"The Dunwich Horror"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, April, 1929

Dunwich, MA is a little shithole full of inbred dopes, amongst them the Whateleys - Lavinia, an uneducated albino and her nutzoid pops, who's name is apparently "Old", and who is generally believed to be involved in black sorcery, Trump rallies not having been invented yet.

Things get weird when Lavinia up and has a baby, with no dad in sight.  Despite the fact that no dude in Dunwich (even) would touch her with a 10 foot pole, this is largely shrugged off.  Old makes some strange pronouncements about the mysteriously absent sperm donor while hanging around the cracker barrel.  

Old raises the offspring, innocuously named "Wilbur", in the Dark Arts, educating him out of some decrepit books and fragments of books he has collected (and we all know what those are, right kiddies?).  Meanwhile he and the kid embark on major renovation projects around their crummy farmhouse, and keep buying up cattle (which are never seen again).  Wilbur himself grows at an alarming rate - which is understating the case (he's basically adult-sized by age 10 or so) and is a less-than appealing character - with a face like a goat and a personality to match (actually goats are friendly but so what, it sounded good when I wrote it).

Old passes on, and Lavinia disappears (yeah, right) while Wilbur just keeps on growing.  He also keeps doing research to fill gaps in his knowledge from the battered and incomplete books Gramps left him.  Said researches take him on a trip to Miskatonic U library, where his attention to The Necronomicon creeps out head librarian Henry Armitage.  

Henry's even more creeped out by what happens next - Willie-boy breaks in one night to steal the Necro, and is killed by a watchdog, which, in the process of mauling him, rips off his clothes.  Armitage, and two colleagues, Profs Rice and Morgan, get a good gander at a nekkid Wilbur W, and it ain't pretty!  From the waist down he's a dinosaur-legged, eyeballed, built-in-tentacled-skirted nasty.  His bod conveniently melts into a pool of goo before disappearing, thus saving the janitor some particularly unpleasant work.

Now that Wille-boy's dead and gone, the invisible monster he's been keeping in the farmhouse (for such is the case), breaks out and goes running all over Dunwich stomping cattle and, eventually, people. Finally Armitage, Rice and Morgan arrive and use magic they've learned from the rare books collection to destroy the beastie, though not before revealing it as a tentacled multi-legged whatsit with an apparently humanoid face on it.  Now that's gone, Armitage drops the bomb - the monster was Wilbur's twin brother, and closer in nature to the dad than Wilbur was.

Here we have another of HPL's most celebrated tales.  And again, rightly so.  This was the first of his longer works I ever read, again, back in 7th grade, and I was pretty well blown away by it.  It still holds up for me after all this time.  Its one of HPL's most disciplined pieces of writing.  He'd shed most of his worst habits and the story is very tautly told.  Even the long intro, which is entirely about the background and history of Dunwich and the area is controlled, makes perfect sense, and enhances the story.  Everything works and every hair is in place.  The buildup is one long tower of mood in the making, the revelation of Wilbur's true nature still has as kick to it, and the monstrous finale doesn't hold back.