4, No 1 (WN 13)
Cover art this issue is an illustration to Lovecraft’s
A Contribution by Leigh Blackmore for the Sword
& Sorcery & Weird Fiction Terminus (Mar 1,
2009/33rd mailing), & Esoteric Order of Dagon
(April 30, 2009/ 146th mailing) amateur press
associations.
Leigh Blackmore, 78 Rowland Ave, Wollongong,
NSW 2500. Australia.
Email: lvxnox@gmail.com
Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Blackmore
Official Website: Blackmausoleum –
http://members.optusnet.com.au/lvxnox/
This issue dedicated to Forrest J. Ackerman
(Nov 24, 1916-Dec 4, 2008) –
”Mr Science Fiction”
& “the Effjay of Akkamin” (see Lovecraft &
Barlow’s ‘The Battle That Ended the Century’ 1934).
Fangs for the mammaries!
“The Transition of Juan Romero” © 2007 by David
Reuss. More examples of Reuss’ wonderful
Lovecraftian illustrations can be seen at
http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/view.pl?id
=113595&genre=4. Many thanks to David for
allowing me to use his illustration for this issue.
Contents this issue
Mantic Notes……………………………………….…1
‘‘Lines on Placing an Order with Arkham House”
(verse) by Judy Reber………………………….…….3
Books By My Bedside……………………………….3
“ABC Fiction Award Breaks Emerging Writers:
Kain Massim, Damian Macdonald & Will Elliott”
by Leigh Blackmore…………………………..……….4
“The Liminal Lovecraft: 1: Some Notes on
Lovecraft’s ‘The Transition of Juan Romero’” by
Leigh Blackmore………..…8
“The Sad and Spooky Time” (verse) by
Richard L. Tierney……………………….15
The August Derleth Centennial, Feb 24,
2009……………………………………..….16
Mantichorus: Mailing Notes…………...16
Mantic Notes
(Pronunciation:'man-tik. Etymology: Greek
mantikos, from mantis : of, relating to the
faculty of divination; prophetic).
I’ve been on summer break from
University, but work has continued apace.
I’ve done numerous manuscript
assessments for my agencies. Issue No 3 of
Studies in Australian Weird Fiction has been
edited by Ben Szumskyj (his last issue
before it passes to Phillip Ellis) but I did
two author interviews for that issue – Kim
Wilkins and Margo Lanagan. Other literary
work has included a short article titled
“Hair in Magick and Occultism” for a
theme book about hair, first in a new series
of chapbooks edited by Meredith Jones for
Bocalatte Press, Sydney. Margi and I
continued our column on witchcraft for
Black magazine, and also conducted an
interview with Tim Hartridge, a well-
known Australian witch/coven leader, but
the sad news came that Black magazine’s print
version will fold and the magazine will go online. We
have yet to see whether our column will continue
and whether the Hartridge interview will be
published with Black or elsewhere. I spent quite a
long time researching English horror movie star and
now Australian-resident-crime-writer Shane Briant,
and hope to interview him for a future issue of
Studies in Australian Weird Fiction. Other literary work
has included desultory efforts on my Rossetti novel,
which I will tackle in earnest when I return to uni
next week, and some editing on Wikipedia, where I
improved some entries on fantasy and horror writers
which seemed woefully inadequate (see, for instance,
the much improved entry on Peter H. Cannon, and
that on Occult Detectives). I started some work on a
story with Ben Szumskyj, and have been going over a
story by Danny Lovecraft, and also assessing part of
a novel by an Adelaide acquaintance of Danny’s. I
was invited to come in and give a guest lecture at the
Faculty of Creative Arts at Uni of Wollongong on
fantasy, sf and horror literature. It seemed to go well
and I hope may lead to some more lecturing or
tutoring work on campus. I still seem to be
negotiating the publication of my own short story
collection in the US, but as things aren’t finalized I
can’t say too much yet. I have also taken over as
editor of Sword and Sorcery and Weird Fiction
Terminus APA (SSWFT) and this March marks both
eight years of SSWFT and the first mailing under my
charge as the new OE. What lofty heights have I
reached, o ye peoples!
There has been some leisure time. A rather
extraordinary amount of time has been taken up
reorganising our house, throwing out junk etc.
Christmas presents I received include Metallica’s
Death Magnetic CD (which fuckin’ rocks!), Elvis
Costello’s The Delivery Man, and Kraftwerk’s
Minimum-Maximum DVD (awesome!).
On January 15th we held a celebration at
our home in celebration of Edgar Poe’s bicentennial
which was attended by several local horror/fantasy
personalities. (I’m tempted to say “colourful
identities” as in that phrase beloved of TV
newscasters: “colourful racing identities”. As well as
general discussion of the horror field and eating and
drinking, we had a round-robin (lol☺ or should that
be “round-Raven”) reading of “The Raven”.
Here are a couple of photos from the event.
Figure 1: L-R Margi Curtis, Rob Hood, Richard
Harland, Cat Sparks,
Aileen Harland,
Graham Wykes
celebrate Poe's
Bicentennial.
Figure 2: Part of my Poe
collection on display at
our Poe celebration.
More can be
seen at my flickr stream:
http://flickr.com/photos/hadit93/
I’ve successfully surpassed the 4,000 book
mark in cataloguing my library at Librarything (see
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/666777).
Whoopee! I still have a thousand or so occult books
to catalogue… We rarely manage to see live music,
but an exception had to be made for the legendary
Leonard Cohen, who played Oz in February. We saw
him at the “Day at the Green” at Bowral, a beautiful
setting in a vineyard, and had the pleasure of hearing
a fantastic band backing him up as he treated the
gathered thousands to three hours of his best music.
The same day I had the experience of meeting Russell
Kilbey, brother of Steve Kilbey who also played on
the day, with the Triffids (Steve K is lead singer of
The Church, my favourite rock band). Russell is
married to Amy, who’s an ex-Tarot student of
Margi’s! What a small world…In other activity, our
coven, MoonsKin, did a Bodycasting day and I am
now the proud possessor of a three-quarter plaster
body cast of myself. We plan another day where our
casts will be painted and decorated. I’ve also been
working extensively with magical talismans recently
and have plans to cast some special ones using a
substance called Hydro-Stone.
I had a fun visit to Sydney one day to see
Danny Lovecraft, and en
route caught up with my
mate Chris Sequeira, who
presented me with copies of
his latest appearances – two
American comics:
Astonishing Tales #1 (a Marvel comic featuring an Iron
Man story penned by Chris) and
Cthulhu Tales #11 (a Boom
Studios comic featuring
“Incorporation”, a Cthulhu-esque
tale penned by Chris). This was
topped off by a preview copy of
Chris’ new locally produced
comic (from new publisher Black
House Comics) Sherlock Holmes:
Dark Detective, with superlative
artwork by Chris’ old Holmesian
comrade, Phillip Cornell. (Cornell,
by the way, contributes a full-
page illustration for every story in
the recent Holmesian anthology
Gaslight Grimoire, edited by
Charles Prepolec and published in Canada by Edge
Publishing. Well worth checking out, people!
Fantastic stories featuring
Holmes are always a joy). I
hear on the grapevine that
Prepolec may do a sequel to
this antho. I spent an
enjoyable day or two with
Danny chewing the fat about
pulps, publishing and
projects, followed by a sojourn through the Sydney
specialist and secondhand bookshops, where I had
not ventured for some time. The only book I had
money enough to buy was Stephen Jones’ Mammoth
Book of Best New Horror Vol 18 (Robinson, 2007),
though there were plenty of other books at Galaxy,
Sydney’s sf specialist I would have loved to snap up!
Danny successfully landed some stock of my Spores
from Sharnoth, and ST Joshi’s Emperor of Dreams, with
Galaxy, so hopefully that will add to the sales. I’ve
been helping P’rea Press by selling the deluxe edition
of Emperors on Ebay, and it’s been going rather well.
Danny, who is hand-binding the deluxe editions
individually, can hardly keep up with the demand
for the hardcover!! [Bibliographers and collectors
note: the first 6 or eight copies of the deluxe
hardcover state of Emperors of Dreams were bound in
green cloth; now Danny is on to red cloth, so there
will be at least two states of the deluxe edition)]
I’ve seen quite a number of films over the
last few months but haven’t kept a record of them all.
Those I can recollect include: THE MUMMY: TOMB
OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR (amiable nonsense),
THE TAKEN starring Liam Neeson (a decent action
thriller), DAYS OF HEAVEN (a drama I’d long
wanted to catch up with), WHALES OF AUGUST
(another drama, this one starring Vincent Price –
gentle and touching in one of his last performances),
THE TINGLER (Price again, seen at Danny
Lovecraft’s place), FAREWELL MY LOVELY (a most
enjoyable movie take on the Raymond Chandler
novel starring Robert Mitchum and Charlotte
Rampling – had seen it many years ago, but enjoyed
it again). Rob Hood lent me a batch of J-horror
movies, since I was incredibly behind on
appreciating Asian horror cinema; these included
KAENA, APPLESEED: EXMACHINA, THE RED
SHOES, STACY, BATTLE ROYALE and PULSE. I
probably enjoyed PULSE the most – a creepy exercise
in ghostliness and ghastliness that had echoes of the
horrors of Hiroshima in the subtext.
In family news, Margi celebrated her 52nd
birthday on Feb 5. We had a great celebration and
she got lots of good presents. My stepson Rohan
continues living in Sydney, with various ins-and-outs
about finding a job, doing further technical computer
training etc. He’s come back to stay with us in
Wollongong with his girlfriend Shavae several times
in the last few months. Margi and Graham, together
with their guitarist friend Bruce, have formed a band,
now called Fedora, and have been working hard
putting together sets. They will go out to play live
probably at mid-year. It’s sounding great, and I’m
enjoying being involved in live music again even if
I’m acting merely as a “vocal coach” and musical
advisor on the sidelines…Oh, one other bit of
publishing news. Here’s the cover
image for Robert Bloch: The Man
who Collect Psychos, edited by Ben
Szumskyj, out shortly from
McFarland in the US. So glad I got
a chance to jump on board that
project.
That’s all the news
that’s fit to print. S.T. has asked
me, from the EOD side, to keep my APA
contributions down to 15 pages, since the last
Mantichore was of heroic proportions, so I will try not
to overfill this issue. (I tired my hardest…still
running 16+ pages; and sorry for the small font size,
which is the only way to fit everything into this
space!) On to some hard content….I’d like to record
my gratitude to my partner Margi Curtis for the title
“ The Liminal Lovecraft” which will serve as the
umbrella title for a series of essays on Lovecraft’s
less-examined stories I will run here, starting this
issue with a piece on “The Transition of Juan
Romero.” Thanks also to Eldritchard – (aka Richard
L. Tierney) for his poem this issue.
Lines on Placing an Order
with Arkham House
By Judy Reber
(reprinted from the 1965
Books from Arkham House catalogue)
Oh, send me an eldritch novel,
Of a Thing come from Outer Space;
Or loathly Hag in her hovel,
With a ruined, blasphemous face.
Let there be Ghouls without number,
Eyes bestial and hellishly red;
Give me the Dead that but slumber
Till midnight, a coffin their bed.
