The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

[Stormbringer]

Should be finishing this up tonight

Well done!

[Sly Boots]

I actually finished this up the other night but forgot to write anything up.

So, one I quite enjoyed as it happens. I think the scene was set very well though the first 'twist', that the inhabitants of Innsmouth are creepy fish-people, was obvious from almost the very beginning (I think the first time he mentions their distinctive facial features and unblinking eyes), but such is the breathless nature of the reveal some 75% of the story later I don't think that was intentional.

Even calling the main big building in the town "the Gilman house" was a bit on the nose

I did, however, only see the second twist, that of the fate of the narrator, coming only a few pages before it happened so that one was quite well kept under wraps.

Random observations:

More than once the narrator has a meal involving crackers (either on their own or with the decadent accompaniment of soup). Is that a period thing, or a taste peculiar to Lovecraft?

While the narrative does give a good sense of place, I do feel old Howie rather belaboured the arrangement of street names, without the aid of a map I couldn't mentally picture the layout in my mind.

Racism-wise there's a deep suspicion of things South Pacific, their indigenous people being a strange lot of fish-f*****s. But then the caucasians end up doing the same so there you go. Unless I've missed it I couldn't see any influence of the dastardly Dutch this time.

I love the fact that his escape plan basically boils down to:



I'm surprised he doesn't head to the Winchester to wait for the whole thing to blow over

[Snowy]

Am on it gents, sorry for the tardiness!

[Stormbringer]

Thanks for the write-up, Sly! Glad you enjoyed it. It is considered one of his "greatest hits".

More than once the narrator has a meal involving crackers (either on their own or with the decadent accompaniment of soup). Is that a period thing, or a taste peculiar to Lovecraft?

I'd heard a rumour on the internet that Lovecraft largely survived on this kind of fare, but evidence from his letters proves contrary:

http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/interest/foods.aspx

I love his $3.00 a week budget, though -- if only we could all survive on that today!

Racism-wise there's a deep suspicion of things South Pacific, their indigenous people being a strange lot of fish-f*****s. But then the caucasians end up doing the same so there you go. Unless I've missed it I couldn't see any influence of the dastardly Dutch this time.

There's a mention of alarm at the fact a New England man came home with a... *chokes* ... CHINESE wife!

But yes, Lovecraft had a strange unease about the South Pacific, apparently. It is, after all, where Cthulhu lives, and we've had at least three stories in recent times make reference to the area:

1. The Call of Cthulhu (obviously)

2. The Haunter of the Dark

Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island.

3. The Picture in the House

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places...they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands.

I'd be very interested to know if Lovecraft ever wrote on why he was so fascinated by the South Pacific as a source of horror, in the same way he wrote as to why 17th Century New England was.


I think Lovecraft weaves at least three phobias into this one:

1. Foreigners (especially "inter-racial" breeding)

2. The Sea

3. Disreputable genetic heritage (likely as a result of point 1)

On the latter point, there's an strong element of Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family -- a man discovering the true source of his quirky traits and committing suicide as a consequence. This all seems to revolve around the idea that being anything other than a white Anglo-Saxon is an unbearable existence.


Three more things:

1. I like how Cthulhu is dragged into this tale; he's not just worshiped by human cultists on land, but by the Deep Ones beneath the ocean.

2. There's mention of a SHOGGOTH in the last paragraph, which scares the living daylights out of the narrator, though very little is said about it. Understanding this reference depends on the reader having already read the earlier tale, At The Mountains of Madness, which we will come to later.

3. This tale plays a huge role in shaping the plot of the 2004 first-person-survival-horror game, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, which you can buy on GOG.COM or Steam for £3.99:

https://www.gog.com/game/call_of_cthulh ... _the_earth



Recommended if you want to "game" this tale!

[Stormbringer]

I've been re-reading the story over the last couple of days while we wait for Snowy. ¬_¬

I noticed this section:

Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far, misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told

REMEMBER THIS. We will be going back there later. Tales referenced within tales. I love how Lovecraft does this.

