by Matt Cardin
The “Dreamscape” series, beginning with Hero of Dreams (1986), follows protagonist David Hero, who is transported to the world of Lovecraft’s “dreamland” stories. These novels are not horror but lighthearted sword and sorcery adventure. Hero and his sidekick Eldin have been compared to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, but, according to Lumley, they were actually inspired by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope’s series of “Road” film comedies from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Lumley’s “Psychomech” series (from 1984) blends horror with science fiction. It involves an injured British soldier, a wealthy German industrialist, and a means of transferring minds. His most successful series, titled “Necroscope” (from 1986), features Harry Keogh, a “necroscope” (one who can speak with the dead) whose mission is to fight and destroy vampires from another planet. These stories combine horror, science fiction, and espionage. A spin-off series, “Vampire World,” follows Keogh’s twin sons, beginning with Blood Brothers (1993). A second spin-off, the “E-Branch trilogy,” begins with Invaders (1999). A more recent entry is the collection Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates and other Tales from the Lost Years (2010). The original Necroscope novel has been optioned for a film.
Many volumes of Lumley’s short stories have been published, including A Coven of Vampires (1998), The Whisperer and Other Voices (2000), Beneath the Moors and Darker Places (2002), Brian Lumley’s Freaks (2004), The Taint and Other Novellas (2007), No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (2012), and Tales of the Primal Land (2015).
Lumley won the British Fantasy Award in 1989 for “Fruiting Bodies,” a tale inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night.” He won the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master award (1998), Fear magazine’s Best Established Author (1990) award, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (2010), and the World Fantasy Convention’s Life Achievement Award (2010). His short story “Necros” was filmed as an episode of the Showtime series The Hunger (1997).
Robert Weinberg has described Lumley as “an author of astonishing skills” and “a gentleman of equally amazing talents” (Lumley and Wiater 2002, 21). Approaching his eighth decade, Lumley shows no signs of putting these talents to rest. He has developed a wide and devoted audience, and he continues to write.
Lee Weinstein
See also: Arkham House; Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Occult Detectives.
Further Reading
“Brian Lumley.” 2016. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.
Joshi, S. T. 2004. The Evolution of the Weird Tale. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lumley, Brian, and Stanley Wiater, eds. 2002. The Brian Lumley Companion, 747–751. New York: Tor.
Schweitzer, Darrell. 1994. “Brian Lumley.” In Speaking of Horror: Interviews with Writers of the Supernatural, 75–80. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press.
THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD
The Lurker at the Threshold is a short novel of approximately 50,000 words published by Arkham House in 1945. It is attributed to H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, and is the first of more than a dozen “posthumous collaborations” published over the next thirty years in which Derleth took fragments or ideas found in Lovecraft’s papers and wrote pastiches of Lovecraft’s fiction based on them. The three fragments Derleth drew on for this novel amounted to approximately 1,200 words of text by Lovecraft.
The novel is divided into three parts. In the first part, Ambrose Dewart moves into a house on the outskirts of the Massachusetts town of Arkham abandoned by his ancestor Alijah Billington a century before. There he finds papers that mention accusations of sorcery aimed at several generations of Billingtons and references to strange noises, sights, and disappearances, all related to a circle of stones and a stone tower raised in the woods behind the house. Another document abjures whoever lives on the property not “to invite Him Who lurks at the threshold.” From a decorative rose window in the house Ambrose sees glimpses of an alien world, and on the night of a new disappearance he discovers that he may have sleepwalked out to the tower. The second part of the novel is the narrative of Ambrose’s cousin, Stephen Bates, whom Ambrose has summoned to the house. Stephen finds Ambrose acting peculiar, as though under the influence of another personality, and in time sees Ambrose performing a ritual on top of the tower invoking the name “Yog Sothoth.” Bates’s narrative ends with Ambrose informing him that he has hired a handyman by the name of Quamis, clearly a descendant or avatar of the Wampanaug Indian Misquamacus who taught sorcery to Dewart’s ancestors. The novel’s third part is the narrative of Winfield Phillips who, with his employer Seneca Lapham, a professor of anthropology at Miskatonic University, helps to piece together the mystery of Dewart’s apparent possession by the spirit of his ancestor and to thwart Dewart’s efforts to bring the monstrous entity Yog-Sothoth across the threshold into our world.
The Lurker at the Threshold was Derleth’s most significant effort to present ideas in Lovecraft’s fiction in terms of what he was defining as the Cthulhu Mythos, the name he gave to the myth pattern linking Lovecraft’s stories and the stories of others writing in homage to Lovecraft and his fiction. Much mythos fiction written in its wake would follow its pattern of cataloguing otherworldly monsters and books of occult lore, giving characters names that resonate with those of Lovecraft’s, and having “evil” monsters and their human servants defeated by the forces of good.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Arkham House; Cthulhu Mythos; Derleth, August; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror.
Further Reading
Joshi, S. T. 2015. The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Price, Robert M. 1982. “The Lovecraft-Derleth Connection.” Lovecraft Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall): 18–24.
