In the new issue I found more good stuff than usual. “The Canal” is truly fine—real terror woven into the inmost atmosphere—& “Bells of Oceana” comes close to packing a genuine kick.
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 4 Nov 1927, Essential Solitude 1.113
“The Canal” by Everil Worell was first published in Weird Tales December 1927, which is where Lovecraft read it. This was Worrell’s fourth published story in Weird Tales; she would publish 19 in the magazine between 1926 and 1954, when the pulp ceased publication, being one of the prolific women weird talers who made their mark on the magazine. Lovecraft wasn’t keen on every story Worrell wrote…but “The Canal” was special, and Lovecraft repeatedly listed it among the best stories ever published by Weird Tales:
Looking over the whole contents of W.T., one’s final impression is that of a devastating desert of crudity & mediocrity, relieved by a very few oases. The high spots that impress me are Suter’s “Beyond the Door”, Humphrey’s “The Floor Above”, Arnold’s “The Night Wire”, Worrell’s “The Canal”, Burks’ “Bells of Oceana”, & Leahy’s “In Amundsen’s Tent”. Those things have the atmosphere & suggestion which spell power.
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 18 Feb 1930, Essential Solitude 1.247
As for my favourite W.T. authors—it would be hard to make a list. The very best tales have been written by persons not at all well known. In my opinion, the relaly high spots run something like this:
Beyond the Door___________Paul Suter
The Floor Above___________M. Humphreys
The Night Wire____________H. F. Arnold
In Amundsen’s Tent_________John Martin Leahy
The Canal________________Everil Worrill [sic]
Bells of Oceana____________Arthur J. Burks
Passing of a God___________Henry S. Whitehead
[…] W0rrill [sic] is good in the main, but has produced some fearsome trash.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 19 Jun 1931, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 18-19
Yes—”The Canal” is great stuff. I once cited it as one of the 6 best stories WT ever printed—the other 5 being “Beyond the Door”, “The Floor Above”, “In Amundsen’s Tent”, “The Night Wire”, & “Bells of Oceana.” The author is a woman, & has written other stuff—some very poor (“Light Echoes”) & some distinctly good (“the Bird of Space”).
—H. P. Lovecraft to Duane W. Rimel, 22 Dec 1934, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin 247-248
Lovecraft wasn’t originally aware of Worrell’s gender, and refers to her as “he” in his correspondence until 1930, when he received a bit of news:
[Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales] adds that Everil Worrell (who turns out to be a woman) is about to become associate editor of W.T. & Oriental Tales.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 14 Oct 1930, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 242 (cf. ES 1.281)
Oriental Stories was a new magazine produced by Popular Fiction Publishing the publishers of Weird Tales and edited by Farnsworth Wright, with the first issue appearing in Oct-Nov 1930; Wright also wanted to bring out a third magazine titled Strange Stories, but a dispute regarding the name hung up production and SS was eventually abandoned. Lovecraft was positive about the idea of Worrell as associate editor, based solely on her fiction—and that mainly “The Canal”:
I hope that the co-editorship of Everil Worrell, whose “Canal” shewed a genuine comprehension of the principles of weirdness, will cause some slight improvement in the magazine’s principles of selection.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 17 Oct 1930, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 246
Unfortunately, it was not to be. Oriental Stories by itself was a strain on Popular Fiction Publishing’s resources, with Weird Tales having to go bimonthly for three issues in 1931 to help keep Oriental Stories afloat. Whether the financial strain couldn’t support an associate editor, or Wright didn’t need an associate editor because the magazines went bimonthly, or Worrell chose not to accept the position—she did not join the Popular Fiction Publishing editorial staff.
What was it about “The Canal” that attracted Lovecraft’s undying appreciation? The protagonist is coincidentally very Lovecraftian, with a love of nocturnal walks and strange places and an appreciation of odd beauty. So too, some of the philosophical themes, such as the loss of freedom that an office job would require, might have struck a chord. The premise of the plot—quite literally love at first sight—is not at all the usual kind of story that Lovecraft enjoyed. But as with “Shambleau” (1933) by C. L. Moore and “Black God’s Kiss” (1934) by C. L. Moore, Lovecraft could appreciate sudden and sensual attachments if the story had a truly weird element, carefully told with the appropriate atmosphere. Werewolves and vampires were rather conventional horrors that held little interest for Lovecraft, but they had their place in the weird oeuvre, and HPL never said a word against Dracula’s brides in the castle.
Lovecraft’s appreciation for “The Canal” led to a brief but illuminating discussion with another master of the weird tale:
By the way, I have just been re-reading “The Canal”, which you mention. It certainly creates a memorable atmosphere; but the one flaw, to me, is the wholesale dynamiting, which seems to introduce a jarring note among the shadowy supernatural horrors. However, this is just my own reaction. I would have had the narrator simply kill himself, overwhelmed by despair at the irremediable scourge he had loosed, and leave the horror to spread unchecked. However, I shouldn’t be captious: it is the only good vampire story I have ever seen, apart from Gautier’s “Clarimonde” and my own “Rendezvous in Averoigne.” […] It seems to me also that Everil Worrel’s co-editorship should help to counter-balance some of Wright’s dunder-headed decisions; and I shall re-submit Satampra and perhaps also “The Door to Saturn” at some future date.
—Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, 24-30 Oct 1930, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 254
“The Canal certainly has atmosphere. The final dynamiting—like my dynamiting of the house on Tempest Mountain in “The Lurking Fear”—is probably less subtly handled than it ought to be, yet is in a certain sense necessary as a means of explaining why the whole world hasn’t “gone vampire”. Whenever a fantastic tale introduces a horror which, if unchecked, would shortly produce strikingly visible results throughout the earth, it is necessary to explain why those results have not occurred—necessary, in short, to check the full action of the thing—unless the tale is laid in the future. There is really no way of escaping this dilemma. We must either explain the present survival of the existing order, or choose a remotely future period at which the existing order is assumed to be destroyed. The only adumbration of a middle course open to us is to have the original horror so subtle as to produce only imperceptible effects for a very long period, or to have a partial checking in which the action of the horror is vastly minimised or delayed. In “Dagon” I shewed a horror that may appear, but that has not yet made any effort to do so. In “Cthulhu” I had a coming horror checked by the same convulsion of Nature which produced it. [earthquake-sinking of R’lyeh] In “The Colour Out of Space” I had a partial checking. Just enough of the Outside influence remains in the well to provide a slow, creeping blight. And in “Dunwich” I had full artificial destruction, as in “The Canal”. When one does have full artificial destruction, the important thing is not to make the process too bald, crude, or incongruous with the atmosphere or action of the narrative as a whole. I agree that very few good vampire tales exist.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 7 Nov 1930, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 261-262
This is a rare case where Lovecraft gives us insight on the craft behind writing his stories, in part because the nature of the ending of “The Canal” caused him to reflect on how he ended his own stories. There is an interesting point of comparison there: when August Derleth reprinted “The Canal” in The Sleeping and the Dead (1947), the story was revised, cutting about 2,000 words and radically changing the ending; the abridged version can be read here. The abridged ending is more melancholy and less climactic than the first; the intention of suicide remains, but there is no dynamite, no colony of bat-creatures; it is, in fact, a bit closer to Clark Ashton Smith’s suggested ending.
Lovecraft’s appreciation of “The Canal” did not lessen with the years, and his letters in 1935 give evidence of that when Worrell’s story was reprinted in the January 1935 Weird Tales. His two longest comments to younger Weird Tales fans are succinct:
In the previous issue, the “Canal” reprint was the real feature. Yes—Everill Worrell was said by Wright to belong to the feminine gender. He once considered hiring her as associate editor, but finally decided not to. Viewed collectively, her work was very uneven—descended from the high level of “The Canal” to the unutterable namby-pamby of “Light-Echoes”…rather a Blackwoodian condition. I have seen nothing new of hers in years, & have no idea whether she is dead or alive. But “The Canal” is a landmark in WT history.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 11? May 1935, O Fortunate Floridian 259
“The Canal” is one of the most powerful tales W.T. ever printed—but I didn’t like “Light Echoes”, which to me suggested the namby-pamby. “The Bird of Space” wasn’t bad. I understand from Wright that Everil Worrell is a woman. He once thought of hiring her as assistant editor, but later decided not to. I don’t know her address, but fancy WT would gladly forward a letter address to her in its care. She ought to be glad to furnish an autograph to one who appreciates her work.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 31 May 1935, Letters with Donald & Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja 437
Everil Worrell was not dead, though Lovecraft could be forbidden for thinking so; she published no stories in Weird Tales under her own name after 1931 until 1939, two years after Lovecraft’s own death. Though they never met or corresponded, she was one of Lovecraft’s esteemed peers at Weird Tales.
“The Canal” would go on to be reprinted many times, sometimes in abridged form. Leonard Nimoy in his directing debut provided an adaptation of the story for The Night Gallery titled “Death on a Barge.” The original published text of the story can be read for free online.
“Where is Bess?” said Solomon Kane.
“Woe that I caused her tears.”
“In the quiet churchyard by the sea
she has slept these seven years.”
The sea-wind moaned at the window-pane,
and Solomon bowed his head.
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
and the fairest fade,” he said.
—Robert E. Howard, “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming” (1936)
For any other pulp writer, Solomon Kane would be a breakout character. Robert E. Howard’s original pulp stories, even the unpublished drafts, fragments, and synopses, have been collected, published, translated into other languages, and recorded as audiobooks. Kane has been adapted to comics by at least Marvel, Blackthorne, Dark Horse, Diabolo Ediciones, and now Karras Comics. In 2009 a feature film titled Solomon Kane was released; no less an author than Ramsey Campbell handled the novelization, and Campbell had also previously completed some of Howard’s Solomon Kane fragments. There is a Solomon Kane roleplaying game, a Solomon Kane board game, toys and action figures, and bootleg t-shirts. Solomon Kane has even been borrowed into the work of other authors, like Paul Di Filippo’s “Observable Things.”
Few pulp characters can claim as much success in publication, commercialization, and longevity. Yet Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane has since the 1930s dwelled in the shadow of Conan the Cimmerian. While Solomon Kane was Howard’s first successful series character, Conan was easily his most popular, and the tales and poems of the Puritan swordsman are often discovered by readers after they have already been hooked by Conan.
El Puritano(“The Puritan,” 2021, Karras Comics) is an original graphic novel based on Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane, who has fallen into the public domain in Europe. The creators of this graphic novel are El Torres (script), Jaime Infante (pen & inks), & Manoli Martínez (colorist); the logo was designed by Ferran Delgado. While it is a standalone graphic novel in that the story is self-contained, the framing narrative makes this a kind of “second chapter” to Sangre Bárbara (2021) by El Torres, Joe Bocardo, & Manoli Martínez—El Puritano begins where Sangre Bárbara ends, with the former slave Mary Bohannon telling tales to a young Robert E. Howard, so while each stands on its own, taken together there is an episodic narrative…or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Robert E. Howard’s own story, the narrative and mythology of his life, have been closely entwined with his characters so that he becomes the common bridging element between them.
Solomon Kane did not attract as much fan interest as Conan in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, so there were fewer efforts to define a canonical chronology of his adventures—and indeed, Howard made no particular effort to set down a timeline; certain adventures clearly take place after others, because they refer to earlier events or Kane had acquired his strange cat-headed staff, but trying to fix real-world dates gets problematic. We never see Solomon Kane’s parents or home, we never get a fix for when he was born or how old he is; Kane steps onto the page, fully formed, and leaves the same way after completing his mission.
In El Puritano, El Torres and Jaime Infante have placed a much older but still spry Solomon Kane in the English colonies of North America. Various influences are at play here, some more obvious than others: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1956); Twins of Evil (1971), starring Peter Cushing as a witch-hunter; and The VVitch (2015) by director Robert Eggers all play their part in the mix, with little nods and homages to the various creators, actors, and storylines at play. Solomon Kane, the self-declared Puritan, is present in a colony of fellow believers, and yet he is apart from them. As it may be, since Howard noted:
All his life he had roamed about the world aiding the weak and fighting oppression, he neither knew nor questioned why. That was his obsession, his driving force of life. Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and lasting, through his soul. When the full flame of his hatred was wakened and loosed, there was no rest for him until his vengeance had been fulfilled to the uttermost. If he thought of it at all, he considered himself a fulfiller of God’s judgment, a vessel of wrath to be emptied upon the souls of the unrighteous. Yet in the full sense of the word Solomon Kane was not wholly a Puritan, though he thought of himself as such.
—Robert E. Howard, “Red Shadows”
The story that unfolds is a love letter to the character, with many references to past adventures without dwelling on them. Kane is faced once again with supernatural evil, and the need to defend an innocent young woman whose only crime may have been to love a witch. But Kane is also faced with his own conscience and past deeds—and how his own people, with all their superstition and ignorant faith, judge him and others. N’longa makes a surprising but very appropriate appearance, this time inhabiting the flesh of a Wampanoag woman, a kind of transgender experience that is at once novel and yet very fitting for the character.
