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

Roger Sheman 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 he took “In the Valley of the Shadow” 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 vampire 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 House (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.

*H. P. Lovecraft: Writings in the Tryout* (1977)

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 Providence. Other 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.

“Lovecraft Thesis #5” (2021) by Brandon O’Brien

The man you say brought us here is a kind of prophet.
—Brandon O’Brien “Lovecraft Thesis #5” in Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021) 59

Every Lovecraftian thesis in O’Brien’s collection includes a soundtrack; for #5 it is Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020), Track 6: Make Them Dead, by clipping. An experimental hip-hop piece of carefully constructed distortion, slow to start, building in speed and lyricality. The track provides added context for the thesis; one should be read with the other, not rushing through O’Brien’s free verse, but savoring the way the lines scan. Like good poetry, and good lyrics, there is something more there than just a clever bit of wording or an evocative image.

Lovecraftian is a state of mind. There’s no hard definition, and it means different things to different people. For folks like W. H. Pugmire, “Lovecraftian” was an aesthetic, a mood, an attitude. You don’t need Cthulhu or tentacles to be Lovecraftian; you don’t even need Lovecraft. The idea is bigger than the man or his fiction, and sometimes it can be crafted in a poem or found by chance in the verse of a song. Every person who comes to Lovecraft and his work brings with them their own experience, their own syntax through which to view and define what “Lovecraftian” means for them—and can put their own stamp on what is Lovecraftian.

Does it bear repeating that the caliber of racism he espoused in his heyday of the 1910s to the 1930s was not uncommon among white Americans? Of coure—but it would be a sorry excuse, as if to imply racism was some unaboidable product of circumstance rather than the deliberate ideology of spiteful people, some of whom may be honestly otherwise remarkable (much to the benefit of that spite). There is no shame or cruelty in observing this. He was a truly remarkable creative mind, but one whose creativity was colored by a misguided value of monoculturalism.

Science fiction is a radical genre, but that fact is a neutral one.
—Brandon O’Brien “Author’s Note” in Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021) 68

The “Lovecraft theses” in Can You Sign My Tentacle? are meditations on a theme, but deliberately ambiguous, letting the reader fill in the gaps. The language is evocative of Lovecraft’s themes, but there are no proper names to hang certainties on. In other poems in this collection, like “Kanye West’s Internet Bodyguard Aks Hastur to Put Away the Phone,” the specificity and pop culture references are played for laughs, surreal humor masking the darker reflections, in the vein of Kanye West—Reanimator (2015) by Joshua Chaplinsky.

how they huddle around warped symbols,
pledge fealty to idols long since dust,
—Brandon O’Brien “Lovecraft Thesis #5” in Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021) 59

For myself, reading these lines about the hooded figures, listening to this track, I’m reminded of Ring Shout (2020) by P. Djèlí Clark. Yet one could just as easily read this as a poem of the fantastic, of any group of cultists; even absent its context, the track, the author’s note, the other poems in the collection, it speaks to familiar themes, people staring into the past, defined by hate and a kind of fanatical devotion. The tenor of the thesis has that kind of Lovecraftian universality to it, picking up its color and timbre from its context.

O’Brien knows what he is doing.

This is not the only work that has taken the most recognizable parts of the Cthulhu mythos and reshaped them for thoughtful and critical effect.
—Brandon O’Brien “Author’s Note” in Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021) 70

One of the key points of the 2010s and 2020s has been not necessarily a rising awareness of Lovecraft’s racism—that was never a secret, and no serious biography has ever shied away from the subject—but a rising awareness that there is a body of literature in response to that, whether it be “Jeroboam Henley’s Debt” (1982) by Charles R. Saunders, “The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) by Victor LaValle, Harlem Unbound (2017) by Darker Hue Studios, or The City We Became (2020) by N. K. Jemisin. Anyone that accuses these writers of whipping a dead horse is missing the point: the issue at hand is not berating Lovecraft for his racism, but demonstrating that Black people have a voice in Lovecraftian fiction too. They get to have their part in defining what “Lovecraftian” means to them, to tell Cthulhu Mythos stories in their own way, reflective of their own interests and experiences, just as white people have been doing for decades.

