“The Head of T’la-yub” (2015) by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

We came to the Mictlán, the place of the dead, which the ancient people called Xinaián […]
—”The Head of T’la-yub” by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, trans. Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Most of “The Mound” is given as a story-within-a-story: the English translation of the Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias, Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545. Few of the Aztec codices have survived the flames and floods, the mold and wear of centuries of hands; we today often read about the peoples and places they encountered through accounts like Zamacona’s…who being their own skewed, flawed interpretation of what they see and witnessed of ways of life and belief of which they knew little, and could only understand through the lens of their own religion, politics, philosophy, and experience.

Which is a long way to say: no one has tried to tell the story from T’la-yub’s point of view.

In Lovecraft’s narrative via Zamacona, T’la-yub is a tragic figure. She dared to love, dared to dream of a monogamous union, and the subject of her affections determined only to put her aside as soon as convenient. For her transgressions in the name of romance, she is doomed to mutilation, death, and then undeath. T’la-yub is one of the ghosts of the mound, the dead woman who holds her head, facing eternal punishment for a momentary infraction.

There’s something very Christian about that interpretation, isn’t there? Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas flips the script. What if Zamacona didn’t understand what was happening? What if he misconstrued his place and importance in the sequence of events?

As with her other stories “Tloque Nahuaque” (2011), “Ahuizotl” (2011), and “In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath” (2014), “The Head of T’la-yub” mixes elements of the Mythos was Aztec mythology. Instead of the more Pellucidar-esque elements of Lovecraft’s alien civilization beneath the earth, the focus is on T’la-yub’s personal spiritual and physical journey, here modeled on the descent of the dead to Mictlán, the growth of her understanding as to what she has become and what her role is. The result is brief, but novel: a new way to look at this aspect of the “Mesoamerican Mythos,” taking Lovecraft not at face value, but as one interpretation of events told through a very European lens.

Which doesn’t mean that Lovecraft was wrong and García-Rosas is right; the point of the story is not to disprove Lovecraft or point out sources of error, but to provide a new viewpoint that suggests that the picture is much more richly complex than Lovecraft himself gives it. Where works like Winter Tide (2017) by Ruthanna Emrys takes “The Mound” at more or less face value, or The Queen of K’n-yan (2008) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) that takes the basic ideas but moves in its own direction, “The Head of T’la-yub” is essentially an alternative narrative of “The Mound”—and readers can put on their scholar’s caps, read up on Aztec mythology, and decide for themselves where the balance of truth lies.

“The Head of T’la-yub” by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas was translated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and was first published in She Walks in Shadows (2015); it was republished in the paperback edition Cthulhu’s Daughters (2016).

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

Winter Tide (2017) by Ruthanna Emrys

After I wrote “The Litany of Earth,” I thought I was done. I’d said what I needed to about Lovecraft and being a monster; it was time to move on. When people started asking for more, I figured it was just a nice way of saying “I liked it.” But the requests kept coming, and I started explaining to anyone who’d listen why the story didn’t need a sequel.

My second thanks, therefore, are to everyone who pushed for more of Aphra’s story until I talked myself around and figured out what else I had to say.
—Ruthanna Emrys, “Acknowledgements” in Winter Tide (2017) 363

A Cthulhu Mythos novel is difficult to write. The very first was August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945); others followed, such as Brian Lumley’s Beneath the Moors (1974) and Robert Bloch’s Strange Eons (1978). Most of these early Mythos novels face the same problems and criticisms: the difficulty of maintaining a Lovecraftian narrative and atmosphere at length, and an over-reliance on Mythos tie-ins. They were basically very long pastiches, and not always good pastiche. The little tie-ins which readers thrill in during a short story can become overburdening if dwelt on at length, or if the entire story’s plot serves no other purpose than to expand on connections between parts of the Mythos. While Lovecraft could sometimes inundate readers with references, it was usually fairly brief and never to the detriment of the plot of the story he was telling. The reference to Innsmouth in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” for example, is a reference that would thrill readers of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” but Lovecraft doesn’t focus on the connection, or even explain it.

Ruthanna Emrys’ “The Litany of Earth” is admirably self-contained in that way. While Aphra Marsh retells some of the events of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in her own words, the story is not just a retelling and commentary of Lovecraft’s story, but focuses on Aphra’s life after that tragedy. Coping and rebuilding, forming bonds and friendship, learning and learning to deal with accumulated trauma, trust issues, etc. The close of the story doesn’t cease Aphra’s narrative—she’s still alive—but neither does it beg for or immediately suggest a sequel.

Looking back at “The Litany of Earth” and Winter Tide in hindsight, it is easier to see how Emrys got from one to the other. The novel takes advantage of its length to explore a few of the themes of “Litany” in greater depth, and following that thread Aphra and her companions return to Lovecraft Country in Massachusetts, picking up on some of the wider connections between “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and the Mythos. Some of these work better than others; Pickman Sanitarium is basically an Easter egg, the Cthäat Aquadingen (originally created by Brian Lumley in “The Cyprus Shell”) a wink and a nod. The regurgitation of endless Mythos titles is the kind of thing that feels like running a finger down the laundry-list of tomes in the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game; the little Mythos details are generally at their best when being creative (salt-cakes!)

While Emrys’ novel definitely isn’t pastiche, the over-reliance of tie-ins does drag a little; Miskatonic University in this incarnation looks a lot more like Ex Libris Miskatonici (1993) by Joan C. Stanley in the sheer density and scale of the occult shenanigans. More annoyingly because some of the details given don’t line up, but without any real explanation. The founders of Innsmouth, for example, are alleged in the novel to have come from England rather than Oceania, and for reasons unspecified apparently the Deep Ones don’t have any communities off the West Coast of the United States. There might be good narrative reasons for this, but without some hint it feels like a misstep rather than a deliberate authorial choice. Those pedantic niggles are relatively rare, and not necessarily bad. For example, the Hall School for girls which Lovecraft mentioned in “The Thing on the Doorstep” is transformed into a women’s college affiliate with Miskatonic University in Winter Tide.

The issue of plot and atmosphere are different for Winter Tide than the early Mythos novels. “The Litany of Earth” never made any attempt to copy Lovecraft’s atmosphere; Emrys has her own voice and is comfortable with it. Aphra and the other main characters are essentially already initiates into the Mythos, or become initiated quickly, so there is a lot less peeling-back-the-onion…which is fine, except that nominally the A plot is a Cold War occult spy thriller (“cloak & enchanted dagger,” or maybe “cloak & tentacle”) a la Charles Stross’ The Atrocity Archives and “A Colder War,” Tim Powers’ Declare, or even the Delta Green Roleplaying Game, and that plot goes…essentially nowhere. Most of the book, and thus most of the interest in the novel, relies entirely on the drama generated by the interactions between the slowly expanding cast of characters.

The expansion of the cast seems less organic than it should be. While admirably diverse for a Mythos novel in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation, the cast is bigger than it needs to be and some of the relationships feel forced. One of the characters from “Litany” is revealed as homosexual, for example, but there’s no build-up to the revelation and ultimately no real impact on the narrative. While Emrys is keenly aware of the discrimination that various characters are subject to in the 1940s United States of America for being some combination of women, homosexual, African-American, Japanese, Jewish, and/or an Innsmouth hybrid and doesn’t shy away from how bad the “good old days” could be if you weren’t a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, she can’t give equal attention to every single character’s experience and not all of those characters have an equal contribution to the nominal plot.

