Pulp Fantasy Library: Through the Gates of the Silver Key

1929 saw the publication of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," a wistful, semi-autobiographical tale of Randolph Carter, his recurring dreamer-protagonist. In that story, Carter, now middle-aged, finds himself disillusioned with the mundane world, bereft of the golden moments of his youth when he roamed the Dreamlands freely. After discovering an old silver key in his ancestral home, Carter then departs for the wooded hills of his boyhood and disappears.

For Lovecraft, that was enough, but not so for his friend, E. Hoffmann Price. He wondered, what really had happened to Carter? During HPL's visit to New Orleans in June 1932, Price suggested to him the idea of a sequel, which he then proceeded to draft. The sequel, which Price titled "The Lord of Illusion," drew on his interests in Theosophy, Eastern philosophy, and occult cosmology. With some reluctance, Lovecraft agreed to revise it and, as often happened in such collaborations, “revision” really meant extensive rewriting. By the end, Price estimated that fewer than fifty words of his original draft remained, though traces of Price’s mystical elements are nevertheless apparent. The story was published in Weird Tales (July 1934) under the title by which it is known today.

Where "The Silver Key" is tinged with melancholy and personal longing, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is expansive, ornate, and metaphysically dense. The story begins at a gathering to settle Carter’s estate, long held in trust since his disappearance. The mysterious Swami Chandraputra, swathed in robes, with strange mittens on his hands, tells the assembled company of Carter’s fate. After performing its ritual, the Silver Key transported Carter beyond space and time, through the First Gate and into the Outer Extension, where he encountered the Ancient Ones led by ’Umr at-Tawil, a being feared in the Necronomicon. 

Accepting an invitation to plunge further into the cosmos, Carter passed the Ultimate Gate and found himself in the infinite void before an entity implied to be Yog-Sothoth, though only a fraction of its true nature, the Supreme Archetype, the All-in-One and One-in-All. Shown the unity of all consciousness as facets of this Archetype, Carter was granted a wish: to experience life as one of the wizardly inhabitants of Yaddith, a world besieged by the monstrous Dholes. The Supreme Archetype transferred his mind into the body of Zkauba the wizard, but Carter soon discovered his arrogance had trapped him in an alien form, sharing a mind with a being that found him as repugnant as he did it.

After centuries on Yaddith, Carter subdued Zkauba’s mind with drugs and returned to Earth using the Silver Key and alien machinery, seeking a manuscript of symbols he believed would restore his human body. The Swami claims Carter found it, contacted him, and sent him to Arkham to announce his imminent return. However, Carter’s cousin, lawyer Ernest Aspinwall, accuses the Swami of fraud, tearing at his face, thereby revealing the inhuman visage beneath. Aspinwall dies of apoplexy and Zkauba’s mind resurfaces, fleeing in a strange coffin-like clock. A postscript speculates the Swami was merely a criminal hypnotist, though some details of the tale seem disturbingly precise.

The shift in tone and content between "The Silver Key" and its sequel is striking. In the first tale, Carter longs to escape a disenchanted world, hoping to reclaim the dreamlike wonder of his youth. In the second, that escape comes at a terrible cost: the obliteration of the self. The human-scale yearning of "The Silver Key" gives way to a vision that is cold, alien, and inexorable, where the price of ultimate knowledge is nothing less than one's personal identity. 

Here, Price’s influence is unmistakable. Themes such as the unity of all beings, reincarnation, and the dissolution of the ego into a higher self are hallmarks of Theosophical thought, ideas largely absent from Lovecraft’s solo work. For Price, such transcendence could be uplifting, a step toward enlightenment; for Lovecraft, it becomes a transformation so complete that the human perspective is erased. Carter’s so-called apotheosis is not joyous but inhuman, stripping away every anchor to his mortal life.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is that Lovecraft seems to attempt to use Price's conceptions as a way to bridge the Dreamlands stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. By introducing Yog-Sothoth, Umr at-Tawil, and Yaddith into Carter’s dream-journey, Lovecraft draws a direct line between the fanciful dream adventures of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and the cosmicism of, say, “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Whisperer in Darkness.” The implications of this are profound: the Dreamlands are not a separate realm of whimsy, but part of the same vast, uncaring universe, which is precisely the tack Chaosium took in its own RPG adaptation of the former.

