"In many ways the story is the culmination of Lovecraft's fictional career, and by no means an unfitting capstone to a twenty-year attempt to capture the sense of wonder and awe felt at the boundless reaches of space and time."
-- S.T. Joshi, introduction to The Shadow Out of Time: The Corrected Text

"[Lovecraft's] single greatest achievement in fiction. The form and substance of this extraordinary novella, its amazing scope and sense of cosmic immensitude, the gulfs of time it opens, the titanic sweep of the narrative ... one of the most tremendously exciting imaginative experiences I have yet found in fantastic fiction ..."
-- Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos

"By the way -- I finished 'Shadow Out of Time' last week, but doubt whether it is good enough to type. Somehow or other, it does not seem to embody quite what I want to embody -- and I may tear it up and start all over again."
-- H.P. Lovecraft, letter to E. Hoffman Price, March 14, 1935

Of the three of them, I tend more toward Lovecraft's opinion of "Shadow Out of Time," although it's far and away good enough to type. It's merely great, though, not transcendent. I think I lowball it for some ill-defined reason, one that Lovecraft put best -- for me, too, it does not seem to embody quite what it could. It's more than a little over-long, and I find very little suspense to the final denouement. Well, technically, none whatsoever. It's a surgically neat climax, but that's the best I can say of it. Maybe if we really got into Peaslee's head, we could feel his shock more fully, but overtypically, Peaslee is a boring stick who spends more time than Lovecraft can believably convey in agonies of Poe-narrative indecision about his experience. Even Australia (with its huge potential for the outre) isn't really milked and brought to unlife the way Lovecraft does Antarctica in "Mountains of Madness." My "adventurous expectancy" is sated early, when Peaslee susses out the core myth of Pnakotic possession, and I never really get it back.

I also wonder how you keep your identical handwriting if your mind is immured in a seven-foot-tall cone-being. This isn't just nitpicking. I am somewhat surprised that Joshi doesn't see (and on past form, stridently object to) the hugely obvious negation of "mechanist materialism" in the assumption that mentation and personality (even memory, in Peaslee's case) -- the soul, in other words -- is independent of the physical brain, or even of humanoid brain structure. (In Lovecraft's original version, the mind-transfers were from ancient -- but human -- Lomar.)

I do love the cosmicism; the stark vastness of time, the great allusion to Buddai ("the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world"), the increasingly deft retournement of the Necronomicon (this time as 'dream diary'), and what we see of Peaslee's attempt to discover his bizarre activities while "amnesiac." I especially love the horrible, horrible Yithians with their "fascistic socialism," their callous voyeurism, and their utter amorality bred of utter invulnerability. ("Flying polyps going to escape, eh?" "Not our problem. It's off to beetle-time we go." BAMF.) Lovecraft never blended the alien and the villainous as convincingly.

But I just don't love this story as I probably should.

NEXT: Nothing is next, to paraphrase John Tynes, but death and coleopterans.

*****

But we've finished the Tour de Lovecraft, hopefully in better shape than we started it. As a final thought, I'd say this. Lovecraft combined an epochal imagination with a nearly nihilist philosophy -- the two ingredients that together make "cosmic horror." But more importantly, Lovecraft was a great writer. Of his solo adult works, 17 of 50 are great by almost any standard. (That's a career .340 average -- home run average, that is. And six of those were knocked clean out of the park.) By the time his style fully matured in the mid-1920s, he was almost incapable of turning out a bad story. He was a complex writer, who believed (correctly) that both verisimilitude and gothicism depended on intricate structures of both plot and language. A true Anglophone craftsman, HPL is not for the lazy, any more than Faulkner or Borges is -- or Hawthorne, his great unsung model. In his mature phase, he almost never wastes a word: if you can't figure out why it's there, that's your problem, not his. Not all of the mature stories work for all readers -- "The Thing on the Doorstep" is probably the weakest of them, and as I've intimated before, "The Silver Key" is perhaps best seen as mental attic-cleaning rather than as fiction in the technical sense. But even those two (clearly his weakest post-1925 tales) are structurally sound as drums, and make interesting reading to boot, two desiderata that far too many short stories fail at.

For all those who say that Lovecraft is all style (and bad style at that) and no substance, why is it that there are no successful pastiches of Lovecraft in his own style? Why aren't we drowning in stories at least as good as "The Shadow Out of Time" or "The Haunter of the Dark"? Why, if it's just a matter of piling up "eldritch unnameables," can't any journeyman hack with Robert M. Price's email address manage it? Why can't even very good craftsmen indeed do it? (August Derleth is no slouch on his own turf, and Robert Bloch and Ramsey Campbell, well, the defense rests.) Why, for that matter, are some of Lovecraft's stories better than others if all it takes to write like Lovecraft is a thesaurus and a lobster-shack menu? No, in the great works there's definitely something there, some "adventurous expectancy," some outside shape scratching "at the known universe's utmost rim."

For all his undoubted skill, knowledge, and perception, I disagree with S.T. Joshi, who sees Lovecraft's art (and by extension all art?) as ancillary to, or derivative upon, the author's philosophy. I disagree with Colin Wilson, who sees Lovecraft's art (and by extension all art?) as ancillary to, or derivative upon, the author's personality, his "madness," if you will. I disagree with attempts to understand Lovecraft's art as murkily sublimated autobiography. Obviously Lovecraft's beliefs, his mind, and his unhappy life played their role, just like any artist's do. But 1920s New England was full of autodidactic Nietzsche wannabes, many of them also neurasthenic, over-coddled, and bankrupt. It only produced one H.P. Lovecraft.

So I hold that Lovecraft's art -- like all great art -- is fundamentally of its own origin. It comes from where it comes, be it genius, or the Muses, or the Gates of Deeper Slumber. Lovecraft, like all artists, learned to transmit it, to shape it and tame it for our view, as best he could. The proof is in the pudding: Cthulhu (and all that he stands for) has become as Superman, or Sherlock Holmes, or Robinson Crusoe, or Hamlet, or Lancelot, or Jason and the Argonauts -- a timeless icon, a myth. Like all myths it can be endlessly interpreted, set on new pedestals or loudly flung away. Without HPL's craft -- and yes, without his "mechanist materialism" and his psychosomatic fish allergies -- he could not have revealed Cthulhu to us in just that form. And without his blindness and his lyre Homer couldn't have sung the words he did, either. But now, Troy burns eternally. And Cthulhu fhtagn.

In his really quite excellent and thorough study A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft, Joshi approvingly quotes Stephen J. Mariconda's description of this tale as "Lovecraft's magnificent failure."

Well, he's half right. The story is magnificent. It is only a failure insofar as it doesn't complete a full Lovecraftian arc. One of Joshi's sounder arguments (possibly adapted from George Wetzel?) is that Lovecraft had only a very limited repertoire of story-elements, and that he continuously reused them, refining them as he went until eventually they became true masterpieces. So you can pick apart the earliest tales -- "Dagon," "The Tomb," and "Polaris" -- and discover the skeletons, if you will, of "Call of Cthulhu" (primordial sea cult alive in nightmares), "Charles Dexter Ward" (antiquarian shares soul with evil ancestor), and "The Shadow Out of Time" (man switches consciousness between aeons to the detriment of his identity). Obviously, some of -- most of -- the later masterworks draw skeletal elements from more than one early source, and some of the early elements are never really developed later (as with about half of the material in "The Tomb"), but the general progression is, I think, fairly clear.