Jaime Infante’s subdued, realistic artwork greatly compliments the script, and Manoli Martínez does some really notable work as a colorist, shifting the palette of the scenes to depict flashbacks, astral visitations, somber daylight, and vicious battle.
The story ends, not with Mary Bohannon talking to a young Robert E. Howard, but with Bob himself in his room, standing before the typewriter. The house still stands in Cross Plains, TX, now a museum with Bob’s room restored. You can see a Tour of the Robert E. Howard Home by Ben Friberg online, if you can’t get out there in person, and see it just as Infante tried to capture it on the page. Bob needs to write a story, and begins to type the opening words of “Red Shadows”…so it is both an ending and a beginning; what might be the last tale of Solomon Kane loops around as Howard records his legend. It begins and ends with Robert E. Howard.
El Puritano can be purchased from Karras Comics; they are working on other new works based on Robert E. Howard’s stories and characters as well.
I was born into a culture in which Lovecraft was not a household name: hell, he was not even a cult name. He came to my neck of Balkan woods pretty late. Yet eventually he ended up as the subject of my first, unfinished MA thesis, and one of the subjects of my (completed and defended) PhD thesis, and ultimately an author whom I translated and edited in his later appearances in Serbia. He is also a spirit looming above and behind many of my horror fiction writings, despite the fact that they are not set in New England but in Old Serbia.
In my childhood, in the early 1980s, during my initial investigations into the scarce horror fiction then available in Serbian, Lovecraft was literally unknown. Not a single story by him had been translated by my late teens, i.e. by 1989. Thus my first encounter with him was indirect – it was through the ideaof Lovecraft, as re-imagined in an Italian comic series Martin Mystere, the episode “The House at the Edge of the World” (“La Casa ai confini di mundo”, 1982), which I read in the summer of 1986, when I was 13. It was love at first sight: for the first time I encountered the concept of houses haunted not by ghosts or any traditional monster, but by unnamable inter-dimensional entities; it also involved places serving as portals into non-Euclidean spaces, nameless cosmic vistas, alien temples and weird-looking gods/demons. Even from a distance of 35 years, I can safely claim that this episode is one of the most inspired, sinister, and clever comic adaptations of HPL’s writings, based more on his spirit than on any particular tales. Up to that point I had not been aware that one was allowed to mix real places and people (Lovecraft himself included) with the fictional ones. I was instantly enthralled by it, and it has remained my favorite approach in my own fiction.
Strangely enough, for more than half a century since Lovecraft’s death, none of his fiction had been available in Serbian, and then, out of nowhere, came a sudden boom in 1990-1991. Within twelve months three books were published: a slim and pretty random selection of mostly minor stories was followed by his two major novels, At theMountains of Madness and The Case of CharlesDexter Ward, the latter accompanied by his essay on supernatural literature which, at the time, served as a more than welcome guide to authors and works then locally mostly untranslated. While Lovecraft was elsewhere, at the time, mostly relegated to the provenance of small presses and independent publishers, in Serbia all initial three books were published by major, state-owned publishers (Rad and Bigz), or at least state-and-local municipality-funded (Gradina).
The sudden boom of Lovecraft in this region was immediately followed by the explosions of Yugoslavia’s break-up in bloody civil wars. A coincidence? One is left to wonder… Later, when I started writing my own horror fiction, I used HPL’s large-scale entrance into Yugoslavia through Serbia just before the war as a springboard for a mixture of fact and fiction in a story titled “Necronomicon, The Third, Updated Edition” (“Nekronomikon: treće, dopunjeno izdanje”, 2014), where Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos, comes to the environment ripe for destruction and quickly joins forces with the local politicians.
My earlier story “Dagon, God of the Serbs” (“Dagon, bog Srba”, 2010) was a playful parable about a country in transition from one type of totalitarianism to an apparent “democracy” which, you guessed it, hides the cosmic evil in plain sight, and where “the new normalcy” of strange cults and weird worship is quickly taken for granted. Black-robed Orthodox priests are easily supplanted by the black-robed cultists who take over the Byzantine churches for human sacrifices and other rituals. The story’s title and central conceit is rooted in an actual medieval document which mentions that Serbs used to worship a god named Dagon (Karlovački rodoslov).
My most ambitious deployment of Lovecraft was in my first novel, In Vivo (Naživo, 2003). I have never been a fan of HPL pastiches or “Mythos fiction” written by his epigones, nor did I intend to become one myself. Therefore, in the plot dealing with the occult background of the civil wars and various brutalities in Balkan’s mid-1990s, Lovecraft is explicitly referred to only twice: in a cruel ritual invocation Yog-Sothoth is mentioned as just one of the many names for the Guardian of the Gate, equal to Choronzon (also named); and on the suggestive inscription on a mysterious man’s t-shirt, which after much divining of the hyper-stylized script, says: Nyarlathotep. What I strove for in that novel, rather than puerile winks and homage, was to apply Lovecraft’s notions of what constituted good storytelling, with painstaking realism in all aspects except the (suggestions of the) fantastic, with carefully placed hints alluding towards the bigger picture which is never explicitly delineated. Always having in mind Lovecraft’s ideals, I also strove to build a strong atmosphere of doom and gloom, for which Serbia in the 1990s, under sanctions, and affected by inflation, neighboring wars, and various forms of degradation, was all too perfect a background.
As can be divined from the above, Lovecraft’s fiction for me has never been just a repository of cool monsters, demons, and other paraphernalia: when I used them literally, it was in a tongue-in-cheek, openly satirical manner, but I mostly avoided them, or used them sparingly, when I was trying to say something more ambitious. It is sad, but true, that when I finally came across all of his writings in the mid-1990s, I found his pessimistic vision about humanity and the universe to correspond with what I’d already seen and felt in my own environment, but also, indirectly, in the rest of the world.
Yes, it took a full decade between my first encounter of the idea of Lovecraft, in a comic, and actually finding and reading all of his masterpieces, including “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” because it was pretty difficult or next to impossible buying books in English in Serbia during economic sanctions in the 1990s. However, when a friend brought me a few Lovecraft’s collections from London, my mind was blown. These stories were all that I imagined and hoped for during those ten years, and then some! This aspect may be hard to imagine for a today’s reader who is one click away from ordering anything by HPL through online sellers, or from accessing it online, across the web. But, in the age before the internet and before books in English became reasonably accessible, for Serbian readers Lovecraft was at least twice as esoteric. And yet, I must stress that in my case Lovecraft’s long unavailability was instrumental in whetting my horror appetites and my imagination: before I was able to read his best works, I imagined them, I thought about them and I dreamed them.
I was aware of Lovecraft’s denigrating attitude to immigrants, including Slavs, especially Poles, among other races and nations turned monstrous in “The Horror at Red Hook.” I also came across his early story “The Street” in which an old Yankee narrator feels a particular repugnance caused by the appearance of a Slavic business venture, “Petrovitch’s Bakery,” in his beloved, ethnically pure WASP town and street.
Of the various odd assemblages in The Street, the law said much but could prove little. With great diligence did men of hidden badges linger and listen about such places as Petrovitch’s Bakery, the squalid Rifkin School of Modern Economics, the Circle Social Club, and the Liberty Café. There congregated sinister men in great numbers, yet always was their speech guarded or in a foreign tongue. —H. P. Lovecraft, “The Street”
Petrovitch is a common Russian family name, but it is also found often among Serbian surnames. This story, admittedly minor, exemplifies the author’s prejudice towards Slavic races, including Serbs, which can be found expressed more explicitly in his essays and letters.
For example, talking about “greater Serbia (Jugo-Slavia)” in a letter to Arthur Harris he describes “Jugo-Slavs” as “a relatively unknown Eastern race” (13 Dec 1918, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others 237). His ignorance of the region, and the race, are typical of his times, because Serbia, until the outbreak of World War I was perceived, if at all, as just another insignificant “land behind the great forest.” At least he was willing to admit as much:
I’d hate to admit how little I know about the Slavonic nations, the Tartars, and even of Germany. […] The Balkans certainly are a hopeless mess, with wide racial variations —H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 16 Aug 1932, A Means to Freedom 1.367
A good example that Lovecraft was far from alone in such estimate, and with similar arguments, is found in Howard’s letter from 9 Aug. which actually instigated the above statement, where he says:
But what a tangled mess and confusion Balkan history is! And what a mixture of blood-strains the average Balkan must be! Celtic, Roman, German, Slav, Greek, Mongol, Turkish—no wonder they’re always ham-stringing each other” (ibid. 1.345)
A “hopeless mess“ is a phrase which could just as easily be used to describe Lovecraft’s anti-Slavic rant in his letter to the Gallomo, of 6 Oct 1921, in which he claims:
(I) do not think any Slav nation will rise even to semi-civilisation. Whatever the Slav conquers will be lost to civilisation, for the race-stock is deficient. Slavs are emotional and irrational… (Letters to Alfred Galpin 112)
Still, I did not mind the implications of his private rants nor his published, fictional diatribes, for several reasons. First, I do not self-identify as a Serb so fully and unreservedly that I would take such minor offences, clearly based on Lovecraft’s meager acquaintance with this subject (and on unfortunate race theories about Germanic and Anglo-Saxon supremacy, widespread in his times) as obstacles for my reading enjoyment, even in such a poor and shallow parable as “The Street.” Second, most of my favorite authors held some questionable views or had lifestyle choices which I may not fully condone (M. De Sade, E. A. Poe, L. F. Celine, W. Burroughs, T. Bernhard), yet it never occurred to me to “cancel” them or stop reading their fictions because of certain aspects of their thoughts or deeds which I did not share. Third, from reading HPL’s letters I realized the expanse of his mind, which included willingness to amend his ideas based on new findings, and felt certain that, if only he’d had a chance to meet some great Serbs who lived and worked in USA at the time, like Nikola Tesla or Mihajlo Pupin, he’d be more respectful, and perhaps even eager to enjoy some pita, or burek, from “Petrovitch’s Bakery.”
With only slightly more exposure to those “aliens,” he wouldn’t have perceived them as “sinister men” nor would he have feared their speech as “guarded” and “foreign.” After all, Tesla with his mysterious personality and public exhibitions of the new electric power may have at least partially inspired his conception of Nyarlathotep as a sinister “itinerant showman” with nightmarish exhibitions and performances… This connection, first suggested by Will Murray in his essay “Behind the Mask of Nyarlathotep”, is found by S. T. Joshi to be likely (see his “Explanatory notes” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, Penguin, 2002, 369). Had Lovecraft actually met Tesla, say, during his stay in New York, he might have even befriended the eccentric, reclusive and world-weary Serbian genius whose attitudes towards humanity, wealth and sex, among others, were rather similar to his own. Perhaps based on such an acquaintance a more benevolent character would have been created: someone closer to his good professors and scientists than to avatars of the Old Ones.
In any case, when in 2008 the opportunity arose for me to edit the first ambitious selection of Lovecraft’s best horror tales in Serbian, in a large format 600-pages hardcover with original illustrations, titled Nekronomikon, I accompanied the tales with my introduction, a lengthy afterword, annotated bibliography, detailed author’s biography and chronology of his entire opus, so that Serbian readers could, for the first time, see the full scope of his poetics and the literary context which shaped it. This was continued in a series of books (twenty five so far), named “Poetics of Horror,” for which I edited two more selections of Lovecraft’s stories, plus I did a new translation of Mountains, and among the authors I presented, most of them for the first time in Serbian, were many of his major influences (Machen, M. R. James, Blackwood, Hodgson) and followers (Ligotti, T.E.D. Klein).
Nekronomikon had three editions so far, each slightly different in content and design, and sold in almost 4.000 copies. His other collections are also in high demand. Serbs have embraced the scribe from Providence and his cult in this country is now quite strong. From a virtual unknown, thirty years ago, he grew into a cult figure in the 21st century’s first decade, while now his name on the covers guarantees sales comparable to those of better-known genre bestsellers. A nice feat for a spirit who, for more than fifty years after departing the body, evaded this part of the world. Once he was finally summoned to Serbia, he was not received as a foreigner and outsider, but as a long-lost prophet of doom whose bleak vision became immediately understandable and relatable.
Born and living in Niš, Serbia, Dejan Ognjanović received his PhD in Literature (“Historical Poetics of Horror Genre in Anglo-American Literature”). Writes reviews and articles for Rue Morgue magazine. In Serbia published three horror novels, three studies on horror cinema, two collections of essays and a book on Djordje Kadijević, pioneering director of Serbian horror films. Contributed to Steven Schneider’s 100 European Horror Films, 501 Movie Directors, and 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die, and also to academic collections Speaking of Monsters (2012) and Digital Horror (2015). He is editor at Orfelin Publishing since 2015, where he edits the series “Poetics of Horror,” and writes reviews and articles for Rue Morgue magazine, who also published his booklet The Weird World of H. P. Lovecraft (Rue Morgue Library #11, 2017).
