Her Letters To Lovecraft: H. P. Lovecraft’s Other Aunts

Howard Phillip Lovecraft’s father Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to Butler Hospital in 1893, and died there five years later. Sarah Susan Lovecraft and her son returned to the home of her parents in Providence, Rhode Island, and it appears that little connection was retained between Howard and his father’s side of the family—but there was at least some correspondence between members of the extended Lovecraft clan and their nephew in Providence. While none of this correspondence is known to survive, and there are too few mentions in HPL’s published correspondence to guess much at the real scope of it, we can at least confirm he did share some communication with his paternal aunts…and they are interesting women, worth taking a look at.

Eliza Allgood (b. 1833 d. 1898)

Winfield Scott Lovecraft was the son of George Lovecraft (b. 1814 d. 1895) and Helen (Allgood) Lovecraft (b. 1820 d. 1881); census records for 1860 and 1880 show that three of Helen’s sisters (who would be Winfield’s aunt and Howard’s great aunts) were living with the Lovecraft family: Eliza Allgood, Sarah Allgood, and Augusta Charlotte Allgood (b. 1842? d. 1884). Richard D. Squires in Stern fathers ‘neath the mould: The Lovecraft Family in Rochester suggests that George Lovecraft may actually have adopted Augusta, but the census doesn’t record this. The 1880 census does record an adopted daughter Rosa Ramesdal, but how she fit into the family and what became of her is unclear. In any case, of Lovecraft’s great aunts, the only two who may have interacted with Lovecraft were Eliza and Sarah—Augusta died before HPL was born, and it isn’t clear what happened with Rosa.

Little is known of Eliza’s life. There is no record of her marrying, and she is listed in the 1880 census as a schoolteacher, which suggests some education. She had no children.

While it is possible a young H. P. Lovecraft might have sent a holiday card or letter to his great-aunt Eliza, there is no record of this. However, Eliza had not forgotten her nephew or grandnephew. In 1895 she registered a will that on her death Winfield S. Lovecraft would receive $1,000—and that if he was dead, this money was to be paid to Howard Phillips Lovecraft. So we know the family was at least still aware of the young Howard. Both Eliza Allgood and Winfield S. Lovecraft would pass away in 1898, within a few months of one another.

Sarah Allgood (b. 1830? d. 1908)

H. P. Lovecraft’s other great-aunt was Sarah Allgood, who was a teacher in Mt. Vernon, New York for sixty years before retiring. Like her sister Eliza, she never married and had no children. Sarah lived with her sister’s family for what appears to be most of that time, having particularly close relations with her nieces, the sisters of Winfield S. Lovecraft: Emily (“Emma”) Jane Lovecraft and Mary Louise Lovecraft.

Yonkers Statesman, 19 Jul 1906

While we may speculate as to whether H. P. Lovecraft ever wrote to Eliza, we know that when he was 14 or 15 years old, Howard wrote to his great-aunt Sarah for genealogical information, which the elder Allgood provided:

There was a chart—one of those partitioned, compartment affairs with broad spaces for one’s parents and little narrow spaces for one’s remote forbears. I had copied it from my late great-aunt Sarah Allgood’s chart (plus a chart of the Lovecraft side) in 1905, and it had nearly fallen to pieces.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Nov 1927, Selected Letters 2.179

While the information about the family tree doesn’t appear to have made much of an impact on Lovecraft in 1905—he was going through a rough period following the death of his grandfather Whipple Van Buren Phillips in 1904, which forced Howard and his mother to relocate into smaller quarters—it’s interesting to note that the information would later be of much greater interest and important to Lovecraft. All of the Celtic connections in his family tree are through his father’s side of the family; and given Lovecraft’s anti-Irish prejudices during World War I (being a lifelong Anglophile, he was on the side of the British during the Irish War of Independence 1919-1921), this may have something to do with a gradual lessening of his prejudice in that regard. How much other family lore that Sarah may have passed on to her grandnephew is unclear; the legend of the “Luck of Edenhall” is so popular that HPL might have picked it up anywhere, but one particular anecdote had to have come from someone on the Allgood side of the family:

The only duel in my family of which I have any knowledge was fought in 1829, in upper New York State, by my father’s maternal grandfather William Allgood (of the Allgoods of Nunwick and Brandon White House, near Hexham—an old Roman station not far south of Hadrian’s Wall—in Northumberland)—who was born in England in 1792, graduated from Oxford, and came to the U.S. by way of Canada in 1817. The affray, as reported by family tradition, was the outgrowth of unpleasant remarks on national differences (memories of the War of 1812, in which the Americans vainly tried to conquer and annex Canada, were then fresh in Northern N.Y.) exchanged with a citizen of Rochester. Pistols were used, both participants were slightly grazed, and everybody appears to have been satisfied, since no more of the matter had been reported to posterity. It appears that my forebear was the challenger in this matter—though not without reasonable provocation. He died a peaceful natural death in 1840.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 10 Nov 1932, A Means to Freedom 1.480

In 1903, Sarah Allgood registered a will dividing her property among her surviving nieces and nephews, which included George Lovecraft Taylor (son of Augusta Allgood and John Lovecraft Taylor), Emma Jane (Lovecraft) Hill, Mary Louise (Lovecraft) Mellon, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft—who, being a rather distant grandnephew, was bequeathed the modest sum of $50. It is unclear how long any correspondence with her grandnephew lasted before her death in 1908.

Mary Louise (Lovecraft) Mellon (b.1855 d. 1916)

The younger sister of Winfield S. Lovecraft, Mary Louise Lovecraft was a teacher like her aunts Sarah and Eliza. Unlike them, she married: her husband was Paul Mellon (b. 1863 d. 1910), and they were wed 8 July 1893 in Illinois. We can only speculate what kind of a marriage it was; Mary L. Mellon was listed as living with her aunt Sarah Allgood and cousin George Lovecraft Taylor in New York in 1900, and when Paul Mellon died he was in California. A clue to the strained nature of the relationship may be read in Eliza Allgood’s 1895 will, where she specifies as a condition of inheriting any property that:

[…] shall forfeit the principal thereof in event she shall give or devise any part of said estate or proceeds to Paul Mellon her husband.

Whether or not this condition ever came into play is unknown; perhaps Paul Mellon skipped out on the marriage, or was dissolute in some fashion. Mary L. Mellon remained with her surviving aunt Eliza until the latter’s death, probably as her caretaker. Mary herself would pass away in 1916. While I have not been able to find a copy of her will, L. Sprague de Camp write in H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (156) that on her death she left $2,000.00 to her nephew H. P. Lovecraft. As with the other bequests, there is no record of this in Lovecraft’s letters, but 1916 isn’t a particularly well-attested year in the letters, and he might be forgiven for not mentioning the death of distant relatives with whom he may not have been in regular contact to such friends as he had. Like her aunts, Mary L. Mellon died without children.

Emily (“Emma”) Jane (Lovecraft) Hill (b. 1849 d. 1925)

My paternal grandfather, George by name, (whom I never saw) emigrated to Rochester, N.Y., in the first half of the nineteenth century, and engaged in a remunerative occupation. He later removed to Mount Vernon, N.Y., and married Helen, daughter to Lancelot Allgood, Esq., another English emigrant, of a family whose ancestral seat is the manor of Nunwick, near Hexham, in Northumberland. This union was blessed with three children: Emma, now wife of Mr. Isaac Hill, Principal of the Pelham, N.Y. High School; Mary; and Winfield, father of the present writer.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 1 Jan 1915, Letters to Maurice W. Moe 43

Like her aunts and sister, Emma Lovecraft was a schoolteacher. On 13 Sep 1872 she married Isaac C. Hill, who would become principal of the high school in Pelham, N.Y. Their daughter, Mary Ida Emily Hill, was born in 1874…and being sixteen when Howard was born, it is perhaps not surprising that there’s no indication the cousins were ever close. Indeed, Howard may have been unaware of his cousin, since he wrote:

George also had daughters, whose childless next generation complete the dead-ending.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 5 Apr 1931, Letters to Maurice W. Moe 294

In 1899, Ida married David Lyon, and the joint Allgood-Hill-Lovecraft-Lyon plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Mt. Vernon, New York is the resting place for several members of the family.

The only suggestion that Howard was in correspondence with his aunt Eliza is the date of her death. Rather later in life, Lovecraft wrote:

His whereabouts were unknown in 1921, when I was last in correspondence with such paternal relatives as survive.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Edward H. Cole, 24 Oct 1934, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 96

Howard was referring to another male relative who had disappeared out west some decades before; he believed himself at the time to be the only male member of the Lovecraft family to still carry the name. Since his last communication was 1921, that would rule out his aunt Mary (d. 1916), so the most likely suspect was his aunt Emma (d. 1925)—while it is possible he was in touch with his cousins Ida Lyon or George Lovecraft Taylor, their general absence in his sketches of the Lovecraft/Allgood side of the family suggests against it. At least, if he was in touch with Ida, he should have received notice at the death of her mother in 1925. More than likely, his aunt Emma’s death severed the final strand of connection with between H. P. Lovecraft and his father’s side of the family.

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

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“The Dunwich Horror” (1945) by Silvia Richards & H. P. Lovecraft

Clown Warning

The newspaper clipping below includes a terrifying picture of Jolly the clown. Reader discretion advised.

“The Dunwich Horror” by H. P. Lovecraft was first published in Weird Tales (Apr 1929). It was not republished until a decade later, when Arkham House brought out the first collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, The Outsider and Others (1939). Despite wartime paper shortages, the story was reprinted in the omnibus Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944). The following year, “The Dunwich Horror” lent its name to a paperback edition The Dunwich Horror (1945, Bath House), an armed services edition The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Stories (1945). On Hallowe’en night (although many newspapers list it as playing on 1 November), a radio adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror,” written by Silvia Richards, was performed by Ronald Colman.

The show was called Suspense and began broadcasting in 1940, lasting until 1962. It did not originally feature stories involving science fiction or the supernatural, but increasingly featured more and more such adaptations during its run.

Silvia Richards’ screenplay makes many necessary adaptations for a radio drama. It begins like Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, as a mock news-broadcast, but the asides for vividly audio-acted scenes and music make it much more of a dramatization. Dr. Henry Armitage narrates the entire story, as though reporting in live from Dunwich (here pronounced correctled as Dunnich). Richards retains all the essential plot points of Lovecraft’s story and several key passages, although much of his language is lost in abridgement and change in presentation. Notably, she retains most if not all of the audio cues—animal noises and suchlike—which the story contains, which translate well into the new medium.

