Sean McBride's Blog, page 17
October 3, 2020
By Any Means Necessary
I’d followed him here to a rundown flop house in the South Side of Chicago. I don’t think I have to tell you, this is not the place I’d like to be after dark. Then again the life of a private detective is never done. At least my protégé, Malcolm, was with me.
The tenement was just what you’d expect. It was filthy, both of bodily fluid and dirt. Stains covered the walls and strange ochre blotches littered the staircase. We ascended to what I hoped was an easy snatch and grab arrest.
We were after Dr. Jack Griffin. A man once reported missing, but recently showed his face…well I guess I can’t say that, now can I? He appeared, but his skin was covered in heavy duty bandages. He announced himself as he robbed the bank. Told everyone he was the illustrious Dr. Jack Griffin.
The guards chased him to the alleyway, but all they found was a trench coat, some shoes and socks, and a large swath of Ace bandages.
So how do I know it was Dr. Griffin, you ask? I took finger prints. It was a slam dunk match. I followed the trail here. Through the years, I’ve found it’s better to sneak up on your prey, so I decided to come at night. I regret that decision.
“Keep your eyes peeled. If you have to shoot, aim for the legs,” I told Malcolm. I made sure my voice was lower than the creaks of the staircase. No point in announcing our visit.
He nodded in response. Good lad, keeping quiet.
We reached the room in question. The door was ajar, so I held my hand out, indicating Malcolm should wait outside. Be prepared in case Griffin tried to escape by way of the stairs.
The room was a sight of horrors. I dared not engage the lamp, because what I saw was enough. It wasn’t a living space, but a laboratory. There were cages lining the walls with dead rotting creatures, and the ones who were alive were so emaciated they might as well be dead. Rats, dogs, rabbits, pigs, you name it. The smell was unbearable.
I slowly pressed the hammer back on my .38 special, wincing as it clicked into place. I moved through the room past lab equipment and what I can only describe as an autopsy table – mid procedure. I could swear that the temperature in this room was far cooler than it was in the hallway, but there was a notable absence of the monotonous drone of fans.
I observed a door with light emanating from behind it. I creeped over to it, pausing only once when the floorboards creaked beneath me. I was sweating profusely despite the cool temperature, the moisture ran down my forehead as I reached for the door handle to this door. I gripped it tightly and took a deep, silent breath.
The door was ripped from my hands and swinging open, revealing a stark bedroom. It had a single bed, upon which was the score from the bank. I lifted my pistol, bracing it with my off hand, and swung it around the room. I was sure Griffin opened the door and I was also sure he knew I was here.
But the room held nothing but the bed and the cash.
I took a few steps in, my arms rigid, holding the gun aloft. I bent at my waist and leading with the gun, peered beneath the bed. Nothing. I stood and looked back into the laboratory and saw what I could only describe as a figure running through the room.
“Griffin! Show yourself!” I yelled. Sneaking was useless. He knew we were there.
I somehow lost him in the room and I was suddenly overcome with horrid nausea. How could anyone live like this?
“Get ready to die,” a voice whispered in my ear. I could feel hot breath on my skin and I broke out in gooseflesh.
I spun around, nearly firing my gun. There was nothing. I must have imagined it.
“Fool,” That hot whisper assaulted my other ear.
I twisted again, this time firing. The bullet went through the wall out into the Chicago air.
The door to the hallway burst open and I caught a glimpse of Malcolm as his expression turned to surprised horror. I can’t explain what happened, but it look like he was pulled back, as though he were a vaudevillian actor being pulled off the stage by a hook. Although, there was no backstage for Malcolm. He went tumbling backwards down the staircase. I heard him scream then I heard a crunch followed by silence. I still could see nothing.
“Show yourself you coward!” I screamed.
Laughter echoed through the room. I feel that he was there with me and I have no idea how he was able to knock Malcolm down the stairs without me seeing.
“I must continue my research.”
The whisper was directly behind me. I felt his fingernails slide through my hair.
I twisted, flailing blindly with my fists. More laughter to my right.
“I thought I was curing cancer.”
He bit my ear lobe. I screamed and pulled away. I felt violated. Something as intimate as a bite. How had he gotten so close?
“But this is something so much more.”
I felt a punch in my stomach.
“So I must continue my research.”
I looked down. It was not a punch. It was a knife. I felt a hand cradle me but saw nothing. I watched as it unlevered itself from my stomach and slammed home again and again into my torso. The knife was moving of its own volition. How was this possible?
“By any means necessary.”
I could see blood spill down the handle of the blade. It covered what looked like a hand. A towel flew up from the table next to my body, as my sight began fading to black. It wiped the hand, and as the blood soaked the towel, the mystery hand it was wiping evaporated. It was the last thing I saw.
October 1, 2020
Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Pickman’s Model
“Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true.“
Welcome back for another Blind Read! This week we’re diving into Pickman’s Model; a singularly unique Lovecraft story. We get not only the classic Lovecraft tropes; Witchcraft, summons, and people going beyond their ken to gain power or knowledge, but we get some insight into the man himself and his personal tastes (hint, they’re just as weird as his writing is).
We know exactly how the story will end within the first few paragraphs, and yet, this is one of Lovecraft’s finest works (at least in my opinion). The previously mentioned themes of Lovecraft are in the background (though obviously present), and two facets of Lovecraft’s personality come through, the love of New England (specifically Boston) and his love of art. His prose transcends much of his normal exposition because he’s describing, what is in his opinion, high art. He isn’t only trying to create horrors, but he’s lifting up some of his favorite artists and some of his contemporaries. It reads as though he was having a blast writing, which some of the stories he wrote (I’m looking at you Herbert West – Reanimator) feel contrived.
The story is simple. We follow an art curator who had Richard Upton Pickman as a resident in his Art Club, to a gruesome conclusion. He begins the story by telling us “…I cant use the subway or go down into cellars anymore.” and that “Morbid art doesn’t shock me…” We know all of Pickman’s art is morbid because the narrator tells us that the only piece that wasn’t wholly grotesque, the one that people could actually palate, was the piece entitled “Ghoul Feeding” which was hung in the narrators Art Club.