“…que entre los años en que los océanos enguilleron Atlantis y sus resplandecientes ciudades, y el surgir de los hijoes de Aryas…
“…hubo una edad no soñada.”
Brillantes reinos se esparacían por el mundo como mantos azules bao las estrellas.
“Nemedia, Ofir, Brithunia, Hiperbórea…”
“Zamora, con sus mujeres de oscuros cabellos y sus torres plagadas de arácnidos misterios…”
“Zingara y su gallardía, Koth, que lindaba con las tierras de pastoreo de Shem.
“Estigia, con sus tumbas custodiadas por sombras.
“E Hirkania, cuyos jinetes vestían de acero, seda y oro.
“Pero el reino más orgulloso del mundo era Aquilonia, que reinaba suprema en el oeste.
“Ya hacía años que allí regia el poderoso Rey Conan, el cimmerio, aquel que fue guerrero, ladrón, pirata y saqueador antes que gran monarca.
“Y llegó el tiempo en que una sombra se agitó en las junglas Pictas que dormitaban al oesta de Aquilonia.”
“Know, oh Prince…
“…that between the years when the oceans engulfed Atlantis and her resplendent cities, and the rise of the sons of Aryas…
“There was an age undreamed of.”
Brilliant kingdoms spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars.
“Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea…”
“Zamora, with its dark-haired women and its towers plagued by arachnid mysteries…”
“Zingara and her chivalry, Koth, which bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem.
“Stygia, with its shadow-guarded tombs.
“And Hyrkania, whose horsemen wore steel, silk, and gold.
“But the proudest kingdom in the world was Aquilonia, which reigned supreme in the west.
“It had been years since the mighty King Conan, the Cimmerian, ruled there, the one who was a warrior, thief, pirate, and plunderer before being a great monarch.
“And the time came when a shadow stirred in the Pictish jungles that slept west of Aquilonia.”
So begins Sangre Bárbara (“Barbarian Blood,” 2021, Karras Comics). It is a fitting opening, with a variation of the incipit that Robert E. Howard wrote for “The Phoenix on the Sword,” which was the very first Conan the Cimmerian story, and which ran as a masthead across the Marvel Conan the Barbarian comics for decades, and even ran in a slightly different form at the beginning of the Conan the Barbarian (1982) film that starred Arnold Schwarzeneggar. The opening sets the mood; it immediately places the reader in the time and place for the action, and then the story opens…
Like The Barbarian King, Sangre Bárbara is set after the series of stories written by Robert E. Howard, giving the creators a freer hand in writing the adventure. Unlike that work, the principal character in the story is not Conan of Cimmeria…although he is still very much in the story…it is his son, the Prince Conan. A lean young man with the lean build and close-cropped hair of a boxer or legionnaire, scouting in the Pictish wilderness over the Aquilonian border, much as his father did in “Beyond the Black River.”
The story that follows wears several of its literary and artistic influences openly: the iconography of the 1982 film runs through the book like a river, from the cover to almost the last page. There is strong dedication to the original Howard texts, as shown in the opening. And there are hints of suggestions from the Marvel comics as well; I wouldn’t liken it to any kind of borrowing, but more of an inspiration: there was a storyline in Marvel’s Conan the King series titled “The Prince is Dead” which might have been the seed of this story…but Karras Comics takes the storyline much further than Marvel would ever have dared.
There is nudity, and there is gore; the writers and artist get away with it because they finally can—the same way the writers and artists of the French Glénat adaptations, and the Italian Leviathan Labs The Barbarian King books. Conan comics have almost always been a little more mature than the standard superhero fare, a little more bloody and sexy and visceral, but they have never been primarily ago either sex or blood. There are plenty of pornographic and horror comics that go in for plenty of each, if those are what readers want; so the trick for Conan comics nowadays is finding the right balance—in 2006, Dark Horse released a nude cover for Conan the Barbarian #24, and that was too much for some. In Sangre Bárbara, for the story being told and the atmosphere being set, it is certainly not much more explicit than in the 1982 film.
When reading this neo-Howardiana, it is interesting to see the choices that the writers and artists make in the depiction of the Hyborian Age. In this particular case, it is notable how racially diverse the cast is. Robert E. Howard held many of the racial prejudices one would expect of a young white man who grew up primarily in small towns in Texas; it was mentioned in the memoir One Who Walked Alone (1986) by Novalyne Price Ellis how Cross Plains was a sundown town. Some of this 1930s Texas racial stratification made it into Howard’s tales of the Hyborian Age—and some of that was continued in the Conan pastiches by other authors, which is why Charles R. Saunders wrote “Die Black Dog! A Look At Racism In Fantasy Literature” (1975, rev. 2011)—but they aren’t essential to it. Of course you can have Black characters in the Hyborian Age. Why not?
It is difficult not to compare Sangre Bárbara and The Barbarian King, since both works are branching off from similar premises, but they go about their work very differently. The Barbarian King is more acid sword & sorcery, heavier on the magic and the melancholy, the dream-like sequences and monstrous clash of color. Sangre Bárbara is much more gritty, subdued, and realistic; there is sorcery, but it isn’t bolts of flame erupting from fingertips, and the conflicts in the story are more complex than just a math problem of how many bodies can be piled up with a sword. There is a constant thread on the nature of civilization that runs through the story…right down to the last, and my favorite page.
As regards African-legend sources, I well remember the tales I listened to and shivered at, when a child in the “piney woods” of East Texas, where Red River marks the Arkansaw and Texas boundaries. There were quite a number of old slave darkies still living then. The one to whom I listened most was the cook, old Aunt Mary Bohannon who was nearly white—about one sixteenth negro, I should say.
This is, as far as I am aware, the first appearance of Mary Bohannon in comic book or graphic novel—and I like the sentiment, that to honor the past does not mean to be bound to every part of it irrevocably, and that the future remains to be written. The adventures of Conan are far from over, there are tales of the Hyborian Age left to tell—and maybe they will be a little more mature in more ways than just enough blood and nudity to ensure an NC-17 rating, but in what stories they tell and how, and how race fits into the age undreamed of. Certainly, this is a good start.
Sangre Bárbara can be purchased from Karras Comics; they are working on other new works based on Robert E. Howard’s stories and characters as well.
Georgina de Castro to H. P. Lovecraft, n.d. [c. Dec 1927 or Jan 1928], MSS. John Hay Library
Dear Mr. Lovecraft,
Illness (cold) prevents Dr. de Castro writing or doing anything at present, but Dr. de Castro hopes to see Mr. Lovecraft soon.
Faithfully, —Mrs. G. de Castro
The above note is, as far as is known, the only communication by card, letter, or note between Georgina de Castro and H. P. Lovecraft. Who she was, and how they came to share this brief correspondence—and an acquaintanceship that stretched a bit beyond that—involves the complicated and murky marital history of her husband, Adolphe Danziger de Castro, in whose adventures she shared for twenty-eight years.
Born in Poland in 1859 as Abram Dancygier, when he emigrated to the United States in 1883 he used the name Gustav Adolphe Danziger—with variations in spelling in various documents as Gustave, Adolph, Adolf, or simply G. A. Danziger. He practiced as a dentist, rabbi, and writer, though his English was at first imperfect, which led to a collaboration with Ambrose Bierce. In 1888, Danziger became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and married Bertha R. Levy. She bore two children by him: Beatrice Danziger (b. 1892) and Nathan Moses Danziger (b. 1895).
In 1900, Danziger left for New York, without his family. Whether this was intended abandonment or some other reason is not clear. He became enmeshed in local Republican politics in New York, and became acquainted with Ida Silbert, who worked as stenographer. Danziger’s politicking bore fruit: in 1903 he was off to Madrid to fulfill a post as Vice-Consul. In Spain he met and apparently became secretly engaged with Lucy M. White Watts. Their relationship was carried on long-distance, by letter and telegram, and was cut off abruptly when she married the Baron von Thielen. Danziger served for a time as Vice-Consul in Aberdeen, Scotland, but by 1906 was back in the United States.
1906 is a complicated year in the life of Adolphe Danziger. According to newspaper accounts, during that year he married Ida Silbert in a Jewish ceremony officiated by a rabbi and before witnesses; I have not yet been able to find any marriage license or registration, but the bride presumptive changed her name to Ida Silbert Danziger. Subsequent to this, Adolphe sued for divorce from his wife Bertha. In response, Bertha charged him with bigamy. It is known that Danziger’s divorce suit was dismissed.
According to Ida, they stayed together for a year before he left for Europe on business, from which he did not return. By that time, Ida was already pregnant. The 1910 census lists Ida Danziger living with her parents and siblings, along with a two-year-old Martha Danziger.
Adolphe Danziger was by this point back in California, working as a lawyer among various other ventures, which makes tracking his movements with any precision difficult. Apparently c.1907 he met and fell in love with Georgina McLelland, a 34-year-old Irish immigrant who had come to the country in 1895.
Documentation on Georgina and Adolphe’s life is scarce, and in places flawed or contradictory. Among Adolphe’s surviving papers is the manuscript for a book that consists of love-letters from himself to Georgina, dating from 3 April 1907 to 22 January 1935—however, there is evidence that these letters have been edited, and it isn’t clear if these are all authentic or partially written after the fact with the aim of collection or publication. It is not known when or if they ever legally married, but a document in Adolphe’s papers titled “Transfer of Patent of invention in the Incandescent Lamps from Adolphe Danziger to Georgina de Castro-Danziger of LA, 11/27/17″ is the first indication that they either married or were presenting themselves as man and wife.
Adolphe Danziger’s legal career hit a snag in 1917 when he was sued by a client for embezzlement; the allegation was that unnaturalized German immigrants were concerned that the United States government might seize their funds or property during the war with Germany, and that Danziger had sheltered the money for them…and then not given it back. While Danziger was eventually acquitted, it would have been a scandal. For this or some other reason, in 1921 he legally changed his name from Gustave Adolphe Danziger to Adolphe de Castro. If the hope was to save his legal practice, it failed: de Castro was disbarred in 1922.
Adolphe moved to Mexico, where he became a journalist; Georgina was apparently with him, at least part of the time. In 1925, the couple left Vera Cruz for New York. The arriving passenger list gives her age as 39, though she was really 52 at the time; the 1930 U.S. Census (which transcribed her name as “Georgeanna”) gives her age as 40. This might have been a scribal error…or, perhaps not; many women have been 39 for a few more years. They settled in New York City, and in 1927 Adolphe got a bit of a break when an article he wrote about Ambrose Bierce was picked up nationally. He hoped to further his success by republishing some of his old stories…and to this end, he sought someone to revise them for publication. So he came into contact with H. P. Lovecraft…and Lovecraft met Georginia de Castro.
References to “Mrs. de Castro” in Lovecraft’s letters are few; they apparently met in person at least once, when Lovecraft visited Adolphe de Castro in New York, and Adolph himself writes in a later letter:
Lovecraft and the late Mrs. de Castro and myself were at dinner at the Styvensen in New York. He had been revising a short story for me, the scene of which was laid in my native land, Poland. There had been some difference of opinion regarding the plot – made by correspondence. In response to his last letter I – stante pede, as it were, made a new plot and sent it to him. Thereupon he flattered me by saying that it was not likely I had so quickly made so new and excellent a plot. My reply was, “come to New York and we’ll discuss it.” At an elaborate bit of dinner we talked the matter over.
Adolphe de Castro to John Stanton, 9 Mar 1949, MSS Wisconsin Historical Society
This dinner would have taken place in 1928, and the work discussed is believed to be the lost “third revision” after “The Electric Executioner” and “The Last Test,” now probably non-extant, but based on “In the Confessional” (1892) by Adolphe Danziger de Castro.
One notable point about Lovecraft’s revisions for Adolphe is that in “A Sacrifice to Science” (1893) the name of the female lead is Alvira; when Lovecraft revised this story into “The Last Test,” it was changed to Georgina.
Lovecraft’s references to Georgina de Castro pick up in 1934, in response to some comments in Adolphe’s letters:
He is aged, infirm, & absolutely penniless—& believes he is slowly going blind. And his wife is in an advanced stage of tuberculosis.
Given Lovecraft’s own brief experience caring for his sick wife, he was sympathetic with what Adolphe and Georgina were going through:
I am surely sorry to hear that recent years have dealt you so many blows, & hope most profoundly that Mrs. de Castro’s health my presently take a turn for the better. It is easy to understand the anxiety you must feel—& with your own ocular troubles the burden is further aggravated.
References to Adolphe and Georginia pop up here and there in his letters, part of the normal pulp grapevine. Lovecraft never gives any indication he was aware of Adolphe’s other wives, but the older man apparently kept him up to date…including when Georgina was admitted to the hospital as her condition worsened.
I am tremendously sorry to hear that Mrs. de Castro’s illness is necessitating an hospital sojourn—but hope that observation & treatment there may afford decidedly favourable results. Sometimes the expert care & continuous medical attention in such a place produces unexpected upturns in cases which seemed very discouraging at home. […] Again expressing the hope that Mrs. de Castro’s health will soon respond favorably to treatment—I remain yrs most sincerely
To others, Lovecraft was more pragmatic and pessimistic:
Old de Castro is in severe straits now, & almost paralysed with grief over the probably fatal illness of his wife—an advanced consumptive who lately went to the hospital, perhaps never to return.
