Reconsiderations: H.P. Lovecraft

This being the 136th anniversary of the birth of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I thought it the perfect opportunity to write another installment in my increasingly irregular Reconsiderations series. I also think it makes sense as a topic, given that, since its inception, Grognardia has focused not just on the history of roleplaying games but also on the authors and literature that inspired those games – and there are few authors who can reasonably be said to have had more of an impact on RPGs than Lovecraft.

Lovecraft is, after all, an Appendix N author and one Gygax notes as being among "the most immediate influences upon AD&D," alongside such other notables as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance. This alone demonstrates my point, but, of course, Gygax is not alone in having been an admirer of HPL. Innumerable RPG creators, both past and present, have acknowledged the role Lovecraft and his stories have played in their own creations. There's thus a good reason why, in my first ever post commemorating his birth, I called him "the father of us all."

Up until now, I've been very consistent in saying that, while I have greatly enjoyed Lovecraft's stories since I was about 12 years-old, he was never my favorites of the famed Weird Tales trinity. I would always say that, of those three authors, Clark Ashton Smith was the one I held in the highest esteem. However, over the last year my focus has shifted and I've begun to question my feelings on this matter. 

To be clear, my regard for CAS remains as immense as ever. He truly is a unique author with a unique voice. I will always chesish his stories, particularly his "dying earth" tales of Zothique, which I frequently reread both for their luxurious language and melancholy tone. That said, I have better come to appreciate how much I owe to Lovecraft.

I don't mean this simply in the obvious sense that I have read and enjoyed his stories for more than four decades, though that's certainly part of it. Nor do I mean merely that Lovecraft's influence can be found everywhere in the hobby that has occupied so much of my life. What I mean is something more personal and, until fairly recently, something to which I had never given much thought.

Last summer, at the conclusion of my The Shadow over August series, I described Lovecraft as a kindred spirit and, as the last twelve months have rolled on, I find it an ever more apt description. There are, of course, many things about Lovecraft with which I do not identify, just as there are aspects of his personality and opinions that I find objectionable or simply baffling. I have no interest in pretending otherwise, but neither do I think a man must be admirable in every respect before we can recognize something of ourselves in him. Indeed, it may be precisely because Lovecraft was such an odd and contradictory man that I increasingly find him so compelling.

Lovecraft was a bookish introvert who often seemed more comfortable with the products of imagination than with the demands of everyday life. He was deeply attached to the past, suspicious of much that passed for progress, fascinated by history and antiquity, and given to constructing elaborate imaginary worlds partly for the sheer pleasure of doing so. He maintained friendships across great distances through correspondence and took enormous pleasure in sharing ideas, stories, discoveries, and enthusiasms with an ever-growing circle of like-minded people. He was, to use a deliberately anachronistic term, a nerd. Obviously, I see a lot of myself in him.

And that may explain why my affection for Lovecraft has grown recently. When I was younger, I approached him primarily through his fiction. I judged him, quite reasonably, I think, by his fiction. Judged solely on that basis, I still think I prefer Smith. At his best, CAS possesses a command of language and an imaginative opulence that few writers of fantastic fiction have ever equaled. However, I'm no longer sure that "Which of the Weird Tales trinity wrote the stories I like best?" is the only or even the most interesting way to judge these immensely talented men.

Lovecraft's achievement extends beyond the stories themselves. He created a body of ideas that have proven extraordinarily fertile in the hands of others. More importantly, he wanted them to be fertile. He freely lent elements of his imaginary mythology to friends and correspondents, borrowed from them in return, and delighted in the resulting cross-pollination. What we now call the "Cthulhu Mythos" was never a carefully guarded intellectual property or a meticulously defined fictional setting. Rather, it was something closer to a shared sandbox of the imagination.

Seen from the perspective of roleplaying games, that aspect of Lovecraft seems especially significant. Roleplaying games are themselves exercises in shared imagination. Referees borrow ideas from books, movies, history, mythology, and one another. They then transform them, combine them, and hand them over to players, who transform them yet again through play. The results are rarely tidy and almost never attributable to a single creator. There is something remarkably Lovecraftian – though not in the cosmic horror sense, but in the creative sense – about that process.

This may be one reason his influence on roleplaying games has been so much greater than simply inspiring monsters in Dungeons & Dragons or even providing source material for Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft and his circle offered a way of creating fantastic worlds that was open, collaborative, allusive, and cumulative. For example, Smith might come up with Tsathoggua and Lovecraft would borrow him. Lovecraft, in turn, creates the Necronomicon and inspires Howard to create the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (with its German title provided by August Derleth). With every borrowing, this shared imaginary world became a little larger and a little more convincing. Anyone who has refereed a long-running roleplaying campaign will recognize this process.

That recognition has caused me to look at Lovecraft differently. For years, I think I regarded him chiefly as one of the great ancestors of the hobby, an enormously influential writer whose fingerprints could be found everywhere. I still regard him that way, of course, but increasingly I see something else as well. Lovecraft is an example of the kind of imaginative life that I myself have tried, in my own much smaller way, to live.

Lovecraft wrote because he loved writing. He read voraciously because he loved learning. He corresponded because he loved exchanging ideas with people who shared his enthusiasms. He invented worlds, histories, books, cults, and strange names because doing so delighted him. He did these things despite disappointments, financial difficulties, personal failures, and the knowledge that the wider world would likely take little notice of most of what he did. Yet, here we are, 136 years after his birth, still talking about him.

Perhaps that's what has changed most in my estimation of Lovecraft. Clark Ashton Smith may remain the pulp fantasy writer whose prose most dazzles me, while Robert E. Howard may remain the one whose best stories possess an energy few writers, even today, can match. Meanwhile, Lovecraft increasingly seems to me the one whose life of the imagination I understand best and have inadvertently emulated the most.

When I called Lovecraft "the father of us all" back in 2008, I was thinking primarily about his influence on RPGs and on the imaginative culture from which it sprang. I still think that's true. Now, though, I would add another meaning to the phrase. Lovecraft belongs to that long lineage of bookish dreamers who found the ordinary world insufficient and responded not by abandoning it but by adding to it, by creating strange countries of the imagination and inviting others to visit them. Some of those visitors then created countries of their own.