Also, I really love the whole Gilman House escape sequence.

[Snowy]

Yeah, we would be reading my insights about now if I had been reading the Shadow over Innsmouth and not the Dunwich Horror...

Am on it gentlemen, just behind the curve even my my own woeful standards...

[Stormbringer]

Yeah, we would be reading my insights about now if I had been reading the Shadow over Innsmouth and not the Dunwich Horror...

Oh boy. Well, since Sly has already read Dunwich, I guess that will be our next!

[Snowy]

OK Shadow over Innsmouth re-read, thoughts to follow. I have also picked up Dunwich Horror from where I left off too.

Shadow is, for me, the first of the full-blown Mythos stories that we have read, the ones that hooked me way back when I was introduced to Lovecraft by way of playing Call of Cthulhu with my old RPG group way back when. In fact, the CoC RPG was useful in rationalising what was otherwise a bit of a weird concept - why HPL's protagonists were so prone to fainting. When it was considered to be such a hammer-blow to your sanity to realise that such things existed, his cast of characters all having less of a grip on consciousness than a herd of fainting goats made more sense.

The story itself is great, the insinuation of the Deep Ones into Innsmouth and their breeding with the residents is pleasantly chilling, especially when factored against a once prosperous but now dying, rotting and boarded up city. That the protagonist does not end up in a sanitarium or topping himself when his own genealogy comes to the fore is a bonus for me though. His deciding to embrace the opportunity to go and live beneath the waves makes for a great ending, although it does call into question why he would choose to commit his intents to paper

Anyway, for me any story that contains Ia! Shub Niggurath! tends to be a winner. I will be back as soon as I finish Dunwich...

[Stormbringer]

Cheers for the write-up, Snowy. I never thought of Lovecraft's protagonists fainting as a total loss of sanity points before, but that's an excellent way to regard it.

Are we happy to move on to The Dunwich Horror? I realise Sly has read this already (albeit a few months ago) and if I'm understanding his posts correctly, Snowy has also just read it?

[Snowy]

I have indeed just finished it. I will post my thoughts when I have a few mins spare, hopefully this evening.

[Sly Boots]

I decided to reread it as it has been a while, started last night and will probably be a few evening as I work through it.

[Stormbringer]

Excellent. I'll get cracking and read it myself over the next couple of days.

[Snowy]

First up for me then - a rarity indeed!

Another Lovecraft classic this one. Some similarities with Innsmouth too, the use of the legend of whippoorwills capturing the souls of the recently deceased being one such.

If I am correct, this is where Yog Sothoth is first really described as one of the Elder Gods. He clearly has a bit of the Greek gods in him, seeing as he appears to have impregnated poor Lavinia Whateley. It might also be the first mention of the dread Necronomicon being held in the Miskatonic University but I am not sure on that point.

A great tale this one, one that really builds to a climactic crescendo and you imagine would make a good film. Sadly seeing the trailer for the 1970 film of the same name makes me suspect it has very little to do with the book.

[Stormbringer]

If I am correct, this is where Yog Sothoth is first really described as one of the Elder Gods.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (which I doubt we'll read, as it's fairly long, and -- controversially -- I find it quite tedious ¬_¬) is where the mysterious Yog-Sothoth makes his debut appearance. However, in it, it's not really clear what it is except a name that is chanted as part of occult rituals. In The Dunwich Horror, Yog-Sothoth's purpose and power is not exactly clear, but we do at least find out that "he" is capable of impregnating human women, much like Zeus, as you suggest, but with more hideous offspring.

It might also be the first mention of the dread Necronomicon being held in the Miskatonic University but I am not sure on that point.

I think this is a good time to introduce this little "story":

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

This piece was written before Dunwich, though published a decade later, though clearly Dunwich depends on this history.

