Tag: poetry

“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.

Psyche (1953) by August Derleth

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

For ego and satyr,
for lover and beloved;

ask to know for whom the heart beats,
send to ask for whom the quickened pulse,
bend to hear the hushed impassioned voice
sobbing your name or mine in all the body’s rapture:
or send to know for whom arms’ clasp,
eyes’ love, the hot possessive mouth;

for lover and beloved,
islandless man, of sea and land equally,
of sky and stars, of heaven and hell—
but never need to ask for whom the bell tolls;
make each man’s answer to yourself:
It tolls for me.

August Derleth, canto XIV of “Enigma: Variations on a Them of Donne,” in Psyche (1953) 25

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditation XVII in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes (1623)

August Derleth’s greatest fame today is as a publisher, co-founder of Arkham House in 1939 with Donald Wandrei. Derleth was also an editor and anthologist of note, and a writer of diverse works of fiction and nonfiction, from the quiet regional portrayals of his Sac Prairie Saga to the potboiler horrors of Weird Tales, from the delicately plotted pastiches of Solar Pons to young adult and juvenile fiction; in non-fiction his works included everything from a book on Wisconsin’s rivers to newspaper columns on his nature walks to his biography of Henry David Thoreau.

Yet before, and during, and among all this other writing, August Derleth was a poet. He wrote, and what is more importantly published, reams of verse from the fantastic and the macabre to the lighthearted, odes on nature to sonnets on love, in many different meters and forms. Poetry was a sensibility and avocation that Derleth shared with many of his contemporaries, including Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and many other writers for Weird Tales. Some of it has been republished here or there, particularly those bits of verse dedicated to or relevant to Lovecraft fans such as “Providence: Two Gentlemen Meet at Midnight” and “On Reading Old Letters, For H. P. L.,” but for the most part Derleth’s poetry remains unreprinted and largely unexamined.

This is a pity as such works provide, if nothing else, an interesting study of the importance of historical context. Derleth’s 1953 collection of love poetry Psyche is a good example.

These are poems of love and anguish. In this cycle of thirty-one poems, August Derleth tells the moving story of a love from its first awakening through uncertanty and agony to its foreseen dissolution.

These poems not only represent August Derleth at this best, but bid fair to take a place among the finest love poetry of our time.

Psyche, inner jacket flap

To anyone that holds this book in its hands, it may appear the prosaic but well-made product of a small press—in this case, the Prairie Press of Iowa City, Iowa—72 pages of good paper on cloth boards with a floral print; the dust jacket, when intact, is often rather tanned by sun and age. The contents are divided into two sections; “Enigma: Variations on a Theme of Donne” runs to 14 cantos, each taking inspiration from John Donne’s lines, and the second cycle of thirty poems runs the gamut of a love affair, from “I. When first I saw you” to “XXX. Beloved, now you are gone.” A few of these later poems have erotic elements, such as:

Something speaks for the essential you scattered here
in the black skirt and the blue blouse,
and the aqua pants with the embroidered I love you
and Forget-Me-Not (and who could?),
the slip in the usual pink and the gold slippers,
and the little bra from which the breasts
have spilled tightly above the taut belly
and Venus’ mound and the indolent legs
in their skilled proportions where you lie
waiting for love, savoring your victory
sweet in your smile, in your eye,
aloof, serene: the thin shoulders,
the slender arms, the small round
still firm nates behind,
all waiting for love, to be possessed
and to possess in ecstasy of union,
knowing my Achilles’ heel:
with that small cat’s contentment of triumph
the smile aware and the eyes
confident and the legs parted
where the dark hair already glistens
and the lips, there shadowed, opening
to sheathe my sword, waiting for love and lust,
knowing I will cross the room and touch and feel,
knowing I will possess and be possessed,
not alone because our mutual wish dictates
but because I must.

August Derleth, “XVII.” in Psyche 46

This collection of thirty poems was apparently a selection from a much longer cycle of love-poetry, which came to light after Derleth’s death when Peter Ruber, who had become editor of Arkham House in 1997, went through some of Derleth’s old files:

Another very important find was the entire Psyche lyric love poems cycle. Derleth published 30 in a 72-page book of that title in 1953. In reality, he had written 233 Psyche poems, and we have them in chronological order. The entire group will be published late 1997 or early 1998.

