Table of Contents
THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Tomb
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The White Ship
The Temple
The Quest of Iranon
The Music of Erich Zann
Under the Pyramids
Pickman’s Model
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Dunwich Horror
At the Mountains of Madness
The Thing on the Doorstep
EXPLANATORY NOTES
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES
H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life.
Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained wide knowledge of many
subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career,
but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine
Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction—three
short novels and about sixty short stories—has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent
work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural
fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.
S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Lovecraft’s collected fiction as well as some
of Lovecraft’s essays, letters, and miscellaneous writings. Among his critical and biographical studies
are The Weird Tale (1990), Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (1995), and H. P.
Lovecraft: A Life (1996). He has also edited Atheism: A Reader (2000) as well as H. P. Lovecraft’s The
Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and Algemon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Other
Weird Stories for Penguin Classics. He lives in New York City.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in Penguin Books 2001
Selection, introduction and notes copyright © S. T. Joshi, 2001
All rights reserved
The stories in this volume are
eISBN : 978-1-101-15721-3
CIP data available
http://us.penguingroup.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Peter Cannon, Daniel Harms, Donovan Loucks, Robert M. Price, and especially David
E. Schultz for assistance in the preparation of the texts and commentary.
INTRODUCTION
Nietzsche said that all philosophy is veiled autobiography, and much the same could be said of
literature. The biographical approach to literature is not currently in fashion, what with the
postmodernists’ gleeful proclamations of the “death of the author” and the New His toricists’
contention that authors merely mirror the social and political tendencies of their epochs. But authors
have proved a surprisingly difficult species to kill off, and their creations continue to embody indi
vidualities of style and outlook, and to refute the notion that literary works emerge fully formed, as if
out of a jack-in-the-box, without in some manner reflecting the physical, intellectual, and imaginative
experiences of their creators.
The horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is more amenable to the biographical approach
than many other creative works because of a series of historical accidents: the fact that Lovecraft,
finding few like-minded individuals in his native Providence, Rhode Island, established a wideranging circle of correspondents to whom he wrote tens of thousands of letters; the fact that these
letters do more than recount the mundanities of his relatively sedate physical existence, but embody
the widest range of his intellectual and personal predilections, from his preference in doughnuts to his
understanding of the cosmos; and the fact that many of his associates, from an early stage, appeared to
recognize the literary and biographical value of these documents and preserved them carefully, so that
they are now available for scholarly examination. Lovecraft has therefore become one of the most
exhaustively self-chronicled individuals of his century, and his letters are the equivalent of a Pepys
diary in their exhibition of the fluctuations of his mind and heart.
It would seem, on the surface, that horror and fantasy literature are not fruitful for biographical
analysis, since (as Lovecraft himself stated) the essence of these literary modes is to depict
“something which could not possibly happen.”1 But while the actual supernatural event is not likely to
yield any simple or straightforward autobiographical connection, other aspects of a story may well do
so. Naturally, care and judgment must always be exercised. When, in the early story “The Tomb”
(1917), Lovecraft’s narrator declares that he was “wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life,
and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances,” we
see the expression of a wish rather than of the reality. Lovecraft was indeed born into a relatively
well-to-do family that could boast one authentic business genius—his grandfather Whipple Van Buren
Phillips, a bold and dynamic industrialist who made and lost several fortunes in his continentspanning career—but by 1917 the family had already been reduced both in numbers (Lovecraft’s
father had died in 1898 of syphilis, his grandfather in 1904 of heart failure, probably brought on by his
latest business collapse) and in economic wealth, so that Lovecraft, his mother, and his two aunts were
compelled to struggle along largely on the ever-dwindling supply of money from Whipple’s
inheritance. As for “formal studies,” Lovecraft’s early ill-health—very likely nervous or
psychological in origin —caused his school attendance to be highly irregular: two separate years
(1898-99 and 1902-3) at the Slater Avenue School, and four years (1904-8), with numerous absences,
at the Hope Street High School, culminating in a nervous breakdown that resulted in his abrupt
withdrawal without a diploma. For the next five years Lovecraft became as reclusive as any of his
eccentric narrators, absorbing prodigious quantities of information out of books but doing little to
make himself employable in the outside world.
