Some History

 

William Scott Home:

An American Horror Fantasy Writer

Scott Home in Eaglecrest Ski Area, Juneau, AK, 1984

Photo by Doug Sanvik

I. As a Beginning

William Scott Home, biologist, poet, and writer of horror fantasy, was born 2 January 1940 in Windsor, Missouri.  Here, in America’s heartland, he grew up in a mainstream Protestant family of musicians and Bible scholars, and here, too, from an early age, he began reading and writing fantasy and science fiction. (He wasn’t alone as a reader and writer in these years. One high school buddy was the late novelist Walter Browder, with whom he stayed in intermittent touch throughout most of their lives.)

Early Writing and Influences

From the fourth grade on, Home produced a book of short stories every year.  In his mid-teens, spurred by A. Derleth’s Dark of the Moon and the poems of Clark Ashton Smith, he produced two books of horror fantasy poems.  Coming by H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature in junior high school, he adopted it as his reading guide.  He was already under the influence of HPL and A. Merritt, and—thanks to the availability of cheap paperback books through the mail—was by the end of high school able to amass a collection of nearly all the works of Machen, Blackwood, Dunsany, M. R. James, Harvey, and many others, while also working his way through the American masters Poe, Bierce, Chambers, as well as Gothic novels and those of Sax Rohmer (of Dr. Fu Manchu fame).

His first nationwide publication (in the men’s magazine, Sir!), at age 17, was a fantasy tale—an imagined visit to a Snake Handler’s ceremony, something he had never seen.  His biggest charge, at age 18, was to hear from a publisher: “You may be the successor to H. P. Lovecraft”—his very aspiration.

Home sent stories and poems regularly to the last three years of Weird Tales, but none were accepted.  By the time he was out of high school, his mainstream poems began appearing in the “little magazines”. These were his most frequent publication until W. Paul Ganley of Weirdbook accepted his story The Fruits of Yebo’s Sins in 1971. And from there, his writing career took off. In less than 15 years, Home moved from a fantasy “true story” in Sir! to being a regularly published writer, and 15 years beyond that found him being mentioned twice in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986) and having one of his articles selected for publication in the Gale Research series Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1987).

While Home’s copy of Sir! has been lost through the years 

and numerous moves, this cover, gathered online (of the 

1957 Spring “Annual” issue) gives some idea of the magazine’s focus.

The Greater World

Poetry and fiction writing were not Home’s only pursuits. He earned a BA in zoology from the University of Minnesota in 1964, and an MS in zoology from the University of Alaska in 1982.  The research director remarked of Home’s 332-page Master’s thesis on the Ecology of river otters (Lutra Canadensis) in marine coastal environments in Alaska: “Should this not have been a Ph.D. dissertation?” Apparently, Home’s trademark attention to detail and tendency to describe rather than infer is not limited to his fiction.

Home taught biology, chemistry, and geography in Belize and the Caribbean before concluding that teaching absorbed all his energies and creativity.  Thereafter, he worked mostly in government research jobs in Alaska (he had first worked there in 1964) since that employment took him into in remote areas where he could remain for long periods nearly isolated from others, absorbed in his writing and research.  But the teaching experience brought him some lifelong friends, broadening and strengthening his connections to the wider world.  A fellow teacher from these early years was the eminent economist Victor Bulmer-Thomas, and one of Home’s students, Frank Reneau, went on to become a well-known composer.  One class in Belize, in fact, remained in touch with their former teacher for over 30 years, including him in their 25^th and 30^th reunions.  The experience and locales also likely informed his darker fiction.

Through the seventies and eighties Home produced an impressive number of biological and anthropological writings, some book-length, which circulated only inside the various agencies or among kindred biologists.  Occasional journal papers and magazine articles got a wider audience.  His 50-page study, The Chilkoot and Chilkat: A Capsule History, encompassed forty years of research into the Tlinkit history of the Upper Lynn Canal and Glacier Bay in his adopted home state of Alaska.  It was much in demand by interested guides and residents, but is currently available only as a computer file. Finding writing by hand while out in the field to be impossibly slow, Home backpacked his Smith-Corona portable typewriter over many miles of mountain trail, sledded it across the Arctic sea ice, and ran it up the Atlin River by zodiac (a trip it nearly didn’t survive).

