‘Lovecraft appears to have had an instinct for bringing together persons who would be congenial, each for the sake of the other, and not merely because each held HPL in such high esteem,’ observed E. Hoffman Price.
During the late 1920s and early ’30s, some of Lovecraft’s stories began to be reprinted in hardcover anthologies. ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ appeared in Beware After Dark! (1929) edited by T. Everett Harré, and Dashiell Hammett included ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ in his Creeps by Night (1931) anthology. In Britain, Christine Campbell Thompson, editor of the Not at Night series published by Selwyn & Blount, Ltd., included ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ in You’ll Need a Night Light (1927), Pickman’s Model’ in By Daylight Only (1928) and ‘The Rats in the Walls’ in Switch on the Light (1928). ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ additionally turned up in editor Herbert Asbury’s pirated omnibus Not at Night! (1928) from New York’s Macy-Masius/The Vanguard Press.
Equally obscure today, ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ was also reprinted in the ‘Great Short Stories’ series in the October 24, 1932 edition of the The London Evening Standard newspaper.
Unfortunately, Lovecraft had not paid much attention to retaining the rights to his stories, and consequently received little or nothing for these reprints and also others in Weird Tales.
He defended his attitude by exclaiming: ‘If this is “poor business”, then I say damn business!’
Perhaps H.P. Lovecraft’s most outstanding literary accomplishment, and arguably his enduring claim to fame, is his creation of a loosely-connected group of works which later came to be called ‘The Cthulhu Mythos’. (The author suggested pronouncing the name ‘Clutu’, with both ‘u”s long, according to his friend W. Paul Cook although, according to Donald Wandrei, on another occasion Lovecraft vocalised it as ‘K-Lütl-Lütl’ and Robert H. Barlow claimed he pronounced it as ‘Koot-u-lew’.)
Evidently, a central theme had been in Lovecraft’s mind while writing many of his tales: ‘All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising Black Magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again’.
The first major story in this sequence, ‘The Nameless City’, was written in January 1921 and included the first references to the mad poet, Abdul Alhazred, which also happened to be a childhood pseudonym of Lovecraft’s.
Although the so-called Cthulhu Mythos consisted of a number of stories unrelated in characters, setting or period, they shared a common background of mythological lore. However, Lovecraft was a supreme rationalist and an avowed atheist. His Mythos therefore mostly eschewed the supernatural in favour of a scientific rationale. Rejecting the old-fashioned monsters of Gothic horror, he made his ancient gods sentient creatures from distant worlds, dimensions or other planes of existence.
Millions of years ago, they came down from the stars and dominated the Earth. Utilising the classic conflict of Good vs Evil, Lovecraft’s deities are of two different natures: the nameless Old Ones or Ancient Ones, also known as the Elder Gods, personify the forces of cosmic good. Their adversaries, who are called by many names, are apparently representative of the four elements. Aeons ago, the Old Ones banished these Evil Ones. Now they wait hidden in the depths of the oceans, imprisoned on distant worlds, or lurk in the spaces beyond time. However, their malign influence remains in frightful myths of ancient antiquity and they are worshipped with loathsome rites by elder cults in remote backwaters. Although the Old Ones continue to keep these evil entities in check, there is a fear that they may one day awake from their deathless sleep, break their bonds and . . . return!
‘These Great Old Ones were not composed altogether of flesh and blood,’ the author revealed in his seminal 1926 novellette ‘The Call of Cthulhu’: ‘They had shape, but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They could never really die.’
When originally submitted to Weird Tales, editor Farnsworth Wright initially rejected the story. ‘I read the typescript and thought it as fine a narrative as he had yet written,’ wrote Donald Wandrei. ‘He too had thought well of it, but he said Wright had rejected it on the grounds that readers would not understand it, and he was plainly discouraged.’
After talking with Wandrei, who (falsely) claimed that Lovecraft was planning to submit the story to other magazines, Wright asked to see the manuscript again and bought it for $165.00. It appeared in the February 1928 issue.
‘Mr Lovecraft’s latest story, “The Call of Cthulhu”, is indeed a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature,’ gushed fledgling writer Robert E. Howard in ‘The Eyrie’, the letters column of Weird Tales.
In his 26,000-word novelette ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, first published, in the August 1931 issue of Weird Tales, Lovecraft famously listed the names of many of his Evil Ones and places connected with them:
‘I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections - Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum - and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.’
Lovecraft’s stories are filled with allusions to and authentic-sounding quotations from obscure books and manuscripts, as he used references to fictional tomes of eldritch lore (often borrowed from the work of other writers, such as Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard) to create the illusion of authenticity. His Mythos tales are filled with scholarly mentions of such works as old Ludwig Prinn’s hellish De Vermis Mysteries, the infamous Cultes des Goules of the Comte d’Erlette, the sinister Liber Ivonis and - perhaps most infamous of all - the forbidden Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred (first introduced in his 1922 story, ‘The Hound’).
