A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Late in 1927 Lovecraft received You’ll Need a Night Light, a British anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thomson and published by Selwyn & Blount. It contained ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, marking the first time that a story of Lovecraft’s appeared in hardcover. The volume was part of a series of ‘Not at Night’ books edited by Campbell; the stories for most of the volumes were culled from Weird Tales, and several of Lovecraft’s tales and revisions would later be reprinted. Although pleased at its appearance, Lovecraft had no illusions as to the anthology’s merits. ‘As for that “Not at Night”—that’s a mere lowbrow hash of absolutely no taste or significance. Aesthetically speaking, it doesn’t exist.’

¹⁷

Rather more significant—and indeed, one of the most important items in the critical recognition of Lovecraft prior to his death—was the appearance of ‘The Colour out of Space’ on the ‘Roll of Honor’ of the 1928 volume of Edward J. O’Brien’s Best Short Stories. Lovecraft sent O’Brien a somewhat lengthy autobiographical paragraph for a section at the back of the book; he expected O’Brien merely to select from it, but instead the latter printed it intact, and it occupied eighteen lines of text, longer than any other biography in the volume. On the whole it is an exceptionally accurate and compact account of Lovecraft’s life and beliefs.

In the autumn of 1927 Frank Belknap Long took it into his head to write a longish short story entitled ‘The Space-Eaters’. This story can be said to have two distinctive qualities: it is the first work to involve Lovecraft as a character (if we exclude whimsies like Edith Miniter’s ‘Falco Ossifracus’, in which the central character, while modelled on Randolph Carter, shares some chracteristics with Lovecraft), and—although this point is somewhat debatable—it is the first ‘addition’ to Lovecraft’s mythos.

To be perfectly honest, ‘The Space-Eaters’ is a preposterous story. This wild, histrionic account of some entities who are apparently ‘eating their way through space’, are attacking people’s brains, but are in some mysterious manner prevented from overwhelming the earth, is frankly an embarrassment. In this sense, however, it is sadly prophetic of most of the ‘contributions’ other writers would make to Lovecraft’s conceptions.

Whether it is indeed an addition to or extrapolation from Lovecraft’s mythos is a debatable question. The entities in question are never named, and there are no references to any of Lovecraft’s ‘gods’ (only Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth had even been invented at this time, the latter in the unpublished Case of Charles Dexter Ward). What there is, however, is an epigraph (omitted from the first appearance—

Weird Tales, July 1928—and many subsequent reprintings) from ‘John Dee’s Necronomicon’—i.e., from a purported English translation of Olaus Wormius’s Latin translation of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft made frequent citations of this Dee translation in later stories. This phenomenon would recur throughout Lovecraft’s lifetime: a writer—usually a colleague—either devised an elaboration upon some myth-element in Lovecraft’s stories or created an entirely new element, which Lovecraft then co-opted in some subsequent story of his own. This whole procedure was largely meant in fun—as a way of investing this growing body of myth with a sense of actuality by its citation in different texts, and also as a sort of tip of the hat to each writer’s creations.

Lovecraft, meanwhile, was doing relatively little fiction-writing of his own—he had written nothing since ‘The Colour out of Space’. What he did do, however, on Hallowe’en was to have a spectacular dream about ancient Rome that might serve as the nucleus of a story. He subsequently wrote a long account of the dream to several colleagues—Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, Bernard Austin Dwyer, and perhaps others. One would have liked to see Lovecraft himself write up the dream into an actual story, but he never did anything with it. In 1929 Long asked Lovecraft that he be allowed to use the letter verbatim in a short novel he was writing, and Lovecraft acceded. The result was The Horror from the Hills

, published in two parts in Weird Tales (January and February 1931) and later as a book.

Around this time Lovecraft also wrote a history of his mythical book, the Necronomicon, although largely for the purpose of keeping references clear in his own mind. This item bears the title ‘History of the Necronomicon’. On this draft a sentence is added about Dr. Dee’s translation of the volume, leading one to believe that Lovecraft had written the bulk of the text prior to seeing Long’s ‘The Space-Eaters’. Since he noted that he had ‘just received’ that story in late September, ‘History of the Necronomicon’ was probably written just before this time.