As a production, the radioplay is interesting for the effort to reproduce the accents, the sounds of whipporwills, the pronounciation of the odd names. As a screenplay, there’s a rather admirable skill in boiling Lovecraft’s narrative (all ~17,500 words of it) down to something that could play in less than twenty-four minutes (a half-hour timeslot has to leave room for commercials); her abridgement was probably about 6,000 words (24 pages) total. An interesting addition was the source for an “alternate formula”: Falconer’s Mystical Formulae of the Middle Ages. Whether Silvia Richards was aware of it or not, this would be one of, if not the, first Mythos tome invented by a woman author.

Lovecraft’s friends, Clifford M. & Muriel E. Eddy, heard the broadcast and commented on it:

Hearing Lovecraft’s ‘Dunwich Horror‘ dramatized on the radion program….”Suspense”……….with the movie star..Ronald Colman….as the narrator…..gave your friends, the Clifford Eddys of Pearl street, a real thrill. I hope you, too, heard it…though I cannot say I cared much for the “Orson Welles” type of presentation…..trying to put the idea across that the thing was really happening right then, was silly. It made a burlesque out of that which I had considered a truly fine horror yarn. Lovecraft himself read that yarn aloud to us…..when it was still in manuscript form…and the way he read it made chills REALLY creep up and down our spines. It was a Hallowe’en yarn….but I think most listeners failed to get the real significance.
—Muriel K. Eddy to Winfield Townley Scott, 2 Nov 1945, MSS. Brown Digital Repository

Silvia Richards continued to work in Hollywood as a script writer for radio, film, and television; the article above from the Los Angeles Daily News for 1 Apr 1947 is the most I’ve found about her life in her own words. A former Communist, she was later called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and her collaboration (in part to protect her two young sons) included testifying against her ex-husband Robert L. Richards. She is not known to have done any further adaptations of Lovecraftian material, but her radioplay stands as an early, fairly faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s material to a new medium.

You can listen to Silvia Richards’ 1945 adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror” for Suspense for free online here.

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

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

Her Letters To Lovecraft: Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft

My first memories are of the summer of 1892—just before my second birthday. We were then vacationing in Dudley, Mass., & I recall the house with its frightful attic water-tank & my rocking-horses at the head of the stairs. I recall also the plank walks laid to facilitate walking in rainy weather—& a wooded ravine, & a boy with a small rifle who let me pull the trigger while my mother held me. At that period my father was alive & in business in Boston, so that our residences were around the Boston suburbs—Dorchester & Auburndale. In the later place we stayed with my mother’s friend, the rather famous poetess Louise Imogen Guiney, pending the construction of a house of our own. That house was never built—for my father was fatally stricken in April 1893, & my mother & I moved back to the old maternal Providence home where I was born.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 4 Feb 1934, Letters to J. Vernon Shea 219

Sarah Susan Phillips was born 17 October 1857, the second child and second daughter of Whipple Van Buren Phillips and Rhoby Alzada (Place) Phillips. As with her older sister Lillian, Susie was educated at the Wheaton Seminary in Norton, MA. Unlike her older sister, Susie never seems to have been engaged in any kind of employment outside the home. She was likely active in Providence society, like her sister Annie, and aside from Louise Imogen Guiney also claimed some familiarity with Charlotte Perkins Gilman. On 12 June 1889 at 31 years old, Susie married Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a commercial traveller for the Gorham Silver Company of Providence, and left her parents home for Massachusetts. A little over a year later, she returned to the family home in Providence to give birth to her sole child, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, on 20 August 1890.

We know very little about Susie’s early life and marriage. There is no information on how she came to meet her husband, or any details of their courtship. It can be assumed, because of W. S. Lovecraft’s work he must have traveled extensively; and it would not be surprising if she grew homesick, especially when she found herself pregnant. Still, there was no reason to think that the marriage was necessarily unhappy. W. S. Lovecraft had purchased a home lot with the idea of building them a home, they had a son…and the young child was a prodigy, speaking and even reading at a precious age. As for her other interests, Lovecraft would write:

My mother was, in all probability, the only person who thoroughly understood me, with the possible exception of Alfred Galpin. She was a person of unusual charm & force of character, accomplished in literature & the fine arts; a French scholar, musician, & painter in oils. I shall not again be likely to meet with a mind so thoroughly admirable.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Elizabeth Toldridge, 1 Jun 1921, Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge 364

In 1893, W. S. Lovecraft was placed under the legal guardianship of a lawyer and on 25 April committed to Butler Hospital in Providence; an anecdote recounts that he had an hallucination on a business trip to Chicago, and had to be put under restraint and returned to Providence. His medical records indicate further hallucinations, and the records show that Winfield Scott Lovecraft suffered from “general pareisis”—late-stage syphilis. Additional rumors and anecdotes suggest that this was contracted before or outside the marriage from sexual encounters with other women, perhaps sex workers (see “The Shadow of Syphilis” in Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos).

This brings up a difficult point in any discussion of Susie Lovecraft: we have basically nothing about herself from her own hand. There are several references to his mother in H. P. Lovecraft’s letters, but relatively few of his letters from before her death survive. What we have left are passing references in other memoirs of her son’s friends and acquaintences who met her only briefly, a letter from Susie’s neighbor Clara Hess, and a good bit of speculation and gossip, passed on from second- and third-hand. So when, for example, we read that:

H. P. used to speak of his mother as a “touch-me-not” and once—but once only—he confessed to me that his mother’s attitude toward him was “devastating.” […] his mother, probably having been sex-starved against her will, lavished both her love and her hate on her only child….
—Sonia H. Davis, “Memories of Lovecraft I” (1969): Ave Atque Vale 152-153

It has to be remembered that Sonia never met Susie, that she’s repeating things she claims to have heard from H. P. Lovecraft over thirty years before, and that she was publishing this after twenty years of Lovecraft scholarship and criticism had already made something of an ogre of Susie Lovecraft, blaming her overprotectedness and coddling for some of her son’s traits. So…how much of that is accurate, and how much of that reflects a tradition?

We don’t know for sure.

What we do know is that after her husband’s medical confinement, Susie and her son moved back into the family home in Providence. The lot and the dream of a house of her own was gone, and she presumably focused on raising her young son and caring for her parents. In 1896, Rhoby Phillips would die; in 1898, W. S. Lovecraft would pass away, leaving a small estate to his widow and son. In 1904, Whipple V. Phillips would die, and the state of the family finances made it unfeasible to keep the house. Susie and her son moved into smaller quarters on the same street…and there they stayed, through all the trials and tribulations of H. P. Lovecraft’s schooling and afterwards.

The period of 1904-1914 is one of the most poorly attested in Lovecraft’s life. We know he suffered various illnesses, that he failed to graduate highschool, that he attempted a correspondence course, read voluminously, kept odd hours, etc. How much of this was due to his mother’s permissiveness or particular parenting is unclear. What she occupied herself with is also unclear. One incident that stands out:

My mother was, in the year 1906, thrown to the floor of a car which started prematurely; & sustain’d a nervous shock whose effects never wholly left her. The company made a moderate settlement out of court, after a litigation had been prepar’d against them.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 13 Dec 1928, Letters to Maurice W. Moe 191

This may or may not be the earlier “breakdown” that Lovecraft mentions in another letter (Letters to Rheinhert Kleiner & Others 134). Money issues were no doubt a major issue on Susie’s mind; as a young man Lovecraft seems to have been both rather spendthrift, had failed to obtain an education, and showed no inclination of getting a job. Neither is there any record of Susie Lovecraft obtaining any sort of employment; perhaps a reflection of her clinging to her family’s social status in Providence. So they were living solely off the slowly-diminishing funds at hand, and that included a sharp downturn in 1911 when her brother lost a chunk of the inheritance money, presumably on a failed business venture or bad investment (LMM 295).

It was presumably during this period that Susie might have participated in suffragette meetings:

Our acquaintence with the Lovecraft family stemmed through my husband’s mother’s having once met Sarah Lovecraft at a women’s suffrage meetings, although I never learned whether or not Howard’s mother really believed in equal rights for women. Mrs. Lovecraft had confided in my mother-in-law that her son was a truly gifted writer, and someday she knew he would be famous. She raved about him.
—Muriel E. Eddy, “The Gentleman from Angell Street” (1961)

In 1914, H. P. Lovecraft became involved with amateur journalism, and amateurs began to show up at their rooms, and met Mrs. Lovecraft. Some of these individuals, Susie apparently did not approve of, others she warmed to. We get only bits and pieces, never a complete picture; the majority of visitors were more interested in Howard than they were in Susie.

I was greeted at the door of 598 Angell Street by his mother, who was a woman just a little below medium height, with graying hair, and eyes which seemed to be the chief point of resemblance between herself and her son. She was very cordial and vivacious, and in another moment had ushered me into Lovecraft’s room.
—Rheinhart Kleiner, “A Memoir of Lovecraft” (1949): Ave Atque Vale 99

In 1919, Susie suffered a nervous breakdown of some sort, and went to stay with her sister Lillian. While we do not have any confirmed accounts from this period, her neighbor Clara Hess wrote an account in a letter, later published as “Lovecraft’s Sensitivity,” which has become the source of many rumors and allegations, part of which reads:

Later when she moved into the little downstairs flat in the house on Angell Street around the corner from Butler Avenue I met her often on the Butler Avenue cars, and one day after many urgent invitations I went in to call upon her. She was considered then to be getting rather odd. My call was pleasant enough but he house had a strange and shutup air and the atmosphere seemed weird and Mrs. Lovecraft talked continuously of her unfortunate son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze at him. […]

I remember that Mrs. Lovecraft spoke to me about weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark, and that she shivered and looked about apprehensively as she told the story.

The last time I saw Mrs. Lovecraft we were both going ‘down street’ on the Butler Avenue car. She was excited and apparently did not know where she was. She attracted the attention of everyone. I was greatly embarrassed, as I was the object of all her attention….
—Clara Hess, Letter to Winfield Townley Scott (1948) in Ave Atque Vale 165-167

Scott, who later gained access to Susie’s medical records, would write:

A psychiatrist’s record at Butler Hospital expresses this another way: it says she was “a woman of narrow interests who received, with a traumatic psychosis, an awareness of approaching bankruptcy.” She entered the hospital March 13, 1919, and at that time Dr. F. J. Farnell found disorder had been evidenced for fifteen years; that in all, abnormality had existed at least twenty-six years. There is only a mention of her husband’s death in the hospital record of her case, but the reader will note that twenty-six years before was the date of the establishment of a legal guardianship for Winfield Lovecraft, the year Howard (“Have been in execrable health—nervous trouble—since the age of two or three”) was three years old.

