Blunders (Intentional or Otherwise)

[humgoo]

Sept 17, 2010 16:46:26 GMT dem bones said:

Depending on your perspective, Horowitz gains or loses a credibility point for attributing The Monkey's Paw to "Edgar Allan Poe" (i so love stuff that gets the pedants beating their pompous chests!) [...]

I love this kind of thing to death. Case in point: I always love the fact that Abdul Alhazred is ungrammatical Arabic. HPL's worshipers would say it's intentional. Abdul Alhazred is supposed to be a "mad Arab" after all!

If you think of something similar, please share!

[dem bones]

Even by his lofty standards, Peter Haining's attribution of The Devil on the Marsh to something called "Mrs. Ethel Marriott-Watson", in The Circle of Witches is a bit special - he even provides a potted biography. "Ethel ... was born and lived for most of her life in a remote area of Cornwall .... she contributed a great deal of poetry to women's weekly newspapers and magazines, but her fictional tales are few and far between."

[humgoo]

Aug 27, 2021 8:22:57 GMT dem bones said:

Wonder how Lovecraft would feel about the nigh on Religious cult that's grown up around his work? I hope he'd laugh his tentacles off - either that, or spontaneously combust in embarrassment. Whatever, some of His worshippers need to have a serious word with themselves. Take this one.

My diligence in unearthing "new" Lovecraft revisions has, however, backfired on me, because it has led to the addition of one revision which I fervently wish had never been written, published, or acknowledged by HPL as his. This is 'Ashes' by C. M. Eddy. jr, a friend of Lovecraft's in Providence. It is Eddy's first Weird Tales story (it was published in the issue for March 1924), and if HPL had not admitted in a letter that he had helped fix it up, along with three other stories for Eddy (‘The Ghost-Eater','The Loved Dead', and 'Deaf. Dumb and Blind'), no one would ever believe Lovecraft had had anything to do with it. In fact, I intentionally suppressed the story for years: I had hand-copied the tale around 1977 from a crumbling issue of Weird Tales in the John Hay Library of Brown University (the issue was so fragile that it could not be xeroxed), but refused to show it to anyone until Robert M. Price finally persuaded me to let it be reprinted in 1982. After that, I was forced to include it in the new edition of The Horror in the Museum.

— S. T. Joshi, How Bad are Lovecraft's Revisions?, Scream Factory # 10

Don't beat yourself up so, mate. It's a disposable pulp story, not a sacred screed!

Sept 17, 2021 8:48:33 GMT dem bones said:

Even by his lofty standards, Peter Haining's attribution of The Devil on the Marsh to something called "Mrs. Ethel Marriott-Watson", in The Circle of Witches is a bit special - he even provides a potted biography. "Ethel ... was born and lived for most of her life in a remote area of Cornwall .... she contributed a great deal of poetry to women's weekly newspapers and magazines, but her fictional tales are few and far between."

It may be a crime to say so, but between the PH approach and Joshi's, I unhesitatingly prefer the former.