The Inevitable Conflict by P. H. Lovering, published in Amazing Stories, December 1930 and January 1931, has recently been attributed to H. P. Lovecraft, and is being republished in Italy under the title L'orrore che Viene dall'Est (The Horror That Comes From The East).
The back cover of the book reads:
Un romanzo inedito e nuovo di H. P. Lovecraft il creatore del Miti di Cthluhu, lo scrittore che ha rinnovato completamente la narrative fantast ca e orrorifica moderna.
Una storia ambientata nei prossimo futuro una visione agghiacciante del destino dell uomo bianco stretto fra due minacce: le sue stesse donne, trasformatesi in sanguinane dominatrici, e il terrore che viene dall'est, la spaventosa orda guerrieri dell'imperatore mongolo, che ha gia conquistato il resto del mondo fra stragi orrende.
L'ultima speranza e affidata a un uomo solo, che per sfidare poteri dele tenebre nei conflitto inevitabile tra le forze del male e quelle del bene dovra fare appello alle tradizioni antiche e dimenticate, alle risorse segrete della razza che un tempo dominava il pianeta.
An unknown and new novel of H. P. Lovecraft, the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, and the writer who has completely renewed fantasy and modern horror.
A tale set in the near future, a chilling vision of the destiny of man, white man pinched between two threats: its women, transformed into bloodthirsty [dominatrici], and the terror that comes from the east, the frightful horde of warriors of the Mongol Emperor, who have conquered the rest of the world between horrendous massacres.
The last hope is entrusted to a single man, who, in order to defy powers of darkness in the inevitable conflict between the forces of evil and those which are good, must appeal to ancient and forgotten traditions, to the secret resources of the race that once dominated the planet.
The evidence for this claim seems to revolve around the caption for the illustration for part two of the story: "By Paul H. Lovering, the author of When The Earth Grew Cold and The Color Out of Space, etc." Despite the spelling, this can refer to no other story than H. P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. Is, then, P. H. Lovering and pseudonym for H. P. Lovecraft?
I have acquired a copy of the story, and after reading it, am quite confident that H. P. Lovecraft is not the author.
Beyond a subjective opinion, how can I prove this?
First of all, we have the word of Lovecraft himself. In a letter to E. Hoffmann Price, dated 19 September 1933, Lovecraft wrote:
But Belknap slipped up on one thing - for he was absolutely and unqualifiedly wrong in believing that I have published non-weird fiction under a pseudonym. I not only have never done so, but have certainly never said anything from which such a mistaken inference could legitimately be made. That's the kid's one trouble - his imagination flies off on a tangent, and now and then goes beyond plain facts.
This was written several years after The Inevitable Conflict was published. Of course, it is always possible that Lovecraft was attempting to distance himself from what he considered a lousy story. Other evidence is required.
Examination of The Inevitable Conflict reveals several characteristics that are quite unlike Lovecraft's style.
Lovecraft avoided major female characters in his fiction, with one exception: Asenath Waite in The Thing on the Doorstep. Asenath hardly qualifies as a female character, for she actually turned out to be Ephriam Waite, having used occult means to switch bodies with his granddaughter. Even then, she/he spent most of the story in possession of the body of her husband, Edward Derby.
Keziah Mason in Dreams in the Witch House might be thought of as a major female character, yet she is simply a cardboard protagonist, female simply to be a witch. There is no interaction with her, and she is not at the focus of the story. The same applies to Lavinia Whateley in The Dunwich Horror
Only in Lovecraft's revisions did he use female characters in a significant role, and only then when the original author had provided them. Ashes with C. M. Eddy, and Medusa's Coil with Zealia Bishop are two examples. Yet Victoria Arston, the Matriarch of the United Companies, and the heroine Ardis Moore play pivotal roles in The Inevitable Conflict.
On those occasions when Lovecraft did include female characters, he avoided any kind of romance in his tales (revisions excepted; even then, the romantic element appears to originate with the client). Even in The Thing on the Doorstep, where the sexual overtones of Asenath swapping bodies with her husband are so obvious, Lovecraft somehow manages to avoid addressing them. Yet the author of The Inevitable Conflict makes much of the relationship of Stephen Mowbray and Ardis Moore.
In all of Lovecraft's fiction, he uses the word "sex" only once, and even then only to describe asexuality of the Great Race in The Shadow out of Time. "Sex" occurs seven times in The Inevitable Conflict.
Likewise for the word "love". Lovecraft uses it only a handful of times, and never to describe the feelings of one person for another; for example, "love of the bizarre," "love of shadows and marvels," "love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples," and so on. There is only one possible exception, and that is the brotherly love of Kalos and Musides, in The Tree. In The Inevitable Conflict, the word appears seven times, and each time it refers to the romantic love of a man and woman.
The author of The Inevitable Conflict treats the Mongols much more fairly than Lovecraft would have.
In He, written in 1925, Lovecraft wrote:
...swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns...
Also in 1925, in The Horror at Red Hook, a place which Lovecraft described as "a maze of hybrid squalor", full of "unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island", Lovecraft wrote:
The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping oily waves at its grimy piers... From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky...
It is inconceivable that a man full of this much vitriol toward foreigners would, only five years later, describe the invading Mongol Emperor as a man of honor, or his soldiers as brave fighting men; he would much more likely have instead turned to the same stereotypes he employed in He and The Horror at Red Hook.
Lovecraft very rarely used dialogue in his fiction, yet The Inevitable Conflict is almost entirely dialogue.
It may be pointed out that the proportion of dialogue in two of Lovecraft's revisions ran much higher than his norm. Medusa's Coil, with Zealia Bishop, contained 144 paragraphs of dialogue (out of 230, 63%). Ashes with C. M. Eddy Jr., is his other dialogue-heavy revision, containing 72 paragraphs of dialogue out of 120 (60%). Both are nearly equal in proportion of dialogue to The Inevitable Conflict (63%). But appearances are deceiving.
