including his Suggestions for Story-Writing, Analyses of the Weird Story, and a List of Certain Basic Underlying Horrors, &c., &c.,

Designed to Stimulate the Imagination

Lakeport, California,
The Futile Press,
MDCCCCXXXVIII

75 copies of Commonplace Book have been printed by The Futile Press in May and June, 1938. This is number 17

Copyright 1938 by R. H. Barlow

I. Suggestions for Writing Story.
II. Elements of a Weird Story & Types of Weird Story.
III. A List of Certain Basic Underlying Horrors Effectively Used in Weird Fiction.
IV. List of Primary Ideas Motivating Possible Weird Tales.

I. Suggestions for Writing Story

(The idea and plot being tentatively decided on)

1. Prepare synopsis or scenario of events in order of occurrence — not order of narration. Describe with enough fulness to cover all vital points and motivate all incidents planned. Details, comments, and estimates of consequences sometimes desirable.
2. Prepare synopsis or scenario of events in order of narrration, with ample fulness and detail, and with notes as to changing perspective, stresses, and climax. Change original synopsis to fit if such a change will increase dramatic force or general effectiveness of story. Interpolate or delete incidents at will — never being bound by original conception, even if the ultimate result be a tale wholly different from that first planned. Let additions and alterations be made whenever suggested by anything hi the formulating process.
3. Write out the story, rapidly, fluently, and not too critically, following synopsis 2. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design. If development suddenly reveals new opportunities for dramatic effect or vivid story-telling, add whatever is thought advantageous — going back and reconciling early parts to new plan. Insert or delete whole sections if necessary or desirable, trying different beginnings and endings till the best is found. But be sure that all references throughout story are thoroughly reconciled with final design. Remove all possible superfluities — words, sentences, paragraphs, or whole episodes or elements — observing usual precautions about the reconciliation of all references.
4. Revise entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties of tone, grace and convincingness of transitions (scene to scene, slow and detailed action to rapid and sketchy time-covering action and vice versa &c), effectiveness of beginning, ending, climaxes, &c., dramatic suspense and interest, plausibility and atmosphere, and various other elements.
5. Prepare neatly typed final copy.

– – –

In certain cases it is advisable to begin writing a story without either a synopsis or even an idea of how it shall be developed and ended. This is when one feels a need of recording and exploiting some especially powerful or suggestive mood or picture to the full. In such procedure the beginning thus produced may be regarded as a problem to be motivated and explained. Of course, in developing this motivation and explanation it may be well to alter–or even transform, transpose beyond recognition, or altogether eliminate — the beginning first produced.

Once in a while, when a writer has a marked style with rhythms and cadences closely linked with imaginative associations, it is possible to begin weaving a mood with characteristic paragraphs and letting this mood dictate much of the tale.

Once in a while it is effective to devise a strikng title or series of titles–of such a sort as to evoke poignant imaginative associations — in advance, and write the fictional matter around it or them. Later, when the work is done, title or titles may be changed.

In rare cases, an effective story may be written around a picture.

Often well to spin out a tale at great length in one’s head — with notes — before actual formulation. Dream it leisurely–slowly–with any number of changes.

Weird stories are of two kinds–those in which the horror or marvel concerns some condition or phenomenon, and those in which it concerns some action of persons in connection with a bizarre condition or phenomenon.

Having decided on a mood, picture, situation, legend, tableau, or climax to express, it is often advisable for the author to explore the list of basic horrors quite thoroughly in order to find one especially adapted to the given framework. This being done, all possible ingenuity must be used in order to develop a logical and naturally motivated explanation for the given effect in terms of the basic horror adopted.

Record all bizarre ideas, moods, images, dreams conceptions, &c. for future use. Do not despair if they seem to have no logical development. Each one may be worked over gradually–surrounded with notes and synopses, and finally built into a coherent explanatory structure capable of fictional use. Never hurry. The best stories sometimes grow very slowly–over long periods, and with intervals in their formulation.

In a tale involving complex philosophical or scientific principles, try to have all explanations hinted at outset, when thesis is put forward (as in Machen’s White People) thus leaving narrative and climactic sections unencumbered.

Be willing to spend as much time and care on formulation of synopsis as on writing of actual text–for the synopsis is the real heart of the story. The real creative work of fiction writing is originating and shaping a story in synopsis form.

Have no scruples against introducing two or more separate basic horrors, provided the story’s natural and internal logic calls for them. Be sure, however, to keep the tale absolutely logical and realistic except in the direction chosen for departure from reality.

It is occasionally useful to concoct a story half-irresponsibly and spontaneously from some given horror-element letting it develop as it goes along, changing when desirable, and recording it in the form of a loose, rambling synoptic outline. From this careless outline a real story may often be fashioned.

In order to ensure an adequate climax, it is sometimes advisable to prepare one in considerable detail first, and then construct a main synopsis explaining it.

An utterly bizarre and sriking mode of approach is sometimes desirable. Time, scene, or other elements wholly remote or non-human.

II. Elements of a Weird Story & Types of Weird Story.

Elements of a Weird Story.

