On the 29th Wandrei finally left, but Lovecraft’s own travels were by no means over. In August, after visits to Worcester, Athol, Amherst, and Deerfield, Lovecraft and Cook went to Vermont to visit the amateur poet Arthur Goodenough. A decade before, Goodenough had praised Lovecraft in a poem (‘Lovecraft—an Appreciation’) containing the grotesque image, ‘Laurels from thy very temples sprout’. Lovecraft had thought Goodenough was spoofing him, and only with difficulty was he prevented by Cook from writing some devastating reply; instead, he wrote a poem in return, ‘To Arthur Goodenough, Esq.’ (Tryout, September 1918). Now, when meeting him, Lovecraft was captivated by Goodenough, and especially by the archaic and rustic charm of his dress and demeanour. Lovecraft later wrote a rhapsodic essay on his entire Vermont visit, ‘Vermont—A First Impression’, which appeared in Walter J. Coates’s regional magazine Driftwind for March 1928.
On 25 August Lovecraft visited Portland, Maine. He spent two days there and enjoyed the town immensely: although it was not as rich in antiquities as Marblehead or Portsmouth, it was scenically lovely—it occupies a peninsula with hills at the eastern and western ends, and has many beautiful drives and promenades— and at least had things like the two Longfellow houses (birthplace and principal residence), which Lovecraft explored thoroughly. Travels to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Haverhill, Gloucester, and Ipswich in Massachusetts concluded Lovecraft’s two-week trek.
Meanwhile various prospects for the book publication of Lovecraft’s stories were developing. One possibility began taking shape late in 1926 when Farnsworth Wright broached the idea of a collection. This project would keep Lovecraft dangling for several years before finally collapsing. The reasons for this are perhaps not far to seek. In 1927 Weird Tales (under its official imprint, the Popular Fiction Publishing Company) issued The Moon Terror by A. G. Birch and others. For whatever reason, the book was a complete commercial disaster, remaining in print nearly as long as Weird Tales itself was in existence. And, of course, the onset of the Depression hit the magazine very hard, and for various periods in the 1930s it appeared only once every two months; at this time the issuance of a book was the last thing on the publishers’ minds. Nevertheless, in late December 1927 negotiations were still serious enough for Lovecraft to write a long letter giving his own preferences as to the contents. Lovecraft concludes with an interesting remark: ‘As for a title—my choice is The Outsider and Other Stories. This is because I consider the touch of cosmic outsideness—of dim, shadowy nonterrestrial hints—to be the characteristic feature of my writing.’16
One story Lovecraft did not offer for the collection (probably just as well, as Wright had already rejected it for the magazine) was ‘The Shunned House’, which W. Paul Cook wished to publish as a small book. Cook had initially conceived of including it in The Recluse, but presumably held off because the magazine had already attained enormous size. Then, around February 1927, he first broached the idea of printing it as a chapbook, uniform in format with two other publications, Frank Long’s slim collection of poetry The Man from Genoa and Samuel Loveman’s The Hermaphrodite, both issued in 1926. The issuance of The Recluse delayed work on the book project, but in the spring of 1928 things began to move. Lovecraft read proofs in early June, even though he was then on another extensive series of travels. By the end of June The Shunned House was printed but not bound. About three hundred copies were printed.
Unfortunately, things soured at this very moment. Both Cook’s finances and his health were in a very shaky state. The Shunned House—which Cook was financing, without any contribution by Lovecraft—had to be put on the back burner. In January 1930 Cook’s wife died and Cook suffered another and severer nervous breakdown. The depression completed his devastation, and The Shunned House’s emergence became increasingly remote. By the summer of 1930 Lovecraft heard that the sheets had been sent to a binder in Boston, but the book still did not come out. The matter hung fire all the way to Lovecraft’s death.
Late in 1927 Lovecraft received You’ll Need a Night Light, a British anthology edited by Christine Campbell Thomson and published by Selwyn & Blount. It contained ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, marking the first time that a story of Lovecraft’s appeared in hardcover. The volume was part of a series of ‘Not at Night’ books edited by Campbell; the stories for most of the volumes were culled from Weird Tales, and several of Lovecraft’s tales and revisions would later be reprinted. Although pleased at its appearance, Lovecraft had no illusions as to the anthology’s merits. ‘As for that “Not at Night”—that’s a mere lowbrow hash of absolutely no taste or significance. Aesthetically speaking, it doesn’t exist.’17
Rather more significant—and indeed, one of the most important items in the critical recognition of Lovecraft prior to his death—was the appearance of ‘The Colour out of Space’ on the ‘Roll of Honor’ of the 1928 volume of Edward J. O’Brien’s Best Short Stories. Lovecraft sent O’Brien a somewhat lengthy autobiographical paragraph for a section at the back of the book; he expected O’Brien merely to select from it, but instead the latter printed it intact, and it occupied eighteen lines of text, longer than any other biography in the volume. On the whole it is an exceptionally accurate and compact account of Lovecraft’s life and beliefs.
In the autumn of 1927 Frank Belknap Long took it into his head to write a longish short story entitled ‘The Space-Eaters’. This story can be said to have two distinctive qualities: it is the first work to involve Lovecraft as a character (if we exclude whimsies like Edith Miniter’s ‘Falco Ossifracus’, in which the central character, while modelled on Randolph Carter, shares some chracteristics with Lovecraft), and—although this point is somewhat debatable—it is the first ‘addition’ to Lovecraft’s mythos.
To be perfectly honest, ‘The Space-Eaters’ is a preposterous story. This wild, histrionic account of some entities who are apparently ‘eating their way through space’, are attacking people’s brains, but are in some mysterious manner prevented from overwhelming the earth, is frankly an embarrassment. In this sense, however, it is sadly prophetic of most of the ‘contributions’ other writers would make to Lovecraft’s conceptions.
Whether it is indeed an addition to or extrapolation from Lovecraft’s mythos is a debatable question. The entities in question are never named, and there are no references to any of Lovecraft’s ‘gods’ (only Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth had even been invented at this time, the latter in the unpublished Case of Charles Dexter Ward). What there is, however, is an epigraph (omitted from the first appearance—Weird Tales, July 1928—and many subsequent reprintings) from ‘John Dee’s Necronomicon’—i.e., from a purported English translation of Olaus Wormius’s Latin translation of the Necronomicon. Lovecraft made frequent citations of this Dee translation in later stories. This phenomenon would recur throughout Lovecraft’s lifetime: a writer—usually a colleague—either devised an elaboration upon some myth-element in Lovecraft’s stories or created an entirely new element, which Lovecraft then co-opted in some subsequent story of his own. This whole procedure was largely meant in fun—as a way of investing this growing body of myth with a sense of actuality by its citation in different texts, and also as a sort of tip of the hat to each writer’s creations.