H.P. Lovecraft Part 6: At the Mountains of Madness (conclusion)

Last week we began a look at one of H.P. Lovecraft's most ambitious works: his short novel At the Mountains of Madness. Professor Dyer, a geologist from Miskatonic University and the narrator of the story, is leading an expedition to the Antarctic continent. The party's chief biologist, Professor Lake, has taken part of the group on a side-trip to a hitherto unexplored region and discovered a mountain range higher than any on earth. They have also found several specimens of strange plant-like creatures with starfish-shaped heads. A severe storm cuts off Lake's party from radio contact with the rest of the expedition, and when Dyer comes to investigate, he finds the entire party wiped out.


In examining the wreckage and the dead, Dyer's party find that some of the dead bodies have not just been injured by flying wreckage or frozen by exposure; they've been sliced open. Lovecraft does not use the word dissected, but that is evidently what has happened. They also find that the six damaged specimens have been buried in the snow underneath star-shaped mounds, like the soapstone pieces, and a lot of strange triangular footprints in the snow. The eight intact specimens of the star-headed creatures, are missing; so are three of the sleds, one of the sled dogs, and an odd assortment of supplies. Gedney, one of Lake's party, is also missing. The inference is inescapable. Lake's party must have gone mad.

Right? Isn't that what you were thinking? No? Maybe you've watched too many monster movies.

Dyer decides to attempt a flight across the mountain range. Because the range is so high, he will be unable to take the plane fully-loaded, so he brings only Danforth, one of the expedition's unpaid interns, with him to pilot the plane and what equipment they think absolutely necessary. As they approach the mountains, like Lake's survey before them, Dyer notes the peculiar outcroppings of rock on some of the mountain slopes. Dyer, the geologist, is reminded of the "Giant's Causeway", a natural rock formation in Ireland, but also of the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. Higher up, they encounter a misty haze, which Lake had earlier mistakenly guessed was smoke from volcanic activity.

Threading their way through the impossibly high mountains, they navigate the lowest pass they can find, and on the other side of the mountains they find something truly startling: A vast ruined city, stretching across a wide plateau. Dyer realizes that this is the same city they saw in the mirage which appeared when they first approached the mountains. The image of the city had been reflected off a layer of ice particles in the upper atmosphere; a common enough phenomenon in the polar regions. Flying over the city, Dyer is struck by the recurring star-shaped motif in the buildings and plazas of the labyrinthine city.

They land their plane and begin exploring some of the buildings. They find several chambers with elaborate carvings and from these carvings they are able to piece together a history of the city's inhabitants. The carvings confirm what the reader has already guessed; that the city was built by the strange star-headed creatures whom Lake had dubbed the "Elder Ones" after creatures mentioned in the Necronomicon.

This part I find to stretch my willing suspension of disbelief a bit, that they could reconstruct a detailed history of the Old Ones after studying some decorative art for a few hours; but Danforth has read the Necronomicon from cover to cover and the images they find confirm the stories in that tome. Everyone who goes to Miskatonic University seems to have some sort of familiarity with the Necronomicon; I suspect that they make fraternity pledges read a page as part of their initiation hazing.

The Old Ones began building this city eons ago, when life as we know it was just beginning to crawl out of the slime. In fact, earlier Lake had suggested the possibility that the Old Ones had actually created life on Earth as "a jest or a mistake." For hundreds of millions of years, they ruled the planet as geological ages passed and the continents shifted. Lovecraft cites Wegner's Continental Drift Hypothesis, which at the time was regarded as highly speculative. The Old Ones built most of their cities underwater, with the aid of artificial creations called Shuggoths: amorphous blobs capable of changing form to whatever shape was necessary and of obeying the Old Ones' hypnotic commands; but built other colonies on land, such as the ancient city in the Antarctic mountains.

Over the Strange Eons, the Old Ones found their dominion of the earth challenged by other beings from Other Worlds; the Mi-Go, the Spawn of Cthulhu and the Fungi from Yuggoth. Here Lovecraft is tying the star-headed Old Ones to other Cosmic Horrors from previous tales, as August Derleth later did with his "Cthulhu Mythos." But as S.T. Joshi points out, he is also de-mythologizing the Mythos. Where previous stories called these Cosmic Entities "Elder Gods", this one makes clear that these are aliens mistakenly worshiped as gods by our primitive ancestors. One gets the impression that Lovecraft was a little embarrassed by the 'men of science' chanting spells of exorcism in "The Dunwich Horror". There is no magic in "At the Mountains of Madness".

The Mi-Go retreated to the peaks of the Himalayas; the Fungi from Yuggoth flew back to Pluto and Great Cthulhu's domains sank beneath the waves. The Old Ones remained, although diminished in power. They had lost their ability to fly through space on their membranous wings; their art showed a decline in sophistication. They had to put down an uprising by their Shuggoth slaves, who had evolved enough intelligence to revolt. As the continents shifted and the climate began to change, the now-decadent Old Ones built a new city near the old near the great abyss where they had first colonized the Earth. Eventually, the land became so cold, they had to abandon the old city completely. Something else also happened; something so terrible, that the carvings only hinted at it; someting terrible and deadly which the artists of that long-dead city refused to portray.

In this history of the Decline and Fall of the Star-Head Empire, I suspect Lovecraft is writing a parable about the America he knew. Certainly in his view American culture and the arts had degenerated since the 19th Century. More suggestive still are the Suggoths, an underclass which performed all the heavy labor for the Old Ones and who eventually rebelled. The theme of Working Class rising up to bring down Society was a common one in the early 20th Century. Lovecraft had a strong streak of xenophobia in him. Although the influence of his circle of friends in the Wide World outside of Providence helped soften his views, his sojourn in New York as a penniless writer competing for jobs with a flood of immigrant workers to a certain extent reinforced his prejudices.

Dyer and Danforth decide to continue their exploration of the City to the Abyss, shown in the carvings, where the later City of the Old Ones was built. The idea of a kind of Abyss near the Pole is another one that goes back to the 19th Century. In the early 1800s, a US Army captain named John Cleves Symmes, Jr. proposed a theory that the Earth was hollow, and contained several concentric shells which could be reached by large holes at the North and South Poles. He lectured widely on his theory and unsuccesfully lobbied President Andrew Jackson to send an expedition to the polar regions to find it. Edgar Allan Poe's story "MS. Found in a Bottle" ends with its protagonist sucked down into such a polar abyss, and Poe used some of Symmes' theories in his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which Lovecraft alludes to in "Mountains of Madness".

Making their way through the labyrinthine passageways under the City, Dyer and Danforth encounter some of the weirder creatures to ever appear in a Lovecraft story, and these are completely mundane: flocks of six-foot tall albino penguins. Living as they do underground, they have evolved to be sightless as well as flightless and have no eyes. Although he does not explicitly say so, I suspect these are meant to evoke the mysterious white shrouded figure which appears at the end of Arthur Gordon Pym. The penguins are harmless, but majorly creepy.

Creepier still is what the two find next: the tracks of the sleds missing from the Parks camp, and the lingering odor that the specimens had. Following the tracks they find the sleds themselves and a kind of camp. And in the sleds they find Gedney and the missing sled dog; both dead, but both carefully wrapped up, just like specimens.

Lovecraft has been coy about directly stating what really happened at Lake's camp, but by now it's pretty clear. The star-headed specimens Lake found were not really dead; or at least not all of them were. Under the warmth of the Antarctic sun, they revived. The dogs, maddened by their unnatural scent, attacked the creatures and lead to the horrific slaughter of the camp. After which, the creatures collected specimens of their own and gear from the camp and proceeded to the City themselves. Dyer guesses that these specimens came from an earlier era, and so the City as it is now will be almost as strange to them as it is to its human explorers. He and Danforth find, in this rude camp, sketchbooks taken from Lake's camp which the Old Ones have added drawings of their own in a peculiar style reminiscent of the carvings Dyer has seen.

