Sean McBride's Blog, page 15

Blind Read Through; H.P. Lovecraft: The Very Old Folk

Frank Frazetta

“One seldom saw them; but a few times a year they sent down little yellow, squint-eyed messengers (who look like Scythians) to trade with merchants by means of gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous rites on the peaks, their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages.“

Welcome back for another Blind Read! This week will be in a slightly different format as the story we cover is a unique entry for Lovecraft as well.

The tale is told through the frame of an epistle recalling a dream; and undoubtedly it’s a recollection of a dream that Lovecraft himself had. There isn’t much to the story in and of itself – it tells of a group in a Roman Legion who are investigating a disturbance outside of a town – but the text itself informs us more as to the man and his incorporation of history than anything else.

The story begins with the salutation of the letter, “Dear Melmoth.”

Without a doubt this is a reference to Charles Maturin’s 1820 gothic novel “Melmoth the Wanderer” which centers around a man who sells his soul to the devil in trade for an extra 150 years of life. This is a common theme in Lovecraft – the pursuit of knowledge and the desire for an elongated life to gather such knowledge. Invariably the contract ends up corrupting the soulless character and they end up seeking Eldritch magic to make their lives even longer. In stories such as “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” we have a sample character of Curwen who has a coven of three. These men have done much the same as Malmoth, where they basically have denied their morals so they may live longer. One has to consider that the narrator of this tale, (whom signs in Latin) is indeed a contemporary of Melmoth and has partaken in a similar deal…perhaps directly relating to the circumstances of this story.

The narrator tells us that he thinks the dream which is the basis of this tale is a product of reading the Aeneid on Halloween, “This Virgilian diversion, together with the spectral thoughts incident to All Hallows’ Eve with its Witch-Sabbaths on the hills, produced in me last Monday night a Roman dream of such supernatural clearness and vividness, and such titanic adumbrations of hidden horror, that I verily believe I shall some day employ it in fiction.”

And clear and vivid it was. We have a six page, single paragraph story which details life in a Roman culture. The story is fairly simple, though with a few Lovecraft flourishes, but what I find fascinating about this is how much Lovecraft was enamored with two ancient civilizations. The Romans and the Egyptians.

Nearly every story of his has some kind of connection to one or the other of these societies, and I have to wonder if it’s because of their accumulation of knowledge. These two cultures were known as two of the most learned early dynasties, both with questionable roots hidden beneath their outward collective togetherness, in fact there is a passage here which brings this to light:

I, however, who seemed to be a close friend of Balbutius, had disagreed with him; averring that I had studied deeply in the black forbidden lore, and that I believed the very old folk capable of visiting amongst any nameless doom upon the town, which after all was a Roman settlement and contained a great number of our citizens.

This group was well within the borders of the empire, and yet still they had “mountain folk” who delved into deep forbidden lore. Obviously Lovecraft is speaking about these “very old folk” of the mountains praying to the Outer Gods or at least the Great Old Ones. This idea brings to mind some of the old cults of Crete and I have to wonder if the origination of the idea of the Eldritch Gods came from the Eleusinian Mysteries.

These Mysteries were one of those hidden cults within the Roman legions who were based on an old agrarian Grecian religion who prayed to Persephone. The Mysteries were heady rituals which often prayed directly to Hades and frequently divulged in psychotropic drugs so that members may have a “vision quest” to the underworld and back…the same journey as Persephone.

Yet another reason to believe this comes in the last line, “Of the fate of that cohort no record exists, but the town at least was saved – for encyclopedias tell of the survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish name of Pampelona...” Pampelona is known as a flourishing agricultural center and seeing as the Eleusinian Mysteries were based around Ag, one has to wonder…

The central dogma of the mysteries come from a dialog from Homer and echoed in Virgil. Could there be a correlation with Lovecraft reading Virgil then relating these Mysteries to modern day Salem, Mass. and witchdom?

“There were shocking dooms that might be called out of the hills on the Sabbaths; doom which ought not to exist within the territories of the Roman People; and to permit orgies of the kind known to prevail at Sabbaths would be but little in consonance with the customs of those whose forefathers…had executed so many Roman citizens in the practice of Bacchanalia – a matter kept ever in memory…graven upon bronze and set open to every eye.”

Lovecraft would be the one to tell you, as he had such a high, nearly narcissistic view of himself. Much like our narrator here: “That the danger to the town and inhabitants of Pompelo was a real one, I could not from my studies doubt.” He here’s the only one in a Roman Legion who has the knowledge that the “very old folk” in the hills are a danger to the town, and the record he puts forth here is that he is the main reason why the town was saved…not because he could defeat whatever was out there that the very old folk summoned…but because he knew well enough to avoid it.

This strange dichotomy, that Lovecraft was agoraphobic and xenophobic, but still he felt he was the only one that could help people, shines here. The narrator knows that there are strange things in the hills, and the only person with first hand knowledge of what could possibly be there cant deal with it, “Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we found only a crumpled heap weltering in a pool of blood…He had killed himself when the horses screamed.” The legion is faced with what the guide knew to be true:

“And the torches died out altogether, there remained above the stricken and shrieking cohort only the noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering peaks; hellish and red, and now silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal forms of such nameless beasts as had never a Phrygian priest or Campanian grandam whispered of in the wildest of furtive tales.“

This is the hidden allegory of which I’m not even Lovecraft was conscious of. The legion was heading off to confront a group of “very old folk” of unknown origin in the great mountains. The alien ranges fed into Lovecraft’s agoraphobia, and the unknown people, the people who had strange beliefs unknown and off-putting to him, fuel his xenophobia. The physical manifestation of these fears are the creatures which are so massive and aged that they block the stars. This fear of Lovecraft’s is so overwhelming that the terror it brings is Eldritch and Ancient and Unfathomable.

If you have any theories, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Join me next week as we delve into the mystery “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”

Blind Read Through; H.P. Lovecraft: The Rats in the Walls

“We spent the rest of the night in the brilliantly lighted study, nervously discussing what we should do next. The discovery that some vault deeper than the deepest known masonry of the Romans underlay this accursed pile – some vault unsuspected by the curious antiquarians of three centuries – would have been sufficient to excite us without any background of the sinister.”

Welcome back to another Blind Read! This week we dive down into the depths of Gothic Romanesque castles to find the truth behind The Rats in the Walls. This story is lauded as one of Lovecraft’s best of his first decade of writing, and though the imagery it elicits created one of the absolute best illustrations of Lovecraft’s work to date (in my opinion at least), the story is a bit plodding. It isn’t until the last five pages or so that we really get into the gruesome reality of the story and it’s understandable that it was turned down by so many publications early on (notably rejected by Argosy)… this is one vivid and gory tale.

Argosy the men’s magazine of the early 1900’s which Lovecraft published many of his works

I contend that the reason it’s said to be the best of his early work is because so much of what he strove to do early on was focus on detail to elucidate setting… in that case this story truly is one of the best he wrote early on. In addition to that factoid, we also have his early theme of family. Specifically revolving around genetic madness. So many of his stories have to do with the narrator slowly realizing that he’s odd, or at least his impulses are, but it’s not really his fault. It’s because there is some kind of hereditary defect which creates a strain of corruption.

This leads me to believe that there must have been something in his own life… some drive or impulse that he (Lovecraft) felt nagging at the back of his skull which he felt was directly a cause of his genes. Or could he have been of the mindset that all humans are inherently good and the only reason someone would turn bad, or even evil, is if they had some kind of genetic interference with their ancestors who in turn passed on the defect? I’m sure there is some Lovecraft scholar out there that knows the answer to this. If you do, leave a comment for discussion!

Anyway, lets get into the text…

We start off with place. The narrator tells us, “On July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his labors.” So the first sentence tells us that there’s some religious undertones to the story. The fact that the narrator is moving into a Priory gives us that immediate understanding of a vast array of history surrounding place…and religion in Lovecraft is rarely good. The reason the place is laid bare is in the next sentence:

“...a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorred line.”

This is our first indication that something is wrong. Why would our narrator call his genetic line abhorred? There’s a bit of contextualization, but we as readers are supposed to pick up that there is something not quite right with the family. However the narrator tells us right up front, “Had I suspected their nature, how gladly I would have left Exham Priory to it’s moss, bats, and cobwebs!”

The narrator gets flack for rebuilding this monument to the past, specifically from the people who live in the nearby town: “When the people could not forgive, perhaps, was that I had come to restore a symbol so abhorrent to them; for, rationally nor not, they viewed Exham Priory as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves.“

Why werewolves? Lycanthropy, in all of my forays into Lovecraft, has not been a trope that he is prone to focus on. There is primate mating, but no specific virus or disease which causes a person to become an animal. What is it about this, “prehistoric temple, a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge“?

