Creepily insistent

© C A Lovegrove

‘The Dunwich Horror’ by H P Lovecraft,
in The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories.
Arcturus Books, 2022 (1929).

Published in 1929 when the author was nearly 40, this 1928 novella represents Lovecraft in his fully-fledged antiquarian horror mode, set in one of his preferred New England locales and in the university town of Arkham, Massachusetts. Sparsely settled as parts of Essex County were in the early 20th century, folks there kept pretty much to themselves, leading to some families becoming inbred. And then there’s this one branch of the Whateleys, consisting of the decidedly strange and reclusive Lavinia, her eccentric father known as Wizard Whateley, and her very strange infant Wilbur, father unknown.

The nearby settlement of Dunwich is spooked by odd lights and disturbing rumblings in and around Sentinel Hill, and by the strange foetid smells that emanate from the Whateley homestead. Still, Wizard Whateley pays out good gold for the succession of cattle that are led to the farm though, curiously, the herd never gets any larger.

But when building works at the farm change the house’s internal layout it rouses more than their mild interest, as does the rapid growth and precocious behaviour of young Wilbur, who shares his grandfather’s predilection for ancient arcane knowledge. That predilection leads Wilbur to consult old tomes in centres of academic excellence – including Arkham – but unfortunately his last visit to Arkham triggers a series of incidents soon known as the Dunwich Horror.

#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.

A thief in the night

‘Holbeins Totentanz: der Sterndeuter’ (Holbein’s Dance of Death / The Astrologer)

Edgar Allan Poe: The Masque of the Red Death (1842)
in Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Everyman 1975 (1908)

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and horror of blood.

Of Poe’s many Gothick tales this is one of the foremost and famous, and it unsurprisingly stuck in my mind more than the others I read many years ago. And why, especially when there’s so little to the plot?

Essentially Prince Prospero holes up in a castle with a load of his friends and plenty of provisions, leaving the populace outside to die from a horrible plague — after half a year he throws a masked ball in a suite of rooms — yet Death still manages to enter the castle, regardless of quarantine.

Given the coronavirus crisis it seemed an appropriate time to read this short story, especially as I forgot to mention it in a previous post about literary treatments of contagion until another blogger’s comment brought it back to mind.

In the lion’s den

Anne Fine: The Devil Walks
Corgi 2012 (2011)

A spiral has but one path to the centre, and like a whirlpool it may seem to suck you into its depths. A maze, however, gives you options, a chance to follow a different way should you so choose.

Anne Fine’s Gothick novel, aimed at young adults but no less engaging for more senior readers, offers its protagonist Daniel similar chances to escape the spiralling path of his life, one which seems to have consigned him to the life of a recluse in a sick room, fated to a permanent limbo of existence.

Until a Doctor Marlow comes calling, and releases him into the world. But at what a cost, one that will mean pain and death for some, and pangs of misery for our Daniel: will he have been freed from one lion’s den only to find himself in another?

Bad and dangerous

Lord Byron (1813) by Thomas Phillips

John Polidori: The Vampyre: a Tale (1819),
and a Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron (1816)
in Three Gothic Novels (edited by E F Bleiler).
Dover, 1966.

Buttressed by an editor’s introduction, the author’s own introduction, an extract from a later letter to Polidori’s publisher, and Byron’s original vampire tale fragment, this — the first completed modern vampire story in English — already contains many of the clichés now expected from the genre. Here is the pale nobleman with a dark secret, and here the young female victims; not unexpected is the vampire’s resurrection after death and the connection with Eastern Europe and the Levant.

But you can forget any mentions of bats, sinister castles or pointy teeth, though there are allusions to stakes, peasant huts, antiquarian structures and blood all over a victim’s neck and breast. Whether these are enough to summon up a vicarious thrill in the reader will really depend on how much one empathises with the characters depicted and the degree to which one is susceptible or immune to High Gothick style and sensibility.

“The dark side of human nature”

Das Eismeer (1823-4) by Caspar David Friedrich

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
The 1818 text edited with introduction and notes by Marilyn Butler 1993
Oxford World’s Classics 1998

“[A] tale so strange, that I should fear you would not credit it, were there not something in truth which, however wonderful, forces conviction. The story is too connected to be a dream, and I have no motive for falsehood.” — Victor Frankenstein recounting the story so far, Volume III Chapter 6

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published on March 11th 1818,* and for two hundred years has never been out of print. Popular culture has led us to picture the Creature as portrayed by Boris Karloff (despite the name, an English actor called William Henry Pratt) in numerous films and parodies; but readers new to the novel might be surprised to first find themselves in the Arctic wastes, as revealed in a series of letters from Robert Walton to his sister Mrs Margaret Saville. He writes from St Petersburgh (sic), then Archangel (Arkhangelsk), and then from somewhere in the polar regions.

