An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Semi-professional publisher in Everett, Pa. In the fall of 1933, Crawford proposed to start a nonpaying weird magazine, Unusual Stories. For this he commissioned HPL’s autobiographical sketch “Some Notes on a Nonentity,” although it never ran in the magazine. Although he accepted HPL’s “Celephaïs” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” for Unusual Stories,neither appeared there; instead, they appeared in Crawford’s Marvel Tales(May 1934 and March-April 1935, respectively). Around July 1934 HPL wrote “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction” for one of Crawford’s magazines, but the essay was published in the Californian(Winter 1935). In the spring of 1935 Crawford contemplated reviving the defunct Fantasy Fan,with HPL as editor; but the plan never materialized. He also thought of issuing either At the Mountains of Madnessor “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as a booklet, or both together in one volume; he considered submitting the latter story to Astounding Storiesafter hearing of the acceptance there of At the Mountains of Madnessand “The Shadow out of Time,” but it is not clear whether he did so. Then, in late 1935, he focused on the issuance of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” as a book. The project came to fruition in November 1936 (although the copy

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right page declares the date of publication as April 1936), but the book was so riddled with typographical errors that HPL insisted on an errata sheet (which, alas, was also faulty). The Shadow over Innsmouth,issued under the imprint of the Visionary Publishing Company, was the only book of HPL’s fiction to be published and distributed in his lifetime. Crawford printed 400 copies but bound only 200; the others were later destroyed. The book features a dust jacket and four interior illustrations by Frank Utpatel. Crawford wrote of the venture in “Lovecraft’s First Book” (in SR;rpt. LR).

“Crawling Chaos, The.”

Short story (3,020 words); written in collaboration with Winifred Virginia Jackson, probably in December 1920. First published (as by “Elizabeth Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jun.”) in the United Co-operative(April 1921), a cooperative amateur journal edited by HPL, Jackson, and others; first collected in BWS;corrected text in HM

The narrator tells of his one experience with opium, when a doctor unwittingly gave him an overdose to ease his pain. After experiencing a sensation of falling, “curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction,” he finds himself in a “strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows.” A sense of fear comes over him, and he realizes that it is inspired by a monotonous pounding that seems to come from below the house in which he finds himself. Looking out a window, he sees that the pounding is caused by titanic waves that are rapidly washing away the piece of land on which the house stands, transforming the land into an ever-narrowing peninsula. Fleeing through the back door of the house, the narrator finds himself walking along a sandy path and rests under a palm tree. Suddenly a child of radiant beauty drops from the branches of the tree, and presently two other individuals—“a god and goddess they must have been”—appear. They waft the narrator into the air and are joined by a singing chorus of other heavenly individuals who wish to lead the narrator to the wondrous land of Teloe. But the pounding of the sea disrupts this throng, and the narrator appears to witness the destruction of the world.

The story was written shortly after the prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (whose opening phrase is “Nyarlathotep…the crawling chaos…”). HPL remarks in a letter: “I took the title C.C. from my Nyarlathotep sketch…because I liked the sound of it” (HPL to R.H.Barlow, [December 1, 1934]; ms., JHL). HPL appears to allude to the genesis of the story in a letter of May 1920, in which he notes the previous collaboration with Jackson, “The Green Meadow”: “I will enclose—subject to return—an account of a Jacksonian dream which occurred in the early part of 1919, and which I am some time going to weave into a horror story…” ( SL1.116). It is not certain whether this dream was the nucleus of “The Crawling Chaos,” but since there are no other story collaborations with Jackson, the conjecture seems likely.