The narrator goes to great pains to explain that “Pickman’s forte was faces.” and how he had “latent instincts” for “the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.“
To give example the narrator says “…Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh.” because “There’s something those fellows catch – beyond life – that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Dore had it.“
[image error]Gustave Dore “Satan in Council”
Indeed Dore was lauded as the most iconic realist artists of in his time. His black and white drawings had more depth of character of anything I’ve had ever seen either (I have “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Coleridge, illustrated by Dore and it is everything). His mostly religious vistas brought humanity to his angels and devils. Dore endeavored to show his audience that humanity could be all of these things. We were the angels. We were the devils. We were everything in between. We came to realize, through his art, that WE were better or worse than anything we could actually dream up.
[image error]Sidney Sime “Slid”
Then our narrator mentions Sime. Sidney Sime was a fantasist and a satirist who relied on his outrageous concepts to elicit emotion. Famously he partnered up with Lord Dunsany (is it any wonder that Lovecraft liked Sime?) to illustrate Dunsany’s “The Gods of Paegana.” Dunsany famously quoted “I tried to account for the Ocean and the Moon. I don’t know whether anyone has ever tried that before.” Dunsany is Lovecraft’s inspiration for stories like Dagon, and with images like “Slid” is it really any wonder?
Art is the centerpiece of this masterful story, but either because Lovecraft is channeling the art or because of it’s inspiration; we get some of the best, most atmospheric writing he’s done. While explaining that Pickman’s relatives were cast out of Salem in 1692 (we’ve heard that one before!), the narrator describes how they treaded through the North End:
“When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the oldest and dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling – looking gables, broken small – paned windows, and archaic chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated against the moonlit sky. I don’t believe there were three houses in sight that hadn’t been standing in Cotton Mathers time – certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre-gambrel type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.”
This is a classic Lovecraft technique. We go from some normal vista to an area that is just a little off. Something that shouldn’t be possible. There’s nothing outwardly menacing about the neighborhood the narrator suddenly experiences, but the mention that “antiquarians tell us there are none left…” indicates that we have passed into another world, or we have transcended into an underworld where normal people don’t pass.
The narrator tells us again and again that he is not weak of heart, that he has seen horrible paintings, but “It was the faces…those horrible faces, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life!” He sets us up for the denouement when we finally reach Pickman’s vault.
[image error]Clark Ashton Smith “The Forbidden Barrier”
The vault is filled with paintings; “…the ones he couldn’t paint or even shew in Newbury Street…” The narrator tells us “There was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood.” No, these were more hyper realistic than his public “Ghoul Feeding” painting that turned everyone’s blood. It seems that most of these paintings had a backdrop of Copp’s Hill burying ground, which had a number of figures who “…were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree.” and “They were usually feeding.”
Our narrator is disgusted, but he allows Pickman to take him into the next area where things get even more atmospheric. We get depictions of art with creatures coming up from cracks and holes in the ground, and strange angles and spaces that should not be possible. Here again, Lovecraft is making an effort to seep into our subconscious without us ever knowing it. There is a very real fear called Trypophobia which states that people are scared of honeycombs or groups of regular holes (I wont scar anyone with pictures…but if you’re curious click here) . To envision hellish creatures coming from these holes is just one more way to make the reader feel ill at ease. It’s an atmospheric addition in which Lovecraft uses to perfection. Likewise his “strange geometry” which we’ve seen before as well. Remember back in “Dream in the Witch House” where the “sorcerer” used the strange geometry of the house to better conjure up horrors? Lovecraft is setting the scene for the climax. Building the tension, making the reader feel… off. The first step is setting the stage that Pickman is somehow odd and descended from witches. The next is heading into a place that even historians say doesn’t exist. The final step is giving the audience a glimpse of strange and off-putting artwork – artwork that’s hard to look at because it shouldn’t be possible. Art work that is too horrible to look at without screaming.
As we digest this, the narrator sees a camera. When asked, Pickman “…told me that he used it in taking scenes for backgrounds...” and our narrator sees a paper crumbled up next to a painting. He makes an effort to unravel it, when he is distracted by Pickman taking him deeper into his studio, so the narrator puts the crumpled paper into his pocket.
When they get into a bricked up room Pickman shows the narrator a work in progress so terrifying that it makes our narrator scream. This, right here, is what’s so wonderful of Lovecraft’s work. He’s painstakingly told us that Pickman had a horrible realism to his work. Then we get possible examples that are close, but not quite as terror inducing as anything Pickman had the ability to exude. We get a few examples of his lesser works as well, just to give the reader some dread as to what is coming – “The Lesson” about dog-like things that are teaching stolen children how to eat like them…”Subway Accident” which portrayed “a flock of vile things…clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.” – also an unnamed drawing that depicted “a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that honeycombed the ground.“
All of this anticipation and then Lovecraft purposely keeps the description of the painting which finally puts the narrator over the edge because Lovecraft knows that whatever we’ve been building in our minds is far more terrifying than anything he could possibly put to page. Lovecraft does this time and again in his work, where he describes just enough to make the psyche of his reader take off and make of what they are reading that much worse.
The scream causes Pickman to start. He produces a revolver and ushers our narrator out of the room. He makes up an excuse that there’s a rat nest in the walls, but when he’s hidden from sight something more devious happens. Our narrator heard, “a sharp grating noise, a shouted gibberish from Pickman, and the deafening discharge of all six chambers of a revolver...”
That ends the narrators adventures with Pickman. He leaves to go home and is terribly off put by the realism of the paintings, the detail Pickman is able to get from the photos he takes for the backgrounds, the realistic faces Pickman is able to create out of nothing. But then, when he gets home, he feels the paper in his pocket. It isn’t a paper at all. It’s a photograph. A photograph of “the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas.”
And oh reader, “It was the model he was using – and it’s background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail…It was a photograph from life.“
Join me next week as we tackle the infamous “History of the Necronomicon!”
Post Script:
There is another painting in Pickman’s vault which gives us and interesting peek into Lovecraft’s social landscape.
[image error]
A scene in an unknown vault, where scores of beasts crowded about one who held a well-known Boston guide-book and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was “Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn.”
This is a seeminly deviant view at first. It’s just demons looking at a…guidebook? But then we get answers when we get the title. Mount Auburn is a well known cemetery in Boston and it’s the main resting place for the Boston Brahmins (nomenclature penned by the doctor and writer Oliver Wendall Holmes…yes the same Holmes).
So why are the demons laughing at the guidebook? Well the Boston Brahmins are heavily associated with the Boston Aristocracy and Anglicism. Two things that Lovecraft railed against.
So what is Lovecraft saying here? The demons have a guidebook. The demons are looking for this place, because they are going to collect the Boston elite and religious, because, to Lovecraft, those two things are worse than being a murderer. The demons, using the guidebook, have finally found their way to the elite to procure thier pound of flesh. Death and the cemetery wont save them.
That right there is what’s so wonderful about Lovecraft. These little gems that you can extract, only if you look close enough, to the overall narrative.
September 24, 2020
Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Herbert West – Reanimator
“It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon.”
Welcome back for another Blind Read! We’re tackling Reanimator this week and yowza, there is a heck of a lot going on here in a story that is absolutely not a typical Lovecraftian story.
Lovecraft was commissioned to write an episodic tale, in which each segment was published subsequently in each issue of the magazine. I have to admit, that after reading the story I did a tiny bit of research into the story, because of how… well… unlike his other stories it was and found that Lovecraft himself called the process of writing for the magazine “manifestly inartistic” because of how the magazine editor wanted it structured. You can feel Lovecraft’s disdain as he writes the story and the further you get into it, there is an aspect of camp that can absolutely be considered Lovecraft’s subtle dig at how much he hated the project. Ironically that bit of camp invigorated film makers from (obviously) Stuart Gordon to Sam Raimi.
But we’ll get to all that soon. Let’s dive in, shall we?
We start the story with a very strange statement which sets up the unreliable narrator right off the bat: “Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror.”
Excuse me, what?
He was your friend in college and… in after life? Is the narrator trying to say that they are friends still after death, or does he just mean that they were friends after college? This is a strange statement because immediately after it we find that West disappears in a “sinister manner.” Lovecraft isn’t one to mince words like this… he tends to be vague, but very precise. So what is our narrator telling us here? Well we wont get the answer to that until the very last sentence of the story.
The narrator states that he can only speak of West in terror because of the “wonder and diabolism of his experiments…” and instantly we understand that West was enamored by the dual nature of life and death. West believes that there could be developed, a method to delay death, or “overcome it artificially” by a “calculated chemical reaction.“
West immersed himself in these experiments during college using his home brew formulas on animals with varying levels of success, but “since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialised progress.”
Ridiculed by Miskatonic University staff and students, he is soon told that he cannot continue this line of study by their dean, “the learned and benevolent Dr. Allen Halsey.”
While the narrator describes this rejection from the Dean, we get our first philosophical rumination. “Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called ‘soul’ is a myth...” (We’ll talk more about Haeckel later) Relying on this thesis West looks for fresh human bodies in an effort to re-animate them. He knows that if the flesh deteriorates too much then the process wont work, so the two men (narrator and West) “followed the local death-notices like ghouls...” and moved out to a farm house for its remoteness. The idea being that they can grave rob and bring the bodies to the house without being seen.
It takes a while, but they finally procure a body with enough freshness so they try the formula. They wait far longer than they think they should and nothing happens. Disappointed, they move into the next room and continue to work, while “…from the pitch black room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemonic succession of cries that either of us had ever heard.”
The two men are so terrified by the ululations and the crashes of destruction coming from that room that they tear from the place and head home, only to hear the next day that the house burned down with nary a glimpse of their reanimated corpse.
And this is all in the first chapter.
There are one or two exceptions, but this first chapter reads like a standard Lovecraftian story. The descriptions, the prose, the tone, it could basically be all out of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but then we move into the second chapter and find the story stalls.
From the first sentence we understand a plague of typhoid has devastated the town, and we rehash the theory behind the freshness of the bodies. We hear again from Dr. Halsey, who tells West in no uncertain terms that he must stop his research.
Then the story devolves for a page or so. From the perspective of the narrator we get into a rant about religion and ethics. He calls the “professor-doctor” type “the product of generations of puritanism...” and “whose worst real vice is timidity” with “…sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation.”
The narrator is railing against morals with an almost Ayn Rand fanaticism. You remember the scientist which we mentioned earlier? Haeckel? Without a doubt a brilliant man who created our classifications for families of living creatures (phylum, kingdom, etc,), BUT was a proponent of scientific racism and eugenics. Yeah, you heard that right. The man the narrator (and probably Lovecraft) is lauding as a genius, believes that there are scientific reasons why some races and creeds are better than others and that we should use eugenics to resolve the problem. You want to know who else got his main ideas from this man? Adolph Hitler. Also a German fanatic who was coming into power as this was being written. One has to wonder if the magazine Lovecraft was writing for had “specific leanings” and that’s why these elements are in this story and so prevalent (seriously, like the whole story), as opposed to his other stories. I wont mention it beyond this but there are some horribly racist things stated in the next chapter, worse than anything I’ve read in Lovecraft so far. Suffice it to say that there are some really interesting things in this story with plotting and style (and perhaps, just maybe, Lovecraft was using this hate as a device, but we’ll see that later), but if these themes are triggers IN ANY WAY, never read this story. It’s not even in the top 50% of Lovecraft anyway, and if it weren’t for the 1985 movie, I don’t think this story would have any historical longevity.
Whew! Sorry, had to leave that disclaimer. Anyway…
There’s a wake at the end of this chapter for Dr. Halsey (he died of typhoid) and West and the narrator tie one on, “making a night of it” and are seen later, after midnight, walking home with a third man in their arms. There’s a kerfluffel in West’s boarding room that night and when the landlord comes to investigate, they find West and the narrator bloodied and the window broken.
There’s a trail of blood and “remnants of bodies left behind...” There is even evidence of these bodies being chewed on. The police follow the trail until they find the fiend, who bears a startling resemblance to Dr. Halsey. The beast is captured and put into Arkham Asylum and the two heroes take a breath of relief as the chapter ends. But before it does, we get the first evidence of camp that will carry through to the 1985 movie.
