The Collected Short Fiction

Foreword To Cold Print - Chasing the Unknown (1984)

The first book of Lovecraft's I read made me into a writer. I found it in the window of a Liverpool sweetshop called Bascombe's. I was fourteen years old then, and went there every Saturday to search through the secondhand paperbacks at the rear of the shop once I'd made sure there was nothing in the window. Sometimes, among the covers faded like unpreserved Technicolor in the window, there would be a bright new book on which to spend my pocket money: an issue of Supernatural Stories written by R. L. Fanthorpe under innumerable pseudonyms (Pel Torro, Othello Baron, Peter O'Flinn, Oben Lerteth, Rene Rolant, Deutero Spartacus, Elton T. Neef were just some of them), a Gerald G. Swan Weird and Occult Miscellany whose back cover advertised studies of torture and flagellation and execution 'for the nature student.' But that Saturday, among the yellowing molls and dusty cowboys, I saw a skeletal fungoid creature, the title Cry Horror, the author's name I'd been yearning for years to see on a book. For a panicky moment I thought I hadn't half a crown to buy the book, dreaded that it would be gone when I came back with the money. I read it in a single malingering day off school; for a year or more I thought H.P. Lovecraft was not merely the greatest horror writer of all time, but the greatest writer I had ever read.

Some (Stephen King and Charles L. Grant among them) would take that to prove that Lovecraft is an adolescent phase one goes through - certainly a writer best read when one is that age. I can only say that I find his best work more rewarding now than I did then. Grant claims that 'when you grow up you discover that what attracted you when you were fourteen was his rococo style and very little else,' but I don't think it was so in my case; certainly I don't agree that 'the style makes the stories.' Indeed, I think that's precisely the trap into which too many imitators of Lo veer aft fall.

I was one of them, of course, having already done my best to imitate Machen and John Dickson Carr. If I avoided the trap to some extent, I did so unconsciously -did so because I didn't merely admire Lovecraft, I was steeped in his work and his vision throughout the writing of my first published book. I began it as a way of paying back some of the pleasure his work had given me, some of the sense of awesome expectation that even reading some of his titles - 'The Colour out of Space,' 'The Whisperer in Darkness' - could conjure up. No other writer had given me that so far. I wrote my Lovecraftian tales for my own pleasure: the pleasure of convincing myself that they were almost as good as the originals. It was only on the suggestion of two fantasy fans, the Londoner Pat Kearney and the American Betty Kujawa, that I showed them to August Derleth at Arkham House.

'There are myriad unspeakable terrors in the cosmos in which our universe is but an atom; and the two gates of agony, life and death, gape to pour forth infinities of abominations. And the other gates which spew forth their broods are, thank God, little known to most of us. Few can have seen the spawn of ultimate corruption, or known that centre of insane chaos where Azathoth, the blind idiot god, bubbles mindlessly; I myself have never seen these things - but God knows that what I saw in those cataclysmic moments in the church at Kingsport transcends the ultimate earthly knowledge.'

So began 'The Tomb-Herd,' one of the stories I sent Derleth. Since his death, a regrettable element of fantasy fandom has devoted a good deal of energy to defaming him. The honesty and courage of these people may be gauged by their having waited until Derleth was unable to defend himself and by the way they often conceal their smears in essays ostensibly on other subjects. For myself, not only did I find him unfailingly helpful and patient and encouraging when I most needed this support, but in retrospect I'm doubly impressed -that he could find anything worth encouraging among the second-hand Love-craft I sent him. Here are a few more choice passages from 'The Tomb-Herd':

'The house which I knew as my friend's, set well back from the road, overgrown with ivy that twisted in myriad grotesque shapes, was locked and shuttered. No sign of life was discernible inside it, and outside the garden was filled with a brooding quiet, while my shadow on the fungus-overgrown lawn appeared eldritch and distorted, like that of some ghoul-born being from nether pits.

'Upon inquiring of this anomaly from the strangely reticent neighbours, I learned that my friend had visited the deserted church in the centre of Kingsport after dark, and that this must have called the vengeance of those from outside upon him.'

