BY G CONNOR SALTER

Dale Nelson is a retired literature professor (Mayville State University) whose work includes exploring the Inklings and exploring a variety of weird fiction authors. He is particularly known for his work on Arthur Machen (published in books like Machenalia Volume 1 and websites like Darkly Bright Press) and an exploration of how the Inklings intersected with H.P. Lovecraft (published in Mallorn). Many of his articles on the Inklings appeared in Beyond Bree and CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society. Nelson writes columns for both of these publications. He has also contributed his thoughts on classic literature in such places as A Pilgrim in Narnia, Mythlore, and Ghosts and Scholars. He wrote the long entry on 19th– and 20th-Century Literary Influences on Tolkien for the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia edited by Michael Drout (Routledge, 2006).

He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his scholarship and interests. The following is the first of two articles containing his answers, focusing on his views on weird and horror fiction. Footnotes have been added leading to articles where Nelson explores many of these ideas further.

Interview Questions

What was your initial introduction to weird fiction, or horror literature? What are some things that attracted you to weird fiction, and to keep exploring it as a genre?

As a youngster I liked spooky, not gruesome, stuff such as was shown in the better Twilight Zone and Outer Limits teleplays. The school library owned Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful and Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum. The latter included Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Slime”—I dug that one.

Parenthetically, perhaps your readers can help me to identify the exact source of an elusive memory. Someone brought to school, when I was 11 or 12 or so, one of those mid-1960s Pocket Book mass-market paperbacks with reprints from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! newspaper feature. This particular copy had something about the “floating coffins of Barbados.” There’s plenty about that topic online, but what I want know about, specifically, is the book with Ripley’s feature on it. I don’t recollect the picture clearly, but it deserves a place in the pictures that linger in memory.

As a youngster I bought a Whitman book called More Tales to Tremble By with items such as M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes” and H. R. Wakefield’s “The Red Lodge.” I liked W. H. Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” so much that, as I recall, I tried to get my 8th-grade English teacher to read it. I also bought a paperback edited by Robert Arthur, aimed at the young adult market, called Monster Mix. I would become a fan, for a while, of the “Cthulhu Mythos.” This book contained a Robert Bloch story called “The Mannikin” that was probably borderline Mythos and the first such story I ever read. In that anthology, though, I liked more Donald Wollheim’s science-fictional “Mimic.”

The Ballantine Fantasy Series for which Lin Carter was editorial consultant got going in 1969, around the time I turned 14, and I got Carter’s anthology The Young Magicians right away. Carter leaned to weird fiction and included items by members of the Lovecraft circle in the book. His annotated bibliography referred to “Cthulhu” and I still remember thinking that sounded like the name of something out of Incan mythology or the like.

The Ashland library had the Fraser-Wise anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, which contained Machen’s “The Great God Pan” and Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Dunwich Horror.” Basil Davenport edited a couple of anthologies to my taste. Tales to Be Told in the Dark contained Machen’s “The White People” and “The Black Seal,” and Famous Monster Tales reprintedLovecraft’s “The Outsider,” maybe the first horror story by Lovecraft that I read, though not one that captivated me. But those Machen stories were really something. I’d probably read all of these stories before I turned 16.

I was a fan of Marvel comics from March 1967 on, for several years, notably of Thor. Around 1970—i.e. the same time I was beginning to explore Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, etc.—Marvel began doing adaptations of Lovecraft, such as “The Terrible Old Man,” and of Howard’s sword-and-sorcery. I still wrote and drew my own comics and text stories, inspired by my reading, including Marvel. I wasn’t going to attempt to write stories in the manner of Tolkien and Lewis, or try to illustrate their great achievements, but it was easy as pie to muggle up my own barbarian adventures. As for creativity influenced by Lovecraft, I leaned more to parody than imitation. The high school paper published my “Rats Emerge from the City Depths,” which, as I recall, was a combination of an actual local news item and a parody of Lovecraft.

On one occasion, our teacher for a high school world religions class left the room for a few minutes. Spontaneously, I got out of my desk and strode up to the front of the classroom and launched into an impromptu, straight-faced lecture on Cthulhuism, the Necronomicon, etc. I was about 16. I, uh, held everyone’s attention. Then the teacher returned, saw my jottings on the chalkboard, and took it all in good part.

I got a few issues of Harry Morris’s Lovecraftian fanzine Nyctalops and subscribed to the sword-and-sorcery fanzine Amra.

In some of his stories, Lovecraft may be considered to be a mythopoeic writer, not close to the level of Tolkien and Lewis, but maybe not too far below that of David Lindsay in A Voyage to Arcturus. Like Conan Doyle with his London of Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft made a locale his own—a haunted New England that embodies his version of “the old weird America,” to use a phrase John Derbyshire picked up years ago for an essay on Hank Williams. But Lovecraft writes of bookish bachelors of independent means who have the freedom to explore mysterious byways whenever they please. There are no claims on them, certainly no claims of love. That aspect of his fiction is a wish-fulfillment scenario attractive to some adolescents. (From what I have seen, almost nobody becomes a big Lovecraft fan for the first time as a grownup.)

“The Colour Out of Space” is Lovecraft’s masterpiece (1) because Lovecraft kept his rhetoric under control almost entirely throughout the work and, (2) especially because he engenders pity for the sufferers—honestly, it’s akin to the pity we feel for Oedipus, on whom such a dire fate has descended though he has committed no conscious crime. And this weird tale is largely about suffering and the pity of it all. It is atypical of Lovecraft. He exceeded himself in this one.

I’m probably about finished with Lovecraft, “horror fiction,” and the “weird tale.” Still of interest are extraordinary works such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The Lamp published my story “The Pageant at Willowton” a few years ago,[1] but I expect I won’t be writing any more stories in that vein. There’s so much unwholesome fascination with the occult, satanism, ugly monsters, etc. these days.[2] It can kind of spoil one’s former enjoyment of, say, M. R. James. There are better things to read if that kind of material tends to preoccupy you.

The later Machen is much to my taste, including his autobiographies and wonder-stories such as “The Great Return” and “N.” I perceive his short novel The Terror as being (ultimately) mythopoeic. My pieces for the Darkly Bright site go into matters that make Machen intriguing.

We have a common interest, the gothic fiction of Russell Kirk.[3] How did you first discover Kirk’s work?

Not sure—maybe seeing an anthologized story or two and then getting hold of the Arkham collections (now subsumed in an Eerdmans omnibus),[4] etc.

You’ve written several articles (Algernon Blackwood’s potential influence on Tolkien, whether Lovecraft read any of the Inklings) that looked for intersections between the Inklings and weird/horror fiction. Did that grow out of a desire to merge your interests or did something encourage you to think there was room to explore that area?

I thought it would be interesting to pin down, once and for all, whether members of the Lovecraft circle had read the Inklings or any Inklings had read Lovecraft circle stuff. As far as I know I pretty well covered the waterfront in that essay.[5]

Wishful thinking pops up now and again about dubious Lovecraft circle-Inklings connections. One of the best Tolkien scholars, for example, thinks that Williams, in his poems that refer to the octopoid ruler of tropical P’o-lu, must have been influenced by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. But he has no evidence, so far as I know, to explain when and where Williams would have read Lovecraft. The parallels are probably coincidental.

We know, though, that Tolkien read some or all of the stories in James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Gollum may owe something to the haunter in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book.”[6]

Dale J. Nelson may be contacted at extollager at gmail dot com.

Come back next week for the second part of this interview, in which Nelson discusses his work on the Inklings in more depth.

Interviewer’s Notes

[1] See Dale J. Nelson, “The Pageant at Willowton.” The Lamp, 27 January 2022. https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/the-pageant-at-willowton.

[2] Nelson contributes some fascinating thoughts on what makes Lovecraft’s horror different from certain kinds of contemporary horror in “Lovecraft’s Comfortable World.” Fadeaway #53 (May-June 2017): 12-20. https://efanzines.com/Fadeaway/Fadeway-53.pdf.

[3] I cited Nelson’s article for Darkly Bright Press (“Russell Kirk: Inkling Without the Inklings,” 2022, https://darklybrightpress.com/russell-kirk-inkling-without-the-inklings/) in a recent review of a book on Russell Kirk. See G. Connor Salter, “The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination, by Camilo Peralta,” Mythlore, vol. 43, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2024): 271-274. https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol43/iss1/19.

[4] See Russell Kirk, Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology Of Ghostly Tales, edited by Vigen Guroian (William B Eerdmans, 2004).

[5] See Dale J. Nelson, “The Lovecraft Circle and the Inklings: The ‘Mythopoeic Gift’ of H.P. Lovecraft.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society No. 59 (Winter 2018): 18-32. https://journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn/article/view/18.

[6] See Dale J. Nelson, “A Jamesian Source for Tolkien’s Conception of Gollum?” Beyond Bree Jan. 2009: 1.