1. Some basic, underlying horror or abnormality–condition, entity, &c.
2. General effects or bearings of the horror.
3. Mode of manifestation–object embodying the horror and phenomena observed.
4. Types of fear-reaction pertaining to the horror.
5. Specific effects of the horror in relation to given set of conditions.

Types of Weird Story.

1. Expressing a mood or feeling.
2. Expressing a pictorial conception.
3. Expressing a general situation, condition, legend, or intellectual conception.
4. Explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax.

III. A List of Certain Basic Underlying Horrors Effectively Used in Weird Fiction.

• Unnatural life in a house, and unnatural linkage of lives of separate persons.
• Premature burial.
• Listening for some approaching horror.
• Metempsychosis–a dead being forces its personality upon the living.
• Off-spring of a mortal and a daemon.
• Any mysterious and irresistible march toward a doom.
• Unnatural life in a picture–transfer of life from person to picture.
• Prolongation or persistence of an abnormal animation in the dead.
• Duplication of a personality.
• Ravages on a grave–discovery that the seemingly dead is alive.
• Unnatural connextion betwixt an object and some image of it.
• Membership in hellish cult of witchcraft or daemonolatry.
• Presence of horrible hidden race in lonely region.
• Shocking metamorphosis or decay of living human as induced by taking unknown and evil drug. Idea of monstrous companion.
• Beasts acting deliberately against man.
• Unseen cosmic presences in certain region — idea of genius loci.
• Psychic residuum in old house–ghost.
• Village whose inhabitants all share monstrous secret rites.
• Elemental spirit intrudes or is invoked.
• Holy organization secretly goes over to diabolism.
• Subtle vampiric preying of one being on another.
• Terrible hermit in lonely place–preys in some way on travelers.
• Powers of darkness (or cosmic outsideness) besiege or take over sacred edifice.
• Hideous daemon attached to some person (and after his death to certain objects pertaining to that person) through sin, incantation, &c.
• Hideous sacrifices attempted through exercise of some bygone paganism. Ghostly reprisal.
• Changes in a picture corresponding to actual events–present or old–in scene it depicts.
• Evil wizard employs metempsychosis to survive in animal forms and carry out revenge.
• Ghostly room in house–sometimes there, sometimes not.
• Wizard acquiring evil companion through trip to strange region of horror.
• A pursuing thing called from the grave through an injudicious incantation.
• Blast on an exhumed whistle of unknown antiquity summons vague and hellish presence from the Abyss.
• Monstrous supernatural guardian set over treasure or book hidden in ancient ruins.
• A dead man comes from the grave to bear off or punish his murderer.
• Inanimate object acts as living thing to avenge crime.
• Ghost of victim convicts murderer.
• Disturbance of an ancient grave looses a monstrous presence on the world.
• Magical telescope (or cognate device) shows the past when looked through.
• Excavation of an ancient and forbidden thing saddles excavator with hostile shadow, which eventually destroys him.
• A household in great terror of the coming of some unknown doom.
• A sacrilege toward an ancient church summons out of space or the sea an avenging monster which devours the desecrator.
• Perusal of a certain hideous book or possession of a certain awful talisman places person in touch with shocking dream or memory world which brings him eventual destruction.
• Man abnormally akin to lower animals. They avenge his murder.
• Insect hypnotizes man and leads him to his death.
• Ghostly vehicle. Man boards it and is carried into unreal world.
• Sleep-walker drawn nearer and nearer to some horrible place. Tryst with dead, &c.
• Body buried in cellar hounds murderer (or injurer) to death.
• In savage land, hermit priest guards old shrine containing a very strange and ancient Presence. Accident looses Presence, and harm is done to person responsible.
• Remote island region at extreme limit of world, Edge of Abyss. Strange horror appears there.
• Ghouls of the sea that come to land in guise of seals and prey upon mankind!
• Reconstruction of ancient temple or re-dedication of ancient altar evokes dangerous, unbodied forces.
• Evil student reanimates mummy four thousand years old, and forces it to do his murderous bidding.
• Man tries to recapture all of his past, aided by drugs and music acting on memory. Extends process to hereditary memory–even to pre-human days. These ancestral memories figure in dreams. Plans stupendous recovery of primal past–but becomes sub-human, develops a hideous primal odor, takes to the woods, and is killed by own dog.
• Traveler coming upon something horrible in strange place–as a horror in a cabin with lighted window found in a forest’s depths.
• Dream and waking worlds confused.
• Some past (or future) horror just outside memory (or prescience).
• Entire scene and set of events caused by hypnosis–proceeding either from living person or from corpse or other harbourer of residual psychic force.
• Coming to unknown place and finding one has some hitherto latent memory of it, or hideous connexion with it.

