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In May, he made his final change of residence, moving with his aunt Annie Gamwell to 66 College St; budgetary circumstances forced the move to this cheaper place, and Lovecraft did not enjoy the moving process and the chaos of trying to pack and store things attendant upon it, but he adored the place itself. He was moving into a real bit of colonial architecture. If he couldn't get his old 454 Angell St back, and he must've known by now that he never would, then this was an acceptable compromise for him. It was located next to the John Hay Library (now the repository for Lovecraft's manuscripts and other papers), and there was a courtyard nearby full of his beloved cats (the cats belonged to his neighbours, of course, though he bestowed his own names on them).

However, travel this year was hampered by a lack of money and also by Annie Gamwell breaking her leg not long after the move, meaning Lovecraft had to stay behind and nurse her. Nonetheless, he still managed to fit in a few days in Quebec (his third trip there) and he spent the New Year period in New York. He would also take advantage of the unusually good autumn weather, even up to November, to take a number of local excursions around the New England region. A new acquaintance from 1933—epistolary, of course—was the 17 year old Robert Bloch. Bloch is now probably most famous for his 1958 novel Psycho, based upon the cannibal exploits of the killer Ed Gein, though the fame of the book is probably overshadowed by the film Alfred Hitchcock made of it in 1960. Just as Lovecraft created a new type of horror fiction where the focus is shifted from the merely supernatural to the cosmically alien and impossibly ancient, Bloch's novel and Hitchcock's film also helped to shift the focus of horror from the supernatural to the human. One wonders what Lovecraft would've made of it.

After finishing the "Silver Key" sequel, he did two more stories for Hazel Heald, the first of these being "Winged Death". This is an exceedingly curious tale of professional rivalry with a bit of a voodoo twist. Dr Thomas Slauenwite takes it upon himself to kill Dr Henry Moore after the latter helps abort the former's career by accusing him of academic malpractice. Slauenwite discovers a particularly nasty insect in Uganda, the blue-winged devil-fly Glossina palpalis which reportedly bites a person, lets them waste away, then absorbs the victim's soul, and after testing it on a couple of unsuspecting souls, decides he will inflict it on Moore, who is still based in America. After Moore's death, Slauenwite disappears and assumes a new name in Johannesburg, where he soon finds himself pestered by a blue-winged fly. Strange indeed, but entertaining even so.

In "Out of the Aeons", another long-forgotten island of horror rises from the sea in the last century. A passing ship explores and retrieves a strange mummy clutching a metallic cylinder containing a strange manuscript, which is duly placed in a museum in Boston. Some decades later, the museum curator finds himself fending off interest from a number of strange people with strange ideas about the mummy. Lovecraft gives prominence to another black book in "Out of the Aeons", the Unaussprechlichen Kulten by von Junzt, one of Robert Howard's additions to the ever-expanding mythology Lovecraft and his associates were busy creating; the story presents a fine example of how this traffic in ideas worked as Lovecraft takes Howard's book and adds an episode described therein devised by himself—the story of T'yog who goes to stare down the alien thing Ghatanothoa that was worshipped by the pre-humans of 200,000 years earlier—which forms the centre of "Out of the Aeons". Clark Ashton Smith had done something similar two years earlier when he invented a quote from the Necronomicon for his story "The Return of the Sorcerer", and the year before that Lovecraft had given Smith's god Tsathoggua some mythical background in "The Mound". Randolph Carter in his "Swami Chandraputra" guise and Etienne Marigny from "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" make passing appearances. The ending is probably visible from about half-way through the story, but even so this is one of Lovecraft's better revisions.

In August 1933, he finally finished a new story of his own, "The Thing on the Doorstep". It had taken months for him to get that far, since he had apparently started but failed to finish a number of other stories before that, although the actual writing of the story only took three days. This story has been commented upon for featuring Lovecraft's only important female character, Asenath Waite. Lovecraft's stories are notable for a general absence of women (Marceline from "Medusa's Coil" is probably Asenath's only real competitor in the important female character stakes; female characters seem to occur with a little more frequency in the revisions than in his original work), and his male characters tend to prefer the social (though not sexual) company of other men; they do not have any interest in or use for women. As Lovecraft had noted in 1919, four years before his own marriage, "horror-writers are not often ladies' men". But in the end, even Asenath turns out to be, strictly speaking, not quite a woman. The story is only moderately interesting, and all told "The Thing on the Doorstep" is not really one of Lovecraft's more shining moments.

A letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer from October 1933 featured a transcription of a Lovecraft dream, and thus inadvertently gave posthumous birth to one of Lovecraft's odder fictional moments, "The Evil Clergyman", when the dream-transcript was extracted from the letter and published as a story. Initially I had chosen not to give this story consideration in this essay, since Lovecraft did not write it as a story as such, but since I include items like "Old Bugs", which similar emerged from a Lovecraft letter, and "The Very Old Folk", which is a Lovecraft letter, it would be wilful and illogical to exclude this.

In the dream, Lovecraft (we may as well call him the protagonist) enters an attic room full of occult books belonging to a dead man; he sees another man silently enter the room, silently burn the books and silently move toward him. He draws a small ray-projector from his pocket to defend himself, the newcomer vanishes and Lovecraft finds himself transformed into the other man, who was the room's previous owner. The not-ineffective "story" was sold to Weird Tales and published by them in 1939 as "The Wicked Clergyman"; as with "The Statement of Randolph Carter", the dream origin explains the formal oddities, though it was so different to the sort of material Lovecraft had been producing in his last decade that serious doubt was reportedly cast on the story's provenance and some believed it was not authentic Lovecraft. And in a sense, although Lovecraft did write it, I suppose they were right.

He may have written his last story for Hazel Heald in 1933, although the Joshi catalogue states that it may have been written in 1935. For the sake of argument, and given that all the other Heald stories date from 1932 or 1933, let's assume the earlier date here. "The Horror in the Burying-Ground" is a real throwback to Lovecraft's pre-cosmic days, with vague echoes of Poe's "Premature Burial", and given Lovecraft's distaste for dialogue, as noted earlier, the preponderance of it in this story as a bunch of old villagers relate the story of Tom Sprague and the undertaker Henry Thorndike is interesting. In the 1880s, Sprague and Thorndike were mortal enemies, and Thorndike had designs on Sprague's sister Sophie; with her connivance, Thorndike managed to carefully do away with the famously drunk Tom by shooting him full of a paralysing fluid, then arranging to have him buried quickly, still perfectly alive though apparently dead to a casual observer. As he went to embalm Tom, however, Tom's seeming corpse sat up and stabbed Thorndike with his own fluid. The story is hardly a masterpiece, though I like the vein of black humour that undercuts it, particularly the double funeral scene.

1934 would prove to be another quiet year for fiction; as with 1929, Lovecraft completed no stories of his own. He seems to have made a number of attempts at stories—the fragment "The Book" may date from the late 1933 period—but none were finished. He did one revision for a new correspondent, Duane Rimel, in May this year, "The Tree on the Hill". Joshi classifies it as a secondary revision, though Rimel himself has claimed that Lovecraft wrote the entire third and concluding chapter, as well as a quote from another mythical black book. It's a story of a haunted hill region, entirely desolate except for a lone tree of very odd shape on one hill. Standing near the tree, the narrator has a bizarre vision of an alien world. Taking photographs of the tree after the vision subsides, he finds the vision reproduced in them. The Rimel sections make for an interesting pastiche of Lovecraftian style, and at least one comment in the second part sounds like pure Lovecraftian philosophy: "You reason in terms of this tiny earth… Surely you don't think that the world is a rule for measuring the universe." But there is a noticeable disunity between the Rimel parts and Lovecraft's conclusion, which is problematic.

In 1934, he paid his first visit to Robert Barlow in De Land, Florida, with whom he had first corresponded in 1931. Lovecraft was amazed to discover that Barlow was only sixteen (indeed, he had his sixteenth birthday during the visit), meaning he'd been only thirteen when he first wrote to Lovecraft. Barlow was not the only teenager on Lovecraft's list of correspondents, though. It's interesting that many of Lovecraft's correspondents were much younger than himself, with Alfred Galpin and Frank Long (both born 1901) in the 1910s being the first, then accumulating Derleth, Wandrei, Howard and Talman in the 1920s, then Barlow, Bloch, Rimel, F. Lee Baldwin, Helen Sully and J. Vernon Shea in the early 1930s. Near the end of his life he first encountered Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, Catherine Moore, Nils Frome, Willis Conover, William Anger and Kenneth Sterling. Of these, Conover and Anger, both born in 1921, were probably his youngest correspondents. Precisely why Lovecraft surrounded himself with such young epistolary company is open to debate. My own theory is that he found them congenial because in some way, even though he never met most of them in the flesh, they made up for the childhood friends, perhaps even the childhood, he had essentially missed out on.

