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Post by dem bones on Oct 11, 2009 6:22:21 GMT
August Derleth (ed.) - The Horror In The Museum: Great Tales Of Supernatural Terror (Panther, 1975) Bob Fowke August Derleth: Lovecraft’s Revisions
Hazel Heald - The Horror In The Museum H. P. Lovecraft & Elizabeth Berkeley - The Crawling Chaos Sonia Greene - Four O’Clock Hazel Heald - Winged Death C. M. Eddy - The Loved Dead C. M. Eddy - The Ghost-Eater William Lumley - The Diary Of Alonzo Typer Adolphe de Castro - The Electric Executioner Zealia Bishop - The MoundAugust Derleth (ed.) - The Horror in the Burying Ground (Panther, 1975) Bob Fowke Zealia Bishop - The Curse of Yig C M Eddy - Deaf, Dumb and Blind H P Lovecraft & Elizabeth Berkeley - The Green Meadow Hazel Heald - The Horror in the Burying Ground Sonia Greene - The Invisible Monster Adolphe de Castro - The Last Test Hazel Heald - The Man of Stone Zealia Bishop - Medusa’s Coil Hazel Heald - Out of the Eons Robert H. Barlow - ‘Till All the Seas’ Wilfred Blanch Talman - Two Black BottlesOriginally published by Arkham House in one volume (1970), Panther spread the contents over two paperbacks, beautifully set off with two classic Bob Fowke cover designs. Derleth had sprinkled several of these stories across earlier anthologies. His revisions and collaborations are often dismissed as minor Lovecraft, but The Horror In The Museum is not without its moments. The title story and Zealia Bishop's The Curse Of Yig both appeared in the Not At Night collections while C. M. Eddy's justly renowned The Loved Dead (the first person reminiscence of a voracious necrophiliac) most certainly should have!
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Post by Steve on Oct 11, 2009 7:38:38 GMT
I was about to recommend Wordsworth's recent The Loved Dead collection to anyone looking for a nice reasonably-priced selection of Lovecraft's revisions and ghost-written stuff, but just came across the statement below on a certain online shopping site;
"**Publisher's Note: This collection has been withdrawn, as it inadvertently, but incorrectly, attributed the story 'The Loved Dead' to H.P.Lovecraft, rather than the true author C.M.Eddy. A revised collection is in the course of preparation**"
Shame that. As I understand it, there's long been a certain amount of contention concerning the proper attribution of 'The Loved Dead'. I also seem to remember a website which had made most of Lovecraft's fiction available online getting the 'cease and desist' treatment from Eddy's estate or representatives. The suggestion being that not only was the story all Eddy's own work but that it was also not, at that time, in the public domain. Whatever the truth of it 'The Loved Dead' is a transgressive little gem which really deserves to remain widely available.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 11, 2009 8:01:32 GMT
Are the contents of the withdrawn Wordsworth the same as Horror In The Museum or did they add/ subtract anything? i've always thought of The Loved Dead as C. M. Eddy's even though the brilliant ending reads like the early Lovecraft at his most histrionic (The Hound, Herbert West, etc.) Eddy's other stories (with or without Lovecraft's assistance) just don't have the same impact.
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Post by andydecker on Oct 11, 2009 12:36:36 GMT
I first read "The horror in the museum" in one of those german anthos, before I knew what was Lovecraft about. Still, it left a lasting impression. A horrid museum, the behind the scenes stuff, the too curious narrator (called Stephen Jones ), the doomed expedition, the idiotic breakdown, the twist ending. All this has become a bag of cliches, still here it is fun.