IV. List of Primary Ideas Motivating Possible Weird Tales.

• Objectivization of imagination-products.
• Metempsychosis.
• Return of spirit.
• Return of body–vampire.
• Hereditary memory.
• Abnormal vision into future.
• Advent of alien entity into world.
• Daemon summoned by rite.
• Vision opened by evil book.
• Daemon guardian of a spot.
• Evil forces focused in a spot.
• Change or vision induced by a drug.
• Ghoul.
• Monstrous birth.
• Lingering influence in house.
• Lingering influence in tomb.
• Tower or other relic of pre-humans.
• World under sea.
• Inhabited daemon tower in remote place.
• House of horror in old city.
• Transposition of mind.
• Interference with time.
• Archeological horrors exhumed.
• Evil force enters edifice as bat.
• Seizure–taking away–of a person by Forces.
• Parasitic entity infuses its memories into one it feeds on.
• Materialization of some Thing through rite or magical act.
• Distinct tones: intense, clutching, delirious horror; delicate dreamlike fantasy; realistic, scientific horror; very subtle adumbration;

Part Two

Commonplace Book

This book consists of ideas, images, and quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. Very few are actually developed plots–for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various–dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, and so on.

Presented to R. H. Barlow, Esq. on May 7, 1934 in exchange for an admirably neat typed copy from his skilled hand.

H.P. Lovecraft

Commonplace Book

[1919]

• Demophon shivered when the sun shone on him (lover of darkness–ignorance).
• Inhabitants of Zinge, over whom the star Canopus rises every night, are always gay and without sorrow.
• The shores of Attica respond in song to the waves of the AEgean.
• Horror Story–Man dreams of falling–found on floor mangled as though from falling from vast height.
• Narrator walks along unfamiliar country road–comes to strange region of the unreal.
• In Lord Dunsany’s Idle Days on the Yann: The inhabitants of the ancient Astahahn, on the Yann, do all things according to ancient ceremony. Nothing new is found. “Here we have fettered and manacled Time, who would otherwise slay the gods.”
• Horror Story–the sculptured hand–or other artificial hand–which strangles its creator.
• Horror Story–Man makes appointment with old enemy. Dies–body keeps appointment.
• Dr. Eben Spencer plot.
• Dream of flying over city. Celephais.
• Odd nocturnal ritual. Beasts dance and march to music.
• Happenings in interval between preliminary sound and striking of clock–ending–“it was the tones of the clock striking three”.
• House and garden–old–associations. Scene takes on strange aspect.
• Hideous sound in the dark.
• Bridge and slimy black waters. Fungi-The Canal
• The walking dead–seemingly alive, but–.
• Doors found mysteriously open and shut &c.–excite terror.
• Calamander-wood–a very valuable cabinet wood of Ceylon and S. India resembling rosewood
• Revise 1907 tale–painting of ultimate horror.
• Man journeys into past–or imaginative realm–leaving bodily shell behind.
• A very ancient colossus in a very ancient desert. Face gone–no man hath seen it.
• Mermaid legend–Ency. Britt. XVI–40.
• The man who would not sleep–dares not sleep–takes drugs to keep himself awake. Finally falls asleep–and something happens. Motto from Baudelaire page 214. Hypnos.
• Dunsany–Go-By Street. Man stumbles on dream world–returns to earth–seeks to go back–succeeds, but finds dream world ancient and decayed as though by thousands of years.
• Man visits museum of antiquities–asks that it accept a bas-relief he has just made–old and learned Curator laughs and says he cannot accept anything so modern. Man says that ‘dreams are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Spinx or garden-girdled Babylonia’, and that he had fashioned the sculpture in his dreams. Curator bids him show his product, and when he does so Curator shows horror, asks who the man maybe. He tells modern name. “No–before that” says Curator. Man does not remember except in dreams. Then Curator offers high price, but man feels that he intends to destroy sculpture. Asks fabulous price–Curator will consult directors.
• Add good development and describe nature of bas-relief. Cthulhu.
• Dream of ancient castle stairs–sleeping guards, narrow window–battle on plain between men of England and men of yellow tabards with red dragons. Leader of English challenges leader of foe to single combat. They fight. Foe unhelmeted, but there is no head revealed. Whole army of foe fades into mist, and watcher finds himself to be the English knight on the plain, mounted. Looks at castle, and sees a peculiar concentration of fantastic clouds over the highest battlements.
• Life and Death. Death–its desolation and horror–bleak spaces–sea-bottom–dead cities. But Life–the greater horror! Vast unheard-of reptiles and leviathans–hideous beasts of prehistoric jungle–rank slimy vegetation–evil instincts of primal man. Life is more horrible than Death.
• The cat is the soul of antique AEgyptus and bearer of tales from forgotten (empires of) cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten. The Cats of Ulthar.
• Dream of Seekonk–ebbing tide–bolt from sky–exodus from Providence–fall of Congregational dome.
