Lost Tale: “Something from Beyond” (1941) by Paul Dennis LaVond

In 1941, Robert A. W. Lowndes became editor of a science-fiction pulp magazine titled Future, which had been merged with another magazine titled Science Fiction Quarterly, and over the next few years would go by such titles as Future Combined with Science Fiction, Future Fiction, Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Stories over the next few years. Future, under whatever title, contained a great deal of work by Lowndes and his friends, sometimes under their own names and sometimes under pseudonyms, often joint pseudonyms for collaborations. One such pseudonym was Paul Dennis LaVond.

Lowndes had been a minor correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, and like several of HPL’s friends, had carved out his own corner of the Mythos, starting with “The Abyss” (Stirring Science Stories Feb 1941), which introduced a new eldritch tome: The Song of Yste. Lowndes would revisit and expand this personal Mythos in stories like “The Mantle of Graag” as by Paul Dennis LaVond (The Unique Magazine Oct 1941), “The Long Wall” as by Wilfred Owen Morley (Stirring Science Stories Mar 1942), “The Leapers” as by Carol Grey (Future Fantasy and Science Fiction Dec 1942), and the poem “Nyaghoggua” (Phantasmagoria 1939 / Famous Fantastic Mysteries Apr 1941). All of these stories were reprinted, sometimes in revised form and under slightly different titles, in later years…except one.

“Something from Beyond” (Future Dec 1941) by Paul Dennis LaVond is a story in the Song of Yste cycle that somehow fell through the cracks. Lowndes never republished or revised it; nor did Robert M. Price, who was studiously collecting early Mythos fiction in Crypt of Cthulhu and various anthologies like The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab (1996, Chaosium) and Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (1992, Fredogan & Bremer / 2002, Del Rey). Other authors associated with Paul Dennis LaVond include C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, and Dirk Wylie; Mike Ashley in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) credits “Something from Beyond” to Lowndes, Pohl, and Wylie (279). Perhaps that was why Lowndes never reprinted it.

※

Something from Beyond

by Paul Dennis LaVond

Foreword

WALLACE GREY was born in 2009, some thirty years after Harley Graeme made his first moon flight, in Norwich, and was schooled in Laurie Hall nearby, later attending Norwich University.

Although not nationally known, Norwich University has a fine, solid reputation for turning out acute, liberally-minded men, men who are neither too idealistic to adjust themselves to the harsh practicalities, nor yet too cut and dried to see beyond their noses. There are compulsory courses in subjects the mere mention of which would bring ridicule in other schools; they teach the occult and delve into what is known as Black Magic. Yet never do they permit their students thus to lose their grip on a world which denies and derides these things. The purpose of these courses is to instil into the student a love of truth and the unknown; they seek to make them like those sturdy scholars of a distant past who were willing to search through innumerable haystacks of falsehood for the needle of truth therein. Norwich men have always been the last to snort and cry “impossible” when the unknown occurs.

Shortly after graduating, Grey turned to anthropology for his vocation, but found the recognized authorities in the field to be grey-headed dodderers with a distaste for unorthodox views. In a fit of despair, he joined the Space Patrol, then popularly thought to be a glorified suicide club, nothing more. After a few months, his state of mind improved; but instead of buying his way out, as easily he could have done, he set about forging ahead in the Patrol. He was the first commissioned officer to rise from the ranks and there is no doubt but that he would have gone far, made a name both for himself and for the Patrol had not his career abruptly been terminated.

Grey was found dead, along with two other members of the crew, in the Patrol ship he commanded. The circumstances of his death were unusual inasmuch as the bodies of the three men were frozen, although the ship was quite warm. These bodies could not be thawed, yet gained heat rapidly upon arrival at Earth until the temperature was almost that of living men. An investigation brought no light upon the incident; there remains only Wallace Grey’s journal, extracts from which we give below.

From the Journal of Wallace Grey

“WHATEVER our scientists may say about the lifelessness of space, I cannot help believing that the void is indeed a harbor of life, even though it may not resemble the life we know. Perhaps such life is so alien that the very word itself cannot be applied, so different that by no stretch could the most plastic imagination conceive it. Yet, we have this word, and it signifies anything which possesses consciousness of being; to that we add growth, power of ingestion, reproduction, motion, and thought. Perhaps there are vortices of pure thought here in space. . . . But there is something out here which we cannot see, hear, taste, touch or smell. Yet we do sense its presence; we know it is here.

