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DID
LOVECRAFT REVISE THIS ARTICLE?
People have sought, and found, Lovecraft's revising hand in all sorts of places, including the most unexpected. And what could be more unexpected than to discover that HPL had a hand in revising a piece of one's own work? Yes, startling as it may seem, I have concluded that H. P. Lovecraft revised, possibly ghost-wrote, the very article I am now writing!
Before you turn the page in disgust, hear me---and HPL---out! Granted, it seems rather unlikely that Lovecraft would have wasted his time with material like this. He wouldn't have been caught dead appearing in the pages of a rag like
Crypt of Cthulhu, but remember that in the revisions Lovecraft didn't need to worry for his reputation. He could churn out any kind of garbage, and who'd be the wiser?
And it's hard to deny that certain characteristic Lovecraftian vocabulary occurs in this article; words like: "shambling", "gibbering", "fungoid", "nitrous". There, I've just used them! I could even produce some bigoted remarks about blacks, Jews, and other ethnics if you want further proof.
But consider the implications if I am right: Lovecraft is still alive! We could then find material for volumes full of new articles, sniffing out Grandpa's revisory contribution to works hitherto attributed to Stephen King, Peter Straub, even S. T. Joshi! Why, I wouldn't be surprised if one day HPL were to finish up August Derleth's fragment "The Watchers out of Time", as a sort of posthumous collaboration!
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ERROR
OUT OF TIME
Now it's time for a little "revision" of our own! In the introduction to
Ashes and Others (Crypt of Chulhu #10), we proudly boasted that Richard Searight's "The Sealed Casket" had never before been reprinted along with the Lovecraftian heading. We goofed! It was indeed published, in folio form, by The Strange Company in 1975. And if that weren't bad enough, we said that there was no evidence that Searight had invented
The Eltdown Shards. Since then (wouldn't you know it?), we read his own statement that he had! Sorry! Er . . . pass another helping of crow over here, will you? We also (blush!) bragged that no one had reprinted our title story "Ashes" since its initial appearance in
Weird Tales. Well, we just got hold of a copy of Terror out of Time (Fay A. Dyer and Ruth M. Eddy, 1976), which contains this and four other Eddy reprints! But these reprintings of the Searight and Eddy stories were such limited editions (100 each) that we still feel pretty good about having made them more widely available.
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