I'm one of them – as I suspect are most of the people reading this post.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Thing on the Roof

When I restarted the Pulp Fantasy Library series back in September, I did so primarily because I knew I could devote myself to writing about every H.P. Lovecraft story associated with the Dreamlands, even tangentially. Because there are a lot of stories that fit this description, I didn't have to think much about which story I'd write next, which eased a lot of the burden I'd previously felt about the series. Now that I've concluded that project, I find myself once again pondering what next to write about and I felt some of my former apprehension return. After all, with 350 entries to date, I've written about most (though not all) of the obvious stories.

Because I'd devoted the first month of the year to Clark Ashton Smith rather than to his colleague and fellow January baby, Robert E. Howard, I thought a good way to solve my immediate problem was to find one of his stories I'd never covered before. REH was a prolific writer and, while his tales of Conan and Solomon Kane are probably his best and most well-known, there's still a wealth of options to choose from, especially if I wanted something a little off the beaten path. That's when I remembered "The Thing on the Roof."

Originally published in the February 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Thing on the Roof" is a horror story in the vein of Lovecraft's tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I first came across it in the early '90s in an anthology of Howard's horror fiction edited by David Drake and then, later, encountered an adaptation of it from an early '70s Marvel comic book (Chamber of Chills issue #3). Compared to, say, "Pigeons from Hell," which is likely the most celebrated of Howard's horror yarns, "The Thing on the Roof" is a much more modest affair, but it's still interesting nonetheless, if only for its slightly different take on "Lovecraftian" subject matter.

The story itself is quite short and fairly straightforward. Its unnamed narrator is a scholar and book collector. He is unexpectedly approached by his academic rival, Tussmann, who offers to publicly retract his previous aspersions on his work in exchange for help obtaining the rare 1839 “black book” edition of Friedrich von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. Tussmann has become obsessed with a passage describing a remote “Temple of the Toad” in Honduras, where a mummy wearing a toad-shaped red jewel supposedly guards a hidden treasure and believes only the 1839 edition contains a full description of the temple. After months of effort, the narrator secures a copy and Tussmann confirms that the original text contains crucial details omitted from later editions. Claiming firsthand knowledge of the temple from a previous expedition, Tussmann then departs for Central America determined to recover the treasure of the temple, convinced that the jewel is, in fact, a key to a store of gold concealed beneath the altar.

Months later, Tussmann summons the narrator to his Sussex estate, where he reveals that he found no gold, only the mummy and the strange jewel, which indeed opened a hidden passage beneath the temple. His account of what lay below is evasive and unsettling and he appears increasingly unstable, hinting that he may have awakened something when he used the jewel to open a subterranean crypt. The narrator, rereading von Junzt, realizes the horrifying implication: the “treasure” was not gold but the temple’s monstrous god. That night, amid strange noises and signs of an unseen presence, Tussmann locks himself in his room with the jewel. The narrator later breaks in to find him dead, his skull crushed by what appears to be the imprint of a gigantic hoof and the jewel missing, suggesting that whatever was released from the temple has followed its key back to England.

As a story, "The Thing on the Roof" is a modest affair. Most of the story consists of conversations between the narrator and Tussmann, as the two discuss historical details about von Juntz, the Temple of the Toad, and related matters. For a Robert E. Howard tale, it's devoid of almost any action, which is probably its most remarkable quality. As a story, it's fine – nothing special but perfectly serviceable for the kind of story it is. For whatever reason, Howard himself really like the tale, writing in a 1930 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith that "this story is by far the best thing I have ever written and one which I am really inclined to believe approaches real literature, distantly, at least." Even overlooking an author's inevitable blindness about his own material, REH's self-assessment is overly charitable.

"The Thing on the Roof" is worth a read, because it's quick and has a few interesting elements, even if it's far from Howard at his best. Sometimes, even Homer nods. 

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Isle of the Torturers

Clark Ashton Smith’s cycle of stories set on Earth’s last continent, Zothique, has long been a personal favorite of mine. For that reason, I assumed I had already written a Pulp Fantasy Library post about each of its tales. I was mistaken. An obvious omission was “The Isle of the Torturers,” first published in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales. This lapse strikes me as particularly odd, since the story is among the most memorable in the cycle, rich with images and ideas that recur throughout Smith’s work. It is, in fact, a minor masterpiece of decadent irony, a grim parable about the impossibility of escape in a dying world.

Like the other Zothique stories, “The Isle of the Torturers” gives voice to Smith’s cosmic pessimism. Written during his most fertile period as a prose writer, it captures the moment when his poetic sensibility fused seamlessly with the demands of pulp fantasy. As with “The End of the Story,” which I discussed last week, it is less a conventional adventure than a dark moral fable, concerned not with triumph but with a protagonist trapped between two equally terminal forms of damnation.

The tale opens with a cataclysm known as the Silver Death, a plague foretold by astrologers to descend from the star Achernar and perhaps inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” This scourge does not merely kill; it transforms its victims into rigid, gleaming corpses, their flesh sealed in a “bright, metallic pallor.” Young King Fulbra of Yoros survives only because his sorcerer, Vemdeez, fashions a magical ring of black-jeweled stone that repels the contagion. Fulbra’s subsequent flight from his silent, silvered kingdom is no journey toward renewal or safety. It is a panicked retreat into the wider, equally doomed world of Zothique.

Cast ashore on the island of Uccastrog, Fulbra discovers that he has exchanged the indifference of Nature for the calculated cruelty of Man. Uccastrog is ruled by King Ildrac, whose people have elevated torture into a supreme esthetic discipline, giving the island both its infamous sobriquet and the story its title. Here, pain has become the last meaningful sensation in a world where extinction looms ever closer. Torture is not merely punitive or sadistic; it is treated as a refined art, one of the few remaining assertions of human will in the face of cosmic decay.

Smith’s treatment of torture is distinctive. He does not linger on visceral realism but instead cloaks suffering in an ornate, almost ceremonial elegance. The torments prepared for Fulbra, such as the constricting coils of hair-covered, ell-long serpents or the psychological horror of a glass-walled dungeon, are described with the same meticulous care Smith might apply to exotic landscapes or jeweled relics. The effect is unsettling. The reader is drawn in by the beauty of the language even as the subject matter repels, reinforcing the story’s theme of estheticized despair.