As we quickly discover, though, this is merely a framing device; the author then introduces us to Victor Frankenstein marooned on an ice floe. We no sooner get to what appears to be the meat of the story when we realise that Victor’s narrative is also a framing device, with the Creature’s story at the heart of it. And at the heart of the Creature’s story we read about a penniless French family, the De Laceys. Frankenstein is, structurally, nothing less than Russian matryoshka dolls, one nesting inside the other. Once we grasp this we can begin to rid ourselves of the popular modern stereotypes and start to come to grips with Shelley’s original, in its first incarnation as it were.

In darkest New England

Collections of short stories can complicate the reader’s fiction experience. In particular, when the pieces are drawn from a range of the writer’s oeuvre — even when especially selected because they share a theme — they may vary in tone, in pace, in quality and in length, and may thus lack the uniformity of style and purpose that a single novel usually supplies. And this may only be the start of possible difficulties for the reader.

One way to bypass such anxieties could be to only consider the stories on a one by one basis. Thus it is that I am spreading out my appreciation of two writers by only reading single pieces interspersed with longer work by other writers. Angela Carter’s Black Venus tales (also published as Saints and Strangers) and a collection of H P Lovecraft’s horror stories entitled The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (edited by S T Joshi) are being enjoyed singly in between my tackling other longer works. And two of these pieces I’ve selected as being the last of my 2016 Reading New England choices. (This, you may remember, is one of Lory Hess’ challenges on her Emerald City Book Review blog, due to end on the 31st December.)

Let me introduce you to them.

When the hurlyburly’s done

1940s freak show, Rutland, Vermont

Ray Bradbury Something Wicked This Way Comes
Gollancz 2008 (1962)

This is a haunting novel, a haunting not necessarily due to ghosts but to images and ideas lingering in the mind’s eye long after the last page is shut. The title (taken from words spoken by the Second Witch in Macbeth) sets the tenor of the story, as much a novel of magic realism as it is a tale of terror. The horror is compounded by being set in an ordinary and very provincial early 1930s town in Illinois where, one is supposed to assume, nothing much happens.

Stones of eternity

Public Library, Waukegan, Illinois

As the northern hemisphere nights start to draw in, the crisp air almost crackles and the mist is a miasma creeping over streets and fields, our thoughts turn to things that go bump in the night. In preparation for a review of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, timed to coincide with The Emerald City Book Review’s annual Witch Week, I thought I’d like to share here a few thoughts on aspects of this Halloween thriller. And I shall start with Green Town’s public library, based on the Carnegie library in Waukegan, Illinois that Bradbury knew so well as a child in the 1930s:

Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. […] This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered.

After this passage, which promises exotic experiences to come, the library — though it remains no less enticing — starts to take on a more sinister aspect:

Happy Families

Doris Lessing The Fifth Child
Paladin 1989 (1988)

A curious novella, this, and a horror story of sorts. Beginning in a Swinging-Sixties England — when David and Harriet meet and fall in love — it traces the story of how the couple attempt to set up a model suburban Happy Family in the face of disapproval from their own families who, irony of ironies, have their own problems of failed relationships. As Harriet and David produce four offspring one after another their large house becomes a popular venue for the extended family and friends during the long school holidays; with childcare help from Harriet’s mother and financial support from David’s father this otherwise unsustainable operation limps along from year to year. Until Harriet discovers she’s expecting a fifth child.

