The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

THE CALL OF CTHULHU AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES

H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction—three short novels and about sixty short stories—has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.

S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Lovecraft’s collected fiction as well as some of Lovecraft’s essays, letters, and miscellaneous writings. Among his critical and biographical studies are The Weird Tale (1990), Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (1995), and H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996). He has also edited Documents of American Prejudice (1999). He lives in New York City.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Penguin Books 1999

Selection, introduction, and notes copyright © S. T. Joshi, 1999

All rights reserved

The stories in this volume are reprinted by arrangement with Lovecraft Properties LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890-1937.

The call of Cthulhu and other stories / H.P Lovecraft; edited

with an introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi.

p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)

eISBN: 978-1-101-10011-0

1. Horror tales, American. I. Joshi, S. T., 1958- .

II. Title. III. Series.

PS3523.0833A6 1999

813’.52—dc21 99-19100

btb_ppg_c0_r3

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Dagon

The Statement of Randolph Carter

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

Celephaïs

Nyarlathotep

The Picture in the House

The Outsider

Herbert West—Reanimator

The Hound

The Rats in the Walls

The Festival

He

Cool Air

The Call of Cthulhu

The Colour Out of Space

The Whisperer in Darkness

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

The Haunter of the Dark

EXPLANATORY NOTES

INTRODUCTION

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, at his family home at 454 Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, could trace her ancestry to the seventeenth century, while his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman for Gorham & Company, Silversmiths, of Providence, derived from a line originating in Devonshire, England, and domiciled in New York State since the early nineteenth century. When Lovecraft was three his father suffered a mental breakdown and was placed in Butler Hospital in Providence, where he remained for five years before dying on July 19, 1898. Lovecraft was apparently told that his father was paralyzed and comatose during this period, but the surviving medical evidence makes it clear that Winfield died of syphilis.

With the death of Lovecraft’s father, the upbringing of the boy fell to his mother, his two aunts, and especially his maternal grandfather, the prominent industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips. Lovecraft was a precocious youth: he was reciting poetry at the age of two, reading by three, and writing by six or seven. His earliest enthusiasm was for Grimm’s fairy tales and the Arabian Nights, which he read by the age of five; it was at this time that he adopted the pseudonym of Abdul Alhazred, who later became the author of the mythical Necronomicon. The next year, however, his Arabian interests were eclipsed by the discovery of Greek mythology, gleaned through Bulfinch’s Age of Fable and Hawthorne’s Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales. His earliest surviving literary work, The Poem of Ulysses (1897), is a paraphrase of the Odyssey in 88 lines of internally rhyming verse. But Lovecraft had by this time already dabbled in weird fiction, and his first story, The Noble Eavesdropper (non-extant), may date to as early as 1896. His interest in the weird was fostered by his grandfather Phillips, who entertained Lovecraft with oral weird tales in the Gothic mode; but it was his ecstatic discovery of Edgar Allan Poe in 1898 that put the seal on the matter: . . . at the age of eight I saw the blue firmanent of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb! (SL II.109).

As a boy Lovecraft was somewhat lonely and suffered from frequent illnesses, many apparently psychological. His attendance at the Slater Avenue School was sporadic, but Lovecraft was absorbing much information through independent reading and study. At the age of eight he discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy. He began to produce hectographed journals, The Scientific Gazette (1899-1907) and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy (1903-07), for distribution among his friends and family. When he entered Hope Street High School in 1904, he found his teachers and his peers congenial and encouraging, and he developed a number of long-lasting friendships with boys of his own age. Lovecraft’s first appearance in print occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter to the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal, on a point of astronomy. Shortly thereafter he began writing astronomical columns for both the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, a rural paper, and the Providence Tribune (1906- 08). Later he wrote such columns for the Providence Evening News (1914-18) and the Asheville [N.C.] Gazette-News (1915).

