As I sit before my laptop this morn, a strange chill seeps through my dwelling, bidding me seek the warmth of my long-forgotten slippers. The air bears that faint, ineffable quality, an autumnal breath that speaks of unseen cycles, of decay and remembrance. At last, San Diego has relinquished its unholy summer grip. For too long have I read the arcane chronicles of Howard Phillips Lovecraft beneath a pitiless sun, sweat trickling down my temple as if in mockery of cosmic dread. There is something indecent—profane, even—about perusing those haunted pages while the sky blazes with indifferent daylight.
I find too that my ritual observances of October—those sonic invocations from Bauhaus, Rudimentary Peni, Samhain, and The Misfits—ring oddly hollow when bathed in brightness. Their spectral lamentations demand the gloaming, not the glare; their necrotic rhythms crave the company of long shadows, not the tyranny of the noon sun.
But enough of these seasonal dissonances. Let me turn, as all seekers of unnameable truths must, to the tale before me: “He”. How curious that words such as domdaniel (a fictional cavernous hall at the bottom of the ocean where evil magicians, spirits, and gnomes meet) and crotala (a percussion instrument of ancient Greece and Rome resembling a pair of clappers or castanets) should lure me to my dictionary like some trembling acolyte before a forbidden grimoire. At first, I confess, the narrative moved with the sluggishness of some half-dreamt vision. Yet when the mysterious companion began to speak in that eldritch and anachronistic tongue, ah!, then my spirit quickened. His every syllable seemed laden with the dust of centuries, his voice a cadence from realms beyond mortal chronology. He might have recited the dullest municipal ledger, and still I would have listened, enraptured, as though through him whispered the echo of a time mankind was never meant to recall.
In the labyrinthine glooms of Greenwich Village our nameless wanderer, weary and repelled by the alien immensities of New York, beheld a figure garbed in the antique vesture of the eighteenth century. Drawn into that stranger’s abode, he heard the tale of a colonial squire who had wrung from the native tribes their occult dominion over time and space, only to betray them with the gift of rum, that all might perish and he alone inherit their dread secrets. With a ghastly smile the host unveiled his true identity as that same squire, unaged across centuries, and subjected the hapless narrator to visions of New York’s spectral past and monstrous future, until screams tore his throat and summoned forth the long-slain tribes to avenge themselves upon their murderer.
Lovecraft himself set quill to this vision in 1924, after nocturnal wanderings through Old New York. It was wrought in the bitterness of his brief sojourn there with Sonia Greene, a time of disappointment and loathing which soon drove him back to Providence. The tale’s opening drips with his abhorrence of the city’s teeming multitudes and looming towers, its alien press of life that crushed his spirit. Upon Perry Street he placed his phantom mansion, and in its chambers he wove echoes of Lord Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguez, wherein sorcerous windows reveal wars unbounded by time. Thus was He born: a lament of exile, a confession of revulsion, and a vision of eldritch vengeance amidst the pavements of Manhattan.
A wiser soul than mine would long since have sought the refuge of slumber, yet here I linger, fingers trembling at my keyboard beneath the wan radiance of a swollen harvest moon. Through my window its argent light spills—cold, pitiless, eternal—illuminating the pages of that most noxious of narratives, “The Horror at Red Hook.” A saner man would not summon such phantoms before surrendering to dreams, for sleep is the kingdom of their dominion. Yet folly, ever my companion, bids me read on.
As I trace H. P. Lovecraft’s ink-born nightmare, my thoughts drift unbidden to Alan Moore’s Providence, that modern scripture of abomination. Therein, Moore, grim artificer, has pried open Lovecraft’s veiled suggestions and laid bare the festering subtext beneath. What the master hinted at, Moore makes flesh; what was whispered, he commands to howl. I confess it is a dreadful brilliance, an exegetic blasphemy I can neither abhor nor resist.
Those who cherish the eldritch might find Providence still obtainable, thirty American dollars, a trivial sum to purchase madness. And so I write, half-aware that the moonlight upon my desk grows ever paler, as if leached by some unseen tide, and that perhaps, before dawn, wisdom itself may desert me forever.
