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Querido H. P. Lovecraft (2016) by Antonio Manuel Fraga

Querido H. P. Lovecraft:

Cuando lea estas lineas yo no estaré ya en el mundo de los vivos . . .

Con estas palabras comienza la carta que Robert E. Howard envía a su amigo, mentor y famoso escritor. En un escrito delirante el auto tejano describe su progresivo descenso al infierno de la locura y la desesparación después de visitar una antiqua tumba india sita en el interior de una cueva.

En la narración se mezclan los sueños con la realidad, la escritura, la relación con los amigos y su novia, la salud de la madre y su dependencia de ella . . Sin salida, totalmente acorralado por sus miedos, Howard debe buscar una solución, una huida, un sacrificio . . .		Dear H. P. Lovecraft,

When you read these lines, I will no longer be in the world of the living . . .

With these words begins the letter Robert E. Howard sent to his friend, mentor, and famous writer. In a delirious letter, the Texan author describes his gradual descent into the hell of madness and despair after visiting an ancient Indian tomb located inside a cavern.

The story mixes dreams with reality, writing, his relationship with his friends and girlfriend, his mother’s health and his dependence on her… With no way out, completely cornered by his fears, Howard must find a solution, an escape, a sacrifice…
Querido H. P. Lovecraft (2017, Spanish), back cover copyEnglish translation

Rusty Burke, a scholar of the life and work of Robert E. Howard, has noted that REH was one of H. P. Lovecraft’s major correspondents—but that HPL was Howard’s major correspondent. The bulk of the surviving letters we have from Robert E. Howard are to Lovecraft; and while many of Howard’s other letters—to Clark Ashton Smith, Farnsworth Wright, C. L. Moore, Novalyne Price, etc. are important, none of them really cover the same breadth and depth as Howard’s letters to Lovecraft. Nor, in many cases, have we much of the other side of the conversation. In the collected correspondence of both men, at least as much as survives, we gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the push and tug of the conversation.

This literary friendship has extended far past the limits of the grave. Novalyne Price Ellis mentioned it in her memoir One Who Walked Alone (1986); “Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1986) by Robert Silverberg sees the two palling around the underworld together. The semiotic ghosts of both men have followed each other into novels and comic books, from Rick McCollum’s Ashley Dust (1996) to Lovecraft’s Book (1985) by Richard Lupoff, later restored as Marblehead (2006). Howard makes an appearance in most of the biographical graphic novels that have come out about Lovecraft, and every biography of Howard cannot avoid mentioning their “civilization vs. barbarism” argument in letters that winged their way from Providence, R.I. to Cross Plains, TX and back again.

It is this relationship that Antonio Manuel Fraga has attempted to capture in his novel Querido H. P. Lovecraft (2016, “Dear H. P. Lovecraft), which was written and published in Galician. The novel was then translated into Spanish (Castilian) by Mercedes Pacheco Vázquez and published, also as Querido H. P. Lovecraft, in 2017. It has not yet been translated or published in English, but in brief the novel takes the form of a classic epistolary novel, like Dracula, but consisting of several fictional letters between H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Dr. Isaac M. Howard (REH’s father, with whom HPL corresponded after REH’s death in 1936). The bulk of the novel consists of Howard’s final letter to Lovecraft, detailing the supernatural curse that descended upon him and the real reason he took his life that day.

De ROBERT ERVIN HOWARD para H. P. LOVECRAFT
10 de junio de 1936
Sr. H. P. Lovecraft
66, College Street. Providence, R.I.

Querido H. P. Lovecraft:

Cuando lea estas líneas no estaré ya en el mundo de los vivos, pues pronto daré el definitivo salto hacia las tinieblas. Sin otra salida, y después de lo vivido, espero que la muerte se abra a mi como una madre redentora, un pecho cálido que me ampare y silencie los horripilates alaridos que no dejan reposar mi mente, cansada y enferma.

Puede que este testimonio, dictado por la urgencia y la necesidad de purga, me sirva también para comprender mejor toda esta atrocidad, o por lo menos para distinguirla de un modo más global.

Hace dos semanas me acerqué a Brownwood, donde compré tres tumbas en su camposanto. Los miembros de mi exiqua familia tendrán así cada uno su trozo de tierra donde reposar, donde olvidar tanto dolor embalsamados en la archilla arenosa de Texas.

Las raíces de nuestros padecimientos se entredan en el pasado, se mezclan y alimentan de las mismas sales, pero sus tallos crecen independientes hacia un sol que es fuego fatuo, sin bndad ni compasión.

En el caso de mi madre, la desgraciada Hester, hablamos de una vida marcada por la enfermedad propia y ajena –si como enfermeded se puede calificar mi mal, que después expcliaré detalladamente. ¡Tiempo habrá!–.

El padecimiento de mi padre, el viejo doctor Howard, tiene el sabor de la ceniza del desprecio de su compañera. Durante toda su vida fue un imán para las malas inversiones, en las que dilapidó los escasos ahorros de la familia. ¡Y bien que se lo reprochó Hester! Esa fue una de las causas del désden de su mujer, pero no el único ni el más importante. En esa guerra fue un titán. Por el contrario, sospecho fundadamente que no resistirá el trance de nuestra partida. Ojalá me equivoque.

Y por último está mi padecimiento, el del necio Bob, el torpe ignorante. Afortunademente, pronto será silenciado por este colt que ahora siento en el muslo y que se convertirá en mi redentor, reverendo y verdugo.		From ROBERT ERVIN HOWARD to H. P. LOVECRAFT
10 June 1936
Mr. H. P. Lovecraft
66 College Street, Providence, R.I.

Dear H. P. Lovecraft:

When you read these lines, I will no longer be in the world of the living, for I will soon take the final leap into darkness. With no other way out, and after what I have experienced, I hope that death will greet me like a redeeming mother, a warm breast to shelter me and silence the horrifying screams that keep my tired and sick mind from resting.

Perhaps this testimony, dictated by the urgency and necessity for a purge, will also help me better understand this whole atrocity, or at least to distinguish it in a more comprehensive way.

Two weeks ago, I went to Brownwood, where I bought three graves in the cemetery. The members of my tiny family will each have their own piece of land to rest in, where they can forget so much pain, embalmed in the sandy Texas clay.

The roots of our sufferings are buried in the past, they mix and feed on the same salts, but their stems grow independently toward a sun that is a will-o’-the-wisp, without kindness or compassion.

In the case of my mother, the unfortunate Hester, we are talking about a life marked by her own and other people’s illnesses—if my illness can be described as illness, which I will explain in detail later. If there is time!

The predicament of my father, old Dr. Howard, tastes like the ashes of his companion’s contempt. Throughout his life he was a magnet for bad investments, in which he squandered our family’s meager savings. And well did Hester reproach him for it! That was one of the causes of his wife’s disdain, but not the only one, nor the most important. In that war he was a titan. On the contrary, I strongly suspect that he will not be able to withstand our departure. I hope I am wrong.

And finally there is my suffering, that of the foolish Bob, the ignorant bumbler. Fortunately, he will soon be silenced by this colt that I now feel in my thigh and that will become my redeemer, reverend and executioner.
Querido H. P. Lovecraft (2017, Spanish) 20-21English translation

Perhaps surprisingly given how prominently the letters formed their relationship—Lovecraft and Howard never met, though they corresponded from 1930 until Howard’s death in 1936—the epistolary format has featured less prominently in their fictional afterlives. In fiction, at least, the two men would get the chance to meet as they never did in life. So too, that way the writer isn’t forced to write as many letters to and from Lovecraft and Howard from the other’s perspective, which would require more than a passing familiarity with both men’s life and letters to convincingly nail the voice and knowledge of each.

It is difficult to judge how well Antonio Manuel Fraga has captured their voices. That Fraga did some research into Robert E. Howard’s life is evident, he obviously read at least the flawed biography Dark Valley Destiny (1983), or Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder (1st ed. 2006/2nd ed. 2013), which emphasizes the sometimes conflicted family dynamics among the Howards. Some of the choices (filtered, admittedly, through two layers of translation) strike me as unlikely; Robert E. Howard would probably not have referred to his mother by her given name, for example, and never had anything but praise for his father in his letters to Lovecraft. There are a few other details that are “off” in the short novel, but to try and catalogue them would be pedantic. This is a fantasy novel, and some allowances have to be given.

As a novel, Querido H. P. Lovecraft is an interesting example of a familiar idea: the author becoming the character. The Robert E. Howard of this book is not the same REH that comes through in his letters to Lovecraft, but he is recognizable as an interpretation of that person. What it reveals is less about Howard and Lovecraft than it does about Antonio Manuel Fraga—what Fraga has taken away from his research about Howard, the aspects of his life and relationships that he wished to emphasize in telling his story.

Is it a story worth telling? As an exercise in fantasy, it’s fine. There have been innumerable stories that mingled H. P. Lovecraft’s death with his Mythos, that have blurred the lines between reality and fantasy, for fun if nothing else. In that sense, Querido H. P. Lovecraft is something of a fanfic novel, a great and impossible what if, the kind of cache of letters that Lovecraft and Howard fan-scholars might dream of coming across, like the scholarly protagonists of a ghost story that find the document that explains it all at last.

What we cannot forget, however, is that this is not about how Robert E. Howard lived and died, but the stories and interpretations that have grown up around it.

The death Robert E. Howard is tinged with tragedy. This was a man whose life has sometimes been described as a trajectory toward his inevitable demise, with biographers and critics looking back across the whole of his existence for signs that would point to his self-destruction. Howard’s suicide is a part of his mythos, as explored in works like “El guardian” (2010) by Enrique Balmes & Roc Espinet and “Life After Death” (2010) by David Güell, so the focus on his crucial final days isn’t unusual. The addition of a supernatural element throws off the narrative of inevitability; it emphasizes Howard as more of a victim and cheapens a tragic affair by diluting his own agency. He goes out not as the cipher, the man who had reached his hidden limit and came to the final step, but as a haunted man who suffers under persecutions the novel details all too well.

It would be interesting, someday, to read this in a proper English translation. To see what niceties of language I’ve missed, what nuances may come out from having someone fluent translate Fraga’s prose. While I doubt the translation would capture Howard or Lovecraft’s voice in their letters, there are a lot of nods to people, stories, and events in Howard’s life that would get a nod from Howard and Lovecraft aficionados.

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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El Necronomicón (1992) trans. Elías Sarhan & Fragmentos Originales del Necronomicón (2001) trans. Marcelo Bigliano

A major focus of the Western occult tradition is the grimoire. For the most part, the occult tradition that has come down to us is primarily a literate one rather than an oral one; and potential occultists are more likely to first encounter magical teachings in written form than by word of mouth. While that may be shifting a bit in an era of ubiquitous streaming video and podcasts, for the most part it holds true: Western magic as we know it has focused heavily on written texts as a primary store of data and means of transmission. Readers interested in delving further into the topic are recommended to read Owen Davies’ excellent and accessible Grimoires: A History of Magic Books.

Translations are a major part of the occult publishing scene. Dan Harms regularly reviews new translations of occult manuscripts and texts into English. However, these reviews rarely deal with just the quality of the individual translation, but the selection and editing of the text, the critical and academic apparatus that surrounds the text. While some works might be simply translated into another language without comment, most translations involve either selective transmission, or the addition of explanatory and critical material that adds to the value of the translation by providing additional historical or literary context, or speaks to the translator’s intended purpose for the translation.

This approach also applies to the Lovecraftian occult tradition, particularly with regard to the various recensions of the Necronomicon that have been translated from English into other languages. We have previously discussed how English-language occult traditions have influenced non-anglophone occult works such as Magic of Atlantis: Sauthenerom: The Real Source of the Necronomicon (1985) by Frank G. Ripel & Necronomicon: Il Libro Proibito di Abdul Alhazred (2022) by Mirando Gurzo, but these are primarily original works. A comparison of two non-English Necronomicon translations might better demonstrate point.

El Necronomicón (1992) trans. Elías Sarhan

The Simon Necromonicon (1977) was the first, most popular, and at this point most pirated Grimoire associated with the Lovecraftian occult tradition; for decades the mass-market paperback edition has been a mainstay of New Age bookshelves, and has numerous sequels and derivative works. Elías Sarhan’s authorized translation, first published in 1992 by EDAF in Spain, has also gone through multiple editions. It is a faithful translation of the Avon paperback edition, including Simon’s acknowledgments, the preface to the second edition, the quote from the Chaldean Oracle of Zoroaster, and all illustrations, magical seals, and non-English names in the original text, with one notable exception:

The highly characteristic Necronomicon gate sigil created by Khem Caigan which normally graces the cover and frontispiece of the Simon Necronomicon is nowhere in evidence. Whether Avon didn’t ship the plates or that wasn’t part of the licensing deal, the publishers simply didn’t use it, at least on several printings. The paperback copy I have includes a generic computer-generated 10-pointed star on the cover. Considering how prominently Caigan’s design has been displayed in many editions and how widely it has been swiped by artists as a generic Lovecraftian symbol, its absence is a significant departure from English-language version.

Necronomicon gate sigil created by Khem Caigan

In addition, there is an appendix. “Cronología, Fragmentos e Invocaciones de H. P. Lovecraft sobre « El Necronomicón»” (“Chronology, Fragments, and Invocations from H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon). This begins with an introduction by Alberto Santos Castillo, an editor of many Spanish-language translations of Lovecraft’s works, that begins:

Si abordamos la obra de H. P. Lovecraft teniendo en cuenca el contenido del presented libro, nos surgeon does cuestiones queue son como dos caras different es del author de Providence: el iniciado en saberes ocultos y el escéptico materialista.