Price, Robert M. 1991. “The Shadow over Dunwich: A Neglected Subplot in Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold.” Crypt of Cthulhu 10, no. 2: 5–7.
Tierney, Richard L. 1987. “The Derleth Mythos.” In Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 65–68. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont.
M
MACHEN, ARTHUR (1863–1947)
Arthur Machen was a Welsh author whose work has exerted a dramatic influence on the horror and fantasy genres. Often referred to as a “lost” writer, he nevertheless wrote works such as “The Great God Pan” and The Three Impostors that have resonated through ensuing horror fiction, and Machen’s influence in that respect is evident throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He was regularly cited as an important benchmark by the coterie of writers associated with Weird Tales, particularly by H. P. Lovecraft. More recently, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, T. E. D. Klein, Mark Samuels, and numerous other horror writers have acknowledged Machen as having a profound impact on their writing and understanding of the genre. King, Klein, and Samuels have all written explicit homages to Machen. In the wider literary world, Machen has received plaudits from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry Miller, among many others. Film directors John Carpenter—who named a character Machen in The Fog (1980)—and Guillermo del Toro have also cited Machen as an important influence on their work, as especially evident in the latter’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Del Toro also provided the foreword for a Penguin Classics edition of Machen’s work, The White People and Other Weird Stories (2012).
Machen was born in Caerleon, a small town in south Wales on the river Usk. The isolated, wild countryside in which he grew up was to remain a persistent influence on his writing, and the fact that Caerleon was formerly a major Roman settlement shaped his childhood imagination. He was the son of a Church of England vicar, who at the time of Machen’s birth was in the process of impoverishing his family through his construction of an extravagant new rectory, which became the home in which Machen was raised. Not having the finances necessary to attend university, Machen instead made an unenthusiastic attempt to enroll in medical school, before deciding to rel
ocate permanently to London with the intention of becoming a “man of letters.” He initially experienced only grinding poverty. After various engagements as a tutor, cataloguer, and translator, and the publication of a medieval pastiche, The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), Machen’s short stories began appearing in periodicals (then a burgeoning market), bringing him to the notice of Oscar Wilde, among others.
One of Machen’s “society” stories, “A Double Return” (1890), angered the readership of the St James’s Gazette to the extent that its editor declined to accept any more submissions from Machen. “The Lost Club” (1890), with its clear debt to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club (1878), marked the beginning of an influence that became one of the prevailing features of Machen’s output for the first half of the 1890s. Machen gained wide and fleeting attention from the reading public with his two books published for John Lane, an imprint very much associated with the controversial new “Decadent” movement: The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895). These exercises in weird horror were to be his most commercially successful achievements as an author, and they remain his most widely read works. Critical reaction to Machen’s uniquely potent blend of Stevenson, Poe, scientific horror, and pagan mystery was mixed and often negative. While H. G. Wells complained that Machen had “determined to be weird [and] horrible” (Wells 1896, 48), the art critic Harry Quilter less soberly accused Machen of being an agent of dangerous moral corruption. Machen was disparaged for being at once too graphic in his descriptions of hideous bodily degeneration and horrific tortures, and remiss in keeping the central mysteries of his stories nebulous and unresolved. However, this latter aspect of his writing has become increasingly valorized over the years, to the point where it is now regarded as one of his definitive stylistic achievements.
1863
Arthur Machen is born in Caerleon, South Wales.
1894
The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light is published.
1895
The Three Impostors is published.
1895–1900
Machen writes “The White People,” The Hill of Dreams, and Ornaments in Jade. None are published until after the turn of the century.
1900–1910
Following the death of his first wife, Amy, in 1899, a devastated Machen becomes involved in the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society. He will later become staunchly self-identified as a high church Anglican.
1903
Machen marries Dorothy Purefoy Hudleston.
1914
Machen’s “The Bowmen” is published in the Evening News in September, giving rise to the legend—widely believed as fact—of the “Angels of Mons.”
1916
The Terror is published.
1920s
Much of Machen’s work is reprinted in Weird Tales, gaining him an enthusiastic American audience.
1926 and 1929
Machen has new supernatural fiction published in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s The Ghost Book and Shudders.
1933
The Green Round is published.
1939
The Children of the Pool is published.
1947
Machen dies shortly after Dorothy.
Matt Cardin
The scandal surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 resulted in “unhealthy” literature such as Machen’s becoming too controversial for publishers and readers alike. While the immediate effect of the trial on Machen’s career can be gauged by the fact that Machen referred to it henceforth as “the disaster,” a series of legacies from a Scottish branch of his family meant Machen felt no financial pressure to calibrate his writing to the new public mood. It was during this period (the second half of the 1890s) that he wrote what was to become one of his most celebrated contributions to the horror genre, “The White People,” although it was not published until 1904. Intent on changing course from Stevensonian horror, a seam he considered by then exhausted, he also produced what are regarded as his most unambiguously Decadent texts: The Hill of Dreams, a novel, and Ornaments in Jade, an anthology of prose poems. At odds with the post-Wilde trial reticence of the closing years of the 1890s, both works did not see print until years after they were written, The Hill of Dreams in 1907 and Ornaments in Jade in 1924.