Yet when Lovecraft wrote to Adolphe, he sought to be optimistic and reassuring:
Let me express my sincerest sympathy regarding your recent illness—which I trust may not soon be repeated. Considering the nervous strain you must be under, I can hardly wonder at the attack—but the rest obtained through the collapse will probably help to ward off another. I hope that, upon reflection, you will not take the tactless pessimism of that nun too seriously. A mere nurse is not a physician, and the lesser fry around an hospital sometimes acquire a casual outlook greatly subversive of accuracy. It does not do to give up hope prematurely in anything as potentially controllable as tuberculosis. As I have mentioned, there are thousands of persons living with lungs impaired to a vast degree—for once the spread of the trouble is checked, a surprisingly small fraction of the pulmonary apparatus can serve to carry on the vital processes.
So if I were you I wouldn’t be totally discouraged. A spirit as indomitable as that of Mrs. de Castro is itself a great bulwark against disease—you may recall that in vast epidemics the psychology of the patients is so influential that the most hopeful and determined are usually the ones to pull through. It is certainly tremendously lamentable that this affliction has had to come—but at the same time it is far too early to conclude that it will not safely pass over and lead to a pleasanter outcome. Don’t believe all the croakers—they’ve had many a person mentally in his tomb, who is today hale and hearty again!
With renewed thanks for the acrostic, and with every good and hopeful wish for you and Mrs. de Castro, I remain, Yrs most cordially
Well wishes, however, could not stave off the inevitable.
Melancholy note—old de Castro’s wife died Jan. 23 at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I dropped Dolph a line of sympathy & told Price & Belknap to do the same. The poor old boy is considerably broken up—he had a two-week’s nervous collapse earlier in January, so that we might have been able to see him had we called during our metropolitan sojourn.
Barlow and Lovecraft had been in New York for New Years, but had apparently missed visiting Adolphe. Find A Grave gives a different date for her death, but the New York State death certificate confirms she died on 23 January 1935 from pulmonary tuberculosis (although it gives her name as “Georgia,” and lists her age as 45). Among Adolphe’s papers is a poem manuscript titled: “L’amour ne Peut pa Mourir” (“The Love That Cannot Die”), with the note “written three days after the passing of Georgina—my first love which lasted for twenty-eight delightful years.”
Georgina was, inadvertently and posthumously, to set the stage for another of the small episodes in Lovecraft’s life. Her expressed last wishes had been, apparently, to have her ashes cast into the ocean—presumably toward her native land—and this Adolphe de Castro finally did, choosing to take the bus up to Boston to do so. On his way back, he stopped into Providence to see Lovecraft, who was at the time hosting R. H. Barlow as his guest:
Another social event was the sojourn of old Adolphe Danziger de Castro early in August. You’ve probably heard me speak of old Dolph—the semi-charlatanic chap whose biography of Bierce Belknap adorned with a preface, & whose stories I used to doctor up. He was here for 5 days at the Hotel Dreyfus—on his way back to N.Y. from Boston, where he had been to scatter his late wife’s ashes on the sea in accordance with her last wishes. Old Dolph vainly tried to saddle me with some wholly unprofitable revision work, & is now pestering Kleiner about the same stuff. On one occasion we all—he, Barlow, & I—sat on a tomb in the hidden hillside churchyard & wrote rhymed acrostics on the name of Edgar Allan Poe—who 90 years ago used to roam that selfsame necropolis when on visits to Providence.
Adolphe de Castro actually managed to sell his acrostic to Weird Tales; the others saw publication in fanzines and poetry collections over the years. Lovecraft and de Castro stayed in touch, even as Lovecraft’s own terminal illness took hold, and one of his final letters is a word to the grieving old man, who had left New York for California once again:
I am glad that you have some of the pictures and other things collected by yourself and Mrs. de Castro, and feel sure that their ultimate effect will be one of consolation rather than melancholy.
Lovecraft would die. Adolphe de Castro would live on, and marry again for the “third” time (presumably, he had decided Ida didn’t count) in 1947, to pass away at the age of 99 in 1959.
Who was Georgina McClellan de Castro? Sadly, in death she is largely attested to only as “Mrs. de Castro,” and that one among many. We know almost nothing of her background or habits, her interests or activities, and that is a direct reflection of the fact that Lovecraft himself no doubt knew little to nothing of these things. Their lives intersected only once or twice, in a note to explain an absence or a seat at a dinner table, connected as they were only by their association with Adolphe de Castro, who had brought them into proximity and contact. What little remains of Georgina’s memory rests now amid his papers…aside from a few scattered references in the voluminous letters of H. P. Lovecraft.
Thanks to Dave Goudsward for help and assistance on this piece.
La vista dell’Inferno è così terrificante de spaventare a morte anche la strega.
Con le ultime energie rimaste stringe un patto con un demonio, un traghettatore di anime, prigioniero anch’egli degli Inferi.
Salomé gli dona parti del suo corpo e quel che rimane della sua anima per fuggire dall’Inferno. In cambio dovrà donare al demone un erede, ma fare patti con il Male ha sempre delle consequenze terribili.
Salomé dies and arrives in the afterlife.
The sight of Hell is so terrifying that it scares even the witch to death.
With her last remaining energy she makes a pact with a demon, a ferryman of souls, also a prisoner of the Underworld.
Salomé gives him parts of her body and what remains of his soul to escape from Hell. In exchange she will have to give the demon an heir, but making deals with Evil always has terrible consequences.
One of the surprises in The Barbarian King 1: Le Spade Spezzate (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Alessio Landi was the appearance of Salomé, the witch-queen from Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “A Witch Shall Be Born” (Weird Tales Dec 1934). This was a surprise not only because of a tie-in with another classic Conan tale, but because Salomé was quite firmly deceased at the end of that episode, long before Conan won his kingdom of Aquilonia. So how did she show up in The Barbarian King?
To answer that, Leviathan Labs published a spin-off: The Barbarian King: Salomé (2020). The creative team for this effort was Barbara Giorgi (script), Nicolò Tofanelli (pencils/inks), Angelo Razzano (colorist), Massimo Rosi (editor), Mattia Gentili (letter), and Lucrezia Benvenuti (logo & map design). This graphic novel covers what happened to Salomé between the end of “A Witch Shall be Born” and her appearance to aid the stricken Conan in The Barbarian King 1.
Robert E. Howard did populate his Conan tales with various non-Conan characters, but he never wrote any separate adventures of Bêlit or Valeria, or of Conan’s grandfather or sons or daughters, so there was no exact precedent for spin-offs. Thus it should not be surprising that in the seventy-odd years of Conan pastiche stories and novels, and fifty-odd years of Conan comics, spin-offs for side characters are comparatively rare. Pasticheurs, faced with the choice of writing new Conan tales or new non-Conan tales set in the Hyborian Age, generally went with the former; although The Leopard of Poitain (1985) by Raul Garcia-Capella is a notable early exception, and The Song of Bêlit (2020) by Rodolfo Martínez focuses in large part on Bêlit, though it is still a Conan story at heart.
In comic books, Marvel was largely skittish about spin-offs, early in Conan the Barbarian‘s run Roy Thomas and Gil Kane had produced a “Tale of the Hyborian Age” backup feature, echoing the successful “Tales of Asgard,” but the idea was never repeated. As Thomas tells it:
So I enlisted Gil to do a “Tale of the Hyborian Age”—a series I’d hoped to use occasionally in the 52-page Conan to give Barry [Windsor Smith] a rest. “The Blood of the Dragon” introduced the concept (which may have been Gi’s idea, since we co-plotted the story) that, when the hydragon was killed, its human assassin was magically changed to take its place. I was always proud of the name “hydragon,” combining the mythical “hydra” and the word “dragon,” and intended one day soon to use the hydragon of the Bossonian Marches in an actual Conan story.
Conan never faced the hydragon, and there would be no more “Tales of the Hyborian Age.” Instead, Thomas created Red Sonja—an original Hyborian Age character loosely inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino from “The Shadow of the Vulture” (The Magic Carpet Magazine Jan 1934). Red Sonja would go on to become a character who could be the protagonist of her own series—or series of series—which are still ongoing as of this writing.
Leaving Red Sonja aside, there were very few non-Conan series to spin-off from the main line: Conan: The Book of Thoth(2006, Dark Horse), Age of Conan: Bêlit (2019, Marvel), Age of Conan: Valeria(2020, Marvel), and Bêlit & Valeria: Swords vs. Sorcery (2022, Ablaze) are the only other spin-off series centered on characters from the Conan line; one might add Robert E. Howard Presents Thulsa Doom(2010, Dynamite) which spun out of Dynamite’s Red Sonja comics, though the character shares little more than a name with Howard’s original creation. Even so, that is a rather sparse showing from the dozens of series and hundreds of Conan and Red Sonja comics produced.
Red Sonja probably gives a good explanation why: for all of the worldbuilding that was put into the Hyborian Age by Robert E. Howard and subsequent writers, many of the comic adventures made little use of this. Red Sonja and Conan often tackled monster-of-the-month in their individual comics, or adventured through cities and countries never named by Robert E. Howard, in what were effectively generic sword-and-sorcery stories starring familiar protagonists. Even when Marvel published both Conan and Red Sonja comics at the same time, the two series were not written with reference to one another; they were effectively standalone S&S series that only nominally shared the same setting.
The same issue is evident in the spin-off series based around Thoth-Amon, Bêlit, Valeria, and Thulsa Doom. Many of these stories were well-written and illustrated—Sana Takeda’s covers for Age of Conan: Bêlit are absolutely gorgeous—but for the most part, these stories veer fairly far from Howard’s original conception of the characters and often have limited continuity with the Hyborian Age in the series they’re nominally spinning off from. Readers interested in greater lore for the Hyborian Age, like readers of the Cthulhu Mythos that desire more fragments of the artificial mythology to fit into their puzzle, were disappointed.
The Barbarian King: Salomé certainly takes it liberties with the character and the setting—but it begins very faithfully to “A Witch Shall Be Born.” Salomé begins just as Howard and Conan had left her, dead and her schemes unraveled. What we get next is her afterlife, which Howard never depicted or wrote about, so the writer and artist had a very free hand. I rather suspect that a possible inspiration for the series was Claudia Chevalier Vampire (2004- , Pat Mills & Franck Tacito), which is a spin-off of the popular Requiem Chevalier Vampire (2000-2012, Pat Mills & Olivier Ladroit)—both series have an emphasis on Hell, violence, sexuality, and mature storytelling, with the spin-offs taking a prominent female supporting character and turning them into a protagonist to expand on their characterization and tell their story.
Salomé’s harrowing, and the physical and mental transformations of her character—something less than redemption—lead her very far from the character that Robert E. Howard created. Yet it does change her into exactly the strange, wan, damaged character who aids Conan in the pages of The Barbarian King. Nor do they ever lose sight of where Salomé came from; her own abandonment as an infanticide and rescue being important themes in her interactions with other characters.
In that sense, Salomé follows the same philosophy of The Barbarian King: Robert E. Howard’s work is the launching point from which the creators start, but they are pushing into new, unwritten territory…but not without losing sight of where they came from, or where they’re going. If you like The Barbarian King, Salomé is an interesting accessory that goes deeper into the background and character of an important supporting character.
The Barbarian King: Salomé (2020) is available from Leviathan Labs. Like The Barbarian King it is in Italian, with no English translation yet.
An often underestimate influence on Lovecraft’s genre is the immensely popular and long time market-sayer, the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, published by Chaosium, Inc. […] The game’s influence extended further than just the gaming community, for Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos authors were quick to discover that Chaosium’s sourcebooks provided a wealth of information, by categorizing and defining Lovecraft’s visions. Soon the game became an encyclopedia, the first point of call for all things Cthulhuoid. This influence is so profound, that new creations which first appeared in the Call of Cthulhu game now appear regularly in the fiction of modern day Lovecraftian authors.
—David Conyers, “Introduction” to Cthulhu’s Dark Cultsviii
Tabletop roleplaying games involve many different types of writing and editing. If you were to sit down and write a new game ex nihilo, you would need to first engage in some top-down game design, probably starting with a concept or pitch for the game—who are the player characters and what do they do?
In Dungeons & Dragons, you are an adventurer and you go on adventures! In Shadowrun, you are a shadowrunner, a mercenary criminal in a fantasy cyberpunk future, and you go on shadowruns, which are illegal jobs that can range from smuggling to murder-for-hire to corporate espionage…only with dragons and elves. In Vampire: the Masquerade, you are a vampire and navigate the complex politics of undead society while striving to sustain yourself and control the beast within. In Call of Cthulhu, you are an investigator and you solve cases and delve into mysteries.
