"The Hounds of Tindalos"

by Frank Belknap Long 

originally published Weird Tales, March 1929  

Halpin Chalmers, occultist and author, invites his friend over for a weird little visit.  After arguing about metaphysical vs scientific concepts of time and space (which Frank dismisses as "rubbish"), Halpin reveals his plan.  He's gotten his hands on a rare drug from China called Liao, which will allow his mind to be freed of the illusion we call reality and allow his consciousness to roam time and space with impunity.  He wants Frank to watch and take notes of what happens and everything he says.  This is what people did in the 20's when they got high, being as Pink Floyd hadn't been invented yet.  In any case Frank agrees to play stenographer, forgiving Halpin for being so rude as to not offer him some of his high.  But he does so grudgingly, with repeated warnings that Mr. Ranger isn't gonna like it.

Frank trips away and begins to describe, in the purplest manner possible, all the things he's witnessing as time and space become simultaneous and he is tripping throughout human history and even pre-history like a coked-up deer (apparently experiencing multiple past lives, all at the same time).  Frank takes notes (he must have known short-hand given how verbose Halpin is) and begins to notice a nasty smell in the room.

Suddenly Halpin begins to wig out.  He's seen, and been seen, by some things he calls "The Hounds of Tindalos"; beyond good and evil, but living(?) repository of everything bad in the universe - and I do mean everything.  More importantly - they're dangerous as hell.  More importantly - they're after him!  

Frank's had enough and leaves Halpin babbling about angles and curves and The Hounds, declaring his intent to send his doctor over (which he apparently forgets to do when he gets home).

The next morning Halpin calls him up and demands he pick up a shitload of plaster of paris and bring it over to his place forthwith, fifthwith even.  Frank thinks nothing of this and complies, not even bothering to ask Halpin to reimburse him.  Back at Halpin's place, Halpin has him help pack the corners and angles of the room with plaster until they are rounded out, turning the room somewhat spherical.  Meantime he blathers on about the Hounds some more, insults Frank, apologizes, then proceeds to insult him again (Frank's mind is prosaic, he declares, while his own is superhuman!  Ah humiity...).  Finally having enough of Halpin's bullshit, Frank leaves again, again declaring his intent to send is doctor over (which he again apparently forgets to do).

That night the town is struck by an earth tremor.  Halpin is found dead in his apartment, in a perfect triangle of crumbled plaster, naked, decapitated, and covered in some kind of blue goo that turns out to be some kind of never-before-seen sort-of living matter.  Oh, and Halpin left a bunch of notes - mathematical forumlas, chants, mad scribblings and a final description of how he's being attacked by monsters, signed off with "aaaaah".  Yeah Long actually went there.

Okay, the things that jump out at me herein are that Long was really into physics and the intersection of physics and metaphysics - c.f. "The Horror from the Hills" for a deeper dive into that - but herein they are presented a lot more concisely and interestingly than in the Elephant story (and here I thought the marriage of eastern philosophy and quantum physics was a 70's thing!).  This all isn't so revelatory now but in 1929 it must have been a major mindfuck.

This story is techinically slight (barely even a story really), and the writing is purple pulp at its purplest and pulpiest - no one in the world ever talked like Halpin, especially when they're higher than a kite, and the whole scribbling a windy description of being attacked while being attacked by extra-dimensional monsters, even to the point of writing out "aaaah" is hilarious.  

BUT - as with "The Space Eaters" (which isn't as good as this one, but has some of the same guilty pleasure charms), I like this story.  It's fun, it's interesting, and I have to give kudos to Long for the Hounds - because he manages to make these things menacing and creepy while in fact telling us virtually nothing about them.  That's effective. 

"The White Ship" by H.P. Lovecraft

Originally published Weird Tales, March 1927  

Basil Elton, like his father before him (and his grandfather before him) is a working man and like his father before him that work is keeping a lighthouse.  Because Elton's aren't terribly ambitious types.  They didn't take rebel stands either - just shared weird stories about the sea and distant exotic lands.  Real exotic.  Like complete fairy-tale-froot-loop exotic.

(Actually I've always thought it would be cool to be a lighthouse keeper.  Just sit out there all night with a good book and the foghorn blowing and turn the thing on once in awhile. But we all know lighthouse keepers are all grizzled old salts with beards and I can't grow one to save my life, plus I'd miss out on friends, dates, etc so I guess it's not meant to be.  Sigh)

(Plus I'd be up late at night waiting for a dinosaur to pop out of the ocean and knock the place down, y'know.  Anyway I digress)

 So Basil keeps the light house and spends his time dreaming (it isn't entirely clear if this is a day-dream (well it happens at night) or a nocturnal one) about a white ship piloted by a bearded man in robes that sails in when the moon is full.  The cap'n invites Basil to board - which at first he declines but finally complies, (crossing the water on a bridge of moonbeams) and they sail off to explore a chain of islands not found in any atlas. 

And oh the places they go, including a "green land" where "dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten", the city of Thalarion where demons (we're never told anything about them except they're "frightful") live, the "Land of Pleasures Unattained" which appears to be not so pleasurable (it "reeks of plague" - not entirely sure what plague reeks like but, okay).  The whole time they're following an "azure celestial bird" which I guess is kinda like HPL's version of a dove.  

