Mantichore 13

4, No 1 (WN 13)

A Contribution by Leigh Blackmore for the Sword & Sorcery & Weird Fiction Terminus (Mar 1, 2009/33rd mailing), & Esoteric Order of Dagon (April 30, 2009/ 146th mailing) amateur press associations. Leigh Blackmore, 78 Rowland Ave, Wollongong, NSW 2500. Australia. Email: [email protected] Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Blackmore Official Website: Blackmausoleum – http://members.optusnet.com.au/lvxnox/ This issue dedicated to Forrest J. Ackerman (Nov 24, 1916-Dec 4, 2008) – ”Mr Science Fiction” & “the Effjay of Akkamin” (see Lovecraft & Barlow’s ‘The Battle That Ended the Century’ 1934). Fangs for the mammaries!

Cover art this issue is an illustration to Lovecraft’s “The Transition of Juan Romero” © 2007 by David Reuss. More examples of Reuss’ wonderful Lovecraftian illustrations can be seen at http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/view.pl?id =113595&genre=4. Many thanks to David for allowing me to use his illustration for this issue.

Contents this issue Mantic Notes……………………………………….…1 ‘‘Lines on Placing an Order with Arkham House” (verse) by Judy Reber………………………….…….3 Books By My Bedside……………………………….3 “ABC Fiction Award Breaks Emerging Writers: Kain Massim, Damian Macdonald & Will Elliott” by Leigh Blackmore…………………………..……….4 “The Liminal Lovecraft: 1: Some Notes on Lovecraft’s ‘The Transition of Juan Romero’” by Leigh Blackmore………..…8 “The Sad and Spooky Time” (verse) by Richard L. Tierney……………………….15 The August Derleth Centennial, Feb 24, 2009……………………………………..….16 Mantichorus: Mailing Notes…………...16

Mantic

Notes

(Pronunciation:'man-tik. Etymology: Greek mantikos, from mantis : of, relating to the faculty of divination; prophetic). I’ve been on summer break from University, but work has continued apace. I’ve done numerous manuscript assessments for my agencies. Issue No 3 of Studies in Australian Weird Fiction has been edited by Ben Szumskyj (his last issue before it passes to Phillip Ellis) but I did two author interviews for that issue – Kim Wilkins and Margo Lanagan. Other literary work has included a short article titled “Hair in Magick and Occultism” for a theme book about hair, first in a new series of chapbooks edited by Meredith Jones for Bocalatte Press, Sydney. Margi and I continued our column on witchcraft for Black magazine, and also conducted an interview with Tim Hartridge, a wellknown Australian witch/coven leader, but

the sad news came that Black magazine’s print version will fold and the magazine will go online. We have yet to see whether our column will continue and whether the Hartridge interview will be published with Black or elsewhere. I spent quite a long time researching English horror movie star and now Australian-resident-crime-writer Shane Briant, and hope to interview him for a future issue of Studies in Australian Weird Fiction. Other literary work has included desultory efforts on my Rossetti novel, which I will tackle in earnest when I return to uni next week, and some editing on Wikipedia, where I improved some entries on fantasy and horror writers which seemed woefully inadequate (see, for instance, the much improved entry on Peter H. Cannon, and that on Occult Detectives). I started some work on a story with Ben Szumskyj, and have been going over a story by Danny Lovecraft, and also assessing part of a novel by an Adelaide acquaintance of Danny’s. I was invited to come in and give a guest lecture at the Faculty of Creative Arts at Uni of Wollongong on fantasy, sf and horror literature. It seemed to go well and I hope may lead to some more lecturing or tutoring work on campus. I still seem to be negotiating the publication of my own short story collection in the US, but as things aren’t finalized I can’t say too much yet. I have also taken over as editor of Sword and Sorcery and Weird Fiction Terminus APA (SSWFT) and this March marks both eight years of SSWFT and the first mailing under my charge as the new OE. What lofty heights have I reached, o ye peoples! There has been some leisure time. A rather extraordinary amount of time has been taken up reorganising our house, throwing out junk etc. Christmas presents I received include Metallica’s Death Magnetic CD (which fuckin’ rocks!), Elvis Costello’s The Delivery Man, and Kraftwerk’s Minimum-Maximum DVD (awesome!). On January 15th we held a celebration at our home in celebration of Edgar Poe’s bicentennial which was attended by several local horror/fantasy personalities. (I’m tempted to say “colourful identities” as in that phrase beloved of TV newscasters: “colourful racing identities”. As well as general discussion of the horror field and eating and drinking, we had a round-robin (lol☺ or should that be “round-Raven”) reading of “The Raven”. Here are a couple of photos from the event. Figure 1: L-R Margi Curtis, Rob Hood, Richard Harland, Cat Sparks, Aileen Harland, Graham Wykes celebrate Poe's Bicentennial.

Figure 2: Part of my Poe collection on display at our Poe celebration. More can be seen at my flickr stream:

http://flickr.com/photos/hadit93/

I’ve successfully surpassed the 4,000 book mark in cataloguing my library at Librarything (see http://www.librarything.com/catalog/666777). Whoopee! I still have a thousand or so occult books to catalogue… We rarely manage to see live music, but an exception had to be made for the legendary Leonard Cohen, who played Oz in February. We saw him at the “Day at the Green” at Bowral, a beautiful setting in a vineyard, and had the pleasure of hearing a fantastic band backing him up as he treated the gathered thousands to three hours of his best music. The same day I had the experience of meeting Russell Kilbey, brother of Steve Kilbey who also played on the day, with the Triffids (Steve K is lead singer of The Church, my favourite rock band). Russell is married to Amy, who’s an ex-Tarot student of Margi’s! What a small world…In other activity, our coven, MoonsKin, did a Bodycasting day and I am now the proud possessor of a three-quarter plaster body cast of myself. We plan another day where our casts will be painted and decorated. I’ve also been working extensively with magical talismans recently and have plans to cast some special ones using a substance called Hydro-Stone. I had a fun visit to Sydney one day to see Danny Lovecraft, and en route caught up with my mate Chris Sequeira, who presented me with copies of his latest appearances – two American comics: Astonishing Tales #1 (a Marvel comic featuring an Iron Man story penned by Chris) and Cthulhu Tales #11 (a Boom Studios comic featuring “Incorporation”, a Cthulhu-esque tale penned by Chris). This was topped off by a preview copy of Chris’ new locally produced comic (from new publisher Black House Comics) Sherlock Holmes: Dark Detective, with superlative artwork by Chris’ old Holmesian comrade, Phillip Cornell. (Cornell, by the way, contributes a fullpage illustration for every story in the recent Holmesian anthology Gaslight Grimoire, edited by Charles Prepolec and published in Canada by Edge Publishing. Well worth checking out, people! Fantastic stories featuring Holmes are always a joy). I hear on the grapevine that Prepolec may do a sequel to this antho. I spent an enjoyable day or two with Danny chewing the fat about pulps, publishing and projects, followed by a sojourn through the Sydney specialist and secondhand bookshops, where I had not ventured for some time. The only book I had money enough to buy was Stephen Jones’ Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Vol 18 (Robinson, 2007), though there were plenty of other books at Galaxy,

Sydney’s sf specialist I would have loved to snap up! Danny successfully landed some stock of my Spores from Sharnoth, and ST Joshi’s Emperor of Dreams, with Galaxy, so hopefully that will add to the sales. I’ve been helping P’rea Press by selling the deluxe edition of Emperors on Ebay, and it’s been going rather well. Danny, who is hand-binding the deluxe editions individually, can hardly keep up with the demand for the hardcover!! [Bibliographers and collectors note: the first 6 or eight copies of the deluxe hardcover state of Emperors of Dreams were bound in green cloth; now Danny is on to red cloth, so there will be at least two states of the deluxe edition)] I’ve seen quite a number of films over the last few months but haven’t kept a record of them all. Those I can recollect include: THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR (amiable nonsense), THE TAKEN starring Liam Neeson (a decent action thriller), DAYS OF HEAVEN (a drama I’d long wanted to catch up with), WHALES OF AUGUST (another drama, this one starring Vincent Price – gentle and touching in one of his last performances), THE TINGLER (Price again, seen at Danny Lovecraft’s place), FAREWELL MY LOVELY (a most enjoyable movie take on the Raymond Chandler novel starring Robert Mitchum and Charlotte Rampling – had seen it many years ago, but enjoyed it again). Rob Hood lent me a batch of J-horror movies, since I was incredibly behind on appreciating Asian horror cinema; these included KAENA, APPLESEED: EXMACHINA, THE RED SHOES, STACY, BATTLE ROYALE and PULSE. I probably enjoyed PULSE the most – a creepy exercise in ghostliness and ghastliness that had echoes of the horrors of Hiroshima in the subtext. In family news, Margi celebrated her 52nd birthday on Feb 5. We had a great celebration and she got lots of good presents. My stepson Rohan continues living in Sydney, with various ins-and-outs about finding a job, doing further technical computer training etc. He’s come back to stay with us in Wollongong with his girlfriend Shavae several times in the last few months. Margi and Graham, together with their guitarist friend Bruce, have formed a band, now called Fedora, and have been working hard putting together sets. They will go out to play live probably at mid-year. It’s sounding great, and I’m enjoying being involved in live music again even if I’m acting merely as a “vocal coach” and musical advisor on the sidelines…Oh, one other bit of publishing news. Here’s the cover image for Robert Bloch: The Man who Collect Psychos, edited by Ben Szumskyj, out shortly from McFarland in the US. So glad I got a chance to jump on board that project. That’s all the news that’s fit to print. S.T. has asked me, from the EOD side, to keep my APA contributions down to 15 pages, since the last Mantichore was of heroic proportions, so I will try not to overfill this issue. (I tired my hardest…still running 16+ pages; and sorry for the small font size,

which is the only way to fit everything into this space!) On to some hard content….I’d like to record my gratitude to my partner Margi Curtis for the title “ The Liminal Lovecraft” which will serve as the umbrella title for a series of essays on Lovecraft’s less-examined stories I will run here, starting this issue with a piece on “The Transition of Juan Romero.” Thanks also to Eldritchard – (aka Richard L. Tierney) for his poem this issue.

