Forbes Parkhill (1892-1974)

Aka Otto Vloto
Author, Editor, Newspaperman, Screenwriter, Teacher

Born December 31, 1892, Denver, Colorado

Died June 19, 1974, San Diego, California

As a writer, Forbes Parkhill was a jack-of-all-trades. He wrote fiction and non-fiction, for pulps and for slicks, for newspapers and for the movies. He was born the son of a surgeon on the last day of 1892 in Denver, Colorado, and remained a Western writer even when he wasn't in the West. Parkhill attended the University of Colorado in 1910-1911 and worked as a reporter and editor on the Denver Post from 1913 to 1928. During World War I, Parkhill served in the U.S. Army and worked on a newspaper in El Paso, Texas. Between 1932 and 1936, he was an instructor in journalism and short story writing at the University of Denver. His career as an author of short stories was well on its way by then, for Parkhill wrote prolifically for Western story magazines between 1922 and 1951. Seven of his many stories made it to the silver screen during the 1930s. Pulp fiction writer James M. Cain wrote the screenplay for Stand Up and Fight (1939), based on a story by Forbes Parkhill. The Colorado author wrote at least two screenplays himself. His last work for the movies--an uncredited work--was the story upon which West of the Brazos (1950) was based. Parkhill's work also appeared in Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and other slick magazines.

In 1940, Parkhill went to New York to serve as national editor of a new publication, PM. World War II caused a change in plans for him and countless others. During the war, Parkhill worked as a magazine specialist in the War Department. Afterwards he became research assistant to U.S. Senator Eugene D. Millikin, in 1949-1950. Parkhill also began writing non-fiction, entirely on the subject of the American West. His book, Last of the Indian Wars, won a prize for best non-fiction by a Colorado author in 1962.

Forbes Parkhill wrote one story for Weird Tales. Entitled "Coils of the Silver Serpent," it earned a spot on the cover in February 1936. Unfortunately for the author, his story shared that issue with "Yvala," a work by C.L. Moore, one of the most popular and imaginative writers for "The Unique Magazine" of the 1930s. Hers was voted the most popular story by readers of that issue.

Parkhill's last book of non-fiction, Donna Madixxa Goes West: The Biography of a Witch, was issued in 1968 when its author was in his mid seventies. Forbes Parkhill died six years later, on June 19, 1974, in San Diego.

Forbes Parkhill's Story in Weird Tales

"Coils of the Silver Serpent" (Feb. 1936)

Further Reading

There is abundant reading on the Internet on Forbes Parkhill and his work. His non-fiction is probably easy to find, too.

"The Kenosha Kid" by Forbes Parkhill was one of the lead stories, maybe even the cover story, for the August 1931 issue of Western Rangers. Parkhill wrote dozens of stories for Western pulps over his thirty-year career. The cover art is by Don Hewitt. Eli Colter's name is also on the cover. She too was a teller of weird tales.

A story by Parkhill also made the cover of Weird Tales in February 1936, despite the fact that he was competing with Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, and Paul Ernst. Even Henry Kuttner, Catherine Moore's future husband, was on hand for the issue with his poem, "Ballad of the Gods," his first work for "The Unique Magazine." The cover artist was Margaret Brundage. The interior artist for "Coils of the Silver Serpent" was Vincent Napoli.

Forbes Parkhill (1892-1974). (Photo from Blue Book, 1942.)

