To start off the new year, I’m officially announcing the launch of my second publishing company, Endless Sky Books. Whereas my first publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is and always will be a traditional publishing company, …
For the first time, you can now buy the entire Shards of Excalibur series in a single omnibus ebook! Just released by Shadowpaw Press, this includes the latest editions of the books, and costs only half …
The Tangled Stars, my far-future humorous space opera from DAW Books, is now available everywhere in ebook and audiobook (narrated by Wayne Mitchell). For an introduction to the main characters, check out “Thibauld’s Tale” in …
Shapers of Worlds Volume III, the third anthology I’ve Kickstarted that features science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The Worldshapers, has now officially been released upon the …
This is the latest in my occasional column about writing science fiction and fantasy that appears in the Saskatchewan Writers Guild magazine Freelance. Authors who are regularly interviewed often profess to hate one particular question, …
At When Words Collide 2022, one of the panels I led featured a handful of the many authors whose stories have appeared in the Shapers of Worlds anthologies I Kickstarted (and who have also, of …
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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/
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