A lo largo de toda su vida, Lovecraft defendió que el contenido de sus historias era producto de un ejercicio literario propio de la ficción y que no mostraban ningún tipo de realidad posible o alternativa a la nuestra. Desde muy pequeño convivió con la soledad y el aislamiento. La imagen de su abuelo Whipple, un hombre bondadoso y «sabio», por toda esa biblioteca que le donó a su muerte, afianzaron en él esa inquietud por el concocimiento. El mundo debía ser creado y medido entre los povorientos volúmenes de las estanterías. Sin embargo, Lovecraft ansiaba un saber oculto cuando las pesadillas y las obsesiones se cebaban en él. Al leer su obra, uno descubre que hay una verdad que se escapa entre líneas, frente a esa imagen de frialdad y distanciameiento emocional pretendido.		If we approach the work of H. P. Lovecraft taking into account the content of the presented book, there are two different faces of the author of Providence: the initiate in occult knowledge and the materialistic skeptic.

Throughout his life, Lovecraft maintained that the content of his stories was the product of a literary exercise characteristic of fiction and that they did not depict any kind of possible or alternative reality to our own. From a very young age, he lived with loneliness and isolation. The image of his grandfather Whipple, a kind and “wise” man, and the entire library he donated to him upon his death, strengthened his desire for knowledge. The world had to be created and measured among the dusty volumes on the shelves. However, Lovecraft yearned for hidden knowledge when nightmares and obsessions took their toll on him. Reading his work, one discovers that there is a truth that escapes between the lines, in contrast to that image of coldness and intended emotional detachment.
El Necronomicón 271English translation

Simon’s Necronomicon has any number of flaws, many of which are discussed in The Necronomicon Files by Dan Harms and John W. Gonce, but there are two immediate issues every Lovecraft fan and would-be Lovecraftian occultists have to face: 1) Simon’s assertions of the real existence of the Necronomicon goes against what we know of Lovecraft’s life, attitudes, and knowledge of the occult; and 2) Simon’s Necronomicon, purportedly a translation of the original text, bears basically no similarity to the Necronomicon that Lovecraft and his contemporaries wrote about, containing only a scattered handful of familiar-sounding names and none of the translations or contents supposed to be in there according to stories like “The Dunwich Horror.”

To address these shortcomings and add value to the basic Simonomicon, Castillo tacked on an appendix that contains (in order), a Spanish translation of Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon,” a collection of quotes (“fragmentos”) from the Necronomicon that Lovecraft peppered into his work in stories like “The Nameless City” and “The Dunwich Horror,” and finally a collection of incantations from Lovecraft’s work, mostly in his made-up artificial language (e.g. « ¡Wza-y’ei! ¡Wza-y’ei! Y’kaa haa bho: ii, Rhan-Tegoth: Cthulhu fthang: ¡Ei! ¡Ei! ¡Ei! ¡Ei! Rhan-Tegoth. ¡Rhan-Tegooth, Rhan-Tegoth!» (287) adapted from “The Horror in the Museum”). Some minor spelling and formatting errors aside from the translation, this is a neat piece of work and a definite improvement over the base version of Simon’s Necronomicon, and makes sense for a Spanish translator that knows they need to address both potential audiences: those primarily interested in Lovecraft’s fiction and those primarily interested in the occult.

Fragmentos Originales del Necronomicón (2001) trans. Marcelo Bigliano

The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names (1978) edited by George Hay is probably the second-most popular (and pirated) Necronomicon grimoires in existence. Except much of the book is not actually a grimoire at all; of the 184 pages, there are 12 pages of front matter, an introduction by Colin Wilson that weaves a fictional history of the “real” Necronomicon manuscript (pp. 13-56), a fake letter from Dr. Stanislaus Hinterstoisser (pp. 57-64), a commentary by Robert Turner (pp. 65-80), and a note on supposed decipherment of the text (pp. 81-102) before readers actually get to the supposed English translation of the medieval grimoire that inspired Lovecraft (pp.103-140). Then there are the appendices in the form of three essays: “Young Man Lovecraft” by L. Sprague de Camp (pp. 141-146), “Dreams of Dead Names” by Christopher Frayling (pp. 147-171), “Lovecraft and Landscape” by Angela Carter (pp. 171-182), and the whole book is rounded off with a bibliography (pp. 183-4).

The actual Necronomicon material in the Hay Necronomicon is effectively less than 40 pages. Which might explain why someone had the bright idea to cut out the pseudo-scholarship and present a highly abridged translation of the book. That is exactly what Marcelo Bigliano did in Fragmentos Originales del Necronomicón: El Libro de Los Nombres Muertos de Abdul al-Hazred (2001), published by Tomo in Mexico in several editions, as a modestly sized and priced paperback.

Where El Necronomicón was being inclusive, Fragmentos Originales is selective. Bigliano begins with what appears to be an original prologue that essentially lays out an abbreviated version of Lovecraft’s history of the Necronomicon and then tries to sell the authenticity of the Necronomicon as an occult document. To give a sample:

También los conocidos libros negros titulados Seventh Books of Moses son mencionados por Lovecraft en sus relatos. Si se considera la relación entre estas obras, basadas en versiones latinas alterads de Key of Solomon y ciertos textos hebreos poco conocidos: The Leyden Papyrus, un antiquo libro de magia egipcio que se le considera parte de un todo con el Eigth Book of Moses y the Sword of Moses, que a su vez se cree que contiene en Ninth and Tenth Books de la serie, surge con fuerza un sistema mágico estrechmente relacionado con el Necronomicón.Also the well-known black books titled the Seventh Books of Moses are also mentioned by Lovecraft in his stories. Considering the relationship between these works, based on altered Latin versions of the Key of Solomon and certain little-known Hebrew texts—The Leyden Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian book of magic considered part of a whole with the Eighth Book of Moses and the Sword of Moses, which in turn is believed to contain the Ninth and Tenth Books of the series—a magical system emerges that is closely related to the Necronomicon.
Fragmentos Originales del Necronomicón 9English translation

However, this is really an uncredited translation of Robert Turner’s “The Necronomicon: A Commentary” from the Hay Necronomicon:

The well-known ‘black books’ entitled the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses are mentioned by Lovecraft in his stories, and if one considers the terlationship between these works—based on corrupt Latin versions of the Key of Solomon and certain little known Hebrew texts—The Leyden Papyrus,—an ancient Egyptian book of magic said to be one with the Eighth Book of Moses—and The Sword of Moses—held to contain the Ninth and Tenth Books in the series, a system of magic closely related to concept of the Necronomicon powerfully emerges. (Hay 68)

Lovecraft does not mention the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses—which are genuine grimoires—in any of his fiction, though the title crops up in some related works by other authors (Dan Harms pointed out to me that the Seventh Book of Moses appears in “Wentworth’s Day,” one of Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations” with Lovecraft). This is part of Turner’s wind-up to the actual magical manuscript material he invented, and if it resembles those “authentic” grimoires at all, it’s because he designed them to.

Following this prologue (pp. 8-16), Bigliano then presents the translation of Turner’s “Foreword” (Hay 105, 108; Fragmentos 17-20), sans illustrations, and then jumps directly into a highly abbreviated rundown of the major eldritch entities in the Lovecraft Mythos, again borrowed from Turner (Hay 74-75; Fragmentos 20-23). For example:

Shub-Niggurat
El Gran Macho Cabrío Negro de los Bosques con un millar de Jóvenes. La manifestación Terrenal del Poder de los Antiquos. El Dios del Aquelarre de las Brujas. La naturaleza ELemental de Shub-Niggurat es la de la Tierra, simbolizada por el signo de Tauro en los cielos y, en el mundo, por la Puerta del Viento del Norte.		Shub-Niggurath
The Great Black Goat of the Woods with a thousand Young. The Earthly manifestation of the Power of the Ancients. The God of the Witches’ Sabbath. Shub-Niggurath’s Elemental nature is that of the Earth, symbolized by the sign of Taurus in the heavens and, in the world, by the Gate of the North Wind.
Fragmentos Originales del Necronomicón 23English translation

Not actually sure if Bigliano picked up these planetary associations somewhere or if they’re original additions to the text, but from there he continues directly into a translation of the magical manuscript portion of the Hay Necronomicon, including reproducing all the sigils and seal (pp. 25-85). A conclusion chapter is also borrowed from Turner in an earlier part of the book (Hay 78-79; Fragmentos 87-89). A brief note on Lovecraft (pp. 91-92) is followed by a translation of Angela Carter’s essay (pp. 93-116), and finally a section on the Cthulhu Mythos (pp. 117-124).

In the end, the Fragmentos lives up to its title: like a handful of pages from a larger manuscript that have been re-bound as their own work. Bigliano cut out the heart of the Hay Necronomicon and packaged it as a mass-market grimoire along the lines of the Simon Necronomicon, judiciously rearranging bits and pieces to suit his needs or tastes and ejecting most of the more peripheral matter about the supposed manuscript’s origins and connections to Lovecraft. All of the tongue-in-cheek elements, such as Colin Wilson’s carefully written introduction, and all the more elaborate illustrations, were cut. That isn’t particularly surprising when one considers that there are no notices of permission granted; this was, by all appearances, one of the many unauthorized translations of the Hay Necronomicon and its material.

The two Spanish-language grimoires are separated in time, translator, and geographical publishing context, but were both working toward a similar end: translating this English-language Lovecraftian occult material to a Spanish-language market who were presumably familiar with Lovecraft and eager for more. The popularity of the works can be attested by their multiple editions, and the different paths that the editors and translators took to the material represent respective approaches.

It is fun to think how, in a couple of centuries, historians of the occult might have multiple different recensions and translations of the Necronomicon available, and will have to figure how the family of texts relate to one another, to try and understand or re-create the chain of events or decisions that led to such similar material following different paths. If only the Fragmentos survived, one could not reconstruct the Hay Necronomicon; but they could probably ascertain its influence on Eldritch Witchcraft: A Grimoire of Lovecraftian Magick (2023) by Amentia Mari & Orlee Stewart based on certain illustrations and lore. Who knows what the Lovecraftian occult tradition might look like, in a different time and in different tongues?

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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“Donde suben y bajan las mareas” (1978) by Alberto Breccia, Carlos Trillo, and Lord Dunsany

Sasturain: Mais mesure un peu l’influence que peut avoir un regard critique sur ton oeuvre: dans les années 1960, tu as tout laissé tomber jusqu’à ce qu’apparaissent des gens qui te lisaient, te suivaient, t’appreciaient. Qu t’ont renvoyé un écho positif de ce que tu avais fait. Ce n’est qu’en 1968, à la sortie du livre de Martínez Peyrou, puis celui de Masotta, qu’on t’apprécie, qu’on reconnaît ta valeur. Ton travail est reconnu en Europe, tu retrouves une stimulation. La réaction de l’extérieur te motive, t’encourage.

Breccia: Et j’ai trouvé un marché où proposer des choses dont tout le monde se fichait ici. Quand j’ai fait L’Éternaute, on m’a tiré dessus à boulets rouges. Mort Cinder n’a pas eu de succés. Richard Long est passé completèment inaperçu. Je veux dire par là que toutes ces ouevres relativement valables, tout le monde s’en battait l’oeil, en Argentine, alors qu’elles ont eu du succès en Europe. Si je propose Le Couer révélateur ici, personne ne le publie. Il est paru dans Breccia Negro, édité par Scutti, mais c’est moi qui l’ai imposé. À cette époque, Scutti publiait n’importe quoi. Je lui ai dit: «Faisons un livre», et c’etait parti. Le cas de Là où la marée monte et se retire, l’adaptation de la nouvelle de Lord Dunsany, par exemple, montre qu’un tas de choses n’ont pas reçu non plus un bon accueil en Europe, elles sont restées et restent inédites. Mais c’est vrai que ce genre-là m’a intéressé. Après, quand j’ai voyagé en Europe et que j’ai vu ce qui se passait la-bas, tout a changé, j’ai découvert qu’il existait un marché immense, un public qui attendait des oeuvres différentes, et qu’on pouvait faire du neuf. Un endroit où la bande dessinée était très respectée, pas comme ici, où elle demeure encore aujourd’hui un genre marginal.		Sasturain: But consider the influence that a critical eye can have on your work: in the 1960s, you dropped everything until people appeared who read you, followed you, appreciated you. Who gave you a positive response to what you had done. It was only in 1968, with the release of Martínez Peyrou’s book, then Masotta’s, that you were appreciated, that your value was recognized. Your work was recognized in Europe, you found stimulation. The reaction from outside motivated you, encouraged you.

Breccia: And I found a market where I could offer things that nobody cared about here. When I did The Eternaut, I was shot at with red-hot cannonballs. Mort Cinder was not a success. Richard Long went completely unnoticed. I mean by that that all these relatively valid works, nobody cared about them, in Argentina, while they were successful in Europe. If I offer “The Telltale Heart” here, nobody publishes it. It appeared in Breccia Negro, published by Scutti, but I was the one who insisted on it. At that time, Scutti published anything. I told him: “Let’s make a book,” and that was it. The case of “Where the Tide Ebb and Flow,” the adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s story, for example, shows that a lot of things were not well received in Europe either; they remained and remain unpublished. But it’s true that this genre interested me. Then, when I traveled to Europe and saw what was happening there, everything changed, I discovered that there was a huge market, an audience that was waiting for different works, and that we could do something new. A place where comics were very respected, not like here, where they still remain a marginal genre today.
Breccia: Conversations avec Juan Sasturain (2019) 306English translation

Alberto Breccia, a comic artist now hailed as a master and whose work is internationally recognized and translated into myriad languages, got his start like pretty much every other artist: wherever he could. When opportunities in his native Argentina were few, Breccia turned to Europe, which welcomed international talent. His fame in the English-speaking world largely rests on a series of nine adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories that he first completed and published in the 1970s, but while these have gained fame and been published and republished, they were part of a broader turn in his career toward adapting classic works of horror and fantasy into the medium of comics during the 70s.