She suffered periods of mental and physical exhaustion. She wept frequently under emotional strains. In common lingo, she was a woman who had gone to pieces.
—Winfield Townley Scott, “His Own Most Fantastic Creation: Howard Phillips Lovecraft” (1944) in Lovecraft Remembered 15-16

Whether or not Scott’s presentation of Susie is accurate or not, Scott’s appraisal of Susie is almost unrelentingly negative. For a woman who had suffered considerable personal losses, possibly been exposed to sexually transmitted disease and the resulting social stigma, and lived under mounting financial strain, in a social situation which made many solutions possibly untenable—even if she had been willing and able to work (a large if, considering her apparent mental health issues), it is not clear what work would have been available for a widow with no prior experience in the 1910s. Susie appears to have been all-too-keenly aware of financial disaster.

This might have been the first time in Lovecraft’s 28 years when he was not in regular daily contact with his mother, and while they had exchanged notes, birthday cards and the like before this—Lovecraft apparently had a habit of writing her poems for her birthday, some of which survive—this is the true start of their correspondence:

My mother, feeling no better here, has gone on a visit to my elder aunt for purposes of complete rest; leaving my younger aunt as autocrat of this dwelling. My aunt does splendidly—but you above all others can imagine the effect of maternal illness & absence. I cannot eat, not can I stay up long at a time. Pen-writing or typewriting nearly drives me insane. […] I am assured, however, that my mother’s state is not dangerous; that the apparent stomach trouble is neurotic & not organic. She writes optimistic letters each day, & I try to make my replies equally optimistic; though I do not find it possible to “cheer up”, eat, & go out, as she encourages me to do. Such infirmity & absence on her part is so unprecedented, that it cannot but depress me, despite the brightest bulletins of her physician—whom, by the way, she writes that she is now well enough to dismiss.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 18 Jan 1919, LRKO 129

By March, her condition had gotten to the point that Susie was admitted to Butler Hospital, the same mental health facility where her husband had died. Lovecraft probably never visited the hospital building itself—at least there is no record of it—but would visit her on the wooded grounds, and continued to write her letters. Two of his letters to Susie survive from this period, and give an idea of what their correspondence must have been like:

My dearest Mother:—

I was greatly pleased to received your letter, and thank you in addition for the small primroses,—which still adorn this apartment—the Weekly Review, the banana, and the most captivating cat picture, which I shall give a permanent place on the wall.

The Amateur Journalists’ Conference of Tuesday, February 22, was a most distinguished success in every way […]
—H. P. Lovecraft to Sarah Susan Lovecraft, 24 Feb 1921, Letters to Family & Family Friends 1.25

With Susie absent from home, Howard began to make day-trips to Boston to visit with his amateur friends. Much as he would later describe his travels in detail to his aunts, Howard gives a blow-by-blow account of the Boston conference—although he left out meeting Sonia H. Greene.

My dearest Mother:—

I was glad to receive your letter of Sunday, and must thank you exceedingly for the Reviews, apples, and beautiful picture of the Taj Mahal, which reminds one of the fabulous Oriental edifices in Lord Dunsany’s tales. Just now I am taking a breathing spell before plunging into a fresh sea of Bush work—he has snet a new rush order which ought to bring in a considerable sum […]
—H. P. Lovecraft to Sarah Susan Lovecraft, 17 Mar 1921, LFF 1.30-31

One has to wonder if the reference to Lovecraft’s revision work for David Van Bush were a way he had of trying to alleviate, if only a little, her economic stress. Very unusually, both of these letters are closely typed rather than handwritten; perhaps this made it easier for his mother to read than his handwriting.

While his letters to his mother are bright and chipper, Howard’s references to his mother in letters from 1919-1921 show his genuine concern at her health and prolonged absence from the home. At the hospital, Susie underwent surgery for the removal of her gallbladder. She succumbed to an infection a week later, and died on 24 May 1921. Her son had not visited her during this final illness, but it was not known that it would be fatal until too late.

Despite my mother’s nervous illness & presence at a sanitarium for two years, the fatal malady was entirely different & unconnected—a digestive trouble of sudden appearance which necessitated an operation. No grave result was apprehended till the very day before death, but it then became evident that only a strong constitution could cause survival. Never strong or vigorous, my mother was unable to recover. The result is the cause of wide & profound sorrow, although to my mother it was only a relief from nervous suffering. For two years she had wished for little else—just as I myself wish for oblivion. Like me, she was an agnostic with no belief in immortality, & wished for death all the more because it meant peace & not an eternity of boresome consciousness. For my part, I do not think I shall wait for a natural death; since there is no longer any particular reason why I should exist. During my mother’s lifetime I was aware that voluntary euthanasia on my part owould cause her distress, but it is now possible for me to regulate the term of my existence with the assurance that my end would cause no more than a passing annoyance—of course my aunts are infinitely considerate & solicitous, but the death of a nephew is seldom a momentous event.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Elizabeth Toldridge, 1 Jun 1921, Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge 364

Susie’s son did not take his own life—and managed to shake himself out of the grief of his bereavement. Howard involved himself deeper into amateur affairs, and in his growing correspondence with Sonia H. Greene. For the rest of his life, H. P. Lovecraft would cherish the memory of his mother, and wrote with all sincerity that:

It takes no effort at all—especially when I am out in certain woods and fields which have not changed a bit since my boyhood—for me to imagine that all the years since 1902 or 1903 are a dream…… that I am still 12 years old, and that when I go home it will be through the quieter, more village-like streets of those days—with horses and wagons, and little varicoloured street cars with open platforms, and with my old home at 454 Angell St. still waiting at the end of the vista—with my mother, grandfather, black cat, and other departed companions alive and unchanged.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 9 Aug 1933, O Fortunate Floridian! 73

Lovecraft’s oldest surviving note to his mother—a little poem asking her to let him sleep in instead of dragging him to his aunt’s for Thanksgiving dinner—was published as the first “letter” in the Selected Letters published by Arkham House. This note and two surviving letters from Howard to his mother are published in Letters to Family & Family Friends volume 1; they have also been digitized and can be read online at the Brown University Library website.

For more information on Sarah Susan Phillips and Winfield Scott Lovecraft, see Kenneth W. Faig Jr.’s excellent essay “The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft” in An Epicure in the Terrible.

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

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

“The Book of Fhtagn” (2021) by Jamie Lackey

I’d thought that changing the ghost to a scion of the Elder Gods made the play more relatable, and that changing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into mad cultists had added a bit of reality. But maybe that was just me.
—Jamie Lackey, “The Book of Fhtagn”

It’s not just her. Lovecraft may not have literally rewritten Shakespeare to dd in elements of his own Mythos, but he did have an interpretation of the Bard’s most famous depiction of madness which dovetails nicely with Lackey’s philosophical approach to Innsmouth in “The Book of Fhtagn”:

Continuing in the dramatick line, but ascending the scale several degrees, I find “Hamlet” a most absorbing character, even as you do. It is hard for me to give an original estimate or opinion, since other commentators’ opinions are so abundant; but I find in Hamlet a rare, delicate, & nearly poetical mind, filled with the highest ideals and pervaded by the delusion (common to all gentle & retired characters unless their temperament be scientific & predominantly rational—which is seldom the case with poets) that all humanity approximates such a standard as he conceives. All at once, however, man’s inherent baseness becomes apparent to him under the most soul-trying circumstances; exhibiting itself not in the remote world, but in the person of his mother & his uncle, in such a manner as to convince him most suddenly & most vitally that there is no good in humanity. Well may he question life, when the perfidiousness of those whom he has reason to believe the best of mortals, is so cruelly obtruded on his notice. Having had his theories of life founded on mediaeval and pragmatical conceptions, he now loses that subtle something which impels persons to go on in the ordinary currents; specifically, he loses the conviction that the usual motives & pursuits of life are more than empty illusions or trifles. Now this is not “madness“—I am sick of hearing fools & superficial criticks prate about “Hamlet’s madness”. It is really a distressing glimpse of absolute truth. But in effect, it approximates mental derangement. Reason is unimpaired, but Hamlet no longer sees any occasion for its use. He perceives the objects & events about him, & their relation to each other & to himself, as clearly as before; but his new estimate of their importance, and his lack of any aim or desire to pursue an ordinary course amongst them, impart to his point of view such a contemptuous, ironical singularity that he may well be thought a madman by mistake. He sums up this position himself when he says:

“How weary, stale, flat, & unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world
Fie on’t! ah, Fie! ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank & gross in Nature
Possess it merely.”

—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 14 Nov 1918, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 219-220
Quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2.

There is a kind of depth in the philosophy of the Lovecraft Mythos which is rarely explored in fiction. Scott R. Jones went into it in When The Stars Are Right: Toward An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality, and Randolph Partain in Lessons From An Indifferent Cosmos: How Cthulhu Can Help You Be A Better Human. Few look beyond the self-blinded earthgazers who see Cthulhu as an evil that must be vanquished, or Innsmouth as a place of horror that has to be escaped rather than a place of dark beauty to be explored and appreciated.

Which is exactly the choice that Jamie Lackey presents in “The Book of Fhtagn.”

The closest works of comparison are probably Innsmouth (2019) by Megan James and “Down into Silence” (2018) by Storm Constantine. With “The Book of Fhtagn,” they present an Innsmouth not as it was, but as it is or might be. A contemporary Innsmouth where the Mythos coexists with smartphones and pumpkin spice, high school plays and global warming. Where James and Constantine play up the domestic and tourist angles, however, Lackey leans into the darker aspect of things: what if it’s not just about being born in Innsmouth, or visiting it? What if there’s a choice involved in becoming a full member of the community? Personal sacrifices to be made? Which begs deep questions about Lovecraft’s philosophy, of going through the motions of daily life when we are all just temporary, meaningless things on a cosmic scale of time.

And, for a teenager in high school, what the heck to do with the rest of their life.

I had gone into the ocean, and a part of me would now live there forever.
—Jamie Lackey, “The Book of Fhtagn”

Like Lovecraft’s Hamlet, Lackey’s Kimberely gets her glimpse of absolute truth—and finds in that contemplation of how small and pointless the mundanity of life is, a certain freedom of detachment from everyday things—and in time she finds the courage to embrace her new purpose.

Jamie Lackey’s “The Book of Fhtagn” is published in the Fall 2021 issue of Starward Shadows Quarterly.

