60 Fun Facts About H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft wrote that the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of what?

The unknown. The line opens his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, where he argues that this ancient dread is what earns the horror tale its dignity as a literary form.

What do the initials in H. P. Lovecraft's name stand for?

Howard Phillips. Phillips was his mother's maiden name, and when the Phillips fortune collapsed in 1904 mother and son had to leave the family mansion for half of a small duplex.

Lovecraft said his father was paralysed by overwork, but the death certificate points to which disease?

Syphilis. The certificate gives general paresis, a late stage of the infection, and he died in an asylum five years after breaking down in a hotel room on a business trip.

What name did the young Lovecraft give the faceless winged creatures of his childhood dreams?

Night-gaunts. He said they came for him night after night from about the age of six, and thirty years on he turned them loose in his fiction, where all they do is clutch, fly and tickle.

As a boy, Lovecraft published his own hectographed Rhode Island Journal of which science?

Astronomy. He wrote each issue by hand and ran off copies for his friends, and as a teenager he went on to write columns on the night sky for local newspapers.

Which university did Lovecraft plan to attend before a breakdown ended his high-school career?

Brown. He never enrolled, yet within months of his death his manuscripts and letters were deposited in the university's library, where they remain.

Lovecraft's path to a writing career began with a 1913 letter attacking which kind of magazine fiction?

Love stories. His letter attacking Argosy's sentimental favourite Fred Jackson set off a long feud in the letters page, with Lovecraft firing back at Jackson's defenders in rhyming couplets.

What title did Lovecraft give the amateur paper he published from 1915 to 1923?

The Conservative. The title suited the young Tory who filled its pages with political essays, but the Great Depression later turned him into a socialist who backed Franklin Roosevelt.

Which 1985 cult horror film is based on Lovecraft's serial about the medical student Herbert West?

Re-Animator. A friend commissioned the serial it adapts, Herbert West-Reanimator, for his new humour magazine Home Brew, which launched it as Grewsome Tales and ran it in six monthly parts.

Which Irish fantasy writer's 1919 Boston lecture did Lovecraft attend soon after discovering his work?

Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft said the encounter gave his writing perhaps its greatest push, and later admitted that in pure fantasy he could do no more than imitate him.

Which words complete Lovecraft's famous line 'And with strange aeons even…'?

Death may die. The couplet, which opens 'That is not dead which can eternal lie', first appeared in The Nameless City in 1921, and Lovecraft brought it back five years later in The Call of Cthulhu, where an aged cultist cites it.

Whom did Lovecraft marry in 1924?

Sonia Greene. The milliner planned to support him while he wrote, but within a year her hat shop had failed and she had left New York for a job in Cleveland.

What was the informal name of Lovecraft's circle of literary friends in New York?

The Kalem Club. The name played on the letters K, L and M, the initials of its early regulars, among them Kleiner, Kirk, Loveman, Leeds, McNeil and Morton.

Which celebrity's supposedly true Egyptian adventure did Lovecraft ghostwrite as 'Under the Pyramids' in 1924?

Harry Houdini. He liked the tale of his own burial beneath the Sphinx so much that he hired Lovecraft again, and the two were planning a book attacking superstition when Houdini died in 1926.

Which Weird Tales editor often rejected Lovecraft, then accepted many stories after his death?

Farnsworth Wright. He liked his stories short, which is why he turned down At the Mountains of Madness, and Lovecraft took the rejection so badly that he shelved the novella for years.

Which Brooklyn neighbourhood near Lovecraft's 1925 lodgings gave its name to one of his horror stories?

Red Hook. Lonely and jobless, he had come to loathe New York, and The Horror at Red Hook pours that feeling, and his hostility to the district's immigrants, into a tale of a hidden devil cult.

Lovecraft's wife remarried in 1936 believing they were divorced, but what had he done with the final decree?

Left it unsigned. She had pushed for the divorce in 1929 and the papers were filed, but without his signature it never became final, which left her new marriage in California technically bigamous.

Which Texan pulp writer became Lovecraft's correspondent after praising "The Rats in the Walls" to Weird Tales?

Robert E. Howard. The creator of Conan the Barbarian argued with Lovecraft by letter for six years, and his suicide in 1936 moved Lovecraft to write a memoir of him almost at once.

Which Lovecraft novel first saw print in Weird Tales, cut, four years after his death?

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. He wrote the 50,000-word novel in early 1927 and then made almost no effort to sell it, so it sat in manuscript for the rest of his life.

Which Lovecraft story came out as a cloth-bound book of its own in 1936, months before his death?

The Shadow over Innsmouth. It was no triumph: the crudely produced edition was full of misprints, to Lovecraft's dismay, and only about half of the 400 printed copies were ever bound.

Lovecraft's last solo story kills off Robert Blake, a writer he modelled on which young correspondent?

Robert Bloch. The future author of Psycho had killed off a Lovecraft-like character in a story of his own, so Lovecraft returned the courtesy in The Haunter of the Dark and dedicated it to him.

What did Lovecraft die of in March 1937?

Cancer of the small intestine. He saw a doctor only in his last month, by which time nothing could be done, and he logged his own symptoms in a diary until he could no longer hold a pen.

What phrase did fans inscribe on the headstone they erected for Lovecraft in 1977?

I Am Providence. The line comes from one of his letters, and for forty years he had no stone of his own, only his name added to the family monument a few feet away.

Which mindless 'daemon-sultan' did Lovecraft enthrone at the centre of all infinity?

Azathoth. Lovecraft began a novel named after him in 1922 and abandoned it after a few pages, leaving a god whose name, his stories say, no lips dare speak aloud.

What name is given to Lovecraft's philosophy that humanity is insignificant in a vast, uncaring universe?

Cosmicism. Lovecraft denied being a pessimist and called himself an indifferentist: the powers in his tales are not hostile to humanity, they simply take no notice of it.

Roughly how many letters is Lovecraft estimated to have written in his lifetime?

100,000. That is roughly his biographers' estimate, so letters, not fiction, make up the bulk of what Lovecraft wrote, and he said he wrote them as easily as he talked.

In The Call of Cthulhu, Inspector Legrasse raids a cult's swamp ceremony south of which city?

New Orleans. Expecting a voodoo meeting, his men seize a hideous stone idol instead, and he carries it to a gathering of archaeologists in St. Louis to find out what it is.

Lovecraft's narrator says Cthulhu's image suggests a human caricature crossed with which two creatures?

An octopus and a dragon. He first meets the shape in a clay relief that a young sculptor modelled from his dreams: a pulpy, tentacled head on a scaly body with rudimentary wings.

In which sunken city does Cthulhu lie dreaming?

R'lyeh. Lovecraft's coordinates for it lie close to Point Nemo, the spot in the ocean farthest from any land, where space agencies bring down their retired satellites and space stations.

How does the sailor Johansen escape Cthulhu at the climax of The Call of Cthulhu?

Rams it with a yacht. The monster's head bursts like an exploding bladder as the steamer drives through it, then begins to knit itself back together while Johansen flees at full speed.

What is the name of the forbidden book of magic that Lovecraft invented and cited across his stories?

The Necronomicon. So many readers took it for a real book that Lovecraft kept answering letters asking where to find a copy, confessing each time that he had made it up.

Who is the "Mad Arab" credited as author of Lovecraft's fictional grimoire?

Abdul Alhazred. It was the name Lovecraft gave himself at five, when the Arabian Nights so thrilled him that he dressed up in a turban and a burnt-cork beard.

In Lovecraft's stories, which real university's library keeps a copy of his invented book of forbidden lore?

Harvard. In The Dunwich Horror the monstrous Wilbur Whateley, turned away at Miskatonic, tries the Widener Library's copy next, only to find its librarians already warned against him.

Which magazine finally serialised At the Mountains of Madness in 1936 after Weird Tales rejected it?

Astounding Stories. Lovecraft's young agent Julius Schwartz sold the novella to the science-fiction pulp, which cut whole passages from the last instalment, to its author's fury.

On which continent is the disastrous expedition of At the Mountains of Madness set?

Antarctica. The geologist who led the party tells the story only to scare a second expedition away from what his own found frozen beyond the mountains.

Which Poe work does At the Mountains of Madness name outright, borrowing its cry 'Tekeli-li'?

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Lovecraft called Poe his God of Fiction, and his narrator stops to recall Poe's 'disturbing and enigmatical' tale just before the same shriek comes piping out of the mist.

What are the immortal creatures that Captain Obed Marsh's townsfolk interbred with called?

The Deep Ones. They paid Marsh's dying port in fish and gold, and the children of the bargain look human at first but slowly change until they take to the water for good.

Lovecraft's fictional town of Arkham lends its name to a notorious location in which superhero's home city?

Batman. Writer Dennis O'Neil brought in Gotham's hospital for the criminally insane in 1974 and called it Arkham as a tribute to Lovecraft's town.

Lovecraft said he pictured his town of Arkham as a hillier version of which real Massachusetts town?

Salem. He told a correspondent he imagined Arkham with Salem's atmosphere and old houses, then added what the real town lacked, a college, and set it on an invented river to the north.

Lovecraft said the only one of his monsters he took any pride in appears in which tale of a blighted farm?

The Colour Out of Space. Tired of aliens that were only people in costume, he made the thing that falls on the farm nothing but a colour, one from outside the visible spectrum.

Which actor stars in Color Out of Space, the 2019 film of Lovecraft's story?

Nicolas Cage. The film was director Richard Stanley's first fiction feature in over twenty years, his comeback after being fired from The Island of Dr. Moreau days into the shoot.

In The Dunwich Horror, which entity is revealed to be the father of Wilbur Whateley?

Yog-Sothoth. The proof comes on a hilltop, where the invisible horror screams for its father by name as it is destroyed: it was Wilbur's twin brother, the last line reveals, but it looked more like the father.

Which correspondent coined the term Cthulhu Mythos and founded Arkham House to keep Lovecraft in print?

August Derleth. He also recast the tales as a war between good gods and evil ones, a tidy moral scheme that Lovecraft, whose universe takes no sides, never wrote.

Which director wrote an At the Mountains of Madness screenplay in 1998 and later enlisted James Cameron as producer?

Guillermo del Toro. He called it his Sisyphean project: he wanted a hard-R horror epic on a blockbuster budget, and by his own account studios shy from an R-rated period film with a bleak ending and no love story.

Which formless creatures from At the Mountains of Madness recur in Lovecraft's fiction?

Shoggoths. Bred as shape-shifting slave labour by the lost city's builders, they grew minds of their own and rose against their masters, and one chases the story's survivors like a runaway subway train.

Which best-selling horror novelist cites Lovecraft as a major influence after finding his work as a child?

Stephen King. He found a Lovecraft paperback in an attic among the things his long-departed father had left behind, and has written that its cover was the moment he knew what he wanted to do.

Which band's 1970 debut album included "Behind the Wall of Sleep", a title taken from a Lovecraft story?

Black Sabbath. The song bends the title of his 1919 tale Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and heavy-metal bands have been raiding his fiction for titles and monsters ever since.

Which company released the tabletop role-playing game Call of Cthulhu in 1981?

Chaosium. Its investigators lose Sanity points as they learn the truth, so knowledge itself wears them down, a rule later borrowed by video games such as Eternal Darkness.

Which FromSoftware game directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki was inspired by the fiction of Lovecraft and Bram Stoker?

Bloodborne. Its Insight stat measures the inhuman knowledge your hunter has gathered, and as it climbs the world itself changes and the character grows easier to drive into a frenzy.

Until 2015, a caricature bust of Lovecraft served as the trophy for which literary award?

World Fantasy Award. Cartoonist Gahan Wilson's bust was retired amid complaints about Lovecraft's racism, and its replacement, unveiled in 2017, is a statuette of a tree in front of a full moon.

What is the generally accepted copyright status of Lovecraft's works?

In the public domain. Searches of the Library of Congress found no sign that the copyrights were ever renewed, though an estate re-formed in 1998 has claimed the rights and only a court could settle it.

Lovecraft identified his sunless world Yuggoth with which real body in the Solar System?

Pluto. Thrilled by its discovery in 1930, he joked that it ought to be named Yuggoth and wrote the new planet into The Whisperer in Darkness as the frozen outpost of his fungus creatures.

Lovecraft turned down an editor's chair offered by the publisher of Weird Tales rather than move to which city?

Chicago. He refused even though he was newly married and out of work in New York, where few employers wanted a 34-year-old who had never held a job.

Which young New York writer became Lovecraft's protégé and one of his closest lifelong friends?

Frank Belknap Long. Eleven years the younger, he outlived his mentor by more than half a century and in 1975 published a memoir of him, Dreamer on the Nightside.

Which relative entertained the young Lovecraft with Gothic horror stories made up on the spot?

His grandfather. Whipple, a businessman often away from home, also kept up a correspondence with the boy, and his death in 1904 cost the family its fortune and its mansion.

In which early Lovecraft story does a castaway on risen Pacific seabed watch a vast scaly creature embrace a carved monolith?

Dagon exists because the editor W. Paul Cook read Lovecraft's boyhood tales in 1917 and urged him back to fiction, which he had abandoned in 1908.

After Lovecraft passed an army physical in 1917, who threatened to do anything to prove him unfit to serve?

His mother Susie did, as Lovecraft told his friend Rheinhart Kleiner, and she got her way: he never served in the First World War.

Which band recorded the Lovecraft-inspired tracks 'The Call of Ktulu' and 'The Thing That Should Not Be' in the 1980s?

Metallica respelled the monster's name as 'Ktulu' because the original was so hard to pronounce, then went back to Lovecraft two years later on Master of Puppets.

Which Lovecraft tale ends with Randolph Carter learning that his sunset city is boyhood Boston?

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was written in the months after Lovecraft came home from two lonely years in New York, and scholars read Carter's discovery as the author's own.

In Lovecraft's tale of the town of Ulthar, the burgesses pass a law that no man may kill which animal?

A cat: the law came once an old couple who trapped and killed cats had been found as clean-picked skeletons, some two weeks after an orphan prayed over his lost kitten.