Whether Lovecraft fully succeeds in this synthesis is open to debate. The story’s ornate, metaphysical passages can be both dazzling and impenetrable and the fusion of Price’s mysticism with Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is uneasy at times. Yet Carter’s arc, from wistful seeker of lost dreams to fragment of an incomprehensible, alien consciousness is an ambitious character transformation. The conclusion of this tale is deeply unsettling. The dreamer passes beyond the gate, not to reclaim his past, but to become something no longer human.

If "The Silver Key" is about losing the magic of youth, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is about losing oneself entirely. In Lovecraft’s cosmos, this may be the only form of escape and the ultimate price of seeking truths not meant for human minds. 

Interview: James Edward Raggi IV (Part III)

Parts I and II of this interview can be found here and here, respectively.

7. In a media landscape increasingly shaped by risk-aversion and corporate IP management, where do small, transgressive publishers like Lamentations of the Flame Princess fit in? Is there still a place for the truly weird? 

I said something a little earlier that's not as true as it used to be. While it is mostly true that people look at the censorship of the past and think it was ridiculous, there's a creeping attitude rising up that looks at some stuff from the 1970s on, wondering how they got away with doing what they did. Like somehow it is wrong these things exist. The '70s were wild for movies. I was too young to see anything in those days (well, I remember Star Wars) but going back ... Blazing Saddles and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Salò and Pink Flamingos and I Spit on Your Grave and Wizard of Gore and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Clockwork Orange and Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now and Exorcist and Death Wish and Last Tango in Paris and and and and and and ... you could just make the most outrageous stuff and somehow there was a way to get it done and get it to audiences. And not just on the lowest independent level, either, there are some major films in just that list there. 

There's a reason I called the second game box, the one after I realized I could do this full time, the “Grindhouse Edition.” This is the feel we're after. Anything can happen, and whether any particular work falls within someone's parameters of good taste is not our concern. 

Whether there is room for that today is entirely up to the public and their willingness to dig a little bit to find it. It might not be on the most convenient platforms. You might even have to order direct from the publisher. That's what allows this stuff to still exist now and into the future in a cultural climate that seems to demand you conform to Group A or Group B's standards in order to have an audience. 

8. Do you think roleplaying games have a unique potential to explore uncomfortable or disturbing subject matter, more so than, say, literature or film? If so, why? 

I think they have less potential. RPGs are all location and situation and setup, and then it's through play that things actually happen. The “emergent story” format of RPGs means that whatever comes out at the end is something of an accident, or the result of a succession of coincidences. 

Literature and film and any medium where someone has complete control over the flow of the entire story means they can take uncomfortable subjects and do different things with them deliberately and drive the point home through narrative and thematic context. 

If the typical RPG group comes across the goings-on in, say, Salò, there's going to be an exploration of a very different kind of violence than the film invites us to explore, I dare say. 

9. Finally, if Lovecraft were alive today, do you think he’d approve of Lamentations of the Flame Princess? Or would he recoil in horror? 

The more interesting question is if Lovecraft were alive today, what would all these people who have appropriated his work and in some cases owe some substantial portion of their incomes to their use of his work, think of him?

Can you imagine Lovecraft stepping through a time portal from the mid-1930s, with all the attitudes from then intact, seeing what's become of his work, and deciding to try to get writing jobs from the publishers selling books based on his work? That would be much more amusing.

As for what Lovecraft would think of LotFP? Oh he'd hate it. He's from a wealthy family that fell on hard times, and apparently carried himself with a sort of upper class manner, thought of himself as a gentleman, and for the first forty years of his life he was deeply conservative, and I'm this racial mongrel (Italians and Poles were two immigrant groups he didn't much care for) kid from the projects who is a fan of and influenced by and I guess producing the lowest of the arts.

