"H.P.L."

by Gahan Wilson

originally published Lovecraft's Legacy, Tor 1990

Edward Haines Vernon, obscure fantasy-horror author, is invited to visit H.P. Lovecraft in Providence.  c. 1990!

It seems HPL is nearly 100 years old now, and has become a very wealthy man.  He's bought up, refurbished, and expanded his grandfather's old home on Angell St.  Complete with secret rooms and passages.  He's got a Rolls, and a strangely familiar chauffeur/housekeeper - with a creepy skin condition.

Edwardius, as HPL refers to him, is given a tour of the home and a fine room, where he experiences strange, Lovecraftian dreams.  He realizes that the chauffeur/housekeeper is familiar because he is, in fact, Clark Ashton Smith.  This is all a bit confusing being as CAS apparently died some time ago.  Smith explains the HPL brought him back from the dead, because he was lonely and Smith was one of his few peers.  Lovecraft lets on to Edwardius that they want him to assist them in some ongoing project, for which they consider him uniquely qualified.  He takes him to his library and shows him an actual copy of De Vermiis Mysteris.  When Edwardius states incredulously that it was his belief that DVM was a fictional invention of HPL and Robert Bloch, HPL explains.

As he lay dying in 1937, HPL discovered that the Great Old Ones were quite real, and that he could open gateways to them by sheer will and concentration alone.  He allowed Shub-Nuggurath to cure him of cancer, carried on with his career, became a rich and famous author.  He also discovered that the characters and events of his fiction were manifesting in the real world.  He and his fellow authors had not imagined the Lovecraftian world, they had discovered it.

With his newfound wealth and freedom, and with the dark magic of his fiction now quite efficacious, HPL resurrected Clark Ashton Smith ala "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" for company, and carried on, gradually working to open the way for the Great Old Ones. Part of this carrying on involved making human sacrifices - usually literary critics and authors who wrote bad pastiches of HPL's fiction.

Edwardius and HPL trek out to a grove of standing stones HPL has had imported from the real-life equivalent of Dunwich, and HPL opens the gate to a cosmic gloopy.  As he attempts to introduce Edwardius as a friend and not a sacrifice, the gloopy scoops HPL up, calling him "father", and vanishes off to its own dimension.

Back in Providence, Edwardius and Clark Ashton Smith carry on...

Attemps at Lovecraftian humor generally don't do much for me, but this one does.  It's a True Fan's love letter to Lovecraft, its genuinely funny and genuinely well-done (the depiction of HPL and CAS as a bickering old couple is especially good, and funny) and it manages to make something of the whole "Lovecraft wasn't writing fiction" trope.  And what HPL fan can't smile at the thought of a latter-day HPL reaping the financial rewards of his latter-day success?  All in all, this one's a fave.