Today marks the eighth turning of my grandson’s mortal years, a span which, to my faltering perception, has fled as swiftly and as strangely as a dream at dawn. How brief the procession of time seems, for it was but yesterday, or so my disordered senses insist, that I stood beside his crib in that sterile chamber of the hospital, gazing in wonder at the small, unknown creature whose soul had only just crossed the threshold of this tenuous world. Even then, I fancied some inscrutable destiny lay before him, as though the cosmos itself paused to regard what manner of being had entered its fold.
This day we shall commemorate his arrival upon Earth by venturing to that vast menagerie men call the San Diego Safari Park, place wherein creatures of all climes and epochs dwell together in strange mockery of the wild order Nature first ordained. The boy speaks with bright fervor of the cheetah, that lithe feline of motion whose speed defies the eye and stirs ancestral memories of pursuit and peril. I cannot but admire his innocent anticipation, though in the darker chambers of thought I sense how fleeting are the joys of youth before the encroaching immensities of time.
Before we set forth, I chanced to read one of H. P. Lovecraft’s lesser-known works, “The Thing in the Moonlight”, a brief yet dreadful whisper from those shadowed gulfs that yawn beyond the veil of sleep. Its spectral visions linger in my mind, twining with the day’s more wholesome expectations, until I scarcely know where reverence ends and dread begins. Thus do love and terror commingle, as they ever have, in the frail heart of man.
Morgan, our protagonist, though unlettered and ignorant of the written art, was seized by an impulse beyond mortal reckoning, and with trembling hand inscribed words not his own. What issued forth was the dream-chronicle of one Howard Phillips, who averred that since the dread night of November 24, 1927, he had slumbered without awakening. In his endless dream he roamed a noisome marsh, its cliffs riddled with cavernous mouths that seemed to gape with silent hunger. Ever did he return to the spectral railway car of yellow hue, numbered as of an age long dead. Within lurked shapes too vile for sanity, one slinking to all fours like a beast, the other bearing a visage no human skull could frame: a pallid cone tapering hideously to a scarlet, questing tentacle. Though Phillips knew the phantasm to be but a dream, no dawn could rouse him, and he fled night upon night before that eldritch horror. Morgan himself trembled at what such testimony implied, and dared not set foot near Phillips’ Providence abode, lest truth outstrip dream.
“The Thing in the Moonlight” (1941), wrought by J. Chapman Miske from a letter Lovecraft penned to Donald Wandrei in 1927, enshrines this nightmare in fuller tale. Miske, in places, echoed so well the cadence of Lovecraft that the voice of the dreamer seemed to throb again from beyond, its first printing appearing in the haunted pages of Bizarre magazine.
Having lately perused that singular novella, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and the novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, I fancied that a descent into one of H. P. Lovecraft’s shorter compositions might offer respite from the vast gulfs of cosmic dread his longer works disclose. Yet such solace was illusory. For in turning to that obscure relic entitled “The Very Old Folk”, I found myself ensnared once more in the black immensities of antiquity, those haunted epochs when elder powers stalked beneath alien stars. The vision of a Roman legion, proud and doomed, groping through the abominable wilds of ancient Hispania, only to brush against forces predating mankind itself, seized my soul with both wonder and despair. Alas, the tale was brief, a mere glimpse into that abyss where forgotten gods and primal cults slumber. Would that others, more daring or deranged, might venture further along the path Lovecraft traced, and illuminate what nameless horrors lurk beyond the dim frontier of his imagination.
It was, as our narrator himself confesses, no ordinary tale but a record of a dream, though what mortal sleep could conjure such hideous verisimilitude I dare not ponder. The dreamer beheld himself as a Roman official stationed in the Vascon country, near ancient Pompelo, where each passing year brought with it dread visitations from the accursed hill people. These degenerates, relics of elder stock, would descend by night to seize the innocent, bearing them away to cruel altars and obscene sabbaths beyond the reach of law or light.
A riot, born of long festering loathing, had lately sundered the fragile peace between townsfolk and mountaineers. Strange rumors whispered of vanished traders and eerie silences in the uplands. Stirred by both civic duty and nameless foreboding, the dreamer resolved to lead an armed host into those haunted hills, guided by one who had drawn his first breath beneath their shadow — a Roman by birth, yet native to that blighted soil.