‘After his first tales,’ explained August Derleth, ‘there began to develop in his later ones a curious coherence, a myth pattern so convincing that readers began to explore libraries and museums for certain imaginary titles of Lovecraft’s own creation.’
‘To further seduce his readers into a momentary suspension of disbelief,’ explained author and editor Lin Carter, ‘Lovecraft buttressed his fictional creations by surrounding them with an elaborate machinery of invented sources - learned anthropological allusions, data drawn from the literature of archaeology, spurious quotations from rare texts of ancient lore. To baffle and intrigue, he cleverly mingled fact with fiction, scholarship with invention; references to the mysterious Ponape ruins, to the enigmatic stone colossi of Easter Island, and jungle-grown remnants of antique Mayan civilizations appear cheek by jowl with whispered hints of “cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei”, “sunken R’lyeh in the Pacific” and “fabulous Irem, City of Pillars, in Arabia Deserta”.’
To add to the confusion and fascination of his readers, Lovecraft cleverly intermingled his allusions to purely imaginary books with references to such actual titles as Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe and Frazer’s The Golden Bough. He also set a number of his stories in a fictional area of Massachusetts, centred around the valley of the Miskatonic and the fictional towns of Kingsport, Innsmouth, Dunwich and Arkham (first mentioned in ‘The Festival’).
‘To an extent his reputation is the victim of his most famous creation, the Lovecraft Mythos,’ explained Ramsey Campbell. ‘It was conceived as an antidote to conventional Victorian occultism - as an attempt to reclaim the imaginative appeal of the unknown - and is only one of many ways his tales suggest worse, or greater, than they show.’
/> Given their continued popularity and influence on modern horror fiction, it is perhaps surprising to discover that, of all Lovecraft’s stories, only around a dozen or so can actually be considered to form the core of the Cthulhu Mythos.
The earliest tale which is acknowledged as genuinely belonging in the Mythos is the dream-inspired ‘The Nameless City’, which was written in January 1921. The last, ‘The Haunter of the Dark’, was written in November 1935, two years before the author’s death. In between, he expanded his interconnected mythology with such tales as ‘The Festival’ (written in October 1923), ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (Summer 1926), ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ (January-March 1927), ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (March 1927), ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (Summer 1928), ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ (February-September 1930), ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (February-March 1931), ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (November-December 1931), ‘The Dreams in the Witch-House’ (January-February 1932), ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ (August 1933) and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ (November 1934-March 1935). Over the years, the number of Lovecraft stories that actually comprise the Cthulhu Mythos has been vehemently debated by various researchers and continues to provoke discussion to this day.
‘As a matter of record,’ August Derleth stated in the mid-1940s, ‘there is everything to show that Lovecraft had no intention whatsoever of evolving his Cthulhu Mythos until that pattern made itself manifest in his work; this explanation alone would account for certain trivial inconsistencies.’
The initial grouping of Mythos stories by Lovecraft were added to and developed by an ever-widening circle of writers. It has been argued that Lovecraft did not actively encourage these pastiches, although at first they were mostly written by his correspondents and fellow writers from Weird Tales. It was also Lovecraft’s habit to adopt the inventions of his friends - such as the names of demonic divinities, exotic locations and cursed volumes - and give them his ‘seal of approval’ by then incorporating them into his own stories.
As a result, Clark Ashton Smith’s Book of Eibon, Robert E. Howard’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, Frank Belknap Long, Jr’s translation of the Necronomicon by Dr John Dee, and August Derleth’s Cultes des Goules by the Comte d’Erlette were all added to the shelf of terrifying tomes of eldritch lore.
‘He was, in reality, a kind, considerate, courteous man,’ recalled Robert Bloch, who began corresponding with Lovecraft when he was just fifteen years old, ‘generous to a fault with his time and talent.’ In his 1935 Weird Tales story ‘The Shambler from the Stars’, Bloch featured a thinly-disguised Lovecraft as his doomed New England protagonist.
‘Naturally I had written to Mr Lovecraft, asking if I could use him as a character and, incidentally, kill him off,’ Bloch explained in his 1993 autobiography. ‘He not only agreed but also sent me an official note of permission signed by a number of his Cthulhu Mythos characters.’
However, the following year, Lovecraft took his revenge by killing off Milwaukee writer ‘Robert Blake’ in his tale ‘The Haunter of the Dark’. ‘Lovecraft dedicated it to me,’ continued Bloch, ‘—the only story of his ever bearing a dedication - and for this I am forever grateful.’ In 1950, the author completed the three-story sequence with ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’, in which fellow writer Fritz Leiber ended up as the unfortunate victim.
