H.P. LOVECRAFT – HIS 1916-1921 WORKS

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM BALLADEER’S BLOG! This year for my October 31st horror post I’m looking at my favorite stories from H.P. Lovecraft’s earliest works by year of publication.

I chose 1916 to 1921 because using 1921 as the cutoff year means we can avoid over-reviewed Lovecraft material like Herbert West – Reanimator and most of the Cthulhu Mythos. SPOILERS AHEAD!

1916 

THE ALCHEMIST – Count Antoine de C- is the last of his family line. Hundreds of years earlier one of his ancestors caused the death of the sorcerer Michel Mauvais. Michel’s sorcerer son Charles cursed the Count’s family so that all male descendants would die shortly after turning 32 years of age.

All of Antoine’s male ancestors did indeed die in their 32nd year and Antoine himself has devoted all his adult life to studying Black Magick in hopes of coming across a cure for the family curse. Our main character is all alone in his crumbling ancestral castle, with his last remaining servant having passed away recently.   

Antoine’s 32nd birthday is approaching, so his desperation is increasing. He begins exploring the decrepit portions of the castle hoping to find eldritch tomes that might provide salvation. 

What he finds instead is a trapdoor that leads to a room he has never been in. He is terrified when a hideous man appears and attacks him. After a monumental struggle, Antoine mortally wounds the figure, who with his dying breaths reveals that he is Michel Mauvais’ son Charles.

Charles completed his father’s abandoned work on an elixir to prolong life indefinitely. He has been alive all these centuries and was personally killing all of the males in Antoine’s family after they turned 32, thus making it seem like the “curse” was taking their lives. 

1918

THE BEAST IN THE CAVE – A man is exploring Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, led by a paid guide. The pair become separated and the first man feels he is being followed but he doesn’t see anyone in his fading torch light.

At length his torch goes out completely and whatever is following him grows bolder and closes in on him. Unsure what kind of beast he may be dealing with, our narrator hurls large rocks in the direction of the entity’s sounds in the dark.

He succeeds in hitting the mystery-beast and soon after his guide at last locates him. By the light of the guide’s torch the pair see that the mortally injured figure is really a pale, misshapen old man-beast in tattered clothing. As he dies it becomes clear that it has been haunting and hunting in Mammoth Cave for a very long time. 

1919

MEMORY (June) – Sometimes called either a prose poem or a vignette, this very brief work presented a conversation between two mysterious entities in what readers are told is the valley of Nis, where runs the “slimy red river Than.” 

One of the beings is the Genie of the Moonbeams and the other is the Daemon of the Valley. They take in their surroundings – enormous ruins of a long-dead civilization. Amid the slowly eroding structures are nothing but snakes and toads. Clumps of trees scattered throughout the area are inhabited by monkeys.

At length the Daemon recalls the names of the creatures who built the ruins and lived in them long ago – man.

In light of Lovecraft’s subsequent writings, Memory makes for a nice switch from his many, many, many ancient ruins and beings from Earth’s distant past. For once the ruins are from humanity’s distant future but typically, all human endeavors end in ruin and nothing lasts forever. 

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP (October) – At an insane asylum in upstate New York, a less than ethical intern decides to test his newly invented device which can visualize human thoughts in the mind of another. The intern theorizes that thoughts are a type of radiation and wants to secretly test his invention on one of the inmates.

That inmate is named Joe Slater, who had been confined in the asylum over his homicidal mania. At night, Slater had taken to raving about a dream entity that drove him mad and taunted him. The murderer wanted nothing more than to unleash his deadly instincts on the being like he did with his previous victims. 

Joe Slater’s health is rapidly declining and his physicians say he will be dead soon. Our unethical intern decides that Joe makes a perfect human guinea pig and hooks his own head up to Slater’s through the wires of his telepathic device.

The intern is horrified by what Joe Slater sees and experiences in his spirit form as he dies. Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog may recall the frequent theme in “ancient” science fiction stories of human spirits traveling the cosmos once freed of their earthly bodies. 

In the now-deceased Joe Slater’s case his dying body explored the astral realm in his dreams and the vicious, taunting figure tormenting Slater turns out to have been Algol, a demonic entity which lives inside a star from a distant galaxy.

DAGON (November) – Though this is technically connected to Lovecraft’s later Cthulhu Mythos, that entity is not mentioned at all in this story. Nor are the subsea lifeforms from this tale said to be Old Ones or Elder Gods but are merely monstrous life-forms which have gone undiscovered in the ocean’s depths for millions of years. 