The opposition to Aphra & her group are basically heterosexual white people—whether privileged Miskatonic students, sexist and sexually abusive male university professors, or racist and sexist FBI agents. The characterization isn’t inaccurate to the time period (and it is the rampant bigotry, spoken and unspoken, which unites the group of outsiders in common cause), but it does get to be a little frustrating when pretty much every single one of them refuses to learn absolutely anything from the mistakes that leave a trail of bodies and ruined lives in their wake. Maybe that’s deliberate, but it still feels like there could have been room for more nuance—or, at least, that there would have been some small moral victory in getting at least one them to step out of their headspace of thinking they know better than everyone else, or of being self-righteous about it.

Where “Litany of Earth” doesn’t demand a sequel, readers might wonder what the point of Winter Tide is. Mostly, it serves to drag Aphra back to Innsmouth, the prodigal daughter returning home to reconnect with and face the demands of her family. Many Mythos stories have focused on issues of reproduction, from Lovecraft’s miscegenation theme in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” to miscarriage and infertility (“In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens), arranged marriages and unwanted pregnancies (“Mail Order Bride” (1999) by Ann K. Schwader), to rape leading to pregnancy (“The Thing from Lover’s Lane” (1996) by Nancy A. Collins), to spousal abuse (“A Coven in Essex County” (2016) by J. M. Yales), but this is one that addresses an issue both perennial and very current: family expectations to have kids, and the right to choose not to have a child.

This could honestly have been the theme of the novel in many ways; a way of confronting past and future at once…but it feels like a B-plot that is, if not completely resolved, at least resolved way too quickly. There are good reasons why Aphra (or any woman) might want to have a child and not want to have a child; replace an aging parent with an immortal, fully-transformed Deep One asking when and how you’re going to spawn and suggesting suitable mates from your immediate pool of friends is something that could be played up for both horror and laughs. Yet for a decision that doesn’t have to be made right away, it’s one that Aphra caves to after a bare minimum of self-reflection. Aphra isn’t the only one subject to this expectation—at least two or three other characters are in analogous positions, even if not all of their family have gills—and Emrys could have played with the comparison of situations a bit more there, but chose not to.

Winter Tide is definitely a better written novel than The Lurker at the Threshold or Strange Eons; the characters are deeper, the interactions better, many of the embellishments on the Mythos more creative. From a Mythos perspective, it feels like it draws too much from the roleplaying game side of things; as a dramatic novel, it feels like it has too many characters and doesn’t do enough with those that are there. In comparison with “The Litany of Earth,” Winter Tide definitely doesn’t have the same focus; Emrys already made her point about providing an alternate take on “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and there’s no need to rehash it here—but neither does Emrys have quite the same twist or insight to offer on Miskatonic-focused stories like “The Thing on the Doorstep” and The Shadow Out of Time.

The marketing for this novel refers to it as part of the “Innsmouth Legacy” series—and it really is the focus on the bits and piece of Innsmouth culture, material and otherwise, that survive which are the best “Mythos” parts of the novel. The references to “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft are less interesting and relevant than the pieces of Innsmouth gold we see, and the meaning that they represent; the depictions of the gods (including “Shub-Nigaroth” as a substitute for “Shub-Niggurath,” probably to avoid any perceived issues with etymology); an origin story for the Deep Ones; the reference to how Innsmouth had few graveyards and that the dates on the stones were relatively young (stillbirths and childhood illnesses & accidents)…these are all good details. The kind of world-building which the book could have used more of, or have focused more on.

It’s a great story and a seamless subversion of Lovecraft’s most repellent views while simultaneously being a tribute to his greatest accomplishments.
—Carrie S., review of Winter Tide on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (26 May 2017)

Is Winter Tide actually subverting Lovecraft? This is a question that applies to many books published around the same time which dealt with issues of race, prejudice, and the Mythos, including Lovecraft Country (2016) by Matt Ruff and “The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016) by Victor LaValle. It’s not an easy question to answer. 1949 is a different world than the one Lovecraft left in 1937, or wrote about when “The Shadow over Innsmouth” in 1931. Lovecraft himself was racist, to the point of bigotry, he was homophobic, antisemitic, and anti-immigrant; how much of that made it into “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Thing on the Doorstep?”

The fantasy racism with regards to Innsmouth in Lovecraft’s fiction is inspired by the real-life racial discrimination of the United States in the 1930s, but in Lovecraft’s stories it is very specifically so much weirder than “normal” racism that the prejudices of the surrounding towns is the red herring. Unlike Winter Tide, no one in Lovecraft’s stories suspects what the people of Innsmouth actually are. That is what makes Lovecraft’s Innsmouth narrative so sensational…and what makes it so difficult to subvert.

Is it a subversion if the Deep Ones are sympathetic and not actively evil? Is it a subversion to tell a story from the perspective of a Deep One? Or to have a protagonist who openly embraces various characters without discriminating about them based on gender, sexuality, race, or religion? Not rhetorical questions; Ruthanna Emrys doesn’t carry forward many of Lovecraft’s prejudices, but neither does she invert all of them.

“The Innsmouth Legacy” is more inclusive than Lovecraft’s Mythos, but it can’t negate or even really address the substance of race and discrimination that informed Lovecraft’s writing. Or to put it another way, Winter Tide does not exist to deconstruct the ideas of race & the Cthulhu Mythos. Emrys works to turn Lovecraft’s ideas to her own usage, but in doing so never really questions the underlying fundamentals of some of those ideas—the Deep Ones (“Children of Water”) and K’n-yans (“Children of Earth”) are in several respects fundamentally different from “normal humans” (“Children of Air”), and Lovecraft’s depictions of them are treated as broadly accurate, if not universal—and they could not be otherwise, for the characters to be as they are, or the narrative to play out as it does.

In the review for “The Litany of Earth,” it was noted to make Deep Ones just a nigh-immortal, magically adept subspecies of humanity is to basically turn them into ugly versions of Tolkien’s elves. To extend a tortured metaphor, the depiction of the inhabitants of K’n-yan is basically a version of the Drow from Dungeons & Dragons. While they don’t have dark skin pigmentation, the K’n-yans are a magically adept subspecies of humanity, but one which is seen as (perhaps genetically) evil, insane, and sadistic; they are shunned by other intelligent peoples and subject to pejorative epithets (“dustblood”) and wariness, if not outright discrimination. The discovery of K’n-yan heritage fundamentally changes how a character views herself, and how she is viewed by an interacts with the other characters; this isn’t an ancestry test where the character is pleasantly surprised to see an unexpected result giving them a genetic tie that didn’t know about…and unlike at the end of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” acceptance of this unusual heritage does not equal any kind of promise of glorious transfiguration.

Which does not make Winter Tide in any sense a bad novel; a Dungeons & Dragons novel can be fine fantasy without working to subvert everything J. R. R. Tolkien wrote about elves. A book can be fresh and well-written without necessarily being revolutionary. Part of the point of a Cthulhu Mythos novel is to build on what has gone before—and add to it. Ruthanna Emrys has certainly done that.

Winter Tide was published in 2017; the Innsmouth Legacy series would continue with a sequel novel Deep Roots in 2019.

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

Her Letters To Lovecraft: Zealia Brown Reed Bishop

Dear Mr. Lovecraft :—

Your letter of the 20th just arrived. I shall be only too glad to have your friend have The Mound for sale or to see—especially ~~that~~ since it offers an opportunity to partially discharge my already disgracefully lengthened debt to you— (You are so patient about money—especially when you need it so very much.)
—Zealia Brown Bishop to H. P. Lovecraft, 26 May 1934, The Spirit of Revision 177

In 1927, Zealia Margaret Caroline Brown Reed turned 30 years old. She had been married at seventeen to James P. Reed (1891-1935); a son (James Reed, Jr.) was born seven months after the wedding. The state of her marriage in 1927 is unknown, but three years later she would be listed on the U.S. Census as “divorced.” Living at the time in Cleveland, Ohio, Zealia Brown Reed worked as a court reporter and sold stories and articles to support herself and her son, but was looking to improve her writing. Via Samuel Loveman, she got in touch with a friend of his that did revision work and dispensed writing advice: H. P. Lovecraft.

