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Sarah Lovecraft died in May 1921, throwing Lovecraft into an even more profound depression than usual. In that same year, though, another woman came into Lovecraft's field of vision. He seems to have first encountered Sonia Greene, of Russian Jewish stock and seven years his senior, around June or July of that year; she had apparently read "Polaris" and "Nyarlathotep" but, understandably, found them incomprehensible. He met her, as he did many others, through the amateur press, and was amazed when she offered fifty dollars—then a reasonable sum—for the UAPA's funds. He liked her for her intelligence and charm as well as her philanthropy, and she visited him in Providence in August that year. He himself started getting out more often at this time, visiting his aunt Annie Gamwell in New Hampshire and attending amateur journalism conferences in Boston, even delivering speeches at these. At one of these conferences in 1917 he'd actually been declared president of the United Amateur Press Association for the following year, though he never attended that one; he was declared president again, this time of the National Amateur Press Association, in 1922.

His first story for the year was "The Nameless City", one of his most famous short works, featuring the first appearance of Abdul Alhazred in Lovecraft's fiction, though he never makes a physical appearance, merely a passing mention (as is the case with his subsequent "appearances" in other stories). His authorship of the Necronomicon is not yet offered, but we are given his enigmatic couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die. Words which might thematically sum up almost all of Lovecraft's fiction. The narrator explores the nameless city in the Arabian desert, built by an unknown people unknown millennia ago; entering one of the temples among the ruins, he discovers a black tunnel leading downwards. He emerges in a passage lined with museum-style cases containing weird mummified creatures, crocodiles of semi-human size and shape, which at first he thinks are artificial idols or an extinct thing that lived when the city was built, and that the reptiles shown in the frescos that line the walls merely represent the builders, until he realises that the reptiles were the builders of the nameless city. Lovecraft will rework this story on a far grander scale in ten years' time. But more of that when we come to it.

"The Quest of Iranon" is one of Lovecraft's best dreamlands stories. The eternally youthful dreamer and singer of songs Iranon comes to the city of Teloth in search of his fabulous home city of Aira, but his dreams and fancies and songs hold no interest for the folks from this granite city of industry. He leaves the city, where the law says he must do physical labour for which he has no aptitude, with a boy called Romnod in tow. Years pass, Romnod ages while Iranon does not, and they live in the city of Oonai for many years, though Iranon keeps dreaming; Romnod eventually dies and Iranon resumes his search. Finally, he asks an old shepherd if he knows the way to Aira, and the shepherd says he only ever heard of Aira in the stories of his old and long-vanished childhood playmate Iranon. Iranon becomes so enchanted by his stories of Aira he forgets he invented them, and his quest ends with him walking into a pool of quicksand. It's easy to identify Lovecraft with Iranon in some respects; modern politically correct critics will no doubt try to pounce on a gay subtext in the relationship between Iranon and Romnod.

"The Moon-Bog" draws on old legends of the ancient Greeks having visited Ireland about 1200 years before Christ, and tells of Denys Barry's attempts to clear an ancient (and accursed) bog near the castle he has bought and restored in Ireland. On an islet in the middle of this bog lies an ancient ruin, all that remains of a temple to Artemis in an ancient Greek village. Barry uncovers this village and its ghosts when he drains the bog. "The Moon-Bog" was written for a Hub Club gathering to celebrate St Patrick's Day; it is minor Lovecraft and not especially interesting, though it seems to have got a good enough reception when he publicly unveiled it.

"The Outsider" is one of Lovecraft's most famous works and one of his best early stories. In it he satirises his own self-image as an outsider in his own time, unfit for human society; his narrator has never before ventured beyond the isolated confines of his ancestral castle, nor beheld his own likeness in a mirror. Then one day he decides to up and leave and visit the world. He sees some people who run away in fright, turns to see what they're running from, and sees a monstrous, classically Lovecraftian thing, "a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal and detestable." He reaches out and touches the paw of the thing—and touches a sheet of polished glass showing him his own reflection. It's one of Lovecraft's best endings.

"The Other Gods" adds a slight horror twist to the dreamlands stories; it was also his last story to be set there until The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in 1926. The gods used to play on Earth but they have moved elsewhere because men kept trying to climb their mountains. Still, they like to come back to their old playgrounds, and so Barzai the Wise attempts to climb Mount Hatheg-Kla one night when he knows the gods will be there because he wants to see their faces. He hears the gods, then he sees the gods—and then the gods see him, "the other gods… who guard the feeble gods of Earth". Barzai falls into the sky and is never seen again, and the gods play undisturbed atop Hatheg-Kla. "The Other Gods" is an effective little piece, and nearly the last time Lovecraft used the dreamland setting, as noted. As with "From Beyond" and "The Quest of Iranon", it also had to wait nearly a decade and a half for its first publication.

