Lin has gathered these evocative titles from various pulp tales of horror. He has catalogued them here much as he did the Mythos grimoires in his early article "H. P. Lovecraft: The Books” (a new, updated edition of which is shortly due out from Borgo Press in the second edition of Darrell Schweitzer’s Discovering H. P. Lovecraft). The rare and potent horror tomes he lists here are nor quite heavy artillery like the Necronomicon or the Livre d'Eibon. They’re no mere Arkham House or Chaosium titles either! No, they are right in the middle, written by people like HPL or CAS, but with a little help from certain Outside forces.
Now just where did Lin get these titles? Figuring it out for yourself is part of the game, a sort of "Test Your Mythos Knowledge" quiz, as if Reader's Digest might contain such a thing. If you want to cheat, here’s the answer key. Edgar Henquist Gordon’s books Night-Gaunts and The Soul of Chaos and his story “Gargoyle” are taken from Robert Bloch’s "The Dark Demon." The weird magazine Outré is possibly derived from the amateur press zine of the same title by J. Vernon Shea. Of course, Derby's Azathoth and Other Horrors comes from Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep." Justin Geoffrey and his verse collection People of the Monolith come from Robert E. Howard’s "The Black Stone." Whispers magazine is the fictive Weird Tales analog in which Randolph Carter's shocking tales, including "The Attic Window", used to appear, according to “The Unnamable.” Amadeus Carson is a Henry Kuttner alter ego, the hapless renter of the Witch Room in "The Salem Horror", with his novel Black God of Madness reflecting his experiences in the ill-fated apartment. Michael Hayward is the author who stimulated his imagination by means of a time-vision drag in Kuttner’s "The Invaders." He was only following in the staggering footsteps of Halpin Chalmers, author of The Secret Watcher, who used the Liao drug to abet his own creative juices in Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Ariel Prescott's Visions from Yaddith appears in Carter’s own “Dreams in the House of Weir” (available in The Shub-Niggurath Cycle). Phillip Howard is, believe it or not, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Lin Carter is referring to Frank Belknap Long’s "The Space Eaters", in which the narrator, one "Frank”, refers to his pal “Howard" and his “The House of the Worm” and “The Defilers”, together with the storm of protest the latter aroused among the stolid citizenry of Partridgeville. Finally, "Shaggai", ”In the Vale of Pnath”, "The Burrower Beneath", "The Feaster from the Stars", and "The Stairs in the Crypt" are the short stories Lovecraft attributes to his Robert Bloch analog Robert Blake in "The Haunter of the Dark."
"The Winfield Heritance" first appeared in Lin Carter (editor), Weird Tales #3, Zebra Books. 1981.
The Winfield Heritance
by Lin Carter
Statement of Winfield Phillips, 1936
IN the event of my death or disappearance, I herewith request of the person into whose hands this statement shall come that he mail it without delay to Dr. Seneca Lapham, care of the Anthropology Department of Miskatonic University in the city of Arkham, Massachusetts. And, for his own safety, if not indeed his sanity of mind, I beg him to send it unread.
My name is Winfield Phillips, and I reside at number 86 College Street in Arkham. I am a graduate of Miskatonic University, where I majored in American literature and took for my minor the study of anthropology. Since my freshman year I have been in the employ of Dr. Lapham in the capacity of a private secretary, and have continued thereafter in that position in order to support myself while researching for a book on the Decadent movement in recent art and literature. I am twenty-nine years old, and consider myself to be sound of mind and body.
As for my soul, I am not so certain.
I.
ON the morning of June 7th, 1936, having obtained a brief leave of absence from my employer, I boarded the train for California at the B&O Station on Water Street. My purpose in undertaking a journey of such length as to traverse the entirety of the continent was partially business and partially pleasure. And, in part, from a sense of family duty.
Due to the recent death of my uncle, Hiram Stokely of Durnham Beach, California, I felt obligated to attend his funeral and to take my place at the obsequies in order that the eastern branch of the family might be represented on this solemn occasion. Uncle Hiram had been, after all, my mother’s favorite brother; and, even though I had never met him, had, in fact, never seen him to my knowledge, I knew that she would have wished me to attend his burial. My late mother was a Winfield of New Hampshire, but my father was a Phillips, sprung from ancient Massachusetts stock which can be traced back to 1670, if not further. I am a descendant of the celebrated, and ever so slightly notorious, Reverend Ward Phillips, former pastor of the Second Congregationalist Church in Arkham, author of an obscure but psychologically fascinating bit of New England eccentricity called Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan, first published at Boston in 1794 and later reprinted in rather expurgated form in 1801. It is an old family joke that the reverend doctor, in this his only known venture into the fine art of letters, literally did his “damnedest” to out-do in hellfire and brimstone mad old Cotton Mather’s hellish Magnalia and the even more nightmarish Wonders of the Invisible World. If so, he succeeded admirably.
Many years before I was born, there had been some sort of trouble between my Uncle Hiram and the rest of my mother’s family. I have never quite known what occasioned this breech, but the breaking-off of relations was lasting and permanent. If my mother ever knew the reason, she never confided it to me, but I can remember my aged grandfather muttering about "forbidden practices" and “books no one should ever read” whenever Uncle Hiram’s name came up, which was not very often. Whatever the nature of the family scandal, Uncle Hiram moved away from Arkham, went to California, and never returned. These ancient, inbred New England families, as you may be aware, are rife with skeletons in the closet, old feuds, centuried scandals. It seems quaint, even perverse, nowadays to bear a grudge for a lifetime, but we are a proud, stubborn, stiff-necked race. Just how still-necked we are can be demonstrated by the fact that my uncle, as if not content with severing all relations with the family (even with my mother, who was his favorite sister), actually repudiated the family name, Winfield, adopting instead his mother’s maiden name, Stokely.
At any rate, all of this happened long before I was born—before my Mother married into the Phillips family, in fact—and because of this, and of the fact that no single communication had ever passed between my uncle and myself, I had no slightest thought of ever being mentioned in my uncle's will, and had as well utterly no interest in his estate, although it was commonly known that he had become immensely wealthy since moving to distant California.
As for the element of pleasure involved in my journey, this lay in the opportunity to resume a cherished friendship with my cousin, Brian Winfield, the only son of my other uncle, Richard. We had first met, Brian and I, quite by chance, in the Widener Library at Harvard in 1927. I had been sent there by my employer to copy out some passages from a certain very rare version of a curious old volume of myths and liturgies called the Book of Eibon, since Harvard was lucky enough to possess the only known text of the medieval Latin translation made from the Greek by Philippus Faber. The young man seated next to me, a cheerful, freckle-faced, snub-nosed fellow with tousled sandy hair and friendly blue eyes, deep in a medical book of the most repulsive illustrations imaginable, responded to the librarian’s call of "Winfield" and ambled forward to claim another book just fetched up from the stacks for his perusal. Thinking he must certainly be a relative. I took the liberty of introducing myself: later, chatting over coffee, we laid the foundations of a lasting friendship.