Chthonic Survivals: Donald Wandrei's The Web of Easter Island

Cover art by Audrey Johnson

Donald Wandrei's The Web of Easter Island was a curious novel, with a story of cosmic terror and revelatory dread. The book was uneven. At times, moments of wondrous poetry and weirdness appeared:
"A fiery sun was setting in a coppery sky. The roofs of buildings and the tops of trees glowed with a dull flame." The passages which involved Easter Island, and "Carter E. Graham, curator of the Ludbury Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology" were initially promising.  Other parts contained awkward phrasing, and the work spun into episodes that unraveled, under the weight of overreach. The writing had a few more overtly racy passages than appear, for instance, in much of the writing of Wandrei's associate, and correspondent, H.P. Lovecraft: "The narrow areola around each nipple clung like the budding heart of a blood rose aganst the tan of her skin." (P. 55, TWEI). (Although one can counter that with this selection from a letter from H.P. Lovecraft to the singular poet and writer, Clark Ashton Smith: "I need not say how enormously grateful & delighted I am at receiving the MS. of 'Solution.' It is a haunting, fascinating thing, which makes the reader involuntarily look over his shoulder as if fearful of beholding long lethal visions of primordial ooze peopled with gnarled, sentient, & cyclopean trees that watch perpetually & wave black slimy branches in unholy orgasms." (From Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, ed. by David E. Schulz and S.T. Joshi; Hippocampus Press, 2017).  (In 2011, Centipede Press issued an edition containing an earlier draft of the book, Dead Titans Waken!.) (Bobby Derie has written extensively on erotic elements in Lovecraft, and many other authors.)

Ultimately, The Web of Easter Island does not "correlate its contents" and conclude in a satisfactory way, in contrast with, for example, H.P. Lovecraft's masterful short story, The Call of Cthulhu (1926).