In 1904, the death of Lovecraft’s grandfather Phillips and the subsequent mismanagement of his property and assets plunged Lovecraft’s family into severe financial difficulties. Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of their lavish Victorian home into cramped quarters at 598 Angell Street. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of his birthplace and apparently even contemplated suicide, taking long bicycle rides and looking wistfully at the watery depths of the Barrington River. But the thrill of learning banished these thoughts. However, in 1908, after having finished only three years of high school (he had been absent for nearly the whole of the 1905-06 term), he suffered a nervous breakdown that compelled him to leave school without a diploma. This event, and his consequent failure to enter Brown University, were sources of great shame to Lovecraft in later years, and he rarely spoke in detail of this critical period of his life. In the absence of evidence, one can only conjecture as to the causes of the breakdown; perhaps his difficulty in mathematics was a factor, since Lovecraft knew that his goal of becoming a professional astronomer hinged on his ability to master higher mathematics.

From 1908 to 1913 Lovecraft was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his astronomical interests, taking some correspondence courses, and writing a little poetry. During this period Lovecraft was also thrown into an unhealthily close relationship with his mother, still suffering from the trauma of her husband’s illness and death, and who developed a pathological love-hate relationship with her son.

Lovecraft emerged from his hermitry in a peculiar way. Having taken to reading the early pulp magazines of the day, he became so incensed at the insipid love stories of one Fred Jackson in the Argosy that he wrote a letter attacking Jackson. This letter was published in 1913 and evoked a storm of protest from Jackson’s defenders; one of them responded with a brief satirical poem. Lovecraft—whose devotion to the poetry of Dryden and Pope was undying—could not resist making several verse responses of his own in the style of the Dunciad. The controversy lasted for a full year, and was observed by Edward F. Daas, Official Editor of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), a group of amateur writers from around the country who wrote and published their own magazines. At Daas’s invitation Lovecraft joined the UAPA in April 1914.

Amateur journalism was just what Lovecraft needed at this juncture. Greatly learned but diffident of his abilities and out of tune with the modern world, Lovecraft found that he could achieve a modicum of recognition and encouragement in the small world of amateur journalism. He published thirteen issues of his own paper, The Conservative (1915-23), as well as contributing poetry and essays voluminously to other journals. He also became President (1917-18) and Official Editor (1920-22, 1924-25) of the UAPA, as well as serving as interim President of the rival National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) in 1922-23. This entire experience may have saved Lovecraft from a life of unproductive reclusiveness; as he himself wrote in 1921:

In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be . . . With the advent of the United I obtained a renewed will to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening void. (MW 452)

It was in the amateur world that Lovecraft recommenced the writing of fiction, which he had abandoned in 1908. W. Paul Cook and others, noting the promise shown in such early tales as The Beast in the Cave (1905) and The Alchemist (1908), urged Lovecraft to pick up his fictional pen again. Lovecraft did so in the summer of 1917, writing The Tomb and Dagon in rapid succession. Thereafter he kept up a steady if sparse flow of fiction, although until at least 1922 poetry and essays were still his dominant modes of literary expression. Lovecraft also became involved in an ever-increasing network of correspondence with friends and associates, and eventually became one of the greatest and most prolific letter-writers of the century. Gainful employment, however, did not seem to be much of a concern, even though the family inheritance was inexorably dwindling. Never trained for an occupation, Lovecraft eventually drifted into poorly paying work as a revisionist or ghostwriter.

Lovecraft’s mother, her mental and physical condition deteriorating, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to Butler Hospital. However, her death on May 24, 1921, was the result of a bungled gallbladder operation. Lovecraft was shattered by the loss, but by July had recovered enough to attend an amateur journalism convention in Boston. It was on this occasion that he first met the woman who would become his wife. Sonia Haft Greene was a widowed Russian Jew seven years Lovecraft’s senior, but the two seemed, at least initially, to find themselves highly congenial. Lovecraft visited Sonia in her Brooklyn apartment on two separate occasions in 1922, and the news of their marriage on March 3, 1924, was not entirely a surprise to their friends; but it may have been to Lovecraft’s two aunts, Lillian D. Clark and Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, who were notified only by letter after the ceremony had taken place.

