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These are my conjectures about the relationship between some of Wellman's writing and the Lovecraft Mythos. Based on letters supplied to me by E.P. Berglund, it seems that Wellman didn't really feel that greatly influenced by Lovecraft per se, but did make the casual mention of HPL and some of his creations as an homage, more than as true inspiration. As it is, I'll lay out my thoughts and let Wellman's letters to Mr. Berglund be his own rebuttle. -Daniel SETTING THE MOOD:
The Lovecraft universe has come to be populated with a lot of place names and monster names, libraries filled all of the rarest tomes, and dynamite-packing scientists that are well versed in the lore of Cthulhu, but rarely has the Mythos pastiche author reached the atmosphere of isolation, horror and dread that Lovecraft wrote about so often. These days it's usually a more pulpy entertainment than an experience of horror, or a displacement into the story itself through the written word. This doesn't make a story bad, in fact they can be quite entertaining, but it's not aiming its goal at transporting the reader to another world. Through his knowledgeable use of local character archetypes, true history, vernacular and a love of the wooded mountains around him, Wellman was able to paint a realistic picture to take the reader into, then chill them with the primal and sometimes frightening folklore of the land. Maybe a different route than Lovecraft would take, but leading to the same destination, where a person can realize the cosmic scheme doesn't really revolve around humankind. It's a bigger scarier universe out there. For example in the short story "Goodman's Place", a simple walk through the woods on a beautiful summer afternoon can lead into a story of cosmic fear and horror of the "Ancient Unknown" in shunned, far away places.
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THE REAL MACOY:
Along
with Mythos based tomes and character lore, Wellman also chose to
pull monsters, books, and personas from European and Native American
folktales, some of them being references to existing texts, such as
John George Hohman's
Long Lost
Friend
,
a book of white magic and folk remedies
brought to America in the 1800's from Germany. Wellman uses
Long Lost Friend many times throughout his
stories, with all of the major protagonists always having a helpful
copy around somewhere to help ward off evil.
Another often mentioned
book is the more rare but famous
Albertus Magnus
, or as Wellman's
characters would call it, the
"Big
Albert".
This is a tome that Lovecraft also mentions in the
short story "The Terrible Old Man" and the Novelette
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
 PREHUMAN SURVIVALS: "He wished that Lovecraft were alive to see and
hear -- Lovecraft knew so much about the legend of Other-People,
from before human times, and how their behaviors and speech had
trickled a little into the ken of the civilization known to the
wakeday world." - "Shonokin Town" Manly
Wade Wellman
Actually I just finished
re-reading AFTER
DARK which is a Silver John
novel all about the Shonokins. They are
an ancient race(possibly more in the Howardian ideal), an aboriginal
"people of the land" who went into hiding with the advent of man.
But they are plotting their return. The Shonokins reason their
takeover of the world because the humans aren't fit to run the Earth
and it's time for the true caretakers to return to power. The
specifics here aren't necessarily something you would see happen in
Lovecraft, but the greater idea of an ancient race returning to
power with humankind falling to the wayside is. If I was reaching,
I'd say that the Shonokins could possibly be a wayward branch of
REH's Lost Race of Picts or even the Inhabitants of Leng. They are that ancient
and that eldritch. If I was to write them into a Mythos story, I'd
say this was a reasonable idea.
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MYTHOS BY NAME:
Also we know that Wellman intended some of his stories to be specifically in the Mythos vein with efforts such as "The Terrible Partchment" which is specifically about the Necromonicon and mentions Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch. Wellman had a story in STARTLING STORIES, Summer 1944, called "Strangers on the Heights" which dealt with an ancient race dwelling high in the Andes Mts. Though no Mythos names were dropped, this was supposedly written as a Mythos story, and was expanded into the 1950 novel THE BEASTS FROM BEYOND. Similar notions are revisited in the 1977 novel THE BEYONDERS where an trans-dimensional monster from the hills terrorizes a small Appalachian village, leaving a trail of burnt grass in its wake. Several of the John Thunstone short stories wave the
Mythos flag, especially when dealing with Rowley Thorne, Thunstones arch-enemy, who
is usually dabbling in the sorts of arcane mischief you might expect
an evil sorcerer to be in during a Mythos related adventure. In "The Letters of Cold Fire" Thorne, failing
to get a copy of the NECRONOMICON, goes
instead for the "schoolbook" of a student of the Deep School, an
extra-dimensional school of sorcery.
In the 1984 Silver John
novel Voice of the
Mountain we hear mention of Miskatonic University and some familiar
Mythos authors as well. First Alka, a sorcerer's assistant, tells
us "I was a librarian, . . . On the staff of
the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham, Massachusetts"
and then "At my library post, I met many
earnest researchers into the occult. Writers, for instance -- Robert
Bloch called on me, and Fritz Leiber, and Frank Belnap
Long."
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