Anyway they end of in Sona Nyl, "Land of Fancy" where Elton spends "many aeons" fancying.  He hears of a place called "Cathuria" and just has to go there like now (I guess fancying had gotten dull) so he persuades ol' beard-and-robes to sail him out there, following the bird.  Except know one actually knows where Cathuria is.  But they sail west anyway - after all we all know The West is the Best, right? (Thanks Jim!)  Anyway it all turns out to be a bad plan since they reach the edge of the world and fall off.  

Just in time Basil starts awake and finds himself on the rocks outside the lighthouse, which he allowed to go out, and now a ship is crashing on the rocks big time.  Later on he finds a dead azure bird and bit of ship debris, pure white.  Poor Basil!

This is really early Lovecraft and it shows, since the whole thing is so sketchy its almost more like a summary of a story (with some evocative notes) than an actual story.  It's completely Dunsany-derivative but Lovecraft does add his own peculiar note of melancholy to the thing.  I think (pure spec here as I don't know that much about Dunsany as a person) that the big diff between Dunsany's fantasies and Lovecraft's attempts to imitate them is that Dunsany enjoyed playing with his worlds of imagination whereas at the time Lovecraft was doing his most Dunsany-dipped work, he was either undergoing or coming out of some kind of major depressive episode, and he really did want to leave the world he found so awful and run off to fairy-tale land.  That kind of feeling completely permeates this story like you would believe.  All in all its an interesting trifle with some sad subtext underneath.

"The Space Eaters"

 by Frank Belknap Long  

originally published Weird Tales, July 1928

Howard (a thinly-disguised - well, actually I hope in a lot of ways he's a thickly-disguised) HPL is buds with Frank, Our Narrator who, for a change, has a friggin' name!  Howard apparently writes supernatural stories - real good ones, per Frank.  But he's having a bad night.  He's frustrated because he can't articulate or describe what he wants to articulate and describe (he then goes on to articulate and describe them - which is basically icky monsters from outer space who have colors and shapes and appearances that don't correspond to anything on our world.  Obviously you can't say something looks kinda like a cross between a lobster and a wallaby if, in fact, it not only doesn't look anything like a lobster or a wallaby - in fact it looks like some other planets equivalent to lobsters and wallabies - except said other planet doesn't have anything equivalent to lobsters and wallabies or anything equivalent to anything we've ever seen before so ... fuck this is even making my head hurt so I kinda don't blame Howard for being a little pissy.  A little pissy mind you - he's being such an ass about Frank's "prosaic" brain that I'm left wondering a little bit why Frank even pals around with the guy.  At least now we know the original inspirations for Titus Crow/Henri De Marigny.

Anyway, there's a knock on the door and its Frank's neighbor/friend Henry Wells, who drives a delivery carriage and ain't too bright, I guess.  But he's had a weird night.  He was out on the road in this terrible fog (did I mention its a really foggy, damp night? Well it is so keep track!) riding through some woods he's always thought were kinda creepy, when something fell in his lap and then jumped in his face - something wet and spongy and gross.  And then he saw something slither rapidly down a tree ... long and white and kind of like a snake - or an arm!  With a hand!  Or maybe not.  He's not sure.  Then he felt a terrible cold or pain (or both) in his head which lasted about 10 minutes.  When he got home, he looked at his temple and he had this nice clean hole there, the size of a bullet hole, going all the way into his brain!

Howard, as if he weren't enough of an asshole, starts shouting at Henry (whom he considers a "yokel") that he's obviously been shot, he's drunk, stupid, voted for Bush twice, etc.  Henry doesn't take too well to this and besides, he's got another headache, so he runs out of the house.  Next thing you know Frank and Howard can hear him screaming in terror or agony.  Frank and Howard proceed to do the natural thing: have a big argument and debate while they change into rain gear - and then go see if they can help him!  OH I forgot to mention there's now a loud droning sound in the woods...

They find him and get him back to the house, where he goes nuts and attacks Howard (which may not be a symptom of insanity, when you get down to it).  A Dr. Smith (oh the pain!) is called.  He operates on Henry while babbling a lot of flowery weirdness (actually Jonathan Harris would have fit the part well) before saying there's nothing more he can do and running away.  He seems to know something ("they have laid there mark on him"), too.  

Frank and Howard flee on Frank's launch, noting a huge shape forming in the sky over the woods, which are now aflame, which they dare not get a good look at.  They make the sign of the cross at it a bunch of times with some burning cotton waste, and it loses definition and vanishes.  Yay!

Back in Brooklyn, Howard gets to writing about the experience, and now he's got what he was looking for - a way to describe "cosmic" horrors beyond the ken of "prosaic" brains (mind you - his big "cosmic" horror is basically semi-visible brain-eating gloop monsters from outer space, as seen in many a 50's sci-fi movie [inevitably starring John Agar], but let's not pop Howie's balloon just yet - he had a rough week).

Frank reads his MS and thinks its brilliant but too horrible for words, and tells him to knock off his seeking after untold horrors.  They have a big philosophical argument until and Frank stomps off, finally tired of Howard's assholery.

That night Howard calls him - the droning's started again!  Frank rushes over (idiot).  He finds Howard writhing on floor yelling about "crawling chaos" while a dark shape beams brilliant lights into Howard's head and pages of his story fly around the room.

Frank manages to make the sign of the cross again, while covering his eyes in horror, and the dark thing bails.  Too late to save ol' Howie though.

Now let me tell you, I've been really looking forward to re-reading "The Space Eaters" for a long time, because I remembered it as being one of the best of the best.  I also remembered F.B. Long as being a genuine literary talent, having been entranced by his collection The Early Long, wherein I first read this at 14 or so, being at that time strung out on all things Lovecraft and desperately trying to find more works by his "circle".  

