The Classic Horror Stories

by Roger Luckhurst

  Irem, the City of Pillars: Iram, a lost ancient city in Arabia, said in the Quran to have been smote by God in punishment.

  Necronomicon … may die: the Necronomicon was HPL’s invented grimoire, and the author’s name, Abdul Alhazred, was one Lovecraft had adopted as an alter ego when obsessed with A Thousand and One Nights as a child. He first cited this couplet in his short story, ‘The Nameless City’ in 1921, and refers to ‘the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred’ in ‘The Hound’ in 1922. HPL began to weave references across his stories, and soon his circle of writing friends and their fictional occult manuals began to be included as in-jokes. HPL even wrote a spoof ‘History of the Necronomicon’ tracing its origins back to the eighth century (see MW, 52–3). To the confusion of librarians and book-dealers, many fans of HPL requested copies for years. Even more confusingly, there now exist hundreds of occult books purporting to be the ‘real’ Necronomicon that have been published since HPL’s death.

  Machen … Smith: Arthur Machen (1863–1947), the Welsh Gothic and weird writer, who provides the structural model for ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ from his nasty tale ‘The Great God Pan’. Clark Ashton Smith (18931961) was a visionary painter and weird writer, a long-term ally and friend of HPL.

  Paterson … local museum: the Paterson Museum in Paterson, New Jersey, was curated by HPL’s friend James Ferdinand Morton from 1925.

  Valparaiso: main port of Chile. All the action in this report takes place in the Southern Seas, a zone HPL returns to in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’.

  Kanakas: generic racial term used for native islanders in British colonies in the Pacific; acquired a pejorative, racist usage in Australia.

  masqueraded as ‘Christiania’: the capital of Norway was renamed Christiania during the seventeenth century. A law of 1924 restored the city to its original name of Oslo.

  non-Euclidean: a revolution in geometry took place in nineteenth-century mathematics, in which the classical tenets of the Greek theorist Euclid were joined by an array of new spatial possibilities and theorizations, including elliptical and hyperbolic geometry. These quite often shaded into the occult (see note to p. 291), and HPL eagerly exploited the rhetoric of non-Euclidean dimensions to add conviction to his scientific materialist version of the Gothic.

  Polypheme … Odysseus: in Homer’s Odyssey, Polyphemus is one of a race of savage one-eyed giants who imprisons Odysseus with his men in a cave and begins to devour them. Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and escapes by boat, the giant hurling stones and imprecations after him.

  Tartarus: in Greek mythology, the place beneath the underworld for the punishment of those who offend the gods.

  THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

  This story was written in March 1927, the last tale written in the burst of creativity HPL experienced when he returned to Providence from New York. He sold it to Hugo Gernsback’s magazine Amazing Stories, where it appeared in September 1927. Gernsback’s magazine was one of the crucial pulps where American science fiction was beginning to be defined, although the term was not yet in use. In his first issue (April 1926), Gernsback called it ‘a magazine of “scientifiction”’, a type of story written by Verne, Poe, and Wells, ‘a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’. Over the next year, the responses of readers began to separate out ‘scientifiction’ from the more ‘fanciful’ type of weird tale. HPL’s story was therefore written in the space between these emergent genres: it is a fusion of science fiction and Gothic tropes. HPL sent a copy to his fellow weird writer, Clark Ashton Smith: ‘It lacks compactness and climax, perhaps, but must be taken as an atmospheric study rather than as a tale’ (SL ii. 127). The main influence was clearly Algernon Blackwood, whom HPL judged to have written the finest evocations of weird atmosphere. He was excited about selling another story, but in the end Gernsback paid only $25.

  Arkham: Lovecraft’s fictional town in Massachusetts, which featured in many HPL stories, starting in 1922.

