Category Archives: h-p-lovecraft

The Cthulhu Centenary (sorta)

The annual Wow-it’s-finally-Livable-in-Austin-again turning of the seasons has happened here – gone are 100+ October days, replaced with crisp mid-80s and frosty overnight lows in the 60s, and for me it’s just in the nick of time! The lingering heat is extremely destructive to one’s health and sanity, so it’s kind of a big deal that we can finally have windows open and don’t immediately wilt upon stepping outside. And, with Texan autumn comes a marked increase in my personal sense of Halloweenishness, so I wanted to do something fun and muse upon about what is probably the single most important horror story of the 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, which is (from a certain perspective) 100 years old this year!

Now, I say it’s “sorta” the centenary of this story because of course it wasn’t actually PUBLISHED until 1928 (we’ll do this again in a couple of years maybe!), which is of perhaps greater technical importance – after all, its influence on people couldn’t start until it was available to be read! That said, we do know, based on his letters, that Lovecraft finished the story in 1926, probably in the summertime, after leaving New York City and returning home to his burrow in Providence. In an October ’26 letter to his buddy, Clark Ashton Smith, he mentions that he’d just wrapped up a couple of tales, including a “sunken-land thing” that he’d described “last year.”

Its route to eventual publication in 1928 is a little arduous; Farnsworth Wright rejected it when it was first submitted (presumably in late ’26 or early ’27) and we know that Lovecraft had earned another rejection for it from a Mystery pulp too; that’s an interesting point, because Lovecraft had wracked up another rejection from a Crime pulp for his story “The Horror at Red Hook,” and later on he’d write a version (sadly lost) of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” that had been much more in the vein of a pulp detective story. There’s an interesting history, one I’ve never seen explored, in Lovecraft’s rejections, a kind of counter-factual Lovecraft oeuvre that’s fun to imagine.

But, of course, “The Call of Cthulhu” was eventually published in Weird Tales. Famously, Donald Wandrei, writer and Lovecraft Circle member, claimed that he was responsible for its acceptance by Wright in late ’27. According to Wandrei, he went into the offices of Weird Tales and, in the course of gossiping with Farnsworth, dropped the juicy bit of news that HE’D heard that HPL had been sending his stories out to other magazines (which was true), and in particular that he had a great one that he was shopping around, and Wandrei just *couldn’t* understand why Lovecraft was looking to move beyond the august pages of Weird Tales, which *really* was the perfect place for his work. In other words, he made it seem like HPL was on the verge of slipping out of Wright’s grasp. Now, this account comes from the 50s, in a retrospective essay Wandrei wrote that was published in the Peter Cannon edited volume Lovecraft Remembered, but it’s a good story and regardless, Wright did accept “The Call of Cthulhu” when it was resubmitted in ’27.

I’m not going to do a full read through of this story – this ain’t a pulp strainer entry after all – but I do want to highlight some bits and pieces that I find interesting, and then we’ll talk about what I, a humble weird fiction writer and reader, think is important about the story.

The very first thing that stands out right away is the a little note appended to the story stating that the document you’re about to read was “found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” You can see it In the original manuscript, right between the title and HPL’s name, added as a parenthetical:

That little parenthetical is doing some heavy conceptual lifting, and is a hugely important part of both this story as well as more broadly within Lovecraft’s broadly defined “mythos!”

First off, within the context of the story and as a mechanism of the plot, it’s absolute gold. It immediately gives the story a very clear narratorial voice, one that lets Lovecraft give background and editorialize as needed without any clumsy expository shoe-horning. It’s a perfect frame for a weird story too – this is the result of a very specific investigation, by a specific guy, into a specific thing, which means again that background and asides and explanations can appear diegetically within the story. That’s important, because it preserves the verisimilitude of the story, letting the reader really immerse themselves fully within the tale. It’s also a nice weird touch that the document we’re about to read is positioned as being the posthumous work of this Thurston fella – we know that the narrator of this story has died, and we’re immediately put into a kind of tense paranoia about how he died, and why.

It’s not anything Lovecraft had control over, but I actually think the presentation of this parenthetical in the pages of Weird Tales is pretty great and really adds to the story. Like you see above in the manuscript, Lovecraft just stuck it in there between the title and his name, which is the way it’s often displayed in collections. For example, here it is in the Penguin Classics The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories:

Likewise, here it is in the Joyce Carol Oates’ edited Tales of H.P. Lovecraft:

Both of these examples follow Lovecraft’s lead in the original manuscript. But take a look at how it appeared in Weird Tales in 1926:

Here, this clever little framing device is put as a footnote on the first page. This feels VERY different – if that same statement is placed up near the title, it’s immediately apprehended as part of the story. But as a footnote, it’s now a different thing – the frame of the story is somehow realer, since it’s borrowing the greater authority of a footnote. And compare it to another footnote from a different story in this same issue, Gautier’s “Clairmonde:”

Here, the very real translator’s footnote, identifying the original French title and the fact that it was translated by Lafcadio Hearn, is in the exact same position as the fictional provenance given for “The Call of Cthulhu.” That’s actually a really fun bit of blurring! Certainly no one is being tricked by this – it’s very clear that Lovecraft’s footnote is part of the fiction, whereas the translator’s note is not. But again, the placement as a footnote makes it that much more fun and conspiratorial and somehow more real than the same framing statement presented as a kind of subtitle.

(As an aside, if you’re interested in the history of these translations in Weird Tales, then buddy, have I got a book for you! And a paper too!)

Anyway, all of this is a great example of Lovecraft’s “hoax” approach to weird fiction, which he articulated in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith in October of 1930:

My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax. The author must forget all about “short story technique,” & build up a stark, simple account, full of homely corroborative details, just as if he were actually trying to “put across” a deception in real life – a deception clever enough to make adults believe it. My own attitude in writing is always that of the hoax-weaver.

You can see that Lovecraft had been working on this idea in pursuit a similar effect for a while in his previous work. “The Statement of Randolph Carter” is basically a transcript of a police statement, and similarly “Pickman’s Model” is entirely a one-sided conversation between the narrator and a second silent friend; superficially these are similar to “The Call of Cthulhu,” in that they’re not merely first person accounts (like in “The Music of Erich Zann,” for example) – rather, they’re presented as kinds of metafictive “documents” within the world of that weird story. However, in both “Carter” and “Pickman,” there’s no formatting to formalize the stories as documents – Carter is just talking to the cops, for instance, and there’s no time stamp or institutional affiliation (“Gainesville PD Official Witness Statement” or something like that) to give the story that specific hoax-like quality that Lovecraft was talking about.

Lovecraft does have “found document” stories that predate “Cthulhu” of course: “Dagon” is a suicide note, though a reader is only informed of that within the story. More explicitly, the tale of submarine madness in “The Temple” is stated as having been found in a bottle “off the coast of the Yucatan.” It’s interesting that another “sunken land thing” story is likewise being presented as a found document, isn’t it? The “found” framing of “The Temple” is an important antecedent for “The Call of Cthulhu,” just as much as the themes of the lost, sunken world of eldritch horror – Lovecraft uses a distinct voice to present us with lots of (potentially) verifiable details (the names of ships and dates of u-boat action, details of shipping routes, etc), loading this fictive message in a bottle with real verisimilitudinous weight.

But “The Call of Cthulhu” is a different beast. For one thing, it’s more than just a single, continuous statement from one solitary character. Structurally, it’s Lovecraft’s Dracula: an epistolary tale about an investigation, organized retrospectively by a character within the story and preserved as a document for posterity. It includes not just a single narrator’s account of their experience, but also newspaper clippings and excerpts from ANOTHER character’s personal retrospective diary, alongside summaries of nested stories told to other characters. It’s really incredibly immersive, and you’re hard pressed not to get sucked into the weird, conspiratorial fun of the whole thing!