At the heart of the tale’s irony stands Ilvaa, a woman of Uccastrog who appears to take pity on Fulbra. She offers him hope, whispering of a hidden vessel and an escape from Ildrac’s dungeons. Smith deliberately plays upon the reader’s expectations here, invoking the familiar “rescuer” trope only to subvert it with shocking cruelty. Ilvaa is not Fulbra’s savior but a living instrument of torture. Her role is to weaponize hope itself, intensifying Fulbra’s suffering when she finally reveals that there is, in truth, no escape. Psychological torment proves as refined and devastating as any physical agony.

The story’s climax delivers a form of poetic justice characteristic of Smith at his most mordant. King Ildrac, covetous of Fulbra’s protective ring, forcibly removes it, unleashing the Silver Death that had been suppressed but patiently “waiting” within Fulbra’s flesh. The very plague Fulbra crossed the sea to escape becomes, paradoxically, his sole means of release from the torturers of Uccastrog.

As the silver crust spreads over Ildrac and Fulbra alike, Smith closes the tale with a line of chilling finality:

“And oblivion claimed the isle of Uccastrog; and the torturers were one with the tortured.”

“The Isle of the Torturers” captures the elegant hopelessness of Zothique with exceptional clarity. It mourns the erosion of human agency in a universe governed by entropy, while refusing to offer the consolation of heroic resistance or moral victory. Instead, Smith gives us a king who finds his only peace in becoming a statue. The story ultimately suggests that we are all fugitives from a fate that cannot be outrun, a fate that will, sooner or later, claim us, regardless of how desperately we attempt to flee.

"Foul Vampire! Accursed Lamia!"

Most stories that appeared in Weird Tales received accompanying artwork, usually on the title page. Clark Ashton Smith's "The End of the Story" is no different, featuring this illustration, which depicts the confrontation between Hilaire, abbot of Périgon, and the lamia, Nycea. I can't quite make out the signature of the artist at the bottom right, so I'm unable to identify him with certainty. I think the initials are "HR," which, if so, suggests the artist is Hugh Rankin, who illustrated several of H.P. Lovecraft's during the same time period.

Regardless, it's a very odd illustration. From the text of the story itself, I assume it depicts the abbot brandishing his aspergillum, which Smith calls (incorrectly) an aspergillus – the world's tiniest aspergillum, it would seem! 

Pulp Fantasy Library: The End of the Story

When I was writing my three-part series on the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, I realized that I had somehow never written a Pulp Fantasy Library post about “The End of the Story,” the very first tale of the Averoigne cycle, appearing in the May 1930 issue of Weird Tales. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. “The End of the Story” is frequently overlooked, probably because, unlike most other entries in the cycle, it is set not in the Middle Ages but in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. [Note: The text linked above gives the date as 1798, which I believe is simply a typographical error. —JDM]

Even so, I feel a little sheepish about this, as it's an excellent story, both within the Averoigne cycle and within Smith's larger body of work. It's also one of his earliest fiction works, written just a few years after "The Abominations of Yondo." Though still a relative amateur at prose, the story nevertheless presents a clear expression of Smith’s decadent sympathies and his esthetic rebellion against conventional morality. Consequently, it is less a horror story than a parable of temptation and the lingering bitterness that follows salvation.

The story is framed as a manuscript discovered after the mysterious disappearance of a young law student, Christophe Morand. The manuscript contains his confession, written at his father’s estate near Moulins in the province of Averoigne. What Morand recounts there is not a description of an ordeal escaped, but of a paradise glimpsed and lost.

Caught in a violent storm while riding through the forest, Christophe stumbles upon the abbey of Périgon, where he is warmly received by its abbot, Hilaire. The abbot is no ascetic but rather a cultivated Epicurean. He is well-fed, well-read, proud of his wine cellar, and even prouder of his astonishing library. The abbot’s library is a treasure trove of lost antiquities, holding lost fragments of Sappho, an unknown dialog of Plato, and many other unique literary and philosophical curiosities. 

Also present is a hidden volume that the abbot fears – an anonymous text written in archaic French, which he claims is cursed. Hilaire's warning is melodramatic, full of signs of the Cross and invocations of Satan. Unfortunately, it's precisely for this reason that Christophe is so tempted by it. Smith handles the temptation represented by the forbidden text beautifully. It is not lust, ambition, or even greed that drives Christophe, but pure esthetic curiosity. It is the scholar’s hunger for forbidden beauty.

When Christophe eventually does read the manuscript, he finds that it tells of Gérard de Venteillon, a medieval knight who, on the eve of his wedding, encounters a satyr in the forest. The creature whispers a secret so powerful that Gérard abandons his faith, his fiancée, and the world itself. He then follows a hidden path to the ruins of Château des Faussesflammes, presses a triangular stone, and descends into the earth, never to return.

The satyr says that

The power of Christ has prevailed like a black frost on all the woods, the fields, the rivers, the mountains, where abode in their felicity the glad, immortal goddesses and nymphs of yore. But still, in cryptic caverns of the earth, in places far underground, like the hell your priests have fabled, there dwells pagan loveliness, there cry the pagan ecstasies."

Though the words are those of a satyr, it seems clear to me that they're also the words of Smith himself, who had little use for formal religion of any kind, least of all medieval Christianity.

Later, from his window at the abbey, Christophe recognizes nearby ruins. Like Gérard before him, he feels irresistibly drawn to them. Ignoring every warning, he slips away, finds the triangular stone, and descends into the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Instead of the horror he was promised, Christophe discovers a radiant pastoral world – a classical paradise of laurel groves, flowing rivers, marble palaces, satyrs, and nymphs. This is no hellscape but Arcadia restored, the world Christianity erased.

