The Classic Horror Stories

by Roger Luckhurst

  Kadath: Kadath is another element of HPL’s cosmogony, an inaccessible mountain, perhaps borrowed from the theosophical idea that the Masters live beyond human range in the mountains of Tibet. The name first appears in ‘Other Gods’ (1921): ‘now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no man treads, and are grown stern, having no higher peak whereto to flee at the coming of men’. It recurs again in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), and is a point of reference for ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1931).

  Shub-Niggurath: in a 1936 letter, HPL suggested: ‘Yog-Sothoth’s wife is the hellish cloud-like entity, Shub-Niggurath, in whose honour nameless cults hold the rite of the Goat with a Thousand Young. By her he has two monstrous offspring—the evil twins Nug and Yeb’ (SL v. 303).

  Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan: Machen’s story, first published in John Lane’s notorious Keynotes series in 1894, was a key reference point for HPL. The plot, which features a scientific/occult experiment on a young girl to open her senses to the sexual pagan god Pan, half-goat, half-man, has many echoes in ‘The Dunwich Horror’.

  Roodmas: 3 May, Feast of the Cross (or Rood).

  Lammas and the equinox: that is, between 1 August and 21 September.

  Bear’s Den: HPL visited Bear’s Den in Massachusetts in the summer of 1928, where he described the deep forest gorge in detail in letters to Lillian D. Clark.

  Associated Press: news agency cooperative that distributes stories to members. This suggests Dunwich becomes a syndicated ‘local colour’ story.

  party telephones: shared telephone lines; this was a common arrangement, particularly in rural areas in the early days of the system.

  alphabet … used in Mesopotamia: Mesopotamian Arabic is associated with the territory now covered by Iraq. HPL might also have been evoking the cuneiform Akkadian script associated with ancient Mesopotamia. Magical books were often written in cipher and ancient script implied Hermetic knowledge ‘forgotten’ by the West.

  Trithemius’ Poligraphia … and Klüber’s Kryptographik: HPL relies on his trusty copy of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he copies out all of these titles from the entry on cryptography by John Eglinton Bailey.

  Aklo … to work on: a lot of the obscure terms here are HPL’s own invention, but STJ has noted that ‘Aklo’ and ‘Voorish’ are borrowed from Arthur Machen’s story, ‘The White People’, published in The House of Souls (1906). Machen’s story is itself largely a transcript of a secret magical diary, which in its first paragraph states ‘I must not write down … the way to make the Aklo letters’ and eludes any detailed descriptions of the Ceremonies undertaken. Machen’s book also refers to ‘the kingdom of Voor, where the light goes when it is put out’. This incantation of invented mythography is also indebted to Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana (1905), another HPL favourite.

  Daemonolatreia of Remigius: HPL’s invented Necronomicon is mentioned alongside the real Demonolatry, written by Nicholas Remy (1530–1616), published in 1595. It is a record of his career as a witch-hunter, and an exploration of the Devil’s manifestations; as a judge, he is thought to have hanged nearly 900 people as witches. HPL also mentions the book in his story ‘The Festival’ (1923).

  Negotium perambulans in tenebris: Latin phrase meaning ‘the pestilence that walks in the dark’. It is a quotation from Psalm 91: 5–6: ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; | Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.’ HPL may well have come to the quotation through the ghost story by English writer E. F. Benson, ‘Negotium Perambulans’ (1922).

  Acherontic: Acheron was one of the principal rivers of the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology; HPL’s adjective thus means hellish.

  THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

  This story was started in February 1930 but not completed until May, prompted by several rewrites suggested by friends. It was published in Weird Tales in August 1931.

  Vermont floods of November 3, 1927: HPL uses a real event as the starting point for his fiction. On the night of 3–4 November, an unprecedented 8 inches of rain fell on already saturated ground in Vermont, resulting in extensive flooding. Eighty-four people were killed, including the lieutenant governor of the state, and 1,285 bridges were swept away by swollen flood waters. HPL visited Vermont in the summer of 1927 and again in July 1928, where, he wrote to a friend, ‘In this half-fabulous paradise of endless green hills and wild, brook-haunted glens, it is needless to say that my nerves recovered very substantially from the strain of New York’ (SL ii. 244–5).