One of the more obscure of these adaptations, especially to English-language audiences, is “Donde suben y bajan las mareas” (1978), adapted from Lord Dunsany’s “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow” from A Dreamer’s Tales (1910). The script was written by Carlos Trillo, and Breccia did the artwork using a collage method; a technique that provides a certain texture to his more experimental 70s works. At a scanty 8 pages, it was probably intended for an Italian market like Il Mago, but as near as I can determine the first—and for a long time only—publication was in the now rare Breccia Negro (1978), a collection of his unpublished and scarce work, which has itself never been reprinted.

Supe que avanzaban por las calles de Londres.
Venían por mí.
Lo hiciste.
¡NO!		I knew they were advancing through the streets of London.
They were coming for me.
You did it.
NO!
Informe sobre ciegos y otras historias 101English translation

The effect is dark, almost minimalist, a chiaroscuro nightmare. As in Dunsany’s tale, it is told primarily from the view of the protagonist, who cannot see the faces of his friends and executioners clearly. Only their eyes, only the numberless mass of them who come to execute justice for the unspoken crime. When in Europe in the 70s, Breccia went to Great Britain to stand on the banks of the Thames.

Sasturain: Un jour, tu m’as raconté que tu étais allé à Londres pour chercher…

Breccia: Pour chercher la boue de la Tamise, celle de Là où la marée monte et se retire. Je suis allé voir ça de nuit. Et j’ai marché dans les ruelles de Soho, tu vois? Les ruelles de Jack l’Éventreur. Tue sais que je ne suis pas vraiment un rigolo. (Rires) J’ai suivi la piste de Lord Dunsany et de Jack l’Éventreur. Mais la ville de Lonres m’a plu tout entiere, tout ce que j’ai vu de l’Angleterre m’a plu.		Sasturain: One day, you told me that you went to London to look for…

Breccia: To look for the mud of the Thames, the one Where the tide ebbs and flows. I went to see it at night. And I walked in the alleys of Soho, you see? The alleys of Jack the Ripper. You know I’m not really a joker. (Laughs) I followed the trail of Lord Dunsany and Jack the Ripper. But I liked the whole city of London, everything I saw of England I liked.
Breccia: Conversations avec Juan Sasturain (2019) 366English translation
Sí. Has hecho algo tan horrible que ahora morirás. Pero no tendrás sepultura ni en tierra ni en mar y ni siquiera habrá infierno para ti.

Vamos.

El silencio de la noche…

…las calles grises yo viéndolo todo. Aun cuando estaba muerto y rígido. Porque mi alma todavía estaba entre mis huesos, ya que no merecía otra sepultura.		Yes. You have done something so horrible that now you will die. But you will have no burial on land or sea, and there will not even be hell for you.

Let us go.

The silence of the night…

…the gray streets, I saw it all. Even when I was dead and stiff. Because my soul was still among my bones, for it deserved no other grave.
Informe sobre ciegos y otras historias 102English translation

I dreamt that I had done a horrible thing, so that burial was to be denied me either in soil or sea, neither could there be any hell for me.

I waited for some hours, knowing this. Then my friends came for me, and slew me secretly and with ancient rite, and lit great tapers, and carried me away.

It was all in London that the thing was done, and they went furtively at dead of night along grey streets and among mean houses until they came to the river. And the river and the tide of the sea were grappling with one another between the mud-banks, and both of them were black and full of lights. A sudden wonder came in to the eyes of each, as my friends came near to them with their glaring tapers. All these things I saw as they carried me dead and stiffening, for my soul was still among my bones, because there was no hell for it, and because Christian burial was denied me.
—Lord Dunsany, “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow”

Truncated, translated; in dark blacks on greys and stark whites, Breccia sought to capture, not the cityscape of London or the lushness of Dunsany’s prose, but that shadowy limbo in which the murdered man was caught. In describing this style, Laura Caraballo wrote:

En premier lieu, les papiers lisses constituent des aplats et sont souvent utilisés pour créer des figures elliptiques qui se détachent du fond créant aussi une réversibilité entre les deux, comme on peut le voir dans Là où la maree monte et se retire (adaptation de la nouvelle de Lord Dunsany, Where the Tides Ebb and Flow), où le collage est la seule technique apploquée. Dans ces séquences, la qualité tangible des couches de papier est mise en avaunt. Breccia ajoute un élément qui redonne son caractère palpable au papier collé, notamment la trace du papier arraché qui vient à la fois avertir sur la technique et fonctionner comme accent de lumière ciblée au niveau de la composition. Dans cest formes construites par la technique du papier arraché, on peut donc retracer le geste de l’auteur qu exerce un mouvement intempestif au moment de définir ses plans et ses figures en coupant brusequement le papier. Il explore ainsi, avec une quantité minimale d’éléments et trois valeurs achromatiques, la possibilitié de construire des images avec des atmosphères très pesantes et un état d’esprit déscenchanté, tout comme la voix du narrateur dans le text de Lord Dunsany, à l’origine de cette adaptation. Le collage oscille alors entre sa fonction de trace de la technique en elle-même et de contiguïté physique avec le geste, et sa fonction mimétique, par exemple pour représenter l’impact de la lumière sur les objets.In the first instance, smooth papers are used as solids, often to create elliptical figures that stand out from the background, also creating a reversibility between the two, as can be seen in Là où la maree monte et se retire (an adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s short story, “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow”), where collage is the only technique applied. In these sequences, the tangible quality of the layers of paper is brought to the fore. Breccia adds an element that restores its palpable character to the collaged paper, notably the trace of the torn paper which both warns about the technique and functions as an accent of targeted light at the level of the composition. In these forms constructed using the torn paper technique, we can therefore trace the author’s gesture, which exerts an untimely movement at the moment of defining his planes and figures by abruptly cutting the paper. He thus explores, with a minimal quantity of elements and three achromatic values, the possibility of constructing images with very heavy atmospheres and a disenchanted state of mind, just like the voice of the narrator in Lord Dunsany’s text, at the origin of this adaptation. The collage then oscillates between its function as a trace of the technique itself and of physical contiguity with the gesture, and its mimetic function, for example to represent the impact of light on objects.
Alberto Breccia, le Maître Argentin Insoumis 46-47English translation

The result is a rather stark, dark tale, in keeping with the mood of Breccia and Trillo’s other adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe and the like; probably the grimmest adaptation of any story by Lord Dunsany to comics to date, though they preserve Dunsany’s ending. While no one would claim this is one of Breccia’s masterworks—the collage technique is effective but lacks some of the energy and brilliance of his pen and mixed media art—it is an effective adaptation, and one that deserves more attention.

A orillas del río dejaron mi cuerpo y cavaron afanosamente en el viscoso fango de la orilla.

En ese foso resbaldizo y soez fui, entonces arrojado.

Durante un rato, ellos me observaron en silencio.

Hasta que la proximidad de la aurora los disperso en solemne procession.		On the banks of the river they left my body and dug busily in the slimy mud of the shore.

Into that slippery and foul ditch, I was then thrown.

For a while, they watched me in silence.

Until the approach of dawn dispersed them in solemn procession.
Informe sobre ciegos y otras historias 103English translation

“Donde suben y bajan las mareas” has been reprinted and translated into several languages, but the only English-language adaptation I could locate is Alberto Breccia Sketchbook (2003, Ancares Editora), a bilingual edition in English and Spanish, but difficult to locate as it was published in Argentina and is now out of print. Most curious readers will have to satisfy themselves with the Spanish-language version reprinted in collections like Informe sobre ciegos y otras historias if they wish to read this tale.

A Note: I am aware that the Breccia interviews conducted with his occasional collaborator Juan Sasturain were originally done in Spanish, but the only edition I have of them is in French. Sometimes we have to work with what we have on hand.

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.

Herbert West Re-Animator (2017)

Italian director Ivan Zuccon isn’t a household name, even among the select audience of Lovecraftian film enthusiasts. Yet he should be; he has directed no less than five feature-length Lovecraftian films and adaptations:

These are all independently produced Italian horror films with modest budgets, but they have all received English-subtitled releases in some format (DVD, BluRay, and/or streaming), though the earlier ones can be more difficult to find, and few have garnered much critical attention.

That is a pity, because while Zuccon obviously is working within tight constraints in terms of budget, these are interesting films. None of them are a straight adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s stories, although La casa sfuggita and Colour from the Dark are strongly inspired by “The Shunned House” and “The Colour Out of Space,” respectively, and partially adapt those tales to an Italian setting. However, Zuccon likes to go beyond Lovecraft, to spend more time developing the characters in his stories and the weirdness they encounter. Which is particularly evident in his 2017 film Herbert West Re-Animator.

In many ways, the all Re-Animator media lives in the shadow of the breakout success of director Stuart Gordon’s classic Re-Animator (1985). Even when the pornographic parody Re-Penetrator (2004) came out, the film riffed off the iconic image of a syringe of vivid green reagent, and even Zuccon cannot completely escape that particular visual. However, Herbert West Reanimator is not a remake or adaptation of Lovecraft’s story; it is something much stranger: a film that tries to make Herbert West more Lovecraftian.

Despite Lovecraft’s original stories of Herbert West being set in Arkham, the series itself had no connection to any other aspect of his nascent artificial mythology. West doesn’t invoke Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu, doesn’t find the formula for his reagent in the Necronomicon, never tries to resurrect a Deep One hybrid from Innsmouth or anything of that nature. Later media, especially in various comics that derive from the 1985 film, have gone back and brought Herbert West into closer contact with eldritch entities and the familiar props of Lovecraft’s Mythos.

What Zuccon has done that is different is try to capture something of the cosmic nihilism and weird aesthetic of Lovecraft in his Reanimator story, while still keeping the Mythos at arm’s length. This is Herbert West against an eldritch universe where death is but a door; but this is not Herbert West vs. Cthulhu. That approach, so different from all the others that riff off of Lovecraft’s creations as if the prop version of the Necronomicon was the source of horror instead of the creeping sense of dread, has rendered a film that is at times beautiful, bizarre, disjointed, and difficult to grasp—but is always and very importantly weird.

Emanuele Cerman plays Herbert West, and Rita Rusciano plays Elizabeth West, his daughter; they are the main viewpoint characters among the small cast, deliver solid performances, and the contrast between their narratives is key to how the film plays out. Here, rather than Herbert West’s obsession with reanimation being a coldly inhuman drive for knowledge that morphs into a morbid fascination with reanimation for its own sake, West pursues reanimation for extremely personal reasons. Nor is he the only one; unweaving the web of personal relationships between living, dead, and reanimated, and their experiences with life, death, and undeath, is the crux of the story that is revealed as viewers learn more about what awaits on the other side of the veil. This metaphysical aspect is where things get Lovecraftian in the sense of other dimensions, strange entities, and sanity-blasting knowledge.

It is still a rather modestly-budgeted independent production, so there is a certain lack of polish at points. The music by Mauro Crivelli and Christian Valentini suits the film, though it lacks the stylistic flourish to make it as memorable as Richard Band’s (who was, admittedly, borrowing heavily from Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Psycho (1960)). The impressive practical effects and almost slapstick physical acting of Stuart Gordon’s film aren’t there; the gore on display reflects more contemporary and brutal horror film conventions. Some computer-generated effects are less than convincing, but fortunately, the whole film is not shot in front of a green screen. I suspect the limitations of the production encouraged Zuccon’s creativity in trying to capture certain images and convey mood through careful shot composition, camera angles, and use of color rather than rely on CGI tentacles, and often the simpler and more stylized effects work to the film’s benefit.

When viewed in comparison to Zuccon’s previous Lovecraftian films, Herbert West Re-Animator comes across as the most polished, the one that most shows his growth as a filmmaker. While there are many fans of Lovecraft’s work that look for faithful adaptation of his stories into other media, they sometimes miss the possibilities of re-imaginings like Herbert West Re-Animator. Works that take Lovecraft’s ideas and aesthetics and run with them in a way that holds interest and keeps the viewer guessing.

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.

“ZOMBIO/死霊のしたたり” (1987) by Abe Yutaka (阿部 ゆたか)

Only a fraction of the comics that Japan produces are ever translated for English-language markets. As a consequence, Anglophones miss out on a lot of great—and sometimes terrible—manga, and sometimes get a misleading impression of the diversity and quality of Japanese comic art and writing. There is far more to horror manga, for example, than luminaries like Junji Ito and Gou Tanabe.

Monthly Halloween (月刊ハロウィン, 1985-1995) was a monthly horror comics anthology publication focused on the shōjo (teenaged girls) market; horror movies being popular among that demographic at the time. It was the first such shōjo horror magazine, but quickly inspired many imitators, and among its publications were the first appearance of Junji Ito’s Tomie. While it wouldn’t be exactly analogous to say Monthly Halloween was like Weird Tales aimed toward Japanese teenage girls, it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate either. The tales within varied in theme from traditional Japanese ghost stories to ripped-from-the-latest-horror-film-from Hollywood. For great overviews, check out Renzo Adler’s Monthly Halloween: How American Horror was Translated for Shoujo Manga (2021) and kevndr’s Halloween Hijinks: Hollywood Horror in Japanese Comics (2022).

Table of contents for Monthly Halloween April 1987.
Herbert West can be seen, second row from bottom.

Director Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) arrived in Japan on 14 March 1987 under the title “ZOMBIO/死霊のしたたり” (“Zombio/Dripping of the Dead”). Not coincidentally, in the March and April 1987 issues of Monthly Halloween, the story was adapted to manga by Abe Yutaka (阿部 ゆたか), probably better known to US audiences for his work on Detective Conan, who had previously adapted Day of the Dead (1985) for the magazine, which also had its Japanese release around the same time. The 64-page adaptation follows the film fairly closely, with a few artistic concessions given the intended audience, the younger characters (Herbert West, Dan Cain, and Megan Halsey) given more stereotypical teenaged appearances compared to the older characters.