What followed defies the limitations of mortal reason. As the cohort neared the unhallowed seat of the Sabbath, there came a trembling of earth and an unseen tumult in the air. Horses screamed in mindless terror. The guide — that ill-fated son of the land — fell upon his own sword, shrieking of things whispered since the founding of Pompelo. Torches guttered and went out, though no wind stirred, and the night was pierced by cries that were not wholly human. Then, from the darkness above, came a coldness deeper than winter and a thrumming vastness, like the beating of monstrous wings unseen since the elder aeons.
So ended the dream, in horror and dissolution, and the dreamer, waking with a cry, could only murmur that it had been the most vivid vision in years, drawn from subterranean gulfs of memory best left unprobed, where the oldest fears of man yet stir and mutter beneath the thin crust of the conscious mind.
“The Very Old Folk” is the title bestowed by later publishers upon a vision set down by H. P. Lovecraft in a letter of the third of November, 1927, to his confidant Donald Wandrei. Born of the fevered gulfs of dream, it was thereafter read by Frank Belknap Long, who, struck with its unearthly resonance, besought Lovecraft’s leave to weave its spectral substance into his own dark fiction. This leave was granted, and so the phantasmal fragment found new life amid the dread pages of The Horror from the Hills, where its echo of immemorial antiquity lingers still, whispering of races older than man and Sabbaths not meant for mortal remembrance.
Ever have I approached with trepidation those cinematic ventures which dare to translate the dread imaginings of H. P. Lovecraft into the vulgar medium of the screen. Too oft hath the unnamable been given form, and the ineffable, a mask of papier-mâché, until what should have inspired awe and trembling is rendered grotesque parody. For this reason do I favor works merely inspired by Lovecraft, rather than those which presume to adapt him outright.
Yet last month I steeled myself, and beheld Color Out of Space (2019), directed by Richard Stanley and with Nicolas Cage as its star. Long had I resisted, for I feared disappointment. In this telling, the Gardner farmstead is stricken by a meteor of radiant hue, whose alien essence poisons the soil, the well, and the very lives of those who dwell there. Strange botanies sprout, livestock twist into abominations, and human flesh is fused in ghastly amalgam. Madness reigns: Theresa and young Jack become a single monstrosity, Benny is lost, and Lavinia is claimed by forces from beyond. Nathan, maddened patriarch, ends his kin with grim mercy before his own fall. Only Ward, the hydrologist, endures to bear witness to the ashen blasted heath that remains, where once life flourished, and where now only silence and horror reign beneath a new-laid reservoir.
As a work of horror cinema, it suffices. Indeed, it surpasses many a clumsy attempt before it. As an adaptation of Lovecraft’s tale, it achieves more than most, though it yet falls short of that ungraspable something which no art may wholly render. Still, I give reverence to those who dared the attempt, and offer a word of praise: bravo!
In the hills beyond sombre Arkham lies a place the rustic folk shun. Ae blasted heath, where no wholesome thing will grow and where the very air reeks of an ancient blight. Into this desolation a Boston surveyor came, and there he sought out aged Ammi Pierce, the lone witness to the doom of the Gardner farm. From Pierce’s trembling lips came the tale: in the summer of 1882 a star-born stone fell upon Nahum Gardner’s land, within it a globule of no hue known to earth: an alien radiance beyond the mortal prism. Scholars examined it in vain, until lightning shattered the thing and it passed from sight, yet not from influence.
Thereafter the fields bore monstrous harvests, swollen yet unfit for consumption, and the cattle twisted into abhorrent forms before perishing. The Gardners themselves waned in flesh and spirit: the wife and son Thaddeus raving in the attic, the brothers Merwin and Zenas lost forever to the tainted well, and Nahum himself withering into madness, whispering that the Colour drank the very essence of life. Ammi, venturing into that accursed house, found the wife a grotesque mockery of being and released her mercifully. Soon after, Nahum too succumbed. When men of Arkham came with Ammi, they found bones at the well’s bottom and then beheld the unearthly Colour surge forth—rising into the firmament, yet leaving behind a fragment that sank into the soil, a remnant to poison the land for all time.