Still, because this tale’s narrator erroneously compares one of the creatures in question to the Philistine deity Dagon, Lovecraft lore has always tied it to The Shadow over Innsmouth because of that later story’s fish-men who worship Dagon.

At any rate, Dagon’s narrator is a naval veteran of the World War who has become a morphine addict because of an experience he had at sea during that conflict. An Imperial German cruiser attacked our narrator’s Allied ship.   

He escaped on a lifeboat and eventually washed up on a land mass that had obviously just been wrenched to the ocean’s surface by underwater quakes. The man explores the island-in-formation and eventually comes across a huge, white monolith which stands before a chasm that stretches all the way back down to the bottom of the ocean.

The monolith features some sort of writing which is incomprehensible to the sailor. The enormous object also sports carvings of a fish-like yet humanoid race nearly as large as whales. A being like those depicted on the monolith emerges from beneath the waves and embraces that monolith.

Our narrator suffered hysterical amnesia over whatever happened next, and he eventually woke up in a San Francisco hospital. His experience at sea haunts him still and drove him to his drug addiction.

The man is consumed by fears of the subsea creatures eventually deciding to raid the surface world at random to abduct and feed upon human beings. With the World War so recent, Lovecraft describes how the creatures “drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind.”

In addition, the sailor fears that because of what he saw, the inscrutable beings from the deep will one day track him down and kill him over what he knows. Sure enough, a slippery creature comes calling on him and his last words are “God, that hand! The window! The window!”

1920

THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER (May) – First appearance of Lovecraft’s recurring investigator of the occult, Randolph Carter. Harley Warren, Carter’s closest friend for the past five years, has enlisted him in his latest undertaking.   

Warren is far more experienced in exploring the supernatural and Randolph is a bit in awe of the man’s steely nerve and reckless disregard of danger. Harley Warren is also very brusque and Carter feels intimidated by him despite their friendship.

Harley’s latest research has led him to believe that there are portals scattered around the world which lead from the surface down into the depths of the Earth. Suspicions are that the staircases and entranceways were built by malevolent beings which used to venture to the surface to prey upon humanity.

Warren leads Carter to a sinister, ancient graveyard deep within Florida’s Big Cypress Swamp. With Carter remaining on the surface to “spot” for Warren, Harley enters one of the portals that lead downward into the bowels of the Earth.

Connecting the two are miles-long telephone wires with rough receivers at both ends. The pair stay in contact mile after mile as Harley Warren descends. At length Carter hears Warren’s screams coming through the receiver amid sounds of a struggle. Harley screams for Carter to save himself and flee. 

Minutes then go by with no response as Carter repeatedly calls out “Warren! Warren!” through the telephone coil. Presently, a chilling, inhuman voice is heard through the receiver saying “You fool, Warren is dead!” Randolph Carter flees in blind terror. (But The Pants-Wetting of Randolph Carter wouldn’t have been a very good title.)

This story puts me in mind of modern-day Found Footage films or those fake online videos which supposedly record frightening encounters with the unknown. 

THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH (June) – Over 10,000 years ago in a long-forgotten land called Mnar, people established a city called Sarnath near a lake. NOTE: Lovecraft stated he had not heard of the Indian city of Sarnath when he wrote this and was not implying that ancient India was where the story took place.

Mnar (Pronounced “Menard’s.” I’m kidding!) was a High Civilization like ancient Sumer, Egypt and others, with growing Sarnath its latest shining success. The people of Sarnath discovered a grey stone city called Ib along the shores of the same lake.

Sarnath’s armies clashed with those of Ib, whose inhabitants were amphibious humanoids who came to Earth from the moon. Sarnath emerged triumphant and the victors slaughtered every denizen of Ib, then carried away the large idol of Ib’s god Bokrug.

A priest in the Sarnath temple now housing the idol was found dead the following night, having written the word “Doom” in the base of the pedestal from which the statue of Bokrug had vanished.

Time passed, and the anniversary date of the extermination of Ib’s inhabitants and the theft of the statue arrived. That night strange lights appeared over the lake and green mists enveloped Sarnath. The slain beings from Ib returned from the dead and avenged themselves on the screaming people of Sarnath.   

Some were lucky enough to escape the horror, and when they returned days later with other citizens of Mnar, they found Sarnath empty but the statue of Bokrug was once again in the temple. Thenceforth, the terrified people of Mnar worshipped Bokrug as their primary god in hopes of avoiding the doom that came to Sarnath.

