An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Norrys, Capt. Edward.

In “The Rats in the Walls,” he is a former member of the Royal Flying Corps and friend of Alfred Delapore. Norrys assists Alfred’s father (the narrator of the story) in the restoration of Exham Priory and helps

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him attempt to find the source of the mysterious sound of rats heard throughout the castle. Ultimately the senior Delapore kills and partially devours him.

Northam, Lord.

In “The Descendant,” an eccentric, aged scholar, of a family whose ancestral line reaches back to Roman Britain, who, as a younger man, had explored both formal religions and occult sciences (much like Randolph Carter in “The Silver Key”). When Williams, a young friend, brings him a copy of the Necronomicon,Northam first reacts with horror and then tells a tale of horrors in Roman Britain. Notes on Weird Fiction.

Written c. summer and fall 1933. First published (b, c, and d only) in The Notes & Commonplace Book(Futile Press, 1938). Erroneously published as part of HPL’s “commonplace book” in BWSand SR

In 1933, HPL began to keep notes in a pocket calendar from his concentrated rereading of the classic works of weird fiction, in an attempt to reinvigorate himself for fiction-writing. The notebook contains four items: (a) “Weird Story Plots” (unpublished) consists of brief plot summaries primarily of the works of Poe, Blackwood, Machen, and M.R.James. From those summaries he compiled (b) “A list of certain basic underlying horrors effectively used in weird fiction” and (c) “List of primary ideas motivating possible weird tales,” a further distillation, giving likely motives for weird occurrences. He then composed the rough draft of (d) “Suggestions for writing weird story (the ideaand plot being tentatively decided on)” and “Elements of a Weird Story & Types of Weird Story,” an instructional piece for turning plot ideas into effective stories. HPL eventually polished (d) into “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.”

“Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.”

Essay (1,490 words); probably written in 1933. First published in Amateur Correspondent(May–June 1937); also in Supramundane Stories(Spring 1938) and in Marginalia;rpt. MW.

Presumably written during HPL’s revaluation of the weird classics in the summer and fall of 1933, the essay propounds HPL’s evolved theory of weird fiction as the attempt to “achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law.” It also presents a summary of HPL’s own methods for writing stories, in which he advises the creation of two synopses, one listing events in order of absolute occurrence, the other in order of their narration in the story. The first three publications of the essay derive from three slightly differing manuscripts; the first appearance is probably preferable.

Noyes,———.

In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” he is sent to the railroad station to retrieve Albert Wilmarth to the Akeley farmhouse. His is the “cultivated male human voice” heard on the recordings Akeley sent to Wilmarth. Unknown to Wilmarth, he is an agent of the aliens from Yuggoth.

“Nyarlathotep.”

Prose poem (1,150 words); probably written in November or December 1920. First published in the United Amateur(dated November 1920,

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but issued at least two months later); rpt. National Amateur(July 1926); first collected in BWS; corrected text in MW;annotated version in CC

In a “season of political and social upheaval,” the people “whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat.” It was then that Nyarlathotep emerged out of Egypt. He begins giving strange exhibitions featuring peculiar instruments of glass and metal and evidently involving anomalous uses of electricity. In one of these exhibitions the narrator sees, on a kind of movie screen, “the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun.” The world seems to be falling apart: buildings are found in ruins, people begin gathering in queues, each of them proceeding in different directions, apparently to their deaths. Finally the universe itself seems to be on the brink of extinction.