Why had the locals “…represented my ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons beside whom Gilles de Retz and Marquis de Sade would seem veriest tyros, and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearances of villagers through several generations“?

Was it because he had an ancestor who “performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest.” or the “young Randolph Delapore of Carfax, who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War” or potentially even “…the hideous tale of Lady Mary de la Poer, who shortly after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was killed by him and his mother, both of the slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they confessed what they dared not repeat to the world.“

Well, for the purposes of this story and for the intention of our narrator, (dont forget the lycanthropy thread) it’s probably “…most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats – the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion – the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent.”

Here we have our explanation more than anything else. The titular rats have made their entrance into the story and they are causing all the havoc. So the priory was burned down. Years later, our narrator rebuilds the house and moves in. Obviously people are not happy, but why? Everything happened so far in the past and the real reason why people disliked his family was because of the rats…well that and the…werewolves.

Shortly after moving in, our narrator immediately finds that something isn’t right with the newly built house. “I told the man there must be some singular odour or emanation from the old stonework, imperceptible to human senses, but affecting the delicate organs of cats even through new woodwork. This I truly believed, and when the fellow suggested the presence of mice or rats, I mentioned that there had been no rats there for three thousand years…“

The narrator’s cat (who’s name I will not repeat here) was pawing at tapestries and walls where nothing presented itself. It was curious to our narrator, but nothing to be alramed about. I will, however, call your attention to the line, “imperceptable to human senses,” and remind you one more time of the strange mention of lycanthropy earlier in the story.

Later that night he has a dream which foreshadows everything else and gives a precursor to the great artwork of Michael Whelan: “I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineheard drove about his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing.“

Strange happenings continue into the next day and eventually our narrator finds a sub-basement. Too scared to proceed alone he calls on a friend, Captain Norrys, and beneath the Roman construction they found a vault:

“The Vault was very deep in the foundations of the priory, and undoubtedly far down on the face of the beetling limestone cliff overlooking the waste valley.”

The quote which opens this essay comes next, with our intrepid explorers trying to figure out what to do. They eventually decide to go through the sub-cellar and go into the vault…where nothing good could ever come.

“There now lay revealed such a horror as would have overwhelmed us had we not been prepared. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling on the flight of stone steps so prodigiously worn that it was little more than an inclined place at the centre, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones. Those which retained their collocation as skeletons shewed attitudes of panic fear, and over all were the marks of rodent gnawing. The skulls denoted nothing short of utter idiocy, cretinism, or primitive semi-apedom.”

What I find truly intriguing about this part of the story is that all of these men are following our narrator down into this pit without any kind of inclination as to what they’re doing. The only person to hear the critters was our narrator (“imperceptible to human senses“), so it must just be the high of the discovery itself that kept them going.

Beyond that we have another mention of “apedom.” This calls back to “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” where, again, one of Jermyn’s ancestors went to the Congo and wed a She-Ape who was considered a demi-god. Arthur Jermyn finds out that his ancestor is a white ape. Could our narrator here have much the same ancestral line? Or could there be a streak of rodent lycanthropy in his past?

Our group keeps going down until we get to this incredible passage. It is here that Lovecraft starts to really pour it on thick:

It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion. There were buildings and other architectural remains – in one terrified glace I saw a weird pattern of tumuli, a savage circle of monoliths, a low-domed Roman ruin, a sprawling Saxon pile, and an early English edifice of wood – but all these were dwarfed by the ghoulish spectacle presented by the general surface of the ground. For yards about the steps extended an insane tangle of human bones, or bones at least as human as those on the steps. Like a foamy sea they stretched, some fallen apart, but others wholly or partly articulated as skeletons; these latter invariably in postures of daemoniac frenzy, either fighting off some menace of clutching other forms with cannibal intent.

Michael Whelan did a number of illustrations for Lovecraft’s work

I’ve been dancing around it, but this has to be the inspiration for the classic Michael Whelan cover. This is the Lovecraft that I had always been looking for as a young man growing up. For me it was always about the imagery and the feel of what he was writing, rather than the actual themes that he was exploiting. I would sit and look at the Michael Whelan covers and marvel at their gothic surrealist nature, but whenever I picked Lovecraft up the language was too daunting for me to overcome.

Now that I’m older and more well read and capable of the mental bandwidth it takes to analyze his language, I felt it was the perfect time to dissect his works, which is why this blog came into being. Hopefully it will give others the ability to enjoy his stories, despite the language, or in some cases, maybe even because of it.

But I digress.

“It was the antechamber of hell, and poor Thornton fainted again when Trask told him that some skeleton things must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more generations.”

Our narrator had taken his fellows into some hellish nightmare with “prehistoric tumuli” and “skulls which were slightly more human than a gorilla’s…” All this in some massive vault underneath the priory and was so tumescent that “We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went…“

The group traverses this nightmare realm, built upon centuries of bodies and bones, until the narrator finally hears what he was dreading:

“It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute players.”

This is where the theories of the narrative diverge, as no one else in the party sees or hears the rats other than our narrator, who incidentally spouts off some phrase in Gaelic:

“That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat.“

Two theories jump out at me as the narrator is put away raving that he didn’t kill Captain Norrys, the rats did. The first is what I like to believe because of all the seeds planted earlier in the story. We had the mention of werewolves, which is merely a reference for us to understand that there is Lycanthropy in the possibility of this story, but instead of it being a werewolf, it’s a wererat.

The second notion is that the narrator is the only one to ever hear the rats in the walls; with the exception of his cat, but I’d contend that the cat was trying to say that something was there in the walls. Some vast power the cat was trying to get to. Cats have power in Lovecraft, just look at “The Cats of Ulthar.”

The unique take on this however, is that the narrator doesn’t take on the appearance of a rat, but the mental capacity of the rat. That’s the power of the lycanthrope here and that’s probably the storm of rats which happened all those years previous. What was built underneath the priory is a temple to the horrible god Nyarlathotep and the people tied to the priory, the people who practiced the rituals and built the horrible vault, were the people inflicted with the curse of the lycanthrope. That’s why so many of the townsfolk are scared of the priory…years ago it was a group of cannibals who imagined they were rats who stormed the village and killed and ate and ravaged. Thus when the narrator discovers the horrible truth, his genetic disposition is to turn feral and become one with the rat…poor Captain Norrys was just in the way as the rodent appetite took hold of the narrator.

We were also given a hint to the cannibalism earlier as well, which could also be considered part of Nyarlathotep’s influence.

The other theory is that everything was normal until they got to the vault and Nyarlathotep’s influence robbed the crew of their senses, but I this theory is all conjecture. The real evidence comes from what I’ve discussed prior and I tend to believe that Lovecraft puts in hints, buried underneath detail, and we just have to dig a bit to get to it.

This story touches on a number of tropes classic to Lovecraft as well. Genetic madness, place triggering memory and sanity, the haunted/possession trope, and architecture which develops a tone for the story. What I love about it (and probably why it’s lauded as his best) is that it puts all these themes together in one place, but doesn’t focus on any individual theme, which just enhances the overall feel of the whole story.

Let me know what you think in the comments! Were there mystical rats? Or was it really our narrator all along?

Join me next week as we dissect “The Very Old Folk”!

Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Cool Air

“For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his habitation – some 55 or 56 degrees Fahrenheit – was maintained by an absorbption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room below.“

Welcome back to another Blind Read! I’ve nearly read all of Lovecraft thus far (I think this series will only take me as far as March!) and I’ve seen many of his stories stated as influenced by Edgar Allen Poe; although Lovecraft himself states this story is more a homage to Arthur Machen, Poe bleeds off the page in this tale.

Because of this influence there is much lauding that this is a straight supernatural tale (no mythos involved). While it’s structure is exactly like “The Picture in the House” or “The Music of Erich Zann” (let’s be real, this story is the exact formula that many Lovecraft stories take), it’s hard to actually find the threat of Cosmic horror in this one, and for a casual reader, that thread would be lost. I contend that it’s there, however, as well as the influence of one of the most nefarious characters in all of Lovecraft’s Mythos.

Let’s get started shall we?

The first line, if you’ve read much Lovecraft, makes you roll your eyes:

“You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day.”

It’s a classic entrance to many of his stories, setting us up with what we’re supposed to be expecting while giving a mild redirection of the action and concurrently establishing the unreliable narrator.