• Strange visit to a place at night–moonlight–castle of great magnificence &c. Daylight shows either abandonment or unrecognizable ruins–perhaps of vast antiquity.
• Prehistoric man preserved in Siberian ice. (See Winchell–Walks and Talks in the Geological Field, p. 156 et seq.)
• As dinosaurs were once surpassed by mammals, so will man-mammals be surpassed by insect or bird. Fall of man before the new race.
• Determinism and prophecy.
• Moving away from earth more swiftly than light. Past gradually unfolded. Horrible revelation.
• Special beings with special senses from remote universes. Advent of an External universe to view.
• Disintegration of all matter to electrons and finally empty space assured, just as devolution of energy to radiant heat is known.
• Case of acceleration–man passes into space.
• Peculiar odor of book of childhood induces repetition of childhood fancy.
• Drowning sensations. Undersea–cities, ships, souls of the dead. Drowning is a horrible death.
• Sounds, possibly musical, heard in the night from other worlds or realms of being.
• Warning that certain ground is sacred or accursed; that a house or city must not be built upon it; or must be abandoned or destroyed if built; under penalty of catastrophe.
• The Italians call Fear La Figlia della Morte–The Daughter of Death.
• Fear of mirrors–memory of dream in which scene is altered and climax is hideous surprise at seeing oneself in the water or a mirror. Identity? Outsider?
• Monsters born living–burrow underground and multiply, forming race of unsuspected daemons.
• Castle by pool or river–reflection fixed through centuries. Castle destroyed, reflection lives to avenge destroyers weirdly.
• Race of immortal Pharaohs dwelling beneath pyramids in vast subterranean halls down black staircases.
• Hawthorne–unwritten plot. Visitor from tomb. Stranger at some public concourse followed at midnight to graveyard where he descends into the earth.
• From Arabia Ency. Britt. II.–255. Prehistoric fabulous tribes of Ad in the south, Thamood in the north, and Tasm & Jadis in the center of the peninsula. “Very gorgeous are the descriptions given of Irem, the City of Pillars (as the Koran styles it) supposed to have been erected by Shedad, the latest despot of Ad, in the regions of Hudramant, and which yet, after the annihilation of its tenants, remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-favored traveler.” Rock excavations in N. W. Hejaz ascribed to Thamood tribe.
• Cities wiped out by supernatural wrath.
• AZATHOTH–hideous name.
• Phleg-e-thon–a river of liquid fire in Hades.
• Enchanted garden where moon casts shadow of object or ghost invisible to the human eye.
• Calling on the dead–voice or familiar sound in adjacent room.
• Hand of dead man writes.
• Transposition of identity.
• Man followed by invisible thing.
• Book or MS. too horrible to read–warned against reading it. Someone reads and is found dead. Haverhill incident.
• Sailing or rowing on lake in moonlight–sailing into invisibility.
• A queer village–in a valley, reached by a long road and visible from the crest of the hill from which that road descends–or close to a dense and antique forest.
• Man in strange subterranean chamber–seeks to force door of bronze–overwhelmed by influx of waters.
• Fisherman casts his net into the sea by moonlight–what he finds.
• A terrible pilgrimage to seek the nighted throne of the far daemon-sultan Azathoth.
• Live man buried in bridge masonry according to superstition–or black cat.
• Sinister names–(Kaman-thoh del).
• Identity. Reconstruction of personality–man makes duplicate of himself.
• Riley’s fear of undertakers–door locked on inside after death.
• Catacombs discovered beneath a city. In America?
• An impression. City in peril–dead city, equestrian statue, men in closed room, clattering of hooves heard from outside. Marvel disclosed on looking out. Doubtful ending.
• Murder discovered, body located, by psychological detective who pretends he has made walls of room transparent. Works on fear of murderer.
• Man with unnatural face, oddity of speaking. Found to be a mask–revelation.
• Tone of extreme phantasy. Man transformed to island or mountain.
• Man has sold his soul to the devil–returns to family from trip. Life afterward–fear, culminating horror. Novel length.
• Halloween incident. Mirror in cellar–face seen therein–death (claw-mark?).
• Rats multiply and exterminate first a single city and then all mankind. Increased size and intelligence.
• Italian revenge–killing self in cell with enemy under castle.
• Black mass under antique church.
• Ancient cathedral, hideous gargoyle. Man seeks to rob–found dead, gargoyle’s jaw bloody.
• Unspeakable dance of the gargoyles; in morning several gargoyles on old cathedral found transposed.
• Wandering through labyrinth of narrow slum streets, come on distant light. Unheard-of rites of swarming beggars, like Court of Miracles in Notre Dame de Paris.
• Horrible secret in crypt of ancient castle–discovered by dweller.
• Shapeless living thing forming nucleus of ancient building.
• Marblehead. Dream–burying hill–evening, unreality. Festival?
• Power of wizard to influence dreams of others.