Postscript (Oct. 18, 2014): A reader has pointed out that Forbes Parkhill filed a copyright for a book called The Black Sombrero, which he presumably wrote under the pseudonym Otto Vloto and published in 1963.
Thanks to Randal A. Everts for the photo of Forbes Parkhill.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Watchmen and "The Call of Cthulhu"

In Robert Bloch's novel, Strange Eons, H.P. Lovecraft is portrayed as an investigator of horrors, a man who wrote thinly disguised fiction as a warning to humanity. The documentary nature of "The Call of Cthulhu" would seem to bear that out. A note of introduction states that the story, if you can call it that, was "[f]ound among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston." It was left to Lovecraft to discover the manuscript, prepare it for publication, and submit it to Weird Tales. The timing was just right: Thurston, who would have spent most of the year 1927 investigating the Cthulhu cult and crisis, must have died late that year. His manuscript must have been discovered immediately after his death. As the discoverer, Lovecraft would have recognized its importance and the great need to have his discovery known to the wider world. Within a short period of time, perhaps a month or two, the story was in print and being read by thousands. In effect, Lovecraft was saying to his readers, "Look, people, this just happened!" The immediacy of "The Call of Cthulhu" contributes to its force and effectiveness.

Another plot involving a Cthulhoid monster was hatched sixty years later and documented by another investigator. There's a question as to whether his manuscript reached the reading public, though. That story took place in Watchmen, a comic book series published by DC in 1986-1987 and later collected in a trade paperback. In the last chapter of the series, a mastermind named Ozymandias destroys New York--killing millions in the process--by dropping an immense creature on the city. The creature--a bloated, repulsive monster with numerous tentacles--originated on an earthly island but is said to have come from another planet. The resemblance to Cthulhu is unmistakable. One difference between Watchmen and "The Call of Cthulhu" is that--despite Lovecraft's dark view of the world--Cthulhu recedes as a threat and humanity is safe in the end--at least for now. In Watchmen, the plot succeeds. In addition, Lovecraft included genuine heroes in his story, ordinary men who go to extraordinary lengths to protect their fellow human beings. The so-called "heroes" in Watchmen are morally reprehensible and complicit in a Utopian scheme in which millions are murdered. Ozymandias, who could be interpreted as a stand-in for the author, Alan Moore, emerges in the end triumphant. More evidence (in Ozymandias, not his creator) that the true monsters among us are human. (1)

The truth behind the plot--whether humanity will learn what has been done to them--is left hanging in the end. Rorschach, another "hero" in the story, has kept a diary of events, including the unfolding of Ozymandias' plot. (2) He submits that diary to a rag of a newspaper, where it ends up in the slush pile. In the last panel of the story, an office boy reaches toward the pile. Will he read the diary? Will word get out into the world, as it does in "The Call of Cthulhu"? The possibility that it could is one of the few signs of hope in an otherwise bleak and cynical narrative. Despite his dark view of the world, I'm not sure that Lovecraft ever reached similar depths.

Notes
(1) To be fair, I should point out that Mr. Moore gives Ozymandias (see Shelley's poem of the same name) an ironic name and by so doing, maintains an ironic distance from him.
(2) Rorschach proves himself heroic in the end because he is the only character who refuses to compromise himself by remaining silent. For that, he must die.

Copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The One and Only Lovecraft

As I was reading L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography (Ballantine, 1976), I came upon a piece of Lovecraft trivia worth sharing. De Camp stated that in his lifetime, Lovecraft was the only man in America with that surname. Intrigued, I searched census records and found that de Camp's statement appears to be true. That would suggest that--barring immigration or name changes--the surname "Lovecraft" is extinct in the United States. Further proof that Lovecraft was and is unique.

The young Lovecraft. Look closely and you will see that there are two faces in this photograph, Lovecraft's and that of a leering, ectoplasmic demon over his left shoulder, seemingly emerging from his ear like a genie from a bottle.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Biography and "The Call of Cthulhu"-Part 4

The central events in "The Call of Cthulhu" take place between March 1 and April 18, 1925, and in investigations made by George Gammell Angell and, after Angell's death, by his grandnephew, Francis Wayland Thurston, the narrator of the story. In the course of their separate investigations, both men interview Henry Anthony Wilcox, a young art student and sculptor powerfully affected by the psychic force of Cthulhu's reemergence in the world. It's worth some lengthy quotes to get to know Wilcox:

Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself "psychically hypersensitive," but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city [Lovecraft's own Providence, Rhode Island] dismissed him as merely "queer." Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from other towns.

