“Lucubrations Lovecraftian.”
Essay (4,570 words); probably written in early 1921. First published in the United Co-operative(April 1921); rpt. MW
The essay is divided into four parts. “The Loyal Coalition” concerns an organization in Boston designed to counteract anti-English propaganda sponsored by Irish-Americans; “Criticism Again!” deals with criticisms directed toward him by John Clinton Pryor and W.Paul Cook about HPL’s opinionated reviews of amateur journals in the Department of Public Criticism; “Lest We Forget” is a brief diatribe on the need for military preparedness against foreign aggression; and “A Conjecture” is a very short but pungent attack on Elsa Gidlow, who had written derisively of HPL in an unspecified amateur journal. The essay as a whole contains some of HPL’s most forceful—and, on occasion, unrestrained—polemical writing.
Lumley, William (1880–1960).
Eccentric friend of HPL, born in New York City but residing most of his life in Buffalo, N.Y. In late 1935 HPL revised his
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“The Diary of Alonzo Typer” from a draft prepared by Lumley (the original draft was published in CryptNo. 10 [1982]: 21–25). HPL also revised Lumley’s “occasional bits of verse,” perhaps including “The Elder Thing” ( Fantasy Fan,January 1935). Lumley, a nearly illiterate would-be author, was occupied as a watchman for the Agrico Chemical Company in Buffalo for most of his career. An occultist, he claimed to have voyaged to various mysterious lands such as China and Nepal, and asserted that the myth-cycle written by HPL and his colleagues was based upon the truth. “We may thinkwe’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves” ( SL4.271). He came in touch with HPL around 1931, and they seemed to remain in contact to the end of HPL’s life, but only a few of HPL’s letters to him survive.
“Lurking Fear, The.”
Short story (8,170 words); written in mid- to late November 1922. First published in Home Brew (January, February, March, and April 1923); rpt. WT (June 1928); first collected in O;corrected text in D.
In the first episode, the narrator is searching for the unknown entity that had wreaked havoc among the squatters of the Catskills near the Martense mansion. He is convinced that the haunted mansion must be the locus of the horror, and he takes two colleagues, George Bennett and William Tobey, with him to the place one night. They all sleep in the same bed in one room of the mansion, having provided exits either through the door of the room or the window. Although one of the three is to stay awake while the others rest, a strange drowsiness affects all three. The narrator wakes and finds that the thing has snatched both Bennett and Tobey, who were sleeping on either side of him. Why was he spared?
The second episode finds the narrator coming upon another associate, Arthur Munroe, to assist him in his endeavors. They know that the lurking fear customarily roams abroad during thunderstorms, and during one such storm they stop in a hamlet to wait it out. Munroe, who has been looking out the window, seems anomalously fascinated by something outside and does not respond to a summons. When the narrator shakes his shoulder, he finds that “Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.”
In the third episode the narrator realizes that he must explore the history of the mansion to come to terms with its lurking horror. The mansion had been built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy Dutchman who hated the English; his descendants similarly shunned the people around them and took to intermarrying with the “numerous menial class about the estate.” One descendant, Jan Martense, seeks to escape this unhealthy reclusiveness and is killed for his pains. The episode ends with a cataclysmic sight of a “nameless thing” in a subterranean tunnel he stumbles upon as he digs in Jan Martense’s grave.
In the final episode the truth is finally learned: there is not one monster but a whole legion of them. The entire mountain is honeycombed with underground passageways housing loathsome creatures, half apes and half moles. They are the “ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk
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behind life.” In other words, they are the degenerate descendants of the house of Martense. The story was, like “Herbert West—Reanimator,” commissioned for Home Brewby George Julian Houtain; but in this case, Houtain provided synopses of the previous segments at the head of the final three episodes, so that HPL need not summarize them in the text itself. At HPL’s request, Clark Ashton Smith was commissioned to illustrate the text. Smith had a bit of fun by drawing trees and vegetation obviously in the shape of genitalia, but he may not have been paid for his work. (The Home Brewtext was reprinted in facsimile by Necronomicon Press in 1977.)
The tale continues the theme of hereditary degeneration found in “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” and continuing through “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; indeed, “The Lurking Fear” could be thought of as a trial run for “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
There are some minor autobiographical touches in the story. Arthur Munroe’s name is probably borrowed from HPL’s boyhood friends, the Munroe brothers. The name Jan Martense may have been taken from the Jan Martense Schenck house (1656) in Flatbush, the oldest existing house in New York City. HPL did not see this house during either of his 1922 New York visits and may not, in fact, have learned of it until after writing “The Lurking Fear”; there is, however, a Martense Street very near Sonia Greene’s apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn, and this may be the origin of the name.
See Bennett Lovett-Graff, “Lovecraft: Reproduction and Its Discontents,” Paradoxa1, No. 3 (1995): 325–41.
Lyman, Dr.
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a Boston physician who is one of several experts brought in to assess Charles Dexter Ward’s mental condition.
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M
Macauley, George W[illiam] (1885–1969).
Amateur journalist and colleague of HPL. Macauley coedited The New Member(a magazine for recent recruits to the UAPA) when HPL first joined amateur journalism and accordingly accepted HPL’s earliest amateur contribution, the essay “A Task for Amateur Journalists” (July 1914). He received his first letter from HPL on October 23, 1914, and continued to correspond regularly until about 1920, after which their correspondence was reduced to Christmas cards; but it revived in 1932. In 1915 HPL wrote to him: “I wish that I could write fiction, but it seems almost an impossibility.” After HPL’s death Macauley published several works by and about HPL in his amateur journal, The O-Wash-Ta-Nong,including “Perverted Poesie or Modern Metre” (December 1937), “Ibid” (January 1938), and “Extracts from H.P.Lovecraft’s Letters to G.W.Macauley” (Spring 1938; rpt LSNo. 3 [Fall 1980]: 11–16).