The nesting structure of the story is really pretty sophisticated, and works like a trap to ensnare the reader. The story starts with Thurston examining his Uncles’ papers, finding the locked box that Thurston implies holds material that would have been destroyed if his uncle hadn’t died mysteriously. Then we enter into the account of the Horror in Clay, a modern bas-relief that, for some reason, got his uncle quite excited and sent him chasing after more mysteries. Thurston doesn’t understand why the bas-relief and the dreams of the weird artist were so interesting to his uncle until *he* reads further into the account, where there’s an EARLIER story of a conference his uncle attended where another mysterious piece of art was presented, accompanied by TWO separate but corroborating stories from two different people! In other words, we’ve been reading Thruston’s story about his uncle’s story about Wilcox’s dreams which are important in the context of a different story from Thurston’s uncle about a conference where he saw a weird statue that would later remind him of the bas-relief AND where he heard strange tales of a horrific cult in Greenland that seem to be the same cult that a New Orleans policeman encountered much later. It’s pretty dizzying, but utterly seamless. And we’re not even half-way through the story!

I really think this kind of knotty, convoluted, intercalating narrative does something to the reader, or maybe it’s just that it forces the reader to really focus and sink themselves into the text. It’s just more fun to read, kind of like the concept of elegance in mathematics – there’s pleasure in seeing the puzzle come together, and the more complex the pieces (and picture), the more fun it is. What’s really remarkable to me is that the other examples of this kind of convolved text are all much, much longer works; Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Stoker’s Dracula (which, famously, has a part where the characters in the novel all stop to read the novel up to the point where you, the reader, are at, so that everyone is on the same page!), or Machen’s The Three Imposters. But all of these are novels, and they take advantage of the novel’s more languorous pace and spacious form to engage in their self-referential hijinks or, in the case of Dracula, to insert the disparate materials for consideration. But “The Call of Cthulhu” is like 11,000 words long, a very lean story for all the complex tricks and nested stories it’s doing!

This is all to say that, structurally, I think this is Lovecraft’s most complex and ambitious work. That’s worth considering on it’s own, but likewise I think that Lovecraft is using this complex structure to reinforce a similarly complex and ambitious concept here, and one very important to the genre of weird horror.

First off all, there’s that famous beginning, as nice a summation of Lovecraftian cosmicism as you could ever want. “The most merciful thing in the world,” writes Thurston, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” That’s the heart of Lovecraftian fiction and one of the major legacies of his work, this idea that we’re just steeped in horror, the world brimful of awful realities that we, luckily, are just too stupid or distracted or plain incapable of apprehending in their annihilating totality. This is something Lovecraft has played with in previous stories; he’s written (but not published yet) “From Beyond,” where this is the central conceit of the tale, and similarly both “The Temple” and “The Horror at Red Hook” are both about hidden realities beneath our own, but this is the first published story of his to really lay down what will become a cornerstone of weird fiction in the 20th century.

While this idea of secret occult forces bubbling beneath the placid surface of everyday life is not unique to Lovecraft (Machen in particular plumbed those depths, and indeed the whole history of Western Esoterism is predicated on that worldview), I do think you can see HPL doing something new and different with it in this story. While Machen and others had already articulated a vision of hidden preternatural forces at work in the world, Lovecraft develops a true paranoid style in weird fiction in “The Call of Cthulhu.” Take, for contrast, Machen’s “The Great God Pan.” Superficially, this is very similar to “The Call of Cthulhu;” the cosmic horror of the entity termed “Pan,” whatever it is, is pretty firmly “naturalized” or “scientized” in the story, a kind of force that exists outside our normal sphere of engagement and is approachable only through a fairly drastic bit of brain surgery. Compare this to the way Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones can communicate with certain members of the human race who possess hypersensitive brains. Also, the corrupting influence of Pan, like the Great Old Ones, is fundamental to their nature as entities beyond humanity – for Machen, Pan harkens back to a time of bestial barbarism in human history, while the Great Old Ones wait for a time when humanity will be like them (“beyond good and evil”).

But the difference, and it’s a major one, between Machen’s Pan and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is that the former is *simply* a kind of force that we rarely perceive, like radiation, whereas the latter is an *active* force with a definite plan and agency and directive, seeking to impose its will on reality. We share the world with Pan, or with Machen’s monstrous “little people,” but we’re actually at war with Cthulhu (even if we by and large don’t know it). That’s a huge difference! Pan or Machen’s little people are just out there, and if *we* impinge on them we’re in danger of being destroyed, but they’re not actively trying to infiltrate our world. This is the difference between encountering the vampire in his castle versus seeing him transplanted to London; Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones *are* actively pursuing a conquest of a reality that we have accidently and temporarily misidentified as our own.

What I’m calling the paranoid style in weird fiction extends beyond the broad theme embedded in monsters to the actions (and reactions) of the characters as well. Machen’s “The Great God Pan” has a correlating of contents that sees two characters, Clarke and Austen, eventually realizing the hideous truth about Helen Vaughn. This knowledge, however, is empowering – it lets them DO something about the monster among them. Likewise, in Dracula, Mina’s correlating of the data collected by her Husband, Seward, Van Helsing, etc, is what lets them attack and ultimately defeat the vampire. This is totally antithetical to Thurston’s experience in “The Call of Cthulhu” where, in fact, the correlating of a mind’s contents, the piecing together of disparate and seemingly unrelated data, results in madness and destruction. This is a revolutionary difference between Lovecraft’s writing and that of his antecedents, and it’s something that would come to underpin modern weird fiction. And here it is, being introduced largely for the first time, a hundred years ago (well, 98 years ago…)

This implicit paranoia is, or at least has been, the dominant mode of weird fiction (and its related genres of sci-fi, sword & sorcery, etc) ever since, and in fact is so dominant that it can feel a little trite to point it out. But I think that speaks to the foundational importance of Lovecraft – his work is in the DNA of Bradbury, of Harlan Ellison, of Philip K. Dick, of Robert E. Howard, of Michael Moorcock, of William S. Burroughs and Joyce Carol Oates and Borges! Cthulhu is the dominant model of transcosmic monstrosity, not merely in horror fiction but in comic books, sci-fi, and pop culture. Cthulhu, like Dracula, is a character that people recognize and understand, even if they haven’t read the source material – what other character in 20th century horror can that be said of? (The nearest I can think of is Pennywise, but that’s down to Tim Curry more than the book he’s from). The reason for this cultural dominance is because Lovecraft united all his interests and ideas together in one superlative package: “The Call of Cthulhu.” It’s a story with everything you can think of in terms of Lovecraft: ancient god-like aliens, reality warping architecture, ancient books, secret cults. But it’s more than the sum of its parts, because Lovecraft welded them to this paranoid literary style and organized it like a hoax.

It’s important to pause here and acknowledge some ugly truths, too – a key part of Lovecraft’s paranoid style in his weird fiction comes from his time spent in New York City, where his racism and xenophobia were both sharpened and ossified. When you look at his “New York” stories, particularly “The Horror at Red Hook” (which is, in parts, a sort of rough draft for “The Call of Cthulhu”), you see Lovecraft modernizing the model of occult influences that he had been writing about. The kind of quaint, traditionalist, almost folksy worm-that-walk cultists in “The Festival” for instance are gone, replaced by hordes of foreigners speaking unintelligible languages and working furiously to destroy Anglo-Saxondom. Lovecraft was just as much a “clash of civilizations” guy as his pal Robert E. Howard, explicitly stating in several letters well into the 30s that he does not believe cultures (which he racializes) can survive mixing – this is a foundational part of not merely this story, but of the whole mythos. That’s why it’s ALSO important to recognize the centrality of Lovecraft and “The Call of Cthulhu” in literature and culture. These kinds of prejudices are baked into it, and it’s important to trace out who, for instance, is being portrayed as the corrupting and corrupted “other” in the stories being written in Cthulhu’s shadow.

