Ralph E. Vaughan; Sherlock Holmes in the Dreaming Detective

A few posts back I mentioned how much I enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories of  Ralph E. Vaughan. After reading both his Sherlock Holmes: The Cthulhu Mythos Tales and Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time and other stories, I purchased a used copy of  Sherlock Holmes in the Dreaming Detective.  I have included a quote from Ralph's post about the book and a link to his site below. The Dreaming Detective is set for the most part in Lovecraft's Dreamlands. The book itself is quite short, some 61 pages and that includes a second story, "The Adventure of the Laughing Moonbeast" which is also quite enjoyable.This post will include spoilers.  

  The Dreaming Detective begins in a New York City hotel room on January 2, 1943. Nikola Tesla is in bed close to death when he is visited by Albert Einstein. He has come to take Tesla to Washington D.C. to save Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is in a dream vault, a device designed by Tesla, which allows Holmes to remain in the Dreamlands without aging. Removing Holmes would mean that he would begin to age normally and given his advanced age, he would die. The machine monitoring Holmes indicates that he is in trouble and it has been decided that Tesla should travel to the Dreamlands to help Holmes. Tesla's relationship with Holmes is detailed in a series of flashbacks that occur on the journey. They first meet in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1899. Tesla is there to conduct a series of experiments in wireless power transmission. The night of the experiment Telsa is approached by Holmes with a warning, one of his technicians, Heinrich Grantz is actually Wilhelm Reisen, an evil scientist whose experiments have killed killed scores of people. Holmes intends to arrest Reisen later, but during the experiment Reisen wounds Tesla and increases the power levels in an attempt to break down the barriers between our Earth and the Dreamlands. Homes intervenes, Reisen is propelled into the Dreamlands and a large severed tentacle is left behind. Giant tentacle, hurrah!!

  Tesla and Holmes will meet again, Holmes explains that using a Heinsenberg pocket of uncertainty, Reisen was able to rescue Moriarty as he fell to his death. They have joined forces still hoping to break down the barriers between the two worlds. This would allow them to introduce magic into our world and gunpowder and internal combustion engines into the Dreamlands, conquering both worlds. Once in the still unfinished Pentagon, the site of the Dream Chamber, Tesla is brought up to speed. Reisen and Moriarty are in dream vaults in Berlin. The Dreamlands has been mapped by a number of Anglo-American expeditions and five agents have proceeded Tesla in attempts to rescue Holmes. Four have died and one is mad. Because of their friendship and because he has nothing to lose, he is dying anyway, Tesla uses the power of the dream chamber to project himself into the Dreamlands. During the course of his journey Tesla enters the Enchanted Wood of the Zoogs. Suddenly Tesla is captured by two Nazi stormtroopers, it seems Reisen has joined forces with Hitler. They have already killed a Zoog and intend to kill Tesla when, well the Zoogs's may or may not think it's okay to punch a Nazi, but they are quite happy to rip them apart and eat them. Tesla continues his journey to Dylath-Leen. Before he can locate Holmes he is captured by the strange creatures that serve the moonbeasts who of course make him drink wine, and yet more Nazi, who have replaced the moonbeast's flying galleries with airships pulled by frost worms. They then carry Telsa off to Plateau of Leng. I will leave it there. 

  Another great tale, despite it's length Vaughan has created a tapestry that mixes real and fictional characters from the Edwardian or Victorian period through the two world wars. He is faithful to Lovecraft's creation while expanding the parameters just enough to allow for a new and imaginative approach to the story of the Dreamlands which never seems formulamatic. Without going into lengthy expostulations Vaughan stitches together a rich and interesting backstory of both the continuing feud between Moriarty and Reisen and Holmes and the ongoing efforts of various governments to deal with the potential problems that the Dreamlands might present should the barriers weaken. It seems the Zoogs have already broken through at least once.

Most importantly it is a fun story, Tesla is a great addition to the Holmes canon and I always enjoy another well-realized trip to the Dreamlands.