Give me a Werewolf, a Demon,
A Shadow most foul on a Wall;
A long-dead voluptuous leman,
Returned now to hold men in thrall;
A Druid with hair wildly streaming,
‘Neath ancient and mistletoed oak;
And Gods of the Eld who lie dreaming,
Where once all was law when they spoke;
An infamous Abbey with Rat Things,
That leave human bones in their wake,
Until a dread being with Bat Wings
Eats them for his hunger to slake;
Doorways to other Dimensions;
An attic in which Time was Not.
Send me your grisly inventions –
Or are they? Ah, are they..?God wot!
Books By My Bedside
I seem to be reading more
and more slowly these days,
and my eyesight is gradually
deteriorating, which doesn’t
help. It took me nearly three
weeks (in between other
work) to read Dan Simmons’
excellent thriller Darwin’s
Blade – admittedly a fat read, but one I would have
polished off in a week in years past. Other recent
reading has included Sinclair Mackay’s A Thing of
Unspeakable Horror: A History of Hammer Films (thanks
to my friend Richard Trowsdale for sending me that);
100 European Horror Films by Stephen Jay Schneider;
Emperor of Dreams: Some Notes
on Weird Poetry by S.T. Joshi;
The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu
Mythos by S.T. Joshi
(hopefully I’ll review this next
time); The Fungal Stain and
Other Dreams by W.H.
Pugmire; Progradior and the
Beast by Keith Richmond (a biography of Aleister
Crowley’s Australian disciple Frank Bennett) and The
Magical Record of Frater Progradior, also by Keith
Richmond; The New Space Opera edited by Jonathan
Strahan and Gardner Dozois; Bob Dylan’s Chronicles
Volume One; and White Line Fever by Lemmy (lead
singer of Motorhead) – a thoroughly enjoyable read
which I passed on to Danny Lovecraft. Not a huge
amount of horror fiction there, I
see…I may be able to review a
couple of the above volumes here
if there’s enough space. Did I
mention that Henrik Harksen’s
excellent Lovecraftian anthology
Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales
(www.lulu.com) is now available?
I’m very happy to see my “The Return of Zoth-
Ommog” reprinted therein. I’ll try and review this
volume next time if space permits.
_______________________________________________
[Following is a story, really a series of
profiles, I did for my Feature Writing class in
Journalism last year at uni. Figured I might as well
use it here as it hasn’t been published elsewhere. The
ABC Fiction Award has now been dropped by the
ABC, so the three writers I interviewed are the only
ones who will ever win it….]
ABC Fiction Award Breaks Emerging
Writers
By Leigh Blackmore © 2008
PROFILE 1: KAIN MASSIM
When Adelaide-based high-school maths
& science teacher Kain Massim
was informed by phone that he
had won the prestigious ABC
Fiction Award for 2008, he
couldn’t do a jig or shout for
happiness, because he was
walking through a public
shopping centre, and he was sworn to silence by the
award’s promoters. “There was no way that I could
whoop or wave my arms around. My knees turned to
jelly, I had to go and sit down. I was having coffee
with friends and I couldn’t tell them about it. I told
my family and my boss at work, but I apart from that
I had to keep quiet about it.”
The recognition, and the chance to get his
book published was more important to him than the
considerable prize money of $10,000. “It’s too early to
talk about the prize money – I haven’t yet received
it,” he says. “It will be put to a good use for the
family as a whole.”
He sees the award as a chance to get more
exposure as a writer. “The news of my win has
certainly appeared all around Australia, and even in
Bangladesh, France and Spain.” And he now has the
opportunity to have more books published. He has
written two others - one a contemporary thriller, the
other a science fiction story set 250 years into the
future. For another book again – it’s currently half-
written - he has much higher hopes than for God for
the Killing, the novel which won the award.
The ABC Fiction Award was begun in
2006. It is presented annually to a novelist who wins
a nationwide competition sponsored by ABC Books
with the support of ABC Local radio and ABC
Television. Surprisingly, the rich prize – very few
other literary awards in Australia offer such a hefty
cash component – so far seems little-known in the
wider community. Nevertheless, hundreds of entries
have flooded in each year to the competition since it
was begun. Significantly, the themes of the three
novels chosen so far have all been controversial. It’s a
heartening sign that the ABC is willing to support
books that are meaty, challenging and don’t follow
the literary line of least resistance.
Jo Mackay, commissioning editor at ABC
Books, considers this hasn’t been a conscious
decision on the publisher’s part. “The only real
criterion in the competition apart from age of the
author and the fact the novel must be adult and
unpublished, is sheer writing excellence.” She
believes that a feature of new writing is that such
books tend to push the envelope of thematic content.
“We are certainly proud of the ones we have
published so far,” she says.
Kain Massim’s award was presented to
him at a ceremony in Sydney on Tuesday 22 April. A
God for the Killing will be published in October.
Massim started out as a writer by
publishing a thriller serial in mid high school in the
school newsletter – a story, he admits with some
embarrassment, about six escaped cobras and their
individual adventures. An Adelaide resident from
the age of seven, Massim had a varied working
career. Prior to being a schoolteacher he was a taxi-
driver, a drinks waiter, a retail salesman and an
above-ground pool installer, amongst others
including work in light manufacturing. He’s a come
a long way since then.
But so have the other writers who have
won the award so far. All of them have taken many
difficult years to reach a point where the magical
“award-winning first novel” has become possible.
Will Elliott, who won the inaugural award
in 2006 for his novel The Pilo Family Circus, grew up
in the bleak suburbs of inner city Brisbane. Dropping
out of a law degree at age twenty due to a diagnosis
of schizophrenia, he lived a somewhat fragmented
existence while he began writing seriously around
the same time. “I was serious then, and did intend to
make it to publication, but I had no idea what I was
in for or what it required,” he says.
Damian McDonald, the 2007 award-winner
with his novel Luck in the Greater West, set in
Sydney’s outer western suburbs, had a similarly
bleak upbringing in suburban Canberra, writing
stories and jamming with rock bands. A long-haired
kid who was often bullied at school for his love of
writing and music, he worked a series of menial jobs
while trying to make it on the Sydney rock scene,
before abandoning music to become a writer.
Educating himself through various tertiary courses,
he now holds a Masters in Creative Arts from the
University of Western Sydney. “When I went back to
school as a mature age student I guess I rediscovered
writing. I also realised that I needed to gain some
skills in the art, as the ideas were there, but the
technique wasn't,” he remembers. .
Kain Massim’s novel God for the Killing tells
the story of Judith, a girl taken from Nazareth in AD
30 and trained as an assassin. The novel, which took
him seven months to write, deals with the betrayal
and death of Jesus Christ. It started out as a short
story but as Massim explains “it grew as I did more
research and as I saw what areas needed more work
and explanation.”
Judith, the novel’s strong female main
character, is sent on a mission to kill the new
‘Messiah’. As her quest continues she learns that he is
her childhood sweetheart, Joshua, now known as
Jesus. Why did Massim decide to write his novel
from such an unusual point of view?
“I’ve been writing more and more stories
with strong female characters,” he says, “so this was
just an extension of my other writing. What I wanted
was a Roman outsider who could observe the last
few days of the life of Jesus. Using the female point
of view was not a long step for me. Making her an
assassin was an almost logical progression when I
asked myself the question: Who would Rome send to
Palestine to deal with the growing problem of Jesus”?
One reason the novel works so well is that
Massim puts an element of doubt into the reader’s
mind. How will the story finish? Will the assassin get
to do what she wants to do? Massim is fondest of the
Judith character in his book, and thinks the reader
will warm to her. But, he says, “I also enjoyed the
conflict between the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate,
the Jewish King Herod and the High Priest,
Caiaphas.” He enjoyed writing “the way they snap at
each other in the most civil manner.”
Massim doesn’t think controversy is an
issue, despite the book’s unusual theme and
viewpoint. “There is very little that’s controversial in
the story,” he says. “There is some tinkering with
what we think we know about the [Jesus] story, but
it’s certainly not central.”
Damian McDonald takes a similar view
about Luck in the Greater West. Though the novel has
been highly praised, it has caused some controversy,
not least for its rape-related segments, loosely
inspired by the gang-related Skaf case. Are these
issues are too inflammatory to be addressed?
McDonald disagrees. “Art is a reflection of human
nature and society,” he says. “Should Thomas
Kenneally not have written Schindler's Ark because
the issues were too inflammatory? What I was trying
to do was to examine a pocket of the Australian
community that was at odds with the wider
community.”
The ABC Fiction award uses a panel of
judges to assess the manuscripts. Judges have
included Lindy Burns, Luke Davies, Murray
Waldren, Jo Mackay, Debra Adelaide, Vernero
Armanno, Alex Sloan, John Dale, Richard Fidler,
Delia Falconer, Richard Falconer, and Malcolm Knox.
This year’s judges were unanimous in selecting God
for the Killing as the best of the 400 entries received.
Kain Massim has been praised for the
amount of historical research in his novel. “Not
Roman history – although that was also important -
but more the history of Jewish society and customs,”
he says. But one of his strongest memories of writing
the book is of having to hold back on the research
aspect. “ I remember having to take up the rein and
pull back. I was in danger of making it too big and
unwieldy.”
Winning entries in the ABC Fiction Award,
as well as winning the $10,000 advance and having
their book published, have it broadcast on ABC Local
radio and made available as an audio book through
ABC Audio. Though there can only be one winner of
the $10,000 first prize, the judges also choose Highly
Commended Works each year from a compiled
shortlist. This year both Highly Commended novels
came from Victoria – Red Queen by Honey Brown and
Homing by Lynda Caffrey.
Each of the three writers who have won
the $10,000 prize-money stresses the need for
determination in the writing game. Kain Massim’s
advice to young writers who aspire to winning the
award is simply “Don’t give up.” He advises the use
of a good writer’s group. “Use them as a sounding
board. Do not write in isolation. Read your work out
to a group of writers who can help to show you the
good and bad points of your writing.” He also
recommends persistence. “When you begin writing,
you tend to have an inflated opinion of your work.
Don’t. Your first efforts will only be the beginning.
First you learn to crawl. Then you stand up. And you
fall over; many times. Walking is a slow process, but
you shouldn’t give up on doing it.”
Will Elliott is of the opinion that budding
writers should read On Writing, by Stephen King; The
Novel Writer's Toolkit by Bob Meyer; and every book
on writing fiction written by John Gardner. Will also
cautions about the often lonely realities of writing.
“Do not commit yourself to this if you like the idea of
being a writer, but aren't so keen on actually sitting
there and writing. If sitting there and writing isn't
your idea of a good time, you are up shit creek if you
get to where I am.”
Damian McDonald says his only real
mistake was thinking that his publisher would
promote the book. “I think you need to do as much
self-promotion as possible. He also recommends
getting an editor – “ Well worth the exorbitant fee
they charge! That way your manuscript will be
presented to agents/publishers as a ready-to-publish
work.”
The 2008 competition for the 2009 ABC Fiction award
commences on Tuesday 22 April 2008. See
http://www.abc.net.au/corp/abcfictionaward/ for
details of how to enter.
PROFILE 2: WILL ELLIOTT
“I was living like shit when I wrote this
book,” confesses Will Elliott, author of The Pilo Family
Circus – “the whole time's a blur, mostly. The hours I
kept, the caffeine I drank were ridiculous. I was
borderline delusional much of the
time. Lurking at the nearest ATM to
my flat at 5am every
second Wednesday, waiting for my
welfare to hit the bank, shivering
with nicotine withdrawal, wanting
smokes & coffee so I could get back
to work. The last 10,000 words was
done in one delirious sitting.”