But, taking the ugliness for what it is, this is still a remarkable story that I really think you should read (a clean version, not a scan from Weird Tales, can be found here). I didn’t even get to talk about how neat R’lyeh is, or how crazy Legrasse’s tale gets! There’s a lot of richness in the text, and it’s also just a fun, snaky, wriggly story that really perfectly builds dread and paranoia, AND it changed fiction (not just weird fic!) forever. It is, as I said at the beginning of this rambling essay, easily the most important horror story of the 20th century, and even if we’ve maybe moved beyond it here in the dismal 21st, there’s still a lot to learn from (and about) it. It’s really a perfect read for Halloween, and even if you’ve already read it, there’s fun in re-engaging with it. It really is one of the key texts of the genre!

The Man who Strained Pulp #45: “The Man who Collected Poe” by Robert Bloch, Famous Fantastic Mysteries v. 12, n. 6, Oct 1951

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January 19th, which was last Monday, was Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, one of the high holy days for weird fiction! Poe, of course, is hugely important, not merely as an antecedent to what would coalesce into the genre of “Weird Fiction,” but also beyond it in the larger world of literature; for starters, just look at the huge impact his work had in other languages once it was translated – Baudelaire’s translations of (and essays on) Poe in the 1850s and 1860s were epochal in French (and Continental) literature, while Konstantin Balmont’s translation of Poe in 1895 ushered in the Russian Symbolist movement. Similarly, Arno Schmidt’s love of Poe, whom he (with Hans Wollschläger) translated and celebrated in his insanely fun (and insanely huge) novel Bottom’s Dream (which is, among other things, a novel about Poe), was an important part of mid-century German lit. There’s Edogawa Ranpo in Japan, Borges and Cortazar in 20th century Spanish lit (preceded by Landa and Alarcon who similarly revolutionized 19th century Spanish literature with Poe as a major factor), I mean, the list goes on and on! Poe was a big deal!

There’s even a fun bit of Poe-in-translation history in the story of Weird Tales – as a college student at the University of Nevada, Farnsworth Wright translated Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” into Esperanto and published it in the Esperantist magazine La Simbolo in the ‘teens! Wright, who would go on to become the single most powerful editor in the history of the genre of Weird Fiction, would often cite Poe as a foundational figure for the genre. And, of course, there’s Lovecraft, for whom Poe was a god; point is, Poe is hugely important to literature, both highfalutin’ AND pulpy, so how about we spend some time reading and enjoying and thinking about a very fun story by Robert Bloch about ol’ Ed A. Poe? It’s “The Man Who Collected Poe” from Famous Fantastic Mysteries 1951!

We’ve talked out little Bobby Bloch before, specifically while looking at “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” his great Lovecraftian story and one of the few non-HPL mythos stories that rises above homage and pastiche to be something interesting, spooky, and good in itself. Interestingly, that story is also from 1951; in both of those it sort of feels like Bloch is looking back on the great influences of his writing career one last time, waving goodbye to them fondly as he begins to really develop his own voice and style.

What we haven’t talked about, though, is the magazine that this story was published in: Famous Fantastic Mysteries was one of the great sci-fi-ish mags that came around as the genre really got going, a major competitor to Weird Tales. It was first published in ’39, when it was owned by the Munsey company, who had a great backlog of weird- and science fictional stories from it’s older mags, like Argosy, that it decided to exploit. For the first few years of its existence, into the 40s, FFM was mostly a reprint magazine, focusing on classics, but it later got bought by another company (I wanna say Popular, but I’m not 100% sure of that right now, and checking would run counter to the spirit of these off-the-cuff essays!) which promptly changed the policy and began publishing new fiction. Some good writers showed up in its pages, Moore, Kuttner, Arthur C. Clarke, some big names. The editor for its entire run was Mary Gnaedinger, who was a HUGE name in sci-fi back then, famous for her deep knowledge of the field.

Oh, hey, it was “Popular” who bought ’em from Muncey then; you can see that on the ToC, above. Margaret Irwin is an interesting character – she was an English writer most famous for her historical novels, mostly set in Elizabethan times, but she (like so many writers from the UK) also wrote “ghost” stories (a term the brits use to cover both traditional spooky tales as well as what we’d call weird fic, too). You can see, though, that FFM focused on longer work with their reprints – that big ol’ “Rebirth,” originally from ’34, is a hefty un! But, luckily, they filled the nooks and crannies with shorter work, and that’s what we’re looking at today!

I love these little writer’s statements up front of the stories in FFM, fun little glimpses into the processes and how the author views their work. It’s a little odd because, as we’ll see, I don’t think this story really does address the question Bloch raises there (goofy and ahistorical as it is) – it’s not about whether Poe would’ve sold his work today at all, so it’s a little strange to see that point raised here. But what IS fun is that Bloch tells you, up front, that he’s grabbed a LOT of text straight from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and, by God, he’s right! Here’s the first two paragraphs of this story:

And for comparison, here’s the opening of Poe’s story:

I mean, that’s super fun, isn’t it? What I really like is the way Bloch hangs a lampshade on the whole thing in the story by suggesting that our nameless narrator seems to recognize the whole scene – which of course he would, since he’s a Poe expert who happens to be entering into a Poe(esque) story about all things Poe! It’s fun and playful, which is one of the hallmarks of Bloch’s writing (and why he’s such a good horror writer).

Anyway, we do get a name here, and it’s another deep cut from Poe’s story: Launcelot Canning, who is the fictional author of the fake book (The Mad Trist) that Roderick Usher reads aloud while his sister, Madeleine, is clawing her way to freedom in the tomb beneath the house. As an aside, that part of “Usher” is a lot of fun and is an interesting earlier example of what would become a hallmark of Lovecraft and his circle of weird writers – the inclusion of a fake book in among a some real ancient texts.

Again, Bloch was very sincere in saying he was mining “Usher” directly here – the allusions come thick n’ fast in this story! It makes for a fun read after reading “Usher” honestly, and I’d recommend you do that too! But, anyway, back to the story:

A good weird intro to the character – ol’ Lance Canning here is the world’s greatest collector of Poe-mobilia, something that, while interesting enough to the narrator, isn’t the real hook that reels him into Canning’s orbit. Rather, it is Canning himself, who is just a straight-up oddball seemingly right our of a Poe tale:

I really like that little joke at the expense of people with obsessive interests – the bit about wanting to figure out EXACTLY when Poe first grew a mustache is a funny line!

Anyway, our narrator accepts Canning’s invite out to the ol’ home place in Maryland (the state where Poe died and is buried, an important point to this story). The house is, of course, the Usher mansion, though without moat and tarn, and the rooms are straight outta the story too. Canning is languidly reclining on a couch, and our narrator feels like there’s something forced, or maybe manic, about his greeting, but our guy here just chalks it up to his weirdness. Moreover, he comes to realize that Canning is, literally, a BORN collector:

As a brief interlude, here are the graves themselves in Baltimore, which I visited during a conference in Baltimore a few years ago. This first one is the original monument:

And here’s the newer one, which was indeed commissioned by notable and literary members of Baltimore’s citizenry in 1875 and which necessitated an exhumation and reburial of Poe’s remains:

In particular, it’s this grandfather, Christopher Canning, the one who helped fund the new monument, that built the bulk of the Canning collection. Lance shows off some of the insanely rare and insanely valuable pieces:

This is some fun bibliomania, and the “commingled pride and cupidity” is a great line that really conveys the very specific affect of Canning here. It’s not merely greed or snobbery – it’s a kind of all-consuming obsession, something Poe wrote about often. It’s also fun to see the long list of Poe works here, especially the weird Conchologist’s First Book, which is a real fun deep cut in Poe’s oeuvre. And this obsessiveness seems to run in the family too:

Some fun metacommentary on the kind of mania that can develop around a subject of study, as well as an important part of the story – we learn that ol’ Grandpappy Canning was not above rank thievery to get what he wanted for his Poe collection! Our narrator tries to explain Canning’s grandfather’s truly all-consuming obsession with Poe by asking if there wasn’t some deeper reason behind it? Perhaps the old man thought he’d been related to Poe in someway?

