"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.

"At the Mountains of Madness"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Astounding Stories, February and March, 1936

Dr. William Dyer, a geologist at Miskatonc U, has something he wants the world to know.

It seems there's a highly-publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica about to launch.  And Dyer has a dire (sorry, had to) warning for them.  You see, he was a member of a smaller Antarctic expedition a few years back, and there's some things he and his fellow survivors (hint hint - not all of his team made it back) have kept under wraps.  But now, for the sake of protecting other hapless explorers from getting in the same jam he and his got into, the whole truth and nothing but the truth shall be known!

Out there in the frozen lands, they found a previously unknown range of mountains that put the Himalayas to shame.  And some pretty amazing fossils.  And then, one member named Lake and a small team found fourteen frozen bodies (described in intense detail) that L. Sprague DeCamp flippantly described as extraterrestrial sea cucumbers.  Well whatever they are they're weird as hell and pretty gross-sounding.

What's more they found `em in layers of rock so friggin' old that such life forms couldn't possibly have existed that far back!  Well, except apparently they could, cuz ... but anyway this is an exciting find!  Nevertheless these things are weird as hell and the sled dogs hate their frozen bods so much they have to be restrained at considerable distance from them.

However, Lake and team lost contact, and Dyer takes the rest to find out what happened.  When they get there, the camp has been devastated.  Everyone's been slaughtered except one man (Gedney) and one dog.  And most of the monster bods are gone.  And someone dissected a man, and a dog, in one of the tents.  I mean dissected - not just hacked up.  Dyer decides the missing man must have gone nuts and killed and mutilated all the others.  Hid buddy Danforth ain't so sure.

Dyer and Danforth go on to discover the ruins of a huge, ancient, and decidedly non-human civilization, one which resembles things mentioned in The Necronomicon.   The beings who built this civ - i.e. the sea cucumber things - were assisted and served by a race of gloop monsters called shoggoths which they bred for service.  Apparently all earthly life also evolved from shoggoth ingredients, thus making the sea cucumbers the creators of mankind (and everything else).  They also learn of great wars betwee the sea cucumbers, the Mi-Go, and the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu.  And of a revolt by the shoggoths, and the decline and degradation of sea cucumber civilization.  It also appears there was something in the enormous mountain ranged beyond the city that the cucumbers were afraid of.  

Eventually they realize (or admit) that the cucumbers thought to be dead had actually been alive, revived, and killed and dissected the men and dogs.  They find the bodies of the now-slaughtered revived cucumbers, and also some giant, blind albino penguins - which don't seem to be responsible for the cucumber-cide.  They encounter a living black bubbling blob - a shoggoth.  They escape and manage to fly their plane out, but Danforth looks back and sees something beyond the mountains  - the thing the cucumbers feared, and goes mad, screaming in imitation of the sounds made by the shoggoths...

I remember the first time I read "Mountains".  It was a bitterly cold and gray day in January.  I cut school and stayed home, wrapped up in blankets with the lights on, as the sun never came out that day, not once - it was like perpetual twilight.   And I intended to start reading "Mountains", but I got sucked in, and 3-4 hours later I was wrapping the sucker up, my little teenaged brain blown.  

Lin Carter has called the story plodding and slow.  It is slow, though I never find it plodding. The interesting thing is it now reads to me like an archaic National Geographic article.  And that is, I think, entirely the intention.  Lovecraft, in the voice of Dyer, keeps listening times and temps and latitudes and longitudes (supposedly all of HPL's Antarctic data was accurate, at least as known in the early 30's). All of this, as in "The Shadow Out Of Time", where he does much the same thing, is intended to give an air of verisimilitude to the tale.  This is supposed to be a true story.  Outlandish, wild, and a dire warning.  Dyer wants to be believed, and he's offering up details to bolster his plausibility.

I dunno, I might find it plodding too if I came to it blind.  But since I've read it a couple times before, this re-read was thoroughly enjoyable, like re-watching a favorite old movie even though one could practically quote all the dialog.  

As it was I really enjoyed this one.  I've been putting off re-reading "Mountains" for several years because I thought I would find it slow going, but I was completely into it and enjoyed every minute of it this time around.

"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 Strange High House in the Mist"

 by H.P. Lovecraft  

originally published Weird Tales, October 1931

Thomas Olney is a "philosopher", which I guess is Lovecraft-ese for "consultant", or "unemployed unrecognized genius", who lives in creepy ol' Kingsport with his wife and kids.  

High on a cliff overlooking the town and the ocean is a strange house which the locals fear and whisper odd things about.  It's been there for generations.  Olney decides to investigate, and climbs the mountain to poke around.  