  

 "A few years ago I posted a blog about when I introduced Sherlock Holmes to HP Lovecraft in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods. If you're interested in reviewing it, you can click on the link in the title and be taken there. However, if you're interested in reading the story, you may have a bit of a problem. Copies of the original fanzine, Holmesian Federation #4 are very difficult to find and can be costly; copies of the chapbook published by Gary Lovisi's Gryphon Books are likewise hard to find and can be even more expensive, especially if it's the first edition with my name misspelled on the cover. Purchasing the book, along with any of my other Sherlock Holmes books published by Gryphon is no longer an option, thanks to a visit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. That incident led me to republish a later book, which introduced Sherlock Holmes to HG Wells' Time Traveler as Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories. The "other stories" in the book were all new ones I had written after 2005, all either about Holmes directly, in homage to Holmes, or about other characters in the Canon.'

for the full post;

http://bookscribbles.blogspot.com/2015/08/sherlock-holmes-vs-cthulhu.html"

All illustrations by Earl Geier, 

Gryphon Publications, 1992.

HPL in the movies; Aquaman and The Dunwich Horror

 
My wife and I watched the 2018 film Aquaman last night. We enjoyed the various special effects, especially the less human groups, like the fish-like merpeople (The Fishermen), the monsters of the Trench and the crustacean forces of the Kingdom of the Brine. Early in the film there is a shot of a snow globe resting on a copy of The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft. The film itself had no real elements of Lovecraftian horror, although it did deal with a Lovecraftian theme, the birth of a character, whose parents represented two very different groups. It is interesting that Lovecraft's work still seems to be part of such a strong cultural dialogue between artists of various mediums. Slate did a thoughtful piece on this element of the movie, the link is here;

"Aquaman Owes a Lot to H.P. Lovecraft. It’s Also His Worst Nightmare." by Keith Phipps

https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/aquaman-movie-hp-lovecraft-racism-miscegenation.html

Edition pictured, 1945 by Bartholomew House,
Cover artist uncredited.

The Dweller in Darkness, The Fisherman of Falcon Point, August Derleth

"The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth
Weird Tales, November 1944, Cover by Matt Fox, Image from ISFDB.

I mentioned over on Jagged Orbit, that I recently purchased a dvd of pdf's of some earlier issues of Weird Tales. While I would have liked more of the earliest issues, there was a good selection. One of the first stories I read was "The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth, I have read it before, a number of times but how could I resist this cover. Derleth occupies a strange position within the mythos. Derleth along with Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House in 1939, thus keeping alive not just Lovecraft's work but also his letters, and the work of many of his circle, including Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. But he is also considered to have introduced some none Lovecraftian elements to the Mythos, including adding a somewhat Christian World View and the casting of the Old Ones as elementals that can be played off against each other. 

Here I am quoting from John Linwood Grant's somewhat (I assume ) tongue in cheek, THE CTHULHU MYTHOS FOR BEGINNERS, Because we don't want to be taking this to seriously.

"August Derleth, having worked in a canning factory, liked everything neatly packaged and labelled, so whilst he added his own beings, he also tried to sort the others into orderly groups which could be represented by elements, nature, and weight of contents when drained."

"Hence his identification of Cthulhu as a water deity, despite Cthulhu’s known dislike of its enforced holiday in the oceanic depths. And Derleth’s creation of Cthulhu’s bad-tempered brother-in-law, Cthugha, when it was pointed out that he’d missed Fire out."

http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-cthulhu-mythos-for-beginners/

I will try to do a more detailed post on Derleth in the future but in this post I want to look at only two works "The Dweller in Darkness" and "The Fisherman of Falcon Point". I plan to include spoilers for "The Dweller in Darkness" so I will look at "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" first. ISFDB indicated that "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" was first published in the Arkham House collection The Shuttered Room rather than making it's initial appearance in Weird Tales. 

