Lost Tale: “The Mortal” (1927) by Anonymous

Eldritch Fappenings

The following historical poetry is of a ribald nature, with both suggestive and explicit references to human sexuality. It is presented uncensored, as originally published. Reader discretion is advised.

THE secret of a poem, no less than a jest’s prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it. Yield to its spell, accept the poet’s mood: this, after all, is what the sages answer when you ask them of its value. Even though the poet himself, in his other mood, tell you that his art is but sleight of hand, his food enchanter’s food, and offer to show you the trick of it,—believe him not. Wait for this prophetic hour; then give yourself to his passion, his joy or pain […]
—Edmund C. Steadman, “Comment on the Poem” in The Raven (1884) by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1845) is widely considered a classic; a narrative poem of 18 stanzas of six lines each, with a relatively complex meter (primarily trochaic octameter) and rhyme scheme (ABCBBB). The result is distinct and easy to recognize, more difficult to emulate accurately but easy enough to parody. Parodies work in part because of shared familiarity; when kids on a school bus sing “Jingle bells, Batman smells…” it hits because of the subversion of expectations. They all know the tune and the original lyrics, and then it veers off into irreverent and transgressive territory. A bit juvenile, but all in good fun. At some point after its publication and rise to popularity, “The Raven” inspired a number of parodies, some of the explicitly sexual variety.

Ribald poetry and poetic parodies used to be more popular. They still are popular, but there are fewer common cultural touchstones, poems that large portions of the reading public can be expected to be familiar enough with that people can appreciate the parody. The parody songs of Weird Al Yankovic like “Amish Paradise” (1996) are good examples of successful and popular contemporary parody verse, though Yankovic’s work is generally fairly clean. Adult parodies these days are normally much more explicit, taking the form of pornographic parodies of popular movies (e.g. Evil Head, a pornographic parody of the Evil Dead films), comic book characters, or celebrities.

Yet in the publishing environment of the late 19th and early 20th century, explicit parodies were difficult to publish openly. Tijuana bibles like Batman and Robin in The Occult Coven (197?) and Red Sonja and Conan: Hot and Dry (1977) by Randy Crawford were explicitly underground publications, crude and potentially opening the publisher up to prosecution. So there was less openly pornographic work and more publications of a spicy or ribald character. Such is the case with sex-infused parodies of “The Raven” that circulated in the cultural milieu of the early 20th century United States.

One particular group or tradition of poems stands out. In the collection Immortalia (1927), which collected various anonymously authored folksongs, poems, doggerel verse, etc. is a parody of “The Raven” titled “The Mortal.” The poem beings with the lines “Once upon a midnight dreary, When of smoking I was weary”; and instead of a raven appearing, a mortal does—in this specific case, a sex worker. Numerous versions of this poem (under various titles) were published in subsequent decades, all of which have the same theme and much of the same specific language, though with notable variations.

However, “The Mortal” didn’t appear full-grown from the head of some anonymous dirty poet, but appears to draw on an existing tradition of parodies of “The Raven.” The earliest relevant version I’ve found is an untitled parody by Edward Cowles from 1913:

This was the obvious inspiration for a bit of verse titled “Raving”or “The Raving” from 1918:

*The St. Louis Republic*, 29 Mar 1918 (12)

*The St. Louis Republic,* 1 Apr 1918 (12)

Both of these have some distinct parallels in language and theme with the opening to “The Mortal,” especially the rhyme “[…] a wishin’ | To my room to gain admission,” which would become characteristic of “The Mortal” and subsequent poems. The repeated language points to a wider family of parodies of “The Raven” that were current in the 1910s and 20s, of which “The Mortal” and its descendants are a subset. For example, “A Big Time in Norfolk” by E.F.S. begins:

“Once upon an evening dreary, When of smoking I was weary, Got me out and—”
—The Transmitter (Mar 1921) 17

And an unsigned bit of newspaper verse from 1922:

(There is a seperate tradition of temperance poems parodying “The Raven”; see also “Your Health” (1935) by C. M. Young).

