Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein

Vinyl catalogue project, entry 047: The Haunter of the Dark (2018, Cadabra Records) by H. P. Lovecraft, Andrew Leman, Theologian. LP. Subscriber variant.

"Was not Scotland part of that primal Hyperborea wherein He was worshipped by the beasts & the Ambiguous Folk before the coming of Conan?"
—H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, 29 Nov 1933, DS 486

"Clevinger being an asshole to the wrong people" was a thing in the later books, although mostly it was "this has not aged well in hindsight."

“The Hyborians do not sacrifice humans to their god, Mitra, and as for my people—by Crom, I'd like to see a priest try to drag a Cimmerian to the altar! There'd be blood spilt, but not as the priest intended.”
—Robert E. Howard, “Xuthal of the Dust”

82: “He was a man—take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.”

81: Nothing could squeeze the life & zest out of his work.

80: He had something to say—& all the hackneyed patterns & conventional technique in the world couldn’t stop him from saying it.

79: No matter how assiduously the profit-motivated critics & editors tried to warp him, he was always a step ahead of them—& a step ahead of himself when he seemed to listen to them.

78.2: consistent substance won such universal praise.

78.1: As a result, the past was as alive for him as the
present—while his grasp of general historical & anthropological principles enabled him to construct from pure imagination those prehistoric worlds of mystery & adventure & necromancy whose lifelike convincingness &

77: He could visualise all the details of every-day existence in these periods, & subjectively enter into the feelings of their inhabitants.

76: He had the imagination to go beyond mere names & dates & get at the actual texture of life in the bygone periods which he studied.

75: He was almost unique in his ability to understand & mentally
inhabit past ages—including many without any resemblance to our own.

74: always gasped at his profound knowledge of history—including some of its more obscure corners—& admired still more his really astonishing assimilation & vitalisation of it.

73: His scholarship in certain lines was truly remarkable.

72: As a poet, too, he was phenomenally gifted—so that I always hoped to see a collection of his verse.

71: His best work would probably have been regional & historical, & I was greatly pleased by his recent tendency to employ his own southwestern background in fiction.

70: Some were pure adventure-yarns with the touch of weirdness rather extraneous, but that is not the case with “Hour of the Dragon”.

69: As for his work—while the King Kull series probably forms a weird peak, I do not think the best of the Conan tales involve any radical falling-off.

68: I had hoped to get to Cross Plains some time—but now I shall probably never see the village whose name I have so frequently written on envelopes & postcards.

67: I owe to Two-Gun my pleasant sessions at 305 Rue Royale, & indeed my general introduction to the Sultan of the Peacock Throne—since as you’ll recall, it was he who telegraphed you of my presence in ancient Nouvelle-Orleans in 1932.

66: I was glad to be able to reciprocate in a small way by sending him material from various points of interest which I visited.

65: (Indeed, I’d like to publish all his letters with their descriptive & historical riches.)

64: He also sent various pertinent odd & ends such as rattlesnake rattles—with one set of which he included a page of comment so vivid & so finely phrased that I’d like to publish it some day as a prose-poem.

63: He made the southwest & its traditions live before my eyes—supplementing his descriptions with generous batches of pictorial matter (all now in my files) whenever he made a trip to any place of historical or scenic interest.

62: We were constantly debating sundry historical & philosophical points, & through these arguments (as well as through many passages of sheer description) I gained a much clearer perspective on various phases of history than I would ever have had otherwise.

61: I value that correspondence as one of the most broadening & sharpening influences in my later years.

60: Well—he replied at length, & the result was a bulky correspondence which throve from that day to this.

59: I could not resist adding some incidental praise of his work—echoing remarks previously made in the Eyrie.