Notes
Visions From Yaddith, a collection of Cthulhu Mythos poetry by Lin Carter.

Volume 5 in the Charnel House Chapbooks series.

Limited edition of 200 numbered copies.

Contains:

1. Dreams in the Dark
2. The Peril from Below
3. The Mage Nzoorka
4. The Fumblers at the Gate
5. The Gathering-Place
6. The Searchers from Afar
7. The Return to Yaddith
8. The Word from Abbith
9. The City Falls
10. To Worlds Afar
11. The Prophecy

Introduction by Robert M. Price
Cthulhu Mythos fiction began to make use of the genre of "inspired poetry" early on, beginning with Edward Pickman Derby's Azathoth and Other Horrors in Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep and Justin Geoffrey's People of the Monolith in Howard's The Black Stone. The idea, of course, is that the especially sensitive psyche of the artist may be receptive to revelations from supramundane sources (again, like Arthur Wilcox in The Call of Cthulhu). It turns out to be more than the muse that inspires the fevered verses.

Lin Carter used this device in his sonnet-cycle Dreams from R'lyeh (Arkham House, 1974) and liked it so much that he introduced it again in his story Dreams in the House of Weir. In this tale the doomed scholarly protagonist moves into an old house and discovers a "slim folio" of verse, a thread-bound sheaf of manuscript pages titled Visions from Yaddith by one Ariel Prescott. The poetry, we are told, "had enjoyed a mild vogue among the [Cambridge] undergraduates – those of them given to sampling hashish and studying occultism and Theosophy at any rate . . ." The authoress had eventually died screaming in a madhouse (Brian Lumley's Oakdeene). It develops that Ms. Prescott had received her disturbing visions while resident in the very house where the narrator is staying. The protagonist himself begins to experience them, and he, too, goes insane.

Prescott's Visions from Yaddith had been issued in 1927 by London's Charnel House Publishers, but her family had bought up and destroyed all the known copies. At least one survived to be discovered by Winfield Phillips in The Winfield Heritance. Young Phillips' late uncle had been a devotee of the macabre and the decadent and so had secured a copy, perhaps the only surviving printed copy of the "slender pamphlet".

Carter quoted a few lines of the Visions in Dreams in the House of Weir; he had actually composed the whole thing and planned to issue it in the Charnel House Chapbook series. Thus this booklet. Like the protagonist in Dreams in the House of Weir, we stumbled across the original author's handwritten copy among his papers, and we herewith release the eleven poems in their entirety.