At this point Lovecraft's writing career took an important turn when he was approached by fellow George Julian Houtain to write six short connected tales for a new professional magazine he was producing called Home Brew. The net result was "Herbert West—Reanimator", Lovecraft's first professionally published work, for which he received the princely sum of ten dollars (having been paid only for the first two parts). "I am become a Grub Street hack," he said at the time, and "hack" is the right word in this, Lovecraft's version of the Frankenstein story. He later dismissed it at his worst work, and certainly the flow of the story is not helped by the repetitions made necessary by its nature as a serial, but later commentators have come to appreciate it for its ghoulish humour. As I've already noted, Lovecraft was a far funnier person than most of his stories might suggest, though his sense of humour could sometimes be a bit obtuse; the wit of "Herbert West" is unusual for his fiction. Of all Lovecraft's stories, this was probably the best-suited to the 1980s splatter horror boom, and the Re-Animator film directed by Stuart Gordon lays the guts on thick while retaining the original's humour, which made it one of the better Lovecraft films. The story took a long time to write, though, beginning in September 1921 and not finishing until April or May 1922.

In between times, he finished 1921 with "The Music of Erich Zann", which tells of a strange mute violist and his stranger music, resident in the Rue d'Auseil, in a garret room that overlooks the wall at the end of the street, although Zann is afraid to look out there. The narrator of the story lives on a lower floor and is intrigued by the music; one night a very frightened Zann promises to write an explanation, but the narrator sees the window shutter opening, revealing a view not of the city outside but a vast cosmic abyss. He escapes, but never finds the Rue d'Auseil again. It's one of Lovecraft's best stories, and he retained a fondness for it to the end of his life, though more because it lacked what he felt were the crudities of some of his other works than because of any positive virtues it had. Is it stretching the autobiographical point too far to ask if Lovecraft's own childhood experiences with the violin had some bearing on this story?

He started 1922 with "Hypnos", a story which frankly leaves me scratching my head wondering as to the point. The nameless narrator and his nameless friend spend their time in searches for strange knowledge beyond the wall of sleep (to coin a phrase); with the help of the right drugs (none of which Lovecraft ever took, it must be noted; he tried tobacco in his youth but hated it, and never knowingly touched alcohol once in his life, never mind any of the harder drugs some of his characters indulge in), they go on their somnolent wanderings through abysses of dream, until in their thirst for knowledge they push too far, crossing a wrong barrier. Soon they come to fear sleep, until a strange visitation one night; the narrator wakes to find nothing of his friend, who he is told by others did not even exist, except a marble statue of his likeness with the name HYPNOS—the Greek god of sleep—carved around the base. The exact meaning of this slightly confusing narrative is something I admit to not yet having discovered.

1922 was an interesting year for Lovecraft personally. That year he wrote his first letter to the Californian poet and artist Clark Ashton Smith; Smith's response then began Lovecraft's most important epistolary friendship (typically, the two never met in the flesh). Smith had somehow seen Lovecraft's "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and Lovecraft had been given Smith's two books to that point and had seen some of Smith's drawings in Samuel Loveman's collection. Like Lovecraft, Smith received little formal education and had a fondness for the fantastic, but there were significant differences. Smith smoked and drank fairly heavily, and was a notorious philanderer given to affairs with married women. Smith had connections among the Romantic poets' scene on the West Coast, with George Sterling acting as his mentor (Ambrose Bierce and Jack London were early fans as well), and had published two books of poetry by 1921. It's easy to see the appeal of a poem like "The Hashish-Eater" for Lovecraft, with its riot of psychedelic visions.

Lovecraft is also credited with inspiring Smith to take up weird fiction; Smith's first published story appeared in Weird Tales in 1926, and between 1929 and 1937 he produced around a hundred stories—far more prolific than Lovecraft ever was. After Lovecraft's death, Smith virtually abandoned fiction. Lovecraft would give Smith a good notice in his Supernatural Horror In Literature essay in 1927, and also namechecked him in his own stories: by his proper name in "The Call of Cthulhu" and, by way of an obtuse in-joke, as "the Atlantean high priest Klarkash-Ton" in "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Battle That Ended The Century", and "The Shadow Out of Time".

In April 1922, Lovecraft also made his first visit to New York. Sonia Greene had suggested a gathering there during her visit to Providence the previous year, and finally Lovecraft acted on the offer. It was the most extended voyage he'd ever made to that point, stating in a letter that "the journey was an event of the keenest pleasure and greatest singularity." While there Sonia gave him accommodation and he met correspondents such as Samuel Loveman and Frank Belknap Long for the first time. Even more interesting than this visit to New York, though, was the fact that he made a return visit to the place the following August, preceded by a visit to Cleveland, Ohio, where he first met Alfred Galpin, another correspondent. A definite personal change is visible in Lovecraft from this time on, as evidenced by his letters. In one of his Cleveland letters, he says "I am altogether free from melancholy—positively cheerful, in fact." In short, Lovecraft was finally starting to get a life.

