The Eldritch Ghost Writer: H.P. Lovecraft's Revisions
The Arbo Files
H.P. Lovecraft died a destitute man. “Poor” does not even begin to describe it. One of the more enduring rumors about Lovecraft is that he sometimes forewent food in order to afford stamps. In one of his letters to Robert E. Howard (dated November 7, 1932), Lovecraft laid out his strict economy when it came to gastronomic matters:
“I’m not, however, a heavy eater — take only 2 meals per day, since my digestion raises hell if I try to eat oftener than once in 7 hours. In winter, when it’s too cold for me to go out much, I subsist largely on canned stuff. I always get my own breakfasts, anyway — doughnuts and cheese. I have financial economy in eating worked out to a fine art, and know the self-service lunch rooms where I can get the best bargains. I never spend more than $3.00 per week on food, and often not even nearly that.”
Lovecraft’s letters tend to talk about such things as matters of health. After all, while a married man, Lovecraft apparently bulked up to 190 pounds or so thanks to his wife’s fine cooking. The truth is that Lovecraft’s pinched dietary budget was due to his lack of money. Lovecraft never held down a day job. Instead, he lived on an inheritance, the familial kindness of his aunts, and the irregular payouts that came from writing short stories. Lovecraft also ghostwrote tales for others, notably the magician Harry Houdini. Per horror editor extraordinaire Stephen Jones, Lovecraft also offered his services to less well known writers looking to break into the pulps.
With money always tight, and as a method of subsidizing his precarious income, Lovecraft provided a literary revision service, giving advice and suggestions where needed, or completely changing the work of some of his less talented clients. In fact, these (usually uncredited) revisions became Lovecraft’s major source of income, with his own fiction merely a sideline. Although much of this work consisted of correcting spelling, punctuation and grammar, or copying out manuscript pages, he would sometimes entirely revise and rewrite a story, retaining only its title or the nucleus of the plot if its content inspired his imagination [1].
It must have been simultaneously a treat and heartbreaking to have one’s story gutted and remodeled by the old man from Providence. And it happened a lot — so much so that Arkham House published an entire book of Lovecraft’s revisions in 1970 entitled, The Horror in the Museum. The book is divided between Lovecraft’s primary and secondary revisions. Of the two, the better tales are the ones that Lovecraft devoted the most time and energy to, which of course means they are the stories that he completely changed.
Take for instance 1928’s “The Curse of Yig.” Attributed to Zealia Bishop, “The Curse of Yig” could easily fit into the greater Lovecraftian canon, even despite its setting in rural Oklahoma. The story concerns a researcher of Native American lore who learns about the dreaded snake god Yig. Yig is supposedly the ancestor of the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl, except more prone to evil. “The Curse of Yig” shows this evil when Yig drives one woman to madness, murder, and eventually transmutation following her killing of a brood of rattlesnakes. The figure of Yig has entered the greater Lovecraft universe, as evidence by the publication of The Flock of Ba-Hui, a collection of Lovecraft-inspired stories written by anonymous Chinese author Oobmab.
Lovecraft’s primary revisions often see him incorporating his cosmology into the stories. Another primary revision for Zealia Bishop, the novella The Mound, mentions Cthulhu and other deities, all the while turning what Bishop originally envisioned as a simple headless ghost story in Oklahoma into a story about the wicked subterranean civilization of K’n-yan. Another Bishop revision, “Medusa’s Coil,” also makes mention of the Cthulhu cult, while also engaging in some of Lovecraft’s chief thematic concerns, namely race and genealogy.
Some of the more interesting primary revisions are the ones that forced Lovecraft to work with other genres, or at least other modes of weird storytelling. 1927’s “The Last Test,” which was accredited to Adolphe de Castro, is ostensibly an early science fiction tale about a peculiar disease, black fever, that takes control of San Francisco in the 1890s. However, the Lovecraftian elements appear once we discover the black fever’s origins. Namely, the crazed bacteriologist Dr. Clarendon discovered it in Tibet, and, in order to further study it, brought over eight emaciated and hooded priest-like figures. Dr. Clarendon releases this disease during his experiments. He also falls under the sway of a skull-faced servant named Surama, a dreadful Tuareg priest with occult powers.
Another excellent collaboration with de Castro, 1929’s “The Electric Executioner,” takes place in Mexico aboard a slow-moving train. On the train with the narrator is the mad scientist Feldon, a former mercenary in the army of Emperor Maximilian. Feldon has designed a type of diver’s helmet that is an execution machine. Feldon’s goal is to eradicate mankind, especially those in Mexico with Spanish ancestry, in order to make way for the return of the ancient Aztec gods Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopotchli. Unlike many Lovecraft originals, “The Electric Executioner” moves quickly, is tense, and feels very much like an Agatha Christie mystery with the menace and horror turned up well past eleven.
Among the secondary revisions is “The Loved Dead” (1923). Penned primarily by Lovecraft’s close friend and fellow Providence resident C.M. Eddy, Jr., “The Loved Dead” caused incredible controversy upon its publication by Weird Tales. The reasons for the controversy are obvious: “The Loved Dead” is a story told from the perspective of a serial killer and necrophile. According to Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, as a result of the furor over “The Loved Dead,” Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright made a point of rejecting several of Lovecraft’s submissions. “The Loved Dead” does not feel all that Lovecraftian, although its language does have some similarities with “The Outsider.”
Eddy was not the only close friend that Lovecraft revised. Sonia H. Greene, later to be Mrs. H.P. Lovecraft, enjoyed the author’s services for her tale, “The Horror at Martin’s Beach.” A story about a gigantic and cyclopean sea monster, “The Horror at Martin’s Beach” was penned during Lovecraft’s early days of publishing. “Two Black Bottles,” a clearly M.R. James-influenced tale of the occult and medieval alchemy written alongside Wilfred Blanch Talman, was a thematic step back for the author, who at the time was ready to release Cthulhu upon an unsuspecting world.
All told, most of Lovecraft’s revisions deserve to be read and admired by the faithful. These are good stories by themselves, and many directly deal with cosmic horror and the monsters therein. Others are simply good horror and weird yarns, with some showcasing Lovecraft’s surprising range and versatility. Your friend Arbogast recommends every story mentioned in this article, plus “The Horror in the Museum” (Hazel Heald and Lovecraft), “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (William Lumley and Lovecraft), and Eddy’s “The Ghost-Eater.”
[1]: H.P. Lovecraft and Others, The Horror in the Museum (New York: Del Rey, 2007): xi.