I would argue that "Witch House" is the almost-completed version of the skeleton first laid down in "From Beyond," (man perceives Outside, Outside comes in) and that (with "Call of Cthulhu") it is actually one of the purest and most important examples of sheer Lovecraftian cosmicism. (Other major iterations of the "From Beyond story" include "The Music of Erich Zann," "Hypnos," "The Hound," "He," and "Strange High House in the Mist" -- although you could easily discover the "From Beyond story" in "Pickman's Model," "The Dunwich Horror" (in negative form), and "The Haunter of the Dark" among others.) What it isn't, is a fully perfected version of this story -- it's not "Call of Cthulhu" or "Charles Dexter Ward," in other words. There's at least one more iteration of this theme left in Lovecraft, and unless you consider "Haunter of the Dark" to be the missing apotheosis, HPL never got around to writing it.

So it's not Lovecraft's best story by any means. (I'd call it about his tenth-best story.)¹ But it is absolutely not a failure, and not at all the "step backward in his fictional development" (whatever that nonsensical phrase means, applied to a Lovecraft story written after say 1925) that Joshi insinuates. Joshi, I think, really, really hates the crucifix, the Black Man, the trappings of witchcraft and evil and black magic in what (to him) should be a stark blast of cosmic higher mathematics. In fact, in A Subtler Magick, Joshi gives us his specific complaints (aside from objecting to the style of the story -- Gilman is something of a Poe-character, and there are indeed a few lapses that Joshi catches with exaggerated disdain), which uniformly circle around this 'historicizing' material. The objections are almost cartoonishly facile:

"What is the significance of the Old Ones in the story?" [They indicate that hyperspace travel goes through time as well as space, and otherwise perform the same function that all of Lovecraft's Mythos callbacks perform, enhancing cosmicism.]

"To what purpose is the baby kidnapped and sacrificed?" [We don't know. It's a purposeless horror, on purpose. Gilman is meant to be off-balance the whole time, and Joshi can't possibly believe the story would be better if Gilman, Keziah Mason, and Brown Jenkin got together on Walpurgisnacht and did really hard math! Any gamer can come up with a million possible reasons that Keziah would carry out such sacrifices, and any horror or SF fan -- or even a critic who writes long divagatory books on the weird tale -- should be able to stump up one or two good ones.]

"How can Lovecraft the atheist allow Keziah to be frightened off by the sight of a crucifix?" [Hmmm. Let's see. Maybe characters aren't their authors? Maybe Keziah Mason, a 17th century witch and initiate of a witch-cult persecuted (for good reason) by cross-wielding folks, might be frightened briefly -- not "off" as Joshi mischaracterizes the event -- by a crucifix? Maybe in faultless Freudian fashion her subconscious is still anti-Christian instead of cosmically atheist?]

"Why does Nyarlathotep appear in the conventional figure of the Black Man?" [For the same reason that he does in both the sonnet and prose-poem that bear his name? And maybe because he was summoned by a 17th-century European witch in the form that she expected -- that she calculated, if you will -- instead of as the Large And Moving Sloar?]

"In the final confrontation with Keziah, what is the purpose of the abyss aside from providing a convenient place down which to kick Brown Jenkin?" [Well, Joshi's got me there. In all my time spent in hyperspatial witch-attics, I've never seen an abyss. Lovecraft is being downright unrealistic. What kind of asinine question is this?]

"How does Brown Jenkin subsequently emerge from the abyss to eat out Gilman's heart?" [Didn't Joshi just complain that we don't know what the abyss does? Does he even read his own essays? Maybe it's a wormhole. Maybe Brown Jenkin -- being the one who taught Keziah to use hyperspace after all -- is really good at emerging from abysses.]

Hey, but don't worry, S.T. -- August Derleth didn't much like this story either.

[1]Absolutely Perfect: "Colour Out of Space"
Vanishingly Close To Perfect: "Charles Dexter Ward," "Call of Cthulhu," "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Dunwich Horror," "Shadow Over Innsmouth"
Masterpieces: "Whisperer in Darkness," "Music of Erich Zann," "Rats in the Walls"
Great: "Dreams in the Witch House," "Haunter of the Dark," "Pickman's Model," "The Shunned House," "Shadow Out of Time," "Strange High House in the Mist," "Doom That Came to Sarnath," "The Cats of Ulthar"

The rest are not great.

NEXT: "The Shadow Out of Time," and the end of our Tour.

I will say this -- this is some kinda slam-bang story. There's more wonderful gaming hooks, trippy metaphysics, and crazy fizzy-pop ideas in this story than in virtually any other Lovecraft tale of like length. And at the end, nothing much has happened -- Carter is still missing, the time is still (literally) out of joint, and all we've got is tapir prints in the carpet and the comforting knowledge that in the year 2169 Pickman Carter will kick "the Mongol hordes" out of Australia.

But I do think, wildness aside, it suffers from being a collaboration (the only one Joshi sees fit to include in the Penguin series).

In that spirit, rather than beavering on into the theosophical thickets therein, I invite you to read the works of a couple of unwitting collaborators on the Tour:

In "Race and Decay (II)" Daniel J. Gall sets out to take up the fraught question of time and decay via "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", with an interesting digression on Lovecraft's literary ability -- and Carteresque desire? -- to divorce "chaos" from time. (Which again, I'd read back from Lovecraft's Puritan ancestors, but what do I know?) It gets really meaty by "Race and Decay (III)", but do read all four chunks.

And in ‘All dimensions dissolve in the absolute’: Magick, modernity and the horror of indetermination in 'Through the Gates of the Silver Key', Justin Woodward presents "Gates" as a paradigm of Lovecraft's "horror of indetermination," gives a quick overview of the uses to which (some) chaos magickians put Lovecraft and Lovecraftian indeterminations in their rites and workings, and worries himself into a tizzy that embracing chaos means embracing (symbolically, at least -- although if one is going to take magick at all seriously, I suppose a symbolic embrace is rather more of a concern) the 'chaotic' capitalist free market. Well, if it's any comfort, Lovecraft was no big fan of capitalism, either, although his critique was, as Schumpeter might have put it, a 'precapitalist atavism' if ever there was one. Nor would HPL have been a fan, as Woodward points out glancingly, of a lot of silly people poncing about trying to summon Yog-Sothoth with cut-up phone books or by visualizing 'chaotic hyperspace' or what-have-you.

If I decide to turn this Tour into a book or PDF or whatever, I'll come back to this story and expand on my comments, but for this medium, I rather think this collaboration thing is pretty neat.

