India. Since, according to HPL’s later testimony, the Necronomiconexists only in Arabic, Greek, Latin, and English, Warren’s book cannot be that volume.
See Robert M.Price, “You Fool! Loveman Is Dead!” CryptNo. 98 (Eastertide 1998): 16–21. Sterling, Kenneth J. (1920–1995),
science fiction fan and late correspondent of HPL (1935–37). In early 1935 Sterling’s family moved to Providence, where he attended Classical High School. A fan of the science fiction pulps and a member of the Science Fiction League, Sterling boldly called on HPL at 66 College Street in March 1935 and introduced himself. HPL was much impressed with Sterling’s precocity and continued the association. In January 1936, Sterling produced a draft of the story “In the Walls of Eryx” (for details on the composition of what would prove to be HPL’s last acknowledged collaborative tale, see entry on that story). It was rejected by various science fiction and weird magazines but finally landed with WT,appearing in October 1939. Sterling wrote little other fiction, but the title of one story—“The Bipeds of Bjhulhu” (Wonder Stories,February 1936)—is presumably a tribute to HPL’s Cthulhu. Sterling began attendance at Harvard in the fall of 1936, graduated from there in 1940, received a medical degree at Johns Hopkins and later became a clinical professor of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He wrote a brief memoir of HPL, “Lovecraft and Science” (in Marginalia;in LR), then a much more substantial one, “Caverns Measureless to Man” ( Science-Fantasy Correspondent,1975; in LR), in which he urged that HPL be “remembered as a scholar and thinker as well as an author.”
See obituary, New York Times(January 27, 1995).
Stof, Oll.
In “Collapsing Cosmoses,” the President of the Great Council Chamber of the “intra-dimensional city of Kastor-Ya,” who urges the commander Hak Ni to take steps to combat the interstellar menace approaching the planet.
“Strange High House in the Mist, The.”
Short story (3,800 words); written on November 9, 1926. First published in WT(October 1931); first collected in O;corrected text in D.
North of Kingsport “the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a grey frozen wind-cloud.” On that cliff is an ancient house inhabited by some individual whom none of the townsfolk—not even the Terrible Old Man—has ever seen. One day a tourist, the “philosopher” Thomas Olney, decides to visit that house and its secret inhabitant; for he has always longed for the strange and the wondrous. He arduously scales the cliff, but upon reaching the house finds that there is no door on this side, only “a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion”; the house’s only door is on the otherside, flush with the sheer cliff. Then Olney hears a soft voice, and a “great black-bearded face” protrudes from a window and invites him in. Olney climbs through the window and has a colloquy with the occupant, listening to “rumours of old times and far places.” Then a knock is heard—at the door that faces the cliff. Eventually the host opens the door, and he and Olney find the room occupied by all manner of
< previous page page_252 next page > < previous page page_253 next page >
Page 253
wondrous presences—“Trident-bearing Neptune,” “hoary Nodens,” and others—and when Olney returns to Kingsport the next day, the Terrible Old Man vows that the man who went up that cliff is not the same one who came down. No longer does Olney’s soul long for wonder and mystery; instead, he is content to lead his prosy bourgeois life with his wife and children. But people in Kingsport, looking up at the house on the cliff, say that “at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly.”
HPL admitted that he had no specific locale in mind when writing this tale: he states that memories of the “titan cliffs of Magnolia” ( SL2.164) in part prompted the setting but that there is no house on the cliff as in the story; a headland near Gloucester called “Mother Ann” ( SL3.433) also inspired the setting. HPL may have had in mind a passage in Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguezabout the home of a wizard on the top of a crag.
In regard to the strange transformation of Thomas Olney, which is at the heart of the tale, the Terrible Old Man provides a hint: “somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney.” The body has returned to the normal round of things, but the spirit has remained with the occupant of the strange high house in the mist; the encounter with Neptune and Nodens has been an apotheosis, and Olney realizes that it is in this realm of nebulous wonder that he truly belongs. His body is now an empty shell, without soul and without imagination: “His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for it.” This tale could be read as a sort of mirrorimage of “Celephaïs”: whereas Kuranes had to die in the real world in order for his spirit to attain his fantasy realm, Olney’s body survives intact but his spirit stays behind.
HPL had submitted the story to WTin July 1927 but it was rejected. In 1929, he let W.Paul Cook have it for the second number of The Recluse(it had even been typeset), but when it became clear in the spring of 1931 that the issue would never appear, HPL resubmitted the story to WT,which accepted it and paid Lovecraft $55.
See Donald R.Burleson, “Strange High Houses: Lovecraft and Melville,” CryptNo. 80 (Eastertide 1992): 25–26, 29; S.T.Joshi, “Lovecraft and Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguez” CryptNo. 82 (Hallowmas 1992): 3–6; Cecelia Drewer, “Symbolism of Style in ‘The Strange High House in the Mist,’” LSNo. 31 (Fall 1994): 17–21; Nicholaus Clements, “‘The Strange High House in the Mist’: Glowing Eyes and the Prohibition of the Impossible,” LSNo. 40 (Fall 1998): 11–15. Strauch, Carl Ferdinand
(1908–1989), literary scholar and brief correspondent of HPL (1931–33). Strauch received a B.A. from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and was put in touch with HPL by his friend Harry K.Brobst, who at the time also lived in Allentown. Strauch visited HPL in Providence in September 1932, not long after he published a book of poetry, Twenty-nine Poems(1932). He conveyed to HPL much of the “hex” legendry of the Pennsylvania Dutch region. HPL reports in a letter to Robert Bloch ([c. late June 1933])
< previous page page_253 next page > < previous page page_254 next page >
Page 254
that Strauch was working on a “realistic novel,” but this evidently came to nothing. Although cordial, the correspondence came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1933: it appears that Strauch was discouraged at the sharp criticism that HPL, Brobst, and E.Hoffmann Price delivered upon a story of Strauch’s during a session in Providence in August 1933. Strauch went on to receive a Ph.D. from Yale (1946) and to become a leading scholar on Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was on the editorial board of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson(Harvard University Press, 1971f.) and wrote Characteristics of Emerson, Transcendental Poet(1975) and other monographs, as well as many articles in scholarly journals. He taught at Lehigh University from 1934 to 1974.