In many ways the novel is a refinement of “The Horror at Red Hook”: Curwen’s alchemy parallels Suydam’s cabbalistic activities; Curwen’s attempt to repair his standing in the community with an advantageous marriage echoes Suydam’s marriage with Cornelia Gerritsen; Willett as the valiant counterweight to Curwen matches Malone as the adversary of Suydam. HPL again dipped into his relatively small store of basic plot elements and again retold a mediocre tale in masterful fashion. HPL, however, felt that the novel was an inferior piece of work, a “cumbrous, creaking bit of selfconscious antiquarianism” (HPL to R.H.Barlow, [March 19, 1934]; ms., JHL). He therefore made no effort to prepare it for publication, even though publishers throughout the 1930s professed greater interest in a weird novel than a collection of stories. R.H.Barlow began preparing a typescript in late 1934, and in 1936 was still typing it, but he typed only twenty-three pages. Barlow did not deposit the manuscript at JHL until around 1940, by which time a full transcript (full of errors, however) had been made by Derleth and Wandrei for its abridged appearance in WTand its complete appearance in BWS. It was published separately by Victor Gollancz (London, 1951) and subsequently reprinted in this form by Panther, Belmont, and Ballantine.
See Barton L. St. Armand, “Facts in the Case of H.P.Lovecraft,” Rhode Island History31, No. 1 (February 1972): 3–10 (rpt. FDOC); April Selley, “Terror and Horror in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” Nyctalops3, No. 1 (January 1980): 8, 10–14; M.Eileen McNamara and S.T.Joshi, “Who Was the Real Charles Dexter Ward?” LSNos. 19/20 (Fall 1989): 40–41, 48; David Vilaseca, “Nostalgia for the Origin: Notes on Reading and Melodrama in H.P.Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” Neophilologus75, No. 4 (October 1991): 481–95; Richard Ward, “In Search of the Dread Ancestor: M.R.James’ ‘Count Magnus’ and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” LSNo. 36 (Spring 1997): 14–17.
Casey.
In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” a factory inspector who overheard strange sounds in the Gilman House, the Innsmouth hotel where he was staying. When inspecting the Marsh Refinery, he found the books in total disorder and with no indication of where it obtained the gold it refined.
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HPL discovered in 1928 that he had Caseys in his Rhode Island ancestry (see SL2.236–37). Castro.
In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the aged mestizo who tells Inspector John R. Legrasse the story of the Great Old Ones following a raid of the Cthulhu cult in Louisiana. (He is not named for HPL’s colleague Adolphe de Castro, whom HPL encountered a year or so after writing the story.)
“Cats and Dogs.”
Essay (6,050 words); written on November 23, 1926. First published in Leaves(Summer 1937); rpt. Cats(as “Something about Cats”); rpt. MW
This delightful essay was written for a Blue Pencil Club meeting in New York—which HPL, having returned to Providence that spring, was unable to attend—at which the relative merits of cats and dogs would be debated. HPL, vastly preferring felines, sees in cats a symbol of aristocracy, unemotionalism, and pride (“The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman”). He maintains that cats are much superior in intellect than dogs, are not dependent upon human beings, and are far more aesthetically beautiful than dogs. In the first appearance of the essay, some of HPL’s more outrageously oligarchical statements (e.g., “whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for even the fascist sentiment to check, none may yet say”) were expunged by R.H.Barlow; his editing was copied by August Derleth (who also retitled the essay) in Cats . The unexpurgated text was first presented in MW
“Cats of Ulthar, The.”
Short story (1,350 words); written on June 15, 1920. First published in Tryout(November 1920); rpt. WT(February 1926) and WT(February 1933); published as separate booklet (Cassia, FL: Dragon-Fly Press, 1935); first collected in O;corrected text in D.
The narrator proposes to explain how the town of Ulthar passed its “remarkable law” that no man may kill a cat. There was once a very evil couple who hated cats and who brutally murdered any that strayed on their property. One day a caravan of “dark wanderers” comes to Ulthar, among which is the little boy Menes, owner of a tiny black kitten. When the kitten disappears, the heart-broken boy, learning of the propensities of the cat-hating couple, “prayed in a tongue no villager could understand.” That night all the cats in the town vanish, and when they return in the morning they refuse for two entire days to touch any food or drink. Later it is noticed that the couple has not been seen for days; when at last the villagers enter their house, they find two clean-picked skeletons. There are several superficial borrowings from Dunsany: the name of the boy Menes (possibly derived from King Argimenes of the play King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior,in Five Plays[1914]); the “dark wanderers” (perhaps an echo of the “Wanderers…a weird, dark tribe” mentioned toward the end of “Idle Days on the Yann,” in A Dreamer’s Tales[1910]). The entire scenario is probably inspired by the many similar tales of elementary revenge in The Book of Wonder(1912). See Jason C.Eckhardt, “Something about the Cats of Ulthar,” CryptNo. 15 (Lammas 1983): 28–29.
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Cave, Hugh B[arnett] (b. 1910).
American pulp writer and correspondent of HPL in the 1930s. Cave contributed voluminously to the weird and science fiction pulps from 1929 onward and became a prototypical “professional” writer. In the 1930s, Cave resided in Pawtuxet, R.I., but he and HPL never met. The two engaged in a heated exchange of correspondence (nonextant) regarding the ethics and aesthetics of writing for the pulps. Some of Cave’s pulp writing is collected in Murgunstrumm and Others(Carcosa House, 1977) and Death Stalks the Night(Fedogan & Bremer, 1995). He has recently written several horror novels for paperback publishers as well as a memoir, Magazines I Remember(Chicago: Tattered Pages Press, 1994).