Lines on Placing an Order with Arkham House By Judy Reber (reprinted from the 1965 Books from Arkham House catalogue) Oh, send me an eldritch novel, Of a Thing come from Outer Space; Or loathly Hag in her hovel, With a ruined, blasphemous face. Let there be Ghouls without number, Eyes bestial and hellishly red; Give me the Dead that but slumber Till midnight, a coffin their bed. Give me a Werewolf, a Demon, A Shadow most foul on a Wall; A long-dead voluptuous leman, Returned now to hold men in thrall; A Druid with hair wildly streaming, ‘Neath ancient and mistletoed oak; And Gods of the Eld who lie dreaming, Where once all was law when they spoke; An infamous Abbey with Rat Things, That leave human bones in their wake, Until a dread being with Bat Wings Eats them for his hunger to slake; Doorways to other Dimensions; An attic in which Time was Not. Send me your grisly inventions – Or are they? Ah, are they..?God wot!

Books By My Bedside I seem to be reading more and more slowly these days, and my eyesight is gradually deteriorating, which doesn’t help. It took me nearly three weeks (in between other work) to read Dan Simmons’ excellent thriller Darwin’s Blade – admittedly a fat read, but one I would have

polished off in a week in years past. Other recent reading has included Sinclair Mackay’s A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: A History of Hammer Films (thanks to my friend Richard Trowsdale for sending me that); 100 European Horror Films by Stephen Jay Schneider; Emperor of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry by S.T. Joshi; The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos by S.T. Joshi (hopefully I’ll review this next time); The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams by W.H. Pugmire; Progradior and the Beast by Keith Richmond (a biography of Aleister Crowley’s Australian disciple Frank Bennett) and The Magical Record of Frater Progradior, also by Keith Richmond; The New Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois; Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Volume One; and White Line Fever by Lemmy (lead singer of Motorhead) – a thoroughly enjoyable read which I passed on to Danny Lovecraft. Not a huge amount of horror fiction there, I see…I may be able to review a couple of the above volumes here if there’s enough space. Did I mention that Henrik Harksen’s excellent Lovecraftian anthology Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales (www.lulu.com) is now available? I’m very happy to see my “The Return of ZothOmmog” reprinted therein. I’ll try and review this volume next time if space permits. _______________________________________________ [Following is a story, really a series of profiles, I did for my Feature Writing class in Journalism last year at uni. Figured I might as well use it here as it hasn’t been published elsewhere. The ABC Fiction Award has now been dropped by the ABC, so the three writers I interviewed are the only ones who will ever win it….]

ABC Fiction Award Breaks Emerging Writers By Leigh Blackmore © 2008 PROFILE 1: KAIN MASSIM When Adelaide-based high-school maths & science teacher Kain Massim was informed by phone that he had won the prestigious ABC Fiction Award for 2008, he couldn’t do a jig or shout for happiness, because he was walking through a public shopping centre, and he was sworn to silence by the award’s promoters. “There was no way that I could whoop or wave my arms around. My knees turned to jelly, I had to go and sit down. I was having coffee with friends and I couldn’t tell them about it. I told my family and my boss at work, but I apart from that I had to keep quiet about it.”

The recognition, and the chance to get his book published was more important to him than the considerable prize money of $10,000. “It’s too early to talk about the prize money – I haven’t yet received it,” he says. “It will be put to a good use for the family as a whole.” He sees the award as a chance to get more exposure as a writer. “The news of my win has certainly appeared all around Australia, and even in Bangladesh, France and Spain.” And he now has the opportunity to have more books published. He has written two others - one a contemporary thriller, the other a science fiction story set 250 years into the future. For another book again – it’s currently halfwritten - he has much higher hopes than for God for the Killing, the novel which won the award. The ABC Fiction Award was begun in 2006. It is presented annually to a novelist who wins a nationwide competition sponsored by ABC Books with the support of ABC Local radio and ABC Television. Surprisingly, the rich prize – very few other literary awards in Australia offer such a hefty cash component – so far seems little-known in the wider community. Nevertheless, hundreds of entries have flooded in each year to the competition since it was begun. Significantly, the themes of the three novels chosen so far have all been controversial. It’s a heartening sign that the ABC is willing to support books that are meaty, challenging and don’t follow the literary line of least resistance. Jo Mackay, commissioning editor at ABC Books, considers this hasn’t been a conscious decision on the publisher’s part. “The only real criterion in the competition apart from age of the author and the fact the novel must be adult and unpublished, is sheer writing excellence.” She believes that a feature of new writing is that such books tend to push the envelope of thematic content. “We are certainly proud of the ones we have published so far,” she says. Kain Massim’s award was presented to him at a ceremony in Sydney on Tuesday 22 April. A God for the Killing will be published in October. Massim started out as a writer by publishing a thriller serial in mid high school in the school newsletter – a story, he admits with some embarrassment, about six escaped cobras and their individual adventures. An Adelaide resident from the age of seven, Massim had a varied working career. Prior to being a schoolteacher he was a taxidriver, a drinks waiter, a retail salesman and an above-ground pool installer, amongst others including work in light manufacturing. He’s a come a long way since then. But so have the other writers who have won the award so far. All of them have taken many difficult years to reach a point where the magical “award-winning first novel” has become possible. Will Elliott, who won the inaugural award in 2006 for his novel The Pilo Family Circus, grew up in the bleak suburbs of inner city Brisbane. Dropping out of a law degree at age twenty due to a diagnosis of schizophrenia, he lived a somewhat fragmented existence while he began writing seriously around

the same time. “I was serious then, and did intend to make it to publication, but I had no idea what I was in for or what it required,” he says. Damian McDonald, the 2007 award-winner with his novel Luck in the Greater West, set in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, had a similarly bleak upbringing in suburban Canberra, writing stories and jamming with rock bands. A long-haired kid who was often bullied at school for his love of writing and music, he worked a series of menial jobs while trying to make it on the Sydney rock scene, before abandoning music to become a writer. Educating himself through various tertiary courses, he now holds a Masters in Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney. “When I went back to school as a mature age student I guess I rediscovered writing. I also realised that I needed to gain some skills in the art, as the ideas were there, but the technique wasn't,” he remembers. . Kain Massim’s novel God for the Killing tells the story of Judith, a girl taken from Nazareth in AD 30 and trained as an assassin. The novel, which took him seven months to write, deals with the betrayal and death of Jesus Christ. It started out as a short story but as Massim explains “it grew as I did more research and as I saw what areas needed more work and explanation.” Judith, the novel’s strong female main character, is sent on a mission to kill the new ‘Messiah’. As her quest continues she learns that he is her childhood sweetheart, Joshua, now known as Jesus. Why did Massim decide to write his novel from such an unusual point of view? “I’ve been writing more and more stories with strong female characters,” he says, “so this was just an extension of my other writing. What I wanted was a Roman outsider who could observe the last few days of the life of Jesus. Using the female point of view was not a long step for me. Making her an assassin was an almost logical progression when I asked myself the question: Who would Rome send to Palestine to deal with the growing problem of Jesus”? One reason the novel works so well is that Massim puts an element of doubt into the reader’s mind. How will the story finish? Will the assassin get to do what she wants to do? Massim is fondest of the Judith character in his book, and thinks the reader will warm to her. But, he says, “I also enjoyed the conflict between the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, the Jewish King Herod and the High Priest, Caiaphas.” He enjoyed writing “the way they snap at each other in the most civil manner.” Massim doesn’t think controversy is an issue, despite the book’s unusual theme and viewpoint. “There is very little that’s controversial in the story,” he says. “There is some tinkering with what we think we know about the [Jesus] story, but it’s certainly not central.” Damian McDonald takes a similar view about Luck in the Greater West. Though the novel has been highly praised, it has caused some controversy, not least for its rape-related segments, loosely inspired by the gang-related Skaf case. Are these issues are too inflammatory to be addressed?

McDonald disagrees. “Art is a reflection of human nature and society,” he says. “Should Thomas Kenneally not have written Schindler's Ark because the issues were too inflammatory? What I was trying to do was to examine a pocket of the Australian community that was at odds with the wider community.” The ABC Fiction award uses a panel of judges to assess the manuscripts. Judges have included Lindy Burns, Luke Davies, Murray Waldren, Jo Mackay, Debra Adelaide, Vernero Armanno, Alex Sloan, John Dale, Richard Fidler, Delia Falconer, Richard Falconer, and Malcolm Knox. This year’s judges were unanimous in selecting God for the Killing as the best of the 400 entries received. Kain Massim has been praised for the amount of historical research in his novel. “Not Roman history – although that was also important but more the history of Jewish society and customs,” he says. But one of his strongest memories of writing the book is of having to hold back on the research aspect. “ I remember having to take up the rein and pull back. I was in danger of making it too big and unwieldy.” Winning entries in the ABC Fiction Award, as well as winning the $10,000 advance and having their book published, have it broadcast on ABC Local radio and made available as an audio book through ABC Audio. Though there can only be one winner of the $10,000 first prize, the judges also choose Highly Commended Works each year from a compiled shortlist. This year both Highly Commended novels came from Victoria – Red Queen by Honey Brown and Homing by Lynda Caffrey. Each of the three writers who have won the $10,000 prize-money stresses the need for determination in the writing game. Kain Massim’s advice to young writers who aspire to winning the award is simply “Don’t give up.” He advises the use of a good writer’s group. “Use them as a sounding board. Do not write in isolation. Read your work out to a group of writers who can help to show you the good and bad points of your writing.” He also recommends persistence. “When you begin writing, you tend to have an inflated opinion of your work. Don’t. Your first efforts will only be the beginning. First you learn to crawl. Then you stand up. And you fall over; many times. Walking is a slow process, but you shouldn’t give up on doing it.” Will Elliott is of the opinion that budding writers should read On Writing, by Stephen King; The Novel Writer's Toolkit by Bob Meyer; and every book on writing fiction written by John Gardner. Will also cautions about the often lonely realities of writing. “Do not commit yourself to this if you like the idea of being a writer, but aren't so keen on actually sitting there and writing. If sitting there and writing isn't your idea of a good time, you are up shit creek if you get to where I am.” Damian McDonald says his only real mistake was thinking that his publisher would promote the book. “I think you need to do as much self-promotion as possible. He also recommends getting an editor – “ Well worth the exorbitant fee