“It…. I cannot call the thing by any term more definite than ‘it’…. is watching us, or, should I say, it is aware of us; it may not possess what we know as sight. It is aware of us and has been following us for the last few days…. perhaps longer: we cannot tell how long it may have been hovering over us before we became aware of it. Perhaps a considerable length of time in its presence is necessary before any suggestion of its being can permeate us; Awareness has come, but not through the customary channels of perception. I wonder, though: is it conscious of us?…. Are trees conscious of the birds and animals that nest therein, of the little boys that climb them, of the men who come at last to hew them down?…. No, trees are still strange to men, even though men have known and dealt with trees as far back as our racial memories go. Even yet we do not know whether or not the tree has a consciousness of being, an awareness of other life-forms about it…. Imagination, psychological delusion, wishes that father thought…. we cannot be certain about anything; our greatest positivism can only be relative. Yet, I say that I can feel that this is a living, malevolent entity; but how do I know it is not my own emotions telling me this, my emotions which color my every act no matter how diligently I try to whitewash? It is only natural that we distrust what we do not know: all that we know is full of danger, pain, disaster, and death for us. We cannot trust ourselves: how, then, can the unknown bring other than apprehension to us?….

“I think that I am aware of this…. phenomenon…. more than Orloff or Jac; yet Orloff has been acting queerly for a number of days. He always was more than a little absent-minded; now he seems completely dazed. Ever since he and Jac repaired the blast-tube, Orloff has been…. different. He speaks very little, and, when he does, it is almost with an effort, as if he did not know the language he was trying to use. His voice, too, seems to have changed and the inflection is weird. I can see that Jac is puzzled; he asked me a few hours ago whether I thought Orloff might be developing some form of space-dementia. That is possible. I have tried to speak to Orloff several times, to see if he is in pain or feeling sick; he evades me and does not seem to understand what I am saying. There is, however, no fault to be found with his work; he does, true, perform his duties a trifle more slowly than before, but his efficiency has increased noticeably. He was always somewhat timid at the controls, fearful lest he make a blunder which would be disastrous to us all; now he handles them with confidence, does so well that I need not oversee him. He spends nearly all of his spare time staring out the portholes into space, although he does not appear to be watching anything. His eyes, I have noticed, are somewhat glazed as he stands there and, after he has finally turned away, his movements, for a few seconds, are incongruously stiff and awkward. Can there be any relationship between Orloff’s eccentricity and it? I must look into the Song of Yste again…. How out of place that ancient book seems aboard this ship, on the dark side of Luna, some quarter-million miles from Earth. Did those olden probers into the unknown, I wonder, ever dream of the day when men would leave the Earth physically?…. Yet, there is a vast amount of truth in this volume! I am told, by friends, that it was once declared pernicious, blasphemous, accursed, and to be destroyed on sight. A few copies were handed secretly from generation to generation lest they be discovered and burnt. (I wonder sometimes just how grandfather obtained it. Did he find it in a tomb, as he claimed, or was it obtained by other methods?)”

Later:

“Something has happened to my copy of the Song of Yste. I am positive that it was packed among other, more orthodox, volumes when we left Earth; yet it is not there now. I am sure Jac would not be rummaging around my things; even if he were, what possible Interest could a book like that hold for him. And Orloff…. but how could the lock on my chest be tampered with without traces being left? Moreover, of what value could a copy of this book be to other than myself? It is in cipher, most ingenious cipher. It took grandfather ten years to work it out, and another five to prepare the volume I now possess. But the mere possession of the key would be of little value, for even then one uninitiate could not read it. Each page holds a different variation of the cipher, the clue to which lies in the little sketch heading the page. Grandfather told me before he died. I mention this to point out the difficulty of reading a volume like my special copy of the Song of Yste and to draw attention to the high improbability that two people on the same ship, two members of the Space Patrol, further, would have the required abilities. Yet, Orloff’s condition leaves him open to grave suspicion.”

