On May 7, I was in Calgary for the joint book launch of the first two titles of the Shadowpaw Press Spring/Summer list, The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer and The Traitor’s Son by the …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, turned to Crowdfundr to help ensure …
This year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The Worldshapers, succeeded, reaching …
Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
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Willett of the Day: Dr. Willett, H.P. Lovecraft character
Some Willetts–though not myself–are entirely fictitious.
Such is the case of Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett, the family physician of Charles Dexter Ward, and ultimately the hero of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. (The image at right is of the late actor Frank Maxwell, who portrayed Dr. Willett in Roger Corman’s 1963 movie version of the story, The Haunted Palace (he took the title from an Edgar Allan Poe story, but the main inspiration for the film was definitely Lovecraft).
Wikipedia has more about the novella here, including this note on the good Dr. Willett:
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia compares Willett’s character to other “valiant counterweight[s]” in Lovecraft such as Thomas Malone in “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925)[8] and Henry Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror“; like Willett, Armitage “defeats the ‘villains’ by incantations, and he is susceptible to the same flaws–pomposity, arrogance, self-importance–that can be seen in Willett.”[9]
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2008/07/willett-of-the-day-dr-willett-hp-lovecraft-character/