As for Barlow, he was indeed a bright spark, capable of turning his hand to many things, though not always capable of finishing projects. During Lovecraft's visit the following year and with his help, he printed and bound a book of Frank Long's poems as a present for the latter, and Barlow similarly surprised Lovecraft with a small copy of "The Cats of Ulthar". He also took charge of the unbound printed sheets of "The Shunned House" from 1928, though in the end even he bound only twelve copies of the booklet.

The two also collaborated on a short comic skit called "The Battle That Ended The Century (MS. Found In A Time Machine)", a mock report of a battle in the year 2001 between Robert Howard and Bernard Austin Dwyer, which ends with "Two-Gun Bob" killing "Knockout Bernie", except that Dwyer protests that he is in fact still alive and after a libel suit Howard is stripped of his victory. This appears to be mostly Barlow's work, though Lovecraft produced all the parody names of the audience members, appearing himself as Horse Power Hateart. The audience is pretty all-encompassing, taking in a number of Lovecraft's acquaintances (Derleth, Smith, Long, Talman, Price, Loveman, etc), a few Weird Tales artists, plus assorted other notables such as Hugo Gernsback, Abraham Merritt, Forrest J. Ackerman (who comes in for a particularly nasty serve) and Julius Schwartz. Everyone, it seems, except Barlow himself. All of them appeared under the ridiculous pseudonyms Lovecraft concocted for them, except for Smith who appears as his usual "Klarkash- Ton", and Otis Adelbert Kline, who appears under his real name. Perhaps his real name was judged to be funny enough as it was.

After his death, Barlow would become Lovecraft's literary executor and collector of his manuscripts, later passing the entire collection to the John Hay Library. There were quarrels with Derleth and Wandrei, and Barlow gave up practically all his interests to focus exclusively, at a friend's suggestion, on Mexican antiquities, upon which he soon became an expert. One of his more famous students was William Burroughs, later notorious as a member of the alleged "Beat Generation" in the 1940s and 1950s, godfather of 1970s punk, and author of books like Naked Lunch. Like Burroughs, Barlow was also a homosexual, and committed suicide in 1951 aged only 33, reputedly after being blackmailed over his homosexuality. The prurient may therefore wish to find something improper in the relationship between him and Lovecraft, who has often been accused of being a homosexual himself, largely on account of the male bonds and absence of relations with women in his stories.

Undeniably Lovecraft had feeble sexual desires for women, though Sonia pronounced him to "adequately excellent" in that department. This does not necessarily mean he therefore had feelings for men instead. Rather, he seems simply not to have had strong sexual desires for anyone, Sonia (and possibly Helen Sully, upon whom he may have had a minor crush in the 1930s) notwithstanding. He also claimed that he'd never even heard of homosexuality as an instinct until he was thirty—which may sound ridiculous these days when homosexuality seems inescapable from an early age, but let us remember the sort of upbringing Lovecraft had and the life he lead until he was thirty—and his written references to it are all negative.

Certainly some of his acquaintances were undeniably gay. Samuel Loveman was a homosexual, as was Loveman's friend Hart Crane. Lovecraft was great friends with Loveman, and he also liked Crane (perhaps the nearest he came to knowing a recognised literary celebrity) as long as the latter was not drunk. He was much less enamoured of Loveman's other gay friend Gordon Hatfield, who he enjoyed mocking maliciously. There are otherwise no authentic reports of Lovecraft being involved in homosexual encounters. And it should probably be said that Barlow's parents were very happy to have Lovecraft around, finding him as congenial as he found them (a photograph of Lovecraft from this visit is one of only a few which shows him smiling); on his second visit the following year, they invited him to stay down all winter, knowing his aversion for the colder northern temperatures.

It is during this visit to Barlow that Lovecraft first openly refers in his letters to the extremes of economy that he practiced in terms of food, accommodation and clothing. Lovecraft had always been somewhat frugal and his diet had never been really adequate, but from now on it got even less so. A 1931 letter refers to a food bill costing no more than three dollars a week, while a 1936 letter describes in exact itemised detail how he could manage to keep his food bills to no more than two dollars a week. On the 1934 trip, however, the figure was even lower—$1.75 a week on the way there, which was further reduced to $1.40 a week on the way back home. Even allowing for the decades of inflation that have ensued since these letters were written, these are astonishing and horrifying figures. He claimed that when Annie Gamwell had broken her leg in 1933, he had been forced to look at the family banking (since that had been her exclusive province until then) and for the first time he realised how precarious his finances really were. By that time he was not producing nearly enough original work to support himself that way, and even revision jobs were none too plentiful.

