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: H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing (Part II)

It is tempting to draw a sharp line between H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales and his cosmic horror fiction. I do not believe, however, that this division is as firm as it appears. The Dreamlands stories and those of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos are not separate creations so much as different angles on the same vision. In both, Lovecraft presents mankind as small. In both, the powers beyond humanity are indifferent, remote, and often hostile. In both, the pursuit of knowledge leads not to enlightenment but to disillusionment. The difference lies primarily in tone and imagery. The Dreamlands stories dress these ideas in velvet and moonlight rather than slime and starlight.

This becomes increasingly clear in Lovecraft’s later dream tales, where the Dreamlands grow darker and more overtly connected to his cosmic horror. The Plateau of Leng, for example, belongs to both realms. It appears first as a dreamlike landscape of cold and mystery, but later becomes a threshold to something far more alien. Likewise, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the messenger of the Outer Gods, enters the Dreamlands not as a jarring intrusion but as a natural inhabitant of that realm. All of this suggests that the Dreamlands are not an escape from the Mythos. They are instead another way of approaching it. Dreaming is not a refuge from cosmic indifference, merely a different form of it.

“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” is often treated as the key to understanding Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories and with good reason. It is his most expansive narrative set there, consisting of a long episodic journey in which Randolph Carter travels across the dream world in search of the “sunset city” he has seen in visions. Carter believes the gods have stolen this city from him and he seeks to confront them and reclaim it.

On the surface, the story is a fairly typical fantasy quest. Carter journeys from place to place, encounters strange beings, bargains with ghouls, is saved by cats, and eventually reaches the cold, forbidding heights of Kadath. The Dreamlands are presented here in perhaps their fullest form, populated by both familiar names and new terrors. Yet a careful reading reveals that, despite outward appearances, this is not a tale of heroic adventure at all. Carter is not seeking to restore order or defeat evil. He seeks only personal fulfillment. He believes that somewhere in the Dreamlands there is a Beauty that will satisfy his longing.

Nyarlathotep’s revelation at the end of the tale is one of Lovecraft’s most moving statements about the imagination. Carter’s sunset city is not something stolen by the gods. It is something he already possesses, namely, his own memory, transformed by dream into something seemingly unattainable. The gods have not taken his desire from him; his desire has taken him away from himself. This is no mere literary twist. Indeed, it could be read as the thesis statement of Lovecraft’s dream tales as a whole. The dreamer’s longing is not truly directed outward toward some distant paradise. It is directed inward, toward something irrecoverable, like childhood, innocence, or the first encounter with wonder.

This is why the dream tales cannot end in triumph. Even when the dreamer finds what he seeks, he cannot keep it. The Dreamlands can offer wonder, but they cannot resolve longing. They can only intensify it, often to the point of existential suffering.

One reason I find these stories so attractive is that they represent Lovecraft’s most sustained attempt to write against modernity. In his horror fiction, modernity is presented as a thin veneer over ancient terror. Science and progress do not protect man; they merely reveal how little control he has. In the Dreamlands, by contrast, modernity is not terrifying so much as impoverished. The dreamer flees the modern world because it cannot satisfy his imagination. Lovecraft’s narrators frequently describe contemporary life as gray, repetitive, and spiritually barren. The Dreamlands, by contrast, are filled with ancient streets, mysterious temples, forgotten gods, and landscapes untouched by industry. They are not simply exotic. They are pre-modern in the most Romantic sense, a world where the past is not history but present.

This is not an incidental feature but a central one. The Dreamlands tales are fueled by a profound dissatisfaction with the contemporary world and a longing for something older, richer, and more enchanted. The irony, of course, is that Lovecraft does not ultimately believe such enchantment can be recovered. The Dreamlands are not a return to the past. They are a fantastical counterfeit of it and, as such, ultimately unsatisfying. This is why so many of the most powerful moments in these stories are tinged with melancholy. Even at their most wondrous, they carry the sense that the dreamer is pursuing something that cannot last.

If Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories have a unifying subject, it is the imagination itself, not merely its power or necessity, but also its danger. These stories are not truly escapist. They do not reassure the reader that there is a better world waiting just beyond the wall of sleep. Instead, they explore the cost of wanting such a world. The suffering dreamers experience in these tales reveals the limits of the human condition. Dreams can show beauty but cannot grant permanence. They can open doors but cannot change the fundamental indifference of the universe. They can provide refuge, but only by separating the dreamer from everything else.

For that reason, I do not think Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories can be separated cleanly from his cosmic horror. They are another side of the same coin, one Lovecraft continued to flip throughout his life. Both bodies of work are concerned with the human desire for meaning, beauty, and transcendence in a universe that does not promise any of these things.

The Dreamlands tales do, however, allow Lovecraft to approach this concern through longing rather than terror. They are the literature of yearning rather than dread, even if their conclusions are not so different. The dreamer may travel far, meet gods, and glimpse wonders beyond imagining. In the end, though, he remains what he always was – a fragile consciousness, haunted by desire and unable to hold what he most wants.

Whether that is comforting or terrifying is likely a matter of temperament. It may well be both. I do not think Lovecraft ever fully resolved this tension, even in his own mind, which makes sense, since it may be intractable. I know I feel it ever more keenly as I get older, hence the continued fascination I have with these stories and the man who struggled for most of his life trying to give shape to longing, only to discover that it cannot be satisfied, only endured.

Pulp Fantasy Library: H.P. Lovecraft and the Literature of Longing (Part I)

This week’s Pulp Fantasy Library post is going to be a little different. After spending several months re-reading the stories commonly associated with H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, I wanted to gather my thoughts in one place. It’s been a long-running project and it seems to deserve a proper send-off. I should also note at the outset that I’ve lately been in a melancholy mood, which likely accounts for some of the tone of what follows, as well as its length. What I’m offering here (and in tomorrow’s conclusion) isn’t intended as a definitive statement so much as an attempt to make sense of a number of impressions that have been accumulating for a while now.

Lovecraft’s present literary reputation rests on his stories in which human beings confront the indifferent vastness of the universe and discover how little mankind matters. Alongside these, however, he wrote another kind of tale, the so-called Dreamlands stories. These fantasies unfold in strange cities and landscapes of impossible antiquity, where remote gods brood, cats are not quite what they seem, and dreamers wander. Fans of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror frequently treat these stories as merely youthful imitations of Lord Dunsany and thus diversions from his “real” work.