II.  In the Midst

All About the Fiction

Weirdbook, Issue 16

Once Paul Ganley began featuring Home in Weirdbook, a number of other magazines began printing his stories; however, he was not widely popular with genre editors and produced far more stories and poems than were ever printed.  Over the years he moved around frequently, from Central and South America to Alaska, and this peripatetic lifestyle reduced his contacts to intermittent so that he often he got no word of his publications for years—or ever.  (One editor, receiving a letter from Home postmarked Belize, and three weeks later one from Alaska, asked, “Are you for real?”)

The 1970s and ‘80s saw a large number of Home’s publications in print, and not always with his knowledge.  In the early 1980s a letter from Australia informed him that his paper, “The Lovecraft ‘Books’: Some Addenda and Corrigenda” (originally published in 1964 in August Derleth’s Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces) had been translated into French and published in the prestigious Cahiers L’Herne in 1969.  While Home had met Derleth, briefly, in New Mexico in 1969, it was over 10 years before he learned of the additional (French) publication, and it would be another ten before he could find a copy.  When later that year Home returned to St. Michael’s College in Belize (where he had taught three years before), he found, in a stack, a copy of the little magazine The Angels containing one of his poems.  In the mid-2000s, his sister found a computer reference to his Weirdbook story “Deadlier at Hearth than Hunt” having been translated into Italian and published in 1995, but no one had ever told him. Many pieces and stories were accepted, and sometimes paid for, and he never heard anything further.

In 1972 his story “Dull Scavengers Wax Crafty” (original title: “Skulls-in-Waiting”) and his essay “The Horror Theme after H. P. Lovecraft” were published in Meade and Penny Frierson’s epochal HPL, with pieces by A. A. Attanasio and fantasy art legend Steve Fabian, both of whom Home considered masters of their art.  Years later, Thomas Ligotti included “the lucid and insightful” Lovecraft essay in Volume 22 of the Gale Research compilation, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1987).

These were heady times for the writer.  Frank Belknap Long referred to Home as “a writer of near genius level”, Meade Frierson called him “the world’s greatest living writer of horror fantasy”, and Ben P. Indick (who printed his study “The Zohar and the Necronomicon” in inBendick, along with other research correspondence) proclaimed him “the reincarnation of M. P. Shiel”.  When Ganley told Home that his story “The Dead Eyes” (Weirdbook 8, 1974) was “… difficult, that had hurt it; it only got second prize in the reader’s votes” (first prize had gone to Robert E. Howard), Home allowed that such a wound was “bearable.”

Cover of Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons. 

Artwork by Fabian.

Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons.  In 1976 Ganley published a collection of Home’s short stories, Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons, that was richly illustrated by the legendary Fabian.  One story, “A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins”, was chosen for The Year’s Best Horror Stories VI, published in 1978.  The editor noted that, despite the limited circulation of Weirdbook (around 3,000), Home exercised a much wider influence on the horror fantasy field.  This story was, at heart, a transcription of a dream Home had had at age thirteen, and had written down shortly after.  

In 2011, Thomas Ligotti named Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons “the weirdest piece of fiction I ever read”, and likened Home’s work to that of Clark Ashton Smith.  In 2012, “bill r”, in a detailed review on his site (“The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 21: Is the Trickling Oil of Rot Tastier than Blood?”) said Home was “a singular artist … quite readable … and exciting even” with “a rich enveloping style”.  He went on to refer to Home’s “special brand of madness” and to state his expectation that one of the collection’s stories (that he had not yet read) is “insane. Brilliantly insane.”  It is notable that Home’s model, M. P. Shiel, was also called “gloriously mad” (and, like Home, is little known today).  Another reviewer called the collection “often boring, often electrifying … worth the money for keeping value.”

