Table of Contents: “Collected Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925)”

The stars have aligned, but rather than creating the correct conditions for Cthulhu to rise from his slumber, the end result is that I’m actually following through on writing yet another Lovecraft post. Your excitement over this development may vary; it’s possible that you were looking forward to being driven mad by the sight of a being the size of a mountain striding out of the sea. If so, apologies, and I hope my little blog post can provide you at least a taste of cosmic horror until the day when the one who is dead but dreaming awakens.

In my initial write-up I mentioned wanting to start a series of posts, but didn’t actually outline my plan in the body of what I wrote, mainly because I was still figuring it out. By the time people started commenting, though, I had a direction in mind, which I will now share here. My plan was to go a similar route to how Bryant approached his Lovecraft journey over on Truth Inside the Lie; I'd start with a post that just ran down Lovecraft’s works, whether I had read them, and what I thought / could remember about them. Then, using my fancy new Joshi volumes, I would really dig in to each story starting with "The Tomb."

That plan has been altered slightly, as in this post I’ll only be addressing the works which comprise the first of Joshi’s new volumes, “Collected Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925).” After that I’ll follow up with three additional posts which follow the same format for each of the remaining volumes, at which point the posts actually digging into the stories should (hopefully) begin. Another development from the comments was my desire to write about how weird fiction in general, and Lovecraft in particular, has gone through a resurgence in the past decade or so, and the last few years have been particularly interesting. It is not lost on me that this resurgence coincides with my own burgeoning interest in the subject; the Dark Tower fan in me wants to call it ka, but which kind of ka I don’t rightly know yet.

As I mentioned in the first post, I kind of jumped all over the place when I first started reading Lovecraft. That works fine for getting into an author's body of work, but is less conducive to the sort of semi-academic pursuits I have in mind. In an effort to catalogue all of his fiction – and to quiet my every-present collectioning OCD – I did at least have the presence of mind to compile a list of all of his stories a few years ago. Like most amateur scholars, I visited the hallowed halls of Wikipedia, and to the site’s credit obtained a nearly complete chronological list of not just Lovecraft’s own writing, but also the stories he had edited / ghost written, and the ones August Derleth had supposedly “finished” from notes Lovecraft left behind.
 

One outcome of this method of research is that, based on the information available to me, I believed that “The Tomb” was where we’d be starting our journey. I had somehow forgotten – despite their inclusion on the Truth Inside the Lie posts – that there are two pieces of published “juvenilia” Lovecraft wrote when he was 14 and 17, respectively. Thankfully these two stories are included in the first Joshi volume, and so I will be able to examine them in the proper order. In that same vein, Joshi’s newest chronology alters the dates for some of the stories based on new information he’s discovered; I have amended my own list accordingly, and below have reproduced the table of contents for the 1905-1925 volume:

The Beast in the Cave

The Alchemist

The Tomb

Dagon

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson

Polaris

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Memory

Old Bugs

The Transition of Juan Romero

The White Ship

The Street

The Doom that Came to Sarnath

The Statement of Randolph Carter

The Terrible Old Man

The Tree

The Cats of Ulthar

The Temple

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

Celephaïs

From Beyond

Nyarlathotep

The Picture in the House

Ex Oblivione

Sweet Ermengarde

The Nameless City

The Quest of Iranon

The Moon-Bog

The Other Gods

The Outsider

The Music of Erich Zann

Herbert West–Reanimator

Hypnos

What the Moon Brings

Azathoth

The Hound

The Lurking Fear

The Rats in the Walls

The Unnamable

The Festival

Under the Pyramids (Imprisoned with the Pharaohs)*

The Shunned House

The Horror at Red Hook

He

In the Vault

---

That’s 44 stories total, which is not an insignificant number, even for a volume that runs 530 pages, although many of them are quite short. Now, for the kicker: As of this writing, I have only read seven (!) of the tales listed above, and a couple of those are the shorter ones. So without counting those – even though I intended to re-read all of them for this undertaking – that leaves me with 37 stories to read twice, take notes on, and evaluate in the course of finishing “Collected Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925).” (If you think you hear something coming through the computer that sounds like a man screaming and running away, just ignore it. I’m sure everything is fine.) For now, I’m going to list the stories I’ve read, plus give a very brief outline of what I can remember about them.

*When I originally posted this, I somehow missed that "Under the Pyramids" was included in this volume. I have added a synopsis for it below.

“The Doom that Came to Sarnath”

I read this story after “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” in which the protagonist Randolph Carter comes across the ruined city of Sarnath on his journey. Of course, Lovecraft clearly wrote this tale before his longer imaginative epic and saw fit to incorporate it into the later story. He’s hardly the first author to do this, but I think he might arguably be the best at it. Unfortunately, I don’t remember many specifics from this story, other than that it don’t end well for the titular locale, do ye kennit?

“The Statement of Randolph Carter”

Yet another Kadath-related yarn, this one actually takes place later in Carter’s life… I think? I don’t want to give too much away, but it takes place in a New Orleans manor, where some folks have gathered to try and determine the fate of Randolph Carter. I will say that I personally am glad I read this after Dream-Quest, and would suggest other readers do so as well.

In the writing of a post which followed this one, I realized I had confused this tale with "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." Such is memory! This is actually the first Randolph Carter tale, and involves him trying to explain the disappearance of a companion while they were meddling with things best left un-meddled.