On to our tale…
In the haunted annals of New York there lies the tale of Detective Malone, whose soul was blasted by the nameless terrors of Red Hook. It was there, among the crumbling facades and festering slums, that he beheld the decline of Robert Suydam, a recluse whose wasted frame grew perversely youthful even as the streets filled with whispers of abduction. A raid unearthed only cryptic sigils, yet the true horror came when Suydam, newly wed, was found lifeless upon a ship, his bride’s flesh mangled by claw-marks of no earthly beast. Pursuing the mystery, Malone descended into unhallowed caverns where sacrificial rites were enacted and Suydam himself was given foul resurrection. Though rescued from the ruins of that blasphemous den, the detective emerged forever marked, his dread of looming edifices a scar left by the lurking menace that yet broods over Red Hook.
Scholars have sought the tale’s worldly roots. Marc Beherec discerns in St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church, raised by Ryneer Suydam, the germ of Lovecraft’s fiction, seeing in its metamorphosis a mirror of both neighborhood decay and Robert Suydam’s hideous transformation. Lovecraft, soured by his sojourn in New York and by the mingled throngs he abhorred, drew his occult trappings from the dry scholarship of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the weird imaginings of E. Hoffmann Price. Yet the tale, steeped in xenophobic bile, has long been scorned by critics. Lin Carter named it “literary vitriol,” and S. T. Joshi judged it among Lovecraft’s weakest works. Still, its malign influence endures, for it gave rise to new visions of horror: Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, which reclaims the tale from its prejudice, and Alan Moore’s The Courtyard and Providence (reader beware, Moore render Lovecraft’s subtext into text, making it a harrowing experience) , which echo its sinister cadences in modern guise.
I have perused the accursed chronicles of H. P. Lovecraft innumerable times, yet for all my familiarity with his dread imaginings, I cannot, in sober truth, recall ever encountering that curious narrative entitled “The Shunned House.” Doubtless I have read it Aye, in some forgotten hour beneath a guttering lamp, but if so, it has slipped from memory as dreams fade before the dawn. Perhaps this is no fault of my own, for the tale, though steeped in miasmic suggestion, lacks the hideous potency of the Dread Master’s most blasphemous works.
And yet, I tremble to confess it, I sense that its malignant spores took root nonetheless in the mind of another visionary: Grant Morrison. In The Invisibles, the transmogrification of John-A-Dreams into a sentient fungus, glimpsed through a thousand disjointed masks of identity, reeks unmistakably of that Providence house where corruption seeped upward from the very earth.
Let us, then, descend into the text itself. Into those damp and haunted chambers, where the walls breathe and the floor remembers. Let us begin today’s reading.
In that ill-starred dwelling upon Benefit Street, our narrator and his venerable uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, pursued a mystery steeped in death and miasma. The house, long cursed by noisome odors and phosphorescent growths, concealed beneath its rotting timbers an evil not born of man. In the cellar, amidst vapors yellow and corpse-like imprints upon the earth, they glimpsed visions of the doomed Harris lineage. At the midnight hour there came a shrieking light, hateful and many-eyed, and Dr. Whipple, seized by nameless powers, assumed a monstrous form before dissolving into a legion of the house’s spectral victims.
Haunted yet resolute, the narrator sought to end the blight. Beneath the cellar floor he uncovered a translucent tube of unimaginable girth, the very limb of some titanic horror slumbering beneath Providence. With barrels of acid he seared the thing until the fungi turned to ash. Though he mourned his uncle, he took grim solace that the abomination lay dead, and the house in time appeared ordinary once more.
Of the tale itself, its history is as curious as its subject. Printed in 1928 by W. Paul Cook, “The Shunned House” lay unbound for decades. In 1959 Arkham House came into possession of one hundred fifty sets, of which fifty were sold unbound, while the remainder August Derleth bound in 1961 without jacket, marked only upon the spine. Those rare volumes, watermarked “Canterbury,” now stand as the most coveted relic of Arkham House, though forgeries abound, bearing the false “Chantry” mark or crimson boards. For the collector, it is a veritable grail, a cursed treasure from the very heart of Lovecraft’s mythic legacy.