Perhaps Lovecraft’s turn to pure fantasy in 1919, under the influence of the great Irish novelist and
playwright Lord Dunsany, was not so surprising. By this time his mother had suffered a nervous
breakdown of her own and would never emerge from the sanitarium in which she was confined. Was
Lovecraft merely seeking an “escape from life”?2 That would perhaps be a too facile analysis. Anyone
who has ever read the early work of Dunsany—especially The Gods of Pegāna (1905) and A
Dreamer’s Tales (1910)—will attest to the almost sensual experience of ideal beauty embodied in
them, and it is no surprise that Lovecraft spent the better part of the next two years in earnest but
ultimately futile attempts to duplicate the style and spirit of his mentor. And yet, his “Dunsanian”
tales are “failures” only when gauged as simple pastiches; for a large part of their “failure” resides in
the plain fact that Lovecraft’s own temperament keeps obtruding itself in tales that he himself
envisioned as nothing but humble imitations. When, in “The White Ship” (1919), the protagonist
deserts the tranquil Land of Sona-Nyl, where “there is . . . neither suffering nor death,” for what
proves to be the mythical realm of Cathuria, “the Land of Hope,” we see a direct reflection of the
Epicurean moral philosophy that Lovecraft had absorbed as a result of his early classical studies:
“Remember that the goal of the great Epicurus was not an earthly he-done (Hedonism), or pleasure,
but a lofty ataraxia, or freedom from cares and trivial thoughts.”3 And when Iranon, in “The Quest of
Iranon” (1921), becomes old overnight because he has suddenly lost the hope of ever finding the
imaginary realm of Aira, we find a philosophical message for which we would search in vain in the
work of Dunsany. “The flight of imagination,” wrote Lovecraft in 1920, “and the delineation of
pastoral or natural beauty, can be accomplished as well in prose as in verse—often better. It is this
lesson which the inimitable Dunsany hath taught me.”4
But Lovecraft would not be much remembered if he had written nothing but the competent but
ultimately insubstantial tales of the first five or six years of his literary career. Even so perfectly
crafted a tale as “The Music of Erich Zann” (1921)—which Lovecraft ranked second among his own
favorites, after “The Colour Out of Space”—does no more than hint at the cosmic horrors of his final
decade. Lovecraft came to realize that he would need a broader palette with which to paint the
wonders and terrors of the universe of which the earth and all upon it are the tiniest and most
insignificant particles. It was not merely a matter of length, although that was important (most of his
later tales are novelettes, novellas, or short novels, but even the longest of them retain all the unity of
effect that Poe sought in the short story); he also needed to fuse the varied literary influences upon his
work—Poe; Dunsany; the Welsh mystic Arthur Machen, whose novels and stories Lovecraft
discovered in 1923; the cosmic tales of Algernon Blackwood, first read in 1924—so as to produce that
new and unclassifiable amalgam we call the Lovecraftian tale. More, he required some further life
experiences—including an uprooting from the placidity of his rather aimless life as a “professional
amateur” in Providence.