Well more recent encounters have learnt me that Long was no literary genius (his ideas were imaginative and his prose could be striking, but other times...).  Still I expected great things from "The Space Eaters".

Well...

Okay, let's establish this - "Space Eaters" isn't bad ... just taken down to bare plot, its not so removed from a lot of much-maligned Derleth things.  I won't go into the whole business of the cross (vs. the Elder Sign) because it seems reasonable that a powerful mystic symbol might work against some cosmic beasties even if it isn't the mystic symbol.  Its more imaginative than Derleth would have been (grosser, too).  And at times its just plain hysterical.  Howard is such a complete asshole that either Long was going over the top or he'd had a hatful of HPL at the time he wrote it ... or HPL was really that insufferable (I hope not!).  I'll say again: his concept of an indescribable cosmic horror is the plot of a movie that would now be pure MST3K fodder.  I had to snicker.  Brain-eating monsters from space??? The dialogue gets so portentous and corny that even Stan Lee wouldn't have put his name on it, especially the doctor's monologue while operating.  And the "Omigod!  Henry's screaming! He must be in trouble!  Let's go help him after we finish arguing and change clothes!" belongs in a Monty Python sketch.

But ... but ... I like Long.  I like him because at his best, his writing is really potent and evocative even if it is pulpy.  This tale begins:

"The horror came to Partridgeville in the fog."

Simple, unadorned, unquestionably pulpy and yet it works, it resonates.  To a pulp horror fan, it sets you up that something special is going to come.  Later, Henry's monologue about what he sees in the woods,  a white, snaky ... arm?  With a hand?  Or not?  may be way too poetic for a yoke, but it also recalls the unrealistic but poetic dialogue characters in Ray Bradbury stories often utter.  Long is no Bradury, but it does appear they sipped from the same cup a time or two.

All in all, not near the classic I remembered it as being, but still a fun spooky read.

"Herbert West: Reanimator"

 by H.P. Lovecraft   

originally published Home Brew, February-July, 1922  

Our Unnamed Narrator recounts his days at med school (Miskatonic U, of course), where he hooked up with his idol, one Herbert West, a froot loop extraordinaire who's big scientific goal was reanimate dead bodies.  Just cuz.  

The two have a lot of wholesome boys adventures, including stealing supplies from the U, grave robbing, stealing corpses from morgues, experimenting on said corpses (with varying levels of success), creating screaming zombies, burning down their secret lab, turning  the dean of the medical school (who has forbidden West access to cadavers since his experiments and theories are, after all, nuttier than a Planter's factory) - into a crazed, flesh-eating zombie serial killer (during a typhoid outbreak, no less!) (PS - despite the above West gets his medical license), helping cover up the accidental death of a boxer, reviving said boxer (who also becomes a flesh-eating zombie serial killer!), murdering a travelling salesman (yep, he gets experimented on, too), serving in WWI as a medic (not for patriotic or humanitarian reasons - just cuz it gives him more free bods to experiment on) re-animating body parts independent of their original owner (not least of which the head of an army major), and probably some other fun things I'm missing.

Eventually all of this catches up with West when a bunch of his old experiments show up one night, tear up his house and disembowel him.  Nontheless there's no evidence of same, and the police ain't buying UN's story...

Christ ... y'know a lot of people cite this p.o.s. as a fave but I can't see it.  True, it does have a hilarious "storyline" and the ludicrous gruesomeness of the whole thing is entertaining in its hysteria and cheerful buckets o' blood insanity.  Unfortunately, its barely even a story at all - more like a series of vignettes regarding the career of one very mad mad scientist.  I might add that the segment with the boxer ("Six Shots by Moonlight") contains some of the most disgusting racist crap HPL ever spun - far worse than the usually cited offender, "Horror At Red Hook" in this reader's unhumble opinion.  I can usually handle Lovecraft's gruesome racial views, however distasteful, but this one goes too far.  Stick with the Stuart Gordon movie.

"The Moon Bog"

 by H.P. Lovecraft  

originally published Weird Tales, June 1926

Denys Barry, a friend to our Unnamed Narrator, has made some scratch in Americay and returned to the Old Sod to rebuild his family's old castle, thus pleasing the locals by creating jobs and taking care of an eyesore.  But after awhile something scares `em off, and Denys has to bring in servants and workers from other parts.  He writes his old buddy UN and asks him to come visit, being as he's lonely out there in that not-so-crumbling-anymore Irish castle.

UN arrives to be told by the locals that the land has become accursed.  He finds on the property a bog, and an islet therein, where sits "a strange olden ruin" that "glistens spectrally".  

It seems Denys lost the workers when he decided to drain the bog, seeing it as nothing but wasted land.  But the locals believed a spirit lived in the ruin, and: "There were tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon, and of chill winds when the night was warm; of wraiths in white hovering over the waters, and of an imagined city of stone deep down below the swampy surface. But foremost among the weird fancies, and alone in its absolute unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him who should dare to touch or drain the vast reddish morass."

Denys laughed off their concerns, which isn't the sort of thing that will endear you to folks, let's face it. 

UN thinks it's all pretty silly, too.  Until he's awakened in the night by weird piping, and observes wispy, glowing figures dancing around the ruin in the moonlight, and a great glow coming from the ruin.  And the hired workers are joining in.