In the way different groups of kids had slightly different lyrics to “Jingle bells, Batman smells…” This collection of related verses presents an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast how a dirty poem evolved over time. Four iterations of “The Mortal” are presented here, since they all appear to be in the public domain:

The Mortal (1927)
Raven (1928)
The Raven (1933)
The Raven Maniac (1945)

Each publication formatted the poem differently, not trying to parody the full poem or all of its attributes, but invoking its rhyme scheme and specific lines and imagery. While it is tempting to try and squeeze these into a format closer to Poe’s original stanzas, the changes to the rhyme scheme and meter make that difficult. So these are mostly formatted in a way that eases direct comparison of the texts.

The Mortal (1927)

Once upon a midnight dreary,
When of smoking I was weary,
And had drunk up all my whisky
Only wishing there was more;
Suddenly there came a rapping
As of some fair female tapping
Tapping at my chamber door.
’Tis some chippy that’s a-wishin’
To my room to gain admission.
Well, I’ll rise and let her enter,
Enter though she be a whore,
Only that, and nothing more.

So I opened wide the portal,
And there stood such a mortal
As in all my living moments,
I had never seen before.
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints,
She was sure the warmest baby
Mortal woman ever bore;
And each palpitating bubby
Was so round and firm and chubby,
That my spirits rose within me,
Just my spirits, nothing more.

’Twas the fourteenth of December;
But more clearly I remember
When I woke up in the morning
Of December twenty-four—
Sequel of ten days before.
All that’s left of what passed between us
Is one poor infected penis;
Drooping, red and retrospective,
Penitent, and very sore;
And that penis still is dripping,
Every morning, every evening,
Dripping on the bathroom floor.
And I murmur vows forgotten
Every time I change the cotton.
No more tapping, no more rapping,
No, never, nevermore.

Source: Immortalia: An Anthology of American Ballads, Sailors’ Songs, Cowboy Songs, College Songs, Parodies, Limericks, and Other Humorous Verses and Doggerel (1927) 146-147

“Chippy” is late 19th-century slang for a promisculous woman or sex worker. It’s notable that the action takes place in December, which is in line with “The Raven” being set in “the bleak December,” and there is a sly working of the dates so that the sexually transmitted infection is apparently on the 24th—an unhappy Christmas present! The painful drip is largely associated with gonorrhea.

†

Raven (1928)

Once upon a Midnight dreary
When of smoking I was weary
And I’d drank my pint of whisky
And was wishing there was more.
Suddenly there came a tapping,
Sounding like a female rapping,
Rapping like the very Devil,
Just without my chamber door.
’Tis some chip thought I that’s wishing
To my room to gain admission,
Well I’ll rise and let her enter,
Even if she be a whore,
Only this and nothing more

Then I opened wide the portal,
And there stood such a mortal,
As in all my wildest fancies,
I had never seen before.
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints
She surely was the warmest baby
That woman ever bore.
And each palpitating bubby
Was so smooth and firm and chubby.
That my spirits rose within me,
As I went to close the door,
Just my spirits—nothing more.

And distinctly I remember,
’Twas the 14th of September,
’Twas the 15th when she left me,
When our little dream was o’er.
It was a dream without a sleeping,
With sad reproach and weeping,
She showed me some red spots,
Made she told me by her hymen’s gore.
Aye, the 14th of September
But more clearly I remember,
What I found upon the morning of Sept. 24.
Sequel to ten days before,

All that’s left of what passed between us,
Is one infected penis,
Drooping, sad and retrospective,
Penitent and very sore.
And that penis never skipping,
Every morning, Dripping, Dripping,
Still is dripping, still is dripping.
Dripping on the bath room floor.
And I murmur vows forgotten,
Every time I change the cotton,
No more rapping, no more tapping,
Not for Uncle—never more.

Source: The Book of a Thousand Laughs (1928) 38

This version of the poem is more explicit in what it’s parodying by a change of title, but also makes several notable changes. The scene is moved from December to September, which is probably an error, since September, November, and December all fit the rhyme scheme. The woman “showed me some red spots, Made she told me by her hymen’s gore”—but as she was a sex worker and he caught a disease, this is more likely a reference to chlamydia, a sexually transmitted infection that can cause bleeding between periods.

The last line “Not for Uncle” is likely a bit of 1930s slang where “your Uncle” was used for “myself.” So the understood meaning would be “Not for me.”