To be fair, there is some truth to that assessment. The Dreamlands stories do not constitute a “series” in any strict sense. They were written over the course of many years, in different moods, and for different purposes. Some are little more than exercises in stylized diction, while others are surprisingly straightforward. A few are whimsical, while several are bleak. Even Randolph Carter, the character most often associated with these tales (and with Lovecraft himself), does not appear in most of them, and the Dreamlands themselves shift in tone and detail from one story to the next.

Nevertheless, taken together, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories do reveal a consistent set of preoccupations. They return to the same themes again and again. What gives them unity is not plot or continuity but impulse. They are, at bottom, stories about longing and about the imagination as refuge, temptation, and trap. As someone who has lived inside his own head for much of his life, I find these subjects hard to resist, which likely explains why the Dreamlands continue to exert such a pull on me, even after a lifetime of reading them.

Any discussion of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories inevitably – and rightly – turns to Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft’s fantasies adopt Dunsany’s Biblical cadence, his remote and capricious gods, his invented antiquity, and his sense that wonder and melancholy are inseparable. Stories such as “The White Ship,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” and “The Cats of Ulthar” wear their inspiration openly. They are written in a consciously archaic style, as though recited by a storyteller who has never heard of the modern world.

Lovecraft admired Dunsany’s ability to evoke vastness without the use of literary realism. Dunsany invited the reader into a realm of dream, but it's not a comforting dream. It is beautiful, yes, but also fatalistic. The gods are not moral; they are simply powerful. Mortals may glimpse wonder, but they will never possess it and there is often a price to be paid for the attempt to do so. Lovecraft borrowed much from this approach, but, even in his most Dunsanian fantasies, there are also differences. Dunsany’s distance is poetic; Lovecraft’s is metaphysical. For him, the dream is never merely a dream. It is a sign of something beyond human reach and the desire for it is not without danger.

The Dreamlands are sometimes discussed as if they were a setting in the sense of a coherent world with geography, history, and consistent detail. Lovecraft occasionally encouraged this impression. He names cities and regions, refers back to earlier stories, and returns to certain motifs, like Ulthar and its cats, the streets of Dylath-Leen, and the Plateau of Leng, to cite just a few obvious ones. Yet, despite the desires of many a fan, the Dreamlands defy cartography. Their consistency is psychological rather than geographical. The Dreamlands are not really a place so much as a condition given form – the landscape of longing.

I think this is why Randolph Carter serves as something like the Dreamlands’ "mascot." Carter is not a hero in the usual pulp fantasy sense. He does not seek treasure or power. Instead, he seeks experience, specifically, a sense of wonder that cannot be found in waking life. He wants to escape the ordinary and, in doing so, find freedom. One can see the same impulse at work in “Celephaïs.” Its protagonist, Kuranes, finds refuge only in dreams, which become more real than his impoverished waking existence. The story’s conclusion is both triumphant and tragic. Kuranes achieves a kingdom in the Dreamlands where he may rule in peace, but he does so only by abandoning the real world entirely. This is one of the governing ideas of Lovecraft’s dream stories. The Dreamlands offer salvation of a kind, but it is a salvation that demands withdrawal.

For this reason, the Dreamlands tales are sometimes treated as a gentler alternative to Lovecraft’s more well-known cosmic horror stories. They contain moments of beauty, whimsy, and even mercy. The cats of Ulthar avenge cruelty. The White Ship carries its dreamer to lands of wonder. There is, at times, a sense that the imagination, for all its dangers, can grant something the waking world cannot. Even so, I think this supposed gentleness is often overstated. The Dreamlands do not offer simple consolation. In many cases, the dreamer’s longing is both a source of wonder and a cause of ruin.

In “The White Ship,” Basil Elton sails to marvelous lands, but his desire is not satisfied. He must go further. He must reach Cathuria, the Land of Hope, which promises absolute fulfillment. Yet in pressing on beyond the Basalt Pillars of the West, he causes the ship to founder and he awakens from his dream, unfulfilled. The story’s structure is essentially moral, but its morality is existential. The lesson is not that the dream is sinful, but that longing is insatiable and that insatiability will always court disappointment.

This pattern appears in different forms throughout Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales. “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” is not a dream story in the strict sense, but it is deeply Dunsanian and shares the same fatalism. A city grows proud, destroys what it considers lesser, and is eventually consumed by forces older than its own arrogance. The story is told as a legend, but its message is quintessentially Lovecraftian: history is not progress but a cycle of forgetting and punishment. Even “The Cats of Ulthar,” one of Lovecraft’s most charming fantasies, contains a darker undercurrent. The cats are not merely fanciful. They are agents of an ancient, inhuman justice. Their mercy is conditional, their vengeance absolute. The tale is comforting only if one is on the right side of it.

This is one of the Dreamlands’ most revealing features. Even in dream, Lovecraft cannot fully imagine a universe governed by benevolence. Beauty exists, but it is fragile. Wonder exists, but it is fraught. The dreamer may glimpse transcendence, but he cannot possess it without consequence.

I've rambled on longer than I'd intended already, so I'll leave the remainder of my thoughts for the second part of this post tomorrow.

REPOST: Pulp Fantasy Library: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was one of the first stories by H.P. Lovecraft I ever read and it baffled me. It baffled me not because its content was difficult to understand – though it does ramble quite a bit – but because it was not at all what expected from Lovecraft. Prior to entering the hobby, I don't believe I'd ever heard his name. Once I had, many of the older fellows with whom I'd become acquainted sang his praises as an unsurpassed horror writer and a huge influence on many of gaming's early designers.

So, naturally, I made my way to library to grab any book by Lovecraft that I could. Among those volumes was the book pictured here, a 1943 Arkham House-published collection of some of Lovecraft's tales, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Though completed in 1927, Lovecraft never submitted it for publication in his lifetime and, indeed, felt "it isn't much good," as he admitted in a letter to Wilfred Talman. Consequently, the version that appeared in 1943 was based on a largely-unedited rough draft, which may explain some of its disjointedness.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is an odd tale – "a picaresque chronicle of impossible adventures in a dreamland," as HPL himself described it in the same letter quote above. At over 40,000 words, it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of length. I'd also argue that it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of being one of Lovecraft's greatest – or at least, most ambitious – works. That's not an opinion everyone shares. Many critics consider The Dream-Quest to be without much merit, seeing it as yet another ape of Dunsanian fantasy without many redeeming features. I won't deny that it owes much to Lord Dunsany, as all Lovecraft's dreamlands tales do, but I think it's a mistake to see it only as yet another knock-off of the Irish writer. That's because I consider the novella to be a valedictory tale, where Lovecraft not only bids farewell to Dunsany but lays the groundwork for the next phase of his writing career.