After all, in terms of Cthulhu, it doesn’t matter what color your skin is. There is no reason a Black character cannot be the protagonist of a Lovecraftian story, cannot experience the same sense of cosmic horror and insignificance that Lovecraft’s white protagonists did. The experience of cosmic fear should ultimately be colorblind.

“Lovecraftian thesis #5” is a little different.

The end goal of this collection is in the same spirit as those works, but hoping to accomplish the inverse: for Blackness ot be seen as radically significant.
—Brandon O’Brien “Author’s Note” in Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021) 70

You can see that in a close reading of the verse. The identity and the perspective of the speaker is critical: they are not among the group of hooded figures, they are apart, watching, questioning. In the first line, the speaker specifies “The man you say brought us here”—the speaker is addressing the audience, and identifying as part of a group that was brought somewhere against their will, set against these hooded figures—you don’t have to see the speaker as a former slave set against the Ku Klux Klan, but you can see how that experience could have informed those words.

What else than to own the carcass
of a land already bought in blood?
—Brandon O’Brien “Lovecraft Thesis #5” in Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021) 59

All five “Lovecraft theses,” along with other poems by Brandon O’Brien can be found in Can You Sign My Tentacle? (2021).

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 Cup-Bearer” (1951) by Lilith Lorraine

Lilith Lorraine, to whom I sent a copy of Out of Space and Time, writes that she will review the book in the January issue of her quarterly, The Raven. She is a kindred spirit, and highly appreciative, and I doubt if I’m likely to find a more favorable reviewer. Her poetry is splendid from what I have read of it.
—Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, 21 Nov 1943, Eccentric, Impractical Devils 341

Lilith Lorraine (Mary W. Wright) was a pulp fiction writer and poet contemporary with H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith and the rest of the Weird Tales circle, but her handful of professional sales were in science fiction magazines such as Wonder Stories, and she didn’t begin to correspond with folks like Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth until the 1950s, but she was active in science fiction fandom in the 1940s and 50s, supply poems for fanzines, books, magazines, etc. such as “The Acolytes” (1946). She also published her own poetry journals and issued collections of her work as well.

In Fall 1951, the fanzine Asmodeus published its second number, a special issue devoted to Clark Ashton Smith. Among the articles and poems was Lilith Lorraine’s poetic tribute to the Bard of Auburn:

The Cup-Bearer
(To Clark Ashton Smith)

The light of other worlds is in his eyes,
His voice is like a sunken temple chime,
And many a moon that sings before it dies
Has heard him in the catacombs of time

Such souls come only when the cycles close,
When the dark wine of ages mellowed long,
blends terribly the tiger and the rose,
Seraph and satyr, savagery and song.

Such souls come only when the dreamer wakes
Alone beneath a decomposing sky,
Before the dream dissolves in crystal flakes
To hold new lamps for gods to travel by.

And just before the old dream turns to dust,
He holds again the dark, delirious grail,
The lethean wine of loveliness and lust,
Of tenderness and terror; should he fail

The dream would vanish and the wavering world
Shorn of its wonder, shaken to the core
Back to the “Never-has-been” would be hurled. . . .
Sing with him softly, lest you sing no more.

As poetic tributes go, there is no doubt that Lilith Lorraine knew her subject well. “The Cup-Bearer” touches on many of the themes that are a hallmark of Smith’s poetry and fiction: satyrs (“Nyctalops”), seraphs (“The Ghoul and the Seraph”), wine (“The Tears of Lilith”), dreams (“The Hashish-Eater”), memory (“Lethe”), necromancy and necrophilia (“Necromancy”), and strange distant stars (“Lament of the Stars”). It is a fitting tribute, because it is of a piece with Smith’s work, and complements it.

