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right page declares the date of publication as April 1936), but the book was so riddled with typographical errors that HPL insisted on an errata sheet (which, alas, was also faulty). The Shadow over Innsmouth,issued under the imprint of the Visionary Publishing Company, was the only book of HPL’s fiction to be published and distributed in his lifetime. Crawford printed 400 copies but bound only 200; the others were later destroyed. The book features a dust jacket and four interior illustrations by Frank Utpatel. Crawford wrote of the venture in “Lovecraft’s First Book” (in SR;rpt. LR).
“Crawling Chaos, The.”
Short story (3,020 words); written in collaboration with Winifred Virginia Jackson, probably in December 1920. First published (as by “Elizabeth Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jun.”) in the United Co-operative(April 1921), a cooperative amateur journal edited by HPL, Jackson, and others; first collected in BWS;corrected text in HM
The narrator tells of his one experience with opium, when a doctor unwittingly gave him an overdose to ease his pain. After experiencing a sensation of falling, “curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction,” he finds himself in a “strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows.” A sense of fear comes over him, and he realizes that it is inspired by a monotonous pounding that seems to come from below the house in which he finds himself. Looking out a window, he sees that the pounding is caused by titanic waves that are rapidly washing away the piece of land on which the house stands, transforming the land into an ever-narrowing peninsula. Fleeing through the back door of the house, the narrator finds himself walking along a sandy path and rests under a palm tree. Suddenly a child of radiant beauty drops from the branches of the tree, and presently two other individuals—“a god and goddess they must have been”—appear. They waft the narrator into the air and are joined by a singing chorus of other heavenly individuals who wish to lead the narrator to the wondrous land of Teloe. But the pounding of the sea disrupts this throng, and the narrator appears to witness the destruction of the world.
The story was written shortly after the prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (whose opening phrase is “Nyarlathotep…the crawling chaos…”). HPL remarks in a letter: “I took the title C.C. from my Nyarlathotep sketch…because I liked the sound of it” (HPL to R.H.Barlow, [December 1, 1934]; ms., JHL). HPL appears to allude to the genesis of the story in a letter of May 1920, in which he notes the previous collaboration with Jackson, “The Green Meadow”: “I will enclose—subject to return—an account of a Jacksonian dream which occurred in the early part of 1919, and which I am some time going to weave into a horror story…” ( SL1.116). It is not certain whether this dream was the nucleus of “The Crawling Chaos,” but since there are no other story collaborations with Jackson, the conjecture seems likely.
Various points in the account carry the implication that the narrator is not actually dreaming or hallucinating but envisioning the far future of the world—a point clumsily made by his conceiving of Rudyard Kipling as an “ancient” author. It is manifest that the entire tale was written by HPL; as with “The Green Meadow,” Jackson’s only contribution must have been the dream whose imagery probably laid the foundations for the opening segments.
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Alfred Galpin (“Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur,November 1921) wrote charitably of the tale: “The narrative power, vivid imagination and poetic merit of this story are such as to elevate it above certain minor but aggravating faults of organisation and composition.”
“Crime of the Century, The.”
Essay (970 words); probably written in early 1915. First published in the Conservative(April 1915); rpt Trail(January 1916) and MW.
HPL asserts that the British and the Germans are committing a kind of racial suicide, since they are “blood brothers” belonging to the same Teutonic race—a race that is “the summit of evolution” and destined to rule all other races in the world.
Crofts, Anna Helen.
Amateur writer and collaborator with HPL. Crofts lived in North Adams, Mass., in the far northwestern corner of the state. She collaborated with HPL on the story “Poetry and the Gods” ( United Amateur, September 1920), published as by “Anna Helen Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe.” Nothing further is known of Crofts; she appeared sporadically in the amateur press, and may have been introduced to HPL by Winifred Jackson. The degree of her involvement in “Poetry and the Gods” is also unknown: HPL never mentions the tale in any extant correspondence.
Cthulhu Mythos.
Term devised by August Derleth to denote the pseudomythology underlying some of HPL’s tales, chiefly the “cosmic” stories of his last decade of writing.
It is difficult to know how seriously HPL himself regarded his invented pantheon or his invented New England topography (which has also been regarded by later critics as an important component of the Mythos). That pantheon developed from his very earliest work—“Dagon” (1917)—to his last, and it was in a state of constant flux, as HPL never felt bound to present a rigidly consistent theogony from one tale to the next. His own references to his pseudomythology are vague and inconsistent, suggesting that, even though he employed it often enough, it was merely for coloration, not the primary theme of his fiction. One of HPL’s first comments on the matter is briefly stated in a letter to James. F.Morton (April 1, 1927; AHT), when he remarks that he has written an “atmospheric episode of the Arkham cycle” (i.e., “The Colour out of Space”). He next noted that “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) “belongs to the Arkham cycle” ( SL2.246). In 1934 he told a correspondent, “I’m not working on the actual text of any story just now, but am planning a novelette of the Arkham cycle [never written]—about what happened when somebody inherited a queer old house on the top of Frenchman’s Hill & obeyed an irresistible urge to dig in a certain queer, abandoned graveyard on Hangman’s Hill at the other edge of the town. This story will probably not involve the actual supernatural—being more of the ‘Colour out of Space’ type . . . . . greatly-stretched ‘scientifiction’” (HPL to F.Lee Baldwin, March 27, 1934; ms. JHL). He never elucidates this expression “Arkham cycle,” which appears to suggest that his invented topography (Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich) is a central component of certain loosely linked tales.
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Writing to Clark Ashton Smith ([November 11, 1930]; ms. in private hands), HPL mentioned YogSothoth as one of several “ingredients of the Miskatonic Valley myth-cycle.” In early 1931, HPL wrote to Frank Belknap Long: “I really agree that ‘Yog-Sothoth’ is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature…. But I consider the use of actual folk-myths as even more childish than the use of new artificial myths, since in employing the former one is forced to retain many blatant puerilities and contradictions of experience which could be subtilised or smoothed over if the supernaturalism were modelled to order for the given case. The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation…. But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitation regarding the sense of outsideness” ( SL3.293–94). HPL’s comment shows that his “pseudomythology” is not so much a “false” or made-up mythology, but an anti-mythology—the only kind of mythology that could be possible in this day and age. It is not a mythology of the kind invented or believed in by previous cultures—lore or legend intended to explain or account for the history of humankind, the history of the universe, the exploits of heroes, and so on. In fact, the careful reader of his stories will realize that it is no mythology at all, but a cycle of events intended to be perceived by only the more primitive or impressionable characters as realin the context of the fiction. Again, HPL’s use of the term “Yog-Sothothery” is unclear, but it appears to denote his more “cosmic” narratives (the letter was written during his writing of At the Mountains of Madness). The context in which HPL used “Yog-Sothothery” (which resembles such terms as tomfooleryand chicanery) suggests that HPL took his pseudomythology none too seriously.