“Under the Pyramids” provides a hint of some of these changes. Its autobiographical features relate
not to the incidents it depicts but to its mode of composition. In early 1924 Lovecraft, having become
the star writer for the new pulp magazine Weird Tales , was asked to ghostwrite a story for escape
artist Harry Houdini, who had been persuaded to lend his name to the magazine in order to rescue it
from flagging sales and an early demise. Lovecraft did not meet Houdini at this time (he would do so
later, in New York), but was told of an adventure that Houdini had supposedly experienced in Egypt
more than a decade earlier, and this was to serve as the basis for the narrative. Lovecraft quickly
determined that Houdini’s story was pure fiction, and he asked Weird Tales owner J. C. Henneberger
for as much latitude as possible in fashioning his tale. Apparently Lovecraft was given that latitude,
for the tale as we have it is certainly extravagant to a fault, although providing the kind of “guilty
pleasure” that the best pulp fiction was meant to provide. Alas for the best-laid plans of mice and
men! Lovecraft, delaying until the last minute, finished the story only a day or two before he departed
for New York on March 2, 1924, on a voyage whose true purpose he revealed to no one, not even to his
two aunts—his marriage to Sonia H. Greene, a Russian Jewish immigrant seven years his senior. The
marriage took place the next day, Lovecraft casually informing his aunts a week later by letter; but in
the rush of events, he left the typescript of the story in Union Station in Providence! (It is from the ad
Lovecraft placed in the lost-and-found section of the Providence Journal that we know his preferred
title to the story; it was published in Weird Tales as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.”) The newlyweds
were therefore obliged to spend much of the next two days retyping the manuscript, which Lovecraft
had providentially brought along with him. Sonia remarks, with exquisite tact, that “when the [typing
of the] manuscript was finished we were too tired and exhausted for honeymooning or anything else.”5
Why would such a man as Lovecraft—who up to this point had expressed an interest only in
literature, science, colonial antiquities, and other intellectual subjects, and who at the age of twentynine had expressed a complete inexperience in “amatory phenomena”6—suddenly plunge into
marriage? To be sure, Lovecraft was one of the most asexual beings on record; perhaps he thought that
his marriage would also be largely an affair of the intellect. Certainly, his strange March 9 letter to his
aunts unwittingly suggests that marriage to Sonia might be slightly preferable to boredom and suicide!
But perhaps a much later work—the story “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933)—provides some hints,
although even these may be unwitting.
Here we find a weak-willed individual, Edward Derby, who upon the death of his mother “was
incapacitated by some odd psychological malady”—just as Lovecraft professed that the death of his
own mother in 1921 “gave me an extreme nervous shock,” and later: “Psychologically I am conscious
of a vastly increased aimlessness and inability to be interested in events. . . . This bereavement
decentralises existence—my sphere no longer possesses a nucleus, since there is now no one person
especially interested in what I do or whether I be alive or dead.”7 But what does Derby do? “Afterward
he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage.”
This is the closest Lovecraft ever came to speaking, in public, of the effect his mother had upon him.
The cloistered life the two of them led from 1904 to 1919—with ever-dwindling finances and with his
mother so terrified of bankruptcy and so frustrated by her brilliant but “useless” son that she herself
suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be sent to Butler Hospital—can only be imagined. Lovecraft
himself was plagued by a variety of nervous ailments during this period, and yet in later years he
would remark casually to friends that “My health improved vastly and rapidly, though without any
ascertainable cause, about 1920-21.”8 Was Lovecraft really so unaware of the “unseen bondage” he
had escaped? There is good reason to doubt it, if “The Thing on the Doorstep” is any evidence.
And just as Asenath Waite, although much younger than Edward Derby, pursues him relentlessly
until he marries her, Sonia Greene—who first met Lovecraft only six weeks after the death of his
mother—went out of her way to visit him in Providence and to invite him for lengthy visits to her
Brooklyn apartment in 1921-22. She claims that they were corresponding almost daily in 1923-24, and
he must have made the decision to marry and uproot himself months before he actually did so.
Initially, the fairylike skyscrapers of New York were a wonder and a marvel, and the numerous
literary friends he had in the area were a tonic both to his intellectual and to his burgeoning social life.
But eventually, one had to think of work. Sonia’s hat shop collapsed, and there was suddenly
“something of a shortage in the exchequer.” 9 Now began the humiliating period of job-hunting. But
who, in this city of garish modernity and hard-sell, would hire a well-bred New England gentleman
who had never been previously employed and seemed fit only to turn the elegant phrase? No one, it
transpired, even though Lovecraft tried such inapposite positions as salesman for a collection agency
and lamp-tester. Somewhat surprisingly, even publishing companies and advertising agencies that
might have benefited from Lovecraft’s facile pen turned him down. Sonia then had to leave New York
and take a job in the Midwest, Lovecraft holing up in a one-room dive in what was then the virtual
slum of Brooklyn Heights. Matters were not helped by his being robbed of nearly all his clothing in
May 1925.
