by Matt Cardin
Roger Luckhurst
See also: The Castle of Otranto; The Hound of the Baskervilles; The House of the Seven Gables; Melmoth the Wanderer; The Monk; Mummies; The Shining.
Further Reading
Holloway, April. 2014. “Assyrian Stele Containing Ancient Curse Will Not Be Reunited with Its Other Half.” Ancient Origins, March 29. http://www.ancient-origins.net/comment/14174.
Lockhart, J. G. 1938. Curses, Lucks and Talismans. London: Geoffrey Bles.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mighall, Robert. 1999. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, 78–129. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nordh, Katarina. 1996. Aspects of Ancient Egyptian Curses and Blessings: Conceptual Background and Transmission. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press.
ARKHAM HOUSE
As soon as he received news in March 1937 of the death of H. P. Lovecraft, writer August Derleth immediately began to make plans for the preservation of Lovecraft’s stories. He had never met Lovecraft, but through correspondence he had developed a close relationship with him. Derleth was by this point a successful writer, both in the pulps and in the literary mainstream. He first submitted a volume of Lovecraft’s stories to his regular publisher, Scribner’s, but when this failed, he collaborated with fellow writer Donald Wandrei to bring the book out under his own imprint. Derleth had to surreptitiously borrow the money from a bank loan on his house, and Wandrei pitched in what he could. The result was The Outsider and Others (1939) under the imprint of Arkham House (the name taken from the imaginary Massachusetts town featured in Lovecraft’s fiction). Nothing would ever be the same again. Not only was the Lovecraft volume of paramount importance, but the publishing precedent Derleth had set would have wide repercussions.
Arkham House, founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei after the death of H. P. Lovecraft to preserve his work, went on to publish some of the most significant works of fantasy, horror, and science fiction in history, including several important horror “firsts.”
1939
The Outsider and Others. Arkham House’s first book, and the first published collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, consisting of thirty-five stories, plus Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” plus a short essay about Lovecraft by Derleth and Wandrei.
1942
Out of Space and Time. First collection of supernatural stories by Clark Ashton Smith.
1945
The Opener of the Way. First book by Robert Bloch.
1947
Dark Carnival. First book by Ray Bradbury.
1958
Nine Horrors and a Dream. First book by Joseph Payne Brennan.
1964
The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. First book by Ramsey Campbell.
Matt Cardin
Derleth’s sole intention had been to preserve Lovecraft. Further volumes were planned, including at least one volume of Lovecraft’s brilliant letters. But at the same time Derleth had submitted a collection of his own weird stories to Scribner’s, and the editor there suggested that a specialized firm, like Arkham House, could publish the book more effectively. This proved to be the case. Despite good reviews, The Outsider and Others sold slowly, and Derleth’s Someone in the Dark actually made a profit first. Derleth and Wandrei then began to consider preserving the work of other Weird Tales writers, beginning with Clark Ashton Smith’s Out of Space and Time in 1942. Another Lovecraft volume, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, appeared in 1943, followed by Henry S. Whitehead’s Jumbee (1944) and another Smith collection. Whether he had planned to or not, Derleth had become a publisher. Wandrei joined the army in 1942, after which Arkham House was mostly Derleth’s business.
Derleth was in new territory, but he was well prepared. Prior to him, there had only been sporadic efforts to publish Lovecraft’s work in book form, such as William Crawford’s very amateurish edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). But Derleth came on the scene as a professional whose books were taken seriously by critics and the book trade. Within a few years, in the period following World War II, there were many such firms publishing fantasy, horror, and science fiction, such as Fantasy Press and Gnome Press, but it was Derleth who had shown the way. Mainstream publishing was not ready, and small presses run by enthusiasts had to demonstrate that there was a market for such material.
Derleth knew there was a market for Lovecraft. He released Marginalia in 1944 as a stopgap, intending to bring out at least one volume of Lovecraft’s letters shortly thereafter. But, as frequently happened with Arkham House, economic realities put the project on hold. The Selected Letters eventually ran to five volumes, but the first one did not appear until 1965.
After World War II, Derleth had to decide in what direction Arkham House should go. He brought out the first collection of Robert E. Howard’s fantasy Skullface and Others in 1946. He experimented tentatively with science fiction, and his edition of A. E. van Vogt’s popular Slan (1946) was the first science fiction book published in hardcover after the war. He sought the newest talent and published the first story collections of Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and Fritz Leiber Jr. He also reprinted the work of older writers, including J. Sheridan Le Fanu and William Hope Hodgson. He signed up as many of the still-living classic ghost story writers as he could: Algernon Blackwood, H. R. Wakefield, Lord Dunsany, L. P. Hartley, and Cynthia Asquith. He also brought out an extremely important anthology of supernatural poetry, Dark of the Moon (1947).