The pitch often but not always contains the basic premise of the setting. Dungeons & Dragons is largely setting agnostic; while the default setting is a quasi-medieval fantasy, the basic rules can (and have) been adapted to many different settings, and players are quite capable of creating their own. For games with specific settings like Shadowrun, a certain amount of setting information has to be brainstormed and written so that players know where the action is taking place. Games set in a historical period of the real world like Call of Cthulhu have a distinct advantage in this case because a great deal of raw setting information is widely available—all you have to do is pick up a history book or delve through old newspaper archive and you can find whatever facts you need for playing in the 1920s or 1890s.
Additional writing involves mechanics—the game’s systems, the mathematical and conceptual specifics that indicate how certain actions like combat or magic are to be resolved, tracked, and sometimes abstracted. It isn’t always possible or desirable, for example, to track how much blood a character loses if they get stabbed; the player marks off a couple hit points on their character sheet and moves on. All of that, and how it integrates into the setting and the gameplay experience, is a matter of game design and editing—complicated stuff!
The last, but not the least, bit of work that goes into a tabletop roleplaying game is what most readers would recognize as narrative fiction: short stories and short-shorts which are set in the setting and are told from the perspective of characters that are in that setting. All the rest of the game give the readers—the prospective players of the game—tools and references so that they can play, but the narrative fiction is what sells the tone and style of the setting, free from any considerations of play.
Most games have to create this from nothing. Dungeons & Dragons took inspiration from Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkein, Fritz Leiber, etc. in creating the game, but none of those authors was specifically writing D&D fiction. Shadowrun added in cyberpunk influences from William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan, but again, those cyberpunk authors weren’t specifically writing Shadowrun stories—they were writing their own stories from which the Shadowrun authors took inspiration, and then the Shadowrun authors wrote their own stories.
With Call of Cthulhu…the lines are a bit blurrier. What exactly is the difference between a Cthulhu Mythos story, and a Call of Cthulhu story? Is there even a difference?
Unlike Dungeons & Dragons or Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu was specifically inspired by the body of Cthulhu Mythos fiction created by Lovecraft, his contemporaries, and all those who came thereafter. So while D&D wasn’t designed to let player characters actually journey around Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Howard’s Hyborian Age, Call of Cthulhu was designed for player characters to be able to visit Lovecraft’s Innsmouth or Howard’s Stregoicavar, to read the Necronomicon and, if they were very unlucky, to even catch a glimpse of Cthulhu. In that sense, yes, all Call of Cthulhu fiction is part of the Mythos by default—because the game is about playing in that Mythos setting.
However, writing for roleplaying games has very different goals than most narrative fiction. Lovecraft & co. were not obliged to keep any strong continuity between their disparate productions, or to go into detail on the people, places, and objects in those stories. Lovecraft’s map of Arkham and Howard’s essay on the Hyborian Age were, in the 1930s, anomalously deep background for the period, and much of that data never made it into any story—but for roleplaying games, that level of detail is relatively common and expected. More, where earlier Mythos writers were free to be loose or even contradictory with their artificial mythology and how magic worked, in a game things typically have to be more concrete—or at least, the format of the game encourages categorization and specification where narrative fiction favors imagination and non-specificity. You can see this in works like the Monster Girl Encyclopedia II (2016) by Kenkou Cross (健康クロス), which has strong roots in roleplaying gaming.
Beyond the strict game design considerations, there are economic ones. A roleplaying game is typically more than a single book, it is an entire line of products with different subjects which involve the same setting and/or system. Overall development of a game line requires high-level decisions on which books to produce, and how to keep setting material and style consistent between products, because what is written in one book can impact every other book in the line. Line development influences how the setting or its presentation changes over time, and players are often quick to harp on real or imagined discrepancies between rules or setting information between books…and by building on developments from one book to the next, the game setting and rules grow richer and more complex, which often draws readers and players in.
With Call of Cthulhu, this sets a complicated relationship with the Mythos. The game itself takes inspiration and makes reference to a set group of stories and concepts created by Lovecraft & co.—and the line developers, editors, writers, and artists need to make decisions when that material is vague or conflicting. Yet those same creators have no control over what anyone else creates, so while they strive to keep consistency within their own game line, the Mythos continues to proliferate outside of those artificial boundaries…and with many writers and artists taking inspiration from each other, it can be very fuzzy as to whether a given Mythos story is “in” the setting (or settings plural, as it is now) of Call of Cthulhu fiction, or if it is general Mythos fiction that has taken, as David Conyers pointed out, some inspiration from the game and the reference materials it has generated.
For most readers, the distinction is negligible or academic. As Conyers noted, many creators have dipped into or taken inspiration from the volumes of material produced by Chaosium and creators of various related Cthulhu roleplaying games over the years. To take one example, the popular image of Nyarlathotep as a three-legged being with a long tendril for a head and a bloody maw with a long tongue is not referenced anywhere in the works of Lovecraft, Derleth, or other first-generation Mythos authors; it was created for the roleplaying game, but has gone on to become one of the most popular depictions of Nyarlathotep. Some other aspects of the popular Mythos were created or codified by Call of Cthulhu, such as the Order of the Silver Twilight which has featured heavily in spin-off works like Arkham Horror and Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game.
As a roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu tends to be very conservative in terms of mechanics, setting development, and presentation. That is part of the reason that a good deal of the actual innovation in the setting in terms of critically analyzing and rethinking the setting and pitch of how the game is played and who is playing it devolves to related games like Harlem Unbound (2017) by Darker Hue Studios.
This has led to a certain domination of the game by nostalgia. The Masks of Nyarlathotep (1984) campaign written by Larry DiTillio with Lynn Willis, for example, has been revised, re-packaged, expanded, and re-released for six different editions of the game. Because of the strong influence and constant re-publication of Masks, it has tied into many subsequent Call of Cthulhu products and become something of a cornerstone of the identifiable Call of Cthulhu line identity. Fans have created original art, spin-offs, prequels, sequels, soundscapes, and props based on the campaign. The Good Friends of Jackson Elias podcast is a direct reference to the campaign, where the player character investigators are good friends of one Jackson Elias.
Madness is the mark of gods, the response to the whisper of ancient secrets, and the unseen hand that turns the world in its disordered course. With it, I have peered beyond mere dream and pattern, beyond childhood impetuosity and adult grief, beyond the analysis of which other men are capable. Accepting madness, I accept the gods and rule well with their gifts thereby.
—The Masks of Nyarlathotep (4th edition, 2010) 185
Last but not least, Masks of Nyarlathotep has inspired Call of Cthulhu fiction such as “The Whisper of Ancient Secrets” by Penelope Love. The background is a bit necessary because while this story can be read and enjoyed on its own, it is so tied into the Call of Cthulhu setting and Masks of Nyarlathotep and its ancillary materials to such a degree that is fundamentally a product of the game rather than an independent Mythos story that is just borrowing some names or characters.
Pastiche takes as its hallmark a slavish devotion to the outer forms and tropes of Mythos fiction, but this is something much more relaxed and intimate. Love isn’t trying to ape Lovecraft’s style or anyone else’s, it’s a story that demonstrates a profound amount of Mythos lore as codified by Call of Cthulhu over the previous five decades but doesn’t really seek to capture anything of the Lovecraftian tone of mystery or cosmic horror. It is very much a peek behind the scenes, at the kind of happenings that occur off the page in a regular Mythos story or as a result of decisions made by the Keeper or gamemaster as to how the story will react to what the player characters are doing.
Like “Scritch, Scratch” (2014) by Lynne Hardy, to really appreciate what Love does with this story really requires understanding that background of game design and the culture of Call of Cthulhu as distinct from how other Mythos writers approach the material.
“The Whisper of Ancient Secrets” was published in Cthulhu’s Dark Cults(2010). It has not yet been reprinted.
Oggi Aquilonia has ottenuto la pace a caro prezzo e il Barbaro ormai è un vecchio stanco Re pieno di rimorsi, sognando il clamore della battaglia e l’adrenalina dell’avventura… questi sono tempi in cui il fuoco e l’acciaio potrebbero dettare le nuove leggi dell’uomo.
Today Aquilonia has obtained peace at a great price and the Barbarian is now a tired old King full of remorse, dreaming of the clamor of battle and the adrenaline of adventure … these are times when fire and steel could dictate the new laws of man. — The Barbarian King 1: Le Spade Spezzate
Dead pulp authors can eternal lie, and in strange aeons many of their works may still be under copyright or have certain characters trademarks depending on the intellectual property laws of any given country. In Europe, the works of Robert E. Howard may be in the public domain, and because of that they are fair game for reprinting and reimagination. This applies both for prose works like the novel The Song of Bêlit (2020) by Rodolfo Martínez, and for comic books and graphic novels like French publisher Glénat’s gorgeous series of new adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s original stories of Conan the Cimmerian.
Comic books and graphic adaptations of the Cimmerian are intriguing because from 1970 to 1993 Conan (and other Robert E. Howard characters) were licensed to Marvel Comics, which provided a distinctive and iconic interpretation of the character—all the more so because the Conan comics were translated and published everywhere from Japan to Turkey. Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian was the most successful sword & sorcery comic of all time, with tie-ins to the 1980s Arnold Schwarzeneggar films, merchandise, and the lore of Robert E. Howard became intimately entangled with the Marvel Universe—including the Serpent-god Set, the Serpent Men, the eldritch entity Shuma-Gorath, the sinking of Atlantis, and by extension the Hyborian backstory of Varnae the Vampire and Kulan Gath, the villain of a popular X-Men event.
Marvel wouldn’t be the first to publish a Conan comic—La Reina de le Costa Negra in Mexico has that honor with its blond barbarian—nor the last, as Dark Horse held the license for many years. Yet Marvel’s Conan remains distinctive in fixing the barbarian’s appearance and some of his mannerisms and the development of his world. Even Dark Horse’s Conan under various artists and writers looked a bit more like the Marvel Conan than it did the original illustrations in Weird Tales, although the Frank Frazetta covers for the Lancer paperbacks in the 60s had their influence on both. Both Marvel and Dark Horse worked to both adapt Robert E. Howard stories and to publish new adventures of the barbarian, woven in and around his published career.
Which makes it really exciting to see how different creative teams handle the character.
The Barbarian King is an Italian-language series of fumetti (comics, equivalent to perfect bound graphic novels in the United States) from publisher Red Dragon and Leviathan Labs. The creative team for the first volume, Le Spade Spezzate (“The Broken Swords”) is Massimo Rosi & Alessio Landi (script); Luca Panciroli, Federico de Luca, & Alessandro Bragalini (pencils, ink, & layout); Marco Antonio Imbrauglio (colorist); Enrico Santodirocco (editing); Mattia Gentili (letterer); and Lucrezia Benvenuti (logo & map design).
In adapting Conan to comics there are traditionally two routes to take: adaptation of the original stories or the creation of new works that are based on past works and/or the same characters—Marvel also had a habit of adapting some non-Conan Robert E. Howard stories, non-Robert E. Howard Conan stories, and even some non-Conan sword & sorcery stories as Conan comics. One reason Marvel could “get away” with this is because they took a very different approach to continuity than Robert E. Howard did.
By the time Marvel got Conan, essentially all of his adventures had been published. These were initially written and published out of chronological order; Robert E. Howard was not setting out to create a single sprawling epic novel like The Lord of the Rings or The Odyssey, the adventures of Conan were written and published out of order, telling different stories from different periods of Conan’s life. This freed Howard from any strict timeline of events, much as the Hyborian Age—as a prehistoric hodgepodge of different places and eras—allowed him the freedom to shift setting and tone. Conan could be in a young thief in police procedural one story (“The God in the Bowl”), then an experience adventurer in a pirate story (“The Treasure of Tranicos”), then a king of a mighty nation overthrowing usurpers in a medieval war (The Hour of the Dragon), and it was up to the fans to piece together a probably outline of Conan’s career…which a couple of early fans did in the 1930s, and which other fans have added to or revisited ever since.
Marvel and to a degree Dark Horse would use these outlines as the skeleton on which to build their own storylines. By starting more or less linearly from the beginning of Conan’s career, they could intersperse Robert E. Howard adaptations with original storylines, follow the trace of Conan’s journeys and develop additional characters and plots—sometimes expanding on what Howard and others had written, sometimes adding new elements, even borrowing from the Cthulhu Mythos or staging crossovers. As a method, this has the advantage in that the Conan comics often had a kind of narrative flow that is usually missing from monthly comics in the United States: you can often literally trace Conan’s travels on the map of the Hyborian Age.
It also allows the development of series characters—sidekicks, reoccurring antagonists, etc.—which are almost entirely absent from Howard’s stories. Robert E. Howard’s Conan is not like Michael Moorcock’s Elric to have a Companion to Champions along for the ride for several subsequent adventures, neither does he have the same lover or enemy. Stygian sorcerer Thoth-Amon as Conan’s arch foe is entirely a creation of later writers; they never even meet in “The Phoenix on the Sword,” or in any other Howard story (although Conan runs afoul of the wizard’s deeds in “The God in the Bowl”). Conan’s habit of killing every wizard he meets and always ending the story with a different girlfriend was one of the major critiques laid against the pulp hero—but in the comics, many more encounters could be planned and carried out, more tension built up, relationships would have more lasting impact because they lasted longer from issue to issue and story to story.
