A Short History of the LGBTQ+ Mythos

This is a brief history of Mythos fiction by and about LGBTQ+ people. “Mythos” in this context refers specifically to the artificial mythology created by H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, popularly known as the Lovecraft Mythos, and then extended by subsequent authors as the Cthulhu Mythos. To a much lesser degree, it touches on Lovecraftian fiction and cosmic horror by LGBTQ+ authors, but this is focused much more narrowly on Lovecraft, Cthulhu, & the associated Mythos.

[…] and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”

LGBTQ+ folks have existed throughout history, though changing gender and sexual norms, and shifting understanding of human biology, psychology, and sexuality, have changed how LGBTQ+ folks were historically understand and identified. H. P. Lovecraft, for example, never used the term “transgender” because it hadn’t been coined until several decades after his death, and when he used the term “queer” he meant odd, strange, or weird.

Yet even if Lovecraft didn’t have the same vocabulary to describe LGBTQ+ folks that people do today, they still existed. He met and interacted with them. LGTBQ+ folks had their part to play in his life and the development and dissemination of the Lovecraft Mythos, and after his death LGBTQ+ authors have played an increasing part in the expansion and redefining of the Cthulhu Mythos.

This brief history is primarily a quick history of the involvement of LGTBQ+ folks with the Mythos; it cannot be and does not pretend to be comprehensive, but aims to provide a quick overview of the last century and change.

Lovecraft, Homophobia, & LGBTQ+ (1914-1937)

I guess it is true that homosexuality is a rare theme for novels—partly because public attention was seldom called to it (except briefly during the Wilde period) until a decade ago, & partly because any literary use of it always incurs the peril of legal censorship. As a matter of fact—although of course I always knew that paederasty was a disgusting custom of many ancient nations—I never heard of homosexuality as an actual instinct till I was over thirty…which beats your record! It is possible, I think that this perversion occurs more frequently in some periods than in others—owing to obscure biological & psychological causes. Decadent ages—when psychology is unsettled—seem to favour it. Of course—in ancient times the extent of the practice of paederasty (as a custom which most simply accepted blindly, without any special inclination) cannot be taken as any measure of the extent of actual psychological perversion. Another thing—many nowadays overlook the fact that there are always distinctly effeminate types which are most distinctly not homosexual. I don’t know how psychology explains them, but we all know the sort of damned sissy who plays with girls & who—when he grows up—is a chronic “cake-eater”, hanging around girls, doting on dances, acquiring certain feminine mannerisms, intonations, & tastes, & yet never having even the slightest perversion of erotic inclinations.
H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 14 Aug 1933, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 146

Homosexuality, bisexuality, transgender and queer identities were publicly, scientifically, and often legally seen as a sexual perversion and mental illness during H. P. Lovecraft’s lifetime (1890-1937), and for some time beyond that. Lovecraft’s experiences with LGBTQ+ folks reflect the social norms, taboos, and medical stigmas that were attached to any sexuality or gender identity that veered away from the heterosexual cisgender norm, and consequently the understanding of these sexualities, identities, and issues was often very poor.

In the quote above, for example, it can clearly be seen that Lovecraft was confusing sexuality and gender identity, and conflating homosexuality with pedophilia (as many bigots continue to do today). Lovecraft was raised in a culture that praised masculinity and masculine identity, and often deprecated undesirable individuals as “effeminate.” To Lovecraft, it was perfectly in keeping to assume that gay men would desire to have sex with other men because they were effectively women in men’s bodies (Uranian). This perceived deviation could be the subject of mockery, and even violence:

Have you seen that precious sissy that I met in Cleveland? Belknap says he’s hit the big town, and that he’s had some conversation with him. When I saw that marcelled what is it I don’t know whether to kiss it or kill it! It used to sit cross-legged on the floor at Elgin’s and gaze soulfully upward. It didn’t like me and Galpin—too horrid, rough and mannish for it!
H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 8 Jan 1924, Letters to James F. Morton 63

Lovecraft met relatively few individuals that were “out” during his lifetime, because individuals who weren’t closeted faced violence and/or legal persecution, as was the case of Oscar Wilde. Lovecraft is not personally known to have acted on this information beyond a few brief passages in his letters. When critics and biographers talk about Lovecraft’s homophobia, this is what they are talking about. It isn’t entirely clear if Lovecraft was even aware of the sexuality of his gay friends and colleagues, and it is worth mentioning the most prominent and important ones briefly.

Samuel Loveman (1887-1976) was a gay Jewish poet, bookman, and amateur journalist. Lovecraft stumbled across Loveman’s work in 1917 and admired his poetry, and the two began a long correspondence and friendship, with Lovecraft often praising and boosting Loveman’s work. The two finally met in 1921 in New York City, both of them invited there by Sonia H. Greene (Lovecraft’s future wife). In 1922 Lovecraft visited Loveman in Cleveland, where he met Loveman’s friend the gay poet Hart Crane (1899-1932), and others in their circle, including composer Gordon Hatfield, the “precious sissy” in the above letter. In 1924 Lovecraft and Greene eloped to New York; Loveman and Crane moved there as well, with Loveman as Lovecraft’s upstairs neighbor for a period. In time, the marriage failed, and Lovecraft moved back to Providence, RI.

Lovecraft never directly referenced Loveman’s homosexuality, and may have been ignorant of it; Loveman would go on to write “To Satan” (1923) dedicated to Lovecraft, and “To Mr. Theobald” (1926). They remained friends until Lovecraft’s death. It is also unclear if Lovecraft knew of Crane’s sexuality, although there are hints in Lovecraft’s letters that suggested he knew, and Frank Belknap Long wrote in a memoir: “Howard and the rest knew of it, but that didn’t affect their friendship with Crane” (Long Memories and Other Writings 56). Ultimately, Lovecraft and Crane were only passing acquaintances.

Amateur journalism also included several other LGBTQ+ numbers, most eminently lesbian Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986) and her gay associate Roswell George Mills (1896-1966). Gidlow and Lovecraft were presidents of rival factions of the United Amateur Press Association, and while they had little direct contact, his letters give evidence that Lovecraft was certainly aware of them and their publication of the amateur journal Les Mouches Fantastiques, which he was critical of. Whether Lovecraft was aware they were homosexuals is not clear. In any event, these too were brief contacts that had little effect on Lovecraft.

The most substantial LGBTQ+ friends Lovecraft had were August Derleth (1909-1971) and Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951). They shared a love of weird fiction and an appreciation of Weird Tales, and were regular correspondents for the rest of his life. Together, both men would have a profound impact on the life and legacy of H. P. Lovecraft, and shape Mythos fiction for decades to come.

August Derleth began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in 1926. In her biography Derleth: Hawk…and Dove (1997) by Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky made the claim that Derleth was a closeted bisexual and had carried on affairs with both men and women. The evidence to support the claim of Derleth’s sexual relationships with men is a bit scanty, but Derleth’s letters with Lovecraft (Essential Solitude) and Ramsey Campbell (Letters to Arkham) show Derleth was at least more cognizant of and conversant with homosexuality than Lovecraft.

R. H. Barlow was younger than Derleth when he began corresponding with Lovecraft in 1931. In 1934, on one of his trips to Florida, Lovecraft was invited to stay with Barlow and his family—where Lovecraft found out his friend’s true age. Lovecraft would visit the Barlows again in 1935, and young Barlow would visit Lovecraft in New York in 1935 and Providence in 1936. If Lovecraft was aware that Barlow was homosexual, he gave no hint in his letters, although Derleth appears to have suspected Barlow’s orientation since 1936.

Before his death in 1937, Lovecraft had left instructions naming the teenage Barlow his literary executor; and Barlow’s efforts to have Lovecraft’s papers deposited at Brown University’s John Hay Library preserved letters, manuscripts, and other materials that would form the core of Lovecraft scholarship to the present day. August Derleth worked with his friend Donald Wandrei to preserve Lovecraft’s literary legacy by bringing his work to print; and when major publishing houses turned them down they founded Arkham House in 1939 to publish Lovecraft’s fiction and letters. As an author, editor, publisher, biographer, and critic, Derleth worked tirelessly to promote Lovecraft’s work and promote his legend.

Given the stigma attached to LGBTQ+ issues during his lifetime, it’s no surprise that early Mythos fiction contains almost nothing directly pertaining to sexuality or gender issues during Lovecraft’s lifetime. The major exception is “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1937), the last of his stories published in Weird Tales during his lifetime.

From Lovecraft to Stonewall (1937-1969)

Lovecraft met and was influenced by many people in his life, and that no doubt included more LGBTQ+ folks than just those mentioned above. Suggestions that fellow-writers and correspondents like Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932) and Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) were gay generally lack evidence, but the very fact those claims are put forward showcases an awareness of and interest—some would say an obsession—with identifying closeted homosexuals as part of the Lavender scare moral panic. Nor was Lovecraft immune from speculation about his sex life and sexuality:

His stories are sexless and one supposes the man was nearly so, all but mothered into impotency. One can say that almost all of his adult relationships were homosexual, if the word is intended in the blandest sense: there is no sign of strong sexual impulse of any kind. He was “not at ease” with women. His marriage was a mistake and a quick failure. He was disturbed by even mildly sexual writing.
Winfield Townley Scott, “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944) in Lovecraft Remembered 26

Nearly every word of that is factually incorrect, but it showcases the thinking of the time. The decades after Lovecraft’s death were not good ones in which to be LGTBQ+, as persecution and discrimination heightened after World War II. R. H. Barlow committed suicide in Mexico at the beginning of 1951; one of the possible reasons he took his own life was an attempt to blackmail him over his homosexual lifestyle. We may never know if that is true, but it emphasized the duress under which LGBTQ+ folks lived.

Derleth continued tirelessly with Arkham House. Working with Wandrei and Barlow, Derleth worked to shape Lovecraft’s literary legacy with collections of his fiction, letters, and essays, as well as memoirs about him. With Barlow’s absence or compliance on most matters related to Lovecraft and an agreement with Lovecraft’s surviving aunt, Arkham House had de facto control of the Lovecraft copyrights—and Derleth used that to bluster, sometimes threatening legal action, to squash publication of material antithetical to Lovecraft’s image (e.g. James Warren Thomas’ masters thesis H. P. Lovecraft: A Self-Portrait, 1950) and any Mythos fiction produced outside Arkham House (e.g. C. Hall Thompson’s fiction such as “The Spawn of the Green Abyss,” 1946).

Mythos fiction under Derleth’s aegis largely consisted of reprinting Lovecraft’s published and unpublished fiction, and the related Mythos fiction of his friends and colleagues such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and himself—the latter of which consisted of both original fiction and so-claimed “posthumous collaborations.” In the 1960s, Derleth began to publish more Mythos fiction from other writers, notably Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. This new generation began to bring differing attitudes of what was acceptable in horror fiction, and Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” (1969) is the first English-language Mythos story to address homosexuality.

Despite these efforts, Derleth did not have complete control of publishing, and some Mythos fiction became published outside his purview (and perhaps without his knowledge). For example, “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (1958) by Jacques Janus, published in France, revisited the gender-bending issues raised by “The Thing on the Doorstep”; and “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) by Joanna Russ is probably the first Mythos fiction written by a lesbian, although Russ was not out about her sexuality at the time. The first Mythos parody published by a gay writer might be “At the Mountains of Murkiness, or From Lovecraft to Leacock” (1940) by Arthur C. Clarke, but again, Clarke was not open about his sexuality at the time. Many fans might have been reading fiction from LGBTQ+ writers for decades and never known it, as the consequences of being outed could be severe.

So there wasn’t exactly an LGBTQ+ Mythos underground sticking it to the man in the form of August Derleth. What was happening is that a new generation of LGBTQ+ writers was coming of age and ingesting Lovecraft and Mythos fact and fiction. Paperback publication in the 1960s and a handful of film and comic book adaptations were bringing Lovecraft and the Mythos to a wider and wider audience…and in 1969 the Stonewall riots became the spark for the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

It was, in other words, increasingly okay to be gay and a Lovecraft fan.

Beyond the Derleth Mythos (1969-2015)

August Derleth died in 1971, and with his passing came a shift in Mythos publishing. The legal bluster that Derleth had used to try and exert influence over Lovecraft’s posthumous image largely died with him; and critical assessments of fiction (“The Derleth Mythos,” 1972) sparked a pushback against Derleth’s interpretation of Lovecraft and his Mythos. The fanzine and newspaper articles of yesteryear began to give way to scholarly and academic essays and hardbound books. Many of these still evinced the lavender scare hangups; in the first full Lovecraft biography, L. Sprague de Camp summarized the issue so far as HPL was concerned:

The question of Lovecraft’s sexuality has stirred much interest. Some writers have called him “sexless.” Others have surmised that he might have been a homosexual or at least a latent one. They have cited his indifference to heterosexual relationships; the lack of women in his stories, whose leading characters are often a single male narrator and one close male friend; and his many friendships with younger men, some of whom either were overt homosexuals or had tendencies in that direct.

“Latent homosexuality,” however, is a vague, slippery concept. Moreover, the charge of “latent homosexual tendencies” has become such a fad that it is leveled at almost any notable whose love life is at all unusual.
L. Sprague de Camp, H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography 189

De Camp (1907-2000), however, was of the older generation, and the newer scholars, fans, and writers attracted to the Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction were more open to new and accepting interpretations of sexuality and gender identity and fresh takes on Lovecraft and the Mythos. What’s more, without Arkham House throttling production, other publishers could publish their own Mythos fiction by new writers. While there are far too many Mythos writers during these decades to name them all, some stand out as helping to shape a more inclusive Mythos literary landscape, writers who by their work and by their lives stand out from the rest.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) became a leading postmodernist and member of the Beat Generation; his explicit writings on homosexuality shocked audiences, but also helped expand the possibilities of science fiction. The influence of Lovecraft on Burroughs can be seen in works like Cities of the Red Night (1981).

Richard A. Lupoff (1935-2020) broke ground when he wrote “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” (1977), re-interpreting an homage to Lovecraft in the form of New Wave science fiction, explicitly including the first explicit transgender and bisexual characters in Lovecraftian fiction.

Stanley C. Sargent (1950-2018) broke ground in Mythos fiction in the 90s with stories like “The Black Brat of Dunwich” (1997), offering far different readings and interpretations of Mythos classics. Stan also authored what is probably the most coherent argument for Lovecraft as a closeted homosexual in a 1997 interview with Peter A. Worthy. Whether or not readers agree, it shows how openly LGBTQ+ people could now become in discussing their lives, and how they felt their experiences were reflected in the Mythos—which had its scholarly counterpart in work like Robert M. Price’s essay “Homosexual Panic in ‘The Outsider'” (1982).

W. H. Pugmire (1951-2019) grew up in the era of punk rock and Boy George, and became the self-declared “Queen of Eldritch Horror.” While mostly remembered today for his sensual, evocative prose, including his re-workings of familiar Mythos entities (e.g. “An Imp of Aether,”1997) and his own personal corner of Lovecraft country in the Pacific Northwest called Sesqua Valley (e.g. “Some Distant Baying Sound,” 2009), Pugmire was also influential as an editor. While a good deal of Mythos publishing in the 90s was focused on pastiche, Pugmire emphasized the importance of Lovecraft’s themes and atmosphere over his eldritch tomes and unspeakable names. He also collaborated with similar-minded writers like Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950-) with works like “Pale, Trembling Youth” (1986) that explored these themes.

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964-) has sometimes been called “Lovecraft’s spiritual granddaughter,” and it shows. Kiernan’s Mythos and Lovecraftian stories often feature strong female characters, including several prominent depictions of lesbians in stories such as “Paedomorphosis” (1998) “Paedomorphosis” (1998), and sometimes broaches transgender themes such as in “Pages Found Among the Effects of Miss Edith M. Teller” (2005). These people are not caricatures but realistic depictions of LGBTQ+ folks as flawed human beings, often struggling with themselves and their relationships.

Billy Martin (1967-) who wrote as Poppy Z. Brite, also pushed boundaries in the Lovecraftian milieu with stories like “His Mouth Will Taste Of Wormwood” (1990) and “Are You Loathsome Tonight?” (1998). Like Kiernan and Pugmire, they were part of a 90s generation that pushed the limits of what Lovecraftian was and could be.

Writers whose work post-2010 stand out for their inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters and themes include Jordan L. Hawk, who writes the Whyborne & Griffith series, a homosexual romantic fantasy with Lovecraftian elements begging with Widdershins (2013); Molly Tanzer whose works include “Herbert West in Love” (2012) and “In the Garden of Ibn Ghazi” (2021); Ruthanna Emrys with “The Litany of Earth” (2014) and Winter Tide (2017).

While some of the work of the above authors verged on or crossed the line into erotica, actual pornographic material has also included LGBTQ+ characters and creations, from the lurid Teenage Twins (1976) to the often-overlooked hardcore bisexual comics of John Blackburn (1939-2006) such as Dagger of Blood (1997), and Logan Kowalsky‘s (1971-) Le Pornomicon (2005). While these and other works may seem n the tawdry side, they’re important examples of the increasing acceptance of non-heterosexuality; while some folks may look on porn as exploitative of sexuality, others find freedom in being able to explore their sexuality through sex work, or just to enjoy porn that matches their interests.

In that vein, you might compare the salacious depiction lesbian characters in Mystery of the Necronomicon (黒の断章, 1999) with the more developed, conflicted gay characters in Cthulhu (2007); while the feature film obviously has more to say about LGBTQ+ folks finding their role in the Mythos, even bad representation is representation—which is more than LGTBQ+ Mythos fans got for decades after Lovecraft’s death.

Which is not to say that all depictions of LGBTQ+ folks and non-heterosexuality/cisgender identity were positive. Far from it. Homophobic and transphobic biases run deep and sometimes pop up in unexpected places, like “The Curate of Temphill” (1993) by Peter Cannon & Robert M. Price. However, the dawn of the internet has substantially widened access to information on sexuality and gender identity; communities have formed to help and support LGBTQ+ folks and connect writers, publishers, and audiences together, and social media often provides a panopticon for intolerance almost inconceivable in the past. Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband continued her abuse for years despite serious allegations, but J. K. Rowling‘s transphobia received immediate pushback on social media.

Revolution & Reimagination (2015-2022)

The Mythos and Lovecraftian fiction scene of today is profoundly different than it was even a decade ago. While intolerance and bigotry are still with us and still very real issues that LGBTQ+ folks face, the Mythos publishing environment is more open and diverse than ever before. This is in part due to a publishing revolution fueled by desktop publishing software, affordable print-on-demand technology, and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Small press publishers continued to grow and diversify in the 2010s, often using crowdfunding to raise awareness and investment in their products, including an increasingly diverse range of Mythos books. Ebooks also provide a new niche for LGBTQ+ authors, such as “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters.

The impact of this publishing shift is still being felt, but one thing that seems clear is that there is increasingly a market for more diverse Mythos fiction, and writers willing to cater to that need. In 2016, publisher Tor shifte focus on publishing a more diverse array of Mythos fiction, including Hammers on Bone (2016) by Cassandra Khaw and its follow-up A Song for Quiet (2017), The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) by Kij Johnson, and Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan. While the days of photocopied Lovecraftian fanzines may not be completely over, it’s become clear that these works are more than just a fad. It’s also increasingly become clear LGBTQ+ folks aren’t just writers and artists, but editors and publishers as well, as interviews with folks like Carrie Cuinn (Cthulhurotica), Lynne Jamneck (Dreams From the Witch House), and Erica Ciko Campbell and Desmond Rhae Harris (Starward Shadows Quarterly).

What the future holds for the LGBTQ+ Mythos is hard to say—there has been so much progress in the recognition of LGBTQ+ rights in the decades since Lovecraft’s death, and the reactionary political and cultural efforts to claw back those rights and discriminate against folks based on their sexuality or gender identity, whether they want to play a sport or transition, is a terrible ongoing challenge. Yet it helps to look back and see how far the genre has come. The Mythos has long outgrown the ignorant homophobia that Lovecraft expressed in a few of his letters, and many of the LGBTQ+ fans his works inspired have become some of the best and brightest creative voices we now have.

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

Booty Call of Cthulhu (2012) by Dalia Daudelin

Eldritch Fappenings
This review deals with works of erotica, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected passages involving sexually explicit activites will be included.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

Joanne Lagrasse is a newly graduated college student living the life. Well, if the life is sitting in your apartment all day trying to research monsters for a novel. The strange book her favorite professor gave her is full of ramblings by what must be a mad man, which makes for uneasy reading and a loner lifestyle.

She pushes herself to go out to the beach, though the takes the tome with her. When she decides to not heed her professor’s warning and reads a chant out loud, she finds herself faced with a giant monster and its lewd tentacles, each one eager to fill her holes.
Booty Call of Cthulhu, back cover copy

Before the internet, erotic literature often left a literal paper trail. It wasn’t enough to write a story or book, if you wanted to sell it you had to advertise—small ads in appropriate adult newspapers or magazines (or, for erotic fanfiction, fanzines), mail-order catalogs or lists of other publications in the backs of books, and for particularly notable works perhaps even a published review in some suitable medium. By the early 2010s, the game had fundamentally changed: the cheap adult paperbacks of previous decades had largely fallen off with the rise of more readily-available pornography, and self-publishing became feasible thanks to print-on-demand publishing and ebooks. The internet was a great leveler, doing away with much of the traditional advertising—and with it, much of the traditional paper trail which historians and smuthounds alike relied on.

Now, scholars have to rely on search engines and internet archives, hoping for social media posts, blogposts, and the occasional interview:

ED: I see you write tentacle erotica, which has a soft spot in my heart as an anime geek. How did you get into that sub-genre?

DD: I love H. P. Lovecraft! I’ve been a member of 4chan’s /x/ for, well, probably 6 years now. That’s their paranormal board. Horror and tentacles are both very fun to write, especially when you can make them sexy.
EROTICA AUTHOR INTERVIEW: DALIA DAUDELIN, AUTHOR OF BOOTY CALL OF CTHULHU by Ellen Dominick

Booty Call of Cthulhu by Dalia Daudelin is a good example of the works of the period. Originally released as a Kindle ebook under the nom de plume Roxy Feurouge in 2012 (and as by Mia Lust on Barnes & Noble’s website), then as a thin print-on-demand softcover in 2013 (still available), the story is straightforward and geared toward specific, clearly indicated kinks: monsters, tentacles, dubious consent—and it delivers on all counts.

My jaw went slack. My mouth opened just enough for the tentacle to slide in. It went from a wool texture to something more slimy, a bit like another tongue.
Dalia Daudelin, Booty Call of Cthulhu 14

Readers hoping for an erotic re-telling of “The Call of Cthulhu” or a Cthulhu Mythos pastiche with a bit more explicit sex than usual will be sorely disappointed. While not quite Porn Without Plot, most of the twelve print pages are devoted to a detailed array of sexual acts, most involving tentacles. Comparisons with tentacle-themed Japanese adult animation like La Blue Girl fall a bit short: while the sex scenes cover much of the same material (penetrations anal, oral, and vaginal, etc.), there is quite a bit more story and character development in the Japanese manga and its anime adaptation. Booty Call of Cthulhu is written like a typical pornographic feature film, with the brief non-sexual interludes providing the set-up for the next carnal scene, with an abrupt finish after the final climax.

Short, sweet, and to the point—and when compared to similar works of the period like I Was Impregnated by Cthulhu! (2012) by Penny P. Zahn, The Tentacles of the Elder Gods (2012) by Lindsey Purl, Cthulhu’s Carresses (2013) by Amy Morrel, Uhluhtc’s Sacrifice (2013) by Grace Vilmont, I Fucked Cthulhu! (2013) by Deliah Fawkes, Cuckolded by Cthulhu (2013) by Lillian Jacobs, and Cthulhu Comes (2014) by Sandy Laws—Booty Call of Cthulhu isn’t particularly poorly written. If there’s a real criticism to be made, it’s that it is no more than it set out to be, and a much more engaging erotic narrative could have come from the same premise.

What differentiates Booty Call of Cthulhu from most of its contemporaries is that it was either popular enough or sufficiently tickled the imagination to elicit two sequels: Booty Call of Cthulhu 2 and Booty Call of Cthulhu 3 by Wren Winter—and neither of which is currently available (Wren has also written My Night With Cthulhu, which is not either of those two books under a new title).

Whether this is a licensing issue or Amazon removed the ebooks for violating one of their policies is unclear, and probably will remain so…because as with internet fanfiction, the internet’s archive is imperfect and there is no paper trail. Neither 2 or 3 ever received a hardcopy printing, at far as I’ve been able to determine, and unless you were fortunate enough to buy them during the window of opportunity they were available, those texts are essentially impossible to obtain. Should the files be corrupted or Amazon stop supporting them, they may well be lost forever.

Several of Booty Call’s contemporaries, including I Was Impregnated by Cthulhu! and Cuckolded by Cthulhu have already suffered the same fate. It’s not just that these works exist only on a handful of Kindle accounts, but unless you were aware they existed already it is exceedingly difficult to find out they ever existed. Posting an ebook to Amazon and letting the search engine handle discovery for a public apparently starved for sexually explicit Mythos-flavored content was often enough to sell a few copies…and then, for one reason or another, the ebooks were no longer sold, and there might not even be a page to point at to show where it had been for sale.

Given the ephemeral nature of pornography and the quality of the writing, few folks will lament this as a great loss to our shared cultural heritage—most erotica is treated as eminently disposable, to be enjoyed in the moment but not necessarily saved for posterity as with so many other books. Yet works like Booty Call of Cthulhu certainly represent a certain moment in time, and a literary trend which, in its perennial reflowering, means critics and fans of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos need to acknowledge two truths:

Some people want to read about having sex with Cthulhu, and a body of work has grown up to meet that demand.

The question that remains to be seen is how, if at all, these works might be preserved. It is fair to say that Booty Call of Cthulhu was not the first and will not be the last sexually explicit story about an amorous eldritch entity, but it is disturbing how easily such works can effectively fall off the face of the internet, perhaps never to be read again. Because it has a print edition, Booty Call of Cthulhu will probably linger on longer than most—and it is weird to think that in generations to come, a furtive Mythos fan may enter into a dusty bookshop and find among the dross of the 2010s an ancient example of Lovecraftian smut…

I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap
Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through,
Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep
Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.
Then, looking for some seller old in craft,
I could find nothing but a voice that laughed.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Book” from Fungi from Yuggoth

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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“The Day He Met Lovecraft” (1972) by Lew Shaw

Sir: As if it were yesterday, I remember meeting H. P. Lovecraft on the corner of Benefit Street and College Hill about noon on a very warm, sunny day.

College Hill is a rather steep climb, but on that day, a friend of mine and I, both attending Classical High at the time, were climbng up it oward the campus. At the base of College Hill on Canal Street, a new courthouse had been built. By taking the elevators to the fifth floor, we could have emerged on Benefit Street and eliminated the climb. However, despite the warm day, we walked.

As we got to Benefit Street, my friend greeted a passerby and introduced me to him. It was H. P. Lovecraft.
Lewis Shaw, “The Day He Met Lovecraft” in Brown Alumni Monthly 72, No. 7 (Apr 1972)

Memoirs and anecdotes of H. P. Lovecraft tend to come from familiar names: his correspondents, friends like Clifford & Muriel Eddy (The Gentleman from Angell Street), and his wife Sonia H. Greene (The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft) most prominent among them. Even the few unfamiliar names like Dorothy Tilden Spoerl (“Cosmic Horror”) prove to have some connection to Lovecraft with a little digging. The very few memoirs that don’t have any provable connection to Lovecraft are thus a little suspect; they are extraordinary, and extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence to prove them.

The geography of Providence is real, and while Lovecraft often kept late hours, he was also more active during the warmer months and went out of doors to write in the sunlight. So at least some of the details given are plausible. Yet the most interesting part of Shaw’s account is the least believable:

On that sunny afternoon, H. P. Lovecraft told us the strange story he wrote about a hotel on Benefit Street, a building which stands there no longer.

Lovecraft had written a story about a true incident. At one time there was a young woman, a chambermaid in the hotel on Benefit Street, who left and married into wealth. Sometime afterward, she returned to visit the hotel as a guest. When she found herself discourteously treated and snubbed, she departed but put a “curse” on the hotel, on all those who had humiliated her, and on everything concerned with the hotel. In short order, ill luck apparently befell all and the hotel itself burned down. Furthermore, it had never been possible, somehow, for anyone to rebuild on the site. Even on the day H. P. Lovecraft told us the story, the place where the hotel had stood was still a vacant lot.

Lovecraft had finished the story and, without making his usual carbon copy, made only one draft, which he then mailed to the publisher. His story never appeared in print. It was lost in the mails.
Lewis Shaw, “The Day He Met Lovecraft” in Brown Alumni Monthly 72, No. 7 (Apr 1972)

Lovecraft is not known to have written any story about a cursed hotel, nor is there a mention of a Lew Shaw in his voluminous published letters. Scholars might be suspicious—an account of a lost Lovecraft story by an unfamiliar name, decades after Lovecraft’s death, during the early 70s when paperback publication was raising Lovecraft’s public profile? It sounds a bit too good to be true. S. T. Joshi certainly was not convinced:

There is much reason to suspect this entire account. In the first place, the story sounds like nothing Lovecraft would have written—the idea is hackneyed, and the protagonist would uncharacteristically have been a woman. Secondly, it is inconceivable that Lovecraft would have prepared a story without his usual two carbons. In the case of his essay on Roman architecture in late 1934, he wrote the piece by hand and sent it to Moe without typing it at all. Lew Shaw claims to have actually met Lovecraft on the street, in the company of a friend “who was interested in science-fiction” and knew Lovecraft; this might conceivably have been Kenneth Sterling, but Sterling never mentions this matter in either of his two memoirs. Shaw also claims to be of the Brown Class of 1941; but there is no one of that name in that class listed in the Brown University alumni directory. There is a Lewis A. Shaw in the Class of 1948, and a Lew Shaw who received a Ph.D. in 1975, but that is all. My feeling is that Lew Shaw (probably a pseudonym) is perpetrating a hoax.
S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence (2010) 2.1001

Joshi’s arguments are well-reasoned—but there are a few counter-arguments. While none of Lovecraft’s surviving letters mention a cursed hotel story, the account does not mention when the story was written or sent out; so it could conceivably fall into a gap in the correspondence, especially if the story was an early one or written for a revision client. A story set in Providence on Benefit St. isn’t out of the question either, “The Shunned House” was based on a real-life house (the Stephen Harris House, 135 Benefit Street). Likewise, while it would be uncharacteristic for Lovecraft to write a story with a woman protagonist, it was not unknown: “The Man of Stone” (1932) for Hazel Heald and “The Curse of Yig” (1929) for Zealia Bishop are primarily focused on female characters, or told in part from their perspectives, so it isn’t entirely out of the question. The postal service has lost many manuscripts and typescripts, so that by itself isn’t unbelievable either. The most obvious evidence of a hoax appears to be the absence of Lew Shaw himself…

Lewis Irwin Schwartz attended Classical High School in Providence, RI and graduated from Brown University in the class of 1941 (listed on page 72 of the Liber Brunensis for 1941). “Lew Shaw” was his stage name (“He Crashed The ‘Crewcuts’,” Brown Alumni Monthly Jan 1962). So, Joshi was correct that there was no “Lew Shaw” among the names in the Class of 1941, and that the name was a pseudonym—but didn’t have access to the bits of the puzzle that would show that Lew Shaw really did exist; those parts of the narrative at least match what we know of his background.

Joshi was also likely correct in identifying Shaw’s unnamed friend interested in science fiction as Kenneth Sterling. In Providence, Sterling attended Classical High School. They were both born in 1920, but Shaw was born in November, so he would probably have been a year behind Sterling. That gives us time as well: Sterling met Lovecraft in March 1935, and in the autumn of 1936 began attending Harvard, so the encounter with Lovecraft could only have happened in the summer of 1935 or 1936. Lovecraft doesn’t mention Shaw/Schwartz in the surviving letters to Kenneth Sterling, but on the other hand, those surviving passages are all excerpts, not complete letters, and there are gaps of months in the correspondence.

Kenneth Sterling wrote two memoirs about Lovecraft: “Lovecraft and Science” (1944) and “Caverns Measureless to Man” (1975). The first is slight, and doesn’t go into detail about how they met; the second is substantial, and more personal and biographical, going into considerable detail. Some of these jive with Shaw’s account:

During the academic year, excepting Christmas and spring recesses, the Science Club met weekly. That meant I had a schedule of one scientist a week—all, with two exceptions, from the Brown University faculty—and every time I walked up College Hill toward the Brown campus I visited Lovecraft for several hours. The total number of hours I conversed with him was huge.
Kenneth Sterling, “Caverns Measureless to Man” in Ave Atque Vale 406-407

This would have been the path Shaw describes. Sterling doesn’t mention the cursed hotel story; the one anecdote Sterling tells about bringing a friend to meet Lovecraft doesn’t jive either, since it was at a gathering in New York City. Again, this doesn’t immediately rule out Shaw’s story, but it doesn’t fully confirm it either. Shaw’s account is shifted from obvious hoax to doubtful…and there’s one final bit of evidence to consider: was there a hotel, cursed or not?

The Hotel Lorraine was on 18-28 Aborn Street, on the other side of the Providence River from Benefit Street, a geographic detail that Lovecraft would not have missed, but I’ve yet to find a notable hotel fire on Benefit St. during Lovecraft’s lifetime—and the 18 Aborn St. lot was still vacant according to the 1935 Providence City Directory, which does jive with Shaw’s story. No mention of a curse has turned up yet, but a lot of century-old folklore probably wasn’t written down, much yet made it onto the internet, where searches about cursed hotels in Providence point toward the Biltmore (now The Graduate).

The question then becomes: is this an error with Shaw’s memory, or did he fabricate the whole anecdote? The former might be understandable: a couple of decades can erode the details of many memories, or add details that weren’t there before. If the latter, why? As far as is known, Shaw never attempted to pass the anecdote off to a paying magazine or publisher or profit from the supposed association. It was of the nature of a brief letter to the editor to a college alumni journal about a local writer with ties to the college whose posthumous star had lately been on the rise and who had ties to Brown (Lovecraft’s papers are archived at the university library). In the Feb 1972 issue of Brown Alumni Monthly there had been an article on “Lovecraftmania at Brown” which probably suggested the letter.

Without any further evidence in Lovecraft’s letters to support the idea that the meeting actually took place, “The Day He Met Lovecraft” will have to remain classified as somewhere between doubtful and apocryphal. We have no absolute evidence that Shaw/Schwartz actually met Lovecraft, as there are no details in the incident that can be independently corroborated with sources that weren’t already published at the time. As Joshi noted, the plot sounds fairly hackneyed and un-Lovecraftian; not something he would write for himself, even with the local angle.

However, we also cannot entirely rule out that Shaw did not meet Lovecraft; we know Sterling had brought at least one friend to meet Lovecraft according to his later memoir. The plot of the apocryphal tale sounds un-Lovecraftian, but Lovecraft was willing to bend his artistic scruples a bit for revision clients. Is a lost revision story plausible? There’s evidence to suggest Lovecraft revised more stories than saw print, such as “In the Gulf of N’Logh” (193?) and “Lair of Fungous Death” (193?) by Hazel Heald, and his letters to Zealia Brown Reed Bishop. By 1935, Lovecraft had largely stopped revising fiction, but it is possible he was talking about an earlier story—Lovecraft didn’t discuss much of his revised fiction that didn’t get published.

While Lovecraft’s life is extraordinarily well documented by his letters, there are still little gaps in which things happened for which we have no record…and, perhaps, in which a clever fiction might be woven. Shaw’s account cannot be entirely ruled out, but neither can it be proved, unless more information comes to light.

Thanks and appreciation to Dave Goudsward for all of his 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.

Her Letters To Lovecraft: Henriette Ziegfeld

“The Blind Prince,” by Henriette Ziegfeld, is an excellent juvenile tale involving a fairy story. The only serious objection is the undercurrent of adult comment which flows through the narrative. Particularly cynical is the closing sentence: “‘And here’s Mother,’ finished poor Auntie with a sigh of relief.” The ordinary fairy stories told to children are bits of actual Teutonic mythology, and should be related with a grave, absolute simplicity and naivete. However, as a psychological study of the typical childish auditor, the sketch as a whole is highly meritorious. We are inclined to wonder at the possible meaning of the strange word “alright,” which appears more than once in Miss Ziegfeld’s tale. It is certainly no part of our language, and if it be a corruption of “all right,” we must say that we fail to perceive why the correct expression could not have been used.
“Department of Public Criticism,” The United Amateur 15, no. 2 (Sep 1915), in Collected Essays 1.72

This was, as far as can be determined, Lovecraft’s first notice of the existence of Henriette Ziegfeld (1894-1976), an amateur journalist from Columbus, Ohio. According to census data, Henriette was the child of immigrant parents, her father Dutch and mother German, and one of 11 children that survived to be recorded. “The Blind Prince” was published in The Woodbee, the amateur journal of the Woodbee Press Club of Columbus, which was associated with the faction of the United Amateur Press Association that H. P. Lovecraft had joined the previous year.

Amateur journalism appears to have been something of a family affair for the Zeigfelds. Lovecraft’s editorials and a letter mention her brothers Arthur (1901-1971; CE 1.267, 302, 307-8) and Florenz (1888-1951; CE 1.88, 124; LRKO 87); a 1920 convention report also lists as voting members their siblings Emelie (Emily), Hilda, Alma, Oscar, and Mrs. Ziegfeld—presumably their mother, Pauline Ziegfeld (1859-1929). A 1921 accounting of officers of the Woodbees lists Arthur F. Ziegfeld as President and his sister Henriette as the Secretary and Treasurer (CE 1.267).

By coincidence, Florenz Ziegfeld shared his name with the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1869-1932), who staged the famous revue Ziegfeld’s Follies (1906-1930s), which featured dozens of elaborately costumed showgirls (popularly called “Ziegfeld Girls”) in an elaborate musical and visual tableau. Inspired by the coincidence, in 1921 Arthur F. Ziegfeld began producing his own amateur journal titled Ziegfeld’s Follies.

The only surviving correspondence between the two is a single letter dated 6 Nov 1920 from Lovecraft to Ziegfeld, thanking the Woodbee Club for the generous donation of $25 toward the United Amateur Press Association’s fund for the publication of The United Amateur. Presumably, Henriette was acting as treasurer and had sent the money and an accompanying letter or note, so this was Lovecraft’s official thank-you. He also included an official notice in The United Amateur, which contains another relevant detail:

The Woodbee Club, now doubly prominent in amateurdom through its possession of both the Presidency and the Secretary-Treasurership, continues to be the most active of local bodies. On Labour Day, September 5, a successful corn roast was held on the Frazier Farm, whilst on September 24 the third annual rummage sale took place. Of the proceeds of the latter, $25.00 will be very generously donated to the Official Organ Fund in five-dollar instalments. The latest event is a farewell party to Miss Henriette Ziegfeld on the eve of her departure for India.
“News Notes,” The United Amateur 21, no. 1 (Sep 1921) in Collected Essays 1.300

Whether she replied is unknown; but possible—someone had to have informed Lovecraft that Henriette was leaving for a teaching mission in India, and in subsequent issues Lovecraft offered brief updates of her progress, so someone was keeping him appraised:

Miss Henriette Ziegfeld of the Woodbee Club on November 12 sailed for India, where she will be engaged in missionary work at Nagercoil, Travancore, in the southernmost part of the peninsula.
“News Notes,” The United Amateur 21, no. 2 (Nov 1921) in Collected Essays 1.303

On December 24th the Club received the pleasing news that Miss Henriette Ziegfeld had safely reached her destination in India, despite two threatened onslaughts of mal de mer during the voyage; onslaughts which were cleverly defeated by means of judicious pedestrianism.
“News Notes,” The United Amateur 21, no. 3 (Jan 1922) in Collected Essays 1.308

Henriette Ziegfeld’s 1921 passport photo

Henriette Ziegfeld in India, 1923, Concordia Historical Institute

That is the last word in Lovecraft’s amateur journalism essays or letters on Henriette Zeigfeld. No doubt a good example of many brief correspondences with women in various positions of amateur journalism, most of which do not survive.

The letter from Lovecraft to Henriette Ziegfeld has been published in Miscellaneous Letters (2022). While the date given on the letter is 1920, the notice of the $25 donation occurred in 1921—either the Woodbee Club made two such donations, or the letter is from 1921 and was misdated or mistranscribed.

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.

“On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” (1773) by Anna Laetitia Aikin & John Aikin

In England one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called “Sir Bertrand”, in which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o’-the-wisps lead up mysterious staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto—The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld’s fragment; and though less crude than Walpole’s novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

Anna Laetitia Aikin was born in 1743; her father was a Presbyterian minister and the headmaster of a boy’s school, and both Anna and her brother John Aikin received solid educations, which led to their careers in letters—Anna being noted for working in multiple genres, and earned a reputation as a poet and author. One of her earliest publications was Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773), published jointly with her brother. Among the contents of this volume is “On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.”

The essay is one of the early English works on the subject of the horror story, and much of it is as insightful today as it was two and a half centuries ago:

A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of “forms unseen, and mightier far than we,” our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy co-operating, elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.
“On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror”

This essay is a literary forebear of Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1925). At the end of the essay proper is given several examples of books and stories which exemplify this philosophy:

In the Arabian Nights are many most striking examples of the terrible, joined with the marvellous: the story of Aladdin, and the travels of Sinbad, are particularly excellent. The Castle of Otranto is a very spirited modern attempt upon the same plan of mixed terror, adapted to the model of Gothic romance. The best conceived, and the most strongly worked-up scene of mere natural horror that I recollect, is in Smolett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom; where the hero, entertained in a lone house in a forest, finds a corpse just slaughtered in the room where he is sent to sleep, and the door of which is locked upon him. It may be amusing for the reader to compare his feelings upon these, and from thence form his opinion of the justness of my theory. The following fragment, in which both these manners are attempted to be in some degree united, is offered to entertain a solitary winter’s evening.
“On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror”

What follows is “Sir Betrand, a Fragment.” The fast-moving fantasy owes much to the medievalisms of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto—A Gothic Story (1764), the latter of which is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. Other influences may have included the 1,001 Nights or Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; the story has the style of an episodic adventure in that mode, like a loose couple of pages taken from a longer narrative. In the context of the essay, however, it becomes clear that the fragment is a heaping-up of horrors, image after image piled up one after another in a kind of breathless chain of wonder and terror. The purpose of the fragment was to provide an example for Aikin’s idea of how a horror story worked.

The individual contributions of Anne and John are not signed in Miscellaneous Pieces, but Horace Walpole wrote:

Miss Aikin flattered me even by stooping to tread in my eccentric steps. Her ‘Fragment,’ though but a specimen, showed her talent for imprinting terror.
Horace Walpole to Robert Jephson, 27 Jan 1780, The Letters of Horace Walpole (1880) 318-319

While Walpole (and many others) assert that “Sir Bertrand, a fragment” was Anna’s contribution, as asserted in the Analytical Review (Dec. 1798) 612-613 (“We are inclined to think, that Dr. D. has erroneouſly attributed the fragment of Sir Bertrand to the pen of Mrs. Barbauld; we believe Dr. Aikin is the author of it.”); her niece Lucy Aikin in The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1825) also clarifies that Anna was not the author of the fiction that accompanied the essay. This misattribution has continued down through the centuries. Luke R.J. Maynard did an excellent job detailing the convoluted history in “A Forgotten Enchantment: The Silenced Princess, the Andalusian Warlord, and the Rescued Conclusion of ‘Sir Bertrand'” (2010), including pointing out that a completed text of the fiction fragment was published as “Sir Bertrand’s Adventures in a Ruinous Castle” in Gothic Stories (1797).

In 1774, Anna married Rochemont Barbauld; subsequent publications of “Sir Betrand, a Fragment,” with or without the original essay that it served as an example for, were often published as by Anna Barbauld or Mrs. Barbauld. “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” thus entered the corpus of English horror-story lore, albeit as a small, incomplete, but influential piece. This is the prose fragment which Lovecraft succinctly summarizes in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and one of the few works by women authors he praises.

Unfortunately, he probably never actually read “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.”

None of Lovecraft’s published letters contain a reference to either Miss Aikin (or Barbauld), or “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.” None of the books he is known to have read or were in his library include the tale. While it is not impossible that Lovecraft read the story at the library during his research into weird fiction while writing “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the lack of any reference to the author or the tale outside that essay is thus suspicious—and we know for a fact that Lovecraft had at hand an easy reference:

When Walpole wrote disparagingly of Clara Reeve’s imitation of his Gothic story, he singled out for praise a fragment which he attributes to Mrs. Barbauld. The story to which he alludes is evidently the unfinished Sir Bertrand, which is contained in one of the volumes entitled Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, published jointly by J. and A. L. Aikin in 1773, and preceded by an essay On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror. Leigh Hunt, who reprinted Sir Bertrand, which had impressed him very strongly in his boyhood, in his Book for a Corner (1849) ascribes the authorship of the tale to Dr. Aikin, commenting on the fact that he was “a writer from whom this effusion was hardly to have been looked for.” It is probably safe to assume that Walpole, who was a contemporary of the Aikins and who took a lively interest in the literary gossip of the day, was right in assigning Sir Bertrand to Miss Aikin, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, though the story is not included in The Works of Anne Letitia Barbauld, edited by Miss Lucy Aikin in 1825. That the minds of the Aikins were exercised about the sources of pleasure in romance, especially when connected with horror and distress, is clear not only from this essay and the illustrative fragment but also from other essays and stories in the same collection—On Romances, an Imitation, and An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations. In the preliminary essay to Sir Bertrand an attempt is made to explain why terrible scenes excite pleasurable emotions and to distinguish between two different types of horror, as illustrated by The Castle of Otranto, which unites the marvellous and the terrible, and by a scene of mere natural horror in Smollett’s Count Fathom. The story Sir Bertrand is an attempt to combine the two kinds of horror in one composition. A knight, wandering in darkness on a desolate and dreary moor, hears the tolling of a bell, and, guided by a glimmering light, finds “an antique mansion” with turrets at the corners. As he approaches the porch, the light glides away. All is dark and still. The light reappears and the bell tolls. As Sir Bertrand enters the castle, the door closes behind him. A bluish flame leads him up a staircase till he comes to a wide gallery and a second staircase, where the light vanishes. He grasps a dead-cold hand which he severs from the wrist with his sword. The blue flame now leads him to a vault, where he sees the owner of the hand “completely armed, thrusting forwards the bloody stump of an arm, with a terrible frown and menacing gesture and brandishing a sword in the remaining hand.” When attacked, the figure vanishes, leaving behind a massive, iron key which unlocks a door leading to an apartment containing a coffin, and statues of black marble, attired in Moorish costume, holding enormous sabres in their right hands. As the knight enters, each of them rears an arm and advances a leg and at the same moment the lid of the coffin opens and the bell tolls. Sir Bertrand, guided by the flames, approaches the coffin from which a lady in a shroud and a black veil arises. When he kisses her, the whole building falls asunder with a crash. Sir Bertrand is thrown into a trance and awakes in a gorgeous room, where he sees a beautiful lady who thanks him as her deliverer. At a banquet, nymphs place a laurel wreath on his head, but as the lady is about to address him the fragment breaks off.
Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (1921), 28-30

Lovecraft acknowledged leaning on Birkhead’s study when it came to the Gothics (see The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) by Dorothy Scarborough & The Tale of Terror (1921) by Edith Birkhead). Likewise, “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” might not have been readily available in the 1920s. It seems likely, comparing that section of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and Birkhead’s entry that Lovecraft largely condensed and summarized Birkhead’s account of both Anna (Aikin) Barbauld and her fragment.

