C. M. Eddy, Jr. - Career - Friendship With H.P. Lovecraft

Friendship With H.P. Lovecraft

The Eddys' first contact with H.P. Lovecraft was as early as 1918; they first met face to face in August 1923. Lovecraft frequently visited the Eddys' home on Second Street in East Providence, and later called on them at their home in the Fox Point section of Providence. He was a member of Lovecraft's inner circle of friends and authors, and he and Lovecraft edited each other's works. Both authors were also investigators for Harry Houdini, and served the magician as ghostwriters. The two collaborated on The Cancer of Superstition, ghostwritten for Houdini, but the latter's death in October 1926 curtailed the project. (Notes and surviving fragments were published in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces).

Eddy and Lovecraft took scenic walks, including one to the Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island; August Derleth later incorporated notes taken by Lovecraft on this occasion into The Lurker at the Threshold (1945).

In August 1923, Eddy and Lovecraft also sought the Dark Swamp,a place of which Lovecraft had heard rumours and which was said to lie "off the Putnam Pike, about halfway between Chepachet, Rhode Island and Putnam, Connecticut." The Dark Swamp was also the basis for Eddy's unfinished short story "Black Noon" (1967) (posthumously published in Exit into Eternity: Tales of the Bizarre and Supernatural, see below). The legend surrounding the place (which they never found) seems to have influenced the opening of Lovecraft's story The Colour Out of Space (1927).

There is a published letter by Eddy on his relationship with Lovecraft - see The Providence Journal 138, No. 283 (26 Nov 1966), 21 (as "Knew Lovecraft").