The action is pretty straightforward. We have a man who is down on his luck, but at the same time extremely perfidious. He was looking for a place to live, but unable to find anywhere clean enough for him. “It soon developed that I had only a choice between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled.”

What I find so interesting and a little ridiculous about this revelation is this narrator cared more for the cleanliness of the place and didn’t seem to mind so much about the loud machines running and a smell coming from the room above him from “an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room below.”

The man in the room above, The Spanish Doctor Munoz, who “…most certainly was a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination.” but then in the very next paragraph describes Munoz as having a physiognomy with a “Moorish touch.” This is our first clue that something is off about the man (well, at least in Lovecraft’s world). I’ve read enough Lovecraft to know that if we have a man of mysterious background and has a tinge of pigment in his skin, he more than likely some kind of ulterior motives. He is either directly a bad actor, or he’s working with someone who is.

Our narrator goes to visit with him and immediately gets a bad feeling from him: “Nevertheless, as I saw Dr. Munoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which nothing in his aspect could justify.” We spend the next few paragraphs discussing Munoz, and how “...repugnance was soon replaced with admiration,” as we learn that Munoz has a strange affliction (which we learn a bit of in the opening quote of this essay). The admiration comes because Munoz, instead of letting his affliction run his life (there is a very good reason which we will find out later), he has designed a spectacular contraption to keep his temperature at 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

The narrator reviews some strange ministrations of which he has seen and been through and marvels at how well Munoz’s method works for him, despite the fact that “He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and Egyptian incense till his room smelled like the vault of a sepulchered Pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings.”

Woah there. Wait a minute, wait just one minute. Here now we have two aspects of this story now relating to the Mythos in general. The first is that Munoz has a bunch of bottles in his apartment, both on tables and hanging, the second was that he developed a taste for Egyptian Incense. We know that Munoz “...talked of death incessantly, but laughed hollowly when such things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently suggested.”

If you remember, in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” the essential “Saltes” of people were kept in bottles which Curwen used to bring them back from the dead and make them slaves. Likewise in “The Terrible Old Man” similar bottles were hung about the old sailors house. Having these bottles is a sure sign that Munoz has had some kind of witchcraft in his past…or he is regularly practicing it.

Then we move onto the Egyptian Incense and which is a sly reference to the most nefarious being in Lovecraft’s oeuvre… Nyarlathotep. A cosmic entity who posed as an Egyptian Pharaoh who was heavily scented with said olfaction.

Rendition of Nyarlathotep without his masks…

The majority of the Gods in the Mythos aren’t evil. They are just so all powerful and other-worldy that they tend to drive people insane… or smash them as a human would a bug. Nyarlathotep is different. Nyarlathotep is one of those absolute evil beings who would take over the world given the chance. In fact the prose poem Lovecraft wrote about this being shows just how terrible he really is.. Knowing that, everytime Lovecraft makes this kind of reference…to Egypt, Pharoahs, or spices, it immediately calls back to Nyarlathotep.

So what is Munoz doing? What is his connection? Well, we’re about to find out.

Dr. Munoz’s contraption to keep the room cool and to keep him healthy breaks. Our narrator runs out to find parts to replace it, while he has a young man run for ice to keep Munoz chilled.

The narrator comes back to find “The house was in utter turmoil, and above the shatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads of their rosaries as they caught the odour from beneath the doctor’s closed door.“

The young man who was fetching ice had fled after the second load was brought in. He left screaming. Our narrator enters and finds “A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door, and thence the desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated.”

On the desk is a letter which ends our little tale of horror, but rather than have me describe it, you should read it for yourself:

“The end…is here. No more ice – the man looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can’t last. I fancy you know – what I said about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was a good theory, but couldn’t keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He couldn’t stand what he had to do – he had to get me in a strange, dark place when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never would work again. It had to be done my way – artificial preservation – for you see I dies that time eighteen years ago.”

Join me next week as we analyze “The Rats in the Walls.”

Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; In the Vault

“As his hammer blows began to fall, the horse outside whinnied in a tone which may have been encouraging and may have been mocking. In either case it would have been appropriate; for the unexpected tenacity of the easy-looking brickwork was surely a sardonic commentary on the vanity of mortal hopes, and the use of a task whose performance deserved every possible stimulus.”

Welcome back to another Blind Read! This week we’re covering a story with all the mental veracity of Ambrose Bierce coupled with the Gothic beauty of Edgar Allan Poe. We have a very supernatural tale (a slight divergence from Lovecraft’s norm) which is perfect for this post because of the overtones matching Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (well, that is as perfect as any Lovecraft tale could be for Christmas!), because of it’s themes of repentance, and the almost anthropomorphizing of the horse in the story.

Well…It’s Christmas! Let’s get started!

Lovecraft let’s you know the tone right from the get go: “Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy.”

We follow George Birch, the aforementioned undertaker in this tale, but Lovecraft does something unique right from the get go. He describes what happens in the story, holding back only the denouement, letting the reader’s mind run wild.

“It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disasterous mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtably true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last.”

So Birch, get’s locked in a tomb by accident and something happens to him there. Sure. My mind immedaitly turns to tales much like “The Tomb” where we get some of the strange Lovecraftian otherworldliness and I began trying to figure out what type of story I was getting my self into…was it a dreamlands? No, the tone was too straightforward. lovecraft has a tendency to give a slightly whimsical, or mystical cadence to his Dream Lands stories… so this must be a Mythos story… right?

Well the tone of this story is different from even those stories. Much like we saw last week, Lovecraft tends to spend quite a bit of time on setting the scene, because the power in much of the magic in “his world” comes from words and smells and architecture. This story spends pages talking about Birch himself. , “I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring… The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness.”

So Birch is a poor Scrooge, or Grinch like character. He is “bucolic” and a grouch, but what’s more he’s lazy. “Birch decided that he would begin the next day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also nearby; but actually postponed the matter for three days…” and adding to his procrastination: “He had, indeed, made that coffin for Matthew Fenner; but had cast it aside at last as too awkward and flimsy, in a fit of curious sentimentality aroused by recalling how kindly and generous the little old man had been to him during his bankruptcy five years before.” so the diminutive Fenner got one of the better coffins, while Asaph Sawyer who was not “a loveable man” got the terrible cast off coffin that Fenner was supposed to have received …all because Birch was just too lazy to build the correct sized coffin for Sawyer.

Fast forward to Birch inside the tomb, we get another indication of his laziness: “For the long-neglected latch was obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own oversight.”

Birch, through his own laziness has become a victim of his own negligence. Here is the first indication of the Scrooge theme, Birch is sowing his own oats. He created a situation where he has now trapped himself because he couldn’t bother with doing a little work. The “Ghosts” of his past are coming back to haunt him here, but this is just the beginning.

He cant get the door opened, so he decides to take the morbid child approach and stack all the caskets in the tomb up like some sort of macabre ladder: And so the prisoner toiled in the twilight, heaving the unresponsive remnants of mortality with little ceremony as his miniature Tower of Babel rose course by course.”

We get the quote which opens the essay where Birch decides that he wants to chizel his way out of an aperture at the apex of his corpse stair, but …”As he remounted the splitting coffins he felt his weight very poignantly; especially when, upon reaching the topmost one, he heard that aggravated crackle which bespeaks the wholesale rending of wood.”

Dalton Trumbo’s masterpiece

Because of his carelessness in constructing the coffins, he was now standing upon a tower of breaking timber and corpses, until “...no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not care to imagine.” That line right there gave publishers a pause. Lovecraft very rarely goes for the gross out, focusing instead on much higher end psychological scare tactics. Here he went full “Johnny Got his Gun” (there is a terrible scene where the main character gets caught in barbed wire and falls on and through a rotten and fetid corpse…this scene and story pales in comparison to the horror that Dalton Trumbo creates in that novel) as Birch’s feet go into the corpse of Asaph Sawyer.

This being a Lovecraft tale you would expect something strange to happen, something unexpected, something otherworldly, but this story is the exception to the rule. This story is a straight supernatural tale, and because of it’s difference it comes off all the stronger because of it. The corpse grabs his leg.

“In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless captivity. Horrible pains, as of savage wounds, shot through his calves; and in his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with an unquenchable materialism that suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking wooden box.”

I felt the same way. I didn’t believe that Lovecraft would take a flat out supernatural approach, but I am kept on my toes. Birch gets free and runs away, liping along until he gets to ghis doctor. Once inspected and unloads his story off his conscience, Dr. Davis is horrified because he comes to understand exactly what happened.

