Review: "Whispers" Magazine

Occasionally, while working through all of this Mythos stuff, I come across something weird that the Real World coughs up and it brings me up short; sometimes I have an encounter with something that looks very much like it sprang from Lovecraftian roots. Take this for example:

It’s a piece of jewellery from an archaeological dig, a gravesite in Central America. From a certain perspective, it simply looks like a fantastic, whimsical creature fashioned from gold. From another angle, it looks like Lrogg, an avatar of Nyarlathotep worshipped by the metal beings of the planet L’gy’hx, which we call Uranus. It’s uncanny. And then there’s this:

What exactly are these New Zealand jam makers putting in their jars?

These coincidences are highly amusing and they allow my mind to wander all over the place, inspired by the thought that the Mythos really is out there.

And then there’s this:

English; Schiff, Dr. Stuart David, Whispers: Volume II, No. 2-3, Fayetteville NC, USA, June 1975.

Octavo; illustrated wrappers; 100pp., many black-and-white line illustrations and 2pp. of colour plates. Mildly sunned along the spine and top edges; moderate shelfwear; else, fine.

Logically, this is not really a stretch. HPL and Ramsay Campbell have both mentioned this hypothetical magazine in their writings, so it’s not such a leap to think that a bunch of Mythos fans would get together and set up a real-life version. Or even a single Mythos fan: in this case Dr. Stuart Schiff, who obviously enjoys/enjoyed Lovecraftiana so much that he engineered this publication.

As snapshots back to an earlier period of Mythos fandom, these sorts of publications provide a solid insight into what was going on at the time. This volume has a fairly scathing review of L. Sprague de Camp’s questionable biography of HPL as well as one about August Derleth’s issue, The Watchers out of Time. There is a discussion of forthcoming re-issues of Robert E. Howard’s writings along with a re-published letter by Howard himself. Frank Belknap-Long contributes a short piece entitled “One Day in the Life of H.P. Lovecraft” and a tale by Fritz Leiber, “The Glove”. As a nice piece of cake-icing, there’s even a re-published letter by HPL himself.

It’s clear that – in the days prior to the Internet and blogging – the level of dedication required to produce something like this is enormous. Schiff writes most of the editorial content and it’s obvious from the references included, that his networks with the movers and shakers of Mythos publishing were strong and productive. The complexities of hardcopy publishing also come through in his editor’s preface: he mentions the technical difficulties of having his “IBM Selectric” malfunction. I assume that’s some kind of PC...     :)

This issue is a double-sized one and there are other clues that difficulties were barely overcome in time to see print. For example, the contents page lists several articles appearing on pages 103, 128 and 132; a nice trick in a volume with only 100 pages! Unless there’s a companion volume to this one, but that seems unlikely.

All of the stories here are fun and interesting and the articles – especially since they come from authors who were familiar with HPL - are replete with fascinating insights. The artwork, mostly monochrome linework runs the gamut of styles and is a good grab-bag of illustrative work, although sometimes the connexions to the rest of the material are a little tenuous. I’ve been here before though: sometimes you have a half-page of blank and you need to fill it with something. A rummage through the artists’ contributions file usually unearths something that will take up the room, regardless of relevance. Still, this volume contains 6 pages of fantastical creatures without any rationale; why weren’t those missing articles on the ‘phantom pages’ included here? Oh well...

I guess it’s easy to be blasé in these days when publishing is only a click away and even then it can be retrieved amended and re-posted.

The value of a piece like this is that it provides a solid sense that the Mythos community is out there and that you can get a piece of it. If such a publication was still around these days, I would certainly be throwing in my US$6.50 (adjusted for inflation) for the annual subscription. Having a concrete link to a wider community is a satisfying justification to participate; unlike a casual website that has limited, or unchanging, information and is not ‘owned’ regardless of being ‘Bookmarked’ or added to ‘Favourites’. But then again, I’m a Luddite bibliophile; so sue me.

Ponderings on the value of community in the Information Age aside, this is a nice little artefact of a time now gone; like anything thrown up out of the past, it is satisfying to hold and peruse, and full of illumination and insights. The fact that this piece of ephemera has survived all this time proves that its owners over the years have highly regarded the things it has to say; I’m happy to be another link in the chain.

Three tentacled horrors.