I was surprised to find that "The Fisherman of Falcon Point". did not appear in several collections that purport to contain all Derleth's mythos stories.

     

 However it can be found in both of the collections below.

"The Fisherman of Falcon Point" is the story of Enoch Conger who lived on the Massachusetts coast not far from Innsmouth. He is not one of the Innsmouth folk, but a powerfully build man with a barrel chest and long arms. He wears his hair and beard long. He is not gregarious, though he will join the other men in the tavern after he sells his fish; 

"He was a taciturn man, given to living alone in a house of stone and driftwood which he himself had constructed on the windswept point of land, where he heard the voices of the gulls and terns, of wind and sea, and, in season, of migrants from far places passing by, sometimes invisibly high. It is said of him that he answered them, that he talked with the gulls and terns, with the wind and the pounding sea, and with others that could not be seen and were heard only in strange tones like the muted sounds made by great batrachian beasts unknown in the bogs and marshes of the mainland." 

And all is well, it seems with this strange solitary man, until one night he lifts the nets he cast off Devil's Reef and brings up a creature that pleads for her life. Not a mermaid, as he tells the tavern hangers on, because she has legs though her feet are webbed. But something else. Conger is of course mocked for this story, but more importantly haunted by this experience. I will leave this story here. I loved this story, perhaps because my enjoyment of Lovecraft's work is not limited to his more canonical stories, like The Call of Cthulhu, or the Dunwich Horror, but also extends to works from his Dunsany phase. "The Fisherman of Falcon Point" reminds me more of Lovecraft's "The Strange High House in the Mist" or even Dunsany himself with perhaps a nod to The Arabian Nights. Nothing momentous happens, no mountain walks, not deities are evoked to battle one another in an incandescent firestorm above Devils Reef. It is a story of mood and atmosphere, that evoked the sounds of the sea and the gulls above it, the feeling of wet sand and the smell of salt in the air.

To listen to the story you can try the link below, but the text contains spoilers. My rating for the story would be totally different because I really enjoyed it. Again it is probably one of my favourite of Derleth's contributions to the mythos, although perhaps very understated for some tastes.

https://sentinelhillpress.com/2016/04/01/derleth-country-5-the-fishermen-of-falcon-point/

"The Dweller in Darkness" is set in Derleth's native Wisconsin, perhaps he is following the advice he gave to a young Ramsey Campbell, to forgo setting his stories in Lovecraft's New England and instead pick a location he knew. This advice led Campbell to rewrite his earlier stores and launched his Severn Valley Tales, collected in the Arkham House collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964) (PS Publishing released a new edition with lots of additional material), https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/the-inhabitant-of-the-lake--other-unwelcome-tenants-paperback-by-ramsey-campbell-new-cover-1340-p.asp

If so, however Derleth's resolve must have wavered because as far as I know he revisited his Wisconsin setting only once more in his mythos fiction with his 1941 story "Beyond the Threshold", which I will try to do another day. The "Dweller in Darkness" begins with a couple of introductory paragraphs describing the physical landscape where the story takes place. Standard stuff, not as well written as the landscapes described in the first paragraphs in Lovecraft's stories, "The Colour Out of Space", "The Picture in the House" or "The Dunwich Horror" but okay. The setting is the empty lodge on Rick's Lake, the lake is shunned because there are strange winds, unearthly music and a tendency for people to disappesar. sometimes they are just gone. Sometimes they reappear, alive but far away, sometimes dead with their bones broken as if they have fallen from great heights, well, you get the idea. Kind of a strange place. But the lodge attracts the attention of Prof Gardner, when he is summoned to the local museum to view a recently discovered mummified figure tentatively identified as Fr. Piregard, a missionary who disappeared in the area three centuries earlier. The problem was, the body was not mummified but frozen and it appeared to have been dead no more than five years. This piqued Gardner's interest and he was off to the lodge to see what he can find. And well, he disappears too.