Birch gave Sawyer Matthew Fenner’s coffin because Fenner’s coffin was poorly made and Sawyer’s coffin was well constructed. Dr. Davis comes to the realization that Fenner is extremely short, whereas Sawyer is extremely tall. Dr. Davis goes to the tomb and finds the corpse and finds the ultimate betrayal of the undertaker…

“The skull turned my stomach, but the other was worse – those ankles cut neraly off to fit Matt Fenner’s cast-aside coffin!”

The final nail in the coffin!

Birch actually cut off Sawyer’s feet to make sure he fit in the coffin and Davis verified that the teeth markes on Birch’s ankle were indeed from the rotten teeth of Sawyer.

To me this is the ghost coming down to show Scrooge the right path. This was the wake up call to stop being lazy and to start doing right by people. Whether you believe that Birch’s foot just happened to land on the corpse’s mouth, or that the corpse animated itself out of anger at it’s slight beyond the grave, this was Birch’s call, much like Scrooge being showed his possible future.

To me the story is perfect for the season (at least as perfect a story as Lovecraft can get), and I hope you all had a blast reading it!

Join me next week as we evaluate “Cold Air”

Post Script:

To me these Post Scripts have started to become a little bit of an inside joke, but truly they are all here just to get one last point across which doesn’t quite fit into the narrative of the essay. Here I would love to talk a little about the anthropomorphosizing of Birch’s horse.

The entire story the horse felt like something Walt Disney would create. The horse was tryign to tell Birch what he was doing was a mistake. You could almost feel the horse rolling it’s eyes at the laxy way Birch held the reigns. To me the horse was the true indicator that we were in a Lovecraft story. Doesn’t make sense does it? Let me explain.

Normally we would have an unreliable narrator teloing us a story. At some point in the story we get information that doesn’t quite add up right, but Lovecraft forcuses so much on subtlety that we wil never get an outright statement from the narrator saying something was off. We just need to infer based upon the surroundings.

In this story everything is fairly normal, except for the horse (a kind of macabre parrallel to The Grinch’s dog Max). The horse gives indication at every stage that Birch isn’t doing the right things with it’s outragous personality.

When Birch finally gets to teh tomb the horse neighs and stamps and paws, and soon leaves Birch to his fate as the man ventures in. It isn’t until this point that the narrator can take leave of reality. It isn’t until the horse leaves that we start to get something far beyond normal, and the horse doesn’t leave until the very end of the story.

The Key-master and Gatekeeper for Gozer the Gozarian

In every tale Lovecraft tells he has a gatekeeper or a key-master. If they cause a rift they are a key-master, if they stop a rift from happening they are a gatekeeper. It is these characters, human or not, that keep things normal. In this story we dont know for sure if what happened to Birch was supernatural or not, but what leaves that open for question is that the gatekeeper is gone. It’s once this horse leaves that the crazy happens, and if you’ll notice…all of Lovecraft happens in the shadows when you’ve turned to look at something in the light.

Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Picture in the House

“As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten.”

Welcome back to another Blind Read! With heavy influences from Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft takes this story to a very dark place, creating an almost grim dark form of his predecessor. In addition to it’s extremely dark nature this tale is apparently the first mention of the Miskatonic Valley and potentially even the first glimpse of Arkham as Lovecraft develops the eponymous Lovecraft Country. We also get echoes and seeds of some other stories which would come about later and perhaps the introduction of a different favorite character; but make no mistake; this story is a wonderfully detailed terror.

This story is all about the details which tends to happen in Lovecraft periodically a ten page story about a single event. He tends to elucidate to such a degree as to give the reader a sense of being there. The detail is spectacular which lends to the extremely visceral denouement.

Our narrator begins by telling us of his search, that many searchers (he’s a genealogist) “haunt strange, far places…” like Egypt, “Rhine castles” and “forgotten cities in Asia.” But we find that our narrator has found a newer venue, a place where he can find ancient knowledge and deep lines of genealogy:

“But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.”

You see what I mean by detail? But what I find most interesting about this passage is “a new thrill“. This is Lovecraft stating that you’ll not find the run of the mill horrors here. This is a whole new level of terror. This is an entirely unique horror. This new thrill is Lovecraftian Cosmic horror.

We find the “Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.” and “In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen.” who have “dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage.“

Here he sets up these people as being human, but slightly separate from the normal, run of the mill, person. We see that, “Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed.”

I find it odd that Lovecraft, the wordsmith that he was, chose to use the word “mortals” instead of humans. This seems to indicate to me that there is a shift in breeding and evolution (which makes sense seeing as the narrator is a genealogist), kind of like what happened to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. These people, for all intents and purposes, are no longer human, but another line of genetics who are merely “mortal.”

Our narrator finds the house he’s looking for. “Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travelers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biased me against places of this kind.” never-the-less our narrator approaches and “...instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did a trepidation I could scarcely explain.”

The narrator decides that the house must be occupied, so he enters and we get a grand description of the place adding to the ambience of the narrative, and just before we get the quote that opens this essay we find out that “Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date.”

So if the owner of the building which is still inhabited, is either stuck in the past metaphorically, or they are preternaturally old and are hiding away from the species that they used to be.

The Regnum Congo

While looking around the narrator comes across a book…Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo, which is a real account of a Italian traveler in the Congo region. The narrator flips through the book surprised and terrified at the illustrations which show beings which are half ape alongside others that are normal humans. This is either a call back or a precursor to “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” as in that story we find that a descendant of Arthur goes into the Congo and claims a wife…who turns out to be one of these partially white apelike creatures. In fact throughout Lovecraft we can see indications of these creatures and so far I am undecided as to whether they have a direct correlation to the ancient magics that take place in the alternate universe of Lovecraft, or they are just an accidental creation and have no real stake in anything that’s happening in the overall cosmic reality. It’s an interesting question and I’m sure that I wont ever truly have an answer to it, but I hope to glean a little more insight as I get through the rest of the stories.

While our narrator is reviewing the terrible “...Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques.” we hear “the unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead.” and the old tenant of the abode appears, who “seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect…But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive.“

The man greets our narrator calmly for someone who just experienced a B and E and the two talk about the book for the majority of the remainder of the story… that is until “The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men – the limbs and quarters hanging on the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.”

Yikes! Could it be there’s a reason the host didn’t balk at seeing a stranger in his house?

A storm brews outside which our narrator doesn’t notice immediately because the intensity of the storm increases as the fervor of the host’s grotesque desires bubble to the surface. As “I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to it’s foundations, but the whisperer (the host) seemed not to notice.”

The tenant is caught in zeal over the depictions of the cannibalism, and in fact soon tells our narrator “Queer haow a cravin’ gits a holt on ye- As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I coudn’t raise nor buy-” and finished by telling our narrator “They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ‘twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same.“

The storm ravages outside as droplets begin to fall upon the opened book, but we soon come to realize that “rain is not red.” Our narrator looks up and “...beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it.”

Our narrator has stumbled into the domicile of a cannibal who has been eating people for hundreds of years to keep himself alive, when “a moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting the accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.”

There is a bit to unravel here and it’s all a little outside the normal realm of Lovecraft. The first aspect is the capitalization of “Gawd” by the host. The general usage of God versus god, is that when the capitalization is used in this context the speaker believes in this higher being, when it isn’t… he doesn’t. By all indications the narrator believes as well. What makes this particularly interesting is that Lovecraft was a notorious atheist, but he still includes divine intervention of the “Thunderbolt” at the end of the story. The whole thing feels more like a really dark Hawthorne tale rather than a Lovecraft story because of these influences. I half wonder if that was the intention because of the detail in the opening salvo of the story. It sounds remarkably similar in tone and description as the openings of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The House of Seven Gables.”

Could there be some latent subconscious religion spattered in here, or is this intentional on Lovecraft’s part?

After working on this project for as long as I have, I’d wager that he was working to emulate, not to infuse religion. That wasn’t something he really even cared to follow through with, and the capitalizations are not there in his other works. The only possible explanation is that the host was speaking of some cosmic being (Azathoth?) as a higher being, not the Roman-Catholic Yahweh.

What do you think?

Join me next week as we cover “Into the Vault!”

Post Script: I mentioned in the introduction that there was the possible inclusion of a favorite character? I think there is a distinct possibility that the tenant is the “Terrible Old Man.” We know that at one point the Terrible Old Man came from Arkham or at least passed through it, and there is mention of the works of Cotton Mather of Salem Mass. fame in the house. We also know that the Terrible Old Man was at one point in Salem (possibly during Joseph Curwen’s time there). We also know that the Terrible Old Man is a sea captain who went all across the globe before finally settling down in Kingsport, so it is possible he gained some of this knowledge or info from his time at sea (possibly sailing into the Congo?).