[image error]Stuart Gordon’s 1985 campy masterpiece.
To conclude the chapter West says: “Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!” Queue slight chuckle and eye roll.
The third chapter begins with the quote from the start of this essay and we spend over half of this chapter re-hashing the previous two. Then West and the narrator, because they are doctors, are asked to oversee an illegal boxing match. One of the pugilists is knocked unconscious and West declares him dead. They take the man and inject him with the formula, hoping that he is recently dead enough for it to work, but the man comes back as a monster, raging at them, and West puts it down with his revolver.
The next chapter is interesting if only because the prose is so simplistic as opposed to the majority of Lovecraft, and the plot so kooky, that it really feels as though Lovecraft is mentally done with the project, as if the only reason he is continuing it is for the money.
Three quarters of the chapter re-hashes the previous ones, until a travelling salesman comes around and “suddenly dies” on West’s porch. West uses the formula on him and when the man re-animates. We understand that West killed him because of his statement when he revives: “Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend – keep that damned needle away from me!”
Then suddenly because WWI is going on, West decides he needs to go to the battle front to get fresh body parts to see if he can reanimate them. Some of the most atmospheric writing comes here and there is a bit more waxing poetic on the idea of the soul versus the mechanics of the body, but there isn’t much more to go on. The reader can feel Lovecraft’s disdain for the project bleeding through the text.
Then finally we get the last chapter where we get more re-hashing and a Halloween haunted house moment where one of the reanimated creatures is wearing a wax mask (check the very last quote in this essay). This triggers a campy moment where all the creatures West has reanimated come back and break through a plaster wall. The creatures are apparently angry at West for reanimating them so they “tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations.”
Servants find the narrator unconscious the next morning with West gone and an “unbroken plaster wall.” The servants state he was either mad or a murderer, and we get the last line which brings it all together: “But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.”
I sat for quite some time after reading this last line. He might not be mad if they had not been so silent. Meaning that he was mad as a hatter the entire time, and everything that we’ve experienced through his eyes were the ramblings of a potentially very dangerous madman. The perspectives on race, religion, science versus the soul, and all that malarkey that we spiraled into, was really just a madman capable of murder and probably much worse. Lovecraft is saying “nope, that was all from a crazy person, so you shouldn’t actually believe any of it.”
Don’t believe me? Lovecraft left us clues.
Remember the first line we talked about earlier? About how the narrator knows West “After Life?” The narrator tells us all along that West is the one reanimating everyone. West is the one killing people. But if the narrator knows West “after life,” then that means that he has killed West and reanimated him, making the narrator the real monster here, not West. In fact because of the unreliable narrator form, the entire story is subject to speculation, because it was probably the narrator who had been doing all the killing and reanimating all along.
We also know that from the very beginning the that West is missing. But in the last paragraph the narrator tells us that West was torn limb from limb. Throughout the story there are contradictions like this. For example: The narrator is a doctor but he doesn’t understand that Jewish, black, and white people (the only examples he gave) have the same internal organs.
There is also the fact that when they went to war and got to see the battle fields, the narrator, as a doctor felt that “Some of these things made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while others have made me tremble...” Really. You’re a field doctor who has killed creatures you brought back to life, done autopsies, looked at desiccated and chewed on corpses without a second thought… but a battlefield makes you faint. I at first thought this was a failing of the writing, but now because of other evidence I think it was a stylistic, unreliable narrator choice.
Throughout the story the narrator lovingly says that West, is “…a calm, blonde, blue-eyed scientific automaton...”, like, multiple times (I think I counted four times). In this exact same way. Yet we have a character call West a toe-head, a slang debasement for a blonde white person. It was odd at first that there would be a slang word against a white person in this story given the hate speech toward others, but what I realized is that the hate speech all came from the narrator, and the other characters in the story (Dr. Halsey, this salesman for example) didn’t hold these same views and railed against what the narrator thought. Those horrible racist, classist, and bigamous statements were from the perspective was an extremist insane psychotic.
The largest evidence of this? This story is too campy, too simplistic, too direct to be a serious Lovecraft story. I’ve spent the better part of two years reading and analyzing his work and I’ve not come across anything like this story. This was a very specific idea that was written for a very specific audience and he got paid $5 a chapter to do it. I get the feeling that he was asked to make it this direct, so the subversion of expectations was his way of sticking his middle finger to the proprietor and the audience.
Join me and read along as we cover “Pickman’s Model” next week!
Postscript:
I’ve stated that the prose in this story is much more simple than most Lovecraft (admittedly making it more accessible to a larger audience), but there were a few moments of brilliance here and there. My favorite examples are as follows:
“A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body’s mouth.“
“In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.”
“I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body.”
“His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it – for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass.”
September 19, 2020
By the Light of the Moon
AAARRRRROOOOOO
“It’s alright Claude, it’s just the wind,” Larry Talbot told his son. Larry was your typical heartthrob. He dressed like Carey Grant and looked like Marlon Brando. Claude was eight going on forty and scared of everything. That was part of the reason Larry brought him out to the woods. He wanted to expand his son’s horizons.
“That sure didn’t sound like no wind, I ever heard of,” Evelyn Ankers said. She was gorgeous, a perfect blonde bombshell, but the only reason she was there in the cabin was to gain notoriety. She had been invited for the weekend, free of charge, if she would only tell her famous Hollywood friends about how wonderful it was up here.
“Max,” Gwen prompted her husband. “Max, would you go out and check on that? Our guests want be comfortable here after all.”
“Of course, mother,” Max responded. Max was an old man with only one leg. His hair was long, stringy, and gray, and his clothes were tattered and torn. He was one of those old men who called their wives mother as a term of endearment.
Max waddled out of the door, rifle in hand, and winked at his guests before closing the door.
“You see Claude? Nothing to worry about!” Larry said.
He got up and walked over to the window, excited to see what the one legged older mountain man could do with that rifle. He cupped his hands around his eyes to cut the glare and pressed his face to the window.
