“The Passionate Fantasophile” (1979) by Janice Arter & “To the Shade of HPL” (1981) by Margaret Carter

Dr. Jeanne Keyes Youngson founded the Count Dracula Fan Club in 1965 after a trip to Romania; this was before the publication of McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972), but after the first full biography of Stoker, Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Bram Stoker: Creator of Dracula (1962). It was the beginning of a serious opening-up of Dracula scholarship, serious scholarship that had fans and researchers scouring archives, uncovering Stoker’s original notes and manuscript, critically annotating and comparing different editions of the text. The work was international, and the fan club contained both enthusiastic vampire fiction fans and literary historians, and it published official journals and other publications.

In 1985, the Count Dracula Fan Club published an annual, a special Lovecraft-themed collectors issue. The highlight of the issue might be Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s brief article “The Revision of Dracula”—the first real address of the Lovecraft/Miniter Dracula revision anecdote from the Lovecraftian scholar’s point of view. However, it was full of more than that, including two neat little Mythos poems by women authors, “The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter and “To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter

Published for the first time in The Further Perils of Dracula (1979), a Count Dracula Fan Club poetry anthology, Arter’s 18-line poem is a lyric poem, opening with the invitation “Come live with me and drink my blood,” and working through a list of familiar activites, including:

Come live with me and we shall learn
The power to make the oceans burn,
The secrets of the Scroll of Thoth,
The chant to summon Yog-Sothoth,
And we shall be as one.

This is a poem for lovers in multiple senses of the term. It is a very romantic invitation, of one horror fan to another, inviting activities that would be horroric to anyone except another horror fan. By the 70s, Lovecraft’s Mythos was being woven into the pantheon of familiar horrors, and Yog-Sothoth could comfortably rub shoulders next to vampires and witches. It is the kind of opening-of-the-heart that would only really work from one true horror fan to another, someone who will both get the references and the appeal of going to the Sabbath or dwelling in unimagined space with someone else who gets it.

“To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter

Published for the first time in Daymares from the Crypt (1981), a chapbook collection of Carter’s poetry, and was re-released in an ebook of the same-name in 2012. Carter’s verse takes the form of an ode in 12 lines, a tribute to Lovecraft and the Mythos he had spawned, which Carter herself had contributed to over the years, and would continue to do so in the years to come. Some of the imagery is in the same vein as Arter’s poem, emphasizing the Mythos experience and aesthetic:

The hand that traced those tales of nameless lore
Never lent its grave-chilled touch to me—
Yet I have groped my way down Arkham’s hills
To watch the rites of Innsmouth by the sea.

The difference is, Carter isn’t just evoking Lovecraft’s Mythos, but Lovecraft himself. The Old Gent had already become a part of his own Mythos, his growing legend entwined with the stories he had written, and the artificial mythology being slowly expanded by fans and pros alike. Carter isn’t directly inviting the reader to participate in nameless rites or to dance with ghouls, but is expressing her own experience of doing so, made possible only by H. P. Lovecraft.

While both of these poems are fairly minor in the grand scheme of fantasy and horror literature, they are examples of the growing acceptance of Lovecraft and the Mythos in the 1980s, even in Dracula fandom, which was only tangential to Lovecraft.


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

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“The Ballad of Conan” (1983) by Anne Braude

Tune: “When I Was A Lad” (H. M. S. Pinafore)
—Anne Braude, “The Ballad of Conan” in Niekas #31 (1983), 41

The first fandom of Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria arose in the 1930s, when the adventures of the barbarian were published in the pages of Weird Tales. Some fans, including R. H. Barlow, Emil Petaja, Charles B. Hornig, Alvin Earl Perry, and P. Schuyller Miller wrote to Howard—and the Texas pulpster wrote back, answering questions, sometimes gifting manuscripts of his stories, subscribing to fan publications like The Fantasy Fan, and providing unpublished stories and poetry for fanzines like The Phantagraph to publish as well.

This early interaction with fandom endeared Howard to his fans, and helped provide the basis for the first fan-publications, like Miller & Clark’s “A Probable Outline of Conan’s Career” in The Hyborian Age (1938), a one-shot zine published after Howard’s death by eager fans and containing Howard’s worldbuilding-essay of the same name. However, early desires to publish a collection of Howard’s Conan stories came to naught in the 30s; while the Texan had fans, he lacked anyone with the entrepreneurial spirit to start their own publishing business like August Derleth and Donald Wandrei did when they established Arkham House in 1939 to print the work of H. P. Lovecraft, who died the year after Howard passed away.

Following Howard’s death in 1936, his works passed to his father, Dr. I. M. Howard, who survived his son; Dr. Howard largely entrusted his son’s literary legacy to his agents, the Otis Adelbert Kline Agency, and several previously unpublished works appeared in the pages of Weird Tales, which continued to pay Dr. Howard the monies they owed his son. Still, within a few years publications dwindled, and no new Conan material was forthcoming in the 1930s. One by one, the first caretakers of Howard’s legacy passed: Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, died in 1940; Dr. Howard joined his wife and son in 1944; Otis Adelbert Kline passed away in 1946. Dr. Howard willed the rights to his son’s material to his friends the Kuykendalls, and Kline’s agency was taken up by his associated Oscar Friend. Slowly, new published opportunities emerged.

In 1946, Arkham House published the collection Skull-Face and Others, and in 1950 Gnome Press published Conan the Conqueror, the first in a series of Conan titles. These collections in hardcovers weren’t just found new fans—and a more organized fandom. The first fanzine devoted to Howard’s creation was Amra, which began publication in 1956, and fan Glenn Lord got the ball rolling on Howard scholarship with The Howard Collector, founded in 1961. In the late 1960s and 70s, paperback reprints of these books exploded in popularity, part of the rise in paperback fantasy that included the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series that began in 1969.

In 1970, Marvel Comics published the first Conan the Barbarian comic, adapting and expanding his adventures into a new medium. The series and its sister magazine title Savage Sword of Conan would run for decades, drawing comic fans to read the stories as much as they drew fans of Howard’s fiction to buy the comics. In 1982 when the film Conan the Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role appeared on screens, it was swiftly followed by a tie-in comic from Marvel’s Conan creative team.

All of this increased fan activity, such as the Hyborian Legion and the Robert E. Howard United Press Association (founded in 1972). Conan was no longer an obscure hero from the pages of Weird Tales; the Cimmerian had become a staple of science fiction and fantasy, an archetype of barbarians, fighters, and rogues, a multi-media figure well-known and established in fandom—and the serious critical study of Robert E. Howard’s life and fiction were picking up, echoing the scholarly interest that Lovecraft had attracted a decade earlier.

Which is where things stood when fan Anne Braude wrote the jocular (but largely accurate) “Ballad of Conan” for the Conan-heavy issue of the fanzine Niekas in 1983. Drawing on the canonical Conan tales then widely available in paperback, rather than the comics adventures or the recent film. Unlike “I Remember Conan” (1960) by Grace A. Warren, this is tongue very much in cheek, showing someone familiar with the material but decidedly irreverent. All in good fun.


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 Message of Thuba Mleen” (1911) by Aleister Crowley

“Was it because of the Desert’s curse?” I asked. And he said, “Partly it was the fury of the Desert and partly the advice of the Emperor Thuba Mleen, for that fearful beast is in some way connected with the Desert on his mother’s side.”
—Lord Dunsany, “The Hashish-Man” in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910)

To properly review “The Message of Thuba Mleen” (1911) by Aleister Crowley requires a little background on Crowley’s relationship with the Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraft’s references to Crowley in his letters. Since this background is a bit long with numerous quotes, some handy links are provided above to help readers navigate to whichever section they want to go to.

Crowley & Cthulhu

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) never met H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) in life. Crowley was an English occultist, writer, poet, and artist who became notorious both for personal life and his mystical philosophy, which coalesced into the development of Thelema in the early 20th century. After his death, his systems of ceremonial magic and philosophy were developed by various successors and fed into the growing interest during the post-WWII spiritual awakening. Notably, his secretary Kenneth Grant worked to expand and integrate Crowley’s system of “magick” with other esoteric practices and even fictional material from writers like H. P. Lovecraft.

Although Lovecraft seems to have been unacquainted with Crowley’s work, it is evident that both were in touch with a source of power, ‘a prater-human intelligence’, capable of inspiring very real apprehension in the minds of those who were, either through past affiliation or present inclination, on the same wavelength. Whether this Intelligence is called Alhazred or Aiwaz (both names, strangely enough, evoking Arab associations) we are surely dealing with a power that is seeking ingress into the present life cycle of the planet.
— Kenneth Grant, “Dreaming Out of Space” in Man, Myth, and Magic (1970), vol. 23, 3215

Grant wasn’t the first to draw associations between weird fiction and magic; Le Matin des magicians (1960) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier referenced the perceived connection between Arthur Machen’s fiction and his membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (an occult organization of which Crowley was also a member). However, Grant did more than draw parallels; in his writing, he directly associated his understanding of Lovecraft’s Mythos into his exegesis of Crowley’s magick.

Fiction, as a vehicle, has often been used by occultists. Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni and A Strange Story have set many a person on the ultimate Quest. Ideas not acceptable to the everyday mind, limited by prejudice and spoiled by a “bread-winning” education, can be made to slip past the censor, and by means of the novel, the poem, the short story be effectually planted in soil that would otherwise reject or destroy them.

Writers such as Arthur Machen, Brodie Innes, Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft are in this category. Their novels and stories contain some remarkable affinities with those aspects of Crowley’s Cult deal with in the present chapter, i.e. themes of resurgent atavisms that lure people to destruction. Whether it be the Vision of Pan, as in the case of Machen and Dunsany, or the even more sinister traffic with denizens of forbidden dimensions, as in the tales of Lovecraft, the reader is plunged into a world of barbarous names and incomprehensible signs. Lovecraft was unacquainted both with the name and the work of Crowley, yet some of his fantasies reflect, however, distortedly, the salient themes of Crowley’s Cult. The following comparative table will show how close they are:
— Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (1972), 114

Grant then followed with a table of correspondences he perceived between Crowley and Lovecraft. A similar, though distinct, table was also included in the Necronomicon (1977) written by “Simon.” This was the first commercial hoax Necronomicon which was also explicitly a grimoire, something that was intended to mimic other collections of ceremonial magic rites, sigils, lore, etc. intended for use by practicing occultists. The introduction by “Simon” leaned heavily on the supposed correspondences between Lovecraft’s Mythos and Crowley’s magick.