And so he learned to economise to the frankly ridiculous and frightening extent that he did. "What hurts me more than anything else about HPL's death," said Clark Ashton Smith in a letter to Barlow two months after that event, "is the feeling that he might have lived for many years with proper recognition, financial recompense, and the nourishing food that his condition must have made doubly imperative. Truly, as you suggest, America has killed her finest artists." In Smith's opinion, it was evidently poverty brought on by lack of recognition that killed Lovecraft by forcing him into this untenable position of extreme economy to the point of malnutrition. At any rate, it may be significant that around the same time Lovecraft first complained of the stomach problems that ultimately did kill him.

Having only meant to stay at Barlow's for a fortnight and actually staying closer to two months, after further wanderings (including yet another very brief trip to "the pest zone") he finally returned to Providence in July. He was now amassing an interesting collection of artefacts including Egyptian and Mayan relics, many of them gifts from Sam Loveman, who now presented him with an intriguing bird carving to add to the collection. Upon returning home, he found Robert Howard had also sent him a pickled spider in a jar for his museum, which he added to the rattlesnake given him by Henry Whitehead. He was also delighted by a new feline presence at the boarding house nearby, a kitten he called Little Sam Perkins and who he often took over to his own residence; and he was heartbroken when the kitten died not long after.

Writing was still a problem for him. His reading tastes now quite often included realist authors such as William Faulkner or Theodore Dreiser, although he claimed he could only respond to realist writing in an intellectual way and his emotional appreciation was reserved for weird fiction. But for all that, he had always known that the weird field was a minor generic one, not "real" literature (whatever that may have meant). He lamented what he perceived as an inability to write anything other than weird fiction (a cursory reading of his letters, in fact, as well as some of the more obscure stories, shows that he had a far wider range than that; in particular his account of a cat called Old Man and how he encountered this cat in Providence for over twenty years has a sweet charm not encountered in any of his fiction. If only he could have transferred some of the wit and lightness of these epistolary accounts into his actual fiction more often, he would no doubt have been happier and more successful), and an inability to cater to the whims of the weird fiction market. Creating one's own hybrid of science-fiction and weird fantasy is fine, but not when there's little or no market for it, and even more so when he was not producing enough material of any sort of survive on.

Lovecraft admired Price's ability to cold-bloodedly determine market trends—since he'd once been on the editorial staff of Weird Tales as well as an author for it, he must've received a particular insight into the business—and to produce market-tailored work accordingly which practically guaranteed sales. He admired Howard because his natural mode of expression happened to coincide precisely with what the market expected and he did not have to make so deliberate an effort. He admired Derleth for the latter's ability to switch between what he perceived as "high" and "low" modes of literature. And while he also admired Smith's stories for their inherent value, he no doubt envied Smith his prolificness and huge output of stories. Perhaps he also envied Price and Derleth in the same way as he admired them, since he felt he was incapable of doing the same.

By now Lovecraft was clearly feeling the pinch of the times—"Outgo persists, income shrinks to invisibility"—but he refused to write his way out of it. He retained a concern for the ultimate value of his work and refused to produce anything that he knew or suspected in advance would be no good, as this comment to Price shows: "God knows I want a job—but I want it to be anything—elevator man, pickaxe artist, night-watchman, stevedore, what the hell—except writing. Anything except a parody on the only thing in life that means anything to me." Had he been less proud about writing for money, of course, Lovecraft could've saved himself much discomfort in his last years. Still, I prefer not to join the ranks of those critics who berate the man for his lack of commercial drive and interest; if Lovecraft believed he required a certain amount of inspiration before he could produce work, then it is hardly my place to tell him that's not good enough.

In November he began work on what eventually became "The Shadow Out of Time". If it is not quite his best story, then it will always remain one of the jewels in his crown. The writing posed problems for him, however, and the published version was his third attempt after destroying two more. The very first attempt was only sixteen manuscript pages long, and represented Lovecraft deliberately trying to escape the tendency of his later stories to inconvenient length. Ultimately it failed, and Lovecraft soon realised it must be made longer rather than shorter, with the final version clocking in at sixty-five pages. He finished it in March 1935.

