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Poe.” HPL met Harré when he visited New York in January 1934 (see SL4.341). Harré published several novels as well as two further anthologies, The Bedside Treasury of Love(1945) and Treasures of the Kingdom(1947).
Harris, Arthur (1895–1966).
Amateur journalist in Wales and correspondent of HPL (1915–37). Harris, living in Llandudno, published one of the longest-running amateur journals, Interesting Items,which ran from 1904 (as Llandudno’s Weekly) to 1956, each issue usually consisting only of four to eight small pages. Harris published HPL’s poems “1914” (March 1915), “The Crime of Crimes” (July 1915), and two sonnets of Fungi from Yuggoth.Harris published “The Crime of Crimes” as a pamphlet; it thereby became HPL’s first separate publication. Copies are exceptionally scarce: three are known to be in existence. HPL continued to correspond with Harris for the entirety of his life, although as early as 1918 his letters numbered no more than one or two a year.
Harris, William (d. 1764).
In “The Shunned House,” a merchant and seaman, the first inhabitant of the Shunned House, along with his wife Rhoby (Dexter) Harris and their children Elkanah (1755–1766), Abigail (1757– 1763), William, Jr. (1759–1797), and Ruth (1761–1763). Most of the family and their servants die while living in the house. Rhoby goes mad, and although William, Jr., becomes quite sickly, he survives, enlists in the army, and returns to the house. He marries Phoebe (Hetfield) Harris of Elizabethtown, N.J., in 1780, but after she gives birth to a stillborn daughter, he moves out of the house and shuts it down. In 1785 his wife bears a son, Dutee Harris, and after his parents die in the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, he is raised by his cousin, Rathbone Harris, son of William’s cousin Peleg Harris. Later descendants are Dutee’s son Welcome Harris (d. 1862), Welcome’s son Archer Harris (d. 1916), and Archer’s son Carrington Harris, the current (i.e., as of 1924) owner of the Shunned House.
Harris, Woodburn (1888–1988).
Correspondent of HPL, living in Vermont. He came in touch with HPL around 1929, probably through the mediation of Walter J.Coates. HPL revised some of Harris’s tracts against Prohibition, although these do not appear to have been published. Only three of HPL’s letters to him survive, but one of these was a handwritten letter of seventy pages (see SL3.58).
Hart, Bertrand K[elton] (1892–1941).
Literary editor of the Providence Journalwho briefly corresponded with HPL. In his column in the Journal,“The Sideshow,” in mid-November 1929, Hart printed a list of what a colleague had recommended as the ten greatest horror stories ever written. HPL found the list so tame that he submitted his own list, published in Hart’s column for November 23; Hart called the list “a little masterpiece of comparative criticism.” Other lists, by August Derleth and Frank Belknap Long, were published in the column for November 25. Hart then stumbled upon HPL’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in Harré’s Beware After Dark!,and professed to be outraged at the fact that the artist Wilcox’s home was given as 7 Thomas Street, where Hart himself had once resided. In the column for November 30 he threatened to send a ghost to
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HPL’s doorstep at 3 A.M. that night. At 3:07 A.M. HPL wrote the sonnet “The Messenger” and sent it to Hart, who published it in his column for December 3. Hart printed a letter by HPL in his column for March 18, 1930. Some of Hart’s columns discussing HPL were gathered in The Sideshow of B.K.Hart,ed. Philomela Hart (1941). Although Hart repeatedly expressed a wish to meet HPL, he never did so; possibly HPL, with his typically exaggerated modesty, felt himself too insignificant to meet so recognized a figure in local journalism.
Hartmann, J[oachim] F[riedrich] (1848–1930).
Astrologer who incurred HPL’s ire when he wrote the article “Astrology and the European War” in the Providence Evening Newsfor September 4, 1914. HPL and Hartmann exchanged several polemics in the Evening News—the former with “Science versus Charlatanry” (September 9) and “The Falsity of Astrology” (October 10); the latter with a letter to the editor (October 7) and “The Science of Astrology” (October 22)—until HPL finally silenced him with satires written under pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaffe, Jr. (derived from Jonathan Swift’s Isaac Bickerstaffe pieces satirizing the astrologer Partridge): “Astrology and the Future” (October 13) and “Delavan’s Comet and Astrology” (October 26). After Hartmann’s last article (“A Defense of Astrology,” December 14), HPL concluded with an article under his own name (“The Fall of Astrology,” December 17) and one final Bickerstaffe article (letter to the editor, December 21). Articles on both sides are collected in Science vs. Charlatanry (1979).
Hartwell, Dr.
In “The Dunwich Horror,” Henry Armitage’s personal physician.
“Haunter of the Dark, The.”
Short story (9,350 words); written November 5–9, 1935. First published in WT(December 1936); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in CCand An2
Robert Blake, a young writer of weird fiction, comes to Providence for a period of writing. Looking through his study window down College Hill and across to the far-away and vaguely sinister Italian district known as Federal Hill, Blake becomes fascinated by an abandoned church “in a state of great decrepitude.” Eventually he gains the courage actually to go to the place and enter it, and he finds many anomalous things within. There are strange and forbidden books; there is, in a large square room, an object resting upon a pillar—a metal box containing a curious gem or mineral—that exercises an unholy fascination upon Blake; and there is the decaying skeleton of a newspaper reporter whose notes Blake reads. The notes speak of the ill-regarded Starry Wisdom church, whose congregation gained in numbers throughout the nineteenth century and was suspected of satanic practices of a very bizarre sort, until the city finally shut the church in 1877. The notes also mention a “Shining Trapezohedron” and a “Haunter of the Dark” that cannot exist in light. Blake concludes that the object on the pillar is the Shining Trapezohedron, and in an “access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear” he closes the lid of the object and flees the place.
Later he hears strange stories of some object lumbering within the belfry of the church, stuffing pillows in all the windows so that no light can come in. A tremendous electrical storm on August 8–9 causes a blackout for several hours.
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A group of superstitious Italians gathers around the church with candles, and they sense an enormous dark object emerging from the belfry. Blake’s diary tells the rest of the tale. He feels that he is somehow losing control of his sense of self (“My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin…. I am on this planet”; and still later: “I am it and it is I”); his perspective is all confused; finally he sees some nameless object approaching him. The next morning he is found dead—of electrocution, even though his window was closed and fastened. What, in fact, has happened to Blake? The poignant but seemingly cryptic entry “Roderick Usher” in his diary tells the whole story. Just as in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” HPL analyzed Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a tale that “displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history—a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment,” so in “The Haunter of the Dark” we are to believe that the entity in the church—the Haunter of the Dark, described as an avatar of Nyarlathotep—has possessed Blake’s mind but, at the moment of doing so, is struck by lightning and killed, and Blake dies as well.