Lovecraft moved into Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn, and initial prospects for the couple seemed good: Lovecraft had gained a foothold by the acceptance of several of his early stories by Weird Tales, the celebrated pulp magazine founded in 1923; Sonia was an executive at a successful hat shop on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. But troubles descended upon the couple almost immediately. Sonia gave up her position to start a hat shop of her own, but it was a failure; Lovecraft turned down the chance to edit Weird Tales (which would have necessitated his move to Chicago), and was also unable to find work with New York magazine and book publishers, in spite of assistance from such colleagues as Samuel Loveman (poet and friend of Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, and Hart Crane) and Harry Houdini, for whom Lovecraft had ghostwritten a story for Weird Tales. Sonia’s health gave way, forcing her to spend time in a sanatarium in New Jersey. Lovecraft attempted to secure work—including positions with such unlikely firms as a collection agency and a lamp-testing company—but was unsuccessful. On January 1, 1925, Sonia went to the Midwest to take up a succession of jobs in Cincinnati and Cleveland, returning to New York only intermittently; Lovecraft moved into a single apartment near the Brooklyn slum known as Red Hook. Although he had many friends in New York—this was the heyday of the Kalem Club, so named because its initial members (including Rheinhart Kleiner, Frank Belknap Long, and Everett McNeil) had surnames beginning with K, L, or M—he became increasingly depressed. Lovecraft, who in his letters and essays expressed prejudice against African Americans, Jews, and other minorities throughout his life, was dismayed by his isolation amidst the masses of foreigners in the city. His fiction turned from the nostalgic (The Shunned House [1924], set in Providence) to the bleak and misanthropic: The Horror at Red Hook and He, both written in August 1925, lay bare his feelings about the heterogeneous megalopolis in which he found himself.

Finally, in early 1926, his aunts arranged for Lovecraft to return to the Providence he missed so keenly. But where did Sonia fit into these plans? No one seemed to know, least of all Lovecraft. Although he continued to profess his appreciation for her, he seemed to stand idly by while his aunts barred her from coming to Providence or Boston to start a business; their nephew could not be tainted by the stigma of a tradeswoman wife so close to the region of the family’s pseudo-aristocratic lineage. No doubt Lovecraft’s sluggish sexuality was also a factor in the dissolution of the marriage. Sonia undertook an action for divorce in 1929, although Lovecraft never signed the final decree.

When Lovecraft returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, settling at 10 Barnes Street north of Brown University, it was not to bury himself away as he had done in the 1908-13 period; rather, the last ten years of his life were the period of his greatest flowering, both as a writer and as a human being. As W. Paul Cook poignantly wrote in his memoir of Lovecraft, the New York exile was in some senses a necessary phase of his maturation: He had been tried in the fire and came out pure gold.¹ Lovecraft’s subsequent life seemed relatively uneventful: in spite of a perilously meager income, he traveled to various sites around the eastern seaboard (Quebec, New England, Philadelphia, Charleston, St. Augustine, New Orleans), in quest of antiquarian sites to nurture his devotion to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; he wrote his greatest fiction, from The Call of Cthulhu (1926) to At the Mountains of Madness (1931) to The Shadow Out of Time (1934-35); and he continued his prodigiously vast correspondence. He nurtured the careers of many young writers, many of whom he never met (August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber); he became concerned with political and economic issues, as the Great Depression led him to renounce his earlier conservatism and support Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal; and he continued absorbing knowledge on a wide array of subjects, from philosophy to literature to history to architecture.

However, the last several years of his life were filled with hardship. In 1932 his beloved aunt, Lillian Clark, died, and in 1933 he moved into quarters at 66 College Street, right behind the John Hay Library of Brown University, with his other aunt, Annie E. Phillips Gamwell. (This house has now been moved to 65 Prospect Street.) His later stories, increasingly lengthy and complex, became difficult to sell, and his revision work was bringing in very small sums of money, forcing Lovecraft into extreme economies in diet, clothing, and other necessities. In 1936 the suicide of Robert E. Howard, the author of the Conan stories and one of his closest correspondents, left him confused and saddened. By this time the illness that would cause his own death—cancer of the intestine—had already progressed so far that little could be done to treat it. Lovecraft attempted to carry on in increasing pain through the winter of 1936-37, but he was finally compelled to enter Jane Brown Hospital on March 10, 1937, where he died five days later. He was buried on March 18 at the Phillips family plot in Swan Point Cemetery.