We can profitably compare the essence of most of Lovecraft’s short stories with the basic themes of Crowley’s unique system of ceremonial Magick. While the latter was a sophisticated psychological structure, intended to bring the initiate into contact with his higher Self, via a process of individuation that is active and dynamic (being brought about by the “patient” himself) as opposed to the passive depth analysis of the Jungian adepts. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos was meant for entertainment. Scholars, of course, are able to find higher, ulterior motives in Lovecraft’s writings, as can be done with any manifestation of Art.
— “Simon” (Peter Levenda), Necronomicon (1977) xii

The ceremonial magic presented in the Simon Necronomicon was distinct from that in Grant’s system derived from Crowley; though they shared some common references in Lovecraft and Crowley’s respective mythos & magick. This unexpected complexity invited comparison, and sometimes fusion. From a metafictional perspective, it became the beginning of a parallel body of literature alongside the growing body of Cthulhu Mythos fiction: a Lovecraftian occult scene. One that started to flower when another Necronomicon, edited by George Hay, was published in 1978:

I had also been reading the works of Aleister Crowley—collected by my friend Roger Staples of Michigan University—and found the parallels so striking that I owndered if Lovecraft and Crowley had been acquainted.

Derleth was positive that they had never met—in fact, he doubted whether Lovecraft had ever heard of ‘the Great Beast’. If he had, Derleth seemed to think, he would have dismissed him as a charlatan and a poseur.
— Colin Wilson, “Introduction,” The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names (1978), 14

Wilson refers to a meeting with Derleth in 1967; later in the same introduction, he cites Grant’s merging of Lovecraftian Mythos with Crowleyian magick. The introduction was written with all the care of a good hoax; starting from a basis of facts and gradually weaving in fictional elements, to build up to the idea that Lovecraft’s Necronomicon wasn’t just a fictional book, but had been based on a genuine occult document from the Middle East—which is what the Hay Necronomicon was presented as.

So as the 1980s dawned and the Simon Necronomicon became available in an affordable paperback edition to grace New Age shelves forevermore, would-be Lovecraftian occultists had at least three separate sources to draw upon. All of them tried to tie H. P. Lovecraft to Aleister Crowley. The two men, who had never met in life, found elements of their legends entwined posthumously.

With the advent of the internet, it became easier for misinformation to spread. Colin Law’s Necronomicon Anti-FAQ (1995) was, like Wilson’s introduction, just a bit of fun—but it fostered certain misconceptions about Crowley and Lovecraft, despite repeated debunkings:

In 1918 Crowley was in New York. As always, he was trying to establish his literary reputation, and was contributing to The International and Vanity Fair. Sonia Greene was an energetic and ambitious Jewish emigre with literary ambitions, and she had joined a dinner and lecture club called “Walker’s Sunrise Club” (?!); it was there that she first encountered Crowley, who had been invited to give a talk on modern poetry. […]

In 1918 she was thirty-five years old and a divorcee with an adolescent daughter. Crowley did not waste time as far as women were concerned; they met on an irregular basis for some months.

In 1921 Sonia Greene met the novelist H.P. Lovecraft, and in that same year Lovecraft published the first novel where he mentions Abdul Alhazred (“The Nameless City”). In 1922 he first mention the Necronomicon (“The Hound”). On March 3rd. 1924, H.P. Lovecraft and Sonia Greene married.

We do not know what Crowley told Sonia Greene, and we do not know what Sonia told Lovecraft. 

Edwin C. Walker (1849-1931) was a radical liberal who founded the Sunrise Club in 1889; this interracial club held dinner meetings at which speakers were invited to discuss on a wide range of topics. According to L. Sprague de Camp’s H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), Sonia joined the club c. 1917 (160-161); and there is a reference to Sonia’s membership in one of Lovecraft’s letters (LFF 1.83). I have yet to find any reference to Crowley addressing or attending the club. Given he lived in the United States from 1914-1919 and was often living in New York City at the time, it is possible, if not necessarily plausible that he could have attended some evening.

There is no reference to Crowley in any of Sonia’s surviving letters, essays, or autobiography; no mention of grimoires or the Necronomicon. The idea that Lovecraft got the idea of the Necronomicon from Crowley by way of Sonia is unsupported by any evidence and relies on the idea that the Necronomicon bears some similarity to Crowley’s The Book of the Law—the same supposition pushed by Grant and Simon, among others. It is rather telling that nothing in Crowley’s own writings supports his meeting with Sonia either, and that all references to the idea of their meeting ultimately derive from Low. For more on this and other Necronomicon-related hoaxes and occult history, see The Necronomicon Files by Daniel Harms & John W. Gonce III.

It’s easy to go on, although facts and fiction get furiously muddled. Despite Grant’s assertion that Lovecraft had never heard of Crowley and Derleth’s assertion (as related by Wilson) that Lovecraft may not have heard of Crowley and certainly never met him, fictional meetings between the writer of the weird and the prophet of Thelema have increasingly featured in books and comics, one notable example being The Arcanum (2007) by Thomas Wheeler. Yet my favorite hypothetical meeting is a 1927 chess game between Aleister Crowley and Wilbur Whateley:

If Derleth did tell Colin Wilson that he doubted Lovecraft had ever heard of Crowley and this wasn’t another part of the hoax, then he was badly mistaken and should’ve known better. Lovecraft’s letters give considerable detail on his thoughts regarding Aleister Crowley.

H. P. Lovecraft on Aleister Crowley

The Crowley cutting is interesting. What has the poor devil-worshipper been up to now? When I was in Leominster (near Athol) with Cook & Munn last month, calling on a bookseller, I saw a copy of a book by Crowley—“The Diary of a Drug-Fiend.” The merchant informed me that it has been suppressed by some branch of the powers that be—though he agreed to part with his copy for three thalers. I did not take him up—but I told Belknap about the offer.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, [8 Jun 1929], LWT 114

In 1929, French authorities deported Crowley, which led to sensationl articles (Why France Finally Kicked Out the High Priest of the Devil Cult), and a similar cutting was no doubt passed to Lovecraft. From this first reference in Lovecraft’s letters, it isn’t clear when exactly the Old Gent from Providence became aware of Aleister Crowley, but the suggestion seems to be that Lovecraft was at least passingly familiar with the magus by the late 1920s, probably from similar newspaper clippings. From Lovecraft’s comments, his friend Frank Belknap Long, Jr. had an interest in Crowley…a greater interest than Lovecraft himself had:

Aleister Crowley still keeps in the news! Don’t take any especial trouble to send the clipping unless you find it lying around, for my interest in the gent is perhaps less intense than Belknap’s.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, [7 Jul 1929], LWT 116

In 1930, Percy Reginald Stephensen’s The Legend of Aleister Crowley: Being a Study of the Documentary Evidence Relating to a Campaign of Personal Vilification Unparalleled in Literary History was published, ostensibly to ameliorate Crowley’s reputation. Lovecraft apparently caught a few reviews:

And speaking of your precious files—have you seen reviews of the new book about that suave diabolist Aleister Crowley? Belknap sent me a cutting from the Tribune. The biographer—abetted by the reviewer—(Hebert S. Gorman, who claims to have dined with Crowley) tries to depict the reputed ally of Satan as a much-wronged and basically blameless poet—whose eccentricities are merely the harmless foibles of genius!
–H. P. Lovecraft to Wilfred B. Talman, [Sep 1930], LWT 133-134

Years passed. Crowley’s infamy was such that he served as the basis for several fictional magicians, most notably the character of Oliver Haddo in Somerset Maugham’s The Magician (1908); the black magician Oscar Clinton in H. R. Wakefield’s “He Cometh and He Passeth By” (1928) (and later, Apuleius Charlton in “The Black Solitude” (1951)); and, though Lovecraft never lived to see it, Rowley Thorne in the stories fellow Weird Tales writer Manly Wade Wellman, in one such story, “The Letters of Cold Fire” (WT May 1944), Thorne attempts to obtain a copy of the Necronomicon!

Lovecraft had not read Maguham’s novel, but was aware of its association with Crowley:

I’ve never seen the Ramuz & Maugham items. Poor old Crowley figures more than once in fiction—for I believe it is her upon whom the villain in Wakefield’s “He Cometh & He Passeth By” is modelled.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 22 Mar 1932, LHB 42

“Ramuz” may be a reference to C. F. Ramuz La Regne de l’esprit Malin (1917) tr. by James Whitall as The Reign of the Evil One (1922). The novel seems to draw no direct inspiration from Crowley, being about a stranger (who might be the devil himself) who comes to a small Swiss town and turns it into hell.

Lovecraft did read Wakefield, however, and was appreciative.

Wakefield’s stuff is generally very good, & I’m glad you’ve had an opportunity to read it. Of the tales in the first book my favourites are “He Cometh & He Passeth By” (the villain in which is a sort of caricature of the well-known living mystic & alleged Satanist Aleister Crowley), “The Red Lodge”, “The 17th Hole at Duncaster[“], & “And He Shall Sing”.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, [22 Jul 1933], LRBO 62

Glad to see the item about Crowley. What a queer duck! He is the original of Clinton in Wakefield’s “They Return at Evening.”
– H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [14 Dec 1933], DS 507

Wakefield is pretty good—I’ll enclose “They Return at Evening” as a loan in the coming shipment. You’l probably find at least four of the tales especially absorbing—“The Red Lodge”, “He Cometh & He Passeth By” based on Aleister Crowley), “And He Shall Sing”, & “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster.”
–H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [Jan 1934], DS 515

Clark Ashton Smith, when he read the “He Cometh and He Passeth By,” gave his own opinion to Lovecraft:

I read one of the Wakefield stories last night—“He Cometh and he passeth by—” and found it excellent, especially in the suggestion of the diabolic Shadow. Crowley is surely a picturesque character, to have inspired anything like Clinton! I know little about Crowley myself, but wouldn’t be surprised if many of the more baleful elements in his reputation were akin to those in the Baudelaire legend . . .  that is to say, largely self-manufactured or foisted upon him by the credulous bourgeoisie.
– Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, [Jan 1934], DS 520

Lovecraft’s reply reveals something new—an acquaintances of his had actually met Crowley:

As for Aleister Crowley—I rather thought at first that his evil reputation was exaggerated, but Belknap says that Harré has met him & has found him indescribably loathsome in mind, emotions, & conduct. This from Harré is quite a damning indictment, for Belkanp tells me that T. Everett himself is far from squeamish or fastidious in his language & anecdotes when amidst the sort of company that dissolves inhibitions. But Crowley was too much for him. He didn’t relate particulars—but said that the evil magus made him so nauseated that he left abruptly. I guess Crowley is about as callous, unclean-minded, & degenerate a bounder as one can often find at large—though he undoubtedly has talents & scholarship of a very high order. It seems to me I heard that he is in New York now—London won’t stand him any longer. And this reminds me that I forgot to return that old cutting of yours which mentions him—permit me to repair the omission now.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [11 Feb 1934], DS 525

In 1933-1934, Crowley appears to have primarily been in London, dealing with a libel suit (which he lost). I have not discovered anything to suggest he went to New York at this time. However, Harré’s papers contain a folder associated with Aleister Crowley, so they may well have met or interacted at some point. It is also known that Harré and Crowley were published together in The International in 1915, so possibly the meeting occurred over a decade and a half earlier, when Crowley was in New York, and Lovecraft misunderstood.

