ultimately, the beastling’s idea of himself as “a brief and hideous scrawl” is more accurate than he knew. Like most creatures, the beastling sees itself as the center of its own narrative; a singular horror in a big world. It cannot conceive of a greater horror than itself…and that lack of imagination is, at heart, what the story is about. To look out into the darkness, see the shadows play, and not wonder at what strange shapes may cast them isn’t just dull…in some cases, it’s damn near fatal.
“A Brief and Hideous Scrawl” by Erin Brown was published in FIYAH #22 (2022).
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 