It is likely that, as he saw death approaching, Lovecraft envisioned the ultimate oblivion of his work, as he had never had a true book published in his lifetime (aside from the crudely issued The Shadow Over Innsmouth, only a few hundred copies of which were distributed in late 1936), and his stories, essays, and poems were scattered in a wide array of amateur and pulp magazines. Lovecraft, convinced that the production of art was a form of pure self-expression in which monetary considerations played no part, refused to tailor his work to the crude formulae of the pulp magazines, and was also markedly reluctant to peddle his work to book publishers. But the friendships that Lovecraft had forged solely by correspondence proved to be the seeds of a posthumous triumph. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei were determined to preserve Lovecraft’s stories in the dignity of hardcovers, and they formed the firm of Arkham House initially for the sole purpose of publishing Lovecraft; they issued The Outsider and Others in 1939. Wandrei was also convinced that Lovecraft’s ultimate reputation might rest as much on his letters as on his fiction, and he spent decades editing what would eventually become the five-volume series of Selected Letters. Lovecraft’s work is now widely available, his essays, poetry, and miscellany have been collected, and his tales have been translated into a dozen or more languages. His position as the leading American proponent of supernatural fiction in this century is assured.

Lovecraft’s reputation as a fiction writer rests upon a remarkably small body of work: about sixty short stories, three of which, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), and At the Mountains of Madness, might be classified as short novels. And yet, this small corpus of fiction presents a surprising richness of form, substance, and texture.

Lovecraft’s fiction must be understood in the context of the philosophical thought that he evolved over a lifetime of study and observation. The core of that thought—derived from readings of such ancient Greek philosophers as Democritus and Epicurus as well as from absorption of the discoveries of nineteenth-century physics, chemistry, and biology—is mechanistic materialism. This is the belief that the universe is a mechanism operating according to fixed laws (although these may not all be known to human beings), and that there can be no immaterial substance such as a soul or spirit. Such a view necessarily necessitates agnosticism or actual atheism, and Lovecraft was not slow in expressing his adherence to the latter:

I certainly can’t see any sensible position to assume aside from that of complete scepticism tempered by a leaning toward that which existing evidence makes most probable. All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don’t regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance’s of theism’s truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else. (SL IV.57)

In the mid-1920s Lovecraft was momentarily disturbed by the implications of Einstein’s relativity theory and Planck’s quantum theory, both of which were hailed by many as spelling the downfall of mechanistic materialism; but his later adherence to the materialism of Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, and others allowed him to reconcile the findings of modern astrophysics with his fundamental views.

However, does not Lovecraft’s philosophy contradict his stated motives for writing weird fiction, as enunciated in the essay Notes on Writing Weird Fiction (1933)?

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclinations best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. (MW 113)

It is important not to be led astray here. Lovecraft is not renouncing his materialism by seeking an imaginative escape from it; indeed, it is precisely because he believes that time, space, and natural law are uniform, and that the human mind cannot defeat or confound them, that he seeks an imaginative escape from them.

Lovecraft’s philosophical position virtually necessitated the central conception in his aesthetic of the weird—the notion of cosmicism, or the suggestion of the vast gulfs of space and time and the resultant inconsequence of the human species. Lovecraft claimed to have derived this sentiment as early as the age of twelve, when he first studied astronomy:

The most poignant sensations of my existence are those of 1896, when I discovered the Hellenic world, and of 1902, when I discovered the myriad suns and worlds of infinite space. Sometimes I think the latter event the greater, for the grandeur of that growing conception of the universe still excites a thrill hardly to be duplicated. (A Confession of Unfaith [1922]; MW 536)

This led to one of his most resounding utterances, made in a letter of 1927:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism ) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold. (SL II.150)

This statement is sufficient to account for the outré aspect of many of his alien creatures—the cosmic entity Cthulhu, the nebulous creature (or creatures) of The Colour Out of Space, the fungi from Yuggoth in The Whisperer in Darkness, and the Old Ones of At the Mountains of Madness. It also points to Lovecraft’s central place in the fusion of traditional weird fiction and the then-emerging genre of science fiction. A late utterance is highly significant in this regard:

The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity? (SL III.295-96)

Lovecraft here is actually renouncing the supernatural for what might better be called the supernormal; that is, the incidents portrayed in his later tales no longer defy natural law, but merely our imperfect conceptions of natural law. His later work, accordingly, could be said to be fully within the field of science fiction aside from its manifest intent to incite fear. It is significant that Lovecraft’s most cosmic stories—The Colour Out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow Out of Time—appeared in the science fiction magazines Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories.