Smith responded:

Judging from Harré’s reactions, it would appear that Aleister Crowley is a pretty hard specimen. I had discounted the legends on general principles, knowing nothing whatever about the mysterious magus.
–Clark Ashton Smith to H. P. Lovecraft, [Mar 1934], DS 536

At this point, Crowley became a reference point for diabolists and occultists of all stripes.

The case of the Boer lady—Mevrouw van de Riet—certainly offers dark food for the imagination. She seems to be a sort of female Aleister Crowley—or a striga, lamia, empusa, or something of the sort.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [18 Nov 1933], DS 479

The subject would next come up when Lovecraft began corresponding with the young fan Emil Petaja in 1935, when the subject turned toward the Black Mass, Satanism, and the occult. Lovecraft was an atheist and materialist, but he had read something of the occult for research purposes over the years, and picked up other tidbits:

In the 1890’s the fashionable decadents liked to pretend that they belonged to all sorts of diabolic Black Mass cults, & possessed all sorts of frightful occult information. The only specimen of this group still active is the rather over-advertised Aleister Crowley . . . . who, by the way, is undoubtedly the original of the villainous character to H. R. Wakefield’s “He Cometh & He Passeth By.”
–H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 6 Mar 1935, LWP 414

Petaja apparently pursued the subject with Lovecraft, who responded at greater length, apparently still under the misconception that Crowley was in New York:

Regarding the Black Mass & its devotees—it is really even more repulsive than fascinating. The whole thing is described minutely in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ “Las Bas”—which was posthumously translated into English in 1923 & promptly suppressed. The Black Mass consisted in general of a malevolent & incredibly obscene parody on the Catholic Mass—involving public actions & natural substances almost impossible to describe in print. It originated in the Middle Ages, & has [ev]er since been secretly celebrated by groups of half-crazed, psychologically degenerate sensation-seekers—largely in the great metropolitan centres. Paris, Berlin, London, & New York are probably its greatest centres today. It seems to draw its devotees almost equally from the decadent artist class & from the general run of over-sophisticated psychopathic personalities. Aleister Crowley is a now-elderly Englishman who has dabbled in this sort of thing since his Oxford days. He is really, of course, a sort of maniac or degenerate despite his tremendous mystical scholarship. He has organised secret groups of repulsive Satanic & phallic worship in many places in Europe & Asia, & has been quietly kicked out of a dozen countries. Sooner or later the U.S. (he is now [in] N.Y.) will probably deport him—which will be bad luck for him, since England will probably put him in jail when he is sent home. T. Everett Harré—whom I have met & whom Long knows well—has seen quite a bit of Crowley, & thinks he is about the most loathsome & sinister skunk at large. And when a Rabelaisian soul like Harré (who is never sober!) thinks that of anybody, the person must be a pretty bad egg indeed! Crowley is the compiler of the fairly well-known “Oxford Book of Mystical Verse”, & a standard writer on occult subjects. The story of Wakefield’s which brings him in (under another name, of course) is in the collection “They Return at Evening”, which I’ll lend you if you like.
–H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 5 Apr 1935, LWP 420-421

The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1918) was compiled by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee; but the book contains three poems by Crowley. The reference to “phallic worship” suggests that Harré may have confided something to Lovecraft about Crowley’s practice of sex magick, but this is as close as Lovecraft would ever come to mentioning the subject. Lovecraft apparently lent Petaja a cutting about Crowley:

Keep the review of the O’Donnell book—& here’s another from the Times. I’d like to see the Crowley one again—though there’s no hurry.
– H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 31 May 1935, LWP 433

Elliott O’Donnell was a well-known collector of ghost and haunted house stories.

As it turned out, Lovecraft wasn’t the only one who knew someone that knew Crowley:

Conversation with one who has known the fabulous Aleister Crowley must surely have been interesting! I’ve seen several articles on this curious & repulsive entity, & am familiar with the portrayal in “He Cometh & He Passeth By”—though I have not read Maugham’s “Magician.” One other side-light comes from the amiable & picturesque source T. Everett Harré—editor of “Beware After Dark.” Harré has met Crowley; & although himself something of a specialist in corpological diction & anecdote, avers that the Hellish Archimage actually sickened him with the tone & subject-matter of his conversation. And anything or anybody capable of sickening the hard-boiled & perpetually pickled T. Everett must be—in the language of Friend Koenig—pretty strong meat! Crowley is evidently a tragic example of diseased & degenerate development in certain lines. Whether such a mass of psychological putrescence ought to be allowed at large is a sociological question too tough for a layman to tackle. The answer would really depend upon just how much social effect he has. But in any case he is obviously one of those “gamey” specimens who are much pleasanter to read & speculate about than to meet! Of his genius—of a sort—there can be no doubt. I believe he is an important contributor to a standard anthology which I’ve never read—“The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse.”
–H. P. Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, 25 Apr 1936, LHB 125

This is Lovecraft’s final published letter on Aleister Crowley—and it’s interesting to note that Lovecraft’s information is entirely second- or third-hand. At no point does he give any indication of having read any of Crowley’s prose or poetry, much less any of his magickal writings. To Lovecraft, Crowley was already essentially a living legend. There is no indication that any information passed between them.

Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection between Aleister Crowley and the Lovecraft Mythos.

“The Message of Thuba Mleen” (1911)

Many believe that it was a message from Thuba Mleen, the mysterious emperor of those lands, who is never seen by man, advising that Bethmoora should be left desolate.
—Lord Dunsany, “Bethmoora” in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910)

In 1911, Aleister Crowley was in France, writing prolifically as he finished the books of Thelema, a considerable body of poetry, and the occasional review. One work that particularly caught his imagination was A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) by Lord Dunsany. This was the fourth collection of Dunsany’s fantasies, and a strong influence on H. P. Lovecraft. Crowley was inspired by the book to write a review titled “The Big Stick,” published in his own magazine The Equinox in 1911. Appended to the review is Crowley’s poem “The Message of Thuba Mleen.”

The Message of Thuba Mleen

I.

Far beyond Utnar Véhi, far beyond
The Hills of Hap,
Sits the great Emperor crowned with diamond,
Twitching the rosary in his lap—
The rosary whose every bead well-conned
With sleek unblinking bliss
Was once the eyeball of an unborn child of his.

II.

He drank the smell of living blood, that hissed
On flame-white steel.
He tittered while his mother’s limbs were kissed
By the fish-hooks on the Wheel
That shredded soul and shape, more fine than mist
Is torn by the bleak wind
That blows from Kragua and the unknown lands behind

III.

As the last flesh was flicked, he wearied; slaves
From bright Bethmoora
Sprang forward with carved bowls whose crimson craves
Green wine of hashish, black wine of datura,
Like the Yann’s earlier and its latter waves!
These wines soothed well the spleen
Of the Desert‘s bastard brother Thuba Mleen.

IV.

He drank, and eyed the slaves “Mwass, Dagricho, Xu-Xulgulura,
Saddle your mules!” he whispered, “ride full slow
Unto Bethmoora
And bid the people of the city know
That that most ancient snake,
The Crone of Utnar Véhi, is awake.”

V.

Thus twisted he his dagger in the hearts
Of those two slaves
That bore him wine ; for they knew well the arts
Of Utnar Véhi—what the grey Crone craves!—
Knew how their kindred in the vines and marts
Of bright Bethmoora, thus accurst,
Would rush to the mercy of the Desert’s thirst.

VI.

I would that Māna-Yood-Sushāī would lean
And listen, and hear
The tittering, thin-bearded, epicene.
Dwarf, fringed with fear,
Of the Desert’s bastard brother Thuba Mleen!
For He would wake, and scream
Aloud the Word to annihilate the dream

Thuba Mleen appeared in two of the stories in A Dreamer’s Tales: “Bethmoora” and “The Hashish Man.” Lovecraft never used the mysterious emperor directly, but Bethmoora appeared in a long list of names and places:

I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum—and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931)

So it was that Crowley and Lovecraft shared at least one influence; and in Lord Dunsany they both found inspiration, and they both created new works that tied into his dreamer’s tales—and by extension, because they were both building off Dunsany’s Dreamlands, so did their own dreams touch, or were in communion, all unknowing. “The Message of Thuba Mleen” stand easily with any of the other dream cycle stories and verses inspired by Dunsany and Lovecraft, with their strange names and dark, suggestive hints.

Many occultists looked for a common source between the two, and sought to create a shared origin for the Necronomicon and the Book of the Law; to tie Crowley to Cthulhu, and Magick to Mythos. Yet the shared Mythos was there all along, in a half-forgotten poem. The two were not tied together by any dark secret or occult truth, but by an appreciation for the great fantaisiste, Lord Dunsany.

And always will be, ’til wakes Māna-Yood-Sushāī.


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 Eldritch One” (1948) by Pauline Booker

I’ve lived for long, uncounted eons
Since Time and I were young;
I dwell in hidden crypts and eyries,
And speak with witch’s tongue.

When blood drips from the horned moon,
And wild winds lash the sea,
And men and ships die in the night,
I laugh with demon-glee.

For well I know my evil curse—
That I shall never die;
My soul will dwell with snakes and toads,
and bats that blindly fly.

I walk my dark, forbidden ways,
And none of human race
Can ever flee my awful spell,
Who look upon my face.

And when the sun at last grows cold
In its vain, ageless quest,
I’ll seek once more the alien land
Where I was born unblest.
—Pauline Booker, “The Eldritch One”

Pauline Booker was a pulp poet during the 1940s and 50s with a long list of verse published in magazines like All-Story Love, Love Book Magazine, Max Brand’s Western Magazine, New Love Magazine, Rangeland Romances, Romance Western, Sweetheart Love Stories, Star Western—and three poems in Weird Tales. Of her life and broader career, practically nothing is known. All we can say for certain is that she had her finger on the pulse of weird fiction, at least a little.

H. P. Lovecraft did not coin the word “eldritch”—did not even use it in the majority of his stories, and only once or most twice in any given story (although he did use it three times in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”) Yet it is a keyword that has become associated with Lovecraft and his mode of fiction as surely as “cosmic horror,” “squamous,” “non-Euclidean,” or “tentacle.” Eldritch has become part of the vocabulary of cosmic horror, used and abused with love and affection by all manner of writers.

When did that transition happen? Google’s n-gram viewer is a handy snapshot for a word’s use, and the word was decreasing in frequency, almost at the nadir of its use until the 1910s—and forms a little peak around the time when Weird Tales began to be published in 1923. Is the recent spike in usage all down to Lovecraft and the fiction he inspired? Maybe. Andrew Eldritch, lead singer of Sisters of Mercy, and Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) probably also contributes to the trend. Yet Pauline Booker was writing during a period when “eldritch” was on the decline again, at least outside of Mythos pastiches.

