See Audrey Parente, Pulp Man’s Odyssey: The Hugh B. Cave Story(1988).
“Celephaïs.”
Short story (2,550 words); written in early November 1920. First published in Sonia Greene’s amateur journal, the Rainbow(May 1922); rpt. Marvel Tales(May 1934) and WT(June–July 1939); first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in CC
Kuranes (who has a different name in waking life) escapes the prosy world of London by dream and drugs. In this state he comes upon the city of Celephaïs, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai. It is a city of which he had dreamed as a child, and there “his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm seabreeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village.” But Kuranes awakes in his London garret and finds that he can return to Celephaïs no more. He dreams of other wondrous lands, but his sought-for city continues to elude him. He increases his use of drugs, runs out of money, and is turned out of his flat. Then, as he wanders aimlessly through the streets, he comes upon a cortege of knights who “rode majestically through the downs of Surrey,” seeming to gallop back in time as they do so. They leap off a precipice and drift softly down to Celephaïs, and Kuranes knows that he will be its king forever. Meanwhile, in the waking world, the tide at Innsmouth washes up the corpse of a tramp, while a “notably fat and offensive millionaire brewer” purchases Kuranes’s ancestral mansion and “enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.” HPL notes that the story was based upon an entry in his commonplace book (#10) reading simply: “Dream of flying over city.” Another entry (#20) was perhaps also an inspiration: “Man journeys into the past—or imaginative realm—leaving bodily shell behind.” The story is strikingly similar in conception to Dunsany’s “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap” (in The Book of Wonder,1912). There a businessman imagines himself the King of Larkar, and as he continues to dwell obsessively on (and in) this imaginary realm his work in the real world suffers, until finally he is placed in a madhouse. The image of horses drifting dreamily over a cliff may echo the conclusion of Ambrose Bierce’s “A Horseman in the Sky” (in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,1891), where a man seems to see a horse flying through the air after he has shot the rider—who proves to be his own father. Kuranes returns for a very different purpose in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath(1926–27). Likewise, the city of Innsmouth, here set in England, later becomes a decaying seaport in Massachusetts.
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“Challenge from Beyond, The.”
Round-robin short story (6,100 words; HPL’s part, 2,640 words); HPL’s part written in late August 1935. First published in Fantasy Magazine(September 1935); first collected in BWS;corrected text (HPL’s part only) in MW.
[C.L.Moore:] George Campbell, camping in the Canadian woods, hears a shrieking in the sky and finds that a strange missile, in the form of crystal cubes, has descended from space. Some shape seems embedded in the center of the cube—a disk with characters incised upon it. [A.Merritt:] Campbell ponders the cube, seeing its interior alternately glow and fade. He hears music, then feels himself being sucked into the cube. [HPL:] Campbell seems to be hurtling through space at an incredible speed. At length he feels himself lying upon a hard, flat surface. He remembers reading in the Eltdown Shards about a mighty race of wormlike creatures on a distant planet who sent out crystal cubes that would exercise fascination upon any intelligent entity who encountered them. The mind of that individual would be sucked into the cube and made to inhabit the wormlike body of the alien race, while the mind of the alien race inhabited the other’s body and learned all it could about the civilization in question. After a time a reversal would be effected. The cone-shaped beings who had inhabited Australia millions of years ago had learned of the nature of these cubes and sought to destroy them, thereby earning the wrath of the wormlike creatures. As Campbell ponders this bizarre tale, he realizes that he is now in the body of the wormlike creature. [Robert E.Howard:] Awaking from his faint, Campbell snatches a sharp-pointed metal shard and approaches the god of the creatures, intent on killing it. [Frank Belknap Long:] On the alien planet, George Campbell, in the body of a wormlike creature, kills the god and becomes a god of the worm people himself, while on earth the creature occupying the body of Campbell dies a raving madman.
The story was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, who wanted two round-robin stories of the same title, one weird and one science fiction, for the third anniversary issue of Fantasy Magazine. He signed Moore, Long, Merritt, HPL, and a fifth undecided writer for the weird version, and Stanley G.Weinbaum, Donald Wandrei, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Harl Vincent, and Murray Leinster for the science fiction version. It was something of a feat to have harnessed all these writers—especially the resolutely professional A.Merritt—for such a venture, in which each author would write a section building upon what his or her predecessor had done; but the weird tale did not go quite according to plan.
Moore initiated the story with a rather lackluster account of George Campbell. Long then wrote what HPL calls “a rather clever development” ( SL5.500); but this left Merritt in the position of actually developing the story. Merritt balked, saying that Long had somehow deviated from the subject matter suggested by the title, and refused to participate unless Long’s section was dropped and Merritt allowed to write one of his own. Schwartz, not wanting to lose such a big name, weakly went along with the plan. Merritt’s own version fails to move the story along in any meaningful way. HPL realized that he would have to take the story in hand and actually make it go somewhere. Notes to HPL’s segment survive (published in LSNo. 9 [Fall 1984]: 72–73) and contain drawings of the alien entities he introduces into the tale (giant
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worm- or centipede-like creatures). His segment is clearly an adaptation of the central conception of “The Shadow out of Time”—mind-exchange. Accordingly, the idea got into print months before its much better utilization in the latter story. HPL’s segment is three to four times as long as that of any other writer’s, or nearly half the story.
Robert E.Howard was persuaded to take the fourth installment, while Long—whom HPL talked into returning to the project after he had abandoned it when Schwartz dropped his initial installment— concludes the story.
The complete weird and science fiction versions appear in The Challenge from Beyond (Necronomicon Press, 1990).
Chambers, Robert W[illiam] (1865–1933).
American author. HPL discovered his early fantastic writing— The King in Yellow(1895), The Maker of Moons(1896), In Search of the Unknown(1904); also the later novel The Slayer of Souls(1920)—in early 1927, and he hastily updated “Supernatural Horror in Literature” just prior to publication to include a discussion of this work. Other weird works (not, apparently, read by HPL) include The Mystery of Choice(1897), The Tracer of Lost Persons(1906), The Tree of Heaven(1907), and The Talkers(1923). Chambers borrowed mythical names—Hastur, Carcosa, etc.—from Bierce; some of these (along with such of Chambers’ s own inventions as Yian) were in turn borrowed by HPL. “The Harbor-Master” (a separate short story later incorporated as the opening chapters of the episodic novel In Search of the Unknown) may have influenced “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Chambers later became a best-selling writer of sentimental romances.