Person From Porlock - in Fiction

In Fiction

• In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a character checks into a motel under the pseudonym A. Person, Porlock, England.
• In Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, the character Ka thinks of a poem, while conversing with another character Necip. The narrator then says that Ka would soon be writing that poem in his notebook if "no one came from Porlock," and explains the phrase's origin.
• Stevie Smith's poem, 'Thoughts About the Person from Porlock', begins as a gentle ribbing of Coleridge and ends in a meditation on loneliness, creativity, and depression.
• Vincent Starrett, Persons from Porlock & Other Interruptions. (1938)
• A. N. Wilson, Penfriends from Porlock. (1988)
• U. A. Fanthorpe, The Person's Tale. (1984)
• "The Person from Porlock" is a science fiction story by Raymond F. Jones published in Astounding magazine in 1947, where Coleridge's vision is explained as the remote viewing of a secret colony of aliens living on Earth. One of the aliens deliberately distracts Coleridge before he can write down a full description of the colony.
• During Paul Jenkins's run on the Hellblazer comic series, John Constantine learns that his ancestor, one James Constantine, was "The Person from Porlock". What he does not learn, but the reader does, is that James disrupted Coleridge's opium-sparked dreams so as to prevent a group of angels from feeding Coleridge what amounted to a propaganda piece for the armies of Heaven.
• In Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the title character saves the world, in part by time-travelling from the present day to distract Coleridge from properly remembering his dream; if Coleridge had completed the poem an alien ghost would have 'encoded' certain information within the completed work that would have allowed him to make repairs to his spaceship in the past at the cost of wiping out all life on Earth.
• In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Etain of the Second Look makes reference to the "Man from Porlock" while trying to recollect a poem she envisioned while having a dream.
• In Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Valley of Fear, Sherlock Holmes is interrupted in his labours by a letter from the pseudonymous Fred Porlock, an informant within Moriarty's organization. Porlock's identity is never revealed.
• In the webcomic "2D Goggles", the "Person from Porlock" is revealed to be Ada Lovelace, who is represented in the series as disliking poets and poetry and, incidentally, owned a mansion rather close to Porlock where she used to retreat to during summer along with husband Baron William King and family.
• Louis MacNeice, Persons from Porlock, and other plays for radio. (1969)
• Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip refers to the person from Porlock in the episode titled "4 AM Miracle". Matthew Perry's character tells his writers the story.
• In the Inspector Morse television series episode "Twilight of the Gods" (1991), Lewis (Kevin Whately) disturbs Morse while he is solving a crossword puzzle, and Morse (John Thaw) shouts out, "Damn. Seven seconds off the record, if you hadn't come barging in like that. It's the person from Porlock, that's who you are." Lewis replies, "No sir, Newcastle."
• Laird Barron's story "The Men from Porlock" was first published in The Book of Cthulhu from Night Shade Books in 2011.
• In Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version the titular character tells us, in relation to the publishing of Terry McIver's first novel, "literature would have been better served had he been interrupted mid-flight by a gentleman from Porlock."
• In Stranger in a Strange Land, Jubal tells Anne "you hail from Porlock" when she interrupts him.