I suspect most of us would be strangely reticent if a stranger came knocking at our door to ask why his shadow resembled that of a ghoul-born being, but let's go on:

'In that stomach-wrenching moment of horrible knowledge, realization of the abnormal ghastlinesses after which my friend had been searching and which, perhaps, he had stirred out of aeon-long sleep in the Kingsport church, I closed the book. But I soon opened it again . . .'

Best of all:

'(Now followed the section which horrified me more than anything else. My friend must have been preparing the telegram by writing it on the page while outside unspeakable shamblers made their way towards him - as became hideously evident as the writing progressed.)

'To Richard Dexter. Come at once to Kingsport. You are needed urgently by me here for protection from agencies which may kill me - or worse - if you do not come immediately. Will explain as soon as you reach me . . . But what is this thing that flops unspeakably down the passage towards this room? It cannot be that abomination which I met in the nitrous vaults below Asquith Place . . . IA! YOG-SOTHOTH! CTHULHU FHTAGN!'

Behold the trap I mentioned earlier - the fallacy by which one can persuade oneself that if one imitates or, more probably, exceeds the worst excesses of Lovecraft's style, one is achieving what he achieved. (One reason Lovecraft and Hitchcock are so often imitated is that both display their technique fully rather than concealing it.) But the hyperbolic passages in Lovecraft's writing (by no means as numerous as his detractors claim) are built up to; as Fritz Leiber puts it perfectly, they're orchestrated. It's easy to imitate Lovecraft's style, or at least to convince oneself that one has done so; it's far more difficult to imitate his sense of structure, based on a study of Poe, Machen (in particular "The Great God Pan'), and the best of Blackwood. I think that's the point Charlie Grant misses: Lovecraft's style would be nothing without the painstaking structure of his stories.

Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts and in general advised me in no uncertain terms how to improve the stories. I suspect he would have been gentler if he'd realized I was only fifteen years old, but on the other hand, if you can't take that kind of forthright editorial response you aren't likely to survive as a writer. I was still in the process of adopting his suggestions when he asked me to send him a story for an anthology he was editing (then called Dark of Mind, Dark of Heart). Delighted beyond words, I sent him the rewritten 'Tomb-Herd,' which he accepted under certain conditions: that the title should be changed to 'The Church in the High Street' (though he later dropped the latter article, along with the prepositions from the title of his book) and that he should be a"ble to edit the story as he saw fit. The story as published, there and here, therefore contains several passages that are Derleth's paraphrases of what I wrote. Quite right too: as I think he realized, it was the most direct way to show me how to improve my writing, and selling the story was so encouraging that I completed my first book a little over a year later.

I've included here a selection of tales from that book, The Inhabitant of the Lake. Though prior publication never deters me from revising my stories - revised editions of my novels The Doll Who Ate His Mother and The Nameless are soon to appear, and some of the stories in my collection Dark Companions were revised for that book - I've resisted the temptation to improve these earlier tales, partly because I feel too distant from them. Here they are, flaws and all.

"The Room in the Castle' expands Lovecraft's reference to 'snake-bearded Byatis' (am I remembering it accurately?) - Bob Bloch's originally, I believe. 'The Horror from the Bridge' is based, like several of these stories, on Lovecraft's Commonplace Book as it appeared in the

Arkham House anthology The Shuttered Room. It's based on two entries: 'Man in strange subterranean chamber -seeks to force door of bronze - overwhelmed by influx of waters' and 'Ancient (Roman? pre-historic?) stone bridge washed away by a (sudden & curious?) storm. Something liberated which had been sealed up in the masonry thousands of years ago. Things happen.'

The story is based to some extent on the chronology of events in Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror,' but towards the end I found I hadn't the patience to build as minutely as Lovecraft would have.

'The Insects from Shaggai' is based on another entry in the Commonplace Book, or rather on my misreading of it. Lovecraft wrote 'Insects or some other entities from space attack and penetrate a man's head & cause him to remember alien and exotic things - possible displacement of personality,' a superb idea I rushed at so hastily that I failed to notice he hadn't meant giant insects at all. (An account of the dream which gave him the idea can be found in the Selected Letters, volume V, page 159.) Of all my stories this is probably the pulpiest. As such it has some energy, I think, but I wish I'd left the note alone until I was equipped to do it justice.