The house is small, almost medieval in construction, and does actually have an occupant.  It is also impossibly placed on the cliff edge.

The resident is a strange character, a young man with ancient eyes, who speaks of strange and ancient places and things - Atlantis, Poseidonis, gods older than "The Elder Ones".  Things get weird as Olney sees shadowed shapes around the windows.  There's a knock on the door.  Who shows up but the gods Neptune and Nodens, ancient sea deities.  Nodens takes Olney up on his shell-chariot and off they go.  They fly over Kingsport during a storm.

Olney comes back but seems more prosaic after his encounters.  He has lost interest in the mysteries of life and the universe, but seems content.

An odd little story, very Dunsany-influenced, but HPL's writing style is borderline obtuse here, and I'm not sure if he knew where he wanted to go with this one himself.  Atmospheric though.

"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 Shadow Over Innsmouth"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Visionary Press, 1936

Our Narrator, a hapless geek, decides to celebrate his "coming of age" by taking a sightseeing tour of New England  (I don't know about you but the sightseeing I did on my "coming of age" involved the bottom of a beer glass and the sight of the lovely G.O - but HPL had far more scruples than I).

After hearing some vague and unsavory legends about Innsmouth in Newburyport, his interest is piqued in Innsmouth (I told you this guy was a geek) and he starts nosing around, hearing some strange tales, mostly from a colorful old geezer at the train station, who enlightens him about a 2x a day bus to and from Innsmouth, which hardly anyone is willing to ride.  He soon finds out why cuz the driver and few passengers are icky-looking and smell like fish.  

After picking the brain of a disgruntled grocery boy, O.N. winds up plying ancient town drunk Zadok Allen with whiskey in order to get the backstory on Innsmouth.  Despite his thick phoneticized accent, Zadok is pretty sharp for a really old drunk (I suppose HPL never actually talked to too many decrepit alcoholics).  

Per Zadok, less than 100 years back, a merchant ship captain named Obed Marsh made contact with some South Sea islanders and adopted their debased religion, which centered around weird sea gods but was known to have some big advantages over Christianity, namely prayers were reliably answered.   Obed started up a church in the town which offered up human sacrifices in exchange for awesome fishing hauls and spectacular gold jewelry. 

This didn't sit all that well with the locals, who arrested Obed and his fellow cultists.  This led to retaliation from the cult's benefactors, a community of Deep Ones who raid the town, killing about half the inhabitants and subjugating the rest, forcing them to breed with Deep Ones, producing half-breed offspring who start life as fairly normal human, then gradually transform into Deep Ones.  What's more, the local Deepies have a long-range plan to dominate the rest of the surface world.  "Ever hear of a shoggoth?" Zadok asks.  But before he can explain, he shrieks that he's been seen and heard, and tells O.N. to get the heck out of Innsmouth ASAP.  Next thing you know, Zadok's gone - never to be seen again. 

O.N. tries to head for home, but the bus is broken down, and he has no choice but to stay at the local fleabag.  As he's trying to maybe grab some Z's, he hears somebodies trying to get into his room.  He flees through the hotel and a window, and makes his way through the streets, pursued by locals and later, he sees, hordes of Deep Ones swimming in from the sea.  He manages to make it to some railroad tracks leading outside of town.  Hiding in the brush, he gets a good look at the full-on Deep Ones and passes out.  

Apparently he hid successfully, because he wakes up unmolested and makes his way back to Arkham, where he reports the whole experience.  This leads to a hushed-up federal raid on Innsmouth which ends up with many of the half-breed citizenry incarcerated or killed, buildings being blown up, and something being torpedoed off the coast.  The press makes out it was over bootlegging but WE know different, heh heh heh...

O.N. goes back to school like a good boy and tries to pretend his little side trip never happened.  But, he soon discovers that he himself is descended from Innsmouth stock.  First he is horrified, but, as the story ends, he has come to embrace his unhuman heritage, and looks forward to joining his brethren...

Whoo!  This is one of HPL's most famous and celebrated stories and its easy to see why.  This is perhaps the third/fourth time I've read it over the last (shudder ... ) nearly 40 years and never fails to kick in, despite familiarity and the dilution of the premise through years of bad Innsmouth knock-offs (last time I looked there's what - at least three Innsmouth-based collections out there).  

It is not flawless.  HPL felt he couldn't write action sequences effectively, while deCamp claimed the chase scene at the end is effective.  I'm somewhere in between.  it is effective, but it also reads very clinically, as if the narrator were carefully and meticulously planning every move, describing every turn and detour with more detail than you can get out of a Google Maps trip planner.  Seriously, if you were trying to get outta town while a bunch of fish-people were after you, would you stop and consider everything so carefully.  P.S. yes I'm aware this is supposed to be the narrator describing his experiences long after the fact, but I still think a more terse description would have worked better.