Many of the stories in Hollow Faces were written during the two winters Home lived alone in a research camp on the outer coast of Glacier Bay (Alaska).  “The Utter Dark Where Blind White Sea Snakes Crawl” was based on an episode, told to him as true, among the Black Caribes of Belize.  “Acid Soul and Sulphurous Sweat” was based on an incident told to him as current when he arrived in Dominica in 1970.  The comedy “Ship of Ghouls”, also based on a real historic incident, was left half finished when he left Glacier Bay to travel cross-county for Atlin, B. C.; on arrival he finished the second half and the two joined seamlessly.

Hollow Faces was, in many ways, perfectly timed; everything just worked out.  When publisher Ganley said he needed three more pages to close the book, Home wrote “What Breeds About Her Heart”, and it fit perfectly, down to the last line.  In contrast, Ganley’s wish to print an anniversary collection of Home’s work in 1987 was frustrated because, although Home had more than half a book finished, he had to move his house that year in the Dyea Valley, west of Skagway, Alaska.  He had to move twice more before 2009, jobs changed, the impetus faded, and a second collection never quite materialized.

Editor’s introduction to story in
The Year’s Best Horror Stories VI.    

Influences.  Many of Home’s Weirdbook stories were based on experience and history.  The old mahogany contractor in “The Hell of Black Lines” (1982) was based on a person Home knew well in Belize.  “Black Silver, Gold, and Purple” (1979) was the first of five stories in the Ruthveniad, based on ancestors in Scotland.  His great-aunt had tried to interest him as a child in the fact that his great-to-the-eighth grandmother was the First Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Anne. Unable to use words like “adultery” and “illegitimate child” to her young nephew, she could only make vague allusions.  Home had to discover for himself the family lore that this bedchamber access had given the chamberlady-grandmother’s handsome 19-year old brother access to the queen and fatherhood of the prince who became King Charles I.  Imagine young Home’s delight to learn that his ten-times-great grandfather was Patrick, Lord Ruthven.  Imagine him rolling the name across his tongue: Lord Ruthven!—the first vampire of English language literature and progenitor of a whole scurvy crew of traitors, warlocks, sorceresses, alchemists, assassins, and mathematicians. Just imagine the jolt that gave to a young writer already bent towards the gothic.

The world and the creatures in it, interpreted by a writer’s imagination, made their own rich contributions to Home’s writings. Summarizing his life in another little magazine, Home wrote that it had been spent mostly in “the orchid-hung jungles of Central America, the glacier-girt faery-world rain forest of Southeast Alaska, and the rarefied heights of the Himalayas”, but he also traveled over western South America, Polynesia (especially Easter Island), plus Scotland, Romania and Antarctica.  When Home returned from 18 months in the Himalayas, Ben P. Indick wrote that Home had “been in some of the remotest and most dangerous places on earth”, to which Home replied that no place he had been was as dangerous as the streets of New York City, where he’d never set foot.

Published Poetry

The first appearance of any of Home’s poetry in a hardback anthology was in the 1965 Poets of the Midwest, and a number of his poems were printed in the little magazines of the 1960s.  However, his style changed in the mid-‘60s with his discovery of writers Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur, and Lawrence Durrell. 

Three Poetry Collections, by William Scott Home (1986).
Included Metamorphoses of The Vampire and Other Transmutations;
The Ransom of Enchanted Castles: Thirty-Six Poems;
and Onyx and Bloodstone: Thirty-Six Poems.

In the 1980s John Squires, who was a regular correspondent and generous donor to Home (and, until his death in 2012, executor of Home’s literary estate), photocopied his own favorite selections from Home’s self-published Onyx and Bloodstone and The Ransom of Enchanted Castles and circulated these amongst a friendly cabal of readers.  Ganley also published his poems regularly in Weirdbook and Amanita Brandy.  However, Home’s more mainstream pieces afterwards were rarely published, and he jokingly referred to them under the collective title: Paradise Disdained.

In 1985, Randy Everts of The Strange Company brought out two collections of Home’s original verse:  Black Diamond Gates, pieces reflecting the 1200-1600 AD era of magic and experimental science, and Stain of Moonlight, more general poems written over the same period.  Home reports that Evert then accepted a third collection, Djinn and Jewel-Men, but never printed (or returned) it.  Other original works finding no publisher include “Depth Charge”, “The Streets of Midnight Wander Through the Skull”, “Made Cold by Universe”, and “The Dimness and Darkness of Distance”, to name just a few.