I wrote to Lovecraft and he replied immediately that he would be glad to examine any of my work I cared to send and offer what assistance he could.

Thereafter I became an established recipient of the famous Lovecraft letters. He wrote regularly, sometimes fifty and sixty page letters, in a fine spidery script which often counted five hundred words to the page. These letters were filled with the strictest rules of rhetoric and meaty literary advice.
—Zealia Bishop, “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” in Ave Atque Vale 254

The correspondence of Zealia and Howard would last for the final decade of Lovecraft’s life. It would result in three weird tales: “The Curse of Yig” (written 1928, published 1929), “The Mound” (written 1929, published 1940), and “Medusa’s Coil” (written 1930, published 1939). Lovecraft also had a hand in revising a number of Zealia’s non-weird manuscripts, none of which are known to have been published or survive. As with some of his other revision clients, Lovecraft’s correspondence goes much beyond the simple “business” side of things. Writing apparently every week or two, his letters would be filled with advice on writing, suggested readings, remarks on articles or newspaper cuttings that Zealia had sent. One letter from Lovecraft to her son James survives, showing how friendly and familiar that the two had gotten, although Lovecraft never failed to address his letters as “Dear Mrs. Reed,” or “Dear Mrs. R”—at least until 1930, when Zealia remarried to Dauthard William Bishop, Sr. and the letters were sent to “Dear Mrs. Bishop.”

As is the case with many of Lovecraft’s correspondents, the bulk of the surviving correspondence are his letters to Zealia, which makes it difficult to get a read on the woman herself. What is apparent from Lovecraft’s responses to her is that she was not primarily interested in weird fiction, being more focused on stories of relationships, real life, and human interest—and apparently sold at least one story “One-Man Girl” the confession pulp Cupid’s Diary (26 Dec 1928). While Lovecraft was always polite to Zealia in his letters to her, to his other correspondents he would occasionally gripe:

And the light diversion wherewith I’m paying it off is the most deodamnate piece of unending Bushwork I’ve ever tackled since the apogee of the immortal Davidius himself—the sappy, half-baked Woman’s Home Companion stuff of a female denizen of once illustrious Cleveland whose pencil has hopelessly outdistanc’d her imagination. Gawd bless the money-orders, but Pete sink the manuscripts!
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 23 May 1927, Letters to James F. Morton 138

David Van Bush was a prolific early revision client of Lovecraft’s who specialized in mediocre poetry and pop-psychology essays; any revision work that that was especially tedious became “Bushwork.” While that might well be the case for some of Zealia’s more romantic fiction, it’s difficult to say that the same should apply to their weird fiction—Lovecraft himself noted that “The Curse of Yig”: “gave me quite an opportunity to practice up on my old creative processes” (Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja 206); and the extensive narrative of “The Mound” stands as one of Lovecraft’s longest stories, based on a very bare premise, so he could hardly have had no interest in it. There is a lacunae in the extent Lovecraft/Bishop correspondence around the time “Medusa’s Coil” was written, and because it was never published almost no references in Lovecraft’s other letters, so it is unclear what his feelings were toward that work.

Zealia herself, however, seemed overall very grateful for the long friendship in letters. When August Derleth contacted Bishop after Lovecraft’s death, looking for his letters and any unpublished stories, she noted:

You see when I first began writing I was prone to be too schoolgirlishly romantic—HPL snapped me out of that & made me infinitely ashamed of myself. My sister has a ranch in Okla & while visiting her over a period of many years I have studied & learned much of Indian folklore. The Mound & Yig are both based on actual stories throughout the locality of my sister’s ranch—Medusa’s Coil might also interest you?

I am sending you a few letters which cover minutely Howard’s principles of revision instructions–one is the first letter ever received from him in ’27 on this subject. Yes he helped me on nearly everything I’ve done in some manner—the stories—Yig—The Mound—Medusa’s Coil—were my first real stories of their kind—the novel—The Adopted Son—was carefully corrected by HPL & revised where he felt necessary—he suggested the method of rhythm—which I endeavored to carry out—& which you will catch when you have time to read it.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 14 Apr 1937, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

For all that the correspondence between Zealia and Howard seems to have run for about a decade, and is mentioned in her memoir “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View”, surprisingly little of it survives. In part, this appears to be a factor in Zealia’s re-marriage and moves. When Derleth contacted her about the Lovecraft letters project, she apparently sent some of the letters in her possession. Eighteen of these became part of the Arkham House Transcripts; fourteen of them appear in Selected Letters II (1968). In her correspondence with Derleth, she hinted at other surviving letters:

My yet unfinished tale is one with Aztec mythology woven through it and I think Howard was well pleased with the progress I made without his supervision…even as he was with three of my novels. Sometimes I shall send you the letters he wrote about them…telling me how I had progressed with structure and the choice of words.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 13 Jan 1950, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

These letters appear to have never made it to Derleth, but some of it did survive; in 2014, it came to light that 36 letters (including the letter from Lovecraft to her son Jim, and one surviving letter from Zealia to Lovecraft) had been in the possession of Zealia’s great niece. This, combined with the letters that Arkham House transcribed and biographical materials on Zealia’s life and her correspondence with Lovcraft, were annotated and published as The Spirit of Revision (2015) by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

The correspondence is still very incomplete; the fifty-four published letters covers a period of 1927-1930, 1934, and 1936. In addition to this, there is one letter which Zealia quoted from in writing to August Derleth, which has not been published:

But I do want you to know that under H.P.L. I most certainly had the finest fundamental training one could ever receive in years at any university.

Thus as example: “I am genuinely astonished by Wright’s attitude toward your last story. It only confirms my opinion of his capriciousness and lack of all objective standards in judging stories. This tale was not so long as the one he accepted the week before—and I don’t see where it could be any less “convincing”. But Wright’s Wright—he will have his self-important ex-cathedra personal reactions. I give him up! In fact I gave him up long ago. It would take some superhuman and veteran behaviourist like Thomas H. Uzzell to fathom the intricacies of his psychology—.”
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 6 Apr 1949, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

This would presumably be a reference to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejecting either “The Mound” or “The Curse of Yig.”

One aspect of Zealia’s letters to Lovecraft that has mostly gone unremarked are the dealings she had with the other authors in Lovecraft’s circle. Samuel Loveman has already been mentioned; the two do not appear to have any lengthy correspondence. At the time she began to engage Lovecraft’s revision services, he was in partnership with Frank Belknap Long. “Sonny” Long may have revised and/or typed some of her manuscripts, and acted as literary agent in trying to get “The Mound” published after it was rejected by Weird Tales. In addition to Long, Zealia got in touch with Robert H. Barlow, the avid fan who later became Lovecraft’s literary executor, in 1934.

Dear Mr Barlow:-

After so long a time I generally get around to accomplishing the thing I’m supposed to. Today I am expressing The Mound to you and am also enclosing a copy of Medusa’s Coil for you to read, then I wish you would please send it on to Mr Frank B. Long of New York (230 West 97th Street) as I’m going to give him a chance to dispose of it unless you would particularly like to have it. Anyway, you may advise me. I have no idea what the Londodn [sic] Publishers will offer. They have asked to see it and are the publishers who made a reprint of The Curse of Yig. […]

Mr Lovecraft must have had a marvelous time at your home and on his trip. Isn’t he a wonderful person? I feel deeply indebted to him for anything I have and may ever accomplish. His letters are always sources of great inspiration to me.