After the death of his first wife, Amy Hogg, a distraught Machen temporarily abandoned writing fiction altogether. He also had a brief dalliance with the occult society the Order of the Golden Dawn, which attracted a variety of notable fin-de-siècle personalities including W. B. Yeats and the notorious Aleister Crowley. Machen’s temporary embroilment in the fractious internal politics of the group, characterized by claims of supernatural persecutions, resulted in or was contemporaneous with an episode that some have characterized as a nervous breakdown of sorts: the still-grieving Machen felt as though various extraordinary scenes from The Three Impostors were now being played out before him, with, for example, Yeats assuming the role of the novel’s “Young Man with Spectacles,” psychically threatened by Crowley’s “Dr. Lipsius.”
During a happier subsequent period as a “strolling player,” or rather a repertory actor in the Benson Company, often playing various Shakespearean supporting characters, he met Dorothy Purefoy Hudleston, who became his second wife. Settled back in London with a young family, Machen found work as a journalist, an occupation that offered him financial stability, but that he bitterly resented. With his signature Inverness cape and pipe he became something of a Fleet Street character, regaling younger colleagues with an apparently endless repertoire of anecdotes in his sonorous Welsh accent. He was frequently assigned to more outré stories commensurate with his interests. It was during this period that he saw his second period of fleeting notoriety and success. Throughout the First World War, he produced morale-boosting pieces for the Evening News, including in September 1914 one with the simple title of “The Bowmen.” It is presented as an account of a supernatural episode experienced by a retreating army unit, saved from extermination at the hands of the Germans by the appearance of ghostly Agincourt bowmen. The tale was taken by some readers at face value, and exaggerated and distorted versions of it spread across the country until it was popularly regarded as fact. Appalled, Machen made every effort to correct the misunderstanding, but the (by then) “Angels of Mons” legend clearly resonated intensely with the national mood, and gained such traction that it is still occasionally discussed as a genuine mystery to this day.
Most of Machen’s output during the Great War could be fairly classed as propaganda, and his nonfiction War and the Christian Faith (1918) is explicitly so. A notable exception is perhaps the wartime serial The Terror (1916), the story of a revolt of the animal kingdom in response to the imbalance to the natural order of things created by the unprecedented scale of the human conflict. Rarely singled out for critical praise, it is nevertheless a well-executed and exciting shocker, and the horrific set-pieces suggest that Machen could have become a very capable thriller writer should he have been so inclined. The Terror is also noteworthy as an antecedent to, and possible inspiration for, Daphne du Maurier’s story “The Birds,” the source material for Hitchcock’s celebrated film.
During the 1920s, and while he was still working as a journalist, Machen’s work experienced something of a renaissance in America. A number of American writers and critics, most notably Vincent Starrett, were recovering Machen’s earlier fiction from obscurity and positioning him as a great forgotten writer of the fin-de-siècle. Machen saw some immediate material benefit from their enthusiasm through revenue generated from U.S. reprints of his work. He was also at this time being enthusiastically discussed in the pages of Weird Tales—which reprinted “The Bowmen” in 1928—as a master of the form. Although it does not appear that Machen directly engaged with or was much aware of this pulp milieu, there is evidence that he read and thought highly of Lovecraft’s discussion of his work in Lovecraft’s influential survey Supernatural Horror in Literature. In
1916, Machen had, coincidentally, favorably reviewed Clark Ashton Smith’s poetry anthology The Star-Treader and Other Poems.
Although Machen’s output between the wars was prodigious in terms of his journalism, nonfiction, and memoirs, he only occasionally turned his hand to supernatural fiction. Much of his work in the genre at this time was the result of commissions from Lady Cynthia Asquith for the various highly regarded anthologies she edited and contributed to in that period. Collections such as The Ghost Book (1926) and Shudders (1929) saw Machen rubbing shoulders with the likes of D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, and L. P. Hartley, as well as fellow supernatural fiction specialists such as Algernon Blackwood. Some of this work was later anthologized in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (1936).
Two more substantial late efforts are The Green Round (1933) and The Children of the Pool (1936). The latter is a collection of original short stories that includes “The Bright Boy,” noteworthy for its use of the trope of a malevolent, aged dwarf masquerading as a child. Once again, Machen anticipates du Maurier, this time her similar conceit in Don’t Look Now (1971), and also the 2009 horror film Orphan. Associated with his interest in fairy lore (evident in his “The Novel of the Black Seal”), the association of child-like figures with malignant supernatural forces became increasingly oblique in his later writing. Examples include the cruel children in “Out of the Earth” (1915) who have wizened, repulsive faces, and the strange childlike entity persecuting the protagonist of The Green Round. M. John Harrison’s short story “The Incalling” (1983) and also his novel The Course of the Heart (1992) offer clear debts to Machen in this respect, acknowledged by the author.