Sheaves of Translations

While studying French in high school, Home received a number of French books from his great-aunt (she who had first alerted him to his hideous genetic heritage) and set about translating Jose-Maria de Heredia’s “Flight of the Centaurs”, published by a highly encouraging Lilith Lorraine in Flame (she liked the Baudelaire translations better). He next set about translating the entirety of de Heredia’s “Les Trophées” as well, finishing, in each of three attempts, about a third of the book, with the results published piecemeal in various anthologies.

By the early 1980s Stanley McNail was publishing his translations in Nightshade, and Home got McNail interested in producing a volume of horror-fantasy translations to equal Derleth’s Dark of the Moon, which had excluded translations.  By that time, Home had a thick sheaf of French, Spanish and Portuguese translations and suggested that if the German, Scandinavian, and Russian translators could be roused, it was a fait accompli. These latter did not respond, but by the time Nightshade ceased publication, Home had enough on his own to fill two books: Metamorphoses of the Vampire and Other Transmutations (tag line from Baudelaire) and We Come From the Deaths of Stars (tag line from Henri de Regnier), containing the Nostradmicon—straight translations, one science fiction writer translating another, of a quatre-vingtain of quatrains from Nostradamus. (Everts briefly showed interest, suggesting the title Strange Moons Circle.)

Home continued to translate full tilt, resulting in the collection Writhing Star-Scaled Body (tag line from Victor Hugo). This also unpublished (and as yet incomplete) volume includes writers unknown in the U. S., such as Iwan Gilkin, Maurice Rollinat, Maurice Magre, in addition to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Corbiere, a number of 19^th Century Brazilian Portuguese poets utterly unknown abroad (with the exception of Olavo Bilac), and a smattering of Haitian French writers. As a self-proclaimed “run-of-the-mill fin-de-siècle symbolist and decadent without even a neo in front of it”, Home felt particularly suited to take on translating the latter school.

Many of these pieces stayed on Home’s to-do list for 30 or 40 years. He noted that, despite many tries, he was unable to render Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” (Spoiled Meat”) until his old age because he had been “insufficiently immature” to manage it before.

III. An American King for Redonda

View of the island micronation of Redonda, from the southeast.

Photo by Invertzoo, made available on Wiki Commons.

It is not widely known that William Scott Home has made a claim to the Kingdom of Redonda.  That Home is the true King of Redonda was a revelation even to himself, and the unraveling of this truth took a winding path.

The Events

In 1960, primed by Lovecraft’s recommendation, Home snapped up a copy of M. P. Shiel’s Best Short Stories in a Denver bookstore and speedily recognized Shiel as his pre-incarnation and stylistic model.  

In December 1970, Home flew around the island of Redonda, from Dominica to Antigua and back, for a seminar, unaware that the last legitimate king, Juan I (John Gawsworth) had died on 23 September, three months before.  Gawsworth had been appointed successor by the first king, M. P. Shiel, whose father had claimed the island* for his son on the occasion of his birth (21 July 1865). 

[*The British Empire’s claim, issued in 1872, is subsequent and invalid.]

In 1974, Ben Indick, responding to the pieces in Frierson’s HPL, declared Scott Home to be the stylistic reincarnation of M. P. Shiel, who was himself recognized as the literary reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe (whose last unfinished story, “The Lighthouse”, set its protagonist alone on an isolated rock).  Thirty-one years after Poe’s death, the 15-year old Shiel was crowned King of Redonda on the island. 

Several years later, Home learned of King Juan’s death, and that there were no legitimate heirs, and so proclaimed his Thaumaturgical Reincarnate Legitimacy with the name Guillermo I, with the concurrence of numerous writers and friends.  Thus was “The Lighthouse” fulfilled.

The Evidence

Home’s bona fides match Shiel’s: Legitimate royal descent through three different illegitimate Stuart daughters; descent from the first vampire of English fiction and his horde; a biographical connection to the Caribbean as a resident and explorer (though the only volcanoes to erupt on Home’s arrival were in Hawai’i and Chile); and as the greatest living writer of horror fantasy.  By his 2005 Instrument of Succession, Home decreed his successor must meet these requirements and adopt a regal cognomen distinct from any predecessors, all subject to confirmation by the House of Lords, which was hereafter to be known as the House of Peers (to avoid sexism).