He still hadn't quite gotten over a few other bad habits: it takes nearly four paragraphs of "Arrgghh! It was so horrible I can't describe it but I'll try!" before he finally breaks down and gives us a word-pic of the fully-developed Deep Ones.  On the other hand, said description is nice and straightforward and terse (by HPL) standards (I guess he figured fish-men were easier to visualize than the weirdies that would take up multiple paragraphs or pages later on).  

But the very very good outweighs the minimal bad.  This is a terrific, even gripping read, full of atmosphere (Derleth called it "brooding", and that fits) and doom.  The final paragraph, which could have been corny or silly in lesser hands, remains chilling.  It's always nice when you come across a classic that really is classic.

"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.

"Through the Gates of the Silver Key"

by H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price
originally published Weird Tales, July 1934

At a gathering to decide the fate of Randolph Carter's estate (which has been held in trust since his disappearance) the mysterious Swami Chandraputra, who wears curious mittens and enveloping robes, tells Carter's acquaintances of his ultimate fate. He explains that the key took Carter to a type of higher dimension. There, Carter, on an ill-defined mission (or out of sheer curiosity), travelled strange sections of the cosmos by first meeting with 'Umr at-Tawil, a dangerous being warned of in the Necronomicon, saying those who deal with it never return. 'Umr at-Tawil offers Carter a chance to plunge deeper into the cosmos; Carter thus perceives the true nature of the universe before passing through the "Ultimate Gate."

After passing through the Ultimate Gate, Carter (now reduced to a disembodied facet of himself) encounters an Entity, implied to be Yog-Sothoth itself. This being explains that all conscious beings are facets of much greater beings, which exist outside the traditional model of three dimensions. Carter himself is a facet of this particular being, the Supreme Archetype, made up of the greatest thinkers of the universe. The Entity, appearing to be proud of Carter's accomplishments, offers to grant him a wish relating to the many facets of which it is a part. Carter explains that he would love to know more about the facets of a particular long-extinct race on a distant planet, Yaddith, which is constantly threatened by the monstrous Dholes. He has been having persistent dreams about Yaddith in the last few months. The Supreme Archetype accomplishes this by transferring Carter's consciousness into the body of one of his facets among that race, that of Zkauba the wizard, though not before warning Carter to have memorized all his symbols and rites. Carter arrogantly believes that the Silver Key alone will accomplish this claim, but it soon transpires Carter's wish was a mistake; he cannot escape, and is trapped in Zkauba's body. The two beings find each other repugnant, but are now trapped in the same body, periodically changing dominance.

After a vast amount of time trapped on Yaddith, Carter finds a means of suppressing the alien mind with drugs, and then uses their technology, along with the Silver Key to return both to the present and to Earth, where Carter can retrieve his manuscript with the symbols he needs to work on regaining his original body. Once there, the Swami reports, Carter did find the manuscript and promptly contacted Swami Chandraputra, instructing him to go to the meeting to say he would soon be along to reclaim his estate and to continue to hold it in trust. After the Swami finishes the tale, one in the party, the lawyer Aspinwall (who is Carter's cousin), accuses Swami Chandraputra of telling a false tale in an attempt to steal the estate, claiming that he is some kind of conman in a disguise. As Aspinwall tears at the Swami's masklike face and beard, it is revealed that the Swami is not human at all, but Carter, still trapped in Zkauba's hideous body. The other witnesses don't see Carter/Zkauba's true face, but Aspinwall suffers a fatal heart attack. The crisis causes Zkauba's mind to reassert itself, and the alien wizard enters a curious, coffin-shaped clock (implied to be Carter/Zkauba's means of transport to Earth) and disappears.

The tale ends with a vague postscript, speculating that the Swami was merely a common criminal who hypnotized the others to escape. However, the postscript notes, some of the story's details seem eerily accurate.

S.T. Joshi (aka He Who Knows All There Is Or Will Ever Be To Know About Lovecraft AND Is Smarter Than You, You Uneducated Peasant!) wrote of Price's draft (published in Crypt of Cthulhu in the 80's) "a textbook example of the follies a pulp hack can perpetrate when dealing with material entirely beyond his limited capacities".   I repeat this not because its necessarily true but because I find it amusing in its nastiness, and its a "textbook example" of why I think Joshi is an insufferable intellectual snob and a nasty little prick.

