My reaction to reading this collection in 2005.

"Lovecraft's 'Revisions'", August Derleth -- In this brief introduction, Derleth reminds us that doing revisions of others prose and poetry was Lovecraft's primary means of support. Derleth talks about Lovecraft's relation to some of the listed collaborators of this collection. He notes Lovecraft never complained about revising works in the horror/weird field. He enjoyed the work, often totally reworked the original author's manuscript (if there even was one -- sometimes he started with just a vague plot idea or outline).

"The Green Meadow", Elizabeth Neville Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jr -- A boring, pointless story about floating towards a mysterious island and the import of the mysterious chanting there -- an import the narrator refuses to reveal lest it drive us mad which is a pretty traditional Lovecraft device. The story does start out promisingly (and reminiscently of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space") with a meteor though this one has a mysterious manuscript inside which relates our tale. This revision stems from 1918-1919, and I was surprised that Lovecraft was already thought highly enough to be paid for revision work at that early point in his career. Of course, he would have been 28 or 29, but I don't really think his fiction (and I have no idea what non-fiction he was publishing in the amateur press then) took off till 1917 with "The Tomb" and "Dagon". The names of the credited authors are pseudonyms for Winifred Virginia Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft.

"The Crawling Chaos", Elizabeth Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, J -- This was another collaboration between Winifred Virginia Jackson and H. P. Lovecraft. It's also not very good though more coherent than "The Crawling Chaos". It's a moody, Dunsanian opium dream by the narrator and really, as a story, doesn't resolve itself at all.

"The Last Test", Adolphe de Castro [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This story has a curious pedigree. It originally showed up in an 1893 collection of Castro, and then, says Joshi, Lovecraft rewrote it completely. The original plot skeleton explains the presence of a woman character and a frustrated romance between the Governor of California and the sister of the mad scientist -- both elements very untypical of Lovecraft. But some of the Cthulhu gods are mentioned, and I suspect the presence of Surama and the Thibetans is a Lovecraft addition. I liked the idea that the black fever may have extraterrestrial orgins. The vernacular and language of the tale is more mainstream than a lot of Lovecraft. I’m curious if Lovecraft did his revisions quicker and with less care than stuff appearing under his own name or if he tried to match the style of his client.

"The Electric Executioner", Adolphe de Castro [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- Like Castro’s “The Last Test”, this story was based on a story published earlier and entirely by Castro. To Castro’s plot added some more mentions of Cthulhu deity, Mexican mythology a la his early “The Transition of Juan Romero” and a maniacal scientist rather like Herbert West. This story is mostly an example of humoring the mad man. It does have a curious continuity error in that the mad scientist takes the narrator’s gun but, later, the narrator mentions he is in possession of his revolver.

"The Curse of Yig", Zealia Bishop [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- An ethnologist of Indians comes across the hideous offspring of Yig, a hideous snake god, in Oklahoma. Yig raped a woman and the result is in an asylum.

"The Mound", Zealia Bishop [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This 1930 story is a dry run for the great Lovecraft stories of “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”. Like those stories, it features the exploration of an alien civilization with detailed descriptions of its science, mores, culture, and history. It does mention some of the Cthulhu deities but does not try to fit in an overarching history, linking other Lovecraft stories, like those latter works do. Another obvious point of difference is that this underground civilization is genetically related to humans, its members originally -- at least they believe -- brought to Earth by Cthulhu. Joshi has described it as a satire on “machine civilization”, and it sort of is. At one point, the narrator, examining the manuscript of a Spanish conquistador who lived in this underground world, says that it might be a hoax as social satire. The satire is interesting because it is a repugnant, decadent civilization whose increasingly jaded entertainments run to torture, ghastly modifications to the condemned bodies, and reanimation of the dead (usually in a mutilated form). However, this civilization sort of embraces Lovecraft’s personal mores (as shown by his “The Silver Key”) of their being no objective morality or purpose in life. Yet, Lovecraft shows us world increasingly superstitious and unable to understand their scientific accomplishments of the past, given to sexual excess (the narrator remarks more than once on the conquistador’s unfortunate “pious reticence”). Their jaded tastes, unlike Lovecraft -- who shares their ultimate nihilism -- don’t run to learning and creating beauty. They do, however, start to post more guards to the entrances to their underground world once they realize Europeans are moving in to the American Midwest (the story, likes the Bishop-Lovecraft collaboration “The Curse of Yig” is set in Oklahoma, shares some characters, and the narrators of both seem to be the same ethnologist). I suspect Bishop’s original plot idea included the liaison between the conquistador and a woman from the underground. Again, that’s not a Lovecraft feature. As with his “At the Mountains of Madness”, there is mention of genetic engineering being done as well as ancient wars, and even older ruins. A interesting and good effort from Lovecraft.