My fingers are getting buttery so shall stop, but wanted you to know that the manuscripts go forth today. Sorry I’ve been so negligent.
—Zealia Bishop to R. H. Barlow, 11 Jul 1934, MSS. John Hay Library

Barlow collected manuscripts from pulp writers, and eventually had an eye toward publishing them in his amateur journals The Dragon-Fly and Leaves. Her correspondence with Barlow would be relatively brief, but Barlow would form an important link in the chain to eventually getting all of her weird revisions published in Weird Tales—and eventually by Arkham House—although this involved a bit of miscommunication and misunderstanding:

Am glad you liked The Mound—altho’ I wonder if you saw Medusa’s Coil after HPL revised it? The partial copy I sent you was the original before his revision? I was shocked at young Barlow’s claim–for it was untruthful from the stark—as I believe one of Lovecraft’s to me proved. HPL wrote me of a “young chap in Florida” who was interested in printing on “his own machine some weird stories” & asked me if I would let Barlow “use” my stories for his “private collection”—or something like that—later Barlow wrote me asking my permission & even asking me to let him use the pictures used by Wright in the Curse of Yig!—I hope I’ve proved that the stories are mine? Barlow never found the stories in Lovecraft’s effects—& has no claim on them. Every one of the three tales—The Curse of Yig—The Mound & Medusa’s Coil—is based on material acquired on my travels around my sister’s ranch in Okla—tho Medusa’s Coil was written around another location. Tell Barlow for me—he’s a poor sport!

The revision prices on all stories were duly noted when HPL had finished, tho’ I owed him either 18.00 or 21.00 at the time of his death on some work done last year—Whatever Wright or anyone else will pay for either or both tales please arrange that half (regardless of the indebtedness) be paid to Mrs. Gamwell—in appreciation for all HPL did for me.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 11 May 1937, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

H. P. Lovecraft mentioned Zealia in several letters to his various other friends and correspondents, usually in relation to “The Curse of Yig” or to the other stories her revised for her, but it doesn’t appear that many of them attempted to actually get in touch with her. Besides Derleth, who contacted Zealia after Lovecraft’s death and seems to have remained in touch with her off-and-on for most of the rest of her life. The only other possible contact she had was with Lovecraft’s friend and fellow pulpster E. Hoffmann Price:

It was just before Bill’s and my brother’s tragic deaths, that H. Hoffman Price (maybe I have that first initial wrong) turned me over to his agent August Lenniger. At that point when he was advising me my heart and mind seemed suddenly to stand still. […]
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 24 Apr 1949, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

August Lenniger was Price’s literary agent; it’s not entirely clear when they got in contact, if it was in the 1930s, there is no reference to any correspondence in Price’s letters with Lovecraft, nor in Price’s memoirs of other pulp writers.

As a writer, Zealia Brown Reed Bishop seems to have found little professional success in terms of sales—her “confession” pulp stories are long forgotten, her novels remained unpublished—except for those stories revised, to the point of being ghost-written, by H. P. Lovecraft. This work is not without distinction: The Curse of Yig (1953, Arkham House) is the first volume of Mythos fiction published under a woman’s name, and the weird fruit of Zealia’s correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft continues to be published and re-published. While many fans may find The Spirit of Revision principally of interest because of the light it sheds on Lovecraft’s revision practices, it should be noted that their correspondence covered much more ground than just that—and Zealia’s letters may yet prove more valuable as a record of their personal and professional relationship.

I could mention one thing more, however, which can hardly be considered of minor importance. Mrs. Bishop was a woman of great charm and quite exceptional beauty.
—Frank Belknap Long,
Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside xiv

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

The Curse of Yig (1953) by Zealia Bishop

After the death of H. P. Lovecraft in 1937, his friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (founders of Arkham House), and R. H. Barlow (Lovecraft’s literary executor) began a concerted effort to get his fiction, poetry, and letters into print. This process took decades, publication being relatively slow and expensive, and the audience being mostly restricted to hardcore fans. Among all the legendary Arkham House publications, Zealia Bishop’s The Curse of Yig (1953) stands out as the first Mythos collection attributed to a woman—and would remain the sole such book for some decades. The contents are fairly succinct:

“The Curse of Yig”
“Medusa’s Coil”
“The Mound”
“H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View”
“A Wisconsin Balzac: A Profile of August Derleth”

Like many books, The Curse of Yig didn’t just happen. At the time of Lovecraft’s death, only “The Curse of Yig” (1929) was published; both “The Mound” and “Medusa’s Coil” had been rejected by Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, and apparently failed to find a home elsewhere. One of the first jobs that Derleth & co. faced was finding out what revision-work and collaborations that Lovecraft had actually done and obtaining manuscripts and permission to publish them.

H. P. wrote stories for a half dozen, some of which I can prove by documents. Bloch (Don’t quote me—there are amenities to be preserved), Heald, Reed, Lumley, had outright jobs done, Rimel & others his enormous tinkering resulting in a wholly re-written ms. These things are—some of them worth collecting–but not in his own books. He said many times he would not permit a collaboration in his collected stories, so certainly he’d resent these things. We’re going to have a hamper full as it is.

Mrs. Reed had him do 3 stories,

1928 – YIG – pub. – written outright for her
*1929 – THE MOUND – novelette – ditto
* ” – Medusa’s Coil – embodying a notion of hers, but all HPL nonetheless

* I have only the ms. of these

[…] Perhaps the works he ghosted could be called “collaborations” without scaring off the ghostees, & made another book. There’s years of work to be sorted & printed.
—R. H. Barlow to August Derleth, 31 Mar n.d. [1937], MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Derleth managed to get in contact with Zealia Bishop in 1937, and they discussed Lovecraft’s letters and revisions. In an early letter, Zealia promised:

I shall prepare an article or—data—on what I think may be of general interest in regard to Howard’s revision work—and send you within the next week—but shall await your reply and if I have anything which you can use I shall compile it for you—and do all in my power to assist you in every way.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 8 Apr 1937, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The article didn’t come. What did happen is that Derleth apparently edited these stories and then apparently acted as Bishop’s agent to sell them to Weird Tales. The timeline on how exactly this happened is a little unclear, but over a year later in the January 1939 issue of Weird Tales, Derleth’s version of “Medusa’s Coil” was published. Fan response was positive, and ‘The Eyrie’ for March 1939 reveals it was voted the second-favorite story in the issue. The success of “Medusa’s Coil” might explain why Bishop’s “The Curse of Yig” was included as a “Classic Reprint” in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, and it was also positively received in “The Eyrie.” “The Mound” did not see print until the November 1940 issue of Weird Tales, possibly due to its length. None of these stories were presented with any mention of Lovecraft’s authorship in Weird Tales.

Following Barlow’s suggestion, Arkham House initially focused on publishing H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction on its own: The Outsider and Others (1939) and Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943) collects nearly all of his fiction. The latter book, however, also included some of his “collaborations,” including “The Curse of Yig” and “The Mound”—this would have been the first time Lovecraft’s hand in Zealia Bishop’s stories was publicly acknowledged. “Medusa’s Coil” was republished in Marginalia (1944), alongside other revisions and collaborations; these Arkham House texts both used Derleth’s edited versions of “The Mound” and “Medusa’s Coil,” rather than the original Lovecraft/Bishop version.

