Monday, March 11, 2013
Fort, Fiction, Fact
Andrew May has a new post up at his Forteana Blog which begins...
"At the end of February, Nick Redfern wrote a blog post about The Lurker at the Threshold – a novel that is purportedly by 'H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth', although it’s generally considered to be almost pure Derleth, worked up from just a brief fragment by Lovecraft that was discovered after his death. Like Agatha Christie’s N or M, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Lurker at the Threshold is a book I’d had sitting unread on the shelf for years. I was finally prompted to read it by Nick’s very positive words about it... and particularly because he mentioned that it 'cites the work and books of Charles Fort.'"
And, in the same way that my article focused on matters of a fact vs. fiction nature when it came to Derleth, so Andrew has done likewise with Fort...
H.P. Lovecraft briefly mentioned the books of Charles Fort in "The Whisperer In Darkness," and "The Call Of Cthulhu." Quite a few years ago, I read something where an author speculated that Fort and Lovecraft met when HPL lived in Brooklyn around the 1924-26 time period. It turns out that during those years, Fort was not residing in the Bronx, rather, he was spending time in London, doing research. Additionally, there is no evidence that Lovecraft even corresponded with Fort. Also, there was no overlap between the literary aquaintances of the two writers. Still, it is an intriguing thought to imagine a conversation between Lovecraft and Fort!
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