The Horror in the Museum (2 page)

“The stories I sent him always came back so revised from their basic idea that I felt I was a complete failure as a writer,” Zealia Bishop remembered. “As a writer and instructor in the field of supernatural fiction he was an undisputed master, and another’s work seldom pleased him when he first saw it. He could always find much to improve, and he was generous with his advice, drawing on a vast store of knowledge quite beyond the capacity of the average man of education of his or our time.”

Bishop felt so grateful to Lovecraft that when her story “Medusa’s Coil” ultimately appeared in the January 1939 issue of
Weird Tales,
she stipulated that half the fee ($120) should be paid to his surviving aunt, Annie E. P. Gamwell. “My debt to Lovecraft is great,” Bishop admitted. “I count myself fortunate that I was one of his epistolary friends and pupils.”

The Horror in the Museum
contains some of the best of these “revisions” or, as they should more properly be called, “collaborations.” If not quite up to the standard of Lovecraft’s own finest work, such tales as C. M. Eddy’s controversial “The Loved Dead,” Robert H. Barlow’s “Till A’ the Seas,” Hazel Heald’s “Out of the Aeons” and “The Horror in the Burying-Ground,” William Lumley’s “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” and Zealia Bishop’s “The Curse of Yig,” “Medusa’s Coil,” and the short novel “The Mound,” along with the title story itself, are all worthy of being considered minor gems in the canon of weird fiction. This is not really so surprising when you recognize that, as August Derleth so succinctly pointed out, “Lovecraft wrote most of what is memorable in them!”

But for me, the greatest thrill of buying this book when I was still a teenager was discovering that I shared my name (and its particular spelling) with the doomed protagonist of the Lovecraft-Hazel Heald collaboration “The Horror in the Museum.” Not only that, but the story is atypically set in London—just across the River Thames from where I was born!

Reading this tale, I have never felt closer to the writer whose work helped shaped my own career in the field of macabre fiction.

***

Howard Phillips Lovecraft died on the morning of March 15, 1937, at the ridiculously young age of forty-six. He was buried in the family plot in the Swan Point Cemetery, where his name was inscribed alongside those of his parents. Just four people attended his funeral.

In the intervening years, all of Lovecraft’s stories have been kept in print, not least through Del Rey’s continuing series of attractive compilations. His work continues to sell millions of copies throughout the world and have been translated into every major language. Anthology editors such as myself continue to draw upon his relatively small cadre of fiction, and there are numerous websites and chat rooms devoted to the man and his work on the Internet.

Perhaps even more important, his stories and concepts have continued to inspire new generations of authors, many of whom have gone on to forge major careers in the weird fiction field.

But when it comes right down to it, there is only one H. P. Lovecraft. Although his style and themes have been copied, expanded, and adapted by countless others, he is genuinely unique among writers of supernatural fiction.

So don’t be fooled by the bylines on these stories. For the most part, these are the
real
thing. The source of the nightmares. The ground zero of horror. Yes, H. P. Lovecraft certainly
could
write, no matter where the original concept came from or who received the final credit … as this book so aptly proves.

S
TEPHEN JONES
London, England
February 2007

S
TEPHEN
J
ONES
is one of Britain’s most acclaimed anthologists of horror and dark fantasy. He has more than eighty-five books to his credit, including
H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror,
H. P.
Lovecraft
‘s
Book of the Supernatural, Shadows Over Innsmouth,
and
Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.
You can visit his website at
www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones
.

A Note on the Texts

In this corrected edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s revisions and collaborations, we have attempted not merely to restore the texts but to arrange the tales in accordance with the presumed degree of Lovecraft’s involvement with them. What we have called “primary” revisions are those that were wholly or almost wholly written by Lovecraft (although a plot-germ or occasionally an actual draft was supplied by the revision client); the “secondary” revisions are those in which Lovecraft merely touched up—albeit sometimes extensively—a preexisting draft.