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

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

Editor Spotlight: Interview with Erica Ciko Campbell and Desmond Rhae Harris of Starward Shadows Quarterly

We’re interested in exploring the wicked, strange places that walk the line between reality and nightmare—the alien, the absurd, and above all else, the weird.—Starward Shadows Quarterly Submissions page

In order for more diverse voices in cosmic horror, weird fiction, and Lovecraftian fiction to be published, there needs to be venues to publish those new voices. Starward Shadows Quarterly published their first issue in Fall 2021. Editor-in-Chief Erica Ciko Campbell and Associate Editor/Designer & Illustrator Desmond Rhae Harris have brought their own aesthetic and appreciation for weird fiction, sword & sorcery, fantasy, & science fiction to their endeavor, and have been kind enough to answer a few questions.

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How did you get into H. P. Lovecraft and cosmic horror?

Erica Ciko Campbell: I actually started writing what I would consider very “soft” cosmic horror all the way back when I was 12 with other kids on roleplay forums online. I didn’t even realize it fell into the genre at the time, but I gravitated towards themes of the insignificance of mankind in a vast and chaotic multiverse, and my characters were almost always aliens. Since I felt like an outsider all my life, it may sound cliché, but I was really just writing about what I felt like inside—but on a cosmic scale.

As far as my introduction the immortal master of cosmic horror himself: In 10th grade, I was “loaned” a copy of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, a collection of many of Lovecraft’s greatest stories such as “The Whisperer in Darkness” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” From the moment I opened it for the very first time, I was awestruck. For the first time in my life, I’d encountered someone who wrote stuff that touched on the same themes I was interested in. I’m pretty sure I read the entire thing in a couple of afternoons, in those little storage cubbies beneath the desks so the teachers wouldn’t catch me during class. From then on, I always said that Lovecraft was my favorite author of all time and space.

Desmond Rhae Harris: I actually first heard of H. P. Lovecraft when I was a teenager and saw him referenced in a “Necronomicon” that somehow made its way into the occult section in a bookstore. I cracked it open and the descriptions of Nyarlathotep sparked a strong interest in the real stories from Lovecraft himself.

…And, since my earliest memories, I stared up into the black nighttime shadows at the treeline and lost myself in the sight of the starry sky or the moon anytime I got the chance. The pale taste of space that you can get from Earth filled my guts with a deep hollowness at the uncertainty of what was out there and where everything I knew stood in comparison to the rest of the universe. It terrified me at times, so the later discovery of cosmic horror as experienced by others was extremely cathartic and held a very strong draw.

Do you feel that your gender and sexuality have shaped your understanding of Lovecraft and your approach to Lovecraftian fiction?

DRH: I do feel that way: my confusion about my sexuality and identity when I was younger made me notice how narrow of a range of demographics appeared in works from authors like Lovecraft. This struggle to find an ideal character to identify with led me to seek out more representation in literature later on.

There are so many people at all age ranges who might be more able to accept themselves for who they are if they can see demonstrations of people like them finding their place in the world. So, while I still read and enjoy H. P. Lovecraft’s work, I am acutely aware of which demographics he pays attention to (or doesn’t) and how he portrays them. And, I look for opportunities to be more inclusive while still preserving the essence of cosmic horror that Lovecraft gave us—after all, the broader the lens through which we view cosmic horror, the more complex and astonishing it can be.

ECC: When I write, I usually don’t put major emphasis on gender, orientation, etc. unless it’s a key point in the story. So I end up with a lot of Lovecraftian stories/cosmic horror with LGBTQ+ and BIPOC characters, but I wouldn’t say I make any special effort to do this: I just enjoy writing these types of characters and feel that I (and also, inadvertently, my audience) can identify with them more.

I can’t help but feel a bit excited to live in a time when every single character no longer reads as the exact same thirty-something white guy. Even as a kid I was kind of critical of this element of Lovecraft’s stories and noticed the lack of diversity: and this was before it was a hot button issue on the internet. To be blunt, I find it boring. So I would say that as an editor, I’m especially excited to see Lovecraftian submissions from female/LGBTQ/BIPOC authors, featuring characters that fall into these demographics as well (If you want a great example, you should check out The Book of Fthagn by Jamie Lackey in our first issue.) That’s not to say that I’ll pass over a story just because the author doesn’t fall into one of these demographics, of course.

What made you want to create your own ezine for cosmic horror?

ECC: I’ve always been a “lone wolf” and liked doing my own thing. If I don’t like the way other people do things, I start my own project instead. There aren’t many magazines out there publishing the same type of stuff that we intend to: New Weird, S&S, and Cyberpunk don’t often cross paths in the same publication, at least as far as I’ve seen. I wanted to create a magazine that contains the exact mix of stories that I’ve always wanted to read, because there weren’t any.

Also, I spent so much time submitting stories to magazines over the past few years that I started to wonder what it felt like to run one. I think it’s really easy for authors to put a lot of pressure on editors and to judge them (I know I’m guilty of it myself)—so I figured the best way to get a true understanding of what goes on “on the inside” was to start my own magazine and see with my own eyes.

I worked for two other magazines before starting SSQ, but I’ve never been good at taking instructions from others. I quit Novel Noctule because of this. I still read for Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores sometimes, but I’m not involved in the internal workings of the editorial process at all, so it’s a totally different experience.

DRH: The most concise way that I can put it is: inspiration. Whenever I look at other ezines, I enjoy them for what they are but they also spark all kinds of ideas. What I could do differently, what I could explore next, what doors I could open, what unseen groups I could highlight. In the end, I can only tolerate so much inspiration before I have to make something out of it.

**What do you want to achieve with Starward Shadows Quarterly?**

ECC: This one is actually pretty simple: I want to create a place where readers can go for a while where they don’t really have to think about the problems of Earth, and where they can feel free to explore hidden worlds and fantastical ideas they wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. I guess you could call it a sanctuary for all true lovers of darkness, where they don’t need to feel choked by the chains of society, and both dreams and delusions have new meaning. That’s not to say that we’ll be avoiding Earth-based stories entirely. With ones like Angel Teeth, you can’t help but stare the ugliness of our human reality dead in the eyes and smile at it.

DRH: I want people of all types to feel welcomed by every issue that we publish. I want to seek out diamonds in the rough that might otherwise have gone unpublished because of either a lack of credentials or a “touchy” demographic, because I know how it feels to be glossed over.

Aside from Lovecraft, other thematic inspirations cited for Starward Shadows Quarterly include J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. How do you handle the historical racism and colonialist tropes inherent in fantasy and sword & sorcery?

DRH: This is a tricky topic. The best I can explain it is that we always look for ways to bring fresh, modern insight on those topics, and we deliberately seek out authors who provide that. If a story doesn’t have a new, enlightened viewpoint that shatters racism and colonialism and instead falls back on addressing those grief-ridden topics in the same, tired, old ways, then we simply won’t publish the story—no matter how good it is otherwise. It isn’t enough for something to be “not that problematic.” It needs to actively counteract the social impact that previous authors have had in these difficult areas in order for us to accept it.

ECC: Like Desmond said, this is a tricky question. Personally, I believe it’s possible to write stories in both these genres that avoid these tropes entirely. In these genres there’s always going to be “the oppressed,” and then you’re going to have “the oppressors”, or you wouldn’t have much of a story: But in my opinion, the old archetypes don’t have to be carved in stone. Stories can be written from different perspectives that were unheard of back in the old days. The background characters of the past can become the heroes (or, if I’m writing it, the anti-heroes) of the future. Even if you tear down the metaphorical statues built by the founders that are tainted with archaic viewpoints and toxic worldviews, you’re left with some pretty good building blocks. It’s up to us to decide what to do with them.

Do you feel writers like Lovecraft, Tolkien, & Howard still resonate with contemporary audiences?

ECC: Oh yes, definitely. In certain corners of the internet, it seems like there’s a subset of people that latch onto one of these authors and worship them almost religiously. Everything they write seems to be an emulation. I think that thanks to mass-printed paperbacks and the unprecedented ability of the internet to spread weird fiction far and wide, these guys have more fans than ever. And many of them don’t even know or care about what the authors were like as people, and get swept away by “fandoms.”

For example, there are tons of people who aren’t aware of Lovecraft’s problematic outlook/history at all. Kind of hard to miss, if you paid attention to the stories… But perhaps they haven’t read them all. Either that, or they choose to ignore them because A) they don’t care or B) they feel the art is the only thing that matters.

On a purely thematic basis, all controversy aside: fads may come and go in the literary world, and the favor of society may shift, but the true masters will reign forever. And even if their names were erased from history, they inspired so many countless authors that they’re burned into the literary world for as long as it exists.

DRH: Absolutely! Classics are classics, after all. And, while our values as a society might have shifted over the course of time, I see no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak: I feel that we should always look for areas where we could do better, but always maintain respect for those who paved the way for us and continue to harvest inspiration from their skills so that we can give new values a timeless voice.

In fact, it’s imperative that we bridge the gap between “old and new” speculative fiction by blending modern insights with creativity and intricacy that has already withstood the test of time. By doing so, we might bridge the gap between different readers as well, and help them understand each other better.

Do you think it is important for weird fiction and fantasy to escape the shadow of Lovecraft & Tolkien? Do you think that is even possible?

DRH: One could argue that, by standing on the shoulders of giants, they might leap to a new mountain entirely—but they’re still highly unlikely to forget the giants that helped them get there. As I’m sure you gathered from my previous responses, I’m not personally concerned with escaping the shadows of previous masters or reinventing the wheel: I just want each new take on speculative fiction to bring in something fresh enough to require a good deal of active, analytical thought to trace it back to Lovecraft and Tolkien—because that means that it took a lot of active thought and creativity for the author to write the piece in the first place.

By the same coin, I think pieces that directly reference previous icons in a tongue-in-cheek manner have their own merits by playing off of something familiar and almost “breaking the fourth wall” in a sense. It’s not quite satire, but it’s not mere fanfiction either. There’s a delicate balance to be struck there, and a few people do it just right.

Another inspiration you cite is Tamsyn Muir. Are there other women/LGBTQ+ authors whose weird work you find inspirational? Any favorites?

ECC: When I was a child, I absolutely adored A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, along with all its sequels. I think these were actually my first real foray into true, far-out science fiction. I had a little Evangelion notebook where I wrote down all the poems from one of the sequel books… The one about the mitochondria. I can’t even remember the name anymore. [A Wind in the Door (1973)] Sadly, aside from Ursula K. Le Guin, no one else is really popping out in my mind. I’m not sure if this speaks to the lack of diversity in the genre, or my lack of adventurism as a reader!