For this tale, Lovecraft brings back his dreaming hero and alter ego, Randolph Carter, who'd appeared in three previous stories.

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

What follows is a record of Carter's attempts to find the "majestic sunset city" of his dreams. This quest includes visits to the Enchanted Wood, to Oriab Isle aboard a black galley, to Celephaïs, and, at last, to the Cold Waste, where Kadath lies. Along the way, he meets the rodent-like zoogs, the cats of Ulthar, ghouls, fellow dreamer King Kuranes, moon beasts, and many, many wondrous and terrifying creatures. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a veritable catalog of the beautiful and the weird, often coming so quickly, one after the other, that it's difficult to really appreciate any of them, or the care with which Lovecraft describes them. That's probably the biggest fault of the novella: it contains so much that it demands a more coherent narrative structure from which to make sense of it all. Without it, the reader is left reeling.

Yet, I can forgive that, partly because I like catalogs of the beautiful and the weird, especially when drawn so artfully as Lovecraft does here. However, the ultimate reason for my forgiveness is the conclusion of the tale, when the messenger of the gods, Nyarlathotep himself, explains to Carter the true identity of the city he has seen in his dreams:

"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset, of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.

"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraithlike from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.

"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.

The world of Randolph Carter's dreams is not in some faraway place, but right before him, in the familiar places he loves and has loved since his childhood. Perhaps it's because I know so much more about Lovecraft's life that I find this passage so powerfully moving, perhaps it's because I, too, feel the pull of my past and an attachment to the places of my youth or perhaps it's because I'm middle-aged and feel more keenly than ever the weight of the past, I don't know, but I consider it one of the truest things Lovecraft ever wrote and enough to earn The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath a place among the pantheon of my favorite stories.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Strange High House in the Mist

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” is a restrained yet quietly affecting tale, often grouped with his Dunsanian or Dreamlands stories. This is understandable, as the story shares with them a preoccupation with mood, suggestion, and the power of longing rather than with overt horror. Instead, it focuses on reverie and yearning, centered on an encounter with something ancient, beautiful, and meaningful that lies just beyond the reach of modern life. In this respect, the story offers a glimpse of Lovecraft’s wistful and elegiac sensibilities, one that is simultaneously at odds with and supportive of the horror stories for which he is better known.

First published in the October 1931 issue of Weird Tales, the story is set in Kingsport, Lovecraft’s fictionalized version of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Kingsport is a location to which he returned repeatedly as a symbol of the old New England (and, by extension, the old world) he so revered. The seaside town is portrayed as steeped in age and wonder. Here, the past is never entirely absent but lingers just beneath the surface of everyday life. In this particular case, that past takes the form of a strange house perched impossibly high on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The house is visible only at certain times, half-lost in mist, and the townsfolk are reluctant to learn more about it.

“The Strange High House in the Mist” reflects, in part, HPL's increasing preoccupation with the erosion of the strange and wondrous. Industrial modernity, the rise of mass society, and the perceived loss of continuity with the past weighed heavily on his imagination. In many of his stories from this time, these anxieties are transmuted into horror, with ancient survivals revealing humanity’s insignificance in an uncaring cosmos. In this tale, however, the same concerns are expressed through melancholy and yearning rather than terror.

The protagonist, Thomas Olney, is a philosopher vacationing in Kingsport. He is immediately captivated by the sight of the house on the cliff and feels an almost instinctive pull toward it. Driven by curiosity, Olney ascends the cliff and discovers that the house is indeed a peculiar locale.

When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as grey as the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward vapours. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below but the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff’s edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.

Inside, he is welcomed by a bearded man who "seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder mysteries." The encounter is striking because it lacks the menace one might expect. The man is dignified and reflective, speaking of distant times and forgotten wonders. Olney’s visit is brief, but it has an effect on him, as we shall see. What he experiences is not forbidden knowledge in the usual Lovecraftian sense, but a momentary awakening to another manner of understanding the world.

Consequently, Olney leaves house a changed man – but not quite for the better. He does not remember what he saw in the house nor does he recall what he discussed with its lone inhabitant. In some sense, both real and metaphorical, he is no longer the same person who climbed the pinnacle and entered the house full of curiosity and wonder.

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.

There is fear present in this story, but it's the fear not of cosmic annihilation or human insignificance, but of loss, specifically, the loss of imagination and curiosity, a perennial concern of Lovecraft. The tragedy is not that wonders such as the house are dangerous, but that the desire for such wonders is vanishing, driven away by unthinking skepticism and the structure of modern life.

In this respect, the story shares a great deal with “The White Ship,” “Celephaïs,” and “The Silver Key,” though I think it's more firmly anchored in something akin to the "real world." Rather than transporting its protagonist to a dream realm, the tale suggests that wonder lies just out of sight but still visible to those who seek for it. Of course, not everyone who does so will find his longing satisfied and, as in the case of Thomas Olney, the opposite might occur. 

Though it is easy to see why some readers classify the story among Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales, it seems more accurate to view it as occupying a middle ground between his early, explicitly Dunsanian fantasies and his later, more austere and uncompromising cosmic horror. The unease it generates does not arise from revelations about what lies beyond humanity, but from an awareness of what humanity may have already abandoned. The true loss is not safety or sanity, but memory, imagination, and continuity with the past. 

Artwork by Joseph Doolin

The Family Tree of the Gods

Fanzines are of particular importance to the history and development of roleplaying games and have, in recent years, enjoyed a welcome resurgence. RPG fanzines were themselves modeled on the earlier ’zines of science fiction fandom. Beginning in the 1930s, these amateur magazines helped popularize the then-new genres of science fiction and fantasy (the distinction between them being a later and largely arbitrary development). Much like the pulp magazines of the same era, early fanzines offer a treasure trove of insight into the tastes, debates, and creative energies of their communities. They capture ideas in motion, as well as passionate – and often acrimonious – arguments played out in print. I take strange comfort in the fact that the nerds of nearly a century ago were no more temperate in their enthusiasm than are their 21st century descendants.

