Eldritch Tales

by H. P. Lovecraft

  Although Granada renewed their sub-rights deals on the Lovecraft books a number of times during the previous decade, by the early 1980s Gollancz’s Rights Department was writing to the publisher informing them that licences had expired for a number of titles and asking if they wanted to renew.

  In 1981, apparently in response to an enquiry from another British publisher about licensing the Lovecraft paperback rights, Gollancz confirmed in writing that At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Shuttered Room (aka The Shadow Out of Time) and the first volume of Dagon were all available. The Lurker at the Threshold had also been long out of print, although the rights were not officially reverted by Gollancz until March 1989. ‘Granada still have two titles under licence but they are not in print and I’m investigating,’ the letter continued. ‘These are The Haunter of the Dark and The Tomb (volume 2 of Dagon).’

  In a letter dated April 2, 1981, Granada confirmed that it was reverting rights to The Haunter of the Dark, while the last extension for The Tomb, dated March 2, 1978, was for a further five years.

  In March 1981, Granada’s contracts manager refused a request from Gollancz to revert rights on The Tomb because their edition was still in print. After that, there is no indication in the Gollancz files that they ever renewed the rights again.

  However, that did not prevent Granada continuing to publish the Lovecraft titles in new editions . . .

  Surviving correspondence indicates that in 1983 Gollancz had been considering doing their own Best of H.P. Lovecraft volume and, in response to an enquiry from Granada, they told the paperback publisher that they would ‘probably retain the rights’ in Lovecraft’s stories.

  However, John Bush (who would step down the following year as Gollancz SF editor and chairman) had somewhat confusingly already confirmed the reversion of Gollancz’s rights in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror in a note dated June 8, 1982, to A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd, who now represented the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in Britain.

  In 1985, Granada Publishing/Panther Books issued three volumes in the H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus series, all with distinctive covers by Tim White. The inaugural book, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror, should have followed the contents of the earlier paperback editions in the UK but, as a result of an editorial oversight, the first printing of this volume only included August Derleth’s introduction, the title story and ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’. Subsequent printings reinstated the remaining six stories.

  The paperback edition of The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales finally returned the collection to a single volume, while The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales retained the contents of the 1951 Gollancz edition, as well as adding ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’.

  On January 1, 1988, the works of H.P. Lovecraft went out of copyright under Britain’s Copyright Act of 1911, which conveyed a protection period of fifty years after an author’s death. However, when the European Union Directive on Term of Copyright came into force in the UK on January 1, 1996, it retroactively extended copyright protection for a further twenty years to life plus seventy years. As a result, Lovecraft’s work went back into copyright until the beginning of 2008.

  4. Postscript

  During the 1990s, independent imprint Creation Books issued the H.P. Lovecraft collection Crawling Chaos: Selected Works 1920–1935 with an introduction by Colin Wilson, while Penguin Books imported the three paperback volumes of Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi’s ‘corrected’ texts as part of their ‘Twentieth Century Classics’ series.

  More recently, Carlton Books issued The Best of H.P. Lovecraft under the Prion imprint, while Wordsworth Editions reprinted Lovecraft’s fiction in two ‘budget’ paperback collections, selected and introduced by M.J. Elliott: The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories, Volume One and The Horror in the Museum: Collected Short Stories, Volume Two (the latter edition replacing the quickly withdrawn compilation The Loved Dead & Other Stories).

  Just as Granada Publishing had swallowed up the Panther Books imprint years earlier, so it in turn was absorbed into the mighty HarperCollins empire. As a result, in June 2002 they reissued H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness collection as part of their ‘Voyager Classics’ series of prestige paperbacks.

  Meanwhile, Gollancz (now one of a number of imprints in the Orion Publishing Group) had launched its ‘Fantasy Masterworks’ series under the guidance of editorial director Jo Fletcher and John Bush’s successor, publisher and then managing director Malcolm Edwards.

  The series was an avowed attempt to build a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written. As Gollancz had already compiled collections of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith’s work, it would seem only natural that they would do H.P. Lovecraft next.

  In 2002, after checking the copyright situation and confirming that they still retained the rights, Gollancz came up with the idea of publishing all Lovecraft’s major fiction in two substantial trade paperback volumes, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Eldritch Horrors (containing mostly the author’s horror works) and The Strange High House in the Mist and Other Dream-Quests (which would feature all the remaining fantastic tales). Each volume would have included around 220,000 words of fiction.

  However, the books got bogged down in editorial discussions, and it was not until four years later that the project was eventually revived as an even more exciting concept.

  In 2006 Gollancz had combined the two volumes of Howard’s ‘Conan’ stories which had been put together for the ‘Fantasy Masterworks’ line into a single leather-bound hardcover entitled The Complete Chronicles of Conan, and priced to appeal to the mass-market. Along with an expansive historical Afterword, it included numerous interior illustrations by award-winning British artist Les Edwards. The handsome trade edition quickly went through multiple printings.