Thus was written “The Colour Out of Space” in March of 1927, wrought in the same season as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and Lovecraft’s grand essay on the macabre. Though he spoke of Rhode Island’s Scituate Reservoir as seed, sages discerned other inspirations—the Quabbin works in Massachusetts, Charles Fort’s thunderstones, the tragedy of the Radium Girls, and even Goddard’s rockets clawing at the heavens. Lovecraft sought here to limn a terror wholly alien, a being beyond man’s feeble categories of life and death, its very essence unnameable save as Colour.
First appearing in Amazing Stories that September, it earned Lovecraft scant coin and tardy payment from “Hugo the Rat.” Yet critics hailed it, Edward O’Brien placing it upon the roll of honor, and in after years it was lauded as among his most perfect unions of science and dread. Scholars S. T. Joshi and Donald R. Burleson praised its nameless horror, while E. F. Bleiler deemed it the finest jewel of Amazing Stories. Now in the public domain, its baleful influence lingers, echoed in Brian Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree and Michael Shea’s sequel The Color Out of Time. Still the tale endures, a testament to an author’s attempt to evoke the truly inhuman, and to the fear that somewhere beneath the soil a fragment yet hungers.
In youth, I lamented that H. P. Lovecraft, the dread-master of Providence, had penned so few volumes of length. Yet now, seasoned by years and insight, I discern the wisdom of his brevity. In his tales of compact design lies the truest distillation of cosmic terror, each word a tincture of nightmare. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward held savory moments of ancestral horror, and I thrilled at the invocation of Pickman and Wheaton; yet its longer form languished like a dream stretched thin, its vitality dispersed among too many mortal pages. Had I dared peruse it beneath the waning lamp, I fancy sleep—or something colder—might have claimed me ere its final revelation.
In Providence whose crooked lanes and mouldering steeples brood darkly over Narragansett Bay, there dwelt one Charles Dexter Ward, scion of a venerable family and victim to a fate more baleful than madness. From the wards of a madhouse he vanished, his cell strangely thick with dust, leaving only whispers of a dreadful transformation. It fell to Dr. Marinus Willett, physician and reluctant seeker into forbidden matters, to unravel the hideous skein.
Through musty tomes and clandestine inquiries Willett traced Ward’s decline to an obsession with his forebear, Joseph Curwen, a merchant of the eighteenth century whose name was whispered only in fear. For Curwen trafficked in necromancies unholy, and a midnight raid upon his farm had once revealed shrieks, lights, and shapes not wholly human, sworn thereafter to secrecy. Ward, probing into Curwen’s ashes and hidden scripts, dared the unhallowed rite of resurrection, calling forth the sorcerer from his “essential saltes.” Disguised in his descendant’s guise, Curwen walked again among men until his anachronisms betrayed him to the asylum.
Willett, pursuing the trail to a Pawtuxet bungalow that cloaked the accursed catacombs of Curwen’s first dominion, beheld ghastly vaults, experiments beyond sanity, and a conspiracy of necromancers spanning centuries, who tortured the mighty dead for knowledge that might shatter mankind’s destiny. In that obscene laboratory the doctor unwittingly summoned a primordial adversary of Curwen. Swooning, he awoke to sealed passageways and a Latin charge: to reduce the usurper to dust.
With trembling resolve Willett confronted Curwen in his asylum cell, invoking the counter-formula that undid the blasphemous rebirth. The necromancer crumbled into motes of ash, and soon thereafter his fellow conspirators perished in calamities befitting their guilt.
Lovecraft himself deemed the chronicle “cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism,” leaving it unpublished until August Derleth and Donald Wandrei exhumed it after his death. Within its pages first glimmers Yog-Sothoth, whispers of the Necronomicon, and symbols known to Randolph Carter. Later writer, like Brian Lumley, would seize its formulae to conjure flesh from ash, while the incantations, drawn from Eliphas Levi, rang with the names of gods and elemental spirits. Thus endures the legacy of Ward and Curwen, a warning etched in dust and dread.
