An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Minnesota author of over 100 stories in pulp magazines including WT, Terror Tales, Amazing Stories, Short Stories, Galaxy, Fantastic Universe, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Thrilling Adventures,and Thrilling Mystery. HPL enjoyed Jacobi’s “Mive” (originally a prize-winning story in Fall 1928 issue of Minnesota Quarterly,the student magazine of the University of Minnesota) in WT(January 1932) and wrote to Jacobi about it (see SL4.24–25). Two stories show Lovecraftian influence: “The Tomb from Beyond” ( Wonder Stories,November 1933) and “The Aquarium” (in August Derleth’s Dark Mind, Dark Heart[1962]). Jacobi published three collections with Arkham House: Revelations in Black(1947), Portraits in Moonlight(1964), Disclosures in Scarlet(1972); a final collection of tales, Smoke of the Snake,appeared in 1994.

See R.Dixon Smith, Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi(1985). James, M[ontague] R[hodes] (1862–1936).

British author of four celebrated volumes of ghost stories— Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary(1904), More Ghost

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Stories of an Antiquary(1911), A Thin Ghost and Others(1919), and A Warning to the Curious (1925)—all of which HPL owned and spoke of enthusiastically in “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” (James also wrote a children’s fantasy, The Five Jars[1922], which HPL read but did not own.) HPL came upon James at the New York Public Library in December 1925, when he began research for his essay. At that time he ranked James as one of the four “modern masters” (along with Machen, Blackwood, and Dunsany), but in later years he complained that James had no sense of the “cosmic,” and by 1932 he referred to him as “the earthiest member of the ‘big four’” ( SL4.15). Nevertheless, James’s structural complexity may have influenced HPL, especially in his longer tales. Richard Ward has made a good case for the influence of James’s “Count Magnus” upon HPL’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.James’s ghost stories were collected in the much-reprinted volume, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R.James(1931). In his own day, James was better known as an authority on medieval manuscripts and a Biblical scholar. His edition of the Apocryphal New Testament(1924) long remained standard.

See S.G.Lubbock, A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James(1939); Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from LeFanu to Blackwood(1978); Richard William Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James(1980); Michael Cox, M.R.James: An Informal Portrait(1983); Richard Ward, “In Search of the Dread Ancestor: M.R.James’ ‘Count Magnus’ and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” LS No. 36 (Spring 1997): 14–17.

Jermyn, Arthur.

In “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” a poet and scholar who sets fire to himself after examining a boxed object from Africa. The entire Jermyn line is marked by a strange history. In the eighteenth century, Sir Wade Jermyn, Arthur’s great-great-great-grandfather, explored the Congo, bringing back with him a mysterious wife. Sir Philip Jermyn, Wade’s son and Arthur’s great-great-grandfather, though a baronet, joins the navy as a common sailor and disappears one night as his ship lay off the coast of the Congo. Sir Robert Jermyn, Arthur’s greatgrandfather, kills his entire family except for a two-year old grandson, when he learns certain information about his past. Philip’s second son, Nevil, marries a commoner and sires a son, Sir Alfred Jermyn, who is Arthur’s father. He joins the Barnum & Bailey circus (never explicitly named, but alluded to as “The Greatest Show on Earth”) but is killed by a gorilla with whom he was conducting a boxing match.

Johansen, Gustav.