{"id":24004,"date":"2019-03-17T11:57:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-17T08:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=24004"},"modified":"2019-03-17T11:57:23","modified_gmt":"2019-03-17T08:57:23","slug":"invisible-monsters-in-magnolia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2019\/03\/17\/invisible-monsters-in-magnolia\/","title":{"rendered":"Invisible Monsters in Magnolia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bobby Derie, at the Deep Cuts<\/em> blog today, has a new appreciation of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923) by Sonia H. Greene & H. P. Lovecraft<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I see there’s also a new PDF scan of its appearance in Weird Tales<\/em> as “The Invisible Monster”<\/a>, because it’s now in the public domain. It can also be seen in its original Weird Tales<\/em> context<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Magnolia, Gloucester was evidently the inspiration for the moonlight\/ropes elements of the story. Though one was to wonder if Lovecraft\u2019s earlier story “The Moon-Bog” (written 1921) didn’t play its part in Lovecraft’s ‘instant inspiration’ on the beach at Magnolia, with its similar moonlight-ladders and bewitched chain of people being drawn to their watery doom. Only published in June 1926, it’s possible that Sonia had not yet seen or heard a reading of “The Moon-Bog” in the early 1920s.<\/p>\n

I’d suggest that for the first part of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (the capture and display of the sea-monster) Lovecraft was also splicing the Magnolia atmosphere with the fabled sea-monster of Sheepshead Bay<\/a>. That was where the amateurs often met, at Dench’s house on the waterfront, and to hint that the setting was similar would add a slick veneer of Jaws<\/em>-like local interest. Possibly that part had significant input from Sonia? The twist ending in the final line is also a bit ‘off’ in the believability of its twist, I think, and I’m not sure that’s from Lovecraft either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bobby Derie, at the Deep Cuts blog today, has a new appreciation of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (1923) by …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-context","category-scholarly-works"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}