Whether these connections are there or not, this is one of the most fun aspects of this project. Looking for these connections. See you next week!

The Dark Ride

Inspired by Vincent Price movies of the 50s and 60s

“Hello.  I’m Vincent Price, and you’re invited to my Carnival this evening.  So far the ghosts have only murdered seven people.  So won’t you come to make it 8?  You’ll find creatures beyond imagination, murderers, ghouls, vampires and other…blood sucking things.  You’d better hurry, your ticket…expires…at midnight.  Your Carnival is at Hubert’s Grove.”

                Oscar pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it, as if its screen would divulge more information. 

                The call’s number was (000)000-0000, so Oscar didn’t answer.  He turned to Olivia.

                “What is it babe?”

                “I just go this really weird call,” he held the phone out to her.  “Listen to the message.”  He half thought it was a joke.  Olivia loved that horror shit.  Oscar didn’t have a clue who Vincent Price was, but he was sure Olivia would.  Besides that, every year at Halloween she begged Oscar to take her to Hubert’s Grove.  It was one of those places where they build a haunted maze in the woods and then charge a crazy admission price to go in and have idiots in costumes jump out at you. 

                He realized he made a mistake handing the phone over a second before he did it.

                “OH MY GOD WE HAVE TO GO!”  Olivia squealed when she finished the message.

“Babe…”Oscar started.

“No!  That was really Vincent Price’s voice!  They must have spliced it from old movies!”

“Babe…” Oscar repeated.

She looked at him, then firmly planted a fist on her hip.  “You wanna get lucky tonight, you’re taking me.”

A few minutes later they were in the car on the way to Hubert’s Grove.

The marquee said “Carnival of Souls” and they parked right in front of it.  The carnival was desolate and run down.  There were no people about and the tarp which encompassed the tents was stained and torn.  Dust blew on a hidden zephyr through the central concourse where a solo ticket booth stood.  Behind the glass of the booth was an old mechanical Zoltar, which had an abyssal stare and teeth that were just a little too white.

The full moon was the only illumination in the carnival, but it was enough to show the way to through the park.  Directly on the other side of the carnival was an old house of horrors dark ride with the title “The Tingler” and a large cutout of Vincent Price’s head under the arched name.

“Oh my God this is spectacular!”  Olivia screamed and ran to the Zoltar ticket booth.

“For access to the carnival please place your tickets in the slot below,” the mechanical soothsayer intoned.

“Ah, damn babe, I don’t know about this,” Oscar said.  “This thing ‘aint looking like it’s been running for years.”

“Oh stop it, you big baby!  I seen the squash festival here last week,” Olivia came back at him.

Oscar looked up to the rusty ferris wheel.  “That enough time to build all this stuff?”

                “Totally!  They build that shit in a few hours.  Where are the tickets?”  She asked.

                “Serious?  You were there, we ‘aint got no tickets.  We just got that phone call.”

                A bright flash came from Zoltar’s eyes that briefly blinded them before Vincent Price’s dulcet tones echoed through its voice box.

                “Welcome to your carnival.  We accept your ticket,” The voice paused and a loud boom echoed over the grounds followed by a shower of sparks.  There was a soft baby’s cry and the rides burst to life.  Oscar was sure he could still hear the baby’s lament behind the screeching of rusted gears, but he was distracted by the voice coming from the Ticket Booth.

                “Your first tickets are for “The Tingler,” so named because of the parasite in your spine that gives you tingles every time you’re frightened.  If you can survive The Tingler you will receive your ticket to the next attraction at the conclusion of the dark ride.”

                Two tickets popped out of a metal disc at waist height on the Ticket Booth.  The voice laughed a terrifying but familiar guffaw before it faded to the ambiance of the grinding gears and soft baby cry.

                “This is so fucking cool,” Olivia said already running toward the haunted house dark ride.

                Oscar looked down at his arms and could see goose flesh and hair standing on end.

                “Hold up!”  He said running after her.

                The Tingler had a long ramp with switchbacks leading up to the entrance, where a track carried cars barely large enough for two people to sit in.  Olivia jumped in one of the cars and slid to the side gently slapping the seat next to her, beckoning Oscar to join her.  Her smile hit each ear.  He squeezed in and lowered the safety bar to cover their laps.

                “The more scared you are, the larger the Tingler grows,” a voice projected from the car’s speakers behind their head.

                The car sped up, then jerkily slowed and slammed a 90 degree turn into the attraction, snapping their heads to the side.  Oscar let out a little “uh” as they were suddenly faced with a realistic wax figure on a hydraulic piston shooting out at their car.  With a hiss, the piston moved the figure away from the car, revealing how fake the set up was.  It was dark inside of the first room, which looked like a laboratory with faint glowing red lights.  There were dollar store props, including rubber bats hanging from the ceiling with twine.  There were other wax figurines in the room as well, all in various poses of horror but none of them moving.  On what looked to be an operating table was a wax figure working on what looked to be a giant rubber centipede.

                “Your first experience of the Tingler is past!  Don’t let it get too strong or it could take over!”  Vincent Price’s voice echoed in their ears.

                The car moved slowly through the room before snapping again to the left.  A sound track of a scream blasted from the speakers behind their heads and the wax figure of a woman with long nails and sharp teeth jumped out at them.  Oscar jumped, but Olivia squealed in delight.  The hiss sounded and the hydraulics brought the wax doll back into the shadows.

                The next scene had even worse décor.  There were more wax dolls in a scene that looked like a scientist fighting off vampire, but the supposed house they were in was just canvas that covered the walls with a painted scene and a jarring green lightbulb which lit the room from the ceiling.  Vampires were painted on the canvas to look like they were swarming the painted windows and there was a Paper Mache dog attached to a metal pole moving back and forth as though it was attacking one of the vampires.  The wax figures looked fairly realistic, though the running wax was evident.  Everything else looked like it was produced for an eight year old’s diorama.

                “Oh, come on!  This is…ooof!” Oscar started as the car made another sharp turn.

                This time he closed his eyes as to not get the jump scare but volume of the scream in the speaker system still made him jump.

                This room was another painted canvas, however this one depicted a large Victorian mansion.  There was a wax figure with a knife attached to a pneumatic track in the middle of the room.  It was moving back and forth so that every time it moved forward it stabbed another wax figure.

                “The only way to stop the Tingler from taking over,” the voice echoed behind their heads again, “is to kill the host!”

                Oscar rolled his eyes and searched for more fake decorations when he saw something strange.  The wax figure getting stabbed was missing one of its eyes and beneath the wax veneer was a real eye, open wide and staring at him.  Olivia was laughing beside him.

                “Yo, what the fuck?”  He said as the car jerked them around another corner.

                Another figure jumped out at them, but this one had a knife in its hand.  The knife slid into his shoulder and his cry of pain echoed the tinny voice over the speaker.

                With a hydraulic hiss the wax figure moved backwards.  As it did the figure’s the head slumped.

                “Oscar?”  Olivia wasn’t laughing anymore.

                The figure that jumped out at them wasn’t wax.  It was a dead woman with her hands tied together around the knife.  She had enough wax coating her that it made her body slightly stiff.

                The room they entered was entirely metal illuminated by a red light.  A figure hunched over a large cauldron in the corner of the room.  It was facing away from them, but it was tall and gaunt and absolutely alive.

                “The Tingler gets stronger!  We must kill its source before it gets out of control!”  The voice echoed behind them.  There was a click and a grinding noise coming from the speakers as if a record had completed and continued to spin on its pin.

                “Oscar?”  Fear laced Olivia’s voice.

                Oscar tried to turn to see what made the noise and felt a needle slide into the back of his neck.

                “Oww!”  Olivia wailed.

                Immediately Oscar’s vision blurred.

                The figure leaning over the cauldron turned around.  It was wearing a melting wax mask and underneath Oscar thought he saw burnt skin.

                “Welcome to your carnival,” the figure said.  “Where you’ll be an attraction for all eternity.” 

                The figure pulled a lever and the last thing Oscar saw was a body falling from the ceiling into the cauldron of wax.

The Spot

I’m taking the week off from the Blind Read series to catch up on work, so I’ll leave you with a Lovecraft inspired story. Here’s a horror short based in the madness of the mind…

THE SPOT

The black spot was still there.  How many times have I scrubbed that damn thing?  It’s always there, in the corner, next to the refrigerator, just above the counter in the kitchen.  I used to put my knife block there to cover it.  It was a large spot, but there were a lot of knifes in the set.  It’s such an embarrassing spot.  It makes me feel like people would look at it and think I didn’t clean.  I mean, how can I ever have anyone over?