[H]is genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, be heard from sometime as one of the great decadents. . . 

He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy. . . .

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect. . . . 

The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like. . . .

I don't think there can be any doubt that Lovecraft's model for Wilcox was Lovecraft himself. If that's so, then the author reserved a special place for himself in the story, which may strike some as a kind of vanity, especially when he calls Wilcox a "known genius" and foresees a place for him someday "as one of the great decadents." I think it's more telling that--through his narrator--Lovecraft would admit that Wilcox was "of a type . . . which I could never like."

Lovecraft spent enough time with himself to know himself well and he came to regret some of the things he wrote or did in his younger days. He couldn't undo the virulent racialism and nativism he put into his letters and fiction however. "The Horror at Red Hook," written when Lovecraft was living in Brooklyn and being jostled by immigrants (either in reality or in his imagination), was perhaps the low point in his fictional work. When he wrote "The Call of Cthulhu" a year later, Lovecraft's feelings on the matter were still in evidence, but more subdued. George Gammell Angell dies after being jostled by "a nautical-looking negro." In Greenland, Cthulhu is worshipped by "degenerate Eskimos," while the monster's cult followers in Louisiana are "very low, mixed-blooded and mentally aberrant types," including a "sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands." Almost everything the investigators learn of the Cthulhu cult comes from "an immensely aged mestizo named Castro," captured in Legrasse's raid near New Orleans. The crew of the Alert is made up of "swarthy cult-fiends," while Johansen, the lone surviving witness to the horror of Cthulhu, dies in the presence of two Lascar sailors. In short, all the Cthulhu cultists--everyone in the story who commits or is suspected of committing a crime--are foreigners or dark in aspect. (1)

We can mark some of that up to pulp conventions and American society of the 1920s, an age of jazz and wonderful nonsense, but also a time of nativism, eugenics, and a resurgent KKK. I think there's a simpler explanation. Coming from an old New England family that was in decline--physically, materially, even numerically--Lovecraft saw that the world he knew (or imagined) was coming to an end. Who better to blame than the antithesis of his beloved colonial New Englanders? The explanation may be simpler even than that. In the 1960s, Jim Morrison sang: "Women seem wicked/when you're unwanted." Cut off from the world, unable to participate in it, isolated (literally, "made into an island") and alienated ("made into an alien"), Lovecraft may have transferred the feelings he had for himself--feelings that were very likely unbearable--to another group. It's always easier to blame others for your situation than admit to your own faults and failings.

So on a March day in the mid-192os, Lovecraft (to Long Island and Manhattan) and Johansen (to R'lyeh) set out for islands where they would find a "strange . . . Cyclopean City" and encounter threats and horrors. Both returned safely to their home ports in April, Lovecraft of course happily, Johansen, a wreck of a man. (2) Lovecraft could probably not have finished "The Call of Cthulhu" in 1925 when he conceived of it because, unlike Johansen, he had not yet escaped from the island. Like the inhabitant of R'lyeh, Lovecraft was an alien living in isolation. But in Providence he was at home and connected to others. In Providence he was happy. (3)

Notes

(1) What Lovecraft failed to understand is that otherwise sophisticated and well-educated people--many of whom would fall into the category of Eric Hoffer's "true believer"--are far more likely to fall for a dangerous and destructive faith than are the poor peasantry.

(2) The Freudian I mentioned before might have something more to say about a gaping doorway with its slick margins, emanating a "nasty, slopping sound down there," as Lovecraft's narrator describes the opening to Cthulhu's crypt in the moment before the creature in its "gelatinous green immensity" emerges ("green[e]" again). A Freudian interpretation of "The Call of Cthulhu" is probably the wrong path to take, though. Likewise, any similarity between the resurrection of Cthulhu and the resurrection of Jesus Christ is probably coincidental. I doubt that Lovecraft thought along those lines. Finally, a friend has pointed out to me the similarity between the encounter at R'lyeh and the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus in Homer's Odyssey. Thanks to my friend.

