Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales

by H. P. Lovecraft

  ‘I would say Lovecraft’s work must stand or fall by virtue of those stories he completed himself, presented for publication, and had accepted for publication,’ stated Robert Bloch in the 1960s. ‘I agree in part that perhaps a greater share of the material would not have been approved by Lovecraft himself.’

  Apparently sponsored by Arkham House, Best Supernatural Stories of H.P. Lovecraft, edited with an introduction by Derleth, appeared as a mass-market hardcover from The World Publishing Company in 1945. The first ‘popular-priced edition’ of the author’s work, it went through three printings in just over a year.

  The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1944) and The Dunwich Horror (1945) were published in early paperback editions by Bartholomew House. They were followed by The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales (1945) in a special Armed Services Edition. In 1947, the Avon Book Company published a paperback of The Lurking Fear and Other Pieces (reprinted eleven years later as Cry Horror!).

  In 1945, New York publisher Ben Abramson issued Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature in a separate hardcover printing, with a new foreword by August Derleth. The essay has since been republished in various editions, including a softcover from Dover Publications in 1973 (with an introduction by E.F. Bleiler) and as an illustrated edition from Montilla Publications in 1992.

  Despite being rejected by Weird Tales, Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ had eventually appeared in Beyond the Wall of Sleep. As Derleth explained in his introduction when the story was subsequently serialised over the first four issues of The Arkham Sampler (1948): ‘It seems clearly evident that, had he lived longer, Lovecraft would have spent more time on a revision of this novel, which was left in first draft and, in the large part, not typewritten.’ In 1956, Shroud Publishers of Buffalo, New York, produced a separate 1,500-copy paperbound edition along with a small-run hardcover printing that sold at $10.00 apiece.

  In 1948, Derleth planned to produce a two-volume collection of Lovecraft stories illustrated by four different artists and limited to 5,000 copies. Although nothing eventually came of the idea, 3 Tales of Horror (1967) appeared from Arkham as an oversized ‘prestige’ hardcover. Containing ‘The Colour Out of Space’, ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’, it boasted fifteen illustrations by East Coast regional artist Lee Brown Coye printed on coated stock.

  Beginning with The Dunwich Horror and Others in 1963 (basically The Best Supernatural Stories of H.P. Lovecraft with two extra tales and a new introduction), Arkham began publishing definitive collections of Lovecraft’s fiction which have been kept in print ever since. Two further volumes, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels and Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, appeared in 1964 and 1965, respectively.

  ‘August Derleth and his good friend, Donald Wandrei, fought like tigers, year after year, to build up a Lovecraft awareness,’ explained E. Hoffman Price, ‘and in so doing, contributed to giving momentum to what became, finally, a fantasy boom.’

  ‘It is a testament to the power of his personality that Lovecraft could elicit such devotion,’ observed S.T. Joshi, ‘even from those who had never met him but were linked only by correspondence. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei expended their own time and resources in founding a publishing company, Arkham House, initially for the sole purpose of preserving Lovecraft’s work in hardcover; but Derleth never met him and Wandrei met him only fleetingly in Lovecraft’s native Providence, Rhode Island, and on Lovecraft’s rare visits to New York in the 1930s.’

  In the 1980s, Lovecraft scholar Joshi returned to the author’s original handwritten and annotated manuscripts for reprints of the three ‘definitive’ Arkham collections in ‘corrected’ editions which ignored previous editorial changes made by August Derleth, Farnsworth Wright and others over the years. These new texts formed the basis for three volumes of Lovecraft’s work published by Penguin Books as part of its ‘Twentieth-Century Classics’ series, and Joshi also utilised Lovecraft’s original texts for the Arkham House editions of The Horror in the Museum (1987) and Miscellaneous Writings (1995).

