The H.P. Lovecraft Reading Club

[Sly Boots]

Will finish it up tonight hopefully chaps.

[Snowy]

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

Casting my mind back as I first read it a long time hence, but no I don't think so. I had guessed that the cattle were being used to feed something, and that the repeated renovations were required because the beef eater was getting rather large, but I also wondered whether the house had tunnels leading into the cliff which it abutted and the beastie lived there also.

[Stormbringer]

Will finish it up tonight hopefully chaps.

Any luck, Sly? ¬_¬

[Sly Boots]

Yes, finished it a few days ago, sorry been a bit flat-out since. In all honesty I doubt I'll get the chance to post anything today as it's my eldest's birthday and she'll be back from school soon, so hopefully tomorrow.

[Stormbringer]

It's my eldest's birthday today too! 8 years old.

[Sly Boots]

It's my eldest's birthday today too! 8 years old.

Mine's 9, happy birthday to both wee nippers

[Sly Boots]

Actually I've finished what I was doing slightly earlier than planned so I'll get some thoughts down now. I'll jot mine down first before I read what you both have posted, then go back and read those and add any further comments off the back of those.

Overall, I liked this one. Racism watch - nothing overt I could see apart from an aversion to backwoods types, but that's fair enough I guess

General observation - unlike a lot of his works, it wasn't clear who the narrator was in this story; rather than it being a protagonist it was more of an omniscient narrator. In fact, there wasn't really a protagonist of any kind - for a while it seems that Wilbur will be the main character/antagonist, but he's killed off halfway through. At that point the lecturer/librarian character takes the reins to an extent, but you never see things from his perspective really.

For me it's a bit of a book of two halves (Brian). You have the first half, which is the history of the area and the Whateleys, Wilbur's growing up and becoming a very enigmatic and interesting character. There's also a lot of foreshadowing about what's to come, the mysterious mounds around the locality, what happens to the cattle the old Whateley keeps buying and so on. This is without a doubt my favourite half of the story.

Then Wilbur, who oddly enough given he's in no way a sympathetic character I nevertheless ended up feeling a bit sorry for, gets killed of halfway through the tale. For me what follows is a bit like an old 1950s B movie, in fact a lot of the time I couldn't help but thing of The Blob. I was rather less interested in this section for some reason, perhaps the lack of a clear protagonist to provide some human agency and inner perspective.

I also found his writing of the New England dialect/accent a bit difficult to follow in this one, certainly some of those sections took a while to plough through.

I also also wasn't entirely clear on the purpose of the horror. Was it to open a gateway for the Old Ones or something like that?

In any event, a good yarn.

[Sly Boots]

Snowy mentioned the whippoorwils, and that was another part I really liked, how they'd herald the deaths of the various Whateleys, with different outcomes, including latterly being wiped out by the death of the horror itself. It worked really well as a creepy narrative device.

[Stormbringer]

I also also wasn't entirely clear on the purpose of the horror. Was it to open a gateway for the Old Ones or something like that?

Good question. It's a bit vague. When I first read it, years ago, I somehow construed that it was about opening a gate through which the Old Ones would come through and wipe out mankind.

A second reading I noticed that there's a plan to drag the earth out of this dimension into another one from where it had originally fallen an incalculably long time ago (which is an interesting idea)...then wipe out mankind. Either way, if Wilbur succeeded, we'd all be toast.

Arguably, the real hero of this story is the Miskatonic University guard dog, who puts a premature end to Wilbur's plans. I did think it was weird that a 9-foot-tall monster with tentacles could be defeated by a regular dog. It seems he'd come to rely too heavily on his firearm and perhaps he'd spent so much of his time concealing his true nature and working on his magical studies, that he had never really thought about fighting with his physical body.

One thing that I forgot to mention was that I thought this line (from the Necronomicon) was interesting:

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.

Here, Cthulhu is referenced as being related to the Great Old Ones. Even his home (the sunken isles of Ocean) is mentioned. Yet we know from his own tale that he deliberately came to earth in ancient times and his plans seemed to differ radically from Yog-Sothoth's. Is Cthulhu cool with the idea of the earth being dragged into another dimension and "cleared off"? Does he have a say in this plan? Is he part of it? It's vague.

The mentioning of the "ice desert of the South" and the "deep frozen city" is interesting. It seems to be the first published hint of an idea that Lovecraft would develop later, into the story that became At the Mountains of Madness.

[Stormbringer]

How did the birthday do go?

We had my family over for the evening -- a meal with cake followed by a present-opening ceremony for my son. It was a resounding success!

[Sly Boots]

How did the birthday do go?

We had my family over for the evening -- a meal with cake followed by a present-opening ceremony for my son. It was a resounding success!

Yeah, it was nice. My dad came over with his gifts so when she came in from school we opened those, built some Lego. I asked my dad to buy her a 3/4 size guitar so I tuned that and showed her a couple of chords (my plan is to do this regularly until she has a little repertoire going). Then before bed we played a round of Dragonwood, which she thrashed myself and dad at. Fun game!

[Stormbringer]

Dragonwood's great fun, isn't it? I should pick up a copy myself for my sons.

[Sly Boots]

Dragonwood's great fun, isn't it? I should pick up a copy myself for my sons.

Funniest part of the night was me and dad moaning for about half an hour that the dice were rolling really low, before I belatedly realised they only go up to 4.

Actual quote: "I haven't seen a 5 or a 6 all night! "

It modified our calculations on how many dice we need to roll to capture cards somewhat.

[Stormbringer]

I did something similar once when I accidentally used a special "3-sided dice" (it was a actually a d6 with the numbers 1, 2 and 3 appearing twice), thinking it was an actual d6, and wondering why I never seemed to roll higher than 3!

[Stormbringer]

Are we done with Dunwich then? Time to move on?