‡

The Raven (1933)

Once upon a midnight dreary
When of smoking I was weary,
And had drunk up all my whiskey,
Only wishing there was more;
Just as I was lightly napping,
Suddenly there came a rapping
As of some fair female tapping,
Tapping at my chamber door;
“Tis some chippy that’s awishin?
То my room to gain admission;
Well, I’ll rise and let her enter,
Enter tho’ she be a whore,
Only that and nothing more.

So I opened wide the portal
And there stood such a mortal
As in all my living moments
I had never seen before.
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints
She was sure the warmest baby
Mortal woman ever bore;
And each palpitating bubby
Was so round and firm and chubby
That my spirits rose within me,
Just my spirits, nothing more;
Yes, my spirits; nothing more.

Source: The Wrecks (1933) 58

This is a very truncated version, with the poetic scheme greatly simplified and the infectious epilogue to the encounter completely cut out. Which is likely a result of where it was published; the booklet being much more upbeat and cheerful, a little naughty but not filthy. Interestingly, the poem likely derives more or less directly from “The Mortal,” since the language is much closer to that than to “Raven” (1928).

⹋

The Raven Maniac (1945)

Once upon a midnight dreary,
When of smoking I was weary,
And had drank my pint of whiskey,
And was wishing there was more;
Suddenly there came a tapping,
Sounded like a female rapping,
Rapping like the very devil,
Just outside my chamber door.
’Tis some chippy that’s a’ wishing
To my room to gain admission,
Well, I’ll rise and let her enter,
Even though she be a whore,
Let her enter, nothing more.

So I opened wide the portal,
And there stood such a mortal,
That in all my wildest fancies,
I had never seen before;
She had lost her upper garments,
And of all seductive varmints,
She surely was the warmest baby,
That mortal woman ever bore;
And each palpitating bubbie,
Was so smooth, so round and chubbie,
That my spirits rose within me,
As I closed my chamber door,
Just my spirits, nothing more.

Oh! distinctly I remember,
’Twas the thirteenth of November,
’Twas the fourteenth when she left me,
When our little dream was o’er;
But more clearly I remember,
The nineteenth of November,
Six days later, and she said
The blood was just her Hymen’s gore,
Only blood, and nothing more.

All that’s left of what passed between us,
Is one poor infected penis
Drooping, sad and penitent,
And very VERY sore;
And that penis-never skipping
Still is dripping—STILL IS DRIPPING,
Morning, afternoon, and evening,
Dripping on the bathroom floor,
And I utter vows forgotten,
Every time I change the cotton,
No more rapping, no more tapping
Not for Uncle, NEVERMORE.

Source: Folk Poems and Ballads (1945) 55-56

If “The Raven” (1933) comes straight from “The Mortal,” then “The Raven Maniac” (1945) derives more or less directly from “Raven” (1928). Once again, the setting shifts (14/24 December→ 14/24 September→ 13/19 November), which is as likely to be an error as anything, but the sex worker still has her bleeding and her false claim of virginity. Aside from the dates, the most notable shift is an emphasis on certain words; one can easily imagine this one being read aloud to a raucous crowd.

⸸

One of my fondest childhood memories is The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror rendition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1990). What made the segment stand out is that the poem itself is unchanged; it isn’t a parody in the sense that words are mocked or changed, but in the way the poem’s visuals are reimagined into the particular style of animation, with some added asides. It’s an expansion of the poem in the direction of humor, while retaining its core identity with longing and obsession.

“The Mortal” and its variants are a different direction; much more focused on the easily-imitable (and easily-parodyable) external elements of the poem than it is with Poe’s message. Yet to work effectively as parodies, these poems all have to retain the essential features of Poe’s “The Raven”: an individual is alone and hears a knock upon the door, and opens to find a companion for the night. The sole reminder of that fateful encounter is painful, but at the end, the individual is still alone. In a sense, this could be seen as a moral narrative—the wages of sin—but it is also a distant, mutated echo of Poe’s sentiment.

She is gone.

The narrator is alone.

With only a painful reminder of the love they shared.

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” (1845)

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.