[1920]

• Quotation: “a defunct nightmare, which had perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might.”–Hawthorne.
• Hideous cracked discords of bass music from ruined organ in abandoned abbey or cathedral. Red Hook.
• “For has not nature, too, her grotesques–the rent rock, the distorting lights of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure of man in the embryo or the skeleton?” Pater–Renaissance (da Vinci).
• To find something horrible in a perhaps familiar book and not to be able to find it again.
• (Charles Dexter Ward) Borellus says, “that the Essential Salts of animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Study, and raise the fine shape of an animal out of its ashes at his pleasure; and that by the like method from the Essential Salts of human dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal necromancy, call up the shape of any dead ancestor from the dust whereinto his body has been incinerated.”
• Lonely philosopher fond of cat–hypnotizes it, as it were, by repeatedly talking to it and looking at it. After his death the cat evinces signs of possessing his personality. N. B. He has trained cat, and leaves it to a friend, with instructions as to fitting a pen to its right forepaw by means of a harness. Later it writes with deceased’s own handwriting.
• Lone lagoons and swamps of Louisiana–death daemon–ancient house and gardens–moss-grown trees–festoons of Spanish moss.

[1921]

• Anencephalous or brainless monster who survives and attains prodigious size.
• Lost winter day–slept over. Twenty years later. Sleep in chair on summer night. False dawn–old scenery and sensations–cold–old persons now dead. Horror–frozen?
• Man’s body dies but corpse retains life. Stalks about–tries to conceal odor of decay–detained somewhere. Hideous climax. Cool Air.
• A place one has been (a beautiful view of a village or farm-dotted valley in the sunset) which one can not find again or locate in memory.
• Change comes over the sun–shows objects in strange form, perhaps restoring landscape of the past.
• Horrible Colonial farmhouse and overgrown garden on city hillside, overtaken by growth. Verse “The House” as basis of story.
• Unknown fires seen across the hills at night.
• Blind fear of a certain woodland hollow where streams writhe among crooked roots, and where on a buried altar terrible sacrifices have occurred. Phosphorence of dead trees. Ground bubbles.
• Hideous old house on steep city hillside, Bowen street, beckons in the night. Black windows, horror unnamed. Cold touch and voice; the welcome of the dead.

[1923]

• Salem story. The cottage of an aged witch, wherein after her death are found sundry terrible things.
• Subterranean region beneath placid New England village, inhabited by (living or extinct) creatures of prehistoric antiquity and strangeness.
• Hideous secret society–widespread–horrible rites in caverns under familiar scenes. One’s own neighbor may belong.
• Corpse in room performs some act prompted by discussion in its presence. Tears up or hides will, &c.
• Sealed room, or at least no lamp allowed there. Shadow on wall.
• Old sea tavern now far inland from made land. Strange occurrences–sound of lapping of waves.
• Vampire visits man in ancestral abode; is his own father.
• A thing that sat on a sleeper’s chest. Gone in morning, but something left behind.
• Wallpaper cracks off in sinister shape; man dies of fright. Rats in Walls.
• Educated mulatto seeks to displace personality of white man and occupy his body.
• Ancient negro voodoo wizard in swamp; possesses white man.
• Antediluvian cyclopean ruins on lonely Pacific island. Center of earthwide subterranean witch cult.
• Ancient ruin in Alabama swamp. Voodoo.
• Man lives near graveyard. How does he live? Eats no food.
• Biological-hereditary memories of other worlds and universes. Butler–Gods Known and Unknown page 59.
• Death lights dancing over a salt marsh.
• Ancient castle within sound of weird waterfall. Sound ceases for a time under strange conditions.
• Prowling at night around an unlighted castle amidst strange scenery.
• A secret living thing kept and fed in an old house.

[1924]

• Something seen at Oriel window of forbidden room in ancient manor house.
• Art note–fantastic daemons of Salvator Rosa or Fuseli (trunk-proboscis).
• Talking bird of great longevity. Tells secret long afterward.
• Photius tells of a ‘lost’ writer named Damascius, who wrote “Incredible Fictions”, “Tales of Daemons”, “Marvelous Stories of Appearances from the Dead”.
• Horrible things whispered in the lines of Gauthier du Metz, 13th century, “Image du Monde”.
• Dried-up man living for centuries in cataleptic state in ancient tomb.
• Hideous secret assemblage at night in antique alley. Disperse furtively one by one. One seen to drop something–a human hand.
• Man abandoned by ship–swimming in sea–picked up hours later with strange story of undersea region he has visited. Mad??
• Castaways on island eat unknown vegetation and become strangely transformed.
• Ancient and unknown ruins. Strange and immortal bird who speaks in a language horrifying and revelatory to the explorers.
• Individual, by some strange process, retraces the path of evolution and becomes amphibious.
• Doctor insists that that particular amphibian from which man descends is not like any known to paleontology. To prove it, indulges in, or relates strange experiment.

[1925]

• Marble Faun, page 346: strange and prehistoric Italian city of stone.
• N. E. region called “Witches’ Hollow”–along course of river. Rumors of Witches’ Sabbaths and Indian powwows on a broad mound rising out of the level, where some old hemlocks and beeches formed a dark grove or daemon-temple. Legends hard to account for, Holmes–Guardian Angel.
• Phosphoresence of decaying wood, called in New England “Fox-Fire”.
• Mad artist in ancient sinister house draws thing–What were his models? Glimpse. Pickman’s Model.
• HSW–Cassius. Man has miniature shapeless Siamese twin–exhib. in circus. Twin surgically detached–disappears–does hideous things with malign life of its own.
• Witches’ Hollow Novel? Man hired as teacher in private school misses road on first trip–encounters dark hollow with unnaturally swollen trees and small cottage (light in window?). Reaches school and hears that boys are forbidden to visit hollow. One boy is strange–teacher sees him visit hollow. Odd doings–mysterious disappearance or hideous fate.
• Hideous world superimposed on visible world. Gate through–power guides narrator to ancient and forbidden book with directions for access.
• A secret language spoken by a very few old men in a wild country leads to hidden marvels and terrors still surviving.
• Strange man seen in lonely mountain place talking with great winged thing which flies away as others approach.
• Someone or something cries in fright at sight of rising moon, as if it were something strange.
• DELRIO asks “An Sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?” Red Hook.
• Explorer enters strange land where some atmospheric quality darkens the sky to virtual blackness–marvels therein.