Canning then goes on to talk of his father who followed in Grandpa’s footsteps and became a reclusive scholar and collector of all things Poe, in particular focusing on letters either from, to, or about ol’ Edgard Allan Poe. While Lance gathers these particular pieces, he pours them some amontillado (natch), and the two of them proceed to get increasingly toasted as they look over the collection.

Aside from the fact that the above passages are just good writing, I like the kind of mounting (or, perhaps “deepening” is more appropriate here) intensity here – Canning began with his Grandfather’s collection, a remarkable but still very MATERIAL kind of thing, full of rare and valuable books. But now we’ve moved beyond the man’s work to the man himself. Canning’s father was obsessed with the letters, little glimpses into Poe the person, and that kind of voyeuristic and intimate examination of a person’s life is a very intoxicating thing, you know, just as much as the wine they’re drinking. It ALSO nicely sets up a kind of generational escalation to this Poe obsession that afflicts the family Canning, right? Grandpa was all about the material of the man, his son was getting into the psychology and life of Poe…so what does that leave for the grandson, Launcelot Canning?

A fun little nod in the text there to Arthur Quinn who wrote, in 1941, the excellent and still definitive biography of Poe (you can read the 1960 edition over on archive.org here, btw).

Lance cracks open a chest and shows our narrator the intimate objects of Poe’s life, a helluva collection. And while he’s doing so, Lance seems to be afflicted with a mounting panic or dread, like he’s juuuuuuust barely tamping down some kinda freak-out.

His reserve almost cracks when our narrator asks about a small box in the chest.

So now we’re getting to the details of the hinted-at mysterious death of ol’ Grandpappy Canning. The two of them take a trip (with more wine) into the weird Poe-themed fun-house mansion that is Canning Manor, wandering down a dark hallway and dismal stairs into the bowels of the castle-like edifice before coming to a huge, copper-lined door:

I mean, that’s excellent stuff right there. Love the wildly Poe-flavored rantings of the madman, for one thing – it’s fun to see ’em purely as allusions, but within the text it’s interesting because we, as the readers, can’t be sure WHAT exactly is happening here – did ol’ Christopher’s Poe-obsessed brain break, and THAT’S why his rantings are all Poe-flavored…or is something else happening, something darker and much weirder? We don’t get an answer immediately, but we do get a nice reveal of Christopher Canning’s ghoulishness:

Just wonderful! It’s really fun to use the Real Life exhumation and movement of Poe’s body as the seed for a story of body theft, isn’t it? It also suggests the joke (or a joke, as we’ll see…) behind the title of this piece. Christopher Canning did, indeed quite literally, Collect Poe.

And what of the little box, which he was clutching when they found him mad and raving before the door of the secret tomb of Edgar Allan Poe?

If you’re a fan of Lovecraft (as Bloch was), you might have an inkling of where this story is heading, but if not, we’ll come back to it shortly.

Lance leads the narrator back to the study, where he continues his tale – his Father kept secret the fact that Poe’s corpse lay in the tomb beneath the house, and only told Lance about it as he lay dying. Even so, it was several years before Lance even found the key that would unlock the door to the secret, shameful tomb. And yet, with that key, somehow, Launcelot Canning is confident in stating that now HE, more than his grandfather or father, is in fact the Greatest Collector of Poe! Wait, what’s that now?

The storm builds in fury, and Lance takes up Poe’s childhood flute and begins to play madly on it, in a scene reminiscent of Roderick Usher’s guitar-playin’ while the storm (and his sister) creep upon the doomed house. Seems like a weird scene, but I guess the wine must be good because, rather than gettin’ the Hell out of Dodge, our narrator decides to peruse the bookshelves of his obviously mad host (as you do when you’re in a weird tale):

Oh hell yes. That’s right – this is Bloch before he’d shed himself entirely of his Lovecraftianisms, so of course there’re forbidden books of dark lore and evil magic here…and they’ve been well-thumbed too!

“…what can be summoned forth if one but hold the key.” hmm…

Anyway, THIS is apparently enough for the narrator, who refuses his ninth glass of wine and says he must, at last, be on his way. This panics poor ol Lance, who seems to desperately want to have someone there with him, particularly on this stormy night. Our narrator demands that Canning admit that all this stuff about the stolen body and the tomb and all is a hoax, but Canning says its all real. And, in fact, he can PROVE it:

A very fun reveal – secret Poe stories that no one has ever read! But how can this be?

Super fun, isn’t it? And if it weren’t for those magical Lovecraftian tomes mentioned earlier, you might think that the Narrator has hit on the solution here, right? That Lance Canning, a la Norman Bates (who hasn’t been written about yet) has monomaniacally BECOME the dead person who is the focus of their obsession. Maybe Canning has so steeped himself in Poe that he has, in some mad way, convinced himself that he IS Poe, right?

Well, surely that IS what has happened, right? New paper, one of the stories is dated 1949…clearly Canning is just nuts and thinks he Poe. MYSTERY SOLVED!

But Canning persists in his denial:

A boxful of dust, you say…what does that sound like…

That’s right – this IS a Lovecraftian mythos tale after all! Canning, like Charles Dexter Ward, has used the essential salts of the corpse to REANIMATE the dead!

It’s a pretty fun little twist, and one you might not have seen coming – after all, even knowing that Bloch began his writing life as a Lovecraft acolyte, you might assume that, by ’51, he’d transformed himself into the writer who was more interested in the twists and turns of a fucked-up mind than in weird gibbering cosmic entities from behind. And it’s fun to see him set that up here – the idea that this family, so obsessed with Poe, would eventually produce a deranged member that believed himself to actually BE Poe is a perfectly good bit of weird horror, you know what I mean? But in many ways this is not merely a story ABOUT Poe…rather, it’s a story about the influence of Poe, of the way an older writer can still impact people from beyond the grave. And, of course, Bloch is also thinking about how that influence was felt by Lovecraft, and how he was, in many ways, the grandson of Poe and the son of Lovecraft, at least from a writing perspective. It’s a neat, weird mediation on influence and writerly genealogies!

AND it’s got an undead Poe writing impossibly horrific stories from beyond the grave!

We’re rapidly approaching the end, so of course we start hearing the metallic pounding on the tomb door below echoing through the house!

A chilling image, and a great, horrific concept too: Poe’s new material is informed by concrete knowledge of what he could only have imagined in life. His old published work is merest preamble to the true horror of his undead writings! It’s all so huge and over the top that it really can’t be beat, it’s so much fun!

Of course, Poe has escaped the Tomb and has been making his way up the stairs and through the house towards the study. Our narrator pushes aside the panicking Canning (knocking over a flaming candelabra) and flings open the door!

And that’s the end of Robert Bloch’s “The Man Who Collected Poe!”

This story has some great art with it that sorta kinda gives away the plot, so I’ve saved it for last:

A wonderful piece by the great Lawrence Stevens showing the moment of the revivified Poe’s appearance. I really like the border there, full of little allusions to Poe’s works. A great piece all around!

Obviously, I love this story. It’s just a blast, and you can really see Bloch is having fun writing it, playing with the original text from “Usher,” really relishing the language and vivacity of Poe’s words. But beyond that, I think it’s a really interesting example of a writer very explicitly exploring both their genre in general and those in it who influenced them very specifically. And, not to be schmaltzy, but I think there’s a real affection and appreciation on display here, both for Poe and Lovecraft, writers who were very important to Bloch at one time but whose work he’s moved (and will continue to move) away from as he develops and grows and ages.

And, like I said above, it is interesting to see Bloch musing on his changing interests in his writing – there’s still the Lovecraftian weirdness here, of course, but there’s also a preoccupation with minds and psychology, highlighted both in his own writing as well as in the sections of “Usher” he chose to use. It’s also reflective of Bloch’s deeply Freudian impulse to look his progenitors square in the face and, if not reject them, at least put them to bed. Poe is the grandfather of all horror writers, and for Bloch Lovecraft was a sort of literary father – for Bloch to grow he has to step out of the shadows, otherwise he’d be in the shoes of Launcelot Canning, brooding over his collection, unable to live his own life and write his own work.