His fiction, however, continued much in the same vein it was already in. "What The Moon Brings" is the last of Lovecraft's "prose poems"; once again, mood and language are paramount over plot or any other considerations. The tone of the piece is pure and simple nightmare, and it's dark stuff indeed for something so concentrated. Around this time he also wrote the fragment "Azathoth", which he intended as a novel but only wrote about 500 words of it. He was still talking about working on it at least two years later, though nothing came of it then either.

In June 1922, between Lovecraft's New York trips, Sonia Greene visited Providence, and Lovecraft fixed up a story for her; this was "The Horror at Martin's Beach", written at his suggestion, and published as "The Invisible Monster". S.T. Joshi classifies this story as one of Lovecraft's secondary revisions, meaning that Lovecraft's work was restricted to fixing up a pre-existing draft. Primary revisions are those works which Lovecraft basically wrote himself, working from a client's outline or sometimes totally rewriting a pre-existing draft; "The Green Meadow" and "The Crawling Chaos" are thus classified as primary revisions, while "The Horror at Martin's Beach" is only secondary. In this story, a bizarre monstrosity is hunted down and fished out of the sea; a few days later, another monster comes and kills those who killed the first one. It's fairly simplistic and frankly not very good; it just reads like Lovecraft having a bad day.

In "The Hound", two bored aesthetes go grave-robbing when they can't find anything normal that can hold their interest, and get a hellhound on their trail when they steal a certain amulet from a certain corpse in Holland. Some commentators have read "The Hound" as Lovecraft in a moment of self-parody, which seems to be as good a way to approach it as any. The two characters are so über-decadent and über-aesthetic, and their splendid museum of tomb loot so extreme, and the story generally so overcharged, that it's possibly best to approach it as an example of Lovecraft taking the piss out of himself. The story's certainly quite good, but not the sort of thing you can easily take seriously. "The Hound" also marked the debut of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. I'll have more to say about the blackest of books in due course.

"The Lurking Fear" gave Lovecraft an opportunity to voice his fears and disgust at the possibilities of human degeneracy, with its setting among the Catskills and its backwoods population of decrepit Dutch ancestry, and its story of an undefined horror with an affinity for thunderstorms that comes to terrorise them. It was, once again, written to order as a serial for Houtain's Home Brew. Lovecraft did not like this composition to order, sticking to his higher artistic principles, though the writing seems to have posed fewer problems than "Herbert West", being done in less than a month, and the end result is reasonably good. But the serial nature of the story meant it turned out too long for its own good; the material is highly promising and could have made a much more effective story with some judicious condensation and streamlining. The first two parts especially could be collapsed into a single unit. Clark Ashton Smith provided illustrations for the Home Brew publication, the only time he and Lovecraft could be said to have actually collaborated on a work in any way.

In 1923 Lovecraft finally found himself with a possible regular market for his fiction. That March, the first issue of Weird Tales, edited by Edwin Baird, was published. Lovecraft's correspondent James Morton alerted him to the possibilities, and so Lovecraft typed five of his stories and sent them off in May. Baird wrote back that he'd be happy to accept them if Lovecraft would retype them with double instead of single spacing; Lovecraft despised typing at the best of times, however, and detested the thought of retyping. Nonetheless, he retyped "Dagon", resubmitted it, and the net result was that it was published in the October issue, with Baird clamouring for more. The introductory covering letter was also printed prior to the story's publication, and the deprecatory tone of it is quite remarkable ("Of these, the first two are probably the best. If they be unsuitable, the rest need not be read… my MSS. are not likely to win your consideration"). It's been said that the letter reads like a deliberate attempt not to score publication. If that were really so, then the attempt failed quite miserably.

Later in 1923, Lovecraft helped revise stories (which I shall deal with shortly) for his Providence friend C.M Eddy, Jr; in return for this service, all Eddy had to do was type some of Lovecraft's stories to submit to Baird. Though he disliked Baird's tendency to alter story titles ("Arthur Jermyn" has already been mentioned, while "The Horror At Martin's Beach" became "The Invisible Monster" on publication after Lovecraft had already changed the name from "The Nameless Monster"), Lovecraft seems to have got along well enough with him; at Lovecraft's suggestion, Baird also accepted early works by Frank B. Long and the stories by Eddy mentioned above, and broke his own rule about not printing poetry when Lovecraft referred him to Smith.

1923 was marked by Lovecraft's antiquarian tours of the New England region and also by visits to Providence from Sonia Greene, amongst others, as well as a temporary bout of deafness. Fictionwise, his output seemed to be slowing down somewhat, producing only three stories this year (not counting the Eddy revisions). The first of these was "The Rats in the Walls", the longest story Lovecraft had produced to date, perhaps foreshadowing his later works and the length of them. It is another tale of heredity gone bad, as an American man goes to England to claim his ancestral home which has lain untenanted and cursed for centuries. Perhaps the Roman connections in the story are meant to recall Arthur Machen, who Lovecraft was then busy reading. All told, one of Lovecraft's more effective and scary works. It is also important for probably having been the first story Lovecraft wrote with professional publication in mind, as opposed to simply donating something for amateur publication. Ironically enough, he'd initally tried to place it with the Argosy, the scene of much conflict ten years earlier, before giving it to Weird Tales.

"The Unnamable" marks the return of Randolph Carter as narrator, and, like "The Hound", seems to show Lovecraft taking a few more swipes at himself in that guise ("my constant talk about 'unnamable' and 'unmentionable' things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author"). Most of the story is a tale within a tale related by Carter to his friend Joel Manton (possibly based on Lovecraft's long-standing correspondent Maurice Moe) about an "unnamable" presence lurking in an old house in Arkham (roughly speaking, Lovecraft's fictionalised version of the Salem area); when the two of them pass by the house in question, the said "unnamable" presence strikes them both down. Nothing much happens, and basically "The Unnamable" isn't especially good. Carter's narrative appears to stem from an authentic bit of New England local myth, preserved in an old collection called Magnalia Christi Americana by Cotton Mather; Lovecraft had a copy of this ancient text.

Critics of Lovecraft's style usually point to the overheated language of the earlier stories, particularly the overuse of adjectives and adverbs, and "The Festival" is one of the stories most often targeted. It's a Christmas story, such as only Lovecraft would write (any similarity between this and Dickens' more famous Christmas books would be miraculous as well as coincidental); the narrator returns to the old port town of Kingsport to celebrate an ancient festival among his people, from whom his family descended centuries earlier, but discovers that the people and the ancient Yuletide festival are rather more horrible than he'd imagined. Certainly Lovecraft lays on the language rather thickly, especially at the climactic scene of the festival, but in general "The Festival" is quite atmospheric. For my money, the third-last paragraph of "The Lurking Fear" is a wilder example of adjective abuse; he really lets rip there.

Around this time, as mentioned, Lovecraft revised four stories for C.M. Eddy, Jr, and I have decided to consider these all together. S.T. Joshi classifies these stories as secondary revisions, and says that Lovecraft's part in "Ashes", the first of these revisions, was probably minimal. Certainly the superabundance of dialogue is something we would not really expect from Lovecraft, who tended to downplay the value of dialogue in his own stories, and the minor romantic subplot which this highly compact short story somehow finds room for is hardly like him either. "Ashes" is a sort of mad scientist tale, where the mad scientist develops a liquid that will reduce anything except glass to ashes. As all mad scientists should be, he is destroyed by his own creation.

"The Ghost-Eater" is a werewolf story with an interesting twist. Lovecraft's hand is much more noticeable in this story, except for the slightly weak explanatory conclusion; again, the dialogue seems to indicate Eddy at work there. Possibly the story would be more interesting were it not for this climactic explanation, though maybe not necessarily. "Deaf, Dumb and Blind", perhaps written in 1924, tells of a writer who is indeed deaf, dumb and blind, who is found dead at his adapted typewriter with a very peculiar typescript. The story is neither especially interesting nor especially comprehensible, and it's hard to tell which of the two had more input into this work, though the language is Lovecraftian enough; interestingly, it seems to foreshadow Lovecraft's much later "Haunter of the Dark", in which the main character is found similarly dead at his desk with an incomprehensible manuscript. Indeed, the characters have strikingly similar names (Richard Blake in "Deaf, Dumb and Blind" and Robert Blake in "Haunter"; we'll come to Robert Blake in due course, though).

But it's "The Loved Dead" which is most notable among these revisions, with Lovecraft seeming (at least on the surface) to gain the ascendant over Eddy in this one. In "The Unnamable", Carter refers to a story of his which manages to get the magazine in which it was printed banned; with "The Loved Dead", Lovecraft and Eddy nearly pulled off the same thing in actuality. The narrator is a withdrawn and reclusive child until he attends his first funeral aged sixteen, and discovers he has a thing for the presence of dead people; he gets apprenticed to an undertaker, and when even that doesn't do it for him any more, he goes out and drums up more business. Unpleasant and nasty stuff indeed, it's easy to imagine why certain hysterical wowsers tried to get Weird Tales banned when this story was published; it's lost little of its power in the ensuing three-quarters of a century, and is one of the best things Lovecraft put his hand to. Certainly, despite or because of the threat of censorship, it did wonders for the magazine's circulation.

On March 3, 1924, Lovecraft did what almost no one ever expected him to do. He got married. He and Sonia Greene hitched and she officially became Sonia Greene Lovecraft. (No children ever resulted from the marriage, though Sonia already had a daughter of her own. One wonders what sort of father Lovecraft might have made, given that he never knew his own father.) Sonia later said that when she first encountered Lovecraft, "I admired his personality but, frankly, at first not his person." Somewhere along the way, and quite early on, her feelings for him became somewhat warmer and more personal, and Lovecraft was soon developing similar feelings. The two had managed to keep the affair secret until after the deed had been done, thus taking everyone either of them knew by surprise. Few even suspected that the two of them had passed beyond the stage of merely being friends.