M. Dianne Bergenske, “Hidden Literary Treasures Revealed: Unpublished Works of Wisconsin Author August Derleth” in BookLovers (V5, N1), 7.

As with Ruber’s projected biography of Derleth and other projects, this never came to pass. However, Psyche did reach a wider audience in another form: as an LP.

Sauk Prairie (2015) 80
“S-P STAR,” June 16, 1960

It isn’t clear how well Psyche sold, but it evinced enough interest that in 1960 Derleth recorded the lyrics onto vinyl at the Cuca Records Company in his native Sauk City:

The LP was released with both a blue and a red slipcase; it isn’t clear if this represents separate printings or one printing, as the discs and backmatter are otherwise identical.

The title Psyche is in reference to the tale of Cupid and Psyche from the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and Derleth’s dedication in the book is: “for the woman who was Psyche and is gone…” which casts Derleth as Cupid, overcoming obstacles to achieve union. Such dramatic romances were not unusual within Derleth’s fiction, and there was often a quasi-autobiographical element, for example, the teenaged romance with “Margery” (a local Sauk City girl) which formed the basis for his first novel, Evening in Spring (1945).

The liner notes are clear on the autobiographical element of Psyche:

That PSYCHE is an immensely felt autobiographical experience can hardly be questioned, and the alert listener will learn that it is a tribute to two women—not only one called “PSYCHE” but another known as “Cassandra”—but primarily it is the celebration of love and passion by a widely-known poet and novelist.

Liner notes to Psyche (1960)

“Cassandra” had been the subject of a previous book of primarily nature poems, Habitant of Dusk: A Garland for Cassandra (1946). In Psyche, Cassandra is mentioned by name only in a single poem:

Death is my mistress; what name I give her matters not—
call her Psyche or Cassandra,
Call her by any name you will,
Death it is in love’s own guise,
my mistress.

August Derleth, canto XIII of “Enigma: Variations on a Them of Donne,” in Psyche (1953) 24

According to Derleth: Hawk…and Dove (1997) by Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky, Cassandra was another romantic entanglement of Derleth’s in the early-mid 1940s, and their affair would be the subject for his unpublished novel Droughts of March.

For all that Derleth mined his personal experiences for fictional and poetic material and inspiration, he was not keen to publish his love affairs and generally avoided providing sufficient information in print for the average reader to identify who he was talking about. Sauk City was, after all, a small town and people would talk. Still, students of Derleth’s life would not be surprised at reading in Litersky’s biography that “Psyche” was none other than Sandra Winters, who married August Derleth in 1953, the year that Psyche was published. There is nothing unusual about a man writing love-poems to his wife, after all.

Except for one important detail.

PSYCHE is now virtually done in its 4th draft, and it seems to stand up very well in amatory verse, at which I have never pretended to be very good. But then, I have always had that as a poet I am at best a second-rater, which is saying a good deal, because there are a lot of poets far worse than that. But this book is most revealing and cannot be published for some (3) years because it is plainly about an affair with a girl who is not more than 15, and the facts wd currently be too obvious to local readers.

August Derleth to Carl Jacobi, 9 Jul 1949, MSS. Bowling Green University Library

Sandra Evelyn Winters was born 1 March 1935; according to Litersky she met August Derleth in 1948, and they married on 6 April 1953. That his relationship with her before their marriage was sexual is not much doubted; in another letter, he wrote:

Oh, yes, I would not deny that Sandra has done me a lot of good. Not just making love to her, Sandra herself. Of course, she is sharp enough to know that, and I think that in this lies the ultimate dissolution of the affair, unless an accident makes it necessary for us to be married. For, being young, she is entirely likely, even with her mother’s advice, to take me for granted, and that might well be fatal. She has been frank enough to say that she intended all along that I should ultimately need her more than she needs me, and, while she intends to marry me, she intends also to have as much of her cake and eat much of it too, as possible. That never works, manifestly. But whatever takes place, it is certain that I have already benefited a great deal, and all the clothes and jewelry I’ve bought her won’t balance my own benefits.