Another way in which those old fanzines strangely mirror contemporary trends is that, much like the Internet today, they enabled fans to interact directly, albeit more slowly, with writers and artists whose work they admired. For example, The Acolyte, a fanzine edited by Francis Towner Laney from 1942 to 1946, often included contributions from members of the Lovecraft Circle, such as Donald Wandrei (co-founder of Arkham House) and Clark Ashton Smith. Though there are many issues of The Acolyte that are worthy of examination, issue #7 (Summer 1944) includes an interesting contribution from Smith.

Entitled "The Family Tree of the Gods," it's a transcript of part of a letter sent by CAS to Robert H. Barlow a decade earlier. In that letter, Smith lays out the genealogy of some of the Elder Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos and how they relate to some of his own creations, most notably Tsathoggua.

From what I have gathered, this family tree is intended as an addition/expansion/correction to one that Lovecraft created in a letter to James F. Morton in April 1933. That one seems to have been a joke, a bit of tongue in cheek genealogy that purported to show HPL's own lineage from Azathoth on down through Nyarlathotep to the present day. Here's a reproduction of that family tree:

As you can see, there are points of disagreement between the two genealogies that cannot easily be reconciled. That’s not really a problem, however, since I doubt that either Lovecraft or Smith intended these schemes to be definitive, let alone reliable. They function more as evocative gestures than as firm statements of "canon." Of course, some of their disciples and fans felt otherwise, seizing upon every stray detail and treating it as holy writ, as overzealous fans have been wont to do for as long as fandom has existed. Being prone to this sort of activity myself, I can hardly censure them too harshly. Even so, I can’t help but feel that attempts at encyclopedic categorization miss the point of Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothothery entirely – hardly the first time fans have tried to pin down something that was meant to remain elusive and unsettling.

I present this material mostly as evidence of the ways Lovecraft and especially Smith interacted with fans and correspondents, engaging their enthusiasm while never fully surrendering the essential ambiguity of their creations. These genealogies reveal a kind of playful negotiation between creator and audience, where hints are offered, contradictions are allowed to stand, and the resulting uncertainty becomes a feature rather than a flaw. In that sense, the disagreements themselves are more revealing than any tidy reconciliation could ever be.

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.

A Poet Among the Pulpsters

CAS at age 19

When discussions turn to the triumvirate of Weird Tales – H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith – there is a tendency to group them together as if they all sprang from the same soil and wrote from the same impulses. In reality, Smith stands apart in a crucial way. Lovecraft was, at heart, an antiquarian essayist who transformed his philosophical anxieties into cosmic horror. Howard, by contrast, was a storyteller of raw physicality, a bard of blood and thunder who wrote like a man shadowboxing the page. Smith, however, came to weird fiction by a very different road. He was a poet first, last, and always and that vocation shaped every sentence he ever wrote.

Today marks the 133rd anniversary of Smith’s birth, which seems as good an occasion as any to reflect on what made his work so distinctive. Rather than simply commemorating another member of the Weird Tales stable, I think it’s worth pausing to consider how Smith’s early life as a poet (and the literary circles in which he moved) gave his fiction its singular texture and enduring power.

Clark Ashton Smith’s literary career began not in pulp magazines but in the rarefied world of early twentieth-century poetry. Born in 1893 in Auburn, California, he had little formal schooling, largely due to health issues, but he compensated through voracious self-education. He devoured classical literature, taught himself French and Spanish, and immersed himself in the Romantic and Symbolist poets. By nineteen, he had produced The Star-Treader and Other Poems, a volume so striking in its imagery and diction that contemporary critics compared him to Keats and Shelley. For a brief moment, Smith seemed destined for a serious poetic career.

Central to his early success was George Sterling, often called the “uncrowned king of Bohemia” in San Francisco literary circles. Sterling became Smith’s mentor, champion, and friend, introducing him to writers and artists and encouraging his lush, decadent style. Sterling himself wrote in a fin-de-siècle mode, rich with classical allusions and sensual imagery, and Smith absorbed this esthetic deeply. From Sterling, Smith learned that language could be luxuriant, that excess was not a vice but a virtue, and that literature could aspire to the condition of dream or myth rather than mere narrative efficiency.

CAS and George Sterling

If Sterling gave Smith his ornate beauty, it was Ambrose Bierce who supplied the venom. Bierce, by then an aging icon of American letters, recognized Smith’s talent and corresponded with him. Where Sterling fostered romance and rapture, Bierce sharpened Smith’s sense of irony and cruelty. Bierce’s influence can be felt in Smith’s merciless endings, his delight in cosmic indifference, and his refusal to grant characters easy moral victories. The combination of Sterling’s estheticism and Bierce’s mordant wit produced something rare: prose that is simultaneously sumptuous and pitiless.

The problem for Smith was that poetry did not pay. By the 1920s, the market for ornate verse had largely collapsed. Smith found himself in financial difficulty and turned, reluctantly at first, to writing fiction for magazines like Weird Tales. It is important to emphasize that Smith did not approach this shift as a conversion. He did not become a pulp writer in the way Howard wholeheartedly embraced the form. Instead, he treated fiction as trade work, seeing it as necessary labor to save himself and his aging parents from utter penury.

Even so, Smith never simplified his voice. He did not trim his sentences, streamline his vocabulary, or abandon his baroque imagery. If anything, he doubled down. While other writers adapted themselves to the expectations of pulp magazines, Smith forced the magazines to accommodate him. His stories read less like conventional narratives and more like prose poems that just happen to feature necromancers, dying empires, and alien gods.

I think this poetic foundation explains why Smith’s fiction feels so different from that of his peers. In Smith, language is not merely a vehicle for story; it is the story. His plots are often simple – curiosity leads to doom, hubris invites annihilation, etc. – but the pleasure lies in how those ideas are expressed. He builds atmosphere through rhythm and sound, crafting sentences meant to be savored aloud. His vocabulary is famously archaic and exotic, not as an affectation but as an extension of his poetic training. Words matter to Smith almost like physical objects, chosen for their texture as much as for their meaning.