(As an aside, in the early 80's I discovered E Hoffman Price lived in the same town I grew up in, and had been living there for decades.  I considered looking him up, but, lacking such tools as the Internet and such - and he wasn't listed in the phone book - plus the nerve, I never did.  I'm glad I didn't, as apparently he was known to be hostile to fans, plus he was an unrepentant bigot - as, of course, was HPL.  In any case, I've read few of Price's stories, but the ones I've read were, yes, pulpy.  But not bad for all that.  Anyway, Joshi's still an asshole)

I find it an entertaining tale that rushes by like Edgar Rice Burroughs.  It's major shortcoming to me is that it isn't very memorable and nothing about it particularly sticks.

"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.

"From Beyond"

by H.P. Lovecraft
originally published in The Fantasy Fan June 1934

Crawford Tillinghast, mad scientist, has invented a device that allows a person to experience planes of existence outside our own reality.

The unnamed narrator, participating in the experiment, sees hordes of weird-ass critters floating around a reality that overlaps our own. Tillinghast reveals that the experiment has actually transported the house into the alien plane, and that the creatures can see us too! 

One of the boogies kills Tillinghast's servant, and is making for the narrator, who grabs a gun and shoots the machine.  Tillinghast dies on the spot.  The cops determine that he died of apoplexy, and that he must have murdered his servants.

An odd, Poe-like tale.  This is H.P.L. finding his way from Poe to his own concepts.  A transitional work.

 

"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 Shadow Out Of Time"

by H.P. Lovecraft
originally published Astounding, June 1936

Pity poor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.  As if weren't bad enough to be named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee(!), he has the misfortune to be a professor of political economy (at Miskatonic U, of course)!  But as if being the prof of the most snooze-inducing class on campus weren't a ghastly enough fate, one day in the middle of a lecture, he suddenly keels over.  The next thing you know he can't speak, move, walk, etc.  In fact, he acts as if his body were alien to him! 

Whether his napping students ever noticed his lapse of consciousness is not mentioned.

Peaslee recovers, sort of.  But he's seriously weird now.  Including a newfound interest in the occult and sciences.  His wife and kids bail on him, while he travels the world, looking for strange places and stranger people.

Five years into this and - poof! - his old personality and persona return.  And he resumes his old life.  Sort of.   It seems, you see, that he has no memory of the past five years - at all.

However, he is further troubled by strange dreams, of an alien landscape and an alien, unhuman civilization, a race of scholars in the form of giant, cone-shaped tentacular gloop-beasties (L. Sprague DeCamp referred to them as "super limpets").   In time, his increasingly vivid dreams reveal to him much of their culture.  The super-limpets were known as "the Great Race of Yith," an extraterrestrial species with the ability to travel through space and time. The Yithians accomplish this by switching bodies with hosts from the intended spatial or temporal destination.  The Yithians' original purpose was to study the history of various times and places, and they have amassed a "library city" that is filled with the past and future history of multiple races, including humans. The cone-shaped entities lived in their vast library city in what would later become Australia's Great Sandy Desert, millions of years before mankind (22°3′14″S 125°0′39″E). (thank you, Wikipedia!)

At first, Peaslee figures he's psychologically damaged.  However, he comes to learn of other cases like his, and their consistency with how own experiences leads him to believe they must be related, somehow.  His studies and his own published articles about his experience lead him into an archaeological expedition to Australia, where he ultimately finds his into the ruins of the city of his dreams.

And that is not all.  For it seems the Yithians were in conflict with another pre-human race, described as "half-polypous", able to control menacing winds.  The Yithians feared these beings, and ultimately fled their cone-bodies to inhabit new form, millenia after man's passing from earth.  But while the Yithians may be gone, the "polypous" are still very much alive.

And that too, is not all.  For, while fleeing the ruins, Peaslee seizes a book that once belonged to the Yithians, an object he remembers from his dreams.  Therein, he finds further proof that said dreams were indeed, not dreams at all.

This tale, though highly regarded, has never been a big personal fave.  Perhaps it just operates on too intellectual a plane ( the final, physical threat is tacked on at the end).  Perhaps just too much of it is a dissertation on the life and culture of a race of limpet-cone-thingies that I don't find all that fascinating (though they are, assuredly, alien).   In any case, its always been a story I admired more than liked. 

By this late in the game, Lovecraft had become a very polished writer, and it is intriguing to me that the rather dry, journalistic nature of the story actually makes profound sense - this narrator is attempting to prove his sanity by the very sober and thorough nature of his writing.

One thing that struck me is how much the final portion, with its mysterious, haunted, unhuman ruins, and a sinister and threatening wind, recalls his early story "The Nameless City".  But where "The Nameless City" is vague, dreamlike, and unfocused, this portion of the story is specific, tight, and matter-of-fact in its strangeness, making it all the more effective.  I wonder if HPL realized he had come full circle as he composed this tale of "mental" time travel? 

Regardless of my reservations, still an impressive work.  And thus, I shall give it my first: