An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The essay is divided into four parts. “The Loyal Coalition” concerns an organization in Boston designed to counteract anti-English propaganda sponsored by Irish-Americans; “Criticism Again!” deals with criticisms directed toward him by John Clinton Pryor and W.Paul Cook about HPL’s opinionated reviews of amateur journals in the Department of Public Criticism; “Lest We Forget” is a brief diatribe on the need for military preparedness against foreign aggression; and “A Conjecture” is a very short but pungent attack on Elsa Gidlow, who had written derisively of HPL in an unspecified amateur journal. The essay as a whole contains some of HPL’s most forceful—and, on occasion, unrestrained—polemical writing.

Lumley, William (1880–1960).

Eccentric friend of HPL, born in New York City but residing most of his life in Buffalo, N.Y. In late 1935 HPL revised his

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“The Diary of Alonzo Typer” from a draft prepared by Lumley (the original draft was published in CryptNo. 10 [1982]: 21–25). HPL also revised Lumley’s “occasional bits of verse,” perhaps including “The Elder Thing” ( Fantasy Fan,January 1935). Lumley, a nearly illiterate would-be author, was occupied as a watchman for the Agrico Chemical Company in Buffalo for most of his career. An occultist, he claimed to have voyaged to various mysterious lands such as China and Nepal, and asserted that the myth-cycle written by HPL and his colleagues was based upon the truth. “We may thinkwe’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves” ( SL4.271). He came in touch with HPL around 1931, and they seemed to remain in contact to the end of HPL’s life, but only a few of HPL’s letters to him survive.

“Lurking Fear, The.”

Short story (8,170 words); written in mid- to late November 1922. First published in Home Brew (January, February, March, and April 1923); rpt. WT (June 1928); first collected in O;corrected text in D.

In the first episode, the narrator is searching for the unknown entity that had wreaked havoc among the squatters of the Catskills near the Martense mansion. He is convinced that the haunted mansion must be the locus of the horror, and he takes two colleagues, George Bennett and William Tobey, with him to the place one night. They all sleep in the same bed in one room of the mansion, having provided exits either through the door of the room or the window. Although one of the three is to stay awake while the others rest, a strange drowsiness affects all three. The narrator wakes and finds that the thing has snatched both Bennett and Tobey, who were sleeping on either side of him. Why was he spared?

The second episode finds the narrator coming upon another associate, Arthur Munroe, to assist him in his endeavors. They know that the lurking fear customarily roams abroad during thunderstorms, and during one such storm they stop in a hamlet to wait it out. Munroe, who has been looking out the window, seems anomalously fascinated by something outside and does not respond to a summons. When the narrator shakes his shoulder, he finds that “Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.”

In the third episode the narrator realizes that he must explore the history of the mansion to come to terms with its lurking horror. The mansion had been built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy Dutchman who hated the English; his descendants similarly shunned the people around them and took to intermarrying with the “numerous menial class about the estate.” One descendant, Jan Martense, seeks to escape this unhealthy reclusiveness and is killed for his pains. The episode ends with a cataclysmic sight of a “nameless thing” in a subterranean tunnel he stumbles upon as he digs in Jan Martense’s grave.

In the final episode the truth is finally learned: there is not one monster but a whole legion of them. The entire mountain is honeycombed with underground passageways housing loathsome creatures, half apes and half moles. They are the “ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk

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