Later:

“Orloff has taken a change for the worse. He is unconscious now: Jac found him lying on the floor when he went below to see why Orloff did not respond to his signals. For a moment, he appeared to revive; his eyes opened yet I would swear that it was not Orloff who looked at us. He is lying on the couch in the next room; Jac and I are sharing his duties. I took advantage of the emergency to search Orloff’s room. Of course, it is within my authority to demand search at any time but I had been reluctant to use my power in this case as I was not sure that perhaps the blame was not mine. But the search proved my initial suspicions to be correct; it was in his room, and he had been reading it. Found figures on a sheet of paper in his desk which prove conclusively that he knew the cipher, was computing the variations for specific pages. When I am free, I shall determine just what he was reading; perhaps it will shed some light upon this gruesome state of affairs.”

Later:

“We are functioning under automatic controls, such as they are…. I have been reading that portion of the Song of Yste which seemed to be of so much interest to Orloff; it is damnable. Now I know what it is which has come out of space to dog our heels; I know why we feel so cold and the reason for Orloff’s curious condition…. We are completely helpless…. If I seem a bit reluctant to state what I know, it is because of the stark, objective closeness of the thing which stuns me. It is one thing to delve into the unknown and learn of hideous and alien secrets with which the cosmos is filled. That is one thing, I say, and it is a thing more than many minds can endure. But to face the actuality of these things is another matter. To those not afraid of thought, the Song of Yste is not so utterly horrible…. bizarre, grotesque…. words, words, words, but what can they mean, what can they mean when the reader has nothing in his own experience to approximate them?…. Imagination always paints a fascinating picture, albeit how gruesome, attaching glamor to the unknown and alien…. but the reality… Ia, Nyagghogua! Shub-Niggurath! Nyarlathotep! Nyartathotep!…. Nyagghogua, dissolver of space…. K’halkru!….

“Orloff’s condition is unchanged. He is still in a coma, apparently. But there are no wounds, no concussion, fractures or symptoms of shock. Jac does not suspect his true condition… but I know…. I know!”

“This is my last entry. It has come out of space…. for us. A short time ago I heard the call…. within. Weird piping sound ending in a piercing shriek. We…. felt it rather than heard it. Jac did not know what it was…. I tried to explain something natural….

“Orloff has arisen…. at the call. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at us, and, in his eyes a blackness, a vast shape of inconceivable power, malevolent power, that glared out at us. We are rooted to our seats…. though I cannot see what manner of resistance we could make were we free. I suppose it prefers us alive…. though could I reach the wall, none of us would go to it alive.

“We both feel very cold, although the instruments show that the temperature has not dropped a single degree. The cold comes from…. within. Orloff is moving slowly toward the space-lock; I sit here frozen to my seat, writing furiously…. Must try to put down what I read in that accursed book last night….

“‘Let not the hearts of men dwell too pleasantly upon escape from this earth to worlds of strangeness and glamor beyond the veil of night for without lies horror and madness and that which no human tongue or pen can describe. Vaster by far than the might and malevolence of those demons that plague and befoul the earth is that which comes out of space to feast upon the souls of men; yet, indeed, it is but a lesser manifestation of the evil which dwells beyond the stars. This out of space may be known by the coldness it brings, a coldness which no fire can abate, and by its unholy piping by which it summons its victims to sacrifice. For of old is it known to send itself into the living bodies of certain creatures so that they appear bewitched and know not themselves, shunning the day and the radiance of the sun which is hateful to it. Many and multiform are the prodigies it performs, for it may enter a city and blast all within into frozen corpses, yet, when these are discovered, there will have been no sign either of cold or of its point of entrance. Many and multiform are the prodigies it performs for its own amusement and contempt for men. And the crowning foulness of all….’

“I may write no more. The space lock is opening…. Orloff…”

“ENTRY in the log of the Space- Liner Majestic, Earth-Mars voyage EM 206: (From File .0078, Derelicts, Report of, for the year 2027, Record Rooms, Interplanetary Transit Building, N’York, Terra.)

“December 9, 2027. Discovered derelict space-patrol cruiser. #SP-070 R3, reported missing August 24, 2027, drifting in and parallel to Band 5. Found bodies of three men in cabin. Two in their official places; a third lying on the floor in such a position as to assume he had been placed there after death. Although ship was entirely warm and instruments showed no variation in room temperature, the corpses were frozen. Ship’s log, found in cabin, was dated August 5, 2027, no entries after that date being found. Journal of Commanding Officer, Wallace Grey, Lieutenant, Space-Patrol, hereby forwarded without comment. Lt. Grey was found, pen in hand, in the act of making entries in aforementioned journal.’’

