Eternal Lies - Azathoth and Other Horrors
Published in 1909, this collection of Edward Pickman Derby’s nightmare-lyrics was printed by the Miskatonic University Press when he was a youth of only 18 years. The forward describes Mr. Derby as “the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known. At seven he was writing verse of a somber, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. In the scant few years which have passed since those early gropings, he has flourished into a sensational talent.”Included in this collection are the poems “Azathoth” (which occupies fully half the book), “Nemesis Rising”, “Charnel House”, “Dead But Not Gone”, and “Medusa’s Kiss”, among others. These works draw heavily upon the local legendry of Arkham, Massachusetts, and combine startling insights with verse of surprising power.
This particular copy has been annotated with extensive marginalia in a cramped hand. These notes draw copious comparisons between Derby’s work and Justin Geoffrey’s The People of the Monolith, alleging that there was a close correspondence between Derby and that notorious Baudelairean poet. The scholarship seems half-crazed, but through a composite of the two poets’ imagery it creates a strong correlation between the omni-present “gaze of the blind idiot” from Derby’s “Azathoth”, the “skipping ebon stones” that “dance across the skim-skein haze” of reality, and the “mastodonic horror” of Geoffrey. One facet of the “compound gaze” is fixed upon the “land beyond the stone” and some solace could be taken from that “plenipotent distance” if a “ladder of faith” had not been built between that land and this.
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