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Another piquant reference, not relating to topography, is to the fact that some of the evil denizens of Red Hook are of a Mongoloid stock originating in Kurdistan—“and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.” This appears to be a borrowing from E.Hoffmann Price’s fine tale “The Stranger from Kurdistan,” published in WT (July 1925), where mention is made of the devil-worshipping Yezidis. HPL would, however, not become personally acquainted with Price for another seven years.
Much of the magical mumbo-jumbo in the story was copied directly from the articles on “Magic” and “Demonology” (both by E.B.Tylor, celebrated author of the landmark anthropological work, Primitive Culture[1871]) from the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,which HPL owned. Specifically, these borrowings involve the Latin quotation from the medieval writer Antoine Delrio (or Del Rio), An sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?(“Have there ever been demons, incubi, and succubi, and from such a union can offspring be born?”) from the entry on “Demonology”; and, from the entry on “Magic,” the invocation uttered at the beginning and end of the story (“O friend and companion of night…”) and the strange Graeco-Hebraic incantation that Malone finds on the wall of the dance-hall church. In a later letter (see “The Incantation from Red Hook,” in The Occult Lovecraft[1975]) HPL attempts to supply a translation of the formula, but commits several errors in the process (the encyclopedia entry provided no translation). The character of Malone may also have something to do with the genesis—or, rather, the particular form—of the story. Sometime before writing “The Horror at Red Hook” HPL had submitted “The Shunned House” to Detective Tales,the magazine that had been founded together with WTand of which Edwin Baird was the editor. But Baird rejected the story. HPL seems to have sought to make “The Horror at Red Hook” a kind of detective story by including the figure of a police detective, even though the actual narrative is supernatural. In early August 1925, HPL planned to send “The Horror at Red Hook” to Detective Tales(HPL to Lillian D.Clark, August 8, 1925; ms., JHL); whether he did so is unclear, but if so, the tale was rejected. HPL later remarked that the story was consciously written with WTin mind (HPL to August Derleth, November 26, 1926; ms., SHSW).
See Robert M.Price, “The Humor at Red Hook,” CryptNo. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 6–9. “Horror in the Burying-Ground, The.”
Short story (5,810 words); ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, c. 1933 or 1934. First published in WT(May 1937); first collected in Cats;corrected text in HM
In the rustic town of Stillwater, the village undertaker, Henry Thorndike, has devised a peculiar chemical compound that, when injected into a living person, will simulate death even though the person is alive and conscious. Thorndike attempts to dispose of an enemy, Tom Sprague (of whose sister Sophie he is fond), in this fashion, but in the course of embalming the body he is himself injected with the substance. Although Thorndike, before he lapses into immobility, pleads not to be entombed, he is pronounced dead and buried alive.
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HPL never mentions the story in any extant correspondence, so its date of composition is difficult to specify; but he seems not to have had much to do with Heald after 1934, and this is evidently the last of the tales he ghostwrote for her. Much of the story is narrated in a backwoods patois reminiscent—and perhaps a parody—of that used in “The Dunwich Horror.” The use of the names Akeley (from “The Whisperer in Darkness”), Zenas (from “The Colour out of Space”), At wood (from At the Mountains of Madness), and Goodenough (referring to HPL’s amateur colleague Arthur Goodenough) suggest that the story is meant, if not as an actual parody, at least as an instance of graveyard humor.
“Horror in the Museum, The.”
Short story (11,440 words); ghostwritten for Hazel Heald, probably in October 1932. First published in WT (July 1933); first collected in BWS;corrected text in HM
The curator of a waxworks museum in London, George Rogers, claims to have captured the deity Rhan-Tegoth on an expedition to Alaska. Rogers shows his skeptical friend Stephen Jones a photograph of the entity, and then shows him the corpse of a dog that has been sucked dry of blood, with puncture wounds all over its body; he claims that he had fed the dog to Rhan-Tegoth, who is kept locked in a crate in the basement of the museum. Irked by Jones’s disbelief of his tale, Rogers challenges Jones to spend the night alone in the museum. Jones agrees, and in the course of the night he seems to hear curious noises in the basement; but it proves to be Rogers himself, who appears to have gone mad and wishes to sacrifice Jones to his deity. Jones manages to overpower Rogers and tie him up; but then both of them hear another noise, and Jones is horrified to see “a black paw ending in a crab-like claw….crab-lik1PHe flees. Coming back a week later, he sees what appears to be a wax statue of Rogers, drained of blood and with numerous puncture wounds on his body; his horror is augmented by noting a scratch on Rogers’s cheek—one that had been made during their tussle.
HPL says of the story: “My latest revisory job comes so near to pure fictional ghost-writing that I am up against all the plot-devising problems of my bygone auctorial days” (HPL to E.Hoffmann Price, October 20, 1932; ms., JHL). Elsewhere HPL says: “‘The Horror in the Museum’—a piece which I ‘ghost-wrote’ for a client from a synopsis so poor that I well-nigh discarded it—is virtually my own work” ( SL4.229). One would like to think the story a self-parody of HPL’s own mythos: the description of Rhan-Tegoth brings Cthulhu to mind, but in this case we have not merely a representation of Cthulhu but the actual god himself, trapped in the basement of a museum. The sight of the “black paw” is reminiscent of the conclusion of “Under the Pyramids.” Houdini, Harry
(pseudonym of Enrich Weiss, 1874–1926), magician and debunker of spiritualism. In early 1924 J.C.Henneberger, owner of WT,in an attempt to salvage the magazine, hired Houdini—then at the height of his celebrity—as a regular columnist. The column “Ask Houdini” appeared in the issues for March, April, and May–June–July 1924. Houdini also appeared as the author of the short stories “The Hoax of the Spirit Lover” (April 1924) and “The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt” (March and April 1924), possibly ghostwritten by Walter Gibson. Henneberger commissioned HPL to write an account of an ad