One facet of Lovecraft’s work that has exercised many readers’ imaginations is what has come to be called the Cthulhu Mythos. This term was not coined by Lovecraft, but rather by August Derleth, who, while being obsessed by it, failed to grasp its purpose. In effect, the Cthulhu Mythos is a series of plot devices utilized by Lovecraft to convey the essentials of his cosmic philosophy. These devices—including a wide array of extraterrestrials (deemed gods by their human followers); an entire library of mythical books containing the forbidden truths about these gods; and a fictionalized New England landscape analogous to Hardy’s Wessex or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County—are certainly found abundantly in Lovecraft’s later tales and lend them a kind of thematic unity not found in other work of their kind. But if the Cthulhu Mythos has any significance, it is as an instantiation of what David E. Schultz has termed an anti-mythology: whereas most of the religions and mythologies in human history seek to reconcile human beings with the cosmos by depicting a close, benign relationship between man and god, Lovecraft’s pseudomythology brutally shows that man is not the center of the universe, that the gods care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.

Lovecraft could hardly have imagined the radical evolution of his work when he first began seriously writing fiction in 1917. Bred from earliest childhood on the literature of the past, Lovecraft gained a poignant nostalgia for the eighteenth century. What he later said of his poetry could apply in lesser degree to his earlier stories as well:

In my metrical novitiate I was, alas, a chronic & inveterate mimic; allowing my antiquarian tendencies to get the better of my abstract poetic feeling. As a result, the whole purpose of my writing soon became distorted—till at length I wrote only as a means of re-creating around me the atmosphere of my 18th century favourites. (SL II.314)

What this meant, as far as his fiction was concerned, was that Lovecraft spent the bulk of his literary career attempting—if at times only subconsciously—to escape the overriding influence of his earliest mentor, Edgar Allan Poe. As Lovecraft’s God of Fiction (SL I.20), Poe inevitably hangs heavy over such early works as The Tomb (1917) and The Outsider (1921).

In this sense, Lovecraft’s discovery of the work of Lord Dunsany in 1919 was beneficial, if only because it resulted in a transference of influence from the American sphere to that of the great Irish fantasist. For two years Lovecraft produced a string of works imitative of his idol, who was then enjoying a tremendous vogue in America. While many of these tales of pure fantasy are undistinguished in themselves, they are of interest as representing the widest possible divergence in tone from the supernatural horror of his other work. Lovecraft was also aware of what he had gained from Dunsany, and as early as 1920 he observed: The flight of imagination, and the delineation of pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose as in verse—often better. It is this lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me (SL I.110). This comment was made in a discussion of Lovecraft’s verse writing; and it is no accident that his verse output declined dramatically after 1920. More to the point, Lovecraft learned from Dunsany how to enunciate his philosophical, aesthetic, and moral conceptions by means of fiction.

In 1923 the discovery of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen fired Lovecraft’s imagination, although he did not produce any obvious imitations of Machen’s work. This discovery coincided with Lovecraft’s renewed interest in his New England heritage; he was at this time engaging in wide travels across his native region, absorbing both its rich history and its varied topography, and Machen’s own evocations of Wales may have shown Lovecraft how to do the same for the land of his birth. The Marblehead of The Festival (1923), the Providence of The Shunned House (1924), and even the New York of The Horror at Red Hook and He owe something to Machen’s example. Lovecraft was well on his way to becoming a significant local colorist, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931) is perhaps the supreme example of this facet of his work.