Yet how many fans of Lovecraft and weird fiction would not have caught her meaning, just from the title?

While it is tempting to try and connect “The Eldritch One” to some specific inspiration from Lovecraft, the imagery of the poem is rather traditional, combining favorite elements from Weird Tales, and not anything specific to one of Lovecraft’s stranger horrors. There are hints of witchcraft, of gorgons, immortality or the undead. A miscellany of horror, a real witch’s brew of familiar elements, but nothing concrete. Yet in its own way, as with all good poetry, it is timeless, as relevant and enjoyable to horror fans now as it was then.

Weird Tales May 1948 (art by Fred Humiston)

“The Eldritch One” was published in Weird Tales May 1948. It has not been reprinted.


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.

Untitled poem (1976) by William Davis Manly

In the summer of 1976, a one-shot ‘zine of of weird poetry and art emerged from 5115 South Mead St., Seattle Washington. The publisher titled it Visions of Khroyd’hon, which probably meant nothing to anyone at the time, and it was published in the spirit of good fun:

There are many interesting poetry publications popping up every now & then, and I thought it wou’d be fun if I join’d—if only for a moment—ye crowd and publish’d this first and only issue of VOK. I’ve assembled lots of good poetry here, with a number of talented youngsters contributing clever rhymes, love sonnets, and exciting verse. There’s something for everyone’ I’m sure each reader will be able to find some moments of entertainment.
—W. H. Pugmire, Visions of Khroyd’hon 1

Among the contributors were luminaries such as Brian Lumley, H. Warner Munn, J. Vernon Shea, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and William Davis Manly, the latter of whom included several untitled verses, including this one:

Weird and wonderful, these tales,
Each an eerie world reveal;
Imagination freely sails
Reaching worlds that can’t be real—
Darkened worlds of daemon-lore.

Time is but a shadow-thing,
All reality has flown;
Listen—Dagon’s children sing!,
Eerily, in tongue unknown.
Surely, I can’t ask for more.
—william davis manly

It is a poem in praise of weird fiction, from someone who loves the strange, eerie, horrific, and awesome. A paean from one Mythos fan to every other. The artist is unknown, but the subject is writer Fritz Leiber, Jr., and appears to be traced from a scene from the 1970 film Equinox.

Equinox has several parallels with Evil Dead II, including a recording of a professor (Leiber) who unwisely reads aloud an incantation from a very evil book…although the book in Equinox is not specifically called the Necronomicon.

The hidden joke is that William Davis Manly is, like Robert E. Howard’s Justin Geoffrey or H. P. Lovecraft’s Abdul Alhazred, not a flesh-and-blood poet at all, but a character in Pugmire’s stories—a staple name in what would become the Sesqua Valley stories. Pugmire had begun producing poetry under the name William Davis Manly in the 1970s, probably first “The Cryptic Power” in the ‘zine Bleak December #8. The first bit of fiction referencing Manly was “From ye Journal of William Davis Manly” (Old Bones #1, Summer 1976), and in “The Thing in the Glen” (Space and Time Sep 1977) the story begins with a poetic epigraph:

“Beneath the old narcotic moon
It preys upon mortality,
Hungry to devour hope,
And whispering to darkness.”
—William Davis Manly, Visions of Khroyd’hon
(quoted from Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror 57)

So Pugmire’s poetry ‘zine became, in the context of his Mythos fiction, a volume of poetry, much like Justin Geoffrey’s People of the Monolith in Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone.” William Davis Manly (or at least, his legend) would grow and develop in Pugmire’s tales, as would his slightly more diabolical counterpart, the sorcerer Simon Gregory Williams.

There is no definitive collection of W. H. Pugmire’s poetry, and maybe such a thing would be difficult to put together, given how much of it was published in ‘zines and scattered hither and yon. The quality and focus of it varies considerably, as Pugmire was equally disposed to either fulfilling some weird and fantastic corner of the Mythos or just praising his aunt in verse, but for readers who enjoy his fiction, Pugmire’s poetry is an indelible part of his larger body of work.

As far as I have yet been able to determine, the untitled poem from Visions of Khroyd’an has only ever been reprinted in the chapbook Sesqua Rising (2016) by Graeme Davis, which collects many other early Pugmire rarities.


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

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

“A Dracula of the Hills” (1923) by Amy Lowell

Roger Sherman Hoar, writing as Ralph Milne Farley, published “Another Dracula?” in the September and October issues of Weird Tales. Long forgotten, the story was eventually republished in the anthology Shades of Dracula (1982), alongside various rare works by Stoker. According to editor Peter Haining, the genesis for this story actually came from Stoker himself:

Among some enthusiasts of Bram Stoker’s works there has been a persistent rumour for years that it was in his mind to bring Dracula back to life in a new story, but in America this time, rather than Europe. The rumours originate from that last trip to America and a conversation Stoker had while the company was in Boston. In the first week of December 1903, Irving was appearing at the Tremont Theatre in Boston in The Bells and, as was customary, a number of the students from nearby Harvard University were employed for ‘walk-on’ parts. Among these was a 17-year-old Freshman named Roger Sherman Hoar.

Apart from his love of the theatre which had caused him to apply for a part in The Bells, Roger was a keen reader of horror fiction and had not long before been absolutely mesmerised by Dracula. As he knew the author always travelled with Irving, he hoped that during the couse of the engagement he might meet Stoker and have a chance to talk to him about the book. Stoker, for his part, liked mingling with the students as he tells us in his biography of Sir Henry Irving, and although he makes no specific reference to any such meeting, Roger Hoar later claimed that he talked with him on several occasions. Hoar says that he expressed his admiration for Dracula and ‘Stoker told me he planned to bring Dracula over to America in another story.’ In the years which followed, the young enthusiast waited unavailingly for the sequel he felt sure would follow. On hearing of Stoker’s death in 1913, he realised sadly that the story would now never be written.

Peter Haining, Shades of Dracula (1982), 134-135

This is, as near as I have been able to determine, a complete hoax on Haining’s part. Bram Stoker did accompany Sir Henry Irving and company to Boston in December 1903 for their U.S. tour, and they did perform “The Bells” with students from Harvard—newspaper accounts agree to the dates, and Stoker himself gives the details:

That night the Tremont Theatre in Boston, where we were playing, saw an occasion unique to the place, though not to the actor. The University had proclaimed a “Harvard Night,” and the house was packed with College men, from President to jib. At the end of the performance—Nance Oldfield and The Bells—the students presented to Irving a gold medal commemorative of the occasion.

I may perhaps, before leaving the subject of Harvard University, mention a somewhat startling circumstance. It had become a custom during our visit to Boston for a lot of Harvard students to act as “supers” in our plays.

Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Sir Henry Irving

Likewise, we can confirm from yearbooks that Roger Sherman Hoar (1887-1963) attended Harvard University in Boston. However, Hoar attended Harvard in 1905, graduating in 1909; in 1903, a 16-year-old Hoar was still a student at the Philip Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Haining does not specify where he got the data for this anecdote—which appears nowhere else before this—and considering that Hoar died nearly twenty years before it saw print, readers might be suspicious as to how Haining got this information.

Unfortunately, there are several such issues with Shades of Dracula.

For example, Haining claimed that “Walpurgis Night” (a retitled version of “Dracula’s Guest”) in the book is reprinted from the May 1914 issue of The Story Teller, but that story did not appear in that issue under that or any other title. “Dracula’s Guest” did appear under the title “Walpurgisnacht” in Ghosts Four (1978), which may have given Haining the idea. Haining also claimed in Shades of Dracula that “In the Valley of the Shadow,” which he took from The Grand Magazine June 1907 is by Stoker, but that story was uncredited in its original publication and there is no evidence Stoker wrote it. Another story, “The Seer,” was definitely written by Stoker, but Haining did not find it in The London Magazine November 1901 as he claimed, but excerpted it from Stoker’s novel The Mystery of the Sea (1902). Stoker’s “At Last” was first published in Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party (1908), not in Collier’s Magazine 1904 as Haining claimed. “Lord Castleton Explains” is an excerpt from The Fate of Fenella (1892), not Cassell’s Magazine 1892 as Haining claimed.

Unfortunately, Haining had a bad habit of falsifying citations, histories, and anecdotes. See Another Haining Fraud for more examples; BramStoker.org has also cataloged several of his incorrect citations. While David J. Skal treats the anecdote somewhat credulously in his Stoker biography Something in the Blood 362-363, given the inconsistencies in Haining’s anecdote about Hoar meeting Stoker and what is known of Hoar’s academic career, and Haining’s own propensity for falsifying evidence, the anecdote should probably be taken as a deliberate hoax. A good pretext, perhaps, for including “Another Dracula?” into a collection of uncollected Stoker stories. It seems likely that Roger Sherman Hoar was inspired to bring Dracula-esque vampires to the United States on his own, without any more direct prompting from Bram Stoker than reading Dracula itself.

Of course, the Americas already had their own vampires—if you knew where to look.

The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo (1819) beat Stoker’s novel to the New World by about eighty years. The New England Vampire Panic during the late 18th and 19th centuries was still making the news while Stoker was composing Dracula—among his notes for the novel is a newspaper article on the subject (“Vampires in New England,” The New York World, 2 Feb 1896, rpt. Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition 186-193.) The New England Vampire Panic laid the foundation for vampire tales inspired by local traditions, which include H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” (1924) and Amy Lowell’s “A Dracula of the Hills” (1923).

You might be hard-pressed to find two writers as disparate in attitude as Lowell and Lovecraft who nevertheless tackle some of the same material, each inspired by local New England folklore, each expressing themselves in their own way. Lovecraft’s attitudes regarding Lowell are well-documented, and, perhaps weirdly enough, are intimately bound up with his attitudes regarding poetry in free verse (i.e. poetry that does not conform to a particular rhyme or meter).

In the July 1915 issue of his amateur journal The Conservative, H. P. Lovecraft launched attacks on two fronts: an antisemitic reproof of the journal of In A Minor Key by Charles W. Isaacson (“In A Major Key”) and a diatribe against vers libre (“Metrical Regularity”). The two were not entirely separate, as part of Lovecraft’s argument against Isaacson was the latter’s praise of Walt Whitman, who has been called the father of free verse. So when “Concerning the Conservative” (1915) by Charles D. Isaacson was published in response, it involved a response to both Lovecraft’s racism and his disparagement of Whitman. James F. Morton, who also responded to Lovecraft’s articles in The Conservative, wrote:

Even among the Imagists, erratic though an Ezra Pound or an Amy Lowell may be in spots, there is wholesome work of its own kind, which has a legitimate place in the literary field. […] Mr. Lovecraft’s conservatism, in this as in some other matters, smacks not so much of loyalty to present accepted truths or even still current habits of thought, as of reversion to the outgrown partial and restricted views of a past age. It is in large measure reaction, rather than conservatism.

