The Classic Horror Stories

by Roger Luckhurst

  The demon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger south-west towards the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer?

  For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.

  Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a prehuman world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from Palaeogean gulfs of time?

  Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories?

  Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking elder things of the mad winds and demon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?

  I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But, mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.

  If the laws of the universe are kind they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.

  I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries.

  No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.

  APPENDIX

  INTRODUCTION FROM

  ‘SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE’

  THE oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tales as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively inspired idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to ‘uplift’ the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

  The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

  Man’s first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extraterrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conducted toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, while a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.

  Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of a darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity be superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

  With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of his tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which
now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which must otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem Childe Roland; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr Holmes, the subtle novel, Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, The Upper Berth and a number of other examples; Mrs Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, The Yellow Wall Paper; whilst the humourist, W. W. Jacobs, produced that able melodramatic bit called The Monkey’s Paw.

  This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author’s knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

  Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfil every condition of true supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author’s intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a ‘high spot’ must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  H. P. Lovecraft has always had dedicated readers and fans who have established a remarkable body of commentary on his work. Any editor working on the tales is reliant on this scholarship. Since 1980, the tireless work of S. T. Joshi has tried to secure authoritative editions of Lovecraft stories, and published many illuminating, additional works. This edition comes in the wake of Joshi’s work on Lovecraft, whilst working with the original publications of the stories.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  HPL

  H. P. Lovecraft

  HPL: AL

  Joshi’s biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life

  MW

  Miscellaneous Writings

  SL

  Selected Letters

  STJ

  S. T. Joshi, the Lovecraft editor and scholar

  THE HORROR AT RED HOOK

  This story was written in August 1925, in direct response to living close to the Red Hook slum in Brooklyn as HPL experienced a slide down the social scale during his stay in New York. HPL wrote to friends that the story ‘deals with hideous cult-practices behind the gangs of noisy young loafers whose essential mystery has impressed me so much’ (SL i. 20) and ‘the idea that black magic exists in secret today, or that hellish antique rites still survive in obscurity, is one that I have used and shall use again. When you see my new tale The Horror at Red Hook, you will see what use I make of the idea in connexion with the gangs of young loafers and herds of evil-looking foreigners that one sees everywhere in New York’ (SL i. 27). The story was later published in Weird Tales in January 1927.

  There are sacraments of evil…MACHEN’: the epigraph is from Arthur Machen’s ‘The Red Hand’ (1895), an adventure of Machen’s Decadent London detectives Phillipps and Dyson, here on the trail of ‘encountering primitive man in this whirling and mysterious city’. Troglodytic defenders of the treasure of an ancient burial mound commit ritualistic murder in Clerkenwell to protect it from discovery. Machen (1863–1947) was a crucial Gothic and occult author, experiencing a revival of interest in America in the 1920s, when HPL first discovered him.

  Pascoag … Chepachet: village and town in north-west Rhode Island, still bearing versions of their Native American names. HPL visited in September 1923 with C. M. Eddy, declaring Chepachet ‘a veritable bucolic poem—a study in ancient New-England village atmosphere’ (SL i. 251). He explains that this trip ‘was a quest of the grotesque and the terrible—a search for Dark Swamp, in north-western Rhode Island, of which Eddy had heard sinister whispers among the rusticks’ (SL i. 264).

  Woonsocket: town 15 miles north of Providence in Rhode Island.

  Red Hook section of Brooklyn: Roode Hoek was established by the Dutch in 1636, named for its red clay and for the hook or point of land which pushed into the river. Fort Defiance was built there during the War of Independence. It became a key port for Brooklyn and New York City, and by the 1920s was the busiest port in the world. That made it a cosmopolitan area, with a transient and poor population. When HPL lived on its edges, it was a bustling slum, and subject to the moral alarms that typically surrounded discussion of slum populations in the early twentieth century (see Introduction).

  Celt’s far vision … things: it was a convention, strengthened by racial science in the Victorian period, that those with Celtic blood had ‘second sight’ and other forms of psychic sensitivity, at least compared to the stolid empiricism of the Anglo-Saxon.

  Dublin Review: respected monthly review, started in 1836 and published in London for English readership, but intended to offer views sympathetic to the Irish Catholic majority. It became a serious journal for long reviews on cultural and scientific matters.

  ‘es lasst… to be read’: the last words of Poe’s famous story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), a feverish nightmare of a pursuit of a slum dweller who refuses to give his odd, clandestine night-time activity up to meaningful interpretation to the initially confident narrator.

  Beardsley … Doré: key Decadent artists. Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98) was the notorious English illustrator and writer associated with the Yellow Book and other scandalous publications in the 1890s. He died of tuberculosis, aged 26. Gustav Doré (1832–83) was the French book illustrator whose illustrations of hell for Milton’s Paradise Lost terrified HPL as a child. He also illustrated Poe and was famous for the gloomy and mysterious portraits of London for Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage. The description of Malone in these passages actually describes the early life of Arthur Machen (see note to p. 3).

  Clinton and Court Streets: when HPL composed this tale in two days in August 1925, he was living at 169 Clinton Street.

  Witch Cult in Western Europe: the book exists: the anthropologist Margaret Murray (1863–1963) published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology in 1921, arguing that witchcraft in modern Europe survived in unbroken continuity from the cult worship of Diana in pagan times. This fitted perfectly with Lovecraft’s interest in ‘survivals’ of primitive races and beliefs, although Murray
’s thesis is no longer supported by historians of witchcraft.

  Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults: ‘Turanian’ was a racial marker, used at various times to demarcate Turkish, Sami, or Finno-Urgic peoples. It suggests here the very borders of East and West.

  Suydam: Lovecraft’s choice of names is careful and they are often chosen for their additional resonances. Here, Suydam is an old Dutch name, associated with the original settlers of Roode Hoek, suggesting ancestral continuity. The original title of the story was ‘The Case of Robert Suydam’.

  Flatbush … gravestones: Flatbush is a more salubrious area of Brooklyn, where HPL lived when he first moved in with Sonia Greene on their marriage in 1924. A Reformed church had been built in Flatbush in 1654; HPL references the third church on the site, built in 1793, which still survives. This makes it the oldest continuous site of worship in the city. HPL’s antiquarian trips regularly involved trips to graveyards, where he took note of names and styles of memorial.

  Kabbalah and the Faustus legend: the legend of Faust began in the fifteenth century and involves a learned doctor who raised the devil Mephistopheles and sold his soul for secret knowledge: the tale has been retold by Christopher Marlowe, Johann von Goethe, Thomas Mann, and many others. The Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical lore that claims to unveil hidden knowledge from sacred texts by various forms of interpretation; the texts of the Kabbalah are made up of various commentaries and accounts, forming a shadow-text to the more official writings of the Talmud.

  ‘Sephiroth’, ‘Ashmodai’ and ‘Samaël’: Sephiroth is the Hebrew term for ‘counting’, but also names a mystical form of insight in Kabbalistic and occult thought. The Sephiroth are the ten different ways in which God reveals his will through emanations, each named in a complex hierarchy and interplay in the Kabbalah. The system was appropriated from Jewish mysticism and used extensively in the late nineteenth-century occult revival. Ashmodai is the Hebrew name for the king of demons, featured in the Book of Tobit, part of the Apocrypha. By the Renaissance, Asmodeus is named as one of the seven princes of hell, each representing one of the seven deadly sins: Asmodeus is lust. Samaël is the Angel of Death, a representative of the severity of God, sometimes held to be the angel that tempts Eve in the form of the Serpent, or wrestles Jacob.