At the heart of this paradise waits Nycea. She is one of Smith’s most memorable creations: a lamia, an ancient vampire-serpent whom Christophe perceives only as a goddess of beauty. Their meeting is neither violent nor coercive. It is, in fact, strangely tender, luxurious, and, above all, intoxicating. Yet Christophe’s response goes beyond simple lust, just as his desire for the forbidden manuscript in the abbey was more than mere curiosity. Nycea represents recognition, the sense that he has always loved her without knowing it. Smith presents their union not as corruption but as fulfillment. The reader is meant to understand why Christophe would risk damnation for her.

It is at this point that Hilaire bursts in, brandishing holy water. Nycea flees, and the paradise Christophe has discovered collapses into dust. The vision vanishes, and he comes to his senses amid the rubble of the vaults beneath Faussesflammes. Hilaire explains that Nycea is an ancient demon who lures men to their doom, drains them, and devours them. The manuscript was her bait, her carefully laid trap. Gérard and countless others met their deaths this way, and Christophe, the abbot insists, is fortunate to have escaped the same fate.

Christophe feels no gratitude. He feels only rage. He does not believe he has been rescued; he believes he has been robbed.

Unheedful whether or not he had rescued me from dire physical and spiritual perils, I lamented the beautiful dream of which he had deprived me. The kisses of Nycea burned softly in my memory, and I knew that whatever she was, woman or demon or serpent, there was no one in all the world who could ever arouse in me the same love and the same delight.

The true end of the story comes when Christophe vows to return. He swears that he will seek out the ruins of Faussesflammes again and descend once more into the vaults below. He has chosen to risk death and damnation, because he cannot unsee paradise and cannot accept a world without it.

“The End of the Story” is among Smith’s finest tales. Though it differs in many respects from later Averoigne stories, I have always found it especially compelling. Those later entries lean more overtly into the grotesque, but this one is strangely moving and elegiac. It mourns not only the loss of one man’s vision of paradise but also the passing of an older, pagan world – a realm of beauty, sensuality, and wonder erased by the march of Christianity and history.

In the end, Smith does not ask us to decide whether Christophe is a fool or a tragic hero. Instead, he leaves us with something far more unsettling: the suggestion that some illusions are worth dying for and that paradise, once glimpsed, can never truly be forgotten.

Invisible Titan

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, three names dominate almost any discussion I have about the foundational figures of modern fantasy, science fiction, and horror: Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. All three were central contributors to Weird Tales in the 1920s and ’30s. All three helped shape the emerging genres in profound ways. All three are still read today. And yet, their legacies are anything but equal.

Howard’s influence is obvious, visible in every barbarian hero who swings a sword against a decadent civilization. Lovecraft’s shadow falls across horror fiction, video and roleplaying games, Internet culture, and popular media more generally. Smith, by contrast, seems oddly absent. His admirers are devoted, but comparatively few writers openly cite him as an influence and his worlds have spawned no major franchises, games, or films.

Why?

The answer is not, I think, that Smith was less imaginative or accomplished than his better-known colleagues. On the contrary, his work is among the most distinctive produced during the pulp era. That's why I would argue that the very qualities that make Smith unique also make him difficult to imitate, adapt, and institutionalize. He inspired readers but not movements.

For example, Smith’s prose is unmistakable. He wrote in long, sinuous sentences thick with Latinate vocabulary, archaic constructions, and sensuous imagery. His stories are, as I have often said, more like prose poems, luxuriating in sound and rhythm as much as, if not more than, narrative. This is both his glory and his barrier. It is hard to write like Clark Ashton Smith without slipping into parody. His style is too idiosyncratic, too personal, too bound to his own esthetic sensibility to become a template others can easily adopt.

To be fair, the same danger exists with his peers. Bad pastiches of Howard and Lovecraft are legion and most attempts to imitate either man’s prose end up as caricature. The difference is not that Howard and Lovecraft are easier to imitate well, but that their styles lend themselves more readily to abstraction. One can strip them down to a handful of recognizable features and reproduce those features mechanically. The result is often parody, yes, but it is also functional.

Howard’s short sentences, violent verbs, and blunt emotionality can be reduced to a usable toolkit. Lovecraft’s catalogs of dread, his breathless escalation of adjectives, his favorite rhetorical tics (“blasphemous,” “cyclopean,” “unnamable”) are equally modular. Writers can plug these components into new stories and produce something that approximates Howard or Lovecraft, even if it lacks the originals’ power.

Smith’s language resists this sort of modularization. You cannot easily isolate a few stylistic tricks and reproduce the effect. His sentences work because of their internal music, their strange balances and cadences, their density of allusion and imagery. Remove any one element and you break the spell. What remains is either pallid imitation or outright parody. In that sense, Smith’s prose is less a toolbox than a fingerprint. You can borrow Howard’s tropes. You can borrow Lovecraft’s cosmology. But you can’t really borrow Smith’s voice, at least not without immediately revealing that it isn’t his.

Lovecraft, moreover, created something deliberately exportable: a shared mythology. The Great Old Ones, forbidden books, ancient cults, and cosmic revelations became a collaborative playground even during HPL's own lifetime. Other writers could add to it (as Smith himself did), reinterpret it, and build upon it. Over time, the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” became a franchise or shared universe long before such terms even existed.

Howard did something similar in a different way. Through Conan and his other heroes, he defined the mode of fantasy we now call sword & sorcery. Other writers could step into that mode, create their own barbarian protagonists, and feel they were participating in a recognizable tradition, even when their efforts lacked the vitality that made Howard’s work so special.

Smith did neither. His stories are scattered across multiple settings, none of which form a unified cosmology. He rarely revisited characters. There is no obvious structure inviting expansion. Each tale feels like a sealed jewel, complete in itself – beautiful, yes, but not obviously expandable. There is no “Smith Mythos” for later writers to inhabit.

Nor does Smith’s worldview encourage imitation. His stories are saturated with decay, extinction, and cosmic exhaustion. Civilizations crumble. Sorcerers damn themselves. Gods are indifferent. Death is inevitable and often absurd. Where Howard offers heroic struggle and Lovecraft offers cosmic terror, Smith offers instead cosmic indifference plus irony. The universe doesn’t care and neither should you.