NEXT: "The Dreams in the Witch House"

A very strange story, one that goes farther than any other, I think, to explicate just who Lovecraft thought he was, and a good bit of why he thought that. Why dredge through "The Outsider" for murky wracks of the Lovecraftian subconscious when he dissects his whole thought and philosophy for you right here? That said, it's hard to find this celebration of the urge to regress to childhood (as opposed to the past in general, or as opposed to the terrors of regression along the family tree) anywhere else in the canon (except, obviously, for "Dream-Quest," written at the same time), and one is tempted to chalk that up to Lovecraft's brief, intense reaction to returning home to Providence after his nerve-shattering experience of "the pest zone" that was New York City.

Sadly, "The Silver Key" is so concerned with meticulously exploring Lovecraft/Carter's interior life and thought that it doesn't do much as a story; one understands why the readers of Weird Tales "heartily disliked" it. My reaction isn't as strong, but it is telling, I think, that I've re-read "From Beyond" (a far inferior piece of technical work on every level) probably six or seven times for every time I've read "Silver Key." It's not even the essential absence of plot: not much more happens in "From Beyond" on a story level either, but it lays out Lovecraft's cosmic dread far more compellingly than "Silver Key" does his "indifferentism." Plus, of course, even Lovecraft didn't believe that "the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is apathy," which is why there's a thriving horror literature, and tales of ennui are rapidly forgotten, dei gratia. Contrariwise, if you're a John Updike fan, maybe this is your favorite Lovecraft tale ever.

****

But "The Silver Key" is a guide to Lovecraft's thought only as far as November of 1926, and I think it's a fading guide even by then. Surely the ending of "Dream-Quest" (which becomes, unbelievably, a prequel to this story) rejects it already -- it is not dream cities Carter searches for, but earthly Boston. It is my contention that Lovecraft must have changed his mind, at least aesthetically, even while he was finishing "Dream-Quest" in January of 1927 -- note his sudden lack of interest in the novel -- and that "Charles Dexter Ward" (begun immediately after completing "Dream-Quest") is almost his own response to it. Here we have a slew of characters, none of them remotely "indifferent," none of them Randolph Carter; a story in which the urge to regress takes on a historical tone -- and resumes HPL's old horrifying tenor -- that would inform almost every tale to follow. Even indifferentism becomes horrible, in "Colour Out of Space" and in the uncaring experimentations of fungoid Outer Ones and crinoid Elder Things. In a very real sense, then, almost everything truly lasting and important about Lovecraft's fiction emphatically rejects this story.

NEXT: "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"

Despite its novella length (38,000 words), this novel -- a literal phantasmagoria -- is so rich, so meandering, so surprising, so tonally discordant, so clever, and so unrelieved in its flumes of incident and invention that it would take at least another 38,000 words to perform anything like an adequate critical examination.

So far, critics have pretty much confined themselves either to discovering its various antecedents (besides the obvious Dunsany tales "Idle Days on the Yann" and "Time and the Gods" again) or adumbrating on its main (and equally obvious) theme. George Wetzel apparently believes that the whole thing is a lengthy gloss on the Aeneid, which has the virtue of being strange enough to be plausible. Peter Cannon's theory that it is an Augustan Vathek is probably more sound, but there are further unmistakable parallels -- if not influences -- from Burroughs (alien hero -- named Carter no less -- fights a collection of ethnic stereotypes and Orientalist imagery in a nonsensical fantasyland) to Baum ("There's no place like home") to Burton (J. Vernon Shea believes that Arabia Deserta and other such travel narratives clearly influenced the novel) to Bunyan (one of Lovecraft's original titles for the novel was A Pilgrim in Dreamland), and that's only the 'B's. I suspect that a lot of it is that all quest tales will turn out to be strongly formally similar (like virtually all heroes of classical and Renaissance romance, for instance, Carter is kidnapped by pirates), though I wouldn't rule out anything Lovecraft proveably read. The re-imagining of his various "Dunsanian" locales and characters (including the heretofore non-"Dunsanian" Pickman, Nyarlathotep, Leng, and Randolph Carter himself) as all part of one "Dreamland" indicates that HPL was in jackdaw mode when he wrote "Dream-Quest," which he soon considered mere "useful practice" for a real novel.

As far as the theme goes, it's (as I said) obvious: Carter realizes that the true city of wonder is Boston. Like so many of the "Dreamland" stories, "Dream-Quest" turns out to be about nothing so much as aesthetics. Lovecraft is turning away from the puerile Decadence he exalted in "Celephaïs" toward his own more natural metier of hyper-realism. This is a fond and final hail and farewell to "Dunsanian" thought (though Joshi argues that Lovecraft is not so much rejecting Dunsany as he is rejecting Lovecraft's own flawed view of Dunsany) and it not coincidentally also marks Lovecraft's joyous return to golden New England after fleeing the gug-infested canyons of New York City.

****

In my experience, readers either love "Dream-Quest" to bursting or they don't quite get the point. I tend toward the latter; the luxury of the novel form (and the absence, unlike "Charles Dexter Ward," of any narrative layers or complexity) gives Lovecraft way too much space to thrash about stylistically. Although by 1926 he was just too good a writer to produce sheer endless waffle, I always feel like reading the thing straight through is a bit much of a muchness. (A surfeit of Turkish Delight, as it were.) As a result, by the time I get to the end, I'm never quite sure whether the "mild gods of Earth" are actually off in Boston, or in some sort of pocket-Boston, or if Nyarlathotep is just lying and the gods are dead, or what. (Keeping in mind the situation in "Time and the Gods" -- in which Time destroys the gods' pleasure-dome -- and what we've seen of the "mild gods of Earth" in "Strange High House in the Mist," none of these options sound particularly good for Hub City.) That said, there are some great, great incidents -- the war of the Cats of Ulthar vs. the Cats of Saturn; the bravura episode with the Veiled Priest; the forest of the zoogs; the sheer delight of meeting Pickman and realizing that, in Dreamland at least, the ghouls are all right.

NEXT: "The Silver Key"

"By the way, I'm almost forgetting to mention 'The Strange High House in the Mist', which impressed me with renewed power. It is like an eyrie from which the imagination can take flight to 'worlds of undiscovered gold'."
-- Clark Ashton Smith, letter to H.P. Lovecraft, March 11 1930

If anything, this note of Smith's is an understatement. The estimable John Rateliff calls "Strange High House" Lovecraft's "single best story," which is going a trifle too far in my opinion, but it's certainly HPL's single best fantasy story, better even than "Sarnath" or "Cats of Ulthar," not least because it has a complexity and a multi-dimensionality not usually found in Lovecraft's fantasies -- and not in his horror tales until "Mountains of Madness" or thereabouts.

"The Call of Cthulhu," a truly great story, is by contrast essentially a dizzying, vertiginous fugue in one direction -- "vastness" or "sublimity" or what-have-you. Every note, from every source, comes back to the same chords. But in "Strange High House" we have two dimensions working -- Thomas Olney's quest for something Other, which in Lovecraft's "Dunsanian" tales is usually a noble thing (even a smugly noble thing, pace "Celephaïs"), and the impingement of the Other on the town of Kingsport, which begins in standard Lovecraftian spook-mode as dangerous, then seemingly joins up with the "noble quest" in a reversal. Except that Olney comes down "hollow," and the Kingsporters fear that the old gods have renewed their appetite for questers. Lovecraft, in other words, is endorsing Olney's quest -- there is a nobler, higher, altogether better truth Outside -- while condemning it -- such quests bring the Outside closer and will hollow out first Kingsport and then perhaps all the world. We end with a kind of photo-negative of Machen's "Great Return," or an echo of Eliot's words: "Mankind cannot bear too much reality." Kingsport becomes Semele, beloved of the gods and burnt alive by their regard.