“Shambleau” (1933) by C. L. Moore

[…] it was a rainy afternoon in the middle of the Depression, I had nothing to do—but I really should’ve looked busy because jobs were hard to get! I didn’t want to appear that I wasn’t earning my daily keep! To take up time, I was practicing things on the typewriter to improve my speed—things like ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” That got boring, so I began to write bits of poetry I remembered from my college courses…in particular, I was quoting a poem called “The Haystack in the Flood.” […] The poem was about a woman in 13th century France who is being pursued by enemies of some kind…she was running across a field and these men were after her. I had misquoted a line in my mind, as well as on the typewriter, and referred to a “Red, running figure.” […] At the time I thought, “Ha! A red, running figure! Why is she running? Who is she running from and where is she running to? What’s going to happen to her? Strangely enough, I just swung from that line of poetry into the opening of “Shambleau.”
⁠—”Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (1976), 26

Red running lions dismally
Grinn’d from his pennon, under which,
In one straight line along the ditch,
They counted thirty heads.
—William Morris, “The Haystack in the Floods”

Then into his range of vision flashed a red running figure, dodging like a hunted hare from shelter to shelter in the narrow street. It was a girl — a berry-brown girl in a single tattered garment whose scarlet burnt the eyes with its brilliance.
—C. L. Moore, “Shambleau” in Weird Tales November 1933

Catherine Lucille Moore was was 22 years old in 1933, and engaged to be married. The Great Depression had nixed her short-lived effort to go to college, and she had gotten a job as a typist at the Fletcher Trust Company in her native Indianapolis—where her fiance also worked. In her spare time, she read pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Astounding, and Weird Tales—and began to write and submit stories to them.

“Shambleau” was the first tale of Northwest Smith to hit print; the protagonist was inspired by a depositor at her company, who signed their letters as “N. W. Smith.” (“C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner” in Science Fiction Writers 161-167), and originally was meant for an entirely different genre:

I have remotest glimmers of memory about a wild, wild Western that never went beyond the idea that there ought to be a One-Eyed Jack, (possibly of hearts) and a Northwest Smith on a ranch called the Bar-Nothing. Thence the name, but whence the character no one knows, least of all myself. When I first began to consider him as a space-ranger, I was guilty of a saga which started out,

Northwest Smith was a hard-boiled guy
With an iron fist and a roving eye—

of which the less is said the better.
—C. L. Moore, Echoes of Valor II, 37

Northwest Smith would not be quite a space cowboy, but the literary genesis makes sense. The Martian town presented is the spaceport equivalent of a little town out west, maybe up by the Canadian border or down south near Mexico—the kind of place that attracts lean, hungry operators who reach for the heat-gun on their hips as easily as a shootist might reach for the big iron on their hip. Other details of the story were more prosaic; for instance, Moore maintained that the name “Yarol” had derived from the Royal typewriter she was using to type the story (C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 10 Sep-9 Oct 1934).

The manuscript for the story ended up on the desk of Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales:

The peak was reached in 1933, when he handed me something by one C. L. Moore.

“Read this!” he commanded, the moment I stepped into the new editorial rooms at 840 North Michigan Avenue, in Chicago.

I obeyed. The story commanded my attention. There was no escape. I forgot that I needed food and drink—I’d driven a long way. […] The stranger’s narrative prevailed until, finally, I drew a deep breath, exhaled, flipped the last sheet to the back of the pack, and looked again at the by-line. Never heard of it before.

“For Christ’s sweet sake, who and what is this C. L. Moore?”

He wagged his head, gave me an I-told-you-so-grimace.

We declared C. L. Moore day. I’d met Northwest Smith, and Shambleau.
—E. Hoffmann Price, Book of the Dead 16

The story was ~11,000 words. Farnsworth Wright wrote to Moore and offered $100; a cent-per-word, payable on publication, was the average for a Weird Tales story.

[…] after I sent it off to WT, I more or less forgot about it. One day I came home from work and there was a long letter on the hall table for me. I opened it up and it said that they were going to pay me a hundred dollars. And that was like TEN THOUSAND dollars at that time. I screamed at the top of my voice! My father came charging downstairs thinking that I had been murdered or something (laughter) and nobody believed it until they read the letter. Then joy was completely unconfined—everyone was so happy about it.
⁠—”Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (1976), 27

It wasn’t her first publication, because Moore had a few things published during her brief time at college, but it was her first professional sale…but she couldn’t quit her dayjob just yet.