Following the trail of the Old Ones through the darkness, the unpleasant smell becomes mingled with another odor, even more vile. Then they come across the bodies of four Old Ones, their starfish heads brutally decapitated and covered with slime.

They had not been even savages -- for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch -- perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia ... poor Lake, poor Gedney ... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had they done that we would not have done in their place? ... Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!

Lovecraft has written disparagingly in letters about science fiction writers who give their aliens human attitudes and motivations; but here he succeeds in making grotesques abominations sympathetic as his narrator slowly comes to recognize the same attitudes and motivations he has.When they first find the bodies, Danforth gives an involuntary scream. Now, as they examine them, Dyer and Danforth hear an answering noise in the blackness beyond, a piping noise, sounding something like "Tekeli-li!" the cry of the gigantic bird-creatures from Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. Dyer guesses that it's one of the group of Old Ones who has murdered its companions. He and Danforth begin to run.

They dash headlong in a blind panic, retracing their path. Coming to the large chamber where they encountered the penguins, they are fortunate in that the mists of the cavern and the large flock confuse their pursuer and it continues down the wrong corridor. But the two men look back and see that Dyer had been wrong. Their pursuer had not been a starfish-headed Old One, but a huge amoeba-like creature, with a multitude of eyes floating on it's formless body. It was a Shuggoth, one of the former slaves of the Old Ones, which had once again revolted against its masters -- this time successfully. The Old Ones were now all truly dead, and only their mindless slaves dwelt in their haunted city.

The two men proceed to the surface. Danforth is near hysterical, babbling the names of the Boston subway train stations as they dash through the tunnels. When they get back to their plane, Dyer takes the controls. Danforth is the more skillful pilot, but his nerves are too shot to fly.

Guiding their way back through the high mountain pass, Dyer is too busy concentrating to look back behind them as Danforth does, and so he does not see what Danforth sees.

What does Danforth see? A bigger, even more terrifying Shuggoth? The mysterious black sphinx Poe wrote of in Arthur Gordon Pym? A mirage like the one they saw before, only this time showing what lies beyond the City? The Abyss of the Old Ones itself?

Those are some of my guesses. Dyer has his own, but will not speak of them. Danforth will not speak of it at all, except in delirium.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about "the black pit", "the cavern rim", "the proto-shoggoths:, "the windowless solids with five dimensions", "the nameless cylinders" "the elder pharos", "Yog-Sothogh", "the primal white jelly", "the colour our of space", "the wings"...

But when he actually saw it... whatever it was he saw... he only shrieked one word, over and over:"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

H.P. Lovecraft part 5: At the Mountains of Madness (part 1)

For the past few weeks I've been perusing some of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, as selected by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi in his collection The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. This week we continue our sampling of Cosmic Horror with one of Lovecraft's few novels and perhaps his most ambitious work: At the Mountains of Madness.


H.P. Lovecraft had a life-long interest in the Antarctic regions, going all the way back to when he was twelve and wrote treatises on the early explorers. Perhaps his strange sensitivity to cold which made him unable to bear temperatures lower than 20 degrees gave him a morbid fascination with the polar regions. More likely is the fact that by the early 20th Century, Antarctica was one of the few remaining unexplored regions on the globe; a blank spot on the map which the imaginative writer could populate with his own creations.

One of Lovecraft's role models, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote a novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym involving a voyage to the South Polar seas, which Lovecraft references in At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft closely followed news accounts of the real-life Antarctic voyages: Shackleton's failed attempt at the South Pole which ended in triumph, and Scott's successful one which ended in tragedy; and more recently, Byrd's airplane flight over the Pole. Mountains of Madness incorporates elements from all of these and more.

The narrator is unnamed, as is frequently the case in Lovecraft's stories. I have to wonder if this is an aspect of Lovecraft's theme that man is an inconsequential speck in the cosmos; that the character's exposure to Cosmic Horrors has not only threatened his sanity, but somehow diminished his sense of identity. In a later story, however, the character is identified as Professor William Dyer.

Dyer is a geology professor at Miskatonic University and leads an expedition sponsored by his school to the Antarctic. But he begins his narrative by telling us that he relates his tale only with the greatest reluctance. He and his colleagues, the ones who survived, all agreed to supress the complete facts of the expedition; and Dyer has only broken this silence to prevent a new expedition from inadvertently stumbling into the horrors they found and releasing... ah, but that comes later.

The chief mission of the expedition is to collect mineral and fossil samples from the Antarctic Continent, using a revolutionary drilling apparatus devised by Professor Pabodie, the team's engineer. Lovecraft describes the progress of the expedition in detail, and for a while all goes well. The drill works perfectly, and Pabodie has devised a melting system to get down to the base rock in places where it is covered in ice. (The idea that core samples of the ice might be valuable as well does not seem to have occurred to Lovecraft, although perhaps it just lies outside the interest of Dryer the geologist).

Lake, the chief biologist with the team, becomes excited by unusual triangular striated markings in in a layer of slate, which he believes to be the fossilized prints of an unknown creature. It was known in Lovecraft's time that Antarctica once had a tropical climate rich with plant and animal life. Shackelton had discovered seams of coal there during his expedition. But the unusual striations are found in a pre-Cambrian layer of rock dating back to a time when there were few known life-forms of any complexity.

Lake persuades Dyer to let him take the four planes and some of the men and equipment to a previously unexplored region of the continent, hoping to find more samples of Archean slate with these fossil imprints. Dyer and the rest of the team remain behind at their current base to prepare for their next move. And so Dyer does not actually witness Lake's discoveries. Like the men of Dunwich watching Sentinel Hill through a spyglass in "The Dunwich Horror", we get what happens next second-hand.

The initial radio reports from Lake are exciting. His team have discovered an unknown range of mountains even higher than the Himalayas; so high that their tops have been swept clean by the high Antarctic winds and are completely devoid of snow. The upper slopes of these peaks bear peculiar clusters of box-like formations which Lake initially attributes to weathering and erosion. Bad weather forces one of Lake's planes down on a plateau in the mountains' foothills, and so he establishes a camp there.

Although the rock formations of the plateau are a comparatively recent sandstone and not the ancient slate he was hoping for, Lake sets up the drilling equipment. That is, after all, what they're there for. The apparatus breaks into a wide cave in a layer of limestone, stretching out in all directions. The cavern contains a treasure trove of fossils, evidently plants and animals washed into the cavern at some point in the Pleistocene Era. Among the fossils, Lake's team finds more of the strange triangular tracks they had found in the Archean slate 600 million years older. They find something even more peculiar: several pieces of green soapstone, roughly star-shaped, each with a series of tiny dots in a regular pattern.

Then they find the Thing.

At first it seems to be a large fossilized plant, barrel-shaped and about six feet in length, with five ridges spaced out around its circumference. It has wing-like membrane apendeges. The specimen is not stone, as a true fossil would be, but it seems that the tough, leathery stuff of its form has somehow been preserved. They find more specimens that are more complete and find that they seem to have groups of flexible arms on each body ridge and a starfish-shaped head on the body's top. In one of his radio dispatches, Lake says:

"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth-life as a jest or mistake."

Clark Ashton Smith was one of Lovecraft's circle of correspondents, who was a poet and and artist as well as a writer. Lovecraft's suggestion that life on earth -- including human life -- was an accident rather than the result of Intelligent Design -- or worse yet, a practical joke by the gods, fits in again with his theme of Man's Insignificance.

