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“The Dwellers Under the Tomb”

26 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH

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MPorcius enjoys and comments on an R.E. Howard horror story new to me, “The Dwellers Under the Tomb”. It’s found to be both complex in plotting and also a little hokey. But fun, and as MPorcius observes it offers several Lovecraftian riffs…

This is a fun story … we see such common Lovecraftian elements as a recovered diary that explains … plans and explorations. Also wall paintings that provide insight on the history…

Lauric Guillaud (in the book The Barbaric Triumph) adds that it is set in “Dagoth Hills” cemetery, in a nod to Lovecraft, and his description further suggests it has a great many Lovecraftian elements and approaches. But stops short of actually naming Lovecraft’s creations. It thus doesn’t feature in collections of Howard’s mythos stories such as Robert M. Price’s Nameless Cults.

The R’lyeh Tribune also noted the strong Lovecraftian approaches and themes. Adding that the tale is “consistent with Howard’s evolving theory of human devolution” and suggesting its use of the wall paintings was a response to reading Lovecraft’s then unpublished and rejected “At the Mountains of Madness” (early 1931). Very interesting.

A little research then finds S.T. Joshi suggesting, looking at the story’s approach and tone, that it was written for a particular market — one of the throwaway… “‘weird menace’ horror pulps such as Terror Tales”. It was presumably found too complex in plot for their readers, and was thus sent over to Weird Tales. There it was rejected in early summer 1932, as the magazine wobbled in the deepening Great Depression. The tale only saw print in 1976 in Lost Fantasies #4. After that it was picked up by the popular Howard paperback collection Black Canaan in 1978. In the early 1990s it was adapted by Roy Thomas for comics in the b&w Savage Sword of Conan #224, and judging by the cover he gave it a Conan retrofit and a vaguely Aliens-like monster makeover.

The R.E. Howard Foundation Newsletter has more recently published a facsimile of one of the two extant drafts, Draft A.

Is there an audio version? Yes, at YouTube. A fine reading in 50 minutes, as “The Dwellers Under The Tomb”.

Greg Staples illustration for the tale, in a Del Ray collection of Howard’s horror tales.

Sadly on hearing the story turns out to be not so fine. The main problem is the very hokey and incredibly creaky dialogue between the two nondescript investigators, although the reader of the audio version does his best with it. Then there’s the ‘lookalike brothers’ sub-plot, which is both too convoluted and too throwaway once the monsters appear. The best part is the final third in the tunnels, and the Lovecraft-infused momentary glimpses of the monsters as the tale’s climax begins to reveal their nature. It reminds me a bit of “The Tomb” and “The Rats in the Walls” as well as “Mountains”, and if you wanted a story in which Howard might be seen as poking a little fun at Lovecraft then this could be the one. Although it feels like the intention was not to poke fun but to have fun, by throwing some Lovecraftian ideas into a quick mish-mash of a pulp story. One intended for a cheap-thrills market, where Lovecraft would probably not see it if published.

Added to Open Lovecraft

25 Wednesday Aug 2021

Posted by in Scholarly works

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Added to my Open Lovecraft page of open scholarly work.

* S. Hadalin, H.P. Lovecraft’s Symbols of Indifference: A Combined Critical Approach. (Dissertation for the University of Mariboru, Slovenia, 2021. In English.)

* S. Chattopadhyay, “Finding the Image of God: Searching the ‘Sublime’ through works of Rene Descartes and H.P Lovecraft”, International Journal of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Vol.2, No.4, 2021.

* A.F. dos Santos, “Passado glorioso, presente decadente: a fabricacao da Nova Inglaterra a partir do conto “The Street” de Lovecraft (1920)”, Temporalidades, 2021. (“Glorious Past, Decadent Present: The Making of New England in Lovecraft’s ‘The Street'”)

* A.O. Soshnikov, “Features of The Structural-semantic Organisation of ‘At The Mountains of Madness'”, World of Science, Culture, Education, 2021. (In Russian. Finds that the interpenetration of genres in the text enhances… “the role of the mystical component … which leads to the expansion of its semantic space and, ultimately, enhances the author’s unique style.”)

* N.S. Mohamed, A Construcao do Locus Horribilis nos Contos de H.P. Lovecraft (“The Construction of the Locus Horribilis in the Tales of H. P. Lovecraft”. Masters dissertation for the Universidade Estadual Paulista ‘Julio de Mesquita Filho’, Brazil. Uses three tales to explore how the combination of spatiality, ambience and atmosphere generates the ‘locus horribilis’ in horror narratives).

A long paws…

23 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts

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Today John Coulthart finds the missing two pages for a Barlow/Lovecraft bio-comic from 1978, via a June post from Bobby Derie…

after 30 years I finally discover that the panel sequence showing a falling cat (seen earlier being dropped from a height by the young Barlow) has a happy conclusion that also ends the strip itself.

Weird. Last night I had a dream about a falling cat that lands safely on its feet, after happily leaping from two flights up. Really.

The bio-strip was in one of the early issues of the French news-stand comics anthology magazine A Suivre #6-7 (July-August 1978), then later reprinted sans the final two pages and still in French in the Italian anthology book The Cosmical Horror of H.P. Lovecraft (1991). It doesn’t appear to have yet had an English translation on-the-page.

This is how I’d suggest the strip should be read, complete. First page as a standalone, then three spreads, then a final turn of the page to reveal the ending and… the safe kittie but Barlow gone.

Letters of Arthur C. Clarke

23 Monday Aug 2021

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A new post today on Arthur C. Clarke and the Smithsonian, which reveals…

In 2015, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum Archives acquired the personal papers of famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke … Over the past year, I completed the task of scanning and digitally ingesting the correspondence series from this collection and now these materials are available to researchers via the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives.