The End

※

“Something from Beyond” is pure Lovecraftian pastiche, albeit in an uncommon space opera setting, which gives it the feel of a very stripped-down prototype of Event Horizon. Aside from the direct mentions to Lovecraft’s Mythos, the mention of Khalk’ru is a nod toward A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), where Khalk’ru is an extradimensional kraken worshipped by a cult in Alaska—sometimes seen as Merritt’s nod toward Lovecraft. Whether Lowndes intended any connection between Wallace Grey and Carol Grey (or simply liked the name) is unknown.

The original publication of “Something from Beyond” can be read on the Internet Archive.

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 Leapers” (1942) by Carol Grey

“Carol Grey” was a pseudonym used by writer and editor Robert A. W. Lowndes for two stories, both initially published in the same pulp magazine: “Passage to Sharanee” (FUTURE combined with Science Fiction, April 1942) and “The Leapers” (FUTURE Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1942). Why Lowndes chose this pseudonym is not, to the best of my knowledge, ever explained. While Sally Theobald and Justine Geoffrey were obvious literary references and made sense within the context of their respective stories, and Linda Lovecraft a persona adopted to fit an anthology, “Carol Grey” appears to have been a purely pragmatic pen-name: Lowndes also edited FUTURE, and did not want to appear cheap or biased in publishing his own fiction under his own name.

In any event, Lowndes got a taste of what it might be like as a female pulp writer from at least one ardent science fiction fan, Earl Andrews, whose letter was published in FUTURE combined with Science Fiction, August 1942) in response to “Passage to Sharanee”:

Ah, Carol Grey! Ah, spring! Ah! Prithee, my Lord Editor: wiltow kindly vouchsafe unto a fellow Lothario certain divers information. Tell me now of yon Carol. Doth she walk in beauty and so on? ((My dear fellow. !!! Ed.))

Lowndes’ reply is perhaps understandable given the circumstances:

This is going to hurt you more than it hurts us, Earl, my lad, but we’re under strict orders not to reveal Miss Grey’s address, or divulge any divers information about her. And we cannot see any reason for not adhering faithfully to those instructions.

Elsewhere in the same magazine, Lowndes had to assure a reader that Carol Grey was “not Helen Weinbaum or Leigh Brackett,” two actual female sci-fi pulp writers of the 40s.

There is no direct connection between the two “Carol Grey” stories; “Passage to Sharanee” is a space opera novelette concerning a missing jewel and an ancient shapeshifting alien called a vombis (no apparent connection to Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis”). “The Leapers” by contrast is a tale of the Cthulhu Mythos, albeit very much of the science-fantasy varietal. It is tied by references to several other pieces of Lovecraftian fiction written and published by Lowndes, beginning with “The Abyss” (Stirring Science Stories, February 1941) in what might be loosely called “The Arkya Cycle” or “The Song of Yste” series, after the most characteristic elements of Lowndes’ additions to the Mythos.

In the early 1940s while editing FUTURE, Lowndes was a member of a New York-based group of science fiction fans and writers called the Futurians; many of their works were tapped by Lowndes for this and other pulps he edited. Another Futurian, Damon Knight, later wrote a book on their activities, which includes the genesis of Lowndes’ “The Leaper”:

Lowndes told me, “There was a Cabal⁠—Donald [Wollheim], Cyril [Kornbluth], John [B. Michel], Chet Cohen and myself. We met once a week. The Cabal was a literary wrokshop, really. We met at Cyril’s place once a week, and each one of us was supposed to bring a manuscript to read. […] And as it turned out,” Lowndes said, “a fair number of manuscrupts that were read at the Cabal were later sold and published. […] It was at a Cabal meeting that my story, ‘The Leapers,’ was read, and the only compliment I remember ever getting from Cyril Kornbluth—he read it, he sort of blinked and shook his head, and said, ‘It’s absorbing.'”
—Damon Knight, The Futurians

Lowndes himself would expand on this a little in his introduction to the story when it was reprinted in Crypt of Cthulhu #62 (Candlemas 1989):

One day when Don was visiting John [B. Michel] and me at the Futurian Embassy (103rd Street, Manhattan) he sayeth unto me: “Doc, do you think you could write a Lovecraft story? I’d like one for my next issue.”

