Miskatonic Arcihves

Explore the encyclopedia

An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: C. M. Eddy Jr.

Literature

Ashes

Ashes is a laboratory thriller framed as Malcolm Bruce’s confession to his friend Prague. A professor develops a liquid that reduces matter to ash, then prepares an experiment involving his assistants. Bruce believes his fiancée has already been killed and turns the invention against its maker. Prague’s return to the laboratory reveals that the visible clues did not mean what Bruce assumed.

5 min read · 885 words

Authors

C. M. Eddy Jr.

Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr. (1896–1967) was a Providence writer and friend of H. P. Lovecraft. Their shared bibliography includes Ashes, The Ghost-Eater, The Loved Dead and Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, but Eddy also wrote mystery, adventure and other pulp fiction. His work and the Eddy family’s recollections connect literary collaboration with the everyday geography of Lovecraft’s Rhode Island life.

6 min read · 1,238 words

Literature

Deaf, Dumb, and Blind

Deaf, Dumb, and Blind is a documentary haunting in which a writer with wartime sensory and mobility impairments records an assault that reaches him despite those impairments. Investigators hear typing shortly before discovering his body, although a physician concludes that he died earlier. The surviving pages appear to change both voice and physical typing style, leaving the identity of the final writer unresolved.

6 min read · 1,131 words

Authors

Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini (1874–1926) was a magician and escape artist whose connection with Lovecraft involved commissioned writing rather than membership in a fictional occult order. Lovecraft wrote Under the Pyramids for publication under Houdini’s name. Houdini also engaged C. M. Eddy, Jr., with assistance from Lovecraft, on writing about superstition.

5 min read · 973 words

Literature

The Ghost-Eater

The Ghost-Eater recounts a traveler’s night in a seemingly hospitable woodland house, where a werewolf attacks a man who is already a ghost. The visitor’s weapons cannot interrupt the scene. Only after escaping does he learn that both figures, and the house itself, belong to a violent episode sixty years earlier. The horror comes from a killing that appears able to continue beyond death.

5 min read · 904 words

Literature

The Loved Dead

The Loved Dead is a confession by an unnamed murderer hiding in a cemetery. His account follows an obsession with death from childhood through work in the funeral trade, wartime experience and serial killing. The narrative ends with pursuit closing around him. Its extravagant supernatural language belongs chiefly to the murderer’s self-description, not to an independently established Mythos intervention.

5 min read · 918 words