  Winooski River … West River … Passumpsic … Lyndonville: three Vermont rivers that drain mountains. Winooski River is in the north of the state, West River in the south; both drain the Green Mountains. The branches of the Passumpsic River meet at Lyndonville.

  Eli Davenport: an invented name.

  circles of stones: probably a reference to Mystery Hill stone circle: see note to p. 81.

  certain caves: HPL had a fascination with the caves of New England, which attracted their own legends. In July 1928 he visited the so-called ‘Endless Caverns’ in Virginia, which had been discovered only in 1879: ‘For over an hour I was led spellbound through illimitable gulfs and chasms of elfin beauty and daemonic mystery … down, down to the sunless secrets of the gnomes and night-gaunts, and the worlds where web-winged monsters and fabulous gargoyles reign in undisputed horror’ (SL ii. 246).

  colonial grants: the governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, issued land grants between 1749 and 1764 in disputed territory. This land dispute became the basis of the formation of the Vermont Republic. HPL was delighted to discover that his publisher-friend W. Paul Cook was directly descended from Wentworth.

  Pennacook myths: Pennacook, a Native American tribe, the Abenaki penakuk. Part of the confederacy of Algonquian tribes, mainly located in what is now New Hampshire and Massachusetts. They suffered catastrophic losses from contact with Europeans through smallpox, and were eventually driven from their territory by British forces in 1676. The Abenaki myths include elaborate, complex origin stories.

  Pennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five Nations: distinct languages are spoken by Pennacooks (see note above), the Huron confederacy, who spoke Wendat, and the Five Nations, another name for the Iriquois League, who spoke dialects of Iroquinian language.

  kallikanzarai: these are goblins in Greek folklore, who surface from below ground between Christmas and 6 January to cause mischief amongst men.

  ‘Abominable Snow-Men’ … of the Himalayan summits: the ‘Abominable Snow Man’ was the invention of a series of mistranslations that occurred in 1921, before being consolidated in Western myths about the Himalayas. The term Mi-Go translates the local term ‘wild man’, which is used interchangeably with ‘Yeti’. During an expedition in 1921, Charles Howard-Bury reported seeing bipedal creatures far above the snowline on the north face of Mount Everest. He misheard his guides calling this creature ‘metch kangmi’, a term authoritatively declared as meaning ‘filthy’ or ‘abominable’ snowman. Several high profile expeditions in the twentieth century were dedicated to finding definitive evidence of the existence of this creature.

  Charles Fort: Fort (1874–1932) was an American novelist and researcher into anomalous phenomena. In 1919, he published The Book of the Damned, a collection of eyewitness and other reports of strange events, delivered in a neutral, deadpan tone. The Fortean Times magazine continues to report anomalous phenomena in the same spirit.

  Arthur Machen: Machen (1863–1946), HPL’s touchstone for weird fiction, used Celtic mythology of the ‘little people’ in several tales, including ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ in The Three Impostors, a key reference for this tale in several ways.

  ‘The Pendrifter’s’ thoughtful column: the Battleboro Daily Reformer did exist, and carried the Pendrifter column, written by Charles Crane. During HPL’s visit to Vermont in June 1928, the colu
mn carried a piece called ‘A Weird Writer is in Our Midst’, a flattering piece about HPL. HPL then met Crane on 21 June.

  Henry Wentworth Akeley: the name is a homage: HPL met Bert G. Akley on his trip to Vermont, a farmer and self-taught painter and photographer (see HPL: AL, 445).