I thought I could and behold I did, getting leave of absence from The Cabal not to write anything else until I had finished “The Leapers.” I shall never forget the night when the ms was passed around and read at a Cabal meeting. Cyril was the last to get it; when he finished he blinked, shook his head slightly as if to wake himself up, and said in an awed tone: “It’s absorbing.” That was the one and only time that Cyril Kornbluth had any kind words for any of my fiction. And since it had been written for Don Wollheim in the first place, there was no question of immediate acceptance.

Alas! It would have led off the fantasy section of the issue following the March 1942 Stirring Science Stories; but that issue never appeared.
—Crypt of Cthulhu #62 (3)

Lowndes and Wollheim would both use Futurian stories in their respective magazines, and there are little in-jokes almost from the start. For example, when Lowndes writes in “The Leapers”:

One of the missing, for example, was an attractive blonde of 23, widely renowned among the devotees of the more imaginative and speculative of pulp fiction as an illustrator; another, a man of 27, was in the process of becoming a favorite in the field of fantastic, cosmic horror-fiction, the general type of narrative wherein Poe, Machen, and Lovecraft specialized.

Illustrator Barbara Hall, who Knight describes as “a good-looking blond woman” associated with Wollheim is obviously the former; Wollheim himself (born in 1914, so 27 in ’41 when the story was probably written) is almost certainly the latter.

In format, “The Leapers” owes much to an older style of horror fiction, large chunks of the text being supposed clippings from newspapers regarding Fortean phenomenon, assembled by the nameless narrator as they seek to piece together the puzzle of a very odd missing persons case. This leads them shortly to the Song of Yste, Lowndes’ own addition to the Lovecraftian library, and which first appeared in “The Abyss.” In a later reprinting of the story, Lowndes would note:

While written as a “Lovecraft story”, even the earlier version contained one fundamental departure from HPL—a matter about which your editor and The Master had argued back in 1936, shortly before he died: that reading “Forbidden Books”, etc. had to bring about dreadful and horrible events, and that such knowledge leads invariably to destruction. While we would not quarrel, even now, with Lovecraft’s statements that reading the Necronomicon would be the beginning of a Frightful End for you, we do assure you that, for a strong mind, the Song Of Yste need not be fatal—unless you’re bored to death.
—Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Magazine of Horror #23 (Vol. 4, No. 5), Sep 1968

Lovecraft and Lowndes had corresponded during the last year or so of Lovecraft’s life, while Lovecraft’s ideas appear to be based strongly on The King in Yellow play as used by Robert W. Chambers, “The Leapers” appears to be Lowndes counter-reaction to that, with lengthy passages of exposition about the reading of forbidden books and why they are forbidden. This was still that first generation of fandom where random literary arguments could be worked out in print on pulpwood paper, and Lowndes even alludes to this correspondence directly in the story:

I had, in fact, read a few of the tales of classic horror, written some more or less precocious speculations regarding them, and written a letter or so to a muchly-famed student residing in Providence, Rhode Island. he it was who had been the source of what little knowledge I possessed, and I had permitted my correspondence with him to lag; now, I could not be sure if he were still available at the old address.

The posthumous unnamed Lovecraft then makes an appearance via letter, with Lowndes doing a fair imitation of his style. Futurians such as Donald Wollheim, who had also corresponded with Lovecraft, would have recognized this immediately; whether the pulp readers of FUTURE picked up on it is less certain.

In the 1960s, Lowndes became editor of The Magazine of Horror, a small digest that focused mainly on classic and pulp reprints put out by Health Knowledge, Inc. The magazine gave him the opportunity to expand and republish some of his earlier works, including “The Abyss” (Winter 1965/66) and “The Leapers” (September 1968), this time under his own name. He later recalled:

It was while working at Health Knowledge that I had occasion to reread “The Leapers,” and found myself unsatisfied. So I rewrote and expanded it, making it a frame story.
—Crypt of Cthulhu #62 (3)

Part of this general expansion includes a sort of preface, identifying the narrator as Arnold Grayson, and that it had originally been sent to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales (who had died in 1940, two years before the story was initially published, a fact which Lowndes notes).

