I wrote the first page of 'The Inhabitant of the Lake' and developed writer's block. What released me weeks later was writing "The Render of the Veils' in the garden on a summer morning. It's based on a Lovecraft note ('Disturbing conviction that all life is only a deceptive dream with some dismal or sinister horror lurking behind') but it began my liberation from Lovecraft's style, in the sense that it's told largely through dialogue. I was pleased enough with it to want to name my first book after it, but Derleth felt - rightly, I think - that it sounded mystical rather than frightening. I returned to 'The
Inhabitant of the Lake' (again rooted in the Commonplace Book: 'Visit to someone in wild & remote house -ride from station through the night into the haunted hills. House by forest or water. Terrible things live there') with renewed enthusiasm.
Four stories followed that are not included here. 'The Plain of Sound' may be read in the small press journal Crypt of Cthulhu, in an issue devoted to my work. 'The Return of the Witch' was suggested by two Lovecraft notes: 'Live man buried in bridge masonry according to superstition - or black cat' and 'Salem story. The cottage of an aged witch, wherein after her death are found sundry terrible things' but it developed as a rewrite, virtually scene by scene, of a Henry Kuttner story I had never read and didn't encounter until several years after my story was published.
My story contains a moderately evocative dream sequence: 'He dreamed of wanderings through space to dead cities on other planets, of lakes bordered by twisted trees which moved and creaked in no wind, and finally of a strange curved rim beyond which he passed into utter darkness - a darkness in which he sensed nothing living. Less clear dreams occurred, too, and he often felt a clutching terror at glimpses of the shuttered room amid bizarre landscapes, and of rotting things which scrabbled out of graves at an echoing, sourceless call' and a sudden outburst of paranoia that points rather disconcertingly forward to fiction of mine such as The Face That Must Die: '(Look at the bastard! He tells you you're possessed, but you know what he really means, don't you? That you're schizophrenic. Push him out, quick! Don't let him come poking round your mind!)' but otherwise I think the story can be allowed to rest in peace.
'The Mine on Yuggoth' was a thorough rewrite of one of the first tales I showed Derleth, 'The Tower from Yuggoth.' I got one of the ideas for the rewrite in church, during mass, and I suspect that was when Catholicism lost its grip on me, though probably never entirely. 'The Will of Stanley Brooke' was my first punning title; the story attempted to tell its tale wholly through dialogue, with no Lovecraftian adjectives at all, but "I remember congratulating myself on the originality of a theme which in fact was Lovecraft's, from "The Festival.' The next story here, 'The Moon-Lens,' has its basis in a Lovecraft note ('Ancient necropolis - bronze door in hillside which opens as the moonlight strikes it - focused by ancient lens in pylon opposite'), as did "The Face in the Desert,' a poorly imagined Arabian tale Derleth rejected from the book and I for this one. More background on the book can be found in Horrors and Unpleasantries, Sheldon Jaffery's anecdotal history of Arkham House.
While Derleth was looking at the manuscript of my collection I wrote another story, "The Stone on the Island.' For a change, this was based on one of M. R. James's 'Stories I Have Tried to Write':
'The man, for instance (naturally a man with something on his mind), who, sitting in his study one evening, was startled by a slight sound, turned hastily, and saw a certain dead face looking out from between the window curtains: a dead face, but with living eyes. He made a dash at the curtains and tore them apart. A pasteboard mask fell to the floor. But there was no one there, and the eyes of the mask were but eye-holes. What (James wonders) was to be done about that?'
My solution was that it wasn't a mask. The tale may be technically superior to any of the Inhabitant stories, and it reads more like me than Lovecraft, I think. However, I find its adolescent sadism excessive, and so I haven't included it here.
Now began my struggle to leave Lovecraft behind and write like myself - a struggle that caused me to write an article, 'Lovecraft in Retrospect,' condemning his work outright (when what I was really condemning was my own dependence on him). I suspect that writing about his creations had been a way to avoid dealing with my own fears. My impatience with trying to imitate the Lovecraftian structure led to the extreme compression of some of the stories in Demons by Daylight, my second book. One story in that collection, 'The Franklyn Paragraphs,' is based on two notes from the Commonplace Book, and two stories written during that period belong to the Lovecraft Mythos. One, 'Before the Storm,' I didn't feel was worth rewriting in order to fit into Demons by Daylight; it appears here for the first time between hard covers. By contrast, 'Cold Print' was fully rewritten in 1966. Both show my struggles to be myself, I think, and in 'Cold Print' the struggle has pretty well been won.
I had nothing more to do with the Lovecraft Mythos until 1971, when Meade and Penny Frierson asked me to contribute to their extraordinarily ambitious (and, on the whole, impressively successful) small press anthology, HPL. I offered them 'A Madness from the Vaults,' written in 1962 but, I'd felt, too fantastic to fit into my first book. When I turned up the fanzine in which it had eventually appeared I was dismayed to find that its sadism far exceeded that of 'The Stone on the Island.' All I could do for the Friersons was write what was virtually a new story under the same title.
'The Tugging' was written three years later, in response to a request for a story for a DAW Books anthology, The Disciples of Cthulhu. That anthology set me thinking of editing one of my own. Just before his death Derleth had told me that he planned to edit New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Arkham House agreed that I should, and I contributed the story 'The Faces at Pine Dunes.'
Editing that book helped me organize my thoughts about the followers of Lovecraft. The great merit of Lovecraft's mythos was always that however much it showed, it suggested more: it was a way of sketching the unknown in terms that fed the reader's imagination -mine, certainly. Perhaps it was inevitable that writers such as myself would attempt to fill in the gaps. I think the most important question to be asked about any story based on Lovecraft is whether it conveys any of the awe and terror Lovecraft's stories did. I've little time for the kind of story which purports to discover yet another genealogical link among Lovecraft's entities - this kind of nitpicking may be all right for the fanzines, but hardly a basis for fiction - and much less time for stories that rob Lovecraft's concepts of awe by explaining them away. On the other hand, I admire such disparate stories as Bloch's 'Notebook Found in a Deserted House' (surely the most frightening Mythos tale by anyone other than Lovecraft), Wandrei's 'The Tree-Men of M'Bwa' and The Web of Easter Island, Frank Belknap Long's 'The Space-Eaters' (an oddly moving as well as awesome story about the pupil confounding the teacher), Henry Kuttner's "The Graveyard Rats,' T.E.D. Klein's 'Black Man with a Horn,' among quite a few others.
My doubts about the overpopulation and overexplanation of the Mythos prompted me to write 'The Voice of the Beach.' Lovecraft regarded Blackwood's 'The Willows' - in which, as he often pointed out, nothing is shown or stated directly - as the finest of all weird tales. The closest he came to achieving what Blackwood achieved was in 'The Colour out of Space,' which contains none of the paraphernalia of the later mythos. 'The Voice of the Beach' was my attempt to return to Lovecraft's first principles, to see how close I could get to his aims without the encumbrances of the mythos. Lin Carter looked at the story when he was editing Weird Tales, but rejected it as insufficiently Lovecraftian. For my part, I believe it's the most successful of these stories.