Despite his growing fame (albeit amongst a small literary circle dedicated to a mostly-disregarded genre), Lovecraft continued to provide a literary revision service as a method of subsidising his meagre income from writing. It was through this service of extensively revising the work of some of his less talented clients that Lovecraft added stories by such writers as Frank Long, Hazel Heald, William Lumley and Zealia Bishop to the Cthulhu Mythos.
In fact, Bishop felt so grateful to Lovecraft that when her story ‘Medusa’s Coil’ ultimately appeared in the January 1939 issue of Weird Tales, she stipulated that half the fee ($120.00) should be paid to his surviving aunt, Annie E.P. Gamwell. ‘My debt to Lovecraft is great,’ she admitted. ‘I count myself fortunate that I was one of his epistolary friends and pupils.’
Successive generations of writers have continued to acknowledge their debt to the author’s work. ‘Lovecraft opened the way for me,’ Stephen King has said, ‘as he had done for others before me - Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury among them. The reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so long and so gaunt, and his eyes, so dark and puritanical, which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.’
In 1935, Lovecraft contributed the middle section to a 6,000-word round-robin story, ‘The Challenge from Beyond’, published in the September issue of Fantasy Magazine , an amateur publication produced by New York fan Julius Schwartz. The other chapters were written by C.L. Moore, A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long.
Although he had enjoyed some success with ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ appearing in Astounding Stories in 1936 (both of which were sold on his behalf by other people), Lovecraft continued to treat the marketing of his own work with almost careless abandon.
Stories such as ‘From Beyond’ (written in November 1920) and ‘The Quest of Iranon’ (written in February 1921) made their initial appearances in fan publications for little or no money. Although two new stories, ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ (written with E. Hoffmann Price, October 1932-April 1933) and ‘The Haunter of the Dark’, both saw their first publication in Weird Tales, editor Farnsworth Wright was forced to keep those readers clamouring for more Lovecraft fiction appeased with reprints of such previously-published tales as ‘The White Ape’, ‘Dagon’, ‘The Temple’ and ‘Pickman’s Model’, amongst others.
Written in August 1933, ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ was an original Lovecraft story that Wright published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales. What neither of them could have foreseen at the time was that it would be the author’s last new story to appear in the magazine prior to his death.
In 1934, Lovecraft had begun to complain about suffering from ‘indigestion’ or ‘grippe’. In fact, he had a combination of colon cancer and Bright’s disease (which affects the kidneys). However, he did not consult a doctor until more than two years after he first noticed the symptoms, by which time his illness was already inoperable.
He became weaker and had trouble eating food, resulting in a marked loss of weight. That Lovecraft probably suspected the nature of his illness is revealed in a letter he sent to August Derleth in February, 1937, writing about his renewed interest in astronomy: ‘Funny how early interests crop up again toward the end of one’s life’.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft died at the age of forty-six on the morning of March 15, 1937, at the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital. He was buried in the family plot in the Swan Point Cemetery three days later, where his name was inscribed alongside those of his parents. A handful of people attended the funeral service.
‘Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries,’ Lovecraft wrote in 1916. ‘I am never a part of anything around me - in everything I am an outsider . . . But pray do not think, gentlemen, that I am an utterly forlorn and misanthropick creature . . . Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me . . . A sense of humour has helped me to endure existence; in fact, when all else fails, I never fail to extract a sarcastic smile from the contemplation of my own empty and egotistical career . . . !’
What Lovecraft could not possibly have predicted was that, so far as his popularity as a writer was concerned, it would only be after his untimely death that his career would really begin to take off . . .
More than seventy years after his death, H.P. Lovecraft remains one of the most important and influential authors of supernatural fiction. This, despite the fact that he was never widely published during his lifetime, except in
the pages of amateur journals, specialist pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, and in a few hardcover anthologies of horror stories.
The only book of his fiction Lovecraft lived to see published during his lifetime was Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936). A slender 26,000-word novelette illustrated with four pieces of artwork by Frank A. Utpatel, it was produced by William L. Crawford’s Visionary Publishing Company of Everett, Pennsylvania.
‘Crawford has at last issued my “Innsmouth” as a lousily misprinted and sloppily bound book,’ the author complained in a letter. ‘The printed errata slip doesn’t cover half the mistakes.’
Although Crawford managed to print around 400 copies, only half of these were bound in hardcovers. He sold just 150 copies before he was forced to quit publishing by financial pressures, and the unbound sheets were subsequently destroyed. ‘It did not bring Lovecraft the recognition I hoped it would bring him,’ lamented the publisher.
It was not until two years after Lovecraft’s death that an omnibus volume of his best work was published by Arkham House (named after Lovecraft’s fictional New England town), set up by young authors August Derleth and Donald Wandrei solely to preserve the collected writings of their literary mentor between hardcovers.