REHupa

Recently, I have been getting back to the good stuff, namely Howard-Lovecraft-Smith. Researching something in Howard’s fiction, I was reminded of a dream sequence of H. P. Lovecraft that he wrote down in 1927 and sent off to Donald Wandrei. The dream had Lovecraft back in Roman Spain in the Pyrenees and the threat of “the Very Old Folk.”

I then remembered that Lovecraft gave it to Frank Belknap Long who incorporated that sequence into his short novel “The Horror From the Hills” which ran in Weird Tales as a two-parter in January and the February/March 1931 issues. Long was something of an also ran. His main claim to fame will always be that he was Lovecraft’s buddy. Most of his fiction is just not very good. Some early stories from Weird Tales are interesting, they are not generally very memorable. He later had a career switching to science fiction in the late 1930s and sold regularly to various magazines. Again, his fiction from that time is probably even less memorable.

“The Horror From the Hills” features Long’s contribution to the Lovecraft or Cthulhu Mythos, the monster Chaugnar Faugn. Chaugnar Faugn is described as:

“It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed its resemblance to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which intertwined and interlocked at the base of the statue, were as translucent as rock crystal…Its forelimbs were bent stiffly at the elbow, and its hands–it had human hand–rested palms upward on its lap.”

The story is a pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” though Long couldn’t pull it off. There is a hilarious scene of the heroes of the story chasing after Chaugnar Faugn in a New Jersey marsh so they can zap the monster with a time-space machine and destroy Chaugnar with “entropy.” This actually got reprinted as a Belmont paperback in 1964 as Odd Science Fiction.

Fast forward to 1933 and you have Robert E. Howard’s “Tower of the Elephant.” Howard was  in the Lovecraft play ground when he revisited the elephant looking alien. Yag-kosha was also an elephant looking alien this time, but Howard injected a degree of humanity making the reader feel sorry for the imprisoned and tortured alien. There is a nice sweep of cosmicism that Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei engaged in. The ending is a classic and one not forgotten.

So you have two different writers using a similar idea, one falling flat and the other creating a classic. That’s how it works sometimes.