Tour de Lovecraft- The Tales Read online

  “In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off the volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time.”

  —H.P. Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark”

  For Sheila:

  Literature lover, Lovecraft skeptic

  TOUR de

  LOVECRAFT

  - the tales -

  By Kenneth Hite

  Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales Kindle Edition is published by Atomic Overmind Press.

  Book Layout and Design by Hal Mangold

  Cover by Hal Mangold and Kenneth Hite

  Interior illustrations by Toren “Macbin” Atkinson

  Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales Kindle Edition © 2011 by Kenneth Hite. All rights reserved. Please don’t pirate this book, or the Terrible Old Man will be Terribly Upset.

  Any discussion of trademarked, service marked, or copyrighted material or entities in this book should not be construed as a challenge to their legal owners. The owners of these trademarks, service marks, and copyrights have not authorized or endorsed this book.

  Reproduction of material from within this book for any purposes, by photographic, digital, or other methods of electronic storage and retrieval, is prohibited.

  Please address questions and comments concerning this book, as well as requests for notices of new publications, by mail to:

  Atomic Overmind Press

  143 Wesmond Dr.

  Alexandria, VA 22305

  Visit us online at

  www.atomicovermind.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Stock number AOP1001, August 2008.

  ISBN 10: 0-9816792-0-X

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9816792-0-4

  Printed in the United States.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  A Brief Survey of Lovecraftian Criticism

  The Stories

  The Tomb

  Dagon

  Polaris

  Beyond the Wall of Sleep

  The White Ship

  The Doom That Came to Sarnath

  The Statement of Randolph Carter

  The Terrible Old Man

  The Tree

  Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

  The Cats of Ulthar

  The Temple

  Celephaïs

  Nyarlathotep

  From Beyond

  The Picture in the House

  The Nameless City

  The Quest of Iranon

  The Moon-Bog

  The Outsider

  The Other Gods

  Herbert West—Reanimator

  The Music of Erich Zann

  Hypnos

  The Hound

  The Lurking Fear

  The Rats in the Walls

  The Unnamable

  The Festival

  Under the Pyramids

  The Shunned House

  The Horror at Red Hook

  He

  In the Vault

  Cool Air

  The Call of Cthulhu

  Pickman’s Model

  The Strange High House in the Mist

  The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

  The Silver Key

  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

  The Colour Out of Space

  The Dunwich Horror

  The Whisperer in Darkness

  At the Mountains of Madness

  The Shadow Over Innsmouth

  The Dreams in the Witch House

  Through the Gates of the Silver Key

  The Thing on the Doorstep

  The Shadow Out of Time

  The Haunter of the Dark

  Conclusion

  Sources and Resources

  About the Author

  Foreword

  John Scott Tynes

  Like many admirers, I first encountered Lovecraft’s work as a teenager. I read “The Colour Out of Space” aloud to my Boy Scout troop on a campout, having found it in my parents’ library. From there I descended steadily into a lightless void of obsession and shortly before my twentieth birthday I found myself devoured by a Lovecraftian beast known as Pagan Publishing, a small press I founded and ran for the next twelve years. In those years I dwelled nearer to the epicenter of Lovecraft fandom than is perhaps healthy, but the creative and personal rewards were great – which is not to say that I escaped the same tradition of shabby-genteel starvation embodied by good old HPL.

  During that period, I made several pilgrimages to Providence, Rhode Island, for the NecronomiCon convention. On one of these trips I set out from the hotel on foot and walked the two and a half miles to Swan Point Cemetery, where Lovecraft is buried. I arrived shortly before midnight on August 19th, the eve of his birthday, bearing nothing but a hand-drawn map of the cemetery and a cigarette lighter, which I could only keep lit for a few moments before the heat against my thumb became unbearable. I crept into the moonlit cemetery, mindful of dogs and night watchmen alike, and with the occasional flash of flame I navigated my way through the headstones until I found the Philips family plot. There lay the humble stone reading “I AM PROVIDENCE,” lain only in recent years, that marked the final transition of H.P. Lovecraft.

  We had a conversation that night, HPL and I, as I sat before his tombstone. Admittedly it was a rather one-sided dialogue, but he seemed game (if quiet) and I had plenty to say. Midnight came and went, I wished him a happy birthday, and then this nocturnal Tour de Lovecraft came to an end.

  I wish I could speak of what we spoke, but some sorceries are best left silent. Light illuminates everything but shadows, and those it simply destroys. I believe the world is a better place with mysteries left in it.

  Ken Hite is that rarity, a source of illumination that shines upon the shadows and makes them darker: an inverted trapezohedron, perhaps, the anti-antiprism. As a source of information he is delightfully unreliable. Fact, rumor, supposition, and outright bunk all bubble and boil in his creative cauldron and exude a miasma of the unknown. A discussion of Schroedinger’s Cat with Ken is likely to lead to conjecture as to whether the fabled chess-playing automaton known as the Turk might well have been operated by Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire feline, a line of enquiry not altogether obvious yet somehow weirdly resonant. All of this, of course, makes him an exemplary tour guide, for that is a profession built upon a scaffold of hokum.