Flag of the Sovereign and Independent Buccaneer Kingdom of 

Redonda, designed by H. S. M. Guillermo I 

(Home pictured, singing the anthem with assembled subjects)

The Kingdom

On the Kingdom’s centennial, 21 July 1980, Home officially demanded recognition of the Sovereign and Independent Buccaneer Kingdom of Redonda, set up a cabinet, and challenged all pretenders and imposters, intenders and preposters, to put up their dukes (should he prevail, he would put up his duchesses).  One humorless and inarticulate Brit declared him “an eccentric writer living in Alaska”, but no challenges were offered.

On that occasion, Home presented the first national flag, the national anthem and hymn, and the national motto (Pro Se Quisque).  He pegged the official monetary unit, the doubloon, at US $4.60 and decimalized the coinage (later regretted).  He also specified the royal regalia (a crystal skull as orb, a narwhal tusk as scepter) and, as Lord of the Sea, issued his claim to the dependencies of Trinidade-Martim Vaz, Buss Island, Daugherty Island, Gama Land, and Yezoland.

Home issued patents of nobility to all the dutiful worthy of royal favor, giving titles to Zaleski, Saulsdomdaniel, Phorfor, Xélucha, Huguenin, Tulsah, L’Abri, Bomarzo, and others; granting Paul Ganley likewise the Earldom of Drakulya and Beztérce and the Baron Frankenstein. Other worthy peers include Ben Indick, John Squires, and such as Frank Belknap Long, Sprague de Camp, Philippe Druillet, Jacques Bondon, and many more, all duly registered in Quirk’s Peerage. (Derleth was dead by the centennial, and Home gave no posthumous titles.) 

Throughout the 1980s, Redonda Day feasts were held annually, to a considerable and riotous assembly, at Castle Huntley tower (now named CreepingKeep), the royal residence, in the Valley Full of Flowers. Over time, attendance declined owing to the natural attrition of the peers. In late years, Homes remarked he suffered from the “loneliness of the long-persisting mummer.”

A Shiel Continuum

In 1983, Home contributed “The Rose Beyond the Thunders and the Whirlpools”, a study of Shiel’s short stories, to A. Reynolds Morse’s massive volume Shiel in Diverse Hands. Morse declared the study “exquisitely erudite.”  

In October 1992, Home reached the island of Vaila in Shetland and was given a personal tour of the griffin-guerdoned House of Sounds where no cat will stay. The house (a real one, not the fictional horror) was for vend at £225,000—a king’s ransom, but no one ransomed this king.

IV.  As a Closing

In later years, Home told one correspondent he had been able to fulfill three ambitions in his life: (1) to be the greatest living writer of horror fantasy; (2) to “journey down the world’s backbone”—that is, travel overland from 10 miles north of Point Barrow (Arctic Circle) to 80 miles north of the Antarctic Circle, in stages permitting detailed exploration of the natural, archeological, historic and cultural features of the whole Cordillera; and (3) to spend time in the Himalayas studying in Tibetan schools and monasteries.  The highlight of achieving the third ambition was being present in the Kingdom of Zanskar for the historic, first-ever visit of a current Dalai Lama (in 1980).  

Home’s travels reflect his interest in hiking, climbing, caving, canoeing, kayaking, skydiving, parasailing, bungee-jumping, and general exploring, especially in other cultures and languages.  His only complaint?  That he never got enough of any of them.  

He has not had enough of the writing life, either.  His writing output never declined, but as the little magazines disappeared, and his own finances ebbed, he less often attempted large-scale mailings, and a newer generation of editors did not know him.  Also, when finishing up  his nonfiction research book In Search of Lord Ruthven, the computer he was using ate the entire text, a devastating blow.  However, in spring 2015, on the revival of Weirdbook, Home resumed contact with Paul Ganley and others and started producing a fresh burst of stories and poems.