Horrors! #1937Club

From Weird Tales 29/1 (1937): ‘The Thing on the Door-Step’ by Virgil Finlay

The Thing on the Doorstep
by H P Lovecraft.
CreateSpace Publishing, 2017 (Weird Tales, 1937).

Written in 1933 but not published till 1937 – the year Lovecraft died – ‘The Thing on the Door-Step’ is typical of the author’s weird fiction with its overused adjectives implying horror too obscure, obscene and terrifying to be described, often expressed by an innocent narrator too appalled by what they’re witnessing to join up the dots until it’s too late.

On one level the writing is laughable, the familiar clichés piling Pelion upon Ossa in their determination to shock the reader, the repeated alien names, the constant references to prohibited arcane texts to imply ancient but forbidden knowledge.

On another level Lovecraft’s fiction is deeply uncomfortable to read, here as elsewhere, not for the horror (which by modern standards is tame enough) but for what I and other critics abhor, namely the misogyny, homophobia and racism implicit in the narratives.

Prince of Hell: detail from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Bosch.

As a novelette of around 11,000 words The Thing on the Doorstep is a first-person narrative presented as the confession of an apparent murderer, one Daniel Upton of Arkham, Massachusetts. He has shot his best friend Edward Pickman Derby who was just due to be discharged from Arkham Sanitarium, and The Thing is an explanation and therefore justification of his actions.

Both Daniel and the younger Edward had been students of magical lore, but Edward had gone as far as to marry a certain Asenath Waite from Innsmouth, a small New England port inhabited by families with a dubious reputation for black magic. Indeed, Asenath’s father Ephraim was known to be a noted practitioner, and as a student at Arkham’s Miskatonic University Asenath herself was a disturbing influence.

This combination of research into the dark arts and marriage into a possibly degenerate family means that Edward’s career is not likely to end well; and, sure enough, in due course he starts to exhibit changes in personality, behaviour and appearance even while the mesmeric Asenath appears to become increasingly reclusive. It takes a motorcar dash up north to the wilds of Maine to rescue Edward and the return journey along the Massachusetts coastal highway south for Daniel to start to have a real inkling of the existential danger his friend has got into.

Arkham, from ‘The Dictionary of Imaginary Places’ by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi

An essay by Anne M Pillsworth and Ruthanna Emrys in Reactormag.com (‘Gender and Identity Anxiety: “The Thing on the Doorstep”’) expresses better than I can the issues surrounding misogyny, homophobia and racism that Lovecraft stories encompass. In particular any women, if and when they do appear (as with Asenath here), are portrayed negatively – as psychic succubi, say, or as mentally deficient whores (‘wenches’). The male friendships that abound in Lovecraft’s stories are never suggested as anything other than homosocial, yet the ‘bohemian’ set at Miskatonic University indulge in behaviours which could be interpreted as homosexual, sufficient at least for blackmail to be involved.

Finally, Lovecraft is often noted as applying his xenophobic notions of white, especially Nordic, supremacy over Jews, people of colour and Native Americans to his fiction, and that is evident here too in his narrator’s references to those responsible for ancient structures in Maine and to the degeneracy of the Innsmouth residents.

Unpleasant and abhorrent his beliefs undoubtedly were, so why do I find myself intermittently drawn back to his mythos? Is it simply the adolescent nerd in me that wants to explore the secret corners of Arkham and what fans call Lovecraft Country, and to document the manuscripts and tomes related to the Necronomicon? Because it can’t be for the characterisation, the subtle plotting or the beauty of the language. Perhaps I’m merely searching for the one or two redeeming literary features that have so far eluded me; for the moment the quest will continue but I’m not sure for how long.

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https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/ https://www.stuckinabook.com/

Read for the #1937Club. This is the first title not chosen from my TBR pile so far this year. I’d hoped to read The Years (1937) by Virginia Woolf, but as a copy of this wasn’t to hand I instead found time for this Lovecraft novelette.

The 1972 edition of The Hobbit (1937) by J R R Tolkien can be found reviewed here, while my review of a graphic novel version is here. A Tintin story and a novel by Antal Szerb follow in the next few days.