  There have been three Tours de Hite in my life.

  One summer I stayed with Ken and his wife Sheila in Chicago. Ken led me through the city, illuminating his favorite examples of architecture, mysticism, and their many children. Chicago is really Ken’s London, his great metropolis of the west. In the way that Tolkien was driven to create a mythology for the land he loved, weaving it together from bits of dead languages and obscure folklore, so too has Ken ensorcelled Chicago and given it a mythic resonance few could perceive unaided. At times his eyes gleam with a messianic fervor and you know the little gray cells of his mind are hard at work preparing their next unwholesome discourse. Of course, like Nyarlathotep come out of Egypt, all Ken’s narratives run towards apocalypse.

  On another occasion, Ken visited me in Memphis at my ancestral home so I could return the favor. Chicago, it may be said, has no king but rather a succession of princes. Memphis has no such lack. Its king lies in eternal repose at Graceland, not dead but dreaming, awaiting the day when he and JFK and Marilyn and all the other gods of America burst forth from our hearts and reassert themselves in the firmament. We visited Graceland 2, the mystically antipodal reincarnation of Elvis’s playland as the home of a father-and-son team of Elvis impersonators and idolaters. Sphinx-like, they ridd
le visitors but make no sense. Ken and I roamed the city and the surrounding environs, conjugating insanity and paranoia as we went. It was somehow comforting to be on my territory rather than his, but then Ken brings his mental landscape with him everywhere he goes and it tends to subsume the unwary.

  For our third tour, neither of us was the guide. Like Harley Warren and Randolph Carter, we set forth in search of dark knowledge in the city of Las Vegas. Everywhere we were surrounded by mystic correspondences and haunting symbols. Cultural, religious, and mythic archetypes loomed large in neon and the psychic weight of all that soul-detritus drove us to drink. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  Which brings us to Ken’s latest tour, a genial ramble through the Lovecraft canon. I followed the original publication of these dispatches on his website with interest, as the prospect of Ken turning his strange illumination upon the corpus was too delightful to resist. My attention was rewarded, as will be yours, with his many insights, associations, and criticisms of these familiar tales. Because Ken is first and foremost a creative writer, and not a critic or scholar, he brings to his discursion the camaraderie of a fellow traveler. Other critics, preoccupied with Lovecraft in his historical, psychological, and social contexts, tend to read the stories as some combination of autobiography and existential diatribe. Ken’s creative sympathies mean he can speak to Lovecraft as an imaginative craftsman who wielded plot, symbol, theme, and character in the service of his art. Authors tend to make indifferent critics, as they are temperamentally inclined towards the brief but cutting pronouncement rather than the sustained critique. This makes Ken’s observations particularly welcome.

  I have greatly enjoyed all my tours with Ken and look forward to more. For now, however, let us turn the aged page and see what charnel mysteries await us within.

  Bring your cigarette lighter. Ken’s supplied the map.

  Introduction

  I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England—sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical—and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived.

  —H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”

  Welcome to the Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. This book is pretty much what that title conveys, a tour through all fifty-one of H.P. Lovecraft’s mature works of prose fiction. We’re skipping the poetry, the collaborations and ghost-writing and revisions (except for “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”), the travel writing, the artistic and literary criticism and all the other things Lovecraft wrote instead of horror stories. It is my contention that the tale’s the thing, and although some of Lovecraft’s other works are interesting or fun or valuable, they’re not what any of us really signed up for. Like most tours, we’ll stay a little longer at the good spots, and try our best to hustle past the weedy, overgrown patches. Hopefully I can point out one or two scenic overlooks along the way, letting you perhaps see some familiar landscape from an angle you hadn’t noticed before.

  Should you not immediately be familiar with the work of H.P. Lovecraft, it is the general consensus among everyone whose opinion need be listened to that HPL (as we call him on occasion) was the most important and influential horror writer of the twentieth century. The consensus is only slightly less overwhelming that Lovecraft was the second-greatest horror writer in American letters, the first being (of course) Edgar Allan Poe. Not all of Lovecraft’s tales are great, though. (Not all of Shakespeare’s plays are keepers either, frankly. Timon of Athens? Henry VI, Part III? Pfah.) More damage has been done to Lovecraft’s reputation by the ill-considered overprinting of his lesser works than by almost any other factor. Even the vaunted Library of America (“publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing”) decided to present Lovecraft from a historical, rather than an aesthetic, perspective, a decision that preserves on acid-free paper and between sewn bindings such malarkey as “Herbert West—Reanimator,” the weak and predictable “Thing on the Doorstep,” and Lovecraft’s most overrated tale, “The Outsider.” This decision, a consequence of the general trend of Lovecraft scholarship and criticism over the last thirty-odd years, doesn’t make the life of even we amateur Lovecraft critics any easier.