I used the initials “C. L.” simply because I didn’t want it to be known at the bank that I had an extra source of income. I wrote “Shambleau” in the midst of the Depression. The bank was a very paternalistic organization. If was always firing those people whose services weren’t really needed. I had the feeling they might have fired me had they known I was earning extra income. Using my initials was simply a means of obscuring my identity.
—Pulp Voices; or Science Fiction Voices #6 47

“Shambleau” saw print in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Competition in the issue was stiff: regulars and fan favorites like Edmond Hamilton, E. Hoffmann Price, Clark Ashton Smith filled the issue…yet it was “Shambleau” and C. L. Moore which garnered the most attention, the most praise. For the sixteen years that Farnsworth Wright edited Weird Tales, he kept a tally of the most popular stories of all time—and not only was “Shambleau” the most popular story of the issue—it was the most popular story of 1933, and the second-most popular story to ever run in the magazine, beating out “The Outsider” by H. P. Lovecraft (3rd place), and second only to A. Merritt’s “The Woman of the Wood” (Weird Tales Aug 1926).

It was the most impressive arrival that any writer ever had at Weird Tales…and it’s easy to see why.

Shambleau! Vaguely of French origin, it must be. And strange enough to hear it from the lips of Venusians and Martian drylanders, but it was their use of it that puzzled him more. “We never let those things live,” the ex-Patrolman had said. It reminded him dimly of something … an ancient line from some writing in his own tongue . . . “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” He smiled to himself at the similarity, and simultaneously was aware of the girl at his elbow.
—C. L. Moore, “Shambleau” in Weird Tales November 1933

The world is rich, lived-in, and perhaps a little like the Martian stories that Clark Ashton Smith had begun to write, such as “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (Weird Tales May 1932) and “The Dweller in the Gulf” (Wonder Stories March 1933). Aliens, Medusa, and Mars were all familiar to readers of weird fiction in the 1930s, and even the tentacle’d horror was no stranger to Weird Tales, though rarely in so sexually suggestive a manner; Robert E. Howard had beaten her to the punch with “The Slithering Shadow” (Weird Tales September 1933) just a couple months before, but both offered the readers suggestions of new and thrilling sins:

A dark tentacle-like member slid about her body, and she screamed at the touch of it on her naked flesh. It was neither warm nor cold, rough nor smooth; it was like nothing that had ever touched her before, and at its caress she knew such fear and shame as she had never dreamed of. All the obscenity and salacious infamy spawned in the muck of the abysmal pits of Life seemed to down her in seas of cosmic filth.
—Robert E. Howard, “The Slithering Shadow” in Weird Tales September 1933

And something . . . some nameless, unthinkable thing . . . was coiled about his throat . . . something like a soft snake, wet and warm. It lay loose and light about his neck . . . and it was moving gently, very gently, with a soft, caressive pressure that sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of him, a perilous delight—beyond physical pleasure, deeper than joy of the mind. That warm softness was caressing the very roots of his soul with a terrible intimacy. The ecstasy of it left him weak, and yet he knew—in a flash of knowledge born of this impossible dream—that the soul should not be handled. . . . And with that knowledge a horror broke upon him, turning the pleasure into a rapture of revulsion, hateful, horrible—but still most foully sweet.
—C. L. Moore, “Shambleau” in Weird Tales November 1933

There were few hard lines between science fiction and fantasy in the 1930s, and C. L. Moore didn’t give a damn for any such distinctions; her Northwest Smith stories often involve encounters with alien gods, sorcerers, and other supernatural elements. Her characters are often driven to terrible experiences that tax and imperil the mind and spirit as much the physical body, seek to describe such states of mingled ecstasy in horror with fantastic, poetic language. In one letter she wrote:

I know now why my fiance looked at me in that peculiar way after he’d read “Shambleau”—the first and only one of my stories he was ever persuaded to read. I know now what he was thinking. What kind of a person is this who can think of such things?
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 12 Nov 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 73

H. P. Lovecraft read the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales, and his initial reaction to the story was modest:

There is a germ of originality, despite much commonplaceness, in “Shambleau” […]
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, Nov 1933, Essential Solitude 2.613