The Howard’s Conan chronology ends, effectively, with The Hour of the Dragon. There he is king, he has survived multiple attempts on his life and rule, and he is going to take as queen the young woman Zenobia. No Howard stories are set after this point, though other authors and comics picked up at this point because it is a natural gray area: anything can happen, because nothing more is written after this point! Conan could even die—an impossibility in earlier tales, because of course he has to survive for the next adventure that is already planned out.
So after the events of The Hour of the Dragon is where The Barbarian King picks up.
King Conan is conspicuously different in this incarnation than the Marvel or Dark Horse versions: heavier, hairier, with grey streaks in his beard and scars on his face. While Conan comics have often been a bit more mature than others on the stands, able to get away with more gore and nudity than most comics, The Barbarian King leans into both more than most, but less for exploitation than because this is a very different, darker, more mature story than more readers will be familiar with and occasionally gritty, multi-media artwork fits the tone.
When Roy Thomas and other writers began to adapt Conan to comics in the 1970s, they did so in part with the guidance of L. Sprague de Camp; de Camp had inserted himself into the editing of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, and had written several Conan pastiches, finished various fragments and synopses, and expanded the outline of Conan’s career. He didn’t do this for free or even directly, and Roy Thomas is frank about their relationship in his great memoir Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, but de Camp’s influence was still strong on the series. Dark Horse’s comics, on the other hand, were published after a revolution in Howard studies & publishing had strongly emphasized the publishing of the original, unedited Robert E. Howard texts and the decline of pastiche—so show fairly less influence from de Camp—but they still follow Campian certain trends, like the emphasis on Thoth-Amon as an archvillain.
The Barbarian King ignores de Camp more or less entirely. Rather than setting Thoth-Amon up as the villain, they turn to one of the most iconic Conan stories of all time: Yara from “The Tower of the Elephant,” who has escaped from his prison and is now in command of new and inhuman powers from the Cthulhu Mythos to revenge himself on the barbarian king. This crossover isn’t the first time the Mythos have entered a Conan story (Robert E. Howard himself included explicit refrences to Lovecraft’s Mythos in the first draft of “The Phoenix on the Sword”), but it set the tone for the series as it develops: this is sword & sorcery with a strong blend of horror into the mix.
If The Barbarian King avoids de Camp and Marvel’s legacy for the most part, the influence of the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian is still very obvious, in theme, language, and occasional artistic flourishes that call back to the iconic Atlantean sword. Perhaps some of the costuming and nudity may also be reminiscent of 1980s Italian Sword & Sorcery films that were inspired by Conan, such as the Ator series or Sangraal…or perhaps not; the artists and writers on this project are obviously keen on the genre, but this is a Robert E. Howard project through-and-through.
Il desiderio era fondere il Fantasy Eroico Howardiano con un qualcosa di quasi Lovecraftiano e Barkeriano, cosa che immaginai quando lessi i VERMI DELLA TERRA con Bran Mak Morn la prima volta, nonché flavour che ho ritrovato da poco in Britannia di Milligan e Ryp, ad esempio.
The desire was to blend Howardian Heroic Fantasy with something almost Lovecraftian and Barkerian, which I imagined when I first read WORMS OF THE EARTH with Bran Mak Morn, as well as the flavor I recently found in Milligan and Ryp’s Britannia, for example. —Massimo Rosi, “Intervista a Massimo Rosi a cura di Italian Sword & Sorcery” in The Barbarian King 1: Le Spade Spezzate
The story is brutal enough in some places to edge toward grimdark, although I don’t think the story is amoral or dystopian in that sense. It is definitely less reminiscent of Howard’s more high-hearted hero and more Conan in his darker and broodier moods, pushed in directions that Howard would never have dared take him in the pulps—and in that respect, I think, the series is highly reminiscent to the new Elric graphic novel adaptions being published by Titan books beginning with The Ruby Throne. Comic storytelling can be grittier and more explicit now than ever before, and in revisiting these characters these writers and artists are pushing the limit a little, going beyond just the words in old paperbacks and pulp magazines…and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Questo è il Re Barbaro! E sono sicuro che lo riconoscerete nell’albo che stringete ta le mani, perché gli autori che lo hanno realizato sono figli di Cimmeria e hanno compreso da temp il segreto dell’acciaio; ad animarli è la passione per le battaglie e per le donne; a contraddistinguerli uno lo spirito libero, sprezzante della censura e del politically correct. Chi sono io per dirlo? Son il cronista delle loro imprese e brindo alla loro gloria. Ma ora, bando alle ciance, è tempo di tornare nel mondo hyboriano.
Buona lettura cimmeri!
This is the Barbarian King! And I’m sure you will recognize it in the book that you hold your hands, because the authors who made it are sons of Cimmeria and have long understood the secret of steel; to animate them and the passion for battles and women; to distinguished by a free spirit, contemptuous of censorship and political correctness. Who am I to say? I am the chronicler of their exploits and I toast to their glory. But now, no more chatter, it’s time to go back to the Hyborian world.
They already have your money. And when the Goddess rises, everybody dies and none of this mattered. That’s just how it goes.
—Lucy A. Snyder, “Cthylla” in When the Black Stars Burn81
There is a popular conception that Lovecraft ignored economics in his Mythos stories. While he doesn’t deal with dollars and cents, and economic woes aren’t a major theme, this isn’t quite true. Money was largely a distraction in Lovecraft’s stories. When it was present at all, it was often in the form of gold, such as the ancient gold pieces spent by the Terrible Old Man, or the strange pale gold that came out of the refinery at Innsmouth, or that gold which was mixed with starborn Tulu metal in the caverns of K’n-yan in “The Mound.” The United States was still on the gold standard throughout Lovecraft’s lifetime; for a man that paid for his daily meals in dimes and quarters, gold was how he thought of wealth.
The cult of Cthulhu never needed gold. Why would they? Why would Cthulhu want your money?
Money and wealth weren’t major themes in Lovecraft’s work largely because the human emotions and narratives that wrapped around them—greed, desperation, economic stress—weren’t what he wanted to write about. His inheritances and legacies focus on different kinds of wealth: the ancient books of Wizard Whateley, preserved for his grandson’s use; the Innsmouth Look that can’t be bought or sold; the jade amulet pried from the corpse of a warlock, dug out of the grave. In that same sense, Lovecraft’s cults were not designed with the realities of religion in mind. We never hear of collection plates during the rites of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, or a building fun for a proper temple for the Cult of Cthulhu, or a bake sale or potluck for the Starry Wisdom.
Lucy A. Snyder’s “Cthylla” is essentially a cyberpunk narrative, even though it’s set in a contemporary period and there isn’t any real science fiction or overt fantasy elements. Maybe some other label would be more fitting, but “cyberpunk” fits in terms of the themes more than the thematic trappings. Cyber because it is ultimately about computers and human connections, punk because it is a narrative of personal alienation, transformation, and ultimately rebellion against the status quo.
Real-life has shifted the technological and socio-political bases that cyberpunk of the 1980s was built on, but the themes remain relevant. Human augmentation and space travel were tropes of an older style of science fiction, adapted and explored with aplomb and style, but they didn’t really foresee the internet or smartphones, nor did they try to; the break-up of global superpowers and the rise of megacorporations never quite happened as they predicted, the environmental disasters and plagues foreseen have rolled out generally slower…but the point of science fiction is not to accurately predict the future. The point was to present a certain setting of high tech and low life, a background dystopia against which to tell stories where technology and society had reached a point of individual alienation and transformation. You can set a cyberpunk story in today’s world, without cyberware. We’ve arrived at the future, just not quite the one we imagined.
Yet the stars are not yet quite right.
The Temple of the Deep Mother needs your money because it is the megacorp of the setting. Technologically and legally savvy, its tentacles are everywhere, and it exists to squash individual interests and identities to conform to its self-serving goal. The megacorp doesn’t care about its employees; they are literally to be sacrificed, products made to be consumed, costs already factored into a cosmic balance sheet, and to fuel their continued growth and achieve their final goal they need to make movies, build and operate spiritual retreats, pay employees…everything costs money. Probably there’s a big spreadsheet with a bottom line pinpointing the exact cost to raise the Goddess from the deep.
There’s a certain banality to it all; that is to be expected when you pull the curtain back and think about how a cult would actually work in a world with smartphones and an internet. The Temple of the Deep Mother might be a bit more sinister than Raëlism or the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, but if it popped up today it would likely be hard to distinguish outwardly from other new religious movements. In the context of the story, Snyder makes that work. The ultimate result they aim for is mystical and nihilistic… “everybody died and none of this mattered.”
One thing didn’t fit into the program or prophecy: you can’t buy love, and you can do ever so much with computers these days. What if somebody did matter? What if you could make them matter? It is a very human response to rise up against a system that seeks to devalue humanity…and “Cthylla” is a very human story. The lesbian relationship that is developed, the brief interludes of loving someone that suffers from mental illness and attempts suicide, are poignant. They have to be, because they are the backbone of the story. One lives her corporate life, born to die; the other finds in her lover a reason to live and rise above herself.
There’s a certain symmetry between “Cthylla” and “Take Your Daughters to Work” (2007) by Livia Llewellyn—both of them feature a comparable ugliness in a cult that will literally sacrifice its future, its children, in pursuit of its goals, but they get there through different routes. “Take Your Daughters To Work” is industrially-focused, steampunk, visible machines and progress; “Cthylla” is more postmodern. Both may involve tallying lives and dollars, but there’s no way to judge progress for the millenarian project in “Cthylla.” There is a very punk aesthetic to the idea of being raised in a system where you very expressly have no future, except instead of nuclear war the promised apocalypse is some cosmic horror raised from the depths, and if Llewellyn’s story is about the horror of acceptance, Snyder’s story is about what happens if, just maybe, someone fights back.
I had to admit that although I might appear boyish, there was nothing masculine about me. I never had wanted to be male, only to be free to do things men could do. Now I know there have been not a few women who dared the male masquerade to achieve the freedom they were denied, many succeeding lifelong, but they must have been more convincing. Yet I would not be defeated. I devised a bat and cast my net into nearer waters to bring to me what I might not yet go in search of.
Elsie Alice Gidlow was born in England in 1898, one of what would be seven children that her mother bore before 40. The family emigrated to Canada in 1904 and settled in Montreal. She was forced to leave school at 14 to help care for her siblings, and by 15 the intelligent and literature-minded Elsie had entered the workforce. In her autobiography, she would label this chapter of her life “The Outsider.” She sought independence from her family, from her dreary day job typing shipping advices, from the church that demanded she give her life over to marriage and babies—and freedom to write poetry and to find love. Gidlow already knew she was a lesbian as a teenager, she just didn’t have anyone to explore those feelings with.
A couple years later, Elsie A. Gidlow became involved with amateur journalism:
In the late autumn of 1917, a letter appeared in the people’s column of The Montreal Daily Star. It inquired if any organization of writers and artists existed in the city which a person might join. There was no reply, but a little more than a week later a second letter appeared responding to the first. It stated that a group of writers was being formede and suggested that the inquirer and any others interested should “communicate with the undersigned” at the address given.
Both letters were written by this lonely young woman groping toward her kind, the first under a pseudonym. Over the course of a week, I received nearly a dozen replies from individuals of both sexes asking for information about the proposed group. I invited them all to a meeting at my parents’ on an evening when Father would be away, telling Mother what I was doing.
Given that Gidlow’s autobiography was published about 70 years after the events in question, she may be forgiven for forgetting a few of the finer details. The letters in question actually appeared in 1916, and by 1917 she was already Second Vice-President of the United Amateur Press Association of America:
The amateur journalism movement had begun in the 19th century; individuals who wished to write and print formed clubs and groups to publish their own small magazines, not for sale but simply to share among themselves, for love of the written word. It was largely focused in the United States, but was international in scope, and relatively egalitarian with men and women both often occupying the highest positions in both local clubs and national-level organizations. Two such organization existed in 1916: the National Amateur Press Association was the largest, oldest, and most heterogenous in membership, while the United Amateur Press Association was smaller, younger, and more dedicated to artistic and intellectual literary work.
Unfortunately, in 1912 a contested election split the United Amateur Press Association into two separate organizations. According to “The Literary Decadence of E.G.” (American Amateur Jul 1920, quoted in The Fossils #329, 5), Gidlow joined amateur journalism c.1914 or 1915, and the group she joined was centered around Seattle, while the other was centered around the East Coast; among the foremost members of the East Coast faction at the time was H. P. Lovecraft, who had joined this faction in April 1914. For ease of reference the Seattle/Gidlow organization will be referred to as the United Amateur Press Association of America (UAPAA), and East Coast/Lovecraft faction the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA). For the 1915-1916 term Lovecraft was elected First Vice-President of the UAPA; he was elected President of the UAPA in 1917. His counterpart in the UAPAA would be none other than Elsie Alice Gidlow.