Who am I kidding?  It’s not like I know anyone who would come over.  Not like I have any friends.  I can’t have friends.  They might want to come over and then they would see the spot and then they would judge me.  I have to get rid of it.  Cleaning doesn’t seem to help, so I decide that the best thing that I can do is cut it out.  Cut it out of the wall, cut it out of my life. 

Ah it worked!  I got it out of the wall!  I went to the hardware store and I bought a drill and cut the embarrassing stain out of the wall.  I bought drywall to cover it up and repainted it.  It finally looks like the rest of the wall!  I can be a normal person now.  I can invite people over, I can have friends.  This is the best day of my life!

The best day followed by the worst day.  When I woke up today, I found a new spot and it’s larger than the last one.  It’s in my living room this time.  It’s large and ugly.  It looks kind of black, but if you get closer to it, it almost looks brown.  Where are these stains coming from?  I have to go get the drill. 

That one was much harder to get out.  It ended up being a much larger hole than I anticipated.  I started to cut and red liquid came out from the wall.  For a moment I thought it was blood.  It can’t be blood.  Walls don’t bleed.  But the liquid spread the stain.  I had to cut out half of the wall.  I didn’t have enough dry wall to cover it the spot I cut so I had to go back to the hardware store.  The clerks there are friendly.  Maybe they could be my friends.  Maybe.  But I have to get that spot out of the wall first.

It’s gotten worse.  There is a human sized spot in my room.  It’s deep brown.  I’m not fooled by thinking its black anymore.  The moment I put the drill to it, blood comes out.  I know, I know.  It can’t be blood, because walls don’t bleed.  But it really seems like it.  What’s even stranger is that when I cut, the house seems to groan.  You know how old houses shift and they make noises?  Creaks, cracks, pops?  That’s what happens when I cut.  I wish I had a friend who could come over and tell me that it’s just the creaks in the house.  That it’s not something more strange.  That it’s not blood.

I cut into the wall.  I ignore the wall’s cries. I ignore the blood.  Behind the drywall is something I can’t ignore though.  The house has bones.  Bloody bones in the walls.  Bones where studs should be. 

I got back to the hardware store.  I need to get more dry wall.  I need to get more paint.  I’m so embarrassed though.  They are nice to me there.  I think they can be friends, but something has changed now.  It is as though they know about my house, with its blood and its bones. They ask me why I’m wearing sunglasses and a hat and a large trench coat with the collar turned up.  They say it’s good to see me, but I can tell that they’re lying.

I put up the drywall when I got home.  I spackled it perfectly, then painted it over.  No one would ever guess that there are bones and blood behind the wall. 

There’s another spot.  Another one!  It’s in the shower.  The brown spot almost makes it look like the wall is skin.  Like it has texture.  Like it has movement.  I repeat the process.  I ignore the groans.  I ignore the blood.  I ignore the bones.  I act like nothing is there.  I act like I have a normal house.  I act like I’m normal.

There’s a new spot today.  I don’t know how they keep appearing.  I know how to fix it.  I’ve done it so many times before.  I know I just need to do it again.  This must be what my life is.  Just getting rid of these dark spots.  Erasing anything that doesn’t seem normal.  I will make sure that people think I’m normal.

I grab the drill.  I run my hand over the spot.  I wonder how I’m going to find the materials to fix the hole I create as I cut out this abnormality.  I put the drill to my chest.  Once I cut this spot out of me, I’ll be normal.  I’ll able to have friends. 

Blind Read Series: H.P. Lovecraft; The Music of Erich Zann

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“On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German voil-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.”

Welcome back to another Blind Read! I cannot tell you how excited I am to be discussing this short story! It is without a doubt my most favorite Lovecraft story to date, filled with creepy ambiance (brimming with classic, though augmented, Lovecraftian tropes) and a terrifying climax . This one is not to be missed!

We start, yet again, with our classic unreliable narrator. Everything seems above board with this gentleman except for the fact that he lived in an apartment on a road that he has since been unable to find. We can brush off the absurdism and take that as Lovecraftian madness, or we can take this story at just face value…an entertaining fiction the narrator weaves for us.

“I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care,” the narrator tells us, “yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil.” We are transported to France, a brand new locale for a Lovecraft story. It’s a nice changeup from our New England home base, because we can now see that these types of events (which we saw on a much broader scale in The Call of Cthulhu) happen around the globe.

The narrator tells us that the French (possibly Parisian) alley “..was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually.” It also stank: “The river was…odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelt elsewhere...” These things in and of themselves are not indicators to anything particularly nefarious. Remember that Lovecraft was writing in the early 20th century and much of the poorer areas of the world had to deal with these types of issues. We were neck deep in an industrial revolution and laws were slim. There were factories which spouted smoke and exhaust with abandon, and rivers were usually run off for toilets. What Lovecraft is doing is just setting up the scene, much like he does in “The Dunwich Horror” by creating a space where the poorer people of the world deal with this kind of degradation that the rich never has to condescend to understand. These types of things just happen with more frequency in the poor areas because the poor doesn’t have any power or recourse to deal with them. So the rich can live in a sunny and perfumed estate, and the poor people have to deal with their smoggy and “odorous” runoff.

The narrator “had never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil.” It was “closed off to vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall.”

The Rue d’Auseil is cut off from the world. It is dirty and difficult to access, but so far we’ve not seen anything really out of the ordinary. Until this sentence:

“The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch...”

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This is where we get Lovecraftian. Much like in “Dreams in the Witch House” architecture plays a large part in the mythos. Strange, non-Euclidean geometry in structures is an indication that it’s a location for a portal to the outside world. These types of places in Lovecraftian fiction are used as a terminus of power. The off-putting architecture means that magic is stronger in the rue d’Auseil and could potentially be a locus of summoning Elder beings.

After getting the description of the building and finding out that our narrator gains a flat on the fifth floor, we get the quote which opens this essay…our introduction to Erich Zann and what our narrator means when he calls Zann “dumb” is just a sobriquet for mute, a matter of much importance for the denouement of the story.

The narrator gains access to Zann’s apartment by being nice, and Zann plays him some music: “He did not employ the music-rack, but offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising…They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.”

So now we have evidence of not only architecture being odd and off-putting, but now music which is discordant. I was riveted when Lovecraft jumped into this realm. Music is known to open one’s mind, to help with memory, to assist with focus, even to repair parts of the brain. I am, in fact, listening to music right now as I write this. If we consider the power music can hold and that it can be used in conjunction with magic, this opens up whole new worlds within the cosmic horror field! It seems to me that Lovecraft is setting up that Zann is an old man who has experienced too much, and possibly had been part of some Cthulhu cult at one point in his life After reading The Call of Cthulhu we know how pervasive they are). He learned the music from them and is using it in some form or another that deals with these eldritch gods…but more on that soon.

When our narrator inquires about the discordant music, Zann glanced “...toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder – a glace doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street… from which one could see over the wall at the summit.”

Ah and there it is. We have an alley that has strange non-Euclidean architecture, and a mute man (is he mute? Or has he seen things so terrible because of his “duty” that he can no longer speak? Is it something else?) playing strange, discordant music in a gambrel room which is the only room in the alley that can see over the wall to the city beyond. That window is always curtained. A diligent reader will tell immediately that this is going to be the…summit…of the story. The focus is too heavy on the window to not understand that something will come from that portal to beyond the wall.

Zann leaves with pleasantries, but when our narrator asks him to play some of the strange music he has heard late at night, Zann’s “...bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence…” him. This reinforces the theory that Zann might not really be mute, but a gatekeeper that knows his voice may cause something to come through that curtained portal.

Zann shakes our narrators hand and he leaves as friends, but doesn’t “speak” to the narrator for some few days. Our narrator, intrigued by the man, listens at his door and hears the man’s cello wail.

“It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player.”

The narrator eventually gets in and talks to Zann and gets him to write down his experience. Over an hour the old man writes before the narrator “half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitly low and infinitiely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look.”

Zann, terrified, “seized his viol (cello), and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.”

and “It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression on his face, and could realise that this time the motive was stark fear.”

And “In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and Bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning.”

Then “The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret.”

A gust comes in through the window and Zann plays furiously, his eyes wide and terrified. The narrator looks to the window where he “might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath… but only blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth.”