In this trying period, Lovecraft himself exhibited all the weakness of will of his later creation,
Edward Derby. He could not bring himself to admit to his aunts that his decision to marry was rash
and ill-conceived, and that (as he wrote in “He” [1925]) his “coming to New York had been a
mistake”; instead, he waited until the aunts themselves (apparently prodded by Lovecraft’s best friend
in New York, Frank Belknap Long) issued the invitation to return home in the spring of 1926. Then,
while accepting that invitation with alacrity and relief, he gave little thought to how his wife fit into
the scheme of things. When Sonia proposed to set up a hat shop in Providence, the aunts vetoed the
measure: shabby genteel though they were, they still had enough sense of their social standing to be
appalled at the thought of a tradeswoman wife for their nephew. Lovecraft, like Derby, meekly
acquiesced in his aunts’ decision, effectively ending the marriage.
And yet, as Derby’s friend Daniel Upton hypothesized, “Perhaps the marriage was a good thing—
might not the change of dependence form a start toward actual neutralisation, leading ultimately to
responsible independence?” This is exactly what happened in Lovecraft’s case. As his longtime friend
W. Paul Cook attested, Lovecraft’s New York “exile” had been a hard necessity to his emotional
maturation: “He came back to Providence a human being—and what a human being! He had been tried
in the fire and came out pure gold.”10 His homecoming did not signal a return to the hermitry of the
1908-13 period; instead, with a stable and familiar base of operations, Lovecraft could travel both
physically (as he did over the next decade, from Quebec to Key West, from Cape Cod to New Orleans,
from Boston to Charleston) and intellectually: he began paying close attention to developments in
American and world politics, society, culture; his fictional work, accordingly, lost the “derivative and
overbookish” qualities that hampered the poetry of Edward Derby. His transient experience of New
York cosmopolitanism had only reemphasized the importance of his New England heritage for his
aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual outlook; and yet, he became the antithesis of the backwoods New
England farmer of “The Picture in the House” (1920), and instead took the entire cosmos as the stage
of his imaginative voy agings.
Lovecraft’s return to Providence in April 1926 impelled the greatest surge of creative writing he
ever experienced, including such memorable performances as “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and “The
Colour Out of Space” (1927). “Pickman’s Model” (1926) is one of the lesser components of this
outburst, but it is a tale of consuming interest for what it says about Lovecraft. To be sure, the setting
of the tale—the then decaying North End of Boston—is rendered with matchless authenticity,
although Lovecraft was mortified to discover that several of the locales (including the actual house
that served as the basis for Richard Upton Pickman’s studio) had been razed by the time he revisited
the place the very next year; but the tale also underscores the aesthetic principles of weird fiction that
Lovecraft had just outlined in his masterful historical sketch, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”
(1925-27), and would continue to embody in his own work for the rest of his life. The distinction
between literature and hackwork; the artist’s need for self-expression; the quest for sincerity and
honesty in art, whether that art be deemed “wholesome” or “morbid”—these principles may appear
elementary, even hackneyed, but Lovecraft’s resolute adherence to them is the chief reason why his
work has survived while that of the many “professional” writers for Weird Tales and other weird,
science fiction, and mystery pulps have vanished into a merited oblivion. In the short term, of course,
Lovecraft was the sufferer for his aesthetic inviolability: some of his best work was rejected by the
pulps as being too far beyond the stifling conventions of the genre, while it was unsuitable to a
mainstream market that was, in its own direction, scarcely less conventional in its outlook and had
deemed genre fiction as beyond the pale of serious literature.
