Examples of Lovecraftian tentacles in the circa-1895 work of H.G. Wells, writing when he was at the height of his powers…

“Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings, near Land’s End. In no department of zoological science, indeed are we quite so much in the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods.”

[…] “The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and displayed the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a human being, but whether of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat resembling an octopus, with huge and very long and flexible tentacles, coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward bend of the tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the bend, the tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length. There were, he thinks, seven or eight at least of the creatures. Twenty yards beyond them, amid the surf of the now returning tide, two others were emerging from the sea.”

— H.G. Wells, “The Sea Raiders” (1896)

“Their heads were round, and curiously human, and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled him on his second observation. They had broad, silvery wings, not feathered, but glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed fish and with the same subtle play of colour, and these wings were not built on the plan of a bird-wing or bat, […] The body was small, but fitted with two bunches of prehensile organs, like long tentacles, immediately under the mouth. […] They would alight upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a smallness almost rod-like, and hop into the interior.” [my emphasis]

— H.G. Wells, “The Crystal Egg” (1897)

“A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal–there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing — against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.”

— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1894/1895)

“Among the inner caves of the place waving trees of crinoid stretched their tentacles, and tall, slender, glassy sponges shot like shining minarets and lilies of filmy light out of the general glow of the city.”

— H.G. Wells, “In The Abyss” (1896)

Possibly more could be found. I was only searching one volume of Wells’s stories.

Lovecraft’s New York stories “The Horror at Red Hook” (written 1st-2nd August 1925) and “He” (written 11th Aug 1925) both culminate in calamitous and severe building collapse. Similarly, “In the Vault” (18th Sept 1925) features a man trapped in a building. Could these elements of collapse and trapping have been inspired by the Pickwick Club collapse disaster, in Boston (New England) in July 1925? The collapse killed 44 people.

Lovecraft’s own building had also been shaken by a minor earthquake in late February 1925, though it was structurally unharmed. This would have primed him to worry about possible building collapse.

From the book The Wicked Waltz and other scandalous dances, by Mark Knowles (2009)…

Also interesting it that, at that time, there was a public association being made between dance halls (a seedy dance hall features prominently in “Red Hook”) and Satan (ditto)…

“[The book] Satan in the Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City (2008) explores the overwhelming popularity of social dancing and its close relationship to America’s rapidly changing society in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the fiercely contested debate about the morality of social dancing in New York City, led by such moral reformers and religious leaders as Rev. John Roach Straton. Guided by the firm belief that dancing was a leading cause of immorality, Straton and his followers succeeded in enacting municipal regulations on social dancing and moral conduct within the more than 750 public dance halls in New York City.”

Chris Perridas is doing sterling work tracking down the young Lovecraft, and he’s currently looking at the inspiration for the juvenile story “Beast in the Cave” (circa 1904/1905). Chris writes today…

“Of the hundreds of caves in New England – including the one in Foster, RI, why did he reach out to write about Mammoth Cave in far off Kentucky?”

Possibly Lovecraft was inspired by the children’s literature of the time, such as…

* Bicard, W. “Lost in Mammoth Cave”. The Youth’s Companion, 63: 54. (1890).

* Guernsey, D. Riley. Lost in Mammoth Cave (c.1905). (This is a 315 page novel and the Lost Race Checklist annotates it as about: “Hidden tribe of Indians.”)

The cave was … “a featured attraction of the St. Louis World’s Fair” (1904). Press coverage for the Fair would have been extensive, and there was also an automobile race from New York to St. Louis to further attract the attention of the press. Although Lovecraft could have reached the Fair with relative ease — the “St. Louisan” of the Pennsylvania was a 24-hour sleeper train from New York to St. Louis — it is very unlikely that he visited the Fair. His grandfather died on 28th March 1904, and the Fair opened on 30th April 1904. Still, he no doubt read about it in the press reports.

Also, from the press of the era, possibly a confirmation for the human-ape ‘devolution’ idea…

BLIND FISH FROM MAMMOTH CAVE (November 24, 1900): “For the first time some blind fish from the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky have reached England alive and been placed in the London Zoological Gardens.”

The blind fish as seen in the children’s book Round-About Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy.

If it could happen to fish, why not humans? — or so the boy Lovecraft may have surmised. The fish are mentioned in the 1902 Britannica article on Mammoth Cave…

“The most interesting inhabitants of Mammoth Cave are the blind, wingless grasshoppers, with extremely long antennae ; blind, colourless crayfish (Cambarus pellucidus, Telk.) ; and the blind fish, Amblyopsis spelaeus, colourless and viviparous, from 1 inch to 6 inches long.”