Lilith Lorraine must have liked “The Cup-Bearer” well enough, for she included it in Wine of Wonder (1952), her thin collection of poetry on themes of poetry and science fiction. She wasn’t the only one. Various editors provided lengthy endorsements on the inside cover flap, and on the back:

The summer lightning of fantasy, the storm-piercing levin of imagination, illume these superbly wrought poems. Lilith Lorraine remembers the ancient wonder and magic, but walks intrepidly the ways that modern science has opened into the manifold infinites.

From the mystic lyric beauty of Termopolis and Only the Black Swan Knows, she turns to such clarion-like annunciations of things to be as Master Mechanic and The Matriarchs. Notable, too, for its plangent irony, is Post-Atomic Plea for Euthanasia. A searching and claivoyant sensitivity is shown in the poems on paintings by Dalí and George Gross. Not too often has one art been interpreted so revealingly in terms of another as in these magnificent verse.

WINE OF WONDER can be recommended unreservedly both to poetry lovers and deotees of scientific fiction. Seldom if ever have the Muses of lyricism and science united their two fold afflatus to a result so distinguished.
—CLARK ASHTON SMITH, Author of [Out of] Space and Time, widely known poet and science fiction author.

Lilith Lorraine is fascinating as an author who outside the normal circle of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and co., only to at occasional interval swoop in within their orbits, bright as a comet…and then out again, forgotten until once more she comes around. Yet hers was a fascinating career, and she deserves to be remembered.

Biographical page, date unknown, from the August Derleth collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society

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.

“Cindy: Scrub-Lady in a State Street Skyscraper” (1920) by H. P. Lovecraft

Ethel: Cashier in a Broad Street Buffet

Cindy: Scrub-Lady in a State Street Skyscraper

Beautiful and calm and proud,
Only Ethel’s soul seems bowed;
Throngs may pass her, kind or curt,
They can neither heal nor hurt;
There she sits with manner strange,
Taking checks and making change!

Eyes are dark, but something fled
Leaves them heavy as the dead;
Brow is white, but something there
Lingers like an old despair;
Lips are sweet, but coldly curled—
Oh, so weary of the world!

Ethel’s always dressed in black;
Parting thus may leave its track.
Ethel’s always wan and pale;
Pining is not known to fail.
Though a life or love you rue,
Ethel, how I pity you!

—Randolph St. John

Black of face and white of tooth,
Cindy’s soul has lost its youth.
Strangely heedless of the crowd,
O’er her mop forever bow’d:
Eyes may roll and lips may grin,
But there’s something dead within!

Brow serene—resign’d to Fate—
Some three hundred pounds in weight—
Cindy wields a cynic’s broom,
Thinking not of hope or doom.
For the world she cares no more—
She has seen it all before!

Cindy’s always dressed in red,
With a kerchief round her head.
What may blight the damsel so?
Watermelon, work, or woe?
Tho’ her days may placid be,
Glad I am, that I’m not she!

—L. Theobald, Jun.

The Tryout no. 6, June 1920

We are spoiled for lore with regard to Lovecraft; because he left such a paper trail, because conscientious individuals like R. H. Barlow, August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei worked to preserve his letters, and then Arkham House, Necronomicon Press, Hippocampus Press, et al. to see them published, we know more about Lovecraft and his thoughts on things than almost any other pulp writer. However, he didn’t make a habit of leaving a trace for every bit of verse he left scattered in every amateur journal.

“Cindy: Scrub-Lady in a State Street Skyscraper” by H. P. Lovecraft (writing under his pseudonym Lewis Theobald, Jun.) appeared as above, opposite “Ethel: Cashier in a Broad Street Buffet” by his friend Rheinhart Kleiner (writing as Randolph St. John) in the same issue of the amateur journal The Tryout. The two poems are obviously a set, with the exact same number of lines, common meter and subject. Beyond that, there is nothing more known about the background of the poems except what is contained in the text; no letter survives regarding their genesis, publication, or reception in Lovecraft’s Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner or any other volume of Lovecraft’s published letters.

