The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

[Sly Boots]

Interesting thoughts on the ending, and after my last post my thoughts started to run down similar (although not as fleshed out) lines... although, how does the letter the cultists presented to the ship's captain giving them permission to requisition Suydam's corpse (which, somewhat hilariously, he allows them to do without a word of protest), written and signed in Suydam's own hand, fit in?

It seems he was not only aware of what was going to happen but had given his permission for it... cold feet, I guess?

[Stormbringer]

Maybe it was all planned - perhaps the Dutch wife's blood was the final offering required to complete the ritual, and having a public wedding ceremony was a better cover than a subtle kidnapping. But, when faced with the final ritual - the marriage to Lilith - Robert realises this wasn't such a great idea and changes his mind!

[Snowy]

Interesting thoughts as ever Doug, and bonus points for adding the word syncretistic to my vocabulary.

I did pick up on the paintings in the church I also agree that the non-Mythos choice of baddie does give the story a greater chill. I came to HPL via Call of Cthulhu though, and love to glean those little glimpses of the Mythos from his tales. A story which goes by without a reference to the plateaus of Leng, dread Nyarlathotep or a frenzied cry of "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!" is a disappointment to the HPL-hungry teenager that still lives in my soul.

But what next? Which unspeakable tale of nefarious Dutch deeds awaits us?

[Stormbringer]

Well guys, here's what I think would make suitable follow-ups:

1. More dark secrets lurking in the back streets of NYC!
2. More creepy cults that take over former churches!
3. More swarthy foreigners and their foreign gods! (especially annoying when they board your ship)
4. More dark, devious experiments!
5. More Irish insanity!
6. More child sacrifice!
7. More creepy children with abormal features!
8. More terrible marriages that don't work out...in terrible ways!
9. The Diabolical Dutch Strike Again!

[Sly Boots]

They all sound promising, no real preference here. Whichever is the best story out of the options.

[Snowy]

I agree - all sound suitably twisted - your call Doug

[Stormbringer]

I don't like making the calls, as I prefer to work "organically" with the whims of the group...

[Sly Boots]

Pick one at random Doug, they all sound equally intriguing to me

[Stormbringer]

I will roll a d10, RPG-style...

[Stormbringer]

Okay, I have thought about it, and decided that we really need to finish the New York City tour before we go anywhere else.

Therefore, we shall do...

He

(Like He-Man, without the Man)

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/tex ... on/he.aspx

Prepare for more of Lovecraft's complex psychological relationship with NYC...

[Sly Boots]

"I HAVE THE POWEEERRR!!!

...of racism."

[Sly Boots]

Thanks Doug, might even give it a read tonight (and write my thoughts down a bit sooner this time while it's fresh )

[Stormbringer]

This one is quite funny.

I think it should be called:

HE: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

I will post my thoughts once Sly and Snowy have.

[Sly Boots]

I'll post mine in spoiler tags until Snowy has read it, but doing it now as I'll only forget stuff otherwise.

Spoiler

It's quite the roller-coaster for me, this one. I will say that it's one of those where I enjoy rather than feel a bit beleaguered by his descriptions, the narrative moves at a fair old lick and overall I would say that I quite enjoyed it.

On the other hand, it's probably his most unintentionally hilarious one yet.

The first description of New York is surprisingly poetic for HPL and nice to read and visualise, something that's immediately spoiled in the following paragraph by ranting against people of colour, any lasting vitriol for which however is instantly rendered comic by the line: "... could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart."

What follows is genuinely quite creepy and atmospheric as the narrator explores the hidden avenues of forgotten NY and meets and enigmatic stranger who leads him down a darker path. What surprised me a little here is we never really get the motivations for either one, short of the necromancer basically saying "you want to see something cool?" and the narrator going along with it. It's only when the narrator's actions lead to the necromancer being endangered do we get a sense of he himself being under threat - as far as I could discern there was no hint of human sacrifice in the natives' ritual so presumably if the evening had gone rather better they'd have simply parted ways? In which case the necromancer's motives still befuddle me slightly. Was he just bored, or perhaps sensed a kindred spirit he wanted to share his magicks with?

But it's the narrator's reaction that makes this unintentionally hilarious. I simply love the fact that there's this creepy buildup, hints of something evil and otherworldly going on, and then the pay-off is that the sight of future-NY reduces the narrator, who is obviously a proxy for HPL himself, to shrieking like a gibbon, and such is the force of his terror that it awakes ancient spirits that obliterate a 150-year-old entity... and the thing that causes this outbreak of terrified schoolgirl shrieking is that future-NY will contain... Asian people!!!!

I did laugh out loud at that I'm afraid, the scene made even funnier for me by imagining HPL in his study penning those lines, wiping a chill sweat from his brow as he puts into words the greatest fear he can imagine.

So, yeah, an interesting one.

[Stormbringer]

I too will post my thoughts in Spoiler form, because I cannot wait for Snowy!

Spoiler

Took me a surprisingly long time to write this:

There are some unpleasant echoes of Red Hook here: Lovecraft's unbridled racism that cannot see any non-white, non-English-speaking people as anything other than "swarms", "hordes", or "infestation". What seems to particularly bother him on this occasion is not merely their presence in New York, but that they have no symbiotic, long-established cultural relationship and shared history with the place. Basically, they didn't build it, nor are they descended from those who did, so they don't belong there. The image of New York as a "dead" city, crawling with Asians the way a rotting corpse is crawling with maggots, is particularly disturbing. It's funny how he writes that London and Paris aren't like this; he'd never recover from the shock if he were able to visit London today!

On that note, I find it strange how he mentions that he imagined New York, when he first saw it at sunset, was a place of "dream" or "faery", "half-fabulous" and akin to places such as "Samarcand", but in garish daylight he sees that it's actually quite ugly and populated with...Asians. I'm pretty sure Samarkand, located in Uzbekistan, has always been populated by Asians! Maybe Asians are okay to Lovecraft as long as they stay in Asia and don't move around the planet?

I did enjoy the hilariously neurotic tendencies of the narrator; he can't seem to cope with daylight, Asians or modern architecture, or even other people who claim to be poets or artists, who are merely pretenders. I also liked the section when he is following his host through the long-lost back-allies of New York, crawling on hands and knees through tunnels and climbing over walls. It reminded me a lot of the scenes from Pickman's Model, our second story in this tour, where Richard Upton Pickman is leading Thurber through the hidden back-streets of Boston, on the way to his studio.

However, my favourite section in the whole story is the vista of the horrific Future New York!

I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

My first reading of this description, years ago, baffled me a bit, but now that I'm a bit older, I realise that Lovecraft is describing the opening scenes of Blade Runner!




Strange Flying Things! Black Impious Pyramids! The Lights of Unnumbered Windows! Asians! Never will you sleep soundly again.


The necromancer-squire's motives are puzzling, I agree. I particularly don't understand why he suddenly calls our narrator a "puling lack-wit!" in a snarling tone, when the narrator, in awe (as you would be), asks a harmless question about how far back (or forward) this trick works. Maybe he expected a more sophisticated reaction?

I had completely forgotten this detail when when I selected this story, but I did laugh when it turned out the Native Americans, on whose land the squire's mansion had been built, had learned their magic rites partly from their own people's traditions and partly from...

...AN OLD DUTCHMAN!



No doubt an ancestor of Robert Suydam! The Dutch never cease to be at the root of all nefarious deeds in New York!

Overall, I really enjoyed this story -- more than I was expecting -- and it was also a lot funnier than I remembered!