“the opinion now held is that they are modified from allied species existing in the sunlight, and that their peculiarities may all be accounted for on principles of evolution,—the process being accelerated (or retarded) by their migration from the outer world to a realm of absolute silence and perpetual darkness.”

A complete history of such fish can be found “Scientists prefer them blind: the history of hypogean fish research” (PDF link).

There may also have been something in “Beast in The Cave” of an earlier, lost, story. Lovecraft writes in his Autobiography: Some Notes On A Nonentity…

“the earliest piece I can recall being a tale of a hideous cave perpetrated at the age of seven and entitled “The Noble Eavesdropper”. This does not survive”

PopMatters has a long new article today by Dennis P. Quinn, surveying the half-baked fruitcakes who really believe that Lovecraft’s mythos is true.

It’s partly an inevitable side-effect of Lovecraft being a pioneer in the field of participative ‘open’ texts and fan-works. Something that was then turbo-charged thirty years later by the works falling out of copyright, just as a new wave of mass interest crashed down on his life and work. If you open up such a deeply psyche-rooted body of work to those who would create fan-works based on its ideas and themes, then inevitably the results are going to bounce off in a myriad of directions that purists are not going to like; Derleth, Lumley, religious loons and suchlike.

One interesting point made at the end of the article is that…

“Lovecraft’s mythos, in stark contrast to its creator’s own ethnocentric views and overall xenophobia, is a perfect mythology in a multicultural world. Lovecraft’s gods are not bound to any ethnicity, as are the gods of Greece, Rome, Israel, Arabia, Northern Europe, the Americas, Africa, etc. Although they were invented by a New Englander, they are by definition cosmic and out of this world. They are extra-terrestrial, extra-dimensional, and post-race.”

That’s certainly an interesting thought, but I’m coming to the realisation that nearly all his monsters are actually cloaked metaphors for perceived threats of racial invasion, for the societal and personal fear of ‘swamping’ by the alien ‘other’ at the peak of mass immigration into America. Although they are not just this, since they are also tangled up in notions of belief, rationality and the limits of scientific knowledge. Perhaps his monsters still carry a trace of the ‘post-race’ in them, precisely because Lovecraft was not simply projecting them as crude contemporary ‘racial invasion’ metaphors, but was depicting them as reflected in the mirror of his own love/hate relationship with hybridity and the liminal psychological responses surrounding it.

Of course, sometimes his monsters barely had their racist metaphor cloaked. For instance “Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” (apparently inspired by Dunsany’s “Sheol Nugganoth”), for such an accomplished word-smith, cannot have been other than been an invitation to the prejudiced reader to find the phrase “nigger wrath” in the name — accompanied as the name is by the references to “black” and to abundant and promiscuous breeding.

An interesting snippet from some notes by Roland John Chester on “Western Hypnosis Arcana” for the website Magazine for Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy…

“Dr. Franklin Chase Clark believes that this state [of hypnosis] occurs through fear (being ‘rooted to the spot’) and cites the serpent’s apparent power over some animals. The victim fears that he can not move: and thus can not.”

Franklin Chase Clark (1847-1915) was Lovecraft’s learned uncle — a medical doctor, translator and author, member of the Rhode Island Historical Society. I can’t find any trace of the paper or book he presumably wrote on hypnosis, but the date would be interesting. Did he perhaps try to hypnotise the boy Lovecraft, to relieve the lad of some of his “nervous maladies”?

I did however, uncover a Sunday magazine article by Lovecraft’s uncle, “A Curious City” in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, April 1878, pages 385-390. It appears to start off as a speculative utopian description of a mysterious ‘communist’ future or past city, the reader then realises that this is an essay on the sponge/corals and the mysterious cities they build in the deeps…

“[sponge] palaces surpassing in elegance and beauty the works of the most famous artists upon earth. These little architects and builders, working miles below the surface of the great ocean, building up quietly and silently in darkness their fragile houses, must remain for ever the wonder and admiration of man.

What beauties, what wonders, then, are found miles beneath the sea? The great steamship, the Challenger, sent out for a four years’ cruise by the English Government, has now returned. It has brought back with it the story so long concealed in these darksome and almost fathomless depths; the story of that great and strange and hitherto unknown country stretching for 140,000,000 square miles beneath the dark blue waves.”

A possible origin here for the underwater cities that Lovecraft would use prominently in his stories, in addition to Poe? And is this illustration for the article a proto-Shoggoth? …