The setting is presumably in Providence, R.I. (which has both a Broad St. and State St.); although Kleiner being a New Yorker, there’s the possibility they were writing from their respective locations. Kleiner wrote a handful of brief memoirs of Lovecraft without mentioning these poems, but in “A Memoir of Lovecraft” (1948) he wrote what might conceivably be their genesis, a trip to Providence that Kleiner took in 1917 with the express purpose of visiting Lovecraft:

On our way back to his home, and while we were still downtown, I suggested stopping in at a cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He agreed, but took milk himself, and watched me dispose of coffee and cake, or possibly pie, with some curiosity. It occurred to me later that this visit to a public eating-house—a most unpretentious one—might have been a distinct departure from his own usual habits.
—Lovecraft Remembered 196

Yet without any more specific reference to go on, we are in speculative territory. We don’t know if this was part of a contest, a jest, or an old shame for the both of them.

It can be clearly seen that this is a lighter bit of verse. Both Lovecraft and Kleiner are being melodramatic about their subjects to the point of parody. The poets were still relatively young (Lovecraft was 30 in 1920, Kleiner was 28) white men who took as their subject two apparently older working women, and finding something dreary and dead in their countenance. Kleiner appears authentic (“I pity thee!”), while Lovecraft is obviously having a bit more fun, which given his subject and the way her frames it, makes a rather forgettable bit of verse come off nastier to readers today. This wasn’t untypical of Lovecraft’s satirical verse, and Kleiner would write in “A Note on Howard P. Lovecraft’s Verse” (1919):

As a satirist along familiar lines, particularly those laid down by Butler, Swift, and Pope, he is most himself—paradoxical thought it seems. In reading his satires one cannot help but feel the zest with which the author has composed them. They are admirable for the way in which they reveal the depth and intensity of Mr. Lovecraft’s convictions, while the wit, irony, sarcasm, and humour to be found in them serve as an indication of his powers as a conversationalist. The almost relentless ferocity of his satires is constantly relieved by an attendant broad humour which has the merit of causing the readers to chuckle more than once in the perusal of some attack levelled against the particular person or policy which may have incurred Mr. Lovecraft’s displeasure.
—Lovecraft Remembered 402

The only thing that makes “Cindy” really stand out among the mass of Lovecraft’s poetry is that it is his only poem that takes as it subject a black woman. It isn’t clear that this is a specific individual or a kind of archetype; “Cindy” in this sense has to be taken as short for “Cinderella,” a shorthand pseudonym for any cleaning woman. The traits that Lovecraft assigns to her: dark-skinned, white teeth, overweight, dressed in red, with a kerchief around her head suggests the “mammy” archetype, which was popular in the United States from the 19th century and on through the 20th century in advertising (Aunt Jemima being one prominent example), and as a stock character in fiction and film (Hattie McDaniel’s characters in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Song of the South (1946) as examples).

Lovecraft’s poem appears to be a response to Kleiner’s; the meter, length, and the shared details (Ethel as being dressed entirely in one color, both women are world-weary, etc.) definitely suggest this relationship. Give the quasi-seriousness of Kleiner’s effort, I suspect Lovecraft wrote his poem as a jocular rejoinder, satirically poking fun at his friend’s effort to pity and commiserate with someone he shared so little in common with. That is speculative, but it would certainly have been apt if Kleiner wrote his poem of the “wan and pale” Ethel, dressed in black, and Lovecraft countered with the exact racial opposite—a black Cindy, dressed in red.