Worse, Smith’s characters are often complicit in their own destruction. Their greed, curiosity, or hubris leads them to ruin, and his stories rarely provide catharsis. There is no triumph, no moral lesson, often not even a clear horror, just the quiet confirmation that everything ends. This sometimes produces powerful literature, but it is poorly suited to adventure fiction. It does not encourage sequels or heroic identification. It offers atmosphere, not aspiration.

Influence also spreads through media. Howard’s creations moved into comics, films, games, and endless pastiches. Lovecraft’s ideas found second lives in tabletop RPGs, video games, movies, and online culture. Smith has never received this treatment. There are no major film adaptations, no prominent games, no shared universe projects. His work remains largely confined to small press editions and academic appreciation. Without this secondary life, his stories remain artifacts rather than living traditions. They are read, admired, and shelved, but rarely transformed.

Perhaps the most important difference is that Smith thought of himself first and foremost as a poet. His fiction is saturated with poetic concerns. Plot is often secondary. Character is minimal. The stories exist to evoke sensation rather than to tell a tale in any conventional sense. In this way, Smith belongs less to modern genre fiction than to a lineage that includes Lord Dunsany, the French decadents, and the Symbolist poets. He is writing fantasy as an esthetic experience, not as an entertainment product. This makes his work resistant to adaptation. You cannot easily turn “The Empire of the Necromancers” into a movie or a game without losing the very thing that makes it memorable. Strip away the language and little remains but a skeletal plot (no pun intended).

None of this means Smith has had no influence at all. It is simply quieter and harder to trace. You can see echoes of Zothique in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. Moorcock’s multiverses also carry hints of Smith’s cosmic weariness. Some New Weird writers share his fascination with decay and estrangement. Heavy metal and doom metal esthetics often feel Smithian. But these are tonal resonances, not structural inheritances. Smith shapes mood, not genre.

In the end, Smith represents a road speculative fiction largely did not take. Instead of heroic adventure or shared mythologies, he offered a literature of extinction, irony, and esthetic despair. His fantasy is closer to Baudelaire than to Tolkien. That he left a lighter footprint may perhaps be fitting. His work resists institutionalization. It does not want to become a franchise. It exists simply as an artifact that is beautiful, strange – and terminal.

Joe Doolin's Duo

The artwork that often accompanied the stories appearing in Weird Tales and other pulp magazines fascinates me. What strikes me about it is how good so much of it is. I don’t just mean in a technical sense – though that is obviously true – but also in its imaginative confidence and narrative clarity. These illustrations rarely function as mere decoration. Instead, they act as visual doorways into the story’s mood and possibilities, offering a concentrated distillation of wonder, menace, or strangeness that primes the reader before a single word is read. 

A good case in point is the single illustration included with Clark Ashton Smith's "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" from the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. Here, we see the titular Satampra Zeiros and his ill-fated companion, Tirouv Ompallios, as they stumble upon the amorphous monster guardian the temple of Tsathoggua in ruined Commoriom. If you ever wondered where Call of Cthulhu's formless spawn of Tsathoggua came from, this is the story and that depiction, by pulp artist Joe Doolin, is probably the first one ever produced. 

One of the things I find notable about the illustration above is the way the two thieves are drawn. Both are attired in generic "Ancient World" garb vaguely reminiscent of a Greek chiton or Roman tunica, complete with sandals. This is common in fantasy art of the pulp era. Many of the earliest depictions of Conan, for example, are similarly dressed, so it's not unusual. Even so, seeing them here made me wonder when it was that we first start to see more genuinely fantastical modes of dress in fantasy or sword-and-sorcery art. That might be a topic worthy of further exploration.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Tale of Satampra Zeiros

With The Ensorcellment of January now underway, I’m taking a brief hiatus from H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales to share my thoughts on four Clark Ashton Smith stories I consider particularly worthy of attention. The first of these is a story of which I am especially fond, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” which appeared in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales. Whatever its other virtues – and they are many – it stands as one of the clearest early expressions of sword-and-sorcery literature. More broadly, it encapsulates many of the qualities that define what I think of as pulp fantasy at its most effective: immediacy, moral ambiguity, horror, and a palpable sense that the world is not merely indifferent to human ambition but actively hostile to it.

The tale opens with one of my favorite first sentences ever to appear in a fantasy story:

I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers.

The story that follows fully earns that opening. It is a first-person account by a professional thief explaining not only how he came to lose his right hand, but how his most recent heist ended in catastrophe. Not a bad beginning! Together with his companion, Tirouv Ompallios, Zeiros ventures into Commoriom, the long-abandoned capital of Hyperborea, a place shunned even by other robbers. Rumored to be cursed and haunted by strange gods, Commoriom nonetheless promises fabulous wealth to anyone bold (or foolish) enough to plunder it. For Zeiros, that promise is irresistible.

The two thieves break into an ancient, seemingly intact temple of the elder god Tsathoggua – the toad-god’s first appearance in Smith’s fiction – where they find no jewels or gold, but instead disturb a foul, viscous substance resting within a vast bronze basin. This substance rises and assumes the form of a monstrous, many-limbed creature that hunts them through the ruins all night long. At dawn, the thieves realize they have come full circle and have returned to the temple itself. Barricading themselves inside proves useless. The creature oozes through a damaged lintel, consuming Ompallios in silence and nearly claiming Zeiros as well. He escapes only by sacrificing his right hand, surviving to record the tale as a warning.

Smith wrote “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” early in his career as a prose writer, when he was still finding his footing in the pages of Weird Tales and the story bears the clear imprint of his literary influences. Poe’s fascination with doom, confession, and inevitable consequence is evident in the framing, while the French Decadents inform the luxuriant prose and preoccupation with corruption, blasphemy, and decay. At the same time, Smith is also clearly engaging with the raw material of adventure fiction – thieves, lost cities, fabulous treasure, and sudden violence. The fusion of these elements gives the story its remarkable staying power. Even decades after first reading it, I can still vividly recall the experience.