  If it worked for Robert E. Howard, reasoned Gollancz, then why shouldn’t it also work for H.P. Lovecraft as well? Consequently, the publisher started putting together the commemorative omnibus Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft.

  Produced in an identical format as the Conan volume for publication in early 2008, the book contained around half-a-million words and most of Lovecraft’s major weird fiction (but excluded some minor juvenilia and the majority of the author’s ‘revisions’). Gollancz decided to utilise the ‘classic’ texts created by Arkham House and Weird Tales, but made a number of corrections and revisions based on the vast amounts of research that has been done by Lovecraft scholars over the past two decades.

  The hefty volume contained another extensive Afterword, and Les Edwards once again filled the book with his remarkable illustrations.

  ‘Somehow Lovecraft has become permanent,’ explained the artist. ‘He endures. Even the word “Lovecraftian” has slipped into the language, although there might be strange ambiguities as to what it actually means. For some it refers to the literary style, for others it’s to do with bulging gelatinous masses, the chanting of barbarous names and huge, ancient and tentacled beings. It’s why the best of Lovecraft’s stories are worth returning to.

  ‘How these feelings translate into visual terms is another question. Obviously, the natural tendency for an artist is to concentrate on the visual, but there is limited capital in detailing every drooling fang and ensanguined talon. Certainly there must be tentacles and bat-winged night-gaunts, but, maybe – just maybe – there might also be some of the dread which will stay long after the lights are out.’

  As an added bonus, famed American cartoonist Gahan Wilson allowed Gollancz to use his detailed map of ‘Arkham circa 1930’ (originally produced for August Derleth’s magazine The Arkham Collector back in 1970).

  ‘In one of the many scrapbook biographical anthologies on Howard Lovecraft produced and published by Arkham House there
is a reproduction of a crude map of the witch-haunted village scrawled by HPL’s very own hand,’ he recalled, ‘and I remember my young self latching onto it obsessively and trying to fill in the blank spaces by hunting though memoirs and stories on the place by his friends and fellow authors, with only limited success.’

  Some years later, after August Derleth commissioned Wilson to create the cover illustration for the 1970 Arkham House anthology The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (‘Which I did, and for which Derleth broke all payment speed records by sending his check for the artwork via return mail!’), the artist thought to ask Derleth if he could help with the map of Arkham.

  ‘He responded at once and positive by saying he’d love to see such a map printed in The Arkham Collector and giving me what he could recall of the missing bits and some valuable addresses,’ explains Wilson. ‘I drew up a revised map using Derleth’s contributions and a few notions of my own (all labelled) and sent copies to people like Frank Long and Bob Bloch and others who had known HPL and surely had asked him Arkhamish questions.

  ‘They all answered (bless their hearts) with generous contributions and brand new suggestions based on what they had been told by the “old Gentleman” (how he would have loved living to be as old as I am now!), giving all sorts of helpful information not only on Arkham itself, but where it sat in relation to Innsmouth and Dunwich and other such matters.

  ‘I sent out another fleet of letters to all concerned to straighten out contradictions and, based on what they told me, drew yet another map, sent it out for their approval and, having got it, did the final map which Derleth printed on the centre double-page in the very next issue of the Collector.’

  Thirty-eight years later that incredibly detailed map formed the distinctive end-papers of Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft.

  Since its initial publication in 2008, Gollancz’s ‘Commemorative Edition’ of Lovecraft’s stories has gone through multiple printings (even outstripping the remarkable success of the imprint’s ‘Conan’ collection). Now, with the publication of Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft, Gollancz finally has – for the first time ever – all of the author’s major stories (along with a number of obscure ‘revisions’, his most important weird poetry and some notable non-fiction) in print in Britain at the same time.

  It has been a long and often complicated journey since Victor Gollancz wrote that letter to August Derleth from his New York hotel room in May 1950. Despite the occasional misunderstanding or minor upset, Lovecraft’s fiction has enjoyed a healthy publishing history in the United Kingdom, even to the extent that some compilations have been unique to this country.

  Now Lovecraft’s body of work has finally returned to Gollancz, its spiritual home in the UK, in a prestige format that once again re-establishes the author as one of the most original and influential horror writers of his or any other generation. Nearly seventy-five years after his premature death and exactly sixty years after his books first appeared on these shores, the cosmic wheel has finally turned full circle.

  H.P. Lovecraft is definitely back in Britain.

  Stephen Jones

  London, England

  OTHER COLLABORATIONS AND REVISIONS

  The following is a list of H.P. Lovecraft’s primary collaborations and revisions not included in the present volume.

  ‘Ashes’ (with Clifford M. Eddy, Jr.), originally published in Weird Tales, March 1924.

  ‘The Ghost-Eater’ (with Clifford M. Eddy, Jr.), originally published in Weird Tales, April 1924.

  ‘The Loved Dead’ (with Clifford M. Eddy, Jr.), originally published in Weird Tales, May-July 1924.

  ‘Deaf, Dumb, and Blind’ (with Clifford M. Eddy, Jr.), originally published in Weird Tales, April 1925.

  ‘The Curse of Yig’ (with Zealia B. Bishop), originally published in Weird Tales, November 1929.

  ‘The Man of Stone’ (with Hazel Heald), originally published in Wonder Stories, October 1932.

  ‘The Horror in the Museum’ (with Hazel Heald), originally published in Weird Tales, July 1933.

  ‘Winged Death’ (with Hazel Heald), originally published in Weird Tales, March 1934.

  ‘Out of the Aeons’ (with Hazel Heald), originally published in Weird Tales, April 1935.

  ‘“Till A’ the Seas”’ (with Robert H. Barlow), originally published in The Californian Vol.3, No.1, Summer 1935.

  ‘The Night Ocean’ (with Robert H. Barlow), originally published in The Californian Vol.4, No.3,Winter 1936.

  ‘The Disinterment’ (with Duane W. Rimel), originally published in Weird Tales, January 1937.

  ‘The Horror in the Burying-Ground’ (with Hazel Heald), originally published in Weird Tales, May 1937.

  ‘The Diary of Alonzo Typer’ (with William Lumley), originally published in Weird Tales, February 1938.

  ‘Collapsing Cosmoses’ (with Robert H. Barlow), originally published in Leaves No.2, 1938.

  ‘Medusa’s Coil’ (with Zealia B. Bishop), originally published in Weird Tales, January 1939.

  ‘Within the Walls of Eryx’ (with Kenneth Sterling), originally published in Weird Tales (as ‘In theWalls of Eryx’), October 1939.

  ‘The Tree on the Hill’ (with Duane W Rimel), originally published in Polaris, September 1940.

  ‘The Mound’ (with Zealia B. Bishop), originally published in Weird Tales, November 1940.

  ‘The Battle That Ended the Century (MS. Found in a Time Machine)’ (with Robert H. Barlow), originally published in The Acolyte Vol.2, No.4, Fall 1944.

  ‘Four O’Clock’ (with Sonia H. Greene), originally published in Something About Cats (Arkham House, 1949).

  ‘Satan’s Servants’ (with Robert Bloch), originally published in Something About Cats (Arkham House, 1949).

  ‘The Survivor’ (with August Derleth), originally published in Weird Tales, July 1954.

  ENDNOTES

  IBID

  1. Rome and Byzantium: A Study in Survival (Waukesha, 1869), Vol.XX, p.598.

  2. Influences Romains dans le Moyen Age (Fond du Lac, 1877), Vol.XV, p.720.

  3. Following Procopius, Goth. x.y.z.

  4. Following Jornandes, Codex Murat. Xxj. 4144

  5. After Pagi, 50–50

  6. Not till the appearance of Schweinkopf’s work in 1797 were St Ibid and the rhetorician properly re-identified.

  THE TRANSITION OF JUAN ROMERO

  1. AUTHOR’S NOTE: Here is a lesson in scientific accuracy for fiction writers. I have just looked up the moon’s phases for October, 1894, to find when a gibbous moon was visible at two a.m., and have changed the dates to fit!

  2. Motto of A Descent Into the Maelstrom

  3. Prescott, Conquest of Mexico

  HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890. A life-long antiquarian who had an interest in astronomy, his early work was initially published in the amateur press. His tales of horror and the macabre did not see print professionally until the early 1920s, and even then the bulk of his work appeared in such pulp magazines as Weird Tales, along with a handful of hardcover anthologies. A voluminous letter-writer, the only book of his fiction due to be published during his lifetime was the privately printed Shadows Over Innsmouth (1938). Following his untimely death in 1937, Lovecraft’s work was initially kept in print by Arkham House publishers and today his fiction – notably the influential Cthulhu Mythos – is known all over the world and forms the basis for countless books, movies, comics, collectibles and role-playing games.

  STEPHEN JONES is one of Britain’s most acclaimed anthologists of horror and dark fantasy. He has more than 100 books to his credit and has won numerous awards. You can visit his web site at www.stephenjoneseditor.com

  LES EDWARDS is an award-winning artist who has established himself as a stalwart of the British fantasy, horror and science fiction illustration scene in a career spanning more than thirty-five years. You can visit his website at www.lesedwards.com

  AL
SO BY H.P. LOVECRAFT

  The Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag (1923)

  The Shunned House (1928)

  The Battle That Ended the Century [with R.H. Barlow] (1934)

  The Cats of Ulthar (1935)

  Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)

  H.P.L. (1937)

  The Notes and Commonplace Book (1938)

  The Outsider and Others (1939)

  Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943)

  The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1944)

  Marginalia (1944)

  The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales (1945)

  Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945)

  Best Supernatural Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (1945)

  The Lurker at the Threshold [with August Derleth] (1945)

  The Dunwich Horror (1945)

  The Lurking Fear and Other Stories (1947)

  Something About Cats and Other Pieces (1949)