  Salvator Rosa: Rosa (1615–73), Italian Baroque painter, a pioneer of wild and picturesque landscapes that would dominate Romantic art. HPL commented: ‘In paintings my favourite subject is the landscape—or the wide architectural vista—and I find most of my favourites extending from the 17th to the middle 19th century’ (SL iv. 419).

  blasted heath: an echo of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c. 1603), where the three witches gather (1.iii.77), but also of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), in the description of the army of the fallen:

  yet faithful how they stood,

  Their glory withered; as, when heaven’s fire

  Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,

  With singed top their stately growth, though bare,

  Stands on the blasted heath. (i. 611–15)

  Miskatonic: another element of HPL’s invented New England topography; Miskatonic University appears in the next paragraph, with which many of HPL’s hapless heroes have an association.

  occluded gases … oxy-hydrogen blowpipe: HPL had taught himself chemistry as a child, even writing his own textbook on inorganic chemistry. This sentence concerns tests with heat: occluded gases can be released when substances are heated; the borax bead is a standard inorganic device used to test for the presence of metals by colouration when heated; the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe mixes oxygen and hydrogen to produce a hotter flame which can melt platinum and other hard substances.

  spectroscope … spectrum: spectroscopy analyses the interaction of matter with light and other forms of radiated waves. Initially through the use of prisms it can render in visible form—across a spectrum of colours—what is invisible, particular colours indicative of particular substances. Spectroscopy was one of the wonders of nineteenth-century science, and its ability to reveal invisible forms of ‘radiant matter’ was often felt to be close to the supernatural. One of its pioneers, Sir William Crookes (18321919), for instance, also spent years using laboratory devices to measure the ‘psychic force’ of spiritualist mediums.

  aqua regia: a potent mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid, strong enough to dissolve platinum and gold.

  ammonia … carbon disulphide: a list of solvents, substances that can dissolve others in solution at certain fixed temperatures.

  Widmänstätten figures found on meteoric iron: in 1808, Count Alois von Beckh Widmänstätten noticed that if he treated material from iron meteorites with nitric acid, striations in strict patterns emerged. These strange figures were the effect of surface crystallization.

  ‘Dutchman’s breeches’ … bloodroots: Dutchman’s breeches is the popular name for Dicentra cucullaria, a herbaceous plant common in North America that has white flowers shaped like breeches. Bloodroot, common name of Sanguinaria Canadensis, is another perennial herbaceous plant of North America, with white flowers that bloom in spring.

  crawled on all fours: possibly an echo of the brilliant Gothic tale ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by HPL’s fellow New Englander, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in 1892. The story concerns a woman whose ‘rest cure’ treatment involves being locked in an attic and ends with her complete insanity, crawling the perimeter of her prison.

  before 1670 … no later than 1730: HPL’s antiquarian precision about Colonial-style architecture is edited out of the Amazing Stories publication, where the sentence simply reads ‘Most of it built before 1700’.

  democrat-wagon: a light, flat-bed wagon, drawn by one or two horses.

  fire of St Elmo … apostles’ heads at Pentecost: St Elmo’s fire is the bright blue or violet glow seen around pointed objects during certain atmospheric conditions, generated like lightning by electrical fields. It was often seen by sailors on masts (St Elmo is the patron saint of sailors), and entered the world of maritime superstition. Apostles’ heads at Pentecost refers to Acts 2: 1–4: ‘And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were
sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.’ The Apostles were often depicted in art crowned by holy fire.

  Fuseli: Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), Swiss painter who lived in England and had a profound impact on Romantic art. He illustrated Milton, but was most famous for his painting The Nightmare (1782), depicting a deformed night-hag perched on the chest of a sleeping woman.

  Deneb: brightest star in the Cygnus constellation.

  THE DUNWICH HORROR

  This story was written in August 1928, and published in Weird Tales in April 1929. HPL was paid $240 for the tale—his highest fee hitherto. The weird atmosphere and nature of the horror owes much to Algernon Blackwood’s most celebrated tales, ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Wendigo’, and the bewitching forests of Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’.

