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Nitokris

Nitokris: Nitokris is a legendary figure who may actually have been the last pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty. She appears as queen of the ghouls, leader of an army of abominable composite mummies, and consort of undead King Kephren in "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," a short story H.P. Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Harry Houdini. Nitokris, "who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates," is presented by Lovecraft as a sinister but beautiful woman, the right side of whose face has been "eaten away by rats or other ghouls."

Nitokris is the subject the "The Queen's Enemies," a play by Lord Dunsany, pointing once again to the heavy influence of that author on Lovecraft.

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Pan, Pickman, "Pickman's Model," "Picture in the House, The"


"Picture in the House, The" (The National Amateur, July 1919): This H.P. Lovecraft short story is the first of several to mention the fictitious city of Arkham, Massachusetts. See full publication history and electronic text.

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Tempest Mountain: A fictitious mountain set in the Catskill Mountains of New York state created by Lovecraft for his serialized short story "The Lurking Fear." It has a reputation in the local area for being haunted and is characterized by terrible storms and lightning strikes, fulgurites, and oddly-shaped mounds in the woods clinging to its slopes. Its peak is occupied by the ruins of the Martense family mansion, the remains of Dutch gardens, groves of misshapen trees, and the burying ground for the family.

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U-29: This World War I German submarine was the venue for most of the action in H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Temple." There was, in fact, a German Imperial Navy submarine with this name active during the Great War, but there is no indication that Lovecraft based his vessel on the historic submarine.

For one thing, the U-29 is unequivocally known to have been sunk early in the war, on March 18, 1915, when it was struck by the battleship HMS Dreadnought (the only submarine known to have ever had such a dubious distinction). It is certainly possible that Lovecraft's submarine had the same characteristics as the U-29, a U-27-type vessel (pictured here), which was a diesel-powered torpedo attack craft that had a crew of 35 and was armed with a 105 mm deck gun.

upas tree: An actual sort of flora, the Antiaris toxicaria, that H.P. Lovecraft mentions in the prose poem "Memory": "In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree." The upas tree is native to savannas and coastal plateaus in parts of Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific and the sap from its leaves and bark is used by native peoples to manufacture a deadly, heart-stopping poison for spears and arrows. It has a thick canopy of long, wide leaves, bears small edible red or purple fruit, and can grow to heights of greater than 100 feet.

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VOCABULARY

H.P. Lovecraft had a wonderful and extensive vocabulary and made good use of it in his works. The criteria for if a particular term is included here is, simply, whether or not the editors were sure what it meant. Most definitions are adapted from entries on Wiktionary.

desiderate:

proxenoi:
("The Tree")

rugose: Having wrinkles, creases or ridges; having a rough, wrinkled surface (botany).

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WEAPONS

Characters in H.P. Lovecraft's stories sometimes try to cope with the horrors facing them through the use of weapons, and this section is dedicated to listing them.

automatic pistol:

Crookes tube: Not a weapon in any conventional sense, the protagonist of "The Shunned House" unsuccessfully attempts to harm an incorporeal monster with a device of this sort.

flamethrower:

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Zann, Erich: This is the title character in the H.P. Lovecraft short story "The Music of Erich Zann," who is described as "an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man ... who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra" whose "desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room ..."

The original heading for the first magazine publication of The Music of Erich Zann" in Weird Tales in 1925, with art by Andrew Brosnatch.