Poe is a writer who often suffers from peoples’ assumptions – the idea that he wrote only horrible, macabre, freaky shit is a common one, and tends to color most peoples’ views of his work. But a careful reading of Poe shows, I think, that he’s deeply interested in consolation after the horror, in looking for solace in the face of unimaginable terror and tragedy. And while he’s mostly just a Monster in this story, I think that there is a kind of catharsis here – Poe is, of course, freed at last, but so too is Canning. The conflagration that consumes him and his collection (and its centerpiece, Poe himself) is a cleansing fire, in more ways than one!

ACAB Includes Strained Pulp #37: “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson, Weird Tales v 34 n 1, 1939

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Trying to do these little free writing essay/dissections a bit more frequently because a) it is Hallowe’en season, after all, and b) it seems like we’re in another round of “social media death throes.” This time it’s over on Bluesky where the CEO appears to be following the Elon Musk playbook of going insane to protect the rights of fascists and TERF scum. It’s not like anyone reads blogs either (I know, I’ve got the stats for this little project right here), but we shan’t let that discourage us! So, with our hearts blazing and our eyes open, let us once again enter the mysterious, pathless wilderness that is the Pulps! And for today we have a fun (and interesting!) story: Robert Barbour Johnson’s homage to Lovecraft, “Far Below” from the 1939 June-July megaissue of Weird Tales!

Ol’ Bob Barbour Johnson seems to have been a bit of an odd duck. While a fairly prolific writer, particularly of circus tales later in life, his footprint in Weird Tales is small but deep, if that makes sense; I mean he didn’t actually write a lot for the magazine, publishing I think only six stories between ’35 – ’41, with a couple more weird stories published in other magazines later. But, despite that, readers apparently thought fairly highly of his writing, particularly of today’s story, “Far Below.” Depending on where you’re getting your info, it was either voted by the readers as the single best story published in Weird Tales OR editor Dorothy McIllwraith said it was the best story the magazine ever published.

Both statements are incorrect, although this is a good and fairly interesting story. But that kind of odd indeterminacy around Johnson seems to be fairly typical. For instance, he’s clearly a fan of Lovecraft (as we’ll see when we dive into the story today) but, with great grandiosity, Johnson says that Lovecraft wrote HIM a fan letter after reading Johnson’s 1935 story “Lead Soldiers.” It’s possible that this is true; Lovecraft was both a voluminous letter writer and the sort of person who would certainly praise work he thought good and interesting…but it just doesn’t feel correct, particularly because the story this “fan letter” is supposedly about doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Lovecraft would’ve liked! “Lead Soldiers” is about a tinpot fascist dictator whose delusions of grandeur are leading the world towards another World War, but he ends up getting killed by a bunch of toy soldiers. It’s VERY timely (then and now, sadly), EXTREMELY didactic, and BLUDGEONINGLY allegorical – not really the sort of work Lovecraft generally praised! It seems like this claim of a fan letter from Lovecraft comes out of some memoir/reminiscences type essays Johnson wrote later in life, and while I haven’t chased them down to read them in full, I gather that there’s a general Derlethian tone to them with respect to Johnson’s view of himself.

(As an aside, it appears there was a Joshi-edited-and-introduced collection of Johnson’s work that, in addition to the weird fiction, also included a few of these biographical essays. It was titled Far Below and Other Weird Stories and was published in 2021 by Weird House Press, though it’s out of print and seems like it must’ve been an extremely small run, since I can’t find a copy for sale anywhere. If you know about it or have one, hit me up!)

What is certainly true, however, is that Johnson thought a great deal of Lovecraft, and the story we’re going to be looking at today is, basically, an homage to the Old Gent and a spiritual sequel to his (great) story “Pickman’s Model,” as well as maybe the earliest example of the metafictional appearance of Lovecraft as a Lovecraftian character! But, before we can get to all that, let’s check out the cover and ToC of this big ass issue of Weird Tales!

An incredible cover by the inimitable Virgil Finlay, representing a cavalier of some sort exploring a mysterious and ghoul-ridden cavern. Absolute perfection, just a blast all around. No idea what story it’s supposed to be illustrative of, and it’s entirely possible Finlay only had the broadest of scenic outlines provided to him. But who cares! Let Finlay paint up whatever weird shit he wants, he’s one of the best to ever have graced the covers of the pulps with his talents!

ToC-wise, it’s a heavy-hitter, lots of Lovecraft and Howard on here, some CAS. We’re VERY late in the Farnsworth Wright run here, and the magazine is facing some challenges, but you can see they’re still putting up the good fight here, and there’s some fun weirdness in this big ol’ issue. Also, it’s always worthy pointing out the magazine’s commitment to poetry – it’s such a huge part of weird fiction’s history and lineage, and it’s nice that the premier magazine (that, I would argue, actually created the genre by doing the necessary boundary definition work) both recognized and encouraged poetical weirdness within its pages!

Now, on to the story!

Absolutely incredible art from the great Harold DeLay here – those old school NYPD uniforms, on a weird little rail cart, emptying a machine gun into a horde of hellish C.H.U.D.s…truly a classic! Excellent little atmospheric touches here too; the smoke, the beam of light, the expressions, and the way the horrible ghoulish horde recedes into the background of the tunnel. Just incredible, action-packed stuff, immediately eye-catching and exactly the sort of thing that gets people to actually sit down and read the story! DeLay was a great artist, and it shows. He did some excellent Conan illustrations for Weird Tales, including some for “Red Nails,” and would go on to a career in comics, something he’s obviously well suited for, given the compact and propulsive nature of his artwork.

The little italicized summary under the title is evocative and tells you everything you know, nice and succinct without giving anything away from the story. That, and the spoiler-free art, is a nice surprise!

A great, powerful start to the story; the reader is immediately drawn into whatever the hell is happening, and the quick transition from the “roar and the howl” into the revelation that the “thing” is a subway train is really nicely executed. Johnson is a good writer, and there’s some real craft in this story!

It is also, of course, a story of its time, which is why the next part has some eye-rolling White Nonsense™ in it:

Johnson wants to highlight the big, heterogeneous nature of New York with a tableau of society, specifically calling out the presence of the minorities in the subway car to give us a kind of population sample that is (unknowingly) under threat in this story. It’s cringe-worthy language, of course, and the description of the two black people as “grinning” is particularly unpleasant, an image straight out of minstrel show. It’s something you have to confront in these older stories, but I think a modern reader, acknowledging the racism, can then focus on the narrative function of the scene like we just discussed: the way Johnson is giving us a thumbnail sketch of the civilian population of NYC, dull businessmen, smoochin’ folks, and a substantial proportion of non-WASPs. Very urban and very modern subway commuters!

The medias res beginning opens up and we realize we’re in some kind of little room, where our narrator is hanging out with someone who, apparently, knows the subway system in detail. We learn that the room is actually some kind of command center, with state-of-the-art ultra-modern technology that lets them monitor the passage of the subway cars:

The Mayor Walker here is a real person, good ol’ Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York City from 1926 to his resignation in disgrace (and at the behest of FDR) in ’36. He had been a Tammany Hall boy, and become a sort of poster child for bribery and corruption at the time; Weird Tales readers, even those not from NYC, would absolutely have recognized the name, as well as the context of his getting this super expensive and super complex monitoring system installed in the subway as he was resigning. It’s an interesting historical, but it functions in the story to really GROUND us in a very specific time and place – this is no Lovecraft country invented landscape, or even a quasi-mythic NYC. This is New York City, 1939, exactly as you know it; it’s an important part of the power of the story, this very precise, very real grounding.

