The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

[Stormbringer]

Drawn by the great fantasy illustrator LES EDWARDS!

Interestingly, Les Edwards writes about this illustration on his website:

Back in my cosmically distant and dream-haunted youth, this was the first Lovecraft story I ever read and it stayed with me down the decaying years.

[Mantis]

That edition of the Lovecraft stories is the one I bought for my girlfriend many years ago. It is a beautiful looking tome. My more up to date collection has more content but doesn't look anywhere near as regal.

[Stormbringer]

It is all right. Better ones have been released since, I would argue. I prefer to read them in a web browser though, as I am fond of searching them with Ctrl + F.

Also...

So, as the week moves toward a close, I will start suggesting our next port of call.

Once again this tale offers us several directions we could travel...

1. Mucking about in graveyards
2. Mucking about in hidden Egyptian catacombs
3. Dwelling alone in ancient castles
4. Feeling isolated from humanity and being angsty about it
5. Returning to the family estate and finding it's not quite what you expected
6. Creepy abhumans living underground

[Gibby]

I vote for either 4 or 6. I like to read about myself. ¬____¬

[Mantis]

I'm easy between 3, 4 and 6.

[Sly Boots]

6 maybe.

[Stormbringer]

Looks like 6 wins the majority vote.

That being the case, I propose we read The Lurking Fear.

Read it here and we'll talk about it next week. I'm pretty excited about this one!

Hopefully Snowy will catch up with us. ¬_¬

[Stormbringer]

Hope you all had a good weekend; did anyone (besides myself and Gibby, who told me via Facebook Messenger) read The Lurking Fear? ¬_¬

[Sly Boots]

I feel like it's only been a couple of days!

I've got a busy morning but will be a bit quieter after that, so I'll aim to read it early pm today.

[Sly Boots]

Done

[Stormbringer]

Looks like Mantis slept overnight at work again and Snowy is too busy roasting various slabs of meat in his back yard to pay any attention to what's going on here. ¬_¬

I'll start the discussion...

Spoiler

I really like this one, mostly because of how funny it is. I enjoy that it is slightly longer than the previous three we have read, even being divided into sub-chapters. The narrator has that same obsessive drive toward the macabre as St John & Co, with that same slightly unhinged edge which escalates as the story develops. He's not interested in robbing graves, but he will dig them up with furious abandon to uncover the secrets of the "grotesque and the terrible", in his manic pursuit of "strange horrors". He strikes me as something of a self-appointed ghost-buster or private eye who specialises in the paranormal. He's the sort of guy you'd send in to investigate the aftermath of other Lovecraft stories. It would be amusing to see a story where he's called in to investigate the deaths of St John and his friend, or the Dutch thieves in Rotterdam. Not that he'd ever want to have anything to do with the Dutch again...

This is the second of three tales where Lovecraft makes very clear his absolute loathing of the Dutch. So far, we know that Dutch people in Holland are thieves, but Dutch people in America, who "penetrate" that great land only "feebly" and "transiently", either become degenerate squatters at best (as opposed to "normal persons" who would never go to the Catskill mountains unless they're looking for horror), or mutant white-haired monkey-men at worst. Cultural and biological degeneration is the natural result, in Lovecraft's mind, of not being English and/or living in rural areas, but this particularly extreme case is the consequence of committing the worst possible crime in Lovecraft's mind: not being English and also hating the English! That is the true horror above all horrors. Actually, that's not quite true. Only one thing is worse than not being English and hating the English: being Dutch and hating the English. The Dutch; those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint daemon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space! He can only sleep at night after the entire mountain on which they used to live is destroyed by dynamite, in the hope that the remnants of their decaying civilisation are "exterminated"!

Going back to the narrator, despite his claims of being a "connoisseur of horrors", he has an incredibly ham-fisted and haphazard approach to investigating this case. His highly sophisticated plan is to camp out in the bedroom of a murdered aristocrat in a haunted house, with rope-ladders hanging out of the window and guns at the ready. Only when his two muscular buddies are killed after they all fall asleep in the same bed ( ) does he actually do some proper research of the place with the help of a journalist.

After said journalist is also killed, our narrator loses his mind (understandably at this stage). Later on, when it finally dawns on him what might be going on, he describes himself as

running, spade in hand; a hideous run across moon-litten, mound-marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous abysses of haunted hillside forest; leaping, screaming, panting, bounding toward the terrible Martense mansion

Then, when he finally gets an opportunity, he TRIUMPHANTLY shoots a straggler of those cursed Dutch monkeys! Ah! The sweet satisfaction of murdering uglier and lesser forms of life! I am surprised he used his gun instead of his shovel, like that other guy with the vulture.

Yeah... actually, this is the last person you'd send in to investigate the aftermath of a Lovecraft story. He'd make a total blunder of it!

Did you notice the narrator ends up like Thurber from Pickman's Model -- phobic about wells and subways? I wonder if HPL was phobic about underground places himself, and the potential horrors that could lurk down there. Each story we have read so far involves an underground lair of some sort, where dark, hideous and abnormal things dwell and fester. Notice he needs medicinal help sleeping now because of the fear of what might be down there. We will return to this theme. Some horror connoisseur he is, eh?