The marriage was accompanied by an even more astonishing move: Lovecraft's relocation from Providence to New York. Or perhaps this move should not have been so surprising. While Lovecraft never let go of letters as a means of communicating with other people at a distance, it is clear that he also enjoyed the personal company and live conversation of his acquaintances, and this was something Providence could not give him (the Eddy family notwithstanding). For all his personal and historical attachment to the place, Lovecraft was evidently begininng to feel that he needed more. New York certainly provided him with it.

In New York, he was a frequent attendee at gatherings of the "Kalem" club, so named because all the members' surnames began either with the letters K, L, or M (George Kirk, Rheinhart Kleiner, H.P. Lovecraft, Frank B. Long, Samuel Loveman, James Morton, Everett McNeil), and he seems to have had little trouble holding his own at these gatherings. And with the Kalem gang he would sometimes keep some rather weird hours. In Providence, of course, he often slept through the day and stayed up through all the hours of the night; however, in Providence he was not often out on the town when he was up late. To take one example he gives in a letter: he went out to a gathering at Kirk's one evening, which broke up at one thirty AM. He and Kirk then went to McNeil's place, where they continued talking until five. Then, the three of them went to a cafeteria on Broadway and continued talking there (with time out for breakfast) until nine thirty, whereupon they went and looked at a museum, then up to Times Square for lunch. No alcohol was consumed by anyone at any time. Presumably—hopefully—Lovecraft finally went home around then. This extravagant jamboree was something Lovecraft would never have done, indeed probably could never have done in Providence, at least to that point in his life. And certainly this is not the sort of thing a reclusive invalid does, either.

The marriage began smoothly; Sonia had her millinery business going, and Lovecraft was kept busy by J.C. Henneberger, the owner of Weird Tales. That magazine was in some financial strife by early 1924, necessitating the replacement of Edwin Baird by Farnsworth Wright, with whom Lovecraft had a much more difficult relationship; meanwhile, Henneberger took a personal interest in Lovecraft. He promised to set up a new magazine, in the more "classic" vein of Poe and Machen, once he'd got his existing ones sorted out and to install Lovecraft as editor; however, Lovecraft did not relish the prospect of a further move to Chicago, which this would necessitate, especially if the magazine failed as he felt it would (in fact it never even got off the ground). Henneberger also had him writing humorous pieces for him; whatever became of these I don't know.

Lovecraft's major work for Henneberger was a story ghost-written by him for Harry Houdini, of all people, called "Under The Pyramids" but better known as "Imprisoned With The Pharaohs" (a better title also, I think). Houdini had related a story of his adventures in Egypt to Henneberger and written down some notes about it; Lovecraft was then commissioned to make a proper story of them. The sceptical Lovecraft soon discovered Houdini's story was fake but took the offer anyway, producing "Under The Pyramids". Disaster struck, however, when the manuscript got lost at the Providence railway station, and Lovecraft actually spent part of his honeymoon rewriting the whole thing with Sonia's help. The end result was as big a humbug as Houdini's story had been; the "only a dream" ending is galling and it's far too long to sustain interest. Cutting some of the travelogue-style bits in the first part, which Lovecraft cribbed from Cairo guidebooks, would reduce the length, but those are some of the more interesting bits. While reading the story, we must remember—which is difficult, admittedly—that Lovecraft ghost- wrote it in the first person, thus putting the words into Houdini's mouth; that said, "Houdini" here still speaks more Lovecraftian than otherwise, but, still, I don't know any other Lovecraft narrator who works as a professional escapologist.

Before long, however, Lovecraft's life was beginning to disintegrate. Sonia's business collapsed, and at the age of 34, Lovecraft found himself having to look for a regular paid job for the first time in his life. In between times he covered himself with the occasional revision job, but increasing financial woes saw the couple forced to sell a number of possessions to survive. Sonia ended up with a nervous breakdown and hospitalisation; then in early 1925 she was obliged to accept a job in the mid-west. Lovecraft was forced to move from Sonia's place on Parkside Avenue to an apartment on Clinton St in Brooklyn, and lived completely alone for the first time in his life while Sonia worked in Cincinnati; she only visited New York (and her husband) occasionally thereafter.

He was also totally unsuccessful at finding work (though at length he did finally secure a brief position with a company, addressing envelopes for $18 a week for three weeks), and Farnsworth Wright was initially not interested in his tales. To cap everything, in May 1925 the apartment was burgled; Lovecraft lost most of his wardrobe, as well as a wicker suitcase belonging to Sonia and a radio set belonging to Sam Loveman. Before long the city which had first seemed as if it had walked out of a Dunsanian dream-fantasy was turning into a more nightmarish version of Hell than even Lovecraft could've imagined.