 James F. Morton, “‘Conservatism’ Gone Mad,” Letters to James F. Morton 408

Imagism was a Modernist movement in Anglo-American poetry that rejected the romantic poetry of the Victorian and Georgian periods and preferred sharp language, clear images, experimentation with different forms, and free verse. Early and leading proponents included Ezra Pound (Des Imagistes: An Anthology, 1914) and Amy Lowell (Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology, 1915).

Lovecraft ultimately decided not to make further prejudiced statements against Isaacson; when it came to free verse and the Imagists, he was a bit more tenacious:

I have lately been amusing myself by a perusal of some of the “Imagist” nonsense of the day. As a species of pathological phenomena it is interesting. The authors are evidently of approximately harmless characteristics, since so far as I know, they are all at large; but their work indicates that most of them are dangerously near the asylum gates—uncomfortable close to the padded cell. There is absolutely no artistic principle in their effusions; ugliness replaces beauty, & chaos supplies the vacant chair of sense. Some of the stuff, though, would mean something if neatly arranged and read as prose. Of the major portion no criticism is necessary, or even possible. It is the product of hopelessly decayed taste, & arouses a feeling of sympathetic sadness, rather than of mere contempt. Since “Imagism” has no relation at all to poesy, I think no lover of the Muse need entertain apprehension for his art from this quarter.

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 Aug 1916, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 58

At this rather early point in Lovecraft’s amateur journalism career, he was very much a “metrical mechanic,” much more fixed on the correctness of form and meter than content, and his preferred style was a pastiche of the older forms of Romantic poetry that the Modernists were trying to get away from. For an individual who was clinging rather stubbornly to a swiftly fading past, the Imagists’ complete break from such styles of poetry was akin to iconoclasm. As Morton perceptively pointed out, Lovecraft was being a reactionary.

Part of the problem was no doubt that the Modernists were not just breaking the molds of poetry, they also tended to be political progressives who advocated positions that Lovecraft was opposed to. So for instance, when Albert Mordell wrote an essay on Amy Lowell for the Poetry Review of America vol. 1, no. 4 (August 1916), Mordell analyzed her anti-war poem “Patterns,” inspired by the war in Europe. For Lovecraft, who was not a pacifist (see “The Peace Advocate” (1917) by Elizabeth Berkeley), this was heaping heretical philosophy onto antithetical aesthetics:

I am not inform’d just who was the first pseudo-poet to succumb to Whitman’s malign influence; certain it is, that I never heard “free verse” mentioned seriously till an exceedingly recent date. Now, however, it seems the recognised avenue of expression for persons who cannot think clearly, or who are afflicted with concomitant symptoms of radicalism and imbecility in other forms. That the vers librists are preeminently coarse in their ideas, is what one might expect as a result of their radical tendencies. A radical of any sort is by nature an iconoclast, and is never satisfied till he breaks some established canon of reason or propriety. Democracy of thought, with its accompanying rejection of the refined and the beautiful, insidiously leads on to a glorification of the gross and the physical; for the physical body is about all that the boor and the poet have in common. Mr. Mo bids these eccentrics keep off Parnassus and build a mount of their own, but methinks they have their Pierian grove already well established on some farmer’s dunghill in Boetia! From the dissipated “Bohemian” swine of Washington Square in New York, to the more scholarly Amy Lowell, they are all of the same clay. Albert Mordell, a critic in THE POETRY REVIEW, refers to the “poem” of Mrs. Lowell’s wherein grossness hath no small part, saying, ‘that if she had written nothing else, this poem would have been sufficient to immortalize her!”

H. P. Lovecraft to the Kleikomolo, October 1916, Miscellaneous Letters 22

By this point, Lowell had edited another anthology of Imagist verse (Some Imagist Poets: An Annual Anthology, 1916), and was something of the face of Imagism in the United States, at least as far as Lovecraft was concerned. When someone suggested that literary types should unionize, part of Lovecraft’s response was:

The place of literary radicals and imagist “poets” in this Utopian scheme demands grave consideration. Since the trade union movement requires at least an elementary amount of intelligence in its adherents, and is applied mainly to SKILLED labour, these deserving iconoclasts of the Amy Lowell school would seem to be left, Othello-like, without an occupation.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Proposed Authors’ Union” in The Conservative Oct 1916, Collected Essays 2.17

Tongue firmly in cheek. However, Lovecraft was much more serious when he penned an essay on “The Vers Libre Epidemic”:

The second or wholly erratic school of free poets is that represented by Amy Lowell at her worst; a motley horde of hysterical and half-witted rhapsodists whose basic principle is the recording of their momentary moods and psychopathic phenomena in whatever amorphous and meaningless phrases may come to their tongues or pens at the moment of inspirational (or epileptic) seizure. These pitiful creatures are naturally subdivided into various types and schools, each professing certain “artistic” principles based on the analogy of poetic thought to other aesthetic sources such as form, sound, motion, and colour; but they are fundamentally similar in their utter want of a sense of proportion and of proportionate values. Their complete rejection of the intellectual (as element which they cannot possess to any great extent) is their undoing. Each writes down the sounds or symbols of sounds which drift through his head without the slightest care or knowledge that they may be understood by any other head. The type of impression they receive and record is abnormal, and cannot be transmitted to persons of normal psychology; wherefore there is no true art or even the rudiments of artistic impulse in their effusions. These radicals are animated by mental or emotional processes other than poetic. They are not in any sense poets, and their work, being wholly alien to poetry, cannot be cited as an indication of poetical decadence. It is rather a type of intellectual and aesthetic decadence of which vers libre is only one manifestation. It is the decadence which produces “futurist” music and “cubist” painting and sculpture.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Vers Libre Epidemic” in The Conservative Jan 1917, Collected Essays 2.20

It isn’t entirely clear what free verse Lovecraft was reading; most of it seems to have come to him either through amateur journalism or what poetry journals he had seen. There is some evidence that Lovecraft may have at least skimmed through the Imagist anthologies, perhaps even Lowell’s own third and final Some Imagist Poets anthology when it was published in 1917.

As I think I have intimated before, I do not read the new “poetry”, save when I skim over a typical collection by Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, or some equally notorious dunce, for the purpose of obtaining material for satire. There is nothing in this radicalism—it is all so arrantly nonsensical & foolishly futile! What do the poor fools want, anyway? I wish they’d might all be chloroform’d & put out of their misery. The other day Campbell sent me a copy of The Seven Arts, a magazine almost as radical in its way as the late but little lamented Bruno’s Weekly. It opens with a treasonable anti-war essay whose classic, fluent prose contains not a single sound idea or tenable theory; continues with a silly piece of Sinn Fein raving by the Irish author Padraic Colum; has a flagrantly disloyal editorial in vers libre by James Oppehnheim—an editorial whose outre verbiage at first gives nomeaning whatever, but which boils down to a plea for a pacifist revolution when deciphered into respectable English; & contains in addition as choice a mess of soft-headed literary garbage as one might wish to behold. And what is it all for? Probably not even the editor & contributors know—yet the sport of juggling with words, ideas, & phantasies probably pleases them just as such frivolous things as games, sports, & vaudeville sometimes please us. But they carry their nonsense too far, & take it so absurdly seriously! Poor creatures!

H. P. lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 24 Sep 1917, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 89

Despite Lovecraft’s antipathy toward free verse, many poetry editors came to accept it as a valid creative expression, publishing such verse in newspapers, magazines, collections, and anthologies. One such editor was William Stanley Braithwaite, which became a particular bone of contention when Lovecraft found out that Braithwaite was Black:

So this—this—is the fellow who hath held the destinies of nascent Miltons in his sooty hand; this is the sage who hath set the seal of his approval on vers libre & amylowellism—a miserable mulatto!

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 5 May 1918, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 112

Time and experience somewhat mellowed Lovecraft’s attitudes towards free verse and Amy Lowell. While the 1922 publication of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” prompted Lovecraft to write his own satire in free verse, “Waste Paper.” For all that Lovecraft remained a lifelong devotee of traditional meters and rhyme schemes, continued interaction with poets that used free verse such as Hart Crane and Edith Miniter seems to have led him to a begrudging acceptance of the practice. When Amy Lowell died 12 May 1925, Lovecraft wrote:

When I say that Miſs Lowell wrote poetry, I refer only to the essential contents—the isolated images which prove her to have seen the world transfigured with poetic glamour. I do not mean to say that the compleat results are to be judg’d as poems in any finish’d sense—but merely that there is poetical vision in the broken & rhythmical prose & disconnected pictorial presentations which she gave us. She is also, of course, the author of much genuine poetry in the most perfect metres—sonnets & the like—which most have forgotten because of the greater publicity attending her eccentric emanations.

H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 8 Aug 1925, Letters to Family and Family Friends 1.340

Later, in what might be his final comment on Amy Lowell and her poetry, Lovecraft offered what might be a philosophical perspective on her and her work:

The individual quality is not a matter of theme, but is simply the manner in which one reponds to any theme that one does respond to. The history of poetry is full of cases of writers who have lived from one age into another & changed their styles accordingly. Byron, for instance, first wrote in the Georgian manner & then wholly recast himself in the mould of the romantic revival—as did many another poet who lived int he early XIX century. And in a later age, Amy Lowell discarded the late XIX century tradition for the imaginistic thought of the early XX century. In neither case was the poet’s essential personality changed. They merely continued to express in their own respective ways the impressions which impinged upon them. The change was not in them, but in the impinging impressions.

H. P. Lovecraft to Elizabeth Toldridge, Jan 1930, Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge & Anne Tillery Renshaw 123

We do not know if H. P. Lovecraft ever read “A Dracula of the Hills.” The poem in free verse was first published in The Century magazine vol. 106, no. 2, July 1923; and reprinted in Lowell’s posthumous collection East Wind (1926), neither of which is mentioned in Lovecraft’s letters or essays. Yet it is clear that Lowell and Lovecraft were drawing on a similar well of New England folklore. Compare:

She died that night.
I mind it well, ’cause th’ whippoorwills’d be’n so loud th’ night before;
When I’d heerd ‘mdash I’d thought Florella’s time was come.

Amy Lowell, “A Dracula of the Hills” (1923)

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr. Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

“They didn’t git him,” he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror” (1928)

The vernacular dialect both authors try to capture is so similar, that if Lowell’s hills aren’t in Lovecraft country, they’re not far off. Both authors too were writing with a conscious eye toward other contemporary works; Lowell didn’t write “A Vampire of the Hills,” but used a reference to Bram Stoker’s Dracula to shape the readers’ preconceptions, much as Lovecraft in “The Dunwich Horror” would inject the line: “Great God, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think it a common Dunwich scandal![“] In both cases, Lovecraft and Lowell were writing to an audience that would presumably get the reference they were making and would pick up on the clues.