His worldbuilding, too, reflects a poet’s sensibility. Whereas Howard constructs the Hyborian Age through action and Lovecraft builds his cosmos through dreadful revelations, Smith creates settings through sensory accumulation. Colors bleed into one another. Landscapes are described like paintings glimpsed in flickering torchlight. Cities feel half-remembered, as if drawn from some collective unconscious. His imaginary realms, whether Zothique, Hyperborea, or Averoigne, are not maps but moods.

Perhaps most telling is Smith’s attitude toward horror. Lovecraft’s terror is intellectual, rooted in the shattering of human significance. Howard’s horror is visceral, something to be fought or fled. Smith’s horror is esthetic. His monsters are often beautiful, seductive, or strangely noble. Doom is inevitable, but it arrives wrapped in velvet. This, too, comes from poetry, from the Decadent tradition that finds fascination in decline and ruin. For Smith, decay is not merely tragic; it is strangely lovely.

This places him at a peculiar angle to his Weird Tales compatriots. Lovecraft wrote to reveal philosophical truths. Howard wrote to thrill and exult. Smith, however, wrote to evoke. His stories appeal to me not because of memorable protagonists or clever twists, but because of the way they sound and even feel, if that's the word. They linger in my mind like fragments of strange dreams.

In the end, Clark Ashton Smith is best understood not as a pulp writer who could occasionally write beautifully, but as a poet who temporarily inhabited pulp fiction. Forced by circumstance to trade verse for narrative, he brought with him Sterling’s decadent romanticism and Bierce’s biting skepticism, infusing Weird Tales with a voice unlike any other. Sixty-five years after his death, that voice still echoes, ornate and unforgiving, reminding us that even in the cheapest magazines, true art can take root and flourish in the strangest soil.

Pulp Fantasy Library: What the Moon Brings

H. P. Lovecraft’s “What the Moon Brings” is another very short work and, though imperfect in many respects, it nonetheless offers a concentrated expression of ideas and techniques that would later come to define his mature style. More a prose poem than a conventional short story, it lacks both plot and character development, relying instead on mood, imagery, and suggestion. In just a few paragraphs, Lovecraft attempts – if not entirely successfully – to evoke a sense of antiquity, cosmic revelation, and existential unease by presenting a world transformed not through action or violence, but through the simple act of seeing it under an unfamiliar light.

Like many of the works I've been discussing for the past few months, "What the Moon Brings" was written during a transitional phase in Lovecraft’s career, when he was moving away from the imitative Gothic and Poe-esque tales of his youth and toward more experimental and personal forms of expression. This was the period when Lovecraft was most deeply influenced by the fantasy of Lord Dunsany, whose dreamlike narratives and mythic landscapes encouraged him to explore atmosphere and symbolism over more conventional storytelling. “What the Moon Brings” reflects this influence, both in its lyrical prose and in its emphasis on a journey into an altered reality. The piece was never submitted to commercial magazines, likely because its extreme brevity, lack of dialog, and absence of a traditional narrative would have made it unsuitable for such venues but well suited to Lovecraft’s ongoing work in amateur journalism. Instead, first appeared in The National Amateur in May 1923, the very same issue in which "Hypnos" also appeared.

Told in the first person, “What the Moon Brings” follows an unnamed narrator as he wanders through his garden by moonlight and gradually enters a surreal, dreamlike landscape. Crossing a stream and an arched stone bridge, he discovers that the garden has become endless, its walls replaced by trees, grotesque stone idols, and drifting lotus blossoms whose dead, staring faces urge him onward. The stream widens into a river and finally opens onto the shore of a sea, where the sinking moon reveals the ruins of an ancient, sunken city, a place where all the dead have gathered. As the tide ebbs further, the narrator glimpses the basalt crown of a colossal and monstrous idol rising beneath the waves, a revelation so terrifying that he flees by plunging into the shallows and swimming among the drowned streets and corpses of the dead, seemingly choosing death over the madness promised by the greater horror he has seen.

Quite obviously, “What the Moon Brings” engages many of the central themes of Lovecraft's later work. Most prominent is the idea of revelation as horror. The moonlight does not merely illuminate the landscape but strips away comforting illusions, exposing a deeper and more ancient reality. The notion that knowledge itself can be terrifying would become a cornerstone of HPL’s cosmic horror. The submerged ruins and half-glimpsed monstrosities anticipate later images of lost and sunken cities, most notably R’lyeh in “The Call of Cthulhu,” while the journey into an uncanny realm recalls the dream-voyages of stories such as "Celephaïs," and “The White Ship,” and foreshadows The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Stylistically, the piece aligns with Lovecraft’s contemporaneous prose poems, like “Nyarlathotep” and “Ex Oblivione,” where imagery and atmosphere take precedence over narrative. Together, these works suggest Lovecraft’s aspiration, at least in this period, to position himself within a broader tradition of decadent and symbolist literature rather than as a mere writer of genre fiction.

In the context of Lovecraft’s larger body of work, “What the Moon Brings” is minor, but it might be said to serve as a compact statement of his evolving worldview. It bridges his early fascination with dream fantasy and his later commitment to cosmic horror, demonstrating how the two modes might coexist. That's probably its greatest strength and the main reason I'd recommend reading it today, even if he achieves similar ends more successfully in other stories, many of which I've linked to above.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Hypnos

First published in the May 1923 issue of The National Amateur, H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “Hypnos” is one of his more obscure works, seldom chosen for inclusion in anthologies and rarely discussed in detail. At just a few pages in length, it lacks the narrative sweep of his later, more famous tales. Nevertheless, it occupies an important place in Lovecraft’s development as a writer. “Hypnos” is not a story of cosmic horror but rather one about aspiration, beauty, and the perils of reaching beyond human limits.

“Hypnos” is a first-person narrative recounted by an unnamed sculptor. He confesses his terror of sleep and explains that he is writing down his experiences before they drive him irretrievably mad, regardless of how others might judge his account. Years earlier, he encountered a mysterious man in a railway station, a figure whose “immense, sunken, and widely luminous eyes” instantly marked him as a being of singular importance. In that moment, the narrator knew he had found his destined companion – indeed his first and only true friend. He also believed he glimpsed in those eyes the long-sought secrets of hidden cosmic truths.