Barbara Crampton as Megan Halsey in Re-Animator
Megan Halsey in Zombio.

The nuances of the actors’ performances don’t really translate, but the somewhat slapstick action does, aided in no small part by an unflinching ability to depict a bit of gore and some common manga visual rhetoric that helps sell frantic energy and motion.

Top Panel:
Dan Cain: West! What is that sound?

Second Panel:
Herbert West: Grab it! Here it comes!

Third Panel:
<<Scream>>

Bottom row, right to left:
West: Ouch! Let go of me!
Dan: West!
West: Damn thing!
<<Splat>>

The pacing is also kept up fairly well; while there might be a bit more emphasis on the Re-Animator sub-plot where Dr. Carl Hill is trying to convince Dean Halsey to give him Megan, balancing that romance angle, they don’t skimp on the actual reanimation, even if it lacks some of the visceral oomph of the film.

Top row, right to left:
<<choking sound>>
<<gulp>>
Dan: Get off him!!
West: Move aside, Cain.
<<buzz>>

Second row:
West: Keep the tape running! Take it, man.

Bottom row:
<<cutting noises>>

While the likenesses of the leads aren’t particularly close to the original actors, the faces are expressive and convey a lot of the emotion of the scenes, and Abe made sure to include many of the now-iconic shots from the film.

Top row, right to left:
West: You know… this is a fresh corpse. Let’s revive it.

Middle row, right to left:
West: As we speak, the corpse gets older. So give me a hand.

West: Cain. We will bring him back to life.

Omissions, there are a few. The infamous visual pun of the “head giving head,” which featured so prominently on some of the Japanese posters for the film (and the Ghana hand-painted equivalents) was rendered inert by keeping Megan Halsey fully clothed.

Top row, right to left:
Megan Halsey: !!
Dr. Carl Hill: I was always attracted to you…
Megan: NOOO!!

Middle row:
Hill: I have been in love with you for a long time!

Bottom row, right to left:
Megan: No!! Please…
Hill: Let me love you.
Hill: Look.
Megan: Stop it! Let me go!!

The emphasis on looking into Hill’s eyes is a reflection of a sub-plot in the film that is sometimes overlooked, that Dr. Hill has developed the power of mesmerism or hypnotism. A bit corny, but it gives him more agency than just as a disembodied head, and is implicitly how he can control his headless body through sheer will. It’s easy to see how the emphasis on the quasi-love triangle between Megan, Hill, and Dan might have appealed in adapting this story to an intended audience of young Japanese women.

The big action scene in the morgue is a bit perfunctory, although Abe covers all the critical moments:

Fortunately, Abe and the editors of Monthly Halloween didn’t try to bowdlerized the ending. As in the original film, Dan Cain is left with a dead girlfriend and a choice:

Top to bottom, left to right:
<<tink>>
Dan: Meg…

Dan: I love you Meg.

Dan: Meg…

Given the limitations of the medium—it would have been nice if they could afford a splash of luminescent green for the reanimation serum—this is a very solid adaptation of the film. There isn’t any indication that Abe Yutaka had access to the 1985 novelization of the film by Jeff Rovin, and it predates the first English-language Re-Animator comic adaption from Adventure, which ran in three issues in 1991, and had the advantage of a larger page size and color.

“ZOMBIO/死霊のしたたり” was reprinted in the back of トライアングル・ハイスクール 2 (Triangle High School 2), which collects another of Abe Yutaka’s series from Monthly Halloween; the first volume also collects Abe’s adaptation of Day of the Dead. Other than that, however, the Japanese manga adaptation of Re-Animator doesn’t seem to have been reprinted; it has never been officially translated into English, although raw scans have circulated on the internet for years.

With thanks and assistance to Dr. Dierk Günther of Gakushuin Women’s College for assistance and translation of the Japanese original.

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 Multi-Dimensional Career of Weird Literature Editor and Book Designer David E. Schultz by Katherine Kerestman

An English major toting a brand-new Bachelor of Arts degree, David E. Schultz stumbled into a numinous career in editing and book design by accepting gainful employment as a proofreader with an engineering firm. The way Schultz tells it, S. T. Joshi, wanted an estimate of page count for his edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature and, recognizing a good potential collaborator when he saw one, S. T. co-opted his talents and energy to aid him in his own efforts in Lovecraft Studies and Weird Fiction. Although he vigorously denies being a horror aficionado, Schultz has never been able to find his way back from the weird genre. Through years of scanning endless documents, converting them to Word, and then selecting type-faces for them, in the guise of freelance amateur book designer, Schultz became learned in the field, through a sort of literary osmosis, and has been able to make significant contributions to the burgeoning study of weird fiction.

In our interview, Schultz provides a tantalizing glimpse into early Lovecraftian scholarship (most notably the coediting with S. T. Joshi of thousands of Lovecraft’s surviving letters); the evolution of book publishing in the computer age; and his own exceptional contributions to Lovecraft scholarship (the highlights of which are his annotated Fungi of Yuggoth [Hippocampus Press, 2017] and his soon-to-be-released annotated edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book). The last I heard, he had written only 84 annotations for a future volume of Clark Ashton Smith’s prose poems and epigrams. Schultz is the guy who looks up all the cryptical words that most non-academic readers skim over, trying to divine their meanings from the context and seldom succeeding; his efforts are much appreciated by those of us who read every footnote and endnote.

From a Lovecraftian standpoint, though, the greatest contribution of David E. Schultz is his collaborative work with S. T. Joshi in preserving 25 volumes of the extant correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft, who is thought to have penned tens of thousands of letters. Not surprisingly, this project has spanned three decades. Lovecraft’s correspondence with friends, colleagues, and revision clients engulfed so much of his time that fans lament the fact that he was not always writing stories. To Lovecraft, though, epistolary conversations with far-flung friends were much more important. His letters provide valuable autobiographical information, commentary on his own writing, a window into his evolving philosophy, his beliefs about life and literature, and an inside look at his relationships with Frank Belknap Long, Sonia H. Greene, R. H. Barlow, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and other contemporary writers. With Joshi, Schultz has published a number of other letters projects; in 2024 what he thinks is the last volume of Clark Ashton Smith’s letters came out.

Currently, Schultz is completing work on an astounding 350-page annotated edition of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book, the pocket notebook in which Lovecraft jotted down ideas for writing. Not a scholar by design or inclination, Schultz became one by default, thanks to a consistent immersion in Lovecraftian texts. And, as he will tell you below, most recently he has been drafted into service by the August Derleth Society to preserve that author’s texts. At the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Schultz recently scanned in one day about 600 pages of Derleth’s fiction, including both published and unpublished works, which are slated for publication by the August Derleth Society. He has created a spreadsheet of 850 poems from the magazines in the Historical Society’s archives. We were obliged to put this interview on hold for a time, as David needed to put in precious time at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library Special Collections Department: he is preparing a bibliography of periodicals containing Derleth’s poetry (much of it uncollected) for future volumes of Derleth’s collected works, and the Special Collections department is about to close for a year to upgrade its fire system. Here’s a sample of a typical work week for David E. Schultz:

Just this week I’ve designed 4 books from scratch (>800 pp) and had my fingers in probably a dozen others. A day in Green Bay coming up, probably another in Fond du Lac (actually 2), another in Madison.

He’s hot on the trail of missing Derleth works—possibly thousands of poems among them—and he’s sure to bag them and bring them home eventually.

Now, I have the great privilege of introducing David E. Schultz.

※

I’ll begin at the beginning, David, by asking you which details of your life and education you would care to share with our readers.

I’ve lived my entire life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Education: Marquette University, B.A. Liberal Arts—in other words, the dreaded “English major.” I entered the workforce completely unprepared. I married my wife Gail in 1977. We had four children and now have 7 grandchildren. We’ve lived in our current house for 44 years. I retired in 2014, but have been immersed in book projects ever since. I still make time to go to organ or early music concerts in Milwaukee or other not too distant locations.

Please talk about your career in publishing.

After brief stint at a local book publisher, and an even briefer one in a factory for a summer, I got a job at—of all places—an engineering company. The company was part of a consortium for a huge wastewater treatment project, and they were responsible for getting a proofreader for the project office. When I was interviewed, the interviewer said, “I think we have a different job for you. Let me get back to you.” Of course, I expected no further communication, but he did in fact summon me again, and I went to interview at the project office. Got the job because the supervisor of the publications department thought my Latin and Greek background would be useful. (He later admitted, “You know, you had no experience . . .”) And so I became a “technical editor.” I spent 5 years with HNTB, 3 with Creative Marketing Corporation (again, hired on as proofreader, quickly bumped up to editor), and 27 with CH2M HILL—once a fellow member of aforementioned consortium. I’ve been retired nearly 10 years, but it seems I work harder than ever.

The engineering companies were rather like publishers. Print runs were very small—environmental impact statements, technical memorandums on various subjects, and so on, typically photocopied and comb-bound in-house. The subject fields were very broad: transportation, civil engineering, environmental engineering, geology, wastewater treatment, you name it. It was particularly fulfilling because the results of our work can be seen all around us. For example, an aging viaduct carrying traffic over the Menomonee Valley, just 2 blocks from my house, was demolished and redesigned by my company, and I worked on various documents associated with the project.

At first, all the “typesetting” in the office was done by our document processing crew. As computers entered the office, I found I could do much of the formatting and editing myself. By reverse-engineering the company’s well-designed templates, I learned the ins and outs of Word, and in time that knowledge led me to book designing—initially against my will.

By that I mean in 1999, S. T. Joshi asked me how big of a book his annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature might be. Well, it could be anything. I had no idea how to design a book that wasn’t 8½ × 11 inches in format, so I picked page dimensions based on a real book, tried to arrange margins to suit, and then picked typefaces. I was instructed to “keep the number of pages down,” presumably to minimize cost associated with the book. So I showed him how it had turned out—thinking only that the design gave an approximate page count. A skilled designer would then execute the actual and final design. His response was “We’re using this!!” And it promptly went to Hippocampus Press. Now, I thought in terms of appearance the thing was barely okay. What I presented Hippocampus with was hard copy—it had to be scanned and cropped somehow by the printer. Very primitive. In time, Hippocampus began to use print-on-demand publishing for most books because it meant the publisher didn’t have to keep inventory in his apartment. And gradually I learned the preferred means of submitting an electronic file for publishing. And I also learned more efficient ways of executing design. I recently made an electronic file of 461 single-spaced pages into two books set up for a conventional 6 × 9 in just a few hours. I hate to think how long that would have taken me, using basically the same tools, 25 years ago.

Being employed full time didn’t allow much time for my own book projects, but I did manage to publish a few booklets with Necronomicon Press and to coedit some books published by university presses. I’ve been publishing a brief rag in the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association irregularly since 1973. So I’ve been “publishing” for more than 50 years.

Were supernatural and science fiction always your chief interests in reading?

My early reading was eclectic. I’d read anything, if I was capable. I was urged, in eighth grade, to participate in a reading program for eighth graders. We got a box of books to read and discuss: Hiroshima, The Diary of a Young Girl, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Seven Story Mountain, Profiles in Courage, and many others The box also contained 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Of that vast array of genres and styles, the last stirred me the most. I swayed toward science fiction after reading Ray Bradbury, thanks to a flyer received in grade school with books recommended for students. It may have been Fahrenheit 451 that first grabbed me. From there I learned of the Science Fiction Book Club and became immersed in the genre. Favorites became Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, R. A. Lafferty, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick. But I think these days my reading—what little there is—leans toward 19th and 20th century literature: Faulkner, Borges, Melville, Wodehouse, Dorothy Day. Mundane stuff, I suppose.

I think I first learned of Lovecraft when I saw a paperback of his stories at a department store. The Colour out of Space from Lancer, with its ridiculous cover depicting a skull amid flames. It may be—I can’t remember—that I first heard of him when I read Bradbury’s “Pillar of Fire,” when in the future, all morbidness in life is gotten rid of. Cemeteries are destroyed, and the works of morbid writers are destroyed. He mentioned Poe, but the other authors he named . . . Lovecraft, Bierce, Derleth, Machen. Well, basically Bradbury was telling me “Go look for these authors’ works!” And so I did. Bierce puzzled me, because the book I found had stories about the civil war and a “devil’s dictionary.” But upon closer examination, there were some outré stories. Many years later, I prepared an annotated “unabridged” edition of The Devil’s Dictionary.

The title story of The Colour out of Space was like nothing I’d ever read before. The copyright page of the book stated that the stories were reprinted with permission of Arkham House, Sauk City, WI. The kindly librarian at my high school looked up the address for me and I promptly requested a catalog. And equally promptly ordered The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, At the Mountains of Madness, and Collected Poems. I can’t remember just how I learned of the various fanzines, such as Nyctalops and Etchings and Odysseys, but in ordering them I saw plenty of advertisements for still other ’zines. I think the most influential was H. P. L. by Meade and Penny Frierson, because it contained discussion of Lovecraft like nothing I’d seen before. Particularly arresting was Richard L. Tierney’s “The Derleth Mythos.” How dare he stand up to August Derleth? But he was right. I gradually came to read more non-Arkham House-sanctioned writing about Lovecraft. And I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Dirk Mosig, Ken Faig, Jr., and R. Alain Everts, who dug far deeper than most others writing about Lovecraft had done.

Speaking as one English major to another, how did you develop into an editor and a conservator of twentieth-century weird literature?

Probably I sought to emulate what I’d seen written about other writers. In college I read books about Faulkner and his work and was struck by the scholarship and deep understanding of his writing. The same goes for other writers. I guess, inspired by Tierney’s article, I thought “Why not Lovecraft?” I was not impressed by the writings of August Derleth, Lin Carter, and L. Sprague de Camp on Lovecraft. But I was bowled over by Willis Conover’s Lovecraft at Last. Not particularly great scholarship, but it vividly brought the man to life. I was particularly impressed by the chronological list of stories that Lovecraft supplied to Conover. I compared it to the “chronology” found in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. The latter was no chronology at all. If one looked at it closely, one could see that for any given year (sometimes incorrectly) the stories were all listed in alphabetical order. I doubt any author starts any year writing stories beginning with the letter “A” in the title and ending the year with stories starting with “Z.”