The argument over “commonplaceness” probably has much to do with the general setting with its humanoid aliens and inhabitable planets; Lovecraft’s essay “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” poo-pooed many of the tropes of Space Opera and Sword & Planet fiction which feature in “Shambleau.” However, to the editor of Weird Tales he offered effusive praise:

Shambleau is great stuff, too. It begins magnificently, on just the right note of terror, and with black intimations of the unknown. The subtle evil of the Entity, as suggested by the unexplained horror of the people, is extremely powerful—and the description of the Thing itself when unmasked is no letdown. Like “The House of the Worm”, it has real atmosphere and tension—rare thing amidst the pulp traditions of brisk, cheerful, staccato prose and lifeless stock characters and images. The one major fault is the conventional interplanetary setting. That weakens and dilutes the effect of both by introducing a parallel or rival wonder and by removing it from reality. Of course a very remote setting had to be chosen for so unknown marvel—but some place like India, Africa, or the Amazon jungle might have been used…with the horror made more local. I trust your revisions may make Mrs. Moore’s second story as striking and interesting as this one.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, 21 Nov 1933, Lovecraft Annual 8.38-39

Wright published an excerpt from this letter in the Jan 1934 issue of Weird Tales, along with other praise for “Shambleau.” The editor of Weird Tales wrote to Moore requesting more of her work. By March 1934, she had sold two more stories (“Black Thirst” and “Scarlet Dream”) to Wright, and she had gotten in touch with her first fan—Robert H. Barlow. (C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 8 Mar 1934)

Barlow was a friend and correspondent of Weird Tales writer H. P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price, and in the early 1930s had begun writing to authors like Robert E. Howard requesting copies of the manuscripts for their stories. Boldly, he asked her for the draft of “Shambleau,” but Moore told him the draft had been destroyed. (C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 28 Mar 1934) Instead, she sent him a drawing she had made of Shambleau:

Lovecraft commented on this as well:

Yes—C. L. Moore is certainly the most powerful & genuinely weird new writer secured by W.T. in many years. She is indeed of the feminine gender, the C. standing for Catherine. It is her wish, however, not to have this widely known—since she hopes to conceal the fact of her writing from her regular employers. She has a secretarial job with some corporation in Indianapolis, & fears she will be fired if it is known that she has another source of income. Miss Moore is also an artist of ability—last month she sent Barlow a drawing of Shambleau which displays phenomenal power.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Duane W. Rimel, 17 June 1934, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, etc. 184-185

As to Miss Moore’s drawings—“Shambleau” is extremely well done, though not as subtly horrible & richly potent as Howard Wandrei would have made it. It is pen & ink, & so far as I know all her other drawings are. She most certainly has great & enviable talents.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Duane W. Rimel, 23 July 1934, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, etc. 195

Ar E’ch Bei shewed me the “Shambleau” sketch, which certainly displays vast cleverness even if it lacks the indefinable menace & cosmic remoteness that you or Howard Wandrei would put into it. As a writer, Miss Moore is certainly the discovery of the last few years. No other newcomers is even in the running.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 30 Sep 1934, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 571-572

Lovecraft’s admiration was by all accounts sincere, and he held “Shambleau” among the best stories Moore had written until the end of his life. In time they would collaborate on the round-robin “The Challenge From Beyond” (1935), and they would correspond briefly (see Her Letters To Lovecraft: Catherine Lucille Moore). He would comfort her after the death of her fiance in 1936, and introduce her to her future husband Henry Kuttner; she would inform him of the death of Robert E. Howard, create the Sword & Sorcery character Jirel of Joiry, inspire Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947), and go on to a writing career that would last decades…and all, perhaps, because of this story, “Shambleau” and its singular reception.

It is interesting to compare this tale with Lovecraft’s revision “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) by Zealia Bishop. “Medusa’s Coil” is often considered one of Lovecraft’s worst stories and “Shambleau” one of Moore’s best, so a comparison of the prose tells us little, but it’s interesting to see how develops their themes. Neither story makes any effort to lift straight from the the ancient Greek myth, except by visual inspiration: a woman with deadly hair. This sets these tales apart from stories like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Gorgon” (Weird Tales Apr 1932). Both Lovecraft and Moore explore what makes these women dangerous, and yet attractive. They suffer prejudice, for different reasons, and we get only limited hints of the female characters’ viewpoints because the perspective comes from men…and mostly their victims relay what little we know of their words and character.