  From 1937 until 1942, Wandrei and Derleth contacted as many of Lovecraft’s correspondents as they could and transcribed thousands of letters, the longest of which consisted of seventy or eighty pages. The eventual result of this enormous effort was five volumes of Selected Letters, published between 1965- 1976 (the final two books were compiled by Derleth and his successor at Arkham House, James Turner). Since then, other publishers have issued their own volumes of Lovecraft’s voluminous correspondence.

  ‘Here at Arkham House we would be the first to admit that Lovecraft would certainly not have wanted a good deal of what he wrote put into print,’ Derleth revealed in the mid-1960s, ‘and this includes not only his juvenilia, but also some of the stories praised by his readers, and his correspondence.

  ‘Of his earliest stories he saved only “The Beast in the Cave”, “The Transition of Juan Romero” and “The Alchemist” as of more merit than those pieces he destroyed. Such earlier pieces as were reprinted were found in the possession of a collector, in manuscript form. Their printing by Arkham House was in limited edition only, with no reprint in any form, specifically for collectors.’

  What Derleth could not have foreseen was that that situation would soon change as Lovecraft’s reputation and growing popularity brought him to the attention of an increasing number of mass-market imprints.

  Published in 1945 under both Lovecraft and Derleth’s bylines, The Lurker at the Threshold was a short novel based upon a fragment, ‘The Round Tower’, and unrelated notes discovered in Lovecraft’s papers totalling approximately 1,200 words. ‘I constructed and wrote The Lurker at the Threshold, which had nowhere been laid out, planned, or plotted by Lovecraft,’ explained Derleth. The book was reprinted in Argentina in 1946 by Editorial Molino and in Britain in 1948 by Museum Press.

  After publishing no titles for three years, Arkham House issued The Survivor and Others in 1957. It contained seven ‘posthumous collaborations’ between Derleth and Lovecraft, including a variation on ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ entitled ‘The Shadow Out of Space’ and based on the same story notes.

  August Derleth’s own contributions to the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ had been appearing in magazines since 1932. ‘The Lair of the Star-Spawn’, a collaboration with Mark Schorer, was published in the August issue of that year’s Weird Tales.

  ‘The Return of Hastur’ was the first of the author’s series of Lovecraft pastiches. Written in 1936, it was voted the best story to appear in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales. As Derleth revealed, Lovecraft ‘saw its opening pages and the outline of my proposed development, and in consequence made several suggestions which were enthusiastically incorporated into the story.’

  It was one of six stories collected in the Arkham House volume The Mask of Cthulhu (1958), and Derleth followed it four years later with the ‘fix-up’ novel The Trail of Cthulhu (1962), based around five stories previously published in Weird Tales during the 1940s and ’50s.

  ‘Derleth’s Mythos tales and posthumous collaborations helped to sustain interest in Lovecraft’s writing at a time when his work had little recognition,’ explained critic Stefan Dziemianowicz, ‘and created a simple template for the Lovecraft pastiche that scores of later writers would use when writing stories set in Lovecraft’s universe.’

  Derleth also edited the 1969 anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which included contributions from most of Arkham’s established stable of authors, along with newcomers such as J. Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley and Colin Wilson.

  Although he had done more than anyone else - often at great personal cost to himself - to keep Lovecraft’s memory and work alive in the public consciousness, there is no doubt that August Derleth made extensive changes and revisions to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, which are still being dissected and criticised by fans today.

  ‘Some of Lovecraft’s admirers have become Derleth h
aters because of the alleged, and perhaps actual creation of a Cthulhu Mythos by August, who is said to have gone too far in imputing this “mythos” to Lovecraft,’ E. Hoffman Price presciently observed.

  Following gall bladder surgery from which he never fully recovered, August Derleth died unexpectedly on July 4, 1971. He was just 62 years old.

  The posthumous collection The Watchers Out of Time and Others (1974) was an omnibus volume of mostly previously published ‘collaborations’ between Derleth and Lovecraft, that included the short novel The Lurker at the Threshold and the incomplete title story, which Derleth had been working on at the time of his death.

  Despite the passing of his greatest champion, Lovecraft’s reputation was now firmly established throughout the world as the twentieth century’s pre-eminent author of supernatural fiction.

