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

‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ has many flaws: first, the obviousness of the basic scenario and the utter lack of subtlety in its execution; and second, poor writing, laden (as with ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’) with hyperbole, stale idioms, and dragging verbosity. The story was clearly influenced by H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928; first published in England in 1925 as The Remedy), a poorly written but strangely compelling novel about a man named Booth who displays anomalous powers of hypnosis and mind-transference. Lovecraft has amended this plot by introducing the notion of mind-exchange: whereas Drake does not clarify what happens to the ousted mind when it is taken over by the mind of Booth, Lovecraft envisages an exact transference whereby the ousted mind occupies the body of its possessor. The notion of mind-transference between a man and a woman may have been borrowed by Barry Pain’s outstanding short novel An Exchange of Souls (1911), which Lovecraft is known to have read.

The fact that the mind-exchange occurs between husband and wife gives the story some small interest, if only from a biographical perspective. Various features of Edward Derby’s life supply a twisted version of Lovecraft’s own childhood; but other features seem drawn from the lives of some of Lovecraft’s closest associates, notably Alfred Galpin and Frank Belknap Long.⁷ Derby’s marriage to Asenath Waite, of course, brings certain aspects of Lovecraft’s marriage to Sonia manifestly to mind. Sonia was clearly the more strong-willed member of the couple. On one occasion Frank Belknap Long told me that Sonia was a ‘domineering’ woman, a description very applicable to Asenath Waite. Aside from these points of biographical interest, however, ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ is crude, obvious, lacking in subtlety of execution or depth of conception, and histrionically written.

Lovecraft was becoming the hub of an increasingly complex network of fans and writers in the field of weird and science fiction; and in the last four years of his life he attracted a vast number of young people (mostly boys) who looked upon him as a living legend. I have already noted that R. H. Barlow first came in touch with Lovecraft at the age of thirteen in 1931; now other teenagers came to the fore.

The most promising of them—or, rather, the one who in the end amounted to the most—was Robert Bloch (1917–94), who first wrote to Lovecraft in the spring of 1933. Bloch, born in Chicago but at this time a resident of Milwaukee, had just turned sixteen, and had been reading Weird Tales since 1927. To the end of his life Bloch remained grateful to Lovecraft for his lengthy reply to his fan letter and for continuing to write to him over the next four years. Lovecraft lent unstinting assistance to Bloch, meticulously criticizing his early stories and urging him to restrain the overcolouring and stylistic excesses that marred his tales (flaws that Lovecraft knew all too well from his own early work). The advice paid off in a hurry, for in July 1934 Bloch landed his first story in Weird Tales. From this point on he rapidly became a regular in the magazine, and— although this occurred chiefly after Lovecraft’s death—branched out into the mystery and science fiction fields as well.

Richard F. Searight (1902–75) was not exactly a teenage fan when he began corresponding with Lovecraft in late summer of 1933; indeed, he had had one collaborative story in an early issue of Weird Tales (‘The Brain in the Jar’ in November 1924). A native of Michigan, Searight worked as a telegraph operator for many years. By the early 1930s he decided to return to literature, writing a series of tales and poems which he wished Lovecraft to revise and help him to place professionally. Lovecraft felt that he could not help Searight in a revisory capacity but encouraged him to reconceive his work along less conventional lines. Searight attempted to follow Lovecraft’s advice and did manage to land some tales in Wonder Stories and other science fiction pulps, although many remained unpublished. In one such story, ‘The Sealed Casket’ (Weird Tales, March 1935), Searight came up with a new ‘book’ to add to Lovecraft’s pseudomythology, the Eltdown Shards; Lovecraft would cite it himself in a few later stories.