I have just done The Moon Bog by H P Lovecraft, one of his lesser-known stories. This story was sponsored by the wonderful Gavin Critchley.
In case you would like to read my notes, they are here. They may add something, who knows?
The Moon Bog by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Moon-Bog" was written in 1921, composed quickly to order as an after-dinner piece for a St Patrick's Day gathering of amateur journalists in Boston — which accounts for both its Irish setting and its relative brevity. Lovecraft himself was characteristically dismissive of it afterwards, calling it "insufferable maundering," and the scholar S. T. Joshi classes it as "one of the most conventionally supernatural" of his stories. Despite being written in 1921, it did not see professional publication until 1926, when it appeared in Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that served as the primary outlet for Lovecraft's fiction during his lifetime. That gap between composition and publication is itself telling: Lovecraft's relationship with the commercial fiction market was always uneasy, and he never managed to support himself from his writing. He died in 1937 in poverty, virtually unknown outside a small circle of pulp readers and amateur press enthusiasts, and his reputation as one of the most significant horror writers of the twentieth century was built almost entirely after his death.
Though minor, "The Moon-Bog" is instructive about where Lovecraft was reading and what he was absorbing at this point in his career. The most immediate influence is Lord Dunsany — the marble temples, the dream-city in the valley, the moon-priestess Cleis with her ivory crown, the whole elevated, quasi-allegorical diction of the supernatural sequences. Lovecraft was deeply under Dunsany's spell in the early 1920s, and you can hear it in every "peristyle" and "ruddy refulgence." Behind Dunsany stands Arthur Machen, whose fingerprints are all over the story's central premise: an ancient, numinous landscape that does not tolerate modern intrusion, a countryside permeated by something pre-Christian and genuinely inimical, the sense that the peasants' superstitions are not ignorance but encoded survival knowledge. Lovecraft acknowledged Machen explicitly as one of his four "modern masters" in his critical essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," alongside Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Lord Dunsany himself. James supplies the narrative template: the cultivated outsider who ignores local warnings, meddles with something buried, and pays a price that is both morally legible and metaphysically excessive. James would have pared the prose back considerably, but the bones of the story are recognisably his.
There is also a striking parallel with William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki story "The Whistling Room" — the correct title, and worth naming precisely. The setup is almost identical: a castle in Ireland, bought by a returning American of Irish ancestry, who promptly falls foul of local superstition attached to the property itself. In Hodgson's version Carnacki arrives as the professional investigator, bringing his electric pentacle and his quasi-scientific methodology to bear on the problem. Lovecraft's narrator arrives as a friend and guest, with nothing but a classical education and a tendency to faint. That difference in protagonist design is quietly revelatory about what each writer thinks horror fundamentally is: for Hodgson it is a problem to be engaged, however desperately; for Lovecraft it is a revelation to be survived, barely, and never understood.
Ferretting in Old Documents
One thing "The Moon-Bog" shows Lovecraft beginning to develop is a technique that will become central to his mature work: the use of real historical and literary sources to lend his invented horrors a kind of borrowed authority. Here he reaches for the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the medieval Irish Book of Invasions, with its account of the Partholonians — the pseudo-historical wave of settlers held to have come from Greece, who brought civilisation to Ireland and were wiped out by plague. This is a real text, genuinely cited in Victorian and Edwardian popular histories, and Lovecraft had clearly read around it. By anchoring his bog-goddess and her sunken city to that tradition, he is doing something rhetorically shrewd: the reader who half-remembers that the Irish mythological cycle really does contain these figures finds the invented horror sitting plausibly alongside genuine learning. To misquote Aristotle on rhetoric, it is truth by authority — the fiction piggybacks on the credibility of the document. It is still relatively unsophisticated here; the Greek and Irish layers sit a little awkwardly beside each other, and a careful reader can see the joins. But the instinct is already there, and Lovecraft will refine it dramatically: the Necronomicon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the carefully forged footnotes of "At the Mountains of Madness" all operate on the same principle, the fake document sheltering in the company of real ones until you can no longer quite tell which is which.