(3) We should note that Johansen presumably didn't finish his account--his own version of "The Call of Cthulhu"--until he too had returned home, to Oslo. And not just to Oslo, but to the Old Town section of the city. Perhaps he--like Lovecraft--was an antiquarian.
A final biographical point in "The Call of Cthulhu": The story's narrator discovers the final clue that leads him to Johansen and events in the South Pacific while visiting in a "local museum" in Paterson, New Jersey. One possibility that failed to open up in Lovecraft's job-hunting was in that exact place.

Copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley 

Biography and "The Call of Cthulhu"-Part 3

In technical terms, "The Call of Cthulhu" is a feat of planning and construction. The idea for the story first came to its author in August 1925 while he was living in Brooklyn. Although he wrote an outline at the time, Lovecraft must have set it aside to take up "Supernatural Horror in Literature," a project that occupied him for several months in 1925-1926. Forsaking New York (and for all practical purposes his marriage), Lovecraft returned to Providence in April 1926 and wrote "The Call of Cthulhu" several months later, in September and October according to L. Sprague de Camp. (1) The story must have gone through a revision sometime before its publication in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales, for some of its events occur after October 1926. In any case, Lovecraft may not have been capable of writing the story in its final form while he was living in New York. In all likelihood, a return to Providence was necessary for its completion. The reasons for that are not merely chronological.

"The Call of Cthulhu" is not a conventional, linear narrative. It may very well have been something new to pulp fiction, though not to mainstream literature. Lovecraft may not have intended to inject modernism into his work, yet the rudiments of the movement are there. As in a Cubist painting, the truth or essence of the work is not fully revealed until it is viewed from multiple angles in space and multiple points in time. (2) William Faulkner and countless other writers were at the time experimenting with non-linear narratives drawn from multiple viewpoints. And like John Dos Passos' magnum opus, U.S.A., completed in 1936, "The Call of Cthulhu" is built up from multiple sources, including letters, newspaper clippings, research notes, interviews, a ship's log, and the diary of a murdered sailor. (3)

In order to construct his story, Lovecraft would have had to carefully lay out a timeline of its events. Chronologically, the first event in "The Call of Cthulhu" (other than the age-old migration of Cthulhu to Earth) is William Channing Webb's expedition to Iceland and Greenland during which the first documented encounter with the Cthulhu cult is made. (4) The narrator of "The Call of Cthulhu" does not give an exact date for the expedition, but by simple subtraction, we can say that it took place in 1860. A researcher known by the Internet name Borrowind has identified a possible historical source for the expedition in the work of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). You can read more about Borrowind's findings at Tentaclii::H.P. Lovecraft Blog, here. If Borrowind is correct, then the Greenland expedition is also the first event in "The Call of Cthulhu" with a historical basis.

The next event in the story is the raid on a Cthulhu cult ring in Louisiana, made by Inspector John Raymond Legrasse of the New Orleans police department on November 1, 1907. Legrasse attends a meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis several months later (thus placing that event sometime in the first six or eight months of 1908). Inspector Legrasse, described as a "commonplace-looking middle-aged man," is no wild-eyed witness to horrors. In the parlance of the game "The Call of Cthulhu," he still has all his sanity points. He just wants to know about the small statue he confiscated in the raid. William Channing Webb is also in attendance, thus the first connection is made between the events in Greenland and Louisiana, separated by half a century and the whole of the North American continent. As a result, a dim but ever-brightening light is cast upon the cult of Cthulhu.