Lake finds a total of fourteen of these "Elder Ones" as he calls them and hauls them back to his camp. This is difficult, because the dogs they brought along to haul the sleds on overland trips detest the smell of them and become highly agitated in their presence; much as the dogs of Dunwich hated Wilbur Whateley. He notes that the flesh of these creatures seems to be softening somewhat under the rays of the antarctic sun, and resolves to study them.

That is Lake's last radio message. A storm comes down off the mountain with tremendous winds which cut off all contact. When the storm ends, Dyer is unable to raise Lake's party. Since each of the airplanes Lake took had a wireless, it seems impossible that all the radios should be irreparably damaged. So what happened?

Dyer has the expedition's fifth plane brought to his camp from the expedition's initial base on Ross Island, and takes the rest of his team to find out what happened. The flight is a long and a trying one, but eventually they reach sight of the impossibly high mountains. As they approach, they see a bizarre mirage over the mountains of a weird Cyclopean city.

Lake's camp, when they arrive, is a shambles; apparently wiped out by the windstorm. The tents and the ice shelters Lake's men tried to build have been wrecked; the drilling equipment smashed. Eleven of the twelve men in Lake's party are dead, and one man, named Gedney, is missing. Dyer says little more about what they found at this point, other than to say that the next day he and Danforth, one of the graduate students with the expedition, took the plane into the mountains to explore further; and that after returning from that trip Danforth was close to a nervous breakdown and all the men of the expedition agreed to keep silent about it all.

NEXT WEEK: What did Danforth see, or thought he saw, that brought him to the brink of madness? What did he and Dyer find on the other side of those dark and gigantic peaks? And what ever happened to Gedney? Next time we cross over into an incredibly ancient world to discover the secrets of The Mountains of Madness! Tekeli-li!

H.P. Lovecraft Part 4: The Dunwich Horror

We've been looking at a few of the stories of horror master H.P. Lovecraft, as selected by S.T. Joshi for his collection The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Previously we listened to the scrabblings of "The Rats in the Walls" and squinted "The Colour Out of Space". This week we once again visit the more eldrich corners of backwood New England to experience 'The Dunwich Horror.'


There's a saying that to an Englishman, a hundred miles is a long way; and to an American, a hundred years is a long time. We've seen Lovecraft play with this type of scale in "The Rats in the Walls", where he set his story of generational evil stretching back to prehistoric times in England, whose rich, layered history has room to accommodate such a span; and in "Colour Out of Space", where the narrator assumed that the dark rumors about "the strange days" come from ancient legend and is surprised to learn that they occurred within living memory.

Perhaps one of the reasons Lovecraft set so many of his stories in his beloved New England was because as one of the oldest colonial settlements in America, it possesses a sense of depth to its history that, say, Ohio or even New York lack. The ancestors of the Whateley family in the story originally left the town of Salem in 1692 Readers don't have to know that was the year of the Salem Witch Trials to make the association. Lovecraft goes back even further, mentioning circles of standing stones which crown some of the hills in the area, evoking an atmosphere of prehistoric, or at least pre-European times. (Although a curious comment in the text suggests that the stones on Sentinel Hill overlooking the village of Dunwich could be of "caucasian" origin. Does he mean the early white settlers? Or an unknown group of pre-historic white men predating the local Indian tribes? Characteristicly, Lovecraft does not elaborate.)

Lovecraft begins his story, like many of his others, by establishing the atmosphere of the setting. This is something he does quite well. Although he gets some justified mockery for his over-use of shambling, amorphous  non-euclidiean adjectives, he usually saves them for later, when the actual horror begins to encroach. He is quite capable of establishing a tone of quiet menace without them. I think he learned this from Poe, who said that every sentence in a short story ought to go to creating a single mood and that this should be established at the very beginning.

He describes the tiny village of Dunwich, in north central Massachusetts. You could describe it as a Town that Time Forgot That the Decades Cannot Improve... only not in a pleasant, Lake Wobegon-ish way. It was settled, as mentioned, by families fleeing from the Salem Witch Trials; some of whom brought with them the dark practices the Salem Puritans feared. In isolation, many of these families have become inbred and degenerate.

Two of Lovecraft's favorite horror themes, which no doubt come from his upper-class New England upbringing, are inbreeding and miscegenation, both of which invariably lead to degeneration. This is perhaps most obvious in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" but we get it here too in the family of Wilbur Whateley, a clan of New England rednecks, despised and a little feared by their more respectable neighbors. (Throughout the story, Lovecraft differentiates between the the decadent Whateley's and the comparatively undecayed branch of the family.)

Old Man Whateley has a reputation as a wizard, and his old farmhouse holds a large collection of old books inherited from his heretical forebears. A widower, he lives alone on his farm except for his daughter Lavinia. She is described as an albino with crinkly hair and has some other undescribed deformity, the nature of which Lovecraft leaves to the imagination.

One night Lavinia has a son. Who was the father? The neighbors have their theories, and Lovecraft is too much the gentleman to voice what those rumors are. Old Whateley, however, says "Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks hereabaouts."

"I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't akt no better church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin; -- some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!"

The child, Wilbur, is dark, as opposed to his albino mother, and has a goatish look to him. He is born on Candlemas, an obscure feast day of the Christian Church which corresponds to one of the four important celebrations of the Witch's Sabbath, (and which has been reclaimed as a celebration by modern Wiccans). Throughout the story are other mentions of Christian feast days with pagan connotations.

Lavinnia is proud of her ugly son and mutters about the great powers he will have and his tremendous future. The boy does seem exceptional. He grows at a remarkable rate and is able to walk and to speak at an early age. His mother takes him with her to the bonfires she lights at the stone table and megaliths atop Sentinel Hill on Hallowe'en and other significant holidays. She keeps him buttoned up in clothing which covers almost his entire body. Dogs and other animals seem to instinctively dislike him.

The Whateley's have little to do with the rest of the community. The only contact they have is to buy livestock. After Wilbur's birth, Old Whateley begins buying cattle from his neighbors, and paying in gold -- very old gold coins. Oddly enough, the size of Whateley's herd never seems to increase much; and his livestock always seems thin and sickly, bearing strange wounds on their necks.

Old Whateley also begins renovating parts of his farm. He starts with one of the old sheds, which he repairs with fresh clapboards and a new lock. Then he begins working on the unused upper floor of his farmhouse. He guts the floor, pulling out all the walls and partitions and boarding up the windows, and eventually removing even the ceiling so that the story is open to the attic. Visitors to his farm notice that a vile odor comes from the shed. They also hear noises of something large walking around in the upstairs part of the farmhouse. Wilbur's room, like that of his mother and grandfather, is on the ground floor.

Whateley teaches his grandson to read from the many ancient, arcane and blasphemous tomes that have come down through the family. "He'd orter hev 'em as well sot as he kin, tho they're goin' to be all of his larnin'."

By the time Wilbur is four years old, he looks like he's fifteen; he's growing fuzz on his face and his voice is beginning to break. He carries a gun with him when he goes into town to protect himself from the dogs, who become violently agitated by his presence.

He is about eleven years old, and by all appearance a fully grown man, when his grandfather dies. The doctor from the nearest large town is summoned, but can do nothing to save him. The whippoorwills are gathering outside the house and raising a tremendous racket. It is believed in that area that whippoorwills come for the souls of the dead and dying -- "psychopomps" is the word Lovecraft uses -- and Old Whateley is sure that they are coming for him. Old Whateley has some last words for his grandson.

"More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows -- an' that grows faster. It'll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant tha ye'll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow."

The doctor doesn't know what to make of this and puts it down to the ravings of a dying man. It makes sense to Wilbur, though.