It also offers a convenient date for the Subway Expert to use to explode the ridiculous conception of just how long whatever it is they’re talking about has been going on:

So we get a sense that there’s something old and frightful going on, and that there’s a concerted, directed conspiracy to keep it under wraps because the truth is so terrible, so horrible, that it would destroy civilization (or at least NYC) to know what was happening. The evocation of Chateau-Thierry and Verdun, famously bloody battlefields in WWI, is interesting; this story is a sequel of sorts to Lovecraft’s own “Pickman’s Model,” and in it the narrator mentions how he’d seen some rough stuff in France, but even that hadn’t been enough to prepare him for the horror he encountered (in the story). Here’s Johnson making sure to hit that exact same point – the horrors of modern, mechanized warfare are nothing to the horror down in these tunnels, AND it’s something with a long, deep history.

An interesting meditation from the Subway Expert on what it means to be in contact with Horror, day in and day out, and the ways the mind shifts and adapts to survive.

The story shifts into a multiple-page long monolog from the Subway Expert, another stylistic choice in imitation (or homage) of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” which is entirely told as the first person dialog of a character. It’s a very effective narrative trick because in addition to letting the writer give a LOT of exposition very naturally, it also anchors the reader in the very personal, very visceral experiences of the view point character, something that can only help a horror story.

We learn that the Horrible Things that our Subway Expert has been tasked with fighting are seemingly restricted to a very small segment of the subway system, for reasons unknown. This is lucky, because its evident that successful containment of this threat is costly and complicated – there’re a bunch of militarized police stationed down here, with multiple command-and-control centers spaced along the line, and lots of careful, attentive monitoring for signs of “Them!” And it takes it’s toll on these members of the NYPD’s “Special Detail:”

Grim stuff indeed, both from the perspective of people in danger of being transformed by the work of combatting these horrors, as well as from the obvious extrajudiciality of the whole apparatus! We learn that these subway-patrollin’ Special Detail Boys are paid handsomely for their work, and that why they are *technically* part of the NYPD, and wear the uniform, they are outside of the hierarchy, free from usual discipline, and apparently answerable only to themselves. Wild, fascist shit! We also get a little bit more about out interlocuter here:

So our guy used to be a Professor who worked at the AMNH, a specialist in gorillas. He mentions that he’d been on Carl Akeley’s first African expedition when he was recruited for this subway hell job. Incidentally, although the “Akeley” name would seem to be another example of Lovecraftian hat-tipping (Henry Akeley was the rural hermit menaced by the Mi-Go in “The Whisperer in Darkness”), Carl Akeley was a real guy, a hugely important figure in museum display technology and taxidermy, perfecting and advocating a method of “life-like” presentation of specimens for museums; the Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH is named after him. Akeley’s first professional visit to Africa was in 1896, but since the NYC subway didn’t open until 1904, I reckon Craig here is referring to Akeley’s first expedition for the AMNH, which would be around 1921 or so. Incidentally, that trip was a turning point for Akeley, who had undertaken it as part of an attempt to learn more about LIVING gorillas and determine whether it was “okay” to kill and stuff them for museums back home – he came to the conclusion that it was not, and was instrumental in starting one of the first Gorilla preserves in Africa.

ANYWAY our guy Craig gets recruited by ~~Delta Green~~ the NYPD Special Detail because he’s an expert in comparative anatomy. He dissects a specimen of the Things (losing 1d10 SAN, presumably), and submits a report detailing the mad truth of the thing:

It turns out that much of what he’d discovered was already known, or at least suspected, by the shadowy cabal of the NYC Transit Authority or whoever it is; they had extensive reports about the subway accident, showing that it was a deliberate, planned attack by horrible anthropophagus mole-men…which sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

That’s from Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” from 1927, and yeah, sure, it’s a subway PLATFORM in Boston, but it’s very clearly the inspiring image for this story!

The “accident” as described by Craig is pretty gruesome – men, women, children, all getting munched on in the dark. It’s some grisly shit! Seems like something that’d be difficult to cover up, doesn’t it?

More brutal authoritarian actions by the Special Detail of the NYPD! It’s wild stuff!

Craig goes into the history of their anti-ghoul actions, and how hard the work was at first, before all the modern technology and approaches had been figured out. There’s some great, spooky writing in this section; Craig remembrances of hunting the Things through the dark tunnels, of glinting eyes in the dark, half-seen white forms flitting into the shadows, tittering mirthless laughter…it’s phenomenal, really atmospheric and legitimately unsettling.

Then we get a long section about the historical and geographical distribution of the ghouls – they’ve been here for a long time, there’s evidence that the Indians knew about them and had taken steps to nullify their danger, and there’s even a kind of funny (if tasteless) retconning of the reason for the cheap price the Dutch got for Manhattan. It’s honestly some very good Lovecraftian history, suggestive fictions woven through history and folklore and things like references to darker meanings behind certain passages in the real book “History of the City of New York” by Mary Booth; it’s not easy to do, and you’ll often run across clumsy attempts in the pastiches of Lovecraft, but here it’s pretty adroitly handled, I’d say! And then we get to a real fun bit:

I mean, c’mon – that’s just good plain fun, isn’t it? Lovecraft, presumably while living in the city, took Craig’s Grand Tour of NYC’s Subway from Hell, and much like Pickman’s practice of painting from life, those experiences are what gave Lovecraft’s story a certain hellish “authenticity.” A delightful bit of metafiction, I think!

Craig goes into the details of their work a bit; the Things seem restricted to a certain stretch of the subway, perhaps for some underlying geological reason, he muses. They also seem to restrict their activity to night-time, even though it’s always dark under the earth, which seems to make the NYPD’s Special Detail’s job a whole lot easier, at least. Craig even seems to let slip a hint of bloodlust here:

“We run them down howling with terror” is a bit grim, isn’t it, and then of course there’s Craig admission that they sometimes CAPTURE the things, imprisoning them in some kind of insane Hell Zoo. These specimens are used to illustrate the seriousness of the horrors and the need for a ruthless extrajudicial police force to recalcitrate officials, but of course they are stored in Craig’s laboratory…what’s he doin’ in there, you have to wonder. There’s a very unpleasant suggestion of experimentation, vivisections and such like. And, of course, they can’t keep any individual Thing around for very long – they’re too horrible, too alien, so they end up exterminating them eventually. It’s dark stuff:

Craig’s discourse on the Things is interrupted by a buzzing from The Big Board – there’s activity in the tunnels, movement and sounds picked up by the vast subterranean panopticon that they’ve built up down in the subway tunnel. Our narrator sees something whirr by the window, and Craig proudly explains that it’s a souped-up electric hand cart, chock full o’ cops w/ heavy artillery, dispatched to take care of the Things in the tunnel. Another one is also coming from the opposite direction; they’ll pin the Things between ’em and gun ’em down.

Because there’re microphones all over the tunnels, Craig and the narrator can hear everything that’s happening:

And then we get to the real meat of the story – in a brilliant bit of writing, Johnson has the characters (and us) overhear the action, narrated by Craig, which builds great tension and forces us to confront what, exactly, Craig has become, down here in the dark, hunting monsters:

Just in case you don’t get it, Johnson spells it out in the next section:

Craig is becoming a ghoul; in fact, all the NYPD Special Detail officers are becoming ghoulish, to a greater or lesser extent, but it’s worse and more pronounced for Craig because he’s been down here the longest. And it’s not just a physical transformation, either!

Even in the midst of his horrible decline, Craig can’t help but be scientifically intrigued by the transformation, however. He muses that perhaps the transformation is the explanation for the origins of the Things, and also why they’ll never be able to exterminate Them fully. He suggests that, while there’s some suggestion of cosmic horror chicanery going on, the transformation is simply atavistic retrogradation, something about being driven underground, being made abject in the dark.

We’re nearing the end of the story; Johnson recapitulates his opening line, the “roar and a howl” bit, as another commuter subway train comes roaring by:

And that’s the end of “Far Below” by Robert Barbour Johnson!