And on a sheerly mechanical level, there's almost not a word out of place; Lovecraft almost effortlessly pulls aside the curtain on Erich Zann's window to show us where our world and Outside are tangent. ("And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.") Only the actual immanence of the gods seems anticlimactic -- Neptune is very much out of place, and even Nodens seems more like a courtly aristocrat than, you know, a god from the Abyss. And even that can be defended as Lovecraft setting us up for the big sting at the end -- that Nodens, what a nice guy. Maybe he'll come back more often. And drain the light out of everyone's eyes, the better to illuminate the high house in the mist.

NEXT: "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

Written on September 18, 1925, this is Lovecraft's last truly bad story, and it's one of his worst. Even Lovecraft's language, which normally has its delights even in the most tiresome moments, is seemingly purposely flat and bald while still wrapped around an interminable series of narrative switchbacks. The setting is nowhere, and there aren't even any of those weird Lovecraftian bits that make you wish he'd written a different story that day. Nope, this is a day you wish he'd written a long, whiny letter to his aunts about those bastard Syrians next door, or maybe just spent the day inventing new spellings for "foetor" or patronizingly explaining Nietzsche to Frank Belknap Long.

Do me a favor: You get a time machine, you go back to September 18, 1925, you knock on Lovecraft's door and say "Hey, they're giving away free ice cream at this place on Sixth and Ninety-Third to anyone who can name all of Hawthorne's novels!" Then you can go off and kill Hitler or whatever, satisfied with a job well done.

Seriously, Al Feldstein would have been embarrassed to write somthing this pointless on deadline day for Tales From the Crypt in 1953. "Too obvious," he'd say. "Just run a house ad or something." And he'd be right.

NEXT: "The Strange High House in the Mist"

After reading this line: "He was conscious ... that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances..." I am reminded forcibly of John McTiernan's grossly under-rated early film Nomads. Well worth seeing, if you haven't.

The tale clearly owes a great debt to Machen, specifically (I'd say) "Novel of the Black Seal," along with (of course) "The Red Hand," which is where the epigraph comes from. Within the Mythos, it prefigures Ramsey Campbell's tales of urban alienation, and T.E.D. Klein's "Children of the Kingdom." At one remove, perhaps, F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb (and the Repairman Jack sequence that followed) can be seen as heirs of "Red Hook," as can Whitley Strieber's Wolfen and possibly even Dan Simmons' Song of Kali.

****

In a way, the most pulp of Lovecraft stories -- one might say, the only pulp Lovecraft story. It features all the standard elements of weird adventure stories -- evil foreigners, tunnels under the City, cribbed occult research, mysterious reversals of plot that get dropped as soon as the next scene is underway -- with enough of the Lovecraftian cosmic to taste.

This doesn't, necessarily, make it a very good story, and considered purely from a structural viewpoint, Joshi and Cannon are right to dismiss it. For an intrepid detective, Malone doesn't actually do much, and the final action is just confused without accomplishing anything. It's also pretty inescapably drenched with Lovecraft's howling racism, unleashed after two years in Babylon-on-Hudson. But that sheer drive, to indict his neighbors for the crime of inspiring his hatred, makes the story just compelling reading, in much the same way that the Fu Manchu novels are. This is what happens when Lovecraft joins his eye for setting to a setting he simply despises; the power is unmistakable, even if (especially because, I'd say) the matter is unpleasant. Not for this story the arch rodomontades of "Cool Air," or the distant antiquarianism of "He." This is a story about New York, in the raw, if not cut remotely on our bias.

****

Are we entitled to dismiss horror on topics, and from perspectives, that we find objectionable? Obviously, we're entitled to read or not read whatever we wish. But it seems a little pecksniffy to dismiss some topics as not merely "not my cup of tea," but to attempt to read them out of the genre as essentially "too unpleasant for horror." In what sense, then, are we really interested in horror, if not in the transgressive power of it? I'm no more delighted with Lovecraft's "Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth" and the rest of that ugliness than I imagine most of you good people are, but it seems to me that if we consider real, urgent horror -- the shock of cold water, the punch in the stomach, the sheer gut-wrench -- to be a desideratum, we are cutting ourselves off if we say "Please, only give me horror that transgresses sexual boundaries I'm more titillated by than scared of" or "Please, only give me horror that transgresses categories set down by medieval Catholics I've never heard of and wouldn't give two hoots for if I had." Don't mistake my meaning: Caitlin Kiernan and Russell Kirk have produced some great, great horror tales, and their horrors are no less real for being less than universally shared, or even for appealing primarily to the conscience or the intellect, as they do. But it's also important for horror to, well, horrify, from the gut, and I think it's best when it such horror horrifies honestly, and as fully as possible.

This is urban horror. Swallow it, or move back to Providence.

NEXT: "In the Vault"

In "The Shunned House," Lovecraft can be seen gathering his legs beneath him for his mighty spring into greatness. It's not quite as pure as "Erich Zann," and not quite as powerful as "Rats," but there's something in this story that stretches up past both of them toward the towering heights of "Call of Cthulhu," which HPL would write within a year and a half.

The rigorous scientism of the horror presages "Mountains of Madness" just as the rigorous historicality of the setting presages "Charles Dexter Ward." ("Cthulhu" takes from both strands, but lightly.) With "The Shunned House," Lovecraft has assembled almost his entire mature repertoire of themes, effects, and methods -- only the transcendence is missing, and this story is all the more impressive for its absence.

This despite the fact that its most notable overture toward cosmicism, the "titan elbow" of the thing in the basement, is just plain silly. Fortunately, the tremendous amount of scientific hugger-mugger Lovecraft deploys -- mentions of relativity, quantum mechanics, lines of force, and so on -- goes quite a way to cushion the blow. Indeed, the introduction of this scientific lore alongside with the (very authentic) ghost and werewolf lore collected in the earlier part of the story serves to emphasize the span of time between the primitive Huguenot vampire in the cellar and the present-day ghost-breaking Whipples, and to point up the multi-dimensional nature of the evil in the house.

I would go so far, contra Joshi (and contra Farnsworth Wright, who rejected "The Shunned House" when Lovecraft submitted it to Weird Tales) as to say that the slow, labored buildup of historical and spectral details and the equally dense justification that the modern, scientific Whipple narrator gives for the continuing horrors are both structurally necessary for the narrative (especially the pacing) to work correctly and thematically necessary for the transmission of the exact weird sensation -- of paranormality, not supernaturalism -- that Lovecraft intends. It's not quite as able and seemingly effortless as some of Lovecraft's later work would usually be (although anyone who finds this story "dry and long-winded" with a "bathetic" ending, as Joshi claims to, shouldn't be as fond of "Shadow Out of Time" as Joshi claims he is), but it's much, much better than the critical consensus seems to have it.