They also both eschewed Stoker’s novel. There is no stake to be driven into a heart, no box on hallowed earth to sleep in, for Lovecraft and Lowell’s vampires. Lovecraft was inspired at least in part by an account in Charles M. Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896), and the case of Mercy Brown in 1892; Lowell’s inspiration is a little more obscure:

In a letter to Glenn Frank, editor of Century Magazine, Lowell wrote in 1921: “THe last case of digging up a woman to prevent her dead self from killing the other members of her family occurred in a small village in Vermont in the ’80s. Doesn’t it seem extraordinary?” She said her source was the American Folk-Lore Journal.

Michael E. Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires 196

Bell couldn’t locate Lowell’s exact source (and she may have been mistaken), but he made a cogent observation:

Perhaps Lowell’s choice of the specific “Dracula” instead of the generic “vampire” for her poem’s title is telling. The term “vampire” did not appear in the Journal of American Folklore articles nor in her letter to Glenn Frank in which she comments on the “extraordinary” custom. Did she make the connection herself? Or had she used other sources of the New England superstition? Her choice of the literary Dracula suggests that Lowell assumed her readers would know the novel and be able to link Florella with the Count. By the early 1920s, when Lowell had completed the poem, Dracula was well on the road to total domination of the vampire genre; the terms “Dracula” and “vampire” had become synonymous. How did this occur?

The New England Vampire tradition, as incorporated into the works of Lovecraft and Lowell, has had no discernible effect on the popular imagination. Indeed, even the impact of the European folk vampire has been less formidable than we might believe. Although the vampire was a genuine figure in the folk traditions of Europe, and remained so in isolated areas of Eastern Europe well into the twentieth century, in the urban centers of Western and Northern Europe the vampire was known principally through written communication. And writing, unlike the malleable oral tradition, freezes texts and images.

Michael E. Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires 199-200

Both Lovecraft and Lowell were writing ~23-24 years Anno Dracula; they were not setting down oral folklore traditions exactly as they heard them. Even focused as they were on the native New England revenant traditions, they scribbled in the shadow of Stoker’s novel, whose influence would only grow as the authorized plays in 1924 and 1927 gave way to the first authorized film adaptation in 1931. Dracula had already come to the Americas, and Lovecraft and Lowell’s recasting of local vampire tales can be read as a response to that.

Lovecraft wrote, “Some of the stuff, though, would mean something if neatly arranged and read as prose.” So too, there are vivid images in “A Dracula of the Hills” that even Lovecraft may have savored. When she wrote:

Florella’s body was all gone to dust,
Though ‘twarn’t much more ‘n a year she be’n buried,
But her heart was as fresh as a livin’ person’s.
Father said it glittered like a garent when they took the lid off the coffin.
It was so ‘ive, it seemed to beat almost.
Father said a light come form it so strong it made shadows
Much heavier than the lantern shadows an’ runnin’ in a diff’rent direction.

Amy Lowell, “A Dracula of the Hills” (1923)

In 1947, August Derleth edited and Arkham House published Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre. Derleth claimed it was the first collection of verse in the genre since Margaret Widdemer’s The Haunted Hour (1920), and it would be the first of several poetry collections by Arkham House focusing on the weird and fantastic. Here at long last, Lovecraft and Lowell shared space between hard covers; “A Dracula of the Hills” reprinted alongside “The Fungi from Yuggoth.” Nor were they sorry company, for all that their technique and formulation differed.

“A Dracula of the Hills” can be read for free on the Internet Archive and Google Books.


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.

“Ammutseba Rising” (2015) by Ann K. Schwader

This is the second story in this collection that takes place in Boulder; it is also the second appearance of Ann’s Great Old One Ammutseba. The first was in the poem “The Coming of Ammutseba”, which will be published in the forthcoming anthology From Kadath to Carcosa, by Mythos Books. Ann describes Ammutseba as “a very dark version/perversion of the Egyptian skygoddess Nut.” She also blames Joseph Pulber for encouraging her to create her own Mythos “book and beastie”. Her tome is included in this story as well: The Gate of All Lost Stars, the quotes from which are Ann’s own corruption of The Book of the Dead. Ann further informs me that the Obscura Gallery in the story is based on a real establishment, though it doesn’t have quite the same name, and it isn’t located in Boulder. She also did a great deal of research for this story, much of which came from Stanley C. Sargent, whose knowledge of Egyptology is simply phenomenal.

Ammutseba is one of only a handful of female Mythos deities. Most are simply mentioned; only five others have actually appeared in stories: Shub-Niggurath, Yidhra, Cthylla, Hydra, and Coatlicue. This may be due, at least in part, to the unspoken chauvinism that has pervaded the Mythos; it may also be due in part to the patriarchal nature of the existing pantheon. Whatever the reasons, however, Ammutseba is a most welcome addition (what am I saying?!) and I personally would like to see more of her.

Robert M. Price, introduction to “Lost Stars” by Ann K. Schwader in Strange Stars & Alien Shadows: The Dark Fiction of Ann K. Schwader (2003) 219

From Kadath to Carcosa never appeared; Mythos Books shut its doors. “The Coming of Ammutseba” was finally published in Twisted in Dream: The Collected Weird Poetry of Ann K. Schwader (2011). In 2015, “Ammutseba Rising” was published in She Walks in Shadows, as a kind of opening invocation:

At first, a spectral haze against the darkness,

some appairtion less of mist than hunger

made visible afflicts our evening. Stars

within it flicker, fettered by corruption

we sense but dimly. Terrible & ancient,

it murmurs in the dreams of chosen daughters.

Not it, but She […]

Opening lines of “Ammutseba Rising” by Ann K. Schwader, She Walks in Shadows 13

Taken together, we might call “Lost Stars,” “The Coming of Ammutseba,” and “Ammutseba Rising” as the Ammutseba Cycle, or possibly the Devourer of Stars Mythos. Relatively late additions to the wider body of Lovecraftian fiction, plagued by publishing delays, and currently not collected together—but such small details have hardly mattered.

Ammutseba exists…and in the days of the internet, has proliferated in odd ways. David Conyers refers to Ammutseba in the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying book Secrets of Kenya (2007); a Finnish metal guitarist has adopted her name, and so did a Maltese metal band (they later changed their name to Nokturnal Void), while there is an Amnutseba in France; J. Nathaniel Corres borrowed the name for an independently published space opera/Mythos novel, Elder Offensive: The Ammutseba Protocol (2018), Ed Russo borrows Ammutseba for his novel The Nameless Monster (2019). DeviantArt and other online galleries include plentiful fanart, some of it not even algorithmically generated.

In the spirit of the game that Mythos authors play, most of these later borrowings are at best impolite. Ammutseba is not in the public domain, as is the case of Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu and Necronomicon and whatnot are acknowledged as communal property. Back when most Mythos authors knew each other, it would be expected that at least some sort of permission would be asked and given first. This probably isn’t the case for most of the above. It is the nature of the internet that it makes it very easy to share information, but also very easy to steal ideas, intentionally or not.

It is easy to lose sight of Ammutseba as Schwader first depicted her—in part because there is no single consolidated source, no Bullfinch’s Mythology for these territories. In large part, this is because the Mythos is still living, growing, and evolving. Physical encyclopedias go out of date, online wikis and websites succumb to too many hands, or web rot as sites are abandoned, not backed up, and finally lost. Such things have happened before.

The eldritch entity Rhogog supposedly first appeared in the story “Sacristans of Rhogog” by Michael Saint-Paul. Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game writer Scott David Aniolowski liked the idea so much he worked it into a scenario, and from there Rhogog has proliferated. Unfortunately, that original story only appeared on a blog in the 1990s, never in print, and the blog long ago disappeared. As of this writing, no one has been able to find the original story or its author.

Her mystery eclipses tarnished stars

we kept for wishing on. Perhaps our daughters

will walk in shadow gladly, holding hunger

inside them for a weapon. […]

Lines from “Ammutseba Rising” by Ann K. Schwader, She Walks in Shadows 14

There is something terribly appropriate in having “Ammutseba Rising” open She Walks in Shadows. The idea of a goddess who bucks the patriarchy of cultists and eldritch entities, whose cosmic horrors can also connect, so very intimately, with the horror and experiences so unique to women, as Schwader demonstrated in “Lost Stars.” A Mythos entity that does not deserve to be forgotten, or misremembered.

“Ammutseba Rising” by Ann K. Schwader was first published in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and reprinted in Schwader’s collection Dark Energies (2015).


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 Peace Advocate” (1917) by Elizabeth Berkeley

It is true that I once used the pseudonym of “Elizabeth Berkeley” in conjunction with its more rightful owner W. V. J.—in 1916 the name covered certain verses by both authors, in an effort to mystify the public by having widely dissmilar work form the same nominal hand.

H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, 12 Sep 1921, Miscellaneous Letters 121

Winifred Virginia Jackson was the normal owner of the pseudonym “Elizabeth Berkeley,” but Lovecraft borrowed it from his collaborator for two poems: “The Unknown” (1916) and “The Peace Advocate” which was published in the May 1917 issue of The Tryout.

On 4 April 1917, the U. S. Senate voted to declare war on Germany. Like many Americans, Lovecraft had followed news of the unfolding Great War since its opening stages. Lovecraft was firmly on the side of the Allies, no surprise given his ancestral affinity for the United Kingdom. Having joined amateur journalism in 1914 near the start of the war, Lovecraft found the amateur press an outlet for his thoughts and feelings with essays such as “The Crime of the Century” (The Conservative Apr 1915) and “The Renaissance of Manhood” (The Conservative Oct 1915), and once war was declared, poems such as “The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania 1915” (Interesting Items Jul 1915), “The Volunteer” (Providence Evening News 1 Feb 1918), and “To the Nurses of the Red Cross” (1917).

Lovecraft’s position with regard to the war was complicated. He was not in a normal sense an American patriot, reserving his greatest affinity for England and the British monarchy. His support for the British Empire meant his opposition to the Irish home rule movement and Irish nationalism; Lovecraft’s bitterest anti-Irish statements date from around the period of the Easter Rising in 1916 and its aftermath. Racial hierarchies and white supremacist doctrine in the early 20th century lauded the “Teutonic race,” to which the “Anglo-Saxons” of Britain were either a part or close cousins; which is why Lovecraft decried the war as “The Crime of Crimes”—because white people were fighting white people.

It should come as no surprise that Lovecraft was, once hostilities broke out, in favor of war with Germany, yet Lovecraft was not a war-hawk in the normal sense, later writing:

No—we can’t justly endorse any sort of killing except in defence of oneself, or of some racial or national fabric representing one’s larger self.

