Chronology
Al Azif written circa 730 A.D. at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred
Tr. to Greek 950 A.D. as Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas
Burnt by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e., Greek text). Arabic text now lost.
Olaus translates Gr. to Latin 1228
1232 Latin ed. (and Gr.) suppr. by Pope Gregory IX
14 . . . Black-letter printed edition (Germany)
15 . . . Gr. text printed in Italy
16 . . . Spanish reprint of Latin text
1. First published in 1938 as a pamphlet by Rebel Press (Oakman, AL). Probably written in November 1927; Lovecraft mentioned the history in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith dated November 27, 1927 (Selected Letters, II, 201).
2. Lovecraft told Clark Ashton Smith in a letter dated November 27, 1927, that he learned this from the notes of Samuel Henley to his 1786 English translation of William Beckford’s The History of the Caliph Vathek (1782), an early but important French work of fantasy and a favorite of Lovecraft’s (letter of November 27, 1927, in Selected Letters, II, 201).
3. The chief settlement of Yemen.
4. See text accompanying note 184 in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
5. Properly, Rub’ al Khali, located in the southern part of the Arabian peninsula.
6. Cf. the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed., II, 240): “[T]he ‘Roba el Khaliyeh’ or ‘Empty Space’ of geographers—the ‘Dahna’ or ‘Crimson’ of modern Arabs, so called from the prevailing colour of its heated sands . . . is never traversed in its full width, not even by Bedouins; and little or no credit can be attached to the relations of those who pretend to have explored it, and to have found wonders in its recesses.”
7. Ibn Khallikan (1211–1282 CE), born in Iraq, was a judge and a scholar and the author of Wafaya¯t al-a a¯ ‘ya¯n wa-anba¯' abna¯' az-zama¯n (Deaths of Eminent Men and History of the Sons of the Epoch), a biographical dictionary that also served as an important work of civil and literary history.
8. There is reason to question whether Alhazred actually died. In “The Last Test,” a tale cowritten by Lovecraft that appeared in Weird Tales in November 1928, Clarendon claims to have met an “old man” who may well have been the poet himself. See “Is Abdul Alhazred Still Alive?,” by Robert M. Price.
9. See “The Nameless City,” note 24, above.
10. The Greek Orthodox patriarch at Constantinople from 1043 to 1059 CE.
11. Gregory also banned the Talmud and declared that black cats were satanic beings.
12. Joseph Curwen fled Salem in 1692. See The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, above.
13. Most likely Doctor John Dee (1527–1608), an astrologer and a confidant of Queen Elizabeth I, who had an extensive occult library.
14. The Private Case was the select collection of pornographic and other “forbidden” books held by the British Museum. It was formally established in 1857, but the collection grew significantly upon receipt of the bequest of the prominent Victorian pornographer-bibliophile Henry Spencer Ashbee in 1900. The collection has now been dispersed into the general catalog.
15. See Lovecraft’s tale “Pickman’s Model” (1926).
16. Published in 1894. See “The Whisperer in Darkness,” note 36, above.
Appendix 4
GENEALOGY OF THE ELDER RACES
Drawn from a letter from H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton
(April 27, 1933, Selected Letters, IV, 183)
* First of their respective lines to inhabit this planet.
** This union was an hellish and nameless tragedy.
Appendix 5
THE WORKS OF H. P. LOVECRAFT1
Title
Year Written
Year First Published
“The Alchemist”
1908
1916
At the Mountains of Madness
1931
1936
“Azathoth” (fragment)
1922
1938
“The Beast in the Cave”
1905
1918
“Beyond the Wall of Sleep”
1919
1919
“The Book” (fragment)
1933 (?)
1938
“The Call of Cthulhu”
1926
1928
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
1927
1941
“The Cats of Ulthar”
1920
1920
“Celephaïs”
1920
1922
“The Colour Out of Space”
1927
1927
“Cool Air”
1926 (?)
1928
“Dagon”
1917
1919
“The Descendants” (fragment)
1926 or 1927
1938
“The Doom That Came to Sarnath”
1919
1920
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
1926–27
1943
“The Dreams in the Witch House”
1932
1933
“The Dunwich Horror”
1928
1929
“The Evil Clergyman” (dream account)
1933
1939
“Ex Oblivione”
1920 or 1921
1921
“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn
and His Family”
1920
1921
“The Festival”
1923
1925
“From Beyond”
1920
1934
“The Haunter of the Dark”
1935
1936
“He”
1925
1926
“Herbert West: Reanimator”
1921–22
1922
“History of the Necronomicon”
1927
1937
“The Horror at Red Hook”
1925
1927
“The Hound”
1922
1924
“Hypnos”
1922
1923
“Ibid.”
1928 (?)
1938
“In the Vault”
1925
1925
“The Little Glass Bottle”
1897
1959
“The Lurking Fear”
1922
1923
“Memory”
1919 (?)
1919
“The Moon-Bog”
1921
1926
“The Music of Erich Zann”
1921 (?)
1922
“The Mysterious Ship”
1921
1959
“The Mystery of the Grave-Yard”
1898
1959
“The Nameless City”
1921
1921
“Nyarlathotep”
1920
1921
“Of Evill Sorceries Done in New England, of Daemons in No Humane Shape” (frag.)
Unknown
1945
“Old Bugs”
1919
1959
“The Other Gods”
1921
1933
“The Outsider”
1921
1926
“Pickman’s Model”
1926
1927
“The Picture in the House”
1920
1921
“Polaris”
1918
1920
“The Quest of Iranon”
1921
1935
“The Rats in the Walls”
1923
1924
“A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson”
1917 (?)