Not sure if it was a dream or what, UN is filled with dread the next day, increasing as he watches Denys prepare to drain the bog.  

That night he falls asleep and is awakened by a repeat of the previous night's supernatural partying, and something in their rites is bringing doom upon the nearby town.  UN does what anyone would do in such a situation - start praying to Graeco-Roman deities!! Next thing you know icy winds are howling in the windows, and he can hear Denys screaming.  He loses his shit and runs through the castle and outside and is eventually found wandering in the town.  

He recalls seeing, as he ran, that the formerly-devoid-of-life bog was now full of big frogs, "which piped shrilly and incessantly in tones strangely out of keeping with their size" (whatever that's supposed to mean).  A particularly big and ugly frog glances up, and UN follows its gaze to see what appears to be a shadowy figure, resembling Denys, writhing in terror or agony as it is drawn up towards the moon. "And now I shudder when I hear the frogs piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places."

This story is fun and long on atmosphere, but slight in content, and Lovecraft's worst stylistic excesses hurt it - I'm kind of a smart guy, but I had to re-read several lines to be clear what it was he was trying to say was going on.  Not to mention some pure silliness (yeah, I know when I'm scared shitless praying to Artemis is the first thing that comes to mind!).  Nonetheless, and story with big frogs as harbingers of doom, bogs, and moonlit faerie dances can't be all bad.

"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.  

"The Hound"

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, February 1924

Our Narrator and his bff St. John are setting up housekeeping in a manner that would make the Addams family blanch - robbing graves to decorate their house full of skulls, bodies, sinister books, headstones, freakish art and weird-ass musical instruments that they make weird-ass music on (gawd, HPL woulda loved Harry Partch!).

St. John gets wind of the grave of a tomb raider, who is said to have stolen something "potent" which is presumably buried with him.  They travel to Holland and dig up the several-hiundred year-old corpse, not giving much thought to the sound of an unusually large hound baying in the distance.  

The coffin is strange and elaborate, and its occupant is torn up, as if by wild animals. There is a jade amulet they recognize from the Necronomicon around the corpse's neck.  They take the amulet and head for home.

Bad news, boy.  The baying of the hound follows them home.  Weird noises are heard inside the house.  Then St. John gets his ass torn to shreds by some kind of animal.  O.N. destroys all the creepy bric-a-brac and flees, intending to return the amulet to the grave they stole it from.  But someone steals it from him.  The next day he finds  a story in the morning paper about a band of thieves who've been dismembered by some unknown animal.

He goes to the Holland graveyard anyway, and finds the corpse is covered in caked blood and bits of flesh and hair.  It also has the amulet. And starts baying at him.  He flees and plans to kill himself.

This one always surprises me whenever I re-read it because its so over-the-top in almost every way.  The morbid home of St. John and the nameless narrator is so crazed its comical, and if I didn't know that HPL wasn't prone to humor I'd think it was meant to be funny.  

After the purplish intro this becomes something like a particularly crazed and surreal EC horror comics tale.  Its about as close as HPL ever got to "splatter".  

Not one of his greatest tales, but terrifically effective and great spooky horror fun!

"The Festival"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, January 1925

For Xmas, instead of watching It's A Wonderful Life for the 1,000th time being as it wasn't invented in 1925, Our Narrator books out to Kingspor, MA, where his scattered familial remains, by tradition, gather once a century for some kind of festival "that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten."

The town seems like a relic of another time, and more than a bit surreal.  And all but deserted.  He finds his relatives' house - and they're even weirder than you might expect.  They sit him down and provide a copy of the Necronomicon for light reading.

At 11, he's led outside where cloaked and cowled folks pour into the streets.  He follows the crowd to a church on a hill in the center of the town.  From there its into a crypt, and from there into a tunnel below, eventually leading to an underground chamber lit by glowing fungus and containing an underground river.  Strange flute music fills the air.  A bunch of icky flying beasties arrive and people mount up.  O.N. is shown proof that he belongs there, but, freaking out, he jumps into the river.

He turns up in Kingsport Harbor and is taken to the hospital.  While recovering, he finds an unsettling passage in the Necronomicon suggesting his experience was no dream.

This is minor stuff but it gets by by being long on atmosphere and dreamy feel.  Some of Lovecraft's weaknesses still show (re: his description of the flying things by comparing them to practically everything under the sun), but it works more often than not, and the last line is chilling.

"Under the Pyramids" aka "Imprisoned With the Pharoahs"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published  (as by Harry Houdini), Weird Tales May-June-July, 1924

Harry Houdini - yes, that Harry Houdini - is poking around Cairo and gets himself kidnapped, tied up, taken to some distant spot and tossed in a pit.  

Well, what else would you do with Houdini?

Houdini hallucinates for awhile, then comes to, gets out of the ropes (he is Houdini, after all), and makes his way around in the dark, looking for an exit.  He finds himself even further underground, in a cavern where he witnesses a bunch of mummies with animal heads having a hoedown with the ancient pharoahs Khephren and Nitokris and a giant tentacled whatsit poking through a hole in the wall.  Houdini runs for it when he realizes the whatsit is only the paw of an enormous whatsit.  Later he decides the whole thing is a dream.