“What do you see out there, Larry?” Evelyn asked. She held her hands prim in her lap, but there was an eager look to her eyes as she stared at Larry.
“Why, it’s just darkness and snow!” Larry turned and winked at Evelyn before turning to his son. “You see Claude? It was just the wind after all!”
Just then the window exploded inward, glass flying into the room. Larry instinctually covered his head as a huge wolf snapped at him, it’s teeth tearing a mouthful from his shoulder.
Larry screamed and twisted. He lashed out with his fist, landing a roundhouse blow to the Wolf’s snout. The snarling beast disappeared out of the window and Larry collapsed onto the ground.
“Everyone get away from the window!” Larry cried, but a moment later a rifle blast echoed through the night.
Claude and Evelyn sat in shock as Larry crawled over to them.
“That must have been Max, shooting the beast. I think we’re safe now, let’s just stay away from the window,” Larry said.
“Dada, I’m scared!” Claude cried.
“Oh my god, are you ok?” Evelyn asked. She hugged him, and held his head to her shoulder. Larry let her.
“I’m alright, it’s just a scratch! Nothing a bandage wouldn’t fix!” Larry said, projecting masculinity.
“You were bit, weren’t you?” Gwen asked. Her thick Romani accent commanded attention.
“Well, yeah. Yeah he did,” Larry responded. A brief moment of panic touched his words, before he caught it and stabilized.
“Then you are beyond help,” Gwen said.
“Dad?” Claude’s voice was small.
“Now you wait just a minute! What do you mean scaring my kid like that?” Larry scolded.
“Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night. May become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright,” Gwen said.
“Now, what in blazes is that supposed to mean?” Larry said. He stood and loomed over Gwen.
“You were bitten by a werewolf Mr. Talbot, and tonight is a full moon,” Gwen said. She held up a bundle of herbs in Larry’s face. He twisted away crying out.
“Uhhh! Those smell terrible! What is that?” Larry cried.
“It is too late for all of you,” Gwen said and threw the bundle out of the window. “You should not have come.”
“Now wait just a minute,” Evelyn cried. “a Werewolf? Why, there’s no such thing!”
“Claude!” Larry cried. He was hunched over, holding his stomach.
“Dada?”
“Larry are you alright?” Evelyn asked. She didn’t notice the click of the kitchen door, nor the thwack of the dead lock as it slid into place, as Gwen disappeared.
“Get Claude out of here!” Larry cried and fell to all fours. His fingernails began to grow into sharp points, and he howled in pain as his mouth elongated and new teeth pushed through his gums.
“Dada?” Claude cried.
“Larry?” Evelyn asked, hugging Claude to her.
“It’s too late!” Larry’s voice was more of a growl than speech.
He turned and looked out the window. There above the trees was the moon. Full, bright, and yellow. In the distance a wolf bayed and Larry responded.
He felt joints pop into place, and his tongue flicked out of his snout and licked his chops. He hadn’t eaten in quite some time and there were two morsels right in front of him.
September 17, 2020
Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Dunwich Horror
“Dr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich and it’s brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb’s cold clamminess.“
Welcome back for another Blind Read! The week we’re diving into one of the creepier, lugubrious, and plodding stories to date – The Dunwich Horror (check pronunciation notes in the post script!).
Lovecraft intersperses some interesting socio-political factors into this, one of his more visceral tales, all the while giving some first hand looks at what some of these cosmic creatures look like – breaking from his standard of building fear by occluding our sight of these terrible creatures. The story is slow developing, but there’s more in this story to build the Mythos than any other story I’ve read from him.
That being said, let’s dive in shall we?
Despite the fact that we divert from Lovecraft’s held tenet of showing his creatures, we begin the story with an old standby, an introductory chapter to set the stage and atmosphere of Dunwich. Lovecraft leans into his overbearing descriptions in an effort to make sure the reader understands the place; “Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on sloping, rock-strewn meadows…” and “It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet.” In fact the town has “…gone far along the path of retrogression…” that “They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.”
[image error]“The Hills Have Eyes” is a 1977 Wes Craven film about a group of cannibals who are deformed by radiation
We’re shown a run down shambles of a town with all the quaint elegance of “The Hills Have Eyes.” But that’s what sets this story apart from his other works. Much of Lovecraft has affluent characters, using their influence and money to dive down into these rabbit holes of terror. The Dunwich Horror is the opposite, it has backwater folks living in the abandoned hills of New England experiencing the insidious horror.
The saddest aspect of this comes in the first chapter of the story: “The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692…” and though they “…have kept somewhat above the general level of decay…” they themselves have degenerated. This is not “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” where we get to gallivant around the globe researching and finding clues to the highest peaks of godhood. No. This is the story of the underside. This is the story of people who had the knowledge (they came from Salem, just like Curwen did in that story) of cosmic wonder, and let it degrade into something foul. I’d wager that’s why we get to see a bit of the creature here…Lovecraft wanted to solidify how dirty, how incredibly unclean this place really was.
But that also raises that sociological aspect I mentioned earlier. Throughout this story Lovecraft is disparaging to the townsfolk. Their speech is degraded, their hygiene is terrible (“Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.“), and their living situations are deplorable. They cant even solve their own problems, they need to get help from the more affluent Arkham people. The whole book almost feels like Lovecraft is saying ‘this is what happens when you live in poverty. You stop caring and you devolve.’ The deceit here is that it doesn’t matter what your fiscal situation is, in Lovecraft, there will always be some fanatic who delves into the unknown and causes unrest.
But I digress. Back to the story!
We are introduced to the Whateley clan, more specifically the “goatish looking” infant Wilbur Whateley, his albino mother Lavinia, and Old Whateley, who are all inbred and have odd looks with no chins. Lavinia gave birth to Wilbur without anyone knowing his parentage, many speculating inbreeding because he was “exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears.“
Wilbur grows at preternatural rates; walking at 8 months, talking at 11 months, reading the tomes of Old Whateley at the age of a year and seven months, and by the time he was four and a half years old he already looked 15.