Yesterday, as I perused “The Strange High House in the Mist” from that blasphemously vast tome, The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft, I pondered with dread how I might reach its end ere the waning of the month. By my reckoning, the final tale would fall upon the eve of All Hallows, yet the accursed volume mocked me, revealing but a third of its depths explored.
Today, in venturing through H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, the riddle found its answer. For that tale is no mere story but a delirious odyssey, a fevered scripture of dream and revelation. Four mortal hours slipped by like whispers from the abyss, and when at last I closed the book, I was unsure whether I had read it, or dreamt it. The memories that lingered were but phantasmal fragments: shimmering towers, impossible skies, and gods that moved like shadows beyond the waking mind, as if illustrated by the likes of Winsor McCay and P. Craig Russel. It seemed as though the tale had read me, drawing my soul across the veiled gulf between sleep and madness.
In the half-lit gulfs where sleep and waking intermingle, Randolph Carter beheld oft a city of opalescent glory—its towers radiant, its streets suffused with the beauty of forgotten suns. Yet when that dream-vision fled from his nightly wanderings, Carter, undaunted, swore to ascend unto dread Kadath, where the gods of dream brood in their cold and perilous silence. Priests in border temples muttered of doom, whispering that the gods themselves had veiled the city from his sight. Still Carter pressed on, threading the perilous lore of Zoogs, heeding the counsel of Atal in fur-haunted Ulthar, and seeking the visage of gods carved colossal on mountain slopes.
His wanderings grew dire. Seized by turbaned slavers, he was borne to the moon and thrust before the obscene moon-beasts, servants of Nyarlathotep. Yet the cats of Ulthar, his steadfast allies, swept down in yowling hosts to bear him free. Nightgaunts, faceless and winged, dragged him into the abyssal underworld, but ghouls led by his comrade Richard Pickman, now forever changed, guided him through the loathsome city of the Gugs. Thence he strode to Celephaïs, where King Kuranes, who had forsaken life for dream, sought vainly to dissuade him. Onward he pressed to Inganok, to Leng, and to the accursed monastery whose priest none dare name, where Carter glimpsed a truth that froze his soul.
From moon-beast citadels to nightgaunt wings, he battled, bargained, and climbed until at last he stood in Kadath itself. Yet the halls were empty, abandoned by the gods who had fled to dwell in Carter’s own lost childhood Boston. There, in regal mockery, Nyarlathotep revealed the truth and sent Carter spiraling not to his sunset city but unto the blind idiot Azathoth at chaos’ center. Only the sudden remembrance of dream’s dominion wrenched him awake, sparing his soul. Nyarlathotep, balked, seethed amidst Kadath’s black spires, while the mild gods crept back to their stolen city.
“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” wrought of strange borrowings, from William Thomas Beckford’s Vathek, from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, from L. Frank Baum’s Oz, and from Lord Dunsany’s jeweled phantasies, stands both reviled and revered. Some find it unreadable, others hail it as akin to Lewis Carroll or George MacDonald. Lovecraft himself dismissed it as “poor practice,” yet even Dunsany, shown its pages, confessed with ironic grace: “I see Lovecraft borrowed my style.”
For many years, those books were the whole of my acquaintance with Lovecraft’s dark scripture. Yet in the waning light of the last year, curiosity drove me again to the abyss: I downloaded The Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft to my Kindle, and there, amid that vast electronic tome, I found tales both familiar and strange. One in particular, “The Strange House in the Mist,” had eluded my earlier readings. Many speak of it with reverence, yet to me it seemed an echo without power, a relic of dream rather than of nightmare. Still, I would not deny others their enchantment; for who can say which tales the unseen gods of our subconscious will claim as their own, or which cup of tentacled tea may taste sweet upon another’s tongue?
In the eldritch town of Kingsport there looms a house of unspeakable antiquity, perched high upon a crag that gazes out over the boundless sea. Toward this dread and mist-wreathed dwelling came Thomas Olney, a humble philosopher, whose soul was stirred by whispers older than memory. With great peril he scaled the sheer precipice and beheld the enigmatic master of that abode, whose only portal yawned upon vapors and abyss. There, amidst archaic lore and unearthly visitants, Olney partook of mysteries beyond mortal ken. When he returned to Kingsport, he walked as though hollowed, his mortal shell intact yet his spirit lingering forever in that supernal house above the mists.