Lovecraft’s prose style has engendered widely divergent judgments, from the towering condemnation of Edmund Wilson to the adulation of his colleagues and disciples, who have sought to imitate (usually in vain) both his stylistic richness and his verbal witchery. Put very simply, Lovecraft’s style is a melding of scientific realism and evocative prose-poetry. One is certainly free to dislike the style and to prefer the spareness of Hemingway or Sherwood Anderson; but it would be difficult to deny its appropriateness for Lovecraft’s type of imaginative effect. At its best Lovecraft’s work becomes a kind of incantation, seducing the mind into a momentary acceptance of the fantastic incidents being related. At its worst it becomes pompous and bombastic. But Lovecraft was almost always the master, rather than the slave, of his style—a point that can be emphasized by considering those two exquisite parodies of himself, Herbert West—Reanimator (1921-22) and The Hound (1922). And Lovecraft was capable of a far broader diversity of style than has commonly been granted—from the delicate prose-poetry of Celephaïs (1920) to the modernized Gothicism of The Rats in the Walls (1923) to the stupendous cosmicism of The Call of Cthulhu to the sober realism of The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

I have not left myself much space for a discussion of Lovecraft’s place in American literature. His work was once dismissed because it appeared in the cheap pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s; nowadays he has become an icon in popular culture in part because his work appeared there. But Lovecraft’s involvement in the pulps was purely fortuitous and should not affect our evaluation of his status one way or the other: he was writing at a time when genre fiction in general, and weird fiction in particular, was slowly being banished from mainstream venues, and the pulps offered the only markets for those who wished to work in these literary realms. While most pulp fiction has rightly been condemned as being hackneyed, formulaic, and shoddily written, it should be acknowledged that a few writers rose above the mediocre average to produce outstanding works of their kind.

The publication of Lovecraft’s letters, essays, and miscellany has provided us with the tools for a broader and more accurate gauge of his standing as a writer. This body of work reveals, firstly, that Lovecraft was a keen (if not especially original) thinker and an acute observer of his time, and, secondly, that he had the skill to embody his philosophical vision in tales that are meticulously crafted and endowed with a vitality of imagination rarely encountered in the entire range of literature. There may be those who banish all weird fiction into a kind of literary purgatory, but the achievements of Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Ramsey Campbell are making this increasingly difficult to do. Lovecraft himself became one of the most articulate spokesmen for the dignity and worth of the weird tale as an art form; and an utterance made early in his career may be all the defense that his chosen literary mode requires:

The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its most essential sense. . . . He is a painter of moods and mind-pictures—a capturer and amplifier of elusive dreams and fancies—a voyager into those unheard-of lands which are glimpsed through the veil of actuality but rarely, and only by the most sensitive. . . . Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. (In Defence of Dagon [1921]; MW 148, 155)

—S. T. JOSHI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For assistance in the preparation of the text and notes I am grateful to Mike Ashley, Donald R. Burleson, Donovan K. Loucks, and especially David E. Schultz.

S. T. J.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

PRIMARY

Lovecraft’s tales, essays, poems, and letters have appeared in many editions, beginning with The Outsider and Others (1939). However, only certain recent editions can claim textual accuracy; other editions (including almost all current paperback editions in the United States and United Kingdom) contain numerous textual and typographical errors. Lovecraft’s fiction and revisions can be found in four volumes published by Arkham House (Sauk City, WI) under my editorship:

The Dunwich Horror and Others (1984)

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (1985)

Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1986)

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989)

Lovecraft’s poetry has now been definitively gathered in my edition of The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1999), superseding all previous editions.

A large selection of Lovecraft’s essays can be found in my edition of Miscellaneous Writings (Arkham House, 1995). Among other volumes of essays are:

Commonplace Book, ed. David E. Schultz (Necronomicon Press, 1987)

The Conservative, ed. Marc A. Michaud (Necronomicon Press, 1976)

To Quebec and the Stars, ed. L. Sprague de Camp (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1976)

The major edition of Lovecraft’s letters is Selected Letters (Arkham House, 1965-76; 5 vols.), edited by August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James Turner. This edition, however, is not annotated or indexed, contains numerous textual errors, and presents nearly all letters in various degrees of abridgement. More recent, annotated editions of letters, edited by David E. Schultz and myself and published by Necronomicon Press, include:

Letters to Henry Kuttner (1990)

Letters to Richard F. Searight (1992)

Letters to Robert Bloch (1993)

Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett (1994)

Schultz and I have also edited a volume largely culled from Lovecraft’s letters: Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).

