Necronomicon
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Around the same time, Malibu issued the one-off Re-Animator: Tales of Herbert West (1991) with Lovecraft’s text illustrated in black-and-white, while the ten-issue The Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft (1993-98) series from Caliber Comics/Tome Press included ‘Arthur Jermyn’, ‘The Music of Erich Zann’, ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘Dagon’ (two volumes), ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’, ‘The Tomb’, ‘The Alchemist’, ‘The Lurking Fear’ and ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’.
The Cosmical Horror of H.P. Lovecraft: A Pictorial Anthology was published in 1991 with text in Italian, French and English. It included artwork by Virgil Finlay, Hannes Bok, H.R. Giger, Bernie Wrightson, Richard Corben, Tim White, Guido Buzzelli, Druillet and others.
H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu from Millennium adapted ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ (1991-92) and ‘The Festival’ (1994) over three issues apiece. Written and illustrated by Jason Thompson, Mock Man Press published H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1997-99). The five-issue series was issued as an animated film in 2004, limited to 1,000 numbered DVD copies.
‘Upon first reading “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, I knew I’d found a work which was the greatest of H.P. Lovecraft’s early dream stories,’ explained Thompson, ‘the purest of his sometimes hateful or jaded philosophy, and which was crowded with the most unique imagery in any fantasy novel of the twentieth century.
‘From the sleeping village of Ulthar to the allegorical islands of the Southern Sea, from the garden lands beside the Skai to Kadath itself, Lovecraft had created a world that yearned to be experienced - or at least seen. Kadath is an unrevised, flawed work, but this only adds to its mythical feeling; there are many fantasy novels with superior plots, but in terms of visual invention, nothing can touch “Kadath”.’
H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions (1999) was published by Oneiros Books in trade paperback format. It collected numerous black-and-white illustrations and three comic-strip adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories by British artist John Coulthart, with an introduction by Alan Moore. Published by Cross Plains Comics in July 2000, writer Roy Thomas and Spanish artist Esteban Maroto adapted ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘The Festival’ and ‘The Nameless City’ for H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu.
Graphic Classics: H.P. Lovecraft (2002) was the fourth volume in the series from Eureka Productions adapting the work of classic authors to comic strip format. The 144-page trade paperback included versions of ‘Herbert West - Reanimator’, ‘The Shadow Out of Time’, ‘The Cats of Ulthar’, ‘The Terrible Old Man’, ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’, ‘The Outsider’ and ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’, along with other material. The impressive line-up of contributors included Richard Corben, Rick Geary, Matt Howarth, Tom Sutton, Stephen Hickman, John Coulthart, Allen Koszowski, S. Clay Wilson and Gahan Wilson. A later second printing added ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, ‘Dreams in the Witch-House’ and the Lovecraft comedy ‘Sweet Ermengarde’.
Featuring an introduction by film director John Carpenter, Lovecraft (2004) was a heavily fictionalised biography of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. An original hardcover graphic novel from DC Comics/Vertigo, it was penned by script-writer Hans Rodionoff with Keith Griffen and painted by Argentine artist Enriqué Breccia.
‘Lovecraft’s particular style is very insidious,’ observed Rodionoff, who based the book on an unproduced screenplay. ‘It worms into your brain and stays with you, it instills a feeling of cosmic dread that’s hard to shake.’
Launched in 2007 by Boom! Studios, Fall of Cthulhu was an epic comic book series created by writer Michael Alan Nelson. Inspired by Lovecraft’s concepts, it postulated that ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ could be happening again in the present day.
Following an aborted attempt by games manufacturer TSR in the early 1980s to incorporate H.P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of elder gods into one of its Dungeons & Dragons games, Chaosium released The Call of Cthulhu: Horror Role-playing in the Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft in 1981. Thanks to the detailed background material derived from its source material, the game became a huge success and, as with the author’s original stories, spawned a whole industry of spin-off supplements, an adventure board game (Arkham Horror), a live-action game (Cthulhu Live), collectible card games (Mythos and Call of Cthulhu) and numerous tie-in books.
The 1992 video game Alone in the Dark was heavily influenced by Lovecraft’s work (even down to specific names and titles), while Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was a first-person survival game inspired by ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. Developed by Britain’s Headfirst Productions, it was released by Bethesda Softworks and 2K Games in 2006.