The nastiness of Lovecraft’s poem stems largely from his reliance on stereotype. His major negative inference on Cindy’s appearance is her obesity (“Some three hundred pounds in weight”), and this is in keeping with Lovecraft’s general attitude, as he disliked fat—to the point that when he himself began to push 200 pounds during his marriage in the mid-1920s (the result of his wife’s cooking and eating out), he took to a strenuous “diet” that saw him shed the “excess” weight—and established the poor eating habits which would stick with him all of his life. This is compounded when Lovecraft ascribes one of the potential “blights” on Cindy’s life as “watermelon”—he’s basically using both a racial stereotype (that African-Americans love watermelon) to suggest that Cindy’s weight is a result of gluttony, rather than, say, a poor diet and chronic lack of sleep caused by working long hours for low pay.

The watermelon stereotype was extremely common during the period—at least one of the many postcards Lovecraft sent that survive might serve as an example of how ubiquitous it was, and how innocuous and “self-evident” it might have seemed at the time to Lovecraft. Lovecraft also liked watermelon, hence the annotation at the bottom of the card.

The major question with this poem might well be: how racist is it? That it is racist isn’t arguable; Lovecraft clearly uses the racial stereotypes of the 1900s in its depiction of an African-American woman. Beyond those images though—it’s hard to say if this rises about the racist background count of the 1920s. It is certainly not a specifically positive view of a working-class African-American woman; and it is probably damning with faint praise to say that it doesn’t call for violence, use a racial pejorative, or ascribe any negative attribute or predilection to Cindy based on race beyond a hypothetical fondness for watermelon. In that sense, Lovecraft was contributing to the overall stereotypes regarding black people, but the best that can be said is he doesn’t appear to have been particularly malicious in their use. The most honest aspect of the poem is undoubtedly the last line, where Lovecraft writes: “Glad I am, that I’m not she!”

Readers might also ask how misogynist these poems are. We don’t get a lot of context for the poems except that these are two working-class women, black and white, employed in relatively menial positions, and we can assume that they have to work for a living and have done for some indeterminate but long period of time. The depictions aren’t entirely negative, but both also assume that whatever spark of joy life had for these women is gone, and that is what makes them pitiable, or at least sympathetic. However, the perspective is very much through the eyes of the someone else—the women don’t get to talk about their experiences in their own voice, we get no peek into their inner life.

The poems, basically, tell us more about the poets than their supposed subjects.

“Cindy: Scrub-Lady in a State Street Skyscraper” has been published in a number of collections of Lovecraft’s poetry; Kleiner’s “Ethel: Cashier in a Broad Street Buffet” is a bit more scarce, being rarely republished since its initial appearance in The Tryout. Both are in the public domain, and both have been reprinted in the appendices to Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner.

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

“The Green Meadow” (1927) by Winifred Virginia Jackson & H. P. Lovecraft and “The Unknown” (1916) by Elizabeth Berkeley

Of genuinely fantastic dreamers, I have discovered but one in amateurdom—this being Mrs. Jordan. I will enclose—subject to return—an account of a Jordanian dream which occurred in the early part of 1919, & which I am some time going to weave into a horror story, as I did “The Green Meadow” dream of earlier date, which I think I once shewed you. That earlier dream was exceptionally singular in that I had one exactly like it myself—save that mine did not extend so far. It was only when I had related my dream that Miss J. related the similar & more fully developed one. The opening paragraph of “The Green Meadow” was written for my own dream, but after hearing the other, I incorporated it into the tale which I developed therefrom.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 21 May 1920,
Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner 190

In 1918, she was Winifred Virginia Jordan. Blonde, blue-eyed, working as a librarian in Boston, an amateur journalist who corresponded with Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and married to Horace Jordan, who is sometimes described as African-American, though his birth certificate and draft card list him as white. Her marriage would shortly end in divorce, and her relationship with Lovecraft would lead to their first collaboration: “The Green Meadow.”