It’s not a long story, and it’s pretty simple structurally, built around a long expository monologue and relying on the neat trick of a character’s second-hand exposure to horror and weirdness. But there’s a lot to unpack, I think!

First off, in our current times (Oct ’25, as of this writing) it’s hard not to read this story as having something to say about both the long history of policing and prisons as well as our very current fascist U.S. government’s use of a militarized, extrajudicial police force to terrorize those it has deemed undesirable. The NYPD Special Detail’s powers are unchecked, their funding unlimited, their remit unrestricted; they are heavily armed, are capable of apparently ignoring any and all oversight, and consider themselves absolutely essential to the continuity of human civilization. And, more importantly, they are completely dehumanized by their task, transforming into literal monsters because of the work they do. It’s pretty on the nose!

Of course, that reading is a little undercut by the fact that, within the text, the Things are ontogenically capital-E Evil, right? They sabotage a subway train and devour the survivors alive, fer chrissake. That complicates the Nietzschean “Beware lest ye become monsters” reading, because these are of course literal monsters; in this way, the horrible degradation Craig and his brave Mole Cops are facing is actually heroically tragic, a sad but necessary sacrifice that must be made for the good of all.

I kind of suspect that, for Johnson, it’s the second one, about brave men sacrificing body and souls, that he wanted us to take away from it. Of course, Johnson was politically-minded; his story “Lead Soldiers,” for all it being a Moral Fable, shows that he was aware of current events and Had Opinions about them, so it is possible that he was thinking about, say, WWI era interment camps or even the crisis in protests and violent police actions post-WWI, and wanted to talk about that. But the way this story is written, and the climax that it’s building to, suggests that he wants us mostly to focus on the horror these cops are facing, and not trying to get us to think about how dehumanizing the Other dehumanizes Us, you know what I mean? That doesn’t mean we have to adhere to that reading, of course; death of the author and all that (literally, in this case; Johnson died in ’87).

As a piece of weird fiction, I think it’s awfully successful. It’s probably in my mind one of the most successful “inspired by Lovecraft” stories I’ve ever written, right up there with Bloch’s “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” or anything by Michael Shea, for example. Obviously based on that little bit of “Pickman’s Model” I excerpted above (which is super evocative, very brief but very striking in the original story), and I think Johnson does it justice, captures the fun and weirdness and horror of a subway being attacked by monsters.

It’s also neat to see Johnson really taking the conspiracy-ball and running with it. Lovecraft creates what is probably the first “widespread gov’t paranormal conspiracy” in his story “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (written in ’31 and published in ’36) – there, the u.s. gov’t comes in (off screen) and raids the town, blows up devil’s reef, sends a submarine against the Deep One’s city, and then sets up concertation camps for the fish-human hybrid survivors. There’s even a mention that the gov’t brings in “liberal activists” and shows them the horrors they’ve imprisoned, which makes the various civil rights organizations shut up about the camps, something echoed in this story by Johnson. It’s a very striking part of Innsmouth, and Johnson does it honor here, establishing a plausible and powerful conspiracy built around directly combatting the mythos menaces out there! Has anybody ever done anything with the story in the Delta Green (a cthulhu ttrpg) setting, I wonder? Craig is even a Call of Cthulhu character, in the way he had an expertise that got him plugged into the darker mythos world (and that he’s going insane and will inevitably die horribly).

Anyway, it’s a fun and interesting story, two things that you can’t always say about work with such clear (and acknowledged) connection to Lovecraft. It’s probably the best thing Johnson ever wrote, at least for Weird Tales, and I think it deserves to be read and remembered for more than just “the sequel to Pickman” that it sometimes seems to be cast as. It’s an inventive story with some good, scary imagery, it uses its source material well, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into the immediate post-HPL world of weird fiction!

The Audient Void #4: Modern Day HPL readings!?

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Hallowe’en Eve, how the hell did that happen already! Yeesh, time flies like an arrow (but fruit flies like a banana). Anyway, I’ve got one last tranche of halloween audio for you today, and they’re some good uns! Years and years ago, the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (now renamed the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast) did some truly excellent readings of some classic Lovecraft stories. Professional sound, with great effects and music, and with some really phenomenal readers, I think these are some of the best audio versions of lil’ Howie Lovecraft’s spook-em-ups. Plus they’re all FREE! You’ll have to follow the links for each to the website, but you can download ’em there. I highly recommend them all, but their “From Beyond,” “Cool Air,” and “The Picture in the House” are particular treats, in my opinion! Enjoy!

The Haunter in the Dark

From Beyond

The Picture in the House

The Cats of Ulthar

Cool Air

The Call of Cthulhu

The Hound

The Temple

Pickman’s Model

The Statement of Randolph Carter

Pulp Beyond the Strainer #27: “From Beyond” by H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, v.31 n.2, February 1938

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Now, look, I’m not gonna apologize here. Everyone knows Lovecraft, he doesn’t need any exposure or anything, so you might be asking why I’m covering his stories in these little free-writing exercises I’m doing here? Well, first off, he’s without a doubt the single most important horror/weird fic writer of the past 100 years, bar none. In terms of influence, he’s everywhere, with his tentacles extending into sci-fi, fantasy, comics, pop culture, and even modern occultism. His particular brand of cosmicism, a world where alien forces and laws operate in ways we simply cannot understand, has come to DOMINATE weird fiction (for good or ill), and while he didn’t INVENT the idea, I think you can argue he did PERFECT it. So it would be disingenuous to preclude him from discussion here merely for being well known.

A second good reason to read Lovecraft is that he is, simply put, the Best to Ever Do It. I mean, artistically, he’s top-tier – his refinement of and commitment to his particular aesthetic of weirdness is unparalleled, and it lends his writing a real force that you simply aren’t going to find in yer Seabury Quinns or yer Edmond Hamiltons. His writing, while elaborate, isn’t affected or purple – he comes by his vocabulary and style organically through Dunsany, Poe, Bierce, and Blackwood, and his appreciation for both their approach and technique is evident.

Finally, I think a lot of people have some serious misconceptions about Lovecraft – I’ve seen a lot of people online say shit like “oh, Lovecraft, all his stories are the same, like: ‘Look, an old weirdo tells me a story and then it turns out he’s right about a big tentacle monster!'” which is extremely annoying and factually inaccurate. He’s enormously inventive, and all the cliche bullshit you think he did he DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO, you’re thinking about the bullshit pastiches that came AFTER him by OTHER people! It’s very frustrating, because, like I said, for all that his DNA is in so much genre literature, his actual stories remain fresh and strange and unique and GOOD, fer fucksake! It’s the same thing that keeps people from reading, like, Jane Austen or Melville or Sterne! Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of reading them out of some misplaced hipsterish misapprehensions!

So, with that goal in mind, we’re going to talk about his very short and very good story “From Beyond,” published posthumously in Weird Tales in Feb, 1938! As I’m writing this, archive.org remains down, so that link takes you to the whole issue that you’ll probably have to download (it’s ~150 MB or so), fyi.

Anyway, the Cover:

Virgil Finley channeling some horny Margaret Brundage vibes here. As an aside, that lady has some long ass hair, doesn’t she? Like, down to her knees! When they thaw her out that’s gonna be one hell of a soggy mess, huh?

An interesting ToC this time around. “Gans T. Field” is Manly Wade Wellman, and “The Passing of Van Mitten” is one of Roy Temple House’s great translation efforts for the magazine. But, perhaps more importantly: lotta dead guys on here! Lovecraft, who died in ’37, is on here twice, actually; he wrote “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” for crazy ol’ William Lumley, one of his “collaborations” were someone paid him to take a teeny tiny kernel of a story idea and turn it into a story that they then slapped their name on. What’s funny about those is that Lovecraft is such a stylist that there’s no real way to miss it when he’s the one behind the pen, it’s so obviously Lovecraft. This one is a particularly middling effort, an obvious vulgar job for filthy lucre, but it’s got some funny bits in it. Worth a read if you got nothin’ else to do, but don’t expect greatness! Whitehead and Howard, both also dead of course, round out this somewhat macabre ToC.

All these dead guys showing up in Weird Tales reflects a bit of a slow-moving crisis in the magazine. The titans who strode through the pages of the magazine in its glory days are, for the most part, all gone – REH in ’36, HPL in ’37. These two deaths in particular come at a tough time, when Weird Tales is facing some particularly stiff competition, from both weird fiction magazines as well as from the burgeoning sci-fi pulps – the field is crowded, and the sf magazines in particular are able to pay MUCH better than Weird Tales, which further cut into their ability to find and publish good work. As such, and in the shadow of these difficulties, Weird Tales began to mine whatever they could from the back catalog of their heavy-hitters. With REH, that ended up being a lot of his verse (for what that’s worth…), but with Lovecraft, there was a whole world of amateur press publications of his.

And that’s where today’s story, “From Beyond,” comes from! It was originally published in 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, the very first weird fic fan magazine, but he’d written it waaaay back in 1920, which is pretty clear from the work itself – it’s obviously one of his earlier efforts, with a style and pacing very similar to stories like “The Terrible Old Man” or “The Tomb.” But, there’s an important difference here, one that marks a key development for ol’ Howie Lovecraft! So let’s get into it!

No illustrations for this one, which is a damn shame, given the wild visuals we’re going to encounter her. Weird Tales was on a very tight budget, and probably figured that the name itself would be enough to ensure people would read this one, so why bother. Still, it’s too bad!

Really dig that first sentence – grabs you and throws you right into the scene, focusing on the terrible transformation that has overtaken Crawford Tillinghast. We learn that Tillinghast, who the narrator considers his BEST FRIEND(!), has become a gaunt, harried shadow of his former stout and vibrant self. Even worse, this transformation occurred over the shockingly short span of ten weeks, following a tremendous argument between the two of them that ended with Crawford chucking our narrator out of the house. What was this argument about, you ask?

Just a fantastic mad scientist speech, isn’t it? Tillinghast has (correctly) identified that fact that our human sensory apparatuses are limited, the product of a messy and lazy evolution that has equipped us well for the mundane world, but which leaves us in the lurch when it comes to deeper and more fundamental layers of reality. Just like the microscope or the spectrograph, Tillinghast has built a machine that will expand human perception into these hidden realms!

Well, this freaked out our narrator, because he knew Tillinghast well enough that he could see this going one of two ways – either he’d fuck it up and be crushed and desolate, OR he’d succeed and discover something horrible, terrible, and overwhelming. Reader, guess which one happened.

So, after balking at his ideas, Tillinghast had thrown our narrator out of the house ten weeks ago, raging and fanatical. Now, he’s suddenly summoned our narrator back again and, despite the row, our dude can’t help but wonder what has happened. So now he’s back, shocked at the change that has come over Tillinghast, and also somewhat perturbed by the fact that the huge old house appears to be utterly empty, except for Tillinghast. Where have all his servants gone?

But our narrator pushes all this aside, because he’s just so danged curious about what Tillinghast hath wrought in those ten weeks. They creep through the dark house with only the lamp for light – Tillinghast seems afraid to turn on the light for some reason – and eventually reach the attic laboratory…and The Machine.

Again, excellent mad science work here – a weird glowing machine, the whine settling into a soft yet pervasive droning, and then, finally, the weird instantiation of an invisible color…ultraviolet made visible.

I mean, crazy cool wave machine weird fiction aside, this is also a remarkable early 20th C. document regarding the popular view of science and the mind, isn’t it? The “shallow endocrinologist, felloe-dupe and fellow parvenu of the Freudian” is just amazing stuff, using the cutting-edge brain science of the day to make weird fiction in 1920. When talking about Lovecraft and science most people reflexively (and not incorrectly) point towards his love of astronomy and physics, both obviously cosmic-scale and important to his world view, but you also run across geology and, here, some great biology (and what we’d now call neuro-psych). That the brain (and, therefore, one’s mind) is a biochemical organ is really just then beginning to be understand, but Lovecraft is putting a weird twist on here – it retains a certain sleeping evolutionary heritage that, properly awoken, allows humans to access the more fundamentally “real” (and terrifying) reality around them!

It can be hard for us, in 2024, to really appreciate how weird the world had been recently made for people back in the early 1900s. I mean, an entirely unknown, totally new, and otherwise INVISIBLE world of rays and mysterious energies had only recently been made manifest! Röntgen had discovered and named X-rays in 1895 and the Curies and Becquerel had been awarded the Nobel in 1903 for their work on radiation; that we were surrounded by processes and waves and things that were mostly invisible was, relatively, a pretty new and newsworthy thing. Likewise, the idea of science as inevitably pushing farther and further into these new invisible worlds was likewise a kind of cultural background noise to daily life. This is one of the KEYS to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, and this story is where he first articulates it. It’s amazing stuff!

As the machine drones on, our narrator begins to, perhaps, hallucinate…or is he beginning to really see for the first time? The attic laboratory seems to him to become a strange, alien temple of cyclopean black masonry, but then this gives was to an even more unsettling sensation:

This sense of drifting in illimitable space so startles our narrator that he involuntarily draws the revolver that he’s been carrying, a habit that started after he’d been held up in East Providence (as an aside, when I attended the NecronomiCon this past summer, I stayed in East Providence, a lovely little end of the city with some great Portuguese restaurants/bakeries). Tillinghast watches this with sardonic amusement, and it’s clear that as much as our narrator is experiencing, ol’ Crawford is seeing and hearing even more.

I mean, c’mon – “we are able to be seen as well as to see” is just fantastic, isn’t it! And the revelation that something from beyond got the servants when they turned on the lights downstairs…creepy, wonderful stuff. And it gets better!

Kaleidoscopic impressions fill our narrators mind; there’s a great image of him staring at a starry sky and seeing the leering, gloating face of Tillinghast in the constellations. And he somehow senses animate things brushing invisibly past him as the machine continues to work. He also notices that Tillinghast seems be able to see these things with his better tuned third eye…something that begins to awaken in our narrator.

Just an absolute blast, and the effect of these overlapping visions, the weird invisible world (now becoming visible) overlaying the mundane laboratory…great stuff!

And once again, Tillinghast goes full Mad Scientist:

I mean, how incredible is that! Tillinghast, in his mad questing after knowledge has transgressed some cosmic boundary – now things are hunting him, but he’s got a plan! He’ll sacrifice our narrator to them to escape, the narrator who hurt his feelings and refused to encourage him when he needed all the support he could get! A great little revenge plan in among the ultracosmic horror! And how about the description of the things, huh? “Shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness…” is unbelievably great, isn’t it?

And then there’s a mini-cliffhanger, where the action breaks and we leap forward a bit in the narrative…

What a twist! Our dude fires the revolver…not at Tillinghast, but at the Machine!!!! Of course, Tillinghast has died, apoplectically struck down by either the noise of the shot, the sudden and jarring destruction of the machine, or perhaps even by the things that he’d been summoning to get our narrator, who knows! Everybody figures that Tillinghast must’ve killed the servants himself and hidden the bodies, and had planned to do the same to our guy here; a doctor even suggest that he’d been hypnotized by Tillinghast, and that the weird shit he’d seen had been the result of suggestion and illusion. How does our guy take that?

And that’s The End!

I mean, really, what more do you want? Short, straightforward, and full of amazing weird ideas and imagery, AND it’s also a major turning point for Lovecraft’s thinking and approach to weird fiction. The things that Tillinghast’s machine make visible are basically at the core of all of Lovecraft’s stories: strange, mysterious presences that lurk just behind the placid delusion that we call “reality.” They’re truly alien, made of different matter and obeying different laws; it’s basically a brief summary of Lovecraft’s entire worldview and approach to weird fiction, all in one short, sweet little package!