The cello brays behind him and the candles flicker out leaving them in pitch. The narrator flails, trying to figure out what’s going on and “Suddenly out the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player.” but when he finally gets a glimpse of Zann, he reaches out to the madly playing musician and “I felt of the still face, the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void.”

The story comes to a close as our narrator flees the scene.

So what does it all mean? Instantly I think of two things and both make for a spectacular story. The first is that Zann died while doing everything he could to stop whatever eldritch horror was trying to make it’s way through the portal and his body was kept animate by whatever secret drive he had written into the lost note to the narrator (or by whatever task he was given by an otherworldly being).

The second, and the version I like better, is that Zann was dead all along. The narrator is unreliable and insane and imagines the whole thing. He has a psychotic episode and that’s why he is never able to find Rue d’Auseil again. That’s why Zann never spoke. That’s why the papers Zann wrote blew away and the narrator never got to read them. That’s why the room was otherworldly. Zann was a corpse all along and everything else is in the narrators head. This version is just so deliciously creepy that I cant help but to prefer it.

But there is a third possibility. This entire story could have taken place in the dreamlands. The rue d’Auseil is not on any map because it doesn’t exist in the waking world, only in the mysterious dreamlands. It’s also fairly reminiscent to “The Strange High House in the Mist” because, there too, we have a caretaker guarding a house against something evil and huge just outside it.

In any case this is a fast paced, unique tale that’s perfect for anyone looking to get into Lovecraft.

Which version do you prefer?

Join me next week as we discuss “The Picture in the House”!

Post Script:

If anyone knows the truth of this please leave a comment! I researched and tried to find rue d’Auseil and even tried to do a translation, but was unable to uncover anything as to it’s meaning. This may be another indication of Lovecraft intending this to be a dreamland tale, but it could also be him trying to expand his own universe. We spend quite a bit of time in New England, but there are a few tales which we go out into the world and in every locale Lovecraft creates fake cities, or roads, or houses, or geographic features. We know that Lovecraft wanted other writers to take his stories beyond what he created… maybe this was his way of creating a parallel universe that’s very similar to ours, but has these eldritch truths which we cannot see in our world. Maybe he was trying to build out enough to ensure his legacy. To ensure his Yog-Sothothery. What do you think?

The Expedition

[image error] Inspired By “The Creature From The Black Lagoon” Universal Studios 1951

“It’s a beautiful place,” I said, looking out over the bow of the ship at the Amazonian jungle as it passed us by.  I wasn’t lying.  Such an untouched place brought a warmth to my heart, more so than any city ever could.

                “It’s a dangerous place, Kay,” My boyfriend David said, “full of deadly creatures, deadly flora, and superstitious and territorial natives.”

                “Which is why you brought me along,” Mark said, cocking his rifle and kicking a box of C4 housed under the windows of the boat.  “Now hold on, while I dock this thing.”

                We were headed to a sacred pool down in the Amazon jungle, following a lead to the find of the century.  The missing link.  For years my research kept hearing rumors of a fish man in the depths of the jungle, but it wasn’t until Mark and I found the skeletal hand with webbing on a tributary of the Amazon that brought some credence to those rumors.

                “Did anyone else find it strange that those natives told us exactly where to look?”  Edwin asked.  He was our Anthropologist.

                “Enough Edwin!  We gave them more supplies than they could use in a year!  Of course they were going to tell us where to go!”  Mark said.

                “I’m just saying.  Native Amazonian’s historically aren’t too happy to work so well with others,” Edwin concluded.

                “The natives are the last thing we have to worry about, Edwin.  Let’s get camp set up, it’s starting to get dark.  We don’t want to be caught outside with these deadly mosquitoes!”  David laughed.

                It didn’t take long to build camp, but David was right.  The Mosquitoes were horrible.  It was so nice to get inside the tent and block out the bugs.

                “You hear that Kay?  Sounds like laughter,” David said after we had settled down to sleep.

                “David, get away from the side,” I cried. 

                “But I really think I heard laughter.  It was strange, kind of gurgling.  I’m gonna to take a look,” He said and left the tent.  I sat there with my sleeping bag pulled tight under my chin, I mean I know that’s a stupid childish protective safety thing, but I really couldn’t help myself.

                I was right to be worried, because after a few minutes I heard him scream.

                “David!”  I cried and unzipped my tent.  I saw a shadow of someone walking by and my skin went cold.  There was a strange earthy, wet smell in the air.  It was like ozone blended with moss. 

                “What’s going on?”  Mark called.  I let out a little yip, embarrassed at my reaction, because he must’ve been the figure I saw. 

                “David heard laughter and went out to check it out.  I heard him scream,” I said.

                “Stay with me,” Mark said.  He lifted his rifle.  “We’ll move to the edge of the water.  That way we can’t get surrounded by anything in the woods.”

                “What’s going on guys?”  Edwin ran up to join us.

                “Stay close,” Mark responded.  I couldn’t open my mouth.  David had better be kidding, but you’d better believe I was going to kill him whether he was or not.

                “Woah!” Edwin cried.  “Look at this!”

                He was bent over something stuck in the muck at the forest edge.  Stuck in the ground was an old wooden pendant, petrified by time.  It portrayed some strange bipedal fish creature.  I turned it in the moonlight when something out of the corner of my eye made me look up. 

                Mark was standing on the edge of the water line looking past us into the jungle.  The something that caught my eye was walking out of the water towards him.  The water was black reflecting moonlight making the water look like oil.  I thought the figure was David at first, but it was just my mind wishing for something that wasn’t true.  The figure opened its arms.  It had a huge arm span and its hands were webbed, its skin was scaly, and its neck had gills.

                “Look out!”  I cried.  I was too late.  The creature’s arms wrapped around Mark and its nails dug into him.  He screamed as the creature bit into his neck from behind.  I could see blood as black as the oily Amazon roll down Mark’s body as the creature ripped a piece of his neck free.  He collapsed into the water. 

                “Run!”  I cried. 

                We ran back to the metal safety of the ship.  My heart was pounding and I was having trouble getting breath.  Did I really just see that?  I had to have imagined it, right?  But, God the metallic stink of blood surrounded me, I couldn’t focus, I just wanted to be with David.  I wanted him to hold me. 

When Edwin and I approached the ship, I saw David on the other side of some bushes.  My heart soared! 

“David!”  I cried.  “David, get on the ship!”

We turned the corner and my knees gave out beneath me.  It wasn’t David.  Or rather, it was only part of him.  His head was stuck down on a pole that was thrust into the ground.  His eyes bugged out of his head, and his tongue lolled.  Bugs crawled in and out of his grotesque mouth.  I saw a mosquito feeding on one of his bulging eye balls.

                I think I cried out. I think I sobbed, but the next thing I knew, Edwin and I were inside the metal boat.  Edwin must have put a mop across the handle of the door, blocking us in.  Didn’t he see David outside?  How did he think a mere mop would stop that thing?  Especially with exposed windows?

                “Let’s get out of here.  We got what we came for,” Edwin said, he was sobbing.  Tears and snot running down his face.

                “What?  What do you mean we got what we came for?”  I cried.  We didn’t got anything but death! 

                Edwin held up the idol he found on the beach. 

                “Get rid of that fucking thing!”  I yelled.

                “No!”  Edwin wailed.  “It’s what we were paid for!”

                The mop handle cracked as the creature slammed on the other side of the door.

                “It’s coming for the idol! Get rid of it!”

                Edwin took a few steps back, nearing one of the many windows in the cabin.

                “No!  Let’s just get the boat moving… ” Edwin said.

                The creature’s hands broke through the window and grasped Edwin’s head.  Its claws dug into his cheeks and he was momentarily lifted before his skin gave way and the claws tore up and back, ripping skin from his face, piercing his eyes and spraying blood across the room.

                I grabbed the idol from Edwin’s dead hands and threw it out the window.  I grabbed the broken mop handle in a futile attempt to defend myself. 

                Then the creature stepped into the room.  It smelled of earth and blood and swamp water.  It looked like a piranha, if a piranha was six foot tall.  Its teeth were razor sharp and its claws were long and dripping with blood.  Its green skin shone in the moonlight and it cocked its head to the side like a dog when it saw me.

                “I’m leaving.  You can go now.  I…I won’t cause you any problems,” I called.  I took a step back and my foot hit a box.  I glanced down.  It was the explosives.  I knelt down and grabbed a packet of explosives and the detonator.  The creature didn’t like that.

                It screeched and opened its arms wide.  Blood dripped from its hands and its mouth. 

                My heart was pounding so hard I thought it was going to leap from my chest.  The creature took a step toward me and I threw the explosives at it.  Its reflexes were incredible.  It caught the C4 in the air and immediately turned to look at it.