Was it your intention to make them appear as his stories?
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 28 Jan 1949, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Zealia Bishop’s letters with Derleth in the mid-to-late 1940s defend her authorship of the three weird stories, other evidence of Lovecraft writing them from synopses notwithstanding. She also continued to promise him an article on her relationship with Lovecraft:

I hope you won’t find too many things wrong with the Lovecraft article. If that passes, then I shall not worry about the others, for he is not an altogether easy subject about whom one can write, yet a very interesting one.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 13 Jan 1950, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Arkham House was slowing down publication in the late 1940s and early 50s. Derleth had repeatedly cited low sales, with books selling out only very slowly despite the relatively small print runs. By the 1950s most of the weird fiction pulps had folded, and even the venerable Weird Tales was on its last few years of existence. So it is somewhat surprising that around 1952, Zealia’s letters start to discuss a print collection of her fiction…and she was also working on not just the long-promised article on Lovecraft, but another on Derleth himself:

You’re wrong, fellow, I haven’t fallen down on the job about the articles on you and H. P. L. I finished them two years ago, but kept rewriting them, unable to throw off that damnable self-consciousness instilled in me by Lovecraft. Now, however, I’ve developed more positiveness and will send them to you for approval and corrections where you feel necessary.

I plan to use both of them in the story collection but if, after reading them, you wish to suggest a market, it might be well to have them previously published.

After you read them and also see the assembled collection, how about writing a “Foreword”? You know I worked and studied hard before I began studying under Lovecraft and Long. Considering that it was during the darkest years of the depression, I paid them both well for their instructions, criticism and any revision. My record at Columbia University will bear out my years of studying and ambition. What shall I do about reprints of stories published in magazines now out of print? […]

What about the reprinting of stories once published in stories now out of business or publications discontinued by a publisher tho’ still in business? What of those published in Confessions?
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 12 Aug 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Derleth’s reaction to this had to be a bit mixed. The time and place for Zealia’s memoir of Lovecraft would ideally have been earlier—in Marginalia maybe, or The Arkham Sampler (1948-1949)—and it didn’t seem that Zealia Bishop had anything genuinely weird to offer besides the three Lovecraft revisions, and those had already been published and re-published. “The Curse of Yig” in particular had been published twice in Weird Tales, three times in hardcover, and most recently in the paperback Avon’s Fantasy Reader No. 14 (1950).

At last here is the article. I hope that it does not fall far short of my opinion of you and that you will see some improvement in my writing. Feel free to augment and delete as you see fit. […] At the time I began the article on you I started one on Lovecraft this should be finished for your approval before I get there—you understand I will need photographs for both? […] In the event my short stories are published as a collection I plan to include both articles. Does that meet with your approval? If only the weird are selected for one book then both articles—DERLETH-LOVECRAFT—would be most appropos—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 15 Oct 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Will have some time to redo my DERLETH and LOVECRAFT articles. If they meet with your approval do you have a market for them or will you suggest one to me, though later they will go in the book with the weird short? Why don’t you quote me a price for publication (by ARKHAM HOUSE) for such a volume? I would like to have such a book done well, such as ARKHAM HOUSE does.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 18 Nov 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The discussion with Derleth now takes on a more business-like tone. The moment that Derleth might have been dreading arrived: Zealia had fixated on Derleth as a possible publisher for her collection. Vanity publishing was a skeleton in Arkham House’s closet: not a service that was widely advertised or ever publicly acknowledged, but a circumstance occasionally resorted to, at least with old Weird Tales authors that Derleth was familiar with and presumably whose material was not vastly divergent from Arkham House’s core focus. Given the relatively expensive costs of publishing, the high cost of the resulting books, the small print numbers, and the slow sales, it also wasn’t likely to be a strong financial investment—and that’s before you consider that most of the volume’s contents would be reprints. Derleth presumably expressed at least some of these risks to Zealia Bishop:

What you say about the publishing of the stories interests me. In the event we come to an agreement, how must this money be paid your company? You say you must get $2.50 for you to break even—then what of the author?

I would like to do this, followed by at least three other books, if you could pass on the work, but I would not want the weird tales published if you feel more credit should go to LOVECRAFT. After all, August, he was the teacher and I the pupil and he was polishing my efforts, trying to direct me, but he did not do any more than you and Frank Long did. While erratic and always in need of money, Frank was an excellent and driving tutor even though we could not always see “eye-to-eye”. I was always pulling between the two teachers trying to write as I wished, not as they were determined I should, but I gained much from both of them as well as from your own kind interest and advice. Yet I would not want to publish the stories as my own efforts if you do not feel I am justified in claiming them. So be perfectly frank and we shall proceed from there.

Am re submitting the articles with the one on H. P. L. Maybe this time you will like the Derleth one better.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 14 Dec 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

I would like very much to work out a plan with you for the publishing of not only the one volume but possibly several more. I feel after your editing, they will all be good and should have reasonable sales. […] My reason for asking how the money is to be paid is that under the circumstances, I cannot draw from a personal fund. I have talked to our banker who has told me “if the contract warrants it” I may borrow the sum.

It is now up to you about the contract. […] I will have the weird tales and articles to you immediately after Christmas. What you choose and assemble will be, of course, entirely up to you.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 22 Dec 1952, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

It isn’t clear what Zealia means by “editing” here—that is, whether she means the usual services of copy-editing by removing typos and grammatical errors and checking for factual accuracy, or editing that was more along the lines of wholesale revision, as Lovecraft would have done. Possibly she didn’t know herself. At the very least, he seemed to have convinced her that the volume should consist solely of the three weird tales revised by Lovecraft, plus her articles (if she ever finished them). The issue of cost and “breaking even” is another key issue: assuming that Zealia Bishop was paying for the printing, who was getting what percentage of the cover cost? Without the actual contracts or the Arkham House business records it is difficult to assess, but we get further hints as their correspondence addresses more details of the project.

First, though, Zealia had to finish her articles on Lovecraft and Derleth.

In three days I wrote exactly four words on the revision of the DERLETH article. Howarver [sic], after your letter I set up all night finishing it as well as the ESCHUTECHEON [sic]—so go over them both with a “curry comb”—streamline them where necessary-especially with newspaper publication in mind for DERLETH—and elaborate upon the “HOUSE OF GHOSTS” as I have no details on that other than behind it is: that ARKHAM HOUSE was founded on the memory of LOVECRAFT and his fictious [sic] name of ARKHAM – Incorporate that as you see fit.

I do not think, however, that for the book the real meaty stuff should be deleted.

But revise both article and story as necessary and have both retyped and send me a statement. Do please send the ESCHUTCHEON to your editor friend if it passes your approval. I will work on the LOVECRAFT article tonight and tomorrow night and it will follow as quickly as typed to be handled the same as the DERLETH one. If you find these two articles and the three Weird stories adequate for publication in book form, then let’s get down to figures, publicity plan etc;.

You know I told you I would have to know how much—when the bills had to be met and so on. After all, I have to plan ahead for any unusual expense or it would not pass D. W.’s approval—certainly not for writing. He loathes publicity and does not encourage my writing—maybe I should use my little granddaughter’s name—LESLIE S. REED—and become an individual-new-unknown-etc.-and after the successful publication of several things bring out a good personality story—?
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 14 Apr 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

This was a little over a week after August Derleth’s marriage; one can imagine that it had begun to dawn on him that for the monies to get the book published, she apparently wanted him to put her articles into printable shape as well as every other task involved with assembling a manuscript. D. W. Bishop was Zealia’s husband, and at that time was essentially an invalid, although he apparently still largely controlled the couple’s finances. The idea of using a pseudonym was probably vetoed by Derleth: one of Zealia’s most bankable assets was likely name recognition from Weird Tales fans from over a decade prior.

Evidently you misunderstood me that day at lunch in Madison. I thought I was very explicit—as well as Helen—that I told you “everything was ready to go except I wanted to rewrite the DERLETH and LOVECRAFT articles. And that I would positively have to rewrite the LOVECRAFT article entirely.”

