An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

science fiction fan and late correspondent of HPL (1935–37). In early 1935 Sterling’s family moved to Providence, where he attended Classical High School. A fan of the science fiction pulps and a member of the Science Fiction League, Sterling boldly called on HPL at 66 College Street in March 1935 and introduced himself. HPL was much impressed with Sterling’s precocity and continued the association. In January 1936, Sterling produced a draft of the story “In the Walls of Eryx” (for details on the composition of what would prove to be HPL’s last acknowledged collaborative tale, see entry on that story). It was rejected by various science fiction and weird magazines but finally landed with WT,appearing in October 1939. Sterling wrote little other fiction, but the title of one story—“The Bipeds of Bjhulhu” (Wonder Stories,February 1936)—is presumably a tribute to HPL’s Cthulhu. Sterling began attendance at Harvard in the fall of 1936, graduated from there in 1940, received a medical degree at Johns Hopkins and later became a clinical professor of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He wrote a brief memoir of HPL, “Lovecraft and Science” (in Marginalia;in LR), then a much more substantial one, “Caverns Measureless to Man” ( Science-Fantasy Correspondent,1975; in LR), in which he urged that HPL be “remembered as a scholar and thinker as well as an author.”

See obituary, New York Times(January 27, 1995).

Stof, Oll.

In “Collapsing Cosmoses,” the President of the Great Council Chamber of the “intra-dimensional city of Kastor-Ya,” who urges the commander Hak Ni to take steps to combat the interstellar menace approaching the planet.

“Strange High House in the Mist, The.”

Short story (3,800 words); written on November 9, 1926. First published in WT(October 1931); first collected in O;corrected text in D.

North of Kingsport “the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a grey frozen wind-cloud.” On that cliff is an ancient house inhabited by some individual whom none of the townsfolk—not even the Terrible Old Man—has ever seen. One day a tourist, the “philosopher” Thomas Olney, decides to visit that house and its secret inhabitant; for he has always longed for the strange and the wondrous. He arduously scales the cliff, but upon reaching the house finds that there is no door on this side, only “a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion”; the house’s only door is on the otherside, flush with the sheer cliff. Then Olney hears a soft voice, and a “great black-bearded face” protrudes from a window and invites him in. Olney climbs through the window and has a colloquy with the occupant, listening to “rumours of old times and far places.” Then a knock is heard—at the door that faces the cliff. Eventually the host opens the door, and he and Olney find the room occupied by all manner of

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wondrous presences—“Trident-bearing Neptune,” “hoary Nodens,” and others—and when Olney returns to Kingsport the next day, the Terrible Old Man vows that the man who went up that cliff is not the same one who came down. No longer does Olney’s soul long for wonder and mystery; instead, he is content to lead his prosy bourgeois life with his wife and children. But people in Kingsport, looking up at the house on the cliff, say that “at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly.”

HPL admitted that he had no specific locale in mind when writing this tale: he states that memories of the “titan cliffs of Magnolia” ( SL2.164) in part prompted the setting but that there is no house on the cliff as in the story; a headland near Gloucester called “Mother Ann” ( SL3.433) also inspired the setting. HPL may have had in mind a passage in Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguezabout the home of a wizard on the top of a crag.