A lot of HPL criticists have named this a fave, but personally I wasn't that enthralled.  The first 2/3 or so read like a travel guide and I could practically hear a Nathional Geo narrator reading it.  The last portion has plenty of atmosphere but hey, the story doesn't really go anywhere - Houdini gets captured, sees something weird - runs away.  HPL wrote a few too many like this in the early days.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published The Vagrant, May, 1920

It seems old Randolph Carter's in a spot of trouble.  They found him wandering around Big Cypress Swamp in a state of partial amnesia.  Sometime earlier he and his bff Harley Warren were seen tramping around the area, carrying a bunch of equipment.  But now ol' Harl has vanished and Randolph's answers are a little - out there.

It seems Harley had acquires an obscure book which led him to believe there are entrances to a demonic underworld, here on earth.  And he had determined that one such could be found in a nearly-abandoned graveyard bear Big Cypress Swamp.  So the two of them headed out there straightaway with picks and shovels and flashlights and a portable telephone rig.  

They open up a tomb, revealing a flight of stairs, and Warren makes his way down, telling Randy his nerves are too delicate for such a trip.

After awhile, Warren starts babbling in disbelief at the things he's seeing - first in awe, then in panic.  He finally starts yelling at Warren to get the hell out of there.  Randy keeps shouting into the phone for him.  Finally an inhuman voice comes on the line and informs if "You fool - Warren is dead!"

Hoo boy!  I remember reading this in 7th grade English class (we had taken a test and those who finished had some free time) and being blooown away!

Re-reading it today: still a fun story, with a lot of atmosphere (admittedly, said atmosphere is laid on with a trowel, but it still works).  Lovecraft's a much less experienced writer at this point.  You can see it in the slight, flimsy plot and almost EC-comical ending (c'mon, some beastie picks up the phone to tell him they killed his buddy??).  Then there's the paragraph-length list of adjectives he trots out in an attempt to describe the voice.

So, a bit silly, a bit amateurish - but still a lot of fun!

"Pickman's Model"

 by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, October, 1927

Our unnamed narrator is apparently having drinks with a pal, and is just a wee bit defensive about the fact that he's nervous as hell and won't go down into subways or cellars ever again.

Much of his newfound nervousness seems to have something to do with local artists Richard Upton Pickman, a controversial guy who's managed to alienate most of the local art community with his paintings, which are considered brilliant, but whose subject matter - ghoulish creatures doing ghoulish things - has become untenable with the crowd.  There's also more than a few odd things about Pickman himself - accusations that he's somehow starting to resemble his own subject matter.  And now, it seems, Pickman has vanished, and Our Narrator neither knows, nor cares, what's happened to him.

It seems not long ago, Our Narrator had developed a friendship with Pickman, who one night invited him to his private studio, a broken-down hovel in a forgotten slum of Boston, where the houses date back to the town's founding.  Pickman talks of tunnels under the city and secret rooms and wells in the cellars of the old houses which lead to dark, occult secrets.

There, O.N. is shown paintings too disturbing in subject matter and execution, to ever be shown to the general public.  While looking at an especially nasty work-in-progress, Pickman steps away to deal with some odd noises coming out of a well in the cellar, which he claims are made by large rats.  To O.N.'s surprise, he pulls a revolver and apparently fires it at something in the well, possibly killing it.  They head back to Pickman's home.

Some time later, O.N. makes a discovery.  He pocketed a small, curled-up piece of paper that was tacked to the painting Pickman was working on in the cellar, which Pickman had alleged was a photograph of a part of the city he intended to use as a background for the painting.  Upon examining the paper, O.N. sees that it is no such thing - it is in fact a picture of the monster he has been painting - but not a photo of a drawing or portrait - an actual photograph of the living creature.

This was one of the first Lovecraft stories I ever read, not too long after seeing the adaptation on Night Gallery.  As a kid who loved art, the idea of a painter who depicted monsters with frighteningly realistic technique was exciting, and I think that part of what comes through in this tale is the very reason some us fall so hard for HPL, especially when we're teens, because, at root - HPL was a weird as we are!

What you can see him doing in this tale is struggling to define an aesthetic, if you will, of weird-fantasy-horror art - "Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear—the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There’s something those fellows catch—beyond life—that they’re able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it..." the narrator tells us.

All of this is saying, Lovecraft imagined for himself, in Richard Upton Pickman, the greatest fantasy-horror artist of all time.  And if he'd been real, HPL would've hung his pics in his living room.

I love this story.  Always have and still do.  There's plenty of buildup, but, as in the best Lovecraft, its craftily orchestrated.  When Pickman rhapsodizes about the sinister, secret history of the old Boston neighborhood... " There’s hardly a month that you don’t read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down ...There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea..." you can feel the thrill of the chill running up your spine.

"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Arkham House, 1943

Randolph Carter is having one of those frustrating dreams where the damn thing shuts down just when its about to get good.  And its recurring no less! Randy's recurring dream happens to be of a beautiful city, "All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles" - well, this is Lovecraft, after all.  You didn't really think Carter would have recurring dreams about Catherine Zeta-Jones or something, did you?

Frustrated, Carter prays to the gods of the dreamworld/dreamlands to tell him where the city is.  In response, the dreams stop altogether.  Now very determined, Carter decides to stage a home invasion on the dreamworld gods, at their crib in Kadath.  Only hitch is - he's not sure where Kadath is, or how to get there.  

Well, every journey begins with the first step, right?  Well, Randy takes 70 of `em to the Cavern of the Flame - the entry to the Dreamlands.  There the guardian priests tell its a harebrained scheme and that there's probably a reason why the gods took his dreams away.  But Randy ain't takin' no fer an answer.