A great deal of the story’s success lies in Smith’s choice of protagonist. Zeiros is no hero. He is greedy, cynical, and ultimately self-preserving, surviving only at the expense of his partner in crime. This perspective strips the tale of any romantic gloss and reinforces a central truth of Smith’s Hyperborea, namely, that audacity is not rewarded, only punished. For that reason, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” is more than merely a foundational sword-and-sorcery text (though it certainly is that). It represents a decisive shift away from quests, kingdoms, and moral uplift toward immediate danger and personal survival. The stakes are not cosmic salvation or political destiny, but simply whether the protagonist lives to see another day. In that respect, it is a near-perfect encapsulation of the pulp fantasy ethos.

Though he never, to my knowledge, confirmed it, I have long suspected that “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” exerted some influence on Fritz Leiber’s conception of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. These roguish protagonists, with their ill-conceived schemes and narrow escapes, feel like natural descendants of Zeiros and Ompallios. Likewise, the relationship between Smith’s two thieves – transactional, greedy, and ultimately fragile – anticipates later depictions of adventuring partnerships defined more by convenience than by trust.

For similar reasons, I strongly associate this story with old school Dungeons & Dragons. The abandoned city of Commoriom, its forbidden temple, and its inhuman guardian are all immediately recognizable elements of dungeon-based play. More importantly, the story embodies an ethos in which exploration is genuinely dangerous and curiosity often carries a terrible price. Nearly a century after its publication, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” remains a sharp and unsettling work of pulp fantasy. It reminds us that an abandoned ruin may be a trap, filled with inimical gods and lethal consequences. In doing so, the story helped establish a tradition of fantasy that values peril over heroism and survival over glory, a tradition that continues to shape the genre today.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Cairn on the Headland

Though Weird Tales was without question the premier magazine of the pulp era, it was hardly alone in exploring the strange and macabre. Among its would-be rivals was Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, edited by Harry Bates, a capable writer himself, best remembered for his 1940 story “Farewell to the Master,” which later inspired the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Strange Tales set out to challenge Weird Tales directly and earned a solid reputation for the high quality of its fiction and the caliber of its contributors, including such luminaries as Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Sadly, the magazine’s ambitions outpaced its fortunes. Its publisher went bankrupt after only seven issues, released between 1931 and 1933.

One of the most intriguing stories to appear in Strange Tales was Robert E. Howard’s “The Cairn on the Headland,” published in the magazine’s final issue in January 1933. The tale stands out not only for its content, which is an imaginative fusion of Norse mythology and Christian legend, but also for what it reveals about Howard’s own enduring fascination with that theme. As he often did, Howard wrote and rewrote versions of this story in his search for a suitable market. Unlike his friend H.P. Lovecraft, who generally shelved a piece once Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright rejected it, Howard was relentless in finding new outlets for his fiction. Yet the persistence with which he revisited this particular idea suggests he found something deeply compelling within it and I’m inclined to agree.

The story begin as “Spears of Clontarf,” a historical adventure centered on the Battle of Clontarf  (1014 AD) and featuring Turlogh Dubh O’Brien, one of Howard’s recurring Irish heroes. When he failed to sell it, REH recast the material as “The Grey God Passes,” introducing more overt fantasy and mythic elements to the same historical events. This, too, went unpublished in his lifetime. Finally, Howard returned once more to the subject, transforming it into a modern story of supernatural horror. In this final version of the idea, the Battle of Clontarf becomes a haunting memory intruding into the present, and Howard at last succeeded in finding a publisher. It's this version of the story I want to discuss today, as the final entry in this month's horror-themed Pulp Fantasy Library posts.

The protagonist of "The Cairn on the Headland" is James O’Brien, an Irish-American scholar devoted to medieval Irish history. Fluent in Gaelic and steeped in the great chronicles of his ancestral homeland, O’Brien embodies Howard’s ideal of the learned yet passionate antiquarian. His career, however, is blighted by Ortali, a strange blackmailer who holds false evidence linking O’Brien to a murder. Ortali believes O'Brien will one day unearth some great treasure through his researches and hopes to benefit from them, hence his extortion. Trapped, O'Brien has little choice but to work side by side with Ortali, even as his hatred for him grows.

During a visit to Dublin, the two men explore the titular cairn on a headland overlooking the city. The locals shun it, believing it cursed since the time of Clontarf, when the Irish under King Brian Boru threw off centuries of Viking domination. O’Brien is uncertain whether the cairn commemorates the victors or their foes, but he is certain it should not be disturbed. Ortali scoffs at his superstition, vowing to return at midnight and dig beneath the stones for treasure, mockingly wearing a sprig of holly, which the villagers say must never come near the place.

Later, O’Brien encounters a mysterious woman dressed in archaic clothing who introduces herself as Meve MacDonnal. She gives him the lost Cross of Saint Brandon [sic], insisting he will soon need it. Only later does O’Brien realize that Meve MacDonnal has been dead for centuries, her grave not far away. That night, in troubled sleep, he dreams – or is it remembers? – his former life as Red Cumal, an Irish warrior who fought at Clontarf. In this vision, Cumal helps defeat a one-eyed Viking chieftain who reveals himself as Odin in human form. Wounded by a spear marked with a cross, the god lies helpless, trapped in mortality. Cumal knows that holly must never touch Odin’s body and he and his comrades seal him beneath a cairn.

O’Brien awakens from his dream to find Ortali gone. He rushes to the headland and arrives just as the blackmailer uncovers the body buried within, unchanged after a thousand years. A sprig of holly falls from Ortali’s lapel and the corpse stirs. Odin reawakens, shedding human guise to become a towering, demonic spirit wreathed in auroral light. His first act is to destroy Ortali with a blast of lightning. O’Brien, remembering the cross he'd been given, raises it high. The relic shines with unearthly brilliance, banishing the pagan god in an act resembling an exorcism. At dawn, O’Brien stands alone among the shattered stones, free of both Ortali and Odin.

The story's fusion of Norse myth and Christian legend is unusual, though not entirely without precedent in Howard's writing, especially when one considers his many Solomon Kane yarns. The Battle of Clontarf becomes not just a struggle for Ireland’s freedom but also a cosmic contest between Light and Darkness, Christ and Odin. Howard’s Odin is no noble All-Father but instead a demon, an ancient power of frost and cruelty whose defeat marks the turning of an age. 