One of the works that Lovecraft never bothered to prepare for publication, although he should have,
was the short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927). It is the second of the two lengthy works
he wrote at this time, directly following The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27). Two more
dissimilar works could scarcely be envisioned; and yet, in the end they underscore the same point. In
the earlier work, the Bostonian Randolph Carter searches through dreamland for the “sunset city” he
can no longer find in his dreams; along the way he meets all sorts of curious creatures—gugs, ghasts,
zoogs, and, of course, a legion of cats who float Carter on their backs as they leap from the moon to
the earth—and traverses a plethora of wondrous realms. The result is an orgy of imaginative
exuberance, free of the strict topographical realism that governs most of Lovecraft’s other work. But
what does Carter find at the end of his journey? He is told by the god Nyarlathotep in a passage as
poignant as anything in Lovecraft:
For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen
and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with
sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables
and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These
things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and
they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love.
Similarly, Charles Dexter Ward, a native of Providence, travels all over Europe for the secrets of
alchemy, but ultimately returns to the city of his birth—exactly as Lovecraft returned from two hellish
years in New York. The simple sentence “It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home”
is all we need to realize that Lovecraft is speaking of himself here. Ward is certainly the most
autobiographical of Lovecraft’s characters; and although he himself succumbs to the evil
machinations of the wizard Joseph Curwen, Providence itself is saved and remains pure and
unscathed.
The autobiographical elements in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) do not relate to character—unless
we adopt Peter Cannon’s wry theory that Wilbur Whateley, his mother Lavinia, and Old Whateley
represent deliberately twisted versions of Lovecraft, his mother, and his grandfather—but rather relate
to topography, embodying the travels in central Massachusetts Lovecraft had undertaken just prior to
writing the story. Celebrated as it is, the story seems to have more than its share of flaws and
drawbacks, particularly in a rather naïve good-versus-evil scenario that Lovecraft carefully eschewed
in most of his other work. It is by far his most “pulpish” story, and it is no surprise that it was snapped
up by Weird Tales as soon as he submitted it.
No one could imagine At the Mountains of Madness as being topographically autobiographical, for
Lovecraft never voyaged outside of the North American continent, let alone ventured all the way to
Antarctica. And yet, the Great White South had fascinated him since boyhood: he had written little
pamphlets on the voyages of Ross, Wilkes, and other mid-nineteenth-century explorers, had eagerly
followed the renewed wave of exploration at the turn of the century, and of course found Admiral
Byrd’s expedition of 1928-30 of consuming interest. Lovecraft was not shy in declaring the novel his
“best” work of fiction11—a judgment with which it is difficult to disagree. The meticulous realism of
the opening chapters is vital in allowing Lovecraft to suggest a slow and gradual incursion of
weirdness within this carefully etched realm. Just as, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward , Joseph
Curwen and his nefarious deeds are inserted craftily and seam lessly within the known historical
record of Rhode Island, so in At the Mountains of Madness Lovecraft incorporates his barrel-shaped
extraterrestrials, the Old Ones, within what was then known of the topography, geology, and history of
the Antarctic continent. Are we not told, in the Necronomicon, that the Old Ones exist “not in the
spaces we know, but between them”? And did not Lovecraft, by 1931, evolve an aesthetic of weird
fiction that exactly embodied this conception? “The time has come when the normal revolt against
time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—
when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible &
mensurable universe.”12
Lovecraft well knew that, in the type of weird fiction he was writing, memorable characters do not,
by design, bulk large:
Individuals and their fortunes within natural law move me very little. They are all momentary trifles
bound from a common nothingness toward another common nothingness. Only the cosmic framework
itself—or such individuals as symbolise principles (or defiances of principles) of the cosmic
framework—can gain a deep grip on my imagination and set it to work creating. In other words, the
only “heroes” I can write about are phenomena.13
And yet, Lovecraft also knew that his characters could not be so bland that they failed to elicit reader
sympathy and reader identification; at the least, they had to serve as the reader’s eyes, ears, and mind
for the perception of the supernatural or supernormal “phenomena” being presented. And in a few
works, as in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and “The Thing on the Doorstep,” characters do
