H.P.Lovecraft: A Look Behind Cthulhu Mythos

by Lin Carter

  Bloch’s character can make nothing of this trove of hideous and blasphemous Elder Wisdom, so he zips off to Providence—a dead giveaway, of course—to consult his friend, who is more learned in the “dark knowledge” than he. Together they pore over the crumbling book. Bloch solemnly informs us that even before opening it they knew... that it was evil. The musty scent that rose from those antique pages,” he records, “carried with it the reek of the tomb. The faded leaves were maggoty at the edges, and rats had gnawed the leather.” Still using delicate, unobtrusive touches of exaggeration for the subliminal lampoon effect, he adds at this point, “rats which perchance had a ghastlier food for common fare.”

  As you might expect, Bloch’s character and his Providence pal translate some of the loathsome rituals in the book—and with the usual dire results. An invisible entity enters the room, and the hapless Providence scholar has his blood drained by a vampiric thing while dangling in mid-air before the horrified eyes of the narrator. People in such tales who dabble in the forbidden lore very generally come to a somewhat gory end. And thus Bloch annihilated Lovecraft in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales.

  Lovecraft found the story quite funny, and hastened to return the favor by annihilating Bloch in a manner even grislier, if possible. During the latter months of 1935 he wrote his twelfth and last Cthulhu Mythos story, The Haunter of the Dark, a minor effort which ran to under ten thousand words.

  The Haunter of the Dark is an amusing reply to Bloch’s pastiche. The protagonist of the tale is, in fact, the identical character of whom Bloch had written, and Lovecraft supplies him with an obvious name—“Robert Blake.” Lovecraft’s story picks up after the close of The Shambler from the Stars, which finished with the death of the Providence scholar, whereupon Bloch had his horrified and soul-shaken writer-hero bum down the house to eradicate all trace of the blood-drained corpse.

  Lovecraft opens his tale with “Blake’s” return to Milwaukee after his Providence visit to “a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame.” Blake is the author of some splendid short stories of weird honor —with vast aplomb, Lovecraft follows this statement by inventing five imaginary stories, whose titles (The Burrowers Beneath, The Stairs in the Crypt, Shaggai, In the Vale of Pnath, and The Feaster from the Stars) are deliciously straight-faced parodies of the typical Cthulhuoid title. He tells how Blake is drawn back to Providence by his continuing interest in the forbidden lore, becomes interested in the curious history of a queer, now-extinct cult called “the Starry Wisdom sect,” and explores its deserted church, finding a library filled with the usual books—Von Junzt, Eibon, Alhazred, Prinn, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and a newcomer called the Book of Dzyan. 1*

  Up in the attic, or the steeple, or whatever it is, “Robert Blake” finds a curiously-angled stone pillar and a metal box “of peculiarly asymmetrical form.” Within the box is an egg-shaped crystal of some kind. Documents turn up which relate the strange rise and peak of the Starry Wisdom sect and its collapse in scandal. The crystal is called “the Shining Trapezohedron,” and it has an odd, colorful history:

  It was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at eons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver’s spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.

  The Shining Trapezohedron, as it turns out, is associated with the worship of Nyarlathotep, and by fiddling around with it, poor Blake releases the Haunter of the Dark, which is supposed to be an avatar of the Crawling Chaos, and comes to the usual sticky end reserved for characters in a Lovecraftian tale—if anything, an end even stickier than that of the “old gentleman of Providence,” who was, you recall, drained of blood while dangling in mid-air in the clutches of the Shambler from the Stars. Blake goes reeling off in mad terror, his mind crumbling as the Haunter of the Dark comes clawing in through the window—

  I am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower—I am it and it is I... There is a monstrous odor... senses transfigured... boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way... Ia... ngai... ygg... I see it com- coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye...

  The story is an excellent one, and the elements of the in-joke are mostly too subtle to be easily seen. But when Lovecraft gives “Robert Blake’s” address, “620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” he is of course giving Bloch’s address at that time. He also slips in several references to Bloch’s stories. For example, the stuff about the Pharaoh Nephren-Ka, whose “evil fane” was destroyed by the priests, is a sly reference to one of Bloch’s best Mythos stories, Fane of the Black Pharaoh, which is all about Nephren-Ka.2* Further references to the Blochian canon may be seen in the query, “Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took on the form of man?” which refers to a cycle of Egyptian stories Bloch was writing, borderline Mythos material, centering around the place of Nyarlathotep in Egyptian history. The last stories in this cycle did not reach print until 1938.

  Just to make sure his readers got the joke, Lovecraft dedicated The Haunter of the Dark to Robert Bloch.

  Bloch retaliated some years later in a final story called The Shadow from the Steeple, which forms a direct sequel to The Haunter. This time he turned the joke on himself.

