"The Lurking Fear"

by H.P. Lovecraft

Written c. Nov, 1922
Published: Home Brew, Jan-Apr 1923

The tale is narrated by a nameless investigator, who travels to a remote mountain in the Catskills, with two musclemen along, to investigate tales of a monster.  They camp in the deserted Martense mansion when a lightning story approaches.  All are overcome by drowsiness and fall asleep.  When the narrator awakes, he finds his bodyguards gone, and, in a flash of lightning, sees the shadow of a demonic creature.

Next he enlists a reporter, Arthur Munroe, to help in his investigations.  They gather as much information as they can on the legends, and soon find themselves trapped in a cabin on the mountain by another storm.  Arthur ends up with his face chewed off! (remember I said HPL wasn't afraid to go for the gruesome!)

The narrator digs open the grave of Jan Martense, last of the Martense family, who have a mysterious history.  He finds himself in a subterranean burrow.  Crawling along, he finds himself confronted by a pair of eyes glowing in the light of his torch.  The tunnel caves in, and he is forced to dig his way out.  He finds the cabin is being burned to the ground by the local yokels, with a monster trapped inside.

He realizes that the monster, or monsters, are coming up through tunnels under the mansion.  He finds a burrow entrance in the basement.  During another storm(!), he watches as an army of small, apelike creatures crawl up from the tunnel.  He also witnesses them kill and eat one of their own number.  He shoots one of them.  On close examination, he realizes that these apelike things are the descendants of the Martense family.

The Lurking Fear is a pretty minor story.  An early Lovecraft effort, and very pulpy.  There isn't much to say about it.  There's some nice atmospheric stuff in the first quarter, with the narrator and friends holed up in the deserted mansion.  But the denouement is  a letdown.  It does play on one of Lovecraft's favorite themes - generational decay; whole families falling into such decline that they become un-human.  Many people name this one as a favorite, though.  Go figure.  It's been filmed three times, though I haven't subjected myself to any of them.

By Way of Introduction

So, what is the point of this blog, anyhoo?

Well, to get to that, let's talk a little about me and HPL.

 Like many Lovecraft-oids, I made the discovery pretty young.  Growing up on a diet of

horror comics and monster movies, Lovecraft was a name you came across.  Paperbacks of his stories were a fixture of the sci-fi shelves of any and all stores.  Marvel comics published several adaptations of his stories.  Even as a kid, I became aware of Lovecraft's rep as the baddest of the baddest-assed of supernatural horror fiction.  Reading "Pickman's Model" as a kid got me hooked, man.

Somewhere in junior high it really kicked in and started down a major Lovecraft haul.  I fell hard for his mix of haunted New England horror, fantasy and lysergic sci-fi.  And I got a major hard-on for ol' tentacle puss hisself, the Big C, Cthulhu.

It's an old story and I bet there's a million folkses like me who can tell a very similar tale.  When I discovered there was a whole gang of friends/admirers who wrote Lovecraft-based/inspired fic, well I went after them, too.  Along the way to adulthood I also devoured most of the major touchstones of fantasy, horror and sci-fi fiction.  And yes I was inspired by the Dungeons and Dragons depictions of the Cthulhu Mythos, and later Chaosium's admirable Call of Cthulhu game.

Well of course, like all such geeks I soon made the sad discovery that precious little of the non-Lovecraft Cthulhu stuff was great or even very good.  And eventually I reached that point of wisdom where I wasn't gonna waste my time on it anymore.

To be honest, that's still where I am in a lot of ways except nowadays I'm a little more willing to ... maybe not waste, let's say invest a little bit of time in this shit.

It occurred to me, or better yet I discovered (to my surprise, actually) that no one out there actually had a site that reviewed the Cthuloid spread in any breadth.  There was no place to go, outside of some forums, to get opinions as to what's good and what ain't in tentacle-land.

And since just around that time (October 2015) I was in da mood for some HPL-ishness and re-reading some Lovecraft and some Lovecraft-related materia, I thought such a thing might make for a good blog.

Now, let's talk turkey here (or should I say, "shantak"?).  Am I actually gonna read and review every piece of shit Mythos fiction out there?  Almost certainly not.  I have my limits, after all.  I planning on trying to get in at least all the major stuff - time, patience and willingness permitting.  I have no timeline or deadline, so this might be done in two years or twenty years (and if it will still be around or what it will look like in twenty years is as open a question as whether I will be).