I had joined the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association in 1973, not really understanding what it was—which was an outfit much like the United and National amateur press associations to which Lovecraft himself belonged, but instead focused on him in some way. I began to get in touch with other fans. I went to many MinnCons with the Minneapolis/Duluth crowd, who alerted me to a fan who lived in Milwaukee, and I met R. Alain Everts of Madison, Wisconsin. In time he started a Necronomicon Amateur Press Association—supposedly for “scholarly” contributions. I’ll never know why I was invited to join, because I hadn’t written anything to date and was no scholar, then and now. My contributions to the EOD were very bad “poetry.” Since I needed to come up with something “scholarly” for the Necronomicon apa, the very first piece I wrote was an article about the order in which Lovecraft’s stories were written. At the time, only three volumes of his Selected Letters had been published. But I was able to do a pretty good job of getting the stories into the proper sequence, expanding Lovecraft’s own list to Conover, even if I could not pinpoint precise dates.

At the time, S. T. Joshi had independently approached Dirk W. Mosig on the same subject, and for the same reason I had. Dirk—also a member of the Necronomicon apa—steered S. T. toward me, and that was how our close relationship began.

I’d like you to talk about your edition of Fungi from Yuggoth. When I read the sonnets, I knew that they must be brimming with allusions and symbolism, but I did not have a key.  And then I read your book, which greatly enriched the reading experience for me.

Having turned in a paper on the chronology of Lovecraft’s stories, I needed something else “scholarly” to do. So I started looking into Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth—his long poem. I don’t recall the details, but it seems to me I issued several little ’zines treating of the poem, eventually writing an “essay” on its composition, meaning, and so on. Some of those little pieces appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu. I provoked a bit of a controversy by stating—contrary to the long-held description of the poem—that there is no linear story in it. The first three sonnets tell a brief narrative, but all subsequent sonnets are completely independent of each other. Some commentators held that there was a cohesive story. I begged to differ and offered proof for my thesis using Lovecraft’s own words.

I was supposed to come up with a book for the Strange Company, but because it was taking me too long to assemble a proper text, it did not appear there. I poked around at the thing for the next 40 years. Over time, more and more information about the poem came to light, so I was always adding to the book. It finally appeared from Hippocampus Press in 2017. Necronomicon Press once issued a pamphlet of the poem printed on three legal-sized sheets, three poems per page. A 12-page booklet. My book is a ridiculous 288 pages. I am completely undisciplined when it comes to making a book. I fill it with everything under the sun.

Please discuss your edition (forthcoming) of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.

Commonplace Book has similar origins to Fungi from Yuggoth. Strange Company was going to publish an edition of Commonplace Book as edited by Ken Faig., Jr. At one of our gatherings in Madison (known as Madcons), Randy Everts handed out proofs of the book for people to proofread. I didn’t know what to make of the thing. Had never heard of Lovecraft’s commonplace book before. I didn’t proof the book at all, but studied it for my own edification. It was a bare-bones presentation of the text. What looked like errors were in fact accurate transcriptions of Lovecraft’s entries as he wrote them. Not long after, I received a copy of The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces. It contained the commonplace book, but the entries were organized differently and were very lightly annotated—mostly to point out which entries were used by August Derleth as Lovecraft’s “contributions” to various stories Derleth wrote that he called “posthumous collaborations.” I thought Heck, I can find all sorts of connections between the entries and Lovecraft’s work, and so I began writing on that for the Necronomicon apa.

With assistance from S. T. (who was attending Brown at the time), and input from colleagues, I began to fashion a book similar in intent to Fungi from Yuggoth. Necronomicon Press published it in 1987 as two fat booklets. I was astonished in 1990 to see a fellow standing on the Quad at Brown (for the Lovecraft Centennial) holding the two books side-by-side against his chest while a colleague took a photo of him proudly sporting my book. Over time, much more came to light about the origin of some of the entries, and then, with the Internet, books.google.com, and the Brown Digital Repository, I had access to an enormous library to sift through looking for material to add to my annotations. I had earlier dismissed Zinge as something Lovecraft whimsically made up, but I later learned that it is real—at least in the sense that it is mentioned in a poem by Thomas Moore—something Lovecraft had in his own library.

After more than 35 years after publication of my first edition of the book, I have now prepared (probably shouldn’t say finished) a new edition. It is not at this time ready for publication, because I have to integrate into text images of Lovecraft’s notebook—a complicated logistical problem. I’m guessing it will run to about 350 pages when done, because again, applying the kitchen sink method, it contains all sorts of related material not in Lovecraft’s original notebook. Once I circulated through the EOD my early annotation of the book. I also included Lovecraft’s text for reference. Being a stingy person, I didn’t want to pay for a lot of xeroxing, so I typed out his text in small type on two sides, in two columns, of a single sheet of 11 × 17 paper. In effect 4 pages. And so, it, too, has bloated into a gargantuan monstrosity.

What place do you accord H. P. Lovecraft and Weird Fiction in the greater rubric of literature? 

Long ago, many kinds of magazines would publish an outré story along with more conventional tales. And publishers would publish a weird novel here and there. It seems to me (though I’m no follower of the book business) that now one needs to publish only in certain markets.

Derleth somewhat disparagingly said Lovecraft was a major writer in a minor field (a somewhat backhanded compliment, since he recognized himself as a minor writer, but in a major field. A better place to be, it would seem). I don’t really have an opinion in the matter. Lovecraft is, of course, now published by the Library of America, whose goal is to keep in print “canonical” American writers. And so he rubs shoulders now with Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edith Wharton, James Thurber, Walt Whitman (Lovecraft would be shocked), Gertrude Stein (ditto), Henry James, and many others. August Derleth does not. I guess that says something.

As with everything else, Sturgeon’s law applies to weird literature. “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” I don’t follow any modern weird writers—I’m just not interested. I haven’t read much other than the masters, and what I have I don’t really remember. I imagine M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen will remain the titans, and there surely are some other worthy of note, such as William Hope Hodgson and Walter de la Mare. Again, I haven’t read them. I couldn’t say who is truly a master in the field, but according to S. T. it probably would be Ramsey Campbell.

What can you tell us about your coediting of Lovecraft’s correspondence?

I can’t remember how it came about exactly, but either S. T. or I, c. 1990, came up with the idea for a Lovecraft festschrift. It wasn’t such a book technically, since its subject was long deceased, but the idea of a book commemorating him 100 years after his birth seemed like a good idea. S. T. had plenty of contacts from whom to solicit essays. At the time, I had typed Lovecraft’s letters to Henry Kuttner. They were at the Wisconsin Historical Society of all places. So we annotated them, but ultimately decided they really didn’t belong in the book, and instead we offered our text to Necronomicon Press, which issued them in a small booklet. That was the genesis of the letters project, although at the time we didn’t know it.

S. T. had worked up a prospectus for 13 volumes of Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry, revision work, essays, and travelogues. I’m sure he said several times “No letters! Too much!” I learned that one could obtain a copy of the microfilm at the Historical Society of Lovecraft’s letters to August Derleth. I ordered it, but then what? S. T. had access to a microfilm printer, and so he printed the entire film—1000+ pages, in triplicate. I used the letters for my own research purposes, but following the Lovecraft Centennial Conference, I felt energized by the whole thing, so on the q.t., I began to transcribe the letters, saying nothing about it. The letters posed some issues. First of all, bad copies, or difficult to read handwriting. Then, most of the letters were not dated, because Lovecraft and Derleth wrote very frequently. Lovecraft’s letters may have said something on the order of “Thursday” and nothing more. So I had to try to determine the sequence of the letters. When I informed S. T. I had typed it all, he was thunderstruck.

Then the possibility of publishing Lovecraft’s letters took off. First we typed all the mss. we could find, preferring them to published (and edited) letters. S. T. typed letters to Donald Wandrei, R. H. Barlow, Duane W. Rimal, and Lovecraft’s aunts. I typed letters to Clark Ashton Smith, Wilfred Blanche Talman, Elizabeth Toldridge, F. Lee Baldwin, and J. Vernon Shea. Then, we were fortunate to be able to borrow a set of the Arkham House transcripts—those held by Derleth at his home. For example, there were a few letters by Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith at Brown University, but others were scattered all around. We merged the Arkham House transcripts among letters from manuscript, but still lacked many. In time, we obtained copies of the photocopies held by Roy A. Squires who had sold the letters, and other letter caches as they appeared: Hyman Bradofsky, Helm C. Spink, Arthur Harris, Frederic J. Pabody, Emil Petaja, and others.

We had issued a few small sets with Necronomicon Press, which always issued booklets in its customary squarish format, but the books we now could compile were far bigger than the press’s capacity. University presses were not interested. Once Hippocampus Press was founded in 1999, we had a sympathetic publisher who could issue big books. And so, in the twenty-first century, we began to publish books first typed in the 1990s.

Again, my models for such books were books compiled by others, such as The Letters of Jack London (Stanford University Press). The Lovecraft letters posed great problems for me, in that much of the material he discusses is not readily available. I was fortunate that the University of Wisconsin–Madison accepted the Fossil Library of amateur journalism, so that I could make short trips every so often to consult the many amateur journals in its collection.

These days, I tend to see Lovecraft more as a lifelong amateur journalist than a writer of spooky stories. His letters show that he thought of himself that way too.

Please share your experiences salvaging, restoring, republishing (or, initially publishing) the works of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (your current project). You’ve saved many of these from being lost to time.

Oh, I don’t know I’ve “saved” anything. The writers stand on their own merits, and their work has long been available. The business of Lovecraft being “saved from oblivion” by August Derleth seems ludicrous to me. If he hadn’t done the work, someone else would have. On the other hand, Sauk City’s pride and joy seems largely to be unknown—when he’s not riding Lovecraft’s coat-tails. His “regional” writings seem to have sold well enough in his time, but the man on the street is more likely by a thousandfold to recognize the name Lovecraft over Derleth—even in Wisconsin. The August Derleth Society is keen on getting his regional writing back into print, and so S. T. (its Veep) has been reissuing his novels, and also quite a bit of uncollected and unpublished material. Much of the latter is available at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and because Madison is a mere 79 miles due west of Milwaukee, I can make trips there to obtain material quite easily. (S. T. would have to travel 1900 miles to do the work himself.) The books are all print-on-demand, with virtually no advertising, so whether people are noticing them at all is questionable. So far ADS has issued 9 titles. There are at least another 13 on my list, but there could be more. ADS won’t do juvenile books, horror, detective, and the like.

I’ve been roped into designing books for the August Derleth Society—books by, of course, August Derleth. Not my favorite author. Because I’m not far from the repository of his papers, I can go there from time to time unearthing uncollected and unpublished writings for various projects. My “research” is somewhat superficial. Merely compiling stuff for others to organize. I had another project I’d long wanted to do, but because it takes me so long to get anything like that done, amid dozens of other books, I have been scooped by another writer. We’ll see.

I have to admit, though, that I really enjoyed and take great pride in The Song of the Sun, by Leah Bodine Drake. I think it is generally overlooked, as I hear very little response to the appearance of the book. Now, her papers at the University of Lexington are available to anyone for consultation. I learned that August Derleth wanted to issue another book of her poetry after her death, but could not himself travel there to consult her notebooks. When I arrived there I was shown a big scanner that was able to flatten out the tight scrapbooks and pull all the text. I scanned all 24 of them in a day, along with other papers of hers. Beyond that, I had to dig in periodicals for appearances of her work. I was fortunate to get assistance from others in tracking them down. No one had ever written a comprehensive bibliography of her work, and much of her poetry was unpublished, or published in obscure little magazines. By careful analysis of the little material available about her, I was able to write a biographical sketch about her. The book is yet another example of the “kitchen sink” method, because it has all her poems that I could find, letters, short stories, essays, reviews, notes—everything. And yet it is unknown, and the disproven myth about publication of her Hornbook for Witches still prevails in the world at large. But I enjoyed doing it.

Same with Eyes of the God [by R. H. Barlow] and Out of the Immortal Night [by Samuel Loveman]. Somehow I got ensnared in them when the books were largely compiled and edited by two others. But for the second editions, I had access to resources that were out of reach when the first editions were prepared. Those were fun to do.

What other projects are keeping you busy these days?

As designer for Hippocampus and Sarnath Press (S. T. Joshi’s micro-press), I do nearly all the book designs. That runs to perhaps forty books a year. The editing of Lovecraft’s letters ended in 2024, with his correspondence with Frank Belknap Long. Same with Clark Ashton Smith’s (far less voluminous) correspondence with his Miscellaneous Letters. S. T. is eager to take on still more letters projects, although letters in a market for weird writings seems like a stretch. Lovecraft and Smith correspondence may sell. But letters to R. H. Barlow? To H. P. Lovecraft? Well, maybe. The letters to Barlow are quite fascinating, very broad in scope, and they shed considerable light on the man, even if the words are not his. I look at most of our projects as building individual research libraries for others to use—and the books do get used from time to time. Midnight Rambles and Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein cite the Lovecraft letters a lot, and it’s gratifying to see that people can stitch together information from those books to make interesting and insightful narratives about Lovecraft.

Ambrose Bierce’s collected journalism—all assembled and designed a year ago—continues to emerge, one volume a month. Fifteen more books remain to be published. Believe it or not, I’ve compiled a fairly large book of the poetry of Winifred Virginia Jackson, amateur journalist and colleague (and lover?) of Lovecraft.

Do tell, what evidence do we have of a possible love affair between H. P. and Winifred Jackson?

