I was one of them, of course, having already done my best to imitate Machen and John Dickson Carr. If I avoided the trap to some extent, I did so unconsciously -did so because I didn't merely admire Lovecraft, I was steeped in his work and his vision throughout the writing of my first published book. I began it as a way of paying back some of the pleasure his work had given me, some of the sense of awesome expectation that even reading some of his titles - 'The Colour out of Space,' 'The Whisperer in Darkness' - could conjure up. No other writer had given me that so far. I wrote my Lovecraftian tales for my own pleasure: the pleasure of convincing myself that they were almost as good as the originals. It was only on the suggestion of two fantasy fans, the Londoner Pat Kearney and the American Betty Kujawa, that I showed them to August Derleth at Arkham House.
'There are myriad unspeakable terrors in the cosmos in which our universe is but an atom; and the two gates of agony, life and death, gape to pour forth infinities of abominations. And the other gates which spew forth their broods are, thank God, little known to most of us. Few can have seen the spawn of ultimate corruption, or known that centre of insane chaos where Azathoth, the blind idiot god, bubbles mindlessly; I myself have never seen these things - but God knows that what I saw in those cataclysmic moments in the church at Kingsport transcends the ultimate earthly knowledge.'
So began 'The Tomb-Herd,' one of the stories I sent Derleth. Since his death, a regrettable element of fantasy fandom has devoted a good deal of energy to defaming him. The honesty and courage of these people may be gauged by their having waited until Derleth was unable to defend himself and by the way they often conceal their smears in essays ostensibly on other subjects. For myself, not only did I find him unfailingly helpful and patient and encouraging when I most needed this support, but in retrospect I'm doubly impressed -that he could find anything worth encouraging among the second-hand Love-craft I sent him. Here are a few more choice passages from 'The Tomb-Herd':
'The house which I knew as my friend's, set well back from the road, overgrown with ivy that twisted in myriad grotesque shapes, was locked and shuttered. No sign of life was discernible inside it, and outside the garden was filled with a brooding quiet, while my shadow on the fungus-overgrown lawn appeared eldritch and distorted, like that of some ghoul-born being from nether pits.
'Upon inquiring of this anomaly from the strangely reticent neighbours, I learned that my friend had visited the deserted church in the centre of Kingsport after dark, and that this must have called the vengeance of those from outside upon him.'
I suspect most of us would be strangely reticent if a stranger came knocking at our door to ask why his shadow resembled that of a ghoul-born being, but let's go on:
'In that stomach-wrenching moment of horrible knowledge, realization of the abnormal ghastlinesses after which my friend had been searching and which, perhaps, he had stirred out of aeon-long sleep in the Kingsport church, I closed the book. But I soon opened it again . . .'
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'(Now followed the section which horrified me more than anything else. My friend must have been preparing the telegram by writing it on the page while outside unspeakable shamblers made their way towards him - as became hideously evident as the writing progressed.)
'To Richard Dexter. Come at once to Kingsport. You are needed urgently by me here for protection from agencies which may kill me - or worse - if you do not come immediately. Will explain as soon as you reach me . . . But what is this thing that flops unspeakably down the passage towards this room? It cannot be that abomination which I met in the nitrous vaults below Asquith Place . . . IA! YOG-SOTHOTH! CTHULHU FHTAGN!'
Behold the trap I mentioned earlier - the fallacy by which one can persuade oneself that if one imitates or, more probably, exceeds the worst excesses of Lovecraft's style, one is achieving what he achieved. (One reason Lovecraft and Hitchcock are so often imitated is that both display their technique fully rather than concealing it.) But the hyperbolic passages in Lovecraft's writing (by no means as numerous as his detractors claim) are built up to; as Fritz Leiber puts it perfectly, they're orchestrated. It's easy to imitate Lovecraft's style, or at least to convince oneself that one has done so; it's far more difficult to imitate his sense of structure, based on a study of Poe, Machen (in particular "The Great God Pan'), and the best of Blackwood. I think that's the point Charlie Grant misses: Lovecraft's style would be nothing without the painstaking structure of his stories.
Derleth told me to abandon my attempts to set my work in Massachusetts and in general advised me in no uncertain terms how to improve the stories. I suspect he would have been gentler if he'd realized I was only fifteen years old, but on the other hand, if you can't take that kind of forthright editorial response you aren't likely to survive as a writer. I was still in the process of adopting his suggestions when he asked me to send him a story for an anthology he was editing (then called Dark of Mind, Dark of Heart). Delighted beyond words, I sent him the rewritten 'Tomb-Herd,' which he accepted under certain conditions: that the title should be changed to 'The Church in the High Street' (though he later dropped the latter article, along with the prepositions from the title of his book) and that he should be a"ble to edit the story as he saw fit. The story as published, there and here, therefore contains several passages that are Derleth's paraphrases of what I wrote. Quite right too: as I think he realized, it was the most direct way to show me how to improve my writing, and selling the story was so encouraging that I completed my first book a little over a year later.
I've included here a selection of tales from that book, The Inhabitant of the Lake. Though prior publication never deters me from revising my stories - revised editions of my novels The Doll Who Ate His Mother and The Nameless are soon to appear, and some of the stories in my collection Dark Companions were revised for that book - I've resisted the temptation to improve these earlier tales, partly because I feel too distant from them. Here they are, flaws and all.
"The Room in the Castle' expands Lovecraft's reference to 'snake-bearded Byatis' (am I remembering it accurately?) - Bob Bloch's originally, I believe. 'The Horror from the Bridge' is based, like several of these stories, on Lovecraft's Commonplace Book as it appeared in the
Arkham House anthology The Shuttered Room. It's based on two entries: 'Man in strange subterranean chamber -seeks to force door of bronze - overwhelmed by influx of waters' and 'Ancient (Roman? pre-historic?) stone bridge washed away by a (sudden & curious?) storm. Something liberated which had been sealed up in the masonry thousands of years ago. Things happen.'
The story is based to some extent on the chronology of events in Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror,' but towards the end I found I hadn't the patience to build as minutely as Lovecraft would have.
'The Insects from Shaggai' is based on another entry in the Commonplace Book, or rather on my misreading of it. Lovecraft wrote 'Insects or some other entities from space attack and penetrate a man's head & cause him to remember alien and exotic things - possible displacement of personality,' a superb idea I rushed at so hastily that I failed to notice he hadn't meant giant insects at all. (An account of the dream which gave him the idea can be found in the Selected Letters, volume V, page 159.) Of all my stories this is probably the pulpiest. As such it has some energy, I think, but I wish I'd left the note alone until I was equipped to do it justice.