I wrote the first page of 'The Inhabitant of the Lake' and developed writer's block. What released me weeks later was writing "The Render of the Veils' in the garden on a summer morning. It's based on a Lovecraft note ('Disturbing conviction that all life is only a deceptive dream with some dismal or sinister horror lurking behind') but it began my liberation from Lovecraft's style, in the sense that it's told largely through dialogue. I was pleased enough with it to want to name my first book after it, but Derleth felt - rightly, I think - that it sounded mystical rather than frightening. I returned to 'The

Inhabitant of the Lake' (again rooted in the Commonplace Book: 'Visit to someone in wild & remote house -ride from station through the night into the haunted hills. House by forest or water. Terrible things live there') with renewed enthusiasm.

Four stories followed that are not included here. 'The Plain of Sound' may be read in the small press journal Crypt of Cthulhu, in an issue devoted to my work. 'The Return of the Witch' was suggested by two Lovecraft notes: 'Live man buried in bridge masonry according to superstition - or black cat' and 'Salem story. The cottage of an aged witch, wherein after her death are found sundry terrible things' but it developed as a rewrite, virtually scene by scene, of a Henry Kuttner story I had never read and didn't encounter until several years after my story was published.

My story contains a moderately evocative dream sequence: 'He dreamed of wanderings through space to dead cities on other planets, of lakes bordered by twisted trees which moved and creaked in no wind, and finally of a strange curved rim beyond which he passed into utter darkness - a darkness in which he sensed nothing living. Less clear dreams occurred, too, and he often felt a clutching terror at glimpses of the shuttered room amid bizarre landscapes, and of rotting things which scrabbled out of graves at an echoing, sourceless call' and a sudden outburst of paranoia that points rather disconcertingly forward to fiction of mine such as The Face That Must Die: '(Look at the bastard! He tells you you're possessed, but you know what he really means, don't you? That you're schizophrenic. Push him out, quick! Don't let him come poking round your mind!)' but otherwise I think the story can be allowed to rest in peace.

'The Mine on Yuggoth' was a thorough rewrite of one of the first tales I showed Derleth, 'The Tower from Yuggoth.' I got one of the ideas for the rewrite in church, during mass, and I suspect that was when Catholicism lost its grip on me, though probably never entirely. 'The Will of Stanley Brooke' was my first punning title; the story attempted to tell its tale wholly through dialogue, with no Lovecraftian adjectives at all, but "I remember congratulating myself on the originality of a theme which in fact was Lovecraft's, from "The Festival.' The next story here, 'The Moon-Lens,' has its basis in a Lovecraft note ('Ancient necropolis - bronze door in hillside which opens as the moonlight strikes it - focused by ancient lens in pylon opposite'), as did "The Face in the Desert,' a poorly imagined Arabian tale Derleth rejected from the book and I for this one. More background on the book can be found in Horrors and Unpleasantries, Sheldon Jaffery's anecdotal history of Arkham House.

While Derleth was looking at the manuscript of my collection I wrote another story, "The Stone on the Island.' For a change, this was based on one of M. R. James's 'Stories I Have Tried to Write':

'The man, for instance (naturally a man with something on his mind), who, sitting in his study one evening, was startled by a slight sound, turned hastily, and saw a certain dead face looking out from between the window curtains: a dead face, but with living eyes. He made a dash at the curtains and tore them apart. A pasteboard mask fell to the floor. But there was no one there, and the eyes of the mask were but eye-holes. What (James wonders) was to be done about that?'

My solution was that it wasn't a mask. The tale may be technically superior to any of the Inhabitant stories, and it reads more like me than Lovecraft, I think. However, I find its adolescent sadism excessive, and so I haven't included it here.