Such stark moral contrasts are typical of Howard, but in “The Cairn on the Headland,” they take on an unmistakably theological tone. The story reflects the medieval Christian reinterpretation of pagan gods as fallen angels. Howard’s Odin undergoes precisely this transformation, stripped of his majesty and recast as a malevolent spirit lingering on the edges of history. Yet, for all its moral gravity, the tale remains quintessentially Howardian. O’Brien, though a scholar by nature, is no passive intellectual. Confronted with a supernatural threat, he meets it head-on, triumphing not only over Odin himself but also over the lingering shadow of his own moral weakness and subjugation to Ortali’s blackmail.

“The Cairn on the Headland” may have begun as an unsold historical adventure, but in its final form it stands among Howard’s more distinctive weird tales. It's a compelling fusion of myth, theology, and pulp vitality. It also serves as a kind of bridge between his historical fiction and his horror stories, where the heroic and the haunted intermingle. On the storm-swept coast of Ireland, faith and myth collide and the old gods are finally banished, not by priests or saints, but by a man of courage who embodies Howard’s enduring belief in strength, will, and the indomitable human spirit.

HPL in Weird Tales

While most interested parties nowadays know that H.P. Lovecraft's stories almost all appeared in the pages of pulp magazines during the 1920s and '30s – the vast majority of them in "the Unique Magazine," Weird Tales – what they may not know is that a great many of these appearances were accompanied by illustrations. I posted a couple of these at the start of the month, but I thought readers might enjoy seeing a few more of these, particularly those associated with some of his more famous yarns.

This one, for example, depicts the bayou ceremony described by Inspector Legrasse in "The Call of Cthulhu."

 Here's an imaginative illustration of Wilbur Whateley's twin brother in "The Dunwich Horror."

This piece shows the end of "The Whisperer in Darkness," when Professor Wilmarth finds the face and hands of Henry Akeley left behind in the chair in which he'd been sitting for most of the story. 

Disappointingly, only one Lovecraft-written story ever appeared on the cover of Weird Tales, "Under the Pyramids," but it did so both with a changed title ("Imprisoned with the Pharaohs") and a Harry Houdini byline (no surprise, since HPL had been hired by Houdini to be his ghost writer).

Lovecraft had much better luck in this regard with Astounding Stories, which featured two of his tales on the cover, starting with At the Mountains of Madness, which features what is likely the first ever illustration of a shoggoth.

This was soon followed by "The Shadow Out of Time."

Both of the Astounding appearances also include interior artwork as well, some of which is quite interesting and probably deserving of a separate post. 

Pulp Fantasy Library: Through the Gates of the Silver Key

1929 saw the publication of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," a wistful, semi-autobiographical tale of Randolph Carter, his recurring dreamer-protagonist. In that story, Carter, now middle-aged, finds himself disillusioned with the mundane world, bereft of the golden moments of his youth when he roamed the Dreamlands freely. After discovering an old silver key in his ancestral home, Carter then departs for the wooded hills of his boyhood and disappears.

For Lovecraft, that was enough, but not so for his friend, E. Hoffmann Price. He wondered, what really had happened to Carter? During HPL's visit to New Orleans in June 1932, Price suggested to him the idea of a sequel, which he then proceeded to draft. The sequel, which Price titled "The Lord of Illusion," drew on his interests in Theosophy, Eastern philosophy, and occult cosmology. With some reluctance, Lovecraft agreed to revise it and, as often happened in such collaborations, “revision” really meant extensive rewriting. By the end, Price estimated that fewer than fifty words of his original draft remained, though traces of Price’s mystical elements are nevertheless apparent. The story was published in Weird Tales (July 1934) under the title by which it is known today.

Where "The Silver Key" is tinged with melancholy and personal longing, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is expansive, ornate, and metaphysically dense. The story begins at a gathering to settle Carter’s estate, long held in trust since his disappearance. The mysterious Swami Chandraputra, swathed in robes, with strange mittens on his hands, tells the assembled company of Carter’s fate. After performing its ritual, the Silver Key transported Carter beyond space and time, through the First Gate and into the Outer Extension, where he encountered the Ancient Ones led by ’Umr at-Tawil, a being feared in the Necronomicon. 

Accepting an invitation to plunge further into the cosmos, Carter passed the Ultimate Gate and found himself in the infinite void before an entity implied to be Yog-Sothoth, though only a fraction of its true nature, the Supreme Archetype, the All-in-One and One-in-All. Shown the unity of all consciousness as facets of this Archetype, Carter was granted a wish: to experience life as one of the wizardly inhabitants of Yaddith, a world besieged by the monstrous Dholes. The Supreme Archetype transferred his mind into the body of Zkauba the wizard, but Carter soon discovered his arrogance had trapped him in an alien form, sharing a mind with a being that found him as repugnant as he did it.

After centuries on Yaddith, Carter subdued Zkauba’s mind with drugs and returned to Earth using the Silver Key and alien machinery, seeking a manuscript of symbols he believed would restore his human body. The Swami claims Carter found it, contacted him, and sent him to Arkham to announce his imminent return. However, Carter’s cousin, lawyer Ernest Aspinwall, accuses the Swami of fraud, tearing at his face, thereby revealing the inhuman visage beneath. Aspinwall dies of apoplexy and Zkauba’s mind resurfaces, fleeing in a strange coffin-like clock. A postscript speculates the Swami was merely a criminal hypnotist, though some details of the tale seem disturbingly precise.

The shift in tone and content between "The Silver Key" and its sequel is striking. In the first tale, Carter longs to escape a disenchanted world, hoping to reclaim the dreamlike wonder of his youth. In the second, that escape comes at a terrible cost: the obliteration of the self. The human-scale yearning of "The Silver Key" gives way to a vision that is cold, alien, and inexorable, where the price of ultimate knowledge is nothing less than one's personal identity. 

