I read, and liked,
Jurgen. It had some laugh-out-loud moments, especially when Jurgen meets his dead father's ghost.
Waugh also nixed some pictures I intended to go along with my essay, again due to lack of space.
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The first pic (above), was intended to illustrate HPL's indebtedness to ERB's
Tarzan stories, particularly the "Dum Dum" ceremony of the giant apes. HPL would seem to refer to this ceremony in "The Horror at Red Hook", when he writes that "Apes danced in Asia" to these horrors,; HPL simply transferring ERB's Dum Dum from Africa to Asia. The Dum Dum ceremony also involves the riualistic flaying and then
eating of the dead carcass of an enemy, to the sound of jungle drums beneath the moon: ideas which HPL refers to via both the "corpse-eating cult of Leng" (again transferring the Dum Dum to Asia), as well as the
eerie tom tom drums beneath the Afric moon (paraphrase from memory), referred to in "Herbert West: Reanimator".
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The second pic (above), was indtended to illustrate HPL's indebtedness to the polar Lost race stories of his youth, many of which -like Stilson's _Polaris -of the Snows_, were set in Antarctica.
I also had a third pic, which I'll upload later, of a characteristic Burroughsian pose, of an ape-man with his foot on the prey he has just killed: a pose later imitated by HPL's Denis de Russy in "Medusa's Coil", who puts his foot on the back of his prey, right after he kills his
wife: who is likened to a (Burroughsian) jungle-cat.
Am now having trouble with the word "gorgon" in my proofreading for my book. I had the word in both lowercase and uppercase: so I went back to consult HPL's original text ("Medusa's Coil" in _The Horror in the Museum_) to see how he had it, and it turns out that HPL has it both uppercase and lowercase in the Arkham House text, as well. Confusion....