And one of those influences is the old pulp author H.P. Lovecraft. I love you, man.

Interview: James Edward Raggi IV (Part II)

Part I of this interview can be found here.

4. Do you feel that the mechanics of traditional RPGs (e.g. levels, hit points, spells) can fully accommodate Lovecraftian horror? Is there a built-in tension between the player agency they provide and cosmic indifference?

Traditional RPGs are the perfect vehicle for Lovecraftian horror. What better way to portray an uncaring universe than a game where the person running the game is (supposed to be) a neutral arbiter and dice decide everything? It's when you start getting into narrative mechanics (hero points, karma, whatever) that this starts to break down.

Thing about an indifferent universe is not just that it doesn't care if you fail and die ... it also doesn't care if you live and thrive.

5. You’ve been an outspoken defender of freedom of expression in RPGs, even when that means publishing work that some find offensive. How do you see that ethos connecting with Lovecraft’s own disregard for popular tastes?

I think this is a bad comparison. Lovecraft had his idiosyncrasies but I don't think much of what he was doing was pushing the boundaries of good taste. The violence, or its aftermath, in his stories weren't really detailed or dwelled upon, and he didn't go anywhere near sexuality or use profanity.

6. LotFP often revels in going beyond the boundaries of "good taste." Is that purely a stylistic choice or is there a deeper creative or philosophical motivation behind it?

Both. I grew up with horror movies and those 70s/early 80s Savage Sword of Conan comics, not to mention Howard Stern. I also grew up with the Satanic Panic and a little later on the PMRC and all the nonsense from the FCC and MPAA throughout my life.

I recently got the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers on Blu-ray, and I watched it, then listened to the commentary ... and they went on about they had censorship problems because, gasp, the two lead characters were both divorced.

We look at what couldn't be done in mass media in the past and we scoff at it. “How silly they were!” And the people that fought to overcome those restrictions, we see them as important people in the history of their art. Heroes, I'd call them.

But then people act like what is restricted today is serious business and totally justified, and anyone who fights against these modern restrictions are bad people who want bad things.

No. It's the same thing. It is absolutely the same thing.

One of my favorite movies is Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. And when the female lead is introduced, she's been put in the stocks. Her crime? Dancing on a Sunday. And after getting the fancy boxed set version and rewatching it this year, that's become my favorite way to describe what everyone gets upset about.

Oh, you used a bad unacceptable word!

Dancing on a Sunday.

That picture is unnecessarily graphic!

Dancing on a Sunday.

You've expressed irresponsible social views!

Dancing on a Sunday.

You made a joke about a sensitive topic!

Dancing on a Sunday.

You're displaying a political point of view I find unacceptable!

Dancing on a Sunday.

Remember the whole Janet Jackson Superbowl controversy? Literally dancing on a Sunday!

I don't even like ratings. Ratings change how people create, both in concept and altering a “finished” product after the fact to attain certain ratings, because ratings shape the potential audience. That's not serving an informational function, that's censorship. Fuck em all.

I know I'm on the far end radical about this sort of thing. Everyone's got that one thing they're fanatical about and this is my thing. People should just be able to do shit creatively without being able to worry that they're going to be actually restricted because of it.

A couple of my favorite stories about censorship:

Back in the day, the movie Nekromantik (a movie about necrophilia) was banned in Finland, so a festival organizer arranged a ferry trip to Estonia so people could see the movie. How ridiculous is that? I learned about this story in 2015 when attending a festival in Helsinki to see the movie. Who benefitted from making Finnish people go to Estonia to watch a movie?

For many years the first three Cannibal Corpse albums were banned in Germany, and no songs were from those albums were allowed to be performed live. There were police monitors at their shows. They'd play the songs anyway, just under different names. That ban was lifted in 2006, but just a couple years ago Germany banned the Cannibal Corpse coloring book. A coloring book!