  What, you may then ask, are the great works? In my considered opinion, Lovecraft’s reputation can rest on seventeen tales:

  Absolutely Perfect: “The Colour Out of Space”

  Vanishingly Close To Perfect: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Call of Cthulhu,” At the Mountains of Madness, “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”

  Masterpieces: “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Music of Erich Zann”

  Great: “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Haunter of the Dark,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Shunned House,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Strange High House in the Mist,” “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” “The Cats of Ulthar”

  The rest are not great, although some of them are quite enjoyable.

  Whether any of this makes Lovecraft “literature” is a question rather more fraught, and one we don’t really have space for. But that said, Lovecraft has been, and can be, read critically and analytically. Every so often in this Tour, we do that, amid the general ruck of aimless commentary.

  Which leads me, elliptically, to the question of how this Tour came about in the first place. Every winter in my LiveJournal1 I do a little devoted long-form serial, usually an entry a day (or as close as I can get) on a specific topic. From March 2 to June 27, 2007, I posted one entry on each story included in the three recent Penguin Classics Lovecraft anthologies edited by S.T. Joshi, in their table of contents order, calling it the “Tour de Lovecraft.” Over the course of that Tour, I received a number of gratifying comments asking if I planned to collect the Tour into a single volume.2 After enough such had built up, I decided to go ahead and do that.

  For this publication, I re-ordered the Tour to set the tales in the order that Lovecraft wrote them, and tweaked the text of the entries to reflect that decision. I occasionally pulled clever things I said in the individual entries’ comment threads up into the main text where they deserved it. Sometimes I said those things in response to quite clever remarks from my readers. I have tried to indicate other people’s ideas where I could, but the pseudonymous nature of LiveJournal, and the exigencies of clear writing, mean that I might not have been able to do so. If I have lifted your thoughts, I hope you’ll forgive me, or at least take comfort in the notion that I’ve also stolen a great deal from George Wetzel, Northrop Frye, S.T. Joshi, and Peter Cannon, among other critical heavyweights.

  I also polished up the prose somewhat, although it retains the vulgar glister of its informal beginnings rather more than my usual work does. And finally, to give people who loyally read the whole thing for free in my LiveJournal a reason to feel like they should buy this compilation, I added a few thousand words of additional insight, commentary, and thought that occurred to me as I went through and copy-edited the text. Finally, to help put this amateur, not to say haphazard, effort at Lovecraftian criticism into some sort of context, I wrote “A Brief Survey of Lovecraftian Criticism,” which immediately follows this Introduction.

  A Brief Survey of Lovecraftian Criticism

  Literary criticism and H.P. Lovecraft both get a bad rap, often the same one: “Useless tail-chasing with no relevance to real human responses and nothing to contribute to the understanding of literature; the obsession of people not capable of dealing honestly with art as it is.” Ironically, this identical libel is leveled by Lovecraft fans at literary critics, and by literary critics at Lovecraft and his fans. Both should know better, not least because H.P. Lovecraft was a literary critic of rare perception and talent. Attempting to address the literature (and theory) of the weird without Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature would be almost as bootless as attempting to do so without discussing Poe’s critical work. But
Lovecraft fans see literary critics, especially academic critics, as effete snobs who dismiss genre fiction—especially supernatural horror—as worthless trash for no better reason than sheer bigotry and laziness. And literary critics can be forgiven for looking at the sheer morass of truly terrible genre fiction and deciding that their time is better spent reading Hawthorne, and Poe, and Melville, especially when genre fans show little or no understanding of those authors, or of why they are all considerably greater than H.P. Lovecraft.

  The seeds of the problem were sown early, with Lovecraft’s failure to sell an anthology of weird stories to a real publisher. His work, mired as it was among the Seabury Quinn and Nictzin Dyalhis garbage, hackily type-set between lurid Margaret Brundage covers, never really made it onto the radar of American literary culture, despite the appearance of “The Colour Out of Space” on the “Roll of Honor” in Edward J. O’Brien’s influential Best Short Stories anthology. After Lovecraft’s death, his work was left in the hands of three worshipful fans: Robert H. Barlow, Donald Wandrei, and August Derleth, which rapidly reduced (following feuds and wartime service) to essentially Derleth alone. Derleth’s insistence on publishing every word of Lovecraft’s writing (including his awful juvenilia, as well as mediocrities like “Herbert West—Reanimator”), larding the anthologies with memorials and tributes by still less-famous names, and generally treating the entire enterprise as a combination religious cult and high-school reunion led to Edmund Wilson, the dean of American literary critics, writing in “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous” (1945) that “the Lovecraft cult, I fear, is on even a more infantile level than the Baker Street Irregulars and the cult of Sherlock Holmes.” For many years, Wilson’s was the last word by a “real critic” on the subject of H.P. Lovecraft.