function as more than merely “principles (or defiances of principles) of the cosmic framework”; and
in those cases Lovecraft found that the best source for the realism that would bring these characters
alive was himself:
All of us are more or less complex, so that our personalities have more than one side. If we are
reasonably clever we can make as many different characters out of ourselves as there are sides to our
personalities—taking in each case the isolated essence and filling out the rest of the character with
fictitious material as different as possible from anything either in our own lives or in any other
characters we may have manufactured from other sides of ourselves.14
That Lovecraft did indeed have many sides to his personality is revealed most clearly in his prodigally
vast correspondence; but in his fiction we also find many figures who in their varied character traits
recall their gaunt, lantern-jawed creator. If, as Vincent Starrett said long ago, Lovecraft was “his own
most fantastic creation,” then he chose a good source for the personalities of those hapless victims
who face their ineluctable doom with the quiet stoicism of a well-bred New England gentleman.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
PRIMARY
Lovecraft’s tales, essays, poems, and letters have appeared in many editions, beginning with The
Outsider and Others (1939). However, only certain recent editions can claim textual accuracy; other
editions (including almost all current paperback editions in the United States and United Kingdom)
contain numerous textual and typographical errors. Lovecraft’s fiction and “revisions” can be found in
four volumes published by Arkham House (Sauk City, WI) under my editorship:
The Dunwich Horror and Others (1984);
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (1985);
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1986);
The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989).
Annotated editions include The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (New York: Penguin, 1999),
The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Dell, 1997), and More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (1999).
Lovecraft’s poetry has now been definitively gathered in my edition of The Ancient Track:
Complete Poetical Works (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2001), superseding all previous
editions.
A large selection of Lovecraft’s essays can be found in my edition of Miscellaneous Writings
(Arkham House, 1995). Among other volumes of essays are:
Commonplace Book, ed. David E. Schultz (Necronomicon Press, 1987);
The Conservative, ed. Marc A. Michaud (Necronomicon Press, 1976);
To Quebec and the Stars, ed. L. Sprague de Camp (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1976).
The major edition of Lovecraft’s letters is Selected Letters (Arkham House, 1965-76; 5 vols.),
edited by August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James Turner. This edition, however, is not annotated
or indexed, contains numerous textual errors, and presents nearly all letters in various degrees of
abridgement. More recent, annotated editions of letters, edited by David E. Schultz and myself and
published by Necronomicon Press, include:
Letters to Henry Kuttner (1990);
Letters to Richard F. Searight (1992);
Letters to Robert Bloch (1993);
Letters to Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett (1994).
Schultz and I have also edited a volume largely culled from Lovecraft’s letters: Lord of a Visible
World: An Autobiography in Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).
SECONDARY
Since about 1975, the literature on Lovecraft has been immense. Much biographical and critical work
prior to that time is of little value, having been written largely by amateurs with little access to the
full range of documentary evidence on Lovecraft (exceptions include the work of Fritz Leiber,
Matthew H. Onderdonk, and George T. Wetzel). The following presents only a selection of the leading
volumes on Lovecraft; see the notes for citations of additional articles.
A useful reference work containing an abundance of information on Lovecraft’s life, work,
colleagues, and other subjects is An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).
The standard bibliography is my H. P. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated
Bibliography (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981). A supplement, co-compiled by L. D.
Blackmore and myself and covering the years 1980-84, was issued by Necronomicon Press in 1985.
The books in Lovecraft’s library have been tallied in Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue
(Necronomicon Press, 1980), compiled by Marc A. Michaud and myself. An expanded edition can be
found on the Necronomicon Press Web site (www.necropress.com).
M y H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press, 1996) is the most exhaustive biographical
treatment. L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975) was the
first full-length biography but was criticized for errors, omissions, and a lack of sympathy toward its
subject. Many of Lovecraft’s colleagues have written memoirs of varying value; these have now been
collected by Peter Cannon in Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House, 1998). Some further memoirs
can be found in my slim collection, Caverns Measureless to Man: 18 Memoirs of Lovecraft
(Necronomicon Press, 1996).