1917
“The Secret Cave”
1898
1959
“The Shadow Out of Time”
1934–35
1936
“The Shadow over Innsmouth”
1931
1936
“The Shunned House”
1924
1928
“The Silver Key”
1926
1929
“The Statement of Randolph Carter”
1919
1920
“The Strange High House in the Mist”
1926
1931
“The Street”
1919
1920
“Sweet Ermengarde; or, The Heart of a Country Girl”
Unknown
1943
“The Temple”
1920
1925
“The Terrible Old Man”
1920
1921
“The Thing on the Doorstep”
1933
1937
“The Tomb”
1917
1922
“The Transition of Juan Romero”
1919
1944
“The Tree”
1920
1921
“The Unnamable”
1923
1925
“What the Moon Brings”
1922
1923
“The Whisperer in Darkness”
1930
1931
“The White Ship”
1919
1919
HPL’s own list of his stories, compiled in 1936 for Willis Conover. Note the touching blanks for the years 1937–48!
1. Based on H. P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography, by S. T. Joshi. The list omits fiction that Lovecraft wrote in collaboration with other authors or revisions of their work.
Appendix 6
THE “REVISIONS” OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
(Stories Cowritten or Ghostwritten by Lovecraft)1
Title
Author (or Coauthor)
Year Written
Year Published
“Ashes”
C. M. Eddy Jr.
1923
1924
“The Battle That Ended the Century”
R. H. Barlow
1934
1934
“The Challenge from Beyond”
C. L. Moore, A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long
1935
1935
“Collapsing Cosmoses”
R. H. Barlow
1938
1938
“The Crawling Chaos”
Winifred V. Jackson
1920
1921
“The Curse of Yig”
Zealia Bishop
1928
1929
“Deaf, Dumb and Blind”
C. M. Eddy Jr.
1924
1925
“The Diary of Alonzo Typer”
William Lumley
1935
1938
“The Disinterment”
Duane W. Rimel
1935
1937
“The Electric Executioner”
Adolphe de Castro
1929
1930
“The Ghost-Eater”
C. M. Eddy Jr.
1923
1924
“The Green Meadow”
Winifred V. Jackson
1918–19
1927
“The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast”
R. H. Barlow
1933
1933
“The Horror at Martin’s Beach”
Sonia Greene (later Sonia Greene Lovecraft)
1922
1923
“The Horror in the Burying-Ground”
Hazel Heald
1933–34
1937
“The Horror in the Museum”
Hazel Heald
1932
1933
“In the Walls of Eryx”
Kenneth Sterling
1936
1939
“The Last Test”
Adolphe de Castro
1927
1928
“The Loved Dead”
C. M. Eddy Jr.
1923
1924
“The Man of Stone”
Hazel Heald
1932
1932
“Medusa’s Coil”
Zealia Bishop
1930
1939
“The Mound”
Zealia Bishop
1929–30
1940
“The Night Ocean”
R. H. Barlow
1936
1939
“Out of the Aeons”
Hazel Heald
1933
1935
“Poetry and the Gods”
Anna Helen Crofts
1920
1920
“The Slaying of the Monster”
R. H. Barlow
1933
1933
“The Sorcery of Aphlar”
Duane W. Rimel
1934
1934
“Through the Gates of the Silver Key”
E. H. Price
1932–33
1934
“Till A’ the Seas”
R. H. Barlow
1935
1935
“The Trap”
Henry S. Whitehead
1931
1932
“The Tree on the Hill”
Duane W. Rimel
1934
1940
“Two Black Bottles”
Wilfred Blanch Talman
1926
1927
“Under the Pyramids”
Harry Houdini
1924
1924
“Winged Death”
Hazel Heald
1932
1934
1. “Bothon,” a story nominally by Henry S. Whitehead, appeared in 1946, and there have been suggestions that Lovecraft may have had a hand in its creation. S. T. Joshi, in I Am Providence, concludes “from internal evidence” that none of the writing is Lovecraft’s. “The Thing in the Moonlight” is an edited account of several dreams of Lovecraft’s worked up by J. Chapman Miske and passed off as a story by Lovecraft in 1940. August Derleth subsequently reprinted it at face value. The scholarship of David E. Schultz (in “‘The Thing in the Moonlight’: A Hoax Revealed”) has since clarified its true authorship.
Appendix 7
H. P. LOVECRAFT IN POPULAR CULTURE
In the preface to the second French edition of his H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq noted: “At book signings, once in a while, young people come to see me and ask me to sign this book. They have discovered Lovecraft through role-playing games [in which players assume the personae of characters] or CD-ROMs. They have not read his work and don’t even intend to do so. None the less, oddly, they want to find out more—beyond the texts—about the individual and about how he constructed his world.” Unsurprisingly, this is not a phenomenon limited to Lovecraft. Houellebecq drew parallels with the work of Conan Doyle, who, notwithstanding Conan Doyle’s disdain for the popularity of his Sherlock Holmes tales, created an essential mythology for the iconic detective. Just as for a century Sherlockians have pretended—or pretended to pretend—that Holmes and Watson really lived,1 H. P. Lovecraft fans have breathed life into his creations and pretended that Cthulhu and its spawn exist.
Lovecraft T-shirt, sold by Zazzle.
“Hello Cthulhu” T-shirt, sold by Studio Tees.
Although Lovecraft did not find motion pictures compelling,2 filmmakers have found his stories to be rich material for the screen. An incomplete list of
films based on Lovecraft’s stories is set forth below. It would be pleasant to report that many are sensitive, caring adaptations, but such is not the case. Most are blatant appropriations of characters and titles, with little regard for the subtleties of Lovecraft’s plots or characterizations, and many have simply borrowed character names or vague concepts of tentacled creatures. Only those by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society—two so far, careful adaptations of “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”—have been true to the source material. Existing television adaptations have no greater merit. Audio adaptations have been far more successful; these are dominated by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society and another producer, the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 116