The narrator is a schoolteacher, Nathaniel Peaslee, who suddenly collapses during a class one day in 1908 and when he wakes is literally no longer himself. He goes on strange voyages and expeditions, not recovering from the inexplicable collapse for five years. Afterwards, he has visions of a strange alien world, Earth hundreds of millions years ago, and being trapped in a weird alien body; later he discovers the legend of the Great Race of Yith, who learned to project their minds across time and space, projecting themselves into the future and borrowing the bodies of others, displacing the original mind backwards in time to the body of the borrower, which is what happened to Peaslee. The Great Race displaced themselves en masse from their homeworld, colonising the bodies of weird conical beings on Earth. This they did in order to acquire all possible knowledge of all possible places and times. (I think there may be a certain logical flaw in this conception, but we'll let it pass since I am not entirely sure how to express it.) The Great Race fled the cone-beings fifty million years ago, colonising an insect civilisation that will follow mankind, and the mindless cone-bodies were destroyed by strange alien polypous things that had harassed them for millions of years. In the 1930s, Peaslee is invited to an archaeological dig in Western Australia, where gigantic basalt ruins have been found—ruins of a city built by the Great Race. Exploring the ruins, he finds his dreams and visions horribly proven true.

"The Shadow Out of Time" has a vast cosmic sweep. Again Lovecraft gives his non-human beings a complex society, much like the sort of society he wished he lived in after years of thought upon social and political matters. The story is excellently proportioned (unlike, say, "The Shunned House") and probably could not be shortened or lengthened without loss. It also has one of his most exciting climaxes. Despite his quest for accurate scientific knowledge, though, some may find fault with Lovecraft's evolutionary and geological timescales, which are also problematic in "At the Mountains of Madness". It is certainly very hard to imagine such highly evolved creatures as the conical Earth bodies of the Great Race existing quite as early as Lovecraft would have them—"a billion years ago", which puts us firmly in the later Precambrian age, when there was no vertebrate animal life and no creatures on the land. The polyp things also originate about 600 million years ago, still Precambrian. Still, we must assume Lovecraft was working on the best knowledge then available. What we now accept as a common scientific truth may only be a relatively recent innovation. The Big Bang theory was formulated as recently as 1948 and not widely accepted until 1965. Let us not mock Lovecraft purely because he thought the universe was five billion years old and we now think it's closer to twenty. One day even that figure may be thought ridiculously conservative.

Like "The Dunwich Horror", "The Shadow Out of Time" represents Lovecraft at the peak of his creative maturity. Given his constant threats during this period to abandon writing altogether, it would've been a magnificent note to bow out on (indeed he wrote that "It will probably mark my last attempt in the vein of recent years"), but there would still be a few more things to come. In January 1935, while labouring over "Shadow", he assisted Robert Barlow with a story called "'Till A' The Seas'", set millennia into the future and describing the death of the last human being on Earth. It reads like the ultimate statement of Lovecraft's philosophy of cosmic indifference set to fiction—the man simply dies, and so proves that indeed all is vanity, for the universe will go on regardless of whether or not humanity ever existed—and you do have to ask "well, so what?" about the story itself. It is not badly written but it is hard to particularly care about it.

He continued to receive attention and recognition. A magazine called The Fantasy Fan devoted a whole 1934 issue to him and printed an updated version of Supernatural Horror in Literature as a serial. In February 1935 another book company requested to see stories of his, the fifth such offer he had received to that point, and the fifth such rejection he would ultimately receive. He was starting to grow fed up with revision and collaboration as well, and announced to Clark Ashton Smith upon the appearance of "Out of the Aeons" in early 1935 that that would be the last such job he would undertake, deciding that the time spent on such jobs could be better spent on original work. There are seven more stories listed in Joshi's catalogue. Six of those are revisions or collaborations, and only one is an original Lovecraft work. So much for that promise.

Travel in the early part of the year was hampered by an extremely late spring, such as had held Lovecraft up the year before, and he was unable to get out much until late April. In June 1935 he took himself off to Florida once again to visit Robert Barlow, during which time the book of Frank Belknap Long poems called The Goblin Tower was assembled. Lovecraft also helped Barlow build a cabin for him away from the Barlow home; hard to imagine him engaging in this sort of heavy physical work of that sort, but evidently he did. As mentioned above, he was invited to stay through the winter, since the family knew he preferred Florida's tropical heat to New England's significantly cooler climes, but ultimately Lovecraft's attraction to his familiar things proved stronger. In mid-August 1935 he finally left for home. While there, he helped Barlow with a brief story called "Collapsing Cosmoses", another parodic work. The idea was that Barlow and Lovecraft would take turns in writing it, rather than the former providing the latter with a finished manuscript to revise, though again Barlow did most of the work. Beyond the idea of it being a parody of the predominant type of science-fiction story of the time, though, it's a bit hard to see any point to it.