“Medusa’s Coil”, Zealia Bishop [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This is, in general plot, that old ghost style formula of visiting the odd house at night, seeing horrifying things, leaving the house in the morning only to be told by a local that that house and its owner (seemingly alive last night) burned years ago. Of course, the narrator, as they always do in these stories, finds material proof (the hair of the home’s owner) that what he saw was reality. However, in this general framework is an interesting take off on the Medusa story with the mysterious Marceline being the descendent of a long line of priestesses serving in a cult older than Atlantis -- specifically Cthulhu deities. The final sentence, in which it is revealed she is part Negro, is less racist (though parts of the story certainly play into old stereotypes of blacks) than a linkage of her with the horrible cult out of Zimbabwe. Her hair really does turn out to be a hideously alive. (Therefore, all three Bishop-Lovecraft collaborations have snake motifs.) I liked the horrible portrait painted of her, and the brief asides and explanations of the Decadent philosophy spoken of approvingly and personified here by Marsh.

“The Man of Stone”, Hazel Heald [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This story seemed awfully familiar to me like I had read it before, but I can’t remember when. I don’t think I read any of Lovecraft’s ghostwriting (apart from “Under the Pyramids” for Houdini) during my first bout of Lovecraft. It might seem familiar because, essentially, it’s a biter-bitten tale of the sort that goes back to at least The Canterbury Tales (perhaps I read a version of this in Boccacio’s Decameron Nights). Anyway, the cruel, jealous sorcerer who plots the poisoning of his wife and a sculptor via a potion that literally petrifies them gets a dose of the same medicine. The only really Lovecraftian touch are certain occult tomes (The Book of Eibon) and some mentions of Cthulhu deities.

“The Horror in the Museum”, Hazel Heald [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- In paging through his biography of Lovecraft, I see that Joshi regards this story as so bad that it has to be a parody of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I’m not sure I agree it’s a parody. It certainly does have an overwrought flavor in parts, mostly because artist and Shub-Niggurath worshiper (the actual form of the god is retrieved from Alaska) is just plain vicious and insane sounding. Most Lovecraft villains like Herbert West are after power or immortality or knowledge. Rogers just gets mad when Stephen Jones doubts his stories or that the odd, macabre figures in the “adult” section of his wax museum are preserved bodies and not sculptures. Because of his less than convincing lack of motivation, I found him a weak villain. Mostly this story reminded me of other Lovecraft works and other authors and other types of stories. Orabona, Rogers assistant, is reminiscent of Surama in the Lovecraft-de Castro collaboration of “The Last Test”. The whole setup of Jones spending a night in the museum and becoming unhinged even before he sees gods walking about reminded me of “Monsieur Redoux’s Phantasms” by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (though, given his spotty history of English translations, I’m not sure Lovecraft read this particular story though he mentions Villiers in his 1927 Supernatural Horror in Literature) with its protagonist finding horror after hours (albeit psychological horror) in a wax museum. Then, of course, there’s the whole idea of wax statutes being preserved bodies and not creations from scratch. I don’t know how far that idea goes back in horror fiction

“Winged Death”, Hazel Heald [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- An interesting biter-bitten story, interesting because of the scientific (or pseudo-scientific) details of using African flies infected with disease. Heald and Lovecraft mix the science with the supernatural transmigration of victim’s souls into the flies whose bite killed them. Unlike the crazed artist Rogers from Heald and Lovecraft’s “The Horror in the Museum”, at least Dr. Slauenwite kills for the understandable motive of revenge, specifically because his victim intimated that he stole his theory from the work of another scientist (Slauenwite admits that the other scientist’s work would have anticipated his had he lived to publish it, but he did not plagiarize it). I’m suspecting the influence of Lovecraft in the plot of the story given that it uses a typical Lovecraft device: a protagonist leaving behind a written record of his demise and the reasons behind it.

