The Classic Horror Stories

by Roger Luckhurst

  Commandery: the name given to a local division of the Knights Templar order of the Freemasons.

  Cthulhu fhtagn! … wgah-nagl fhtagn: the terrifying fragment of incantation that first appears in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to the god of the sunken city of R’lyeh.

  shoggoth: the primitive slimy creatures that are the final terror in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. See note to p. 240.

  THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

  This story was written in 1934, then rewritten in 1935 and circulated only in manuscript. HPL’s crisis of confidence after the rejection of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ continued: in March 1935, he declared himself ‘woefully dissatisfied’ with this story ‘and may destroy this version as I did the first’ (SL v. 130). A second draft was too long to bother trying to interest Weird Tales, he knew. Once again, it took close friends to act on his behalf. Robert Barlow secretly typed up the manuscript and then presented it to HPL; this typed version was then offered to Astounding Stories on HPL’s behalf by Julius Schwartz in December 1935. It was accepted and appeared in the magazine in June 1936. As with ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, the editor F. Orlin Tremaine reparagraphed the story throughout to give it pulp pace, and this edition retains this version. Derleth corrected errors for the Arkham House editions, working from HPL’s comments. The original manuscript resurfaced in 1995 and a ‘corrected text’ appeared in 2003. The editor of the manuscript version, STJ, restored a very small number of passages altered or deleted by Astounding; these are noted below.

  1908–13: these dates suggestively match HPL’s own ‘breakdown’, when he lived as a recluse in his mother’s house.

  and did not go to Arkham … in 1895: Astounding simplified this sentence from HPL’s original, which ended: ‘and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as instructor of political economy in 1895.’

  someone else … possession of my thoughts: in 1930, the occultist Dion Fortune (Violet Evans) published Psychic Self-Defence: A Study in Occult Pathology and Criminality, which provided advice on how to prevent psychical attacks from a distance by malignant oppressors armed with intense hypnotic powers and ability to project their dominant will. Signs of attack were not just a sense of dread or anxiety, but also evil smells and repulsive physical traces: ‘sometimes there is a broad smear of slime, and at others, distinct footprints, often of gigantic size’. Fortune’s paranoid imagery shares many elements with HPL stories.

  unconscious … for five years, four months, and thirteen days: HPL exploits many psychological case studies of what was called ‘double’ or ‘multiplex’ personality reported from the 1880s to the 1920s, concerning people who suffered forms of dissociative amnesia or altered personality for many months or years. HPL had read Henri Béraud’s novel Lazarus (1925) about an amnesiac double personality, but HPL might have known about the famous case of Ansel Bourne, since Bourne lived in Providence, Rhode Island. After a severe blow to the head in 1887, Bourne disappeared from his job as a preacher, left home, and lived as a carpenter under the name A. J. Brown for several months, before his traumatic amnesia lifted and he returned to his previous identity. Another famous case was that of Hélène Smith, who under hypnosis by the psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy recovered memories of her time as a princess on Mars, and even transcribed in detail the Martian language (a language with sufficient consistency as to persuade the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure that it was authentic). Her case was published in Flournoy’s From India to Planet Mars (1899). Hypnotic or Mesmeric attacks are also the stuff of late Victorian Gothic fiction: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Gilroy in ‘The Parasite’ (1894) is also subject to a humiliating hypnotic attack by a foreign menace in the middle of a lecture and Bram Stoker consistently used hypnotic powers as a marker of supernatural intervention, in Dracula and elsewhere. In Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910), a man is occupied psychically by an eighteenth-century ancestor.

  secondary personality: the correct psychological term at the time, a translation of the French dédoublement de personnalité in the medical literature. It suggests HPL had at least a working knowledge of this field.

  utter alien usurping … her husband: also familiar in psychology, this symptom is termed the Capgras Delusion, the primary belief being that loved ones have been replaced by exact doubles or aliens.

  Himalayas … Arabia … Arctic … cavern systems: Peaslee visits sites that have resonated throughout HPL’s career: the Himalayas, the inaccessible terrain that was meant to be home to the ‘Masters’ of ancient lost wisdom in occult theosophical thought; the deserts of Arabia is the place from which HPL’s invented Necronomicon emerges; the Arctic was a space of mythology and occult belief as much as its polar opposite, the setting for ‘At the Mountains of Madness’; the cavern systems of Western Virginia included the ‘Endless Caverns’, which HPL visited in 1928 and used as models for illimitable subterranean spaces in his later fiction.

  Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes de Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred: an incantatory list of occult texts largely invented by HPL’s writer-friends. Cultes de Goules and De Vermis Mysteriis (‘The Mysteries of the Worm’) were fictional grimoires created by the teenage weird writer Robert Bloch, who was just starting to publish in Weird Tales and who was in contact with HPL through letters. Unaussprechlichen Kulten (‘Unspeakable’ or ‘Unnameable Cults’) was a book created by Robert E. Howard. HPL’s book of the dead, the Necronomicon, was cited in many key stories.

  Jevons: William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), pioneering economic theorist, using mathematics to examine commodity value.

  Einstein: Albert Einstein (1879–1955) published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 and the General Theory in 1915. See note to p. 140. For HPL’s use of the revolution in physics, see note to p. 287.

  alienists: the Victorian term for psychiatrists.

  true insanity, but … neurotic disorders: the major classificatory division between the psychoses and neuroses was relatively recent, the whole taxonomy of psychological disorders being transformed in the 1910s and 1920s.

  calamites: extinct ancestor to horsetail plants, bamboo-like in structure.

  cycades: cycads, the general category for plants like palm trees.

  Lepidodendron, and Sigillaria: each is an extinct genus of arborescent plants.

  Permian … Triassic: geological periods from 300 to 250 million and 250 to 200 million years ago.

  Palaeozoic and Mesozoic: Palaeozoic era was 540 to 250 million years ago; Mesozoic, 250 to 65 million years ago.

  theosophists: see note to p. 24.

  Pnakotic Manuscripts: see note to p. 164.

  agglutinative: agglutination is the ‘gluing together’ of simple terms to make compound words.

  Antarctica … Great Race: another listing of creatures that HPL has imagined in other tales, or borrowed from the weird tales of his friends. The star-headed creatures in Antarctica are the Old Ones who are found in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. Valusia is where King Kull reigns in the stories by Robert E. Howard. The Hyperboreans worship Clark Ashton Smith’s creation, Tsathoggua. The ambominable Tcho-Tchos were imagined by August Derleth.

  Yiang-Li … Lomar: invented names and references, but often embedded in HPL’s previous fictions.

  Nug-Soth … Cimmerian chieftain: more invented references and names, again embedded in HPL’s previous fictions. Nug-Soth is an echo of Yog-Sothoth, the creature first referenced in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. For Nyarlathotep, see note to p. 135. Cimmeria is the mythical country in which Robert Howard set the ‘Conan the Barbarian’ stories.

  fascistic socialism: the Fascists in Germany were officially known as ‘National Socialists’, notorious for the racist basis of their nationalism,
less so for the initially anti-captialist, anti-trust rhetoric of their politics in the wake of the economic collapse of Germany after 1918. In the economic crisis of the 1930s, many political stances suggested that capitalist crisis could only be managed by suspending democracy for a more ‘rational’ management of the economy by an authoritarian elite (many American science fiction texts supported the case for a ‘technocratic’ elite of engineers and scientists to run the economy, for instance, classically in pulps like Astounding Stories, where this HPL tale was first published). By the mid-1930s, HPL qualified his support for the violence and coercion of the German Nazis (SL v. 13) and suspected that their eugenic racial programme was not fine-tuned enough to manage the question of alien blood. HPL remained a racist authoritarian, yet he did swing towards ideas of more overt governmental management of the economy.

  Eltdown Shards as Yith: another reference to a Weird Tales story: Richard F. Searight invented The Eltdown Shards in a headnote to his story ‘The Sealed Casket’ (1935); they purport to be ancient pottery shards found in the south of England.

  unexpected places: the rediscovered handwritten manuscript of the story shows that Robert Barlow missed typing the remainder of this paragraph, which reads: ‘fresh rifts caused by that self-same geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities’.

  blackfellows: pejorative racial term for aboriginal Australians, used from early white settlement. In Victorian anthropology, Australian aborigines were seen to be the most primitive humans and therefore the earliest ‘survivals’ of the evolutionary development of man. HPL entirely conformed to this already outdated paradigm, commenting in a letter in 1934 that ‘Australian black stock’ had many ‘stigmata of primitiveness—such as great Neanderthaloid eyebrow-ridges. And it is likewise incapable of absorbing civilisation’ (SL v. 78). Further information in this paragraph on religious beliefs is lifted from the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Warburton’s path of 1873: Peter Egerton-Warburton (1813–89) undertook a famous exploration across the centre of unexplored Australia in 1872–3, crossing the Great Sandy Desert and arriving more than half-dead north of Perth. He recovered at the De Grey station. He published Journey Across the Western Interior of Australia in 1874.

  Dyer of the … Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31: a reference to the narrator of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, interlinking the two stories he published in Astounding magazine.

  abnormal memory: this echoes the access the patient Hélène Smith had to ‘Martian’ language when hypnotized by her doctor Théodore Flournoy in his study of her alternating personality in From India to Planet Mars.

  APPENDIX: ‘INTRODUCTION’ TO SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

  Researched and composed in 1925 when HPL was in New York, this essay was published in the amateur journal The Recluse in 1927. He continued to revise it for a possible republication in The Fantasy Fan, but the magazine folded before the new edition could be published. The revised version eventually appeared in The Outsider and Others (1939). Supernatural Horror in Literature is a historical survey piece and a guide to HPL’s reading, but the introduction is a manifesto statement in which ‘weird fiction’ is defined. The introduction is reproduced in full.

  1Colin Wilson, The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962; London: Abacus, 1976), 25. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree (London: Weidenfeld, 1973), 176. Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ (New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. xiii. Edmund Wilson, ‘Tales of the Marvellous and Ridiculous’, Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (London: Allen, 1951), 288.

  2 Lovecraft, Letters (16 Nov. 1916 and 27 May 1918), in Selected Letters, i (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1965), 30 and 67. Further references to the 5 vols. of letters (1965–76) marked as SL.

  3 See Don G. Smith, H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture: The Works and Their Adaptations in Film, Television, Comics, Music and Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), and A. Migliore and J. Strysik, The Lurker in the Lobby: The Guide to Lovecraftian Cinema (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003). For the spill of Lovecraft into wider occult beliefs, see Victoria Nelson, Gothika: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), and Jason Cavolito, The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (New York: Prometheus, 2005).

  4 Lovecraft, Letter (27 Feb. 1931), SL iii. 295–6.

  5 Fritz Lieber, ‘A Literary Copernicus’, in S. T. Joshi (ed.), H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 1980), 50.

  6 Lovecraft, ‘Notes on Weird Literature’, in Miscellaneous Writings, ed. S. T. Joshi (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1995), 113.

  7 Lovecraft, ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, 113 and 116.

  8 China Miéville, ‘Weird Fiction’, in M. Bould et al. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2009), 511.

  9 Lovecraft, Letter (4 June 1921), SL i. 137.

  10 Edmund Wilson, ‘Tales of the Marvellous and Ridiculous’, in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (London: Allen, 1951), 288.

  11 Lovecraft, ‘The Unnamable’, in The Dreams of the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin, 2005), 82.

  12 Kant, Critique of Judgment, cited in Carol Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 46.

  13 Lovecraft, ‘Suggestions for a Reading Guide’, in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces by H. P. Lovecraft and Divers Hands (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1966), 42 and Letter (7 Sept. 1934), SL v. 31.

  14 Quotations from Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper: A Study and A Confession (London: Cape, 1930), 12 and 26. Lovecraft, Letter (10 June 1929), SL ii. 357.

  15 Lovecraft, Letters, SL ii. 150 and iii. 39.

  16 Citations from Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 23, and In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy, vol. i) (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 9.

  17 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, 4th edn. (New York: Scribners, 1923), 167 and 263, and Grant, introd. to Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (London: Chapman and Hall, 1922), p. xxix.

  18 Citations from Lovecraft, SL i. 278 and 17; ‘Americanism’ in Miscellaneous Writings, 265; ‘Bolshevism’, in Miscellaneous Writings, 269; Letter, SL i. 207.

  19 Lovecraft, Letter (21 Mar. 1924), SL i. 333-4.

  20 Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Scribners, 1948), 87, 83, 86, 109, and 121.

  21 Lovecraft, Letter (8 Nov. 1923), SL i. 260.