This is where the slog hits in the story, where page after page goes by with familiar themes and normal Lovecraft happenings. We find sores on Old Whateley and Lavinia, cattle are sent to the house frequently, paid for with gold of an extremely ancient date (who even accepted it as a form of payment?), evidence of vampirism, strange odors no one is able to recognize, and odd rituals on May-eve and All-Hallows up on Sentinel Hill led by Old Whateley amongst strange rock formations and a rock altar. Old Whateley and Wilbur re-build the house, to make the inside space larger, and to give it some of the same strange architecture as can be found on the hill. These are all integral to the story and all instances which come up in Lovecraft again and again.
Then one day Old Whateley dies and tells Wilber, “Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye’ll find on page 751 of the complete edition…“
Wilbur heads to Miskatonic University library to search out The Necronomicon as the Old Whateley’s volume is not complete. He seems to get the information he needs and heads back home. That Halloween there is some kind of kerfluffle and his mother is never seen again.
Dr. Armitage of nearby Arkham hears of Wilbur’s visit and looks over his shoulder at page 751 translated. Here we get more information about the Old Ones than we’ve gotten in nearly all of Lovecraft, and all in one page (It’s so provocative that I’ll set a link here for you to read it, but it’s so long that it will just take up too much space, so you may read it…at your own peril!). That page of the Necronomicon leads directly into the opening quote for this essay.
There is also another interesting connection with other Lovecraft here, and that’s “Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family“, where Wilbur’s movement is considered “Gorilla like” along with his “albino mother,” and if you’ll remember the story a princess was pulled from a temple in the jungle and it was found out that she was basically an albino gorillaesk figure. Could it be that this is what happens to people as they take on aspects of the Old Ones? Did at one point in our evolution, we humans diverted from the cosmic skein while our hominid ancestors were closer to those outer deities? Something to ponder.
[image error]The Great God Pan was an inspiration for Lovecraft to write The Dunwich Horror, and has echoes of similar story lines.
Armitage makes a crack that inbreeding could not have caused the physical features displayed by Wilbur, “Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think it a common Dunwich scandal!” Armitage already knows something is amiss.
Later that year Armitage, along with two fellow compatriots hear a dog howl and smell the horrible odor connected to the cosmos. They find a dog had jumped through the window and killed Wilbur Whateley, though this was not the Wilbur Whateley everyone had known…”...with very man-like hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley’s upon it…though it’s chest…had leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply…whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings…“
Yikes!
Strange things begin to happen in Dunwich and they all seem to surround a large invisible creature who is destroying houses and killing people. Armitage delves into research to figure out how to dispel the creature and comes across the “Dho-Hna” formula and a singular terrible phrase written in Wilbur’s crooked scrawl: “I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it.”
Double yikes!
Wilbur obviously began his transformation into some sort of cosmic avatar, whether that be the servant Shoggoth, or something else, he was actively looking to wipe the earth clear of humanity. From everything I’ve read in Lovecraft thus far, this is the first instance where it is absolutely clear the destruction of the human race is the point of the fanatic study. Usually it is just a lust for power or eternal life or knowledge beyond what they should be able to understand.
Dr. Armitage, along with Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan head to Sentinal Hill with a special sprayer which will show the invisible creature (clever if trite plot device). Again we are shown a description. Lovecraft does a fairly good job at this though, because he just throws out a few vague discordant descriptors and lets our mind construct the monstrosity. It is readily apparent that the invisible monster is a Shoggoth. Here it is in clear terms from one of the villagers:
Bigger’n a barn…all made o’ squirmin’ ropes…hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step…nothin’ solid abaout it – all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together…great bulgin’ eyes all over it…ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’…all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings…an’Gawd in heaven – that haff face on top!…
I find this description particularly interesting, not only because we finally get to see what a Shoggoth looks like (It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. – description of a Shoggoth from “At the Mountains of Madness”) with a bit more clarity, no the more intriguing thing here is that section about a ‘half face.’
The Shoggoths are the work horses of the Old Ones (Like the actual workers. They tend to whatever the Old Ones need. Do the dirty work as it were.) and this story seems to be indicating that humans can become Shoggoth, and all they need to do is breed with them…
The story concludes with the trio from Arkham banishing the Shoggoth creature to whence it came. This would probably be a satisfactory conclusion, but Lovecraft takes it a step further. In the last paragraph we find the truth of where the creature came from. This entire story, the Whateley’s were building bigger and bigger spaces. It was unclear as to why, just a vague mention by Old Whateley on his death bed: “More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows – an’ that grows faster.”
But oh god, the creature had half a face. “That face with the red eyes an’ crinkly albino hair, an’ no chin, like the Whateleys...”
Remember that Wilbur grew at an abnormal pace? This was because of his connection with the cosmic deities. Why would the Shoggoth grow at the same pace? We finally see that this monster was not something Wilbur or his grandpappy summoned. Lavinia gave birth to Wilbur and the no one knew who the father was, well it turns out that the monster “…was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”
One only has to wonder…did Old Whateley willingly give up Lavinia to birth cosmic deities?
Triple Yikes!
Join me next week as we jump into Herbert West – Reanimator!
Post Script:
Here’s just a fun rejoinder about the pronunciation of Dunwich.
My brother and his family live in Providence, RI and he is adamant that the real pronunciation of Dunwich is Dunnich. Because RI was a colony they took on the English pronunciation and that’s what is used today (Hence Greenwich village is pronounced Grennich village. What’s interesting in this story is that Lovecraft goes to far lengths to use onomatopoeia to make the speech of the villagers precise to their dialect. He does this to the point that some of it is neigh on impossible to read because he focuses so much on pronunciation to show their destitution. I mention this because there’s one instance where a villager, in dialogue, calls the town Dunwich. Therefore we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is the Dunwich Horror, not the Dunnich Horror.
Necronomicon Notes
Page 751 of The Necronomicon:
“Nor is it to be thought,” ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it, “that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of like and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The Ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Ia! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
September 10, 2020
Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Colour out of Space
“All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form.”