The story of this collaboration begins, very likely, near the end of World War I. Lovecraft, having been passed over for the draft and unable to contribute to the war effort, threw himself into amateur affairs. His mother Susan Lovecraft suffered a nervous breakdown in the winter of 1918, and was removed to the sanitarium of Butler Hospital on 13 March 1919, where she would die two years later. H. P. Lovecraft would write of the story:

My next job was more mechanical. A singular dream had led me to start a nameless story about a terrible forest, a sinister beach, and a blue, ominous sea. After writing one paragraph I was stalled, but happened to send it to Mrs. Jordan. Fancy my surprise when the poetess replied that she had had a precisely similar dream, which, however, went further. In her dream a piece of the shore had broken off, carrying her out into the sea. A green meadow had loomed up n the left hand side, and horrible entities seemed to be hiding among the trees of the awful forest behind her. The piece of earth on which she was drifting was slowly crumbling away, yet this form of death seemed preferable to that which the forest things would have inflicted. And then she heard the sound of a distant waterfall and noted a kind of singing in the green meadow—at which she awaked. It must have been quite some dream, for she drew a map of it and suggested that I write a story around it. After a little consideration I decided that this dream made my own proposed story a back number, so I abandoned my plan and used my original opening paragraph in the new story. Just as I was speculating how I should infuse a little life and drama into the rather vague fragment, my mother broke down, and I partially broke down as a result of the shock. For two months I did nothing—in fact, I can hardly remember what I even thought during those two months—I know I managed to perform some imperative amateur work mechanically and half-consciously, including a critical report or two. When I emerged, I decided to add piquancy to the tale by having it descend from the sky in an aerolite—as Galba knows, for I sent the thing to him. I according prepared an introduction in very prosaic newspaper style, adding the tale itself in a hectic Poe-like vein—having it supposed to be the narrative of an ancient Greek philosopher who had escaped from the earth and landed on some other planet—but who found reason to regret his rashness. As it turned out, it is practically my own work all through, but on account of the Jordanian dream-skeleton I felt obliged to concede collaboration, so labelled it “By Elizabeth Neville Berkeley and Lewis, Theobald, Jun.” I sent it to Cook, who will soon print it.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the GALLOMO, Apr 1920, Letters to Alfred Galpin 82-83

The GALLOMO was a circular of Alfred GAlpin, H. P. LOvecraft, and James F. MOrton. “Cook” is W. Paul Cook, an amateur printer with which Lovecraft was friendly and who admired his work, he would eventually publish “The Green Meadow” in his amateur journal The Vagrant (Spring 1927). This account puts the letter exchange as probably November or December 1918, with Lovecraft finishing the tale a few months after his mother entered the hospital, in late May or June 1919.

Sometimes between 1919 and 1920, Winifred would divorce her husband and return to her maiden name of Jackson. The two would go on to write one more story together, “The Crawling Chaos”, and then their association would apparently end sometime around late 1921. Lovecraft’s future wife Sonia H. Greene, whom he met shortly after the death of Susan Lovecraft at an amateur journalist convention in Boston, would later claim in a 1967 interview that: “I stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson.”

While Lovecraft had great respect for Winifred as a poet, he was more critical of her work as writer:

In prose technique she fails, hence can utilise story ideas only in collaboration with some technician. These ideas are generally fantastic and terrible in the extreme, and so curiously like my own conceptions that I can develop and express them—in some cases build upon them—with so little difference that the result shows no sign of dual authorship. Such tales are published under the pseudonyms “Elizabeth Berkely” and “Lewis Theobald Jun.” The Green Meadow is the earlier of the two tales enclosed, and has a curious history. It began with me—the seacoast and forest scene being an actual dream of my own, around which I wrote the first paragraph of the story proper as an isolated bit on which to build a later narrative. The paragraph was a mere impression, or a bit of colouring. Later, in the course of a discussion on imaginative writing, I showed it to Miss Jackson, who was amazed to find that it corresponded exactly to a dream of her own—a dream which had extended much farther than mine. Upon her relating this dream, and furnishing a map of its supposed scene, I decided to abandon the plan for an original story and develop the Jacksonian outline—which I did, supplying the quasi-realistic aerolite introduction from my own imagination. W. P. Cook will eventually print The Green Meadow, but Heaven only knows when….
—H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, 4 Jun 1921, Selected Letters 1.136

