(Sorry for the last, empty post.)

                        The Shadow over Usenet
                         "Two Black Bottles"

Sources:  _The Horror in the Museum_, Arkham; (same), Carroll and Graf.

Synopsis:  The narrator journeys to the town of Daalbergen to investigate
his uncle's death.  Village gossip implicates the sexton in the death
of the uncle, the preacher at a local church.  The narrator visits
the church and finds the sexton drunk in the belfry, guarding two
black bottles.  When the narrator breaks one...

Comments:  I didn't like it.  Why the old preacher kept the sexton's
soul, and how the bottles worked is never explained.  Ambiguity works
in horror fiction usually when it conceals the event that happened,
rather than the circumstances and rationale behind it.  The story
could also have used more characterization; normally this would
hinder the development of an HPL story, but here we really need
to know more about the uncle and sexton for the horror to take its
best effect.

        Lovecraft revised this story for his correspondent Wilfred Blanch
Talman, for whom it was his first _Weird Tales_ sale.  It's uncertain
just how much HPL changed, but Talman especially objected to his changes
in dialogue, and extracted "revenge" on him by quibbling over small
details in an essay HPL later sent for publication in Talman's magazine
_De Halve Moon_ (sp?) a decade later.  This proves Talman was an
interesting character, if nothing else.

        No Mythos, nothing else to say.  Good night.

Daniel

                          The Shadow over Usenet
                            "Two Black Bottles"

While I will agree with Daniel Harms that this isn't an especially good
tale, I didn't find it to be all that bad.  I find that I have a certain
fondness for Lovecraft's more traditional horror tales.  The lack of a
rationale for "how the bottles worked" didn't bother me, and I wasn't
concerned with this aspect of "The Terrible Old Man" either.  What did
irritate me about the bottles was that the sexton apparently went about
his life despite his absence of a soul.  Very strange.

Daniel also mentioned Talman's aggravation over Lovecraft's dialog
changes, and here's a comment from Talman from his _The Normal Lovecraft_,
(quoted from S.T. Joshi's biography, _H. P. Lovecraft: A Life_):

   He did some minor gratuitous editing, particularly of dialog . . .
   After re-reading it in print, I wish Lovecraft hadn't changed the
   dialog, for his use of dialect was stilted.

S.T. goes on to comment that Talman was probably down-playing Lovecraft's
involvement in revising this tale, since he believes that there are plenty
of indications of Lovecraft's hand in it.

The story takes place in "Daalbergen, that dismal little village in the
Ramapo Mountains".  I cannot find the town of Daalbergen on any map, but
the Ramapo Mountains can be found cutting across the border between New
York and New Jersey, appropriately near the Ramapo River.  The
northeasternmost county in New Jersey, which these mountains are in, is
Bergen county, and seems as likely a place as any for the location of
Daalbergen.  Note also that adjoining Bergen county is the city of
Paterson (in Passaic County), where Lovecraft's longtime friend James F.
Morton was the curator of the Paterson Museum.

According to S.T. Joshi's "Chronology of the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft"
which appears in the back of _Dagon and Other Macabre Tales_, "Two Black
Bottles" was written in July-October 1926.  "Pickman's Model" is listed
after this story, but is only listed as having been written in 1926.  In
S.T.'s recent biography of Lovecraft, he discusses the latter story first.
It seems that "Pickman's Model" was written in September, and was thus
completed prior to "Two Black Bottles", despite the fact that the latter
was begun earlier.  Whatever.

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