Review of “Winged Death” (1934)
H. P. Lovecraft (writer), Hazel Heald (writer).
Read in 2026.
On the floor, uncomfortably evident amidst the stifling summer heat, was the body of a dead man—but this was not what the four were afraid of.
It’s delightful to read a Lovecraft original for the first time after several years, but it’s clear why this is rarely included in anthologies of his work. It’s not the racism, which is obvious and unredeemed, but still nuanced. The main character says, of a gentle black man whose life he has saved in Africa, that “[h]is pluck would shame a white man”, and the villain is white. Rather, the problem is the uniform weakness of the supernatural premiss and the structure of the narrative. A dead man’s journal charts the progress of his crime in tedious detail. Nothing is revealed by investigation and the stakes remain as low as in the most pedestrian fiction of middle-class crime, despite one off-hand allusion to Tsathoggua and Cthulhu.
References here: The Fly (1958).