So by the end of 1924 the marriage and the new life was on the rocks, and it seemed for a while that Lovecraft's literary muse had followed it there. The fiction that came out of the New York period on the whole does not present him at his best, although individual stories show some individual nice touches. Only two stories were written in 1924. We have already covered "Under The Pyramids"; the second, "The Shunned House", from October, is Lovecraft on especially low wattage. Poe is cited at the start of the story and overall it seems to have a Poe-esque tenor. It is written in a somewhat flat, dryly uninteresting style, telling a story of an ill-defined vampiric presence lurking beneath an ancient house in Providence sucking the life from its erstwhile inhabitants. It is not exactly Lovecraft's most inspired work, being let down by a flat ending as well suffering from a general lack of momentum and a surfeit of genealogy in the second and third parts. The Providence setting is notable, and this was his first story to be set there. Clearly he was already missing the old place.

He did not write another story until the following August, when he produced three in fairly rapid succession. "The Horror At Red Hook" came first. Were anyone daft enough to doubt that Lovecraft hated New York, this story should cure them of that delusion, as Lovecraft vents his spleen and unleashes a torrent of unattractively racist bile. Not only do these inbred mongrel foreigners bring their weird smells and evil diseases, they bring their old devil-cults along too. The story features a curiously conventional black magic cult, though if you can look past the racial epithets the story itself is quite good; Lovecraft will feature other cults with more interesting objects of worship in future, as we'll see. "The Horror at Red Hook" is significant for another reason, having been the first Lovecraft story to receive book publication, being collected with various other authors' stories in a collection called Not At Night in 1927. Other similar anthology appearances would follow this one over the next few years.

"He" is one of Lovecraft's more overtly autobiographical stories, at least in that the narrator comes to New York full of high hopes and expectations and disillusion sets in before too long. One night he encounters a curious stranger who shows him horrific visions of the future and is mysteriously engulfed. At the end of the story, the narrator announces his return to his ancestral Providence; perhaps when he wrote it, that was merely wishful thinking on the part of Lovecraft, who must have felt permanently trapped in what he called "the pest zone", but within a few months the hope would become a reality.

"In The Vault" shows Lovecraft making a rare venture into basic physical nastiness. In this story, we have an undertaker who makes a coffin for a rather small man but his first attempt proves unusable. Rather than discard it, however, he holds onto it and uses it for someone else. Of course he has to make a few adjustments to the body before it will fit into the coffin—and then one night when he gets locked in the sepulchre where he keeps the coffins before burying them, the body tries to make similar adjustments to him. It's a good bit of ghoulish fun, and might be turned into a nice short film by someone like Michele Soavi or Dario Argento.

There was one more story from the New York period, that being "Cool Air", written in March 1926, a month before his triumphant return to Providence (he may also have written the unfinished fragment "The Descendant" before this). The narrator moves to New York to do some "dreary and unprofitable magazine work"—which Lovecraft himself also did during the New York period, writing a number of anonymous bits of advertising copy for a trade magazine, though these did not lead to a paid position of any sort—taking up residence in an apartment in an old brownstone building. Upstairs lives Doctor Muñoz, from whose apartment comes a curious smell; Muñoz cannot leave the apartment because he needs constant refrigeration to stay in one piece. The story owes a lot to Poe's "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", though I think it possibly improves on its evident model. Lovecraft himself had absolutely no tolerance for cold temperatures, as we shall see in due course, which makes this an interesting case.

Both Sonia and Frank Belknap Long would later take the credit for arranging Lovecraft's eventual removal from New York. Lovecraft's two aunts, Lillian Clark and Annie Gamwell, were informed of the situation, they immediately sent back a rail ticket for their nephew to return to Providence, and in April 1926 he used it, taking up residence now at 10 Barnes St with his two aunts rather than the old place on Angell St. He did make a few return voyages to New York in the decade remaining to him, and he would travel extensively to other parts of the country, even making a couple of trips north of the border into Canada, but he never took up permanent residence away from Providence again. At last he realised just what his ancestral soil was worth to him—and what his wife was worth to his two aunts, which is to say, not much. Sonia later said that Mrs Clark and Mrs Gamwell did not want the social stigma of their nephew being married to a tradeswoman, hence she was not invited back to Providence with her husband. It was a triumphant return for Lovecraft, but a solo one.

Not long after his return to Providence, Lovecraft first made epistolary contact with a certain teenager from Wisconsin called August W. Derleth, who had already been published by Weird Tales aged only seventeen. Derleth it was who was largely for establishing Lovecraft's posthumous reputation when he founded Arkham House in 1939 to publish Lovecraft's work in hardcover, and however much we may carp at him for his misreadings of the Lovecraftian Weltanschauung or for his tendency to monopolise Lovecraft's written remains by refusing to permit paperback publications of his stories or indeed for the many manifest inadequacies of his own pastiches of Lovecraft, we must give credit where it is due. At least Derleth kept Lovecraft in print when the latter might easily have sunk into complete oblivion. Arkham House was started by Derleth in tandem with Donald Wandrei, who Lovecraft first discovered through Clark Ashton Smith and who he actually met in Providence in early 1927. Lovecraft never met Derleth in the flesh.