  In Bloch’s story Edmund Fiske is investigating the death of his friend, Robert Blake, whom Bloch describes as “a precocious adolescent interested in fantasy-writing.” Tracing the events surrounding his friend’s demise, Fiske goes to Providence, digs into the history of the Starry Wisdom cult, and learns that the Shining Trapezohedron itself was carried off after Blake’s death by a certain Dr. Ambrose Dexter. Fiske tracks down this Doctor Dexter and visits his home (finding his library filled, as one might suspect, with the usual run of “fabulously rare” ancient tomes). They talk, and here Bloch quite openly brings not only himself, Robert Bloch, into the story, but also Lovecraft as Lovecraft; among other things they discuss the Nyarlathotep legend, and Fiske even quotes from Lovecraft’s sonnet, “Nyarlathotep”—one of his “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence—a delectable bit of macabre versifying which includes the ominous lines:

  And at the last from inner Egypt came

  The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;

  Silent and lean and cryptically proud,

  And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.

  Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,

  But leaving, could not tell what they had heard:

  While through the nations spread the awestruck word

  That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

  Fiske is not deceived by the suave physician. He pulls a gun on him—an unwise move—and Fiske drops dead of what seems to be a heart attack. As for the Doctor, who is far more than just a Doctor, he goes out into the moonlit garden, where two escaped black panthers are roaming about; they spot him and advance, “eyes aglow, jaws slavering and agape.” Bloch concludes the tale neatly:

  Doctor Dexter turned away. His face was turned in mockery to the moon as the beasts fawned before him and licked his hands.

  Lovecraft wrote The Haunter of the Dark in 1935; it was the last of his Cthulhu Mythos stories. That same year he performed some extensive revisions on a science fiction horror tale a young correspondent named Kenneth Sterling had written. The story was called In the Walls of Eryx, and it appeared in Weird Tales as
by “Kenneth Sterling and H. P. Lovecraft.” It was the only one of his revisions to appear under a dual byline (not counting Through the Gates of the Silver Key, which is really a collaboration, not a revision).

  Lovecraft wrote no more stories, The Haunter of the Dark being the last completed story to come from his hands.

  The next year, 1936, members of the Lovecraft Circle were shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden death of Robert E. Howard. “Two-Gun Bob,” as Lovecraft jokingly called him, was a hardy and robust Texan, but he had an unusually strong emotional attachment to his mother. Howard was capable of enormous effort—he created the mighty saga of Conan the Cimmerian in just four years 3*—but he was not able to sever this relationship. Mother and son were just too close. After a lingering illness, Mrs. Howard died, and her son fell into a deep mood of despondency. Unable to endure the thought of life without her presence, Howard put a pistol to his head and blew his brains out at eight o’clock on the hot summer morning of July 11th, 1936. With his untimely death, Weird Tales lost one of the greatest writers ever to fill its pages with his surging narrative and glorious gusto.

  Robert E. Howard was a writer of enormous verve and energy, and his production of stories was truly amazing. Between 1925 and 1936 he wrote something like 91 weird or fantastic tales, some of them book-length novels, mostly for Weird Tales. And this was only a fraction of his total output; it does not include his historical adventure stories, mysteries, sports and westerns, and other fiction. He also produced enough verse to fill at least two small volumes. Today he is chiefly remembered as the founder of the Sword & Sorcery school of heroic fantasy, whose members have included Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, and others.

  His death was a major loss to Weird Tales. Had it not been for his one fatal flaw—this unhappy emotional relationship with his mother—Howard would probably be very much alive today, and very likely, at only 65, would be still writing. Lord—I wonder what sort of thing he would be writing today, with all those years of experience behind him!

  Lovecraft, who greatly admired Howard, despite the vast difference in temperament and life-style that existed between the two-fisted Texan and the sickly Rhode Island recluse, was very deeply moved by Howard’s tragic death. For Julius Schwartz’s Fantasy Magazine he composed a tribute, entitled Robert Ervin Howard: A Memoriam. It was a serious, thoughtful, appreciative study of Howard’s writing, and it ran to around two thousand words. He noted Howard’s “skill and zest in depicting sanguinary conflict” and observed that his stories possessed “a vitality found in few of his contemporaries.” In a shrewd analysis, he delved into the very heart of Howard’s power as a writer: that he was, purely and simply, a story-teller. He wrote:

  It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out so sharply. But the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them, whether they were ostensibly commercial or not. Even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke through the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote. Seldom, if ever, did he set down a lifeless stock character or situation and leave it as such. Before he concluded with it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality in spite of popular editorial policy—always drew something from his own experience and knowledge of life. Not only did he excel in pictures of strife and slaughter, but he was almost alone in his ability to create real emotions of spectral fear and dread suspense. That such a genuine artist should perish while hundreds of insincere hacks continue to concoct spurious ghosts and vampires and space-ships and occult detectives is indeed a sorry piece of cosmic irony.

  An even greater loss was to follow in the space of a very few months.