In his or her blog entry, "Franz Boas in 'The Call of Cthulhu'," Borrowind has also identified a source for Lovecraft's fictional meeting of anthropologists and archaeologists in the International Congress of Americanists in 1908. (Borrowind doesn't mention that the congress was held in a real-life drowned city, Venice.) As far as I know, there isn't and wasn't any such thing as the American Archaeological Society, but it sounds like it could be real. The society's named members, William Channing Webb of Princeton University and George Gammell Angell of Brown University, sound like they could be real persons, too. They certainly come from real places. Webb and Angell are in fact inventions, though Angell is named for a Lovecraft ancestor (Gammell or Gamwell) and the street on which Lovecraft was born (Angell). It's through these juxtapositions of fact and wholly believable fiction that Lovecraft built up the verisimilitude of "The Call of Cthulhu." (5)

The main events in "The Call of Cthulhu" begin in early 1925. On February 20, the Emma leaves Auckland, New Zealand, for Callao, Peru. In its journey, the ship will encounter another, the Alert, crewed by cultists and bound for Cthulhu's island city of R'lyeh. On March 1, 1925--February 28 on the East Coast--R'lyeh is thrust up from the ocean floor by a powerful earthquake, thus the Cthulhu crisis begins. (6) Over the course of the next six weeks, the crew of the Emma will endure horrors, culminating in their encounter with Cthulhu on March 23 and ending with their "safe" arrival in port on April 18. (Actually, only one member of the crew--Second Mate Gustaf Johansen--arrives at Darling Harbor in Sydney, Australia, on that date. All the others have died or have been killed.) March 1--two days before H.P. Lovecraft's wedding day. April 18--Lovecraft's first full day back in Providence after two years in New York. Throw away the years--1924 for his wedding, 1926 for his return to Providence--and the Cthulhu crisis fits neatly within Lovecraft's own personal crisis of marriage and exile.

Next: Biography and "The Call of Cthulhu"-Part 4

Notes
(1) That would make the period in which I write this essay the 85th anniversary of the composition of "The Call of Cthulhu." Happy Birthday, Cthulhu!
(2) Lovecraft must have been acquainted with Cubism, though he referred to it as "futurism" in "The Call of Cthulhu." He made allusions to that recent movement in art in his description of R'lyeh, for example: "the geometry of the dream-place . . . was abnormal" and "crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity."
(3) Unlike Dos Passos, Lovecraft quoted only one of these sources at length in his story. Coincidentally, J.P. McEvoy worked along the same lines in "Show Girl," his saga of Dixie Dugan, which was serialized in Liberty magazine beginning in the same month "The Call of Cthulhu" was published.
(4) A Freudian might have something to say about an initial horrific encounter in Greenland, i.e., a land of people called "Green(e)."
(5) Such a thing had been done before, but maybe not so convincingly or with such sophistication. Lovecraft's innovation may have been his use of science and history as a framework for his fictional creations. (Contrast that with William Hope Hodgson's annoying, even terrible, framing devices, which he similarly used to lend some believability to his stories.) In his essay of the same period, "Supernatural Horror in Literature," Lovecraft explicated a genre. In "The Call of Cthulhu," he perhaps began to lay it to rest, at least in his own work. Although the term science fiction had not yet been invented when Lovecraft wrote "The Call of Cthulhu," the story begins to look more like that nascent genre and less like its predecessor, supernatural horror. It's interesting to note that the first science fiction magazine, Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, bore a cover date of April 1926 and would have been on the newsstand at about the time Lovecraft quit Brooklyn and his marriage.
(6) The earthquake was also a real event and no doubt remained in the memories of many who read "The Call of Cthulhu" nearly two years after it struck. What Lovecraft called "a slight earthquake tremor" occurred at 9:23:30 p.m. on February 28, 1925. (The New York Times claimed that "New York City was shaken roughly" and described floors swaying, crockery breaking, and clocks stopping, hence the exact time of the quake.)  The earthquake was felt in the northeastern quarter of the country south to Louisville and Richmond and north into Canada. According to Dr. Chester A. Reeds of the American Museum of Natural History, the epicenter of the quake was located off the coast of Maine, about 345 miles from the city. (Thanks to Magister for pointing out that the earthquake in "The Call of Cthulhu" was based on a real event.)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sonia Greene in a snapshot taken in Boston in July 1921. It doesn't take an expert to see the sharp contrast between Lovecraft and his future bride. He is stiff, his smile is restrained. She is loose, happy, smiling broadly, her arm flung around him with affection. A little tighter and she would have him in a headlock. In response, Lovecraft leans away slightly, perhaps in the direction of Providence. (Photograph from the collection of Randal A. Everts.)