Elliott’s writing falls somewhere between
conventional horror fiction and savage ‘mainstream’
fantasy. For fun, he plays cricket. Refreshingly
honest, he doesn’t shy away from the difficult issues
in his life, such as his schizophrenia.
He doesn’t feel that the themes of the novel
– which won the 2006 ABC Fiction Award for best
first novel and a clutch of other awards including
Best Horror Novel (Aurealis Awards) plus the
Golden Aurealis; and the Sydney Morning Herald's
Best Young Novelist Award - are autobiographical.
“Maybe I'm turned around on the subject,”
he says. “Too many of my works have the same
recurring theme for me to ignore it any more: a
normal person thrust into an abnormal, often
unpleasant reality, and they fight to come out of it.”
Elliott steadfastly resists the suggestion
that his book is merely metaphor for the illness. “Not
everything I've done has that pattern, but a lot of
things do. I don't sit down and plan it, it just comes
out that way. But Jamie is definitely not me - it's my
best friend, Andrew, warts and all. I got his
permission, but I'm not sure he realized that this
thing would actually be for sale in bookshops around
the world.”
The novel’s central character Jamie finds a
bag of facepaint which transforms him into separate
personalities, including JJ, a dark alter ego. Elliott
says the temptation to treat this as simplistic fable
based on his condition is too obvious. “I would
certainly still deny the suggestion the face paint
represents the illness; the effects of the magic face
paint, bringing out Jamie's "clown" personality, are
nothing like the illness.”
Despite denials, the novel’s malevolent
clowns motif clearly expresses the anguish that
Elliott felt about his own life, growing up in Brisbane.
He remembers that life as almost too ordinary. “There
was food on the table, there were the comforts of
middle class suburbia, meaning I'm in no position to
complain, but yeah – overwhelmingly, relentlessly
normal.” An imaginative child, he resented that. “We
lashed out against it. My strongest memory is
probably the many times my friends and I went out
to destroy shit. It started innocently enough, rocking
roofs, prank calls, but we wound up trying to start
fires big enough to burn down a new housing estate
(uninhabited, I'm happy to report.) We were little
bastards, really.”
He recalls settling down at adolescence,
describes his youth as a typical Australian rite of
passage. “All that wildness calmed down a bit when
we got older and discovered drugs and alcohol.” But
then he got sick. “From that point on I regarded
myself as a writer, but in the years that followed, the
illness periodically interrupted things - for a while I
barely thought about writing. When I remembered
again, it was 2002, and that began a 4-year period in
which I'd write 6 manuscripts, including the Circus,
and dozens of short stories.”
The darkly creepy world of acrobats, glass-
eating yetis and Fishboys into which Jamie, his
protagonist, is drawn, suggests parallels with genre
horror fiction. The clowns from the Pilo Family
Circus are determined to retrieve their facepowder,
and (like the freaks in Todd Browning’s classic
horror movie), force Jamie to become one of them.
Does his work fit the genre stereotype?
“The Circus was dark fantasy, I'd say, more
than horror,” he says. “ I don't dislike the horror
label. I've considered myself an "unorthodox fantasy"
writer, (a better term I've heard since
is "slipstream") but of course there is genre cross-
pollination at work.” His prose influences range
widely, too. “My short stuff is of a kind that aspires
to sit alongside George Saunders or David Foster
Wallace.
Schizophrenia still dominates his life. “I
just finished writing a 60,000 word book about it,
called Strange Places. It basically took my life off one
course and set it on another. Once I
was back in the land of the living, I
backed myself into a corner (or so
it felt) whereby writing was the
only option open to me.” He likes
his life now, he acknowledges,
likes where he’s headed. “But this
is a very recent development; for
the majority of the time since that
diagnosis, I haven't liked it and have wanted to bail
out. It sounds romantic to be a starving artist until
you've done it for 5 years or so, alone, and there's no
end in sight.”
Elliott’s characters - Rufshod, Goshy, Doopy,
Winston, Jamie, Kurt and George Pilo are all
extremely eccentric. “As for the eccentricity, I think
it's a Mervyn Peake influence,” Elliott says. “My
work looks nothing like Peake for the most part - but
that weirdness, I think, is what engages me, ever
since getting seriously into the Gormenghast books at
age 15. He of course is several orders of magnitude
above my level; I'd sit him at the same table as
Shakespeare.”
 He doesn’t focus on research. “Drawings,
was all: lots of character sketches. I stick them up on
the wall above the desk, which helps keep track of
them for plotting purposes. I'm trying to incorporate
more research into my work these days ... the follow-
up novel, Nightfall, has characters I couldn't have
invented without researching some memorable
historical figures.”
Elliott is sanguine about the violence in his
book, which has drawn comment in many reviews.
“The violence in my book was done more for the
effect I wanted to have on the reader. It's sometimes a
kind of slapstick, hard to take seriously, but
sometimes a bit confronting.
“I could be cute and say that if I want to
write a shocking scene, we're so desensitized that I'm
forced to go to such extremes, but almost certainly
that's a copout. Violence in real life makes me cringe,
but in the books it's like playing with clay. I'm not
intending to take it to the pornographic level of, say,
Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
“As for violence, I think we've been
desensitized to it, and I think it's deliberate, though
for what specific purpose I can't even guess. I wasn't
trying to satirize our society, as such. That kind of
thing, much like themes, may emerge in my work
organically (which is a euphemism for 'accidentally',
I'm afraid.) But if people want to extract such things
from the work, be my guest. I've been wrong before.”
The prize money hasn’t changed his life,
though he has moved back in with his parents. “The
money was gone to repay debts almost instantly,” he
says. “I am fortunate and very glad to be published,
don't get me wrong, but we're talking about 3 years'
work here ... How far do they think 10 grand goes,
these days? I bought a fucking mansion on the
coast, Jesus. Financially I'd have been maybe 10
times better off working in a servo instead of writing,
so I try not to think too much about money.”
PROFILE 3: DAMIAN MCDONALD
“When I lived at Burnie Court housing
estate,” says Damian McDonald, now a 38-year-old
assistant curator at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum,
and author of novel Luck in the
Greater West which won the
prestigious ABC Fiction Prize in
2007, “a whole different set of
morals existed there. The police
were the ultimate enemy. Several
times I was stopped, searched,
questioned, had criminal checks done, and was
abused - and this was just after getting off the bus
and trying to get to my flat. The searches were illegal,
but were performed relentlessly on the tenants.
That part of his life fed later fed into his
award-winning novel. “Alcohol, drugs and
joblessness were the norm in Burnie, and me
attending uni was something of an anomaly, a source
of humour to my neighbours. But the people were
warm and generous, once they knew me.”
McDonald did it tough growing up in
Canberra during the 1980’s. “My family were quite
poor, and life was boring as hell out there!” he
remembers. “My friends and I made our own fun -
mainly breaking into schools and other public
buildings and shoplifting; until I discovered rock
music when I was about fourteen or fifteen - then I
was just possessed with learning guitar and
obtaining records.”
School was an unhappy experience. “I was
bullied relentlessly for not being interested in football
and for growing my hair long. It was demoralising;
female students would join in on the pay-outs. It was
clear that I wouldn't score a girlfriend unless I cut my
hair and started barracking for the Raiders! Most of
my fellow students were very mundane and devoid
of original thought- one of the main reasons I left
high school and moved up to Sydney when I was
sixteen to fulfil my dream of being a hard rock
musician.”
As a teenager McDonald read Stephen
King stories and wrote short stories that attempted to
emulate the genre. But then music took over. “It
really took over all my creativity, though I did write
a lot of lyrics. I studied English literature at uni, and
hopefully picked up a tip or two from the texts I
studied.” He began to write short stories, with
published work in Hermes and several UWS literary
journals. He has had, he confesses, “many, many
rejections!”
His novel Luck in the
Greater West, which has been
described as “edgy, contemporary
and with genuine spark,” began as
a series of short stories. “I noticed
that they all shared the theme of
location - the outer western
suburbs of Sydney. Short story
compilations from unknown
writers seem to have gone well out of fashion, so I
started thinking about writing a novel-length piece.
That's when I started to tie the stories together, using
the location as the binder. “
These days, McDonald likes to hang out
with his partner and daughter when not writing, and
plays again in bands. But at one point he had to give
that away. He has spoken of drug use alongside his
years in menial jobs as reasons that he abandoned his
ambition to be a successful muso.
“When I realised that music was never
going to pay off, I knew I had to get a decent day
job!” says McDonald. “I had no skills other than
driving trucks and forklifts, so I went back to
school. Studying became actually enjoyable. I hardly
touched my guitar while I was at uni - studying was
my outlet.”
Luck in the Greater West is a novel of social
realism with compelling insights into the lives of
characters in Sydney’s outer west. McDonald is
gratified to have won the ABC Award for such a
work. “One of the reasons I pursued the theme of the
western suburbs is that there wasn't a great deal of
literature that dealt with the outer west of Sydney -
or outer suburbs in general. I felt I could give a
particular part of Australian society a voice.”
The book took him about two years to
write, firstly linking together existing short stories,
then researching subject matter such as police
procedure, the emotional effects of rape on young
women, and the notorious Skaf rape case.
“The writing mostly flowed pretty
naturally,” he recalls. “I tried to hear the character's
voices - the nuance of their syntax, their accents, their
expression. When writing the events, I tried to
picture and describe particular details, rather than
describe events or situations as a whole. “
The centrality of violence to the lives of
many in our society concerns McDonald. By the same
token, he believes it is exciting.
“Violence is part of human nature,” he
says. “Thankfully, in Australia, we do a good job of
suppressing it and finding alternatives.
Unfortunately though, in my personal experience
many people experience violence from people who
are meant to protect them from it - the police and
parents/guardians. “
McDonald feels validated by winning the
ABC Fiction Award. “It has given me the impetus to
continue writing. It was a massive high to win the
award. There's a lot of novels out there, and it's been
said that books have the shelf life of yogurt, so it's a
gamble that any novel from an unknown is going to
sell in any amount. Mine's already being pulled from
the shelves. The down side was the void of
promotion done by the publisher; but that is
apparently the norm for fiction.”
His strongest memories of the process of
writing the book revolve around the realisation that
he had a whole book completed. “I felt that I had a
whole novel, that my writing and ideas were coming
together,” he enthuses. “The first few rejection letters
from agents were hard. But I ended up with enough
of them that they lost their meaning!”
McDonald is hopeful about the future of
the novel in this country. “Australian literature is
original, of very high literary merit compared with
much of the rest of the western world, and an apt
reflection of and reaction to our society. But it needs
continued support.”
______________________________________
Stop Press…just heard of a new anthology edited by
Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft Unbound. Contents: Houses
Under the Sea Caitlin R. Kiernan;
The Din of Celestial Birds Brian Evenson; In the
Black Mill Michael Chabon; Commencement Joyce
Carol Oates ; One Day, Soon Lavie Tidhar ; Catch
Hell Laird Barron ; Machines of Concrete Light and
Dark Michael Cisco; Leng Marc Laidlaw; Sight
Unseen Joel Lane; Vernon, Driving Simon Kurt
Unsworth; Marya Nox Gemma Files; That of Which
We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable
Nick Mamatas ; Sincerely, Petrified Anna Tambour;
The Tenderness of Jackals Amanda Downum ;
The Office of Doom Richard Bowes; Mongoose
Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear ; Cold Water
Survival Holly Phillips; The Recruiter Michael Shea;
The Crevasse Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud;
Come Lurk with Me and Be My Love William
Browning Spencer.