  Although by the early 1950s most of Lovecraft’s original circle of friends and protégés had moved away from the Cthulhu Mythos to develop their own individual writing styles, August Derleth had continued to turn out a steady stream of Lovecraftian pastiches for Weird Tales before the magazine ended its initial run with the digest-sized September 1954 issue. After thirty-two years, declining budgets, market conditions and the collapse of its publisher sealed the demise of ‘The Unique Magazine’.

  However, a new generation of authors was soon poised to reinvent the Cthulhu Mythos for a modern readership. The first and most notable among these newcomers was Liverpool writer (John) Ramsey Campbell who, at the suggestion of Derleth, created an Arkham-like milieu in Britain for his first collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964), which was published by Arkham House when the author was just eighteen years old.

  ‘When I was fourteen I first encountered H.P. Lovecraft,’ recalled Campbell. ‘Cry Horror! (1958) was a collection of some of Lovecraft’s best - and worst - stories, and I read it in a day. I immersed myself and decided that this was the greatest stuff I’d ever read and thereupon wrote some Lovecraftian stories to the extent of imitating his style and setting them in Massachusetts when I’d hardly set foot outside Liverpool.’

  After appearing with several Cthulhu Mythos stories in The Arkham Collector and Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Royal Military Police Sergeant Brian Lumley joined the Arkham House line-up with the collections The Caller of the Black (1971) and The Horror at Oakdeene and Others (1977), along with the novel Beneath the Moors (1974).

  ‘I was twenty-nine when - having by then collected almost all of the available Lovecraft material - I wrote to August Derleth at Arkham House to order books,’ explained Lumley. ‘Along with monies, I sent some “extracts” from a handful of dubiously titled “black books”, the survivors of antique, now extinct civilizations that either worshipped or shunned the variously imagined “gods” and “demons” of the Cthulhu Cycle. These forbidden volumes were my own invention (following in the footsteps of HPL and others) and Derleth seemed much taken by them; he hinted that I might like to “try my hand” at writing “something solid in the Mythos” for an anthology he was going to call Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Of course I attended to that immediately!’

  British author Basil Copper’s first genre novel, The Great White Space (1974), was dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth - ‘Openers of the Way’. This tale of an expedition to the centre of the Earth was not only inspired by the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, but was also in the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

  ‘I rate Lovecraft very highly indeed and at his very best the next in succession to the great 19th-century master,’ revealed Copper some years ago. ‘Poe is, of course, now recognised as a classic author both in prose and poetry and, though in a somewhat lower niche, I am certain that Lovecraft will in time - though it may take another thirty years - take his true place as a classic writer in the field he made uniquely his own.’

  American-born James Wade lived in South Korea and started writing Cthulhu short stories in the 1940s. However, these didn’t appear in print until two decades later. Around 1965, author and editor Lin Carter began writing poetry that included elements of the Cthulhu Mythos and was based on Lovecraft’s sonnet cycle ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’. Dreams from R’lyeh was a slim volume of Carter’s verse published by Arkham House in 1975.

  Prolific British author Colin Wilson wrote the Mythos-inspired novels The Mind Parasites (1967) and The Philosopher’s Stone (1971), as well as the novella ‘The Return of Lloigor’ (1969), after he had severely criticised Lovecraft’s writing as being ‘atrocious’ in his book The Strength to Dream (1962).

  ‘In due course, a copy of my book fell into the hands of August Derleth,’ explained Wilson. ‘And Derleth wrote to me, protesting that my judgement of Lovecraft was too harsh, and asking me why, if I was all that good, I didn’t try writing a “Lovecraft” novel myself.’

  Gary Myers’ ‘fix-up’ novel The House of the Worm (1975), based on material that was originally serialised in The Arkham Collector, was inspired by the title of a novel Lovecraft intended to write for Weird Tales in the early 1920s.

