A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The Knopf deal is probably the closest Lovecraft ever came to having a book published in his lifetime by a mainstream publisher. If he had done so, the rest of his career—and, it is not too much to say, the entire subsequent history of American weird fiction— might have been very different. But, after this fourth failure at book publication (following Weird Tales, Putnam’s, and Vanguard), the last three and a half years of Lovecraft’s life were increasingly filled with doubt, diffidence, and depression about his work, until toward the end he came to believe that he had entirely failed as a fiction writer.

In September 1933 The Fantasy Fan began publication. This is, canonically, the first ‘fan’ magazine in the domain of weird/ fantastic fiction, and it inaugurated a very rich, complex, and somewhat unruly tradition—still flourishing today—of fan activity in this realm.

It is an anomaly beyond my powers of explanation that the fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction have attracted legions of fans who are not content to read and collect the literature but must write about it and its authors, and publish—often at considerable expense—small magazines or books devoted to the subject. There is no analogous fan network in the fields of detective fiction or the western, even though the first of these fields certainly attracts a far larger body of fans than does weird fiction. Nor is this fan activity entirely to be despised: many of today’s leading critics of weird fiction emerged from the realm of fandom and still retain connections with it. Fandom is perhaps most charitably seen as a training ground that permits young writers and critics (most individuals become fans as teenagers) to hone their nascent abilities; but the field has gained well-deserved contempt because so many of its participants never seem to advance beyond its essentially juvenile level.

The Fantasy Fan was edited by Charles D. Hornig (b. 1916) of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who was scarcely seventeen when the magazine was launched. Celebrated as it is, it operated at a loss during its entire run: it had a pitifully small circulation in its day— only sixty subscribers and a print run probably not exceeding three hundred—and looks very crude and amateurish today. But it attracted immediate attention throughout the world of weird fiction, not only among fans but among its leading authors. Lovecraft saw in it a chance to land (without pay, of course) his oft-rejected tales. He urged Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and even the relentlessly professional August Derleth to send original stories to it, and the appearance of stories by these and other writers has made

The Fantasy Fan a choice collectible commanding high prices.

Hornig made, however, one mistake in judgment by instituting, in the very first issue, a write-in column called ‘The Boiling Point’ in which controversial and polemical opinions were deliberately sought out. As a result, a nasty letter-feud broke out between Forrest J Ackerman (b. 1916)—who had harshly criticized a Clark Ashton Smith story—and Lovecraft, Smith, Barlow, and others. By February 1934 Hornig decided that ‘The Boiling Point’ had served its purpose and had in fact aroused too much ill-feeling to be productive. And yet, bitter, vituperative controversies of this sort have remained common in fandom and continue to this day.

Hornig made a wiser decision when he accepted Lovecraft’s offer of preparing a new edition of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ for serialization in the magazine. Lovecraft evidently revised the essay all at once, not piecemeal over the course of the serialization (October 1933 to February 1935); indeed, he seems simply to have sent Hornig an annotated copy of The Recluse, with separate typed (or even handwritten) sheets for the major additions. The serialization progressed very slowly, as the magazine could accommodate only a small portion of text in each issue; when the magazine folded in February 1935, it had published the text only up to the middle of Chapter VIII. For the rest of the two years of his life Lovecraft sought in vain to find some fan publisher to continue the serialization. The complete, revised text of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ did not appear until The Outsider and Others (1939).