So he enters the Enchanted Wood and hangs out with some "zoogs", who have good wine and sometimes eat people (but not Randy cuz he's an old friend and speaks their language).  They can't tell him how to get to Kadath, but suggest he try Atal, in the the town of Ulthar.  Atal isn't all that helpful, but, plied with wine Carter got from the zoogs,  he does let slip that on Mount Ngranek, there's a giant stone face that's modeled on a Dreamlands god.  And gods often mate with mortal women.  So, if Carter can get a look at that face, he'll get an idea of what gods look like, and thus the mortal offspring of gods look like, and if he can find folks that have god-like features, he might be getting close to Kadath! Right???

(If your head's starting to hurt trying to follow this line of logic, please know that I understand)

Carter makes his way to Dyath-Leen, a port city where sinister black galleys, crewed by weird, turbaned men and manned by oarsmen who are never seen, dock and trade.  His plan is to book passage for Oriab, whence he can go to Mt. Ngranek.  Instead he ends up shanghai'd aboard a black galley.  They sail to an ocean on the moon, where he discovers the turban-heads are actually slaves of the gloopy octo-toad moon-beasts.  He is rescued by a vast army of cats from Ulthar, who can leap from the rooftops of their hometown to the moon itself(!).  They take him back to Dyath-Leen.

Carter goes to Baharna, a port of Oriab, buys a zebra and sets off for the mount.  Along the way he hears spooky tales of things called "night-gaunts".  He makes his way up the Mount (no easy task!) and finds the carving.  He realizes he has indeed scene people with similar features to this god - in Celphais!  (you know Celephais, right?).  Before RC can plan his itinerary further, he's snatched by the night-gaunts - flying devil-bat people without faces, and dropped into the Vale of Pnath.

But wait! All hope is not lost!  Some friendly(!) ghouls lead Carter (who also speaks ghoul.  Miskatonic U foreign languages department must be an interesting place), who lead him to his old buddy, Richard Upton Pickman, last seen running off "rats" in his Boston studio, currently a half- or semi-ghoul himself.  Pickman and a couple other ghoulies agree to help Carter get back on his track.

In the city of the gugs, Carter and co are attacked by ghasts, and a gug sentry, but escape back into the Enchanted Wood.  There Carter finds himself in the middle of a war between cats and zoogs.  Carter warns the cats, allowing them to surprise attack the zoogs and cause them to sue for peace.  

In the city of Thran, Carter books passage on a ship to Celephais.  There he learns that the men he believes to be offspring of the gods come from a cold, dark land called Iganok.  And that is a place most folks avoid.  And there's no cats there!  It apparently lies too close to the Plateau of Leng, a place of greeeeeeeeaaat eviiiiiiil, for most folks to want to hang.  He does some drinking with King Kuranes, who encourages him to forget his plan.

Carter books passage to Iganok and hears some more creepy tales.  But no one will tell him much.  At night, strange howls are heard from the land.  Carter gets himself a yak and sets out in search of a rare onyx quarry, which he believes will put him in proximity of his goal.  He finds it, but is promptly captured by the sneaky slant-eyed merchant he met in Dyath-Leen, and he finds himself making an unwanted trip via shantak to the monastery of the dreaded High Priest Not to Be Described.

Carter realizes that ol' Slant is a Man of Leng, and that the turban conceals horns.  Carter is taken before the high priest.  Though terrified, he pushes Slant into a well and escapes.  He realizes that he is in the ruins of Sarkomand.  He finds his three ghoul-friends captive of the Men of Leng and some more moon-beasts.  He trips back to the underworld and raises an army of ghouls and night-gaunts, rescues the captives, and arranges for a flock of night-gaunts to transport him and some ghouls to Kadath. 

After a flight full of ominous implications, they arrive at the palace of the gods, but no one's home (though the lights are indeed on).  A pharoah-looking fellow arrives and tells Carter that (a) the gods have, in fact, taken up residence in that very city he seeks and that (b) that city is, in fact, Boston!

(I have honestly never heard Boston described as "golden and lovely" - "dirty, old, crime-ridden, drivers who run down pedestrians" yes.  But maybe I don't get out enough.)

Pharoah reveals himself to be Nyarlathotep.  He pops him on a shantak to fly him home.  Mid-flight, Carter deduces that Ny has been f'ing with him, and is actually sending him to Azathoth himself.  Remembering at last that this is, after all, a dream, Carter jumps off the bird, falls through space, and wakes up to a beautiful day in Boston.   Back in Kadath, Nyarlathotep broods.

What we have hear is, effectively, a travelogue.  Of the Dreamlands, Lovecraft's own version of "beyond the fields we know".  

Lin Carter states emphatically that Dream Quest is not a Cthulhu Mythos tale.  To prove this further, he asserts that Lovecraft scholars Robert E. Briney and Robert Weinberg agree with him - so there!  And if that isn't enough, he trots out no less than August Derleth, who insisted that Dream Quest was distinctly separate from Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, as his own Sac Prairie stories were separate from his "Wisconsin" stories - despite the fact that characters may interconnect in both.

My own opinion is that this is a lot of hair-splitting bullshit that only a bunch of very literal minds or hapless nerds would give much credence to.  Lovecraft wrote it, it's Lovecraft, its Cthulhoid.  If that's too simple or complex for ya - go suck on a dhole.