  CHARLES LAMB: the epigraph derives from the reminiscence of childhood terrors, particularly ones invoked by a biblical etching of the witch of Endor, written by Romantic essayist Charles Lamb. Lamb’s essay was written for the London Magazine under the pseudonym Elia and reprinted in Essays of Elia (1823). Lamb (1775–1834) suffered bouts of mental illness and spent much of his adult life attending to his sister Mary, who had killed their mother in a bout of lunacy. Interestingly, HPL’s ellipsis cuts out a sentence that has a great bearing on the shape of ‘The Dunwich Horror’: ‘All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante—tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons—are they one half so fearful to the spirit of man, as the simple idea of an unembodied spirit following him.’

  lonely and curious country: nearly all of the place names in this story are fictional, but are often based on specific locales HPL visited in his antiquarian wanderings. HPL wrote to Derleth: ‘there is no “Dunwich”—the place being a vague echo of the decadent Massachusetts countryside around Springfield—say Wilbraham, Monson, and Hampden. It would be impossible to make any real place the scene of such bizarre happenings as those which beset my hypothetical towns. At the same time, I take pains to make these places wholly and realistically characteristic of genuine New England’ (SL iii. 432–3).

  stone pillars … crowned: much of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ seems to be inspired by the stone circle at Mystery Hill in North Hampshire. This is a complex array of standing stones, oriented towards the stars, and centred on a slab some claim as a sacrificial altar stone. Some stones also have unknown hieroglyphic markings, first noted in the eighteenth century. Although some claim Mystery Hill and other stone circles to be prehistoric sites, proving very early European contact with the Americas (a claim first made by Josiah Priest in American Antiquities in 1835), it is likely a very recent creation made of local quarry stones. The stories were built up by successive owners of the site, which was named Mystery Hill in 1937 and became a commercial tourist attraction in 1956.

  whippoorwills: a nightjar bird, common to North America, the onomatopoeic name borrowed from the native Pequot language. The haunting cries of the bird have produced many legends and superstitions, some derived from Native American myths. HPL exploits the conventional superstitions that the birds can sense human souls departing and try to capture it at death, or that the singing of a whippoorwill on a gatepost or doorstep presages death in the household. See also note to p. 83 (psychopomps).

  Satan-worship: HPL exploits folk memories of the New England witch-trials that peaked in the 1690s throughout ‘The Dunwich Horror’.

  armigerous families … from Salem in 1692: that is, families with status enough to possess a heraldic coat of arms; these are families that evidently escaped from the intensive wave of persecution during the witch-trials in Salem, Massachusetts, at their height in 1692.

  sermon … in which he said: this is a fictional priest and sermon, but a fair pastiche of the kind of rhetoric used. Congregationalists are a dissenting Protestant low church that take their authority from the congregation assembled, rather than any external authority—an important factor in generating local forms of belief.

  Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial: a list of demons. Azazel is a term associated with the ritual of offering a goat in sacrifice in Leviticus, and becomes personified as a fallen angel in later elaborations. Buzrael is HPL’s invention. Beelzebub, the ‘Lord of the Flies’, names a deity associated with the Ba’al religion, demonized in the Old Testament. Belial is another fallen angel, this time from the New Testament; one of the principal Princes of Darkness in the complex bureaucratic hierarchy of hell.

  Noises in the hills … puzzle to geologists and physiographers: HPL builds on a phenomenon associated with the town of Moodus in Connecticut. The ‘Moodus Noises’ have been heard for centuries from the area around Mount Tom, now ascribed to small tremors and earthquakes, and were the basis of a cult religion in local Algonquian tribes. HPL used the entry in Charles Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896), which recorded particularly intense rumblings and crackings in the area around 1700.