I've got no sympathy for anyone who argues for restricting the availability of creative work. The fact that all of this is still an ongoing concern makes me more confrontational about it. The books, movies, and music that I like pretty much guarantees that some of this stuff was always going to be a part of LotFP, but the fact that there are people who want to penalize people for making up stuff they don't like makes me do it more.

And we do get penalized for it. The first Free RPG Day book we put out was trashed by a number of the participating stores. We were later kicked out of Free RPG Day entirely because some other publisher threatened to pull out if we were allowed to continue to participate. One of our titles got trashed by a British distributor, and we only caught wind of that because one of the distributor's employees publicly complained that the bosses didn't let her look at it first, they thought it was so bad. Our stuff regularly gets denied from DriveThru, sometimes for reasons I can't fathom.

And of course there's the reputational factor, “Oh, they do that sort of thing.” Well yes, but not only that sort of thing. You work outside of someone's comfort zone once and they're going to try to punish everything you do because of it.

I just don't understand the impulse to look at something and decide that the public shouldn't get to decide for themselves whether they accept it or not. And it's the worst when it comes from someone who makes things themselves; it's the basest form of cowardice, trying to argue for caps on imagination and be in favor of more restricted thinking in creative work.

Aarrrghhh I get so angry, even when it happens to something I don't care about, even when it happens to something/someone I don't like. I don't understand why anyone does that, and I don't understand why anyone goes along with it.

And yes, that includes pretty much whatever example anyone reading this is thinking of. Blatant plagiarism is about all I can get on board with restricting.

To me, the first step in doing anything creative is to take down the creative walls so there's nothing but clear horizons on all sides, and then you decide what you want to create. If there's someone keeping creative walls up, how do people not feel like they're being physically crushed? How are they not expending at least some of their creative energy attacking those walls?

Hmm. I got very worked up answering this one. But it is the hill to die on.

Interview: James Edward Raggi IV (Part I)

I think it's fair to say that James Edward Raggi IV needs no introduction. He's been publishing old school fantasy roleplaying game materials since 2008, many of which are not only foundational to the OSR but also take inspiration from the works and ideas of H.P. Lovecraft. I asked James a few question relating to LotFP, HPL, and other matters and he very kindly provided with some lengthy answers that will appear over the course of the next two days.

1. Let’s start with the obvious: Lamentations of the Flame Princess has always been described as a “weird fantasy roleplaying game.” What does “weird” mean to you and what role does Lovecraft play in shaping that definition?

Formally it's taken straight from Lovecraft's definition of “weird” from his Supernatural Horror in Literature essay:

“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

Basically what Lovecraft called “cosmicism.”

I think the best example of this sort of “weird” in fiction wasn't even made by Lovecraft, but by Algernon Blackwood in The Willows. I put some quotes of this in the old Grindhouse box for LotFP that I thought served as the best short examples:

“We had strayed into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.” 

“You think it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.”

“There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.”

That's my ideal of what the “weird” should be, but in practical terms it isn't always so. It's sometimes just a slush word to signify some sort of genre crossing, such as mixing fantasy with horror or sci-fi.

Awe-ful

There is a particular kind of emotion that, in my experience, is easily forgotten in our world of algorithms and explanations but that once held a central place in human experience. I’m speaking of awe, not merely in its diluted modern sense, but in its original meaning: a mixture of wonder and fear in the face of something vast, strange, and beyond human comprehension. It’s a feeling that borders on the religious and it is the lifeblood of the weird and the uncanny.

H.P. Lovecraft understood this, perhaps better than most writers of the last hundred years. Through his work, he attempted to refine the weird tale it into a kind of secular mysticism, in which the cosmos itself becomes the site of both revelation and terror. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, he famously wrote that 

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” 

However, Lovecraft’s best stories do more than simply terrify. They evoke awe in its fullest sense, what he elsewhere calls a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” When he describes beings whose very geometry defies human perception or ancient truths that shatter the minds of those who grasp them, he is evoking something far deeper than mere fright. He is pointing toward the sublime.