His mother is starting to become worried about him. The pride she felt at how special he was is becoming overshadowed by fear. He's doing something and she doesn't fully understand what it is. And she cannot speak to anyone about what she does understand. Sometime later, the whippoorwills are heard again around the Whateley farm, and Lavinia is never seen again.

Wilbur moves all his books and belongings into another of the sheds in the farmyard, and then starts gutting the inside of the rest of the farmhouse, carefully boarding up all the windows and doors, just as his grandfather had done previously. He has now grown to about seven feet tall. And about this time he ventures out into the wide world.

He travels to the town of Arkham, to visit the Library of the great Miskatonic University. Well, maybe "great" is an exaggeration; in another story Lovecraft calls it a minor college; but it does have an excellent collection of rare and arcane books of occult lore, including the legendary Necronomicon.

A few words about the Necronomicon. I think August Derleth erred in calling his organizing of Lovecraft's stories the "Cthulhu Mythos." The central unifying element in Lovecraft's foetid oeuvre is not Great Cthulhu, but rather the Necronomicon, that celebrated compendium of dark and eldritch lore, compiled by the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred in the 8th Century. The book turns up in several of his stories, often providing helpful information about Elder Gods and/or driving its readers to madness. In the 1970s there were a couple books published with that title, claiming to be the "real" Necronomicon, but they were rather pedestrian hoaxes about your ordinary garden variety of occultism. The True Necronomicon in it's purest state exists only in the ravaged imagination of Abdul Alhazred... whom Lovecraft invented.

Wilbur has his own copy of the Necronomicon, a worn and damaged edition of John Dee's English translation. Dee was an actual historical figure, an occultist who was a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth, and Lovecraft's friend Frank Belknap Long added a connection between Dee and the Necronomicon in one of his own stories. Wilbur wants to compare his own copy to the superior Latin translation in the M.U. Library, particularly the portions corresponding to page 751.

The librarian, Dr. Henry Armitage, dubiously permits Wilbur to look at the book; but he's frankly suspicious of the strange creepy young man who sets the dogs on campus howling. He knows a little bit about Wilbur, having heard about the young prodigy with the interest in the occult and visited him a couple years earlier. He's even more suspicious when he looks over Wilbur's shoulder to see exactly what he's reading: a passage about the Old Ones who dwell in a space other than our own and who someday will rule again when humanity is no more, and about Yog-Sothoth, the guardian of the gate to the Old Ones' dimension. Wilbur asks to borrow the University's Necronomicon, but Armitage refuses.

"Maybe Harvard wun't be so fussy as yew be," Wilbur says as he leaves.

This encounter with the now adult Whateley has confirmed some suspicions lurking in Armitage's mind. He muses on the rumors about Wilbur he heard in Dunwich.

"Inbreeding?" Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. "Great God, what simpletons! Shew then Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal!"

"The Great God Pan" was a story by the English fantasy writer Arthur Machen, one of Lovecraft's influences. The main character in the story is the offspring of a human mother and a non-human creature of great power; much like Wilbur Whateley.

S.T. Joshi calls "The Dunwich Horror" a flawed story, and criticizes Henry Armitage as a as a rather conventional and boring horror story hero. I'm not sure I agree. I don't think Armitage is the hero. Oh yes, he figures out what Wilbur is up to and he is ultimately the one who defeats the Horror, but he isn't the protagonist. Wilbur is. Wilbur Whateley is really the central character and the most interesting character in the story. Despite what happens to him next.

Wilbur doesn't get Harvard's copy of the Necronomicon either. Armitage has written ahead to warn them. He's beginning to get desperate. He needs that book; but he also needs to get back to his farmhouse. He left Something back there which needs looking after.

A couple weeks later, Armitage is awoken by the campus watchdog who has caught someone trying to break into the library. Then the dog's growls are accompanied by an inhuman scream... and a chorus of whippoorwills. The dying body Armitage and his colleagues find on the floor of one of the library's reading rooms in a puddle of greenish-yellow ichor is unmistakably Wilbur Whateley. It is also definitely inhuman. Wilbur's head and hands were man-like, if ugly and goatish; but the watchdog has torn away his coat revealing a hideous chimera of a body.

Even more astounding, after his death, much of Wilbur's body simply melts away. Whateley was the union of a human and a creature from another universe whose physical laws are different from our own. Just like the meteorite in "Colour Out of Space", his physical mass was incompatible with our universe and could not remain long without something holding it here.

Wilbur's business in Arkham is left unfinished. The something he left behind in the farmhouse will have to fend for itself. The real Horror is about to commence.

A couple weeks later, the folks around Dunwich hear reports of something monstrous and huge lurking in the hills. The hired boy working at a nearby farm comes across footprints as big as barrel-heads of a creature bigger than an elephant but with many, many more legs. Another boy reports that the old Whateley farmhouse has been destroyed. It looks like it has been blown up with dynamite, and foul, dark, sticky substance coats the wreckage.

The locals come to the obvious conclusion. Wizard Whateley "must a raised sunthin; in that there nailed-up haouse as ain't even so human as he was." But the authorities in the nearby town do not take these reports seriously, and the local newspaper prints a humorous paragraph about the "record-breaking monster the bootleg whiskey of Dunwich had raised up."

The people around Dunwich see nothing funny about it. Something destroys Elmer Frye's barn and kills half their cattle, draining them of blood. The next day tracks are found going up Sentinel Hill, where the Whateley family used to perform their wild rituals.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep and about 3 a.m. all the party telephones rand tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, "Help, oh, my Gawd!..." and some thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more.

A group of men go out to the Elmer Frye place the next morning and find the house crushed like an eggshell.

...amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.

Meanwhile, Henry Armitage has been busy. After Wilbur Whateley's death, the authorities had gone to the shed in his farmyard where he lived. They could not work up the courage to investigate the boarded-up farmhouse with the vile odor emanating from it, but they took away some of Wilbur's books, including one which seemed to be his diary. The diary seemed to be written in some kind of code, apparently based on an ancient language, so it was given to Armitage to decode. For the past several weeks, he's been working on it and has finally cracked it.

From Wilbur's diary, Armitage learns the true purpose for which Old Whateley groomed his unnatural grandson. Wilbur is to open up a portal to another universe and summon the beings there to earth in order to cleanse the earth of all humanity. The creature in the farmhouse was to be Wilbur's servant to achieve this. Wilbur's death in the library has forstalled this horrific plan, but what of the Other?

It is only then that Armitage hears the rumors that have come out of Dunwich and realizes that Whateley's servant is now running loose. Armitage gathers the colleagues who with him witnessed Wilbur's death and are most likely to take him seriously, and together they go to Dunwich.
The end comes where it must: on the top of Sentinel Hill, in the megalithic ruins where Livinia and Wilbur used to hold their bonfires. Armitage and the Men of Science confront the creature, armed with spells from the Necronomicon and spray-guns filled with the powder of Ibn Ghazi.

We do not get a close look at the battle. We remain with the men of Dunwich, observing it from a distance through a spyglass. The creature is invisible, but briefly becomes visible when dosed with the dust from Armitage's spray gun. It's a hideous, many-legged, tentacled creature, but most horrific is the huge half-face taking up much of the top of its body, looking horribly like Old Man Whateley. As the scientists cast their magic spells -- yes, that's what they do -- the creature cries out in agony. And it's indistinct, guttural cries suddenly becomes words in English:

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah -- e'yayayayaaa ... ngh'aaaaa ... ngh'aaa ... 'yuh .. h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff--ff--ff FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..."

Lightning strikes the altar-stone on the hill, and an overpowering wave of stench sweeps over the hillside. And the the thing is no more.