I myself don’t have evidence re Jackson. George Wetzel and R. Alain Everts wrote a monograph on her in which that is mentioned. I believe the source of the anecdote is in Sonia Greene’s memoir, in which she says she “stole” Lovecraft away from Jackson. Now, Jackson and Lovecraft may not have been a thing—or even a potential thing. Maybe Sonia was just trying to head off Jackson at the pass.

※

I wish to thank David E. Schultz for a most informative conversation. First, through his painstaking overview of the myriad technical and intellectual processes necessary to the physical production of books, he provides a privileged look at the behind-the-scenes mechanisms of publishing. Secondly, and of greater moment, though, are his personal contributions to a broader discourse regarding a philosophy of literature; for, his editorial exertions safeguard the vulnerable texts of worthy writers. Typically, authors hope their works will outlive them — and yet human memory is very short and very fickle; as an example, consider that fashions in literature must change rapidly in a consumer society in which books are a commodity and yesteryear’s writers are relegated to discard bins. Thirdly, while most authors, trusting foolishly in the protection of copyright, have absolutely no idea how much and how often their works will be adulterated once they have sent them into the world, published texts are, in fact, corrupted appallingly often. Finally, today, as so often in dark eras past (the student of history may find cases in every corner of the globe and in every aeon), there are nefarious individuals hard at work, intent upon erasing the ideas of those writers who lived before and who thought differently than they do. Simply by letting authors’ works stand unmolested, we help fight that societal evil.

Schultz’s honorable efforts have helped to preserve the integrity of texts, presenting them to the world as the authors meant the world to see them; and his herculean footnote-endeavors permit the ideas of these writers to be accessible to readers of later generations. David E. Schultz’s deeds in the conservation of manuscripts and letters provide the literary world with an arsenal of invaluable tools that may be used for the defense of literature as an art form, the defense of intellectual property, and the defense of free, individual expression in a modern climate in which both art and thought are threatened with extinction.

Katherine Kerestman is the author of Lethal(Psychotoxin Press, 2023), Creepy Cat’s Macabre Travels: Prowling around Haunted Towers, Crumbling Castles, and Ghoulish Graveyards (WordCrafts Press, 2020), and Haunted House and Other Strange Tales (Hippocampus Press, 2024). She is the Editor (with S. T. Joshi) of The Weird Cat (WordCrafts Press, 2023), Shunned Houses: An Anthology of Weird Stories, Unspeakable Poems, and Impious Essays (WordCrafts Press, 2024), and Witches and Witchcraft (Hippocampus Press, 2025). She is wild about Dark Shadows and Twin Peaks; and her name is etched among the inscrutable glyphs of the Esoteric Order of Dagon and the Dracula Society. Interested parties may stalk her at www.creepycatlair.com 

Copyright 2025 Katherine Kerestman

Lance McLane: Even Death May Die (1985-1986) by Sydney Jordan

Glasgow Daily Record 4 Nov 1985, p57

The space opera comic strip Jeff Hawke by British cartoonist Sydney Jordan (with William Patterson 1956-1969) ran from 15 Feb 1955-18 Apr 1974 in the Daily Express. While cut in the mold of Flash Gordon, Jeff Hawke was aimed at an adult audience (including some mild erotic elements in the form of topless women, which also appeared in British newspaper strips like Axa), and found an appreciative audience not just in the United Kingdom but in translation outside of English, particularly in Italy, Spain, and Sweden. Because the Express owned the rights to the strip, there were no English-language reprints until the 1980s, wheren Titan Books obtained the rights, although various European collections appeared.

Glasgow Daily Record 18 Nov 1985, p29

In 1976, Sydney Jordan launched a “new” strip, Lance McLane (1976-1988), which ran in the Scottish Daily Record newspaper (several strips 1-238 also ran in the London Evening News under the title Earthspace.) This was, more or less, a soft relaunch of Jeff Hawke under a different title; Jordan even made it clear in a connecting storyline that “Lance McLane” was simply Jeff Hawke, several decades into the future, and some European editions continued the series numbering without interruption (which leads to some confusion, especially as some strips were created specifically for European magazines or fanzines that didn’t run in the daily paper).

Glasgow Daily Record 20 Nov 1985, p35

In 1985, the “Even Death May Die” storyline began which saw Jeff Hawke and the telepathic female android Fortuna up against the Cthulhu Mythos—a run has only been collected once in English, in Jeff Hawke’s Cosmos vol. 10, no. 3, a subscription-only publication of the Jeff Hawke Fan Club. The storyline is more available inthe Italian collection Jeff Hawke/Lance McLane 2 Storie Inedite (2014), which also offers some valuable background material, if you can read Italian.

Io fui uno dei pochi a non esere totalmente sorpreso dall anuova direzione che aveva preso la storia, a circa metà di Vele nel Rosso Tramonto, perché sapevo che Sydney Jordan aveva acquisito i diritti di un racconto di H. P. Lovecraft da utilizzare per una storia chiamata The Dark Tower che non fu mai pubblicata. Le prime citazioni derivano da Il Richiamo di Cthulhu (1928), ristampato da August Derleth nella raccolta L’Orrore di Dunvich e altre storie, 1963, e in una selezione di storie da essa tratte, Il Colore dallo Spazio e altre storie (Lancer, 1964). Marise Morland suggerì la litania “O Gorgo, Mormo, luna dalle mille facce, guarda con benevolenza ai nostri sacrifici”, e altri dettagli, perché Sydney aveva letto solo poche storie, mentre lei le aveva lette tutte.I was one of the few who wasn’t totally surprised by the new direction the story had taken, about halfway through Sails in the Red Sunset, because I knew that Sydney Jordan had acquired the rights to an H. P. Lovecraft story for use in a story called The Dark Tower that was never published. The earliest citations are from “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), reprinted by August Derleth in the collection The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories, 1963, and in a selection of stories from it, The Colour from Space, and Other Stories (Lancer, 1964). Marise Morland suggested the litany “O Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look kindly upon our sacrifices,” and other details, because Sydney had only read a few stories, while she had read them all.
“Note a ‘..Anche la morte può morire!’” di Duncan Lunan,
Jeff Hawke/Lance McLane 2 Storie Inedite (2014) 96		“Notes on ‘Even Death May Die!'” by Duncan Lunan
Translated into English

Sails in the Red Sunset was the storyline immediately preceding Even Death May Die, and includes the first references to Lovecraft and Cthulhu on the lips of a madman; it is this clue that leads McLane and Fortuna to Earth to investigate the cult of Cthulhu. It isn’t clear which Lovecraft story Jordan might have attempted to license for the never-published “The Dark Tower” story; presumably this would have been a deal with Arkham House, based solely on the title, I wonder if it didn’t involve The Lurker at the Threshold (1945).

Duncan Lunan also shared the above image in his post Space Notes 24 Jeff Hawke Part 4 – Not As We Know It (29 Oct 2023), a montage that combines panels and images from several strips in the storyline under the Earthspace banner.

Glasgow Daily Record 23 Nov 1985, p33

Many of Jordan’s storylines ran 12-16 weeks (~72-96 strips), but but according to Tony O’Sullivan’s index “Even Death May Die” ran for 145 daily strips (A1508 – 1653), making this one of the longer storylines, and according to O’Sullivan’s notes the storyline wasn’t even syndicated in Europe (hence “Storie Inedite”—”Unpublished Stories”). Italian Wikipedia gives a different numbering, 149 strips (A1503 – A1652), but with the way “Even Death May Die” dovetails with the previous storyline and idiosyncrasies of international publishing it can be tricky to decide where one story starts and ends, exactly.

Glasgow Daily Record 2 Dec 1985, p25

Given that there are ~10,000 strips, that the Cthulhu material came nearly at the end of this long-running project, wasn’t even published in Europe at the time, and that reprints nearly always focus on the beginning of the run, it may be no surprise that collections are scarce and that Jordan’s take on the Mythos has been largely overlooked. I only stumbled across it because the Daily Record archive is available on newspapers.com, while trying to find the first newspaper comic strips to include Lovecraft and Cthulhu.

Glasgow Daily Record 30 Apr 1986, p33

The story itself follows what is now fairly familiar territory: Lovecraft was writing more than fiction, the Cthulhu Mythos is real, malevolent, and it’s up to Lance McLane and Fortuna to stop their nefarious plans for the human race. The pace of a daily strip can seem plodding compared to a comic book or graphic novel, and the often muddy tones of newsprint often render Jordan’s artwork very dark in the newspaper scans. Which is a pity, because Jordan’s artwork is strongly realistic, grounding the strip in a way that makes the fantasy elements appear as truly intrusive…even if the darker text boxes are sometimes difficult to read.

Glasgow Daily Record 1 Feb 1986, p34

The 1980s UK sensibilities allowed a degree of eroticism, which is probably one of the reasons Lance McLane never found syndication in the United States newspapers. This is measured titillation (Jordan couldn’t be explicit even if he wanted to), but not inappropriate to the material: the idea of an orgiastic cult comes straight from “The Call of Cthulhu,” after all, and it’s a bold storyteller that manages to get as much on the screen as Jordan does.

Glasgow Daily Record 11 Feb 1986, p33

However, this has to be read in the context of works like “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone” (1977) by Richard Lupoff and Strange Eons (1978) by Robert Bloch: this was one of the first attempts to project the Mythos into the space opera future, and it was doing it in a mainstream newspaper, not in the pages of Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal or other specialist comic magazine.

Glasgow Daily Record 22 May 1986, p37

It is a pity that “Even Death May Day” hasn’t received a more widespread publication; at the moment, your best bet to read it in English is to get a newspaper.com subscription and manually scroll through the Daily Record day by day. For those that read Italian, Jeff Hawke/Lance McLane 2 Storie Inedite (2014) is a choice option to see the strip compiled and restored, looking better than it ever did on newsprint, being on glossy paper and in color:

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.

“Amb la tècnica de Lovecraft” (1956) by Joan Perucho

The works of H. P. Lovecraft have never entered another language wholesale; they tend to trickle in, translated a story here and a story there, or at best one collection at a time. Tracing the spread and influence of Lovecraft’s work in languages other than English thus becomes doubly tricky. A Spanish translation might have first been published in Barcelona, Mexico City, or Buenos Aires, just as an English edition might be published in New York, London, or Brisbane, and by what paths a copy in one nation might end up in the hands of a reader in another…well, the distribution is ultimately uneven.

According to S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2009), Lovecraft began being translated into Spanish in the 1940s, although publication was largely piecemeal until the 1980s (which in Spain, at least, may have been in part due to the Francoist regime), and regional languages like Galician and Catalán have their own publication histories that largely start in the 1980s and 1990s. However, when it comes to the history of Lovecraft in Catalan and Spanish, there is at least one really interesting outlier, which has been largely overlooked in much English-language histories of Mythos fiction.

Joan Perucho Gutiérrez (1920 – 2003) was a noted writer and poet in the Spanish and Catalán languages in Spain, who wrote under the pen-names Joan Perucho (Catalán) and Juan Perucho (Spanish). In 1956 he published his first short fiction, “Amb la tècnica de Lovecraft” (“In the style of Lovecraft”) in the Catalán publication Els Quaderns d’atzavara (“The Agave Notebooks”). Perucho must have been a precocious writer indeed, because Lovecraft was far from a household name in Spain at the time, and this is sometimes credited as Lovecraft’s introduction to Catalán audiences—a claim I cannot verify or deny.

In 1969, Perucho translated “Amb la tècnica de Lovecraft” into Spanish, where it was published in the newspaper La Vanguardia Española (16 Aug 1969, p.9) under the title “Magia Negra” (“Black Magic”), and in the anthology Los Mitos de Cthulhu (Alianza Editorial) under the more well-known title “Con la técnica de Lovecraft” (“In the style of Lovecraft”); the two Spanish versions have some minor differences, particularly in the beginning of the text. Largely because of its inclusion in that important Spanish-language Mythos anthology, Perucho’s story has gained a degree of notability, if not exactly acclaim, and has been republished a few times. However, it has largely gone without comment in English.

The following translation is taken from the “Magia Negra” Spanish version of the piece:

TRADUJO el texto, hace aproximadamente diez años, el poeta José Corredor Matheos, en homenaje a Philip Howard Lovecraft, escritor de «science fiction» que murió perseguido por los seres invisibles. Sólo entonces se supo la verdadera relación de los hechos y que, en un momento impreciso, el automático de la gramola se disparó; hizo un ruidito y lentamente bajó el disco. Hubo uno pausa. Alguna cosa, como una corriente de aire casi imperceptible, fue creciendo en intensidad; entreabrió una puerta y descendió unos escalones que daban a un patio interior; tropezó con algo sólido y opaco, y blasfemó en vox baja; después se dirigió a un pequeño pasadizo, al otro lado del patio, y allí se arremolinó. La música se oía ahora lejana, sorda, filtrada. Era una noche silenciosa y tranquila, de una gran suavidad, con el aromo de la primavera que descendía de los árboles.

La magia de la boca desapareció debajo de las pequeñas placas de la sífilis en los labios y en el paladar. Eran unas luces rojas y verdes, en el interior de las cuales podía verse perfectamente su imagen con un rictus de ironía amarga y de decepción. Ironía nacida de la desesperación y de la muerte, más allá de las cuales, débiles ráfagas de aire descansan en el interior de los vasos abandonados, llenos de ceniza y agua pútrida; o dentro de la caja de resonancia de los pianos «Chassaigne», modelo 1906, esperando la oportunidad del conducto sutilísimo que les una, con unas cuantas palabras no pronunciadas, al oído del caballero momificado o de la dama solitaria. Formas gastadas de vida o de muerte, de nacimiento mecánico en un dolor visceral; de vómitos que se suceden implacables (o que por lo menos atormentan con la angustia del espasmo que ha de venir y que siempre, siempre desemboca en una suerte de abismo, y en el sudor, y en los cabellos enganchados) y de pequeñas crisis de histeria, y de dientes que se carían y que la lengua percibe voluminosos y febricitantes.

