THE DEEP ONES: "Medusa's Coil" by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop

"Medusa's Coil" by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop

Discussion begins May 7, 2025.

First published in the January 1939 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?363051

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions
The Loved Dead and Other Revisions
Medusa's Coil and Others: The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H. P. Lovecraft

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mc.aspx
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Medusa%27s_Coil

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi4hGvdCKJw

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealia_Bishop
https://tinyurl.com/2k57pb99
http://famous-and-forgotten-fiction.com/writings/bishop-lovecraft-the-curse-of-y...
https://tinyurl.com/3wzaxe45

*deleted* by gwendetenebre

Re-read it today. It has to be about twenty years since last I read it.

>3 AndreasJ: It's been more than twenty years since I first read it too.

It was more effective than I remembered and had more Mythos references than I remembered too.

However, I think Lovecraft and Bishop could have done without the timeslip/ghost story twist at the end.

Well, the ending. It's racist of course, but it's also hopelessly underwhelming; even a far more virulent racist that what de Russy seems to be would surely agree that a small percentage of African ancestry is a minor thing next to being a literal gorgon.

I found myself wondering if the final revelation was part of the original plot-germ from Bishop which Lovecraft left in when he turned Marceline into something far more alien than a human of mixed ancestry.

Like Randy, I dunno if the timeslip / ghost story element added much. The story features at least three things that might have served as a final revelation - Marceline's postmortem activity, the timeslip, and Marceline's race - which is more than enough.

Sophonisba's invokation of "Marse Clooloo", BTW, is one of the main pieces of evidence that HPL really did intend "Cthulhu" to be pronounced something like the "Khlûl′-hloo" he claimed in a letter. One just wonders why he didn't then spell it "Clhulhu" or similar.

I first read this story getting on for twenty years ago. In the mid-00's Forbidden Planet in London had a stock of Arkham House titles (I wish I'd bought more...).

My feeling about the ending was the same as @AndreasJ's. Setting aside the racism, it sabotaged the foregoing drama and felt almost like an intentionally bad ending in a spoof Weird tale. Since that reading, I've learned about the kind of exploded Race theories that Lovecraft believed and would have (in the context of those racist and wrong ideas) made more sense of the ending.

Before reaching that ending, which does frankly ruin the whole story for me, there were some things I liked. There's the fin de siécle air of Denis' story (as recounted by his father), which suggested the work of Robert W Chambers as well as earlier stories HPL such as "The Hound". I don't know if I liked the ghost story twist. It's not something I can recall from other HPL stories, but it's a well-used idea (of the top of my head, I thought of Orson Welles' short film Return to Glennascoul and Simon Raven's short story (anthologised in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories), "The Bottle of 1912".

I have flagged >7 stromtkames: for suspiciously LLM-like diction and a .com domain apropos of nothing. The user has no books cataloged and no profile details.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

Good catch! Flagged and hopefully soon to be exorcised.