Sigmund Freud distinguished between the "uncanny" and the "familiar," noting how the former is not simply the unknown, but the strangely known, the familiar made alien. Lovecraft seized on this psychological dissonance and expanded it to include the entire cosmos. His monsters are not just unknowable; they are that which we once knew in some long-buried dream of pre-human memory. The sense of uncanny recognition is part of the horror. It is this effect, more than mere violence or gore, that marks the best weird fiction.

Of course, horror is only part of the equation. What often goes unspoken is how beautiful the weird can be. The shimmering city of the Elder Things beneath the ice of Antarctica; the dream-haunted vistas of Kadath; the mind-transcending journey of Randolph Carter through the stars. These are not scenes of mere terror. They are awe-inspiring in the truest sense – sublime and strange, but also profoundly glorious. Lovecraft understood that what we call horror and what we call wonder are not always distinct categories. The numinous is a threshold. The emotion it provokes may be colored by fear, reverence, or ecstasy or some combination of the three.

Naturally, this brings me to roleplaying games.

When I think back to my earliest experiences with RPGs, what strikes me most is how often they trafficked in awe. I'm not talking about desperate combats or puzzles to be solved, but fleeting and fragile moments when the game evoked something stranger and deeper. A mysterious door that could not be opened. A statue with eyes that seemed to follow you. A creature whose motives and nature eluded simple categorization. In those moments, even the purple prose of boxed text or the improvisations of a teenaged Dungeon Master could occasionally brush up against the ineffable. 

This is, I think, one of the great potentials of the roleplaying medium: its ability to resurrect feelings that modern life has largely anesthetized, like wonder before the uncanny. These feelings are not mere tropes to be mined, but modes of perception, ways of seeing the world as something deeper and more alive with meaning and strangeness.

Lovecraft feared the loss of these feelings in modernity. It's ironic that he is most famous for his fiction, because Supernatural Horror in Literature, an essay of literary criticism, is undeniably one of his greatest works. There, he laments the triumph of the merely rational in fiction and calls for a return to cosmic awe, a feeling that transcends individual psychology and touches something vast and impersonal. He believed that the weird tale could restore "the stimulation of wonder and fancy." It's no surprise, then, that his own work (and the many games it inspired) have done exactly that for generations of readers and players.

Perhaps that is the true function of the weird tale (or the weird game): to break through the crust of the mundane and let in something ancient, fearful, and magnificent. Weird tales remind us that the universe is, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine and that, in the face of that strangeness, we are still capable of awe.

Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts by James Maliszewski

In Which I Begin to Doubt Myself

Read on Substack

Retrospective: Call of Cthulhu

"Didn't James already do a Retrospective on Call of Cthulhu?" After four hundred posts in this series – this one is, in fact, the four hundredth – you would understandably think that, but it's not true. As I've discovered in the process of choosing the contents of my Grognardia anthologies, I didn't start writing Retrospective posts until September 17, 2008 and, even then, those posts didn't become consistent, weekly features of the blog for a while longer. 

Now, I did write a post – my first one on the subject – about Call of Cthulhu on October 31, 2008 that definitely has something of a Retrospective vibe about it. Indeed, I regularly link to that post as a kind of substitute for the fact that, even after all these years, I'd still never written a Retrospective on CoC, despite my immense affection for the game, which I consider among the greatest and most influential games and game designs in the history of the hobby.

Since I'm now nearly halfway through my The Shadow over August series honoring the memory of H.P. Lovecraft, I thought now might be the perfect time to rectify this very old oversight on my part. However, since my original post from 2008, "A Game for Grown-Ups," already covers much of the ground I'd usually cover in a Retrospective post, I've decided that this one will instead focus on a different aspect of Call of Cthulhu, namely, its place in the history of the hobby.

