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.