Factory in Horta de Ebbo (1909) by Pablo Picasso, an early work of analytical cubism. Lovecraft's description of Cthulhu's city suggests that the author was acquainted with modern art.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Biography and "The Call of Cthulhu"-Part 2

Reputed to be a recluse and a shrinking violet, Howard Phillips Lovecraft did a most unexpected thing late in the day on March 3, 1924: he married Sonia Greene and moved to New York City. Lovecraft had met Sonia through their shared interest in the amateur press. (1) By all accounts she was an attractive and vivacious woman. She was also a successful--though perhaps erratic--businesswoman. If he was going to keep up with her, Lovecraft would have to find work (something he had never done before) in the bustling big city (a place he had never lived before). He would also have to share a home and a life with her. In short, he was going to have to live like a normal human being. He proved himself unequal to the task.

Lovecraft was at first enchanted by New York, but by the end of 1924, hard times in the lives of the newly married couple had soured him on the city and his place there. Lovecraft's biographer, L. Sprague de Camp, wrote that "[t]he year and a quarter following Sonia's departure [on the last day of 1924, to work in Cincinnati] was the low point in Lovecraft's life. His depression and misanthropy reached near-suicidal strength, while his behavior showed him at his worst." (2) Sonia returned to the couple's Brooklyn home in February 1925 but left for another job in Cleveland that summer, departing on August 20, her husband's thirty-fifth birthday.

Lovecraft spent a good deal of the year 1925 living as a bachelor. His job-hunting was largely fruitless, yet the year was not wasted. Lovecraft wrote several stories in 1925, including "The Horror at Red Hook," completed at the end of July and published in Weird Tales in January 1927. Set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the story might best be described as a screed. The story "He" followed quick on its heels. Ostensibly fictional, "He" opens with a confession:

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me. . . .

A dire situation indeed.

As summer slipped into autumn, Lovecraft had an idea for another story, tentatively titled "The Call of Cthulhu." Although he wrote an outline, the tale itself would have to wait until the following year before being completed. Lovecraft spent the end of 1925 working on an essay, "Supernatural Horror in Literature," a work that would take many more months to complete. By early 1926, he was ready to quit New York and return to Providence. His aunt arranged it, and even Sonia (back from Cleveland) helped him pack, unwittingly participating in her husband's abandonment of their marriage. On April 17, 1926, H.P. Lovecraft arrived by train in the city of his birth. His friend W. Paul Cook described him as "the happiest man I ever saw." (3)

Having never been loved properly, H.P. Lovecraft probably did not know how to love in return. He was also stubborn in his eccentricity, holding onto ways that could only have made his life more difficult. His wife loved him and did much for him. He expressed  affection (though not love) in return. But Providence and a decaying household shared with his mother's sisters were home to him. Although the marriage of H.P. Lovecraft to Sonia Greene never legally ended, the couple drifted apart due almost entirely to Lovecraft himself, or as L. Sprague de Camp described it, to his "imp of the perverse."

Lovecraft's unhappy sojourn in New York began on March 3, 1924, and ended with his return to Providence on April 17, 1926. In "The Call of Cthulhu," a story still in outline form at his return, those dates are seemingly combined into a single year, thereby bracketing a crisis for the earth and all of humanity: the resurrection of great Cthulhu.