When the game first appeared in 1981, it was unlike anything that had come before it. Published by Chaosium and designed by Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, it was the first fully realized horror role-playing game. There had, of course, been fantasy games with horrific elements before it. Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, had more than its share of shambling undead and sanity-blasting monsters, but Call of Cthulhu was the first to make horror not merely an atmospheric seasoning but the whole meal. In doing so, it did more than simply introduce a new genre to the RPG marketplace; it reframed what a role-playing game could be.

The significance of being first is hard to overstate. By 1981, science fiction, post-apocalypse, superheroes, and espionage each had their own dedicated RPGs, often more than one. Horror, however, remained conspicuously absent, perhaps because many assumed its central emotion, fear, couldn’t be easily conjured at the table. Petersen’s ingenious solution was not to frighten the players directly, but to have them role-play fear. Dread emerged from the slow unravelling of an investigator’s mind, the accumulation of forbidden knowledge, and the grim realization that the forces at work could never be overcome in the usual, heroic way.

This approach has since become the template for almost all horror games, even when they are self-consciously attempting to distance themselves from it. Just Alfred North Whitehead famously called Western philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato, the same can be said of Call of Cthulhu's place in the realm of horror RPGs. The sanity mechanic, the emphasis on investigation over combat, and the focus on player knowledge versus character fragility all flowed from Petersen’s design choices in Call of Cthulhu. Nearly every horror RPG since has grappled with or responded to this foundation.

For Chaosium, Call of Cthulhu was similarly transformative. Before 1981, the company was best known for RuneQuest and its Glorantha setting, along with Basic Role-Playing, the streamlined system that powered it. These were critical successes but niche compared to the behemoth that was TSR. Call of Cthulhu changed the equation, thanks to its much wider appeal. By the mid-1980s, Call of Cthulhu was outselling everything else Chaosium produced and it became the company’s flagship line for decades. In many respects, Call of Cthulhu was Chaosium in the public mind and arguably is still the game most closely associated with the company.

It’s telling that Chaosium survived rough patches in its history largely because Call of Cthulhu never went out of print. Where other RPGs waxed and waned in popularity, CoC had a steady, international audience. Indeed, its scenarios and campaigns became not just supplements but cultural touchstones in RPG history. Many are considered landmarks whose influence extends far beyond their original audience, much like Call of Cthulhu itself. Looking back, the game’s influence is visible everywhere. Here are just a few that occur to me:

Dungeons & Dragons modules before 1981 were largely site-based adventures. By contrast, CoC’s scenarios pioneered investigation-driven play, where clues, interviews, and research were central. This structure seeped back into other genres, shaping how adventures were written.

Though frequently imitated, few mechanics have been as thematically perfect as CoC’s sanity rules, which track not just the erosion of mental stability but the cost of knowing too much. It’s become almost impossible to design a horror RPG without addressing the question: what’s your version of this mechanic?

Translations of CoC played a huge role in spreading RPGs worldwide, especially in countries where Lovecraft’s stories already had a foothold. In France, Japan, and elsewhere, it rather than, say, Dungeons & Dragons was often the gateway RPG.

More than four decades later, Call of Cthulhu is not merely Chaosium’s flagship; it is "the Dungeons & Dragons of horror gaming." It has become the lingua franca of the genre, the common framework through which players, Keepers, and designers alike approach tales of the uncanny and the unknown. It remains the benchmark for how to adapt a literary source faithfully without becoming a prisoner to it, preserving the essence of Lovecraft’s cosmic dread while evolving into a style of play all its own.

Like D&D, it has been endlessly imitated, parodied, expanded upon, and reimagined, yet the original endures – still recognizably itself and still drawing new players into its orbit. For many, it is not simply a horror RPG; it is the horror RPG, the game against which all others are measured. As long as players gather to face ancient secrets and watch their fragile investigators descend into madness, Call of Cthulhu will remain the universal tongue of tabletop terror.

"Lovecraft was not a good writer."

