Lovecraftian Horror

 

cover art by Lee Brown Coye

Of the many authors who dipped their pens into the universe of H.P. Lovecraft, one of the best is the short story "The Will of Claude Ashur," by C. Hall Thompson, published in the July 1947 issue of Weird Tales.

The narrator of the tale is Claude Ashur, who is confined to an insane asylum while his body is being eaten away by incurable leporsy.

Well, except he's NOT Claude Ashur. He's Claude's brother Richard. The body belongs to Claude, but it's Richard who the unwilling occupant. 

The story flashes back to explain how this happened, starting with Claude's birth. The mother died during the process and the doctor says it was as if the baby were taking all the strength of will from her for himself. 

Claude is a creepy child. His father hires tutors, but all quit very quickly. After Richard's dog bites him, the dog is later found dead as if killed by a wild animal. 

When he gets older, Claude attends Miskatonic University, which firmly sets this story within Lovecraft's universe. He supposed to be studying medicine, but instead delves into the rare literature kept by the college--books like the Necromonicon or "the loathsome Book of Eiban." He's eventually expelled, but apparently not before he learns what he wants to learn.

When Richard and Claude's father dies, Claude takes his portion of the inheritence and begins to travel to places where he can learn voodoo and magic. When he returns home, he has a wife.

Richard begins to suspect that the wife isn't acting of her own free will and that Claude has nefarious designs on her. Richard's correct, of course, but it turns out to be a little too late to do anything about it. Things don't end will for either Richard ot the girl. Claude, on the other hand, seems to have found a way to live forever.

Thompson is an excellent writer who effectively emulates Lovecraft's style. The story is scary and creepy in all the right ways.

Which makes me think: Why do I like Lovecraftian cosmic horror. As a Christian, I believe that we live in a world broken by sin, but is is still a purposeful creation, with divine love and human diginty both being realities. Lovecraft created a universe where there is no purpose and human beings are less than nothing in the cosmic scope.

So why do I like reading stuff with themes antithetical to my own beliefs?

Well, part of it is simply an appreciation that the stories are told so well--Lovecraft, Thompson and others knew how to craft a tale effectively, with style and perfect word choices. 

Another reason is perhaps a glimpse into a universe without a loving God makes me more appreciative that there IS a loving God around.

Or perhaps I'm overthinking it. Perhaps its just fun to have the bejeebers scared out of me from time to time.

You can find "The Will of Claude Ashur"  HERE. 

The Real Name of the planet Pluto!

The August 1931 issue of Weird Tales gave us one of H.P. Lovecraft's best stories. It also tells us what the actual purpose the planet Pluto serves. (And yes, I know Pluto isn't considered a planet anymore. Tough toenails--on my blog, Pluto still gets to be a planet!)

"The Whisperer in Darkness" was written right after Pluto was discovered. That plus Lovecraft's admiration of Arthur Machen's 1895 book The Novel of the Black Seal, from which Lovecraft drew plot ideas and themes, resulted in a truly creepy tale.

The narrator is Albert Wilmarth, a professor at Miskatonic University--the school where you are as likely to die horribly or be driven insane as get a graduate degree. Wilmarth is interested in certain aspects of New England folklore. He begins a correspondence with Henry Akeley, who lives in a secluded area of Vermont and believes he has found proof that alien beings have set up a small mining colony nearby and have been visiting Earth for centuries.

Like most aliens who inhabit Lovecraft's perpetually horrific universe, these creatures do not share any human concept of right and wrong with us. As Wilmarth, who eventually comes to believe Akeley, describes them:

I got this image from the Lovecraft wiki--
I couldn't find an artist's credit.

The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the ether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at once as a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under the hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too curious about them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony. That is what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from outside—any number of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave things as they are to save bother.

I really admire Lovecraft's story construction here. The first part of the story consists of Wilmarth and Akeley exchanging letters without ever actually meeting. At first,they calmly trade ideas and information. But Akeley gradually becomes more and more concerned that the Mi-Go (as the aliens are called) are stalking him with help of human agents. Eventually, Akeley is essentially besieged in his home, exchanging rifle fire with those human agents. His dogs manage to hold off the Mi-Go themselves.



Lovecraft employs his usual skill with sentence construction and perfect word choices to gradually build up the tension. Akeley is reluctant to leave his family home, but his situation is becoming untenable. Then Wilmarth gets a long letter (typewritten rather than handwritten) in which Akeley says he's been misinterpreting the Mi-Go's intentions and has actually made friends with them. Why doesn't Wilmarth come to Vermont and meet them?

It's actually fair to consider this a weak point in the story. That Wilmarth is being drawn into a trap is mind-numbingly obvious, but Wilmarth goes to great lengths to explain his absurd reasons for thinking its not really a trap. Gee whiz, Wilmarth. You were doing so well up to now and suddenly you are too dumb to live.

But he actually does manage to live. That's not a spoiler--he's narrating the story, so we know he lives. The second major part of the story comes when he does visits Akeley's home and learns, among other things, that he's not very safe there; that there's a planet located beyond Neptune called Yuggoth, which is a sort of base for the Mi-Go; that travel between planets, stars and dimensions often requires having your brain temporarily moved into a jar; and that Akeley is no longer--well, let's just say that he's not quite himself any more. In fact, Wilmarth learns a lot of things so bizarre and frightening that it puts his sanity at risk.