  Soon new single-author collections and anthologies of Lovecraft-inspired work began appearing from major publishing houses and small press imprints all over the world. Lin Carter edited The Spawn of Cthulhu (1971), Edward P. Berglund edited The Disciples of Cthulhu (1976), Ramsey Campbell edited New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980, which included a new Stephen King novella), and James Turner edited Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1990) and Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL in Popular Culture (1998).

  Editors Robert E. Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg celebrated the author’s centennial with Lovecraft’s Legacy (1990). Shadows Over Innsmouth (1994) and Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth (2005) were a brace of themed anthologies edited by Stephen Jones, while Robert M. Price edited numerous themed volumes for gaming imprint Chaosium, along with such titles as Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (1992), The New Lovecraft Circle (1996) and Acolytes of Cthulhu (2001).

  The Children of Cthulhu (2002) was edited by John Pelan and Benjamin Adams, while Pelan and Michael Reaves’ Shadows Over Baker Street (2003) combined Lovecraft’s themes and characters with Sherlock Holmes. From Kurodahan Press, editor Asamatsu Ken’s ‘Lairs of the Hidden Gods’ anthology series, originally published as two volumes (Hishinkai) in 2002, offered a unique interpretation of the Cthulhu Mythos from a Japanese perspective.

  Modern authors such Donald R. Burleson, Fred Chappell, Neil Gaiman, John Glasby, C.J. Henderson, Caitlin R. Kiernan, T.E.D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, Richard A. Lupoff, Brian McNaughton, Kim Newman, W.H. Pugmire, Stephen Mark Rainey, Stanley C. Sargent, Mark Samuels and Richard L. Tierney, amongst numerous others, have taken their inspiration from Lovecraft’s works.

  Joyce Carol Oates selected Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, a “best of ” collection of ten stories in 1997. ‘I’d first read Lovecraft when I was a young adolescent,’ she recalled, ‘which is perhaps the best time to read Lovecraft. Now, I admire him for his style, his monomaniacal precision, the “weirdness” of his imagination, and the underlying, intransigent tragic vision that informs all of his work. He’s an American original, whose influences on subsequent writers in the field (Stephen King, for instance) is all-pervasive.’

  In 2001, Black Seas of Infinity: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft contained nineteen stories and three non-fiction pieces, edited by Andrew Wheeler for the Science Fiction Book Club. Best-selling author Peter Straub edited Lovecraft: Tales (2005), a classy hardcover collection of twenty-two classic tales published by the prestigious Library of America imprint.

  ‘I read Lovecraft when I was thirteen,’ recalled Straub. ‘I didn’t understand him, but I thought he was really good. I’ve always liked things I didn’t understand. It’s nice to have the feeling that the world looms larger than is revealed to you by your own perceptions and intelligence.’

  H.P. Lovecraft himself turned up as a character in such revisionist novels as Pulptime (1984) by Peter H. Cannon (alongside Sherlock Holmes, Harry Houdini and Frank
Belknap Long, Jr); Lovecraft’s Book (1985) by Richard A. Lupoff (featuring many of the ‘Lovecraft Circle’ of writers battling the Nazis); Shadows Bend: A Novel of the Fantastic and Unspeakable (2000) by David Barbour and Richard Raleigh (teaming HPL with fellow Weird Tales authors Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith); The Arcanum (2004), a debut novel by Thomas Wheeler (involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini and voodoo priestess Marie Laveau), and The Chinese Death Cloud Peril (2006) by Paul Malmont (in which pulp magazine authors Walter Gibson, Lester Dent and L. Ron Hubbard investigated Lovecraft’s horrifying poisoning).

  Peter Cannon’s collection Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (1994) contained three Lovecraftian tales featuring P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster, and Nick Mamatas’ debut novel Move Under Ground (2004) involved ‘Beat Era’ authors Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Alan Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs battling the minions of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in the California of the early 1960s.

  It soon became apparent that no genre was safe nor any plot too outlandish when it came to authors putting a new spin on H.P. Lovecraft and his work.