A selection of the best of the earlier criticism on Lovecraft can be found in my anthology, H. P.
Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Ohio University Press, 1980). A substantial anthology of early
and recent criticism is Discovering H. P. Lovecraft , ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Mercer Island, WA:
Starmont House, 1987). Other recent critical treatments, on a wide variety of topics, can be found in
An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft , edited by
David E. Schultz and myself (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991). Some of
the better monographs and collections of essays on Lovecraft are:
Timo Airaksinen, The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror (New York: Peter Lang,
1999), chiefly concerned with Lovecraft’s use of language.
Donald R. Burleson, H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Greenwood Press, 1983), a sound general
study.
Donald R. Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1990), a challenging deconstruction ist approach to Lovecraft.
Peter Cannon, H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Twayne, 1989), another good general study with up-to-date
references to the secondary literature.
S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990; rpt.
Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press, 2000), a study of Lovecraft’s philosophical thought.
S. T. Joshi, A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft (San Bernardino, CA:
Borgo Press, 1996; rpt. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press, 1999), a general study.
Maurice Lévy, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, trans. S. T. Joshi (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1988), a revision of a Ph.D. dissertation for the Sorbonne and perhaps still the finest critical
study of Lovecraft.
Steven J. Mariconda, On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations (Necronomicon Press,
1996), a collection of Mariconda’s penetrating articles on Lovecraft.
Dirk W. Mosig, Mosig at Last: A Psychologist Looks at Lovecraft (Necronomicon Press, 1997), a
collection of articles by a pioneering scholar in Lovecraft studies.
Robert M. Price, H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House,
1990), a collection of articles on the “Cthulhu Mythos” as developed by Lovecraft and other writers.
Barton L. St. Armand, The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (Elizabethtown, NY:
Dragon Press, 1977), a penetrating study of “The Rats in the Walls.”
Barton L. St. Armand, H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent (Albu querque, NM: Silver Scarab
Press, 1979), an analysis of the melding of Puritanism and Decadence in Lovecraft’s thought and
work.
Lovecraft Studies (Necronomicon Press) is the leading forum for scholarly treatments of Lovecraft.
Past and current issues can be consulted at the Necronomicon Press Web site (www.necropress.com).
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Although the texts in this edition are similar to those found in my Arkham House editions of
Lovecraft’s tales (1984-86), they have been recollated from manuscripts and early printed sources,
with the result that several additional errors have now been corrected.
The Tomb
“Sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam.”
—Virgil1
IN RELATING THE CIRCUMSTANCES which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the
demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my
narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh
with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically
sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no
sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the
delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the
prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate
the common veil of obvious empiricism.
My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.
Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal
studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible
world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books,2 and in roaming the
fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books
or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must
say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I
sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to
relate events without analysing causes.
I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no
human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the
companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular
wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming.
Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled
oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of
those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon—
but of these things I must not now speak.3 I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside
thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes,4 an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had
been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.
The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and
dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance.
The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened
ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome
fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned
the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up
from a disastrous stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion,
the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what
they call “divine wrath” in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination
which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of
the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a
distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay
flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger
strangely about the water-worn stones.
I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was
in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost
homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist
verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind
loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric
past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been wandering through the
mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need
not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was
oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briers, I
suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark
blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal carvings above the arch, aroused in me
no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but
had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards and
cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and
speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so
tantalisingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born
the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice
which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in
spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled
the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight
form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was
now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred
gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that
seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room
once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave
final judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.
The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the complicated padlock
of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the
structure. With the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual
secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth
mentioning that I was not all surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather
original ideas regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathing
body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister family of the burned-down mansion was
in some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites
and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the
tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the
nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward. The
odour of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond all
recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.
The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of Plutarch’s Lives
in the book-filled attic of my home.5 Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that
passage telling of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny
whenever he should become old enough to lift its enormous weight. This legend had the effect of
dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe.
Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the
heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed the
will of Fate.
Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my time was spent
in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out
to walk in those churchyards and places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What I
did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I know that on the
day after such a nocturnal ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics
almost forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I shocked the community with
a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history
who was interred in 1711, 6 and whose slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was
slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed not only that the
undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin smallclothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had turned
twice in his mound-covered coffin on the day after interment.
But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the unexpected
genealogical discovery that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the
supposedly extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this older
and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot
eagerness to the time when I might pass within that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the
dark. I now formed the habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my
favourite hours of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small
clearing in the thicket before the mould-stained facade of the hillside, allowing the surrounding
vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This bower
was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground,
thinking strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.
The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was
with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of those tones and accents I hesitate to
speak; of their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain uncanny differences
in vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England dialect, from the
uncouth syllables of the first Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed
represented in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time,
indeed, my attention was distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so
fleeting that I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been
hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulchre. I do not think I was either astounded or panicstricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I
went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day
unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.
It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the abandoned slope. A spell
was upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door
behind me and descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way;
and though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the
musty, charnel-house air. Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the
remains of coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the
silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read
the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later. In
a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well-preserved and untenanted casket, adorned with a single name
which brought to me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broad
slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.
In the grey light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the cabin of the door behind me. I
was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters had chilled my bodily frame.7 Early-rising
villagers who observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marvelled at the signs of
ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and solitary. 8 I did not appear
before my parents till after a long and refreshing sleep.
Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal.
My speech, always susceptible to environmental influences, was the first thing to succumb to the
change; and my suddenly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer
boldness and recklessness came into my demeanour, till I unconsciously grew to possess the bearing
of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with
the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the godless cynicism of a Rochester. 9 I displayed a peculiar
erudition utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered the
flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up suggestions of Gay, Prior, 10
and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits and rimesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to
disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of eighteenth-century Bacchanalian
mirth; a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like this:11
Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For ’tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
So fill up your glass,
For life will soon pass;
When you’re dead ye’ll ne’er drink to your king or your lass!
Anacreon12 had a red nose, so they say;
But what’s a red nose if ye’re happy and gay?
Gad split me! I’d rather be red whilst I’m here,
Than white as a lily—and dead half a year!
So Betty, my miss,
Come give me a kiss;
In hell there’s no innkeeper’s daughter like this!
Young Harry, propp’d up just as straight as he’s able,
Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table;
But fill up your goblets and pass ’em around—
Better under the table than under the ground!
So revel and chaff
As ye thirstily quaff:
Under six feet of dirt ’tis less easy to laugh!
The fiend strike me blue! I’m scarce able to walk,
And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!
Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;
I’ll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!
So lend me a hand;
I’m not able to stand,
But I’m gay whilst I linger on top of the land!
About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to
such things, I had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of
the house whenever the heavens threatened an electrical display. A favourite haunt of mine during the
day was the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture the
structure as it had been in its prime. On one occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently
to a shallow sub-cellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had been
unseen and forgotten for many generations.
At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered manner and
appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over my movements a kindly espionage which
threatened to result in disaster. I had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret
purpose with religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in threading the
mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept
suspended from a cord about my neck, its presence known only to me. I never carried out of the
sepulchre any of the things I came upon whilst within its walls.
One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the portal with none too
steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for
my bower was discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not
accost me, so I hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to my careworn father.
Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my
delighted astonishment on hearing the spy inform my parent in a cautious whisper that I had spent the
night in the bower outside the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked
portal stood ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced that a
supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sent circumstance, I began to resume
perfect openness in going to the vault; confident that no one could witness my entrance. For a week I
tasted to the full the joys of that charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing
happened, and I was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.
I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds, and a hellish
phosphorescence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was
different. Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of the slope whose
presiding daemon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged from an intervening grove upon
the plain before the ruin, I beheld in the misty moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The