M R James does this too.
Genre Bending
One thing that can get lost when Lovecraft is discussed purely as a horror writer is that he did not think in those terms himself, and neither did his great model Edgar Allan Poe before him. Poe moved freely between terror, detective fiction, comic satire, lyric poetry, and speculative cosmology, often within the same piece, and Lovecraft inherited that same refusal to be contained by genre boundaries. His output ranges from the pure dream fantasy of "The White Ship" and "The City of Iranon" through the science fiction of "The Colour Out of Space" and "At the Mountains of Madness" — which are essentially first contact narratives dressed in horror clothing — to the Gothic antiquarianism of "The Rats in the Walls" and the cosmic mythology of the Cthulhu cycle. Many individual stories refuse to sit cleanly in any single category. "The Shadow Out of Time" is as much a science fiction meditation on consciousness and deep time as it is a horror story. "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is a picaresque fantasy novel that happens to end in dread. "The Moon-Bog" itself blends Irish folklore, classical mythology, dream fantasy, and ghost story into something that resists easy labelling. The genre categories we now apply to Lovecraft were largely imposed after his death by the publishing industry's need to shelve books somewhere. Lovecraft himself was simply writing what he called weird fiction — a broad enough tent to accommodate almost anything that engaged his imagination — and the variety within that category is one of the things that makes him a more interesting and less predictable writer than his reputation as the father of cosmic horror sometimes suggests.
Romanticism and Anti-Modernism
The story's central conflict is less about America specifically than about what America had come to represent as a symbol in the European imagination — the forward-forcing drive of technological improvement, the conviction that nature exists to be made productive, that wasteland is a moral failure awaiting correction. Barry is American, but the impulse he embodies is a current running through the whole of western modernity; he could just as easily be a Manchester mill owner or a Haussmann bureaucrat. Ireland in turn is less a specific place than an exemplar of something: the folk roots of European culture, the old knowledge encoded in superstition, the landscape that remembers what official history has forgotten. Lovecraft could have set this story in Brittany, the Scottish Highlands, Transylvania, or Carinthia — all of which had served similar symbolic purposes for earlier Gothic and Romantic writers — and the essential argument would have been identical. He chose Ireland partly because the St Patrick's Day occasion demanded it, and partly because Irish antiquity, with its genuine medieval literature and its layered mythology, gave him the Partholonians and the Book of Invasions to work with. But the poles of the conflict are universal: on one side the rationalising, improving, disenchanting impulse of modernity; on the other the long, inarticulate memory of a landscape that has swallowed civilisations before and will swallow this one too.
It is worth pausing on how deep this tension runs in western culture, because it connects Lovecraft to currents far larger and more troubling than a minor Irish ghost story might suggest. The conflict between technological modernity and rooted, place-based tradition is not just a literary theme — it is one of the defining anxieties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it generated responses across the entire political spectrum. In America it produces Thoreau at Walden Pond, the conservationist tradition, the romanticisation of wilderness as a counter to industrial civilisation. In Europe it feeds directly into the Völkisch movement — the cult of blood, soil, and ancestral landscape that runs from German Romanticism through to its catastrophic political expression in the 1930s and 1940s. The idea that a people is organically rooted in its land, that this rootedness carries a spiritual authority which rational modernity threatens and destroys, that those who have lost contact with that root are somehow diminished or corrupted — all of that is present in embryo in "The Moon-Bog," and in much of Lovecraft's work. Lovecraft was not a Völkisch thinker in any systematic sense, but his reactionary nostalgia, his reverence for ancestral soil, his contempt for the rootless cosmopolitan improver, all draw from the same deep well. The peasants of Kilderry are right not because Lovecraft is a democrat — he emphatically is not — but because they are autochthonous, native to the ground, and the ground remembers them. That is a romantic and potentially very dangerous idea, and the twentieth century demonstrated exactly how dangerous.