THE LIMINAL LOVECRAFT
A series examining tales of Lovecraft which have to
date received little critical attention.
1: SOME NOTES ON LOVECRAFT’S
“THE TRANSITION
OF JUAN ROMERO”
© 2009 Leigh Blackmore
“I yearned to Shew what ought to be done”
Figure 3: Lovecraft in 1919
Let us confess at the outset
that this tale is a
comparatively minor one of
Lovecraft’s. It tells of events
which took place in the gold-
mining country of the
American West at the Norton
Mine on October 18 and 19,
1894.
Lovecraft wrote the tale in 1919; he was
then aged 29. He had resumed writing fiction (after
an eight-year hiatus) with “‘The Tomb” (June 1917).
In March 1919 his mother, Sarah Susan Lovecraft,
was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence. In
September of 1919 he discovered the work of Lord
Dunsany, which was to influence him greatly for
some years to come. (In November of 1919 Lovecraft
actually heard Dunsany lecture at an amateur
convention in Boston).
There is only one reference in Lovecraft’s
letters roughly contemporaneous with the story’s
composition, which occurs in a letter to the Gallomo
[April 1920]. Lovecraft says “My next – “Juan
Romero” – was written merely as a reaction from
copying a dull yarn by Phil Mac. He had made such a
commonplace adventure yarn from a richly
significant setting, that I yearned to shew what ought
to be done with such a setting” (LVW, 69 and LAG
83). (“Phil Mac” was the amateur writer Prof Phillip
B. Macdonald, who contributed several articles to
magazines such as The Vagrant, The United Co-
operative and even to Lovecraft’s The Conservative.
Lovecraft had previously taken Macdonald to task
for belittling the importance of classical authors).
Other references to the tale occur in letters
to Robert H. Barlow, commencing with one of Mar
12, 1932: “There is a repudiated story of mine [so far
below my standard that I wouldn’t have it in print
under any circumstances] called “The Transition of
Juan Romero” which is also innocent of type, &
which you could have for nothing if you’d be willing
to type me a private copy for my files. Possibly,
though, a frankly poor story wouldn’t make a good
collector’s item.” (OFF, letter 25). On Mar 21, 1932,
Lovecraft sent a couple of tales including
“Transition” to Barlow. He wrote: “Here are the
stories mentioned -- neither much to brag about!
Don’t feel obliged to copy “Juan Romero” unless you
want to keep a copy. I want only one, & this scrawl is
plenty so far as I’m concerned. Neither of these items
has been in any kind of print.” (OFF, letter 26). In
another letter dated ten days later (Mar 31), he wrote:
“Dear Mr. Barlow: --To be sure -- keep the MS. of
“Juan Romero” if you wish. I fear that it is rather a
poor tale, & doubt if it would be worth working
over.” (OFF, letter 27). On April 14 that year,
Lovecraft referred to the story again in writing to
Barlow: “No hurry at all about “Juan Romero”. I
hadn’t look[ed] at it for ten years when I dug it out, &
probably shan’t want to see it again in less than that
time. About the inverted question-mark -- it must
have been in connexion with a quotation in Spanish.
In Spanish interrogative & exclamatory phrases have
marks before as well as after -- the first one being
inverted. Thus: ¿Quien va? or ¡Que lastima! It surely
does make a problem for an exclusively ‘English-
speaking’ typewriter.” (OFF, letter 28). On May 19,
1932, Lovecraft was staying with Frank Belknap Long
in New York before embarking on a trip through
Southern states. He wrote Barlow that he had
received the copy of “Transition” that Barlow had
prepared: “Thanks indeed for “Romero” -- the copy
of which is better than I’d have made. I read it over
for the first time in over a decade, & have to admit
that it’s a pretty poor attempt at a story. I don’t blame
editors for rejecting it.” (OFF, letter 31). In March
1934, a letter to Barlow mentions “Transition” again,
in the context of tales which Lovecraft has expunged
from his list of acknowledged writings. He refers to
“Transition” as “a failure.” (He here mentions half a
dozen other tales he also considers failures, including
“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and “The
Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”) (OFF, letter 66). A
letter of Sept 1934 to Barlow has the comment that:
“As to what forms my earliest longhand fiction MS. --
if the “Beast” is indeed lost, as I fear it is, I suppose
“Juan Romero” would be it. I didn’t recall that this
was in longhand till you reminded me of it.” (OFF,
letter 94). While Lovecraft often denigrated various
of his tales in which others saw worth, his references
to “Transition” make it clear that he considered the
tale one of his earliest and least successful efforts.
Perhaps because of this, “Transition” has
been little studied, not warranting even a mention in
de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography or in book-length
studies of Lovecraft by the likes of Timo Airaksinen,
Donald R. Burleson, and Maurice Levy. Peter
Cannon merely mentions it in passing. S.T. Joshi’s
Starmont Reader’s Guide on Lovecraft of 1982 does not
discuss the tale, though Joshi does address it in his
later books including his biography of Lovecraft.
Joshi’s bibliography of Lovecraft lists no critical
articles about the tale. T.E.D. Klein touches briefly
upon the tale in his introduction (“A Dreamer’s
Tales”) to the corrected Arkham House edition of
Dagon (D, xxxiii), but only to comment that the
narrator of the tale is a typical Lovecraft narrator –
well-travelled, well-educated, and able to quote lines
from Prescott and Poe despite now working as a
common labourer in a mine.
Darrell Schweitzer has adjudged it be
“much worse” than the contemporaneous minor
story “Old Bugs.” He summarises the plot as follows:
“The protagonist is even more reticent than most
HPL narrators, and never does say exactly what
happens. A blast in a gold mine reveals a vast abyss,
from which eldritch throbbing sounds emanate. The
hero and a Mexican laborer investigate, and
something shocking happens to Romero. Then the
scene shifts to a bunkhouse, where the narrator is
awakened and Romero is dead. All witnesses insist
they never left the room, but mysterious glowing
Hindu ring is gone…” (Schweitzer, 9). Schweitzer
doesn’t venture an opinion as to why the tale is
supposedly so bad. S.T. Joshi merely considers that
the tale is “not an entire success” (Subtler Magick, 59),
an opinion with which I concur. Nevertheless, I
believe all of Lovecraft’s tales deserve critical
examination; hence while ”Transition” can be
regarded as an apprentice effort, there is much of
interest to be found in this story if we look hard
enough.
We may assume that the tale was
conceived and written quickly, for the manuscript
bears a single day’s date – September 16, 1919. The
tale was published for the first time in Marginalia
(Arkham House, 1944), edited by August Derleth and
Donald Wandrei. The editors called it an example of
Lovecraft’s “middle work…which was written not
long before “The Picture in the House,” commenting
that “the advance from it to this latter story is
remarkable” (Marginalia, vi).
S.T. Joshi has written of Lovecraft’s
disavowal of the tale. “Lovecraft recognised that
“The Transition of Juan Romero” was a false start,
and he refused to allow it to be published, even in the
amateur press. He disavowed it relatively early in life
and it fails to appear on most lists of his stories; he
does not seem to have shown it to anyone until 1932,
when R.H. Barlow badgered him into sending him
the manuscript so that he could prepare a typescript
of it.” (HP Lovecraft: A Life, 168).
But at least Lovecraft did not destroy the
tale, as he had done with many of his other early
fictional efforts. While not on a par with Lovecraft’s
most accomplished later tales, “Transition”’s motifs
foreshadow themes which are central to Lovecraft’s
later fiction, and thus “Transition” is not wholly
without interest.
The narrator of the tale remains nameless –
but he implies he is an immigrant to the United
States, for he says “my name and origin need not be
related to posterity; in fact, I fancy it is better that
they should not be, for when a man suddenly
migrates to the States or the Colonies, he leaves his
past behind him” (D, 337). We learn of him that his
present name “is very common and carries no
meaning”; it is a name he has “accepted” (or more
likely, adopted) presumably for the purposes of
remaining anonymous. But we do learn some facts
about him. We deduce that he is English, for he refers
to his use of “Oxonian Spanish” when speaking to
Romero. (“Oxonian” is a term for a student of Oxford
University in England). He has served in India, and
admits: “I was more at home amongst the white-
bearded native teachers than amongst my brother
officers. I had delved not a little into odd Eastern lore
when overtaken by the calamities which brought my
new life in America’s vast West.” He does not specify
the nature of these calamities and we must be
satisfied with a subtle implication that perhaps it has
something to do with the Hindu ring that he wears.
(Lovecraft spells it in the old style of “Hindoo.”) R.
Boerem comments that the narrator of “Transition”
“left his life as a British officer apparently because of
some scandal.” (Boerem, 266).
Lovecraft sets up this nameless narrator,
then, as someone who has already seen or researched
some mysteries. We also learn that he is telling this
tale “in these last years of my life”, and that despite
having no desire to speak of what he calls the
“Transition” of Juan Romero, all that impels him to
recall the story is “a sense of duty to science.”
The setting of the tale is unusual in
Lovecraft’s oeuvre, as compared with that of many of
his later tales which are set in the vicinity of the
Eastern States – New England and so on. It is his only
tale set in the Southwest apart from the revisions
“The Curse of Yig” and ‘The Mound.” Norton Mine
is said to be located in the “drear expanses of the
Cactus Mountains.” This appears to be a fictitious
location, although there is a real Cactus Mountain in
Fremont County, Colorado in America’s West and
one in Wallowa County, Oregon on America’s West
Coast. Joshi speculates that the Norton Mine is
“somewhere in the Southwest, one imagines,
although Lovecraft is not specific as to the actual
location” (HP Lovecraft: A Life, 167), but as Joshi has
pointed out to me (email to LDB, Mar 13, 2009), the
possibility of the story being set in Colorado or
Oregon is nil; the prevalence of Mexican “peons”
must mean the story is set in one of the States
bordering on Mexico, probably Arizona or New
Mexico.
The mines have been started due to the
discovery some years previous by an “aged
prospector” of “a cavern of gold, lying deep below a
mountain lake” (D, 337). Since then, “additional
grottoes had been found, and the yield of yellow
metal was exceedingly great”; a minor character, Mr
Arthur, the mine Superintendent, speculates on the
probable extent of what Lovecraft calls, in a delicious
phrase typical of his Latinate vocabulary, “auriferous
cavities.” (D, 337).
There is a “Jewel Lake” in the vicinity of
the mines and their adjacent caverns in the tale.
There is a real Jewel Lake in Jackson County,
Colorado but no Jewel Lake in Oregon. As we have
seen, these states are unlikely to be the setting for the
story; and in any case, the name is not so unusual
that Lovecraft could not simply have invented it.