Lovecraft, inspired by Lord Dunsany’s Chronicles of Rodriguez and the looming headland of Mother Ann in Massachusetts, penned this spectral vision. Though first rejected by Weird Tales in 1927 and later promised to The Recluse, fate delayed its unveiling until 1929, when Weird Tales at last accepted it, granting Lovecraft a meagre fifty-five dollars. In after years, critic Robert A. W. Lowndes hailed “The Strange High House in the Mist” as one of the master’s most haunting and consummate tales.
Finished reading: Jerusalemby Alan Moore 📚 The folks at the Supercontext Podcast turned me on to this tome, which devoured more than a year of my life reading it. Thanks, guys!
As you might well surmise, the quiet custom of reading one tale each October day from the accursed pen of Howard Phillips Lovecraft provides a curious occasion for reflection upon my long and changing acquaintance with his work. When first I was introduced to his singular literature, I had not yet reached my eighteenth year, and now I find myself well into the somber corridors of middle age. Time has altered not only my countenance but also the quality of my admiration, so that what once thrilled me now leaves me pensive, and what once seemed lesser has grown in secret power.
In revisiting the tales of the recluse of Providence, I have come to favor his stories of the supernatural above those of his vast and dreadful cosmos. The subtle horrors, rooted in the mortal and the spectral, touch my spirit more deeply than those that whisper from beyond the stars. I take especial delight in again meeting the shades of tales I have long cherished, such as “In the Vault” and “Pickman’s Model”., which remain as potent and as grave as when I first encountered them. None have diminished in my esteem, and others, such as “The Silver Key”, now reveal depths I once overlooked.
In the impatience of youth, I would hurry through “The Silver Key”, eager to reach what I believed were the greater marvels of Lovecraft’s mythic imaginings. Yet now, with the weariness and reflection that come to men of my years, I find myself drawn to its quiet melancholy and to its dreamer, Randolph Carter. He too lamented the passing of mystery from the world, and I, like him, perceive that we dwell in an age stripped of its wonder. The iron spirit of pragmatism has banished enchantment from our waking lives, leaving us poorer, though we are too proud to confess it.
Not always do I feel this melancholy, yet there are moments when I look upon the world and sense that it has grown barren of the unseen. In such hours, I cannot help but wish that I, too, possessed Carter’s key, that fragile token which opens the hidden door between dream and remembrance, and leads once more to the lost kingdoms of the soul.
At the age of thirty, Randolph Carter beheld with despair that he had lost the key to that mystic portal which opens upon the gate of dreams. No longer could he summon the ineffable splendors of enchanted cities and unearthly beings, for the grey weight of waking science and the barren creed of the commonplace had dulled his once-radiant vision. In vain he sought meaning among the schools of philosophy, but their sterile systems brought him naught save emptiness, until at last he fled into solitude.
Then, in the dim recesses of sleep, his long-dead grandsire whispered of a hidden relic—an ancient silver key wrought with cryptic arabesques—resting in the attic’s dust. Carter seized it and returned to the cavern of his boyhood, where, upon uttering the syllables of his blood, he slipped from mortal time and was reborn as a child of ten. Strange it was that kinfolk recalled how, from that tender age, he spoke with uncanny foresight of futures yet unshaped.
The chronicle closes with a haunting promise: that Carter now reigns in a dream-city beyond mortal sight, sovereign of realms where the silver key unlocks the ultimate mysteries of the cosmos.
I have ever cherished H. P. Lovecraft’s sinister chronicle “Pickman’s Model”, not solely for the grim savor of its narrative, but because it entwined itself with a pastime of mine in years long past. In a session of The Call of Cthulhu, that dark game of dread imagination, I assumed the guise of Robert Pickman, brother to the accursed artist Richard. My Robert was a man of wealth and standing, who spoke but sparingly of his birth. He met his end beneath the knives of cultists, a glorious death steeped in the ichor of forbidden rites. Only later did I learn that our Keeper of Arcane Lore, lord of the tale and master of the dice, had never perused “Pickman’s Model,” nor many of the other eldritch writings of Lovecraft himself. The revelation astonished me, yet the game was no less delightful, even if my homage to that dire tale was lost in the shadows.
Richard Upton Pickman, the Boston painter, wrought canvases so grotesque in their verisimilitude that the art-world cast him out as a leper. A confidant tells of visiting his hidden gallery in a noisome slum, where images grew more foul and unearthly until the final vast canvas revealed a red-eyed, canine horror rending human flesh. Shots rang out, and Pickman returned with a tale of rats dispatched, yet in his companion’s pocket lay a photograph, grim evidence that Pickman’s monstrosities were no dreams, but dreadful realities.
And yet Lovecraft did not leave him thus. In “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” Pickman returns, now a ghoul, guiding Randolph Carter through nightmare realms. Scholar Robert M. Price observes that this ghoul-Pickman bears scant resemblance to the mortal artist, likening him instead to Tars Tarkas of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars. In technique, too, the tale is peculiar, for Lovecraft employed layered monologues and a colloquial tone seldom found in his work, a departure from the customary chill of cosmic indifference.
When at length I resumed my custom of reading one tale each October day from the dread canon of H. P. Lovecraft, I found myself possessed by a curious and most unsettling revelation. Those works of vast and monstrous scope, for which he is chiefly remembered among the disciples of horror, stirred within me little of the awe they once did. Instead, I discovered a growing fondness for his tales of a more traditional and spectral nature, those haunted by the chill breath of the supernatural rather than the vast indifference of the cosmos.
After much brooding upon this strange preference, I discerned a reason for it. By the time my own eyes first beheld Lovecraft’s prose, his influence had long since bled into the arteries of popular culture, permeating it like a contagion that none could name. The dread he had once called forth from the abyss had become the common inheritance of storytellers. His vision, perhaps, had been refined, its terrors rendered more immediate to the modern imagination. He may indeed have expressed, in his age, the truest form of comic horror, yet the figures that wander through his stories are, for the most part, pale and bloodless shadows, scholars and dreamers without the pulse of the living.
It was left to others, such as the comic book writer Len Wein and the director John Carpenter, to shape that same grotesque humor into something more personal, more visceral, and, in their way, more alive. In Swamp Thing and The Thing, one may sense the restless ghost of Lovecraft’s imagination, transfigured into forms that breathe and decay before our eyes.
Thus, I find myself drawn more to tales such as “Cool Air” and “The Rats in the Walls” than to “The Call of Cthulhu”, though the latter stands as the great monument of his name. Yet even within that most famous chronicle lies, in its opening lines, the purest expression of cosmic dread ever to pass through his pen:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
There, within those sentences, lies the cold marrow of Lovecraft’s terror: that knowledge itself is the forbidden gate through which sanity perishes.
And now, having dwelt too long in the shadows of that terrible wisdom, I depart to witness a gentler spectacle. My grandson’s Little League team plays this afternoon, and they are said to be on a fine winning streak. Perhaps today they shall claim their sixth triumph beneath a sky that, mercifully, conceals whatever lurks beyond.
Now, let’s discuss today’s tale.
From beyond the shroud of mortality, Francis Wayland Thurston sets down his testament, a grim bequest of knowledge inherited from his late grand-uncle, Professor George Angell of Brown University. Among Angell’s papers lay strange and terrible proofs: a bas-relief wrought by the trembling hand of artist Henry Wilcox, whose fevered dreams were peopled with vast Cyclopean cities and sky-flung monoliths; reports of unholy rites and mass hysteria across the globe; and the testimony of Inspector Legrasse, who in 1907 shattered a swamp cult steeped in blood sacrifice. Their idol, fashioned of green-black stone, was the very twin of Wilcox’s accursed carving, and the cultists named it Cthulhu, one of the “Great Old Ones.” That Esquimaux tribes on the polar rim muttered the same blasphemies bespoke a worldwide, immemorial covenant.
Thurston’s inquiry led him to the journal of Gustaf Johansen, survivor of the derelict Alert. The sailor’s account revealed the unspeakable: the rising of nightmare R’lyeh from the abyss, its angles affronting human geometry, its vaults disgorging the thing whose name shudders through human legend. Johansen and his crew had loosed Cthulhu, who strode forth to claim them. In terror they fled; Johansen alone lived long enough to tell of ramming the monster with his vessel, a futile gesture that scattered but did not slay. Soon after, he perished under sinister circumstance, as if the cult’s reach spanned oceans.
Thus Thurston, piecing together dream, idol, journal, and death, discerned the dire truth: that Cthulhu, though chained in slumber, stirs restlessly in his drowned crypt, and that men, in their ignorance, stand ever upon the brink of his return.
“The Call of Cthulhu” itself was born of a dream Lovecraft suffered in 1919, later nourished by the deep roots of Poe, Maupassant, Machen, Dunsany, Merritt, and Wells. A tremor in Quebec in 1925 may have lent it its seismic note. Rejected at first by Weird Tales, it found print in 1928, and though Lovecraft judged it “middling,” others knew its magnitude. Robert E. Howard proclaimed it a masterpiece, Peter Cannon hailed its cosmic terror, and Houellebecq named it the first of Lovecraft’s “great texts.” Scholars in later ages discern even the echo of warped spacetime in Johansen’s visions. Today it endures as a black monument to the utter insignificance of man beneath the gaze of powers vast, alien, and eternal.
Though I hold in reverence the vast immensities of cosmic horror, it is not within that infinite void that my deepest affections for H. P. Lovecraft reside. Rather, two tales of more intimate dread, “The Rats in the Walls” and that frost-laden vision, “Cool Air,” I treasure above all, for they whisper not of gulfs between the stars, but of corruption festering close at hand, within the walls we build and the chambers we inhabit.
It was within the pages of Warren Publishing’s Eerie that I first encountered “Cool Air,” brought forth in ghastly splendor by the pen of Bernie Wrightson. The tale itself chills the marrow, yet Wrightson’s art breathed upon it a grotesque vitality, searing its images into my brain as though etched with acid. So potent was this encounter that I was lured, with the added enticement of Michael Whelan’s spectral cover, to purchase The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. Imagine, then, my despair upon discovering that “Cool Air” was absent from its pages. Yet by that moment, the abyss had already claimed me. The seed of Lovecraftian devotion had sprouted, and my love for his sombre genius had taken root, never to be torn away. Indeed, I have recounted this blood-stained chronicle to my grandson, though I was compelled to strip it of its darker enormities, softening its horrors until they might pass gently into the mind of one so young. Yet even in that gentler form, I fear some echo of its dread may have lingered, whispering faintly in the secret chambers of his dreams.
Our narrator recoils from the merest breath of chill, for in that faint draught lies the memory of horrors unspeakable. It was in the year 1923, when, in his search for lodging amidst the labyrinth of New York, he came upon a brownstone on West Fourteenth Street. There a leaking effluvium betrayed the presence of the tenant above me, Dr. Muñoz, a recluse of prodigious skill in medicine and stranger habits still. When death’s icy hand clutched at his heart, it was Dr. Muñoz who restored him, and thus began a companionship both fascinating and dread.
Yet with each passing month the truth of his obsession unveiled itself. Dr. Muñoz’s chambers, ever chilled by infernal engines and ammonia coils, lay at a constant 56 degrees, often sinking below the freezing point. He lived only in the embrace of cold, and the more his health waned, the more he labored to hold back decay with science that verged upon sorcery. When at last his pumps failed, he shrieked for ice, imploring our narrator to heap it round his body in tubs and crates. He scoured the streets for supply, but the effort was vain. When mechanics came to mend the machine, they found only corruption, for Muñoz’s body had burst into putrescence, and a smeared missive told the ghastly truth. He had been dead for eighteen years, sustained in mockery of nature by frost and drugs, a revenant of his own unholy craft. From that day forward, the faintest draft of cold air has borne for our narrator the stench of his doom.