****

As a little lagniappe, I'll note that "The Shunned House" conveys the horror of the "common soul" we've noted before, as the Roulet vampire imposes (or impinges) its "lines of force" on others in the house and finally absorbs Uncle Elihu into its "multitude" of faces. One could draw some interesting lines from this story toward Lovecraft's hatred of "mongrelization," his fear of the mass man (he wrote this story while still in New York), his strong distaste for social pressures from economics to editing to marriage, his concern with degeneration (expressed here, as in "Cool Air" and perhaps "Doorstep", as deliquescence), and even his architectural mysticism (like "Rats," the monster is in some real way congruent -- sharing grue? -- with the house, although the implication of parasitism is stronger than that of symbiosis), or his pride in materialist mechanism (implying an absence of individual souls) and in his Augustan-colonial tradition (a "line of force" shaping his outlook just as the dead hand of Roulet does the Harris family). You can just keep circling around and around, looking at Roulet as the past -- still unnaturally present as with the Gothic, a survival of individual will that exists by breaking, deforming, and absorbing the will of others (Tradition), revealed through history and excavation (another metaphor for science -- or for self-knowledge, if you like), and so on.

****

And dude, Whipple Jnr. armors up with flame-throwers, a "large and specially fitted Crookes tube," sulfuric acid, and a gas mask, and he burns out the evil despite fainting! He weeps at his uncle's death, but the ghost is well and truly broken, and we end with the happiest ending in all of Lovecraft: "The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs." Providence is cleansed; Eden prevails. What a great story.

NEXT: "The Horror at Red Hook"

This is a critical essay disguised (not particularly well) as a horror story, and like virtually all "message pieces," it's clumsy and not very interesting as a story. Even as criticism, it isn't helped by the fact that Lovecraft in 1923 was still in the grip of puerile Decadent aesthetics, which blend badly with his Augustan tastes. Hence, like HPL's other literary-critical essay in the form of a mediocre story, "Celephaïs", it suffers from Lovecraft's essential unsuitedness for writing in the style he thought he should. (Compare, for example, the smooth confidence with which "Haunter of the Dark" demonstrates what we hear about Blake's aesthetic.) It does make one think that the various dialogues of Plato would be more riveting if the symposists might be attacked by ghost-monsters at any juncture, though.

As a pile of signifiers, tropes, and general stuff, the story is somewhat better -- we see a little hint of the "suicide-by-philosophy" as Mary Sue Carter gets attacked by spectral awfuls, there's some pretty good use of genuine New England folklore (complete with unwarranted but admittedly effective slagging off on the Puritans), and George Wetzel insists that the story demonstrates that for Lovecraft ghosts are hideous and grotesque. This last provides a bit of a link between the supernatural unnamables of pre-HPL fiction and the alien unnamables of mature Lovecraft; it's probably worth a bit of chewing over.

NEXT: "The Shunned House"

"There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear."
-- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Lurking Fear"

Or in other, better-written, words, "It was a dark and stormy night."

This is Lovecraft's best terrible story. It is so artificial ("Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died. But I was saved by the very thunder that had summoned it..."), and so overblown ("an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils"), and so ludicrous ("Baleful primal trees...") that it slithers -- through tiramisu-rich prose that might well be heavy metal lyrics ("a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning") -- all the way to the summit of high camp. Although Joshi is far too ready to play the "self-parody" card to justify Lovecraft's more godawful slop, it is impossible to believe, in this story at least, that HPL wasn't doing some portion of it on purpose, given the letter he wrote from about this time on the pleasures of giving in to pure hackery.

****

"History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism."
-- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Lurking Fear"

But even in the midst of such squamosity we see the outlines of a vast form rising. Just as "Re-Animator" introduces Lovecraft's intriguing and eventually quite productive trope of the suicide-by-philosophy, "Lurking Fear" (written in the same slam-bang, damn-the-climax style, and for the same cheapskate client) introduces the suicide-by-history, the protagonist whose interest in uncovering the past leads to his doom. It's prefigured as suicide-by-archaeology in "Moon-Bog" and "Nameless City," of course, but this tale is the first explicit narrative engagement at length with the researcher-hero. It transposes the exposition as narration into exposition as narrative -- rather than the author filling us in on the history of the Jermyn family, we have the protagonist read up on the Martenses, and we read over his shoulder, as it were. (Lovecraft's increasing skill in thus emotionally identifying us -- the curious reader -- with the protagonist doomed for his curiosity is perhaps under-emphasized in critical comment.) This trope flowers in almost all of Lovecraft's Great Works, directly in "Call of Cthulhu", "Charles Dexter Ward," "Innsmouth," and "Haunter of the Dark" and at close approach (often, again, as archaeology) in "Mountains of Madness," "Shadow Out of Time," "He", "Whisperer in Darkness" and various of the revisions such as "The Mound".

It approaches "Whisperer in Darkness" not merely in that element, and in a shared note of Fortean-cryptid ghost-hunting, but in the very un-Lovecraftian arena of character. Our unnamed narrator (whose "love of the grotesque and the terrible... has made [his] career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life") is much like the folklorist Wilmarth, with perhaps Randolph Carter as a third dimension for what George Wetzel might well call the ur-Investigator, the detective in the great mystery novel -- or mystery play -- that Lovecraft was writing. Badly, at first.

NEXT: "The Unnamable"

N.B.: We had a big hiatus for the Memorial Day holiday, and we're going to have another this weekend-ish as I attend BookExpo in New York. If you're going to be there, I'll be connected tether-ball style to the Chaosium/Elder Signs Press booth, so drop by and say "My God, there are a lot of books here."

Okay, "Hypnos" is just crazy-making. It's chock full of vitally interesting bits -- the "evil star" business again, the strong hint that the narrator's friend is the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe (immense brow, dark liquid eyes, black hair, dreamer, aged forty as Poe was when he died, references to "Tell-Tale Heart" and "Man in the Crowd" among other Poe tales, Poe structure), the Greek myth thing we've talked about before, the possibilities of time-travel and destiny loops, and the allusions to Einstein (complimentary) and Freud (dismissive). Even the setting -- the London demimonde -- is interesting in its semi-random way, and there's weird sexual-obsession vibes with the whole Muse angle which not even Lovecraft could have been unaware of.

Plus, the story gives another example of Lovecraftian supra-dimensional magic, blending "dream travel" a la Randolph Carter and hyperspatial exploration a la Walter Gilman. The narrator's description of their experiments sounds an awful lot like a path-working in the modern Western occult tradition -- which is weird, because this is too early for HPL to have read anything by Crowley or the like. (Lovecraft's exposure to the formal occult remained very, very sketchy for someone of his interests and profession, being far more interested (justifiably so from a narrative perspective) in authentic ghost and witch lore. HPL eventually tracked down and read Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic, but that was years after writing this story -- as late as 1926 he was bemoaning his inability to find a copy.)

But for all that, "Hypnos" just doesn't cohere. The bits fall all over the place, and the magic is just arbitrarily shoveled out. Part of this incoherence is intentional -- it's another unreliable narrator story, of course, and better at it than "Dagon". Part of it is the occasional lurch into hysterical language in misbegotten imitation of Poe. (Yes, the narrator is a hysteric. But read this and, say, "The Black Cat" side by side, and see which one is clear when it needs to be and which one isn't.) But a big part of it is just that I don't think Lovecraft had it in him, in 1922, to do justice to the whole concept of human psychic exploration of the inhuman. (As contrasted with human physical, or even intellectual, exploration of the inhuman, a narrative which HPL clearly mastered.) And indeed, given that "The Dreams in the Witch-House" doesn't quite wind up working either, maybe he never did.

But man, a bad story has no business being this good. It's like biting into a Jack-in-the-Box burger and realizing that some fool has made it with what began as Kobe beef.

NEXT: "The Lurking Fear"

By comparison, here is an example of a failed Dunsany pastiche. Lovecraft attempts Dunsany's lightly terrifying (or terrifyingly light) parable mode (as shown to best effect in Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods) and, as one might expect, comes crashing to earth like Atal the priest. "Ulthar" notwithstanding, delicate arabesque was not Lovecraft's metier, especially not in 1921, and double-especially not when he attempted to combine it with cosmic sublimity. Where Dunsany was a musical fabulist, all silver and moonbeams, Lovecraft was a Gothic architect; he worked in stone and leaded glass, and it is a tribute to HPL's powers in his own media that his later works fling up such vertiginous traceries of language and concept (eventually surpassing Dunsany).

****

I forget which writer it was (Faulkner?) who gave something like this advice to his colleagues: Cross out the first page of every story. Then keep crossing out paragraphs until you get to the actual beginning.

This isn't actually true with most Lovecraft. The prolonged serpentine advance from mundanity to Otherness is usually vitally necessary; Lovecraft's intricate structure requires such a survey for its foundations.

But this is not the case with a pure fable. Specifically, "The Other Gods" would be immensely better without its first five paragraphs. I'd also venture to say that it would improve mightily if it followed Lovecraft's standard terminal-climax structure and ended three paragraphs earlier. Re-read that middle section, beginning with "Hatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert..." and ending with "Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!" and see if I'm not right.

NEXT: "Hypnos"

The saving grace of "The Moon-Bog" is that Lovecraft doesn't appear to have cared enough about it to over-write, or at least he doesn't fill every scintilla of narrative space with his Poe-esque spasms. On the other hand, aside from one or two concepts that will pay off big in later works -- such as the notion of archaeology as the Gothic sin of 'awakening the past' -- and another intriguing example of lunar trouble (along with "Sarnath"), this story, by its very pro forma nature, is almost worse than something like "The Outsider."

****

Again, though, I like the use of Greek myth as Elder Horror.

****

For racism-watchers, it's interesting to note that despite the anti-Irish sentiments he sometimes expressed in HPL's letters ("try and reason with an Irishman!"), the simple Irish workmen in this story are far more notable for their class than their ethnicity. They're not even the colorful, childlike Irish country folk you meet in, say, Ray Bradbury's Irish tales, but rather generic peasants, who drop exposition in their "wild legendry," bustle about as servants, and then get kidnapped by the Fair Folk, er, naiads. The story could just as easily have been set in England (as its great descendant "The Rats in the Walls" was) or Pomerania or Spain; a remarkable deafness to setting from HPL, although the bog itself is a familiar New England swamp. For "The Moon-Bog," HPL chose the setting because the piece was meant for a St. Patrick's Day meeting of his amateur fiction group; Dunsany aside, Lovecraft doesn't seem to have felt Ireland to be much of an inspiration. Indeed, the sole other Irishman named as such in all of Lovecraft's fiction is the "great wholesome" policeman in "Haunter of the Dark." [EDIT: I'm an idiot. Of course Detective Malone, the "Dublin College man" from "Horror at Red Hook," is an Irishman, and another good cop at that.]

In Lovecraft's correspondence with Robert E. Howard, who claimed to be of "Celtic stock," they seem to have agreed that the Celt provided a necessary leavening of poetry and magic to the hardy and stolid Anglo-Saxon, and that was about it. (Seriously, though, even in our enlightened era, who doesn't have a little bit of that antique ethnography still rattling around in their brain?) One suspects that between Dunsany, Maturin, Stoker, and LeFanu, Lovecraft may not have shared quite the disdain and contempt for the Irish that his self-image as an 18th-century Englishman would otherwise demand.

NEXT: "The Other Gods"

This is a fairly annoying story, in that it contains far too many good, powerful ideas than should be allowed in a story this badly written. One would like to just ignore it and move on, but one really can't.

****

I'll just note, for those joining us late, that the Nameless City is not Irem of the Pillars. The legend of Irem served as Lovecraft's model, but here again we see our city-cycle unfold, this time as a sort of photo-negative. The Nameless City spawns (?) the human imitation city Irem; Irem appears as the Nameless City dries out; the debased remnants of the Nameless City tear "a pioneer of ancient Irem" to pieces; the Nameless City's inhabitants enter the hollow earth. Irem is riding for a fall as Mecca rises; the debased Iremites drive off Hud (the lone "pioneer" from Mecca); Irem sinks into the sands. (More of my priceless wisdom on Irem -- and on Lovecraft -- can be found by the curious in my collection Dubious Shards, he plugged gratuitously.)

****

Joshi is correct to notice that Lovecraft does the "history of the aliens by convenient bas-relief" better in At the Mountains of Madness, although even there it's just never very convincing. The psychic visions of Robert Blake in "Haunter" are at least plausible.

****

It is interesting to note that this, too, like "Dagon" and "The Temple" and "Festival" and "Celephaïs" and "Dream-Quest" and "Innsmouth", is one of the "Oceanic Underworld/Otherworld" motif stories. The reptiles are aquatic (crocodile-seal blend), the Nameless City was a seaport, the Moore poem quoted (to better effect than Alhazred, in fact) mentions the "Sea of Death," and the narrator fights "swirling currents" and a "torrent." Lovecraft repeatedly plays with words like "abyss" and "gulf," which can apply to caverns and ocean deeps alike. The inner world of the reptiles ("a sea of sunlit mist") even resembles both the "Dreamlands" and Y'ha-Nthlei: "glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys". Finally, Lovecraft took partial inspiration for this tale from a dream in which the protagonist in a "subterranean chamber -- seeks to force door of bronze -- overwhelmed by influx of waters." Dreamland, Underworld, Ocean, Otherworld.

****

But how on earth does someone who can compose the wonderful simile of the ruins "protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave" manage to let themselves write, not a page later, that the "brooding ruins ... swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet". It's like a Randall Garrett Lovecraft parody in its pluperfect wrongness. And it ain't gonna get any better for the next five stories, sadly.

NEXT: "The Moon-Bog"

"From Beyond" is evidence that I will overlook the worst excesses (and this story, in Darrell Schweitzer's apt description, gibbers from start to finish) of Lovecraft's early Poe-influenced style if he's using it in the service of an actual Lovecraftian concept.