I have done what I could on it and am sending it as is, “but I am not in the slightest pleased with it and feel that I should be the one to rewrite it.”

The material is here and could be redone beautifully but it would take me at least another two weeks so I am sending it so that you may pass judgement edit it and then if you think I should rewrite it return or bring it.

I will do the foreword as quickly as possible.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 25 Apr 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The Lovecraft article is finished—but you’ll have to have it retyped—Helen cannot type fast enough & my secretary has had a baby, has to stay home—etc—etc—so—take it as is—but it must be slicked up & retyped.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, n.d. (after Apr 1953), MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Ultimately The Curse of Yig was published without a foreword, so presumably it was either cut or never finished.

In the correspondence, there are suggestions that Derleth may have been trying to agent the Lovecraft and Derleth essays to magazines or fanzines before the book was published. If this was the case, no record of a prior publication has been found. It’s reasonable to assume that the original manuscripts for the two profiles “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View” and “A Wisconsin Balzac: A Profile of August Derleth” required more than a little copy-editing, and possibly wholesale re-writing, including lengthy bibliographical lists in Derleth’s profile, which elicited a comment:

Approve manuscript-with exceptions: some typographical errors and suggest Derleth profile be cut to eliminate so much commercialism and cataloging which should be in a separate pamphlet. Suggest I proof read—What about contract? We should settle on that before printer begins work—
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 29 Jun 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The contracts arrived—but you do not mention in your letter that the DERLETH & LOVECRAFT articles are included in THE CURSE OF YIG. Without them the publications would be of little, if any, value to me. I merely mentioned that I thought the article about you included too much listing of your works and killed the interest about the writer and man. […] Your prices do not correspond with those in the printers’ letter. I shall send a check to the artist. Also, watch for proofs from photographers.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 19 Jul 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Before desktop publishing, print costs would be a bit vague: the printer’s letter would have included the quote for costs for an approximate number of books at so many pages; the addition of photographs, large changes in the text, etc. could require substantial rework in terms of layout and raise the cost of the final product. Which is apparently about what happened with The Curse of Yig.

I am going to ask that you proofread this manuscript—particularly the Lovecraft. It needs some smoothing—it seems a little jerky—Maybe you will not think so—. […] I’m much too anxious about publicity, August—that can come with my new name—But I do wish the picture of Derleth & Lovecraft included in the Curse of Yig.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, 16 Sep 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

You should add that I have done journalism or writing for several newspapers including an historical series around Clay County Missouri—That I am a member of the National Federation of Press Women & the Missouri Womens Press Club. These women hold pretty well together & would feel slighted if mention were not mad on the blurb.

It would be better if the book dd not come out too soon or at least that the printers bill does not come before Dec if you can so arrange it.

Our Dispersion sale is Oct 21—Final settlement & especially in the case of a dispersal, if normally takes from 60 to 90 days—
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, n.d. (Sep 1953?)

The “dispersion sale” refers to the selling off of the livestock of Highland View Farms, which the Bishops owned; presumably with D. W. Bishop incapacitated they were no longer able to manage the rigorous cattle business. The blurb on the inside rear flap of her book jacket does include all of the points she wished included in the above letter.

We have not yet had the bill from Banta, but it will be coming along in a week or ten days, and it will be due thirty days from its date. I will send you a copy of it promptly, but I will not notify you how much you will have to pay until some time later, since we will want to wait at least until November 10th to give payments and orders time to come in. We have had 27 advance orders to date, and of course we have about 100 standing orders with the shops, though their payments will very probably not come through at once, and you will have to be remitted to you after you have met the bill. Our shipment indicates that somewhere between 1200 and 1220 copies of THE CURSE OF YIG were printed; the book itself is very handsome, I feel.
—August Derleth to Zealia Bishop, 20 Oct 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

I enclose a copy of the bill from the printing company for THE CURSE OF YIG. This is due November 15. You will note its details, please, and then return it to me in the envelope enclosed for that purpose. You will see that 1217 copies of the book came to $1,698.23, or a cost over all of approximately $1.40 per book. The deduction of $14.45 is listed as “150 copies of last section” which I had printed for lecture platform use, and it is thus my personal expense, and is included here only because it is part of the “job” of printing for Banta.

Now, then, as of today, the book has actually brought is, with the per copy deduction for our handling charge already taken off, a total of $127.40, which, deducted from $1698.25, would leave you—as of today, that is—the sum of $1,5580.73 to send to me. However, this sum will be further reduced by still further orders to come in and to be paid for. $127.50 represents only 50 copies of the book at $3 the copy, less .45$ handling charge […] We have, however, sold 157 copies of the book thus far, and there are thus manifestly more payments due to us. I do not know how many of those payments will come in before the bill must be paid, but it seems certain that the total amount you will have to pay will be not less than $1,400.00, judging by previous experience with payments to us.

A study of the bill will show you some interesting things. For instance, the inclusion of the two photographs, which you wanted inserted, added a total of $55.78 to the cost of production. Alterations in text and jacket, at $5.50 an hour, added a further total of $73.60. These were potentially avoidable expenses, of course; to offset them I could arrange only for an $11.58 deduction as indicated in the final credit entry. On the other hand, the 200 extra copies I added to the print order, cost only another hundred dollars, which, it seems to me, is well worth the additional expense, since we have just 200 copies more with which to come into the black from the red on this title. We should come out all right; happily, we are discovering that patrons who do already have your stories in our earlier collections are still ordering this title because they want a complete Arkham House collection. […] Do now please arrange to send the required sum as soon as I let you know; figure on paying at least $1,400.00 […]
—John Stanton to Zealia Bishop, 27 Oct 1953, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Arkham House contracted with George Banta Publishing Company of Wisconsin for the physical publication of the books; John Stanton was an Arkham House employee that handled some of the business matters. Copies of the “lecture platform” edition of “A Wisconsin Balzac” appear to be extremely rare ephemera.

As the bill comes due, the question of reimbursement and profits comes up again. The stock price of the book was $3, and the “handling fee” was $0.45/book, so the gross value of each book was $2.55. At 1217 books, that left a potential gross of $3103.35—but how much of that would Zealia be getting? How many copies would have to sell for her to recoup the cost of printing? There’s no doubt that Derleth had to be getting at least a portion of the cover price to keep the lights on at Arkham House. Nevertheless, the terms must have been acceptable enough, because Zealia footed the printer’s bill.

Herewith is check on account for 300.00—leaving a balance of 1100.00 which you shall have not later than November 14th. I may be in Madison on that day or before—but you may depend on the check on that day in any eventuality. This has been a little difficult to handle as you told me that the bill would come in on Nov 10th & be payable in thirty days—If this is the fact let me know as it would be easier for me & I would not have to borrow any money—as I will have checks coming in to cover the amount early in Dec—Write me about this at once. It means a great deal to me—as previously explained. […]

I’m not interested in publicity–merely that sales pay the amount used to publish it—
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, n.d. (c. late Oct 1953), MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

Herewith is the 1100.00 balance on the printing bill etc.—in three checks. I would like, if possible, for you to deposit them a few days intervals. The money is on deposit—but we have a devil of a banker—who is just as apt as not to call me out of a sound sleep & say “why are this….” knowing that D. W. would know nothing of the deal & that I would be called upon to explain. Things will not always be like this—at present, however, to antagonize anyone could be disastrous. Since you can be assured that the money is in the bank I know you will arrange to handle the amount with your usual diplomacy.