Like Lovecraft’s, Moore’s story is not a moral tale in any strict sense. Northwest Smith’s action in saving the persecuted Shambleau was heroic; his efforts to care for her without taking advantage of the situation sexually is, if not commendable, at least shows Smith as not the worst of criminals…but the purpose of the story is not to show that Smith should have let the mob have the alien woman, though some readers may take that away from the ending. The “no good deed goes unpunished” interpretation of the narrative is a rather weak “I told you so,” and it doesn’t stop Smith from getting into other troublesome situations in later stories. Likewise, the “transgression” of marrying Marceline Bedard is not the focus of “Medusa’s Coil”—it’s just how the Medusa-character is brought into the story.

The difference is, at the end of “Medusa’s Coil,” nobody is alive to marry the Medusa-character again. The act cannot be repeated. With “Shambleau,” the horror is not Shambleau’s alien appendages or strange appetites, but the addiction to her terrible feeding. What Northwest Smith knows and fears is that he has become a junkie, and if the opportunity comes again—he might embrace it. That is rare territory for a weird tale, especially with the feeding so explicitly pseudo-sexual in nature—and shows something of the different approach both brought to their respective works. With Lovecraft, the horror rises from the grave, but with Moore, it might dash through the next Martian alley, a red, running figure…and Northwest Smith unable to stop himself as it plays out again.

C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau” can be read for free online here.

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

“The Horror in the Museum” (1933) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft

I’ve just ghost-written a tale for a client in a fashion amounting virtually to original composition—about a waxwork museum or chamber of horrors where there is a rumour that not all of the fabulous monsters displayed are artificial. I’ve included Tsathoggua among the blasphemies.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 28 Oct 1932, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 394

After the successful sale of “The Man of Stone” (1932), Hazel Heald and H. P. Lovecraft pursued further “revisions”—which, as with his client Zealia Bishop, critics and biographers assume amounted to Lovecraft writing the story based on an idea or synopsis provided by Heald. This is certainly the case as far as Lovecraft was willing to discuss it in his letters:

Yes—the waxwork museum story is mostly my own; entirely so in wording, & also so far as concerns the background of Alaskan archaeology & antique horror. You will find Tsathoggua mentioned.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 14 Jun 1933, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 420

The Horror in the Museum—a piece which I “ghost-wrote” for a client from a synopsis so poor that I well-nigh discarded it—is virtually my own work. Glad you found it entertaining. There will be two more Heald tales equally dependent on my pen.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 28 Jul 1933, Selected Letters 4.229

There is not much to gainsay this. Other pulpsters of the period noted Lovecraft’s style without needing to be told. Heald herself does not comment on the writing of the story in any surviving letter, but she did note in a much later letter to August Derleth:

He was a severe critic but I knew that if I finally suited him in my work that the editor would usually accept it. For example— I had to rewrite “Out of the Eons” six times before he was completely satisfied!
—Hazel Heald to August Derleth, 25 Mar 1937

This would appear to jive with a comment on collaboration or revision work that Lovecraft made to another correspondent:

These alleged authors are pretty easy to handle—discard their dope little by little & substitute your own, & in the end they not only swallow it but honestly believe they wrote it themselves! Thus some of my revision clients congratulate themselves when the readers of Weird Tales praise stories (like “The Last Test”, “The Curse of Yig”, “The Horror in the Museum”, “Winged Death”, &c.) that I wrote.
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 28 Mar 1934, Letters to James F. Morton 350

So the possibility remains that the revision process for this story could have been a bit more involved than Lovecraft simply writing the tale from scratch based on a mostly-discarded synopsis. Presumably, the business arrangement was identical to that of Lovecraft’s other client: Heald would have paid a fixed sum for the work, and then tried to sell it to the pulp magazines for whatever she could get. None of their correspondence survives to give greater insight into this aspect of their dealings or the composition of their stories.