“The Cats of Ulthar”

Now we’re three-for-three on stories that would eventually come to be incorporated into Dream-Quest, and it occurs to me that I should eventually do a post – or a series of posts, or a dissertation – about how, like the Dark Tower for Stephen King, the tale Randolph Carter’s travels in the dreaming realm has tendrils which thread themselves through most of Lovecraft’s work. This particular yarn (cat pun intended!) is about a city where no man may kill a cat, and precisely how that law came to be.

“The Nameless City”

Aha! Here we have a story which doesn’t seem to have any direct connections to Dream-Quest… but is also basically the acknowledged starting point for the Cthulhu mythos! It’s most well-known for being the first appearance of the demonic couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie; And with strange aeons even death may die.”

This couplet is attributed to the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, writer of the fabled grimoire known as the Necronomicon, and both appear frequently in following Lovecraft works. The core of this story involves an unnamed traveler making his way deep into the desert, where he finds an entrance to an ancient – and possibly inhuman – city. From a writing perspective, this is where we first see many of the concepts and stylistic choices which permeate Lovecraft’s most famous stories.

“Herbert West–Reanimator”

Whether or not this story links to other is debatable, but it is the foundation for what is unquestionably the most well-known direct film adaptation of a Lovecraft story. I’d wager that anyone with at least a passing interest in horror is aware of Re-Animator (that’s how the movie stylizes the title). If that interest is any deeper than passing - and especially if it leans toward cult classics, cool gore effects, or schlocky B movies – then chances are good they’ve seen it.

The story focuses on the experiments of the titular Herbert West, as told by his one-time friend and assistant. There’s quite a bit of Frankenstein in there, along with some Island of Doctor Moreau. I quite enjoyed the story, though it causes divisiveness among some readers. (Hey there, Bryant and McMolo!) I will say that while it does put to use some of the tropes Lovecraft often relied upon, it reads differently than most of his other works in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

“The Lurking Fear”

Y’all, this story terrifies me for multiple reasons, none of which I’ll spoil here. Though I admittedly haven’t read every story that preceded this one, to my knowledge this is the first tale to fully employ the tropes which would become Lovecraft’s bread and butter. The narrator becomes embroiled in attempting to unravel a mystery that’s best left unsolved, and begins digging up parts of the past best left undisturbed; it also involves strange mounds of dirt and lightning strikes.

“The Rats in the Walls”

Along with the previous story, this one marks one of the earliest examples of Lovecraft’s “unnamed protagonist messes with things they ought not to” structure put to its full effect. I have a friend (Hi, Erich!) who puts this at the top of his list as far as scare factor; I personally still find “The Lurking Fear” to be more horrifying, but this one certainly delivers on the fear scale. Spoiler Alert: The titular rats are far from the most unsettling part of the tale. 

“Under the Pyramids (Imprisoned with the Pharaohs)”

 

I originally missed the fact that this story is contained in this volume, and if you’ll allow me to share a bit of history, I think you’ll understand why. This story was originally commissioned in 1924 by J. C. Henneberger, the founder of Weird tales magazine. The magazine had recently begun an association with Harry Houdini in an effort to combat its shrinking readership; Henneberger wanted Lovecraft to write a story based on an experience Houdini claimed to have had while in Egypt.

Lovecraft listened to the story and, unsurprisingly, determined it was utter nonsense, but found a nugget of potential within. After getting clearance from Henneberger to add his own twist to the tale, Lovecraft wrote “Under the Pyramids.” He then lost that manuscript, and had to completely rewrite it during his honeymoon, which is when it became “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.” The story was split into three parts and published in Weird Tales under the new title, although Lovecraft was given no credit, since Henneberger wanted readers to think it was Houdini telling the story.

I was therefore expecting to find the story in the contents of the fourth of Joshi’s new volumes – which deals with revisions and collaborations – rather than in this first volume. It wasn’t until I was reviewing the fourth volume’s table of contents last night that I realized my error. I would have been exceedingly surprised if this story hadn’t been included at all if for no other reason than Joshi himself has praised it on numerous occasions.
 

I was personally flustered to find I had mistakenly overlooked it because I also greatly enjoy this particular yarn. I’ve had a bit of the Egyptian mysteries flu my entire life, and Lovecraft uses the setting to great effect. Equally effective is the claustrophobia that begins to sink in the longer “Houdini” spends in those ancient, torch-lit tunnels. The finale is terrific, and I remember upon reading it that I felt the creators of Stargate owed Lovecraft a fair more amount of credit than they’ve given him, which as far as I know is none whatsoever.

 

 

 

 

So there we have it! Writing those snippets was fun, but also made me realize that at least a couple of those stories have become so dim in my recollection that it’ll probably feel like I’m reading them for the first time. I did my best not to look the stories up – not saying I succeeded in every case, just that I tried! – so that my original impressions remained preserved. All of the work and writing I’ve done so far has gotten me excited to get reading and taking notes, so fingers crossed my first story analysis post is up by early in 2018. My current plan is to have it cover “The Beast in the Cave,” “The Alchemist,” “The Tomb,” and “Dagon.”

Between now and then, depending on time, I may go ahead and do a post like this one for the remaining three volumes in the new Joshi set. My reading time is currently more limited than my writing time, and since these posts really just consist of me listing stories off a table of contents page and reminiscing about them, I can get them done more expediently than the analytical pieces.