The folks in Dunwich then remember what Old Whateley said years ago: some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!" Armitage confirms this. The Horror which had besieged the communtity for the past several nights was not a fiend from hell summoned by Wilbur.

"...It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did."

NEXT: We continue our look into the worlds of H.P Lovecraft by venturing into the Antarctic wastes. Do you dare seek what lies "At The Mountains of Madness"?

H.P Lovecraft Part 3: The Colour Out of Space

We're going through a sampling of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, whose blending of science fiction and horror and a tremendous influence on both genres, selected by S.T. Joshi from his collection The Annotated H.P Lovecraft. Last week we descended into the depths of Exham Priory to discover the ghastly secret of the de la Poer family in "The Rats in the Walls". This week we investigate a horror of a different... (heh heh) ... colour.


"The Colour Out of Space" was one of Lovecraft's favorite stories, and not just because it gave him the opportunity to use the British spelling of "colour" in the title. Lovecraft felt that too many aliens in science fiction stories were simply humans in funny suits, like the "rubber forehead aliens" in some Star Trek episodes. Lovecraft saw no reason why aliens should have either human shapes or human motivations, and he strove to make his Entities From Beyond wholly incomprehensible. In "Colour" he succeeded, probably better than any of his other stories.

I read "The Colour Out of Space" in high school, and it was my first exposure to Lovecraft. I didn't care for it. The story didn't seem to have a plot. A lot of things happened, but the characters mostly observed them. Or were consumed by them. And I found the ending disturbing and unsatisfying, (which is probably the reaction in his readers Lovecraft was going for). Upon re-reading it now, I can appreciate it a little better.

The unnamed Narrator of the story is a surveyor, who has been sent up to the wild hills west of Arkham to survey a new dam. The fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts is perhaps the center of the Lovecraft Universe. It often turns up in Lovecraft's stories, usually in connection with Miskatonic University, located in that town; and Lovecraft sometimes referred to those particular tales as his "Arkham Cycle". Lovecraft loved the weird, wild corners of New England and placed Arkham and the Miskatonic River right in the middle of it.

While surveying the area the new dam will flood, the Narrator finds a strange, grey patch of land; five acres of desolation upon which nothing grows and which the locals call "The blasted heath."

It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire, but why had nothing new ever grown over those five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little to the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it seemed sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight.

The locals don't talk much about the blasted heath, other than to mutter vaguely about "the strange days". At first the Narrator assumes that this is some old legend of the region, but he learns that the "strange days" occurred within living memory. Old Ammi Pierce knows most about it, but people warn him not to pay attention to Ammi's crazy tales.

So naturally, the Narrator goes to visit Ammi; and after hearing the old man's story, the Narrator decides to return to Boston and resign from the job. He does not wonder that Ammi might be a little cracked or that the local dislike talking about the blasted heath; he doesn't want anything more to do with it either and will be happy when the new reservoir obliterated the cursed spot. He hurries back to town before nightfall; he feels uncomfortable with the thought of being out under the stars of the open sky.

Another writer might have given us Ammi Pierce's story in the man's own words, using the surveyor character only as a framing device. Lovecraft does not. He allows the main narrator to paraphrase Ammi's tale of the strange days. Perhaps Lovecraft just didn't want to write the whole story in dialect, which was a good call on his part; it would have been annoying. Telling the story this way lets the narrator control the foreshadowing and the pacing of how events are revealed. It also allows the narrator to fill in certain technical and scientific details which Ammi would not be able to clearly understand.

The strange days began about fifty years previous, when a meteor landed in the field of Ammi's neighbor, Nahum Gardener. The meteorite caused quite a sensation, and some Professors from Miskatonic University in Arkham came to study it.

The meteorite is quite puzzling; it shrinks in size overnight; it shows no sign of cooling; it's substance is soft and yielding rather than hard and brittle. Most noteworthy, the scientists find a globule inside it of a peculiar color, (sorry, colour), which when struck with a hammer bursts like a bubble, leaving a spherical cavity. The samples taken back to the University for study do not react with any known acids, but do react with the glass containers they are placed in, gradually disintegrating both the beaker and the sample. Most noteworthy, spectroscopic analysis of the samples reveal unknown bands of color, similar to the color of the mysterious globule. Lovecraft describes the analysis in great detail. He had an interest in chemistry in his youth and in spectroscopy in particular, and his description builds the mystery.

A couple days after the meteor lands, a freak thunderstorm comes and the meteorite site is struck repeatedly by lightning. The next day the meteorite is gone. The scientists are disappointed, but they shrug and go back to Arkham.

That autumn, the trees in Nahum's orchard grows a bumper crop of large fruit; but the harvest is disappointing. All the fruit is bitter and uneatable. The same proves to be true of the melons and tomatoes growing near the meteorite site. Nahum guesses that the meteorite has poisoned the soil somehow. His crops upland from the meteorite seem unaffected though. More strange signs appear. During the winter, Nahum notices that the animal tracks he finds in the snow seem peculiar. In the spring, skunk cabbages growing up through the mud have a peculiar colour -- much like the globule -- and emit an odor foul even for skunk cabbage.

Neighbors begin avoiding Nahum's farm, and the Gardeners stop going into town. Soon Ammi is the only neighbor to still visit the Gardener farm. He notices that their water has a bad taste to it and tells Nahum to dig a new well, but Nahum ignores the advice.

Things go from bad to worse. Nahum's wife slowly goes mad and he locks her up in her room. We think of insane family members locked in attics as something out of Jane Eyre, but as late as the 19th Century the state of mental health care was such that there were few better options for treatment, especially for poor rural families. Nahum and his sons go about their routines listlessly, like automatons, and they continue to drink the water. The animals all come sick with a strange malady, their flesh becoming grey and brittle; and all the vegetation on the farm emits a faint glow at night of a peculiar... colour.

One of Nahum's sons falls victim to the same disease as the farm animals. Another goes mad and disappears. What of the third? When Ammi asks of him, Nahum distractedly says that he "lives in the well." Ammi goes upstairs in the farmhouse to try and talk to Nahum's wife. What he finds is horrifying. She too has met the same fate as young Thaddeus and the livestock. She's just not dead yet. Her body still moves as it slowly crumbles. Ammi also encounters something like a cloud, or some hateful current of vapour and for a moment strange colours dance before his eyes.
When he returns downstairs, Nahum has also turned grey and crumbly.

"Nothin' ... nothin' ... the colour ... it burns ... cold an; wet ... but it burns ... it lived in the well ... I seen it ... a kind o' smoke ... jest like the flowers last spring ... the well shone at night ... Than an' Mernie an' Zenas ... everything alive ... suckin' the life out of everything ..."

Ammi flees the farm and goes to the police. Three policemen, along with the coroner  the medical examiner and the local veterinarian accompany him back to the Gardener farm to investigate. They find the grey remains of Nahum and his wife. Examining the well, they find the skeletons of the two missing boys.
 
Their investigation takes longer than Ammi would like and night falls. Light begins pouring out of the well and the trees outside the farmhouse begin to writhe on their own accord with no wind to stir them, the tips of their branches glowing like St. Elmo's fire. The very planks and beams of the old farmhouse begin to glow eerily.

A column of the unknown colour shoots out of the well, straight up into the sky, taking with it all the trees, all the wood, everything organic in the farm. The men only barely escape.

Something had come with the meteor, that was clear; something from another world, something the sucked the life out of every living thing it touched; something which had now returned to the stars which spawned it, leaving nothing but grey desolation behind it.

Or has it completely gone? Ammi has his doubts. As they fled the farmhouse, Ammi looked back and thought he saw something feebly rise after the cataclysm, only to sink back down into the well. And the toxic grey blight of the blasted heath continues to spread about an inch more every year.