  Lovecraft and his remaining aunt, Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, lived quietly in the old house at 66 College Street in Providence, which was Lovecraft’s last home. He was fond of writing during the nighttime hours, and he took to drawing the window shades down by day and working by electric light. Although he wrote no new stories in the last two years of his life, he kept up a tremendous correspondence with about one hundred regular pen pals all over the world. Among these, towards the last, was a young fan in California named Henry Kuttner, who was only twenty-three in that year of 1937. Although Kuttner only corresponded with Lovecraft during the last eighteen months or so of his life, he felt the same stimulation from the older writer’s friendly encouragement that had helped August Derleth and Robert Bloch move into the ranks of professional writers while still in their teens.

  And there were two other fledgling writers who joined the ranks of Lovecraft’s innumerable correspondents during his last year or so. One was a young woman of 26 named Catherine Lucile Moore, or “C. L. Moore,” as she signed her stories. She had been working in a bank in Indianapolis when she sold her first story to Weird Tales. It had appeared only four years before, in the November 1933 issue. Called Shambleau, the story had been a big hit with the readership, and C. L. Moore was well on her way to becoming one of the most popular of the new crop of Weird Tales writers.

  Also among the last of Lovecraft’s correspondents was Fritz Leiber, jr., the son of the celebrated Shakespearean actor (who can still be seen on the Late Late Show in such fine films as the Charles Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Anthony Adverse). Leiber, who was 27 in Lovecraft’s last year, was to become very popular as a contributor, not to Weird Tales, but to its forthcoming (and, unfortunately, short-lived) fantasy competitor, Unknown, as well as to Unknown's, science fiction companion magazine, Astounding Stories, both under the creative editorship of John W. Campbell, jr.

  I suppose C. L. Moore and Fritz Leiber corresponded too briefly with Lovecraft to fall under his spell as completely as had Bloch, Derleth, and the others. They never wrote anything that is, strictly speaking, part of the literature of the Mythos. Leiber, in fact, has written very little weird or horror fiction, and what few pieces he has done in the genre show no traces of Lovecraftian influence. Indeed, that very fact is probably what makes his few weird stories so remarkable: the finest of them, the short novel Conjure Wife,4* is as un-Lovecraftian as you can get—a bright sunlit, everyday sort of horror story which takes place in the mundane atmosphere of a college campus. Un-Lovecraftian or no, it is a brilliant and exciting piece of fiction—all the more noteworthy in that it avoids the typically Lovecraftian excesses of using stock adjectives to suggest a mood of spectral terrors.

  Writing letters filled the days; the nights Lovecraft loved to spend strolling the moonlit streets of Providence on solitary expeditions—the same streets that Poe had walked before him. Increasingly dissatisfied with his stories, he wrote less and less of them, and none at all came from his hand during the last two years of his life.

  He lived like a hermit, a recluse, in self-imposed exile from his own world and his age, neither of which he enjoyed. Far rather would he have been born a cosmopolitan Roman of the late Empire, or an English squire in his beloved 18th century, or a colonial gentleman of the days before the Revolution. Alas, he was none of these things, except in his extraordinarily vivid dreams.

  As time went on his health gradually worsened, although his letters to his friends reflect little of this. It was not in Lovecraft’s nature to complain about his health any more than it was to complain about the low ebb of his finances, but one cannot sustain bodily health on the sort of diet of beans and other cheap foods his slender income could afford. His letters during 1936, said August Derleth, occasionally mentioned “little disabilities and annoying infirmities,” but there was never a mention of the very serious nature of his illness, although he must have been aware that he was in truth seriously ill; Derleth mentions, in H.P.L.: A Memoir, how in a letter dated February 17, 1937, Lovecraft wrote, discussing a renewed interest in his old boyhood hobby of astronomy, “Funny how early interests crop up again toward the
end of one’s life.” Twenty-six days after writing those words, H. P. Lovecraft died in the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence, from a combination of Bright’s disease 5* and intestinal cancer.

  In simple language, August Derleth quietly described the end of the story. I cannot hope to improve upon his words, so I shall repeat them here:

  He was buried three days later, in his Grandfather Phillips’ lot in Swan Point Cemetery, of which he had increasingly written in the last decade of his life, “where I shall someday repose.” Though his name is inscribed on the central shaft, no stone marks his grave.

  ***

  1* Since these mouldering tomes of ancient lore turn up, in just about every Mythos story, in the collection of this or that eccentric recluse, cult or institution, I wonder why the members of the Lovecraft Circle keep telling us how fantastically rare they are!

  2* Few of Lovecraft’s readers could possibly have gotten the point of the joke, unless they were fortunate enough to have access to a time machine. The Bloch story, which Lovecraft doubtless read in manuscript, was not published until 1937.

  3* So well did he do the job that the famous barbarian is still very much alive and kicking today, thirty-five years after Howard’s death. At the time of this writing, a new novel, Conan the Buccaneer, has just been published: It is a Howardian pastiche, written by L. Sprague de Camp and myself, who have picked up and continued the saga of the Cimmerian from the point at which Robert E. Howard left him.