As I set forth this day to attend my grandson’s Little League game, I prepare to join the throng of parents and kin who cheer the young players with cries of “Swing batter, batter,” while consuming hot dogs laden with mustard and relish. Yet, unlike my companions in this innocent ritual, I know that beneath the benign autumn sun, my skin will creep with remembrance of Lovecraft’s tale, “The Festival.”
In that dread story, an unnamed traveler comes at Yuletide to Kingsport, the ancient seaport of his forebears. He beholds crooked alleys, sagging houses, and the church that looms untouched by centuries. A mute elder, gloved and bland of countenance, guides him through ancestral halls where the Necronomicon lies among worm-eaten tomes. At the appointed hour, he joins a silent multitude of cowled figures, descending beneath the church to a subterranean shore where green flames belch and an amorphous flutist pipes to the abyss. There, winged horrors—neither beast nor man—bear the worshipers into gulfs unguessed. The traveler recoils, for his guide reveals proof of kinship and a face not human. In terror, he flings himself into the oily waters.
He awakens in a hospital, told he had walked from a cliff into the sea. Yet when he later reads in Arkham the blasphemous words of the Necronomicon, he finds them echoing all he has seen, speaking of corruption that spawns monstrous life and of things that walk when they were made to crawl.
Critics have marked the tale’s import. Lin Carter names it the first of Lovecraft’s works to root itself in witch-haunted Kingsport and the earliest to yield a lengthy citation from the dread Necronomicon. S. T. Joshi recalls that “The Unnamable” first introduced Arkham. Yet, he concedes that “The Festival” binds itself more deeply to the Mythos.
I can’t explain why, but I wish there were a Kobo Clara available in Apple MessagePad 2000 green.
Today I set forth toward Scream Diego, a gathering whose very title stirs both curiosity and unease. I have walked the crowded corridors of Comic-Con, where merchants ply their wares and masked devotees pose in the guise of heroes, sorcerers, and voyagers among the stars. Yet never before have I entered a conclave devoted wholly to horror. What spectacles might await me there? Surely stalls of merchandise, yet perhaps other rites as well. Will revelers dip for apples as if in some rustic game? Will tales be spoken around a campfire fashioned for artifice alone? Might there be attendees garbed in the likeness of Poe, or perhaps even Ligotti? Dear reader, your conjecture is as good as mine.
As I prepare myself for this descent into the unknown, I turn to a tale of H. P. Lovecraft’s devising, “The Unnamable.” In this story, Randolph Carter and his companion Joel Manton linger in a graveyard beside a ruined house upon Arkham’s Meadow Hill. Carter recounts whispers of an entity beyond the compass of mortal senses, a terror unfit for any earthly name. Their discourse is shattered when the abomination itself emerges, rending flesh and mind alike. They awake within St. Mary’s hospital, marked with wounds like horns and bruises like hooves. Manton, once unbelieving, can speak only of slime and vapor, of eyes and blemishes, of a thousand shifting forms. At last he names it in trembling tones, calling it what it had ever been: the unnamable.
“The Rats in the Walls” has ever been my most cherished of Lovecraft’s dread imaginings, though it may seem strange that I, enamored as I am of cosmic horror and gulfs beyond time, should favor a tale rooted in ancestral horror and subterranean decay. Permit me, then, to recount.
In the shadow-haunted days of my youth in South Bend, Indiana, I haunted the venerable Griffon Bookstore. On the shelves I first beheld The Best of H. P. Lovecraft, its’ cover beautifully painted by Michael Whelan. Though I had never yet pierced the veil of his prose, his presence already festered everywhere, upon the mouldering pages of Swamp Thing, within the role-playing game of The Call of Cthulhu. With wages earned in grease and weariness as a busboy, I at last secured the tome.