Next: Biography and "The Call of Cthulhu"-Part 3.

Notes

(1) Sonia H. Greene's story, "The Invisible Monster," was printed in Weird Tales in November 1923. Her future husband had made his debut in the magazine the month before with "Dagon."
(2) Lovecraft: A Biography by L. Sprague de Camp (Ballantine, 1976), p. 244.

(3) Quoted in de Camp, p. 276.

Sonia Haft Shafirkin Greene (1883-1972), H.P. Lovecraft's one and only wife, and then only for a while. (L. Sprague de Camp gave her name as "Shifirkin." Everyone since then seems to have spelled it "Shafirkin." I'll go with the accepted spelling.)

"The Horror of Red Hook," Lovecraft's tale from his unhappy years in Brooklyn was published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales, after he had returned to Providence. The story was reprinted in March 1952. In neither case did it make the cover. "Drome" by John Martin Leahy, illustrated here by C. Barker Petrie, Jr., was the lead story, the first part of a five-part serial. I have included the cover here mostly because it's one of my favorites from the early years of "The Unique Magazine."

"He," written in August 1925, appeared a few months before "The Horror at Red Hook," in the September 1926 issue.  Lovecraft's name made the cover, though it was Everil Worrell's "Bird of Space" that nabbed the lead spot. The artwork is by E.M. Stevenson.

Text and captions copyright 2011 Terence E. Hanley

Biography and "The Call of Cthulhu"-Part 1

"Earthquake Felt in New York"
New York Times, Aug. 23, 2011

"There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years. . . ."
"The Call of Cthulhu," Weird Tales, Feb. 1928

"The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft is a seminal work in many ways. Published in Weird Tales in February 1928, it was the first of Lovecraft's stories to mention and describe Cthulhu, a great and horrifying creature from another star system, imprisoned in a drowned crypt at the bottom of the ocean. The tale was not the first in Lovecraft's so-called "Cthulhu Mythos," but it provided the central figure and a unifying theme for what might otherwise have been an inconsistent and non-systematic cycle. Lovecraft appears not to have used the term "Cthulhu Mythos." He was also not its systematizer. We can attribute the term and the system instead to his successor and champion, August Derleth. Nonetheless, Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos survives to this day, arguably one of the most successful and long-lasting of literary inventions, at least of the twentieth century.

"The Call of Cthulhu" is also an early example of Lovecraft's attempts to wed science fiction (a term not used in print prior to 1929) and supernatural horror. Although Cthulhu is a monster, it is a monster from another planet, transported to Earth by scientific (or pseudoscientific) means. There are elements of fantasy, horror, and even Oriental adventure in Lovecraft's tale, but every fantastic and horrifying event in "The Call of Cthulhu" can be explained in rationalistic and scientific terms--or at least the story's narrator so tries. (1) In "The Call of Cthulhu" as in much of Lovecraft's subsequent fiction, the world's secrets are uncovered not by a medium, psychic, or ghost hunter, nor by a two-fisted man of action, but by a scientific investigator. With this story, the material universe supersedes the supernatural as the origin of Earth's horrors. 

Lovecraft claimed not to have been able to write a detective tale. He may have been ingenuous in that belief, or he may simply have wanted to avoid a genre that wasn't really up his alley. What else is "The Call of Cthulhu" but a detective story? A practical, rational investigator stumbles upon a mystery--a series of seemingly unrelated events--and carefully reconstructs the relationship among them, thereby revealing the truth. In his non-linear narrative, Lovecraft may have unintentionally paralleled developments in what was then considered modern fiction. (2) He may also have been inspired by the first cover story for Weird Tales, "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud (March 1923). As in "The Call of Cthulhu," the narrator of "Ooze" is an investigator, a man obligated by friendship rather than family ties or scientific curiosity to discover the causes of insanity, death, and destruction on an Alabama farm. Like Lovecraft's narrator, the investigator in Rud's story carefully reconstructs hidden events and solves the mystery. One difference, reflective of Lovecraft's somewhat darker view of the world, is that his narrator investigates the mystery from within, eventually to fall prey to it. The threat survives him. By the time the narrator of "Ooze" has entered the picture, the threat has passed and humanity is safe. (3)