Now began my struggle to leave Lovecraft behind and write like myself - a struggle that caused me to write an article, 'Lovecraft in Retrospect,' condemning his work outright (when what I was really condemning was my own dependence on him). I suspect that writing about his creations had been a way to avoid dealing with my own fears. My impatience with trying to imitate the Lovecraftian structure led to the extreme compression of some of the stories in Demons by Daylight, my second book. One story in that collection, 'The Franklyn Paragraphs,' is based on two notes from the Commonplace Book, and two stories written during that period belong to the Lovecraft Mythos. One, 'Before the Storm,' I didn't feel was worth rewriting in order to fit into Demons by Daylight; it appears here for the first time between hard covers. By contrast, 'Cold Print' was fully rewritten in 1966. Both show my struggles to be myself, I think, and in 'Cold Print' the struggle has pretty well been won.

I had nothing more to do with the Lovecraft Mythos until 1971, when Meade and Penny Frierson asked me to contribute to their extraordinarily ambitious (and, on the whole, impressively successful) small press anthology, HPL. I offered them 'A Madness from the Vaults,' written in 1962 but, I'd felt, too fantastic to fit into my first book. When I turned up the fanzine in which it had eventually appeared I was dismayed to find that its sadism far exceeded that of 'The Stone on the Island.' All I could do for the Friersons was write what was virtually a new story under the same title.

'The Tugging' was written three years later, in response to a request for a story for a DAW Books anthology, The Disciples of Cthulhu. That anthology set me thinking of editing one of my own. Just before his death Derleth had told me that he planned to edit New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Arkham House agreed that I should, and I contributed the story 'The Faces at Pine Dunes.'

Editing that book helped me organize my thoughts about the followers of Lovecraft. The great merit of Lovecraft's mythos was always that however much it showed, it suggested more: it was a way of sketching the unknown in terms that fed the reader's imagination -mine, certainly. Perhaps it was inevitable that writers such as myself would attempt to fill in the gaps. I think the most important question to be asked about any story based on Lovecraft is whether it conveys any of the awe and terror Lovecraft's stories did. I've little time for the kind of story which purports to discover yet another genealogical link among Lovecraft's entities - this kind of nitpicking may be all right for the fanzines, but hardly a basis for fiction - and much less time for stories that rob Lovecraft's concepts of awe by explaining them away. On the other hand, I admire such disparate stories as Bloch's 'Notebook Found in a Deserted House' (surely the most frightening Mythos tale by anyone other than Lovecraft), Wandrei's 'The Tree-Men of M'Bwa' and The Web of Easter Island, Frank Belknap Long's 'The Space-Eaters' (an oddly moving as well as awesome story about the pupil confounding the teacher), Henry Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats,' T.E.D. Klein's 'Black Man with a Horn,' among quite a few others.

My doubts about the overpopulation and overexplanation of the Mythos prompted me to write 'The Voice of the Beach.' Lovecraft regarded Blackwood's 'The Willows' - in which, as he often pointed out, nothing is shown or stated directly - as the finest of all weird tales. The closest he came to achieving what Blackwood achieved was in 'The Colour out of Space,' which contains none of the paraphernalia of the later mythos. 'The Voice of the Beach' was my attempt to return to Lovecraft's first principles, to see how close I could get to his aims without the encumbrances of the mythos. Lin Carter looked at the story when he was editing Weird Tales, but rejected it as insufficiently Lovecraftian. For my part, I believe it's the most successful of these stories.

Whether I shall return to Lovecraft as an influence I don't know. Some may feel I've never shaken it off. 'Blacked Out,' the most recent story in this book, is clearly indebted to Lovecraft, though it wasn't written with that intention. (In a sense 'Among the pictures are these' is the earliest piece, a literal description written in 1973 of some drawings I executed in my early teens.) One Edna Stumpf (a name on which I can scarcely improve) rounded off a review of my novel Incarnate, which she very kindly described as 'surprisingly good,' with the words 'My dream is that Campbell take ten years to flush the Lovecraft out of his typewriter. And rewriter (sic) it.' I hope she and any others of like mind will not be too distressed if I don't take ten years off from writing. If some of Lovecraft's sense of wonder remains in my work, so much the better. I hope that at least my attempts to repay the pleasure his work still gives me have not lessened his power.

Merseyside, England 6 July, 1984