  Tylor … Smith: this is a list of anthropologists, mainly Victorians who adopted versions of evolutionary theory and who specialized in the early development of the races of man. Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) was famous for Primitive Culture (1871), a Darwinian account of the origins of culture. Tylor focused on the notion of ‘survivals’, aspects of superstition or magical belief that had not died out but continued up into even allegedly ‘civilized’ societies. John Lubbock (1834–1913), an ally of Darwin, was central to the establishment of scientific institutions and public funding in Victorian England, and was also a specialist in prehistoric settlers in the British Isles. James G. Frazer (1854–1941) wrote The Golden Bough (first volume published in 1890), a key anthropological synthesis of origin myths. Armand de Quatrefages (1810–92) was a naturalist and expert on racial theory. For Murray, see note to p. 7. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) was an American zoologist and palaeontologist, who countered Darwinian descent of man from the apes with his own ‘Dawn Man’ theory. Arthur Keith (1866–1955) was Hunterian professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and a theorist of racial difference. Marcellin Boule (1861–1942) was a pioneer of the study of Neanderthal fossil remains. G. Elliott Smith (1871–1937) was a doctor and archaeologist, who argued passionately for the European (as opposed to African) origin of man. HPL’s own racial theories found sustenance from many of these authoritative figures.

  Ex nihilo nihil fit: ‘Nothing comes from nothing’, a scientific and philosophical principle, first argued by Parmenides.

  ether: from ancient to Victorian physics, the ether was the invisible substance that permeated the universe and thus explained action at a distance. Developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century effectively discarded the theoretical need for any ethereal substance. As it fell out of scientific use, it did retain occult resonances: theosophists were trained in ethereal astral travel, for instance.

  black stone with unknown hieroglyphics: many have speculated on the runic inscriptions on stones in New England (see note to p. 57 on Widmänstätten). Here, HPL is also echoing Arthur Machen’s story, ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, which centrally features ‘a lump of black stone, rudely annotated with queer marks and scratches’ and which leads to fugitive survivals of an ancient race.

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

  kodak views: Kodak was a photography company founded by George Eastman in 1889. It pioneered the use of portable, compact cameras and film that could be developed by amateurs, and so dominated the mass market that ‘kodak’ became an adjective in its own right.

  double exposure: the device of superimposing two exposures on the same photographic plate was frequently used to create fraudulent images of spirits and other supernatural phenomena.

  Yuggoth …Tsathoggua … Magnum Innominandum: an invocation of gods and monsters, created by HPL, but also by his circle of weird tale friends and other admired writers. Yuggoth was HPL’s name, coined in the sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth, composed in 1929–30. Later in this story, it becomes identified with the planet Pluto, discovered and named in 1930, whilst HPL was drafting this tale. Great Cthulhu was the monstrous god detailed in HPL’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Tsathoggua is the name of the monstrous toad god created by Clark Ashton Smith in his story, ‘The Return of Satampra Zeiros’ (written in 1929, published in Weird Tales in 1931), a repeated reference point for HPL. Yog-Sothoth was the god invoked in ‘The Dunwich Horror’. R’lyeh is the city of Cthulhu, sunk beneath the waves. Azathoth was one of HPL’s invented demons, called ‘the boundless daemon sultan’ mentioned at the beginning of HPL’s Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926) and ‘monstrous nuclear chaos’ in ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. Nyarlathotep, ‘the crawling chaos’ out of ancient Egypt, appears in HPL’s early short story of the same name, based on a nightmare (1920). Hastur is borrowed from the story ‘Haita the Shepherd’ by Ambrose Bierce (1891), and mentioned again in ‘The Demoiselle D’Ys’ in Robert Chambers’s celebrated collection of weird tales, The King in Yellow (1895). Yian is another borrowing from Robert Chambers. Leng is a ‘cold desert plateau’ in HPL’s 1920 tale, ‘Celephaïs’. It is also associated with an amulet marked with ‘the soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia’ in ‘The Hound’ (1922). It will reappear in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. The Lake of Hali is derived from Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow, where the mysterious city of Carcosa is located. Bethmoora is the name of a city recalled in Lord Dunsany’s short story, ‘Bethmoora’ (1910), ‘that white and beautiful city’ beyond the desert, wiped out by a vengeful emperor. The Yellow Sign is a reference to the central story in Chambers’s The King in Yellow. To possess this sigil is to be victim to a form of baneful influence from the king. L’mur-Kathulos echoes the name Kathulos, which appears in Robert E. Howard’s key weird tale, ‘Skull-Face’ (1929)—he claimed to have invented the name independently from HPL, despite its closeness to Cthulhu. By association, Bran is an echo of Robert E. Howard’s Pictish hero, Bran Mak Morn, who featured in a connected series of stories Howard published in Weird Tales from 1930, part of Howard’s exploration of his own Scottish ancestry. Magnum Innominandum is a Latin term meaning ‘The Great Unnamable’. In a letter in 1927, HPL recalled lengthy dreams in which he appeared to be channelling the life of a Roman centurion. One dream set in the Pyrenees features the Strange Dark Folk who capture people to sacrifice ‘to their unknown, unnamable deity (in the dream Magnum Innominandum)’ (SL ii. 190).