Here, Price’s influence is unmistakable. Themes such as the unity of all beings, reincarnation, and the dissolution of the ego into a higher self are hallmarks of Theosophical thought, ideas largely absent from Lovecraft’s solo work. For Price, such transcendence could be uplifting, a step toward enlightenment; for Lovecraft, it becomes a transformation so complete that the human perspective is erased. Carter’s so-called apotheosis is not joyous but inhuman, stripping away every anchor to his mortal life.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is that Lovecraft seems to attempt to use Price's conceptions as a way to bridge the Dreamlands stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. By introducing Yog-Sothoth, Umr at-Tawil, and Yaddith into Carter’s dream-journey, Lovecraft draws a direct line between the fanciful dream adventures of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and the cosmicism of, say, “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Whisperer in Darkness.” The implications of this are profound: the Dreamlands are not a separate realm of whimsy, but part of the same vast, uncaring universe, which is precisely the tack Chaosium took in its own RPG adaptation of the former.

Whether Lovecraft fully succeeds in this synthesis is open to debate. The story’s ornate, metaphysical passages can be both dazzling and impenetrable and the fusion of Price’s mysticism with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is uneasy at times. Yet Carter’s arc, from wistful seeker of lost dreams to fragment of an incomprehensible, alien consciousness is an ambitious character transformation. The conclusion of this tale is deeply unsettling. The dreamer passes beyond the gate, not to reclaim his past, but to become something no longer human.

If "The Silver Key" is about losing the magic of youth, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is about losing oneself entirely. In Lovecraft’s cosmos, this may be the only form of escape and the ultimate price of seeking truths not meant for human minds. 

Hugh Rankin and "The Silver Key"

Though the covers of Weird Tales are usually more well remembered by history (for obvious reasons), it should be remembered that most of the stories published within the Unique Magazine had at least one accompanying illustration. So it is with H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," which featured this piece of artwork by Hugh Rankin.

Rankin provided illustrations for dozens of stories during the 1920s and '30s, including many by Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Perhaps his most significant one may be one from "Pickman's Model," depicting a ghoul.

I can't say with absolute certainty that this is the first ever depiction of one of Lovecraft's ghouls in a publication, but I suspect that it is. That alone makes Rankin worthy of remembrance. 

(I feel compelled to add Lovecraft's own drawing of a ghoul, which he drew in 1934, years after the publication of "Pickman's Model." I find it strangely charming.)

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Silver Key

First published in January 1929 issue of Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key” is an often overlooked but, in my opinion, important piece of his fiction. The story suffers in comparison to many of his more famous tales, because it contains no monstrous revelations, no ancient alien deities, no creeping madness. Instead, this is a deeply introspective and melancholic tale that straddles the line between fantasy and philosophical memoir. It’s a story less about horror and more about a different kind of loss: the loss of imagination, wonder, and a child's capacity to dream. These are topics that mean a great deal to me, as anyone who's read this blog for any length of time must know.

The story's protagonist is Lovecraft’s recurring alter ego, Randolph Carter, now a man in his forties and burdened by years of disillusionment. In his youth, Carter had access to other realms through dreams of “strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas." Alas, adulthood robbed him of that power. Now, “custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions.”

The crisis presented in "The Silver Key" is not merely fictional. Lovecraft was himself approaching 40 when he wrote the story. The 1920s had been a difficult decade for him. His marriage had collapsed, his brief sojourn in New York had ended in unhappiness and homesickness, and he had returned, somewhat defeated, to his beloved Providence. He had always found himself at odds with the modern world, disliking its commercialism and crudity, but the pace of change at that time seemed to him to have quickened. Lovecraft longed ever more for an idealized past, both personal and cultural, as a means to escape his dreary present. In “The Silver Key,” he gives poetic form to that longing.

What ultimately restores Carter’s access to the dream realms is the discovery of a literal silver key, hidden in the attic of his home. The key is a relic of youth, tied to his earliest experiences of fantasy. Using it, Carter is able to travel not merely through space or even into dreams, but into his own past. He once again becomes his younger self, at the age of ten, standing before a mysterious cave in the wooded hills outside of Arkham. The story ends with the suggestion that Carter has vanished from the adult world entirely, returning to his own youth, thereby regaining his ability to dream once more.

There is little action in “The Silver Key.” Much of the story is instead given over to philosophical reflection and autobiographical lament. It can thus be challenging reading for those expecting the grotesque thrills of Lovecraft's more well-known and celebrated tales. However, for those already familiar with his life and mind, "The Silver Key" may perhaps be his most revealing story. He wrote it not merely as fiction, but as a statement of belief:

“They had changed him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic is moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him to find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.”

The longing for hidden marvels, for the “twilight realms” just beyond the veil of waking life runs through all of Lovecraft’s fiction, but rarely had he expressed it so directly or so wistfully. “The Silver Key” is not about terror, but about the creeping desolation of rationality untempered by wonder.

When I was younger, I didn't hold this particular story in very high esteem. However, as I trudge toward old age, I judge it much more favorably. I suspect that those attuned to the imaginative currents that run between early fantasy fiction and tabletop roleplaying games will likewise find that “The Silver Key” offers a potent metaphor. It is the story of a character who finds that the rules of the real world no longer satisfy him. So, he uses an inherited tool (a “key,” in the broadest sense) to reenter a realm where those rules don’t apply. It is a dream-quest, but one that begins not with a map or a monster, but with memory and imagination.

This story, and its sequel “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” also serves to bind together the stories of Lovecraft’s so-called Dream Cycle and his broader cosmic mythos, turning Carter’s spiritual journey into something vaster and stranger. On its own, though, “The Silver Key” remains more intimate and perhaps more affecting. In it, Lovecraft invites the reader to consider that fantasy is not merely an escape but also a return, a recovery of something we all once possessed and may yet reclaim, if only we can remember the way.

Arkham House Congratulates Weird Tales

As I noted in my earlier post, "The Master of the Crabs" first appeared in the 25th anniversary issue of Weird Tales. You can take a look at the contents of the entire issue here, including its advertisements. Among those ads is this one, placed by none other than Arkham House:

This is a good reminder of just how significant to the history of fantasy and science fiction Arkham House once was. It's also a reminder of just how ephemeral tastes can be. Of the nearly twenty authors listed, less than half of them have had any lasting literary influence and fewer still remain well known and read today. However much I might wish to decry this, it remains a fact and will likely only become truer as the decades grind on. 
 

Are You An … Enslaved God?

An advertisement from the April 1934 issue of Weird Tales: