“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.
I wasn’t a fan of Gil Kane’s artwork when I was a boy. I preferred George Pérez and John Byrne’s stuff instead. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate Kane’s work more and more. Blackmark just hit my mailbox, and I’m excited to read it!
I read Arctic Dreams after coming across this quote:
“No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
— Barry Lopez