This would be the first map associated with Lovecraft’s works. Unfortunately, both the map and the letter from Winifred V. Jackson do not appear to survive, for reasons Lovecraft would explain in a subsequent letter:

In the case of “The Green Meadow” I related to her a dream of mine, and she claimed to have had exactly the same dream, with a subsequent development which mine lacked. this was certainly her honest belief, yet I could swear that she had no such dream till she had seen my account. Then, doubtless, she did have the dream in its amplified form; automatically putting it backward in time when later thinking of it and repeating it. I will send the epistolary extract to [James F. Morton], who seems most interested in the tale. He can return it either directly to me, or to me via Appleton. And by the way—don’t mention to W.V. J. that I sent the thing. She has a fad for destruction, and wishes all her epistles burnt without exhibition, though they are in truth far less slanderous than the presumably preserved GALLOMO. I usually comply with the wish, though in this case had to save this one sheet for the sake of the story.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the GALLOMO, 12 Sep 1921, Letters to Alfred Galpin 109

A few of Lovecraft’s letters to Winifred V. Jackson survive, although none mention “The Green Meadow.” Given Lovecraft’s forthcoming and consistent accounts, there is little doubt that events likely happened as he said; the story built up from two dream-fragments, one by Lovecraft and one by Winifred, almost certainly rewritten in his own words, and framed in the way given.

However, there is one thing that Lovecraft did not tell all of his correspondents.

“Elizabeth Neville Berkeley” was Lovecraft’s private nickname for Winifred Virginia Jackson, and he addressed at least one letter to her in this way. Among “Elizabeth Berkeley’s” publications was a poem that ran in the October 1916 issue of Lovecraft’s own amateur journal, The Conservative:

THE UNKNOWN

A seething sky—
A mottled moon—
Waves surging high—
Storm’s raving rune;

Wild clouds a-reel—
Wild winds a-shout—
Black vapours steal
In ghastly rout.

Thro’ rift is shot
The moon’s wan grace—
But God! That blot
Upon its face!

Lovecraft in “The Department of Amateur Criticism” for The United Amateur (Mar 1917) would discuss this poem:

Another bit of sinister psychology in verse is “The Unknown”, by Elizabeth Berkeley. Mrs. Barkeley’s style is less restrained than that of Mrs. Jordan, and presents a picture of stark, meaningless horror, the like of which is not often seen in the amateur press. It is difficult to pass upon the actual merit of so peculiar a production, but we will venture the opinion that the use of italics, or heavy-faced type, is not desirable. The author should be able to bring out all needed emphasis by words, not priner’s devices. (Collected Essays 1.140)

On the surface, this appears to be a continuation of the hoax that “Elizabeth Berkeley” and Winifred Virginia Jordan were separate writers. However, he gave the game away later:

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 dissimilar work from the same nominal hand. But that is past history, and today Elizabeth ain’t me at all […]
—H. P. Lovecraft to the GALLOMO, 12 Sep 1921, Letters to Alfred Galpin 108

“The Unknown,” it turns out, was not the work of Winifred at all, but of Lovecraft operating under a female pseudonym—a first for himself. The double-joke, then is that in his review Lovecraft is gently chiding himself for the habit of using italics for the culminating revelation, a tactic that he would later go on to employ to great effect in his fiction. An especially amusing irony, considering the confusion raised by Sally Theobald.

Chronologically speaking, “The Green Meadow” was the first of Lovecraft’s collaborations with a woman—and that is important, regardless of how much of Winifred’s prose made it into the final product, or that it is a relatively minor piece with no connection to the wider Mythos. Works like this were stepping stones to what would one day become the Lovecraft Mythos—a precursor to the tales of the Dreamlands, to the way of writing stories as found accounts or documents, of taking inspiration from his dreams as the basis of narratives.