I should also make clear my own attitudes re: Lovecraft and Lovecraft-related fiction:

First, I don't buy into a lot distinctions among HPL's stories between "mythos" and "non-mythos".  I know Derleth and Lin Carter started this trip and its endlessly debated by fans but I say its bogus.  To me there's only Lovecraft and his fiction, all of it.  And then there's authors - friends and followers, who played with ideas/themes/places/characters from that body of fiction.  Trying to stuff all this into a box labelled "Cthulhu Mythos" puts a straight jacket on the imagination.  It's not conducive to anything good except geekdom.

Second-o, I'm actually pretty cynical about 99% of non-Lovecraft "Cthulhu"-ism.  Mainly in that so much of it isn't very good.  Or even if it is, it's got lots of problems.  Or, mosre honestly, its got two main problems - two horns, as Rob Pirsig might have it. For a long time, almost all Cthulhu-type fiction was invariably Lovecraft pastiche.  Well-intentioned or amusing or embarrassing attempts to produce something that could pass for Lovecraft himself.  The problem here is that inevitably, it fails, coming off as a weak imitation of the real thing.  It might be sorta fun to read, but it will never scale the heights of the best of the original.  The other aspect of this horn is that, after all, why do it?  Why try to create in someone else's style vs your own, since it will inevitably be judged against the originator?  Look - the thing with originators is, without exception that I can think of - once they make them, they break the mold.  Thus the spectre of genuinely talented writers like August Derleth leaving behind a trail of stinky Lovecraft knock-offs that ultimately have succeeded in souring his rep and legacy as an author.

The other horn is to veer away from Lovecraft completely, trying to tell a tale without using (or overusing) his style or setting or conventions or tropes.  This approach has more integrity, but the prob is, too often its so far off of Lovecraft as to make any Lovecraftianism pointless.  Why bother calling your monster a "shoggoth" when it bears no resemblance to any prior interpretation of same.

So, when it comes to Lovecraft-ian fiction, you're either damned if you do (too much like Lovecraft but obviously not as good) or damned if you don't (not enough like Lovecraft to give one the HPL fix).

All of which goes to the point, which is there's not much point in writing Lovecraft-type fiction, nor in reading it, except to get that Lovecraft fix.  That's the thing about fandom - whether its Lovecraft or Star Trek or Gone With the Wind - we always want more - of the same.

Thirdly-ish, I should note that I do not hold with most Lovecraftian scholars in their analysis of Mr. HPL.  This is to say that while I greatly respect Mr. S.T. Joshi's efforts and scholarship re: Lovecraft, this does not change the fact that I find Mr. Joshi, in his writings, to be a tiresome intellectual snob (those who think I am unfair are directed to Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale, wherein he pretty much slags everything that isn't Robert Aickman or Ramsey Campbell).  I do not really go in for a lot of highfalutin' rhetoric about Lovecraft's place in the canon of Great Literature, or his "philosophy" of pessimism/meaningless horror/uncaring universe blah blah blah, all of which strikes me as less of a "philosophy" and more like the articulate ramblings of too-intellectual guy who saw life as bleak cuz he didn't have much of a life.  As a young teen, I didn't gravitate to Lovecraft because he was a Great Man of Letters of a Profound Philosopher, but because he wrote really cool stories full of gloopy, tentacled monsters!  As an adult who considers himself reasonably well-read and educated, I do indeed believe Lovecraft was fine, evocative writer.  But the def of Great Literature is very subjective, and quite honestly, its the gloopy tentacles monsters that I think are still central to Lovecraft's appeal.  I suspect Joshi feels the same way.  But you'd have to torture him to get him to admit it.

All of which leads to the fact that I don't take any of this all that seriously.  Certainly not the Lovecraft pastiches.  But look, even the Lovecraft stories I like best I will make jokes about.  So those looking for a reverent, serious analysis of Lovecraft's stories, or those of his disciples are going to be profoundly disappointed by this here blog.  There are no sacred shoggoths here, baby.  But if you can handle that, we might have some fun together.