they charge! That way your manuscript will be presented to agents/publishers as a ready-to-publish work.” The 2008 competition for the 2009 ABC Fiction award commences on Tuesday 22 April 2008. See http://www.abc.net.au/corp/abcfictionaward/ for details of how to enter. PROFILE 2: WILL ELLIOTT “I was living like shit when I wrote this book,” confesses Will Elliott, author of The Pilo Family Circus – “the whole time's a blur, mostly. The hours I kept, the caffeine I drank were ridiculous. I was borderline delusional much of the time. Lurking at the nearest ATM to my flat at 5am every second Wednesday, waiting for my welfare to hit the bank, shivering with nicotine withdrawal, wanting smokes & coffee so I could get back to work. The last 10,000 words was done in one delirious sitting.” Elliott’s writing falls somewhere between conventional horror fiction and savage ‘mainstream’ fantasy. For fun, he plays cricket. Refreshingly honest, he doesn’t shy away from the difficult issues in his life, such as his schizophrenia. He doesn’t feel that the themes of the novel – which won the 2006 ABC Fiction Award for best first novel and a clutch of other awards including Best Horror Novel (Aurealis Awards) plus the Golden Aurealis; and the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelist Award - are autobiographical. “Maybe I'm turned around on the subject,” he says. “Too many of my works have the same recurring theme for me to ignore it any more: a normal person thrust into an abnormal, often unpleasant reality, and they fight to come out of it.” Elliott steadfastly resists the suggestion that his book is merely metaphor for the illness. “Not everything I've done has that pattern, but a lot of things do. I don't sit down and plan it, it just comes out that way. But Jamie is definitely not me - it's my best friend, Andrew, warts and all. I got his permission, but I'm not sure he realized that this thing would actually be for sale in bookshops around the world.” The novel’s central character Jamie finds a bag of facepaint which transforms him into separate personalities, including JJ, a dark alter ego. Elliott says the temptation to treat this as simplistic fable based on his condition is too obvious. “I would certainly still deny the suggestion the face paint represents the illness; the effects of the magic face paint, bringing out Jamie's "clown" personality, are nothing like the illness.” Despite denials, the novel’s malevolent clowns motif clearly expresses the anguish that Elliott felt about his own life, growing up in Brisbane. He remembers that life as almost too ordinary. “There was food on the table, there were the comforts of middle class suburbia, meaning I'm in no position to complain, but yeah – overwhelmingly, relentlessly

normal.” An imaginative child, he resented that. “We lashed out against it. My strongest memory is probably the many times my friends and I went out to destroy shit. It started innocently enough, rocking roofs, prank calls, but we wound up trying to start fires big enough to burn down a new housing estate (uninhabited, I'm happy to report.) We were little bastards, really.” He recalls settling down at adolescence, describes his youth as a typical Australian rite of passage. “All that wildness calmed down a bit when we got older and discovered drugs and alcohol.” But then he got sick. “From that point on I regarded myself as a writer, but in the years that followed, the illness periodically interrupted things - for a while I barely thought about writing. When I remembered again, it was 2002, and that began a 4-year period in which I'd write 6 manuscripts, including the Circus, and dozens of short stories.” The darkly creepy world of acrobats, glasseating yetis and Fishboys into which Jamie, his protagonist, is drawn, suggests parallels with genre horror fiction. The clowns from the Pilo Family Circus are determined to retrieve their facepowder, and (like the freaks in Todd Browning’s classic horror movie), force Jamie to become one of them. Does his work fit the genre stereotype? “The Circus was dark fantasy, I'd say, more than horror,” he says. “ I don't dislike the horror label. I've considered myself an "unorthodox fantasy" writer, (a better term I've heard since is "slipstream") but of course there is genre crosspollination at work.” His prose influences range widely, too. “My short stuff is of a kind that aspires to sit alongside George Saunders or David Foster Wallace. Schizophrenia still dominates his life. “I just finished writing a 60,000 word book about it, called Strange Places. It basically took my life off one course and set it on another. Once I was back in the land of the living, I backed myself into a corner (or so it felt) whereby writing was the only option open to me.” He likes his life now, he acknowledges, likes where he’s headed. “But this is a very recent development; for the majority of the time since that diagnosis, I haven't liked it and have wanted to bail out. It sounds romantic to be a starving artist until you've done it for 5 years or so, alone, and there's no end in sight.” Elliott’s characters - Rufshod, Goshy, Doopy, Winston, Jamie, Kurt and George Pilo are all extremely eccentric. “As for the eccentricity, I think it's a Mervyn Peake influence,” Elliott says. “My work looks nothing like Peake for the most part - but that weirdness, I think, is what engages me, ever since getting seriously into the Gormenghast books at age 15. He of course is several orders of magnitude above my level; I'd sit him at the same table as Shakespeare.”

He doesn’t focus on research. “Drawings, was all: lots of character sketches. I stick them up on the wall above the desk, which helps keep track of them for plotting purposes. I'm trying to incorporate more research into my work these days ... the followup novel, Nightfall, has characters I couldn't have invented without researching some memorable historical figures.” Elliott is sanguine about the violence in his book, which has drawn comment in many reviews. “The violence in my book was done more for the effect I wanted to have on the reader. It's sometimes a kind of slapstick, hard to take seriously, but sometimes a bit confronting. “I could be cute and say that if I want to write a shocking scene, we're so desensitized that I'm forced to go to such extremes, but almost certainly that's a copout. Violence in real life makes me cringe, but in the books it's like playing with clay. I'm not intending to take it to the pornographic level of, say, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. “As for violence, I think we've been desensitized to it, and I think it's deliberate, though for what specific purpose I can't even guess. I wasn't trying to satirize our society, as such. That kind of thing, much like themes, may emerge in my work organically (which is a euphemism for 'accidentally', I'm afraid.) But if people want to extract such things from the work, be my guest. I've been wrong before.” The prize money hasn’t changed his life, though he has moved back in with his parents. “The money was gone to repay debts almost instantly,” he says. “I am fortunate and very glad to be published, don't get me wrong, but we're talking about 3 years' work here ... How far do they think 10 grand goes, these days? I bought a fucking mansion on the coast, Jesus. Financially I'd have been maybe 10 times better off working in a servo instead of writing, so I try not to think too much about money.” PROFILE 3: DAMIAN MCDONALD “When I lived at Burnie Court housing estate,” says Damian McDonald, now a 38-year-old assistant curator at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, and author of novel Luck in the Greater West which won the prestigious ABC Fiction Prize in 2007, “a whole different set of morals existed there. The police were the ultimate enemy. Several times I was stopped, searched, questioned, had criminal checks done, and was abused - and this was just after getting off the bus and trying to get to my flat. The searches were illegal, but were performed relentlessly on the tenants. That part of his life fed later fed into his award-winning novel. “Alcohol, drugs and joblessness were the norm in Burnie, and me attending uni was something of an anomaly, a source of humour to my neighbours. But the people were warm and generous, once they knew me.” McDonald did it tough growing up in Canberra during the 1980’s. “My family were quite poor, and life was boring as hell out there!” he

remembers. “My friends and I made our own fun mainly breaking into schools and other public buildings and shoplifting; until I discovered rock music when I was about fourteen or fifteen - then I was just possessed with learning guitar and obtaining records.” School was an unhappy experience. “I was bullied relentlessly for not being interested in football and for growing my hair long. It was demoralising; female students would join in on the pay-outs. It was clear that I wouldn't score a girlfriend unless I cut my hair and started barracking for the Raiders! Most of my fellow students were very mundane and devoid of original thought- one of the main reasons I left high school and moved up to Sydney when I was sixteen to fulfil my dream of being a hard rock musician.” As a teenager McDonald read Stephen King stories and wrote short stories that attempted to emulate the genre. But then music took over. “It really took over all my creativity, though I did write a lot of lyrics. I studied English literature at uni, and hopefully picked up a tip or two from the texts I studied.” He began to write short stories, with published work in Hermes and several UWS literary journals. He has had, he confesses, “many, many rejections!” His novel Luck in the Greater West, which has been described as “edgy, contemporary and with genuine spark,” began as a series of short stories. “I noticed that they all shared the theme of location - the outer western suburbs of Sydney. Short story compilations from unknown writers seem to have gone well out of fashion, so I started thinking about writing a novel-length piece. That's when I started to tie the stories together, using the location as the binder. “ These days, McDonald likes to hang out with his partner and daughter when not writing, and plays again in bands. But at one point he had to give that away. He has spoken of drug use alongside his years in menial jobs as reasons that he abandoned his ambition to be a successful muso. “When I realised that music was never going to pay off, I knew I had to get a decent day job!” says McDonald. “I had no skills other than driving trucks and forklifts, so I went back to school. Studying became actually enjoyable. I hardly touched my guitar while I was at uni - studying was my outlet.” Luck in the Greater West is a novel of social realism with compelling insights into the lives of characters in Sydney’s outer west. McDonald is gratified to have won the ABC Award for such a work. “One of the reasons I pursued the theme of the western suburbs is that there wasn't a great deal of literature that dealt with the outer west of Sydney or outer suburbs in general. I felt I could give a particular part of Australian society a voice.” The book took him about two years to write, firstly linking together existing short stories,

then researching subject matter such as police procedure, the emotional effects of rape on young women, and the notorious Skaf rape case. “The writing mostly flowed pretty naturally,” he recalls. “I tried to hear the character's voices - the nuance of their syntax, their accents, their expression. When writing the events, I tried to picture and describe particular details, rather than describe events or situations as a whole. “ The centrality of violence to the lives of many in our society concerns McDonald. By the same token, he believes it is exciting. “Violence is part of human nature,” he says. “Thankfully, in Australia, we do a good job of suppressing it and finding alternatives. Unfortunately though, in my personal experience many people experience violence from people who are meant to protect them from it - the police and parents/guardians. “ McDonald feels validated by winning the ABC Fiction Award. “It has given me the impetus to continue writing. It was a massive high to win the award. There's a lot of novels out there, and it's been said that books have the shelf life of yogurt, so it's a gamble that any novel from an unknown is going to sell in any amount. Mine's already being pulled from the shelves. The down side was the void of promotion done by the publisher; but that is apparently the norm for fiction.” His strongest memories of the process of writing the book revolve around the realisation that he had a whole book completed. “I felt that I had a whole novel, that my writing and ideas were coming together,” he enthuses. “The first few rejection letters from agents were hard. But I ended up with enough of them that they lost their meaning!” McDonald is hopeful about the future of the novel in this country. “Australian literature is original, of very high literary merit compared with much of the rest of the western world, and an apt reflection of and reaction to our society. But it needs continued support.” ______________________________________ Stop Press…just heard of a new anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound. Contents: Houses Under the Sea Caitlin R. Kiernan; The Din of Celestial Birds Brian Evenson; In the Black Mill Michael Chabon; Commencement Joyce Carol Oates ; One Day, Soon Lavie Tidhar ; Catch Hell Laird Barron ; Machines of Concrete Light and Dark Michael Cisco; Leng Marc Laidlaw; Sight Unseen Joel Lane; Vernon, Driving Simon Kurt Unsworth; Marya Nox Gemma Files; That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable Nick Mamatas ; Sincerely, Petrified Anna Tambour; The Tenderness of Jackals Amanda Downum ; The Office of Doom Richard Bowes; Mongoose Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear ; Cold Water Survival Holly Phillips; The Recruiter Michael Shea; The Crevasse Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud; Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love William Browning Spencer.

THE LIMINAL LOVECRAFT A series examining tales of Lovecraft which have to date received little critical attention.

1: SOME NOTES ON LOVECRAFT’S “THE TRANSITION OF JUAN ROMERO” © 2009 Leigh Blackmore “I yearned to Shew what ought to be done” Figure 3: Lovecraft in 1919 Let us confess at the outset that this tale is a comparatively minor one of Lovecraft’s. It tells of events which took place in the goldmining country of the American West at the Norton Mine on October 18 and 19, 1894. Lovecraft wrote the tale in 1919; he was then aged 29. He had resumed writing fiction (after an eight-year hiatus) with “‘The Tomb” (June 1917). In March 1919 his mother, Sarah Susan Lovecraft, was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence. In September of 1919 he discovered the work of Lord Dunsany, which was to influence him greatly for some years to come. (In November of 1919 Lovecraft actually heard Dunsany lecture at an amateur convention in Boston). There is only one reference in Lovecraft’s letters roughly contemporaneous with the story’s composition, which occurs in a letter to the Gallomo [April 1920]. Lovecraft says “My next – “Juan Romero” – was written merely as a reaction from copying a dull yarn by Phil Mac. He had made such a commonplace adventure yarn from a richly significant setting, that I yearned to shew what ought to be done with such a setting” (LVW, 69 and LAG 83). (“Phil Mac” was the amateur writer Prof Phillip B. Macdonald, who contributed several articles to magazines such as The Vagrant, The United Cooperative and even to Lovecraft’s The Conservative. Lovecraft had previously taken Macdonald to task for belittling the importance of classical authors). Other references to the tale occur in letters to Robert H. Barlow, commencing with one of Mar 12, 1932: “There is a repudiated story of mine [so far below my standard that I wouldn’t have it in print under any circumstances] called “The Transition of Juan Romero” which is also innocent of type, & which you could have for nothing if you’d be willing to type me a private copy for my files. Possibly, though, a frankly poor story wouldn’t make a good collector’s item.” (OFF, letter 25). On Mar 21, 1932, Lovecraft sent a couple of tales including “Transition” to Barlow. He wrote: “Here are the stories mentioned -- neither much to brag about! Don’t feel obliged to copy “Juan Romero” unless you want to keep a copy. I want only one, & this scrawl is plenty so far as I’m concerned. Neither of these items has been in any kind of print.” (OFF, letter 26). In

another letter dated ten days later (Mar 31), he wrote: “Dear Mr. Barlow: --To be sure -- keep the MS. of “Juan Romero” if you wish. I fear that it is rather a poor tale, & doubt if it would be worth working over.” (OFF, letter 27). On April 14 that year, Lovecraft referred to the story again in writing to Barlow: “No hurry at all about “Juan Romero”. I hadn’t look[ed] at it for ten years when I dug it out, & probably shan’t want to see it again in less than that time. About the inverted question-mark -- it must have been in connexion with a quotation in Spanish. In Spanish interrogative & exclamatory phrases have marks before as well as after -- the first one being inverted. Thus: ¿Quien va? or ¡Que lastima! It surely does make a problem for an exclusively ‘Englishspeaking’ typewriter.” (OFF, letter 28). On May 19, 1932, Lovecraft was staying with Frank Belknap Long in New York before embarking on a trip through Southern states. He wrote Barlow that he had received the copy of “Transition” that Barlow had prepared: “Thanks indeed for “Romero” -- the copy of which is better than I’d have made. I read it over for the first time in over a decade, & have to admit that it’s a pretty poor attempt at a story. I don’t blame editors for rejecting it.” (OFF, letter 31). In March 1934, a letter to Barlow mentions “Transition” again, in the context of tales which Lovecraft has expunged from his list of acknowledged writings. He refers to “Transition” as “a failure.” (He here mentions half a dozen other tales he also considers failures, including “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”) (OFF, letter 66). A letter of Sept 1934 to Barlow has the comment that: “As to what forms my earliest longhand fiction MS. -if the “Beast” is indeed lost, as I fear it is, I suppose “Juan Romero” would be it. I didn’t recall that this was in longhand till you reminded me of it.” (OFF, letter 94). While Lovecraft often denigrated various of his tales in which others saw worth, his references to “Transition” make it clear that he considered the tale one of his earliest and least successful efforts. Perhaps because of this, “Transition” has been little studied, not warranting even a mention in de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography or in book-length studies of Lovecraft by the likes of Timo Airaksinen, Donald R. Burleson, and Maurice Levy. Peter Cannon merely mentions it in passing. S.T. Joshi’s Starmont Reader’s Guide on Lovecraft of 1982 does not discuss the tale, though Joshi does address it in his later books including his biography of Lovecraft. Joshi’s bibliography of Lovecraft lists no critical articles about the tale. T.E.D. Klein touches briefly upon the tale in his introduction (“A Dreamer’s Tales”) to the corrected Arkham House edition of Dagon (D, xxxiii), but only to comment that the narrator of the tale is a typical Lovecraft narrator – well-travelled, well-educated, and able to quote lines from Prescott and Poe despite now working as a common labourer in a mine. Darrell Schweitzer has adjudged it be “much worse” than the contemporaneous minor story “Old Bugs.” He summarises the plot as follows: “The protagonist is even more reticent than most HPL narrators, and never does say exactly what

happens. A blast in a gold mine reveals a vast abyss, from which eldritch throbbing sounds emanate. The hero and a Mexican laborer investigate, and something shocking happens to Romero. Then the scene shifts to a bunkhouse, where the narrator is awakened and Romero is dead. All witnesses insist they never left the room, but mysterious glowing Hindu ring is gone…” (Schweitzer, 9). Schweitzer doesn’t venture an opinion as to why the tale is supposedly so bad. S.T. Joshi merely considers that the tale is “not an entire success” (Subtler Magick, 59), an opinion with which I concur. Nevertheless, I believe all of Lovecraft’s tales deserve critical examination; hence while ”Transition” can be regarded as an apprentice effort, there is much of interest to be found in this story if we look hard enough. We may assume that the tale was conceived and written quickly, for the manuscript bears a single day’s date – September 16, 1919. The tale was published for the first time in Marginalia (Arkham House, 1944), edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. The editors called it an example of Lovecraft’s “middle work…which was written not long before “The Picture in the House,” commenting that “the advance from it to this latter story is remarkable” (Marginalia, vi). S.T. Joshi has written of Lovecraft’s disavowal of the tale. “Lovecraft recognised that “The Transition of Juan Romero” was a false start, and he refused to allow it to be published, even in the amateur press. He disavowed it relatively early in life and it fails to appear on most lists of his stories; he does not seem to have shown it to anyone until 1932, when R.H. Barlow badgered him into sending him the manuscript so that he could prepare a typescript of it.” (HP Lovecraft: A Life, 168). But at least Lovecraft did not destroy the tale, as he had done with many of his other early fictional efforts. While not on a par with Lovecraft’s most accomplished later tales, “Transition”’s motifs foreshadow themes which are central to Lovecraft’s later fiction, and thus “Transition” is not wholly without interest. The narrator of the tale remains nameless – but he implies he is an immigrant to the United States, for he says “my name and origin need not be related to posterity; in fact, I fancy it is better that they should not be, for when a man suddenly migrates to the States or the Colonies, he leaves his past behind him” (D, 337). We learn of him that his present name “is very common and carries no meaning”; it is a name he has “accepted” (or more likely, adopted) presumably for the purposes of remaining anonymous. But we do learn some facts about him. We deduce that he is English, for he refers to his use of “Oxonian Spanish” when speaking to Romero. (“Oxonian” is a term for a student of Oxford University in England). He has served in India, and admits: “I was more at home amongst the whitebearded native teachers than amongst my brother officers. I had delved not a little into odd Eastern lore when overtaken by the calamities which brought my new life in America’s vast West.” He does not specify

the nature of these calamities and we must be satisfied with a subtle implication that perhaps it has something to do with the Hindu ring that he wears. (Lovecraft spells it in the old style of “Hindoo.”) R. Boerem comments that the narrator of “Transition” “left his life as a British officer apparently because of some scandal.” (Boerem, 266). Lovecraft sets up this nameless narrator, then, as someone who has already seen or researched some mysteries. We also learn that he is telling this tale “in these last years of my life”, and that despite having no desire to speak of what he calls the “Transition” of Juan Romero, all that impels him to recall the story is “a sense of duty to science.” The setting of the tale is unusual in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, as compared with that of many of his later tales which are set in the vicinity of the Eastern States – New England and so on. It is his only tale set in the Southwest apart from the revisions “The Curse of Yig” and ‘The Mound.” Norton Mine is said to be located in the “drear expanses of the Cactus Mountains.” This appears to be a fictitious location, although there is a real Cactus Mountain in Fremont County, Colorado in America’s West and one in Wallowa County, Oregon on America’s West Coast. Joshi speculates that the Norton Mine is “somewhere in the Southwest, one imagines, although Lovecraft is not specific as to the actual location” (HP Lovecraft: A Life, 167), but as Joshi has pointed out to me (email to LDB, Mar 13, 2009), the possibility of the story being set in Colorado or Oregon is nil; the prevalence of Mexican “peons” must mean the story is set in one of the States bordering on Mexico, probably Arizona or New Mexico. The mines have been started due to the discovery some years previous by an “aged prospector” of “a cavern of gold, lying deep below a mountain lake” (D, 337). Since then, “additional grottoes had been found, and the yield of yellow metal was exceedingly great”; a minor character, Mr Arthur, the mine Superintendent, speculates on the probable extent of what Lovecraft calls, in a delicious phrase typical of his Latinate vocabulary, “auriferous cavities.” (D, 337). There is a “Jewel Lake” in the vicinity of the mines and their adjacent caverns in the tale. There is a real Jewel Lake in Jackson County, Colorado but no Jewel Lake in Oregon. As we have seen, these states are unlikely to be the setting for the story; and in any case, the name is not so unusual that Lovecraft could not simply have invented it. The narrator becomes friendly with a Mexican peon named Juan Romero, of whom we learn several things. Described as “ignorant and dirty”, (D, 338), he had been found as a child in a crude mountain hut, “the only survivor of an epidemic which had stalked lethally by.” Two skeletons found nearby were presumably those of his parents. An avalanche closed a rather unusual rock fissure nearby the skeletons and Romero was reared by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name. One wonders whether Lovecraft is implying something here about Romero’s mysterious origins