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Post by Steve on Oct 11, 2009 17:29:28 GMT
Are the contents of the withdrawn Wordsworth the same as Horror In The Museum or did they add/ subtract anything? Here's what you got for your £2.99; The Green Meadow Poetry and the Gods The Crawling Chaos The Loved Dead The Horror at Martin's Beach (AKA The Invisible Monster) Imprisoned with the Pharaohs The Last Test Two Black Bottles The Thing in the Moonlight The Curse of Yig The Mound Medusa's Coil The Trap The Man of Stone Out of the Aeons The Disinterment The Diary Of Alonzo Typer Within the Walls of Eryx The Night Ocean By my reckoning that's just over half of the stories from the original Arkham House edition of The Horror in the Museum with a couple more that appeared in later revised editions, plus a few additional bits and pieces from elsewhere. Well it's certainly always had Eddy's name attached to it as far as I'm aware. I think this may be where the Wordsworth collection has run into a few problems - the fact that, while the contributions to each story made by other writers are mentioned in a fairly extensive introduction, the stories themselves are all credited solely to Lovecraft (in as much as nobody else gets a mention in the body of the book or on the cover). Maybe this takes the assumption of Lovecraft's 'authorship' of the tales in question - even if many of them are substantially his work - just a step too far? Here's what M. J. Elliott has to say about 'The Loved Dead' in his introduction; "Credited to Houdini's booking agent Clifford Martin Eddy, The Loved Dead is perhaps the most controversial of Lovecraft's career. At this stage in his life, HPL had already undertaken numerous ghost-writing assignments and had rewritten several of Eddy's stories... The two men shared a love of the macabre, and would often take night-time strolls through the cemeteries in their home town of Providence... The narrator's background, described in [ The Loved Dead's] opening paragraphs, is clearly Lovecraft's own work, since it mirrors his own childhood so closely"
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Post by dem bones on Oct 11, 2009 17:38:33 GMT
I can't get anywhere near my books right now on account of half the flat has been demolished (don't ask ...), so perhaps the answer is in Derleth's introduction, but just how much of the Heald, Bishop and Eddy stories are Heald, Bishop and Eddy and how much is Lovecraft? It seems unlikely, for example, that Lovecraft, who, from what we read, doesn't appear to have had much, if any interest in sex would dream up the story of a randy corpse-lover.
Robert A Lowdnes' Magazine Of Horror #30 (Dec. 1969) includes Robert Bloch's novelette Satan's Stepson, with a partial listing of HPL's comments and suggestions to the author. He's coaching him rather tan revising/ rewriting him though i'm guessing that wasn't always the case?
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Post by dem bones on Oct 11, 2009 17:42:47 GMT
"Credited to Houdini's booking agent Clifford Martin Eddy, The Loved Dead is perhaps the most controversial of Lovecraft's career. At this stage in his life, HPL had already undertaken numerous ghost-writing assignments and had rewritten several of Eddy's stories... The two men shared a love of the macabre, and would often take night-time strolls through the cemeteries in their home town of Providence... The narrator's background, described in [ The Loved Dead's] opening paragraphs, is clearly Lovecraft's own work, since it mirrors his own childhood so closely" Thanks Steve, you answered my questions while i was still typing them! the power of paranormal romance, eh?
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Post by Steve on Oct 12, 2009 7:18:55 GMT
I can't get anywhere near my books right now on account of half the flat has been demolished (don't ask ...), so perhaps the answer is in Derleth's introduction, but just how much of the Heald, Bishop and Eddy stories are Heald, Bishop and Eddy and how much is Lovecraft? It seems unlikely, for example, that Lovecraft, who, from what we read, doesn't appear to have had much, if any interest in sex would dream up the story of a randy corpse-lover. I don't have any reference material to hand at the moment (I'm half demolished) but I think, as these stories are all rewrites or ghostwriting jobs, we can safely assume that in each case the original ideas came from other writers rather than Lovecraft himself. Having said that, it's an interesting point you raise about Lovecraft's, shall we say, proclivities in regard to 'The Loved Dead'. Given when the story was written, we can't really expect anything too explicit but, even so, it's always struck me as a curiously asexual approach to necrophilia. Granted, the narrator does get extremely physically excited in close proximity to the dearly departed but it all seems to stem from some rather deep-seated repression. Of course we can only speculate, just for the sake of outrageous slander, what form the conversation took on Lovecraft and Eddy's regular nightly walks through the cemeteries of Providence. As regards how much input other writers had in the actual writing of these stories, it seems to have varied considerably. Apparently the synopsis that Zealia Bishop submitted to Lovecraft for 'her' story, 'The Mound', went something like; "There's this mound. And a ghost. or something."
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Post by dem bones on Oct 12, 2009 7:56:17 GMT
As regards how much input other writers had in the actual writing of these stories, it seems to have varied considerably. Apparently the synopsis that Zealia Bishop submitted to Lovecraft for 'her' story, 'The Mound', went something like; "There's this mound. And a ghost. or something." OK, so that one was fairly extensively revised It's such a shame CCT didn't include The Loved Dead in a Not At Night as i wonder what the reaction would have been in the UK? It now seems that the particular edition of Weird Tales back in 1924 wasn't as banned in the States as some commentators would have us believe, but how would it have gone down over here? !! When i get my room back, i'll dig out my old Magazine Of Horror's and Startling Mysteries as i'm pretty sure C. M. Eddy's wife contributed a 'memories of HPL' item that might shed some light on which of 'em was the cemetery flasher or what have you.
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Post by Steve on Nov 29, 2009 19:16:29 GMT
Seems Wordsworth are now set to release their own Horror in the Museum early in the new year. From what I can make out this isn't a straight reprint of the original The Horror in the Museum but rather a slightly rejigged version of their previously available Loved Dead collection. Haven't seen a full list of contents yet so don't know exactly what changes have been made - I think it's fairly safe to assume that "The Horror in the Museum" itself has been added but I don't know whether "The Loved Dead" has been re-attributed to C.M. Eddy or just left out completely.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 1, 2009 22:28:00 GMT
Hi Steve
I just dug out Muriel C. Eddy's Memories Of HPL in Magazine Of Horror #12 (Winter 1965/66), very charming but disappointingly vague. "After the first meeting, our discussions of writing grew more and more interesting and Lovecraft asked if he could come at night instead of the daytime. So we spent many nights from 11 PM to 2 AM reading stories of horror aloud with H.P.L. We wrote stories under Lovecraft's tutelage: we typed some of his stories: we assisted in his ghost-writing of material for the great magician, Houdini. It was a marvelous relationship and one we shall always treasure".
But ...
When C. M. Eddy died on November 21 1967, Muriel broke the sad news on the letters page of MOH #22 (July 1968). This time, she writes of "my dear husband, author of several stories published in the now defunct WEIRD TALES, etc., such as The Loved Dead, Deaf, Dumb & Blind, etc..... Mr. Eddy and Mr. Lovecraft often discussed plots of their stories before writing them and I was always an interested listener .... My husband was not as prolific a writer as was HPL, but what he did write was bloodcurdlingly readable."
Not that it's conclusive evidence, but Mrs. Eddy certainly believed her husband had a big hand in The Loved Dead.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 11, 2010 13:15:21 GMT
Seems Wordsworth are now set to release their own Horror in the Museum early in the new year. From what I can make out this isn't a straight reprint of the original The Horror in the Museum but rather a slightly rejigged version of their previously available Loved Dead collection. Haven't seen a full list of contents yet so don't know exactly what changes have been made - I think it's fairly safe to assume that "The Horror in the Museum" itself has been added but I don't know whether "The Loved Dead" has been re-attributed to C.M. Eddy or just left out completely. H. P. Lovecraft - The Horror In The Museum: Collected Short Stories Volume 2 (Wordsworth Editions, Jan. 2010) Garibaldi's Bedroom in the Victor Hugo Museum. Mary Evans Picture Library, London. picked up the revised version this morning, introduced by the editor, M. J. Elliott, and to cut straight to the chase, it drops The Loved Dead and adds; The Electic Executioner The Horror In The Museum Winged Death The Horror in the Burying Ground 'Till All the Seas’i think Volume 1 is The Whisperers In Darkness as i saw that on the shelves. should've given it the once over but i was too preoccupied with ordering a skip so i could get Varney The Vampyre home (1166 pages, and even then it's small print)
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Post by benedictjjones on Feb 11, 2010 17:28:54 GMT
cheers dem, didn't realsie this one was out - and al those stories are lacking from the collection i shall be perusing the usual purveyors of wordsworths (the discount book warehouse) in the hope that they have it - although they havent seemed to be restocing of late.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Feb 11, 2010 19:22:06 GMT
I wish we had a local stockist of Wordsworths, but with Borders gone, it has to be Amazon for me. Mind you, even before Borders went, I was loath to buy them there, as they always seemed to be a pound or two dearer than I knew the Wordsworth editions to be - still cheap, but I wasn't happy at Borders inventing their own pricing.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 11, 2010 19:46:22 GMT
perhaps we should have a 'where do you find your Wordsworths' thread? it might be useful for people to know where to find them. i notice Foyles have a few mixed in with what they laughingly advertise as the 'horror' section, but they seem to favour Penguin classic editions which, of course, are more pricey.
it was really depressing traipsing along Charing Cross Road this morning, seeing the boarded-up Borders. no Murder One, the once-thriving remainder shops all vanished bar Lovejoys (and it's probably the-stuff-round-the-back keeps them going). There's even a sale in Quinto's - which had been there forever - on account of their "relocating".
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