Do we have enough “Lovecraft as character” appearances to do The Encyclopaedia of H. P. Lovecraft as Character, focussed only on the appearance of H.P. Lovecraft and his close circle as characters in stories, graphic novels, rock songs, games and more? I think we do. By now there must be at least a hundred such depictions of Lovecraft himself.
For instance, my recent Good Old Mac biographical book on Everett McNeil, the keystone Lovecraft Circle member, found ten such instances of him alone. And I haven’t even read the various books which treat the Lovecraft circle to a detective novel outing (such as the recent novel by Joshi), in which he likely also appears as a character. Nor the various table-top RPGs. McNeil had another depiction in one of the new graphic novels of Lovecraft’s life, He Who Wrote in the Darkness, and I would suspect he may also appears in the other new graphic novel Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H. P. Lovecraft (though I haven’t yet seen that). That’s just one often-overlooked member of the Circle, and yet there’s already material enough for an Encyclopaedia chapter.
It might be organised by date and by cultural milieu:
Lovecraft as ‘living character’; pre-1937.
The War Years: 1938-1949.
The Depths of the Cold War: 1950-1964.
The Counter-culture: 1965-1975.
The De-censorship Decades: 1976-1996.
Gone Global: 1997-2007.
Haunting the New Puritans: 2008-2018.
Lovecraft’s Circle as Characters.
Due to the estimated cost of making it I won’t be the one to do such an Encyclopaedia, but if the idea tickles both your fancy and wallet then please feel free to give it a go. Bear in mind that acquiring all the works needed to comprehensively make such a book will require either a vast collection and/or a very plump wallet.
The essay “H. P. Lovecraft and Real Person Fiction: The Pulp Author as Subcultural Avatar”, in The Age of Lovecraft (2016), has some discussion of recent uses. According to the abstract for this, this centres… “on Mac Carter’s successful comic book mini-series The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft (2010), but [also] referring to other examples such as Hans Rodionoff’s Lovecraft (2004) and Bruce Brown’s series of ‘children’s’ Howard Lovecraft volumes”.