Not all of this worked out well. By the early 1950s, Derleth had to be bailed out by a $2,500 loan from author-physician David H. Keller. Arkham House survived the 1950s on a reduced scale, publishing several volumes of poetry (by Robert E. Howard, Leah Bodine Drake, and Clark Ashton Smith), a collection of Keller’s stories, and more Lovecraft. The 1960s saw a general reprinting of all of Lovecraft’s work, plus his Collected Poems (1963), and the last volumes of Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction (ultimately six in all), plus his monumental Selected Poems (1971). There were major discoveries: the first books by Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. By the time of his death in 1971, it was clear that Derleth had been a major force in twentieth-century fantasy publishing, and he had done his job superbly, producing attractive volumes much prized by collectors.
Derleth probably did not expect Arkham House to outlive him, but his heirs continued. New volumes by Campbell and Lumley appeared, along with other backlog. In 1975 the dynamic James Turner took over as managing editor. He oversaw the reissue of Lovecraft in carefully revised texts (edited by S. T. Joshi), published a Cthulhu Mythos anthology, and brought out horror collections by Charles L. Grant and Tanith Lee, but outraged Arkham House traditionalists by turning heavily to modern science fiction, so that when a rival firm, Fedogan and Bremer, began to appeal to the old Arkham House market (starting with a collection by Donald Wandrei), fans called it “the new Arkham House.” There is no doubt that Turner’s books—by Michael Bishop, James Tiptree, Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Lucius Shepard, J. G. Ballard, and others—sold extremely well. His departure in 1996 left Arkham House in a difficult position. Fedogan and Bremer had captured their old readership and Turner had walked off with the new, founding the Golden Gryphon Press, which published the same sort of books that he would have done for Arkham House. The post-Turner Arkham House has seemed to drift. It has brought out some interesting nonfiction, notably E. Hoffmann Price’s book of pulp-era memoirs, Book of the Dead, plus a biography of Hugh B. Cave and two volumes of stories by pulp writer Nelson Bond. These may not have sold very well. The firm still exists but has not published a new title in several years.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Blackwood, Algernon; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Campbell, Ramsey; Derleth, August; Hartley, L. P.; Howard, Robert E.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lumley, Brian; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wakefield, H. R.; Wandrei, Donald.
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p; Further Reading
“Arkham House: Home to Horror, Sci-Fi Writers.” 2004. Weekend Edition Sunday. NPR, October 31. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4133870.
Barrett, Mike. 2013. “Arkham House: Sundry Observations.” In Doors to Elsewhere, 17–43. Cheadle, Staffordshire, UK: Alchemy Press.
Joshi, S. T. 1999. Sixty Years of Arkham House: A History and Bibliography. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
At the Mountains of Madness is the longest story that H. P. Lovecraft published during his lifetime, although legend has it that he had set it aside in 1931 when it was rejected by his usual market, Weird Tales, and was subsequently submitted by Donald Wandrei without Lovecraft’s knowledge to Astounding Stories of Super-Science, where it was serialized in a heavily edited version in 1936. A version much closer to the original was included in the Arkham House omnibus The Outsider and Others in 1939 and reprinted as the title story of an Arkham House collection in 1964; a corrected version of the latter collection was issued in 1985.
The novella follows the standard format of an archepological mystery story, in which investigators of long-buried ruins disturb entities that might have been better left to lie. The narrative takes the similarly standardized form of an account by geologist William Dyer of a scientific expedition to the Antarctic in 1930–1931, supposedly relating facts previously unrevealed, with the motive of warning future prospective explorers of the dangers they might face.
John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”: Antarctic
Horror with Echoes of Lovecraft
John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella “Who Goes There?” is one of the most original—and influential—treatments of a shape-shifting monster, widely acknowledged as a classic of the science fiction genre. The story was originally published, under the pseudonym “Don A. Stuart,” in the August 1938 issue of the pulp Astounding Stories.
Set at an Antarctic research station, “Who Goes There?” echoes H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1931) in its depiction of an isolated group of scientists besieged by alien forces. In Campbell’s tale, this extraterrestrial invader is capable of assimilating and perfectly mimicking any life form, including human beings, and the story’s horrific charge lies in the growing paranoia of the increasingly harried men, who cannot be sure who is friend and who is foe. Above all, the monster must be prevented from reaching civilization, where its ability to simulate humans would be given free rein, spreading like a contagion.
“Who Goes There?” has influenced much subsequent SF-horror hybrids, such as Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers and the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based upon it. Campbell’s story also has been adapted for the screen, first in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, which removed the shape-shifting premise, and then in 1982, by director John Carpenter, as The Thing, which reinstated the original plot line.
Rob Latham
Source: Leane, Elizabeth. 2005. “Locating the Thing: The Antarctic as Alien Space in John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’” Science Fiction Studies 32 (2): 225–239.
Dyer explains how the expedition discovered traces of a civilization established there fifty million years ago by extraterrestrial colonists, called Elder Things by the expedition’s ill-fated biologist Professor Lake, but probably identical to entities previously introduced in other Lovecraft stories and allegedly known in arcane writings as the “Old Ones.” The colonists’ cities were built with the aid of monstrous biologically engineered slaves called shoggoths, whose eventual revolution brought the civilization to an end. In the course of the story the members of the expedition realize that the city’s final inhabitants were only in suspended animation; having been disturbed, they are now returning to life, apparently continuing their ancient conflict. After a climactic encounter with a shoggoth, the narrator reports that his companion, the graduate student Danforth, was driven insane by the sight of even worse horrors that he was fortunate enough not to glimpse.
Along with the other Lovecraft story published in Astounding, “The Shadow out of Time,” At the Mountains of Madness became a pivotal item of the retrospectively constructed “Cthulhu Mythos,” ingeniously redefining entities that had been deemed supernatural in previous stories within a science fictional context, as products of alien biology, and thus decisively altering the assumed metaphysical context of that schema. In consequence, its substance offered more scope than its predecessors for future development and elaboration by the many other hands who added later works to the Mythos, and more temptation to exercise the imagination in extrapolation and variation. It is, therefore, one of the most extensively plundered and supplemented narratives in the sequence, and one of the most influential texts in modern weird fiction.
At the Mountains of Madness has been the subject of various extraliterary adaptations, including a graphic novel and audio dramatizations and readings by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society and the BBC. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro spearheaded an effort to make a big-budget movie adaptation, with James Cameron being named as producer and Tom Cruise attached as a lead actor at one point. However, the project ran into roadblocks at Warner Brothers, and del Toro was reportedly dismayed and discouraged by similarities between his vision of the film and director Ridley Scott’s 2012 science fiction–horror film Prometheus. At the start of 2017, the project was still in limbo.
Brian Stableford
See also: Arkham House; “The Colour out of Space”; Cthulhu Mythos; Lovecraft, H. P.
Further Reading
Collis, Clark. 2012. “‘Prometheus’ Kills Guillermo del Toro’s Dream Project.” Entertainment Weekly, June 10. http://www.ew.com/article/2012/06/10/prometheus-ridley-scott-guillermo-del-toro-lovecraft.
Harman, Graham. 2012. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, 148–172. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Long, Christian. 2015. “The Story of Guillermo del Toro’s Fight to Bring Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ to the Screen.” Uproxx, August 20. http://uproxx.com/movies/guillermo-del-toro-mountains-madness.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1936] 2005. At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition. New York: Modern Library.
Mosig, Dirk W., and Donald R. Burleson. 1979. “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol. 1, edited by Frank N. Magill, 97–101. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
“On At the Mountains of Madness: A Panel Discussion.” 1996. Lovecraft Studies 34 (Spring): 2–10.
B
BALLARD, J. G. (1930–2009)
James Graham Ballard was known primarily as an author of science fiction, although the tones and textures of his best work converged with horror literature. Ballard was interned in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, enduring trials that left him with an abiding alienation from the values of Western modernity, convinced that advanced civilization is merely a screen for violent and irrational impulses. Influenced by Freudian psychological theory and European surrealism, Ballard’s early work—gathered in such collections as The Voices of Time (1962) and The Terminal Beach (1964)—pointed the way toward a sophisticated and cynical new breed of science fiction, skeptical about the scientific mastery of nature and the essential heroism of the human species. His trilogy of disaster novels—The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966)—challenged every convention of the genre: rather than battling to preserve the remnants of civilization in the face of adversity, his protagonists pursued a psychic accommodation—virtually a mystical fusion—with the forces destroying their worlds. In these works, the pessimistic impulses of horror literature seemed to overcome the essential optimism of science fiction.
This movement toward horror was even more pronounced in Ballard’s mid-career trilogy chronicling the crushing boredom and despair of modern urban experience: Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1973), and High-Rise (1975). Crash evokes the automobile as a kind of demon lover, with fatal collisions becoming embl
ems of perverse eroticism, of denatured humanity bleakly coupling with machines, while High-Rise centers on an apartment building swiftly descending into chaos, driven by the low-grade tensions and rivalries that mark urban existence itself. Disturbingly surreal examinations of the tenuousness of civilization, these works—both memorably filmed (Crash by David Cronenberg in 1996, High-Rise by Ben Wheatley in 2015)—depict eruptions of the wanton irrationalism lurking beneath life’s surface pleasantries.
These novels’ grim tone and inclination to explore the basest of human impulses made Ballard a controversial figure within science fiction, with many fans arguing that he was not a science fiction author at all. Certainly, his later work moved resolutely away from the field, with his culminating tetralogy—Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006)—extrapolating the vein of social horror plumbed in Crash and High-Rise. All of these works are set in artificial environments, planned communities where their denizens’ darkest fantasies can be given free rein, and their tone is consistently somber, though enlivened by flashes of ferocious satire. When Ballard died in London in 2009, he was widely celebrated as one of the most important British authors of the postwar period.
Rob Latham
See also: Psychological Horror; Surrealism.
Further Reading
Baxter, Jeanette, and Rowland Wymer, eds. 2012. J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Luckhurst, Roger. 1997. The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