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 7 May 1936, A Means to Freedom 2.929

This is to say, Lovecraft did not advocate wars of aggression, but was impassioned in his support for defensive wars, especially when it was his beloved England and its allies (and later, fellow Americans) who were attacked. The initial neutrality of the United States to the war in Europe incensed Lovecraft, who bitterly attacked Woodrow Wilson’s position, and wrote in letters and essays passages like this:

This neutrality hath been a source of the keenest distress and humiliation to me ever since the war began, since I believe that the rightful place of America is at the side of her mother nation, defending the Anglo-Saxon civilisation and ideals which both countries hold in common. In fact, I have more than once blushed at the base and selfish attitude of the States at a time when all the forces of humanity should be engaged in warding off the Hun. Never before was I more disposed to make ostentation of the legal provision which makes me still able, as the grandson in direct male line of a true-born Englishman, to call myself a rightful British subject. England is my country as well as America—let those call me “hyphenate” who so desire!

H. P. Lovecraft to the Kleikomolo, Oct 1916, Miscellaneous Letters 28

Lovecraft’s dislike of neutrality also found expression in his personal discontent with pacifists and anti-war protestors; those who argued either for concessions to the Central Powers to buy peace, or simply opposed the United States sending troops to join a foreign war, or selling weapons and materiel to the Allies, which would only extend the war and its suffering—or as in the case of the Irish-American John T. Dunn, who opposed aiding Britain because he supported Irish nationalism. Dunn would later be drafted, refused to serve, and was sentenced to prison.

When Lovecraft’s Jewish friend Samuel Loveman faced the draft, the man from Providence had no sympathy:

By the way—our mutual friend & fellow-bard Samuel Loveman is in CLass I Div. A, expecting to be called for active duty. In the first draft he was exempted for poor vision, but the requirements are now less strict. If I were Loveman I should enlist. I have no patience at all with a strong man sans dependents who deliberately stays home till dragged out from under the bed. Loveman admts he is “unpoetically robust” & that his sight is not at all seriously impaired. But Jews will be Jews, & I will judge neither harshly nor hastily. He is certainly a very pelasant & exceedingly gifted person, & now that he is subject to call, shews no sign of timidity or unrest. I trust his career may be honourable, & tht he will meet with an easier fate than the other soldier-poets, Brooke, Seeger, Ledwidge, et al.

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 Feb 1918, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 103-104

As it happened, Loveman spent most of his military service 1918-1919 at Camp Gordon in Georgia, and did not serve overseas.

A recurring theme in Lovecraft’s war-poems, essays, and letters is masculine identity and its ties with white supremacist national identity. Anglo-Saxons and Teutons were in the racial rhetoric of the day supposed to be warriors and conquerors who had dominated the globe because racial superiority was synonymous with martial superiority. It was a white man’s place to show courage and gladly answer the call. For Lovecraft, these were not just armchair ideals: not long after “The Peace Advocate” was published he attempted to enlist.

Some time ago, impressed by my entire uselessness in the world, I resolved to attempt enlistment despite my almost invalid condition. I argued that if I chose a regiment soon to depart for France; my shear nervous force, which is not inconsiderable, might sustain me till a bullet or piece of shrapnel could more conclusively & effectively dispose of me. Accordingly I presented myself at the recruiting station of the R. I. National Guard & applied for entry into whichever unit should first proceed to the front. On account of my lack of technical or special training, I was told that I could not enter the Field Artillery, which leaves first; but was given a blank of application for the Coast Artillery, which will go after a short preliminary period of defence service at one of the forts of Narragansett Bay. The questions asked me were childishly inadequate, & so far as physical requirements are concerned, would have admitted a chronic invalid. The only diseases brought into discussion were specific ailments from which I had never suffered, & of some of which I had scarce ever heard. The medical examination related only to major organic troubles, of which I have none, & I soon found myself (as I thought) a duly enrolled private in the 9th Co. R.I.N.G.! As you may have deduced, I embarked upon this desperate venture without informing my mother; & as you may also have deduced, the sensation created at home was far from slight. In fact, my mother was almost prostrated with the news, since she knew that only by rare chance could a weakling like myself survive the rigorous routine of camp life. Her activities soon brought my military career to a close for the present. It required but a few words from our family physician regarding my nervous condition to annul the enlistment, though the army surgeon declared that such an annulment was highly unusual & almost against the regulations of the service. The fact is, I had really gotten the best of that astute medicus; for without making a single positive misstatement I had effectively concealed the many & varied weaknesses which have virtually blasted my career. Fortune had sided with me in causing no attack of blurred eyesight to come upon me during the physical examination. But my final status is that of a man “Rejected for physical disability.” On the appointed day I shall register for conscription, but I presume my services will not be desired. My mother has threatened to go to any lengths, legal or otherwise, if I do not reveal all the ills which unfit me for the army. If I had realised to the full how much she would suffer through my enlistment, I should have been less eager to attempt it; but being of no use to myself it was hard for me to believe I am of use to anyone else. […] And so I am still in civil life, scribbling as of old, & looking with envious eye upon the Khaki-clad men who are now so frequently seen upon the streets of the business section & in the cars everywhere. […] Had my enlistment matured successfully, I wonder how I should have kept up! And yet—I will wager that I would have kept up some way or other. Now that death is about to become the fashion, I wish that I might meet it in the most approved way, “Somewhere in France”.

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 23 May 1917, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 83-84

The effect on Lovecraft was dejection. While readers today might be glad that Lovecraft did not die as part of the American Expeditionary Force, for Lovecraft it was as those who hold their manhood cheap on St. Crispin’s Day. In a subsequent letter, he lamented:

I am feeling desolate & lonely indeed as a civilian. Practically all my personal acquaintances are now in some branch of the service, mostly Plattsburg or R.I.N.G. Yesterday one of my closest friends entered the Medical (not as a doctor, but as an assistant—carrying stretchers, driving ambulances, &c. &c.) Corps of the regular army. The physical tests for this corps are very light, & in spite of my previous rejection for Coast Artillery I would try to enter, were it not for the almost frantic attitude of my mother; who makes me promise every time I leave the house that I will not make another attempt at enlistment! But it is disheartening to be the one non-combatant among a profusion of proud recruits.

H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 22 Jun 1917, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 85

As it was, Lovecraft had to content himself by offering what moral support he could, in the form of poems in praise of those who could serve. This is the context we must imagine for when Lovecraft was writing “The Peace Advocate”: fighting had been going on for almost three years, yet the United States retained its stubborn neutrality as the Allies and the Central Powers engaged in bloody trench warfare in Europe, allied shipping faced German submarines, Britain itself was bombed from the air by zeppelins, and around the world the colonies and allies of the two sides clashed in a truly global conflict.

“The Peace Advocate” is a narrative poem about a conscientious vicar who opposes war (implicitly on religious grounds), even as his son goes off to fight, until the invaders literally land on his doorstep, destroying his church. The vicar regains his masculine ferocity (“manhood’s thought,” “with the manhood he had found,” “wak’d to man’s estate”) and fights to defend his home—too late, for his wife and daughter both die in the fray.

The politics and philosophy are not complex, and would be counted as propaganda if published by some government outlet. The fore are faceless, the reasons and causes of the war utterly unknown and opaque. It’s enough that they are the invaders in the universe of the poem. Lovecraft makes no effort to understand the peace advocate’s position or give them any arguments for opposing war; the combat and loss, on the other hand, are effective and brutal to support the moral. In failing to join the fight in time, the vicar has failed as a husband and father…and perhaps importantly, burns his book.

Prieſt. Give peace in our time, O Lord;
Anſw. Becauſe there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God.

1662 Book of Common Prayer

Lovecraft was a materialist and atheist; while not militantly anti-Christian, he did oppose the passivity and turn-the-other-cheek theology as counter to his ideas of the natural character of white people. Influenced by Nietzsche and similar thinkers, Lovecraft attributed this attitude to the Jewish origin of Christianity. As he would put it after the war:

Semiticism has never done anything save harm when forced upon us or adopted by accident. It gave us the puling hypocrises of the Christian doctrine—us, who by every law of Nature are virile, warlike, and beauty-loving pagans and Northern polytheists!

H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, 21 Aug 1926, Selected Letters 2.67

It is a rhetorical trick to make the subject of the poem a Christian priest, because Lovecraft can imply a religious motivation for antiwar sentiment without actually engaging with any religious arguments.

Of all the stanzas in the poem, one in particular stands out in its imagery as possibly being inspired by another poem:

His son had buckled on his sword,
The first at the front was he;
But the vicar his valiant child ignor’d,
And his noble deeds in the field deplor’d,
For he knew not bravery.

While “buckled on his sword” could be a metaphor for joining the Army and taking up arms against the foe, there is a parallel with another very well-known war song:

The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone,
 In the ranks of death you’ll find him;
His father’s sword he has girded on,
 And his wild harp slung behind him.
“Land of song!” said the warrior-bard,
“Tho’ all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!”

Thomas Moore, “The Minstrel Boy”

This could be simply parallel imagery: Moore was after all writing specifically from an Irish nationalist perspective, while Lovecraft was in the midst of his anti-Irish period, and there wasn’t much common purpose there. On the other hand, there would be a certain irony in appropriating the image of the boy who clads on his father’s sword to go to war, when the father himself stays home as a take-that to Irish nationalists who refused to fight in Britain’s aid. Lovecraft’s letters are silent on the subject, no doubt to maintain the illusion that “Elizabeth Berkeley” had written the verses.

Lovecraft’s motivations and ideology in writing this piece were wrapped up in contemporary politics and ideas of masculinity, national identity, and racial identity; he failed to attempt to accurately understand or present anti-war arguments in his letters, essays, and poems, because his rhetorical purpose was in support of the side of the conflict he identified with. It is one thing to understand, from an intellectual standpoint and the distance of years, how Lovecraft’s ideas and rhetoric were shaped by the forces of his life…and there are flaws in both.

Yet how would “The Peace Advocate” be received in Ukraine if it was published in 2023? As the men and women of that nation strive to defend their people, their culture, and their borders from the invading military forces of the Russian Federation? Would they not see parallels between the parable of “Elizabeth Berkeley” and Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odessa?

While Lovecraft’s ideology is flawed and his rhetoric ignores real tenets of and arguments for pacifism, or conscientious objection, there is an argument to be made that in the face of unprovoked aggression, there exists a moral justification to take up arms and resist. Every individual, and nation, has the right to self-defense—and if necessary, to meet deadly force with deadly force. Slava Ukraini.

“The Peace Advocate” is not one of Lovecraft’s more influential works, in part because he never openly acknowledged authorship and it has seldom been reprinted. There is nothing weird or supernatural about it, there are no connections to the Mythos, and it was written years before Weird Tales first hit the stands or Cthulhu was conceived. That it holds any resonance to events in 2023, over a century after it was first published, is due only to the fact that war is as much a reality today as it was then. In that respect at least, less has changed than we might have hoped.

“The Peace Advocate” may be read in its entirety at https://hplovecraft.com.


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.