An intense partnership quickly forms. By day, the narrator sculpts his companion again and again, striving to capture his uncanny features; by night, the two embark on shared dream-journeys that carry them far beyond ordinary human perception. Through the combined use of sleep, drugs, and rigorous experimentation, they pass through alien realms and successive barriers of sensation and awareness. Over time, the companion grows increasingly exalted and ambitious, speaking of using their power of dream-transcendence to rule the universe itself. The narrator recoils from this vision, denouncing it as reckless and blasphemous hubris. Then, during one perilous expedition, they traverse a vast, ineffable void until the narrator reaches a final threshold he cannot cross, while his companion passes beyond it alone.

When the narrator awakens in the physical world, he waits in dread for his friend’s return. The companion eventually wakes as well, but is profoundly shaken and will say only that they must avoid sleep at all costs. With the help of drugs, the two struggle to remain awake, for whenever they succumb to sleep they seem to age rapidly and are tormented by horrific nightmares the narrator refuses to describe. Inevitably, the effort fails. One night, the companion falls into a deep, unresponsive sleep and cannot be awakened. The narrator shrieks, faints, and later regains consciousness to find police and neighbors gathered around him, insisting that no such man ever existed. All that remains is a single sculpted bust in his room, bearing a chilling Greek inscription: ΥΠΝΟΣ (Hypnos).

Whether “Hypnos” is another tale of Lovecraft's Dreamlands cycle depends, as always, on how one views these works within the larger context of HPL's oeuvre. Regardless, there is a sense in which it clearly differs from other dream-adjacent stories. Unlike, say, the stories of Randolph Carter, which treat dreams as a strange but navigable places, “Hypnos” instead presents dreams as perilous thresholds. They are not realms for adventure but gateways to truths that the human mind can barely endure. The story thus lacks the whimsical or romantic qualities found in Lovecraft’s more overtly fantastical dream tales, replacing them with a tone of somber fatalism.

“Hypnos” obviously reflects Lovecraft’s deep admiration for classical art and his belief in absolute esthetic standards. The sculptor’s obsession with ideal forms mirrors Lovecraft’s own reverence for the art of antiquity, but the story complicates this admiration by linking artistic perfection to isolation and inhumanity. To approach the ideal too closely is to abandon the world of ordinary people. The sculptor’s triumph is ultimately inseparable from the loss of his friend (and his sanity).

In terms of Lovecraft’s broader body of work, “Hypnos” is another story that falls within the period of his transition as a writer. Like "The Other Gods," it anticipates the cosmic horror of his later fiction, in which reality is layered and humanity occupies a lowly, precarious rung. Here, horror lies not in malevolent entities but in the discovery that higher states of existence are real and fundamentally incompatible with human life. At the same time, "Hypnos" story retains a personal, almost confessional quality that would largely vanish from the more explicitly cosmic horror tales for which Lovecraft is now best known.

What I think makes “Hypnos” particularly striking is its asymmetry. The narrator and his friend embark on their quest together, but only one of them remains at its conclusion – assuming he was ever there in the first place. This uneven distribution of insight and endurance is a recurring motif in Lovecraft’s fiction, where knowledge isolates and enlightenment (if such is the word) comes at the cost of connection. The narrator’s fate is not madness in the theatrical sense but resignation. He gains a life spent fearing sleep, haunted by what he has glimpsed and by what he has lost because of it.

Though minor in scale, “Hypnos” is a revealing story. It distills Lovecraft’s ambivalence toward transcendence, capturing both his yearning for something beyond the material world and his conviction that such yearning is ultimately destructive. In doing so, it offers a quiet but potent expression of the philosophical pessimism that underlies even his most extravagant cosmic horrors. It's probably for that reason that I have considerable fondness for the story and consider it a minor masterpiece of HPL's fiction.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories

Despite his profound influence over the subsequent development of fantasy, science fiction, and, of course, horror, adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft's works into film or television don't have a great track record. Most of them deviate considerably from their source material, often because it's clear that the creators don't really understand – or want to understand – HPL and his esthetic and philosophical worldview. Consequently, the number of Lovecraft adaptations I consider genuinely worthy are few and far between. Even so, I'm always on the lookout for new ones, in the hope that I might come across a rare gem.

The other day, while doing some research for Dream-Quest, I stumbled upon references to a 46-minute claymation film released in 2007 by the Japanese multimedia company, Toei. Written and directed by Ryo Shinagawa, it adapts three of Lovecraft's stories – "The Picture in the House," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Festival" – and does so reasonably faithfully within the limited context of its chosen medium. I particularly like the adaptation of "The Festival," but then I am inordinately fond of that tale already. In any case, I thought this film might be of interest to fellow Lovecraft fans and so bring it to your attention.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games"

I strongly considered not writing a post about this particular article from issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), since I know it’s likely to stir up strong feelings and perhaps understandably so. At the same time, the guiding principle behind my revival of the Articles of Dragon series has been to focus on pieces that had a particular impact on me when I first read them, and this one – “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games” – most certainly did. Of course, if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, that should come as no surprise.

The question of Tolkien’s influence on the creation and later development of Dungeons & Dragons is a topic to which Gary Gygax regularly returned. From nearly the moment the game appeared, Gygax denied that Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings, held any special place of honor among the many fantasy works that inspired him. He never denied having read and enjoyed The Hobbit, nor that he had borrowed certain monsters and creatures, such as orcs and halflings, from Tolkien. What he seems to have rejected was the idea that this borrowing meant D&D was primarily inspired by Tolkien, rather than being a mishmash of many different influences.

I say "seems," because I really don't know why this particular question so vexed Gygax. That he kept writing articles like this more than a decade after the first appearance of the game suggests that it somehow mattered to him. I suppose the easy explanation is ego – he simply couldn't countenance the idea that someone might think D&D's success was owed, in whole or in part, to the popularity of Tolkien's work rather than his own imagination and ingenuity. But is that what was going on? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure anyone else does either.

"The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games" is a strange article. For one, Gygax begins it by admitting – in the very first paragraph – that "the popularity of Professor Tolkien's fantasy works did encourage me to develop my own." This is undeniable, since the Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail directly references J.R.R. Tolkien and includes not just hobbits but orcs, balrogs, and ents among its bestiary (all of which appeared in OD&D, at least in its earliest printings). Gygax continues that "there are bits and pieces of his works reflected hazily in mine," before stating that "I believe his influence, as a whole, is minimal" [italics mine].

Gygax then recalls the many, many fantasy books and authors he read, beginning in childhood. He points particularly to Robert E. Howard's only Conan novel, Conan the Conqueror (more accurately The Hour of the Dragon) as being his first exposure to sword-and-sorcery literature. He then goes on to cite L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Abraham Merritt, and H.P. Lovecraft as also being important to developing his sense of fantasy. None of those names should come as surprise, since he highlights all of them in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. (Of more interest to me is why Jack Vance is not mentioned at all, despite Gygax's regular praise of him and his works and his role in inspiring the D&D magic system.)

With that out of the way, Gygax says he "thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit" but found The Lord of the Rings a "tedious ... allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil." Tolkien would, of course, object strenuously to that characterization of The Lord of the Rings, but we must take Gygax at his word. He claims to have found the novel's action to be slow, its magic unimpressive, and its resolution disappointing. Moreover, Tolkien drops his favorite character, Tom Bombadil, soon after introducing him, which contributed to the slowness with which he finished it (three weeks).

Gygax then goes on, rather unconvincingly in my view, to say that many of the common elements of Middle-earth and Dungeons & Dragons have common sources, like Norse mythology for dwarves, and that therefore no one should assume the game he created owed much to Tolkien. In fairness, he also admits once again that there were some things he borrowed with the intention of "capitalizing on the then-current 'craze' for Tolkien's literature." He did this in a "superficial manner," believing that, once he'd attracted these Tolkien fiends to D&D, they'd soon realize that there was only "a minute trace of the Professor's work" therein.

As I said, I really don't know what to make of all of this. On the one hand, I generally agree with Gygax that D&D's similarities to Tolkien's creations are skin-deep at best and probably included solely for the purposes of enticing Middle-earth aficionados to the game. On the other hand, the fact that Gygax kept beating this particular drum makes me wonder if he actually believed the lines he was saying. Furthermore, Gygax was never shy about admitting the debt he owed REH or Vance or Leiber, so why did the charge he was borrowed Tolkien rankle him so? It's frankly baffling to me.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Azathoth

Written sometime in June 1922 and never published during H. P. Lovecraft’s lifetime, “Azathoth” is little more than a fragment. Comprising just three paragraphs and fewer than 500 words, it might seem insubstantial at first glance. Yet, it remains a revealing artifact from a pivotal transitional moment in Lovecraft’s development, poised between the dreamlike, Dunsanian mode of his early work and the colder, more unsettling cosmic horror for which he is now best known. Precisely because of its brevity and ambiguity, “Azathoth” resists easy classification. It is often grouped with the Dunsanian tales when it is mentioned at all, but doing so obscures its real significance. "Azathoth" is not merely a relic of an earlier phase, but as a sketch of what Lovecraft was in the process of becoming.

By Lovecraft’s own account, “Azathoth” was at least partly inspired by his reading of William Beckford’s Vathek the previous year. An eighteenth-century Orientalist fantasy, Vathek centers on an immoral caliph whose accumulated sins drive him into a descent through the underworld, where he endures a succession of grotesque and fitting torments. Lovecraft, who had been fascinated by Middle Eastern lore since childhood – Abdul Alhazred itself began as a youthful pseudonym – was deeply struck by Beckford’s novel. So much so, in fact, that he resolved to write a weird novel in a similar spirit.

That ambition, however, quickly foundered. Lovecraft never advanced beyond a tentative beginning, and the fragment now known as “Azathoth” is all that survives of the project. For years it remained virtually unknown, surfacing only in 1938, when it was finally published in Robert Barlow's amateur journal Leaves. Since then, it's frequently been included in many anthologies of HPL's works, including the very first one I ever read. 

Despite its brevity, “Azathoth” repays attention, particularly for readers interested in the evolution of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories – or, more accurately, the evolution of his own thinking about dreams, creativity, and nostalgia. Its opening paragraph sets the tone unmistakably:

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.

Rereading it, I was very much reminded of "The Silver Key," with its portrait of Randolph Carter’s attempt to reclaim the sense of wonder that adulthood has stolen from him. The loss of enchantment and the longing to recover it through imagination or dreams is a potent theme for literary meditation and one that resonates powerfully, perhaps increasingly so, with readers who feel themselves estranged from the world they inhabit.

The issue becomes more complex, however, when one considers The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written only a few years later, in 1926 (though not published until 1943). That work could plausibly be read as Lovecraft’s belated fulfillment of his earlier ambition to write a weird novel in the spirit of Vathek. In Dream-Quest, Randolph Carter quite literally “travels out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled,” echoing the aim of the unnamed protagonist of “Azathoth.” Yet, the conclusions of the two works diverge in an important way. Carter’s journey in Dream-Quest does not end in a permanent withdrawal into dream, but rather in an acceptance of the flawed, limited, but irreplaceable value of the real world into which he was born and in which he has no choice but to live.

Seen in this light, “Azathoth” marks a moment before that reconciliation was possible for Lovecraft. It captures a stage at which escape into dream still seemed not only tempting but necessary, before he had fully worked through the implications of such a retreat. As a fragment, it does not offer resolution, but as a document of transition it is invaluable. “Azathoth” shows Lovecraft standing at a crossroads, still mourning a lost world of wonder, yet already groping toward the darker, more complex vision that would define his mature work.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Other Gods

Written in August 1921 but not published until November 1933 in the pages of The Fantasy Fan, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Other Gods” provides an earliest and revealing glimpse into the ideas that would later coalesce into his distinctive cosmic mythology. Brief though it is, the story articulates with remarkable clarity a vision of the universe that would come to define Lovecraft’s work. In it, the cosmos is neither ordered for human benefit nor governed by sympathetic or intelligible divinities, but instead dominated by vast, indifferent, and alien powers. In this vision, human ambition is not merely misplaced but positively perilous, for to seek forbidden knowledge is not to advance toward enlightenment, but rather to step, unwittingly, toward obliteration.

The story concerns Barzai the Wise, a venerable sage from the city of Ulthar, who has devoted his long life to the study of the gods. Unlike the fearful or superstitious masses, Barzai is driven by intellectual pride and a desire for direct knowledge. When he learns that the gods of Earth are said to descend upon the summit of the distant mountain Hatheg-Kla in the land of Mnar, he determines to climb the mountain and behold them with his own eyes. Accompanied by his young disciple Atal, Barzai ascends the cold, alien slopes and reaches the peak, where ancient stone seats and mysterious carvings suggest a long-forgotten cult.

At the summit, Barzai performs an invocation to compel the gods to show themselves. What answers this summons, however, are not the gentle, familiar deities of Earth, but the Other Gods, who are vast, formless, and terrifying cosmic entities that exist beyond human thought and earthly divinity. As Atal watches in horror, these beings blot out the moon and sweep down upon the mountaintop. Barzai is carried away into the void, leaving only terror and silence behind. Atal alone survives to stagger back to the world below, forever changed by what he has witnessed.

The strength of “The Other Gods” lies less in its action, of which there is not much, than in what it implies. Here, Lovecraft makes a distinction between the parochial gods of Earth and the greater, indifferent forces that actually rule the cosmos. The story marks a turning point from earlier, more folkloric/Dunsanian fantasy toward the fully developed cosmic horror for which Lovecraft would later become famous. Like many of the stories that would later be deemed part of his dream cycle, "The Other Gods" is a transitional piece, standing at the boundary between wonder and horror. 

Lovecraft's admiration for Lord Dunsany is still evident, particularly in the tale's elevated, archaic prose and fantastical setting. At the same time, it's also clearly a rejection of Dunsany’s romantic treatment of divinity. Where Dunsany’s gods are beautiful, tragic, and ultimately part of a comprehensible cosmic order, Lovecraft’s Other Gods represent something colder and more disturbing. They represent a universe in which even the gods of myth are small and provincial compared to the true nature of reality.

The story is notable too for the way it explicitly references characters, places, and concepts that appear (or later would reappear) in previous stories. The city of Ulthar, the character of Atal, and the distinction between “earthly” and “Other” gods are all examples of this. Likewise, the story is an early meditation on one of Lovecraft’s most enduring themes, namely, that the pursuit of forbidden knowledge is not a heroic quest but a transgression of sorts and that the universe does not reward human curiosity with enlightenment, but only with annihilation.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Nameless City

“The Nameless City” occupies a peculiar and revealing place in H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Written in January 1921 and first published later that same year in the amateur journal The Wolverine (before appearing Donald Wolheim's Fanciful Tales), it fits comfortably in neither his Dunsanian dream fantasies nor his later cosmic horror tales. Instead, it stands astride both, blending several strands of Lovecraft’s evolving imagination into a single narrative. The result is a story that feels simultaneously archaic and forward-looking, poised between decadent fantasy, pulp archeological adventure, and the nascent Cthulhu Mythos that would soon define his mature fiction. 

The plot is straightforward. An unnamed explorer ventures into an ancient ruin somewhere in the Arabian desert, a city so old that even legend has forgotten it. What he finds is not the expected relics of a vanished human people but the physical remnants of an inhuman race. They are reptilian beings who built their low, elongated architecture to suit their own forms and who left behind murals and funerary chambers chronicling a far older history than that of mankind. As the narrator moves from sun-blasted ruins into the pitch-black passageways beneath them, the story shifts from a travelog into something uncannier. A visionary experience soon overtakes him. Part dream, part revelation, the vision lets him to see the reptilian race alive, chanting during nocturnal rites. The tale ends with a familiar crescendo of terror: a sudden rush of wind from the darkness and the narrator’s panicked flight, shaken by the conviction that the ancient beings may not be entirely gone.

Objectively speaking, “The Nameless City” is not a particularly strong story, even by the standards of Lovecraft’s early fiction. Its prose is overwrought and its plot unnecessarily dramatic. Even so, HPL regarded it with considerable fondness, perhaps because it marks one of his first serious attempts to portray a genuinely non-human civilization, complete with its own art, culture, and long arc of rise and decline. This is a theme he would revisit throughout his career. Its desert setting and dreamlike atmosphere still bear the imprint of Dunsany, but the tale also seems shaped by the era’s growing fascination with archeology and the mysteries of the ancient world. It is hard not to read it in light of the cultural moment, coming as it did barely a year before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb captured the world’s imagination.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that “The Nameless City” anticipates several of Lovecraft’s major later works. The long, claustrophobic descent into the ruins points toward the archeological exploration of At the Mountains of Madness, while the conception of a non-human race with its own history looks ahead to both "The Shadow out of Time" and "The Mound." Even the narrator’s sudden, overwhelming revelation of the ancient past prefigures the shocks of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and other mature tales. The inhuman builders themselves, with their distinct physiology and culture, have a faint resonance with the pre-human or parallel races that populate Lovecraft’s later tales, though he would eventually reframe such beings in more explicitly cosmic or quasi-scientific terms.

Yet what makes the story especially revealing is the way it straddles two different phases of Lovecraft’s imaginative geography. “The Nameless City” is clearly set in the waking world, but it makes casual reference to Sarnath, Ib, and Mnar, places that would later come to be associated with the Dreamlands in “The Doom that Came to Sarnath.” However, in 1921, Lovecraft seems to have imagined these locales as belonging to a remote prehistoric era rather than a parallel dream realm. The borders had not yet hardened. Names, ideas, and mythic motifs drifted freely between dream fantasy, cosmic antiquity, and pseudo-historical prehuman epochs. “The Nameless City,” then, offers a rare glimpse into this fluid early stage of his mythmaking, before his different modes of fiction crystallized into distinct conceptual territories.

For all its rough edges, I think the tale remains significant because it marks a turning point in Lovecraft’s development both as a writer and as a creator. Here, for perhaps the first time, he fully embraces the idea that human civilization rests upon the remnants of a far older and indeed alien past. It's a notion that would become central to his mature worldview. It is also among his earliest attempts to blend antiquarian curiosity with cosmic dread, the signature synthesis that would soon define his best work.

This is why I see “The Nameless City” as a kind of literary bridge. It spans fantasy and horror, waking world and dream, the Dunsanian phase of Lovecraft’s youth and the more confident, original voice that would produce “The Call of Cthulhu,” "The Colour Out of Space," and the great masterpieces of his later career. Its imagery of ancient stones, subterranean chambers, and forgotten races may lack the polish of his mature style, but the essential vision – that distinctly Lovecraftian sense of deep time, buried history, and alien life – is unmistakably present. In that sense, “The Nameless City” may well be the first fully Lovecraftian tale and it deserves appreciation on those grounds alone.