Which is a pity, because there is a thematic vein that runs straight from “Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” through William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) to works like Machen’s “The White People” (1904) that Lovecraft likely would have recognized and appreciated. Lovecraft may not have had the time or opportunity to read every work he mentioned in his essay—his original assessment of The Golem (1928) by Gustav Meyrink, for example, was based on the film and not the book, an error which he worked to resolve once he had read the original. Perhaps Lovecraft would have a more genuine appreciation for Anna (Aikin) Barbauld if he could have read her essay on terror…but, as he never mentions this essay either, it seems likely he did not.

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.

A Song for Quiet (2017) by Cassandra Khaw

Blues is about wanting and not having, about putting that need into someone else’s hands for a little while so you can pause and breathe.
Cassandra Khaw, A Song for Quiet 35

In Hammers on Bone (2016) by Cassandra Khaw, an eldritch abomination walks around in a human suit, playing hardboiled private detective John Persons, a monster who works against other monsters, working for its own inscrutable reasons against Lovecraftian incursions. A Song for Quiet is a standalone novella in the same setting, though a continent away and decades prior, with Persons relegated to an ambiguous supporting role as the narrative shifts to focus on rambling bluesman Deacon James.

Any more detail would give away the plot of the story, and it has little to spare.

In terms of theme and content, A Song for Quiet is a distant literary descendent of “The Music of Erich Zann,” the essential theme reworked and woven with considerable skill and imagination into a new context, a cousin to stories like “The Opera Singer” (2015) by Priya J. Sridhar and “While The Black Stars Burn” (2015) by Lucy A. Snyder—in part because music is the language and the medium by which the weirdness from Outside penetrates this reality, but because music doesn’t just happen. You need a figure on the threshold, like Erich Zann, who has the skills to play and faces the choice to do so. That places a very human conflict in the midst of what might otherwise be a very impersonal cosmic struggle. Ultimately, the musician on the threshold has to decide if to play.

Khaw’s choice to center the narrative on one such threshold-character, Deacon James, comes with advantages and drawbacks. The advantage is that Khaw is a skillful writer who really gets into James’ head, and the world seen through his eyes is a part of the world in stories like The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle, Lovecraft Country (2016) by Matt Ruff, and Ring Shout (2020) by P. Djèlí Clark—where Black people, even in a relatively unsegregated northern city like Arkham, have to step carefully, watch their words and actions, because any wrong step could mean violence and death. Jim Crow America was an ugly place with its very mundane horrors, without adding any Lovecraftian horrors to the mix.

The downside is, James knows nothing about the Lovecraftian aspect of the setting and doesn’t learn much of anything by the book’s end. Hammers on Bone worked so well in part because John Persons was an insider on the occult world of the Mythos, readers got their point of view and many things could be explained or accepted because of that. A Song for Quiet, seen mostly through the bluesman’s eyes, is like much in life a puzzle for which many pieces are missing and which will never be complete. John Persons in this book is one piece that doesn’t seem to fit (unless the reader has read Hammers on Bone at some point); he appears from nowhere, does things, explains almost nothing, and this is all perfectly in keeping with how the character might appear to James, but it’s as damnably frustrating as a poorly-played non-player character in a session of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, enigmatic to a fault.

Another piece that doesn’t quite fit is Arkham itself. As a setting, Khaw does a tremendous job of expressing the unease a Black man might feel traveling to and being in a relatively unknown northern city; used to the more openly segregated South, Deacon James is only really at ease in Black spaces. Why it features in the story is another question entirely: Arkham is the backdrop, but it could almost as easily have been Boston, New York, or even London. While an American city makes sense, since blues music is an African-American creation, by the 1940s the geographic remit of blues music and players had gone global. There’s nothing special about Arkham in this regard—it is the place name to cement a Lovecraftian connection, but Deacon James isn’t playing to an audience of hip Miskatonic University students or anything like that. So the setting feels a bit superfluous; like a film that drops a few Lovecraftian place names but doesn’t really connect to Lovecraft’s stories about those places.

This isn’t a damning criticism: many stories have only peripheral connections to the wider Mythos, and that’s fine. The first and most important thing is whether or not the story is good, the amount of Mythos lore dropped is not a primary measure of story quality. The lament here is that it could have been better. Khaw’s take on Arkham through James’ POV is intriguing, it’s something that the novella could have used more of, and if that setting had tied more strongly into the plot it would have been smashing…or perhaps it would have turned a tightly written and fast-paced novella into a bloated short novel.

There is a lot to like about this story; Khaw’s prose is alternately poetic and grounded, using music metaphors to give shape and texture to things seen and unseen, and the characters are well-defined. As another episode of the Persona Non Grata series, it expands the world of Hammers on Bone without stepping on any toes, far enough away in time and space so that the two stories can work independently, but taken together suggesting a wider, more complex world. Thematically, the ending is a strong focus on the human conflict of the musician on the threshold, but the missing pieces of the puzzle leave a bit of tension, like a chord that refuses to resolve.

Cassandra Khaw’s A Song for Quite (2017) was published as part of Tor.com’s Lovecraftian novella series including Hammers on Bone (2016) by Cassandra Khaw, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) by Kij Johnson, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) by Victor LaValle, and Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

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 Old Ones Reborn” (2007) by Erin Donahoe

I. The Book

It all began because I was not afraid

and I told the bookseller so.

Horror tales never disturbed me

never elicited that much desired chill of terror.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007, 36

There are no rules for the Mythos, but there are traditions. H. P. Lovecraft’s original works blazed a trail that many have tread, sometimes following in his footsteps, sometimes eschewing the increasingly well-beaten paths to branch off in their own directions. The route maps for these weird trails are written down in bibliographies, indices, and concordances…but there are too many. No one source can map them all, and even those dryly noted road markers can only point a reader in the right direction.

It is still up to individual readers to hunt down the sources if they want to follow some of these off-trails. There are little-tread and oft-overlooked byways, paths in danger of being forgotten and lost in the weeds. Works that never see reprinting, and aren’t likely to. Some day, the last copy of a magazine will fall apart, and some small part of the Mythos will be lost forever.

II. The Reading

I lifted the heavy tome

and placed it on the table before the window

moonlinght shining in upon the book’s dark surface.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 37

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry for Erin Donahoe shows she was most active in the early 2000s; the page contains a link to the web archive of her long-defunct SFF.net profile, and links from there go to her long-defunct personal blog and a more extensive bibliography. Magazine publications, online publications, and involvements with various small publications. “The Old Ones Reborn,” published in 2007, is the latest work of hers listed. It may well have been her last work published.

More digging would probably find out more about Erin Donahoe, but the point is not to engage in digital stalking or necromancy, it is to illustrate a point: not all creators are in it for the long haul, not every literary or artistic path goes very far. For every writer, poet, artist, and fan-publisher who devotes their life to creation, there are many others whose careers cover only a handful of years when time and enthusiasm allow such efforts. Then other priorities shift to the fore: careers, relationships, kids and parents and pets to take care of, health issues, money issues, etc.

III. The Dream

My explanation at the time was

That it was some kind of hypnosis, that I was sleepwalking.

I only remember feeling that I had been submerged

in warm, nearly scalding water, but that,

in some manner, I was able

to breathe.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 37

“The Old Ones Reborn” is a narrative poem in free verse, perhaps inspired by Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet cycle, and starting in a very similar manner—perhaps as homage—but Donahoe follows tradition only so far. She took it in a different direction, more stylistically similar to Caitlín R. Kiernan than Lovecraft or Derleth. More about the experience of being in that situation, that first encounter with the Mythos, the violation of that threshold, and what happened next.

Donahoe does not need to use the names Arkham, Dunwich, or Innsmouth to invoke something of them; does not need to name the Deep Ones, Cthulhu, or Yog-Sothoth to suggest their presence. The poem is more effective for its restraint; for suggesting connections instead of making them concrete. Making the reader draw their own conjectures, based on the paths they have walked.

IV. The Visions

The things I saw over the net several days,

and so many days since,

were terrifying in ways mre words

could never describe or explain;

but minding that inadequacy, I will attempt

to tell here of the most prominent of my visions.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 38

“The Old Ones Reborn” was published in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. It has not been reprinted, or collected. All the copies of it may well be contained in that print run, and when the grey, soft paper rots and molds…it may be lost. There are no ebooks, as yet, and may never be. Few libraries have copies. What efforts are being made to preserve it are collectors, and the people who sell to collectors. With luck, perhaps it will outlast living memory for a couple generations.

Other works are not so fortunate. Some are lost; others simply…obscure. Poems and stories that are not republished are generally not read, and that is another kind of death. Forgotten paths, some going nowhere, others leading into new dark places…and who is to say which is which? Should works like “The Fluff at the Threshold” (1996) by Simon Leo Barber or “Two Fungi From Yuggoth” (1977) by Alice Briley be lost forever to obscurity? It is always a thought, in retreading these rare paths, to think of what feet may yet follow, and what they will make of it.

V. The End (?)

[…]

I am not alone on this rocky pedestal;

the bookseller is here with me,

the gleam in his eye telling me

that while he may not be the father of the

burden in my womb

he certainly had the pleasure

of violating me.
Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 39

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: Bernice Nette (Leach) Barlow

The present household consists of Barlow & his mother; & of a mother & son named Johnston, from Virginia, who keep house & attend to various duties.
H. P. Lovecraft to Duane W. Rimel, 13 May 1934, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin &c. 171

On the second of May 1934, a little after noon, H. P. Lovecraft stepped off the bus into the Florida afternoon sunshine. He was met there by Robert H. Barlow—a young correspondent whose letters had first reached him via Weird Tales three years earlier. Lovecraft was shocked to find his friend, with whom he would be staying for several weeks during his Florida vacation, to be only 16 years old.

No account is given, in letters or memoir, of Lovecraft meeting his teenage friend’s mother, Bernice Barlow. That is rather typical for everyone involved; she was there—cooking meals, driving the car, and no doubt a million other things—but during his two trips to DeLand in 1934 and 1935, Lovecraft’s letters focused on his adventures with Bobby Barlow, and R. H. Barlow’s memoirs of the time focus on Lovecraft. Little interest was given to the woman who quietly held everything together.

She was born Bernice Leach in Leavenworth, Kansas on 12 May 1884. Her father Adoniram (“Nide”) Bostwick Leach was a schoolteacher associated with the Leavenworth Business College; her mother Myrtilla Emlin (Parker) Leach appears to have been a homemaker. Bernice was the third of five children, with her older sisters Mabel (b. 1877) and Minnie (b. 1879), and younger brothers Parker (b. 1888) and Elwood (b. 1889). Absent any biographies, much of her life has to be pieced together with census data and newspaper accounts.

Bernice graduated high school and continued to live with her parents. At about age 20 or 21, she met Lt. Everett Darius Barlow (b. 1881), who was stationed at Fort Leavenworth. Newspaper accounts report on the visits of Everett and his brother Warren with the family. In 1905, it was announced that Everett and Bernice were engaged; on 21 December 1907, after he returned from his first stint in the Philippines, they were married. About ten months later, their son Everett Wayne Barlow was born, on 10 October 1908.

Life for a military wife is hard, and hardly documented. Census data shows that in the ensuing ten years the family moved from one posting to the next. When E. D. Barlow shipped out to France in April 1918, Bernice was heavily pregnant with their second child. She would be with relatives in Kansas when Robert Hayward Barlow was born on 18 May 1918. We can only guess at the unspoken decade between children—miscarriages, stillbirths, long absences from home might have all played their part.

When E. D. Barlow returned from the Great War, he was not the same. Without his medical records it can be difficult to get at the heart of the matter, but there are suggestions that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which made family life difficult. Lovecraft, whose own mother had suffered a breakdown before her death in 1921, was sympathetic:

Glad to hear your father is somewhat improved, & hope he can arrange to make his gains permanent. These nervous breakdowns are no joke; no matter how much they may inconvenience & depress the bystanders, they are a damned sight worse for the victim himself.
H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 19 Mar 1934, O Fortunate Floridian 114-115

In 1934 when Bernice Barlow and H. P. Lovecraft met they had been living pillar-to-post for about twenty-six years. With E. D. Barlow’s retirement at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, the family ended up in rural Deland, Florida, far from family and friends. The house they built was named Dunrovin, and when Lovecraft arrived it was not quite finished. E. D. Barlow was up north, seeking medical treatment; Wayne Barlow had joined the army. So Bernice was on her own, with her precocious teenage son, and the Johnstons to help her out around the house. There is only one real anecdote about Lovecraft and Bernice from this period, but it bears repeating:

We had been in the habit of gathering blueberries beyond a shallow creek running between the swamp. Now HPL was no woodsman, as may be seen, and it was always perilous to trust his poor sight and lack of horse-sense. […] A series of recent rains had rendered the land very muddy, and the creek-channel had far overflowed, elaving a widespread thin puddle through which we had no choice but to wade. At the deeper creek had been placed a board to serve as bridge; and this was crossed without mishap. We spent some time gathering berries, but were through long before his dim eyes had attained even a half-basket. So we helped him filled it, and then all started home (Lovecraft, [Johnston], and myself). He lingered for possible other berried, and fearing just such a mishap, I stood uponthe makeshift bridge and called out its location to HPL.

[…] although I missed the scene myself (meeting him upstairs later) mother said he came in, soaking wet, and with most of his berries gone. In the God-awful rig he must have appeared very comical, thought it had also a tragic air about it. Promptly he said to mother, “I really must apologize!” She, amazed by this vision of a thoroughly wet HPL, said in surprise, “What for?”

He went on to explain he had been homeward bound when he came to the creek. Not seeing the board, he was abruptly pitched up to his neck into cold water. The berries were flung up and upset, most of them going on the slight current.
R. H. Barlow, “Memories of Lovecraft (1934)” in O Fortunate Floridian 406-407

The first visit lasted until 21 June 1934, about six weeks. Once in St. Augustine, Lovecraft posted a card to his gracious host:

It surely seems odd, after so many weeks of enjoyment of the Villa Barlovia’s hospitality, to be absent from the familiar table’s west end, & to forego the evening promenades on the moonlit Cassia road! I scarcely need reiterate how keen a delight my protracted visit gave me—& how profoundly I hope that I did not occasion any gortesque extremes of inconvenience with my wild hours & habitual absences from scnes of constructive endeavour.
H. P. Lovecraft to Bernice Barlow, postmarked 21 Jun 1934, O Fortunate Floridian 140

This is, as far as survives, the only piece of correspondence directly between Lovecraft and Bernice Barlow. No doubt any important news would have been shared through Lovecraft’s continuing correspondence with her son; there is a note on the envelope of one letter (“No news—Mother” O Fortunate Floridian 351) which may or may not be intended for HPL. Yet for the most part, Lovecraft seems to have quickly and firmly settled in as a family friend. On his 1935 visit, Lovecraft met Everett and Wayne Barlow and got along well with both of them.

Lovecraft did not write about the invisible stresses in the family—between husband and wife, father and son. R. H. Barlow would leave Florida for Kansas and the Kansas City Art Institute; Bernice and Everett would divorce in 1941. Yet Bernice was a survivor…she would continue to rebuild her life, and would eventually outlive her younger son. Perhaps in her waning years, back in Florida, she would remember the strange man who came to stay with them, how he would talk and the incident with the berries…and the card he sent, which she had kept for many years before it was donated with so many other documents of Lovecraft’s life to the John Hay Library.

The full text of Lovecraft’s postcard to Bernice Barlow is published in O Fortunate Floridian.

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 Day of the Stranger” (1947) by Novalyne Price Ellis

A couple of years after Bob’s death, I was standing on a street corner in Houston and I saw a man coming across the street that looked exactly like Bob. The incident stayed with me for several years. Finally, it wrote itself when I needed to hand in a radio script at LSU. I like the script, and it has briefly, some of the things we talked about almost as we talked them.
Novalyne Price Ellis to L. Sprague & Catherine Crook de Camp, 8 Jun 1978

Every biography ends the same way. A person dies, and whatever is left of them in this world is in the memories of those who knew them. A very few, however, take the next step. From memory to myth, from reality to fiction. Today, Robert E. Howard is as much a literary character as his creations and has appeared as versions of himself in stories (“Far Babylon” (1976) by L. Sprague de Camp, “Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1986) by Robert Silverberg), novels (Lovecraft’s Book (1985) by Richard Lupoff, Shadows Bend (2000) by David Barbour), comic books & graphic novels (The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob (2007) by Jim & Ruth Keegan), and even films (The Whole Wide World (2006), portrayed by Vincent D’Onofrio)—and that only begins to scratch the surface of Robert E. Howard’s many posthumous incarnations.

Though those characters shared Howard’s name, their characters differed. None of the writers knew Bob Howard; they had to work from letters and memoirs, biographies and anecdotes. Yet one of the earliest, if not the first, fictional character based on Robert E. Howard was drawn from the memory of one who knew him well: the eponymous stranger in Novalyne Price Ellis’ radio play “The Day of the Stranger.”

In 1947, my husband [William W. Ellis] and I were attending LSU, and my professor in radio assigned a script to be written and handed in for a semester’s grade. While I was trying to think what to write about, I remembered that incident (seeing Bob Howard get on the bus in Houston, when he’d been dead two years […]). I wrote it up as if it happened in New Orleans, got my grade, directed it for the school radio program, and sold it to a group producing amateur radio scripts.

It was copyrighted in 1949 by J. Weston Walch—Publisher of Portland, aine. I’m not sure he’s still publishing things. He published it in a book called Radio Player’s Scriptbook. It was for amateurs looking for scripts to produce. . . . The Stranger is Bob and it was as much of his regular talk as I could get it. The cry in Jeanne’s heart for a second chance was my cry. Jerry was Truett [Vinson]. The girls in the drug store were just necessary character to help put the story across.

THey changed my original title, which I thought was good. However, at that time, they were afraid that to say ‘New Orleans’ would be to give it a regional slant, and so they changed ‘New Orleans’ to ‘This.’ I’m sure they wouldn’t change it now, and I prefer the use of the city’s name.
Novalyne Price Ellis to Rusty Burke, Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 31

In 1936 when Robert E. Howard died, his sometime girlfriend Novalyne Price was attending school at Louisiana State University. She returned to Cross Plains to teach school, and for much of the next decade she continued teaching and attending courses in Texas and Louisiana. Novalyne had planned to write about Howard’s life, using her journals as material for the book—but life always got in the way. By the time of her marriage to William W. Ellis in 1947, Novalyne had extensive experience with drama, and even radio plays (“Daniel Baker College To Offer Enlarged Speech Program,” The Commanche Chief, 24 Aug 1945). “The Day of the Stranger” would be, in a sense, an early effort to capture some of the words and tone of Robert E. Howard’s character, decades before she could complete her book One Who Walked Alone (1986).

In an interview with Howard scholar Rusty Burke, she went into more detail about the play and the experience that inspired it:

BURKE: A lot of people who may read this interview may not know that there are other things you’ve written about Bob. In fact, a number [of] years ago you wrote a play in which Bob is a character, called “Day of the Stranger”. One of the things the stranger does is that, when he sees someone, he begins telling you what the person is like, what’s on his mind as he sits on the streetcar, and what he’s thinking about. Did Bob do that kind of thing?

ELLIS: All the time. That was his interest in people. Oh, ys. Fantastic stories. I remember very vividly one time, we passed a man—there was a very cold norther blowing—and we passed a man on a horse, riding along, and the man was all humped up over the saddle, trying to get away from the cold—you can imagine sitting ona saddle in a Texas norther—(shivers)—cold, yes—well, I don’t remember the story, but I remember that it was a fantastic story—pretty soon I knew everything that man thought. “Day of the Stranger” was the first thing that I had been able to write about him. I had to hand in a radio script, and all of a sudden it occurred to me. It came from an incident that had happened to me in Houston about two years after Bob’s death. It was a cold, rainy, drizzly day, and I had gone to Houston with some of my teacher friends. I was supposed to meet them somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, but it was in downtown Houston. It was time to go meet my friends. I was standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross a street, ready to step down off the crub. I looked up and there came Bob! Dressed in his brown suit with that tan hat—big man, heavy-set—and I couldn’t cross the street. There was Bob coming toward me! I’m sure, from the way people looked at me, that I made some kind of sound. But I backed up all the way across the sidewalk against a store window, and stood there until the man crossed the street. He stood on the edge of the sidewalk about 8 or 10 feet from me, and I still couldn’t get away from the fact that this was Bob. He turned around and looked at me, and I told myself I could see differences, but I couldn’t. That was Bob. He looked at me for a few minutes—I don’t know whether I was making a sound or not. Then he turned around, turned his back on me, and looked down the street. In just a moment his bus came down the street. Came down, stopped at the corner, and he got on the bus. I watched it. I watched as it went on, and I saw him take his money out and put it in the slot for the fare, and start toward the back of the bus. Then the bus moved on further. I watched it till it was out of sight. I stood there for a few minutes until I could get myself together. Then I went over and met my friends. That was a very vivid incident!

BURKE: That would certainly shock a person.

ELLIS: It shocked me! As I think about it now, I’m shocked by it, I can remember the strange feeling I had. TO see somebody coming across the street that you know has been dead about two years! When I got ready to write my play, I thought about that. I wrote “Day of the Stranger” in order to say some of the things I was still worried about—in order to get some of the old frustrations out of my mind. You say, “Now, in 1947 you were happily married and you had one beautiful child”—I just hadn’t gotten over the feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling that I think everybody who knows a friend or a family member who commits suicide feels. The feeling of guilt has this to do with it—you say, “If I hadn’t said thus-and-so, if i’d been more sympathetic, if I hadn’t sent that book back to Bob, if I’d gone by that morning, if I’d answered his letter”—all these things that you say. It doesn’t matter that maybe your reasoning mind can tell you “Oh, well, this would not have done it”—you still think it. I wrote that play to relieve my own heart. I used that play myself. It was produced a good many places, but after writing it, I felt better. After you were here earlier I read it again, while making the copy; I hadn’t written nearly as much about his Egyptian beliefs as I thought it had.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 19-20

At least by 1956, Novalyne had adapted the radio play into a script for a one-act play or dramatic reading suitable for high school dramatics:

Lafayette High School’s Dramatics department has been experimenting with the “Readers’ Theatre” technique since the 1956-57 school year. That year they presented a drama quartet called “The Day of the Stranger,” a radio play written and adapted to the new medium by Novalyne Price Ellis. The quartet, composed of Celia Guilbeaux, Marilyn Montgomery, Gerald Hernandez, and Pauline Harding, performed for the Louisiana State University Workshop in drama and interpretation and at the Northwestern Theatre Festival at Natchitoches.
“Lafayette Drama Class To Present Five Readings,” The Daily Advertizer, Lafeyette, LA, 15 Nov 1966

At least one dramatic reading was directed by her husband William Ellis (The Daily Iberian, New Iberia, LA, 18 Nov 1957), and it it is likely there were several more, either carried out by the Ellises over the years or various amateur groups using the script in Walch’s book.

The script itself is very brief, for five characters with some bit parts and direction for music, appropriate for dramatic radio production. The crux of Novalyne’s eerie experience is retained, but the scene was shifted to a drug store on Canal Street in New Orleans. The character based on Novalyne was named Jeanne, the Robert E. Howard equivalent in the story was named Craig Blair…although it is only the Stranger who gives his voice.