It’s a commonplace criticism of H.P. Lovecraft that his writing is overwrought and I can certainly understand why one might say so. His style is undeniably dense with adjectives, studded with archaisms, and includes unusual words like "eldritch" and "cyclopean" to cite just two obvious examples. These are old indictments. In a 1945 essay appearing in The New Yorker, the American literary critic, Edmund Wilson stated plainly 

"Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe's is only one of many sad signs that almost nobody any more pays real attention to writing."

Many modern readers, including some who otherwise enjoy horror fiction, more or less agree with Wilson's judgment. On some level, there's more than a little truth to it, but I also think Wilson missed something essential about what Lovecraft was trying to do.

Certainly, Lovecraft’s prose is not plain. He does not describe a crumbling house or the whisper of wind through dead trees with, say, Hemingway’s economy. Instead, he piles on adjectives like charms against something too large and too old to be named. This is not accidental. Lovecraft was not a bad stylist. He was a purposeful one, even if he was not always a successful one. Any faults of his prose are, I believe, the byproduct of its ambition.

One of Lovecraft’s core preoccupations was with the limits of human understanding. His protagonists, whether scholars, scientists, or dreamers are nearly always brought to a precipice – of history, of knowledge, of space or time – beyond which lies something that cannot be fully grasped by the human mind. The horror in Lovecraft's stories is not simply monstrous; it is ontological. His stories revolve around experiences that are, by definition, indescribable. Despite this, they must be described, for the very simple reason that fiction requires language.

Faced with this paradox, Lovecraft responded in a way that makes perfect sense: he embraced inadequacy. His style is not polished to clarity but instead embraces excess. His adjectives are cumulative, not precise. His use of antiquated words is not an attempt at faux-scholarly authority, but a deliberate effort to suggest a register of experience outside the ordinary. The result is not always readable in the conventional sense, but it is evocative and that is the point.

In this way, Lovecraft’s prose functions almost like glossolalia or automatic writing. It does not persuade or explain. It reaches instead for effect. Its baroque qualities are not the product of ignorance or even bad taste, but of desperation. They're an attempt to use every available tool to conjure a feeling of cosmic awe or creeping dread. The occasional absurdity of his style, like the much-mocked “indescribable” things described at length, should not obscure the sincerity and power of his attempt.

One might say that Lovecraft was not writing about the weird so much as trying to write weirdly, if you can see the distinction. His stories are often most effective when read not for their literal content but for their cumulative mood, the way one might listen to a dissonant piece of music not to understand something, but to feel something. That he sometimes failed in this attempt is obvious. That he failed interestingly – and at times succeeded brilliantly – is equally so.

This does not mean that all criticisms of his prose are misplaced. Even Lovecraft himself was aware of his stylistic excesses and, in his letters, often laments them. However, to dismiss his writing as “bad” in some generic sense is to misunderstand both what he was trying to do and how radical it really was. His style was not an obstacle to his cosmicism. Rather, it was cosmicism writ large, trembling with adjectives and echoing with the voices of unnamable things.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Cthulhu Mythos Revisited" and "A Rebuttal to 'The Cthulhu Mythos Revisited'"

Having already broken the original intent of this series by highlighting Dragon magazine articles I never read during their initial publication simply because of their Lovecraftian content, I'm going to do so again, this time by discussing two articles in a single post. In this case, I think it can be more than justified for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the "articles" in question are actually letters to the editor and, therefore, comparatively short. Secondly, the two letters are in dialog with one another, as well as with the "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column I discussed last week. Discussing both of them here thus makes a great deal of sense.

The first letter by self-proclaimed "High Priest of the Great Old Ones," Gerald Guinn, appears in issue #14 (July 1978). It's mostly a nitpicky – and inaccurate – criticism of the Kuntz and Holmes presentation of the Mythos in D&D terms. I say "inaccurate," because Mr Guinn, despite being "an avid fan of Lovecraft," seems to have imbibed more than a little of the Derlethian Kool-Aid when it comes to his understanding of HPL's creation (and I say this as someone who unironically appreciates Derleth's contributions). His complaints, by and large, boil down to deviating from Derleth's interpretations of Lovecraft.