“Out of the Aeons”, Hazel Heald [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- In a sense, this story is a reworking of Lovecraft’s own “The Call of Cthulhu”. It deals with the rising of an island out of the Pacific and ruins on it intimating at a worldwide cult devoted to the ancient deity Ghatanothoa. Both stories are related via papers found in the effects of dead men and intimate that others have died at the hands of the cult. However, this story does not feature “The Call of Cthulhu” sweep of ideas. There are no artists and psychics picking up strange visions in their work and dreams. The story is much more limited in geographical scope. (I believe that, at least for the environs of Earth, “The Call of Cthulhu” has Lovecraft’s most dispersed settings.) The story’s largest flaw is the story, full of too many details and names which began to strike one as silly unlike Lovecraft’s more disciplined efforts under his own name, involving T’yog the High-Priest of Shub-Niggurath who meets a bad end when he climbs a mountain top to confront the Dark God Ghatanothoa. (The story’s end where his brain is revealed to be still living in a seemingly mummified body, is predictable but then so are a lot of Lovecraft endings.) Lovecraft not only references Clark Ashton Smith in a mention of Averoigne, France (setting of a cycle of Smith stories), but his earlier (this story is from 1933) Randolph Carter cycle since Randolph Carter is mentioned in the guise of Swami Chandraputra and so is De Marigny (the dates do link up to Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (finished earlier in 1933). It’s middle grade Lovecraft.

“The Horror in the Burying-Ground”, Hazel Heald [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This is another biter-bitten tale. Here the would be biters are an undertaker with an extensive knowledge of poison and the woman he wants to marry. However, the woman’s brute of a husband will not let her marry, so she connives at the undertaker poisoning him with a petrifying chemical. He does that but, at the man’s funeral, he accidentally doses himself. Intimations are that the woman can hear both men whisper to her at night from their graves. It was with this story that I realized that a motif runs through the Heald-Lovecraft collaborations as the snake motif does through the Zealia Bishop-Lovecraft collaborations. That motif is petrification or, variantly, a conscious mind inhabiting a paralyzed body. There are the humans turned to stone in “The Man of Stone”. In “The Horror in the Museum”, the alleged mummy of Shub-Niggurath is alive. In “Out of the Aeons”, the site of Ghatanothoa paralyzes T’yog. Here men are paralyzed and then buried alive. The burial alive might have appealed to Lovecraft because of its resonances with Edgar Allan Poe, but Heald seems fascinated by the image.

“The Diary of Alonzo Typer”, William Lumley [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This is a Cthulhu Mythos story primarily, according to Joshi, written by Lovecraft. It is another story that mentions Shub-Niggurath. Lovecraft uses his typical device of telling the story via the diary of a man who has a fatal encounter with an entity from another dimension in a sinister old house.

“The Horror at Martin’s Beach”, Sonia H. Greene [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- I wonder if this story is by the same Sonia Greene who was briefly Lovecraft’s wife. It’s not a bad story. It has, in its account of a sea monster fatally hypnotizing the men trying to drag it to shores by ropes and dragging them to their deaths in the sea, a certain weirdness which is perhaps spoiled by a rather explicit description of one of the monster’s relatives in the beginning of the story. This is the first story in the collection which is from the secondary revision, part -- in other words, Lovecraft was not a major part in the composition. However, I’d feel comfortable stating that he definitely wrote the penultimate paragraph which shows, in this 1922 story, typical Lovecraftian vocabulary.

“Ashes”, C. M. Eddy, Jr. [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- With this story, it’s pretty obvious we’re in the “secondary revisions” section of the collection. This story is very un-Lovecraftian in its 1920s’ slang and story of a man, working for a mad scientist, worried that said scientist has killed the game girl (She’s great in chemistry as well as beautiful!) with his superacid. The biter-bitten plot has the scientist -- whose malevolent motivations are unexplained -- dissolved in his own acid and the implications of his invention utterly unexplored. As Joshi’s textual notes state, Lovecraft’s hand in this tale was very light. (C. M. Eddy, Jr was a writer of many pulp stories solo.)