lying in the caverns beneath the earth, but unfortunately he has not given enough for us to do more than speculate. Romero seems of different blood to the rest of the “unkempt Mexicans” attracted to the mine. “It was not the Castilian conquistador or the American pioneer, but the ancient and noble Aztec whom imagination called to view when the silent peon would rise in the early morning and gaze in fascination at the sun as it crept above the eastern hills, meanwhile stretching out his arms to the orb as if in the performance of some rite whose nature he himself did not comprehend.” (D, 338). Is Lovecraft hinting here that Romero is actually of Aztec blood? If so, does that imply that the later horror has some connection with Aztec rites or history? This is never made clear. There is also an example of Lovecraft’s racism in the phrase where Lovecraft says Romero “first commanded attention only because of his features; which though plainly of the Red Indian type, were yet remarkable for their light colour and refined conformation, being vastly unlike those of the average “Greaser” or Piute of the locality.” (D, 338). Apart from the pejorative term “greaser” which Lovecraft applies to the Mexicans (one hardly thinks Indo-Americans of today would take kindly to this terminology!), Lovecraft is subtly hinting that Romero’s racial stock is more acceptable because he is a bit closer to the white man – the “lighter colour” and “refined conformation” mean he is one step up from the other natives. This is in accord with Lovecraft’s racial attitudes at the time he wrote “Transition.” “Paiutes” or “Piutes” refers to two related groups of native American peoples, who hailed from the states east of Colorado – Oregon, Nevada, California, and Utah and Arizona. These native American tribes spoke a language known as ‘UtoAztecan’. It would be fascinating to learn more of Lovecraft’s possible research sources for the native American references he puts into “Transition”; perhaps they derived from his delvings into his set of Encyclopedia Britannica, but this is only a guess. The night that the new vein at the mine is dynamited, instead of a rich vein of gold, an inconceivably deep gorge is revealed. As a storm gathers, Romero hears above it, weird sounds coming from the earth, which he dubs “el ritmo de la tierra – THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!”. The narrator, who also hears the throbbings, likens them to the strange chantings of Orientals whom he had heard when he was in India. Becoming obsessed with the throbbing sounds, Romero charges headlong toward the gorge, with narrator close behind. Romero starts to repeat the cry “Huitzilopochtli” as the two characters plunge down a succession of abysses into the vast rift, as the narrator’s ring lights the way: “I realised that the ancient ring on my finger was glowing with eerie radiance, diffusing a pallid luster through the damp, heavy air around.” (D, 341). The narrator later shudders when he learns the association of that

word, which he says he placed in the words of a great historian. (Only a note indicates that this is Prescott’s [History of the] Conquest of Mexico). Huitzilopochtli was a war god, legendary wizard and sun god of the Aztecs. (This ties in with Romero’s apparent gesture of homage to the sun earlier in the tale). The god was often represented in art as a hummingbird, with a black face, and holding a snake and a mirror. There are many legends about him, however none seems especially enlightening in regard to the action of “Transition.” Most likely Lovecraft was throwing his name in here as a touch of exotic strangeness, much as he did later in “The Rats in the Walls” with its references to strange gods like Atys and the Magna Mater. Lovecraft seems not to have had a copy of Prescott in his library, and he does not refer to Prescott in his letters, but he may well have read the volume – it had been published in 1843 and was for many years a standard volume on the history of Mexico. While there are no references to the Aztecs in his letters published in the Arkham House Selected Letters volumes, we know that Lovecraft was quite interested in this ancient civilisation. (And here I must extend my thanks to David E. Schultz for performing a keyword search on his database of Lovecraft letters which revealed the following). [add details on Aztec refs] If Lovecraft had read Prescott’s book he might have been intrigued by the mention of Huitzilopochtli in Chapter Three of Prescott’s volume where the author states: “At the head of all stood the terrible Huitzilopochtli, the Mexican Mars; although it is doing injustice to the heroic war-god of antiquity to identify him with this sanguinary monster. This was the patron deity of the nation. His fantastic image was loaded with costly ornaments. His temples were the most stately and august of the public edifices; and his altars reeked with the blood of human hecatombs in every city of the empire. Disastrous, indeed, must have been the influence of such a superstition on the character of the people.” A note includes the information that “Huitzilopochtli is compounded of two words, signifying "humming-bird," and "left," from his image having the feathers of this bird on its left foot.” On another note, Lovecraft’s inordinate fondness for “gibbous moons” (that is to say, moons which are three-quarters full during either the waxing or waning part of the lunar cycle) led him look up the moon’s phases for October, 1894 to find when a gibbous moon was visible at 2 a.m., and to change the dates of the story to fit. “Here is a lesson in scientific accuracy for fiction writers” he wrote in the appended note. (D, 340). The tale continues as Romero apparently perishes, and the narrator witnesses some inexplicable phenomenon: “shapes, all infinitely distant began to detach themselves from the

confusion” (D, 342). Then there strikes a titanic lightning-bolt which knocks the narrator unconscious. The next morning he awakes, and the men of the camp perform an autopsy on the body of Romero, whose dead body has been found in his bunk. The men swear that neither the narrator nor Romero left their cabin the night before; the narrator finds that his Hindu ring is missing. The Influence of Jonathan Hoag Apart from Lovecraft’s desire to top “Phil Mac’s” use of a somewhat exotic setting, another important influence upon the genesis of “Transition” appears to have been a line in a poem by Jonathan Hoag, a contemporary of Lovecraft’s to whom he dedicated a number of his own poems. Lovecraft also wrote a preface for Hoag’s poetry collection. George Wetzel has pointed out in his “The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study” that in that preface Lovecraft quoted a line from Hoag’s “To the Grand Canyons of Colorado” (1919) where in black caves “vast nameless satyrs dance with noiseless feet.” Wetzel feels this imagery recurs in “Transition” (as well as in Chapter Five of “At the Mountains of Madness”). (Wetzel, 93). Certainly the chronological placement of Hoag’s poem in the same year as the composition of Lovecraft’s story lends credence to the possible influence of this phrase. The mention of Colorado in the title of Hoag’s poem is, of course, not a clue to the geographical setting of “Transition”, for it refers to the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the term “the Colorado” refers not to the state of Colorado but to the Colorado River. (Thanks again to S.T. Joshi for clarifying this). The Influence of Poe and ‘Sonic Horror’. I believe the influence of Poe shows heavily in “Transition”. Lovecraft had first read Poe at the age of eight. A letter in Selected Letters II, quoted by Joshi in H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (p. 27) makes this clear: “Then I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!! It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!” We know from the catalogue of Lovecraft’s library (see Joshi in Works Cited) and references in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters about the editions of Poe that Lovecraft owned; they included the Raven edition of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe in 5 volumes published in 1903 by P.F. Collier and Sons. While it doesn’t follow that Lovecraft owned this set as from its publication date, and while I have not spent the time to ascertain (if indeed it can be ascertained) when Lovecraft first read “The Tell-Tale Heart”, we can confidently assert that Lovecraft had absorbed the bulk of Poe’s bestknown tales and poems including “The Tell-Tale Heart” well before the time he came to write “Transition’. We shall discuss the influence of Poe’s tale presently. A central motif in “Transition” is the mysterious throbbing which comes from underground and which draws Romero and the narrator on to

investigate the cavern. The word “throbbing” means “to beat with increased force or rapidly, as the heart under influence of emotion or excitement; palpitate.” (Italics mine). What more appropriate sensation could be utilised in a horror tale? Lovecraft may have used this motif in “Transition” as a semi-conscious device to indicate the increased excitement of a heart beating due to the anticipation or encountering of a horror and perhaps to assist in evoking the requisite sense of fearful anticipation in the reader. Poe used the motif of “throbbing” to indicate horror in several of his works. The poem “For Annie” includes the following lines as its fourth stanza: The moaning and groaning, The sighing and sobbing Are quieted now, With that horrible throbbing At heart: -- ah, that horrible, Horrible throbbing! The throbbing in that poem seems to form part of the “the fever called Living that burned” in the brain of the poet. Poe’s poem “To F— “includes the “Some ocean throbbing far and free”, although contextually the throbbing in that poem forms part of the poet’s memory of his beloved which is a positive, rather than a disturbing memory. What we may term “sonic horror” is also exemplified in Poe’s poem “The Bells”. The last stanza of this celebrated poem deals with the solemn iron bells. Some of the lines include a reference to throbbing: To the throbbing of the bells Of the bells, bells, bells, -To the sobbing of the bells; Keeping time, time, time… Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet cycle (1929-30) also contains many references to the horrible nature of throbbing or beating, usually in the form of the chiming of bells. Lovecraft’s own sonnet “The Bells” in the “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence centres on the memories of a past life evoked by “…that faint, far ringing Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind”. The narrator is beckoned: “…back through gateways of recalling to elder towers where the mad clappers tolled”. Whether or not Lovecraft’s sonnet was partly inspired by Poe’s poem of the same title, there can be no doubt that the notion of bells tolling, that

is, a continuous insistent sound akin to throbbing, is integral to Lovecraft’s notion of the horror in the poem. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” ends with the words: “I felt that I must scream or die! -- and now -again -- hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER! -"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!" The main motif in the story is the psychological pressure exerted upon the protagonist by the beating of the heart of the old man whom he has killed. (That the beating of the heart after the old man is dead may be imaginary does not matter in the least). Lovecraft must have been highly affected by this tale, with its motif of the insistent beating or throbbing of the heart, and the horror arising therefrom. The centrality of the motif of horrible throbbing sound in “Transition” certainly seems to owe much to the similar motif in Poe’s tale. Consider also this passage from Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart (1843): “And now--have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but overacuteness of the senses?--now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.” The key word in Poe’s tale is “beating” rather than “throbbing”, and yet these words are closely connected in sense. I would suggest that the motif of a horrible beating or throbbing as Lovecraft read it in Poe influenced “Transition”. It may even have influenced other instances of “sonic horror” in his work. Consider the way Azathoth is usually described, e.g. “[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes” (“DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath” (Autumn-22 Jan 1927). (MM, 308). Clearly, for Lovecraft, certain sounds were associated with horror. In the description of Azathoth we have “maddening beating of vile drums”. This sound is closely akin to the notion of “throbbing”. (Indeed, notice again the Poe passage from “The Tell-Tale Heart” quoted above and Poe’s comparison of the beating of a heart to “the beating of a drum”. Note also the “muffled” nature of the heartbeat sound in Poe’s tale: it makes a sound “such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”. This may form an analogue to the “muffled, maddening” nature of the vile drums in the Azathoth descriptions.