Once the dam is built, the waters of the reservoir will cover the site and put an end to the last vestiges of the strange days. Perhaps. But the Narrator thinks he will not want to drink any of the water in the Town of Arkham when it does.

Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing -- and its influence was so insidious. ...I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.

NEXT:  What's with weird Wilbur Whateley? And what does it have to do with the Necronomicon? The hills are alive with the sound of "The Dunwich Horror"! Tell 'em Yog-Sothoth sent you!

H.P. Lovecraft Part 2: The Rats in the Walls

Last week we took a very brief look at the life and career of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the Grand-daddy of Cosmic Horror and Elder Godfather of the Necronomicon. From here we're going to look at a few of Lovecraft's best stories, as selected by S.T. Joshi in his collection The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. We're starting off with "The Rats in the Walls", a tale which Joshi calls "a nearly flawless example of the short story in its condensation, its narrative pacing, its thunderous climax, and its mingling of horror and poignancy."


"The Rats in the Walls" was an early story of Lovecraft's, published in Weird Tales, and considered by some critics to be the first story specifically written for the pulp market.
It's narrator, a man named Delapore, comes from a wealthy Virginia family whose founder had come to America in the 17th Century because of some un-named scandal. The records relating to this family secret were lost when the Delapore's house was burned during the Civil War, and so the narrator is ignorant of this secret when he goes to England to research his family history and buys the ancient family estate, Exham Priory.

The Priory is a ruin, having been left vacant for centuries. The locals will have nothing to do with it, and Delapore has to bring in outside contractors to renovate. The de la Poer family, it seems, has had a bad reputation going back to the reign of Henry III, and Delapore's ancestor, Walter de la Poer, murdered his entire family with the help of four servants after making a "shocking discovery" and then fled to America. That the locals do not blame Walter for this says something about the family's reputation. The narrator begins delving into his family's history with the help of Captain Edward Norrys, one of his son's army buddies whose family had owned the land on which Exham Priory stands.

Although the narrator claims to be repelled by the gruesome hints of his family's misdeeds, and is repelled by the one black sheep on the American side of his family, (a cousin who "went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War", one gets the sense that he has a morbid fascination with it all.

Shortly after moving into the renovated Priory, the narrator finds that the cats, of which he owns several, seemed to be highly agitated in the building. He notes in particular that the old black tom cat he brought with him from the States seems disturbed about something in the house.

I mention the cat in particular because it's an example of one facet of Lovecraft that many modern readers can find disturbing -- and not in the way he hoped they'd be disturbed. Lovecraft was raised as a child of privilege in an exclusively white upper-class New England home, and from that upbringing unpleasant bits of racism occasionally arise in his writing. His exposure to a more cosmopolitan environment when he lived in New York and widened his circle of friends mitigated these views to some extent; but at the same time, struggling to find work in a city flooded with immigrants helped intensify his dislike of foreigners.

We saw a hint of his racist attitudes in the narrator's comment about his cousin the voodoo priest. Here we get something a lot less subtle. Lovecraft names the narrator's black cat "Nigger Man".
I am sure Lovecraft was not intending to be offensive here. He named the cat in the story after his own cat. The cat has no connection to blacks in the story other than his color. I suspect that this was more of an unconscious, oblivious racism arising from his sheltered upbringing rather than an intentional demeaning of a race of people; I find his comment about the cousin who lived among the negroes more indicative of Lovecraft's attitudes about race than the name of the cat is. Still, there it is.

Whatever the cat's name he seems agitated about something. At first the narrator guesses that some sort of odor, undetectable by human senses, was emanating from the walls. Either that or the place is infested with rats; there was a local legend about swarms of rats pouring out of the Priory a couple months after Walter de la Poer's departure. But the workmen had found no evidence of rodents during the renovation project.

At the same time, the Narrator begins having hideous dreams:

I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with a his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing.

The cat's nocturnal agitation leads the narrator down to the Priory's sub-basement, a crypt constructed in Roman times and used to worship an eastern god named Attys associated with the goddess Cybele. The foundations of the temple were believed to have dated back to the time of Stonehenge. Now the narrator can plainly hear the sounds of rats scrabbling in the walls which are driving the cats crazy.

He summons his friend Norrys and together they investigate the crypt. The cat seems intent on something underneath the crypt's big stone altar, but the two men can't budge it. Here Lovecraft does something remarkable.

He has his hero do the sensible thing.

Instead of trying to break into whatever lies beneath the crypt on their own, as characters in a bad horror movie might, the Narrator and Norrys recruit several eminent authorities, experts in the fields of archaeology, history and psychic phenomena to help investigate the mystery. Lovecraft did not like the "idiot plot" where the protagonists have to act like idiots in order for the plot to work. His heroes are perfectly willing to bring in experts to aid in facing the Unknown.

Not that it helps the protagonist much.

The Narrator and his team of Eminent Men of Science uncover an ancient stairway beneath the prehistoric altar; stairs worn down by unknown millenia of footsteps. Scattered about the steps lie bones; mostly human, but many displaying sub-human qualities, suggesting that they have degenerated. Some of these sub-human skeletons seems to be quadrupeds. They also see the bones of many rats

At the bottom of the steps they find a huge grotto; the grotto from the narrator's dream. In that grotto are several structures from varied periods of history: a neolithic circle of standing stones, a Roman ruin, a Saxon house. One of the buildings contained the remains of pens where once dwelt the pale, flabby beasts of the narrator's dreams. Most ghastly, perhaps, is the most recent building, dating to the early English period, containing a butcher's shop and kitchen.

This is clearly the secret that William de la Poer discovered; an antediluvian cult whose unspeakable practices had continued down through the Romans and through the Narrator's own family.
The Narrator ventures beyond the buildings into the dark abyss deep in the grotto. He loses track of his companions and begins to rave. His free-association rantings spiral backwards in time, going from modern English, to Elizabethan, to Middle English, Latin, Gaelic and finally degenerating into inarticulate grunts.

He ends up in an insane asylum. Exham Priory has been dynamited to forever seal the secret beneath it.

When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it, They must know it was the rats, the slithering  scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep...

Even in the barred room in the asylum, he still hears the noises of the rats, the rats in the walls.

NEXT:  HPL's Wonderful World of the Colour Out of Space! Taste the Rainbow!  Fear the Rainbow!

H.P. Lovecraft: Part 1: Introduction

(Originally posted on Daily Kos)

I've never been a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft. Although I loved monster movies as a kid, that love didn't really translate over to horror fiction. I read "The Colour Out of Space" in high school and later borrowed a collection of Lovecraft stories from a friend who was a Cthulhu fan, but I didn't really get into them. I found Lovecraft's prose to be dense and his characters not terribly engaging. Most of all, I found Lovecraft's over-riding theme that Humanity is but a meaningless speck in a vast, uncaring (if not outright hostile) cosmos, unappealing.

But recently, I've been reading through a couple volumes of Lovecraft edited and annotated by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi that have been making me look at his work in a different light. I hadn't really thought of Lovecraft as a science fiction writer, but actually his Cosmic Horror springs as much from his understanding of Science as it does from a sense of the Supernatural, and Lovecraft took great pains to check his stories against the science of his day. Although I've read little of Lovecraft's work before, the truth is that all my life I've been reading stories that were influenced by him.


Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 to a prosperous upper-class family in Providence, Rhode Island. As a boy he had an intense love of reading and a burning curiosity about science. His favorite authors were the great Victorian authors of imaginative literature, like Arthur Machan, Lord Dunasy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. Raised to privilege, he tried to model himself as a gentleman. But with the death of his grandfather and the subsequent mis-management of his grandfather's estate, the family fortune dwindled. His family's lack of money and an illness which prevented him from finishing high school kept him from attending college. He found himself an unemployed gentleman with no marketable job skills, except his imagination.