“The Ghost-Eater”, C. M. Eddy, Jr. [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- A horror story using the old plot about the protagonist staying in a mysterious house at night where he sees mysterious things -- not just a werewolf but a ghostly werewolf who recreates his attack on the house’s previous owner -- only to discover in the morning, from the locals, that the house hasn't existed in years. Nothing surprising here.

“The Loved Dead”, C. M. Eddy, Jr [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This 1923 story is actually a rather creepy character study in to the mind of its narrator who finds himself increasingly obsessed with the dead and energized by being around them and their funeral rites. His stints as an undertaker aren’t the only necrophilic thing about him. Eddy and Lovecraft all but bring up necrophilia with “... to find me stretched out upon a cold slab deep in ghoulish slumber, my arms wrapped about the stark, stiff, naked body of a foetid corpse! He roused me from my salacious dreams ...” The narrator eventually turns to murder to satisfy his obsession. An effective story that has echoes of Lovecraft’s own “The Outsider” (in its alienation) and “Pickman’s Model” (its ghoul obsession).

“Deaf, Dumb, and Blind”, C. M. Eddy, Jr [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This has the flavor, with its plot of its wounded protagonist -- deaf, dumb, and blind -- sensing some hideous presence, of an unfinished story since the horror his furious typing relates is inchoate.

“Two Black Bottles”, Wilfred Blanch Talman [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- The main point of interest in this story about a church that falls under the sway of a devil worshipping cleric who stole and bottled the soul of the sexton who learned his secret -- and the sexton in turns steals the soul of the following cleric -- is that it’s corrupted church (Joshi says the evidence from correspondence says Lovecraft wrote the middle of the story, but he doesn’t say who plotted it.) reminded me of those in Lovecraft’s own “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “The Haunter of the Dark”.

“The Trap”, Henry S. Whitehead [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- An interesting fantasy involving a magic mirror. I suspect Lovecraft not only provided the details of Axel Holm, master of the glassmaking, science, and the occult, but also provided the many details (complementary colors, reversal of chirality, the merging of the worlds the mirror has reflected and captured) of the magic world in the mirror. These carefully thought out details of the world and how to escape from it, the references to how Holm’s studies of the fourth dimension anticipated Einstein, not only reminded me of Lovecraft’s own “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (in fact the stories were written back to back with this one coming first) but Robert A. Heinlein’s later mathematical fantasy “And He Built A Crooked House”.

“The Tree on the Hill”, Duane W. Rimel [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This is another Lovecraft revision (Joshi says he probably wrote the second half) that is too vague or inchoate to have much of an effect. A blasted clearing (rather reminiscent of that in Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” -- though I suspect Rimel contributed that image) and its sole tree and photographs of them are the facilitators of an apocalypse narrowly avoided. What appears to be a tree with three shadows at story’s end seems to be a hand groping into this world from another dimension.

“The Disinterment”, Duane W. Rimel [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- I found this 1935 story interesting because it describes zombification in pharmaceutical terms much like Wade Davis discovered it to be in his The Serpent and the Rainbow. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the fictional uses of zombies to know if this is really innovative. The narrator’s surgeon friend was of the same vein as Lovecraft’s Herbert West except he actually does experiment on his friend. The horrific “revelation” at story’s end -- that not only has the narrator’s friend given him a zombie drug and dug him up but also transplanted his head to another body -- is hardly a surprise. Still, that’s hardly uncommon for Lovecraft’s solo efforts. The story’s main flaw is not detailing exactly why the narrator, stricken by leprosy, is going to be better off by faking his death. True, he might escape deportation or being quarantined, but he’ll be out his money and still uncured of the disease.