Welcome back to another Blind Read! I’ve been thinking about this story for quite some time because of the recent Nicholas Cage movie (of which I’ve not watched. I wanted to have a fresh vision of what the story was without any preconceived noise in my head). Lovecraft didn’t disappoint because where there is a nice celestial feel to the story, it is decidedly different from just about every Lovecraft story I’ve read (and at this point I’ve read quite a bit!). This story has an interesting facet that adds to the malevolence of the elder gods. In pretty much every other Lovecraft story there is some kind of bad actor who is making an effort to bring about these older gods (even a story like The Shadow Over Innsmouth, because cultists brought Dagon forth), but in this story everything that happens is far outside of any of the characters desires or abilities to stop it; showing how devastating the pantheon can be to us who are bound to the mortal coil.
But we’ll get into that in a minute, let’s jump into the story shall we?
We start, much like all Lovecraft does: with an old man telling a story to a younger narrator. The old man, Ammi Pierce, told of strange happenings west of Arkham, Massachusetts where “The hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.”
The point of the visit for our narrator is he is scouting out a place where they want to create a new reservoir, a place where the people of Arkham told him “the place was evil…” He assumes because Arkham “is a very old town full of witch legends…”
The place they were referring to was specifically a place called the “Blasted Heath”. When our narrator gets to the location he looks upon the Blasted Heath and offers a curious perspective: It must, I thought as I viewed it, to be the outcome of a great fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over those five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields?
Lovecraft wrote this novellette in the late 20’s and one cant ignore the similarities to the descriptions of the blasted heath in the story with the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908. The Tunguska event is still argued over, but the foremost thought is that a meteor hit the earth in Siberia, creating massive devastation which resulted in something similar to the “Blasted Heath”, while also producing an earthquake and so much radioactivity, that (I didn’t do any research into this, but I’m pretty sure this is true) it will still make a Geiger counter go crazy…over a hundred years later. I seriously wonder how much of Lovecraft’s full line of fiction came from this idea. A meteor came down from the heavens with a piece of eldritch godhood and created all the disturbance we see in his fictional Massachusetts. Disturbances of an accord, just like radioactivity would cause mutations, death, and strange visions. This might be something to keep in the back of your mind as we delve deeper into this story.
Our narrator is spooked and heads back to the village and speaks with old Ammi about what happened there. Ammi tells the story of the colour out of space which may indicate why the people of Arkham and the surrounding environs tended to be a locus for such otherworldly influence, but we’ll touch on this again at the conclusion.
Ammi tells us of Nahum Gardner, who was a farmer who had “fertile gardens and orchards”, until a meteor fell from the sky and landed down in the middle of his land. It immediately shrinks and Nahum and his family take a specimen to nearby Miskatonic University to figure out what it is. The professors at first thought it was a silicon, or plastic of some sort, but “when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colors of normal spectrum...” The professors tell him that it is metal without a doubt , but they think that it’s from some unknown source, or it’s a brand new element.
They pry the metal open and inside “They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule imbedded in the substance.” They take the globule out of the metal and put it in a beaker, but the next day the globule and the beaker are gone, replacing them is a burn mark on the counter.
Nahum goes home and finds in the next couple of weeks that the fruit and veggies are of a similar strange “colour” and larger than normal size. The crop seemed to be flourishing, but whenever he took a bite he found that, “for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not a single jot was fit to eat.”
Animals started acting strangely shortly there after. They seemed to mutate and do things they weren’t normally wont to do.
There are two strange phenomena going on here. The first is the fact that the meteor shrinks, and the second is that the produce grows. Why wouldn’t they both grow? Why wouldn’t they both shrink? The answers come just a few months later when Nahum’s crops begin to turn to grey dust, just as Nahum’s family begins to act strangely.
Nahum locks his wife in the attic because she begins to rant and seems to lose her mind. In her words; “she was being drained of something – something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be…nothing was ever still in the night – the walls and windows shifted.”
Nahum’s children also go either missing or die. Ammi tells Nahum that something is off in their well water, but Nahum tells Ammi he wont stop drinking from it. The animals die with “grey dust” in thier heads, along with the land dying in larger and larger circles emanating out from the well. Even the insects began to turn to grey dust.
Nahum’s littlest even “…Fancied they (his mother and brother) talked in some terrible language that was not of this earth.”
While all this was happening Ammi paid a visit to Nahum. He found a grey looking Nahum, barely able to move spouting nonsense before he eventually died.
The grey circle continued to expand until one day there was an explosion and a flash of that otherworldly “colour” blasted out into space, which we see in the opening quote.
After this explosion Ammi, tells the narrator, there is still some of that strange colour left in the well. The grey area of the blasted heath is also still expanding, though slower. These are all indications that something is still there, however nothing else ever happened.
The story ends as the narrator speculates that when they created the reservoir and covered those lands with water, that Ammi never left. He recalled something the old man said to him, which Nahum told Ammi…”can’t git away…draws ye…ye know summ’at’s comin’, but ’tain’t no use…“
Huh. Let’s go back to the beginning of the story, shall we? We know that “The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there.” We also know that Arkham (which is in Massachusetts) is “a very old town of witch legends.”
(Note: this is theory! Not that these essays are based on the first time I’ve read these stories. I am trying to get the most out of them, but if I get something wrong please let me know! Otherwise we can discuss it!)
This story was written during one of the most prolific time periods of his life. What if this was supposed to be the origin of his Providence Yog-Sothothery? There are two basic tenants in the Mythos from what I understand. There are the Gods that have home on the earth (Cthulhu, looking at you), then there are the Cosmic gods.
The Gods of the earth have the history. Mad Alhazred wrote down eldritch truths in the Necronomicon, and the Pnakotic manuscripts are even before that, but those seem to be necromantic tomes with only partial notation of their elders (like in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where they use Yog-Sothoth {Cthulhu’s grandfather) in ritual, but only to gain an aspect of his power latent in the earth with Chthulhu.
The Cosmic gods are what we only see in the dreamlands, because they are so far removed from earth that the only way to get to them is by dreaming (Azathoth, etc.). I believe that this story is these cosmic gods coming down to earth to take a piece of our consciousness and see where we are at in our evolution. The reason for this theory goes back to why the globule shrank in the metal and grew the harvest.