Late that night, I opened its pages and descended with Delapore into Exham Priory, where phantom rats whispered behind worm-eaten walls. As I read, my own chamber betrayed the same uncanny stirrings, as if unseen vermin crept through the plaster about me. Shuddering, I cast the book aside unfinished. Months later, in Boston, the volume re-emerged from my boxes, and once more I dared the tale. Again came the sound of gnawing in the walls, yet this time I steeled my nerves and endured to the final abomination.
What I beheld therein chills me still: the last De la Poer, haunted by phantom scurryings of rodents, uncovering the monstrous history of his line: a subterranean city of human cattle, bred and devoured until madness claimed both kin and heir. His frenzy, his cannibal feast upon poor Norrys, his gibbering in tongues dead and unholy, all culminating in confinement and delusion, while the gnawing persisted beyond reason.
Author, editor and critic, Lin Carter has deemed it among Lovecraft’s finest; Lovecratian scholar S. T. Joshi hails its perfection of form and dread. I take comfort in such recognition, though I doubt they knew the terror of reading while the same spectral scratching echoed through their very walls. For me, the tale will ever remain not merely literature, but lived experience, a nightmarish communion with the vermin of eternity.
Reading articles saved to Instapaper on my Kobo is a delight.
This day finds me seated beside the diamond where my grandson partakes in the innocent rites of Little League, the young voices rising in cheerful chorus as the coach exhorts his charges through their drills for Sunday’s game. It should be an idyll of sunlight and laughter, yet to me it is tinged with nameless disquiet, for my eyes have been buried in the dread chronicle of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear.”
Therein, an unnamed hunter of abominations braves Tempest Mountain, where thunder and slaughter had erased a village. Companions vanish into the maw of a haunted mansion, shadows gibber against the lightning, and a journalist ally meets a doom too hideous for words. The revelations are ghastly. The Martense line, shunned and insular, had sunk into grotesque degeneration, birthing the cannibal wretches that stalk the hills. Though the mansion is leveled by fire and thunder, the hunter’s mind is blasted by the certainty that such foulness festers unseen in the world beyond.
Author, editor and critic Lin Carter once remarked that while this tale strives at solemn terror, it lacks the macabre exuberance of “Herbert West.” I concur; yet on this bright field of youth, its shadow fell across me like a storm-cloud, darkening an otherwise wholesome day with whispers of things best left unspoken. Bravo, indeed.
When I was but a youth, I steeped myself daily in the grotesque imaginings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, reading a tale each October evening as the dying light lengthened across Boston’s crooked streets. With half-closed eyes, I could all but believe the mists and crumbling stones about me were those same accursed vistas of New England that his pen evoked with dreadful authority. Last year, I revived that eldritch ritual. Though I now dwell in the sun-bleached expanse of Southern California, where October knows nothing of frost-bitten wind or the spectral rustle of autumn leaves, the chill of Lovecraft’s prose still seeped into my bones, as if borne on some unhallowed wind from beyond the gulfs of space.
Yet I miscalculated, for the man’s corpus of weird tales is far vaster than a single mortal month. Thus, I continue now, with “The Hound,” a blasphemous chronicle first loosed upon the world in the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. In it, two solitary ghouls of men fashion a charnel museum from desecrated graves, until at last they unearth in Holland a skeleton clutching a jade amulet of dreadful provenance. This relic, linked to the unhallowed Necronomicon, summons the baying of an unearthly hound whose pursuit knows neither distance nor sanctuary. Blood and madness follow, St. John torn asunder, thieves annihilated, the narrator himself driven to seek the release of death from horrors no sane man may endure.
Within this tale lies the first dread naming of the Necronomicon, that profane tome whispered of in forbidden circles. Lovecraft had hinted before at its accursed author, Abdul Alhazred, in “The Nameless City,” yet here the blighted book itself first takes form in his mythos, a scripture of cosmic despair that would bind together his works, and the works of those kindred spirits who likewise dared to peer into gulfs best left untraveled.
Not the most potent of Lovecraft’s dread imaginings, yet possessed of sufficient eldritch savor to quicken anew my October rite of unholy reading.