For all that they helmed rival factions of the United, Lovecraft and Gidlow were opposites rather than rivals: the two Uniteds had developed into similar but different groups. Both were very intelligent, with limited formal education but compensated for that by being autodidacts and voracious readers, with large vocabularies and strong skills in poetry and prose. Of the two, Lovecraft was either the more efficient administrator or the luckier in having good help and funding: his faction of the United produced the official organ of the group, The United Amateur, reliably during his tenure. Gidlow lacked an Official Editor during her term, and the UAPAA lacked an OE during 1918 as well, which makes “official” activities of the UAPAA difficult to trace during this period.
What Gidlow did produce was Les Mouches Fantastiques.
Inspired by a group in New York who published their own newspapers and magazines and were known as the Amateur Press Association, I spoke to Roswell about doing the same. “We are not exactly amateurs,” he said, “I’m paid for my work on The Star and am considered a pro. You have been paid for your stuff in the Bookman and other rags. Why not? We could bring out a mimeographed paper for the fun of it.” […] We formed a group, myself named president, and planned a publication. Roswell and I were the co-editors. Someone knew of a mimeograph machine we must use that produced somewhat smudgy looking, glaring purple type.
My recollection is that much of the matter was also purple. We were by intention iconoclastic, mocking hypocrisies and smugness. Our first few issues were named Coal from Hades. Later, at Roswell’s instigation, we changed the name to Les Mouches Fantastiques (The Fantastic Flies). About half the material was written by Roswell and me. Besides our poetry, he contributed translations from Verlaine, articles on “the intermediate sex,” and one-act plays sympathetically presenting love between young men. My poetry was obviously addressed to women. My editorials satirized what I saw as society’s stupidities and injustices and the wrongness of the war. The hundred or so copies went locally to our friends and the amateur journalists (“AJ’ers”) in various parts of the U.S.
Roswell George Mills was a Canadian poet, journalist, and outspoken homosexual; he quickly became Gidlow’s friend and partner in Les Mouches Fantastiques, and through their bohemian, convention-defying journal they came into contact with other LGBTQ+ folks in the amateur journalism movement—including F. Graeme Davis, an Episcopal priest who also happened to be Offical Editor of the National Amateur Press Association during the 1917-1918 term and NAPA president during the 1918-1919 term. Gidlow claimed that Davis was homosexual, and carried on a brief but intense affair with Mills in Montreal; Davis certainly was full of praise for Les Mouches Fantastiques, Gidlow, and Mills…and it was through his efforts that Lovecraft, Gidlow, and Mills joined the NAPA, while simultaneously being members of their respective United factions.
Despite Gidlow’s recollection that “we formed a group,” the reality must have been more complex than that. She had obviously been a member of the UAPAA for some years before she became President, and she submitted work for other amateur journals which were duly published. Tracing her amateur journalism career is difficult: given both the low print run, the non-U.S. source, and the nature of amateur journalist publications, it is understandable that very few copies of Les Mouches Fantastiques survive in university collections or archives to this day. Other amateur journals are likewise rare, and the contents poorly indexed.
Yet we know that she did make a name for herself in amateur circles, and that her work was read, because Lovecraft commented on it:
The esthetic Elsa Gidlow’s outburst could undoubtedly be a great deal worse, as free verse is reckoned. Of the “two lovers that woo her unceasingly”, I advise her to choose oblivion That is the best way for all vers-libristes. Her colleague, Rossy George, tangles himself all up in some words & phrases, in which a trace of metre is observable. His spasms, however, are less definite in thought (if, indeed, there be any definiteness in imagistical chaos!) & less meritorious altogether.
Lovecraft here refers to Gidlow’s poem “The Two Lovers” and Mills’ poem “Once,” which appeared in W. Paul Cook’s amateur journal The Vagrant #7 (Jun 1918). The comments are less directed at the content of the work than the form; Lovecraft was then a noted “metrical mechanic” and an opponent of “free verse” who thought poetry ought to rhyme. Nor was Lovecraft the only one who took exception to Gidlow’s poetry; his close friend Alfred Galpin conceived and wrote a parody, which was published in Lovecraft’s amateur journal The Conservative vol. 4, no. 1 (Jul 1918):
Two Lovers
I have two lovers who woo me unceasingly: One is very beautiful; His countenance is as the face of a god, and radiates a light that is intoxicating; Through his transparent skin I can see the warm blood leaping in his veins; The even beat of his pulse is as the restless tide of a thousand oceans; But he is very fickle. I know that he would love me well, but only for a little while. Yes, he is very fickle. He is as a little yellow bee that draws the warm honey from flowers, then passes on his way; He is as a seducer that robs young maidens of their sweetnesses, and then mocks at them; He is as a radiant morning sun-cloud that swallows the little lingering pale stars; Yes, he is very beautiful and desirable, but he is very cruel.
The other is not fair or lovely: He has long fingers with nails that are pointed and tipped with purple, And his hair that flows free is iron grey and very lank; There are little grooved wrinkles in his brow that make him seem very old; But his eyes are young. They are as the eyes of a child that looks upon suffering innocently, not comprehending, And yet they are so compassionate; I love his eyes because they are so compassionate. His soul is very beautiful: It is a pool of light that is depthless; (I should like to bathe in that pool).
I think that he is constant. He would love me very deeply, and through the forever that is ageless; Yes, he is very constant. He would hold me in his restful arms and touch my lips with soft kisses; He would cover my eyes, that burn hotly, with little green leaves to cool them; He would breathe sad songs to me so sweetly they would seem happy; Ah, he is unlovely to look upon, but his soul is very beautiful.
They are Life and Death.
I have two lovers who woo me unceasingly: Which shall I take?
Two Loves (After, and with apologies to, Miss Elsie Alice Gidlow in the June Vagrant)
I have two loves, who haunt me unceasingly. Which shall I choose?
One is ugly to men’s sight, and arouses repulsion in them; Not so to me; for I know the true heart within. Yes, he is ugly and repulsive to many— His robust mien and his plebeian companions dishonour him. But they are as he: For his heart is as pure gold, the gold Scorned in sham by the would-be poetic, but ever true and useful.
He is constant, and I could love him forever; Yea, with dishnour stamped on his brow by the mob, I yet do love him. For his heart is as the heart of a thrifty and comely woman sought by all of thought.
He hath a hard skin, and is difficult of acquaintance; But to him who searcheth beneath, he is a rich mine of delicious treasure.
In my sensuous dreams I behold him, and long for him; When all the world is heartless and I am weary of it, Then do I long for him.
The other I would shun; for he is traitorously fair and beauteous: But he draws me to him inevitably, as the raft through many streams to the ocean.
His soul burneth as the hot torrents that prompt love— Ever youthful and daring in heart, but changing ere ultimately carefree; Inspiring hesitant fear at a distance, but enticing and ever victorious.
He is not constant, Except as he forceth me to everlasting constancy; For he is exacting. He draws me to him and I drink of his luscious beauty— But O the aftermath! The satient afterwhile!
He would destroy me; He has become a part of my soul, and meaneth my ruin; And yet I should die without him.
His beauty sparkles, and is given fastidious care. His speech flows swiftly and fluently, and is the language of all who are subject to his sway. Yea, him I long for passionately, and the other is only a comfort.
I have two loves who woo me unceasingly: One is bologna and the other Scotch Whiskey: Which shall I take?
Lovecraft had initially submitted this parody to W. Paul Cook for The Vagrant, but Cook refused it for unknown reasons. Such games were far from uncommon in amateur journals, and Lovecraft would try his own hand at such poetic mockery, such as “Cindy: Scrub-Lady in a State Street Skyscraper” (1920). Lovecraft was amused:
The general reception of your “Two Loves” is most gratifying to me, both as an endorsement of my own opinion and otherwise. I cannot suggest just the professional magazine for it, but Mo’s suggestion will undoubtedly be satisfactory. […] The Association must not be denied the privilege of seeing it, after having endured the original. Did I tell you that Miss Gidlow is President of the rival “United” Amateur Press Association which split off from ours in 1912? It is a peurile thing, with very easy literary standards. Some idea of its calibre may be gainedby noting the opinion of the majority of its members regarding the weird & wondrous work of the Mills-Gidlow duet. They call it “very highbrow”!! At least, this is what Cook informs me, & his acquaintance with this circle is fairly representative.
This is the first mention of Gidlow or Mills in Lovecraft’s letters. Cook was apparently a recipient of an issue or two of Les Mouches Fantastiques, who in turn passed it on to Lovecraft (LAGO215). The same issue of The Conservative which contained Galpin’s parody “Two Loves” also contains Lovecraft’s review Gidlow & Mills’ LGBTQ-heavy amateur journal, which reads in part:
The reader may, up to date, unearth nothing save a concentrated series of more or les sprimitive and wholly unintellectual sense-impressions; instinct, form, colour, odour, and the like, grouped in all the artistic chaos characteristic of the late Oscar Wilde of none too fragrant memory. Much of this matter is, as might be expected, in execrable taste. Now is this Life? […]
It seems to The Conservative that Miss Gidlow and Mr. Mills, instead of being divinely endowed sers in sole possession of all Life’s truths, are a pair of rather youthful persons suffring from a sadly distorted philosophical perspective. Instead of seeing Life in its entirety, they see but one tiny phase, which they mistake for the whole. What worlds of beauty—pure Uranian beauty—are utterly denied them on account of their bondage to the lower regions of the senses! It is almost pitiful to hear superficial allusions to “Truth” from the lips of those whose eyes are sealed to the Intellectual Absolute; who knows not the upper altitudes of pure though, in which empirical forms and material aspects are nothing.
The editors of Les Mouches complain very bitterly of the inartistic quality of amateur journalism; a complaint half just and half otherwise. The very nature of our institution necessitates a modicum of crudity, but if Miss Gidlow and Mr. Mills were more analytical, they could see beauty in much which appears ugly to their rather astigmatic vision.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Les Mouches Fantastiques,” Collected Essays 1.204
There is a bit of a pot-calling-the-kettle black here: Gidlow was only eight years younger than Lovecraft himself, who was not yet 28 at the time and had only emerged into amateur journalism four years previously. Lovecraft did not sign this editorial, but was taking on the rhetorical persona of the old and cynical Conservative of the title of his amateur journalism, even though he and Gidlow were pretty comparable on that score. It is doubtful Lovecraft missed the content of the issue: the reference to Oscar Wilde, who had been jailed for homosexuality in 1895, is a little too pointed. The reference to “Uranian” beauty does not appear to be a reference to the sexological term for homosexuality per se, or to the pedophilic Uranian poets, but the older Classical reference that underlies it: the love of spiritual beauty that supersedes love of physical beauty. It is also possible that Lovecraft used the term without understanding its different possible meanings in the context of homosexual subject matter.
Unfortunately, while Lovecraft’s letters and amateur journal writings have been saved and published; we don’t have Gidlow or Mills’ take on this critique, at least not directly. They could easily have seen it; if W. Paul Cook could send a copy of Les Mouches Fantastiques to Lovecraft, he could easily have mailed a copy of The Conservative to Montreal. Gidlow’s autobiography does not focus much on the response to Les Mouches, aside from a correspondent in Cuba who was appreciative of the openly homosexual content, and Graeme Davis’ arrival in Montreal and his affair with Mills. Davis wrote a lengthy review of Les Mouchesin his own amateur journal The Lingerer in 1919.
A total of five issues of Les Mouches would be produced from 1918 to 1920, the fifth and final being dated May 1920. Unlike earlier issues, the final issue was finely printed rather than mimeographed. It is not clear if Lovecraft saw anything more than that single 1918 issue of Les Mouches; his letters are silent on Gidlow and Mills for two years. Then, in 1920, he mentions them again:
The hedonist, following Aristippus and Gidlow-Mills, believes in seeking the wildest delights of sense, and ina accepting all the consequences both to the individual and to society. That is what he calls “living”—the poor fish! He thinks the calm and unemotional epicurean is only half alive; that he misses something in avoiding the violent alternation of emotional exaltation and depression.
The attitude is identical to 1918; perhaps Lovecraft had no other prompt than that the conversation had turned to pleasure-seeking as a philosophical issue once again. Yet only the next month, the subject came up again:
As to day-dreams & Rossie George—I am afraid that the wildest of his flights is rather tame compared with what I have seen in other universes whilst asleep. He can’t even get off this one poor planet, or rise much above the animal instincts here. Carcass-worshippers like Rossie & Elsie make me so infernally sick & tired that I lack patience with them. This reminds me—I never shewed you that putrid fellow’s letter, which he wrote me last summer. I promised to do so, & will enclose it herewith. My personal comment is twofold: (a) Nobody home. (B) Throw it in the garbage pail behind the house & cover well with chloride of lime. Kindly return this bit of mental & moral aberration for preservation as a horrible example in my private museum of mental pathology.
