09 Sunday Aug 2020
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, REH
New on Archive.org…
Howard Collector #5, Summer 1964.
Howard Collector #6, Spring 1965. With the poem “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”, from a letter. This would count as another early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, albeit not in fiction. I wonder what the likely year on this poem is?
Howard Collector #7, Winter 1965.
Howard Collector #8, Summer 1966.
Also new and of interest is a new Dark Worlds Quarterly survey of Robert E. Howard’s Bran Mak Morn in the Comics.
16 Tuesday Jun 2020
Posted in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraft as character
A series of blog posts celebrating H.P. Lovecraft’s keen interest in our fascinating felines.
In his final letter to Robert Bloch, Lovecraft notes the lad’s new story in the March 1937 Weird Tales, “The Brood of Bubastis”. The cat theme and the Cornwall setting were both an obvious nod to Lovecraft. Cornwall being the more American-recognisable stand-in for neighbouring Devonshire, to which Lovecraft traced many ancestors. Though the general idea of a Cornwall-Egypt link was not at all new by 1937.
I was hardly aware of the early Bloch beyond the story that inspired Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”, but I know a bit more now. The Egyptian theme was obviously one that Bloch pursued in his early Lovecraftian stories in 1936-38. An entry for Bloch in Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia usefully lists the short cycle of Bloch’s ‘Lovecraftian Egypt’ stories, and from 1936-38 points to…
“The Faceless God”
“The Secret of Sebek”
“The Brood of Bubastis”
“Fane of the Black Pharoah”
“The Opener of the Way”
“The Eyes of the Mummy”
“Beetles”
… with a warning that some lack Lovecraft lore, though all are generally said to be in the style and manner of Lovecraft. So far as I know these have not yet all been collected in a single “Robert Bloch’s Lovecraftian Egypt” volume. Such a collection might make for a good audiobook.
Looking into these I found a long survey essay on the early Bloch at Dark Worlds Quarterly, that I had missed in January 2020. I thus inadvertently discovered yet another early appearance of Lovecraft as a character…
“The Dark Demon” (Weird Tales, November 1936) is another love letter to Lovecraft. Like “Shambler”, Bloch creates a character that is obviously HPL in Edgar Henquist Gordon. The man is tall and pale, writes horror stories for small magazines and is a bit of a recluse, though he has hundreds of correspondents.
Lovecraft had sent editor Farnsworth Wright a signed note saying that Bloch was permitted to portray and ‘murder’ Lovecraft in published fiction, and this must have permitted the story a slot in Weird Tales that it might not otherwise have had. Curiously enough, this issue of the magazine managed to get a cute kitten on the cover of Weird Tales…
15 Monday Jun 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraft as character
Toward the close of the Bloch section of the Letters to Robert Bloch book, a mention of two early ‘Lovecraft as character’ stories…
Not long ago Kuttner showed me a new story — “Hydra” — in which all three of us figure … & are disposed of” … Shea has also slain me in a recent tale.
I’d not known about these before now. I was initially not quite sure what the Shea item is. The endnote for the mention is “RB 66”, this refers not to page 66 of the Bloch letters, but to letter #66. At first I thought it might refer to Shea’s “The Snouted Thing”, to be found his In Search of Lovecraft (1991), which appears to be its first publication. But a little further digging revealed that Lovecraft must have been referring to Shea’s tale “The Necronomicon”.
Kuttner’s “Hydra” eventually appeared, perhaps revised since Lovecraft had seen it, in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, later collected in The Watcher at the Door: The Early Kuttner, Volume Two.
At 2,500 words in clean text, I was interested in using the Shea tale as an AI audio test-text, and went looking to see if there’s any ‘sounds like a real human’ AI-shaped text-to-speech services or desktop software. Nope, it seems not — it’s still ‘if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it’ offers of chatbot-focused API services which claim to do deep learning. Who uses chatbots enough that people want to invest in them?
Anyway, it seems we might have ‘just about good enough’ story-reading AI voices in the European languages by 2025. But for now ordinary mortals are still stuck with the TTS robo-voices, albeit with a few of them being vastly improved since the 2000s and with a new range of local accents. But I guess I should just stop being cheap, lugubriate the voice-box and do it myself.