This tale, “Cool Air”, Lovecraft wrought during his banishment in New York, when alien streets and oppressive crowds weighed upon his spirit. Critics discern in it his loathing of that city, a reflection of the jarring opposites between his cherished relics of New England and the clamorous multitudes of Red Hook. Its setting was drawn from a townhouse at 317 West Fourteenth Street; its maladies echoed the heart afflictions of Frank Belknap Long, and its chill mirrored Lovecraft’s own frailty. In its conception there stir the shades of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder.” Though Weird Tales cast it aside, later voices proclaimed it among his most potent New York visions, an understated horror, subtle yet enduring, wrought in the cadence of frost and death.
In my renewed observance of that grim October ritual, wherein I partake each day of one accursed tale from the hand of H. P. Lovecraft, I have come upon a truth both sobering and strange. Not every work born of his eldritch imagination breathes the full terror of the cosmic abyss. “The Descendant”, though steeped in the chill perfume of his favored themes, drifts rather as a spectral reverie, less a tale of horror than a murmured lament from beyond the veil of time.
Upon the brink of death, our narrator relates his sojourn within the shadowed halls of Gray’s Inn, where he dwelt beside Lord Northam, a gaunt and spectral relic whose soul shrank at the tolling of church-bells and the phantoms of ancestral memory. Drawn by curiosity, the narrator pressed for his confidences, and at length procured that dreaded tome, the Necronomicon, begging Northam to render its eldritch Latin. At sight of it, the old lord recoiled, beseeching him to consign it to the flames, and in trembling tones unveiled the legacy of his house. From Roman legionaries who first trod the isle, his bloodline arose, raising their fortress upon ground accursed, once sacred to a primordial race from lands long drowned beneath the sea.
Haunted by this legacy, Northam had sought the paths of forbidden knowledge, wandering even unto the Nameless City of Arabia, where he came to believe that certain places, seeped in immemorial blasphemy, open onto gulfs beyond the ken of man. The tale, unfinished, lingers in uncertainty, poised between madness and revelation, yet whispering of truths no mortal should seek.
“The Descendant,” composed in 1927 and issued only after Lovecraft’s death in the pages of Leaves (1938), edited by R. H. Barlow, reveals his yearning for the elder mysteries of London, whose deeper antiquities offered a backdrop richer in dread than the youthful soil of America could ever supply.
As I perused that dread chronicle known as I “In the Vault”, a curious recognition seized me, as though some dim recess of memory stirred from a half-forgotten dream. The tale, though brief, possesses a potency that lingers like the scent of disturbed earth. Shameful though my confession be, I had long ascribed its authorship to that latter-day conjurer of horrors, Stephen King. Yet such an error, I think, may be forgiven; for “In the Vault” bears that unmistakable taint of the macabre moderns, whose art descends directly from Lovecraft’s own unhallowed lineage. Indeed, one might imagine the tale’s yellowed pages lying amidst the ghastly pulps of Eerie or Creepy, whispering of graveyards and the restless dead.
In the ill-omened hamlet of Peck Valley, George Birch, the coarse and careless undertaker, found himself imprisoned within the winter vault, where coffins lie stacked until the thaw permits burial. Desperate for escape, he piled those grim boxes beneath a transom, yet the weight of his blundering frame shattered the lid of a frail casket. His ankles sank into the rotting receptacle, torn and mangled as he clawed his way to freedom.
Later inquiry by Dr. Davis revealed the ghastly truth. That coffin, crudely fashioned and ill-suited, had been pressed into service for the malignant Asaph Sawyer, whom Birch had long despised. The box was built for the smaller Matthew Fenner, and to make Sawyer fit, Birch had hewn away the feet with barbarous indifference. The wounds upon Birch’s ankles were no accident of splintered wood, but the livid imprints of Sawyer’s vengeful teeth, sunk into living flesh from beyond the veil of death.
The tale, conceived in 1925 from a suggestion by Charles W. Smith, to whom Lovecraft dedicated it, was deemed too gruesome for Weird Tales and spurned by Ghost Stories. Only in April of 1932, through August Derleth’s urging, did it find print in Weird Tales. Critics, surveying it coldly, have judged it a lesser work, an attempt at rustic horror and colloquial tone that failed to capture the grandiose dread of Lovecraft’s greater visions. Yet within its humble frame stirs the same eternal theme: that the grave does not always yield forgiveness, and the dead may gnash their teeth in dreadful recompense.
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.