Illustrated by D.L. Hutchinson, The Lovecraft Tarot was issued by Mythos Books in 1998, and in recent years Lovecraft fans could choose between collectible action figure sets featuring Dagon and Cthulhu, T-shirts embalzoned with ‘Collect Call of Cthulhu’ or ‘Pokéthulu’ designs and, perhaps most disconcerting of all, a cute and cuddly Baby Shoggoth plush or various Cthulhu soft dolls with poseable wings and floppy tentacles.
In the decades since his untimely death at the age of forty-six years and seven months, H.P. Lovecraft and his works have become a marketing brand that is recognised all over the world. In a manner that he could never have imagined during his lifetime, while eking out a living revising other writers’ manuscripts and selling the occasional story to the pulp magazines, the author has even eclipsed his literary hero Edgar Allan Poe, and is now widely regarded as the pre-eminent American horror writer of all time.
All of his fiction continues to be available in hardcover and paperback editions, and anthology editors still draw extensively upon his relatively small cadre of stories. His writings continue to sell millions of copies throughout the world, and have been translated into every major language. Today, there are numerous web sites and chat rooms devoted to the author and his work on the Internet.
In December 2006, Sotheby’s auction house sold a signed manuscript of ‘The Shunned House’ for $45,000. An autographed manuscript of ‘Under the Pyramids’ achieved $24,000 and, even more staggering, a group of fifty letters by Lovecraft sold to an American dealer for a record $48,000. A total of twenty lots realised $203,400.
‘Personally I should not care for immortality in the least,’ Lovecraft wrote in 1921, and yet that is exactly what this Gentleman of Providence has achieved through his work, more than seventy years after he died in relative obscurity.
‘It is not for any of Lovecraft’s friends to give an estimate of any value as to his position in the literature of the macabre and of pure imagination,’ wrote W. Paul Cook. ‘Such an estimate from a friend will be both too high and too low. Possibly he will hold a permanent position more because of his influence than for what he actually wrote. His invention of a completely new out-of-space mythology which has been extensively adopted and used by other writers may be his final bid for lasting fame.’
Perhaps it is best left to his devotee and literary saviour, August Derleth, to sum up Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s standing as an author: ‘Lovecraft was an original in the Gothic tradition,’ he explained in H.P.L.: A Memoir; ‘he was a skilled writer of supernatural fiction, a master of the macabre who had no peer in the America of his time, and only the fact that in America there is no quality market for the supernatural tale prevented his work from reaching a wider audience. By his own choice he was in his letters, as in his personal existence, an outsider in his time.’
From a contemporary perspective, it is probably safe to say that whether he wanted it or not, Howard Philips Lovecraft is no longer the outsider that he once was . . .
Stephen Jones
London, England
June 2007
PRIMARY COLLABORATIONS AND REVISIONS
The following is a list of H.P. Lovecraft’s primary collaborations and revisions not included in the present volume.
‘Poetry and the Gods’ (with Anna Helen Crofts), originally published (as by Ann Helen Cr
ofts and Henry Paget-Lowe) in The United Amateur Vol. 20, No.1, September 1920.
‘The Crawling Chaos’ (with Winifred V. Jackson), originally published (as by Lewis Theobald,Jr. and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley) in The United Co-operative Vol.1, No.3, April 1921.
‘The Horror at Martin’s Beach’ (with Sonia H. Greene), originally published under the title ‘The Invisible Monster’ in Weird Tales, November 1923.
‘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 Green Meadow’ (with Winifred V. Jackson), originally published (as by Lewis Theobald, Jr. and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley) in The Vagrant, Spring 1927.
‘Two Black Bottles’ (with Wilfred Blanch Talman), originally published in Weird Tales, August 1927.
‘The Last Test’ (with Adolphe de Castro), originally published in Weird Tales, November 1928.
‘The Curse of Yig’ (with Zealia B. Bishop), originally published in Weird Tales, November 1929.
‘The Electric Executioner’ (with Adolphe de Castro), originally published in Weird Tales, August 1930.
‘The Trap’ (with Henry S. Whitehead), originally published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, March 1932.
‘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.
‘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).
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 published during his lifetime was the privately printed Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936). 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 nearly 100 books to his credit, and has won numerous awards. You can visit his web site at www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones
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 years. You can visit his web site at www.lesedwards.com