This began a minor flurry of creative writing for Lovecraft, even if it mostly was revision work. In August came perhaps the most unusual project to bear his name, "The Challenge From Beyond". To celebrate its third birthday, Fantasy Magazine invited five science-fiction writers and five weird fiction writers to produce two stories under the above name, a sci-fi and weird version. Donald Wandrei was one of the contributors to the science-fiction story, while Lovecraft found himself thrown in with C.L. Moore, Abraham Merritt, Robert Howard and Frank Long on the weird version. It did not go smoothly; Long originally wrote the second part with Merritt to follow in third position, but Merritt refused to accept this arrangement and demanded he be placed second and Long last. Since Merritt had some professional standing, he got his way. As such, Moore set the introductory atmosphere, in which George Campbell discovers a mysterious cube in the forest; Merritt's section merely continued this introductory part without actually developing it in any way, leaving Lovecraft to finally develop the actual plot in third place. He was justifiably sick of the whole thing and dismissed it as mere sport, with Merritt feeling free to make up the rules as he went.

Lovecraft's development section, evidently for want of any other inspiration, basically restates the mind-displacement theme of "The Shadow Out of Time", as Campbell stares into the cube and is displaced across galaxies into a horrific worm-like body. Howard's section jars a bit with the rest as Campbell discovers how to slash and burn his way to the top in typical Howard fashion, while Long's effective conclusion alternates between the alien mind in the human body on Earth, unable to control it, and Campbell's mind in the alien body on Yekub where he becomes a god of sorts. No masterpiece, but it's more interesting that Lovecraft gave it credit for, and a damn sight better than the science-fiction version.

In September came another revision for Duane Rimel, "The Disinterment." Like many of the secondary revisions, it presents a curious semi-throwback to earlier Lovecraftian style, particularly "Herbert West"; admirers and pasticheurs would generally not pick up on the later fiction as a model until after his death. The narrator returns from the Orient with a case of leprosy; a doctor friend with an unsavoury reputation for medical experiments offers to confine him in a comfortable mansion rather than a scummy hospital. Andrews, the doctor, goes to Haiti and there discovers a drug which renders people apparently dead but actually in a state of suspended animation. He would be injected with it and then buried, whereupon Andrews would resurrect him and there would be no danger of his being formally incarcerated. When the narrator wakes, he finds himself having difficulty making his body work—probably because it is no longer his body. Rimel claims that Lovecraft did little work on the story, and certainly the crunchy murders don't sound like him; he knew his voodoo, however, and I suspect that the Haitian drug may have been his addition.

In October he wrote "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", the very last of his primary revisions. This work was undertaken on behalf of William Lumley, a mildly eccentric but widely read and learned old gentleman from New York who Lovecraft took a shine to. Lumley wrote a first draft (which has since been published), which Lovecraft rewrote entirely, retaining only the title and the plot nucleus. Alonzo Typer explores an ancient mansion of ill repute with a mysterious connection to places not quite of this Earth, which belonged to the family van der Heyl of even more ill repute. Claes van der Heyl visited the city of Yian-Ho (evidently a shunned place on the order of the Plateau of Leng) and there summoned up something nameless but infinitely evil, and it must fall to one of his descendants to undo the bad deed. To his unsurprising horror, Typer finds he is the descendant in question.

"Alonzo Typer" is very good stuff indeed; unfortunately I have not read Lumley's original draft to see precisely how they compare. Lovecraft seems to have taken the idea of the mansion with an other-dimensional link from William Hope Hodgson's classic The House on the Borderland, which he'd recently discovered, but the rest of it is vintage Lovecraft, as Farnsworth Wright was beginning to notice; the Lovecraftian hallmarks in stories nominally by Hazel Heald or Adolphe de Castro or Zealia Reed were becoming too noticeable even for him to ignore. In response to Wright's enquiry, Lumley admitted that Lovecraft was indeed responsible. Lovecraft had no objection to Wright knowing the truth, deriving some ironic amusement from the way Wright accepted his ghost-work while rejecting his original work; although perhaps if he had written and submitted more original material, Wright might have published more of it.

part five

part one

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