DRH: I personally really like the work of C. S. Friedman, particularly Black Sun Rising.

Besides specific authors, are there any specific anthologies, ezines, magazines, or films that have inspired Starward Shadows Quarterly?

ECC: Films have actually been a massive inspiration for me over the years, arguably moreso than literature. Growing up, I was absolutely obsessed with A Clockwork Orange, Pink Floyd: The Wall, and Natural Born Killers, just to name a few. I was also a huge anime fan in my youth, and I can practically recite the entire Neon Genesis Evangelion series by heart at this point. On the Science Fiction end of things, Outlaw Star was also one of my greatest inspirations of all time and space.

Video games have been another massive inspiration for me over the years. While we were in the process of creating the magazine, I was (and still am) obsessively playing through the entire Dark Souls series. I’m awestruck with what a wonderful job the developers did at creating a bleak and sorrowful world that still somehow manages to inspire the slightest bit of hope in the end. One thing that absolutely captivates me about Dark Souls is what a great metaphor it is for depression and other mental illnesses. No matter how many times you lose and get beaten to a pulp, eventually you overcome it, and life (or undeath, in this case, I suppose) goes on.

As far as other magazines, I really admire the design and setup of both Vastarien and Cosmic Horror Monthly. I also worked for a New Weird magazine called Novel Noctule for a time, and admittedly, what I learned there inspired our “behind the scenes” processes a great deal.

DRH: You’ll never guess this, but Lord of the Rings… I think I speak for both of us when I say that we also take a huge amount of inspiration from music in genres such as dungeon synth and dark ambient. I also really enjoy the atmosphere in games like Morrowind and Oblivion, so that tends to creep in as well.

**While Starward Shadows Quarterly wears its literary inspirations on its sleeve, who are the artistic inspirations?**

DRH: Oh wow, well, I could go on for more hours than anyone wants about this, so I’ll just give you a list of highlights: Michael Whelan, Philippe Caza, Lady Frieda Harris, H. R. Giger, Zdzisław Beksiński, Austin Osman Spare, Vincent Van Gogh, Alphonse Mucha, Bruce Pennington, and Frank Frazetta.

ECC: I really like the art of Michael Whelan, the guy who did the covers for the Elric series, along with countless others. Zdzisław Beksiński also immediately came to mind. Once upon a time, a former member of one of the most legendary proto-black metal bands of all time told me that my own artwork reminded him of Austin Osman Spare, so I suppose he makes the list as well.

Your submissions guidelines specifically call for works by neurodivergent and disabled authors. Do you feel weird fiction in general does a poor job of representing such voices?

ECC: Actually, yes. I feel that too often, the neurodivergence ends up being the “horror” or the punchline of the story. The same goes for disability. I feel there are too many stories about neurodivergent/disabled people and not enough by them, if that makes sense—and it should come as no surprise that most of these aforementioned stories are written by neurotypical people who see a life of disability as the ultimate horror.

DRH: I do feel that speculative and weird fiction do tend to follow the troughs previously dug for them by cisgendered male authors. Obviously, that’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of authors within that demographic that fully deserve the pedestal that they’ve been given. But I’ve always felt a burning desire to raise equal pedestals for other demographics: Pedestals reserved for others who match previous and current authors in skill, not in demographic.

Just a side note: I’m afraid that, sometimes, the label of “weird” sometimes also causes a lot of the very authors we seek to slink back and hide a bit: not everyone is comfortable wearing an alternative or underrepresented label like a shroud. Not everyone wants to feel like a “freak who joined the circus” thanks to a lot of the stigma that still clings to the idea of being different. So, hopefully, I’m not creating a catch-22. However, I do feel that speculative/weird fiction as a whole tends to passively allow neurodivergent and disabled voices to go unheard, and I want to actively call those voices to a place where they’ll feel welcome, whether it be as authors or as readers.

Based on your submissions, do you feel there is a lot of diversity in the folks writing weird fiction these days?

ECC: Unfortunately—and it’s hard to tell from a single submissions period, but I’ll try my best—it still in some ways seems to be an “old boys club.” I can say with confidence that we received more submissions from cis guys than any other demographic. Now I want to stress there’s nothing wrong with this. We’ve published several of them, in fact, and will continue to welcome them with open arms along with everyone else. But even though we specifically called for disabled and neurodivergent authors, we didn’t get submissions from a ton of them.

One genre that’s especially lacking in diversity, I’ve noticed, is Sword and Sorcery. Finding a good Sword and Planet story by a female author honestly felt like fishing out a single pearl in a sea of marbles. We barely received any S&S/S&P from anyone but cis guys, which I hope in the future will change.

Another trend I noticed was that guys lean towards “harder” SF stuff and body horror, while women seemed more likely to send fantasy or psychological stuff. Of course, there were a few awesome ladies that sent hardcore body horror that made everything else in the inbox seem pale—but unfortunately that’s not exactly the type of thing we’re going for with the magazine, as cool as it is.

I must say, I feel that the published Weird Fiction sphere feels very “curated” after digging through our inbox. The subs were definitely not in line with what I see out there in the world published. I think editors are doing a careful job selecting work by underrepresented groups, and making sure not to gloss them over like they might have in the past.

DRH: …I wish I had a different answer to give you, but: not so much. There’s more diversity than there used to be, certainly, and that’s wonderful. However, I do still have to put in a deliberate effort to find authors from underrepresented demographics within the ocean of slush. (If you fall under a marginalized demographic, take this as an active call! I’d love to read what you have to say.)

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

DRH: At the risk of seeming blunt or harsh: If a submission contains enough content that I don’t even feel comfortable reading, let alone publishing, I simply auto-reject. I tend to ramble (in case anyone missed that) so I can’t afford the time to give personal feedback if something surpasses a certain threshold of “not at all what I’m looking for.” It’s too overwhelming.

But if a piece is creative and promising enough to maintain its “spark” despite any discriminatory/prejudiced language or themes, I’m happy to reach out to the author and discuss the matter with them. I’ll point out how it could be interpreted, ask if that’s how they meant for it to come off, and offer them the opportunity for an R&R. After all, if someone is open to the idea of learning and growing as a modern author, I’m thrilled to play a part in helping them to do that.

ECC: There were a few situations where we received a story where it genuinely seemed like the author didn’t realize what they were writing could be perceived as offensive. In these cases, if I felt they were well-intentioned but naïve, I gently explained why we couldn’t publish it. However, if something was written on purpose with the intent to shock or come across as offensive, we usually just sent them a form rejection. Right out of the gate I decided I wasn’t going to engage with trolls—especially the ones who know exactly what they’re doing. Why give them the sick satisfaction?

As speculative fiction writers, artists, and editors, you have both worked in the trenches of weird fiction websites and ezines for a few years. Have you faced discrimination for your gender or sexuality in that context?

ECC: Recently, I had a really weird experience where I submitted a story to a certain venue, and it was quickly accepted with much enthusiasm. However, somehow, the editor seemed to have missed the fact that the main character was trans. (It certainly wasn’t the focal point of the story, so I guess it makes sense it went over his head: I always try to present characters as just “people” so maybe this time I did too good of a job, ha). But anyways, as soon as he found out, he started acting kind of weird, and basically tried to delicately tiptoe out of the contract.

All discrimination aside, the same guy was also incredibly hurtful and rude to me during the prolonged illness of a family member after approaching me for some totally unrelated writing event, so he may have just been a jerk.

But all-in-all, my experiences haven’t been so bad. Overall people have been pretty courteous, honestly. I can’t really comment definitively on whether or not my gender has worked for or against me, because if I’ve been rejected on that basis, it’s been kept behind the scenes.

DRH: Unfortunately, yes, I have. There has been more than one seemingly-promising opportunity that went dark after my LGBTQ+ status came to light, and I’ll admit that it can be very disheartening. There was even a situation where I was asked/welcomed to volunteer my voice as a marginalized demographic, only to have the project fall through after the creator moved on and found more “convenient” replacements. Things like that suck. They always have, and they always will—but, at the end of the day, they only reinforce the conviction that I’m doing the right thing by working on a publication that actively seeks to welcome and elevate authors who may have experienced similar things.

**As a medium, how do you think ezines like Starward Shadows Quarterly compare with older media like Weird Tales? What are the advantages and disadvantages?**

ECC: Weird Tales has an old, dedicated audience who might not even be that tech savvy. People are always going to follow it just for the name, and the fact that Lovecraft was published in it back in the day. It could be owned by a team of purple canaries and certain people would still rave about Weird Tales. Also, it’s basically impossible to get into this thing without already being established. I remember following their submissions a year or two ago, and they took a grand total of one unsolicited submission from a pool of 500 to 1,000 authors. So basically it’s an invite-only old boys club that, in my opinion, isn’t really offering anything revolutionary or even new.

This probably sounds like a stab, but I don’t mean it that way: I feel the same way about plenty of other big-name magazines that invite the same big-name authors again and again. For lack of a better word, it’s boring. At Starward Shadows, we promise to give new voices a chance instead of creating an echo chamber for the same old ones. (Not like we could afford the big names anyway! Ha!)

But at the end of the day, I think this makes us a lot more relatable. The average up-and-coming author stands about as much of a chance at getting into Weird Tales as a street urchin does at becoming the Emperor of the Galaxy, so hopefully they’ll dream of getting into Starward Shadows instead.

DRH: I don’t really have much to say about this other than that we hope to bring in all kinds of fresh content that Weird Tales doesn’t offer.

The tagline for Starward Shadows Quarterly is “The Speculative Fiction Ezine Where The Stars Are Always Right.” Do you think that the stars have always been right for diverse cosmic horror fiction? Or has something changed?

DRH: Oh boy, this is a loaded question. Erica and I actually banter back and forth on a very regular basis over whether the stars are “right” for something or not. I say that the stars are ever changing, and that the constant chaos and change of the universe mean that there’s a point of opportunity for just about anything. In fact, one could say that the stars have always been right for diversity since it’s always been present—humanity’s social confines have been the problem.

I would, however, say that the “cultural stars” are now more favorable towards diversity within cosmic horror fiction than they used to be during, say, Lovecraft’s day. I do think that society has shifted towards a place of greater awareness of marginalized demographics—I shudder to think of the life of secrecy and fear that I’d have had to live mere decades ago. And hopefully, with future issues, we can continue to make the stars even better for those who can relate to a statement like that.

ECC: Oh, they never are. It’s an inside joke, really. If you sit around waiting for the stars to be right, your life and the entire world will pass you by. Whether the stars are right or not, this is the time you were born in, so it’s the only chance you’ll ever have to write cosmic horror.

All jokes aside, I think we can all agree on one thing: In the past, the stars definitely weren’t aligned for anybody that didn’t fit the mold. But this isn’t a problem unique to cosmic horror. And sadly, to this day, things haven’t changed as much as they should have. We can’t fix the world, but we can promise to give you a chance that others wouldn’t if you send us your greatest cosmic horror piece, no matter who you are or where you come from.

What do you see as the future of Lovecraftian fiction and cosmic horror?

ECC: I think the universe, and the future of cosmic horror, is a circle. In other words, everything old is new again. The past and the present will slowly integrate in a way that Lovecraft himself probably never would have imagined. New authors will continue to be inspired by his work, but slowly, the trickle of new material flowing into the Mythos will become a waterfall: So the authors of the future will have a lot more to work with than we do in this generation. If we do a good job, that is.

I wonder what he’d think about it, really. Maybe if the universe really is a circle, the stars will finally be right someday in the far future of the distant past, and I can ask him.

DRH: Oh, everything. As social dynamics and culture have changed to become more accepting, and as scientific discoveries have progressed, so many doors have been opened. In online spaces you find people exchanging incredible, inspiring, and horrifying ideas at a rate that never used to be possible. I think that all these things will contribute to cosmic horror becoming more intricate and well known than ever before—perhaps too well known…

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Thank you Erica and Desmond for answering these questions, and for a chance to pick your brains about the state of weird fiction, and a look at the inner workings of Starward Shadows Quarterly.

Starward Shadows Quartery can be found online at https://starwardshadows.com/ and you can follow them on twitter at https://twitter.com/StarwardShadows.

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

“Zolamin and the Mad God” (2013) by Lisa Morton

“You can best me at dice, girl, but let’s see how well you do in my bed.”

She’d grinned, but Amarkosa had shouted from the bar, “You, sir, would be well advised to release her arm while you’ve still got one of your own.” The spectators had all guffawed, but the barbarian had flushed and yanked Zolamin close. “I think I can handle this—”

When she broke the bottle of ale over his head, he was only stunned—but when he found the jagged bottleneck pressed to his throat, he’d sobered up quickly. “You can leave like a good boy,” Zolamin told him, “or you can leave like a dead man. Your choice.”
—Lisa Morton, “Zolamin and the Mad God” in Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyberborea (2013) 111

Pedants can argue whether or not Clark Ashton Smith’s stories of Hyperborea count as sword & sorcery; stories like “The Seven Geases” are replete with sorcery, but little swordplay. As with his contemporaries like Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, E. R. Eddision, Lord Dunsany, Poul Anderson, J. R. R. Tolkien, Smith took inspiration from Orientalist fiction such as the 1,001 Nights and epic tales such as the Prose Eddas. Their settings of Pegāna and Elf-land, Witchland and Demonland, Middle Earth, the Hyborian and Thurian Ages, Hyperborea and Poiseidonis are exotic fantasy-lands, filled with thieves, warriors, wizards, and monsters. Each of them added to a growing fantasy milieu which blossomed in roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, and inspired the huge resurgence in fantasy settings which continues today.

What differed for each writer was the approach. Howard’s tales of Conan the Cimmerian, Kull of Atlantis, and and Solomon Kane are action-packed, bloody, dark, with a gritty, hardboiled American sensibility. Clark Ashton Smith’s stories such as “The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” and “The Black Abbot of Puthuum” are more sardonic, less focused on bloodshed, giving more detail to the descriptions of gems and cruelty, to sorcery and horror. If Howard’s tales are heroic fantasy, driven by protagonists that live by their swords and their wits, Smith is closer to dark fantasy, with few heroes to triumph, where many of the main characters are undone by their own hubris and unbridled desires.

Lisa Morton’s Zolamin shares a literary lineage with Howard’s Valeria (“Red Nails”) and Bêlit (“The Queen of the Black Coast”) and Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, in that she is a woman warrior and mercenary; but the setting of the story and the overall tone is definitely Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea…though a little more explicit than Smith could ever publish:

She remembered her mother, forced into a life of prostitution after her parents had traded her at the age of ten for a pair of oxen. Zolamin’s mother had borne her while still a teen; her father could have been any of dozens of men. Determined that her daughter would not follow in her footsteps, mother had done her best to disguise the child’s gender and raised her as a boy […]
—Lisa Morton, “Zolamin and the Mad God” in Deepest, Darkest Eden 114

Zolamin’s backstory is essential to her character for this story, because the Mad God plays on her ambitions, small and different as they are. Her character drives the story, and if it is not quite hardboiled fantasy in the vein of Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest with swords, it is still a respectable entry in a fairly small body of work: stories set in the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, and striving to capture some of the mood of his tales rather than pastiche the way he wrote them. Like “Hode of the High Place” (1984) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, it isn’t sword-skill which determines the course of the story as much as choices made which are a bit darker and more psychologically driven. There are scenes of action but they are often anti-climactic, interrupted by the visions of the Mad God, and that in itself is part of why the story works, because Zolamin has to decide how to handle the messy affair she has stumbled into…and unlike Conan and the Tower of the Elephant, there is no mercy to be dealt out here.

“Zolamin and the Mad God” was published in Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyberborea (2013). It has not yet been reprinted.

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

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The Shuttered Room (1966) by Julia Withers

Incidentally, I’ve just sold Heritage Productions THE SHUTTERED ROOM. No doubt they’ll flesh out the “romance” between Dunwich boy and Innsmouth girl to give it “body” and we’ll have a shilling shocker out of it, but I couldn’t care less, really….
—August Derleth to Ramsey Campbell, 6 Feb 1964, Letters to Arkham 170

“The Shuttered Room,” the title story for the collection The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959), is arguably Derleth’s greatest work of fanfiction. While originally billed as one of Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations,” and Derleth had claimed to base it on unspecified notes by Lovecraft. In one letter, Derleth described it as:

[…] wedding of the Innsmouth and Dunwich themes, as manifestly HPL intended to do, judging by his scant notes.
—August Derleth to Felix Stefanile, August 11, 1958, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Whether or not these notes actually existed is open to speculation; no surviving letters suggests Lovecraft had any intention to unite the two themes. Nevertheless, in 1958 Derleth sat down to write the story (A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos 215, 231). The result is not his best Mythos story, or even his best pastiche, but probably the best fanfiction story that Derleth would ever write, a literal union of the Whateley and Marsh family trees from “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” paying detailed homage to both.

In the 1960s, August Derleth and Arkham House began to have some success in selling the film rights to various Lovecraft & related properties, resulting in five films:

The Haunted Palace (1963, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”)
Die, Monster, Die! (1965, “The Colour Out of Space”)
The Shuttered Room (1967)
Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968, “The Dreams in the Witch House”)
The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Despite the fact that every film except The Shuttered Room was distributed by American International Productions, this wasn’t an early effort at a cinematic universe or franchise along the lines of the Universal monsters. While a couple of the films shared a few elements such as the Necronomicon, each was produced separately and without any direct tie-ins to the others in the form of characters, sets, props, or storylines.

The films all received different marketing promotions and led to the creation of associate media: Die, Monster, Die! got a comic book adaptation and there was an Italian fotonovela created for Curse of the Crimson Altar, for example. In 1966, released before the film came out, The Shuttered Room received a film novelization—as a kind of Gothic romance.

The novel was written by “Julia Withers,” a pseudonym used by prolific novelist and ghostwriter Jerrold Mundis who had worked on several different screenplay novelizations in the late 1960s. It’s difficult to tell how successful the slim paperback (only 156 pages) was. It is even more difficult to tell if Mundis ever bothered to read Derleth’s original story. Probably not; there is little enough let of Derleth’s original story in the screenplay by D. B. Ledrov and Nathaniel Tanchuck. Much of the best writing in the short story is in the descriptive passages that Derleth wrote so well, and the best part of the film is the cinematography; the novel lacks both.

The Shuttered Room (novel) is a very barebones kind of contemporary thriller dressed up (at least in terms of the cover) as a kind of Gothic romance, where family secrets, an old building, and a family curse threaten a nice young couple. There is no Mythos content beyond the name of Dunwich itself—here an isolated island rather than a town. Even “Whateley” is rendered as “Whately,” and there is no reference to Innsmouth at all. What Mundis does add above and beyond what is in the film is a touch of the grotesque, some backstory that either never made it to the final film or was cut out, and one important thing…

There, squatting in the midst of the tumbled bedding from that long-abandoned bed, sat a monstrous, leathery-skinned creature that was neither frog nor man, one gorged with food, with blood still slavery from its batrachian jaws and upon its webbed fingers—a monstrous entity that had strong, powerfully long arms, grown from its bestial body like those of a frog, and tapering off into a man’s hands, save for the webbing between the fingers…
—August Derleth, “The Shuttered Room” in The Watchers Out of Time 158

Something vaguely resembling a woman crouched in that doorway. Its hair was long and matted and tangled. A tattered filthy garment hung from its twisted body. Its eyes were large and bulbous. Its nose was non-existent, only two gaping holes. A slit with jagged teeth served for a mouth. It’s skin was leathery and cracked—scale-like, actually—and it glistened with moisture.
—Julia Withers (Jerrod Mundis), The Shuttered Room 149

Imagine trying to describe a Deep One/Whateley hybrid, in a setting which has already expunged every reference to Innsmouth and to an audience that has no familiarity with “The Dunwich Horror.” The solution in Mundis’ The Shuttered Room was to describe the nameless Whately child as a monstrous freak: “stillborn…or it should have been…but it lived.”

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” as Lovecraft would put it. The idea was that living things re-experience the stages of evolution as they grow; so that human embryos have gills…tails…which are lost as they develop. The idea that an embryo might get “stuck” at a certain stage and yet successfully be born and grow to adulthood is not unique to The Shuttered Room novel. In fact, it is strongly reminiscent of the 1953 horror film The Maze—and one has to wonder if Derleth might not have taken a bit of inspiration from this film too. Some years after Derleth wrote “The Shuttered Room,” Ramsey Campbell mentioned the film to Derleth:

There have been movies with a definite slant toward the conceptions of the Mythos, however […] there was the one starring Richard Carlson titled THE MAZE, which was about the hideous frog-creature which is kept and fed in an ancient castle, and finally turns out to be the first in a line who now live in the castle!
—Ramsey Campbell to August Derleth, 10 Aug 1961, Letters to Arkham 12-13

Did Derleth borrow from The Maze? Did Jerrold Mundis? In such a case as this, where the original work has been so translated, and so changed in the transformation from short story to screenplay to short novel, it’s difficult to say…but the various works stand as distinct iterations of a very odd cadet line of the Mythos.