“Lines On Placing An Order With Arkham House” (1965) by Judy Reber

There was never any question about the name of our publishing house—the imprint to be used on what we then thought perhaps the first of three volumes. Arkham House suggested itself at once, since it was Lovecraft’s own well-known, widely-used place-name for legend-haunted Salem, Massachusetts, in his remarkable fiction; it seemed to use that this was fitting and that Lovecraft himself would have approved it enthusiastically. […]

Nevertheless, the buyers of our first book were sufficiently enthusiastic to persuade me to believe there might be a market for small editions of books in the general domain of fantasy, with emphasis on the macabre or science-fiction.

August Derleth, Thirty Years of Arkham House (1970) 3, 4

Before he was a professional writer of weird fiction, Lovecraft was an amateur. He came out of his shell in the 1910s with the amateur press movement, and his first weird fiction was published not in pulp magazines or anthologies, but in small amateur journals—and he carried that amateur attitude with him for the rest of his life. While Lovecraft did not disdain being paid for his work, he disliked writing for money rather than for art. He loved weird fiction, and that appreciation and passion became a part of his legend.

So too, it became a part of the legend of Arkham House.

It is easy today to consider Arkham House as a mere business venture. It was not the first small press in the United States, nor the first to publish anthologies and novels of weird fiction. The Popular Fiction Publishing Co., the publishers of Weird Tales, had tried their hand at a slim anthology titled The Moon Terror and Others (1927), culled from the magazine; it was a commercial failure that took decades to sell out. More success was found in the United Kingdom with the Not At Night series edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, which had its pick of the most gruesome Weird Tales, and brought writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard into hardback publication.

Yet mainstream publishers, while they might tolerate H. P. Lovecraft in the occasional anthology like Creeps By Night: Chills and Thrills (1931), would never bring out a collection of Lovecraft’s fiction during his lifetime, or in the years immediately after. Nor was Robert E. Howard collected during his lifetime, except for the Western stitch-up novel A Gent from Bear Creek (1937). Popular as they might have been in the pages of Weird Tales, many of the most prominent Weird Talers lacked recognition outside of the pulps and the growing body of organized science-fiction/fantasy fandom.

Imagine for a moment that you were at a newsstand in July 1954, and you put down your thirty-five cents for the penultimate issue of Weird Tales. It was the 278th issue of the Unique Magazine, which during its initial run had been published since 1923. The first story in that issue you might have read was “The Survivor,” one of August Derleth’s “posthumous collaborations” with H. P. Lovecraft, worked up from a note in Lovecraft’s commonplace book.

If that story resonated with you—if you wanted to read more from this “Lovecraft” person—how would you do it? Try to buy back issues of Weird Tales? Hope for a reprint in another pulp? Or, perhaps, you would note the advertisement for Arkham House in the back of the issue, and write to them for a catalog, or mail off your check or money order for one of the advertised titles.

That is what Arkham House was, for much of its existence: for decades, it was practically the sole source for Lovecraft’s works and those related to him. As it expanded, it also published works by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Henry S. Whitehead, Frank Belknap Long, and many more. These were relatively expensive books at the time, in limited print runs, but it was not the limited book market of today. These books took years and sometimes decades to sell through 2,000-4,000 copies.

August Derleth did not get rich off Arkham House. It was a business, to be sure, and he was by necessity a businessman as well as a writer, an editor, and a fan. Yet if it had just been about the money, or just about Lovecraft, Derleth could have stopped long decades before his death and focused more on his own writing. Instead…he inspired competition.

By the close of the first decade of publishing, the seeming success of Arkham House had brought into being a dozen other small houses in direct competition, following the lead of Arkham House.

August Derleth, Thirty Years of Arkham House (1970), 9

Derleth doesn’t name names, but Arkham House outlived erstwhile publishers like Fantasy Press (1947-1961), Gnome Press (1948-1962), and Macabre House (1954-1979). With longevity came the legend: Arkham House had not only been the first to publish many works by Lovecraft & co., but those books, once sold out, began to demand higher prices on the used & rare book market. A cycle which still feeds collectors paying fabulous prices even today, with no end in sight.

Like Weird Tales, Arkham House was not some faceless corporate enterprise. The readership was relatively small, and intimate, especially during the first period under August Derleth’s directorship—when Derleth would often personally take and fulfill orders, answer letters, put together newsletters and journals like The Arkham Sampler (1948-1949) and The Arkham Collector (1967-1971)…and it would have been Derleth who received a token of poetic appreciation from a fan toward the enterprise he was so closely associated with:

These are lines by a fan of weird fiction; what else could be “An infamous Abbey with Rat Things,| That leave human bones in their wake,” but a knowing nod to “The Rats in the Walls”? Who might have inspired “A long-dead voluptuous Leman,| Returned now to hold men in thrall” except Clark Ashton Smith? Poetry was a long favorite of fans to pay tribute in weird literature circles; and Judy Reber here follows in the tradition of “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman, and “The Acolytes” (1946) and “The Cup-Bearer” (1951) by Lilith Lorraine.

In the Arkham House poetry book, The Dark of the Moon (1947), August Derleth inscribed Reber’s copy:

For Judy Reber,
the best of macabre verse,
Cordially, August Derleth

That was the connection between fantasy fans and the director of Arkham House; that was the kind of personal touch which built the legend of Arkham House, above and beyond their catalog. It was the weird community of spooky book lovers, and the experience of being able to order those strange and weird works which were otherwise inaccessible to the average fan which Judy Reber paid tribute.

“Lines On Placing An Order With Arkham House” by Judy Reber appeared on several of Arkham House’s promotional materials from 1965 until 1970. Being ephemera, these small pamphlets and folded sheets are often overlooked by cataloguers, so the exact publication history is obscure. The poem is in the public domain (no copyright registration or renewal could be found), and was last published in Leigh Blackmore’s ‘zine Mantichore vol. 4, no. 1 (2009).


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.

“Two Fungi From Yuggoth” (1977) by Alice Briley

Sonnets, it seems to me, are preëminently the medium for complete ideas—in short, for a poetry as nearly intellectual as poetry can be without ceasing to be poetry. There is something inherently reflective and analytical about the very form of the sonnet.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, 25 Feb 1924, SL1.317

The Fungi from Yuggoth is a sonnet-cycle by H. P. Lovecraft which has become, post-mortem, his most-remembered and celebrated work of poetry. As David E. Schultz deftly traces in “Dim Essences: The Origins of The Fungi from Yuggoth” in The Fungi from Yuggoth: An Annotated Edition, most of the sonnets were composed in a forty-day burst from December 1929-January 1930, but their numbering and publication proved complicated during Lovecraft’s lifetime, with various sonnets appearing in different amateur journals and Weird Tales, sometimes labeled as part of the cycle and sometimes not, often with different numbering. Never published as whole during his lifetime, the full sonnet cycle was finally compiled in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943, Arkham House), and has been reprinted in whole and in part many times in the decades since, as well as analyzed, illustrated, set to music, and even adapted to comics.

More than that, “The Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnets have inspired generations of writers and artists. One somewhat infamous project was Alan Moore’s Yuggoth Cultures, a novel of short pieces inspired by Lovecraft’s sonnets. Most of that work was lost, but of the ones that survive “The Courtyard” was adapted to comics and launched a body of related works, notably its sequels Neonomicon and ProvidenceOther works were in a more poetical vein, such as the anthology More Fungi from Yuggoth (2000), and Starry Wizdom’s “Night Gaunts, Too (On reading sonnet XX in H.P. Lovecraft’s *Fungi from Yuggoth* cycle)” from Walk on the Weird Side (2017).

Alice Briley’s “Two Fungi from Yuggoth” (“in the manner of H. P. Lovecraft”) are a little more obscure. How and why she was inspired to write them isn’t clear. Briley was a noted poet associated with both state-level and national-level poetry organizations, and was no doubt at least aware of August Derleth through his poetry publications: in addition to publishing fantastic poetry through its regular imprint, Arkham House had a poetry-only imprint titled Hawk & Whipporwill. She could have read Lovecraft’s Fungi in the Arkham House Collected Poems of H. P. Lovecraft (1960), or the Ballantine paperback Fungi from Yuggoth & Other Poems (1971).

Whatever the case, in 1977 two sonnets labeled “Fungi from Yuggoth” appeared in her collection From A Weaver’s Shuttle. Newspaper accounts in ’77 and ’78 show Briley won awards from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, possibly for that volume; the August Derleth Society Newsletter (vol. 4, no. 3, 1981), which reprinted the two Fungi claimed the poems won the August Derleth Memorial Award—unfortunately, the newspapers failed to list what awards that Briley won, and there are no lists of awardees for the NFSPS that far back currently available online, so it is hard to give specifics. The last publication of Briley’s Fungi I have been able to find is in a small pamphlet titled Weird Sonnets (1981, Owl Creek Press), which is described by one review as not a sequel to Lovecraft’s Fungi, but a collection of works that “belongs to the same loose tradition.”

Which is as accurate a description of Alice Briley’s Fungi as anything.

Her sonnets consist of “I. The Elder One” and “II. Arkham Hill.” They follow the form of Lovecraft’s Fungi, being 14 lines each; they are technically correct in terms of rhyme and meter, but probably aren’t the more beautiful lines she ever produced. The last lines to “The Elder One” for example are a bit clunky:

A feathered thing that bore a human face
Came swooping toward me in a wild descent,
and clutch me tightly in a foul embrace.
Not heaven’s herald, but from its fetid breath,
An Elder One more primative [sic] than death.

“More primitive than death” is an odd image. The rhyme works, but one wonders what exactly she was thinking of, since the “Elder One” reads more like a harpy or some fallen angel than most of Lovecraft’s creations.

“Arkham Hill” is a bit more promising, in that at least it establishes a stronger narrative and an effort at an original creation with ties to Lovecraft’s setting. The witch Eliza Pruitt lived by Arkham Hill, and many sought her until:

Until that fearful twilight when she found
Those mushrooms she had never seen before,
At dawn, they found her writhing on the ground
“Fungi from Yuggoth!” she screamed. Then said no more.

Again, not a great deal of familiarity is shown with Lovecraft’s fiction; at least, nothing to show that she had read anything beyond The Fungi from Yuggoth. Yet even that little exposure appears to have stirred her imagination, and she sought to expand on Lovecraft’s horrors in her own way. Yuggoth spores that took root in a fertile imagination and sprouted, however briefly, some fruiting bodies.

Given the decades since their last publication and Alice Briley’s demise, whether these particular Fungi will spread once again is unclear. Under current U.S. law, the work is almost certainly protected by copyright…but they are possible orphan works where determining who owns those copyrights and getting permission may be difficult and more costly than it is worth. This is an ongoing issues with many minor Mythos works, akin to some of the issues involved with fanfiction—and there is a danger that such works may be forgotten or lost with time before they can enter the public domain. Even digital archiving can be difficult without the proper permission from the copyright owners.

Alice Briley’s “Two Fungi from Yuggoth,” then, represents both the fecundity and the fragility of the Cthulhu Mythos: while Mythos works are in no immediate danger of dying out, who knows what works have already been lost, crumbling away in some forgotten fanzine? 


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.