NYARLATHOTEP (November) – Set in the modern day, this tale marks the first appearance of Nyarlathotep. The figure appears in Egypt dressed similarly to ancient pharaohs and claims to be back from “beyond” after 2,700 years.

Nyarlathotep dazzles Egypt and then western nations with his teachings and his claims to be in contact with intelligences from other worlds. Wherever he goes, Nyarlathotep leaves the population shaken and trembling from his power and the miracles he performs through what is either magic or very advanced technology.

Once in the U.S., a land of rational, outspoken skeptics, Nyarlathotep is roundly ridiculed and his miracles dismissed as mere theatrics. The furious being drives the disbelievers from the performance hall.

Next, Nyarlathotep causes a complete power outage in the city and enthralls all the skeptics. A third he herds to their unseen (but heard) deaths around a corner. Another third he drives into fits of insane laughter and herds them into the subway tunnels, never to be seen again.

The final third Nyarlathotep herds out of the city and into the wilderness. The entity causes unseasonable snows, but the skeptics must continue walking and eventually enter a rift to another world.

In that other world, the humans experience terrors unimaginable and realize that Nyarlathotep and those like him rule over an ancient, dying universe and its physical laws are nightmarish. (Think of the hellish dimension in Event Horizon, which is why that film is described as Lovecraftian.)

1921

THE TERRIBLE OLD MAN (July) – This story is set in Lovecraft’s fictional New England town of Kingsport, making it the first tale that takes place in Lovecraft Country. Yes, long before the recent series, Lovecraft Country referred to the author’s eldritch New England setting.

The area was home to fictional locations like Arkham, the Miskatonic River and Valley, plus Miskatonic University, where several of Lovecraft’s later characters lived and worked, including the mad Dr. Herbert West. Some fans jokingly call the Miskatonic University sports teams the White Apes in reference to an H.P. Lovecraft story of that title.

The Terrible Old Man of this tale lives in a very old house on Water Street in Kingsport. The house is supposedly hundreds of years old and the old man himself a wealthy former clipper captain who made a fortune in the East Indies. 

The man had yellow eyes, was very unfriendly and was regarded with fear and suspicion by the locals. His yard contained odd groupings of stones that hinted at some unwholesome purpose and when he sat on his front porch passersby could swear they heard him converse with figures trapped within bottles – figures who responded in an unknown language.

One day, three criminals pass through Kingsport and upon learning about the supposed fortune inside the Terrible Old Man’s house they make plans to break in and rob him. That night the trio puts their plan in motion and discover the man’s unholy powers.

Indecipherable screams are heard from inside the house and the next morning the corpses of the three criminals are found at the seashore. The bodies are slashed up and mangled and the event causes quite a stir in Kingsport. For his part, the Terrible Old Man shows no interest in the incident.

THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE (Summer) – A genealogist is riding his bicycle through the Miskatonic Valley and, with a storm approaching, he tries a shortcut to Arkham. He learns he miscalculated but comes across an old, seemingly abandoned house and takes shelter inside as the storm hits.

The genealogist looks around and finds furniture dating from before the Revolutionary War. He also discovers books that are several hundred years old yet seem to be first editions. A frightening encounter with the house’s secret resident follows.   

That resident is a very, very old man with a long beard and tattered clothing. The old man seems unstable, but the unnerved genealogist engages him in conversation since the rain, thunder and lightning make leaving the house undesirable.

Among the strange man’s books that they discuss is Regnum Congo written in 1591 by Italian explorer Fillipo Pigafetta. The already weird conversation turns even darker when an engraving from the book depicts cannibals chopping up human beings and selling their meat like in a western butcher shop.

It turns out the old man has gleaned secrets from Regnum Congo which have let him live for well over a hundred years by eating human flesh. He has been preying on people who happen upon his house and the narrator discovers that an upstairs room of the house is full of freshly butchered remains of recent victims.   

Aiding our main character’s escape from ending up as a meal for his host is a providential lightning strike which sets the house on fire. The interior of the building burns quickly, burning the old man alive but the genealogist escapes.

FOR MY REVIEW OF A CLEVER FILM VERSION OF THE CALL OF CTHULHU DONE IN THE STYLE OF A SILENT MOVIE FROM THE 1920s CLICK HERE.

FOR MY REVIEW OF A FOUND FOOTAGE/ MOCK DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE HORRORS UNLEASHED AT A STAGE MUSICAL TITLED A SHOGGOTH ON THE ROOF, CLICK HERE. Stuart Gordon and Chris Sarandon have roles.