Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture

Abstract

Though much of his most significant work was published elsewhere, for many years H. P. Lovecraft remained inexorably associated with pulp magazine Weird Tales. Launched in 1923 as part of the surge in specialist fiction magazines in the American popular market (Goodstone xiv), Weird Tales was the longest lived of the supernatural and fantasy publications—and yet throughout most of its history it lost money and never exceeded a circulation of 50,000 (Haining 11), at a time when the most popular pulp magazines could sell several hundred thousand copies (Robinson and Davidson 8). Despite the long and relatively respectable traditions of the Gothic novel and the ghost story, horror was a marginal form for much of the twentieth century; and even within the associated generic fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, the Lovecraftian weird tale was very much a minority interest. In the years immediately following his death, Lovecraft’s work was kept in print, and his “mythos” continued, by a small coterie of associates and acolytes, most obviously by August Derleth through Arkham House, the publishing company he established to reprint Lovecraft’s works.