They’re fun, in a crude way, but only serve to remind us why the Weird Tales greats, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Whitehead, Robert E. Howard, and the rest seemed so electrifyingly wonderful at the time. Here’s what the competition was like. (Not surprisingly, Lovecraft’s “Dagon,” reprinted here to represent the October 1923 issue, is conspicuously the best of the lot.)
The other stories are of varying interest. “An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension” by Farnsworth Wright (the very man who, as editor of Weird Tales, would bring about the magazine’s amazing transformation a couple years later) is a pioneering, clumsy attempt at the sort of “funny alien” science fiction Stanley G. Weinbaum was to make popular in the mid-’30s. “The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other” stretches the long arm of coincidence outrageously, but has moments of effective description. “Beyond the Door” (one of the very few early Weird Tales stories Lovecraft liked) has a genuinely creepy atmosphere. “Lucifer,” by John. D. Swain, manages a cruel, surprising twist. Most of the others are anecdotes of madness, revenge, and rudimentary hauntings, by writers who did not subsequently become famous.
But this was the beginning. Here you can see how a great tradition started.
Mosig At Last: A Psychologist Looks at H.P. Lovecraft
by Yozan Dirk W. Mosig
Necronomicon Press, 1997
128 pp. $7.95
At the recent Cthulhu Mythos convention, Necronomicon, held in Providence, Rhode Island, at the very base of Lovecraft’s old neighorhood of College Hill (along the steep streets of which your editor conducted a somewhat breathless walking tour), there were two guests of honor. One was Brian Lumley, which is obvious and fitting.
The other was Yozan Dirk W. Mosig, who may not be a household name, but who is, in his own way, equally important. For the occasion, this volume essays was published.
It’s astonishing to discover how little Mosig actually wrote. The bibliography lists a total fifteen articles about Lovecraft, all published between 1973 and 1980. The present volume contains nine of them, plus what appear to be four short original pieces.
Despite this, Donald Burleson, Peter Cannon, S.T. Joshi, and Robert M. Price all attest in their tributes at the back of the book that Mosig is a seminal figure (“the Northrup Frye of Lovecraft criticism,” says Burleson), who raised Lovecraft criticism to the level of a serious discipline and paved the way for a whole new generation of Lovecraftian scholars, including Messrs Burleson, Cannon, Joshi, and Price. Dr. Mosig, a professional psychologist (who has added the Yozan to his name after having become, among his other accomplishments, a Zen monk; he also describes himself as a follower of Bertrand Russell and B.F. Skinner), applied a variety of psychological approaches, not to Lovecraft’s life, but to his writing. One dazzling piece, “The Four Faces of ‘The Outsider,’” explores a single story as autobiography, as Jungian allegory, as a Freudian and mechanistic nightmare, and makes them all work, each facet providing new and striking insights.
More than anyone else, Mosig was the first to show us Lovecraft as a serious thinker and an artist of almost infinite depth. That he wrote only a small amount merely shows that if you say something important enough, you don’t have to say it at great length.
(Available from Necronomicon Press, P.O. Box 1304, West Warwick RI 02893. Add $1.50 for postage.)
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