  Devil’s Hop Yard: area of woodland located in East Haddam, Connecticut, associated with several legends. The strange formations in the rocks below the waterfall are said to have been made by the Devil (a Puritan transmutation of a Native American legend); the site is consequently associated with Witches’ Sabbaths. Witchery in the area is also discussed in the entry in Charles Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land on ‘Haddam Enchantments’.

  psychopomps: Greek term meaning ‘guide of souls’; many religions feature beings that serve to guide the newly dead through the passage between life and death. Here, HPL directly uses local New England superstition, which plays a crucial role in ‘The Dunwich Horror’. In his essay, ‘Mrs Miniter—Estimates and Recollections’, describing a visit to Wilbraham, he wrote: ‘I saw the ruinous, deserted old Randolph Beebe house where the whippoorwills cluster abnormally, and learned that these birds are feared by the rustics as evil psychopomps. It is whispered that they linger and flutter around houses where death is approaching, hoping to catch the soul of the departed as it leaves. If the soul eludes them, they disperse in quiet disappointment; but sometimes they set up a chorused clamour of excited, triumphant chattering which makes the watchers turn pale and mutter—with that air of hushed, awestruck portentousness which only a backwoods Yankee can assume—“They got ‘im!”’ (MW, 477).

  Pocumtucks: the Pocumtuc tribe were associated with western Massachusetts, already on the decline in the seventeenth century through war with the Mohawk, and further destroyed by contact with European settlers. Tribal burial sites still survive. Sentinel Hill is probably based on Wilbraham Mountain, Massachusetts.

  Candlemas: Christian feast day, usually 2 February, celebrating Mary taking Jesus to the Temple forty days after birth, to complete her ritual purification. The ceremony of ‘churching’ new mothers forty days after birth (‘purifying’ them and allowing them to return to the congregation) has been discontinued, but obviously has resonances for this tale, which uses the Christian calendar of feast days throughout.

  Hallowe’en: All Hallow’s Eve, 31 October, the day before All Saints’ Day, and thus used as one of the key days for Witches’ Sabbaths.

  Yog-Sothoth: this god in HPL’s cosmogony first appeared in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1926), a demon called up by the black magician Curwen. Curwen says in passing: ‘I laste Night struck on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE.’ In HPL’s spoof ‘History of the Necronomicon’, he also mentioned that the author Abdul Alhazred ‘was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu’ (MW, 52). In a letter in 1936, HPL elaborates: ‘Yog doesn’t always have long, ropy arms, since he assumes a variety of shapes—solid, liquid, and gaseous—at will. Possibly, though, he’s fondest of the form which does have ‘em … It’s not safe even to speak the name of Yog-Soggoth aloud’ (SL v. 303).

  May Eve: 30 April, al
so known as Walpurgisnacht, see note to p. 18.

  bullock is sacrificed … to certain heathen gods: perhaps a reference to Apis, the sacred bull deity of ancient Egypt, worshipped from the earliest dynasties. Bull sacrifice was also central to the Roman cult of Mithras. In the Mithraic Mysteries, the god Mithras is always represented slaying a bull. The cult religion met in temples below ground in secrecy.

  draft board … development camp: in 1917, HPL applied to join the army, and was initially accepted before his mother intervened, and he was declared permanently unfit for service. Worry about the poor physical conditions of potential troops was part of the discourse of fears about racial degeneracy.

  Lammas Night: 1 August, the first harvest festival day of the calendar. In Anglo-Saxon culture, ‘Lammasbread’ was baked with the first grain of the season, and was held to have magical powers.

  Widener library … Arkham: all real research libraries, except the fictional Miskatonic University at Arkham, which is based on the library at Brown University in Providence (where the John Hay Library now holds most of HPL’s papers).

  Necronomicon: HPL’s fictional Arabic magical grimoire. For details, see note to p. 39.

  Dr Dee’s English version: John Dee (1527–1608) was a celebrated scientist, mathematician, and occultist, who became one of Europe’s leading authorities on magic, alchemy, and divination. The private circulation of magic books in manuscript between scholars was a widespread practice in the Renaissance, and it was the translation of Arabic magical texts that brought Hermetic philosophy into the West.