What saved him was blogging. The Internet, of course, did not exist in 1914, but something else did: Amateur Publishing Associations. These early fanzines were publications in which amateur journalists could write about things that interested them and distribute them. Lovecraft had already earned a small reputation writing to the letters columns of magazines such as Argosy, and was invited to join once such APA.

This proved to be a perfect outlet for Lovecraft's self-expression because it allowed him to find an audience for his writing and make friends. The lack of pay did not bother him, because he felt that a gentleman ought not to stoop to writing for hire; he believed in Art for Art's Sake. The contact and correspondence with other views also allowed him to somewhat broaden the insular outlook his sheltered childhood had given him.

One of his friends was starting a humor magazine and asked Lovecraft to contribute a series of stories for it. The resulting serial, "Herbert West -- Reanimator", was a broad parody of the horror genre and Lovecraft detested it. Still, it was an entrance into the world of Commercial Fiction.

In 1923 the magazine Weird Tales was founded, considered by many critics to be the first Pulp Magazine. Lovecraft's circle of friends urged him to submit to it. Although many of his stories were published in the pulps, Lovecraft never considered himself a pulp writer. He disdained writers who cranked out verbiage by the yard according to formula and tried to hold himself to the artistic standards of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

By this time, Lovecraft's life had undergone dramatic upheavals. His mother had died after a lengthy illness. Sometime afterwards, he met a woman named Sonia H. Greene, a widow seven years his senior, at an amateur journalism convention. She persuaded him to move to New York and they married. Sonia was a businesswoman who owned a hat shop; but shortly after their marriage, the shop failed. She was able to find a new job in Cleveland, but her husband stayed in New York.
Life in the Big City did not suit Lovecraft. He found it threatening and impersonal. In addition, he had difficulty finding work. About the only good thing about his "exile", as he called it, was that it gave him greater contact with the friends he had made through his correspondence. His circle of friends became known as "The Kalem Club", because most of it's members had names starting with the letters "K", "L" or "M".

After a few years, his aunts in Providence invited him to move in with them. He welcomed the chance to escape the hated metropolis. The invitation did not extend to Sonia. She was, after all, in Trade, and the idea of her opening a shop in Providence was unthinkable. And the fact that she was a Russian Jew probably had a lot to do with it too. Lovecraft acceded to his aunt's demands. He rarely saw his wife any more anyway; now he saw her even less, and they divorced in 1929.

His return to Providence marked a burst of output, and here he wrote what are considered some of his best stories, including the stories associated with what later became known as the "Cthulhu Mythos". Many of these stories were set in upstate Massachusetts near a fictional town called Arkham where the fabled Miskatonic University was located and many referenced a nebulous body of lore found in that unspeakable tome, the Necronomicon.

Lovecraft is sometimes regarded as a man born in the wrong century, because of his outdated notions of gentility and his pre-Victorian mannerisms, but in many ways he was very much a man of his time, the early Twentieth Century. He had an abiding interest in science, but his philosophical interest led him to make connections that others might not have. For him the great revelation of Einstein's Theory of Relativity was not in physics, but in metaphysics; by demonstrating that Matter and Energy are interchangeable  Lovecraft felt that Einstein had demolished the ancient duality of Matter and Spirit. On a broader theme, mankind has known since Copernicus that he was not the Center of the Universe; but most people didn't think much about what that really, really meant. Lovecraft did.

Lovecraft died in 1937 of intestinal cancer. After his death, one of his friends August Derleth started a publishing company, Arkham House, to keep his works in print. He also appointed himself a sort of keeper of the flame, organizing and expanding upon Lovecraft's stories into a kind of continuity, codifying the amorphous, non-Euclidian lore of Old Ones and Elder Gods into organized pantheons. Derleth's "Cthulhu Mythos" is controversial among Lovecraft fans, but he did much to keep Lovecraft's stories alive.

Since Lovecraft wrote mostly shorter works, instead of discussing a single story of his, I'll be looking at a few of his short stories and a novella, which are collected in The Annotated H.P Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi. I intended to start on the first one this week, but my biographical sketch would up a bit long; so next week we'll find out what's with "The Rats in the Walls" and experience the terror of "The Colour Out of Space."

Day 23 of October Horror Month: John Carpenter's The Fog

Ghosts that haunt, beings coming out of the fog to kill! John Carpenter's work, THE FOG was imperfect, but at that same time, far beyond similar films in quality that had come out at the same time. The victims of a shipwreck at a point along the coast awaken 100 years to the day to wreak havok amongst the present and the living.

Brilliantly done I say.

Day 21 of October Horror Month: Joe Monks, Horror Writer

Asked why I am a friend of Joe Monks, I'd tell you that he is bright, funny, and has a personal manner about him that is forthright and straight to the point. But that isn't why I am offering up this recommendation to you. It isn't because I am impressed with his directing a film, though blind although I am impressed. It isn't because of anything personal.

It is because he writes horror very well. And his works might not be as popular as Stephen King or Anne Rice, but there is something that I cannot exactly explain about his work that is both similar to both King and Rice, but totally unique. I will try though, I think the word is verisimilitude, and I think that like King and Rice he makes horror work because it isn't all splatter and screams, it is brutal, but there is so much more there if you do more than just read. The unique aspect is found in the work with his own personal touch and additions of his personal style. When you go through his stories there is a foreboding and reality that might make you not want to read it again. But you will.

About his writing @
About his movie work @

Day 19 of October Horror Month: The Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.” H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips "H. P." Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Before Lovecraft and since, there have been many authors of the genres he wrote in. But, of them, few reached into the cold, unfathomed logic of evil and the response of the human mind to that evil, like Lovecraft. As such, his work in this horror month is perfectly apt. No author but Lovecraft has ever scared me like his words were able.

“I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. “ H.P. Lovecraft "Dagon" - Written Jul 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)



About H.P. Lovecraft @
About his work @

Day 10 of October Horror Month: The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman

The reason the comic book THE WALKING DEAD scores here as horror is that the world is infected/infested with zombies. However, Robert Kirkman's work is far greater than the greatest result that such a scenario can offer. His characters are real, suffering from a disaster of epic scale, and the catastrophe he writes about can be seen because rather than writing about heroes, he writes about real people facing horror.

It is soon to be on television screens everywhere.

Read more @

HORROR IS:

DEFINING HORROR
Noun horror (plural horrors)

1. An intense painful emotion of fear or repugnance.
2. An intense dislike or aversion; an abhorrence.
3. A literary genre, generally of a gothic character.
4. (The horrors, informal) An intense anxiety or a nervous depression.

Horror Fiction Encyclopedic entry

FROM PEOPLE WHO KNOW
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For me a horror film or horror novel involves fear, terror, and boundless fascination with some force that is unseen and difficult to define. Almost always, good horror novels and films have to do with the supernatural and the way that it menaces human beings, or works in their lives in mysterious ways. But not always. The remake of The Thing was an excellent horror movie and the source of the horror was an alien who could enter into and take over human form.

---- ANNE O’BRIEN RICE Amongst the finest Horror authors, and writers ever



Merriam Webster gives the following as the primary definition of horror:

Horror: noun. painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay.

While it's certainly all that, I've got a bit of a different take.

If you want to see ice hockey being played, you may trudge to the Nassau Coliseum (if you're an Islanders fan), or Madison Square Garden (for the arch-rival Rangers), to take in the game. At the arena, you'll see fast play. Passing and shooting. Scoring, on most nights. You'll see fans rise to their feet, emotions unchecked, when the home team hits the twine. You may see the crowd agonize if a favorite player or superstar goes down with an injury. You'll see collective tension as a member of the opposing team races in on a breakaway, and a collective sigh of relief if the goal tender makes a save and the puck squirts harmlessly away.