                “Fuck you,” I said, and depressed the button a split second before diving behind a table.

                The echo of the explosion resonated in my ears, but somehow I got up and got to the wheel.  I thrust the throttle all the way to the maximum.  Fuck this place.  I was getting out of here. 

                I managed a glance at the body of the thing.  Its arm was completely gone.  Disintegrated.  Its head was half gone, the rest a toasted black.  I had to get the thing off the boat.  There was no way I was going to keep going with its corpse there, but I couldn’t think of that right now.  I was shaking too bad, I just had to focus on getting out of the jungle.

                I heard distant chanting.  It got louder and louder and I felt bile rise in my throat.  I peered out the window and I saw Amazonians at the shore line.  They were dancing and shaking something in the air.  The chant was a dissonant sound that made my skin crawl.  I squinted at what they held.  It was the same as we saw on the beach.  The fish idol.

                I went back to the wheel when I heard clicking behind me.  Nails on metal.

Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Sweet Ermengarde

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“Thus only a week after his advent to the Stubbs family circle, where he lurked like the vile serpent that he was, he had persuaded the heroine to elope! It was in the night that she went leaving a note for her parents, sniffing the familiar mash for the last time, and kissing the cat goodbye – touching stuff!”

Welcome back to another Blind Read! This week we’re talking about the satiric and absurdist piece, “Sweet Ermengarde.” This is a literature genre that I’m not super familiar with (at least it’s history), but this story seems to bite off the comedic nature of some of his contemporaries, while calling back to some of those classical authors like Shakespeare, or even further back, Aristophanes.

Calling on Vaudeville, Lovecraft tells a story of Ethyl Ermengarde Stubbs, whom “...her father persuaded her to drop the praenomen after the passage of the 18th Amendment, averring that it made him thirsty by reminding him of ethyl alcohol” This is the beginning of our tale, setting us up to understand what we’re getting ourselves into.

Ermengarde is a “Simple Rustic Maid” who “confessed to sixteen summers, and branded as mendacious all reports to the effect that she was thirty.” and had “light hair which was never dark at the roots except when the local drug store was short on supplies.” This sets our maid up as duplicitous from the start. These examples, of course are not devious in any way, but they give an indication that things are not actually what they seem. If we know anything about Lovecraft we know this will eventually pay off, because he tends to be very exacting in his prose, never leaving the slightest detail to chance.

We soon learn that Ermengarde had two suitors, “‘Squire Hardman, who had a mortgage on the old home (The Stubbs farm), was very rich and elderly.” and “the handsome Jack Manly, whose curly yellow hair had won the sweet Ermengarde’s heart...”

Nearly Dickensian isn’t it? We have the dastardly vaudevillian villain, Hardman (he’s a “hard man” to love…he is a “hard man” with a hard heart, only caring about money and prestige) who could frequently be seen “viciously twirling his moustache and riding crop, and kicking an unquestionably innocent cat who was out strolling (Lovecraft loves cats).” Meanwhile we have the Jack Manly, who was a young heartthrob and was the romantic love interest who frequently whispered secret nothings to Ermengarde. We immediately know we are supposed to root for “Manly” and hate “Hardman” despite the over the top affections Lovecraft writes in to fan the flames of absurdism in the tale.

Then, just to add another nail in the ridiculous coffin, when the first chapter ends Lovecraft puts “Curtain” as a stage direction indicating the end of a scene; though this is very obviously a story and not a play. It’s just yet another call back to the vaudeville stage plays, with their moustache twirling villains and hooks to pull the players from the stage after a gaff.

The second chapter begins with Hardman going after the Stubbs unknown “vein of rich GOLD!” He plans on foreclosing the Stubbs farm unless Ermengarde disavows her “Manly” lover and marries him. Jack, being the man he is (and after his “Tears flowed like white ale“), he decides he is going to go off to the city to gain a fortune and buy the mortgage from Hardman. Queue more over the top PDA.

Hardman, not to be foiled, decides to kidnap Ermengarde only to realize (after deciding she was being too “Difficult” that it would just be easier to foreclose! Why then he could just take the gold! But, in the mean time, a few hunters find the gold and make an attempt to garner sweet Ermengarde’s affections.

And, believe it or not, ANOTHER suitor comes into play, the indominable Algernon Reginald Jones; the perfidious “city chap” who came down to work on the foreclosure which brings up to the quote at the beginning of this essay. That was all pure Lovecraft: all at once vilifying and romanticizing the exit. Pure satire.

But then our resourceful young (well, as long as the hair dye held out) lady finds a love note from another woman in Algernon’s breast pocket! Well I never! She just had to leave that scoundrel behind!

So she heads off and gets lost “Alone in the Great City.” She looks for her “Manly” suitor but fails. She looks for a job and only finds only a “fashionable and depraved cabaret; but our heroine was true to her rustic ideals and refused to work in such a gilded and glittering palace of frivolity – especially since she was offered only $3.00 per week with meals but no board.”

[image error] The parallels are deep with this one.

She wanders and finds an ornate bag in the park. Soon after finding that the the owner is a Mrs. Van Itty, a clever play on words and very much a replacement for Havisham of Great Expectations fame. Mrs. Vanity, sorry… Van Itty is so pleased with our heroine that she takes her on as a ward, and then everything begins to come up Millhouse.

Van Itty hires a chauffer who turns out to be the down and out Algernon. remember the note from the woman in his breast pocket? She stole all his land and money from him.

Algernon drives Van Itty and Ermengarde to Hogton (another fun play on setting and words), Ermengarde’s home, and there they find that Manly has become a beggar. Van Itty sees Ermengarde’s mother and realizes that she was a maid who stole Van Itty’s babe from her crib some 28 years previous (“How could she get away with the sixteen-year-old-stuff if she had been stolen twenty-eight years ago?”). So Ermengarde was really Van Itty’s child all along! With this incredible revelation our intrepid heroine decides to take Hardman up on his offer and foreclose on her faux parent’s house and take the vein of gold for herself. Hardman, “The poor dub did…” what she asked and became subservient, and Ermengarde was suddenly the devious rich heiress.

[image error] A Possible basis of Lovecraft’s Sweet Ermengarde

We come to the end of the tale and find there is a bit of a Lovecraftian twist and role reversal going on. Ermengarde is a play on a contemporary Frances Hodgson Burnett’s character in The Little Princess (P. 1905), of the same name. In that story Ermengarde is a “fat child who is not in the least bit clever…” and that’s who we are meant to believe this Ermengarde is (mentally, not physically), but this is Lovecraft and he’s never pleased with leaving things simple so he flips expectations on their head multiple times. Manly becomes a bum. Algernon becomes a pauper. Hardman becomes a cull. Van Itty becomes a loving mother.

[image error] One of Shakespeare’s most popular absurd comedies

Taking an “As You Like It” type of approach, Lovecraft excels in his humor and construction to give us the surprise ending, but he does leave clues along the way.

Her father, the elder Stubbs, is a bootlegger and loves alcohol so much that he has to drop his daughter’s first name, lest he become a lost drunk. Hardman makes poor decisions and cant figure out that he can just foreclose on the property to get the gold until it’s too late. Algernon let’s things happen to him, rather than making things happen for himself. Manly is nothing but a pretty face and curly hair. These are the types of details you must pay attention to in Lovecraft to be informed on where he’s going next, both in this absurdist romp, and the normal horrific fare.

This is not your normal Lovecraft, but it is spectacular and hilarious. If you’re a fan of classic literature the references and the humor will hit you in exactly the right way. This is a must.

Join me next week as we delve into an underground Lovecraft classic “The Music of Erich Zann!”

Post Script:

[image error] Horatio Alger’s Street Boys, starting small and living large

I have one last reference I wanted to call up. Algernon Reginald Jones (and the whole tale in total) seem to be a call back to the tales of Horatio Alger, the classic rags to riches author. Alger wrote about “Street Boys” who lived the American Dream. They worked hard and worked their way up the ladder to become pillars of their community or leaders in business. Alger(non) was a play on those classic characters, but with the classic Lovecraft twist.

It’s truly amazing the depth and intelligence that Lovecraft writes with. It makes me a bit sad that I started here and not with Lord Dunsany or other contemporaries, because even as I delve deeper, I find that his work is founded on so many others. His ideas are built from the seeds of his predecessors and I feel as though I’ve missed so much by not understanding fully his foundation.

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This post has been a bit English Teachery (and I get rid of that idea by using a word like teachery!) but there is so much more enjoyment when you catch the threads and really get into the man’s head!