It's hard to know what to say about Dream-Quest.  For starters, it's not really a finished work, and in some places, it reads like a detailed outline or treatment as much as it does a story.  HPL set it aside in 1927 and never returned to it.  He wrote little or no Dunsany-influenced fiction afterwards, and I suspect he simply no longer related to it.  Perhaps, had he lived to a ripe old, he would revisited and polished it up.  Perhaps not.

I first read Dream-Quest when I was around 15 or 16, the tail end of my Lovecraft Lust phase.  It was one of the last major HPL stories that I read.  I recall somewhat struggling with it.  The nature of the story seemed to cry out for more ... dialog? action?  I wasn't sure.  The lack of chapter divisions troubled me for some reason, and somehow made the story more of a slog (though it isn't really all that long - 90 pages in printed form).  In all the years since, it is one of the pieces I've never revisited - though there are many other Lovecraft stories I've read only once, this is probably the only major Lovecraft tale I had not previously revisited.

So what now, is my perception, 35+ years later?  A bit hard to say.  I didn't find it a slog - in fact, I genuinely enjoyed reading it (though the lack of chapter divisions still bothers me - and I couldn't even tell you why).  I found myself both awed and amused by the creativity and imagination, and sheer surrealism of the whole venture (It's a shame Basil Wolverton never illustrated Dream-Quest.  He's almost the only one I can imagine doing it justice.)  There are several memorable moments.  The whole cat-battles thing which made me laugh - both for HPL's obvious love of felines (which I share) and the absurdity of imagining cats forming a disciplined army; the chase through the city of the gugs is both spooky and exciting.  There are several memorably eerie moments (though the story is not intended to be horror) of the sort HPL did best.  Basically, I had a lot of fun with it.  

But I didn't love it.  Whether its the unfinished feel of the whole thing, a preference for different kinds of fantasy, the thought that perhaps Dunsany did this sort of thing better (I can't be sure of that - I read quite a bit of Dunsany in the 80's, but not since.  He too is someone I need to revisit).  In any case, I'd rule Dream-Quest to be worthwhile and enjoyable, not one of HPL's most shining moments.  

"The Cats of Ulthar"

by H.P. Lovecraft
originally published The Tryout, November, 1920

Once upon a time in Ulthar, there was a cotter ad his wife who liked to trap and kill cats.  The townsfolk were too afraid of them to put a stop to it.

A caravan of traders comes through the town, and on it is an orphan boy named Menes, whose only companion is a black kitten.  The kitten disappears.  Menes, having heard tell of the old couple, takes revenge by praying to the gods.  And he is heard.  

That night, after several ominous warning signs, the cats of the town surround the cotter's home.  They come back fat and happy.  But all that's left of the cotter and his wife are two clean-picked skeletons.  The authorities of Ulthar pass a law forbidding the killing of cats.

I don't have any particular thoughts to offer about this little Dunsanian bon-bon, except that its as close as HPL ever came to sweet.  And as a guy who grew up with a cat and always loved them, I like it.

"The Shadow Kingdom"

by Robert E. Howard

originally published Weird Tales, August 1929
 
King Kull, the new king of Valusia, one of the seven great empires and the greatest power in the known world, is invited to come alone to a feast by Ka-nu, emissary of the Picts, a savage tribe allied to Valusia.
He tells him that a trusted emissary, Brule, will come to him in the night.

Brule turns up, shows Kull the maze of secret passages that riddle the palace, and reveals that all of Kull's guards have been killed, and their bodies hidden, while impostors stand sentry outside his rooms.  Kull's chief councillor, Tu, enters the room, expecting to find Kull asleep, intending to assassinate him.  A wide-awake Kull kills Tu, who turns out not to be Tu, but in fact a serpent-headed monster magically disguised as his advisor.

Brule reveals that the Serpent Men have been ruling Valusia from the shadows for hundreds of years, replacing the kings with Serpent Man impostors. 

The Serpent Man use illusions lead Brule and Kull into the room where a long-ago king Eallal was slain.  They realize the trap and manage to fight their way out to the Council Room, where a phony Kull is holding court.  The real Kull confronts and kills the Serpent Man, thus exposing their nefarious plans as well.  He vows to hunt down and destroy the race.

I first came across this near-classic in a comic book back in the early 70's.  It adapted perfectly.  Later, in my teens, I came across the original in a sword and sorcery anthology.  "The Shadow Kingdom" is early Howard, and his style has plenty of pulp in it, but the energy and atmosphere are all there.   Its a memorable, exciting, and suspenseful tale, among Howard's best.

"The Tree"

by H.P. Lovecraft
published in The Tryout, 7, No. 7 October 1921


Somewhere on Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, Greece, is an olive grove which was once a "chosen haunt" for the god Pan.  In this grove grows a humanoid-looking tree.

Once there were two famous Greek sculptors, Kalos and Musides.  They were invited to compete in creating a wonder of the world.  Kalos fell ill and died.  Musides created a marble tomb for him, and, at Kalos' request, planted olive twigs near the head.

A humanoid tree grew from the tomb.  During a storm, a branch fell, crushing Musides and the statue he had made.
  Lovecraft himself dismissed "The Tree" - "if typed on good stock make excellent shelf-paper, but little else."  I'd have to agree.

"The Silver Key"

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, January 1929


Randolph Carter, age 30, has "lost the key to the gate of dreams." The groundedness of everyday life and the mundane world have worn him down, leaving him empty and depressed.  He explores many philosophies and spiritual paths, but nothing satisfies him.

