Letters to C. L. Moore and Others by H.P. Lovecraft & CL Moore
413 pages, Paperback
Published January, 2017 by Hippocampus Press
A Phil Dickian I am lucky that every part of that writer’s life is very detailed in multiple biographies. Catherine Lucille Moore is the next author of the past I have become most fascinated with. Her life is the opposite, and honestly, before this book was suggested I thought we would never know about her life at all. I hate that I feel I have to introduce her with every review, but he name is not as well known as it should be.
Here is how the publisher introduced the book…
“This latest volume of H. P. Lovecraft’s complete unabridged correspondence is unique in that it contains a substantial amount of letters by one of his most distinctive later colleagues—the weird writer C. L. Moore, whose stories mingling fantasy and sexuality were among the most striking contributions to Weird Tales in the 1930s. Lovecraft’s letters to Moore survive only fragmentarily, but Moore wrote more than 60,000 words of letters to Lovecraft, and these are now published for the first time, revealing a vivid imagination and keen analytical mind who held her own in debates with her older colleague. Lovecraft introduced Moore to her future husband and writing partner, Henry Kuttner, whose own brief correspondence is included here.”
This book is a collection of letters between the two writers between 1934 and 36. There is very little we know about Catherine and her time, in Indianapolis, which is of great interest to me not just because she is from my home state (her college dorm was a five-minute walk from the house I lived in during high school, but also because she is an important figure to the genre, even more so than Lovecraft for me. There are plenty of sources of information about Howie. Personally I like her fiction more.
The existence of these letters is something I knew about, the existence of this book was a revelation. It is a look into the lives of these writers. Moore and Lovecraft most share ideas about the field of weird fiction and that stuff is fascinating. Some of the most fascinating moments are Moore’s reactions to deep reads of the stories that Lovecraft shared with her. Some were handwritten and Moore appeared to type them up for Lovecraft. Some seriously famous stories like Call of Cthulhu for example appeared to be first typed by her. Many will find Lovecraft’s letter telling Moore of Robert E. Howard’s death and his passionate feelings for the Conan stories most powerful. I did find those parts fascinating. Lovecraft took stories I found impressive already and explain them in a way that made me want to go back and read them again.
Odd that this book is credited to HP Lovecraft and not CL Moore, who wrote a good majority of the words. This was a problem in her life when many of the stories she co-wrote with her husband were often remembered as Kuttner tales. I know most are reading this book for what they can learn about Howie…still.
Last you’ll have to check out my column about Catherine Moore over at Amazing Stories for why I am most interested. I am trying to get a plaque up in the building she worked in during the 1930s I wanted more details about her work life. There are some fun moments on that front, but I wanted more. She tells Howie about going to movies in Indianapolis and working for pretty much every banker in the Fletcher Trust Building. That is neat. So yeah Lest honor her memory.
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Yeah. If you are interested in a deep history of weird fiction this is a must-read.
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