Edward Lucas White (May 11, 1866 – March 30, 1934) was a historical novelist who turned horror short story writer. He is best remembered for his two collections of terror tales, The Song of the Sirens (1919) and Lukundoo and Other Stories (1927). The weird stories he penned were based on his dreams, so it’s not surprising the nightmarish quality tales like “Lukundoo”, “The House of the Nightmare” and “The Snout” have.
Lovecaft, writing originally before the author’s suicide, in 1927 said of him: “Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes arise from actual dreams. The Song of The Siren has a very persuasive strangeness, while such things as Lukundoo and The Snout arouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very peculiar quality to his tales — an oblique sort of glamour which has its own distinctive type of convincingness.”
One of the tales that Lovecraft read most likely in Lukundoo and Other Stories (though he does not mention it in his essay despite its obvious influence on his own work) is “Amina”. First published in the magazine The Bellman, June 1, 1907, “Amina” tells of a foolish skeptic who comes face-to-face with actual ghouls. Read it here.
The dog-oriented nature of White’s ghouls can be seen in Lovecraft’s own canine-esque monsters. Lucas reveals the dog-like body of the ghoul thus:
“He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced; and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative…Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but more like the underside of an old fox-terrier with puppies, or of a white sow, with her second litter; from collarbone to groin ten lolloping udders, two rows, mauled, stringy, and flaccid.”
Lovecraft’s most famous use of the dog-like ghoul can be found in “Pickman’s Model”(October 1927):
“There was one thing called ‘The Lesson’–Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen–can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless doglike things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose-you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes-how they grow up-and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non- human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly nonhuman and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!”
Lovecraft and Lucas had an influence on HPL’s friends as well, such as Robert E. Howard in “The Dwellers Under the Tomb”(posthumously published in 1976).
“But before it closed, a ghastly picture leaped out at us, half lighted by the straggling moon-beams: the sprawling, mutilated corpse, and above it a grey shambling monstrosity-a flaming-eyed dog-headed horror such as madmen see in black nightmares. Then the slamming door blotted out the sight, and as we fled across the slope in the shifting moonlight, I heard Conrad babbling, “Spawn of the black pits of madness and eternal night! Crawling obscenities seething in the slime of the earth’s unguessed deeps-the ultimate horror of retrogression-the nadir of human degeneration-good God, their ancestors were men! The pits below the fifteenth tier, into what hells of blasphemous black horror do they sink, and by what demoniac hordes are they peopled? God protect the sons of men from the Dwellers-the Dwellers under the tombs!”
What truly chains these writers’ work together is not the dog-like attributes (for these could have been inspired by werewolf legends, and we see this in Robert E. Howard’s “Wolfshead” (April 1926), but the idea that these creatures were once human-like or, in fact, human. For White it is an ancient other-race that dwells in a world of deceit. For Lovecraft and Howard the decay has been voluntarily chosen and the person has fallen so low that they have mutated into a foul beast. Lovecraft has other kinds of ghouls but they all possess this same state of degeneration.
When Rod Serling chose “Pickman’s Model” (December 1, 1971) for Night Gallery we got our chance to see a Lovecraftian dog-headed ghoul in action. (A year earlier, Marvel Comics did an adaptation in Tower of Shadows #9 (January 1971) but Tom Palmer drew the ghoul in the photograph like a Ninja Turtle with dreadlocks.) The painting and the make-up were well done even if Bradford Dillman wasn’t. For more on Lovecraftian ghouls of every kind see here.