The film was not so creative. Or perhaps it just wasn’t in the budget. The company forewent any supernatural or preternatural explanation; there was no monster, and almost no explanation. In that sense, at least, the novel is an improvement on the film, or at least a step closer to Derleth’s original story. The idea of a madwoman trapped in the attic is closer to Jane Eyre than Cthulhu; perhaps that’s why the marketing of The Shuttered Room (novel) bears the hallmarks of the Gothic romances of its day, rather than any effort to market it to Lovecraft fans. The novel stands as an example of how truly weird and diffuse Lovecraftian influence can get.

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

“Hode of the High Place” (1984) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

For the first time he recognized that the possession of an object was never as ecstatic as the seeking; the reality never as pleasurable as the dream.
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “Hode of the High Place” in The Last Continent 201

There is no pithy word for stories that are inspired by Clark Ashton Smith, that partake of his style and essence, are reminiscent of his darker moods and most erotic intimations. When someone writes a tale that draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft, or involves him in some form, we call it “Lovecraftian.” For the Bard of Auburn, we might say “Smithian,” but there are many Smiths. “Klarkash-Tonian” is a bit of a mouthful. Nothing seems to succinctly embrace the whole concept.

It is a rare story where we have need of such a word.

“Hode of the High Place” is not set explicitly in Smith’s Zothique, or any other fantasy world we know. In mood, in device, in tone, it could well be. It fits neatly among the other neo-Zothique tales of The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique (1999), one of the very few anthologies where authors are encouraged to play in Clark Ashton Smith’s imaginary worlds. Smith himself might well have smiled and recognized this story as a literary descendant, had he lived long enough to read it.

When considering those who follow Smith, there is a tendency toward pastiche, as in “The Vulviflora of Vuutsavek” (2008) by Charlotte Alchemilla Smythe. Salmonson is wise enough to not try and mimic the same tendency for arcane vocabulary, but there are elements of Smith that readers will recognize in the tone, the omniscient third-person perspective which is almost voyeuristic in following the triumphs and tragedies of this story. Then there is the erotic element.

A gelatinous mass flowed over him, oblivious to his thrashing, smothering him as the water had smothered the flames. Then he felt something expected and pleasant: gentle, rhythmic constrictions around his genitals.
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “Hode of the High Place” in The Last Continent 197

One of the hallmarks of Smith’s fiction was a fascination with scenes of unnatural carnal pleasures, necrophilia (or perhaps more accurately, a love that extends beyond death), assignations with witches, lamia, and succubi, etc. It isn’t in every work, and it isn’t in any sense explicit by contemporary terms, even his play The Dead Will Cuckold You (1951) is concerned with character and relationships rather than actually describing the actions of genitalia. Some of Smith’s stories which could only be published in expurgated form during his lifetime, such as “Mother of Toads” (Weird Tales Jul 1938), are quaint in terms of actual sexual content, though still potent in terms of image, plot, and suggestion.

This reticence toward explicit sexual description in Smith’s fiction, and his frustration with the standards of his day that censored even that, can be easily understood. Clark Ashton Smith was writing weird fiction of which sex was a part, but not weird erotica or pornography with a weird setting. The point of Smith’s stories was not to sexually excite the reader, not in the way of Victorian erotica like The Way of a Man With A Maid. The erotic element was always intimately tied to the weirdness in some fashion, as with the work of Arthur Machen. Perhaps Smith might have been more explicit if editors and laws had allowed it, but there was no way it could have been published in the 1930s under existing censorship laws.

Contemporary writers don’t operate under the same restrictions. It is much more acceptable these days to be much more explicit about sexual relations. Salmonson could no doubt have gotten away with far more sexual content in this story; other tales are more explicit. Yet this is not a case where the point is to titillate the reader; it is a necessary plot point for the story. Ultimately, I would say that “Hode of the High Place” shows admirable restraint, getting just explicit enough to cross that conceptual line between “suitable for young adults” to “suitable for adult audiences,” but not becoming particularly lurid or distracting from the rest of the story…indeed, the brief sexual scenes are ultimately critical.

It was fashioned in the shape of a bone with a serpent wrapped around, the universal insignia used on jars of poison, pictured on no-trespassing signs to prove the warning adamant, and marked on maps to show where wayfarers had best not go.
—Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “Hode of the High Place” in The Last Continent 206

If “Hode of the High Place” is not set in Zothique itself, it still feels like it could be set beneath a dying sun on a dying world, one last tragedy being acted out with all of its follies and its terrible inevitability.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s “Hode of the High Place” was first published in Beyond Lands of Never (1984), the second volume of the fantasy Lands of Never (1983). It was republished in The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique (1999), and in her collection Dark Tales (2002).

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

Shadows of Wings (1930) by Susan Myra Gregory

A poet-friend of mine, Susan Myra Gregory of Monterey, sister of the novelist Jackson Gregory, asked me to write a preface for a little collection of her verse which is being brought out in Southern California. She has a real lyric talent, of the true feminine Sapphic type, and I was glad to do the preface—an odd interlude in the writing of my Antarean novelette.
—Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, 10 Dec 1929, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 190

Susan Myra Gregory was 46 years old when her small 40-page book of poems was published, with a card cover, by the Troubadour Press in San Diego. She had worked for many years as a teacher of English and journalism at Analy high school and Monterey high school. Gregory provided some of the local color to John Steinbeck, who set novel Tortilla Flat (1935) in Monterey and dedicated it to her. There are few references to her in Smith’s published letters, but it seems likely that, as with many California poets, Susan Myra Gregory may have met Clark Ashton Smith through his mentor George Sterling, or possibly when Smith made one of his trips down from Auburn to Carmel. Her brother Jackson Gregory, an author of popular westerns, whose wife Lotus McGlashan Gregory had bought a few of Clark Ashton Smith’s drawings some years before (The Shadow of the Unattained 200).

Whatever the extent of their relationship, it was obviously enough of a relationship for Smith to gladly write an introduction to her poetry collection.

It is easy to see why Smith would enjoy Gregory’s poetry. Poems such as “Tonight,” “Necromancy,” and “Orpheus’ Song to Eurydice” touch on some of his favorite themes, and his introduction struck enough of a chord with one contemporary reviewer to quotes liberally from it.

if she is more Classical and less cosmic or macabre in her scope than either Sterling or Smith, her poems smack of the fantastic verse which Arkham House would publish in volumes such as Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (1961). “Dream” and “Sleep” might not have been out of place in the pages of Weird Tales, and indeed several of these poems are reprinted from various magazines and journals.

From a strictly commercial standpoint, the book is a bit of a trifle, and has a certain vanity-press air, although it was published as part of a series of ten booklets by modern poets. Classic poems dedicated to Sappho had less cachet to the general public during the interwar years, though no doubt H. P. Lovecraft or Samuel Loveman, both dedicated Classicists, would have appreciated the beauty of lines like:

No, the “lost songs of Sappho” are not lost;
Only ye seek afar for something near.

Though no doubt Lovecraft would have tsk’d at the use of archaic English diction in this instance, Clark Ashton Smith’s edict that “it seems impossible that such poetry as hers will not always have its lovers” is true, or at least it should be. For the sentiments are sweet, the language is soft, and lines such as “Beauty so keen is like a two-edged sword” deserve to be mumbled through the lips of some trenchcoat-clad detective in a Noir film.

Susan Myra Gregory’s poetic career did not end with this book; she had several poems published in Singing Years: The Sonoma County Anthology of Poetry and Prose (1933), but what further contact she had with Clark Ashton Smith is unclear. She died in 1939.

Shadows of Wings has been scanned and is available here.

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

Her Letters to Robert E. Howard: Catherine Lucille Moore

Dear Mr. Howard:

My blessing! I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed “Sword-Woman.” It seemed such a pity to leave her just at the threshold of higher adventures. Your favorite trick of slamming the door on a burst of bugles! And leaving one to wonder what happened next and wanting so badly to know. Aren’t there any more stories about Agnes?
—C. L. Moore to Robert E. Howard, 29 Jan 1935, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 24

Catherine Lucille Moore burst into the pages of Weird Tales with “Shambleau” (Nov 1933). She was a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in her native Indianapolis, Indiana, and engaged to a bank teller named Herbert Ernest Lewis. During the Great Depression, jobs were scarce and her $25 a week was needed to support her family; married women were often expected to be homemakers, and this may be why Moore and her fiance had a long engagement—and it is why, when she began to sell her stories to the pulps for extra cash, she used her initials “C. L.” so that her employers would not discover she had an extra source of income.

By the time C. L. Moore hit the pages of Weird Tales, to immediate acclaim, Robert E. Howard had already become a fixture; his stories of Conan the Cimmerian were still going strong, interspersed with other weird tales and poems, as well as sales to Weird Tales‘ companion magazine The Magic Carpet, and he had just employed an agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, who would help Howard break into many other pulp markets.

Both Moore and Howard had correspondents in common, notably H. P. Lovecraft, but also R. H. Barlow and E. Hoffmann Price; Howard and Moore also shared a friend in Frank Thurston Torbett, a Texan fan of weird fiction. Yet there is nothing in the letters of either of the principles to their friends to suggest of a correspondence between two of the great fantasists of Weird Tales in the ’30s. All that is known to survive of their correspondence is a single letter, dated 29 January 1935…and from that, and a few inferences in the rest of their correspondence to others, is all that we can judge of their exchange.

To begin with, we know that Moore was a fan:

I’d like to read everything Robert E. Howard has ever written. The first story of his I read was WORMS OF THE EARTH, and I’ve been a fanatic ever since. And of course Lovecraft and Price.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, n. d. [early Apr 1934], MSS John Hay Library

In the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, readers were treated to both the Conan story “The People of the Black Circle” and “Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore—which introduced her character Jirel of Joiry, a redheaded French swordswoman in a fantastic medieval France. While not as heavy on the action as Howard, Moore’s weird imagination and the fiery disposition of her warrior made an impression on the readers, with comments printed such as:

I (and I’m sure many others) want to hear a great deal more of Jirel. She’s the kind of person I’d like to be myself. A sort of feminine version of Conan the Cimmerian. He, too, is one of my favorites.
—Mary A. Conklin, WT Dec 1934

The character of Jirel may become as famous to us as Conan. I vote her first place.
—Claude H. Cameron, WT Jan 1935

We don’t know exactly what began the exchange of letters; Lovecraft, Price, Barlow, or Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright could all easily have supplied the other’s address for the asking. Near the end of the letter, Moore writes:

Thanks for being flattering about “Black God’s Shadow,” and for letting me read “Sword-Woman.” So see if you can’t find some more about Agnes?
—C. L. Moore to Robert E. Howard, 29 Jan 1935, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 27

“Black God’s Shadow,” the second Jirel of Joiry story, was published in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which would have hit the stands in mid-November. Few of Howard’s letters from this period survive, but a letter to August Derleth (11 Dec 1934) mentions the contents of the December Weird Tales. “Sword Woman” was an historical adventure story starring Dark Agnès de Chastillion, a red-haired female warrior-mercenary in 16th century France—with obvious parallels to Jirel of Joiry, although the two were conceived separately. “Sword Woman” is neither set in the East or a weird story, so it would seem unlikely that Farnsworth Wright saw and rejected it, unless it was intended for the never-published third magazine Strange Stories; possibly Howard had intended to send it to Action Stories.