The two collaborations with Winifred Virginia Jackson, “The Green Meadow” and “The Crawling Chaos,” are interesting in that they are among the few works (the others are “Poetry and the Gods,” “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and “In the Walls of Eryx”) where Lovecraft affixed his name along with that of his collaborator, even though here both used pseudonyms. Nevertheless, there is little evidence to suggest that Jackson contributed any prose to either tale.

For the two tales revised for Adolphe de Castro, “The Last Test” and “The Electric Executioner,” we have de Castro’s original versions: they were published in his collection
In’the Confessional
(1893), under the titles “A Sacrifice to Science” and “The Automatic Executioner.” Lovecraft has rewritten both stories completely, preserving only the skeleton of each work. It should be noted that in Lovecraft’s only reference to the first tale he calls it “Clarendon’s Last Test”; it is not certain whether he or someone else made the change. Lovecraft also speaks in letters of a third story revised for de Castro, but this has evidently been lost.

All three stories revised for Zealia Bishop—”The Curse of Yig,” “The Mound,” and “Medusa’s Coil”—were, as Lovecraft notes, based on the scantiest of plot-germs and are accordingly close to original works by Lovecraft. The persistent rumor that Frank Belknap Long assisted in the writing of “The Mound” is false: Long, as Zealia Bishop’s agent, merely abridged the story in a vain attempt to place it with a pulp magazine; after these efforts failed, the original version of the story as written by Lovecraft was restored, remaining in manuscript until Lovecraft’s death. August Derleth then radically revised and abridged both “The Mound” and “Medusa’s Coil” and marketed them to
Weird Tales.
This edition represents the first unadulterated publication of both works.

There is abundant evidence that Lovecraft wrote nearly the entirety of all five stories revised for Hazel Heald; Heald’s contention that Lovecraft’s role in “The Man of Stone” was somewhat less extensive than in the others does not seem to be borne out by the text.

For “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” we have both a draft by William Lumley (the title is his) and Lovecraft’s rewriting. Again Lovecraft has preserved only the nucleus of the plot, and all the prose is his. Lumley’s draft was first published (along with the original versions of the two Adolphe de Castro tales) in a special edition of
Crypt of Cthulhu, Ashes and Others
(1982).

Of the secondary revisions, Sonia H. Greene (Davis) reports that Lovecraft “revised and edited” “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” (the title “The Invisible Monster” was supplied by
Weird Tales),
hence we can assume a preexisting draft. The other tale by Greene thought to be revised by Lovecraft, “Four O’Clock,” was written, as Greene tells us, only at Lovecraft’s suggestion and does not seem to bear any Lovecraftian prose or content; it has accordingly been omitted from this edition.

In recent years Lovecraft’s revisory hand has been detected in a number of tales by his friends and colleagues, and five stories have been added to this edition. Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., first observed that Lovecraft in letters refers to four tales revised for C. M. Eddy, Jr.; all were probably based on existing drafts by Eddy, who wrote many tales in his own right. “Ashes” appears to be the earliest of these stories, and Lovecraft’s hand in it is probably very light. In the other three—”The Ghost-Eater,” “The Loved Dead,” and “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind”—the two authors probably contributed equally.

It is difficult to ascertain how much of Lovecraft remains in Wilfred Blanch Talman’s “Two Black Bottles,” as Lovecraft’s letters suggest that Talman was annoyed at Lovecraft’s extensive revisions in the story and may perhaps have reinstated his own prose in the final draft.

I discovered Lovecraft’s role in Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Trap”; in a letter to R. H. Barlow (25 February 1932) he reports writing the entire central section of the story. In letters Lovecraft refers to another story by Whitehead, “The Bruise,” for which he supplied a synopsis; and although William Fulwiler, who brought this matter to our attention, believes that Lovecraft may have actually written the story (published as “Bothon” in
West India Lights),
I am not convinced that Lovecraft contributed any prose to this work.

Lovecraft’s letters to Duane W. Rimel indicate that he was reading and reviewing many of Rimel’s tales during the 1930s, and in two of them he seems to have had a hand. Scott Connors noted Lovecraft’s involvement in “The Tree on the Hill,” and Robert M. Price and I confirmed it. Rimel has stated that Lovecraft wrote the entire third section of the tale, as well as the citation from the mythical
Chronicle of Nath
in the second section. Will Murray first suspected, on internal evidence, Lovecraft’s role in “The Disinterment.” Rimel maintains that Lovecraft’s revisions in the story were very light, and letters by Lovecraft unearthed by Murray and myself appear to confirm that claim.

