Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire May 3. 1051 - March 26, 2019

  Some weeks ago I received a catalogue from a bookseller I have been dealing with for over 30 years. The first things I purchased from him (he had a table at an antique show I think ) was Frank Belknap Long's The Rim of the Unknown with a wonderful Herb Arnold cover, my wife also purchased all five volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters for my birthday. I have purchased many other things over the years and always scan his catalogue eagerly when it appears though I rarely buy Arkham House as I have a number of the less expensive ones and some of the others are beyond the parameters of my pension. He had a copy of The Mask of Cthulhu  which I discussed in the post below. But again I resisted the urge to spend that much.

https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2019/07/new-arrivals.html

But a copy of The Survivor caught my eye, it seemed more fiscally approachable. I had always been indifferent to the white and purple Ronald Clyne dust jacket until now. Also the stories were Lovecraft Derleth "posthumous collaborations" written after Lovecraft's death. Which are now considered a bit gauche in some circles. A brief summary of these works can be found at this link.  

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/derleth.aspx

But now the dust jacket seemed totally appropriate to the strange haunted landscapes of these stories. When I began reading Lovecraft I was in elementary school and made no distinctions between the works of the master and the collaborations and pastiches that followed. The first works I read, borrowed from a friend were Ballantine editions with the John Holmes covers. The first book I owned however was a "posthumous collaboration"  a Ballantine edition  of The Lurker on the Threshold with a rather strange cover by Murray Tinkleman, that my mother gave me for Christmas, sadly I did not keep my early copy when I found a Arkham House edition. Then I read the words (Donald A Wollheim's copy), stamped in the back. That Wollheim, early SF fan, Futurian, author, editor and the founder, which his wife Elsie Balter Wollheim, of DAW books.  I ordered The Survivor right away. While I waited, I hate waiting, I had a book which I knew discussed the controversy about August Derleth's contributions to the mythos.  So I pulled out A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the "Cthulhu Mythos" by John D. Haefele. I am still working through the book but it was the introduction by mythos author Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire that held my attention. 

"I have always considered the book’s title story one of the finest Lovecraftian tales that I have ever read; but I was a little doubtful about the rest of the book, because I entered Lovecraft fandom in the early 1970s, at a time when there was a growing amount of anti-Derleth sentiment. I was at the time far more a Cthulhu Mythos fanboy than a pure Lovecraftian. As a Mormon missionary in Northern Ireland, I had been influenced by my correspondence with Robert Bloch to read weird fiction, and the first titles of Lovecraft that I picked up were used paperback editions found in wee bookshops. Upon returning home from my mission, I read Derleth’s original edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (still, for me, the finest Mythos anthology) and Lin Carter’s Love- craft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, the combined reading of which convinced me that becoming an established Mythos author was my destiny. I loved the Mythos, but I had been taught that Derleth’s tales were sub-literary dreck, and that the posthumous collaborations were a criminal act. "

and 

"Thus, in early 2011, I picked up my Arkham House edition of The Survivor and Others, determined to read the stories with fresh eyes and unpolluted mind. I was no longer a clueless Cthulhu kid; I was a sixty year old man who had dedicated decades of his life to writing Lovecraftian weird fiction. I read the first story and was confirmed in my long-held opinion that it is excellent. Carefully, slowly, I read the other tales in the book, and after reading a story I would comment on it in a YouTube video. My opinion of the book was now completely my own, and I found it quite wonderful. It was, in some ways, a shocking experience. I was so ready to confirm my opinion that “The Shadow out of Space” was nothing more than a pathetic rip-off of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow out of Time.” It was nothing of the kind. "

from Pugmire's introduction to A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos, Origins of the "Cthulhu Mythos"  by John D, Haefele.

In an earlier post I discussed how much I enjoyed reading Caitlin R. Kiernan lovely reminiscence concerning her first experience with the works of H.P. Lovecraft in her new collection Houses Under the Sea from Subterranean Press. The first book she encountered was (1965) Arkham House edition of Dagon & Other Macabre Tales.  

http://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2019/10/new-eldritch-tomes.html

She notes that 

"I discovered not only the title story, but such dark gems as “The Hound,” “The Strange High House in the Mist,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,”"



She goes on to say

"at the time, I had no idea that that were far from Lovecraft's best stories. and it would be several years yet before I'd figure that out...,"

Kiernan is correct The Hound,” “The Strange High House in the Mist,” “The Lurking Fear,” all seem to be considered minor tales, but they are among my favourites as well. These two introductions have helped remind me that any work or author that is well known will attract an ever expanding ring of critical  accretions, good and bad. In the end however we should not allow this veritable critical shoggoth to devour the work itself. The stories themselves should remain the property of the girl on the Trussville, Alabama school bus, the Mormon missionary in Northern Ireland, or the geeky kid in Windsor Ontario.