We can only speculate who wrote first. What is clear is that the 29 January letter is not the first letter in the exchange; it is too involved in answering specific points from a previous letter, such as notorious bank robber John Dillinger, who had been shot to death on 22 July 1934:

About Dillinger, it’s not distinction in this part of the country to have known him—practically everyone did. Mooresville, his home town, is only a few miles south of here and happens to be my fiance’s birthplace too. I know several who went to school with him, and in Mooresville the sympathy with him ran very high.
—C. L. Moore to Robert E. Howard, 29 Jan 1935, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 24

Howard, who had a fondness for outlaws (at least of a certain sort), had been following news of Dillinger at least somewhat, since he had written to Lovecraft on 24 March 1934 that “Notice they haven’t caught Dillinger yet” (A Means to Freedom 2.724). Presumably he had responded to some comment that Moore had made, possibly regarding his death.

Much of the letter, however, focuses on a mutual love of both Howard and Moore: poetry. In keeping with the theme of warrior-women, Moore thanks Howard for “the original of Mary Ambree,” which suggests Howard copied out the ballad that begins:

WHEN captains courageous, whom death could
Did march to the siege of the city of Gaunt,
They mustered their soldiers by two and by three,
And the foremost in battle was Mary Ambree.

From Moore’s comments, the other snippets of poetry were taken from Kipling (the title of whose novel Captains Courageous is taken from the ballad); Howard had an edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse in his library at the time of his death. Other poems Howard quoted include Frederick I. C. Clarke’s “The Fighting Race” (“But his rusty pike’s in the cabin still, With Hessian blood on the blade.”) and G. K. Chesterton’s “The Ballad of the White Horse” (“That bore King Alfred’s battle-sword Broken in his left hand.”) Most, if not all, of the poems are about battle and war, suggesting that they were discussing the theme, possibly as an extension of Jirel and Agnès.

Well, I could go on and one forever on that line, but had better change the subject.
—C. L. Moore to Robert E. Howard, 29 Jan 1935, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 25

What’s left of the letter is largely concerned with Howard’s own fiction, especially Conan stories. She mentions “The Devil in Iron” (WT Aug 1934) and “A Witch Shall Be Born” (WT Dec 1934), saying of the latter:

That “Witch” story was pretty strong meat, but perfectly grand. Such a lustiness about your stories when you want them that way. And the witch herself was gorgeous. Odear, I’m consumed with jealousy.
—C. L. Moore to Robert E. Howard, 29 Jan 1935, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 24

There is a passing reference to “the new serial, with Conan among the frontiersmen,” which would be a reference to “Beyond the Black River” (WT May-Jun 1935) that Howard had just sold, and accepting his offer for a copy of “The Garden of Fear” (Marvel Tales June 1934). Howard wrote to Lovecraft ca. Dec 1934 a passage which he might have copied, in essence if not word-for-word, in his preceding letter to Moore:

My latest sales to Weird Tales have been a two-part Conan serial: “Beyond the Black River”—a frontier story; and a novelet dealing with Mississippi negroes, etc. “The Moon of Zambebwei”, which I understand will be changed to “The Grisly Horror.” In the Conan story I’ve attempted a new style and setting entirely—abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a back-ground of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen Some day I’m going to try my hand at a longer yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts.
—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, ca. Dec 1934, A Means to Freedom 2.817

Perhaps this precipitated one of the most interesting passages in Moore’s letter, the equivalent to asking Lovecraft if the Necronomicon is real:

Tell me, do you really think it possible that mankind goes back as far, and thru as many changing times and topographies, as you write about? I understand Lovecraft, for instance, doesn’t take anything he writes at all seriously. But sometimes I have myself half convinced—as those times when I’m alone in the house late at night and am perfectly sure that the entire outside is one solid mass of vampires and were-wolves! It seems rather arbitrary to be hard-headed and say, “Nothing exists but what we can see or feel,” and yet it’s even worse to err on the side of credulity. What’s your opinion?
—C. L. Moore to Robert E. Howard, 29 Jan 1935, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 26

Quite a few people would love to read Howard’s answer to that question. This letter to Robert E. Howard predates Moore’s first letter from Lovecraft, so she was repeating what her friend and correspondent R. H. Barlow had said about the Old Gent in Providence. As far as can be ascertained, Howard never mentioned his correspondence with Moore to Lovecraft, Moore never mentioned her correspondence with Howard to Lovecraft, and Lovecraft never mentioned his correspondence with Moore to Howard, but discusses and alludes to his correspondence with Howard to Moore. Whether that means that Howard and Moore corresponded only briefly, and dropped each other after a time—or whether it carried on for the rest of Howard’s brief life, we don’t know.

The implication, from some of her letters to Lovecraft showing ignorance of Howard’s upcoming publications and travels in 1935, suggest that the correspondence may have been sporadic or intermittent (Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 68, 70). Years later, she recalled in an interview:

Do you remember anything in particular about your correspondence with REH?

Moore: We really had such a short period to correspond that I don’t remember much, except that he seemed interested and had a good mind. We had enough common background that we were able to talk to each other, on paper anyway. I think he would have been pleasant to know—just as Lovecraft would’ve.
—Chacal #1, 31

On 13 February 1936, her fiance Herbert Ernest Lewis died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Though reported as an accident in the newspapers and in Moore’s letters, the death certificate lists it as a suicide. Moore was severely affected, and Lovecraft rushed to keep her occupied:

Despite my upheaved programme I at once started a letter of what I thought to be the most consoling & useful sort—with sympathetic remarks & citations of others who have bravely pulled out of similar bereavements) gradually giving place to the cheerful discussion of general & impersonal topics in which long time-stretches (thus placing local & individual sorrows at the small end of the telescope) are concerned—answering a letter received early in February. History was the main theme—the dominant topic being Roman Britain & its long decline, as brought up by C L M’s discussion of Talbot Mundy’s “Tros” stories. That, I fancy, is the kind of stuff a bereaved person likes to get from the outside world—sincere sympathy not rubbed in, & a selection of general topics attuned to his interests & quietly reminding him that there is a world which has always gone on & which still goes on despite personal losses. […] I managed to finish & despatch the epistle last Monday. But the tragic accident surely is a beastly shame—far worse than deaths which do not his promising young folk with everything before them.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 11 Mar 1936, O Fortunate Floridian 321

Talbot Mundy, whose Tros of Samothrace was serialized in the pages of Adventure, was a favorite author of Robert E. Howard. What is real is that on 11 June 1936, Robert E. Howard took his own life, also with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Frank Thurston Torbett told Moore; Moore told Lovecraft; Lovecraft told everyone. With Robert E. Howard dead, she wrote to his father Dr. Isaac M. Howard for confirmation…and he wrote back:

I have since received a letter from Dr. Howard, his father, enclosing a note dated May 14 which REH had apparently been saving to send to me. […] The news was like a blow in the face. It’s amazing how real he seemed even through the medium of his letters. I had hoped to see him next year when and if I get that much-talked-of car and make the California trip, but he could scarcely have become more vivid had I known him personally.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 24 Jun 1936, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 130-131

She wrote more to Lovecraft about Howard, but her most important letter was sent to his father:

It was a shock as stunning to me as if I had really known your son, for his letters made him very real to me. […] Nothing that I can say now would help you—I know, for four months ago I too suffered bereavement under very similar circumstances. The young man whom I was to marry this year was accidentally shot in the temple and instantly killed while leaning a gun which he thought unloaded. So I can understand what you are enduring now, and I know that nothing but time will help you find life worth living again. In one respect you are luckier than I, for you have memories of a full and happy life with your wife and son that nothing can take away. […] In the meantime, and until time has brought your comfort, as it is just now beginning to comfort me, there is nothing to say except that all over the United States we are grieving with you, and not only for you but for ourselves.
—C. L. Moore to Dr. I. M. Howard, 25 Jun 1936, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 52-53

The letter was published in the Cross Plains Review for 3 July 1936, although they misspelled her name.

Most of Moore’s letters to Robert E. Howard do not appear to survive, at least not beyond those preserved among Howard’s papers:

[Gil Kane]: I made a deal with the agent who handled the Robert E. Howard estate. The agent’s name was Oscar Friend – he was an old pulp writer and, in fact, he gave me a box to take home which contained everything they owned that Howard had ever done. I found original manuscripts there… letters from H.P. Lovecraft to Howard… also letters from… who was that wonderful writer? She married a science fiction writer called Henry Kuttner.

Dave: That’s C.L. Moore, isn’t it?

Gil: C.L. Moore! Of course! She was working a bank as a teller and she wrote letters to Howard that he kept – they were the most beautiful, poetic, lovely, intimate letters… they were sensational. They talked about how she wanted to write. I went through every scrap of paper in that box and held onto it for about nine months – I thought that Friend had possibly forgotten about it but he didn’t. What happened was Friend became quite ill and the Howard estate’s bank wanted a new agent for the material and they got Glen Lord who was a fan down in Texas. He took things over and he wanted the box back.
—Steve Whitaker & Dave Proctor, “Interview with Gil Kane” (1986)

We can only guess what else Howard and Moore might have discussed: poetry, philosophy, history, and action were all shared interests. Perhaps Howard showed her his other unpublished Dark Agnès works, or “Red Nails” with the pirate Valeria; perhaps she shared some of her own unpublished fiction, or they discussed Otis Adelbert Kline. Perhaps; unless some cache of letters surfaces, this is all we have…and perhaps we should be grateful that even this letter was saved from the ash heap of history.

The sole surviving letters to Robert E. Howard and Dr. Isaac M. Howard are published in The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard.

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