The narrator becomes friendly with a
Mexican peon named Juan Romero, of whom we
learn several things. Described as “ignorant and
dirty”, (D, 338), he had been found as a child in a
crude mountain hut, “the only survivor of an
epidemic which had stalked lethally by.” Two
skeletons found nearby were presumably those of his
parents. An avalanche closed a rather unusual rock
fissure nearby the skeletons and Romero was reared
by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his
name. One wonders whether Lovecraft is implying
something here about Romero’s mysterious origins
lying in the caverns beneath the earth, but
unfortunately he has not given enough for us to do
more than speculate.
Romero seems of different blood to the rest
of the “unkempt Mexicans” attracted to the mine. “It
was not the Castilian conquistador or the American
pioneer, but the ancient and noble Aztec whom
imagination called to view when the silent peon
would rise in the early morning and gaze in
fascination at the sun as it crept above the eastern
hills, meanwhile stretching out his arms to the orb as
if in the performance of some rite whose nature he
himself did not comprehend.” (D, 338). Is Lovecraft
hinting here that Romero is actually of Aztec blood?
If so, does that imply that the later horror has some
connection with Aztec rites or history? This is never
made clear.
There is also an example of Lovecraft’s
racism in the phrase where Lovecraft says Romero
“first commanded attention only because of his
features; which though plainly of the Red Indian
type, were yet remarkable for their light colour and
refined conformation, being vastly unlike those of the
average “Greaser” or Piute of the locality.” (D, 338).
Apart from the pejorative term “greaser”
which Lovecraft applies to the Mexicans (one hardly
thinks Indo-Americans of today would take kindly to
this terminology!), Lovecraft is subtly hinting that
Romero’s racial stock is more acceptable because he
is a bit closer to the white man – the “lighter colour”
and “refined conformation” mean he is one step up
from the other natives. This is in accord with
Lovecraft’s racial attitudes at the time he wrote
“Transition.”
“Paiutes” or “Piutes” refers to two related
groups of native American peoples, who hailed from
the states east of Colorado – Oregon, Nevada,
California, and Utah and Arizona. These native
American tribes spoke a language known as ‘Uto-
Aztecan’. It would be fascinating to learn more of
Lovecraft’s possible research sources for the native
American references he puts into “Transition”;
perhaps they derived from his delvings into his set of
Encyclopedia Britannica, but this is only a guess.
The night that the new vein at the mine is
dynamited, instead of a rich vein of gold, an
inconceivably deep gorge is revealed. As a storm
gathers, Romero hears above it, weird sounds
coming from the earth, which he dubs “el ritmo de la
tierra – THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!”.
The narrator, who also hears the throbbings, likens
them to the strange chantings of Orientals whom he
had heard when he was in India. Becoming obsessed
with the throbbing sounds, Romero charges
headlong toward the gorge, with narrator close
behind.
Romero starts to repeat the cry
“Huitzilopochtli” as the two characters plunge down
a succession of abysses into the vast rift, as the
narrator’s ring lights the way: “I realised that the
ancient ring on my finger was glowing with eerie
radiance, diffusing a pallid luster through the damp,
heavy air around.” (D, 341). The narrator later
shudders when he learns the association of that
word, which he says he placed in the words of a
great historian. (Only a note indicates that this is
Prescott’s [History of the] Conquest of Mexico).
Huitzilopochtli was a war god, legendary wizard and
sun god of the Aztecs. (This ties in with Romero’s
apparent gesture of homage to the sun earlier in the
tale). The god was often represented in art as a
hummingbird, with a black face, and holding a snake
and a mirror. There are many legends about him,
however none seems especially enlightening in
regard to the action of “Transition.” Most likely
Lovecraft was throwing his name in here as a touch
of exotic strangeness, much as he did later in “The
Rats in the Walls” with its references to strange gods
like Atys and the Magna Mater.
Lovecraft seems not to have had a copy of
Prescott in his library, and he does not refer to
Prescott in his letters, but he may well have read the
volume – it had been published in 1843 and was for
many years a standard volume on the history of
Mexico. While there are no references to the Aztecs in
his letters published in the Arkham House Selected
Letters volumes, we know that Lovecraft was quite
interested in this ancient civilisation. (And here I
must extend my thanks to David E. Schultz for
performing a keyword search on his database of
Lovecraft letters which revealed the following).
[add details on Aztec refs]
If Lovecraft had read Prescott’s book he
might have been intrigued by the mention of
Huitzilopochtli in Chapter Three of Prescott’s
volume where the author states:
“At the head of all stood the terrible
Huitzilopochtli, the Mexican Mars; although it is
doing injustice to the heroic war-god of antiquity to
identify him with this sanguinary monster. This was
the patron deity of the nation.
His fantastic image was loaded
with costly ornaments. His
temples were the most stately
and august of the public
edifices; and his altars reeked
with the blood of human
hecatombs in every city of the
empire. Disastrous, indeed, must have been the
influence of such a superstition on the character of
the people.” A note includes the information that
“Huitzilopochtli is compounded of two words,
signifying "humming-bird," and "left," from his
image having the feathers of this bird on its left foot.”
On another note, Lovecraft’s inordinate
fondness for “gibbous moons” (that is to say, moons
which are three-quarters full during either the
waxing or waning part of the lunar cycle) led him
look up the moon’s phases for October, 1894 to find
when a gibbous moon was visible at 2 a.m., and to
change the dates of the story to fit. “Here is a lesson
in scientific accuracy for fiction writers” he wrote in
the appended note. (D, 340).
The tale continues as Romero apparently
perishes, and the narrator witnesses some
inexplicable phenomenon: “shapes, all infinitely
distant began to detach themselves from the
confusion” (D, 342). Then there strikes a titanic
lightning-bolt which knocks the narrator
unconscious. The next morning he awakes, and the
men of the camp perform an autopsy on the body of
Romero, whose dead body has been found in his
bunk. The men swear that neither the narrator nor
Romero left their cabin the night before; the narrator
finds that his Hindu ring is missing.
The Influence of Jonathan Hoag
Apart from Lovecraft’s desire to top “Phil Mac’s” use
of a somewhat exotic setting, another important
influence upon the genesis of “Transition” appears to
have been a line in a poem by Jonathan Hoag, a
contemporary of Lovecraft’s to whom he dedicated a
number of his own poems. Lovecraft also wrote a
preface for Hoag’s poetry collection. George Wetzel
has pointed out in his “The Cthulhu Mythos: A
Study” that in that preface Lovecraft quoted a line
from Hoag’s “To the Grand Canyons of Colorado”
(1919) where in black caves “vast nameless satyrs
dance with noiseless feet.” Wetzel feels this imagery
recurs in “Transition” (as well as in Chapter Five of
“At the Mountains of Madness”). (Wetzel, 93).
Certainly the chronological placement of Hoag’s
poem in the same year as the composition of
Lovecraft’s story lends credence to the possible
influence of this phrase. The mention of Colorado in
the title of Hoag’s poem is, of course, not a clue to the
geographical setting of “Transition”, for it refers to
the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the term “the
Colorado” refers not to the state of Colorado but to
the Colorado River. (Thanks again to S.T. Joshi for
clarifying this).
The Influence of Poe and ‘Sonic Horror’.
I believe the influence of Poe shows heavily in
“Transition”. Lovecraft had first read Poe at the age
of eight. A letter in Selected Letters II, quoted by Joshi
in H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (p. 27) makes this clear: “Then
I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!! It was my downfall,
and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of
Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal
exhalations of the tomb!” We know from the
catalogue of Lovecraft’s library (see Joshi in Works
Cited) and references in Lovecraft’s Selected Letters
about the editions of Poe that Lovecraft owned; they
included the Raven edition of The Works of Edgar
Allan Poe in 5 volumes published in 1903 by P.F.
Collier and Sons. While it doesn’t follow that
Lovecraft owned this set as from its publication date,
and while I have not spent the time to ascertain (if
indeed it can be ascertained) when Lovecraft first
read “The Tell-Tale Heart”, we can confidently assert
that Lovecraft had absorbed the bulk of Poe’s best-
known tales and poems including “The Tell-Tale
Heart” well before the time he came to write
“Transition’. We shall discuss the influence of Poe’s
tale presently.
A central motif in “Transition” is the mysterious
throbbing which comes from underground and
which draws Romero and the narrator on to
investigate the cavern. The word “throbbing” means
“to beat with increased force or rapidly, as the heart
under influence of emotion or excitement; palpitate.”
(Italics mine). What more appropriate sensation
could be utilised in a horror tale? Lovecraft may have
used this motif in “Transition” as a semi-conscious
device to indicate the increased excitement of a heart
beating due to the anticipation or encountering of a
horror and perhaps to assist in evoking the requisite
sense of fearful anticipation in the reader.
Poe used the motif of “throbbing” to indicate horror
in several of his works. The poem “For Annie”
includes the following lines as its fourth stanza:
The moaning and groaning,
The sighing and sobbing
Are quieted now,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart: -- ah, that horrible,
Horrible throbbing!
The throbbing in that poem seems to form part of the
“the fever called Living that burned” in the brain of
the poet.
Poe’s poem “To F—
“includes the “Some ocean
throbbing far and free”, although
contextually the throbbing in that
poem forms part of the poet’s
memory of his beloved which is a
positive, rather than a disturbing
memory.
What we may term
“sonic horror” is also exemplified
in Poe’s poem “The Bells”. The last
stanza of this celebrated poem
deals with the solemn iron bells.
Some of the lines include a
reference to throbbing:
To the throbbing of the bells
Of the bells, bells, bells, --
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time…
Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet cycle
(1929-30) also contains many references to the
horrible nature of throbbing or beating, usually in the
form of the chiming of bells.
Lovecraft’s own sonnet “The Bells” in the
“Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence centres on the
memories of a past life evoked by
“…that faint, far ringing
Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind”.
The narrator is beckoned:
“…back through gateways of recalling
to elder towers where the mad clappers tolled”.
Whether or not Lovecraft’s sonnet was
partly inspired by Poe’s poem of the same title, there
can be no doubt that the notion of bells tolling, that
is, a continuous insistent sound akin to throbbing, is
integral to Lovecraft’s notion of the horror in the
poem. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” ends with the
words: “I felt that I must scream or die! -- and now --
again -- hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER! --
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the
deed! -- tear up the planks! -- here, here! -- it is the
beating of his hideous heart!" The main motif in the
story is the psychological pressure exerted upon the
protagonist by the beating of the heart of the old man
whom he has killed. (That the beating of the heart
after the old man is dead may be imaginary does not
matter in the least). Lovecraft must have been highly
affected by this tale, with its motif of the insistent
beating or throbbing of the heart, and the horror
arising therefrom. The centrality of the motif of
horrible throbbing sound in “Transition” certainly
seems to owe much to the similar motif in Poe’s tale.
Consider also this passage from Poe’s “The
Tell-Tale Heart (1843): “And now--have I not told
you that what you mistake for madness is but over-
acuteness of the senses?--now, I say, there came to
my ears a low, dull, quick sound,
such as a watch makes when
enveloped in cotton. I knew that
sound well too. It was the beating
of the old man's heart. It
increased my fury, as the beating
of a drum stimulates the soldier
into courage.”
The key word in Poe’s tale is “beating”
rather than “throbbing”, and yet these words are
closely connected in sense. I would suggest that the
motif of a horrible beating or throbbing as Lovecraft
read it in Poe influenced “Transition”. It may even
have influenced other instances of “sonic horror” in
his work. Consider the way Azathoth is usually
described, e.g. “[O]utside the ordered universe [is]
that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion
which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all
infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth,
whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who
gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted
chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled,
maddening beating of vile drums and the thin
monotonous whine of accursed flutes” (“Dream-
Quest of Unknown Kadath” (Autumn-22 Jan 1927).