The return to Providence gave Lovecraft a real energy boost, and the remainder of 1926 would be a productive period. He spent much of it writing Supernatural Horror In Literature, which we will not consider here, but also turned out some important stories as well, and the first of his post-return stories was the one which has perhaps made him most famous, "The Call of Cthulhu". For the first time in his fiction, Lovecraft sounds his major theme, swapping his hitherto rather earthbound Gothic horrors for something far more interesting and cosmic. The structure of the story is interesting, as the narrator ties together three separate narratives (a sculptor produces a weird carving after a weird dream; the narrator's anthropologist grandfather discovers a peculiar Eskimo cult; a sailor goes mad after witnessing a monstrous thing on a newly risen Pacific island—the echoes of "Dagon" in this last part are notable) into a whole. Lovecraft's classicism extended to architecture as well as literature, hence his equation of the "wrong" angles of Cthulhu's city of R'lyeh with Futurist designs. At the end of the story, Cthulhu sinks once again with his city, which does beg the question as to why he doesn't leave the island when he has the opportunity; it is a bit of a logical flaw, though not massively damaging.

What matters, though, is the expanded perspective Lovecraft's fiction now takes, as he introduces more of a science-fictional element into his work—though by "science-fictional" we should not understand that as referring to the sort of 1920s/30s "Doc" Smith-style space opera pulp that Lovecraft entertained a very low opinion of. The SF element in Lovecraft consists in the way he attributes an extraterrestrial origin to his monsters, which are natural and not supernatural. Formally speaking, the later stories are probably not what would be generally recognised as SF, but certainly they're no longer pure horror or classical "weird" fiction.

Herein lie the roots of what later mutated into the "Cthulhu Mythos"… which phenomenon let us now discuss, since this seems as good a point as any to do so. For a start, let's remember that Lovecraft never used the term "Cthulhu Mythos". He did regard his stories as having a general thematic unity, though the only time I can think of that he actually refers to one of his stories being part of a series is in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith (Selected Letters vol.2, letter 332) when he refers to the newly-completed "Dunwich Horror" as "belong[ing] to the Arkham cycle". The credit or blame for the devising of the "Cthulhu Mythos" as such is usually laid at the feet of August Derleth.

So what actually is the Cthulhu Mythos? Dirk Mosig has drawn a useful distinction between the stories and the background collectively mythology they draw on. In his mind, the latter is what the Cthulhu Mythos really is; it's not the stories themselves but their collective background. As such, you shouldn't really talk about whether or not a story belongs to the Mythos. This is a theory that I generally tend to side with. With this distinction in mind, let's look at Derleth's Mythos.

In Lovecraft's hands, the background mythology is somewhat incoherent, if not actually self-contradictory at some points (one example: the Plateau of Leng and Kadath being both in Antarctica and at the north pole of the dreamlands). In Derleth's hands it becomes systematised and smoothed out. To draw a perhaps slightly blasphemous parallel, if Lovecraft's stories are the Gospels, then Derleth's Mythos stories are like the letters of St Paul, trying to form a sort of template or set of guidelines. Derleth's conception of the Mythos is most clearly set out in the third part of the 1945 "collaborative" novel The Lurker at the Threshold, which is not as bad as his other pseudo-collaborations and is worth reading if only to get a feel for Derleth's vision of the Mythos.

This seems to be the pattern most later Mythos authors have followed, and for my money it tends to reduce Lovecraft's conception to a rather more basic action-adventure type of thing. Not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, and not that Lovecraft would have necessarily disapproved of such stories. It is also not necessarily what Lovecraft did. What Derleth left out of this was Lovecraft's cosmic vision of things. The supremely wide-angle view of events that Lovecraft takes is one of the things which makes him so appealing for me. Yet this is perhaps the most important element of Lovecraft's view of things, fictionally and otherwise, and Derleth's Mythos tends to minimise it.

But to say that Lovecraft didn't produce some sort of new mythology would be to fly in the face of all available evidence and make oneself look very foolish indeed. He knew exactly what he was doing in that regard. He borrowed freely from his fellow creators, and encouraged them to borrow back just as freely. He dropped his own creations into stories ghost-written for others (such as "The Last Test", "The Mound", "The Diary of Alonzo Typer"), which further spread the mythology he was slowly building up.

So Lovecraft did indeed create his own mythology, but he did so in tandem with others who borrowed from him and from whom he borrowed. It also seems to have been a fairly organic process, with Lovecraft happy to let his myth-system grow by accretion. Derleth then codified the various elements into a whole during the 1940s. Strictly speaking, therefore, although Lovecraft wrote with a mythology in mind, he wrote before there was a "Mythos" as such. I think that's another distinction worth making. As such, it is perfectly possible to maintain, as does Donovan Loucks for example, that Lovecraft's stories and the ensuing "Cthulhu Mythos" are entirely separate entities and that strictly speaking HPL never wrote a "Mythos" story himself. But it's impossible to maintain that at the same time HPL was not busy creating his own mythology; he knew that he was doing so. He just never laid down the law about it like Derleth did.

One of the things which, to me, seems to most conclusively disprove Derleth's conception of the Lovecraftian universe, reducing the cosmic conflict to a fairly simple good gods vs bad gods scenario, is the fact that the good does not usually come to drive away the bad and save us. "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Dreams in the Witch House" are about the only cases in the later fiction where the threat is pretty much stopped. Cthulhu still sleeps at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean waiting to rise again. The Deep Ones still possess Innsmouth. Rhan-Tegoth is still in the museum. Ghatanothoa is still on his island. The people of K'n-yan are still in their mound. The Mi-Go still lurk around Vermont. The shoggoths and indeed the Elder Things still lurk around Antarctica. The fungoidal things from "The Shadow Out Of Time" still lurk around subterranean Australia. And presumably Yig is still beating his tail and making babies somewhere. Even the various horrors of earlier stories such as "Dagon", "The Nameless City", "The Festival", "Under The Pyramids" or "Pickman's Model" are never properly contained. Lovecraft's fiction is interestingly open in this way; he does not often provide the sort of narrative closure you'd expect, by stopping the threat and restoring things to normality. (Many modern horror films don't really do this either, but they generally do this for the purposes of leaving the way clear for at least one more sequel.)

Lovecraft's next work after "Cthulhu" was another revision, this one for a young correspondent called Wilfred Blanch Talman. The writing of this story was attended with numerous difficulties, mostly in that Talman seems not to have been too happy with the changes which Lovecraft told him he was not obliged to accept (as Adolphe de Castro would not accept Lovecraft's changes to one of his stories; see below); hence, although the story is classified as a Lovecraft work, it is unknown exactly how much if any of the writing actually is by him. It's a reasonably standard old-fashioned horror story of people in league with dark forces, nothing special though not bad; probably it would fare best read aloud in company around a campfire at night. It's that sort of story, basically. Talman would later extract a form of revenge on Lovecraft; commissioning him to write an article in 1933 for a paper he was editing, he kept returning it with requests for changes, much as Lovecraft had done with Talman's story, until he was finally satisfied.

"Pickman's Model" followed, showing that Lovecraft was by no means completely confirmed as to his future course. "Cthulhu" marked a major and perhaps rather change of direction, but it was not a complete shift yet. For once Lovecraft puts visual art in the spotlight in this story of a painter with unusual subject matter and equally unusual models; his tastes in painting were predominantly conservative ones (a late letter expressing guarded admiration for an exhibit of Soviet socialist realist paintings betrays this), but he did have some knowledge of art dealing with fantastic themes, referring in this story to figures such as Goya, Henry Fuseli, Sidney Sime (Dunsany's illustrator) and Clark Ashton Smith; he was also a great fan of the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich and the English painter of biblical and apocalyptic subjects John Martin, and some of his late correspondents were young artists working in the pulps, Virgil Finlay, Willis Conover and Frank Utpatel. Lovecraft later dismissed "Pickman's Model" as tame, but it's still a likeable piece of work.

Although Lovecraft often maintained that a story was no place to air philosophies, he airs plenty of his own in the first half of "The Silver Key", which features Randolph Carter again; it features the most direct statement of his philosophy of cosmic indifference in his fiction. He had formulated this theory more or less completely at least a decade earlier, but had not yet given it a fictional voice. The action as such does not begin until about half way through. Carter finds himself unable to dream his old dreams and the real world is too godawful for him, until he discovers an ancient silver key wrapped in a parchment containing unintelligible hieroglyphs, left by an ancestor of his who was a wizard; with this key he returns to the old Carter home that he has not seen in forty years and, in an extremely subtle transition, becomes the nine year old child he used to be. I have already mentioned how Lovecraft's own peak period was the 1902-03 season, and he always longed to be able to return to those days, which he could only do in his dreams (a huge percentage of which, according to him, were set around that time); if we accept Carter as Lovecraft's alter ego, then we can read 'The Silver Key" as a sort of wish fulfilment. If Lovecraft couldn't go back to his childhood, he could make Carter do it instead.

"The Strange High House In The Mist" is a curious little work, telling of an old house on an inaccessible crag and the hermit who lives there and is visited by the old gods and the man who goes to investigate it. It has a sort of lightness of tone, not unlike the Dunsanian fantasies though without using the Dunsanian language or style, but the lightness is mixed with a certain unease, most notable at the end. A curious little story, seemingly uncertain as to whether it would rather be Dunsanian fantasy or Lovecraftian Gothic, and trying to be both with doubtful success. It's pleasing enough, but Lovecraft had greater things ahead of him, both in the future and immediately after finishing "Strange High House".

part three

part one

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