#1936Club: The Shining Trapezohedron

Illustration by Virgil Finlay for ‘Weird Tales’, 1936

‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (1936)
by H P Lovecraft,
in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories,
edited by S T Joshi. Penguin Books 1999.

With its suitably macabre title ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ was the last published fiction of H P Lovecraft, who died from intestinal cancer in the year following its appearance. It follows the narrative pattern of much that he wrote in this genre: a student of the occult, inevitably a male, sticks his nose into a place or situation which any sensible person would steer clear of, ignoring all the telltale signs. But then, we wouldn’t have a story if they really were as sensible as the rest of us!

Set in contemporary Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft’s home town, this short fiction conceals beneath its lugubrious exterior a glee that incorporates in-jokes shared with fellow writers and acolytes, along with his individual literary style marked by a superfluity of favourite adjectives and repeated words which conversely risks becoming banal.

But then one doesn’t read collections of Lovecraft stories for its range but for the familiar slow build-up of immanent alien presence and the inevitable demise of the protagonist, or the narrator’s reduction to a gibbering wreck or, at best, transformation to a sadder and wiser man.

Robert Blake is an artist and writer of occult stories; his dwelling off Providence’s College Street gives him a direct view of distant Federal Hill, dominated by the steepled tower of a grimy church. He finds himself somehow drawn towards the decaying abandoned structure despite its forbidding air, finally trekking the two miles to it and making ingress into the tower.

Here he finds the partially dismembered skeleton of an investigative journalist (whose notebook he pockets) and an asymmetric chest; within the latter he glimpses a strangely facetted stone, which turns out to be his fatal mistake because what he observes there will haunt him for the remaining months of his life.

Another aficionado of Lovecraft’s writings — and I counted myself among them fifty years ago — will recognise his trademark literary tics: ancient cults, secret rituals, cryptic texts in strange languages with sinister titles, references to foetid smells, bumps and scrabblings, dark shadows and amorphous entities. ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ has these vague hints in barrowloads along with pepperings of precise details such as dates, distances, locations, periodicals and other local colour.

You know where it ends, as it always does, it’s only becomes a question of variations on the ‘how’. Forget the inconsistencies — such as how a man in the grip of abject terror manages to keep writing in his notebook, or how a third party can build up circumstantial details as though they were themselves a witness — and immerse yourself in the music of a prose composition which obsessively develops the same handful of melodies with hypnotic chords and the imagined shrill of monotonous pipes. But shun the Shining Trapezohedron!

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On the spur of the moment I decided to have a go at the 1936 Club cohosted by Kaggsy and Simon for this middle week of April, opting to go with this short story.