(MM, 308).
Clearly, for Lovecraft, certain sounds
were associated with horror. In the description of
Azathoth we have “maddening beating of vile
drums”. This sound is closely akin to the notion of
“throbbing”. (Indeed, notice again the Poe passage
from “The Tell-Tale Heart” quoted above and Poe’s
comparison of the beating of a heart to “the beating
of a drum”. Note also the “muffled” nature of the
heartbeat sound in Poe’s tale: it makes a sound “such
as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”. This
may form an analogue to the “muffled, maddening”
nature of the vile drums in the Azathoth
descriptions.
 I don’t believe it is drawing too long a bow
to suggest that Lovecraft absorbed the references to
“beating” and “throbbing” (and perhaps to the idea
of the noxious sound of certain instruments in Poe’s
work), and utilised them as suggestive of horror in
“Transition” and perhaps other works of his. Most
likely Lovecraft already had a psychological aversion
to certain types of sound, so that on encountering
Poe’s use of “beating” and “throbbing”, the motif
struck a chord with Lovecraft.
Another Poe influence is discernible in the
tale. The narrator says that to his mind “rushed
fragments of a passage in Joseph Glanvill which Poe
has quoted with tremendous effect:
"..... the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness
of His works, which have a depth in them greater than
the well of Democritus."
This is, of course, the motto of Poe’s “A
Descent Into the Maelstrom”. It is evidence of the
very profound effect which various works of Poe’s
had on Lovecraft, and his citation of this passage
from Glanvill (author of the work on witchcraft,
Sadducismus Triumphatus) by way of Poe inextricably
links the horrible abysses of “Transition” with the
terrible watery abyss of Poe’s “Descent.” (Lovecraft
also cites Glanvill in “The Festival,” in which the
narrator notices Glanvill’s book in the house on
Green Lane in Kingsport, Massachusetts).
Lovecraft likely had a
purpose in citing the Glanvill
quotation which went beyond
simply a tip of the hat to Poe. The
mention of Democritus in the
Glanville quotation is telling, for
Democritus was one of the pre-
Socratic philosophers who co-
founded atomism, reasoning that
space is a “void” of finite size in which float
innumerable particles – the atoms – too miniscule to
be perceivable by the senses, but which have formed
the heavens (earth and the planets). Atoms could not
destroyed, only changed from one form to another
over time. Democritus’ philosophy is crucial to
mechanistic materialism, the philosophy to which
Lovecraft adhered. Since a well (or a cavern) dug
deep in the earth is also a “void” of great depth,
Glanvill used “the well of Democritus” to
figuratively represent the infinite Void of our
physical universe. (I am indebted to the entry on
Glanvill in Anthony Pearsall’s The Lovecraft Lexicon
for bringing this point to my attention).
By referring to Democritus in “Transition”,
Lovecraft is offering us a clue to his own philosophy
– a completely non-supernatural one – and this
elevates the basis of the horror in “Transition” from
an instance of supernatural occurrence to a
manifestation of the strangeness of the cosmos itself.
On this point, “Transition” is very much in keeping
with Lovecraft’s interest in “cosmic outsideness.”
But let us return to the sonic motifs in
“Fungi from Yuggoth”. The “fungus” “Mirage” also
includes the notion of tolling bells: “evening chimes
for which I listen still”. And of course, in “St Toad’s”,
the phrase “St Toad’s cracked chimes” is repeated
thrice; another instance of insistent repetitive sound
drawing the narrator on to some unspecified doom.
Very similar in function, (that is, the notion of a sort
of “unearthly music”), are the harbour-whistles of
“Harbour Whistles”:
“The harbour whistles chant all through the night;
Throats from some strange ports and beach far and white,”
While the motif of chanting or whistling in this
particular sonnet is perhaps a step removed from the
tolling of chimes that occurs in other fungi, and
which corresponds in effect to the throbbing in
“Transition”, it is another instance of Lovecraft’s
fascination with the effects of repetitive sound.
In “The Elder Pharos”, the imagery of the
insistent sound of drums of is recapitulated:
“the last Elder One lives on alone,
Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums”. (Italics mine)
The theme of throbbing sound in
“Transition”, then, can be seen as an early instance
of a theme of sonic horror which runs like a thread
through of Lovecraft’s works.
The horror of sound and repeated cries
also figure largely in “The Nameless City” (1921) and
“At the Mountains of Madness” (Feb-22 Mar, 1931),
but this may be the subject for another essay.
The Alleged Influence of Ambrose Bierce
Chris Perridas of the HP Lovecraft
and His Legacy blog has suggested
that “Transition” is reminiscent in
places of various phrases to be
found in several tales by Ambrose
Bierce. Lovecraft did read Bierce
at Samuel Loveman’s prompting
sometime in 1919. I am not entirely convinced by all
the similarities of phrase that Perridas adduces
between phrases in “Transition” and in tales of
Bierce’s such as ‘The Moonlit Road”, “The Eyes of the
Panther”, “The Night-Doings at ‘Deadman’s” and
“The Damned Thing”. Some of them, however, are
suggestive, and interested readers should check the
detailed textual comparison made by Perridas by
consulting:
http://chrisperridas.blogspot.com/search/label/The%2
0Transition
Inconceivable Depths
“Transition” ends with these thoughts of
the narrator: My opinion of my whole experience
varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at
most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a
mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about
two in the morning when the winds and animals
howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths
below [italics mine] a damnable suggestion of
rhythmical throbbing ...and I feel that the transition
of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.
 The phrase “inconceivable depths below”
adumbrates a similar and more memorable phrase
used in Lovecraft’s later story “The Rats in the
Walls.” Who can forget the following resonant
sentence from that tale? “These creatures, in numbers
apparently inexhaustible, were engaged in one
stupendous migration from inconceivable heights to
some depth conceivably or inconceivably below. (Italics
mine). The word “inconceivable”, we may recall, also
occurs in the description of Azathoth from the
“Dream-Quest” as quoted above – Azathoth “gnaws
hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers.”
“Inconceivable” is a partial semiotic analogue of
“nameless” or “unnamable”; another example of
Lovecraft’s use of non-explicitness in his horror
fiction to increase the frisson provided to the reader.
The Charge of Excessive Vagueness
Joshi has criticised “Transition” because it
“suffers from excessive vagueness” (HP Lovecraft: A
Life, 167). While the story is certainly not satisfactory
in all its aspects, I take issue with Joshi on this point
to some extent. Hints and portents, the technique of
keeping the actual horror offstage, form an integral
part of Lovecraft’s technique in later stories.
Let us cite just a few examples. Recall “The
Unnamable” (1923), whose very point is that some
horrors must remain nameless because they cannot
be described. Again, consider the vague yet
portentous references Danforth utters at the end of
“At the Mountains of Madness”: “ He has on rare
occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible
things about "The black pit," "the carven rim," "the
protoShoggoths," "the windowless solids with five
dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder
Pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the
color out of space," "the wings," "the eyes in
darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the
eternal, the undying," (MM, 106). We know from
other tales at least something about the nature of the
colour out of space, and about Yog-Sothoth, and
about the Elder Pharos (for which see the “fungus” of
that title); but Danforth’s other mutterings point to
strange and perhaps inexplicable places, things and
experiences. There are many such instances of
deliberate “vaguery” in Lovecraft’s work. Take, for
instance, the concluding two lines of the “fungus”
“The Pigeon-Flyers”:
“The other laughed – till struck too mute to speak
By what they glimpsed in one bird’s evil beak.”
Well, what was it that was in that bird’s
evil beak? We are not meant to know, but to imagine.
And yet such a passage has not been subject to
criticism for “excessive vaguery.” The same may be
said of the figure of the High Priest Not to Be
Described in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown
Kadath”. This figure, which wears a yellow silken
mask over its face, is of unknown identity and its face
is likewise unknown. This figure recurs in the
“fungus” “The Elder Pharos” where it is said, of a
mysterious blue ray which shoots out from the
plateau of Leng, that
“Many, in man’s first youth, sought out that glow,
But what they found, no one will ever know”. (Italics
mine).
These instances of vaguery could be
interpreted as meaning that Lovecraft himself did not
know what the mystery was; but I suggest he
deliberately utilised this artistic technique to impart
more horror than could be achieved by describing
the mystery outright. That great weird tale “The
Night Ocean” by R.H. Barlow and Lovecraft
(Autumn? 1936) could also be criticised for
“excessive vagueness”; but few would disagree that
in the authors’ refusal to delineate the actual nature
of the horror lies the story’s very imaginative power.
I believe that “The Transition of Juan Romero” is the
more effective for leaving the horror ill-defined,
whereas an artificial horror brought on stage may
have lessened its power of suggestion.
Similarly, let us consider that passage from
“The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) where Edward
Derby sputters out his wild tale of the events in the
Chesuncook woods to his friend Daniel Upton: “Dan,
for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the
six thousand steps... the abomination of
abominations...” Once again we are given vagaries by
Lovecraft – but highly suggestive vagaries. The effect
of a phrase such as “the abomination of
abominations” here is to allow the reader to form a
picture of the horror in their own mind. This is the
same technique that Lovecraft has utilised in
“Transition”.
I suggest that in refusing to delineate the
actual nature of the horror glimpsed by the narrator
in “Transition”, Lovecraft was beginning to work out
in practice his theoretical position that horrors too
specifically defined on the page are ineffectual. (Of
course, the scientific precision with which he
describes, for instance, the dead Old One in “At the
Mountains of Madness” or the dead Wilbur
Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) or the
statuette of Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu”
(Summer 1926) could be seen as undermining this
argument; but this scientific precision formed
another aspect of Lovecraft’s abilities as fiction
writer. It seems there were circumstances where
Lovecraft felt indefiniteness was the best policy, and
other circumstances where a very careful delineation
of a horror or alien being lent the narrative a sense of
authenticity not otherwise obtainable).
In regard to the plot of “Transition”, it is
true that Lovecraft left things unclear or unresolved.
What, for instance, is the exact function or relevance
of the Hindu ring worn by the narrator, by which
Juan Romero becomes so fascinated, and which goes
missing at the end of the tale? Are we to assume that
Romero’s death and transition has something to do
with its disappearance? Or are we to assume that the
dark hints about the narrator’s having delved into
mysteries into India mean the ring is imbued with
some special power? If so, has this power aided or
hindered in the events of the tale? We know that
Romero is fascinated by the “hoary hieroglyphs” on
the ring (presumably these are characters in Sanskrit)
and that the ring “glistens queerly in every flash of
lightning” but that is all. Why is it that the ring has
the power to light the narrator’s way as he chases
Romero into the mines? Lovecraft has certainly not
made any of this clear. Let us frankly admit
therefore, that in some essentials the story is
weakened considerably and that charge of excessive
vagueness can be justifiably levelled in regard to plot
points such as this.
The Abyss Too Deep to Sound
The motif of the “abyss too deep to sound”
also recurs in Lovecraft’s work as a constant motif.
Consider the last two lines of the “fungus” “The
Well” :
“And yet we put the bricks back – for we found
The hole too deep for any line to sound.”