MARY: Why, early this morning when there weren’t many customers in here, I was getting a chocolate malt ready for a fellow. I had my back to the bar. (SOMEWHAT DRAMATIC) Then all of a sudden a voice said: “Hey, my little bunch of onion tops, give me a cup of black coffee, the blacker and stronger the better.” (POINTED) WEll, you know who’d say it like that, don’t you?

JEANNE: (SUDDENLY ALARMED) No. No. I don’t.(t)

MARY: Well, honey, you could have knocked me over with your little finger because when I turned around…well, Craig Blair was sitting in that chair.

JEANNE: (EMOTIONAL) That’s not true. You know that’s not true.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 34

The real Robert E. Howard didn’t drink coffee, generally; but the line about “my little bunch of onion tops” could have come straight from his letters to Novalyne Price. Fact and fiction are thus mixed together in this scenario, but readers familiar with Novalyne’s later One Who Walked Alone or the film The Whole Wide World based on it can see many parallels between things the Stranger says in the play. For another example:

JEANNE: (WONDERINGLY) So you still think people live more than one life?(t)

STRANGER: (LAUGHS) Oh, well, I’ve always thought it was possible, if that’s what you mean. Who knows for sure? NOw, I didn’t go to school much—just to the eighth grade, but I’ve read a lot. The Egyptians used to believe you kept being born over and over until you got all your hopes and desires attended to. Pretty confusing thought, I think.

JEANNE: That’s a crazy thing to think, and you don’t really believe. You used… (CONFUSED) …that is… Craig Blair used to say the same thing, but he didn’t believe it. People talk and talk, and they never believe half of the things they say. I think—
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 36

Robert E. Howard wrote many stories about reincarnation and past lives, from the James Allison tales like “The Valley of the Worm” and “The Garden of Fear” to the Conan the Reaver story “The People of the Dark.” How much he himself believed in reincarnation has always been and probably always shall be an open question. Novalyne Price Ellis would interpret such ideas through her own experiences.

ELLIS: TO me, what Bob said about that was just a fascinating idea. Just another fantastic story to weave. I was down in the dumps. So he says, “Now here I was in Brownwood. I met this man, and we disliked each other the minute we saw each other. Maybe way back yonder somewhere, maybe he stole my woman or the bear I’d killed for food”—which was the most important to him I don’t remember. How could anybody take him seriously? I mean, that was spur-of-the-moment.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 21

Whether or not the Stranger is the ghost or reincarnation of Robert E. Howard—or Craig Blair in the setting of the play—it is indubitably an effort to capture something of Howard’s character and mannerisms.

As a piece of drama, “The Day of the Stranger” has legs: the identity of the “stranger” is never revealed, and all of the conflict is in Jeanne’s head, the tumult of emotions as she is torn between the memory of a dead man and the more unimaginative man she’s dating now. Yet on another level, for those familiar with the outlines of Novalyne and Bob’s relationship, it reads as a kind of catharsis—a way for her to work out many of the lingering emotions she might have had, to put a sense of closure on a relationship which ended on an unresolved chord.

*The Trail*, yearbook of Daniel Baker College, 1947

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.

Deeper Cut: Spirits of Bigotry Past & Present: H. P. Lovecraft & J. K. Rowling

The main points of concern for the journalists seem to be the same as those of the bloggers; first and foremost they feel the need to express that Rowling is wrong and transphobic, but they also want to present their views on the debate of whether liking Harry Potter is still justifiable. The separating the art from the artist discussion is a crucial part of the majority of these articles. Several of the authors mention other controversial artists such as H.P. Lovecraft and analyse how these situations were handled.
Fleur Heiltjes, Alive but #Cancelled? The Public’s Response to the Controversial Author (2021) 31

In 1967, Roland Barthes published his essay “La Mort de l’Auteur” (“The Death of the Author”). This influential work of literary criticism examined the relationship between the author and their work; interest in a work often extends to interest in the author, and what we know about the author informs how we read a work. Many literary critics of H. P. Lovecraft have read elements from his own life in his fiction. Sometimes these readings are supported by primary evidence. Lovecraft himself noted in his letters that real-world personal experiences and places he had visited sometimes informed his fiction. For example:

[…] am now on the 22nd manuscript page of a long short story to be called “The Dunwich Horror”. The action takes place amongst the wild domed hills of the upper Miskatonic Valley, far northwest of Arkham, & is based on several old New England legends—one of which I heard only last month during my sojourn in Wilbraham.
H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 4 Aug 1928, Essential Solitude 1.151

While evidence from Lovecraft’s letters has led to deeper insight into his life, his writing process, and his fiction, their wider publication beginning with the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft from Arkham House also led to wider awareness of his personal prejudices. While many readers would have already picked up touches of early 20th-century prejudices in Lovecraft’s fiction and poetry, Lovecraft’s growing reputation as a writer, this reputation always cared with it the unpleasant reality that Lovecraft was racist, an antisemite, homophobic, etc. As his fame spread and his works entered the public domain, that same public—which has grown ever more diverse—has re-evaluated both Lovecraft and his work.

Lovecraft’s prejudices have become part of his legend. For many, they have become his defining feature: a popular image that is easy to turn to caricature and resistant to nuance and complexity. H. P. Lovecraft has become the ghost of a bigoted past who continues to haunt the readers of today. Unfortunately, the present is haunted by its own bigoted spirits.

Prejudice has become almost as indelible a part of the legend of British writer J. K. Rowling over the last few years as Lovecraft—and this has drawn comparison between the two. However, there are many important differences between the two writers, both in their specific circumstances and how they are read and interpreted by today’s audiences. Comparing two bigoted authors is fundamentally different from comparing apples to oranges…because to torture a metaphor, we have to take into account not just the fruit, but the trees they grow from, the orchard, the terroir: the historical context in which a living author and a dead one lived and worked.

H. P. Lovecraft, Spirit of a Bigoted Past

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a pulp writer and amateur journalist. Born into a moderately affluent white family in Providence, Rhode Island, a series of deaths in the family greatly reduced its fortunes. Lacking strong financial acumen or prospects, and with limited education, Lovecraft lived much of his life in genteel poverty, largely unknown outside of a small but ardent circle of admirers of pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, where many of his stories have published. After his death, his friends and fans continued to promote and publish his work, to expand and elaborate on the shared universe known as the Cthulhu Mythos he had devised, and to study his life and letters. Lovecraft’s fame is largely posthumous: he died a relatively obscure pulp author and reaped few financial rewards from his work. Awareness of his racism began to grow in the public consciousness after the publication of his Selected Letters (1965-1976) and especially Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp, which not only emphasized his prejudices but contained the first widespread publication of the poem “On the Creation of Niggers,” which along with his childhood pet, the black cat Nigger-man, has become part of his legend, and usually the first things cited as examples of his racism.

It is not unusual that a white man in the early 20th century United States of America might be anti-immigrant, racist, homophobic, and misogynist: this was the era of the second Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and the rise of the Nazi party. Women did not have the right to vote in the US until 18 August 1920, two days before Lovecraft’s thirtieth birthday. Lovecraft would never live to see the Holocaust, the Stonewall Riots, or the Civil Rights Movement. His prejudices reflect the period he lived in, and were widespread.

That is an explanation, not an excuse. Lovecraft may not have known better as a child or young adult, but as he entered his twenties he learned not everyone shared his bigotry. Relatively early in his writing career, Lovecraft received public pushback against his prejudices (“Not All Anglo-Saxons” (1911) by Herbert O’Hara Molineux, “Concerning the Conservative” (1915) by Charles D. Isaacson). After this censure, Lovecraft did not assay such public prejudice again, but kept his comments largely to himself and his close friends and family. While Lovecraft’s fiction shows the definite prejudices of his period, what we know of Lovecraft’s own prejudices comes almost exclusively from his thousands of letters and the memoirs of his friends and family, including his wife Sonia (The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft (1985) by Sonia H. Davis, Her Letters To Lovecraft: Sonia H. Greene). Through his letters, we see Lovecraft at his best and worst, in his travels (Deeper Cut: Lovecraft in Chinatown, Deeper Cut: Lovecraft in Harlem) and in those he met and interacted with (Deeper Cut: Elsa Gidlow & Les Mouches Fantastiques, Deeper Cut: William Stanley Braithwaite).

While Lovecraft’s views on race were not static throughout his life, and were strongly influenced by his travels and meeting different people, he never overcame the prejudices of his earlier life.

Lovecraft’s influence on contemporary genre fiction cannot be overstated. He was a friend and encouragement to Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, C. L. Moore, August Derleth, Donald A. Wollheim, James Blish, and many more; his fiction, down to the most obscure fragment, has been published and republished. The shared universe he created and encouraged has been enthusiastically embraced by fans, writers, artists, and game designers for decades, all the more so since his fiction has entered the public domain. Despite Lovecraft’s personal prejudices, his work has been embraced by and re-imagined by generations of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ folk. Many works today specifically address the complex issues of Lovecraft’s personal prejudices (“The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) by Victor LaValle, The City We Became (2020) by N. K. Jemisin)—Lovecraft has become a public domain character as much as Cthulhu, the spirit of a bigoted past who continues to haunt the present.

J. K. Rowling, Spirit of a Bigoted Present

Joanne Rowling (1965- ) was born in Yate, Gloucestershire, in the United Kingdom. From a fairly stolid middle-class background, she matriculated to university, graduated with a B.A. in French from the University of Exeter. Her first young adult novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) reached widespread acclaim on publication, would be followed by more books, a series of critical and commercially successful films, merchandise, licensing deals, etc. Millions of copies of her books sold, and Rowling herself became a multimillionaire. With newfound wealth came both adulation and expectations: Rowling came under the public spotlight, her social media presence the subject of constant attention and criticism.

In the late 2010s, Rowling’s opposition to gender transition and transgender individuals have come increasingly to public attention and received commensurate criticism. (“JK Rowling criticised over ‘transphobic’ tweet about menstruation”). While Rowling attempted to justify her views with a self-serving essay (“J. K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues”), she has neither apologized nor corrected her views. Instead, Rowling doubled down on her prejudices and has used her wealth and public position to continue to discriminate against transgender individuals and support anti-trans activists (GLAAD Accountability Project: J. K. Rowling).

Rowling’s social media presence and the huge footprint of the Harry Potter media empire have led to swift and tremendous public awareness of her anti-trans prejudices. Individual friends and public figures, including those involved with the Harry Potter films, have variously distanced themselves from her views (Every Harry Potter actor who’s spoken out against J.K. Rowling) or supported her despite her prejudices (Ralph Fiennes defends JK Rowling). Her wealth and, perhaps, her ego have largely sheltered her from consequences: despite substantial efforts to publicly educate her on the realities of the discrimination that transgender people face, Rowling has doubled down on her beliefs in the face of criticism and opposition—and there isn’t much anyone can do about it.

There is a timing aspect to the rapid death spiral of Rowling’s reputation: her initial displays of transphobia have come at a time of increased awareness and vocal support from transgender people in the face of a rising of toxic political rhetoric against transgender people, especially in the United Kingdom (The Growth of the Anti-Transgender Movement in the United Kingdom, The Roots of Anti-Trans Feminism in the U.K.), but also internationally. The backlash against and support for Rowling and her transphobia have a strong partisan bias, even if that puts Rowling into proximity with individuals she herself wouldn’t want to be associated with (Putin cites J.K. Rowling as proof of West’s ‘cancel culture’) and her prejudices have had real-world consequences (How J. K. Rowling helped kill a proposed American LGBTQ civil rights law).

That’s the explanation, not an excuse. The terminal online nature of media in the 2010s and 2020s has made Rowling’s tweets a feeding frenzy of takes, trolls, and political posturing for those eager to stake out their space in the culture wars, but when you cut through the clickbait ledes, the facts are pretty straightforward. LGBTQ+ people in the United Kingdom had been fighting for and winning equal rights throughout Rowling’s life (Timeline of LGBT history in the United Kingdom). This isn’t a case where Rowling was raised a bigot in a terminally transphobic society and is repeating popular prejudices. Rowling’s transphobia is a marginal, reactionary pushback against legal recognition and protections that have taken LGBTQ folks decades of organized effort to secure. Instead of supporting the rights of women or working to protect the transgender fans of the Harry Potter series who have quite literally enriched her, Rowling has become one of the gilded bogeymen of Twitter, using her wealth and privilege to promote her agenda (If J. K. Rowling’s Women’s Shelter Turns Away Trans Women, Then It Isn’t Helping Women).

Comparison

When taken into comparison like that, the differences between Lovecraft and Rowling may seem a bit stark—but context is important. Lovecraft doesn’t get a pass just because his bigotry was commonplace while Rowling’s is marginal—but the fact that they had such different life experiences and reactions when confronted on their prejudice is in large part due to the 80-odd years between Lovecraft’s death and Rowling first hitting “like” on a transphobe’s tweet. We can only imagine what Lovecraft might have been like had he had Twitter, but we cannot know. As it is, lacking a broad public forum or the desire to push his prejudices in such a way, Lovecraft’s prejudices were kept mostly private until his death. The spotlight never shown on Lovecraft in that way during his life, except for the very briefest of moments; by the time fans could seriously react to his bigotry, Lovecraft was dead.

Rowling has the benefit of many things that never came to Lovecraft during his life—a university education, fame & fortune during her lifetime—but not a filter. Fame comes at its own cost, both in terms of loss of privacy and dealing with toxic fandom, but twenty-plus years since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hit shelves, any sympathy for the online hate Rowling deals with has to be balanced against the fact that she’s had decades to manage and shape her media presence. When Rowling responded to allegations in 2020, she made a clear statement that she was not playing the victim:

I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.
J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues

Rowling went on to oppose Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform bill; apparently she supports every trans person’s right to live in any way that feels authentic and comfortable them as long as it doesn’t involve the right for trans women to call themselves women. Which is a step further than Lovecraft went. While it may be damning with faint praise to say Lovecraft never joined the KKK or participated in a lynching, the only physical act of discrimination Lovecraft’s ever performed was riding on a segregated bus. Then again, Lovecraft had no money. We have no idea what he would have done, if had the means to do it. Discrimination is a matter of means and opportunity as much as motivation.

Which is why comparison between H. P. Lovecraft and J. K. Rowling sort of falls apart. Both were and are prejudiced, respectively. Their exact prejudices are different (transgender identities was not understood in the same way during Lovecraft’s lifetime, see Deeper Cut: The Hormonal Lovecraft), as were the forms their discrimination took, and the arc of their reputation. It was shaped by the context of their lives and careers; if Lovecraft had been successful, perhaps he would have faced more backlash during his lifetime, if Rowling had died in poverty and Harry Potter kept alive by an ardent circle of fans, her tweets only published decades later, we wouldn’t be hearing about her transphobia until then. For want a nail, the main thing that Rowling and Lovecraft have in common, if you ignore all their circumstances, is that they were both bigoted.

So why compare Lovecraft & Rowling? Why not Rowling & Ernest Hemingway? In truth, Rowling has been compared to many other bigoted authors—and as with Lovecraft, the comparisons tend to be pretty superficial. When you get down to the level of what exactly people believed and how they expressed their discrimination, the divide between historical racism and contemporary racism, between letters in amateur journals which get seen by tens of people months later versus tweets that are seen by thousands of people in seconds—it gets difficult to make meaningful comparisons.

J. K. Rowling is no H. P. Lovecraft, and vice versa. Nor do we read them quite the same.

How We Read Bigoted Authors

Barthe’s “death of the author” is metaphorical as much as it is literal: while it might be polite to wait until the author is dead and can no longer comment on their work, in a broader perspective the point of “death of the author” is that the reader can engage with the text without knowing anything about the author, or without reference to the author’s comments and other writings outside of the text. For writers that might still have a pulse and some brain activity, it might be better to think of it in terms of “ignoring the author”—not with the intention of trying to enjoy an author with disagreeable views, but as a technique of literary criticism.

What readers generally can’t ignore is what they themselves bring to the text. Readers today don’t need to know anything about H. P. Lovecraft to figure out he was influenced by early 20th century views of race in stories like “Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.” However, readers today will also generally have very different interpretations of the concentration camps in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” than someone reading the story in the 1920s and 30s, and are more likely to draw comparisons with the Nazis and the Holocaust than with the enemy alien camps of World War I which Lovecraft was familiar with (“The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999) by Brian McNaughton & “The Litany of Earth” (2014) by Ruthanna Emrys).

This is part of the reason Lovecraft’s reputation as a racist is so pronounced: if someone had a black cat named after a racial slur for Black people today, as Lovecraft did as a child, it would be so far beyond the pale of what is acceptable today that there would be accurately labeled as a terrible bigot. At the time when Lovecraft owned the cat, that wasn’t an uncommon name for a black pet. It is still an example of Lovecraft’s racism, but in context it is more accurately seen as part of a wider cultural trend in a society that is much more openly racist than today’s, not Lovecraft being uniquely racist. Which is generally why historical context is important when looking at dead authors and their fiction: looking at the past solely through the lens of contemporary experience often leads to misunderstanding and misrepresentation (presentism).

Given how prevalent racism, antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, etc. were in the past, it should come as no surprise that there were a lot of bigoted authors. With the combination of social progress and increases in scientific knowledge, it’s not surprising that there are a lot of authors who end up on the wrong side of history—and many of them, like Lovecraft, were fairly conservative or reactionary even with respect to the politics and social views of their own time. Even then, humans tend to be rather complex: for example, Lovecraft was a bigot in terms of race, but he was progressive in other areas such as opposition to censorship, support for women writers, and New Deal-style socialism.

Not that you would really know that from reading his stories. Those are aspects of Lovecraft’s personality and life that never found expression in his fiction. Readers who approach Lovecraft’s fiction with a “death of the author” perspective would be totally ignorant of anything except what is in the stories themselves. Which is why “death of the author” is a tool in the literary criticism toolbox, but not the only technique or approach that can or should be used to evaluate a work or body of work.

In practice, most readers bring something of their understanding of an author to the work when they read it. After the revelation of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s child sexual abuse, for instance, it can be very difficult not to look at her fiction through the lens of this knowledge (“Doom of the Thrice-Cursed” (1997) by Marion Zimmer Bradley). Readers aware of Lovecraft’s racism will tend to read his stories with an eye toward finding expressions of his racism in those stories—and they will find it, although their understanding may be imperfect without a broader understanding of the historical context of Lovecraft’s life and how and when and why he wrote the story.

Before the internet, it might have been said that posterity would probably not be kind to J. K. Rowling…but things are faster now, and Rowling is a bigger target. It took decades after he was dead for Lovecraft to become big enough to attract serious scholarship and opprobrium for his racism Fans, literary critics, and scholars were already combing over Rowling’s every word before she liked her first tweet. Unlike Lovecraft, Rowling is alive as the vultures pick her literary bones and the scholars root through her tweets like diviners making note of lesions on a bird’s liver. Rowling has a voice to push back against her critics in a way that Lovecraft can’t. She also has a possibility of redemption that Lovecraft will never have.

Cancel Culture

Minus some required reading for school or work, nobody has to read H. P. Lovecraft or J. K. Rowling. Their literary status is due to popularity, but there’s no compulsion behind it in the sense of the Nazis handing out copies of Mein Kampf. If you don’t want to read about Cthulhu or Harry Potter…why not change the channel, return the library book, block the tweets? Read or watch or listen to something else. Don’t give then your precious attention or your dollars.

For all the hyperbole that pundits, politicians, and celebrities have given to “cancel culture” and the terrible consequences that folks can suffer if held to account for being racist or sexist or anything else, the fundamental idea behind it is essentially laissez faire: you the consumer get to decide what to buy, what to read, etc. While social media can drum up semi-organized boycotts, share information about the intended subject of ostracism, or rally signatures for specific projects, for most people it’s a decision as simple, straightforward, and personal as putting an aluminum can in the recycling bin instead of the trash. The individual effort involved is generally minimal. It is only the net effect of thousands of potential customers en masse exercising their right to not buy what someone else is selling that has real impact on the bottom line.

In this way, cancel culture combines two effective techniques: social ostracism and economic impact. The massed body of the public cannot issue fines or enforce social mores, but they can refuse to buy Rowling’s books or ignore her until she either goes away or decides to act right. The latter is, perhaps, what a lot of people hope for: that an author who has said something stupid, bigoted, and offensive will realize the error of their ways, learn better, apologize, grow as a person, and make amends. Many fans want the moral values of the creator to match their content; there is a collective guilt that can be experienced in continuing to enjoy and support an author with bigoted views.

After all, the dollars, euros, and pounds spent on Harry Potter books, films, games, and merchandise are ultimately ending up in J. K. Rowling’s pocket…which she will then dip into to continue to support anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, or fund shelters that discriminate against trans women, or a shiny new smartphone to tweet with. Most readers don’t like to be complicit in supporting those authors who actively support their oppressors. When they are made aware of it, anyway.

The major problem of cancel culture is that the economic impact often has minimal visible effect, at least not for individuals as wealthy as J. K. Rowling is. She has already made her money, she’s already won. If nobody spent a penny on any Harry Potteriana for the rest of her life and she was stuck self-publishing verbose crime thrillers, she’s probably still set for life. Rowling’s wealth insulates her from pretty much any sort of collective economic action. If readers hope Rowling will one day shift her views and come to accept that trans women are women, it probably won’t be because there’s an economic impetus driving the decision.

H. P. Lovecraft cannot be canceled.

If nobody buys Lovecraft’s books, the text of them is still free on the internet. Lovecraft, for the most part, is in the public domain. Like it or not, he belongs to all of us now, and there is no way to stop people from using Lovecraft’s texts and his Mythos in pretty much any way they see fit. If the economic carrot-and-stick of cancel culture doesn’t work on Rowling because she’s too rich to care, it doesn’t work on Lovecraft because he’s broke and dead. No matter what nasty names Lovecraft is called on the internet, his moldering bones in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, R.I. won’t rotate even a quarter-turn. No amount of urine on his grave can change his mind.

At least none of the money is going to benefit the prejudices Lovecraft had while he was alive.

The Two-Headed Ghost

Lovecraft cannot be canceled, but his legend continues—and his position in the literary firmament continues to be evaluated, debated, argued, as when his image was removed from the World Fantasy Award in 2015. Which is as it should be. While many readers identify strongly with works of fiction, the characters inside, and values they espouse—while many readers may idolize the creators of their favorite book, comic, game, or film—at the end of the day, H. P. Lovecraft and J. K. Rowling are just people. Very flawed, very complex human beings, not secular saints, and deserving of praise and sanction in response to their actions the same as anybody else.

Bigotry is a two-headed ghost. Janus-like, it stares into both the past and the future. Readers cannot escape the reality of historical racism, they can only choose how they themselves will approach the material and authors. If you as a reader cannot see past H. P. Lovecraft as anything but a bigot, cannot stand to read him, don’t want to hear about historical context or anything else that smacks of an excuse for racism, homophobia, antisemitism, etc.

Then don’t read him. Nobody can force you to. That’s your right. If you ever change your mind, Lovecraft will still be there. The dead cannot be hurt, only forgotten and misremembered.

Readers can also choose not to endorse and support bigots in the present. Unlike Lovecraft, J. K. Rowling can still change, can still look to the future—and she can already see, in the scholarly articles, the heartfelt fan letters, the opportunistic political punditry—what her legacy is shaping up to be. People may or may not read Harry Potter in a hundred years, but the question Rowling faces is how she herself will be remembered.

As long as an author breathes, they have a chance to change, to grow, to redeem themselves, at least a little. Lovecraft didn’t live long enough to do that; perhaps most don’t. The tide of history is relentless, and no one can see perfectly either where it came from or where it is going…nor force anyone else to change their minds. In the final analysis, all readers are faced with Barthes’ choice: how do they choose to approach the authors and their work? Because it is up to the readers to decide who they read, and how and why they read them. Whether to ignore their faults, or to accept them.

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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