Here, Lovecraft revisits "Fall of the House of Usher," (as he will again, far more ably, in "Rats in the Walls") with a hyper-sensitive madman and his mostly anonymous guest, who exists almost solely to hear the exposition unfold and to plausibly describe the madman's destruction. But where we see further (and more horribly) into Usher in Poe's tale, in this one we see further (and more horribly) into the truth of the Universe.

I consider "From Beyond" to be an almost critical story for understanding the Cthulhu Mythos, despite its narrative flatness and the absence of any of the great names. However, its very simplicity of construction and paucity of specific myth-cycle linkage allows it to serve as a skeleton key to the more sophisticated later stories. This story is entirely a disquisition on the nature of the Outside.

We learn that the Outside is:

* Much vaster than the perceptible cosmos, and that our dimensionality (including time) is purely local.
* Entirely interpenetrative of our universe; as Uncle Chu would say, "The Outside is here, Mister Burton."
* Largely (even entirely) independent of our concerns.
* Horribly dangerous, both physically and mentally, to those who encounter it, even fleetingly.
* Inhabited by entities, both sentient and non-, as well as by intelligences that transcend sapience.
* Possessed of its own hierarchies, ecologies, and struggles.
* Accessible by human (and logically by inhuman or prehuman) technology.
* When so accessed, capable of being harnessed or of expanding human abilities in ways strongly resembling legendary magic.

This metaphysics becomes common to the rest of Lovecraft's oeuvre. With this metaphysics established, Lovecraft spends the rest of his career learning the exact ratio of Outsideness to put in a story, and the need for rigorous verisimilitude, even calm, in the "material components" of a tale. His best stories, in my opinion, are those that skirt the line between reality and Outsideness; what the radical critic Paul Buhle has so interestingly phrased thusly:

Lovecraft's true strength, then, lay in his ability to give the modern sense of indeterminacy a weird and poetic interpretation. What man feared was not correctly speaking the 'Unknown' ... [but] ... being on the verge of rediscovering something terrible and arcane ... the more threatening because in another sense it was known already....

I like Buhle's nod to Heisenberg in this quote, and the way it grounds Lovecraftian cosmicism not just in quantum physics (which, like the Tillinghast resonator, demonstrates just how meager our world of Newtonian experience and inference really is) but also Theosophy; the sense of knowledge that predates, but somehow informs, humanity. The Theosophical component is mostly absent from "From Beyond," but the Heisenbergian component of the Mythos is never clearer.

NEXT: "The Nameless City"

Another great story. Only its lightness of tone, in my opinion, keeps it from the utter perfection of "Sarnath," but this could be a sheerly personal judgement. I like my Lovecraft (and my horror) heavy, and lightness isn't Lovecraft's natural metier, although you certainly couldn't determine that from this story alone. No doubt his great, great love for Felis d. helped impel HPL to a deftness and playfulness of tone in this story that he seems unable to quite reach before or after.

****

When re-reading it in the Penguin edition for this entry, I noted Joshi's note no. 6, saying that young Menes' name is "probably derived from Dunsany's play King Argimenes..." Perhaps I'm crazy, here, but doesn't it make far more sense that young Menes is derived from, indeed is supposed to be, Menes the (historical) first Pharaoh of the Two Lands of Egypt? Note the Egyptian motifs on his cart and amongst his entourage, and that Menes' people are "dark" compared to the Ultharians. (This, btw, would be a reverse of "Terrible Old Man" -- dark people use the Outside to punish lighter-skinned evildoers.)

If Menes is the future Pharaoh Menes, that means:

a) Ulthar is a historical city, and the story takes place around 3100 B.C., when Menes would have been a young boy, or:

b) Menes and the priest-magicians who would eventually found Memphis and unite Egypt spent some time in the Otherworld/Dreamlands/distant past/Faërie, where they had adventures and gained knowledge necessary to unite Egypt.

The preponderance of evidence would tend toward b), as the general tenor of Ulthar seems more cod-medieval than pre-Bronze Age, since there are inns and blacksmiths in Ulthar. Also, since Menes' folk come "from the South," that would imply that Ulthar is somewhere on the upper Nile Valley (later tales reveal that Ulthar is on the River Skai) if it's a historical location, and it's unlikely that a town in Nubia or Abyssinia would consider Egyptians "dark." Of course, Lovecraft could be gaming the situation; reversing the sojourn of Israel (with Menes as a kind of parallel to Joseph) by inventing a sojourn of proto-Egypt in the north. Or Ulthar could be a city north of the Sudan, in the future Egypt, settled by the Berbers or some "lost white race" of the primordial Saharan grassland.

The story, meanwhile, presents Menes' folk as Romany, or Gypsies, as much as anything else: their fortunetelling habits, itinerant lifestyle, decorated carts, and ethnic markers indicate as much. At the time, the Romany claimed to be exiles from Egypt (hence the name 'Gypsy'), and 19th century occultists decided that 'Gypsy fortunetelling' was actually lost (and debased) Egyptian wisdom. It would be a typically Lovecraftian touch to imply that 'Egyptian wisdom' began as Gypsy fortunetelling, cloud-magic, and cat-cursing, and that the whole thing turned in cycles.

****

Like "The Terrible Old Man," "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," and "The Tree," this story has a pretty straightforward "punishment of the sinner" message that many critics find uncongenial. Lovecraft, too, seems to have found it so: "In the Vault", a 1925 story, is the last one in this direct mode. Most sufferers in Lovecraft after 1925 (as well as a goodly number before that date, of course) commit only the sin of Faust, that of seeking knowledge beyond their power, and such Faustian dreams often have a sort of doomed nobility to them ("Charles Dexter Ward", "At the Mountains of Madness"). We can, however, read "The Dunwich Horror" (1928) as a kind of last gasp of the "sinner narrative," a sort of Rosetta stone linking it to the more orthodox Lovecraftian message of inevitable cosmic doom.

NEXT: "From Beyond"

Grecian argle-bargle from HPL, obviously modelled on Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, and just as obviously a mistaken choice by Lovecraft. I'm not sure why Lovecraft's historical fiction skills suck here, when his work in, say, "Charles Dexter Ward" demonstrates how good his historical sense was. Maybe it's just the seven years' or whatever difference in writing dates. Maybe it's just that nothing much happens in the story at all, or that Lovecraft the writer was stultified by his historical knowledge here. For whatever reason, comparing "The Tree" to Robert E. Howard's historical fiction (written with a far more slapdash approach) is kind of depressing.

****

Far more interestingly, George Wetzel takes "The Tree" as an example of the unsung influence of the Greek myths on the Cthulhu Mythos, along with other early efforts such as "Hypnos," "The Moon-Bog," "The Crawling Chaos," "The Green Meadow," and the word Necronomicon, which is (bad) Greek. Wetzel has ahold of something there, specifically when he cites the rarely seen 1920 Lovecraft collaboration "Poetry and the Gods," from which I quote thusly:

In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that the Gods were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In Tartarus the Titans writhe and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the children of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotos gardens beyond the sunset.