It is impossible to say now how “Yig” is going or will go over. I’m receiving “fan” mail, of course—but that’s all happened before— […]

D. W. took one fleeting glance at the book. He did not so much as touch it & has never mentioned it. That has cut me deeply—the girls, too, are wounded over his attitude—but it has only made me more determined to continue on—to do something more as often as I can—I cannot be destroyed—so many & so much depend upon me & my well being. […]

I hope “Yig” is successful enough to offset the printer’s bill & that we may publish one or two more under this plan then perhaps the other things will sell outright.
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, n.d. (c. Nov 1953), MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

If Zealia Bishop hoped that the book would sell quickly, she had either deluded herself or else Derleth hadn’t been entirely forthright about the economics of the situation. As it was, it was not many months later when he was forced to write the kind of letter a writer hates to get.

I’m afraid you haven’t read your contract with Arkham House. There is no money due you by February 10th, I am sorry to say. The very earliest that any payment would be earned, would be in June, and I am not sure that there will be a payment then. The contract specifies that royalty reports on earnings shall be made after every half year, and that payments shall be made thereon not later than June and December respectively, following. Thus your first royalty report—which I shall try to have made up and enclose for you—carries you up to 1 January 1954, and covers the sale of only 250 books. And we have sold just 20 books since then, for a total of 270 books so far.

You will recall, too, that the total bill was $1,712.68, of which $14.45 was my personal responsibility—see my letter of 27 October 1953—leaving the actual cost of THE CURSE OF YIG—not counting other expenses incurred here which I did not put on the bill—at $1,698.23. Of this sum, you were asked to pay only $1,400.00, in the hope that the remaining figure would be earned by the time the bill was met. It was not quite earned; so you do not begin to receive monies until some months after (the first June to December) our royalty reports show that your book has earned the full $298.23. That is to say, form the first report of earnings, we must deduct no less than $298.23 plus a .45¢ per title handling charge, as per contract. If my estimate, purely off the cuff, is correct, the payment to you in June will be approximately $150.00, $20 more or less. My rough estimate puts it at just short of $150.00, but if I can have Alice make up the royalty statement in time to enclose it in this letter, than you will know for certain just what is due you in June; following which, the next payment will be made to you in December of this year, and on the same basis, at the same intervals, thereafter.

I am sorry that THE CURSE OF YIG has not sold faster; we are now just under 25% of the edition sold, and I know we will sell all the books, but they are just not moving fast, and none of our titles do so move. It took us 10 years to sell 1200 copies of THE OUTSIDER & OTHERS; yet, on the other hand, we sold 4,000 copies of SLAN in short of 4 years. But you will recall that I told you in advance not to expect any miracle sales, but a slow, steady accretion of sales. An initial payment of $150 or slightly less does represent 10% of your investment, and that is not too bad for two months’ sales, considering. […] We published Seabury Quinn’s ROADS in a 2000 copy edition in 1948 under a similar arrangement; it took him 4 years to recoup his $900 investment, and he is still earning his royalties now. We published David Keller’s TALES FROM UNDERWOOD in 1951 under a similar arrangement; he invested $1725, and still has $1450 to be earned for him.
—August Derleth to Zealia Bishop, 22 Jan 1954, MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

25% would equate to about ~300 books sold in only two months (or a bit longer, counting advance sales); that should have grossed $900, or $765 minus the handling charges. If Zealia still owed ~$300 on the printing and might still expect $150 in June, that suggests her share or 300 books sold amounted to $450 net, so she was getting something like $1.50 per book (and remember that the printing cost was $1.40 per book). That leaves a full dollar of the cover cost unaccounted for, so either Derleth’s math is fuzzy, or (hopefully) there is a large piece of the accounting picture missing, because at $1.50 a copy Zealia would have to sell almost the entire run to earn out her initial investment ($1,698.23 / $1.50 per book = 1133 books), much less expect to see a profit.

We can compare these estimates with the one extant earnings statement:

$627.75 / 384 books = $1.63 per book, which isn’t far off from the estimate (presumably Derleth is rounding somewhere), but the basic picture is the same: to actually earn back her money, much less make a profit, The Curse of Yig would need to sell most of the edition. Just to break even, Arkham House would need to sell ($1,070.48 / $1.63 per book = 657 books), and there were only 833 left in the edition—and some of those might probably be author’s copies, archival copies, etc. At the current rate (384 books/year) the book wouldn’t be expected to show a real profit until 1956.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead of sales remaining steady, they appear to have decreased:

Our Bishop book, done in October 1953, has sold only 450 copies so far; and our Metcalfe, done in April 54, only 400. The one was largely reprint material, true, but the other was new work, though by a British author.
—August Derleth to Clark Ashton Smith, 26 May 1955, Eccentric, Impracticable Devils 451

Several of Zealia’s later letters to Derleth, tracking her economic decline, include requests for checks ahead of the agreed-upon schedule, no matter how small. In at least some cases, Derleth appears to have done his best to comply…but any hopes of actual profit, much less further publication, probably vanished quickly.

Certainly there seems to be an even interest in Yig—What do you think about a paperback for it—& in Airports etc?
—Zealia Bishop to August Derleth, n.d., MSS. Wisconsin Historical Society

The reason it’s called vanity publishing is because it is vain.

At the end of the day, The Curse of Yig would seem to largely be a book for Arkham House collectors more than general fantasy or horror readers. One contemporary review probably said it best:

Zealia B. Bishop’s The Curse of Yig (Arkham House, $3) contains three negligible stories from Weird Tales, plus two first-rate biographical profiles: one plausibly presenting H. P. Lovecraft in a somewhat less favorable light than that in which he is shown by his idolaters, and one which comes close to doing justice to the fabulous career of August Derleth.
—”Recommended Reading” in Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 6, no.2 (Feb 1954) 95

Much of the enduring legacy of The Curse of Yig lies not with the stories themselves—these were the Derleth-edited texts, later superseded by corrected texts compiled and edited by S. T. Joshi in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989, Arkham House). “A Wisconsin Balzac” has never been reprinted, and may well have been written entirely by Derleth himself.

What has been reprinted, and is perhaps the most remembered inclusion to The Curse of Yig is “H. P. Lovecraft: A Pupil’s View”—Zealia’s long-simmering, often re-written memoir of being Lovecraft’s student-cum-revision client. While not without its flaws, this was until the publication of their letters the only account of Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop’s professional and personal relationship available.

Which in its own way is what The Curse of Yig is: a testament to the lasting impact of these two human beings on one another, and through their fiction on the world. No other woman would be so associated with Lovecraft for decades afterwards; no other woman would have her own Mythos anthology until after the death of August Derleth in 1971. The Curse of Yig might have been a commercial failure, but those books still exist, and are purchased and read today. While every writer might hope for profit during their own lifetime, what more could a writer hope for, after they’re dead and gone, but to be read and remembered?

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

The Queen of K’n-yan (2008) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健)

This is Cthulhu Mythos fiction unlike any you have read before.
—Darrel Schweitzer, introduction to The Queen of K’n-Yan xiii

The Queen of K’n-yan (2008, Kurodahan Press) by Asamatsu Ken (朝松健) is the English-language translation of his 1993 novel 崑央の女王 (K’n-Yan no Joō); the translator was Kathleen Taji.

There is a world of Mythos fiction beyond the English language, and it depends on translation. The original works of Lovecraft and his contemporaries, their ideas, concepts, and language, have to be translated from their original English into the new language. This process is not automatic or uniform, not every word that Lovecraft & co. wrote has been translated or published; many of the letters especially have not yet made the jump into other languages, and may never. Imagine what it takes to read Lovecraft, filtered through someone else trying to capture his style and language, to twist the language to translate not just the literal words but the ideas and weird names which might not transliterate easily or cleanly.