Yes, tested just now… and the Clarke letters are now online and public.

From Lord Dunsany to Clarke.

How to remove the icon on the WordPress.com “Write” button

23 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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Here’s how to remove the new ‘leaf’ icon on the “Write” button for your free WordPress blogs. It began to appear today, on the old Classic Editor. For frequent bloggers it’s going to get old very quickly, and it may be that the space will become a micro-platform for more ‘messaging’ in future. This trick will not work on the newer editor, which appears to use dynamic SVG icons.

1. In the Stylus addon for your Web browser, create a new UserStyle for your target blog: top icon, click, ‘create a style for this site’.

Your new style will override the site’s default design, but only on the small bit that you specify.

2. Paste the following into the new blank style…

#wpadminbar ul li#wp-admin-bar-ab-new-post a:before {
background-image: none !important;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
margin-top: 6px;
margin-left: -5px;
}

Note that you may also want the indenting, which is not being captured in the code block above and which should look like this…

This removes the leaf icon by setting it to ‘none’, and also removes the spacing area that it sits inside.

3. Down at the bottom of the new UserScript, also tweak the sites it applies to. Now it applies to all your wordpress.com blogs. No wildcard * is needed here…

Name and save the UserStyle. Reload the site and the leaf icon is gone.

You can also DIY and block any such small annoyances in a similar way. Use uBlock Origin’s right-click / ‘inspect element’ to see the target CSS code required, if they can’t be blocked more easily using the uBlock Origin eyedropper tool.

Lovecraft’s 131st birthday round-up – part three

22 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts

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Some of the Spanish, Bandcamp and ‘new podcast launched’ birthday items are now starting to be indexed by the search-engines.

* The newspaper El Pais published a long introduction to Lovecraft and a fine header photo…

The article recommends a 2021 translation to readers…

* Ominous Conclusions chose the day to release The Outsider… “A three-part instrumental E.P. for electric guitar and symphonic orchestra, inspired from H.P. Lovecraft’s tale ‘The Outsider’.” FrontView magazine said of it… “progressive metal, but so much more. Packed with technical proficiency and profound storytelling”.

* La biblioteca de R’lyeh chose the day to start a new bi-weekly ‘Lovecraftian culture and thereabouts’ podcast in Spanish.

‘Lovecraft was right’ – part 567

22 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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From the editorial accompanying the cover-story in the latest New Scientist magazine…

Many of the researchers who work [in the Arabian desert] were told not to bother because “there was no prehistory in Arabia” and were even laughed at. Those researchers are getting the last laugh. As the [magazine’s] feature explains, it turns out there is an enormous amount of prehistory in Arabia: [over just one decade the Palaeodeserts / DISPERSE teams found] dozens of archaeological sites, often with rich collections of artefacts, that date back 500,000 years and perhaps further.

Lovecraft in a letter of 1927, outlining the career of the author of The Necronomicon…

the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred [ventured into] the devil-haunted & untrodden wastes of the great southern deserts of Arabia — the Raba el Khaliyeh [‘Empty Quarter’] — where he claimed to have found records of things older than mankind, & to have learnt the worship of Yog-Sothoth & Cthulhu.

On my recent index for Lovecraft’s poetry

21 Saturday Aug 2021

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Some random thoughts arising from my recent making of a free index for Lovecraft’s poetry…

* His poetry is surprisingly interested in birds of various types. Almost as much as cats, though I suppose the two form a sort-of natural pairing. One could almost create a small H.P Lovecraft illustrated ‘bird book’ as easily as a ‘cat book’.

* Zoar, though only mentioned twice is obviously a place which Lovecraftians might usefully investigate for associations. It’s a place, rather difficult to discover anything about, in New England and he appears to have associated it with his ill-fated young cousin.

* The poetry as a body is surprisingly light on the Teutonic thundering and Nordic/Saxon racial-memory haughtiness that some might expect from all the leftist hoo-ha of recent years. A small handful of poems from the mid 1910s, that’s all, plus one done as a close translation of a skaldic poet. Modern Odinists may be disappointed.

* The poetry is also light on use of colours. I found no cause to index these (blues, greens, orange etc) though they are implied in subjects such as sunsets. He’s more a poet of faun-haunted summer evenings and dark spectral landscape-moods. Something along the lines of a Lovecraft’s Year artbook might be devised, bringing together and illustrating the month-by-month weather/landscape description in the poetry and fiction. With a focus on examples that have supernatural or mythic elements.

* The Doctor Who writers evidently took the very memorable Tennant-era monsters ‘The Silence’ directly from Lovecraft’s poem “The Wood”, as well as the setting. Another example of their quiet borrowings from Lovecraft in the Tennant-era and then in the Capaldi-era of the series, I’d suggest. ‘The Weeping Angels’ statue-monsters of the Smith-era also seem to owe something to Lovecraft poems such as “The City” and others — although of course the ‘seeing turns you to stone’ idea has ancient roots.

* ‘Time’ and ‘Chaos’ in Lovecraft’s poetry really need separate indexing and close comparative commentary. I’ve skipped them in the index as “Too frequent to index”.

* Appreciation of the poetry suffers somewhat because the characteristics of the ancient myths and figures are not immediately known to modern readers. Even classicist may struggle to recall Polyhymnia (the ancient muse of geometry, as it turns out) and even then you also need to recall the semi-magical nature of geometry in the ancient world. But the names are now easily looked up. Ideally in a reliable encyclopedia or reference work on myth, to avoid the confused and spiralling confabulations of modern pagans. Even then, such a reference can be inflected in rather complex ways, for instance to the Elizabethan incarnation of Astraea as evoked by the royal court in the time of Shakespeare. Lovecraft’s friend Loveman was an Elizabethan poetry specialist and could do doubt have told him much about such courtly masques.