I don’t believe it is drawing too long a bow to suggest that Lovecraft absorbed the references to “beating” and “throbbing” (and perhaps to the idea of the noxious sound of certain instruments in Poe’s work), and utilised them as suggestive of horror in “Transition” and perhaps other works of his. Most likely Lovecraft already had a psychological aversion to certain types of sound, so that on encountering Poe’s use of “beating” and “throbbing”, the motif struck a chord with Lovecraft. Another Poe influence is discernible in the tale. The narrator says that to his mind “rushed fragments of a passage in Joseph Glanvill which Poe has quoted with tremendous effect: "..... the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus." This is, of course, the motto of Poe’s “A Descent Into the Maelstrom”. It is evidence of the very profound effect which various works of Poe’s had on Lovecraft, and his citation of this passage from Glanvill (author of the work on witchcraft, Sadducismus Triumphatus) by way of Poe inextricably links the horrible abysses of “Transition” with the terrible watery abyss of Poe’s “Descent.” (Lovecraft also cites Glanvill in “The Festival,” in which the narrator notices Glanvill’s book in the house on Green Lane in Kingsport, Massachusetts). Lovecraft likely had a purpose in citing the Glanvill quotation which went beyond simply a tip of the hat to Poe. The mention of Democritus in the Glanville quotation is telling, for Democritus was one of the preSocratic philosophers who cofounded atomism, reasoning that space is a “void” of finite size in which float innumerable particles – the atoms – too miniscule to be perceivable by the senses, but which have formed the heavens (earth and the planets). Atoms could not destroyed, only changed from one form to another over time. Democritus’ philosophy is crucial to mechanistic materialism, the philosophy to which Lovecraft adhered. Since a well (or a cavern) dug deep in the earth is also a “void” of great depth, Glanvill used “the well of Democritus” to figuratively represent the infinite Void of our physical universe. (I am indebted to the entry on Glanvill in Anthony Pearsall’s The Lovecraft Lexicon for bringing this point to my attention). By referring to Democritus in “Transition”, Lovecraft is offering us a clue to his own philosophy – a completely non-supernatural one – and this elevates the basis of the horror in “Transition” from an instance of supernatural occurrence to a manifestation of the strangeness of the cosmos itself. On this point, “Transition” is very much in keeping with Lovecraft’s interest in “cosmic outsideness.”

But let us return to the sonic motifs in “Fungi from Yuggoth”. The “fungus” “Mirage” also includes the notion of tolling bells: “evening chimes for which I listen still”. And of course, in “St Toad’s”, the phrase “St Toad’s cracked chimes” is repeated thrice; another instance of insistent repetitive sound drawing the narrator on to some unspecified doom. Very similar in function, (that is, the notion of a sort of “unearthly music”), are the harbour-whistles of “Harbour Whistles”: “The harbour whistles chant all through the night; Throats from some strange ports and beach far and white,” While the motif of chanting or whistling in this particular sonnet is perhaps a step removed from the tolling of chimes that occurs in other fungi, and which corresponds in effect to the throbbing in “Transition”, it is another instance of Lovecraft’s fascination with the effects of repetitive sound. In “The Elder Pharos”, the imagery of the insistent sound of drums of is recapitulated: “the last Elder One lives on alone, Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums”. (Italics mine) The theme of throbbing sound in “Transition”, then, can be seen as an early instance of a theme of sonic horror which runs like a thread through of Lovecraft’s works. The horror of sound and repeated cries also figure largely in “The Nameless City” (1921) and “At the Mountains of Madness” (Feb-22 Mar, 1931), but this may be the subject for another essay. The Alleged Influence of Ambrose Bierce Chris Perridas of the HP Lovecraft and His Legacy blog has suggested that “Transition” is reminiscent in places of various phrases to be found in several tales by Ambrose Bierce. Lovecraft did read Bierce at Samuel Loveman’s prompting sometime in 1919. I am not entirely convinced by all the similarities of phrase that Perridas adduces between phrases in “Transition” and in tales of Bierce’s such as ‘The Moonlit Road”, “The Eyes of the Panther”, “The Night-Doings at ‘Deadman’s” and “The Damned Thing”. Some of them, however, are suggestive, and interested readers should check the detailed textual comparison made by Perridas by consulting: http://chrisperridas.blogspot.com/search/label/The%2 0Transition Inconceivable Depths “Transition” ends with these thoughts of the narrator: My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when the winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below [italics mine] a damnable suggestion of rhythmical throbbing ...and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.

The phrase “inconceivable depths below” adumbrates a similar and more memorable phrase used in Lovecraft’s later story “The Rats in the Walls.” Who can forget the following resonant sentence from that tale? “These creatures, in numbers apparently inexhaustible, were engaged in one stupendous migration from inconceivable heights to some depth conceivably or inconceivably below. (Italics mine). The word “inconceivable”, we may recall, also occurs in the description of Azathoth from the “Dream-Quest” as quoted above – Azathoth “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers.” “Inconceivable” is a partial semiotic analogue of “nameless” or “unnamable”; another example of Lovecraft’s use of non-explicitness in his horror fiction to increase the frisson provided to the reader. The Charge of Excessive Vagueness Joshi has criticised “Transition” because it “suffers from excessive vagueness” (HP Lovecraft: A Life, 167). While the story is certainly not satisfactory in all its aspects, I take issue with Joshi on this point to some extent. Hints and portents, the technique of keeping the actual horror offstage, form an integral part of Lovecraft’s technique in later stories. Let us cite just a few examples. Recall “The Unnamable” (1923), whose very point is that some horrors must remain nameless because they cannot be described. Again, consider the vague yet portentous references Danforth utters at the end of “At the Mountains of Madness”: “ He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about "The black pit," "the carven rim," "the protoShoggoths," "the windowless solids with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder Pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out of space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the eternal, the undying," (MM, 106). We know from other tales at least something about the nature of the colour out of space, and about Yog-Sothoth, and about the Elder Pharos (for which see the “fungus” of that title); but Danforth’s other mutterings point to strange and perhaps inexplicable places, things and experiences. There are many such instances of deliberate “vaguery” in Lovecraft’s work. Take, for instance, the concluding two lines of the “fungus” “The Pigeon-Flyers”: “The other laughed – till struck too mute to speak By what they glimpsed in one bird’s evil beak.” Well, what was it that was in that bird’s evil beak? We are not meant to know, but to imagine. And yet such a passage has not been subject to criticism for “excessive vaguery.” The same may be said of the figure of the High Priest Not to Be Described in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. This figure, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face, is of unknown identity and its face is likewise unknown. This figure recurs in the “fungus” “The Elder Pharos” where it is said, of a mysterious blue ray which shoots out from the plateau of Leng, that “Many, in man’s first youth, sought out that glow,

But what they found, no one will ever know”. (Italics mine). These instances of vaguery could be interpreted as meaning that Lovecraft himself did not know what the mystery was; but I suggest he deliberately utilised this artistic technique to impart more horror than could be achieved by describing the mystery outright. That great weird tale “The Night Ocean” by R.H. Barlow and Lovecraft (Autumn? 1936) could also be criticised for “excessive vagueness”; but few would disagree that in the authors’ refusal to delineate the actual nature of the horror lies the story’s very imaginative power. I believe that “The Transition of Juan Romero” is the more effective for leaving the horror ill-defined, whereas an artificial horror brought on stage may have lessened its power of suggestion. Similarly, let us consider that passage from “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) where Edward Derby sputters out his wild tale of the events in the Chesuncook woods to his friend Daniel Upton: “Dan, for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps... the abomination of abominations...” Once again we are given vagaries by Lovecraft – but highly suggestive vagaries. The effect of a phrase such as “the abomination of abominations” here is to allow the reader to form a picture of the horror in their own mind. This is the same technique that Lovecraft has utilised in “Transition”. I suggest that in refusing to delineate the actual nature of the horror glimpsed by the narrator in “Transition”, Lovecraft was beginning to work out in practice his theoretical position that horrors too specifically defined on the page are ineffectual. (Of course, the scientific precision with which he describes, for instance, the dead Old One in “At the Mountains of Madness” or the dead Wilbur Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) or the statuette of Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu” (Summer 1926) could be seen as undermining this argument; but this scientific precision formed another aspect of Lovecraft’s abilities as fiction writer. It seems there were circumstances where Lovecraft felt indefiniteness was the best policy, and other circumstances where a very careful delineation of a horror or alien being lent the narrative a sense of authenticity not otherwise obtainable). In regard to the plot of “Transition”, it is true that Lovecraft left things unclear or unresolved. What, for instance, is the exact function or relevance of the Hindu ring worn by the narrator, by which Juan Romero becomes so fascinated, and which goes missing at the end of the tale? Are we to assume that Romero’s death and transition has something to do with its disappearance? Or are we to assume that the dark hints about the narrator’s having delved into mysteries into India mean the ring is imbued with some special power? If so, has this power aided or hindered in the events of the tale? We know that Romero is fascinated by the “hoary hieroglyphs” on the ring (presumably these are characters in Sanskrit) and that the ring “glistens queerly in every flash of lightning” but that is all. Why is it that the ring has