One of Lovecraft's innovations in "The Call of Cthulhu" is the atmosphere of verisimilitude in the story. The author gets carried away at times with his own purple prose and the conventions of pulp fiction, but if you set those aside, "The Call of Cthulhu" has  the appearance of an investigative article or--in movie terms--a documentary. There is little dialogue or characterization and not much of the pulse-pounding action so characteristic of pulp fiction. (4) The text is peppered with the names of real people, places, things, and events--or at least they sound like they could be real. Lovecraft even gives the exact location of Cthulhu's island city (South Latitude 47 degrees 9 minutes, West Longitude 126 degrees 43 minutes). This is no never-never land of past, future, or imagination: the main events in "The Call of Cthulhu" took place in the three years prior to the story's publication (three years to the month in fact), and Lovecraft provides all the dates as proof. Those events are so recent in fact that the manuscript of "The Call of Cthulhu" could only have been discovered among the narrator's papers shortly before Lovecraft submitted it to Weird Tales.

One of the reasons why "The Call of Cthulhu" rings true is that it was drawn largely from fact, either from Lovecraft's own experiences or from historical figures and events. The emotional atmosphere of the story may also have been drawn from the author's life. I'll talk about that in Part 2 of "Biography and 'The Call of Cthulhu'."

Notes

(1) It's interesting to note that five years before King Kong (1933) was released in theaters, a ship's crew landed on an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly loosed a large and terrifying creature on the world in the pages of Weird Tales. Godzilla shares something of his origins with Cthulhu and King Kong, as does the monster in the 2008 film Cloverfield. See Chris Perridas' blog, H.P. Lovecraft and His Legacy, for more on the Cthulhu-Cloverfield connection.

(2) For example, William Faulkner's finest novels of the 1920s and '30s, including his own non-linear investigation of a mystery, Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

(3) "Ooze" may also have been the inspiration for The Blob (1958), that quintessential teen monster movie of the 1950s, starring Hoosier Steve McQueen and Andy Griffith's girlfriend, Aneta Corsaut. Correction (Nov. 11, 2019): The Blob was actually based on Joseph Payne Brennan's story "Slime," which was published in Weird Tales in March 1953. That's not to say, of course, that Brennan was not inspired by "Ooze."

(4) Lovecraft also claimed an inability to write action scenes, yet the encounter with Cthulhu near the end of the story lacks nothing for excitement or suspense. The makers of the recent movie adaptation of "The Call of Cthulhu" (2005) captured that excitement very effectively in what must have been a difficult sequence to put on film.

Weird Tales for February 1928, the issue in which "The Call of Cthulhu" first saw print. Despite the fact that the story was voted the most popular story of the month and of the year, and was tied for eighth place as the most popular story published in "The Unique Magazine" between 1924 and 1940, "The Call of Cthulhu" failed to make the cover except through its author's name. Instead, a scary, scary ghost table, scary enough to make a young woman swoon, is the subject of the cover art by Curtis C. Senf. (And why is her rescuer carrying a gun? Wouldn't an ax or a power saw be a better weapon?)

H.P. Lovecraft's own version of Cthulhu, drawn for the author's youthful admirer and eventual literary executor, R(obert) H(ayward) Barlow, dated May 11, 1934.

"Ooze," the cover story for the very first issue of Weird Tales (March 1923), was the work of Anthony M. Rud and a possible inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu." The cover art is by Richard R. Epperly. The octopoid body is misleading: in actuality, Rud's monster is a giant amoeba. It's worth noting, however, that the head of Cthulhu resembles the creature depicted here.

Revised slightly on April 26, 2020.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley