behind life.” In other words, they are the degenerate descendants of the house of Martense. The story was, like “Herbert West—Reanimator,” commissioned for Home Brewby George Julian Houtain; but in this case, Houtain provided synopses of the previous segments at the head of the final three episodes, so that HPL need not summarize them in the text itself. At HPL’s request, Clark Ashton Smith was commissioned to illustrate the text. Smith had a bit of fun by drawing trees and vegetation obviously in the shape of genitalia, but he may not have been paid for his work. (The Home Brewtext was reprinted in facsimile by Necronomicon Press in 1977.)
The tale continues the theme of hereditary degeneration found in “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” and continuing through “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; indeed, “The Lurking Fear” could be thought of as a trial run for “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
There are some minor autobiographical touches in the story. Arthur Munroe’s name is probably borrowed from HPL’s boyhood friends, the Munroe brothers. The name Jan Martense may have been taken from the Jan Martense Schenck house (1656) in Flatbush, the oldest existing house in New York City. HPL did not see this house during either of his 1922 New York visits and may not, in fact, have learned of it until after writing “The Lurking Fear”; there is, however, a Martense Street very near Sonia Greene’s apartment at 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn, and this may be the origin of the name.
See Bennett Lovett-Graff, “Lovecraft: Reproduction and Its Discontents,” Paradoxa1, No. 3 (1995): 325–41.
Lyman, Dr.
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a Boston physician who is one of several experts brought in to assess Charles Dexter Ward’s mental condition.
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Macauley, George W[illiam] (1885–1969).
Amateur journalist and colleague of HPL. Macauley coedited The New Member(a magazine for recent recruits to the UAPA) when HPL first joined amateur journalism and accordingly accepted HPL’s earliest amateur contribution, the essay “A Task for Amateur Journalists” (July 1914). He received his first letter from HPL on October 23, 1914, and continued to correspond regularly until about 1920, after which their correspondence was reduced to Christmas cards; but it revived in 1932. In 1915 HPL wrote to him: “I wish that I could write fiction, but it seems almost an impossibility.” After HPL’s death Macauley published several works by and about HPL in his amateur journal, The O-Wash-Ta-Nong,including “Perverted Poesie or Modern Metre” (December 1937), “Ibid” (January 1938), and “Extracts from H.P.Lovecraft’s Letters to G.W.Macauley” (Spring 1938; rpt LSNo. 3 [Fall 1980]: 11–16).
Machen, Arthur [Llewellyn Jones] (1863–1947).
Welsh author of horror stories, journalist, autobiographer. Machen gained early notoriety for “The Great God Pan” (1890; collected in The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light[1894]), The Three Impostors(1895), and other works that were accused of being the outpourings of a diseased and licentious imagination. HPL discovered Machen in late spring 1923, evidently at the urging of Frank Belknap Long (see SL1.250); at that time HPL actually considered Machen “the greatest living author” ( SL1.234). Machen was temperamentally very different from HPL: an Anglo-Catholic and mystic, he bitterly resented the increasing authority of science over human affairs. HPL’s “The Dunwich Horror” seems clearly a borrowing of the central idea of “The Great God Pan” (a god impregnating a human being), while that of “Cool Air” is (by HPL’s own admission) derived in part from “Novel of the White Powder” (a segment in The Three Impostors). “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Whisperer in Darkness” owe something to “Novel of the Black Seal” in the same volume, which conveys horror by the “documentary approach” of slow and me
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