the power to light the narrator’s way as he chases Romero into the mines? Lovecraft has certainly not made any of this clear. Let us frankly admit therefore, that in some essentials the story is weakened considerably and that charge of excessive vagueness can be justifiably levelled in regard to plot points such as this. The Abyss Too Deep to Sound The motif of the “abyss too deep to sound” also recurs in Lovecraft’s work as a constant motif. Consider the last two lines of the “fungus” “The Well” : “And yet we put the bricks back – for we found The hole too deep for any line to sound.” “The Transition of Juan Romero” can be seen as an effective early example of Lovecraft’s utilisation of the idea of horrors buried, submerged or lurking in the hidden recesses of our planet. We see this theme continuing to fascinate Lovecraft as late as “The Haunter of the Dark” (Nov 1935) where the character Robert Blake is made the author of stories which include “The Burrowers Beneath” ( a title which Brian Lumley, of course, later borrowed for one of his early ventures into Mythos fiction). Compare the theme of the “fungus” “The Dweller” with “Transition”; it is essentially about a nameless city unearthed by diggers who then encounter an unseen but horrifying force or creature. Its final two lines: “We cleared a path – but raced in mad retreat When from below we heard those clumping feet” encapsulate essentially the same emotions of horror that occur in “Transition”, though in the story there are no “clumping feet”. Lovecraft then, in “Transition” was groping towards a motif which would find more elaborate expression in many of his later tales. For Lovecraft, the suggestion that the earth is riddled with unknown and horrific creatures or presences is a constant source of horror; this is one of the most pervasive themes in his fiction. Many of his tales, like “Transition,” imply that the ground we walk on is merely a thin crust over unimaginable horrors. One need only consider the cavern of “The Beast in the Cave” (21 Apr, 1905) with its degenerate human within; the degenerate Martense family of “The Lurking Fear” (Nov 1922) with their subterranean mound-burrows which honeycomb the underneath of Tempest Mountain; or the descent into subterrene spaces which reveals successively frightful horrors in “The Rats in the Walls” (Aug or Sept 1923), to see this demonstrated in Lovecraft’s fiction. Other examples include the titan creature buried in the cellar in “The Shunned House” (Oct 1924); the descent into the Pyramid and the encounter with the hybrid monsters of “Under the Pyramids” (1924); Pickman’s painting “Subway Accident” in “Pickman’s Model” (1926) and other revelations in this story concerning what may lurk beneath modern cities such as Boston, and the

narrator’s consequent fear of subways and other underground places; “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” (Jan-1 Mar, 1927) with its hideous creatures locked up in the deep pits of Ward’s catacomb; and of course, the many instances of horror living in the deep places of the sea, such as in “Dagon:” (July 1917), “The Temple” (1920), “The Call of Cthulhu” (Summer 1926),“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (Nov?-3 Dec 1931), etc. Let us recall also that phrase from The Necronomicon cited in “The Festival”: “Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. (“The Festival,” 216). (Clark Ashton Smith echoed this quotation in an extended quotation from the Necronomicon is his tale “The Nameless Offspring” (1932): “Many and multiform are the dim horrors of earth, infesting her ways from the prime…”. (Smith, 3). I suspect that both Lovecraft and Smith partly derived this concept from the alliterative opening of Poe’s “Berenice” – “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.” But I digress). The parallelism of plot between “Transition” and ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter” may seem too obvious to mention. In both stories, two men venture into an underground location (in “Statement” it is a crypt) and encounter a force or creature (or creatures) of such hideousness or horror that the first enterer dies. Harley Warren in “Statement’ perishes; so does ‘Romero” in “Transition”; though Warren dies underground and Romero’s body is found next morning in his bunk. “Statement” was written some two months later than “Transition”, and I would be tempted to venture the opinion that “Transition” was in some senses a tryout for “Statement”, save for the obvious and well-recorded fact that “Statement” derived almost wholly from a nightmare of Lovecraft’s. (SL I, 94) It is interesting to speculate, since the two stories are so chronologically close in composition, whether the dream which caused Lovecraft to write “Statement” was in some wise derived from the imagery of “Transition”; that the theme of subterrene horror was ‘surfacing’ in his work at this time is clear, and there may be at the very least a psychological connection between the two tales. The Transition What is the actual nature of the “transition” of Romero per the story’s title? Clearly, at one level, it is the simple transition from life to death. Yet the tale obliquely suggests that there is more involved in Romero’s transition than this – that he has, perhaps, passed beyond the human plane due to his encounter with force or forces unknown. In this sense, Lovecraft’s tale implies that in encountering some force or being which cannot be adequately described in human language, that the narrator has been privy to some terrible gnosis. Again, this is a perennial theme of his work – the idea that in unearthing (willingly or unwillingly) information on the existence of beings on an order unguessed at by puny humankind, the individual narrators and characters of his stories gain an unwanted and

hideous knowledge of the insignificance of humankind in the cosmos at large. “Transition” adumbrates this theme to a marked degree. Also, what are we to make of the claim made by the men in the camp that neither Romero nor the narrator left their cabin the night they entered the vast rift? Were the men somehow hypnotized or mistaken? If not, did Romero and the narrator enter the rift in some non-corporeal state? And if that is the case, why is it that Romero’s body has died after encountering the unknown forces that inhabit the cavernous void? Again, we can only speculate on the explanations for these things, and one has to say that Lovecraft did not do a very good job of tying together these loose threads of the plot. Likewise, he has incorporated references to both the widely disparate Aztec and Hindu cultures, but there seems no clear reason why these might be connected through the events of the story. On these points, Lovecraft has let the reader down; and it was probably in recognising these facts that he refused to allow the story to be published in his lifetime. Deus ex Machina At the climax of the story, when the narrator looks into the final cavern which has swallowed up “the unfortunate Romero”, there is a terrible bolt of lightning which strikes the mountain: “Some power from heaven, coming to my aid, obliterated both sights and sounds in such a crash as may be heard when two universes collide in space. Chaos supervened, and I knew the peace of oblivion”. While the phrase “power from heaven” probably refers simply to the sky and is not meant in any explicitly religious manner, as S.T. Joshi has pointed out to me, this tendency to utilise deux ex machina involving lightning-bolts which “supervene” and bring “merciful oblivion” to the narrator of various tales is one of Lovecraft’s least effective literary devices. This is notwithstanding that Lovecraft probably borrowed the device from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which has just such a climax. Lovecraft was fond of merciful oblivion – recall the opening of “The Call of Cthulhu” – “The most merciful thing in the world…” and that phrase from “The Outsider” (1921) regarding the figure in the mirror – “it was the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide”. As to lightning and convenient thunderbolts, Lovecraft used this awkward and unconvincing device again in “The Picture in the House” (1920), where the tale ends with the following: “I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.” (DH 124), an ending which has always seemed to me laughably convenient. He verges on it in “The Lurking Fear” (1922) which is rife with storms: the tale opens “There was thunder in the air the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear.” The last episodes of that tale take place amidst “faint glows of lightning” (D, 198) and “insane lightning over malignant ivied walls…” (D,

199). There is a far more mature use of a lightning storm at the conclusion of “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935) where the storm is integrated more convincingly as part of the plot. “Transition”, with its crash which obliterates the narrator’s consciousness, is a fumbling first attempt to use this rather ineffective device. Conclusion “The Transition of Juan Romero” is neither a very good story nor a very bad one. It has its points of interest but it remains a relatively insignificant tale in Lovecraft’s corpus because of the unresolved nature of various of its plot elements. One can at least see in it in the partly-formed outlines of motifs and themes that Lovecraft would use in his later fiction when he had gained more command of his craft. Works Cited For Lovecraft’s works the following abbreviations have been used in the text of this article. AT: The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H.P. Lovecraft. San Francisco: Night-Shade Books, 2001. D: Lovecraft, H.P. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, [1986] corrected ninth printing (no date). Contains the corrected text of “The Transition of Juan Romero”. DH: Lovecraft, H. P. The Dunwich Horror and Others. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House date/ corrected 11th printing (no date). LAG: Lovecraft, H.P. Letters to Alfred Galpin. (edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz). NY: Hippocampus Press, 2003. LVW: Lovecraft, H.P. Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. (edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz). Athens, Oh: Ohio University Press, 2000. M: Lovecraft, H.P. Marginalia. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944. MM: Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964; corrected ninth printing (no date). OFF: Lovecraft, H.P. O, Fortunate Floridian!: Lovecraft’s Letters to R.H. Barlow. Tampa,FL: University of Tampa Press, 2008. (edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz). [I am grateful to S.T. Joshi for supplying a .pdf of Lovecraft’s letters to Barlow to me for the purposes of this essay as I had been unable to purchase the published volume as yet; hence references in the essay are quoted by letter number rather than page number]. SLI: Lovecraft, H.P. Selected Letters I. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965.

The following sources are listed alphabetically by author. Boerem, R. “Lovecraft and the Tradition of the Gentleman Narrator” in David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi (eds). An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft. Cranbury/London/ Mississauga: Associated University Presses (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 1991. Joshi, S.T. H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, Oct 1996 (2nd printing October 1997)

I contemplate the stars -- those distant suns Strewn in such huge profusion through the black And boundless space of this vast universe. Are their worlds, too, like our own wretched earth, Centers of monstrous, obscene sufferings Designed to glut the hungers of mad Gods -The Things that fashioned our mad universe? No answers come. At length I cook my meal Of frugal beans and rice, then bed me down Between my blankets on the leaf-soft ground, Clutching my knife and pistol as I drift Into a fitful and uneasy sleep, Wondering what fears the pregnant Night might spawn. Feb. 23, 2009

Joshi, S.T. and David E. Schultz (eds). An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Joshi, S.T. Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue: Revised and Enlarged. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002.

The August Derleth Centennial

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

Space doesn’t permit me to cover the August Derleth Centennial

Pearsall, Anthony. The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places and Things in the Tales of H.P. Lovecraft. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 2005.

in this issue in detail, but this important occasion occurred on Feb 24, 2009. (Feb 24 also just happens to be the birth date of our fellow SSWFT alumnus Phillip A. Ellis, poet and raconteur!) Here are some images I nabbed off George Vanderburgh’s blog (Vanderburgh runs Battered Tin Dispatch Box, a Holmesian publisher which has close ties with Arkham House). First up we have the designs of two first Day covers – well, the stamps for cancelling same being issued in Wisconsin to mark the occasion of Derleth’s Centennial. Pretty cool huh? John Haefele tells me you can get ahold of these things from George Vanderburgh at [email protected].

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. NY: Library of America, 1984. Schweitzer, Darrell. The Dream-Quest of H.P.Lovecraft. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, May 1978. Smith, Clark Ashton. The Abominations of Yondo. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1960. Wetzel, George. “The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study” in S.T. Joshi (ed). H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980.

THE SAD AND SPOOKY TIME By Richard L. Tierney It is the sad and spooky time of day When the horizon darkens in the west And the black trees upon the ridgetop's crest Cast inky shadows down upon the land. The dimming sun, fading to baleful red, Settles behind black pines to find its rest, Ceasing to light the earth. Now, leaden gloom Creeps stealthily into my anxious soul, Stirring within me dormant dreams of dread And rousing me to fears of death and peril. I light my fire, heap twigs and faggots on it, Then sit and brood as light wanes from the skies, And wonder somberly why all this world Came into being so full of fear and pain. What did its grim Originator gain By fashioning such a swamp of suffering As seethes upon the surface of this earth? My campfire flares, and as I heap wood on it

Next, an image of some promotional stamps which apparently Derleth devised himself, to promote his Sac Prairie saga. What a showman! And here are the covers of four new Derleth compilations which I understand Battered Tin Dispatch Box will issue under the aegis of Arkham House as a sort of joint publishing venture. So it appears Arkham House’ three-year publishing drought will soon be broken.

Finally, here’s a photograph of August Derleth’s grownup children, April Rose and Walden (Wally) Derleth, at a fantasy convention form a few years back. It is April who currently oversees the day-today

operations of Arkham House. I had long wondered what Augie’s grown-up kids looked like…

Mantichorus: Mailing Notes In a fit of virtuousness I am commenting on each and every contribution from the last mailing of both APAs!

EOD #145 Joshi/What is Anything?: A plethora of interesting projects! Fascinating article on how Poe wasn’t influenced by the Gothic writers! Nice piece on Wilum. I read somewhere PS Pubg will now do Black Wings? Hurrah! John Navroth/Lovecraftiana: Enjoyed the article on HPL & the Polar Myth. You might want to also track down the book Polaria: The Gift of the White Stone by W. H. Muller (Albuquerque: Brotherhood of Life Pubg, 1990, an occultist tract on Lovecraft which goes further into the Polar myths and HPL. Faig/Brobst, Lincoln, Poe. Nice piece on the 100year-old Brobst. I heard the interview with him that was played during the Lovecraft Centennial. Has anyone attempted to contact or re-interview him or photograph him these last few years? Worth doing for HPL’s last living friend! Poe & Lincoln – intriguing. Everts/ Horror Icons: Nice piece on Forry. I met him back in 1975 when I was 15 and he attended Aussiecon 1 in Australia. A sad loss to the world of sf and fandom…Hey, saying Derleth was a “polymorph pervert & bisexual pedophile” is over the odds. You may be unaware of the sexual proclivities of certain members of this a.p.a! What constitutes “perversion” is in the eye of the beholder – if you read your Freud you’ll find that for him it was a non-judgmental term. And what evidence do you have for pedophilia (i.e. “a sexual proclivity for pre-pubescent children”) on Derleth’s part? No matter your opinion of Derleth’s sexual orientation, his name should not be blackened by such an extreme allegation without proof. Lovecrafts: Danny –enjoyed the weird verse info re Australia. We must explore further! Margaret’s story

brought back childhood memories of cracker night; though the HPL connection was difficult to discern. Pugmire/Idiot Chaos: The book for Centipede Press sounds awesome – I can hardly wait. Lumley attacked you verbally? He plummets further in my estimation. Nice photo of STJ at the Whipple Gates! Drake’s Potpourri: I hope to read more of your work Dave. I just always have so much weird material to get through! Point taken re: Derleth. I’d also like to know more about Munn. Indick/Ibid: I hope your health at least stays stable, Ben. The Jorkens books are fun. There’s a movie out called Dean Spanley, based on a lesser-known Dunsany title. Why don’t they film one of his best books? I am still to read The Gunslinger books by King. I shall, I swear! XIIth Legion/McLachlan: Good reviews. I won’t buy into the atheism thing since I’m pagan. Schultz/Cthulsz: Yes, Derleth needs a thorough bibliographer; I have Wilson’s but it’s inadequate. Who shall take up the challenge? Fascinating info on Scarecrow and your editing processes. That plot robot’s a worry! Fabulous to look forward to all those future books including the many author-specific HPL letters vols! Livesey/Redux: Fascinating piece on the Crookes Tube! Lucky the narrator in “Shunned House” didn’t die of radiation! Burlesons/Gazette: Congrats on 100 issues! Good to know you atheists celebrate Winter Solstice! Does anyone know how Marc Michaud is doing these days? Very nice poems – why not send to Danny Lovecraft for his upcoming anthology of Cthulhuesque poetry? Your cryptographic tinkering with “Call of Cthulhu” reminds me of the type of thing the Qabalists do with the Talmud (you’ll probably hate me saying that) and modern ceremonial magicians do with Crowley’s ‘English Qabalah’. Wish I had the maths to do real cryptanalysis. Review of Infidel absorbing. Linda Navroth/ Squiddy’s Ink: J-horror is cool. Have you seen Pulse? Spooky. We can’t be reminded too often of HPL’s principles of writing weird fiction. Walker/Criticaster: Nice retro on FM 23. Your comment on the difference between spirituality and religion is well-taken. Belief in transcendence and the numinous do not necessarily imply one’s subscription to the tenets of the monotheistic religions – something that atheists often overlook. Re: films of HPL, I always thought Peter Weller (starred in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch) would make an excellent choice to play HPL himself. Neily: Gotta get that B&N Lovecraft volume. I got my uni library to order in the Stephen Jones Necronomicon compilation. Worth having for the Les Edwards illos. Good article on HPL movies. Punchy horror short by Bonniol. Andersson/Aurora Borealis: Kontext sounds fun. One never rushes into panels in Australia with snow in one’s hair! I commend your translation efforts re: HPL in Sweden. I also have a copy of Tierney’s Drums of Chaos coming after I got in touch with RLT after he blurbed my poetry book. He’s a legend! Awesome corrections list for HPL:Fic. My mate Perry

Grayson I believe lent John Pelan some assistance with obscure Long stories for the forthcoming FBL collection. Phillips/Kommati: The New Paltz Lovecraft Forum sounds great. I can’t believe I never even heard of this until you told me, and it’s been going 21 years! Sadly I’ve not yet read Waugh’s HPL book. Glad your Necronomicon paper was well received. Mention of Frankenstein reminds me that I am missing only the Karloff Frankenstein from the official Universal set of 8 classic monster movie DVD’s; this is an excellent series, with good docos and extras. Your joke about German food made me laugh heartily! Re: witchcraft books, I collect only the practical, preferring not to acquire those dealing with historical witchcraft (i.e. the witch trials etc); though I do collect books on the history of esoteric philosophy, history of magick, etc. Our collections in this area would complement each other nicely! Your poem this issue was very haunting; but I wish you would title them… Briggs/Dark Entries: Scott, welcome back! You may recall we used to correspond via snail mail back in the mid-80’s – mucho water under the bridge, eh? Greatly enjoyed your zine including the music recommendations. Gotta like a guy whose musical taste ranges across Emmylou Harris through Suicide to Morton Feldman! Haefele/Hesperia: Good biblio info on the Bart House and World/Tower eds of HPL. The high print numbers surprise me, given the rarity of the Barts these days – though the ASE’s are scarcer still. Wonder how many of the ASEs were printed for the for the forces. I’m very interested in Harold Gauer’s correspondence with Bloch, and if you are still in touch, you might give him my email, for I have a project afoot… Faig/EOD letter: Sorry to hear of the death of CJ Docherty. Enjoyed the reviews and the piece on Sonia. A curious legal tangle!

SSWFT #32 Szumskyj/Quill: Ben, all the best with your studies . I have valued working with you as a literary colleague and hope we will continue to do so! Good piece on Perez-Reverte. Barrett/Koshtra Belorn: Nice piece on C. Hall Thompson. I knew the first two stories but have never read “Pale Criminal” or “Clay”. See also http://www.rehupa.com/?p=701 for info on a story CHT wrote about a prisoner of war camp. I note “Clay” can be found in Stuart Schiff’s 1980 anthology Mad Scientists, but “Pale Criminal” doesn’t appear to have been reprinted since its WT appearance. I envy your acquisition of the massive Centipede Press HPL art volume. Book Depository seems great value – they send books post-free worldwide; a great saving for me in the Antipodes… Sheaffer/Dalriadic: More good stuff on TZ. Lovecraft based Innsmouth mainly on Newburyport, Mass, but Innsmouth residents are said to do their shopping in Ipswich. You ask if the horror anthology edited by myself (Terror Australis) is any good? Ha! It rocks! You’ll have to track a copy secondhand now, though, it’s been O/P for a goodly time.

Doig/Via Occulta: Nice title! And welcome to the APA. I love Lifeline Bookfairs too – they have ‘em in the Gong twice a year; always a few good finds. Thanks for the opportunity to read Prance’s ghost story, which I thought quite good. I love those old Four Square pbks – that’s how I got into reading horror back in the 70’s. I have all the Horwitz Higham anthologies, I think (although I’ll have to check on Weird Stories) and the James Darks. Looking forward to your 3rd antho of Aussie ghosts! Howard:/Change-Winds: Yep, feeling better now. Enjoyed your emcees and movie reviews. Are you interested in Solar Pons at all? I have long wanted to write some stories a la Basil Copper’s Derleth sequels…Marc Michaud’s daughter Marie seems to run the Necronomicon Press MySpace site, and the press has some titles on Ebay at http://stores.ebay.com/Necronomicon-Press but it’s all pretty inactive these days. (I met Marie when I ‘crashed’ on the floor of Michauds’ house in 1990 during the Lovecraft Centennial – she was about 2 or 3 and we watched a Disney film together, The Little Mermaid from memory…) Valentine/ Opharion: Ms in a Red Box was fascinating. Also fascinating about Arkholme – please tell me more! Congrats on the 3rd Connoisseur book; and thanks for the Wordsworth anthos, which are atop my huge reading pile, with Wormwoods and other good things. Andersson: Hyperborean: Too many books – aargh! I can’t keep up. Curious article about Norton I. Re: the Australian Dunwich, I have now researched it and a Lovecraftian tale based there is brewing in my fevered brain. I only exchanged a few letters with Bloch, and missed meeting him in 1990 because he was out of town when I hit LA. I did meet Dennis Etchison and Bill Nolan, and may someday write up an account of my fateful time spent with those two… _______________________________________________