[1926]

• Footnote by Haggard or Lang in “The World’s Desire”: “Probably the mysterious and indecipherable books which were occasionally excavated in old Egypt were written in this dead language of a more ancient and now forgotten people. Such was the book discovered at Coptos, in the sanctuary there, by the priest of the Goddess. ‘The whole earth was dark, but the moon shone all about the book,’ a scribe of the period of the Rameseides mentions another in indecipherable ancient writing. ‘Thou tellest me thou understandest no word of it, good or bad. There is, as it were, a wall about it that none may climb. Thou art instructed, yet thou knowest it not; this makes me afraid.’ Birch Zeitschrift 1871 pp 61-64. Papyrus Anastisi I. pl. X, I. 8. pl. X, 1-4. Maspero, Hist. Anc. pp. 66-67”.
• Members of witch cult were buried face downward. Man investigates ancestor in family tomb and finds disquieting condition.
• Strange well in Arkham country–water gives out (or was never struck–hole kept tightly covered by a stone ever since dug)–no bottom–shunned and feared–what lay beneath (either unholy temple or other very ancient thing, or great cave-world). Fungi–The Well.
• Hideous book glimpsed in ancient shop–never seen again.
• Horrible boarding house–closed door never opened.
• Ancient lamp found in tomb–when filled and used, its light reveals strange world. Fungi.
• Any very ancient, unknown, or prehistoric object–its power of suggestion–forbidden memories.
• Vampire dog.
• Evil alley or enclosed court in ancient city–Union or Wilson Street. Fungi.
• Visit to someone in wild and remote house–ride from station through the night–into the haunted hills. House by forest or water–terrible things live there.
• Man forced to take shelter in strange house. Host has thick beard and dark glasses. Retires. In night guest rises and sees host’s clothes about, also mask, which was the apparent face of whatever the host was. Flight.
• Autonomic nervous system and subconscious mind do not reside in the head. Have mad physiclan decapitate a man but keep him alive and subconsciously controlled. Avoid copying tale by W. C. Morrow.

[1928]

• Black cat on hill near dark gulf of ancient inn yard. Mews hoarsely–invites artist to nighted mysteries beyond. Finally dies at advanced age. Haunts dreams of artist–lures him to follow. Strange outcome (never wakes up? or makes bizarre discovery of an elder world outside three-dimensional space?)
• Trophonious–cave of. Vide Class. Dict. and Atlantic article.
• Steepled town seen from afar at sunset–does not light up at night. Sail has been seen putting out to sea. Fungi.
• Adventures of a disembodied spirit–through dim, half-familiar cities and over strange moors: through space and time–other planets and universes in the end.
• Vague lights, geometrical figures, &c. seen on retina when eyes are closed. Caused by rays from other dimensions acting on optic nerve? From other planets? Connected with a life or phase of being in which person could live if he only knew how to get there? Man afraid to shut eyes–he has been somewhere on a terrible pilgrimage and this fearsome seeing faculty remains.
• Man has terrible wizard friend who gains influence over him. Kills him in defense of his soul; walls body up in ancient cellar–BUT–the dead wizard (who has said strange things about soul lingering in body) changes bodies with him… leaving him a conscious corpse in cellar. Thing on Doorstep.
• Certain kind of deep-toned stately music of the 1870’s or 1880’s recalls certain visions of that period–gas-litten parlors of the dead, moonlight on old floors, decaying business streets with gas lamps, &c.–under terrible circumstances.
• Book which induces sleep on reading–cannot be read. Determined man reads it–goes mad. Precautions taken by aged initiate who knows protection, as of author and translator, by incantation.
• Time and space. Past event, 150 years ago, unexplained. Modern period. Person intensely homesick for past says or does something which is physically transmitted back and actually causes the past event.
• Ultimate horror. Grandfather returns from strange trip… mystery in house… wind and darkness… grandfather and mother engulfed… questions forbidden… somnolence. . . investigation… cataclysm … screams overheard…
• Man whose money was obscurely made loses it. Tells his family he must go again to the PLACE (horrible and sinister and extra-dimensional) where he got his gold. Hints of possible pursuers, or of his possible non-return. He goes. Record of what happens to him: or what happens at his home when he returns. Perhaps connect with preceding topic. Give fantastic, quasi-Dunsanian treatment.
• Man observed in a public place with features, or ring or jewel, identified with those of man long, perhaps generations, buried.
• Terrible trip to an ancient and forgotten tomb.
• Hideous family living in shadow in ancient castle by edge of wood near black cliffs and monstrous waterfall.
• Boy reared in atmosphere of considerable mystery. Believes father is dead. Suddenly is told that father is about to return. Strange preparations–consequences.
• Lonely bleak islands off N. E. coast. Horrors they harbour–outpost of cosmic influences.
• What hatches from primordial egg.
• Strange man in shadowy quarter of ancient city possesses something of immemorial archaic horror.

[1930]

• Hideous old book discovered–directions for shocking evocation.
• Pre-human idol found in desert.
• Idol in museum moves in a certain way.
• Migration of Lemmings–Atlantis.
• Little green Celtic figures dug up in an ancient Irish bog.
• Man blindfolded and taken in closed cab or car to some very ancient and secret place.
• The dreams of one man actually create a strange half-mad world of quasi-material substance in another dimension. Another man, also a dreamer, blunders into this world in a dream. What he finds Intelligence of denizens. Their dependence on the first dreamer. What happens at his death.
• A very ancient tomb in the deep woods near where a seventeenth century manor-house used to be. The undecayed, bloated thing found within.
• Appearance of an ancient god in a lonely and archaic place–probably temple ruin. Atmosphere of beauty rather than horror. Subtle handling–presence revealed by faint sound or shadow. Landscape changes? Seen by child? Impossible to reach or identify locale again?
• A general house of horror…nameless crime…sounds… later tenants… (Flammarion) novel length?
• Inhabitant of another world–face masked, perhaps with human skin, or surgically altered to human shape, but body alien beneath robes. Having reached earth, tries to mix with mankind. Hideous revelation. Suggested by C.A.S.
• In an ancient buried city a man finds a mouldering prehistoric document in English and in his own handwriting, telling an incredible tale. Voyage from present into past implied. Possible actualisation of this. Used 1935.
• Reference in Egyptian papyrus to a secret or secrets under tomb of high-priest Ka-Nefer. Tomb finally found and identified–trap door in stone floor–staircase, and the illimitable black abyss.
• Expedition lost in Antarctic or other weird place. Skeletons and effects found years later. Camera films used but undeveloped. Finders develope–and find strange horror.
• Scene of an urban horror–Sous le Cap or Champlain Streets, Quebec–rugged cliff-face–moss, mildew, dampness–houses half-burrowing into cliff.

[1931]

• Thing from sea–in dark house, man finds doorknobs &c. wet as from touch of something. He has been a sea-captain, and once found a strange temple on a volcanically risen island.
• Dream of awaking in vast hall of strange architecture, with sheet-covered forms on slabs, in positions similar to one’s own. Suggestions of disturbingly non-human outlines under sheets. One of the objects moves and throws off sheet–non-terrestrial being revealed. Suggestion that oneself is also such a being–mind has become transferred to body on other planet.
• Desert of rock–prehistoric door in cliff, in the valley around which lie the bones of uncounted billions of animals both modern and prehistoric, some of them puzzlingly gnawed.

[1932]

• Ancient necropolis; bronze door which opens as the moonlight strikes it. Focussed by ancient lens in pylon opposite?
• Primal mummy in museum… awakes and changes places with visitor.

[1933]

• An odd wound appears on a man’s hand suddenly and without apparent cause. Spreads. Consequences.
  Thibetan ROLANG–Sorcerer (NGAGSPA) reanimates a corpse by holding it in a dark room, lying on it mouth to mouth and repeating a magic formula with all else banished from his mind. Corpse slowly comes to life and stands up. Tries to escape; leaps, bounds, and struggles; but sorcerer holds it. Continues with magic formula. Corpse sticks out tongue and sorcerer bites it off. Corpse then collapses. Tongue becomes a valuable magic talisman. If corpse escapes–hideous results and death to sorcerer.
• Strange book of horror discovered in ancient library. Paragraphs of terrible significance copied. Later unable to find book and verify text. Perhaps discover body or image or charm under floor, in secret cupboard, or elsewhere. Idea that book was merely hypnotic delusion induced by dead brain or ancient magic.
• Man enters, supposedly, own house in pitch dark. Feels way to room and shuts door behind him. Strange horrors… or turns on lights and finds alien place or presence. Or finds past restored or future indicated.
• Pane of peculiar-looking glass from a ruined monastery reputed to have harbored devil-worship set up in modern house at edge of wild country. Landscape looks vaguely and unplaceably wrong through it. It has some unknown time-distorting quality, and comes from a primal, lost civilization. Finally, hideous things in other world seen through it.
• Daemons, when desiring an human form for evil purposes, take to themselves the bodies of hanged men.

[1934]

• Loss of memory and entry into a cloudy world of strange sights and experiences after shock, accident, reading of strange book, participation of strange rite, draught of strange brew, &c. Things seen have vague and disquieting familiarity. Emergence. Inability to retrace course.
• Distant tower visible from hillside window. Bats cluster thickly around it at night. Observer fascinated. One night wakes to find self on unknown black circular staircase. In tower? Hideous goal.
• Black winged thing flies into one’s house at night. Cannot be found or identified, but subtle developments ensue.
• Invisible Thing felt–or seen to make prints–on mountain top or other high, inaccessible place.
• Planets formed of invisible matter.