Also, do you notice here Lovecraft's total disgust of organic matter, and the potential varieties and possibilities of what could happen to it if not kept in check by the rigours of English civilisation? Even the trees and plants that grow in Dutch areas are vile to him. I start to wonder if the narrator's murder of the ape-man here, and the narrator of The Hound's murder of the vulture at the graveside, is really an outpouring of the utter hatred and disgust that HPL felt toward what he perceived as the chaos of the untamed natural world.

The purple prose is pretty wild in this tale; almost as wild as the exessive thunder that ravages Tempest Mountain, and as bloated and over-nourished as the descriptions of the overgrown vegetation it is so often employed to describe! However, that's all part and parcel of a classic Lovecraft tale; it wouldn't be the same without it!

One particular phrase which has stuck with me over the years is this:

a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning

Once again, the first time I read this tale, many years ago, I did not see what was coming and I was just as perplexed by the goings on as the narrator. For some reason that particular line stuck in my head and even after I reached the conclusion and learned what the Lurking Fear actually was, in my memory I muddled things up and somehow always remebered this tale as being about creatures that could travel via lightning. The same year (2005) I watched War of the Worlds where I believe the aliens do actually travel into their underground tripods via lightning bolts, and somehow I confused these two stories and couldn't remember which one involved something that "rode the lightning".


So what did you guys think of this story?

[Sly Boots]

Spoiler

Wow, you've really covered a lot of the points I was going to touch on, particularly the stuff about the Dutch. It was actually quite hilarious how hateful the descriptions of them were, and I feel it has to be a hatred borne of fear.

What I will say is that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one, could well be my favourite of the four we've done so far. While I had guessed the final twist ahead of time, it was only really a few pages ahead of the denouement, so on the whole I felt he did a better job of teasing that while keeping it under wraps than in The Outsider.

One element I found slightly confusing given the final twist is that abject horror he feels when he sees the shadow on the chimney breast, after his companions have been taken. It's described very much as an unearthly, demonic, eldritch horror beyond the ken of men, and yet at the end we learn the monsters are humanoid in appearance, being quite ape-like. You would have thought in shadow they would appear very close to human.

Highly enjoyable on the whole, even the hilariously overt racism

[Stormbringer]

Spoiler

Yes, I should probably let other people speak their thoughts BEFORE I bombard you with all mine...

One element I found slightly confusing given the final twist is that abject horror he feels when he sees the shadow on the chimney breast, after his companions have been taken. It's described very much as an unearthly, demonic, eldritch horror beyond the ken of men, and yet at the end we learn the monsters are humanoid in appearance, being quite ape-like. You would have thought in shadow they would appear very close to human.

Good observation! A fairly classic example of the over-the-top language he typically uses to describe material things that repulse him.

Lovecraft: "It was a blasphemous abnormality from hell’s nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe!"

Reader: "Let me guess... was it somebody who is not English?"

Lovecraft: "...how did you know?!!"

It could be that there were several monkey-men coming through the window at the same time, so he just saw a mass of furry, writhing arms all moving at the same time, which would be pretty freaky.


Speaking of the chimney -- did you notice that the Dutch fireplace in Jan Martense's bedroom, which the monkey-men use to access the house, is decorated with images of the parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Luke? Ironic that Jan Martense did return to the family home as a prodigal son (after hanging out with the English for some years), but instead of being welcomed back with open arms, he is savagely murdered by his own family. Those vile Dutch!

[Sly Boots]

Spoiler

Lovecraft: "It was a blasphemous abnormality from hell’s nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe!"

Reader: "Let me guess... was it somebody who is not English?"

Lovecraft: "...how did you know?!!"

[Gibby]

Spoiler

Doug has really captured pretty much all I wanted to say about this one. I really enjoyed it, but it is hilarious rather than horrifying.

Nowadays we could definitely read into this sentence:

"...two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness" ( ), especially considering they later sleep comfortably on a bed next to each other even though they are in a scary ass house in the middle of a damned storm!

Doug and I briefly discussed this one on Facebook (in our secret HPL and other random stuff chat for only the most unhinged minds ¬_¬) and I mentioned to him how absurdly flowery the language is in this story! If someone wrote this today they'd get so much shit because we know that they think they're clever, leafing through their Thesaurus for the most convoluted way of saying things. But this is Lovecraft, it was the '20s, and as Doug says it wouldn't be the same without it all. A couple of favourites:

"And yet, as I have said, vague new fears hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons squatted invisibly on the mountain-tops and leered with Abaddon-eyes that had looked on trans-cosmic gulfs."

"Then, as I playfully [lol] shook him and turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time."

Has anyone ever been THIS scared?

I also love the ending, where he casually shoots some poor creature that waddles out a bit late behind the others. That Lovecraft thinks men could devolve into ghoulish apes within 300 years really sums up his limited knowledge on the topic of evolution and genetics. But then, these were DUTCH folk. ¬_¬