He dreams one night of his grandfather, and his dream leads him to an antique key, inscribed with arabesque symbols, in the attic.  Taking the the key, he returns to his boyhood home in the backwoods of northeastern Massachusetts.  There he enters a cave that he played in as a boy.  In some unexplained way, he is returned to his 10 year-old self, in his past, and his adult self vanishes.  He also recalls that, at the age of 10, he had gained the ability to glimpse events in his future. 

The unnamed narrator tells us that he expects to meet Carter soon, in his own dreams, "in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt", where Carter is now the ruler.

"The Silver Key" is an odd, and I suspect, very personal story for ol' HPL.  It seems very much influenced by Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, a moving but frankly self-indulgent novel about an author struggling to reconcile his rich inner life with a rotten outer one, known to be one of HPL's favorites.  It is one of the last of his "Dreamlands"-related pieces, and full of wistful sadness.  Lovecraft would have been nearly 40 when he wrote this, and perhaps he was pining for his youth.  I have always found the story somewhat unsatisfying - it seems there should be more, somehow.  But at 50 myself, I find it rather moving.

"The Doom That Came To Sarnath"

Jason Thompson - mockman.com

by H.P. Lovecraft
originally published The Scot, June 1920

(from Wikipedia) According to the tale, more than 10,000 years ago, a race of shepherd people colonized the banks of the river Ai in a land called Mnar, forming the cities of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron (not to be confused with Kadath), which rose to great intellectual and mercantile prowess. Craving more land, a group of these hardy people migrated to the shores of a lonely and vast lake at the heart of Mnar, founding the metropolis of Sarnath.

But the settlers were not alone. At the other side of the lake was the ancient, grey-stone city of Ib, inhabited by a queer race who had descended from the moon. Lovecraft described them as "in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it.... They had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice."

These beings worshipped a strange god known as Bokrug, the Great Water Lizard, although it was more their physical form that caused the people of Sarnath to despise them.

The people of Sarnath killed all the creatures inhabiting Ib, destroyed the city and took their idol as a trophy, putting it in Sarnath's main temple. The next night, the idol vanished under peculiar circumstances, and Taran-Ish, the high-priest of Sarnath, was found dead. Before dying, he had scrawled a single sign on the empty altar: "DOOM".

Ten centuries later, Sarnath was at the zenith of its power and decadence. Nobles from distant cities were invited to the feast in honour of Ib's destruction. That night, however, the revelry was disrupted by strange lights over the lake and heavy greenish mists, and that the tidal marker, the granite pillar Akurion, was mostly submerged. Not too much later, many of the city's inhabitants fled, maddened by fear, as the king and the people in the feast had been transformed into the original creatures from Ib.

After this some of the survivors reported seeing the long-dead inhabitants of Ib peering from the windows of the city's towers, while others refused to say exactly what they had seen. Those that returned saw nothing of those unlucky enough to be left behind, only ruins, many water lizards, and most disturbingly, the missing idol. Ever since then, Bokrug remained the chief god in the land of Mnar.

Another early, Dunsany-ish tale.  This one clearly points to some ideas HPL will develop later.  It's not a great story, though - more a colorful sketch.

"The Horror At Red Hook"

by H.P. Lovecraft
originally published Weird Tales January 1927

Poor New York Detective Thomas F. Malone.  He's convalescing in rural Rhode Island from a terrible experience during a raid in NYC, that's left him phobic about cramped urban areas with large buildings.

It seems Malone was investigating occult activities in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a place full of crime, violence, gangs and (gasp) foreigners.

A series of kidnappings leads Malone to the trail of Robert Suydam, a fat old recluse who suddenly gets thinner, younger, and socially active.  Suydam and his new bride are murdered on their wedding night, aboard an outbound ship, and Suydam's body and apparently large quantities of his wife's blood are stolen by some mysterious men.

Malone is investigating Suydam's flat, and finds a door in the basement that leads to a secret chamber, where he encounters a weird, never-fully-described thing that crawls out of an underground lake, an altar, and witnesses a ritual involving human sacrifice and the reanimation of Suydam's corpse. Somewhat inexplicably, the building collapses and the chamber caves in, and the revelers are either killed or drowned.  Malone survives, a shattered man.

"The Horror At Red Hook" is one of HPL's most controversial stories, in part because of its inherent racism, in part because it isn't that great a story.  S.T. Joshi hates it - which, frankly, only makes me like it more.  Actually, I do like the buildup - the whole thing coming together like a particularly sinister Law and Order SVU episode.

The bigger problem is the climax.  While the ritual, especially the weird, ambiguous creature that emerges from the lake and oversees the whole thing, is pretty effective, the whole story then collapses as thoroughly as the building.  What exactly is supposed to have happened? And why?

As to the stories infamous racism; well, there's no denying that HPL had repulsive racial views, and no amount of whitewashing from Derleth can erase that - HPL made them very clear in letters and essays, and his ex-wife gives vivid testimony to it.  However, I have always believed in trusting the art not the artist, and HPL's despicable racial pronouncements have never diminished my enjoyment of his fiction.  As to the racism of "Horror At Red Hook" in particular: well, it's certainly true that Lovecraft paints an unflattering picture of Red Hook, and that the non-white inhabitants and their inherent ignorance, lawlessness and corruption are big part of Lovecraft's hang-up.  I personally don't find it as overbearing as some readers have.  Maybe I'm just inured to it, knowing already how awful the old guy's opinions were.  In any case, I find "Horror At Red Hook" a good but not great HPL story.