  May Eve—the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend: one of the most important nights for witch gatherings, a calendar date also used in ‘The Dunwich Horror’; see note to p. 18 on Walpurgisnacht.

  Shub-Niggurath: an invocation to the ‘hellish cloud-like’ wife of Yog-Sothoth, also used in ‘The Dunwich Horror’. HPL continues to associate her with ancient fertility religions, and, via goatish associations, with the Devil. See note to p. 94.

  Einsteinian space-time continuum: the theory of relativity espoused by Albert Einstein was not very widely understood in its specifics, but Einstein became an American celebrity in the 1920s and popular versions of his theory were commonly available. HPL approved of Einstein’s atheism (SL iii. 229) and incorporated Einstein into his cosmicism in 1930: ‘Whatever future mathematicians and physicists may discover regarding the widest working out of [Einstein’s] principles, it seems certain that the general facts of relativity and curved space are unshakable realities … There is no point in the archaic attitude of questioning how the ordered cosmos “was evolved out of nothingness”, for we realise now that there never was or can be such a thing as nothingness. The cosmos always existed and always will exist, its order being a basic and inseparable function of the mathematical entity called Space-Time. There is no sense in talking about the “creation” of something which never needed to be “created”’ (SL iii. 241).

  telepathic and hypnotic powers: Frederic Myers coined the term ‘telepathy’ in 1882, suggesting that it was a fugitive sign of the next stage of evolutionary development. Almost immediately, it became associated in scientific romances with advanced beings.

  R.F.D. man: a postman from the Rural Free Delivery mail service.

  modus vivendi: Latin, meaning a way of finding an agreement between parties who disagree.

  cormophytic fungi: Cormophyta, a redundant classification of plants with roots and stem.

  My train … beliefs: this paragraph and several that follow over the next couple of pages are largely transposed from HPL’s travel notes, ‘Vermont—First Impressions’, written in 1927 (MW, 293–6).

  daylight time schemes: daylight savings
time was first introduced in the Great War to aid the war effort. It was locally applied in the United States at this time.

  Wantastiquet … old legends cluster: Wantastiquet Mountain is in south New Hampshire. In an 1874 discussion of legends associated with the mountain, Charles Frost recalled: ‘It was related that about 100 years ago, early one evening, an explosion which terribly shook this mountain was heard by the people of Hinsdale, and also by the inmates at old Fort Dummer, which was this side of the river … This spot commanded a view of the top of the mountain, and by them a great light was seen, so astonishing and remarkable that it was resolved to visit the place as soon as they thought safety would permit, and the place where the explosion took place was soon guessed at among the jagged rocks and fissures, and from an examination of the surroundings they were thoroughly convinced of the great event’ (‘That New Hampshire “Volcano”’, 1874).

  ‘sacred codfish’ device of that year: in 1928, Massachusetts licence plates carried the mark of the codfish, symbol of the fish on which the state made its wealth and one of which hangs over elected officials in the Massachusetts legislature.

  Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo: ‘Italian primitives’ was a term in the history of art used for those involved in the transition from medieval to Renaissance art. Giovanni Sodoma (1477–1549) was mainly known for work in Siena. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) became the archetypal figure of the Renaissance artist and scientist.

  R’lyeh when it was above the waters: the lost city, sunk beneath the Pacific. See the last section of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.

  K’n-yan … Yoth … N’kai: K’n-yan is an underground realm that HPL went on to describe in detail in the story he revised for Zealia Bishop, ‘The Mound’, work he did at about the time he was composing this story. Yoth is the red-lit cavern beneath K’n-yan, and N’kai the dark cavern beneath that, in HPL’s classic structure of recursive horrors beneath horrors beneath horrors.