“The Transition of Juan Romero” can be
seen as an effective early example of Lovecraft’s
utilisation of the idea of horrors buried, submerged
or lurking in the hidden recesses of our planet. We
see this theme continuing to fascinate Lovecraft as
late as “The Haunter of the Dark” (Nov 1935) where
the character Robert Blake is made the author of
stories which include “The Burrowers Beneath” ( a
title which Brian Lumley, of course, later borrowed
for one of his early ventures into Mythos fiction).
Compare the theme of the “fungus” “The
Dweller” with “Transition”; it is essentially about a
nameless city unearthed by diggers who then
encounter an unseen but horrifying force or creature.
Its final two lines:
“We cleared a path – but raced in mad retreat
When from below we heard those clumping
feet”
encapsulate essentially the same emotions
of horror that occur in “Transition”, though in the
story there are no “clumping feet”. Lovecraft then, in
“Transition” was groping towards a motif which
would find more elaborate expression in many of his
later tales.
For Lovecraft, the suggestion that the earth
is riddled with unknown and horrific creatures or
presences is a constant source of horror; this is one of
the most pervasive themes in his fiction. Many of his
tales, like “Transition,” imply that the ground we
walk on is merely a thin crust over unimaginable
horrors.
One need only consider the cavern of “The
Beast in the Cave” (21 Apr, 1905) with its degenerate
human within; the degenerate Martense family of
“The Lurking Fear” (Nov 1922) with their
subterranean mound-burrows which honeycomb the
underneath of Tempest Mountain; or the descent into
subterrene spaces which reveals successively
frightful horrors in “The Rats in the Walls” (Aug or
Sept 1923), to see this demonstrated in Lovecraft’s
fiction. Other examples include the titan creature
buried in the cellar in “The Shunned House” (Oct
1924); the descent into the Pyramid and the
encounter with the hybrid monsters of “Under the
Pyramids” (1924); Pickman’s painting “Subway
Accident” in “Pickman’s Model” (1926) and other
revelations in this story concerning what may lurk
beneath modern cities such as Boston, and the
narrator’s consequent fear of subways and other
underground places; “The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward” (Jan-1 Mar, 1927) with its hideous creatures
locked up in the deep pits of Ward’s catacomb; and
of course, the many instances of horror living in the
deep places of the sea, such as in “Dagon:” (July
1917), “The Temple” (1920), “The Call of Cthulhu”
(Summer 1926),“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
(Nov?-3 Dec 1931), etc. Let us recall also that phrase
from The Necronomicon cited in “The Festival”: “Great
holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought
to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought
to crawl. (“The Festival,” 216). (Clark Ashton Smith
echoed this quotation in an extended quotation from
the Necronomicon is his tale “The Nameless
Offspring” (1932): “Many and multiform are the dim
horrors of earth, infesting her ways from the
prime…”. (Smith, 3).
I suspect that both Lovecraft and Smith
partly derived this concept from the alliterative
opening of Poe’s “Berenice” – “Misery is manifold.
The wretchedness of earth is multiform.” But I
digress).
The parallelism of plot between
“Transition” and ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter”
may seem too obvious to mention. In both stories,
two men venture into an underground location (in
“Statement” it is a crypt) and encounter a force or
creature (or creatures) of such hideousness or horror
that the first enterer dies. Harley Warren in
“Statement’ perishes; so does ‘Romero” in
“Transition”; though Warren dies underground and
Romero’s body is found next morning in his bunk.
“Statement” was written some two months later than
“Transition”, and I would be tempted to venture the
opinion that “Transition” was in some senses a
tryout for “Statement”, save for the obvious and
well-recorded fact that “Statement” derived almost
wholly from a nightmare of Lovecraft’s. (SL I, 94)
It is interesting to speculate, since the two
stories are so chronologically close in composition,
whether the dream which caused Lovecraft to write
“Statement” was in some wise derived from the
imagery of “Transition”; that the theme of subterrene
horror was ‘surfacing’ in his work at this time is
clear, and there may be at the very least a
psychological connection between the two tales.
The Transition
What is the actual nature of the
“transition” of Romero per the story’s title? Clearly,
at one level, it is the simple transition from life to
death. Yet the tale obliquely suggests that there is
more involved in Romero’s transition than this – that
he has, perhaps, passed beyond the human plane due
to his encounter with force or forces unknown. In this
sense, Lovecraft’s tale implies that in encountering
some force or being which cannot be adequately
described in human language, that the narrator has
been privy to some terrible gnosis. Again, this is a
perennial theme of his work – the idea that in
unearthing (willingly or unwillingly) information on
the existence of beings on an order unguessed at by
puny humankind, the individual narrators and
characters of his stories gain an unwanted and
hideous knowledge of the insignificance of
humankind in the cosmos at large. “Transition”
adumbrates this theme to a marked degree.
Also, what are we to make of the claim
made by the men in the camp that neither Romero
nor the narrator left their cabin the night they entered
the vast rift? Were the men somehow hypnotized or
mistaken? If not, did Romero and the narrator enter
the rift in some non-corporeal state? And if that is the
case, why is it that Romero’s body has died after
encountering the unknown forces that inhabit the
cavernous void? Again, we can only speculate on the
explanations for these things, and one has to say that
Lovecraft did not do a very good job of tying
together these loose threads of the plot. Likewise, he
has incorporated references to both the widely
disparate Aztec and Hindu cultures, but there seems
no clear reason why these might be connected
through the events of the story. On these points,
Lovecraft has let the reader down; and it was
probably in recognising these facts that he refused to
allow the story to be published in his lifetime.
Deus ex Machina
At the climax of the story, when the
narrator looks into the final cavern which has
swallowed up “the unfortunate Romero”, there is a
terrible bolt of lightning which strikes the mountain:
“Some power from heaven, coming to my aid,
obliterated both sights and sounds in such a crash as
may be heard when two universes collide in space.
Chaos supervened, and I knew the peace of
oblivion”. While the phrase “power from heaven”
probably refers simply to the sky and is not meant in
any explicitly religious manner, as S.T. Joshi has
pointed out to me, this tendency to utilise deux ex
machina involving lightning-bolts which “supervene”
and bring “merciful oblivion” to the narrator of
various tales is one of Lovecraft’s least effective
literary devices. This is notwithstanding that
Lovecraft probably borrowed the device from Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” which has just such
a climax.
Lovecraft was fond of merciful oblivion –
recall the opening of “The Call of Cthulhu” – “The
most merciful thing in the world…” and that phrase
from “The Outsider” (1921) regarding the figure in
the mirror – “it was the awful baring of that which
the merciful earth should always hide”. As to
lightning and convenient thunderbolts, Lovecraft
used this awkward and unconvincing device again in
“The Picture in the House” (1920), where the tale
ends with the following: “I did not shriek or move,
but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the
titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that
accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing
the oblivion which alone saved my mind.” (DH 124),
an ending which has always seemed to me laughably
convenient. He verges on it in “The Lurking Fear”
(1922) which is rife with storms: the tale opens
“There was thunder in the air the night I went to the
deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the
lurking fear.” The last episodes of that tale take place
amidst “faint glows of lightning” (D, 198) and
“insane lightning over malignant ivied walls…” (D,
199). There is a far more mature use of a lightning
storm at the conclusion of “The Haunter of the
Dark” (1935) where the storm is integrated more
convincingly as part of the plot. “Transition”, with its
crash which obliterates the narrator’s consciousness,
is a fumbling first attempt to use this rather
ineffective device.
Conclusion
“The Transition of Juan Romero” is neither
a very good story nor a very bad one. It has its points
of interest but it remains a relatively insignificant tale
in Lovecraft’s corpus because of the unresolved
nature of various of its plot elements. One can at least
see in it in the partly-formed outlines of motifs and
themes that Lovecraft would use in his later fiction
when he had gained more command of his craft.
Works Cited
For Lovecraft’s works the following abbreviations
have been used in the text of this article.
AT: The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of
H.P. Lovecraft. San Francisco: Night-Shade Books,
2001.
D: Lovecraft, H.P. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.
Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, [1986] corrected ninth
printing (no date). Contains the corrected text of
“The Transition of Juan Romero”.
DH: Lovecraft, H. P. The Dunwich Horror and Others.
Sauk City, WI: Arkham House date/ corrected 11th
printing (no date).
LAG: Lovecraft, H.P. Letters to Alfred Galpin. (edited
by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz). NY:
Hippocampus Press, 2003.
LVW: Lovecraft, H.P. Lord of a Visible World: An
Autobiography in Letters. (edited by S.T. Joshi and
David E. Schultz). Athens, Oh: Ohio University Press,
2000.
M: Lovecraft, H.P. Marginalia. Sauk City, WI: Arkham
House, 1944.
MM: Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness and
Other Novels. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964;
corrected ninth printing (no date).
OFF: Lovecraft, H.P. O, Fortunate Floridian!:
Lovecraft’s Letters to R.H. Barlow. Tampa,FL:
University of Tampa Press, 2008. (edited by S.T. Joshi
and David E. Schultz). [I am grateful to S.T. Joshi for
supplying a .pdf of Lovecraft’s letters to Barlow to
me for the purposes of this essay as I had been
unable to purchase the published volume as yet;
hence references in the essay are quoted by letter
number rather than page number].
SLI: Lovecraft, H.P. Selected Letters I. Sauk City, WI:
Arkham House, 1965.
The following sources are listed alphabetically by
author.
Boerem, R. “Lovecraft and the Tradition of the
Gentleman Narrator” in David E. Schultz and S.T.
Joshi (eds). An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial
Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft.
Cranbury/London/ Mississauga: Associated
University Presses (Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press), 1991.
Joshi, S.T. H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI:
Necronomicon Press, Oct 1996 (2nd printing October
1997)
Joshi, S.T. and David E. Schultz (eds). An H. P.
Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2001.
I contemplate the stars -- those distant suns
Strewn in such huge profusion through the black
And boundless space of this vast universe.
Are their worlds, too, like our own wretched earth,
Centers of monstrous, obscene sufferings
Designed to glut the hungers of mad Gods --
The Things that fashioned our mad universe?
No answers come. At length I cook my meal
Of frugal beans and rice, then bed me down
Between my blankets on the leaf-soft ground,
Clutching my knife and pistol as I drift
Into a fitful and uneasy sleep,
Wondering what fears the pregnant Night might
spawn.
Feb. 23, 2009

Joshi, S.T. Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue: Revised and

Enlarged. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002. The August Derleth Centennial
Joshi, S.T. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Space doesn’t
Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo permit me to cover the
Press, 1996. August Derleth Centennial

Pearsall, Anthony. The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s in this issue in detail,

Guide to Persons, Places and Things in the Tales of H.P. but this important
Lovecraft. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 2005. occasion occurred on
Feb 24, 2009. (Feb 24
Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. NY: Library of also just happens to be the birth date of our fellow
America, 1984. SSWFT alumnus Phillip A. Ellis, poet and raconteur!)
Here are some images I nabbed off George
Schweitzer, Darrell. The Dream-Quest of H.P.Lovecraft. Vanderburgh’s blog (Vanderburgh runs Battered Tin
San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, May 1978. Dispatch Box, a Holmesian publisher which has close
ties with Arkham House).