[Stormbringer]

So, The Dunwich Horror. Overall, I really love this story. I think it might even be my favourite mythos tale! A very creepy, very local horror, yet with massive global implications, with an exciting build-up and a heavy sprinkling of occult science and magic. I also love the monster in this. I find it, and its father, to be far more horrifying than Cthulhu!

Here are my (overly) detailed observations:

The epigraph at the start of the story is taken, as it says, from Charles Lamb, an 18th Century English writer who was close friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge of The Ancient Mariner fame. Lamb's brief essay that Lovecraft quotes, Witches, and other Night Fears can be read here. It is mostly an account of Lamb's own dreadful superstitious fears as a child and his theory that these fears are not instilled into our mind via external things that we see (such as pictures in books) but exist already within us, and are merely given definite shape by external sources. He also advises keeping your children up until midnight to prevent them from waking up screaming alone in the dark, plagued with such terrors. As a parent of three children, and with Charles Lamb never having had any children himself (he never married), I do not endorse his suggestion. ¬_¬

One final thing on the epigraph: in his short essay, Lamb mentions that he was singularly disturbed by a picture he found in one of his father's Bibles (which has certain echoes of The Picture in The House) -- of the story where King Saul of Israel visits a witch with whose aid he "calls up" the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel, to consult him for advice, as God has turned his back on Saul. According to the essay, this one picture seems to have particularly frightened young Charles to the point where it prevented him from sleeping soundly for years of his childhood. I've had a look at the picture myself (I believe it is THIS one) and I honestly can't see what's so scary about it. I guess he was a very sensitive fellow! And, perhaps in the 18th century, nothing scarier was available as a frame of reference?

Anyway, back to the main story...

The opening reminds me a lot of the The Picture in the House -- the bleak, rural, dilapidated backwoods New England that Lovecraft has somehow twisted into the scariest place on earth through his purple prose. As the narrative describes the journey into tourist-shunned Dunwich and its degenerate inhabitants, there's an inescapably strong resemblance to Innsmouth going on.

Once again, just like Innsmouth, Lovecraft has his degenerate denizens of this dilapidated town engaging in heathenish, orgiastic rites on May Eve and All Hallows Eve -- this concept he derived from The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) [text here], by Margaret Murray (an anthropological study based on spurious evidence, which has now been rejected by scholars, yet ironically influenced modern-day actual "witch cults" like Wicca etc.) which he references frequently throughout his works.

I enjoyed the excerpt from the 1747 sermon by Reverend Abijah Hoadley:

It must be allow’d, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I my self did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou’d raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.

In it, he reels off several names of daemonic entities pulled straight from the Bible: Azazel, Buzrael, Beelzebub and Belial. Well, three of them are. "Buzrael" is completely made up. Why Lovecraft did this, I do not know! Not a very convincing Reverend if he just makes up daemon names off the top of his head! Just as well he didn't stay long in Dunwich...

It was interesting learning about all the generally-now-disused annual festivities such as Lammas, Candlemas and Roodmas, two of which I had never even heard of before reading this tale!

Lovecraft borrows several ideas from Welsh author Arthur Machen , and even gives him a little nod half way through:

“Great God, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think it a common Dunwich scandal!

The Great God Pan is a great story [text here], and I do recommend it!

Also -- speaking of Machen -- that bit where Dr Henry Armitage finally deciphers the diary of Wilbur Whately? Wilbur wrote (at the age of three) that he had learned "Aklo". You MIGHT recall that Aklo was also used by members of the Church of the Starry Wisdom in The Haunter of the Dark...

The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way through previous researches.

Arthur Machen made up this "Aklo" language for use in his story The White People [text here]. Also a really fun, creepy little story.


One final note on this tale:

I love how, in Lovecraft stories, when people AREN'T SPEAKING ENGLISH, you know something is terribly wrong. However, in this one, the climax of the horror is when something terribly wrong ACTUALLY SPEAKS ENGLISH!


And one final question: did you guess that Lavinia had twins before the reveal in the final sentence?