August Derleth to Zealia Bishop, 18 Aug 1949, MSS. Wsconsin Historical Society

Given the age gap (August Derleth was born in 24 February 1909, making him 40 years old in 1949 when these letters were written), Derleth may have had more to worry about than his reputation; statutory rape charges were a real possibility. As Litersky points out, this fact rather changes how Psyche is read. When Derleth writes:

When first I saw you,
but one among a sea of faces,
my glance swept past, came wondering back
in search of something from alien places
to see the countenance of little more than child,
demure, aloof, and bland,
not akin to what I felt—that wild,
strange beauty, that warm impassioned spirit
lurking deep,
hidden by a child’s serene and lovely face,
inscrutable as sleep.

As Iseult, Helen of Troy,
immortal Psyche—you, too, in this child’s guise:
something from deep within gazed tranquil back,
the challenge of your untamed spirit looked
from out your eyes.

August Derleth, “I.” in Psyche 26

At what age would you as the reader have put Psyche and Derleth based on this poem? Do you read it differently now that you know he met his future wife as a thirteen-year-old girl, and this poem might be an attempt to capture—or at least capitalize on—the beginning of that relationship? Without that piece of information about who Psyche was based on and her age at the time, Psyche is little more than an innocuous curiosity. With that bit of historical context, it becomes a different thing entirely, and a reader might not only look for new meaning in the lines, but find it. Comparable in some ways to “Doom of the Thrice-Cursed” (1997) by Marion Zimmer Bradley, it is impossible to turn back the clock to before you knew, and read the words they wrote with innocent eyes.

With thanks and appreciation to John Haefele for his help with this article.

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 Mould Shade Speaks” (1919) by Winifred Virginia Jackson

Mrs. Jordan’s serious literary work is all poetical, and her poems may br roughly grouped in six classes: Lyrics of ideal beauty, including delightful Nature poems replete with local colour; delicate amatory lyrics; rural dialect lyrics and vigorous colloquial pieces; poems of sparkiling optimism; child verse; and poems of potent terror and dark suggestion.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Winifred Virginia Jordan: Associate Editor” (1919) in Collected Essays 1.228

In 1919, Winifred Virginia Jackson was still married to Horace Jordan, and so it is under that name that Lovecraft knew her and her poetry. Lovecraft’s appreciation for her poetry appears genuine, and perhaps he had read enough of her verse to form a solid opinion. Although little-remembered and little-reprinted these days, during her life Winifred Virginia Jackson was a fairly prolific poet, both in amateur journals and in newspapers, publishing well over a hundred poems, some of which were collected in the collections Backroads: Maine Narratives, with Lyrics (1927) and Selected Poems (1944), now both quite rare.

Indeed, very little of Jackson’s poetry has been reprinted, and much of it is uncollected or largely inaccessible for those without access to newspaper archives and obscure and expensive amateur journals, although a selection of poems have been republished in the appendix to Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others. What’s notable about the selection of Jackson’s poems that survive and are accessible is that very few are of that final category that Lovecraft delineated: “poems of potent terror and dark suggestion.” Lovecraft expanded on this in a subsequent essay:

It remains to speak of the singular power of Miss Jackson in the realm of the gruesome and the terrible. With that same sensitiveness to the unseen and the nreal which lends witchery to her gayer productions, she has achieved in darker fields of verse results inviting comparison with the best prost work of Ambrose Bierce or Maurice Level.

H. P. Lovecraft, “Winifred Virginia Jackson: A ‘Different’ Poetess” (1921) in Collected Essays 2.50

One such poem Lovecraft thought to mention in his letters:

Cook’s Vagrant did not specialise in the weird, & was in general very variable. […] However, quite a few weird things appeared. In June 1918 my verses “Nemesis” (later in W.T.) & my old juvenile tale “The Beast in the Cave” (written in 1905) appeared. July 1918 contained a long piece of my weird blank verse which I presented in the guise of comedy, with a comic rhymed framework around it. […] Oct. 1919 contained our old friend “Psychopompos”, & also a shorter piece of weird verse, “The City”, which I contributed under the pseudonym of “Ward Phillips.” Furthermore—an exotic Chinese piece called “Tea Flowers” (based on Wilde & suggesting Lesbianism) by Roswell George Mills, & a rather powerful ghoul-poem, “The Mould-Shade Speaks” by Winifred V. Jackson. A rather bizarre issue on the whole.