Not an Unreliable Narrator
Several commentators reach for the term "unreliable narrator" when discussing the story's ambiguities, and while the instinct is understandable it is not quite accurate in the technical sense. The unreliable narrator as a craft device — think Stevens in The Remains of the Day, or Humbert Humbert in Lolita — involves a systematic gap between what the narrator tells us and what is actually happening, a gap that the author manipulates deliberately to produce irony, revelation, or moral complexity. The reader is positioned to see around the narrator, to catch what he is concealing or distorting, whether through self-deception or outright dishonesty. Lovecraft is doing none of this. His narrator is transparent with us to the best of his ability; he is not withholding, not deceiving, not rationalising away something he secretly knows. The ambiguity in "The Moon-Bog" arises not from narrative manipulation but from the narrator's genuine epistemic limitation — he simply does not know what he saw, because what he saw exceeded the categories available to him. That is a subtly different thing. The narrator is unreliable in the way that any traumatised witness is unreliable: not strategically, but constitutionally. His mind has been damaged by the encounter, and the gaps in his account are honest gaps. Lovecraft will develop this mode throughout his career — the narrator who tells you everything he can and it is still not enough — but he never really moves toward the more sophisticated literary unreliable narrator in the modernist sense. His narrators are broken witnesses, not compromised ones.
The Sublime
This brings us to one of the most characteristic and frequently mocked features of Lovecraft's prose: the unspeakable, the indescribable, the thing that cannot be named or rendered in human language. Critics have had sport with this habit — if it is truly indescribable, why are you describing it? — but that mockery misses what Lovecraft is actually reaching for. Behind the adjective-pile and the strained superlatives is a genuine philosophical intuition with a respectable intellectual pedigree. Edmund Burke, in his 1757 essay "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," argued that the sublime — the experience of something vast, overwhelming, and beyond human scale — is inseparable from terror, and that its power depends precisely on obscurity. We are more frightened, Burke argues, by what we cannot fully see or comprehend than by what is plainly laid before us. The defined and the describable can be managed; the obscure and the boundless cannot. Lovecraft is working squarely in that tradition, whether or not he arrived there consciously. His unspeakable entities and indescribable geometries are attempts to gesture at the numinous — Rudolf Otto's "mysterium tremendum et fascinans," the holy terror that is simultaneously repellent and magnetic — through a materialist and essentially godless framework. He cannot use God, because he does not believe in God. So he reaches instead for cosmic scale, deep time, and the frank admission that language fails. The unspeakable is not a laziness; it is a theology with the theology removed, Burke's sublime wearing a Mythos mask.
It is worth noting that Lovecraft is not the first writer to reach for Burke in this way. The Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth century did exactly the same thing, and for similar reasons. Burke's essay appeared in 1757, and its timing was almost perfectly calibrated to provide respectable philosophical dressing for what the Gothic writers were already doing by instinct. Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis — all of them were producing fiction that their educated contemporaries might have dismissed as vulgar sensation-mongering, ghost stories for servant girls, and Burke gave them a way of arguing that the literature of terror was not mere excess but a legitimate engagement with a genuine category of aesthetic experience. Radcliffe in particular leaned on the distinction between terror and horror — terror being the sublime anticipation that expands the mind, horror being the gross revelation that contracts it — a distinction she drew almost directly from Burke. The machinery of the Gothic novel, the crumbling castle, the labyrinthine passage, the figure glimpsed at the edge of candlelight, is essentially a practical application of Burke's theory of obscurity: keep it dark, keep it vast, keep it just out of focus, and the imagination will do the rest. Lovecraft inherits all of this, consciously or not, and pushes it into a new register. His crumbling castle becomes a non-Euclidean city; his shadowy figure becomes an entity whose geometry the human mind cannot process. But the underlying rhetorical strategy is identical, and it goes back to Burke. The pulp magazine wrapper is deceptive — Lovecraft is operating within a philosophical tradition that runs straight through the eighteenth century.