Dream-like and disorientating

Carlos Ruiz Zafón The Prince of Mist
Orion Children’s Books 2010
Translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves
(El principe de la niebla 1993)

The fiction of Ruiz Zafón reminds me of dreams bordering on nightmare. Everything is vague: geography (even when set in a well-known city like Barcelona), supporting characters (especially when they appear able to anticipate the protagonist’s mood and thoughts) and time (even when we’re given a specific year and month in which the story takes place). Disjointed places and sequences cause confusion and disquiet in dreams; in novels they can also be frustrating and irritating. Ultimately I found The Prince of Mist — the author’s first novel, in this instance for a young adult readership — as unsatisfying as the dream-like adult novels he is more famous for; unsatisfying because they are full of manufactured mysteries as insubstantial to the grasp as shadows, winds and mists. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

It is June, 1943, and it is Max Carver’s 13th birthday. His father Maximilian, a watchmaker, gives his family some unwelcome news: they all — Maximilian and wife Andrea, along with Alicia, Max and Irina — have to leave the city and relocate to a small village on what appears to be the Atlantic coast. At journey’s end, after three hours on the train, they arrive at a seaside station — only to be joined by a mysterious stray cat, who seems to have adopted them.

Further mysteries await:

The beast without and within

Tim Winton In the Winter Dark Picador 2003 (1988)

This bleak novella is set in an isolated valley called the Sink, somewhere in Western Australia. The inhabitants of three houses — Maurice and Ida Stubbs, Murray Jaccob and Ronnie Melwater — all have secrets which, in the normal run of things, would just stay secrets. Except, with the arrival of an unseen predator which starts attacking livestock — a dog, geese, ducks, a goat, a kangaroo, sheep — these secrets come creeping out of their past, into their dreams and out into reality. What is this predator? A feral cat? A mange-ridden fox? Wild dogs? A Big Cat escaped from a circus trailer? Or something more rare, something out of the Southern Continent’s dark prehistory? And how does its unpredictable presence impact on the guilty feelings of individuals and their relationships with each other?

Fiction most foul

The creative writing course I’m attending, looking at various genres, this week turned from Gothick horror to 20th-century Horror fiction, though not without a look first at 19th-century antecedents. These included Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stoker’s Dracula (1897), James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and, not long after the turn of the century, Blackwood’s The Empty House (1903). Even a short romp through these key titles reveals a singular lack of female authors.

However, one female writer whose name did crop up in discussion was Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Writing under the masculine pseudonym ‘Francis Stevens’ (given her by a pulp magazine editor) she is now credited with having invented the genre of dark fantasy in the years around 1920, maybe influencing H P Lovecraft’s writing in the twenties (though the connection is disputed).

I could have added, of course, Edith Nesbit, better known as a children’s writer. Between 1893 (with collections called Something Wrong and Grim Tales) and 1910 (Fear) via 1897’s Tales Told in Twilight she published several short horror stories; many of these have recently been republished in a new collection by Wordsworth Editions as The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror (2006).

Thereafter male domination of horror seems to have continued, usually with supernatural overtones (as in M R James’ ghost stories).

Fathering Gothick

Horace Walpole by Sir Joshua Reynolds (oil on canvas, circa 1756-1757): the father of Gothick
NPG 6520 licenced for non-commercial use © National Portrait Gallery, London

We’ve come to regard the late 17th and early 18th centuries as the Age of Enlightenment, a period when science and rational thought were promoted as philosophical ideals in Europe. Come the mid-18th century there was the inevitable backlash, of sorts, and particularly in the arts. A kind of romanticism — before that term came into being in the closing years of the 18th century — was in the air, and in Britain its epitome may be seen in the strange figure of Horace Walpole.

Apprentice psychopomp

Grotesque roof boss, Southwark Cathedral, London

Chris Westwood Ministry of Pandemonium
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books 2011

A sensitive boy who frequents graveyards. Who sees the spirits of the recently departed. Who displays extraordinary artistic gifts. Who finds it hard to make friends when he starts a new school. And a boy whose father has mysteriously disappeared and a mother who is seriously ill. In other words, a youngster who fulfils many of the prime requirements for the outsider protagonist of a novel. This is Ben Harvester, who is drawn into a world of ghosts and demons and, in the process, discovers the latent abilities he has arising out of that sensitivity, a sensitivity that encompasses both his artistic gifts and his concern for those less well off than himself.

Through a rather odd stranger, Mr October  — whose name conjures up that witching period of Halloween or Samhain, with its feasts of the dead — Ben is introduced to the secret Ministry of Pandemonium. As you might expect from a word coined by Milton for Paradise Lost, this synonym for disorder and chaos simply means “all the demons”. It transpires that the Ministry’s job is to locate lost souls and open the door to another world for them before demons gets to them — no easy task given the magnitude of the task. Will Ben manage to put off his inquisitive new friend Becky Sanborne before she discovers his unlikely calling? And what is the secret of his mother’s exhaustion and the explanation for his father’s disappearance?