Smith, Clark Ashton. The Abominations of Yondo. Sauk First up we have the designs of two first
City, WI: Arkham House, 1960. Day covers – well, the stamps for cancelling same -
being issued in Wisconsin to mark the occasion of
Wetzel, George. “The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study” in Derleth’s Centennial. Pretty cool huh? John Haefele
S.T. Joshi (ed). H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. tells me you can get ahold of these things from
Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980. George Vanderburgh at gav@cablerocket.com.
Next, an image of
THE SAD AND SPOOKY TIME some
By Richard L. Tierney promotional
stamps which
It is the sad and spooky time of day apparently
When the horizon darkens in the west Derleth
And the black trees upon the ridgetop's crest devised
Cast inky shadows down upon the land. himself, to
The dimming sun, fading to baleful red, promote his Sac Prairie saga.
Settles behind black pines to find its rest, What a showman!
Ceasing to light the earth. Now, leaden gloom And here are the covers of four new
Creeps stealthily into my anxious soul, Derleth compilations which I
Stirring within me dormant dreams of dread understand Battered
And rousing me to fears of death and peril. Tin Dispatch Box
I light my fire, heap twigs and faggots on it, will issue under the
Then sit and brood as light wanes from the skies, aegis of Arkham
And wonder somberly why all this world House as a sort of
Came into being so full of fear and pain. joint publishing
What did its grim Originator gain venture. So it
By fashioning such a swamp of suffering appears Arkham
As seethes upon the surface of this earth? House’ three-year publishing
My campfire flares, and as I heap wood on it drought will soon be broken.

Finally, here’s a photograph of August Derleth’s
grownup children, April Rose and Walden (Wally)
Derleth, at a fantasy convention form a few years
back. It is April
who currently
oversees
the day-to-
day
operations of Arkham House. I had long wondered
what Augie’s grown-up kids looked like…
Mantichorus:
Mailing Notes
In a fit of virtuousness I am commenting on each and
every contribution from the last mailing of both
APAs!
EOD #145
Joshi/What is Anything?: A plethora of interesting
projects! Fascinating article on how Poe wasn’t
influenced by the Gothic writers! Nice piece on
Wilum. I read somewhere PS Pubg will now do Black
Wings? Hurrah!
John Navroth/Lovecraftiana: Enjoyed the article on
HPL & the Polar Myth. You might want to also track
down the book Polaria: The Gift of the White Stone by
W. H. Muller (Albuquerque: Brotherhood of Life
Pubg, 1990, an occultist tract on Lovecraft which goes
further into the Polar myths and HPL.
Faig/Brobst, Lincoln, Poe. Nice piece on the 100-
year-old Brobst. I heard the interview with him that
was played during the Lovecraft Centennial. Has
anyone attempted to contact or re-interview him or
photograph him these last few years? Worth doing
for HPL’s last living friend! Poe & Lincoln –
intriguing.
Everts/ Horror Icons: Nice piece on Forry. I met him
back in 1975 when I was 15 and he attended
Aussiecon 1 in Australia. A sad loss to the world of sf
and fandom…Hey, saying Derleth was a
“polymorph pervert & bisexual pedophile” is over
the odds. You may be unaware of the sexual
proclivities of certain members of this a.p.a! What
constitutes “perversion” is in the eye of the beholder
– if you read your Freud you’ll find that for him it
was a non-judgmental term. And what evidence do
you have for pedophilia (i.e. “a sexual proclivity for
pre-pubescent children”) on Derleth’s part? No matter
your opinion of Derleth’s sexual orientation, his
name should not be blackened by such an extreme
allegation without proof.
Lovecrafts: Danny –enjoyed the weird verse info re
Australia. We must explore further! Margaret’s story
brought back childhood memories of cracker night;
though the HPL connection was difficult to discern.
Pugmire/Idiot Chaos: The book for Centipede Press
sounds awesome – I can hardly wait. Lumley
attacked you verbally? He plummets further in my
estimation. Nice photo of STJ at the Whipple Gates!
Drake’s Potpourri: I hope to read more of your work
Dave. I just always have so much weird material to
get through! Point taken re: Derleth. I’d also like to
know more about Munn.
Indick/Ibid: I hope your health at least stays stable,
Ben. The Jorkens books are fun. There’s a movie out
called Dean Spanley, based on a lesser-known
Dunsany title. Why don’t they film one of his best
books? I am still to read The Gunslinger books by
King. I shall, I swear!
XIIth Legion/McLachlan: Good reviews. I won’t buy
into the atheism thing since I’m pagan.
Schultz/Cthulsz: Yes, Derleth needs a thorough
bibliographer; I have Wilson’s but it’s inadequate.
Who shall take up the challenge? Fascinating info on
Scarecrow and your editing processes. That plot
robot’s a worry! Fabulous to look forward to all those
future books including the many author-specific HPL
letters vols!
Livesey/Redux: Fascinating piece on the Crookes
Tube! Lucky the narrator in “Shunned House” didn’t
die of radiation!
Burlesons/Gazette: Congrats on 100 issues! Good to
know you atheists celebrate Winter Solstice! Does
anyone know how Marc Michaud is doing these
days? Very nice poems – why not send to Danny
Lovecraft for his upcoming anthology of Cthulhu-
esque poetry? Your cryptographic tinkering with
“Call of Cthulhu” reminds me of the type of thing the
Qabalists do with the Talmud (you’ll probably hate
me saying that) and modern ceremonial magicians
do with Crowley’s ‘English Qabalah’. Wish I had the
maths to do real cryptanalysis. Review of Infidel
absorbing.
Linda Navroth/ Squiddy’s Ink: J-horror is cool. Have
you seen Pulse? Spooky. We can’t be reminded too
often of HPL’s principles of writing weird fiction.
Walker/Criticaster: Nice retro on FM 23. Your
comment on the difference between spirituality and
religion is well-taken. Belief in transcendence and the
numinous do not necessarily imply one’s
subscription to the tenets of the monotheistic
religions – something that atheists often overlook.
Re: films of HPL, I always thought Peter Weller
(starred in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch) would make
an excellent choice to play HPL himself.
Neily: Gotta get that B&N Lovecraft volume. I got
my uni library to order in the Stephen Jones
Necronomicon compilation. Worth having for the Les
Edwards illos. Good article on HPL movies. Punchy
horror short by Bonniol.
Andersson/Aurora Borealis: Kontext sounds fun. One
never rushes into panels in Australia with snow in
one’s hair! I commend your translation efforts re:
HPL in Sweden. I also have a copy of Tierney’s
Drums of Chaos coming after I got in touch with RLT
after he blurbed my poetry book. He’s a legend!
Awesome corrections list for HPL:Fic. My mate Perry
Grayson I believe lent John Pelan some assistance
with obscure Long stories for the forthcoming FBL
collection.
Phillips/Kommati: The New Paltz Lovecraft Forum
sounds great. I can’t believe I never even heard of
this until you told me, and it’s been going 21 years!
Sadly I’ve not yet read Waugh’s HPL book. Glad
your Necronomicon paper was well received.
Mention of Frankenstein reminds me that I am
missing only the Karloff Frankenstein from the official
Universal set of 8 classic monster movie DVD’s; this
is an excellent series, with good docos and extras.
Your joke about German food made me laugh
heartily! Re: witchcraft books, I collect only the
practical, preferring not to acquire those dealing with
historical witchcraft (i.e. the witch trials etc); though I
do collect books on the history of esoteric
philosophy, history of magick, etc. Our collections in
this area would complement each other nicely! Your
poem this issue was very haunting; but I wish you
would title them…
Briggs/Dark Entries: Scott, welcome back! You may
recall we used to correspond via snail mail back in
the mid-80’s – mucho water under the bridge, eh?
Greatly enjoyed your zine including the music
recommendations. Gotta like a guy whose musical
taste ranges across Emmylou Harris through Suicide
to Morton Feldman!
Haefele/Hesperia: Good biblio info on the Bart
House and World/Tower eds of HPL. The high print
numbers surprise me, given the rarity of the Barts
these days – though the ASE’s are scarcer still.
Wonder how many of the ASEs were printed for the
for the forces. I’m very interested in Harold Gauer’s
correspondence with Bloch, and if you are still in
touch, you might give him my email, for I have a
project afoot…
Faig/EOD letter: Sorry to hear of the death of CJ
Docherty. Enjoyed the reviews and the piece on
Sonia. A curious legal tangle!
SSWFT #32
Szumskyj/Quill: Ben, all the best with your studies .
I have valued working with you as a literary
colleague and hope we will continue to do so! Good
piece on Perez-Reverte.
Barrett/Koshtra Belorn: Nice piece on C. Hall
Thompson. I knew the first two stories but have
never read “Pale Criminal” or “Clay”. See also
http://www.rehupa.com/?p=701 for info on a story
CHT wrote about a prisoner of war camp. I note
“Clay” can be found in Stuart Schiff’s 1980 anthology
Mad Scientists, but “Pale Criminal” doesn’t appear to
have been reprinted since its WT appearance. I envy
your acquisition of the massive Centipede Press HPL
art volume. Book Depository seems great value –
they send books post-free worldwide; a great saving for
me in the Antipodes…
Sheaffer/Dalriadic: More good stuff on TZ. Lovecraft
based Innsmouth mainly on Newburyport, Mass, but
Innsmouth residents are said to do their shopping in
Ipswich. You ask if the horror anthology edited by
myself (Terror Australis) is any good? Ha! It rocks!
You’ll have to track a copy secondhand now, though,
it’s been O/P for a goodly time.
Doig/Via Occulta: Nice title! And welcome to the
APA. I love Lifeline Bookfairs too – they have ‘em in
the Gong twice a year; always a few good finds.
Thanks for the opportunity to read Prance’s ghost
story, which I thought quite good. I love those old
Four Square pbks – that’s how I got into reading
horror back in the 70’s. I have all the Horwitz
Higham anthologies, I think (although I’ll have to
check on Weird Stories) and the James Darks.
Looking forward to your 3rd antho of Aussie ghosts!
Howard:/Change-Winds: Yep, feeling better now.
Enjoyed your emcees and movie reviews. Are you
interested in Solar Pons at all? I have long wanted to
write some stories a la Basil Copper’s Derleth
sequels…Marc Michaud’s daughter Marie seems to
run the Necronomicon Press MySpace site, and the
press has some titles on Ebay at
http://stores.ebay.com/Necronomicon-Press but it’s
all pretty inactive these days. (I met Marie when I
‘crashed’ on the floor of Michauds’ house in 1990
during the Lovecraft Centennial – she was about 2 or
3 and we watched a Disney film together, The Little
Mermaid from memory…)
Valentine/ Opharion: Ms in a Red Box was
fascinating. Also fascinating about Arkholme –
please tell me more! Congrats on the 3rd Connoisseur
book; and thanks for the Wordsworth anthos, which
are atop my huge reading pile, with Wormwoods and
other good things.
Andersson: Hyperborean: Too many books – aargh!
I can’t keep up. Curious article about Norton I. Re:
the Australian Dunwich, I have now researched it
and a Lovecraftian tale based there is brewing in my
fevered brain. I only exchanged a few letters with
Bloch, and missed meeting him in 1990 because he
was out of town when I hit LA. I did meet Dennis
Etchison and Bill Nolan, and may someday write up
an account of my fateful time spent with those two…
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