The Cash
Against all of this intellectual richness it is worth pausing on the material reality of Lovecraft's writing life, because the contrast is almost grotesque. He earned very little. The pulp magazines paid by the word and not generously, and Lovecraft was in any case a slow and finicky writer who revised obsessively and ghost-wrote extensively for others, often for less than he would have earned writing under his own name. He supplemented his fiction income with editorial work and revision services, effectively functioning as an uncredited collaborator for writers who could afford to pay someone to make their prose presentable. It was not enough. He lived in genteel and then increasingly threadbare poverty in Providence, Rhode Island, eating poorly, heating inadequately, and borrowing from friends. He died in 1937 of intestinal cancer complicated by malnutrition, aged forty-six, with no book to his name published in his lifetime by a commercial publisher. His entire reputation rested on appearance in pulp magazines with titles like Weird Tales, read by enthusiasts and largely ignored by the literary establishment. The posthumous revival began almost immediately — August Derleth and Donald Wandrei founded Arkham House specifically to preserve his work, publishing the first collection in 1939 — but it was a slow burn through pulp fandom and the counterculture of the 1960s before serious critical attention arrived. The academic rehabilitation came later still. The man who could not afford adequate food in Providence is now a global brand, his creations recognisable worldwide. It is one of the more extraordinary cases of posthumous canonisation in twentieth century literature.
The question of who has profited from Lovecraft's work after his death is genuinely murky, and not entirely to anyone's credit. The situation begins with the copyright law of his era, which required active renewal to maintain protection — and no evidence has ever been found that Lovecraft's copyrights were renewed by anyone. The prominent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi concludes that most of Lovecraft's works published in the amateur press are most likely now in the public domain, and that Derleth's claims to ownership are "almost certainly fictitious." Fandom The story becomes darker still when you look at what actually happened after his death. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arkham House ostensibly to preserve Lovecraft's legacy, publicly claimed ownership of the rights to Lovecraft's works for decades, collecting fees and licensing money — while their own lawyers were simultaneously arguing in a 1973 courtroom that the copyrights had in fact lapsed entirely into the public domain, and that therefore no royalties were owed to anyone. Blogger In other words, the copyright was asserted when there was money to be collected and disavowed when there were royalties to be paid. Lovecraft himself never benefited from any of this — he died with nothing — and neither did his heirs in any meaningful sense. What we are left with is one of the more dispiriting stories in twentieth century publishing: a writer who earned almost nothing from his work in life, whose work was then fought over by others after his death, and whose global cultural presence today generates revenues in which he and his family never shared a penny.
That said, simple fairness requires a more charitable reading of Derleth's motives. Arkham House was not a cold-blooded commercial operation. Derleth was a genuine devotee who founded the press specifically because he could not bear to see Lovecraft's work disappear into the pulp graveyard, and he did so at considerable personal financial risk — small specialist presses publishing weird fiction in the 1930s and 1940s were not obvious routes to wealth. Whatever legal manoeuvring surrounded the copyright claims, the animating impulse was homage rather than exploitation. Derleth kept Lovecraft's name alive during the long decades when no mainstream publisher would have touched him, and without Arkham House it is entirely possible that the scholarly revival of the 1970s would have had much less to work with. The tragedy is structural rather than personal: a system in which a writer of Lovecraft's eventual stature could die in poverty, leaving a legal and financial vacuum that others — however well-intentioned — inevitably moved to fill. The money that now flows from Lovecraft's imagination goes to publishers, filmmakers, game designers, and merchandise manufacturers. None of it reaches him or anyone connected to him. That is less a scandal than a melancholy illustration of how badly the commercial machinery of culture can fail the people who actually generate it.