The other major addition is an expansion from the pseudo-Lovecraft letter, which goes to some odd places:

Well, I have a letter from Hannes [Bok] dated 1939, in which he tells me that Ray Bradbury is going to show some samples of his work to Farnsworth Wright at WEIRD TALES. I replied that I did hope that Wright would be impressed, for as delectable as Mrs. Brundage’s covers were to the more erotic-minded readers, few of them were truly weird. (I assure you that I have never objected to well-exposed depictions of delightful-looking young girls—but maintain stubbornly that a girl cannot be both delightful-looking and weird at the same time.)

Lovecraft died in ’37, Bok’s first art for Weird Tales was ’39, Wright died in ’40, the events of the story nominally take place in ’42…the timeline is a little screwy, but Lowndes mentions that in the preface. The comment on Brundage’s art is interesting because it recalls a similar comment made by Lovecraft in an actual letter:

I have no objection to the nude in art—in fact, the human figure is as worthy a type of subject matter as any other object of beauty in the visible world. But I don’t see what the hell Mrs. Brundage’s undressed ladies have to do with weird fiction!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Willis Conover, 16 Sep 1936, Selected Letters 5.304

Which raises an interesting problem: volume 5 of the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft was published in 1976, the revised edition of “The Leapers” was published in The Magazine of Horror in 1968. So did Lowndes have access to this quote from Conover’s letters or…and this is a tantalizing possibility…did Lowndes cannibalize or paraphrase part of a letter that Lovecraft had sent to him? Until and unless Lovecraft’s letters to Lowndes are ever published, we may never know.

In any event, this second incarnation of “The Leapers” had one final evolution:

Few of the readers of the issue of Magazine of Horror had read the original version, and the revision went over quite well—except with one person who had read and remembered the original: Robert Silverberg. Silverberg wrote me a polite note, more in sorrow than in anger, and pointed out that my frame approach went far to spoil an excellent story. Thus I have revised the story for a third time and the final version, which follows, has (I hope) the best of both earlier versions.
—Crypt of Cthulhu #62 (3)

Titled simply “Leapers” in Crypt of Cthulhu, the third-and-final revision starts by dropping the initial part of the “frame” mentioning Farnsworth Wright and Weird Tales. The added portion of the pseudo-Lovecraft letter remains, and at the end is tacked on an addendum containing the gist of the 1968 framing device, Wright and all. Whether this is actually better is a bit subjective—it gets at the story more directly, but the mention of Wright still feels problematic from a timeline point of view.

It’s difficult to judge the impact of Carol Grey and “The Leapers.” Even among devoted Mythos-fans, the Song of Yste is not exactly as popular as the Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or the Book of Eibon. Robert Weinberg and Ed Berglund in the Reader’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos (1973) have marked the story as “integral to the Cthulhu Mythos”—a distinction they don’t give to items such as “The Cats of Ulthar” or “The Colour Out of Space.” Certainly, the theme of forbidden knowledge begun in “The Leapers” was something that stuck with Lowndes, as he wrote later about his correspondence with Lovecraft:

So I finally wrote him that winter, and in the course of my first letter told him what had bothered me about At the Mountains of Madness, and some of the other stories: the discovery of the unknown always led to madness and destruction. couldn’t some unknown things possibly be beautiful, leading to greater happiness, etc.?

His reply was that such stories must have such an ending, because the universe was really a terrible place and only our relative ignorance and limitations made it endurable to us; to seek to go beyond those limitations, to find the real nature of things, would inevitably be shattering. it is only our illusions of order and relative safety that protect us from madness. (That is, of course, a paraphrase of what he wrote me.) The seence of horror lay in abnormalities, in violations of what we consider to be natural law, dislocations of time and space, etc. […]

And when I got around to trying my hand at the Lovecraft type of story, I stuck by my guns. Awful things happened to some of the characters, of course, but everyone who had read the forbidden books was not destroyed nor turned into a monster. And while I still love HPL, I cannot but look at him as something of a vandal, at times—all those precious and priceless copies of the Necronomicon burned!
—Robert A. W. Lowndes, “On Forbidden Knowledge” in Crypt of Cthulhu #62 (56)

If there is anything to be said for the story, it is that it is almost a perfect encapsulation of Mythos fiction in the 1940s, with its odd pulpy plot and in-jokes, the convoluted history of reprints and revision. That first generation of post-Lovecraft fans, still coming to terms with Lovecraft and his philosophy.

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