What does this have to do with horror? Go back to the Merriam Webster folks' summation.

Figured out my take?

Horror is the arena. Horror is Maple Leaf Gardens or the old Spectrum in Philadelphia. Horror is where you, as the creator or as the visitor, choose to go to attend the thrill-ride. Like buying tickets to a hockey game. Or like strapping on the blades and the helmet if you're fortunate enough to be on the proactive side of the equation.

When I write, I'm lacing up. I'm taping my stick and sharpening my skates and heading out to the ice to do my thing. And, my thing will be, in part, to bring the pain. To make the fans in the seats uncomfortable. To cause them to hold their collective breath as the bad guy threatens to lower the boom, before, perhaps, letting the goal tender bat away the shot.

Or perhaps letting it tear off his hand...glove and all.

Horror encompasses everything we have in the emotional toolbox of human existence. It's not just the painful and obscene and terrifying. It's the quiet dread, like a fan might feel before facing a favored opponent whose team leads the league and has all sorts of weapons on offense. It's the very rafters of the building. It's the seats upon which we spend all that time on the edge. Horror is all the negatives of our existence, put into black and white and stuffed down our throats, no different than the box scores in the paper the morning after a true whippin' at the hands of another team. Horror is the inescapable. You're there, in the building, trapped in your seat, or mucking about in the corners looking for a shift change. It can be exhilarating, it can be nerve-wracking, it can be heart-stopping. It does not have to be bloody...but sometimes it is. It doesn't have to be violent...but sometimes it is. It doesn't need to stay with you...but when it's good it does, following you around like the lingering afterimage burned into your retinas of a pass taken in full stride and fired into the net in the blink of an eye. Something you stop, examine well after its occurred, and can still find awe-inspiring, or blood-chilling.

Horror is our arena for taking people on the joyride. For others, the arena may be comedy or drama. For those of us who live and breathe the darkness; who seek to mold the unseen and unthinkable into our tools of the trade, horror brings us all together, tears aside our defenses and sends the lowest-common-denominator of our fears hurtling at us on an end-to-end rush.

That it breaks the rules, or occasionally locks the EXIT doors and pins us to our seats as the rafters threaten to crumble in upon us, is just part of the price of admission.

--- JOE MONKS Horror author, and Director



Horror is a feeling. People often want to define horror as the thing that CAUSES that feeling, but that's too vague. The causes for horror are too subjective. What horrifies me may not affect you the same way. Horror is personal.

It's more than simple fear. It's shock. It's revulsion. It's primal. It's so strong that we crave it until we actually experience it. Then we want to get as far away from it as humanly possible.

--- MICHAEL MAY writer and blogger



Like all genres, horror's main function is as a marketing tool: it lets book publishers and movie producers tell you succinctly, through the use of a universally recognised code, what sort of story you'll get if you buy a particular book or see a particular movie. It helps consumers to avoid the wrong kind of narrative surprise - the kind you'd get, say, if you were all keyed up for blood and gore and you found yourself reading a Mills & Boon novel.

Once you get into the specifics of the code, of course, you find that it's more subtle and variegated than you might expect. Horror narratives are distinguished by being - at least potentially - frightening or shocking or disturbing, but within that there are supernatural narratives, there's slasher fiction, there's the sort of cosmic horror of Lovecraft, genre fusions like urban fantasy, and monster movies that (at one extreme )may intentionally be far more cheesy than scary. there's no one, universal thing that both binds these stories together and separates them absolutely from other stories. It becomes a question of weighting and emphasis. Maybe you can still get away with saying that horror tells stories about things that are now or were once thought to be frightening: or maybe you should look at the narrative purpose of horror instead.

Brian Boyd's book "On the Origin of Stories" discusses the possibility that all narratives confer adaptive advantage - that they evolved because they're useful to our development ad our survival. If that's so, then one thing they do is certainly to allow us to test our responses to situations we've never encountered, so that arguably if we *do* then encounter them we don't freeze up from the sheer strangeness of the sensory input. Horror would be an extreme example of that process: it pre-adapts us to the most hideous and appalling events, toughening us mentally and emotionally.

Or maybe it's just fun to get pants-wettingly scared when there's nothing really at stake for us...
--- MIKE CAREY Writer of Hellblazer, Lucifer and far far more.



TWO HORROR AUTHORS in print have said

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. --- H.P. Lovecraft * Supernatural horror in Literature (1927)

Fear is an emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We're afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We're afraid to stick a knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unpluggin' it first. We're afraid of what the doctor may tell us when the physical exam is over; when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in midair. We're afraid that the oil may run out, that the good air will run out, the good water, the good life. When the daughter promised to be in by eleven and it's now quarter past twelve and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand, we sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson and look occasionally at the mute telephone and we feel the emotion that makes us blind, the emotion that makes a stealthy ruin of the thinking process.

--- Stephen King, Night Shift, foreword (1978)

And lastly Me

Horror is what humans do to each other, like war, terrorism, racism, and violence.

Lovecraft

Pronounced by the creator of the mythos as Khlûl'-hloo, H.P. LOVECRAFT’s work The Cthulhu Mythos, lingers today as one of the greatest concepts in genre fiction. The combination of unreal horrors and the response of unquestioned reality of the human mind is the subject of his writing. His universe is a terrible place, where there is little hope, and humanity cannot comprehend the world that used to be normal but now is inhabited by terrible things.

Lovecraft was a person unmoved by emotional things. He considered religious views to be abjectly pitiable, that is, he saw the need for religion as coming from a source of weak minds and fear. The result of his views about belief clearly underpins his views on the structure of the universe, the cosmology of this world, and his fictional mythic universe he created. The Gods and their minions are largely above even thinking about humans, for they are considered little more than talking meat. The world in which humans live is alien to those Gods, called the Elder Gods, because of the vast knowledge and view towards the universe that those Gods have. That is, humans live in a universe where beings far more powerful exist, who do not even pay attention to humanity beyond an annoyance, and upon earth we discover them and their schemes at our own risk and detriment.

The world created by Lovecraft was stark, brutal, but also, measured in how much the human mind could describe and endure before collapsing. Some reviewers and critics considered his use of language to be filled with archaic terms, hyperbole, and unconvincing characters. But in saying/writing/asserting so, those critics miss out on the great ability of Lovecraft to create horror. Since the action mostly happens off camera, and the narrator is the reader’s eyes to the event, the language evokes antiquity, the hyperbole reflects the narrator’s inability to comprehend exactly what is happening, and the characters themselves are portrayed far better than the critics suggest because unlike most fiction, the major characters in this are neither heroic, nor victims, but observers. While there are some heroes certainly, the event of the story within such a powerful setting is the reason for the trip, it is by no means due to the characters nor the genre nor language of the writer.

Why does it succeed? I believe that Lovecraft’s horror succeeds because it doesn’t rely upon formulaic patterns, however much it uses templates, archetypes, and devices. It uses stereotypes of human races, and gender, but it does so in the context of the work being considered. Lovecraft did believe in his race’s superiority, and it would be foolish to suggest otherwise, but as part of a early twentieth century piece of literature it is neither out of place nor should it be unexpected. I’d suggest it is regrettable, but I also think it is not something that should remove greatness from the memory and view towards Lovecraft’s work and legacy of intellectual creations.

I recommend the written works of H.P. Lovecraft, the critical works of S.T. JOSHI regarding H.P. Lovecraft, and hope you can get into the quality of the work without being distracted by the baggage of it.