For example, Guinn repeats the un-Lovecraftian idea that the Elder Gods "defeated" the Great Old Ones, as well as making dubious genealogical ("Cthulhu, first spawn of Yog-Sothoth") and elemental connections ("Hastur ... is the KING OF AIR !!!!!!!") that have no basis in HPL's own texts. In some cases, I'm not even certain I can pin these errors on Derleth, who, for all his faults, never seemed to have suggested that Nyarlathotep was a Great Old One or an offspring of Azathoth. Neither did Derleth make Ubbo-Sathla "the center of the universe." 

This is all very "inside baseball" stuff, but I find it very interesting. If nothing else, it's a reminder of just how obsessive nerds can be about getting the "facts" of fictional settings correct – and how much effort they'll put into demonstrating their superior knowledge of those facts. It's also a reminder of the extent to which not just Derleth but other post-Lovecraftian authors proved influential in fans' understanding of the Mythos. Much like Robert E. Howard's Conan, whose popular conception was largely colored by the pastiches of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, Lovecraft was similarly misunderstood well into the 1970s. Most of Guinn's objections stem, in my opinion, from such misunderstandings, including his taking issue with the D&D stats of Hastur, Cthugha, and so on.

Rather than dwell on how many hit points a shoggoth should have, I want to turn to the second letter, which appeared in issue #16 (July 1978). Written by J. Eric Holmes, it's intended as an answer to Gerlad Guinn's critique of the original article. Holmes starts, amusing enough, by stating that "When one gets into religious controversy the first thing one discovers is that the scriptures themselves are self-contradictory and subject to varying interpretations." It's a funny line, but also an apt one, as dissecting just what Lovecraft meant or intended is a kind of exegesis. I've often felt that, as the practice of traditional religion has declined, many people have turned to pop culture as a replacement. 

Whether my thesis is true or not, Holmes quickly gets to the heart of the issue: the "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column he and Rob Kuntz wrote "draws most heavily from Lovecraft's own works" rather than those of HPL's friends and imitators. This is a perfectly valid rebuttal and no more need be said on the matter. Even leaving aside the errors Guinn makes in his original critiques, which Holmes addresses individually, the larger point still stands, namely, that Kuntz and Holmes wrote their descriptions with Lovecraft in mind and no one else. To continue Holmes's earlier religious analogy, he prefers a textualist reading of the Mythos over any other.

One can, of course, agree or disagree with this approach, but I think it's a defensible one. In general, my own preferences when it comes to this specific question is fairly close to that of Holmes. At the same time, I think it's equally defensible to include a wider range of source material in conceiving of the Mythos. How wide a range is an equally important question. From its first edition, Call of Cthulhu, for example, has included a fairly broad range of sources – just look at the creatures in its bestiary – and that rarely raises any comment from gamers. On the other hand, I don't begrudge anyone who draws the line at one place or another, so long as he can articulate why and to what purpose.

These kinds of debates are fascinating to me. Lovecraft himself hoped his ideas and concepts, his monsters and alien gods would be picked up and used by other writers, each of whom would add his own wrinkles to the growing tapestry of what we now call the Mythos. He did not care that this would introduce contradictions and confusion, because that's the nature of a real mythology. The only thing I suspect he'd have objected to is the claim that there was one and only one "true" version that everyone else must accept. He wasn't founding a dogmatic religion but creating a smorgasbord of elements from which his fellow authors could pick and choose as they wished. In that respect, I think he'd probably be delighted at how broadly disseminated his ideas have since become, even if he might not like some of the specific uses to which they've been put.

Why Thousand Suns?

Here's another post over at Grognardia Games Direct that would benefit from more eyes. I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who've never picked up or played Thousand Suns, since one of the goals of the second edition is to attract new players who might otherwise have never considered it.

Why Thousand Suns? by James Maliszewski

An Attempt at a Sales Pitch

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