R. G. Mills’ letter to H. P. Lovecraft is not known to survive, so we can only speculate as to the contents. It seems clear from context that Lovecraft did not destroy the letter, and he seemed willing to lend it to his friend Kleiner, which argues against it having anything blatantly obscene (by 1919 U.S. mail standards), and one can’t quite imagine Mills asking for a photograph of Lovecraft so that he could daydream about him as Gidlow claims Mills did with Davis. It seems unlikely that Mills openly flouted his homosexuality in the letter either, as Lovecraft remarked elsewhere that “I never heard of homosexuality as an actual instinct till I was over thirty” (LJS 146), and he would only have been 28 or 29 in the summer of 1919. The most likely content would probably be simply a response or rebuttal to Lovecraft’s critique in The Conservative; but perhaps there was something more. Lovecraft would go on to write:
Some persons shrink from a fellow like Rossie Mills when young because they deem him an unique & leprous abnormality; yet tolerate him in later years because they learn that most mortals share his foulness. I shrank from such in youth merely because I disliked them & was not like them. And in later life I still shrank from them, for exactly the same reason. I am the same & they are the same—& it does not matter to me that their qualities are more widely diffused than I had fancied.
There are two possibilities here: either Lovecraft was (despite his later letter) aware that Mills was homosexual and this is simply homophobia, or Lovecraft was not aware Mills was homosexual and this is some other prejudice. While we can’t know for absolute certain which it was, there may be a clue in Lovecraft’s other letters and Gidlow’s autobiography. In a later letter Lovecraft recalled meeting Gordon Hatfield in 1922:
Have you seen that precious sissy Gordon Hatfield that I met in Cleveland? […] When I saw that marcelled what is it I didn’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!
LGBTQ+ folks in the 1920s faced not only legal and social discrimination but genuine violence for nonconformance with expected gender roles and behavior, or even suspected homosexual behavior. While Lovecraft did not engage in such violence, he was clearly aware of the social implications and was reacting as he thought was appropriate. It is notable that Lovecraft did not have that reaction to other homosexuals he met, such as Samuel Loveman and Hart Crane. In another letter he expands:
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 & seems to dislike boys, & who—when he grows up—is a chronic “cake-eater”, hanging around girls, doting on dances, acquriing certain feminine mannerisms, intonations & tastes, & yet never having even the slightest perversion of erotic inclinations.
In her autobiography, Gidlow writes that Roswell George Mills was “ambiguously beautiful” and when not at work “delicately made up and elegantly dressed, wearing exotic jewelry and as colorful clothes as he dared” (ELSA 74). While Lovecraft never met Mills in person, if he did get the impression from the letter received that Mills was a “sissy”—for example, if it was sent on perfumed stationery—that might be enough to satisfy the “putrid” comment.
Lovecraft’s thoughts on homosexuality, gender conformity, and early-20th century crises of masculinity aside, Elsie Alice Gidlow was not idle. In 1920 shortly after her 21st birthday she immigrated from Montreal to New York City, much as Lovecraft himself would do a few years later, away from her parents and her old life. The transition was marked by a change in name: Elsie became Elsa, which had been an occasional byline. While no longer president of the UAPAA (and the cessation of Les Mouches Fantastiques may have been due in part to her precarious finances at the time), she was still involved with amateur journalism…and as it happened, both Gidlow and Lovecraft were members of NAPA, reading and submitting to some of the same amateur journals.
In the United Amateur vo. 19, no. 5 (May 1920), an unsigned editorial “The Pseudo-United” records an attempt to recruit members of the UAPAA for the UAPA—particularly a branch of the UAPAA that had set up in Flatbush in Brooklyn—but the effort was rebuffed. While Gidlow isn’t named, and there is no clear indication she was involved, if she was still involved in the UAPAA while in New York, her word as former president might have carried some weight. The article, right down to the name, echoes some of the sentiments in a previous piece (“The Other United,” United Amateur vol. 16, no. 9, Jul 1917) that ran during Gidlow’s presidency of the UAPAA.
That she was still involved in amateur journalism is clear because she published an essay “Life for Life’s Sake” in The Wolverine (Oct 1920); the same amateur journal which would publish Lovecraft’s “The Street” (Dec 1920), “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (Mar 1921), and “The Nameless City” (Nov 1921). Gidlow’s essay begins:
Now that all the gods are cast down, now that they, products of the golden dust of human imagination that they were, are indistinguishable from the dust of the dead things that they mix with, now that they have become altogether disintegrated, so many are asking, What of us, what of the universe? What of life, to what purpose everything? Truly the first new blankness that comes after one’s exchange of Gods and Eternities for Nothingness is very crushing, devitalizingly deadening, and the resultant persisting thot is, This is life, then death; a flash of rainbow, then endless, cold grey; a light, then no light, something─nothing…middle distance thot. There are also the extremes: extreme nearness and the furthermost distance, and with these two the thot is the same, that thot being─what but Life for Life’s sake?
Lovecraft would respond directly to Gidlowwith an answering essay: “Life for Humanity’s Sake” (American Amateur Sep 1920), which runs in part:
Miss Gidlow has discovered the fact that there is no vast supernatural intelligence governing the cosmos—a thing Democritus could have told her several centuries B.C.—and is amazingly distrubed thereat. Without stopping to consider the possibility of acquiescence in a purposeless, mechanical universe, she at once strives to invent a substittue for the mythology she has cast aside; and preaches a new and surprising discovery the ancient selfish hedonism whose folly was manifest before the death of its founder Aristippus. There is something both amusing and pathetic about the promulgation of hedonism in this complex age of human interdependence.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Life for Humanity’s Sake,” Collected Essays5.45
This response was aimed not just at Gidlow, but also at fellow amateur and Lovecraft correspondent Maurice W. Moe who had likewise responded to Gidlow’s piece, which evidently dealt with the consideration of ethics once religion has been repudiated. While Lovecraft points out what he feels are flaws in both their arguments equally, his tone is patronizing…and Gidlow had perhaps been patronized once too often by amateur journalists. She at last responded with “The Literary Decadence of E.G.”, which reads in part:
There is Mr. Goodenough with his rhymed very-moral maxims; Mr. Lovecraft with his morbid imitations of artists he seems not even able to understand; Mr. Ward Phillips who admires Poe wisely and far too well, since he mimics him so laboriously; and a host of others, male and female, who apart from having no new word to speak, cannot write three consecutive rhymed verses in even metre, although they raise their voices tontinuously and wildly against “modern” poetry and that in their opinion heretical expression of a perverted intellect, vers libre.
This opinion, in the main, applies to the N.A.P.A. The “United” displays more youth and spirit but less, if possible, literary ability, its A.J.’s being mostly filled with slangy recruiting propaganda or banal opinions on President Wilson’s or somebody else’s attitude under such and such circumstances. The contributors to these journals also run to imitative verse.
The possibilities of Amateur Journalism are limitless. That I have always believed. But its development is retarded by the majority of its members’ too-obvious limitations.
“Ward Phillips” was one of Lovecraft’s pseudonyms. Amateur journalists, including Lovecraft, responded:
In the July American Amateur, the precocious Miss Elsie (alias Elsa) A. Gidlow of Les Mouches fame refers with admirable courtesy to “Mr. Lovecraft with his morid imitations of artists he seems not even able to understand”. Possibly Mistress Elsie-Elsa would prefer that the amateurs follower her own example, and perpetrate morbid imitations of morbid artists whom nobody outside the asylum is able to understand.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Lucubrations Lovecraftian,” United Co-Operative vol. 1, no. 3 (Apr 1921), Collected Essays 1.284
Miss Gidlow mentions Mr. Lovecraft. I confess I’ve tried manfully to read his poetry and have gone to sleep over it. Yet I have read his few stories with genuine pleasure. I recall that one night I let the moon shine in my eyes because I was afraid to get up and pull down the shade after reading one of his stories, “Dagon” I think it was. No doubt other readers would toss it aside and remark that they could do better than that. Perhaps they could and perhaps some of them tried.
Pearl K. Merritt, “Amateur Journalism is Not Futile” in American Amateur Sep 1920, reprinted in The Fossil #329, 34-35
Lovecraft had begun to publish more fiction in the amateur press, including “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (The Vagrant, May 1920), and Gidlow’s comment seems aimed at those early works. His response is a bit juvenile, amounting to little more than “I’m rubber and you’re glue.” It isn’t known if Gidlow read their replies.
Gidlow left amateur journalism by the end of 1920, though W. Paul Cook published a poem some years later in 1927. In 1923, Elsa Gidlow published On a Grey Thread, considered to be the first book of lesbian poetry published in the United States; she would travel widely, write and lecture, and cement her place in the history of LGBTQ+ literature. Her autobiography ELSA is said to be the first where the author “outs” herself as a lesbian, without a pseudonym.
Lovecraft continued his own life as well, met and married Sonia H. Greene. Their tumultuous marriage would coincide with Greene holding the UAPA presidency for two terms, 1923-1924 and 1924-1925, with Lovecraft as Official Editor. Despite his best efforts, without his leadership recruitment stalled and the UAPA became moribund around 1926; the UAPAA continued on, and Lovecraft’s later dealings with amateur journalism in the 1930s exclusively involve the National Amateur Press Association.
While Lovecraft’s interaction with Elsa Gidlow, R. G. Mills, and Les Mouches Fantastiques was slight, the encounters stuck with him and cropped up in a few of his later writings. In a later issue of The Conservative (#12, Mar 1923) he would recall them in an editorial:
Shall we remain comfortably cloistered with out Milton and Wordsworth, never again to know the amusing buzzing of such quaint irritants as Les Mouches Fantastiques?
The same year, while Lovecraft was serving as interim president of NAPA for the remainder of the 1922-1923 term, his tone is a bit different:
Intelligent controversy will shortly receive a stimulus from the appearance in our microcosm of Mr. H. A. Joslen, the first thorough “young modern” we have had since the Gidlow-Mills days. —H. P. Lovecraft, “President’s Message”, National Amateur #45 (May 1923), Collected Essays1.334
Mr. H. A. Joslen’s Gipsy[sic] is an unique and by no means unwelcome addition to amateur journalism, supplying the place of the long-departed Les Mouches Fantastiques. —H. P. Lovecraft, The Conservative #13 (Jul 1923), Collected Essays1.343
This does not appear to be Lovecraft giving any kind of backhanded compliment to Joslen or his amateur journal Gypsy, as elsewhere Lovecraft spoke approvingly of Joslen’s youth, energy, and determination to maintain a high literary quality in his amateur journal. While Lovecraft as a metrical mechanic was averse to free verse, and his cosmic philosophy would have been at odds with any philosophy that devolved to overwhelming preoccupation with physical pleasure—he never complained of the overall quality of Les Mouches Fantastiques‘ production, nor accused it of being of low literary quality. Perhaps he did have a sneaky respect for Gidlow & Mills and their skill and efforts, even if he disagreed with the specific content.
The last mention in Lovecraft’s published letters involved the contents of an old issue of The Recluse (Oct 1919), as part of a list of notable contents of that amateur journal:
Furthermore—an exotic Chinese piece called “Tea Flowers” (based on Wilde & suggesting Lesbianism) by Roswell George Mills, & a rather powerful ghoul-poem, “The Mould-Shade Speaks” by Winifred V. Jackson. A rather bizarre issue on the whole.
“Tea Flowers” was a play dedicated to “Sappho,” which was Mills’ nickname for Gidlow. Probably, Lovecraft never knew that his young friend R. H. Barlow was homosexual—and perhaps wasn’t aware that in this off-hand mention, he provided a clue that there were more folk like him involved in amateur journalism, or at least those who dared to write on themes like Wilde’s “love that dare not speak its name.”
It was probably Lovecraft’s first encounter with a lesbian; possibly the only one we have any verifiable record of. If that is the case it’s not clear if Lovecraft was even aware of it. His critiques of Les Mouches Fantastiques show he was not totally unaware of such things, but whether he recognized or knew of such matters at that early date, or simply glossed it all as Decadent literature is unclear.
The whole affair is little more than a footnote in the lives of writers that have gone on to be remembered for other things: Lovecraft for his weird fiction, Gidlow for her poetry and autobiography. Most of what we know about the interactions, which happened not in person but through the snail’s pace of scattered pieces published in amateur journals months apart, are from Lovecraft’s side of things—and even his biographies do not record the tiff. Nor does Gidlow mention Lovecraft in her autobiography; six or seven decades is more than enough time for emotions to fade and memories to grow dim. Yet they did play a role in one another’s story…and that story was entwined, informed, and shadowed by the growing awareness of and discrimination applied to LGBTQ+ folks.
For more on Elsa Gidlow, Lovecraft, and amateur journalism please check out:
“Lavender Ajays of the Red Scare Period: 1917-1920” by Ken Faig, Jr., in The Fossil #329.
Gidlow’s ajay poems and materials related to the history of the United Amateur Press Association, Gidlow’s presidency, and possible early amateur journalism activities are reprinted in The Fossil #332 and #334.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 