Update: easy2reading.com Free online Text To Speech TTS and freetts.com Text to Speech Converter were found to be the best in April 2021, with either using Google’s excellent male GB-Standard-D, though lacking in emotional colouring. The latter costs $6 per 1m characters, but has the advantage of using TTS markup for pauses and emphasis.
I’ve started a new Lovecraft as character tag on this blog, and gone back and retrospectively tagged. It’s limited to just the early appearances or recognisable versions of him. I’ve also found another new one, but that will appear here tomorrow in the Kittee Tuesday feature.
06 Saturday Jun 2020
I’ve found another early appearance of ‘Lovecraft as character’. It was mentioned in the Bloch letters, and takes the form of a three-page spoof story/sketch. Robert Bloch’s humorous “The Ultimate Ultimatum” appeared in Fantasy Magazine for August 1935. This purported to be an account, over three pages, of a very large convention of writers and fans. Supposedly having taken place recently in a large crypt, the ‘event’ clearly anticipated the form of ‘the large science-fiction convention’ as it later emerged — none had actually happened at that point, though regional ‘conventions’ were a thing in amateur journalism.
The relevant issue of Fantasy Magazine is not online, and nor is the item itself, but here is a taster dug out of a later magazine article on Bloch…
It was a big convention. Lovecraft was there. So was Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and Otto Binder. Ray Palmer was present, and Stanley Weinbaum. Also there was I, thrilled and proud at attending this gathering of masterminds.
In his letter to Bloch, Lovecraft commented on Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” story in which he had also featured as a character. He added… “the spoof also is extremely clever — I can recognise myself except for the pipe”.
An endnote for the letter adds a little more text from “The Ultimate Ultimatum”…
Howard Cthulhu Lovecraft … sat in the corner, puffing furiously at a skull-shaped pipe.
So far as I can tell the spoof has never been collected, and the Fantasy Magazine for August 1935 has its only appearance. It’s unknown if there were illustrations, but probably there weren’t. It might make for an interesting 1960s Mad magazine -style comics adaptation, today, by a good caricaturist.
10 Tuesday Mar 2020
I don’t usually cover anthology slabs here at Tentaclii, but I’ll make an exception for a fun one that features Lovecraft as a character, edited by the venerable S.T. Joshi. His Own Most Fantastic Creation is a £25 (about $40) hardcover from PS Publishing, and is pre-ordering now for shipping in April 2020.
The blurb is usefully descriptive…
Darrell Schweitzer focuses on Lovecraft’s childhood, when he was plagued with dreams of “night-gaunts” and was left bereft by the early death of his father. John Shirley depicts Lovecraft as a gawky teenager evolving his notions of “cosmicism”, while Scott Wiley emphasises Lovecraft’s devotion to cats. Stephen Woodworth and Donald R. Burleson ring changes on the Lovecraftian theme of personality exchange. Lovecraft famously collaborated with Harry Houdini on a story. Donald Tyson and Jonathan Thomas write very different stories on the association of these two figures. Mark Samuels focuses on Lovecraft’s creation of imaginary tomes of forbidden lore, while the stories by Richard Gavin, David Hambling, Jason V. Brock, and S. T. Joshi supply broader ruminations on the origins of Lovecraft’s revolutionary motifs. While eschewing Lovecraft himself as a character, the tales by W. H. Pugmire and Simon Strantzas exhibit figures who reveal strikingly Lovecraftian elements while probing the psyche of the man from Providence.
Super. It’s perhaps a pity that there’s not also an essay comprehensively surveying the uses of Lovecraft-as-character and Lovecraft-alikes in fiction, comics and poetry up to about 1969. Perhaps also appending the 1970-2020 titles in a simple checklist form. But I guess that might belong in a companion volume collecting such early stories and poems. However, Joshi does mention just a few of them in his short introduction…
Lovecraft the man has served as an inspiration for fiction writers as early as Edith Miniter (“Falco Ossifracus’ 1921), Frank Belknap Long (“The Space-Eaters’ 1928), and Robert Bloch (“The Shambler from the Stars:’ 1935) in his own day”.
31 Friday Jan 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraft as character
Dark World Quarterly’s new post “Mark of the Monster: Jack Williamson’s Lovecraftian Lapse” takes a look at the May 1937 Weird Tales cover-story tale “The Mark of the Monster”. Reading it, one glimpses the possibility that editor Farnsworth Wright hoped he had found a somewhat more downmarket and pliable ‘Lovecraft Mk. II’.