The story ends with a wonderfully horrific twist, but not before Wilmarth has time to wonder about the discovery of Pluto, which he knows must be Yuggoth. What reason do the Mi-Go have for allowing us to discover the planet they've always kept hidden from us? One horrible day, we'll probably find out.

I suspect the Mi-Go will be mad at us for reducing Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. And who can blame them?

Lovecraft mentioned the Mi-Go in one future story--In the Mountains of Madness--in which we learn they once fought a war with yet another race of ancient aliens. Cthulhu is also mentioned, so this is a part of what would become one of the first shared universes in literature. Other writers would contribute stories to this mythos, while Lovecraft would often mention elements from their stories in his own prose.

For instance, "The Whisperer in Darkness" mentions a being from Clark Ashton Smith's story "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," which hadn't itself been published yet, but which Smith had allowed Lovecraft to read. There's also a shout-out to "The Hounds of Tindalos" a 1929 story by Frank Belknap Long. Looking up those references also led me to read those two stories, so I think we'll examine both of them in another post sometime soon.

You can read "The Whisperer in Darkness" HERE.

"Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me."

H.P. Lovecraft once wrote: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

Lovecraft played on that idea in his wonderful horror stories. He didn't depend on splashing blood and disembowelment and gore--he built a sense of fear on the idea that there are unknown things in the world that we are better off not knowing about. Because when someone finds out about them, death or insanity (or something even worse) is that person's likely fate. Someone (and I can't find the quote to credit it) once remarked that the central theme of the Lovecraftian universe is that we only remain sane because we don't fully understand its real nature.

And he backed up his themes and ideas with a fantastic prose style that (like Poe) begs to be read aloud--full of perfect word choices and sentence structures that keep you riveted to the story until your done reading it. Don't start one of Lovecraft's longer stories if it's close to your bedtime. You aren't going to be setting it aside until you finish it.

In Lovecraft's version of the universe, human beings aren't the only intelligent beings on the planet. There are other--well, things. Impossibly old things that came here in the distant past from other parts of the universe. Our physical laws and our understanding of logic and reason don't apply to them. They're still out there, you know. Sometimes, they interact with us. When that happens...

His 1936 novella "The Shadow Out of Time" is one of Lovecraft's finest tales. (Author Ramsey Campbell considers it "awe-inspiring.") First published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories, it's narrated by an economics professor named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.

Peaslee was teaching at Miskatonic University (located in Arkham, MA) in 1908.

 By the way, if you ever get a chance to teach or attend Miskatonic University--FOR THE LOVE OF HEAVEN, DON'T! It won't end well for you.


In the middle of a lecture, Peaslee is struck with a strange sort of amnesia in which a secondary personality seems to take over. This by itself is strange, but by itself would be easily explained by assuming that Peaslee has simply taken a trip to Crazy Town. But that doesn't explain the strange knowledge of many languages and obscure facts this other personality seems to have.

In 1913, Peaslee's original personality returns and he manages to pick up the pieces of his life. But he's troubled by vivid dreams and fragmentary memories of living in an ancient city (about 150,000,000 years ancient) inhabited by strange creatures.

He discovers that there are rare other cases of this sort of temporary amnesia, where the victims afterwards have eerily similar dreams. Could there be some sort of strange reality behind the dreams?

Well, this is a Lovecraft story, so of course there can be. It all involves the Great Race--originally from the planet Yith--that has the ability to swap bodies with other intelligent beings. What makes this ability really scary is that they can traverse space AND time to do this. They swap with someone like Peaslee in the distant future and gather information. They have thus compiled a very extensive library of all history and all things that will happen--both on Earth and elsewhere in the universe.

This ability gives them a sort of immortality. They came to Earth originally when their home planet was about to die, swapping enmass into a strange pre-human race that lived eons ago. When that race eventually dies out (as the Great Race already knows it will), they'll be swapping into an intelligent race that will exist on Earth after mankind dies out.

It's a handy ability--though it's a bit hard on the creatures they permanently swapped into, since those poor slobs are transferred without warning into the bodies of a completely alien species that's about to go extinct.

Poor Peaslee has a hard time dealing with this, but eventually convinces himself that his dreams and visions can't possibly be real. But an archaeological dig in Australia might convince him otherwise. And what about the Elder Things--the subterranean creatures that eventually destroyed the bodies the Great Race were using millions of years ago? It's not possible that they're still around, is it?

Gee whiz, this is a creepy story. I love the little details Lovecraft puts in to the story--the descriptions and hints of other humans and various alien beings Peaslee meets while he's trapped in the distant past are particularly effective in establishing atmosphere. (By the way, one of these characters is a shout-out to Conan the Barbarian, created by Lovecraft's friend Robert E. Howard.) All the elements of the story, in fact, work together to gradually build up a palpable feeling of increasing dread.

Whether the strongest emotion known to man is fear is probably open to debate in calmer moments. But after you've read "The Shadow Out of Time," you'll be convinced of it.