“’Till A’ the Seas’”, R. H. Barlow [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- A Wellesian tale in style and plot very unlike Lovecraft. (Joshi states his revision of the story was very light.) It is not Wellesian in a time travel sense like Lovecraft’s "The Shadow Out of Time" is, but, rather, like H. G. Wells' "The Star" a tale of impersonal disaster and the extinguishment of the human race. The Earth has grown closer to the sun. The increased heat kills whole animal and plant species, deserts spread outward from the equator, the oceans vanish, and man is pushed into the polar regions. The story begins by introducing us to the last man, Ull, as he stands overlooking a valley looking for a legendary habitation of humanity. But he finds nothing, and suffers the horrifying revelation that he is, in fact, the last man on Earth. At story's end, trying to get water out of a well, he falls in and dies, "the final, pitiful survivor". The story's theme matches Lovecraft's personal philosophy of the universe's vast indifference to man and marries it to comic farce. I definitely sense, in it's vocabulary, that the third from final paragraph was revised by Lovecraft, but I suspect the rest may be all Barlow's -- and it's a fine accomplishment in the post-apocalypse sub-genre.

"The Night Ocean", R. H. Barlow [and H. P. Lovecraft] -- This is the last piece of fiction Lovecraft worked on before his death. Joshi says his hand on the text was light and that seems probable. Despite the thematic linking of the external landscape and the narrator's internal emotional landscape being in element in some of Lovecraft's solo efforts (and, one suspects, influenced by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"), I really only saw a few lines in the last two paragraphs which seemed Lovecraftian. This is a literary type fantasy of a skillful creation and sustaining of mood as the narrator becomes fascinated by the strange moods of the ocean outside of the house he is vacationing in. He sees something enigmatic come out of the ocean, but it is never explained. The ocean is linked to death of several swimmers but we see no monsters or aliens. As story's end, the night ocean becomes the one constant of the universe, a feature of horrible beauty, a power and beauty and mystery the narrator must "abase myself before". The ocean is a link to mystery -- perhaps extradimensional life (though, again, that is not explicity said or explained) -- and its dismal beauty will outlast life on Earth. ("Silent, flabby things will toss and roll along empty shores, their sluggish life extinct." That line seems Lovecraftian and reminiscent, as does the Barlow-Lovecraft collaboration of "'Till A' the Seas'", of H. G. Wells.) An exquisite mood story. Barlow is the only one of Lovecraft's collaborators whose solo efforts I would be interested in reading. ( )

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this anthology. You can definitely tell which, stories and where Lovecraft did the most revising. While some of the reviews below give more credit of it's quality to the 'Primary Revision', which were heavily edited (and sometime written) by Lovecraft, my favorite stories were from the less revised 'Secondary Revisions'. R.H. Barlow's "Till a' the Seas" and 'The Night Ocean' both paint beautiful landscapes that are captivating before the supernatural horror occurs. The included stories of C.M Eddy Jr are short, punchy and have characters gripped by mania. In all it is a good read. ( )

Bon recueil de nouvelles, même si la majorité ne sont pas directement écrites par Lovecraft, on est dans son univers et on sent bien son empreinte dans la révision des textes.
Les plus marquante, selon moi sont: L'homme de pierre, La mort ailée et l'Horreur dans le musée. Le reste étant bien plus insipide mais ces trois là vous laissent des frissons dans le dos. ( )

Rogers avait cessé de hurler et de se cogner la tête contre la porte massive ; il se pencha comme pour écouter. Un rictus de triomphe éclaira son visage ; il chuchota : – Ecoute ! Ecoute bien ! Entends-tu le bruit d'éclaboussures qu'il fait en sortant de sa cuve ? ll est arrivé sur Terre, venant de Yuggoth la grise, où les villes se trouvent sous la mer chaude et profonde. Donne-moi mes clefs, nous devons le faire entrer et nous mettre à genoux. Puis nous irons chercher un chat ou un chien, peut-être un homme ivre, et lui donner à manger. Jones eut le souffle coupé. Il aurait dû savoir que cet endroit le rendrait aussi fou que Rogers. On le sommait d'entendre l'éclaboussement d'un monstre mythique derrière cette porte, et à présent... que Dieu lui vienne en aide... il l'entendait effectivement ( )

one can almost spot where the "boss" (lovecraft) did most of the work, such as in THE MOUND, which in itself is worththe price of admission. If a reader is trying to piece together Lovecraft's "other universe," he'd do well to study this one nouvella, keeping in mind the other works of the master himself, whee the aliens who fell to earth were described in several aquatic manners. ( )