No era esto. Sólo la quemadura gélida de un «thoulú», uno di aquellos seres informes y terribles que ya había descrito minuciosamente en el siglo XII el árabe Al-Buruyu en su tratado «Los que vigilan». La evidencia de las cosas surgía de improviso con mil y una significaciones aterradoras y alusivas. No había fuerza humana capaz de conjurar lo inevitable, de alejar el dogal que ceñiría al elegido, el cual, por un impulso misterioso, sería arrastrado al sacrificio, al aniquilamiento de lo propia personalidad, y se convertiría en algo horrible y sin nombre. Abominable concepción ésta, fruto de las nupcias del cielo y del infierno. No era otra cosa lo aparición de señales en todas las habitaciones de la casa, y aquellos restos de cuerpos extraños, hallados en el patio una mañana, y que se volatilizaron misteriosamente una hora después. El magisterio de Al-Buruyu se presentaba como una fuerza maléfica, anticipándose a los siglos; como un ojo impasible y escrutador; y con una voz caligráfica y cabalística que iba avanzando como una risa en la noche, sobre la nieve surcada de pisadas deformes y con alaridos alucinantes cerca de las rejas de los manicomios.

Se oyó la bocina de un automóvil. La presencia, inquieta, se distendió. Murmuró unos sonidos ininteligibles y se insinuó —leve fosforescencia apenas— en el fondo del pasadizo, entre inmundicia y botellas de licor vacías. Se encendió una luz en una ventana vecina y poco después se apagó. La primavera respiraba afuera.

El tiempo se acumulaba en el cerebro y en la sangre en pliegues suavísimos y turbadores, en los cuales se percibía la claridad solar. Había cortezas y una materia rugosa, resquebrajada por surcos sin dirección precisa, que parecía calcinada por un contacto satánico o sordamente enfurecido. O bien una superficie enharinada con polvos de arroz, debajo de la cual, latían, vívidas y sensibles, amplias llagas supuradoras, como bocas martirizadas y ocultas, como flores monstruosas y sonámbulas que súbitamente se agrandaban inflándose, tensando su estructura íntima hacia un delirio febril. Era demasiado tarde para el antídoto: la invertida esvástica de plata, que traería ecos de los cantos litúrgicos hasta la huida de la estepa y la venida de la savia vivificadora. El vuelo de las hojas era un vuelo de bronces, enlutado y solemne, sobre una tierra árida y espectral. Apenas se podío entrever, con un supremo esfuerzo, la risa de un niño vestido de marinero, medio nublada por el dolor; o la triste tenacidad del hombre que medita hasta altas horas de la madrugada, y que se veía ahora bajo el peso de una lágrima; o la inútil trenza perfumada, aire de una mirada que alimentaba el deseo. La carne había comenzado a corromperse, todavía con la presencia de la vida, y exhalaba una pestilencia indefinible que lo impregnaba todo. Lentamente se inició el éxodo, e incluso la araña huyó, con su perezosa pero terrible seguridad, abandonando el refugio de su vida feliz. Entreveía lecturas de íncubos y súcubos, formulas mágicas dé la muerte y del diablo, traspasando todo vestigio de razón, viéndose hojear la «Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits et sur les revenants et vampirs», del monje Calmet, que ponía en evidencia la realidad de la fría certeza de Al-Buruyu. Ya Angela Foligno había revelado al comentarista que al principio «non est in me membrum quod non sit percussum, tortum, et pœnatum a dœmonius, et semper sum infírma, et semper stupefacta, et plena doloríbus in omnibus membris vivís». Existía también un flotar sobre la realidad, un ir a la deriva a través de paisajes inexistentes, de algas mortecinas que se crispaban airadas y amenazadoras al contacto más leve, y manubrios que giraban vertiginosamente dentro del cráneo, con un alboroto insufrible de timbres y altavoces disporados, para desaparecer después en un angustioso silencio de tumba.

Se alisó el cabello con la mano, despacio y maquinalmente. Bebía con delectación y a pequeños sorbos una copa de auténtico «scotch» Forrester, y se encontraba seguramente a diez millas de la costa y con una tempestad de todos los diablos. Una muchacha rió, con la risa provocadora di Jane Rusell, y se aproximó desde la barra. Llevaba la boca pintada de un rojo intenso, color de sangre de buey, y un jersey que le ceñía apretadamente el busto. Le hizo una caricia en la mejilla y le murmuró algo afectuoso, mientras rozaba con su cara la de él. Había una atmósfera densa y enturbiada por el humo del tabaco, y algunos invitados se habían quitado la chaqueta. Otra muchacha, que movía las ancas como una estrella de Hollywood, cantaba con éxtasis lánguido y sensual que se adhería a la piel.

Creía que no lo volvería a ver. De pronto se le ocurrió ponerse a reír delante de aquel niño vestido de marinero, pasado de moda y ridiculo. Lo relacionó con muchas otras cosas, como el banderín de un club de hockey clavado en alguna pared, una desteñida fotografía que fijaba unos rostros ausentes en una lejana excursión a Bañólas, un día de mucho frío; o en un pequeño bar del Paseo de Gracia, mucho tiempo después, cuando ella ya preparaba el equipo de novia y le regalaba corbatas el día de su santo.

La cantante agradeció los aplausos con una sonrisa. Ahora la gente intentaba bailar, excepto un grupito que bebía y conversaba con el camarero y con la muchacha, que ya había concluido su número. Había una media luz, sucia y gastada.

Penetrado por las sombras, detrás del gran monumento a Napoleón, detrás de las campanas de los tranvías, bajo los burdeles de todas las ciudades del mundo, en el último momento lúcido, necesitaba ahora buscar la luz, engañar a la presencia, acercarla si era preciso, de la manera que fuese, a la luz limpia y purificadora, a la luz que a veces rasgaba las tinieblas. Debía haber luz en algún sitio. Así se lo parecía a él.

Muy lejos, seguramente a diez millas de distancia, alguien o algo reptaba por la alfombra. Dejó atrás las dos butacas y se incorporó poco a poco. Era como un babear o como un ruido inconfesable. Se hizo una claridad lívida. Como una alucinación de Lovecraft.



Juan PERUCHO		I TRANSLATED the text, about ten years ago by the poet José Corredor Matheos, in homage to Philip Howard Lovecraft, a science fiction writer who died persecuted by invisible beings. Only then did the true story become known, and that at an imprecise moment, the jukebox automatically triggered; it made a little noise and slowly lowered the record. There was a pause. Something, like an almost imperceptible current of air, grew in intensity; it half-opened a door and went down some steps that led to an inner courtyard; it stumbled against something solid and opaque, and cursed in a low voice; then it went to a small passageway on the other side of the courtyard, and swirled there. The music now sounded distant, muffled, filtered. It was a night silent and calm, of great softness, with the aroma of spring descending from the trees.

The magic of the mouth disappeared beneath the small syphilis plaques on the lips and palate. They were red and green lights, inside which one could perfectly see his image with a rictus of bitter irony and disappointment. Irony born of despair and death, beyond which, weak gusts of air rest inside abandoned glasses, full of ashes and putrid water; or inside the sound box of the “Chassaigne” pianos, model 1906, waiting for the opportunity of the subtlest conduit that would unite them, with a few unspoken words, to the ear of the mummified knight or the lonely lady. Worn-out forms of life or death, of mechanical birth in visceral pain; of vomiting that follows one another relentlessly (or that at least torments with the anguish of the spasm that is to come and that always, always ends in a kind of abyss, and in sweat, and in tangled hair) and of small hysterical crises, and of cavities in teeth that the tongue perceives as voluminous and feverish.

It was not this. Only the icy burn of a “thoulú”, one of those formless and terrible beings that the Arab Al-Buruyu had already described in detail in the 12th century in his treatise “Those Who Watch”. The evidence of things emerged suddenly with a thousand and one terrifying and allusive meanings. There was no human force capable of adjuring the inevitable, of removing the noose that would bind the chosen one, who, by a mysterious impulse, would be dragged to sacrifice, to the annihilation of his own personality, and would become something horrible and nameless. Abominable conception this, fruit of the marriage of heaven and hell. It was nothing else than the appearance of signs in all the rooms of the house, and those remains of strange bodies, found in the courtyard one morning, and which mysteriously vanished an hour later. The teaching of Al-Buruyu presented itself as an evil force, anticipating the centuries; like an impassive and scrutinizing eye; and with a calligraphic and cabalistic voice that advanced like a laugh in the night, on the snow furrowed with deformed footprints and with hallucinatory screams near the bars of the asylums.

The sound of a car horn honked. The presence, uneasy, became relaxed. It murmured some unintelligible sounds and insinuated itself—barely a faint phosphorescence—at the end of the passage, among filth and empty liquor bottles. A light came on in a neighboring window and shortly after went out. Spring was breathing outside.

Time accumulated in the brain and blood in soft and disturbing folds, in which the light of the sun could be perceived. There were crusts and rough matter, cracked by furrows without a precise direction, which seemed calcined by a satanic or dully enraged contact. Or a surface floured with rice powder, beneath which, vivid and sensitive, wide suppurating sores throbbed, like martyred and hidden mouths, like monstrous and somnambulistic flowers that suddenly enlarged and inflated, straining their intimate structure towards a feverish delirium. It was too late for the antidote: the inverted silver swastika, which would bring echoes of liturgical chants until the flight from the steppe and the coming of the life-giving sap. The flight of the leaves was a flight of bronze, mournful and solemn, over an arid and spectral land. It was only with a supreme effort that one could make out the laughter of a child dressed as a sailor, half clouded by pain; or the sad tenacity of the man who meditates until the early hours of the morning, and who now saw himself under the weight of a tear; or the useless perfumed braid, the air of a look that fed desire. The flesh had begun to rot, still with the presence of life, and exhaled an indefinable stench that permeated everything. Slowly the exodus began, and even the spider fled, with its lazy but terrible security, abandoning the refuge of its happy life. He glimpsed readings of incubi and succubi, magical formulas of death and the devil, transcending all vestiges of reason, seeing himself leafing through the “Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits et sur les revenants et vampirs” [1], by the monk Calmet, which highlighted the reality of the cold certainty of Al-Buruyu. Angela Foligno had already revealed to the commentator that at the beginning “non est in me membrum quod non sit percussum, tortum, et pœnatum a dœmonius, et semper sum infírma, et semper stupefacta, et plena doloríbus in omnibus membris vivís.” [2] There was also a floating above reality, a drifting through non-existent landscapes, through dying algae that twitched angrily and threateningly at the slightest touch, and handlebars that turned vertiginously inside the skull, with an unbearable uproar of ringing bells and loudspeakers, to then disappear in an agonizing silence of the grave.

He smoothed his hair slowly and mechanically. He sipped a glass of genuine Forrester scotch with delight and in small sips, and was probably ten miles from the coast and in a hell of a storm. A girl laughed, the provocative laugh of Jane Russell, and came over from the bar. Her mouth was painted a deep red, the color of oxblood, and her sweater cinched tight around her bust. She caressed his cheek and murmured something affectionate as she brushed her face against his. The air was thick and clouded with tobacco smoke, and some of the guests had taken off their jackets. Another girl, who moved her haunches like a Hollywood star, sang with a languid, sensual ecstasy that clung to the skin.

He thought he would never see her again. Suddenly it occurred to him to laugh in front of that boy dressed as a sailor, old-fashioned and ridiculous. He connected it to many other things, like the pennant of a hockey club nailed to a wall, a faded photograph that showed some absent faces on a distant excursion to Bañólas, one very cold day; or in a small bar in Paseo de Gracia, long after, when she was already preparing her bridal outfit and giving him ties on his saint’s day.

The singer acknowledged the applause with a smile. Now people were trying to dance, except for a small group that was drinking and talking with the waiter and the girl, who had already finished her number. There was a half-light, dirty and worn.

Penetrated by the shadows, behind the great monument to Napoleon, behind the bells of the trams, beneath the brothels of all the cities of the world, in his last lucid moment, he now needed to seek the light, to deceive the presence, to bring it closer if necessary, in whatever way, to the clean and purifying light, to the light that sometimes pierced the darkness. There had to be light somewhere. It seemed so to him.

Far away, surely ten miles away, someone or something was crawling across the carpet. He left the two armchairs behind and slowly sat up. It was like drooling or an unutterable noise. It became a livid clarity. Like an hallucination of Lovecraft.

[1] French: “Dissertation on the apparitions of angels, demons and spirits, and on ghosts and vampires”
[2] Latin: “There is not a member in me that is not struck, twisted, and punished by the devil, and I am always sick, and always astonished, and full of pains in all my living members.”

Juan PERUCHO
Transcribed from La Vanguardia Española (16 Aug 1969, p.9) English translation

“Magia Negra” / “Con la técnica de Lovecraft” is more of a prose poem than a short story; a collection of images and ideas meant to invoke the mood and style of Lovecraft more than a pastiche like “Celui qui suscitait l’effroi…” (1958) by Jacques Janus. It isn’t clear what exactly Perucho had read of Lovecraft at this point, but several themes are and ideas are evocative of Lovecraft’s Mythos tales without being direct references to any specific story.

We have a strange Arab author (“Al-Buruyu” instead of Abdul Alhazred), and his mysterious book (Those Who Watch, rather than the more familiar Necronomicon). There is no Cthulhu but there are the strange and formless “thoulú.” Was this deliberate, mangling things like Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s name for effect, or the result of a botched translation from English into another language? I suspect the cumulative differences represent Perucho’s innovation and playing of the Mythos game, mixing fact and fiction. Which is very Lovecraftian.

The work remains a liminal entry, a Catalán introduction to an English-language author that was later translated into Spanish for a wider audience, even as Lovecraft himself began to enjoy wider translation in Spanish-language markets. It is easy to see how it might have frustrated early readers of Los Mitos de Cthulhu (1969); it doesn’t fit neatly into the Mythos like many early pastiches. The very ambiguity gives it character, however; so few early efforts to write in Lovecraft’s style try to capture the essence. While I don’t think Perucho really nailed it—like the pasticheurs, he tends to focus on the more obvious elements—it’s an interesting experiment, and strikes an interesting contrast with some of the other Lovecraft-inspired works in the 1950s and 60s.

Thanks to Mariano Villarreal ( literfan@yahoo.es ) for his help and assistance; all the errors in the translation are mine.

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.

Uterus of the Black Goat Vol 1.(黒山羊の仔袋 1, 2022) by Haruki (春輝)

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work of adult literature. Some images contain nudity. Reader discretion is advised.

Powers of Darkness

The lifting of the curtain on the massive horrors of Germany’s prison and concentration camps recalls the supernatural tales of H. P. Lovecraft, a writer who was relatively unknown until August Derleth undertook his popularization, says a Chicago Tribune column. To conjure up the mood of unearthly terrors, Lovecraft invented the mythology of Cthulhu in which there are many monstrous spirits of evil, forever seeking to take possession of this planet.

Lovecraft wrote of his work: “All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on teh fundamental lore or legend that this race [sic] was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again.”

Perhaps Othulhu [sic] has come back through the cracks in Hitler’s mind. Lovecraft, who died in 1937, would be staggered by the revelation.

—The Windsor (Ontario) Star, 2 May 1945, p4

In the aftermath of World War 2, the combination of Allied propaganda and the real-world horrors and atrocities committed by the Nazis and central powers created a perfect icon of evil. The Nazis became the epitome of cruelty, madness, violence, lust, and decadence; while Hitler and the Nazis became occasional figures of ridicule in works like Hogan’s Heroes, they also became the perfect embodiment of sin in post-war men’s adventure magazines, comic books, Stalag novels, and the Nazisploitation films like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. (1974), The Night Porter (1974), and Salon Kitty (1976).

H. P. Lovecraft died before the German invasion of Poland in 1939 that sparked the European beginnings of World War 2, and long before the Final Solution was decided upon and enacted. He did not live to see the Holocaust laid bare, and certainly not the pop-culture cross-pollination as the Nazis, the ultimate figures of taboo, became enmeshed in erotic and sadistic art and literature. Yet perhaps it is not surprising that, over time, Lovecraft’s Mythos and Nazis have mixed and mingled on occasion.

Dagger of Blood (1997) by John Blackburn, for instance, featured a former Nazi scientists in South America, inspired by Mengele and works like The Boys from Brazil (1976). Hellboy fought any number of Nazis in comics and film, some of whom had connections with Lovecraftian critters (a point called out specifically in the crossover Batman/Hellboy/Starman). Brian McNaughton brought the Reanimator to the Nazis with “Herbert West—Reincarnated: Part II, The Horror from the Holy Land” (1999). Insania Tenebris (2020) by Raúlo Cáceres also includes scenes where the Third Reich mixes with the Mythos, and Kthulhu Reich (2019) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) is an entire collection of stories that re-imagines the Nazis in a Lovecraftian context, and Charles Stross’ outstanding novel The Atrocity Archives (2004) also riffs on the wedding of these two taboos, the eldritch evils of Lovecraft and the visceral cruelty of Hitler and the Nazis.

Most of these works take as a jumping-off point the Nazi’s real and fictional investigations into the archaeological and the occult, which became widespread in popular culture thanks to films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). There is some basis for truth in this, as Kenneth Hite explores in The Nazi Occult (2013), but the pop culture legacy of Nazi mystics dabbling in the Mythos has grown very far from reality. Intersections between sex and the Nazi occult exist, and so do works that combine sex and Lovecraft’s Mythos, but the combination of all three flavors is relatively rare.

Most works that deal with Lovecraftian Nazism eschew the erotic.

Uterus of the Blackgoat Vol 1.(黒山羊の仔袋 1, 2022) by Haruki (春輝) is a standout in that it very specifically does just that. This historical occult action manga’s prologue opens in Nazi Germany, where Hitler’s disciples are trying to unlock a Lovecraftian artifact with sex magick.

Nazi sacrifices disrobe for a ritual to Shub-Niggurath

Haruki (春輝) is an established mangaka whose works include the Ero Ninja Scrolls and Parasite Doctor Suzune series. Like all legal erotic works in Japan, the actual genitalia is obscured, often by carefully placed speech bubbles, figure-work, and blurring out the genitals. However, this work is more than “tits and tentacles”; there is a considerable amount of detail given to period dress, architecture, and background to ground the story, including some very effective splash pages that appear to have been referenced from period photographs.

Post-War Berlin

The bulk of the story takes place during the early days of the Cold War, as both the USSR and United States attempt to seize the Nazi’s research into Shub-Niggurath for themselves. At the center of their separate and competing investigations is a former maid, Mia Olbrich, who worked in the house where the rituals took place. Trying to keep both the Americans and the Soviets from getting the information is a woman named Macleod (who may actually be Mata Hari) with supernatural powers, who is also the secret agent codenamed Black Goat.

What readers get is thus a three-way struggle involving a lot of sex, some body horror, and Cold War spy shenanigans with some interesting plot twists and revelations (and this only in volume 1, there are 3 volumes in the series). While there are many typical tropes of the eromanga genre (all of the main characters are willowy, busty young women; there’s a sex scene in every chapter, etc.), it is sort of refreshing to see a work that strongly leans into the sexual aspect of Shub-Niggurath in as explicit a means as they can given the limits of the medium. While we don’t get a lot of actual Nazis in this volume after the prologue, the emphasis on sex, sexual violence, and the setting is what draws comparisons to exploitation films; there is a similar aesthetic, the idea that this is a serious story that is being played for titillation as well as action and intrigue.

There are some cosmetic parallels with “The Elder Sister-like One, Vol. 1” (2016) by Pochi Iida (飯田ぽち。) and The Mystery of Lustful Illusion -Cthulhu Pregnant- (2015) by Takayuki Hiyori (宇行 日和); the manga creators are each drawing from similar manga artistic traditions and Lovecraftian stories and roleplaying games, which shows variations on similar themes, less in any plot sense as in similarities between the depictions of Shub-Niggurath, playing with tentacles, etc. However, the emphasis on erotic content in each work is different and distinct and reflects the tone of the stories, with Uterus of the Black Goat aimed more toward erotic horror than the other two.

A Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, as inspired by the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game

Uterus of the Black Goat has not yet had an official English translation or release, but Japanese editions are available from various outlets, including Amazon.co.jp and Ebay.

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.

Pleasure Planet (1974) by Edward George

Eldritch Fappenings
This review concerns a work of adult literature. Reader discretion is advised.

Around November 1923, H. P. Lovecraft sent a letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird, commenting on the contents of the magazine during its first year of existence. The letter was published in the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales, and included a challenge to writers of weird fiction:

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and ‘different’ as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace. Take a werewolf story, for instance—who ever wrote a story from the point of view of the wolf, and sympathising strongly with the devil to whom he has sold himself? Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated?
—H. P. Lovecraft to Edwin Baird, c. Nov 1923

This inspired H. Warner Munn, a weird fiction enthusiast from Athol, Massachusetts, to write a story and submit it to the magazine. “The Werewolf of Ponkert” (WT Jul 1925) and earned the coveted cover spot. It was Munn’s first professional publication, the start of a long career in science fiction and fantasy, and perhaps most importantly the start of a long series of tales. Subsequently in the pages of Weird Tales, Munn published “The Return of the Master” (WT Jul 1927), “The Werewolf’s Daughter” (WT Oct–Nov–Dec 1928), and a series of Tales of the Werewolf Clan published as “The Master Strikes” (WT Nov 1930), “The Master Fights” (WT Dec 1930), and “The Master Has A Narrow Escape” (WT Jan 1931).

Munn also became friends and correspondents with Lovecraft, who referred to the whole work in one letter as the “master” cycle—much as he referred to his own mythos as the “Arkham” cycle. Yet for Lovecraft, Munn had missed the mark:

It is my constant complaint that allegedly weird writers fell into commonplaceness though reflecting wholly conventional & ordinary perspectives, sympathies, & value-systems; & in this instance (as in others) I sought to escape from this pitfall as widely as I could. It pleases me that you grasp this matter so spontaneously—for some persons seem unable to understand what I mean when I bring it up. For example—I once said that a werewolf story from the wolf’s point of view ought to be written. H. Warner Munn, taking me up, thereupon produced his “Ponkert” series; in which, however, he made the werewolf an unwilling one, filled with nothing but conventionally human regrets over his condition!
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 19 Jun 1931, LJS 16

The series also suffered from a relative lack of overt weirdness, as Lovecraft put it:

The trouble with Munn’s tale is that it subscribes too much to the conventional tradition of swashbuckling romance—the Stanley J. Weyman cloak & swordism of 1900.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [17 Oct 1930], DS 245

Yes—Munn does get into arid and sterile regions when he tries to hitch his romantic-adventure mood and technique to the domain of the weird. He is drawing the poor Master out to such lengths that one cannot keep track of the creature’s nature and attributes—indeed, the impression is that he merely retains the supernatural framework as a matter of duty—or concession to Wright—whereas he really wants to write a straight historical romance. But the kid’s young, and we can well afford to give him time. Let him get Ponkertian werewolves out of his system, and see what he can do with a fresh start!
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, [Dec 1930], ES1.305

“Romance” in this case doesn’t refer to stories about love or lust, but the older sense of romance as a fictional prose narrative of heroic adventure, in the traditional of medieval romances. The sentiments echo some thoughts by Lovecraft with regard to Robert E. Howard, whose weird fiction often contained a strong action-adventure element, sometimes with the monster or magic a bit of an afterthought. Still, Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was impressed enough to consider the publication of Munn’s werewolf tales as a standalone volume:

Munn’s effort—I read the whole tale in MS. a year ago—has romantic facility, but to my mind he seldom achieves real weirdness. He is, though, a very capable writer, & ought to have quite a future ahead of him. Wright tells him that his collected “Ponkert” tales will form the third book of a W.T. series beginning with “The Moon Terror”—my own tales forming the second. Personally I’d wager that much time will elapse before W.T. publishes any more volumes.
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, [6 Sep 1928], ES1.155-156

Unfortunately, Lovecraft was correct: The Moon Terror failed to sell, and the idea of Weird Tales publishing collections or anthologies was largely abandoned. The Werewolf of Ponkert series would finally be collected in 1958, and when Munn expanded the series with additional tales in the 1970s and 80s was reprinted and recollected again. Of his friend, Lovecraft wrote:

Frank B. Long, Jr., Donald Wandrei, Wilfred B. Talman, H. Warner Munn, August W. Derleth, & Clark Ashton Smith are indeed all friends of mine, but it would hardly be fair to their own talents & initiative to call them my “proteges”. I have tried to encourage the younger ones & help them with their style whenever such help seemed in order, but they all succeed on their own merits. I am proud, though, to have been the first to persuade Long & Talman & Munn to send stuff to W.T.
—H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 19 Jun 1931, LJS 18

So what does this have to do with Pleasure Planet (1974) as by Edward George (pseudonym for Robert E. Vardeman and George W. Proctor), an erotic science fiction novel? Well…read the back cover copy:

Step aboard the sex-computer equipped Intergalactic Vessel Werewolf along with Captain Chad Ponkert and his very horny co-pilot, Janet. Their mission—to find a planet to be used as a sex playground—a place where creatures from all over the galaxy can come together and get it on!

Chad Ponkert, I. V. Werewolf. Yes, it does appear that Lovecraft’s innocent suggestion in 1924 had, fifty years later, inspired a sleazy erotic novel, by way of one H. Warner Munn (who was probably utterly unaware of the borrowing).

The novel itself is almost a parody, although it might be more accurate to call it a pastiche. The oversexed everyman Chadwick Ponkert the Third is a spaceship pilot with a raging libido and a black belt in karate, who plays a few BDSM games with his co-pilot Janet where she refers to him as ‘Master.’ Their ship crash lands on a planet called Keller, which is like medieval Europe if there were no Christian church, a rather open and eager attitude toward sex, and the occasional alien beast. Which is to say, not much like medieval Europe, but not unlike a thousand sword & planet stories that ran in the pulps. Ponkert and Janet quickly establish themselves as lords and ladies in the oversexed land, happily screwing pretty much anyone and everyone they encounter page after raunchy page.

The girl was a veritable wealth of information about Keller. During their endless hours of bouncing on the backs of their sturdy steeds, he had never tired of her explanations of various sights they passed. She had also provided a history of Keller’s development. From what Ponkert could make of the various legends and myths she told, Keller had grown from the remnants of a derelict colonial rocket from Earth. The lost voyage had long been forgotten by the mother planet, which was to his advantage. If the Earth’s residents had known about Keller, they would have come in the teeming millions.
—Pleasure Planet 113

Aside from the names mentioned, Vardeman and Proctor make no overt reference to Munn’s werewolf stories, nor are they parodying them. It is, rather, a rather basic and straightforward sword & planet tale fluffed out with a lot of hardcore sex. The difference between this and a mainstream science fiction novel is a matter of degree rather than kind, although there really isn’t anything to recommend it as science fiction. The story hits most of the weaknesses that Lovecraft noted about interplanetary stories in the 30s, following the Edgar Rice Burroughs model of a strong Earthman arriving at an Earth-like planet, rescuing a very human princess, etc.

As with many erotic novels, Pleasure Planet went through a number of titles and author pseudonyms. While it may be of interest to some folks for its place in the history of erotic science fiction, it also demonstrates the ripple-effect that Lovecraft had on science fiction and fantasy—how inspiration spreads out, from one little letter, to a series of werewolf tales, to an erotic novel—and who knows where it might end?

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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