It must be noted that both of these tales employ a great deal of monologue, rather than true dialogue; in Medusa's Coil, the narrator speaks but four times at the beginning, and a local speaks three times at the end - the entire remaining 137 paragraphs of speech are a monologue by Antoine de Russy, who relates the body of the tale to the main character. In Ashes, 43 paragraphs, more than half of the 72 paragraphs of speech, are a monologue; there is an additional shorter 6 paragraph monologue by another character at the end.
Even in his own fiction, Lovecraft resorted to monologue, rather than dialogue. Of the 60 paragraphs of speech in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, 17 paragraphs are a monologue by the ticket agent in Newburyport, and 43 are a monologue by Zadok Allen in Innsmouth; the narrator of the tale never says a word. This kind of monologue is essentially Lovecraft's normal style, put in the mouth of one of the characters.
The Inevitable Conflict contains almost one thousand paragraphs (out of 1571, 63%) of true dialogue - with characters speaking alternately and their interaction actively advancing the plot, instead of merely describing past events - making it entirely unlike anything ever Lovecraft wrote.
Lovecraft's knowledge of science was profound for a layman, having dabbled in chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, and a dozen other sciences as a youth, and kept up with the latest advances of science, all through is life. For example, he incorporated the planet Pluto into his The Whisperer in Darkness, as Yuggoth, only months after it was discovered. (Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on 18 February 1930; Lovecraft wrote The Whisperer in Darkness between 24 February and 26 September 1930.)
The science of The Inevitable Conflict is, at best, hokey, full of such Flash Gordonesque devices as "Radionic power" from "radionic impulses" powering "radiomotors", "Telemnon" mind reading equipment, "Electrono" thought transmission gear, "Death Rays", "Sleep Rays", and so on.
Compare this to the technology referred to in Lovecraft's revision Within the Walls of Eryx, with Kenneth Sterling. This tale mentions only two technologies not currently extant in the 1930's; the mysterious Venusian crystals used to "warm" cities and the devices used to detect them, and a weapon called a "D-radiation cylinder", and no attempt is made to explain the principles behind either technology. Where the author of The Inevitable Conflict spends over a thousand words describing the functioning of his technologies, Lovecraft merely mentions that his technologies exist, and that is that. He touches only on the crystal-detectors, and only long enough to dismiss them with a curt "It is curious how that principle of affinity works - without any of the fakery of the old 'divining rods' back home."
"Your words are treasonable."
The words to which the Matriarch referred were spoken by "General K'ung Fu, Mongolia's famous soldier-statesman", who had spoken of "the military impotence of America under the government of the United Companies."
The word "treasonable" means "relating to, constituting, or involving violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign." Since the General wasn't an American, but rather the ambassador of a hostile power, how could he be possibly be accused of treason against America?
H. P. Lovecraft, one of the most eloquent authors to ever take pen to paper, would never have made such an asinine mistake.
I compared the The Inevitable Conflict with the Lovecraft corpus of fiction, and found some significant differences.
| Title | Lovecraft Fiction Average | Standard Deviation | The Inevitable Conflict by Paul H. Lovering | Standard deviations from the mean |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average Sentence Length | 26.69 | 4.36 | 12.42 | 3.27 |
| Fog Index | 14.46 | 1.75 | 9.85 | 2.63 |
| Flesch Index | 60.53 | 6.50 | 68.37 | 1.21 |
| Commas | 1.50 | 0.30 | 0.84 | 2.25 |
| Dashes | 0.10 | 0.12 | 0.03 | 0.63 |
| Ellipses | 0.01 | 0.03 | 0.00 | 0.48 |
| Semicolons | 0.19 | 0.09 | 0.00 | 2.06 |
| "and" | 1.09 | 0.38 | 0.25 | 2.20 |
| Hyphenations | 0.21 | 0.10 | 0.06 | 1.55 |
The last column is the important one - the number of standard deviations from the mean is measure of deviation independent of scale.
The average sentence length in The Inevitable Conflict is not merely approximately half of the Lovecraft average, but more than three standard deviations shorter Lovecraft's usual; over 99% of the sentences Lovecraft wrote are longer than the average sentence found in The Inevitable Conflict.
The Gunning Fog Readability Index indicates "the minimum grade level at which a piece of writing is easily read". The Inevitable Conflict comes in at less than grade 10, while Lovecraft comes in at an imposing grade 14. This is 2.63 standard deviations below the typical Lovecraft piece.
The Rudolf Flesch Readability Index is another measure of readability - a higher number is an easier read. A typical comic book rates around 92, the IRS Tax Code at negative 6. Lovecraft rates at 60, on par with the New York Daily News, while The Inevitable Conflict rates at 68, on par with Seventeen magazine.
Commas, dashes, ellipses, semicolons, and the word "and" (here measured on a per sentence basis) are all used to tie ideas together, and are therefore a measure of the complexity of writing; the more ideas are tied together in a single sentence, the more complex the sentence. In terms of dashes and ellipses there is little difference between The Inevitable Conflict and Lovecraft's usual writing, but there is a very large difference - on the order of 2 standard deviations - in terms of commas, semicolons, and the word "and".
Could these differences simply be the result of the use of dialogue? Or an attempt on Lovecraft's part to "dumb-down" his prose for the readership of a magazine he considered inferior to Weird Tales? While these data are interesting, and certainly lend credibility to the claim that The Inevitable Conflict wasn't written by Lovecraft, they are not indisputable.
Under development...
No one measure is conclusive. However, when taken together, there is enough evidence to support the conclusion that The Inevitable Conflict was not written by H. P. Lovecraft.