Too, a hundred years after it was written, “The Green Meadow” affirms the role of women in Lovecraftian fiction:

We were there from the start.
—Ann K. Schwader, “Reclaiming the Tradition” in Strange Stars & Alien Shadows

“The Green Meadow” may be read for free here.

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

“On A Dreamland’s Moon” (2017) by Ashley Dioses

The cats of Ulthar steal across my dreams
On paws of softest fur and blure the seams
Of my subconscious with their purrs and eyes
Of molten gold that twinkle and that gleam
Like Beacon lights toward where their kingdom lies.
—Opening stanza of “On A Dreamland’s Moon” by Ashley Dioses,
Diary of a Sorceress (2017), 120

Poetry is an inextricable part of the Mythos, there from the beginning. Lovecraft and many of his contemporaries were poets, from the sonnet-cycle “The Fungi from Yuggoth” published in Weird Tales by the grace of editors Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith, to Robert E. Howard’s “Arkham” and the verses of the mad poet Justin Geoffrey capture in “The Black Stone.” Fans got in on the act fairly early on, including “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman, and the poetic tradition of the Mythos has continued down to the present day, through practitioners such as Ann K. Schwader, and to Ashley Dioses.

“On A Dreamland’s Moon” takes its most direct inspiration from Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, but the object of this dreamer’s quest is not the hidden gods of dream, but Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos. In language and imagery, however, the influence of Clark Ashton Smith is more evident, echoing some of his narrative poems such as “The Nightmare Tarn.” The purpose for which the narrator seeks out the soul and messenger of the Other Gods is revealed in such lines as:

Hail Nitokris, my patron, grant me skill
In amorous endeavors so the thrill
Of His enchantment will coil round my soul!
—”On A Dreamland’s Moon,” Diary of a Sorceress 121

Again, very much in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith, whose work so often dealt with love, sorcery, and death. The carnality by contemporary standards is subdued and artistic; erotic fantasies are better hinted at for the imagination to paint than spelled out explicitly, and there is always beauty in it, nothing as gritty as “Cthulhu Sex (ahem!)—a poem—” (1998) by Katherine Morel.

One thing that jumps out in this work is the clever expansion of the role of Nitocris in the Mythos from her original appearances in both Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” and “Under the Pyramids” (as “Nitokris”). A relatively minor character, seldom-used by other Mythos writers (Brian Lumley’s “The Mirror of Nitocris” comes to mind), the idea of the ghoul-queen as a spiritual patron—someone to model yourself after—is both entirely appropriate and offers interesting possibilities. Dioses expands on the character further in the subsequent poem, titled simply “Nitokris.”

Diary of a Sorceress is based after the Sorceress in the poem. This is her diary.
—Ashley Dioses, “Afterword” in Diary of a Sorceress 166

For context, within the book itself “On A Dreamland’s Moon” is sandwiched between the poems “Nyarlathotep” and “Nitokris” in the fourth section of the book. The three poems together form a thematic unit, but not a narrative one, in that they share characters and can be seen to speak about the same setting, but are not linear entries in the same story. The same in general could be said for the book as a whole: this is a collection, and there is a thread of a narrative that binds some of the poems together, but it is not a case that every poem is an integral part of the eponymous sorceress’ descent, and most can be enjoyed on their own.

What is interesting in considering “On A Dreamland’s Moon” in the context of the collection is how the Sorceress in her dreams is drawn by dark attraction to seek an inevitable yet destructive meeting. This puts the shoe on the other foot compared to how she initially responded to the love letter in the waking world, where she herself was the object of attraction…and the consummation and dissolution that the Sorceress faces in dream perhaps foreshadows what is to come, in the diary’s final entries.

“On A Dreamland’s Moon” was first published in Black Wings VI: New Tales of Lovecraftian Terror (2017), and then collected in Diary of a Sorceress. Ashley Dioses has published a good deal of weird and Lovecraftian poetry in places such as Weirdbook, Vasterian, Necronomicum, Skelos, Hinnom, and Infernal Ink.

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