The material of the gods (the globule) needed to feed, but it was also looking for information. It was hungry and got no food, and thus would shrink until it fed. When it got into other things it shone through them. Temporarily expanding them (with it’s own girth) until it sucked all knowledge and life from it’s host, turning that life into grey ash (remember in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward when they used Grey Ash as “Saltes” in a ritual to bring back old knowledge?).
When something with intelligence got the substance in them, it exposed them to the cosmic wonder of the universe, “It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.”
That’s why all the animals and people went crazy, because they saw beyond what the mortal mind can comprehend outside of dreams. So far that it enabled them to speak different languages and see far away sights. It opened a doorway between worlds, because as it was letting Nahum and his family see the eldritch truth, it was looking into our world at the same time. Once it gained what it was looking for it closed the door, ate the life out of the creature and moved on.
This is also why people couldn’t leave. The human mind is inherently inquisitive, (i.e. people running towards danger…tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, murderers…you get the idea) because we want to understand. We’ve talked about this many times before and this is where the horror of Lovecraft comes in, because no matter how much we want to be able to put everything in a nice neat box to reduce our fear of them, there are things in this world that we can’t possibly understand, in fact aren’t meant to understand.
Come back next week as we cover another Lovecraft classic “The Dunwich Horror!”
September 8, 2020
The Hargrave Collection, by Max D. Stanton
“Paying for college destroyed me. Lots of people can say that, but few of them mean it like I do. My debts led me to madness, murder, and Hell.” Max D. Stanton, “The Hargrave Collection” “Your catalogue of hellish and forbidden books sounds highly impressive, and the very names make me shudder. Of only one […]
The Hargrave Collection, by Max D. Stanton
September 6, 2020
First Impressions and Here Be Monsters – LOVECRAFT COUNTRY
Some are already declaring Lovecraft Country as ‘this years Watchmen‘, but this feels hyperbolic to a degree. Watchmen was an immediate shock to the system. Lovecraft Country will, hopefully, slow build its way to a piece of cathartic theatre. Based on a 2016 pulp novel by Matt Ruff, the show adapted by Misha Green begins…
First Impressions and Here Be Monsters – LOVECRAFT COUNTRY
Beautiful
“There’s someone at the window! Please God, there’s someone at the window!” She was thrashing in her bed when I got into the room. My beautiful, gentle fiancée. She had been so sick the last few days, and now it seemed as though the fever was transitioning into hallucinations.
“My love! There’s nothing at the window but a tree branch! Look! I will open it for you,” I didn’t know what to do. My friends were in the drawing room. I’m sure they were nervous and abashed at the noises coming from my dear loved one’s bed chambers, but there was nothing I could do about that. I had to just worry about my poor sick fiancée.
“NO! Stay clear of the window! I saw him! He was so pale, and terrible. His eyes were red, he looked at me, Jonathan. He looked right into me. I felt his gaze to my core. I feel so very cold!”
She was raving. I knew it to be nothing but fever dreams. I could clearly see there was nothing at the window. It was cold and windy though, and I thought maybe it would be wrong of me to introduce a chill into the room of someone so sick, by opening the window.
“Jonathan,” My friend Quincey called from the doorway.
He was a gruff man, but his demeanor was gentle towards me, almost apologetic. I could tell in his face that he didn’t expect my love to live through this terrible sickness.
“BEHIND HIM!” She screamed form the bed. She held up a pale emaciated hand that looked more like a claw, and pointed at my friend. “MY GOD, THE TEETH!”
“Shhhhhh,” I said and stroked her hair. I felt tears well in my eyes, so I bent and kissed her hot forehead in an effort to hide my emotion.
“Sorry for intruding,” Quincey said. “But I called the doctor earlier. I know you said not to, but well, I couldn’t stand to sit by and do nothing. He’s here now and would like to see her.”
“Alright,” I wanted to berate him. Mina had such a terrible fear of doctors. I held my tongue. I knew what he had done was right.
“Please, let me through,” A gruff voice said.
“You see, my love? It was just the doctor. That was who was behind Quincey,” I said to her.
Her eyes flittered back to the window, wide with horror. She pointed to the window. My lord, her nails were so long and ragged. How had I not noticed that?
“What is going on here?” The doctor said. He face was weathered and brown. His beard was long and unruly and white as snow. His hair, buried under a stained brown hat, sprang to his shoulders with the same coarseness as his beard.
“She’s had a fever doctor. We don’t know why,” I said and looked at disgust to Quincey. How could he invite such a man here, knowing Mina’s fear of doctors? A regular doctor would be bad enough; this…unorthodox man…was so much worse.
“NO!” Mina screamed at the sight of him.
“Mina! It’s ok! He’s a doctor!” I tried to sooth her to no avail. Her eyes were locked on the window and her breath heaved so rapidly that her chest began to heave.
“It’s far worse than I thought,” The doctor said. He turned to Quincy. “Quick! Get me as much garlic as you can.”
“IT’S TOO LATE!” Mina screamed. She scratched at me and her skin turned cold.
“Be gone!” The doctor said while producing an old wooden cross and thrusting it in Mina’s face.
The window exploded inwards making the men in the room dive to the ground. I heard Mina moan and when I lifted my head a figure was bent over her. A large black cloak occluded their bodies.
“Quickly!” The doctor said, pulling a long wooden stake from his satchel.
The figure turned to me and hissed. Its visage will forever haunt my dreams. Its skin had the gray tones of slate, contrasted by bright splashes of blood from my poor Mina’s neck. Its eyes, as red as that blood, bore into me. It had two incisors, as long as coffin nails. It stared into my soul. I felt reality shift. It was death and, lord help me, I cannot help but think it was beautiful.
It was gone a moment later and so was my Mina. Dead. Her face returned to peace and beauty that it held before the sickness took hold of her.
The doctor told me that I had to cremate her body. He told me he was on the hunt for that creature and we must hunt it down. That we must kill it.
I prepared to cremate my Mina. But when I lay her down, I dreamed of her opening her eyes. I dreamed of her kissing me. I dreamed of her telling me everything was ok. That we could now be together forever. She kissed my neck and I felt death approach. It was beautiful.