Wetzel likewise suggests that Lovecraft the Epicurean modelled his Cthulhoid gods on Epicurus' deities, who remain blissfully unconcerned with -- or even unconscious of -- human affairs. (This, I think, would be the middle position between the generally upbeat apocalypse of "Poetry and the Gods" and the more familiar degeneracy-and-devastation of "Nyarlathotep", written about the same time.) Wetzel draws a number of specific parallels between Lovecraft's horror and fantasy worlds and the Greek myths, and I think in general he's correct to do so, if only because a) we know, from his own testimony, that HPL modelled his mythos on historical myth patterns, and b) almost the only historical myth pattern that Lovecraft understood in any sophistication was the Greek.

****

Myself, I've found reading Greek myths, and reading about Greek myths, to be particularly useful in constructing horror mythologies and secret histories, including and especially Lovecraftian ones. Although Robert Graves is a howling crazy person whose footnotes should not be trusted one iota, his anthology The Greek Myths will rapidly undo a great deal of the false certainty one gets from one's childhood reading of Hamilton, Bulfinch, D'Aulaire, etc. (I also recommend hitting the very fine Theoi.com site for a first cut at comparative Greek mythology.) The Greek mythic tradition extends over at least 900 years (and at least four geographically and culturally separate matrices: Ionia, Classical Greece, Hellenistic Egypt, and Rome) in written works alone -- as a body of worship it goes back at least another thousand years or so. Our first work of Greek mythology, Hesiod's Theogony, is an attempt to rationalize and unify a hugely disparate body of myths. (Hesiod was the Lin Carter, if you will, of Greek mythology.) There is a palpable change (or rather, many palpable changes) over that time in the whole tenor and character of written Greek myth, as well as in the patterns of worship and lived experience of Greek pagan religion.

M. Jane Harrison and F.M. Cornford and their ilk likewise went far too far, especially in imagining that they could suss out the "primitive" versions of the myths, but reading them is likewise a corrective to collapsing Hesiod and Ovid into one story, as well as a great way to creep yourself the hell out. I recommend E.R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational as another study in that corrective tradition, and usefully, one that doesn't happen to be full of Frazerian bilge.

NEXT: "The Cats of Ulthar"

Not actually a bad story, in an EC Comics kind of way, but far, far from Lovecraft's best. I don't find myself particularly annoyed by the arch diction (which Joshi, I think, is correct to derive from Dunsany's tales), and at least Lovecraft doesn't drag it out endlessly (a la "The Outsider") in an attempt to prolong the journey to the punch line.

****

And I really do like the Terrible Old Man, his necromantic bottles (which I've ripped off for a number of RPG sessions since), and especially his front yard:

Among the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys...

This sentence-plus is nigh-perfectly done, although one might cavil at Lovecraft using "strange" and "oddly" to force the reader's conclusion.

****

Honesty compels us to admit that this is a Lovecraft story (although almost the only one) in which he gives ugly narrative (as opposed to descriptive) vent to his racism. Ethnic minorities (Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, as Joshi points out, represent Italians, Poles, and Portuguese, the three main non-Anglo immigrant groups in Providence in 1920) die horribly at the hands of Outside forces, directed by an old Anglo-Saxon New Englander. Worse yet, their deaths are obviously played for comic effect. Lovecraft diminishes some of the nasty taste by conflating Anglo-Saxon New England longevity with degeneration and horror (which he repeats in, for example, "Picture in the House," "He," "Charles Dexter Ward," and even "Dunwich Horror" -- all of which have Anglo-Saxon victims), but not all of it.

NEXT: "The Tree"

This is a terrific, terrific story. I've loved it forever. I set part of one of my early Call of Cthulhu campaigns in Sarnath an unspecified number of years before the DOOM. (Time gates and dream-based time travel, since you asked.) This story is like caramel. I'm sure there are people who don't like caramel, but don't ask me to understand them.

****

"Sarnath" is one of HPL's three best pre-"Cthulhu" tales, up there with "The Music of Erich Zann" and "Rats in the Walls." And where "Rats" is his perfect 'Poe' story, this is his perfect 'Dunsany' story. ("Zann" is his perfect 'Lovecraft' story to that point, although with "Call of Cthulhu" HPL goes and rewrites the rulebook for perfect Lovecraft stories.)

Like "Rats," the tone and aim are slightly different than the model (In this case "Time and the Gods," primarily, but there's lots of others in there.), but like "Rats" (and "Dunwich Horror," his perfect 'Machen' story) the difference is an intentional culinary choice, in this case a surprisingly mature one given the story's early composition. (1919 -- like I say, HPL writes nothing to touch it for two more years, although "Cats of Ulthar" comes perhaps close.)

It's a little denser than Dunsany (a custard, not a meringue), but it makes up for the added weight with both mythic resonance and horror. Dunsany's tales sound like late-Classical myths, something spun up by Virgil or Ovid or one of those guys and translated by an Edwardian Irishman. Lovecraft's best work sounds like early myth, something desperately smooshed together by Hesiod or hinted at by Euripides and translated by a shocked Cotton Mather.¹ And Dunsany only very seldom gets into true horror, although he'll make more small hairs stand up on the back of your neck than any other fantasiste this side of Fritz Leiber.

****

This story is pregnant with Biblical weight, referencing Daniel at Belshazzar's feast, the fate of Dagon before the Ark, and the fate prophesied for Edom in Isaiah.² Even the dimensions of Sarnath and the fulsome description of its wonders recall the New Jerusalem in Ezekiel and Revelation. But of course, it's Lovecraft, so the avenging God who brings the well-deserved DOOM to Sarnath is not YHWH but Bokrug, and his angels are demonic ab-human moon-spawn.

****

There's all kinds of other places you could go with this story. I'll toss a little one out here for now, as it suits my own personal urban-mythic obsessions. Consider the Lovecraftian city topos. As with cities in most of the Western literary canon, a city is either Dis (Ib, Irem, New York) or Jerusalem (Sarnath, Providence, Randolph Carter's 'sunset city'). What this story tells us is that Dis and Jerusalem are the same city. Sarnath destroys Ib, Ib destroys Sarnath. We see the same evolution with Kadath and Pnakotus -- both locus of horror and alien paradise, the horror of the place occurring precisely because the city was once an alien paradise -- and in a twisted way with Innsmouth (a place of horrible exodus becomes a place of welcome pilgrimage) and even R'lyeh, the promised New Jerusalem of the apocalyptic future when the stars come right again.

"The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth." You tell 'em Isaiah, and play that over on your non-Euclidean tintype.

[1] Mather had a fine amateur scientific mind, for 1690; an archaeologist, a naturalist, and to the extent of his abilities quite the natural philosopher. He may have been wrong about witches -- and even there his error was more in the realm of legal than scientific theory -- but he was right about smallpox inoculation.

[2] Isaiah 34:12: "They shall name it No Kingdom There, and all its princes shall be nothing." One of the few actual improvements to the poetry of the King James Version made by the RSV. The KJV, normally the gold standard, has this kind of meh line: "They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing." On the other hand, the KJV comes roaring back to kick all kinds of ass in the very next verse: "And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls." I'm a Calvinist; of course I love Isaiah. I'm a writer; of course I love the King James.

NEXT: "The Terrible Old Man"