Written c. summer and fall 1933. First published (b, c, and d only) in The Notes & Commonplace Book(Futile Press, 1938). Erroneously published as part of HPL’s “commonplace book” in BWSand SR
In 1933, HPL began to keep notes in a pocket calendar from his concentrated rereading of the classic works of weird fiction, in an attempt to reinvigorate himself for fiction-writing. The notebook contains four items: (a) “Weird Story Plots” (unpublished) consists of brief plot summaries primarily of the works of Poe, Blackwood, Machen, and M.R.James. From those summaries he compiled (b) “A list of certain basic underlying horrors effectively used in weird fiction” and (c) “List of primary ideas motivating possible weird tales,” a further distillation, giving likely motives for weird occurrences. He then composed the rough draft of (d) “Suggestions for writing weird story (the ideaand plot being tentatively decided on)” and “Elements of a Weird Story & Types of Weird Story,” an instructional piece for turning plot ideas into effective stories. HPL eventually polished (d) into “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.”
“Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.”
Essay (1,490 words); probably written in 1933. First published in Amateur Correspondent(May–June 1937); also in Supramundane Stories(Spring 1938) and in Marginalia;rpt. MW.
Presumably written during HPL’s revaluation of the weird classics in the summer and fall of 1933, the essay propounds HPL’s evolved theory of weird fiction as the attempt to “achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law.” It also presents a summary of HPL’s own methods for writing stories, in which he advises the creation of two synopses, one listing events in order of absolute occurrence, the other in order of their narration in the story. The first three publications of the essay derive from three slightly differing manuscripts; the first appearance is probably preferable.
Noyes,———.
In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” he is sent to the railroad station to retrieve Albert Wilmarth to the Akeley farmhouse. His is the “cultivated male human voice” heard on the recordings Akeley sent to Wilmarth. Unknown to Wilmarth, he is an agent of the aliens from Yuggoth.
“Nyarlathotep.”
Prose poem (1,150 words); probably written in November or December 1920. First published in the United Amateur(dated November 1920,
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but issued at least two months later); rpt. National Amateur(July 1926); first collected in BWS; corrected text in MW;annotated version in CC
In a “season of political and social upheaval,” the people “whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat.” It was then that Nyarlathotep emerged out of Egypt. He begins giving strange exhibitions featuring peculiar instruments of glass and metal and evidently involving anomalous uses of electricity. In one of these exhibitions the narrator sees, on a kind of movie screen, “the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun.” The world seems to be falling apart: buildings are found in ruins, people begin gathering in queues, each of them proceeding in different directions, apparently to their deaths. Finally the universe itself seems to be on the brink of extinction.
HPL notes that the piece not only was based largely on a dream, but also that the first paragraph (presumably following the very brief opening paragraph) was written while he was still half-asleep ( SL1.160). As with “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” the dream involved Samuel Loveman, who wrote HPL the following note: “Don’t fail to see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.” HPL states that the peculiar name Nyarlathotep came to him in this dream, but one can conjecture at least a partial influence in the name of Dunsany’s minor god Mynarthitep (mentioned fleetingly in “The Sorrow of Search,” in Time and the Gods) or of the prophet Alhireth-Hotep (mentioned in TheGodsofPegāna). -Hotepis of course an Egyptian root, befitting Nyarlathotep’s Egyptian origin. The fact that Nyarlathotep “had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries” places him in the 22nd Dynasty of Egypt (940–730 B.C.E.).
Will Murray has plausibly conjectured that Nyarlathotep (described in the prose poem as an “itinerant showman”) was based upon Nicola Tesla (1856–1943), the eccentric scientist and inventor who created a sensation at the turn of the century for his strange electrical experiments. Nyarlathotep recurs throughout HPL’s later fiction and becomes one of the chief “gods” in his invented pantheon. But he appears in such widely divergent forms that it may not be possible to establish a single or coherent symbolism for him; to say merely, as some critics have done, that he is a “shape-shifter” (something HPL never genuinely suggests) is only to admit that even his physical form is not consistent from story to story, much less his thematic significance.
See Will Murray, “Behind the Mask of Nyarlathotep,” LSNo. 25 (Fall 1991): 25–29.
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O
O’Brien, Edward J[oseph Harrington] (1890–1941).
Anthologist and literary critic. HPL admired his annual series, The Best Short Stories…(1915f), believing it to be superior to another series, Blanche Colton Williams’s O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories(1919f), which HPL felt reflected commercial rather than literary values. O’Brien cited HPL in the volumes for 1924 (“The Picture in the House” [one star]), 1928 (“The Colour out of Space” [three stars]), and 1929 (“The Dunwich Horror” [three stars], “The Silver Key” [one star]); he published HPL’s “Biographical Notice” in the 1928 volume (it was not repeated in 1929, as such biographies were published only for first-time recipients of three-star ratings). HPL admired O’Brien’s The Dance of the Machines: The American Short Story and the Industrial Age(1929), which HPL deemed “a splendid expose of the vulgar shallowness, insincerity, and worthlessness of American commercial fiction under the false-standarded conditions of the present” ( SL4.91). O’Brien, “Kid.”
In “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a semi-professional boxer (presumably Irish but with “a most unHibernian hooked nose,” suggesting that he may actually be Jewish) who inadvertently kills Buck Robinson, an African American, in an informal bout in Bolton, Mass.
“Observations on Several Parts of America.”
Essay (9,700 words); probably written in the fall of 1928. First published in Marginalia(as “Observations on Several Parts of North America”); rpt. MW.
The first of HPL’s several travelogues, which cover his annual spring and summer voyages; written in the form of an open letter to Maurice W.Moe and meant to be circulated to HPL’s other colleagues (hence it exists as a typescript rather than as an autograph ms.). It deals with HPL’s arrival in Brooklyn in the spring of 1928, progressing through his travels to the Hudson River region, Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Vt. (Vrest Orton’s home near Brattleboro), Athol (W.