[From a Later Notebook]

• A monstrous derelict–found and boarded by a castaway or shipwreck survivor.
• A return to a place under dreamlike, horrible, and only dimly- comprehended circumstances. Death and decay reigning. Town fails to light up at night–revelation.
• Disturbing conviction that all life is only a deceptive dream with some dismal or sinister horror lurking behind.
• Person gazes out window and finds city and world dark and dead (or oddly changed) outside.
• Trying to identify and visit the distant scenes dimly seen from one’s window–bizarre consequences.
• Something snatched away from one in the dark–in a lonely, ancient, and generally shunned place.
• (Dream of) some vehicle–railway train, coach, &c.–which is boarded in a stupor or fever, and which is a fragment of some pastor ultra-dimensional world–taking the passenger out of reality into vague, age-crumbled regions or unbelievable gulfs of marvel.
• Special Correspondent of N. Y. Times, March 3, 1935 “Halifax N. S.–Etched deeply into the face of an island which rises from the Atlantic surges off the S. coast of Nova Scotia 20 m. from Halifax is the strangest rock phenomenon which Canada boasts. Storm, sea, and frost have graven into the solid cliff of what has come to be known as Virgin’s Island an almost perfect outline of the Madonna with the Christ Child in her arms.
• “The island has sheer and wave bound sides, is a danger to ships, and is absolutely uninhabited. So far as is known, no human being has ever set foot on its shores.”
• An ancient house with blackened pictures on the walls–so obscured that their subjects cannot be deciphered. Cleaning and revelation. Cf Hawthorne–Edw. Rand. Port.
• Begin story with presence of narrator–inexplicable to himself–in utterly alien and terrifying scenes.
• Strange human being, or beings, living in some ancient house or ruins far from populous district–either old N. E. or far exotic land. Suspicion, based on shape and habits, that it is not all human.
• Ancient winter woods … moss … great boles … twisted branches … dark … ribbed roots… always dripping…
• Talking rock of Africa–immemorially ancient circle in desolate jungle ruins that speaks with a voice out of the aeons.
• Man with lost memory in strange, imperfectly comprehended environment. Fears to regain memory–a glimpse…
• Man idly shapes a queer image–some power impels him to make it queerer than he understands. Throws it away in disgust but–something is abroad in the night.
• Ancient (Roman? prehistoric?) stone bridge washed away by a (sudden and curious?) storm. Something liberatde which had been sealed up in the masonry thousands of years ago. Things happen.
• Mirage in time–image of long-vanished pre-human city.
• Fog or smoke–assumes shapes under incantations.
• Bell of some ancient church or castle rung by some unknown hand–a thing … or an invisible Presence.
• Insects or other entities from space attack and penetrate a man’s head and cause him to remember alien and exotic things–possible displacement of personality.
• This last entry can be rather accurately dated, since on May 11, 1935 he wrote this about it to a friend:
• “Your Chobey-Maam dream surely was a winner—worthy to rank beside the mighting wallaroo! Can you form any conjecture as to the planet on which you were situate? I had a very vivid dream fragment only last night–perhaps in part derived from that extremely clever plot idea outlined toward the end of your letter. You speak of a cranium containing, in place of a brain, a curious metal device–implying that the latter is either an alien and conscious entity itself, or else a sort of receiving set by which remote outside entities can control the body in which it is planted. Well–in my dream I was, while walking in a familiar rural region, suddenly attacked by a swarm of swift-darting insects from the sky. They were tiny and streamlined, and seemed able to pierce my brain and enter my brain as if their substance were not strictly material. No sooner had they entered my head, than my identity and position seemed to become very doubtful. I remembered alien and incredible scenes—crags and pinnacles lit by violet suns, fantastic piles of cyclopean masonry, varicoloured fungous vegetation, half-shapeless forms lumbering across illimitable plains, bizarre tiers of waterfalls, topless stone cylinders scaled by rope ladders like ships’ ratlines, labyrinthine corridors and geometrically frescoed rooms, curious gardens with unrecognizable plants, robed, amorphous beings speaking in non-vocal pipings—and innumerable incidents of vague nature and indefinite outcome. Just where I was, I could not be certain–but there was a powerful sense of infinite distance, and of complete alienage to the earth and to the human race. Nothing actually happened at any time–and I realized I was dreaming considerably before I actually awakened. Upon rising, I made a note of the dream in my Black Book (whose present edition you so assiduously started) and some day I may employ either that or your unadulterated suggestion in a story. Thanks for the idea—whether or not it caused the dream.”

Errata

Certain unavoidable changes in punctuation have been made in various places throughout Commonplace Book. Aside from these, the most grievous errors are:

p. 1, l. 9: narration misspelled;
p. 5, l. 3: comma after );
p. 5, l. 18: comma after element;
p. 6, l. 2: striking misspelled;
p. 8, l. 10: Offspring;
p. 12, l. 20: his own dog;
p. 17, l. 10: period after Canal;
p. 17, l. 15: period after rosewood;
p. 24, l. 10: Mass;
p. 27, l. 3: Shunned House should follow story;
p. 27, l. 25: will misspelled;
p. 30, l. 21: should be “fox-fire”;
p. 31, l. 23: Red misspelled;
p. 32, l. 11: Ramessids misspelled;
p. 40, l. 5: should be Sorcerer (or NGAGSPA);
p. 44, l. 19: liberated misspelled;
p. 45, l. 26: should be cranium in place of brain.