  After a through search by the local sheriff the mystery of his disappearance is abandoned. Until two of the professor's graduate students, Laird and Dorgan (wonderful mythos name that) spurred on by some of Gardner's letters to Laird. decide to investigate. Equipped with a dictaphone to record any evidence, they travel to Rick's Lake. At the lodge the sheriff gives them some notes Gardner left behind and they also meet Old Pete, a "half breed" prospector who is familiar with the area. They hear spooky wind sounds and scary music and take a brief side trip to visit Professor Partier, who was retired from the university, because he was crazy. I guess they did not have tenure in those days. He fills them in on all the details of the Deleth/Cthulnu mythos and suggests they go home. Later, because that is how these things are done in the pulp magazines of the 1940's, they will ply Pete with "firewater" and force him to take them to see a strange carving of a giant figure accompanied by two smaller figure that is on a rock near the lodge. Pete is rightly, terrified to approach this location after dark and they return him to the highway. When they listen to the dictaphone there is a message from Gardner telling them to flee, but only after summoning Cthugha, remember we heard about him earlier. Then Gardner himself shows up, accidentally destroys the dictaphone recording and Laird and Dorgan visit the rock carving. 

This was an okay mythos tale, certainly better than Derleth's very repetitive adventures of Prof. Laban Shrewsbury in The Trail of Cthulhu. But I did have some quibbles, first off, even though I had read it before, I was convinced based on the hints that the creature would be Ithaqua, the setting and behaviour was consistent with his portrayal in other stories by Derleth, Lumley and others. That it was Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos, baffles me. I have always pictured him as a bit more urbane, it may be made up nonsense, but I have standards. 

"He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude." from Nyarlathotep by H.P. Lovecraft.

I also see shades of Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in the Darkness" in the resolution. While I enjoyed the cosmic bits of "The Whisperer in the Darkness"I find certain aspects of the plot very weak. The pussyfooting around that the Mi-Go go through with Wilmarth to get hold of the evidence for one, (and don't get me started on Basil Cooper's tribute The Great White Space) has always seemed unnecessary. In this case Nyarlathotep has even less to lose if exposed than the Mi-Go so why all the deception. Come to the point, pick them up, carry them off to Leng or R'lyeh and make them walk home. I do get a little frustrated when I feel people emulate the weakest rather than the strongest aspects of Lovecraft's work. Mythos tales have always been uneven, even some of Howard's so maybe i expect to much. The setting and atmosphere in this story are okay, the plot fairly standard. And I do like the rather silly cover from Weird Tales.

Illustrations and covers 

In Lovecraft's Shadow and directly above Stephen E. Fabian for Mycroft & Moran

A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos cover by Leo Grin

The Shuttered Room cover by John Holmes

The Watchers Out of Time and Others cover by (the great) Herb Arnold

Weird Studies Podcasts

"I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons — the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown." 

from Nyarlathotep by H.P. Lovecraft

A couple of days ago Helen mentioned a Podcast called Weird Studies. Great stuff the creators cover a variety of topics, including Lovecraft, Philip K Dick, David Lynch, Borges, David Cronenberg, and one I am really looking forward to William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist"

Followers of this blog might especially enjoy episode 29: On Lovecraft. Ford and Martel are really well read and interweave a lot of their reading, no just in genre literature, but elements from literature, poetry, media studies, philosophy, anthropology, music and film into their podcasts. I have listened to three episodes and the discussion is so wide ranging and thoughtful that I want to listen to them again so I can take notes.

https://www.weirdstudies.com/29

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction" and the prose piece "Nyarlathotep." Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, and David Foster Wallace make appearances as our fearsome hosts talk about how the weird story differs from conventional horror fiction, how Lovecraft gives voice to contemporary fears of physical, psychological and political infection, and how authors like Lovecraft and Dick can be seen as prophetic poets of the "great unbuffering of the Western self."

REFERENCES

H. P. Lovecraft, "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

1974 Rolling Stone feature on PKD
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Theodor Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition
Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo"
Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows"
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Weird Studies, Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man