I had read some of Pugmire's stories in the past so I began a more systematic search though my anthologies and the internet for more of his work. It was only then I learned that Pugmire had passed away in March of this year at the age of 67 not that much older than I am. Pugmire's friend S.T. Joshi has offered an extended remembrance of his passing. His blog does not offer separate links so you have to scroll down to the entry for March 31, 2019.

http://stjoshi.org/news.html

March 31, 2019 — My Friend, Wilum Pugmire

John D. Haefele discussed it here.

https://donherron.com/rediscovered-from-one-derleth-devotee-to-another/

Since then I have read and enjoyed more of Pugmire's work and purchased a number of his books with plans for a couple more. I will be looking at some of his stories in future posts. Here however I want to thank him for his introduction to Haefele's book. Pugmire gave me back my early enjoyment of Derleth's work as well as his own wonderful stories, and when I look thru my copy of The Survivor I will think of him as well as Wollheim. 

Cover/Photo Credits:

Photo of W.H. Pugmire by Michael J. Contos, from back cover of The Strange Dark One

A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the "Cthulhu Mythos"s ,cover by Leo Grin

The Doom That Came to Sarnath, cover by the wonderful Gervasio Gallardo

Monstrous Aftermath: Stories in the Lovecraftian Tradition, cover by Matthew Jaffe, design Barbara Briggs Silbert

 The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep, cover by Jeffrey Thomas

The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams, cover by Richard H. Knox

New Arrivals

It is funny how I now tend to create the same environment around me wherever I spend much time. Now at least these few shelves at the cabin look very much like my shelves at home crammed with science fiction and mythos related items with the covers of the more striking paperbacks and chapbooks displayed so I can enjoy them at a glance.

As I have mentioned previously on this website, my collecting, as opposed to just accumulating books to read began with H.P. Lovecraft's books and other Arkham House publications. While I did not aspire to first edition copies of The Outsider and Others or Beyond the Walls of Sleep, I did get a lovely The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson (with a Hannes Bok dust jacket) and a copy of Derleth’s Lurker on the Threshold with Oswald Train’s (an early science fiction publisher) bookplate. One thing I now regret is I traded in a number of my original Lovecraft paperbacks as I got hardcovers. Eventually, I collected more widely, expanding to small press science fiction and magazines. But now having a lot of books I find I enjoy collecting paperbacks, a less pricey and bulky segment of the publishing industry. And while I had been looking at some UK science fiction editions, my latest purchases as often happens, brought me back to Howard yet again.

A couple of years ago I had the chance to spend $300 on the Arkham House edition of The Mask of Cthulhu with a beautiful dust jacket by Richard Taylor. I passed and now I love my Consul edition (1961) with a sadly unattributed cover.

I really enjoy Darrell Schweitzer’s mythos tales as well as his essays and the anthologies he puts together. I could not resist this Starmount Press book Discovering H.P. Lovecraft (1987) with a cover depicting Randolph Carter as the wizard Zkauba of the planet Yaddith, (Through the Gates of the Silver Key). Cover by Richard Huber. Also appeared as Essays Lovecraftian.

Brian Lumley seems to get some criticism in the Mythos community, I suspect because much of his work is seen as more closely related to August Derleth’s additions to the mythos than the Lovecraft canon. While I think his Titus Crow adventures continued too long and morphed into more action-adventure stories than mythos tales, he has contributed a lot of solid work. I hope to look at his stories more closely in the future. Cover by Les Edwards, New English Library, 1995.

I cannot resist a Derleth anthology with a cover featuring wolves with coral snakes for tongues, thanks to Don Punchatz. This collection includes “The Man Who Collected Poe” by Robert Bloch, a story I had not read before and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” by H.P. Lovecraft. I had not realized there was a connection between these tales before but I  hope to provide more detail regarding this in my next post. 

And my shelves always have room for another Bradbury, cover and interior illustrations by the incomparable Joseph Mugnaini.

Full wraparound cover.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?226697

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