4, No 1 (WN 13)

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!

Cover art this issue is an illustration to Lovecraft’s

“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.

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

Enlarged. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002.

Joshi, S.T. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and

Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo

Press, 1996.

Pearsall, Anthony. The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s

Guide to Persons, Places and Things in the Tales of H.P.

Lovecraft. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 2005.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. NY: Library of

America, 1984.

Schweitzer, Darrell. The Dream-Quest of H.P.Lovecraft.

San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, May 1978.

Smith, Clark Ashton. The Abominations of Yondo. Sauk

City, WI: Arkham House, 1960.

Wetzel, George. “The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study” in

S.T. Joshi (ed). H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism.

Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980.

THE SAD AND SPOOKY TIME

By Richard L. Tierney

It is the sad and spooky time of day

When the horizon darkens in the west

And the black trees upon the ridgetop's crest

Cast inky shadows down upon the land.

The dimming sun, fading to baleful red,

Settles behind black pines to find its rest,

Ceasing to light the earth. Now, leaden gloom

Creeps stealthily into my anxious soul,

Stirring within me dormant dreams of dread

And rousing me to fears of death and peril.

I light my fire, heap twigs and faggots on it,

Then sit and brood as light wanes from the skies,

And wonder somberly why all this world

Came into being so full of fear and pain.

What did its grim Originator gain

By fashioning such a swamp of suffering

As seethes upon the surface of this earth?

My campfire flares, and as I heap wood on it

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

The August Derleth Centennial

Space doesn’t

permit me to cover the

August Derleth Centennial

in this issue in detail,

but this important

occasion occurred on

Feb 24, 2009. (Feb 24

also just happens to be the birth date of our fellow

SSWFT alumnus Phillip A. Ellis, poet and raconteur!)

Here are some images I nabbed off George

Vanderburgh’s blog (Vanderburgh runs Battered Tin

Dispatch Box, a Holmesian publisher which has close

ties with Arkham House).

First up we have the designs of two first

Day covers – well, the stamps for cancelling same -

being issued in Wisconsin to mark the occasion of

Derleth’s Centennial. Pretty cool huh? John Haefele

tells me you can get ahold of these things from

George Vanderburgh at gav@cablerocket.com.

Next, an image of

some

promotional

stamps which

apparently

Derleth

devised

himself, to

promote his Sac Prairie saga.

What a showman!

And here are the covers of four new

Derleth compilations which I

understand Battered

Tin Dispatch Box

will issue under the

aegis of Arkham

House as a sort of

joint publishing

venture. So it

appears Arkham

House’ three-year publishing

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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