The idea of a waxwork museum and its chamber of horrors goes back to the 19th century, with Madame Toussads in London being the archetype and inspiration for a number of other such galleries, and the horror stories and comics eventually created in tribute to them. It is notable that the same year “The Horror in the Museum” was released, the horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933, once thought lost), hit theaters. Lovecraft recalled:

Haven’t done much cinema-viewing, but I did drop in to see that “Wax Museum” thing—especially since I had revised (in fact, virtually ghost-written) a tale on a similar theme for a client. (you’ll see it in the current W.T.) As a story, the film was of course childishly cheap—but it did have some effective horror-touches—especially when the mask falls off & reveals the monstrosity beneath.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 13 Jul 1933, O Fortunate Floridian! 67

This puts the Heald/Lovecraft story in a small but distinct media-spanning horror tradition, one which includes the 1953 and 2005 House of Wax films, Terror in the Wax Museum (1973), and “Vandoom, The Man Who Made A Creature” (Tales to Astonish #17, 1961, by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Dick Ayers), as well as pulp stories such as Robert Bloch’s “Waxworks” (1939). The wax museum with its simulacra and tradition of a chamber of horrors offers a ready-made setting for a number of simple plots, perhaps the simplest and most realistic of which involves actual human remains incorporated into one or more of the figures—an idea with its parallels in real life—and thematically linked to “Pickman’s Model,” where the horrors are taken from life.

But this is an H. P. Lovecraft story, and that rather simple premise served as the bare beginnings for yet another tale of cosmic horror. As with “The Mound,” the opportunity was presented to add a major chapter to the nascent Mythos, trying together not only some of Lovecraft’s fiction; writers such as August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard all noted their own creations (the Tcho-Tcho, Book of Eibon, and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, respectively) mentioned, and it introduced a new entity, Rhan-Tegoth, who would go on to feature in stories by later writers.

What did Hazel Heald make of it? We don’t have her account, although the fact that it sold (and that she didn’t have to sue Weird Tales to get the money) must have been gratifying. So too, the readers of Weird Tales were enthusiastic; one wrote:

A Bouquet for Mrs. Heald

Bernard J. Kenton, of Cleveland, writes: “How can any discriminating reader find merit in other fantasy magazines when Weird Tales adds a new Poe to its columns every month or so? Of the recent writers, Hazel Heald strikes my fancy most, for whenever did anything so strikingly horrible as ‘The Horror in the Museum’ appear in print? Even Lovecraft—as powerful and artistic as he is with macabre suggestiveness—could hardly, I suspect, have surpassed the grotesque scene in which the other-dimensional shambler leaps out upon the hero.
—Weird Tales “The Eyrie” May 1934

The response which most sticks out, however, was another entry in ‘The Eyrie’:

“H. P. Lovecraft’s tale of witchcraft and the elder gods, The Dreams in the Witch-House, was superb; while not far behind was Hazel Heald’s The Horror in the Museum—a particularly exceptional tale for a woman to write, in that she built up the horror sequence as few women writers have ever been capable of doing.
—Weird Tales “The Eyrie” Sep 1933

Weird Tales was perhaps better than other science fiction and fantasy pulps of its day with regards to women writers (such as Greye La Spina and C. L. Moore), poets (including Alice I’Anson and Grace Stillman), fans (notably Gertrude Hemcken and a young Margaret St. Clair), and artists (Margaret Brundage being a particular favorite), but a degree of sexism still existed in the pages of the magazine. To us today, with women authors like Joyce Carol Oates and Nancy Collins, who grew up reading Shirley Jackson and Alice B. Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) it seems strange to imagine “few women” capable of writing a horror sequence. Even in the 1930s, readers of horror would probably have recognized Lady Cynthia Asquith and Edith Nesbit.

So, an odd comment. Perhaps Heald reconciled herself with the satisfaction that the story was popular enough to be reprinted in the “Not at Night” anthology Terror by Night (1934), and again in the Not at Night Omnibus (1937). If she was wise enough to only sell Weird Tales first American serial rights, these reprints may even have netted her some profit—although there is evidence in Lovecraft’s letters that, like Zealia Bishop, Heald had fallen behind on paying for revision services and ended up typing “The Thing on the Doorstep” for Lovecraft in lieu of part of the debt.

Whatever the exact nature of their business arrangements, they were apparently satisfactory enough that three more “revisions” would issue from Lovecraft’s pen, under Hazel Heald’s name.

“The Horror in the Museum” may be read for free online here.

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