An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

The last time Sonia saw HPL was in mid-March 1933, when she had come to Hartford, Conn., for a visit and asked HPL to join her. (In correspondence HPL mentions the trip but not that he was meeting Sonia.) Later that year Sonia left for California; prior to her departure she destroyed HPL’s letters to her (only a few postcards survive). In 1936 she married Dr. Nathaniel Davis. She did not hear of HPL’s death until 1945. Three years later her memoir “Howard Phillips Lovecraft as His Wife Remembers Him” appeared in the Providence Sunday Journal(August 22, 1948), heavily edited by Winfield Townley Scott, the Journal’sliterary editor. Further edited by August Derleth, it appeared in Catsas “Lovecraft as I Knew Him” (rpt. LR). The original version, which survives at JHL, was published uncut bearing her original title: The Private Life of H.P. Lovecraft(Necronomicon Press, 1985, 1992). Additional recollections were published as “Memories of Lovecraft: I” ( Arkham Collector, Winter 1969; rpt. LR). Some letters by her to August Derleth in the 1940s were published in Gerry de la Ree’s article, “When Sonia Sizzled” (in Wilfred B.Talman, et al., The Normal Lovecraft[Gerry de la Ree, 1973]).

See R.Alain Everts, “Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft,” Nyctalops2, No. 1 (April 1973): 45. Davis, Walker and Audrey.

In “The Curse of Yig,” they are settlers in the Oklahoma Territory in 1889. Walker, who has a tremendous fear of snakes, is inadvertantly killed by Audrey when she mistakes him for Yig, the legendary snake god. She herself gives birth to three half-human, half-snake offspring, of which only one survives.

“Deaf, Dumb, and Blind.”

Short story (4,720 words); written in collaboration with C.M.Eddy, c. February 1924. First published in WT(April 1925); first collected in DB;corrected text in HM.

A deaf, dumb, and blind man, Richard Blake, “the author-poet from Boston,” rents a lonely cottage— the Tanner place, on the outskirts of Fenton—because he thinks its “weird traditions and shuddering hints” might be an imaginative stimulus. The hermit Simeon Tanner had been found dead in the house in 1819, and something about the expression on his face led the townspeople to burn the body and the books and papers in the house. Blake moves into the place with his manservant, Dobbs. But after some anomalous incident Dobbs flees, babbling incoherently. Blake is left to himself, and he records his impressions in a diary he is preparing on his typewriter. This diary shows that Blake had become aware of some nameless presence in the house, and presently he somehow hearsbizarre sounds, then a blast of cold air, and finally icy fingers “that draw me down into a cesspool of eternal iniquity.” Blake is found dead, and Dr. Arlo Morehouse, who comes to investigate, becomes certain that the final bit of writing found in the machine was not typed by Blake. In a letter to August Derleth (in DB), Eddy reports: “[HPL] was unhappy with my handling of the note found in the typewriter at the very end of the protagonist’s account of his eerie experiences, the final paragraph that seemed to have been typed by one of his persecutors. After several conferences over it, and an equal number of attempts on my part to do it justice, he finally agreed to re

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write the last paragraph.” This seems to suggest—although perhaps not by design—that HPL revised only the last paragraph; in truth, the entire tale was probably revised, although Eddy presumably wrote the first draft.

The tale’s conclusion bears some analogy with “The Statement of Randolph Carter”: in that story, the monstrous entity makes its presence known by speech (through a telephone); here, the entity reveals itself by writing. There is also a foreshadowing of “The Dunwich Horror,” in that Simeon Tanner is said to have “bricked up the windows of the southeast room, whose east wall gave on the swamp,” suggesting that he had kept some creature imprisoned within the room, just as Old Man Whateley attempted to contain Wilbur Whateley’s twin.

[Death Diary.]

Written January 1–March 11, 1937.