For R. H. Barlow’s “Till A’ the Seas’“ we have a typescript by Barlow (apparently a second draft) with exhaustive revisions by Lovecraft in pen. Dirk W. Mosig discovered Lovecraft’s hand in Barlow’s “The Night Ocean,” as cited in a letter to Hyman Bradofsky (4 November 1936). Mosig believed the tale to be nearly entirely written by Lovecraft; but documents subsequently consulted by me suggest that he played a much smaller role in the genesis and writing of the tale. The work was probably largely Barlow’s, although with heavy revisions and additions by Lovecraft at random points.

For a more detailed discussion of the degree of Lovecraft’s involvement in these stories, see my article “Lovecraft’s Revisions: How Much of Them Did He Write?”
Crypt of Cthulhu
2 (Candlemas 1983): 3-14.

Our editorial practice for this disparate body of work must of necessity be cautious. Autograph manuscripts (or Lovecraft’s autograph corrections) exist for only two tales in this volume—”Till A’ the Seas’“ and “The Diary of Alonzo Typer.” Typescripts exist only for “The Mound” and “Medusa’s Coil,” although both were prepared by Frank Belknap Long and contain several errors and incoherencies, the apparent result of Long’s inability to read Lovecraft’s handwriting. The texts for all other works must be based upon publications in amateur journals or pulp magazines. For the primary revisions we have reinstated Lovecraft’s normal punctuational, stylistic, and syntactic usages, on the principle that nearly all the prose in these tales is his; for the secondary revisions we have only corrected obvious misprints or internal inconsistencies of usage in the original publications.

Many colleagues have assisted in the compilation of this volume, and I am especially grateful to Donald R. Burleson, Kenneth R. Johnson, Marc A. Michaud, Dirk W. Mosig, Will Murray, and Robert M. Price. The advice of James Turner has been invaluable both in the overall arrangement of this edition and in countless points of difficulty in the texts themselves.

S. T. J
OSHI

Lovecrafts “Revisions”

However paradoxical it may seem, in view of his present posthumous fame as a master of the macabre, Howard Phillips Love-craft made his scant living principally by revising and correcting manuscripts of prose and poetry sent to him by a variety of hopeful writers. The greater number of his clients seldom achieved publication in any but amateur-press magazines, but his revision of the stories by a small group of writers with reasonably strong themes but a concomitant lack of literary skills or prose style enlisted a greater share of his interest and assistance—amounting often to the complete rewriting of a submitted manuscript—and so found their way into print.

Lovecraft’s revision work can be divided into two classes. The bulk of it amounted to little more than professional correction of language, syntax, punctuation, and the like, but a minority of tales in the domain of the macabre aroused his personal interest to the extent of active participation. Even this small group of tales was subdivided into areas of lesser and major interest. Some, as in the case of Sonia H. Greene’s story, the early work of Hazel Heald, and the tales of his old Providence friend C. M. Eddy, Jr., required less drastic revision and more or less advisory assistance. Writing on 30 September 1944 of one such story, “The Man of Stone,” the late Hazel Heald admitted, “Lovecraft helped me on this story as much as on the others, and did actually rewrite paragraphs. He would criticize paragraph after paragraph and pencil remarks beside them, and then make me rewrite them until they pleased him.” But of course Lovecraft did considerably more with Hazel Heald’s later stories: he rewrote them from beginning to end so that they are essentially Lovecraft stories, retaining only the plot or central theme of the author whose by-line appeared over the work—and not even this in every case. The kind of revision to which Mrs. Heald here referred is illustrated in the manuscript of R. H. Barlow’s tale, “Till A’ the Seas,’“ in the Lovecraft Collection of the John Hay Library of Brown University, a specimen page from which appears as the frontispiece to the present volume.