Then imagine translating an original Mythos novel back into English. How much survives? How much is recognizable? What new cultural syntax is picked up?

It is more of an issue than you might think, because there is a cultural syntax to the Cthulhu Mythos already; the stories, and the secondary literature of pastiches, sequels, prequels, etc. are highly intertextual, sometimes metatextual—and not everything that is written in English gets translated. The result is that some ideas which are largely outmoded in current English-language Mythos fiction may be retained longer in non-English-language Mythos fiction; and of course some new bits are often added which English language Mythos fans have never seen before.

Kathleen Taji’s translation of The Queen of K’n-Yan is a good example. As a novel, Asamatsu Ken’s work is definitely atypical for Mythos fare: the setting is a contemporary Japan and WW2-era China, the massive, secured corporate arcology and overall plot are something out of a cyberpunk novel, echoes of The Thing (1982), Aliens (1986), and Gunhead (1989). Archaeological mystery and psychic flashbacks to a Japanese war camp conducting medical experiments on Chinese civilians give way to a survival horror/body horror aesthetic somewhat foreshadowing works like Parasite Eve (1995) and Resident Evil (1996).

As the title suggests, the primary Mythos influence of the story is “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft:

It isn’t too much of a spoiler to let you know that Asamatsu Ken’s The Queen of K’n-yan involves the discovery of a mummy from that same underground realm, but excavated in China […]
—Darrel Schweitzer, introduction to The Queen of K’n-Yan ix

Asamatsu Ken takes the idea of the people of K’n-Yan and expands them to a global scale, parts of their underground realm running throughout Asia, and ties them into existing history and mythology:

Before the advent of humanity, the world was divided and ruled by several races of intelligent beings. That’s to say, the dragon race, the denizens of Zhùróng – the fire deity – the earth wolf tribes, the wind bull people, and the star-spawn – as can be deduced, they symbolize the five elements of water, fire, earth, wood, and metal. The human descendants of the dragon race are the Han, the human descendants of the earth wolf are the Manchu, and the human descendants of the wind bull people are the Tibetans […] The denizens of Zhùróng, the symbol of fire, rose in revolt against the Yellow Emperor and were sealed underground in retribution. The underground cavern where they were imprisoned is called K’n-Yan. And the star-spawn were banished to the distant heavens.
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 85

For English-language Mythos fans, this might be sounding suspiciously like the early “elemental” theory of the Cthulhu Mythos first postulated by August Derleth in “The Return of Hastur” (1939). Derleth designated various entities according to the four elements of the Western tradition of Hermetic occultism (Cthulhu, water; Tsathoggua, earth; Hastur, air; and creating Cthugha as the missing “fire elemental”). Asamatsu Ken is certainly paying homage to this idea, even if he is taking it in a different direction:

What appeared were strange sentences containing a mix of Chinese characters, cursive Japanese hiragana, and roman letters. They read –

“Beseech the god of the western seas, THCLH, with sacred reverence.

Beseech the forefather of heat and flame, THGHC, with sacred reverence.

Beseech anon our birth lord, ZTHRNG, with sacred reverence.

The infant princess, through the black disease

When reborn as Queen

Even death will not die…”
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 112

Zhùróng is a complicated personage, but often considered a god of fire; THGHC is a reference to Derleth’s Cthugha, THCLH to Cthulhu. The complexities of Japanese, Chinese, and Japanese languages coming into play here were probably difficult to translate, but readers can recall how in “The Mound” Cthulhu was represented as “Tulu” and get the vague idea of how Japanese readers might have been piecing together clues.

As an aside, applying the five-element approach to the Mythos is not unique to Asamatsu Ken’s work either. Shirow Masamune in his manga Orion (仙術超攻殻オリオン) has a Cthulhu-esque entity arise from an occult effort involving an unbalanced water-element.

The discussion of “races” in the context of Mythos fiction is more complicated, and not unique to this work. Perhaps for the best, Asamatsu Ken doesn’t delve too deep into the geopolitics or genetics of it all. The main characters are left piecing together bits of history so old that they’ve faded into myth, trying to sort out bits of truth from the old legends.

As the story enters its penultimate phase, the survival horror aspect comes to the fore. A weird game of cat-and-mouse occurs between Morishita Anri (the novel’s protagonist, Japanese), Dr. Li (the novel’s secondary antagonist, Chinese), and the Queen of K’n-Yan, who a la The Thing has taken on the form of a human woman—hinted to possibly be either Morishita or Li. Reanimated body parts are combined together in was reminiscent of Bride of Re-animator (1990):

An ankle with eyes. A left hand with three lips. Orifices with fangs. A large intestine with wings on its back. Thirty upper arms congealed together, spherical in shape. A thigh with a face, knees with thin hands, and ankles growing out of shins. Eyeballs with tentacles, and most horrendous of all, hordes of internal organs, squirming and groping.
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 175

Strange as it may be with all these diverse elements, the novel does actually come together at the end, in a fairly satisfying way. Not every mystery is explained, nor do they need to be; background noise about large sinkholes in China where the Princess of K’n-Yan was discovered, outbreaks of disease, and rising heat suggest what is about to come, but that is a horror for the future beyond the last page in the novel.

For all that works, at least within the internal rationale of the novel, there are a few things that don’t translate well. There are elements of style and plot which simply don’t come across to English-language readers as nicely as they could, and it is difficult (not having read, or able to read, the original) to tell whether this is a quirk of the translation being too literal or simply a faithful reproduction of Asamatsu’s style which doesn’t quite click.

Stylistically, the chunks of raw exposition embedded in the narrative stand out as exactly that; the Mythos references when they come aren’t exactly subtle. From the standpoint of characters, most are fairly weakly developed except for the protagonist Morishita Anri and the mysterious Dr. Li…and even then, there is a relatively late development in the novel which comes almost out of nowhere:

Something was trying to take shape. Akiyama Haruka’s face appeared in midair – three times larger than the actual face. This was followed by the appearance of a neck, shoulders, lithe arms, and lastly, shapely breasts. Akiyama winked at Anri, and her pupils sent an insinuating and lascivious look her way.

“Hold me, please…pretty please.”

On hearing her words, Andri felt like retching.

The queen knows?! Somehow she’s found out that I’m gay.
—Asamatsu Ken, trans. Kathleen Taji, The Queen of K’n-Yan 199

The issue of Mosihita Anri’s homosexuality, for about the first hundred and ninety-eight pages up until this point, is so low-key as to be completely absent. Going back to re-read the novel, there are only extremely vague hints which maybe point to that if the reader already knows she’s a lesbian; this feels like a character development which was either not communicated well in the original or which was so subtle that the translation didn’t quite convey it. Which is not in any way a dig at Kathleen Taji, only an exemplar of how difficult the job of translation is. How do you communicate someone’s sexuality in Japanese culture when they do not have any immediate love interest? Were there cues that would have made sense to a Japanese audience that an English reader would miss?

These are the kind of questions that consume the reader in The Queen of K’n-Yan. It is an effective Mythos novel; Asamatsu Ken knows what he is doing. Yet it is undoubtedly a very different Mythos novel from August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) or Robert Bloch’s Strange Eons (1978). The setting and the syntax are in line with Japanese horror of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mythos translated, adapted, and integrated into a post-WW2 world with computers, genetic engineering, wuxing, and the People’s Liberation Army.

Perhaps most importantly, The Queen of K’n-Yan is an example of what translation offers to the English-speaking audience: something different, a new way to think about the old Mythos. For those of us who cannot read Japanese, it is only through translation that we can approach these works—even if, like Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror,” thumbing through the English translation of the Necronomicon, we know that there is something missing from the original.

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