H. P. Lovecraft to Robert H. Barlow, 17 Dec 1933, O Fortunate Floridian! 91-92

“The Mould Shade Speaks” has never been reprinted since it first appeared in The Vagrant #10—which is a shame, because as Lovecraft says, it is a ghoul-poem, darker and more suggestive than most of Jackson’s verse:

The Mould Shade Speaks
by Winifred Virginia Jordan

I hide at early dawn, gray-clothed,
 I rub my fingers cold
Against my face, dark-browned and loathed,
 To better see the world
I loved and walked in some old dream,
 That hangs about me still,
And wonder if ‘neath sunshine’s gleam,
 I forged my silent will.

My voice you hear when storm-fiends sack
 The sunbeams from the sky;
I shriek with joy when earth grows black
 And jangling thunders cry.
I clutch with glee the raindrops white
 For my will’s evil hap,
I hold them, shiv’ring in their fright,
 Within my musty lap.

I hate the noon-high sun whose eyes
 Seek out my spawn, my moss,
With smiles for ferns, where lizards rise
 And crawl the leaves across.
I hate the murmurs that reel round
 When sunbeams get within
My slimy gulches, without sound,
 That I keep black as sin.

But when night strikes the sunbeam’s doom
 I wrap myself in black,
And stalk, a hydra-headed gloom,
 Red fears astride my back;
Then I set out my tumorous plague,
 I seed my foul decay:
My touch has feel of menace vague
 That gnaws at edge of day!

And I climb up the heights of air
 To spray my poisoned breath,
I swish my skirts upon trees where
 I leave the mark of death;
I never sleep, I never rest
 I cherish but life’s tears,
And hug close to my sexless breast
 The scourge of charnel fears!

Gravestones, particularly older ones which have been long exposed to the elements and uncared for, tend to become host to lichen, molds, fungi, moss, creeping vines like ivy or kudzu, even algae if the environment is wet enough. Even as the bones and flesh that moulder in the grave are slowly consumed, the names and inscriptions may be covered or effaced by the decay of the grave itself—and that is the “mould shade” of Winifred Virginia Jackson’s poem, the animate spirit of that decay made manifest, anthropomorphized with fingers and skirts, shrinking from the sun, leaving its mark on stone and wood, setting up baleful miasmas. There is an almost Poe-esque quality that recalls “The Conquerer Worm” which has a similar structure and may well have inspired it.

It is easy to see why Lovecraft may have liked this poem, ghoulish as it was.

Thanks and appreciation to David E. Schultz for his help and assistance.

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

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

“I Remember Conan” (1960) by Grace A. Warren

Conan?
The tall barbarian?
He who came with the rough gusto of the west wind?
Aye—I remember Conan!

Grace A. Warren, opening lines of “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138

Although Robert E. Howard died in 1936 and H. P. Lovecraft in 1937, the study of the life, letters, and work of Howard have often lagged behind Lovecraft. This was not for want of fans; Donald Wollheim consulted Lovecraft on the possibility of issuing a collection of Howard’s fiction shortly after the Texas pulpster’s death. However, circumstances were different: it took time to settle Howard’s estate, which went to his father Dr. I. M. Howard. Doctor Howard was not familiar with publishing, and with his son’s agent Otis Adelbert Kline worked to receive compensation due for stories his son had sold and to place what unpublished works remained—but various projects to get Robert E. Howard into print failed to be financially feasible, and unlike Lovecraft there was no one who thought to deposit Howard’s collected correspondence at a local university, no energetic duo like August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arkham House specifically to put Lovecraft in print.

By the time Arkham House did publish the first hardback American collection of Howard’s fiction, Skull-Face and Others (1946), Dr. Howard was dead…but Robert E. Howard’s posthumous career was just beginning. Arkham House had shown the viability of small presses dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, and pulp authors from storied publications like Weird Tales were in demand among the burgeoning fan movement. Gnome Press began publishing the Conan series in 1950, and after five books had exhausted most of Howard’s finished Conan material—at which point L. Sprague de Camp produced Tales of Conan (1955), a series of Howard non-Conan stories re-written as Conan adventures, and then the original novel The Return of Conan (1957), a novel by Björn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp.

Although Conan and Robert E. Howard hadn’t hit a mass audience—that would have to wait for the release of the Lancer paperbacks in the 1960s with the iconic Frank Frazetta covers, the Conan the Barbarian comic book by Marvel beginning in 1970, and finally the 1982 film of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous barbarian—organized fandom activity around Howard began to pick up. Robert E. Howard had never quite been forgotten: there are many references to him and his work in the 1940s fanzine The Acolyte, which was nominally devoted to Lovecraft, for example. Yet in 1955 the Hyborian Legion was formed, and among the fanzines put out was one called Amra, named after Conan’s pseudonym among the pirates of the Black Coast.

Like most fanzines, issues of Amra weren’t intended as scholarly journals the way modern works like The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies is, but it was a step in that direction, a place where fans who wanted to talk about Howard and the characters and settings he created could share their insights and thoughts, fanfiction and poetry, art and cartoons, essays and articles. During its fairly long run, Amra attracted some interesting names (including Frederic Wertham of Seduction of the Innocent fame, who would go on to write The World of Fanzines in 1973). It took decades more work for Howard studies to be properly established, with a pure-text movement and the publication of Howard’s letters, much as had been done with Lovecraft, but Amra played its part.

But what could Conan be to me?
Father of fatherless children?
For who should train such sons to manliness?
Not I alone.
Who should shelter daughters fair?
Not I alone!

Grace A. Warren, lines from “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138

Grace Adams Warren (born Marguerite Grace Adams) and her husband Dana Thurston Warren appear to have been involved with organized fandom from at least the 1960s through the 1990s, though exact dates are hard to come by. Her poem “I Remember Conan” appeared in the ninth issue of Amra vol. II (January 1960), and is reminiscent of such works as “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman and “The Acolytes” (1946) by Lilith Lorraine—fan poetry, a pure expression of sentiment. She would have written that in the years between the last of the Gnome Press books, but before the Lancer paperbacks, when it really was fanzines like Amra that were keeping the memory of Robert E. Howard and his favorite barbarian alive.

It is easy now to forget how precarious memory can be—how easily the public forgets, how few characters find an audience, how many pulp authors lie forgotten, their works no longer read or published, no one much caring whether they’ve fallen into the public domain or if they were ever written at all. It is easy to overlook, in this time of corporate-driven properties and big-budget films and streaming adaptations, that such works are often only possible because of continued fan-interest, fans who take the original material and comment, study, and build on it over time. Nowadays, there are wikis and websites, discussion groups and discords to facilitate the kind of communication that was carried out at the speed of a manual typewriter and a mail carrier’s measured pace.

For Howard studies in particular, fan contributions tend to be overlooked. The pure text movement that began in the 1970s emphasized the changes that had been made to the published stories and the wider setting and Mythos of the Howard tales, by editors and pasticheurs like L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and others. And there was quite a lot of non-Howard material dealing with Conan that would be published over the years, from original novels, comic books, film adaptations, video games, tabletop roleplaying games and more. If you’re going to draw the line between Howard’s original work and a “official” (in the sense of being authorized by the estate or its agents) pastiche novel like The Return of Conan, critical interest in even more derived works like The Leopard of Poitain (1985) by Raul Garcia-Capella, The Barbarian King 1: Le Spade Spezzate (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Alessio Landi, The Song of Bêlit (2020) by Rodolfo Martínez, and Sangre Bárbara (2021) by El Torres, Joe Bocardo, & Manoli Martínez is perhaps understandably low.

Yet these derivative works are worthy of study and appreciation in their own right. They have something to say about Howard’s characters, and they represent—as Grace Warren’s “I Remember Conan” represents—how inspiring Robert E. Howard’s writing can be, that it drives fans to create and remember, long after Howard’s own untimely death.

You too will remember Conan,
The tall barbarian,
He who came with the rough gusto of the west wind—
Aye—even as I remember Conan!

Grace A. Warren, last lines of “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138

“I Remember Conan” was first published in Amra. Vol. II, no. 9 (1960), and was reprinted in The Conan Grimoire (1972).

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

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

“The Old Ones Reborn” (2007) by Erin Donahoe

I. The Book

It all began because I was not afraid

and I told the bookseller so.

Horror tales never disturbed me

never elicited that much desired chill of terror.

Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007, 36

There are no rules for the Mythos, but there are traditions. H. P. Lovecraft’s original works blazed a trail that many have tread, sometimes following in his footsteps, sometimes eschewing the increasingly well-beaten paths to branch off in their own directions. The route maps for these weird trails are written down in bibliographies, indices, and concordances…but there are too many. No one source can map them all, and even those dryly noted road markers can only point a reader in the right direction.

It is still up to individual readers to hunt down the sources if they want to follow some of these off-trails. There are little-tread and oft-overlooked byways, paths in danger of being forgotten and lost in the weeds. Works that never see reprinting, and aren’t likely to. Some day, the last copy of a magazine will fall apart, and some small part of the Mythos will be lost forever.

II. The Reading

I lifted the heavy tome

and placed it on the table before the window

moonlinght shining in upon the book’s dark surface.

Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 37

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry for Erin Donahoe shows she was most active in the early 2000s; the page contains a link to the web archive of her long-defunct SFF.net profile, and links from there go to her long-defunct personal blog and a more extensive bibliography. Magazine publications, online publications, and involvements with various small publications. “The Old Ones Reborn,” published in 2007, is the latest work of hers listed. It may well have been her last work published.

More digging would probably find out more about Erin Donahoe, but the point is not to engage in digital stalking or necromancy, it is to illustrate a point: not all creators are in it for the long haul, not every literary or artistic path goes very far. For every writer, poet, artist, and fan-publisher who devotes their life to creation, there are many others whose careers cover only a handful of years when time and enthusiasm allow such efforts. Then other priorities shift to the fore: careers, relationships, kids and parents and pets to take care of, health issues, money issues, etc.

III. The Dream

My explanation at the time was

That it was some kind of hypnosis, that I was sleepwalking.

I only remember feeling that I had been submerged

in warm, nearly scalding water, but that,

in some manner, I was able

to breathe.

Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 37

“The Old Ones Reborn” is a narrative poem in free verse, perhaps inspired by Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet cycle, and starting in a very similar manner—perhaps as homage—but Donahoe follows tradition only so far. She took it in a different direction, more stylistically similar to Caitlín R. Kiernan than Lovecraft or Derleth. More about the experience of being in that situation, that first encounter with the Mythos, the violation of that threshold, and what happened next.

Donahoe does not need to use the names Arkham, Dunwich, or Innsmouth to invoke something of them; does not need to name the Deep Ones, Cthulhu, or Yog-Sothoth to suggest their presence. The poem is more effective for its restraint; for suggesting connections instead of making them concrete. Making the reader draw their own conjectures, based on the paths they have walked.

IV. The Visions

The things I saw over the net several days,

and so many days since,

were terrifying in ways mre words

could never describe or explain;

but minding that inadequacy, I will attempt

to tell here of the most prominent of my visions.

Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 38

“The Old Ones Reborn” was published in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. It has not been reprinted, or collected. All the copies of it may well be contained in that print run, and when the grey, soft paper rots and molds…it may be lost. There are no ebooks, as yet, and may never be. Few libraries have copies. What efforts are being made to preserve it are collectors, and the people who sell to collectors. With luck, perhaps it will outlast living memory for a couple generations.

Other works are not so fortunate. Some are lost; others simply…obscure. Poems and stories that are not republished are generally not read, and that is another kind of death. Forgotten paths, some going nowhere, others leading into new dark places…and who is to say which is which? Should works like “The Fluff at the Threshold” (1996) by Simon Leo Barber or “Two Fungi From Yuggoth” (1977) by Alice Briley be lost forever to obscurity? It is always a thought, in retreading these rare paths, to think of what feet may yet follow, and what they will make of it.

V. The End (?)

[…]

I am not alone on this rocky pedestal;

the bookseller is here with me,

the gleam in his eye telling me

that while he may not be the father of the

burden in my womb

he certainly had the pleasure

of violating me.

Erin Donahoe, “The Old Ones Reborn” in H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Spring-Summer 2007. 39

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.

Lorraine bio

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.