But a few issues later the published letters from readers called the cover-story a stolidly written formula shocker, found its clunky ending unworthy of Weird Tales, and observed that the story was… “a blurred carbon copy of late HPL’s classic The Dunwich Horror”. The experiment doesn’t appear to have been repeated.
A few months later one can find Wright trying a different angle on Lovecraft. Tucked away in the back of the August 1937 issue of Weird Tales Wright ran the short and more amusing “The Terrible Parchment” by Manly Wade Wellman. This is not a ‘Lovecraft as character’ tale, though he’s certainly strongly there in the background and is named several times, and there’s a footnote indicating this is a Lovecraft-tribute story. Yet it does feature one of his key creations, The Necronomicon. As such, it would probably merit at least a footnote in a hypothetical “Lovecraft as Character” encyclopaedia.
I suspect there may be more ‘tributes’ and tangential nods like this to be found, before the war broke out and Derleth and his lawyers began firing off warning letters. It might be useful for a future Lovecraft Annual to have a complete survey and chronology of such creative reactions to Lovecraft’s death, April 1937 – summer 1939? I don’t have the collectable source material to be able to do that, but those with a large collection might consider such a thing.
12 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraft as character
Snagged from the listings. This is what Driftwind would have looked like as Lovecraft opened his mail in November 1931. This particular issue had a checklist that included some of his own publications.
More covers here and a picture of the editor Walter J. Coates.
And a June 1937 Pantagraph, with a Lovecraft-tribute fan-poem on the cover. The *** .. *** is presumably meant to call attention to the implicit evocation of Lovecraft. A such it’s another item for a possible Encyclopedia of H.P. Lovecraft as a Character.
30 Tuesday Oct 2018
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings
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.
09 Sunday Sep 2018
An early appearance of H.P. Lovecraft in fiction is to be found in “The Black Druid” by Frank Belknap Long, published in Weird Tales for July 1930. The Editor, Farnsworth Wright, knowingly bills the story on the contents page as: “A short tale that compresses a world of cosmic horror in its few pages”, trusting the regular reader to make the connection between “cosmic horror” and Lovecraft.
The picture illustrates the Lovecraft character in his ‘dream form’.
The story is interesting to scholars of Lovecraft’s life for being a knowing bit of fun-poking fictional commentary on Lovecraft, by someone who knew him on a near-everyday basis during the New York years. Lovecraft is only lightly veiled as “Stephen Benefield” and the character has similar concerns, physical attributes and locales. The story also fictionalises Lovecraft’s wife Sonia. Possibly the Bene in the name Benefield was even a comment on Lovecraft’s frugal diet, hinting at beans.
Archive.org’s OCR of the text is middling, but I’ve made the story readable as a PDF and have given it some annotations and a little introduction — along the way solving a very minor scholarly mystery about an entry in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.
31 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc., REH
I thought I might read R.E. Howard’s six ‘Lovecraft influenced’ stories, for Halloween. As best I can make out from twenty minutes of cursory research, the R.E. Howard Lovecraftian-ish tales are…
* The best two:
“The Black Stone”
“The Children of the Night”
* Lesser two:
“The Cairn on the Headland”
“The Thing on the Roof”
* Two tangential stories:
“Worms of the Earth” (Generally said to be the best Bran Mak Morn story, with a few Lovecraftian bits and bobs mentioned?)
“The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Reportedly, only the ending is relevant?)
All six are available in the audio book form in the collection The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard [on Amazon USA], read by veteran audio-book reader Robertson Dean. “The Black Stone” is also available for free as a less memorable audio reading.
It’s been quite a long time since I read Howard’s Conan et al, and it’ll be interesting to see what the original Howard experience is like in polished audio-book form. I read Howard as a boy, at about the same time I first read Lovecraft, via the UK Panther paperback collections: Skull-face; The Valley of the Worm; and The Shadow Kingdom. From there I went to the UK Sphere King Kull collection, Tigers of the Sea (Cormac mac Art in the UK paperback), then into the numerous UK Sphere Conan paperbacks (one or two of which were quite rare at that time, and it was difficult to gather a full set) and the Solomon Kane stories (possibly via a tatty import copy of the U.S. Centaur Books paperback). More recently I read one of his werewolf stories, but that’s been it until now.