SECONDARY

Since about 1975, the literature on Lovecraft has been immense. Much biographical and critical work prior to that time is of little value, having been written largely by amateurs with little access to the full range of documentary evidence on Lovecraft (exceptions include the work of Fritz Leiber, Matthew H. Onderdonk, and George T. Wetzel). The following presents only a selection of the leading volumes on Lovecraft; see the notes for citations of additional articles.

The standard bibliography is my H. P. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981). A supplement, co-compiled by L. D. Blackmore and myself, covering the years 1980-84, was issued by Necronomicon Press in 1985. The books in Lovecraft’s library have been tallied in Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue (Necronomicon Press, 1980), compiled by Marc A. Michaud and myself. An expanded edition can be found on the Necronomicon Press website (www.necropress.com).

My H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press, 1996) is the most exhaustive biographical treatment. L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1975) was the first full-length biography but was criticized for errors, omissions, and a lack of sympathy toward its subject. Many of Lovecraft’s colleagues have written memoirs of varying value; these have now been collected by Peter Cannon in Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House, 1998). Some further memoirs can be found in my slim collection, Caverns Measureless to Man: 18 Memoirs of Lovecraft (Necronomicon Press, 1996).

A selection of the best of the earlier criticism on Lovecraft can be found in my anthology, H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Ohio University Press, 1980). A substantial anthology of early and recent criticism is Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1987). Other recent critical treatments, on a wide variety of topics, can be found in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by David E. Schultz and myself (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991). Some of the better monographs and collections of essays on Lovecraft are:

Donald R. Burleson, H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (West-port, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), a sound general study.

Donald R. Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), a challenging deconstructionist approach to Lovecraft.

Peter Cannon, H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Twayne, 1989), another good general study with up-to-date references to the secondary literature.

S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), a study of Lovecraft’s philosophical thought.

S. T. Joshi, A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft (San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 1996), a general study.

Maurice Lévy, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, trans. S. T. Joshi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), a revision of his Ph.D. dissertation for the Sorbonne and perhaps still the finest critical study of Lovecraft.

Steven J. Mariconda, On the Emergence of Cthulhu and Other Observations (Necronomicon Press, 1996), a collection of his penetrating articles on Lovecraft.

Dirk W. Mosig, Mosig at Last: A Psychologist Looks at Lovecraft (Necronomicon Press, 1997), a collection of articles by a pioneering scholar in Lovecraft studies.

Robert M. Price, H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), a collection of articles on the Cthulhu Mythos as developed by Lovecraft and other writers.

Barton L. St. Armand, The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977), a penetrating study of The Rats in the Walls.

Barton L. St. Armand, H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent (Albuquerque, NM: Silver Scarab Press, 1979), an analysis of the melding of Puritanism and Decadence in Lovecraft’s thought and work.

The semiannual journal Lovecraft Studies (Necronomicon Press) is the leading forum for scholarly treatments of Lovecraft.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The stories in this volume derive from my corrected editions of Lovecraft’s stories: The Dunwich Horror and Others (1984), At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (1985), Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1986), and Miscellaneous Writings (1995). These editions are based on consultations of Lovecraft’s handwritten and typewritten manuscripts and early appearances in magazines. A few additional errors have been corrected.

Dagon

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation;¹ so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.

When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coast-line was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastnesses of unbroken blue.

The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish,² and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position.³ Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.

For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue.

On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a distance; an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.

I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.

I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.⁴

As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy foot-holds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.

All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.

Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’s⁵ or archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean⁶ monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.

It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré.⁷ I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer,⁸ they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown⁹ or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like,¹⁰ and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measures sounds. I think I went mad then.

Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.

When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God;¹¹ but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.

It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.¹²

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

The Statement of Randolph Carter

I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice;¹ but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything