by Kenneth Hite
In my own case, reading this story also let all the light in at once about the “house as violated human body” subtext that, for example, William Hope Hodgson used in House on the Borderland. Indeed, “The Rats in the Walls” is a great, if somewhat over-loud, haunted house story as well—the comparisons with, say, The Haunting of Hill House or The Shining just jump out at you. It’s instructive in this context to note Poe’s dictum on locale:
[I]t has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident—it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity of place.
We can see Lovecraft apply this dictum in tales like “From Beyond,” “The Temple,” and “Erich Zann,” as well as closer “haunted house” parallels such as “Picture in the House” and “The Shunned House.” As the tales go on, though, the circumscribed spaces get vaster and more sublime: the underground warrens in this tale spread out to become vast buried gulfs in At the Mountains of Madness and “Shadow Out of Time,” and a single circumscribed attic in “Dreams in the Witch House” turns out to contain all of hyperspace.
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On a far more pointless note, the use of President Harding’s death as a thematic sting just before Delapore’s final descent may be unique in popular fiction. This is the sort of detail that just hangs there and niggles at me—did some unknown cadet Delapore kill Harding? Was President Harding somehow protecting the world against the Rats in its Walls? Yes, yes, I know it’s just a weird thematic choice. And Roswell was a weather balloon, Buzzkill Bob.
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For those of you running Elizabethan horror games, I’ll note that the last Baron Exham, the heroic Walter De la Poer, discovers the awful truth about his family and flees Britain during “the reign of James the First.” Surely you can do something with that, perhaps tied in with John Dee’s researches into the ancient Welsh language, which of course the De la Poer basements would preserve…
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This is also one of the few HPL stories to have anything like a typical roleplaying-game player-character investigator party in it. There’s a dilettante, a former pilot, an archaeologist, an anthropologist, a cat, and a renowned psychic (with whose weak-minded powerlessness Lovecraft has a great deal of fun). They’re even “bearing powerful electric searchlights and implements of excavation.” No shotguns, though. Tch tch tch.
The Unnamable
[September 1923]
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. Lovecraft will write this same essay, and tell this same joke, again much more effectively in “Pickman’s Model.” Even as criticism, it isn’t helped by the fact that Lovecraft in 1923 was still in the grip of puerile Decadent aesthetics, which clash 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.
Namelessness is another strong element in Lovecraft, beginning with the narrator of “Dagon” and, to hit only the high points, running through the pointedly nameless “Terrible Old Man” and “He,” “The Nameless City,” the indescribable (and hence impossible to name) “Colour Out of Space,” and Wilbur Whateley’s unnamed twin. The narrators of At the Mountains of Madness and “Shadow Over Innsmouth” are both unnamed in the stories, both the “Thing on the Doorstep” and “Shadow Out of Time” feature nameless entities possessing their narrators, and even the greatest name of all—Cthulhu—is explained as a mere approximation of the unspeakable.
The Festival
[October 1923]
This story always puts me in mind of eels, who migrate, transform, and die when it’s time. Like the eel, our narrator feels an “ancestral call” to gather at a specific spot, in this case a vast cavern underneath Kingsport. (Which is itself a kind of architectural Sargasso, but that’s pushing the metaphor.) Once there, he will undergo a metamorphosis that will change him forever and be unable to return to his normal life. Of course, this being a Lovecraft story, he panics instead and flings himself into the underground river (talk about your potent tropes—this one goes back to before the tales ofSinbad), where he washes up back in the “normal world.” (Here, again, the connection with the apocalyptic “Dagon” and its unreliable narrator.)
He is the eel who woke up and saw himself trapped in his ancestry, trapped in an immense pattern he didn’t create, and one that will easily survive his insignificant defection from it. In my reading, “The Festival” is Lovecraft’s cosmic fatalism in miniature: all humanity is trapped in the patterns of entropy, evolution, and geology, to be destroyed by sudden unknowable catastrophe or erased in slow grinding erosion. The human who sees this clearly—the eel who wakes up—can’t change it. The act of awakening, meanwhile, separates him from the rest of society.
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Although I have to say that the Miskatonic University Library’s policy of letting inmates at local insane asylums study the Necronomicon is probably not helping matters.
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It’s also interesting that in “The Festival,” Lovecraft locates the center of the cosmic evil beneath Kingsport, which he based upon memories of a 1922 visit to the beautifully preserved colonial town of Marblehead, Mass. HPL described that visit as “the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence… That was the high tide of my life.” Somehow, for Lovecraft, the act of perceiving his utopia simultaneously undermined it, perhaps by awakening his cosmic perception: as he put it, the sight “identified me with the stupendous totality of all things…”
Under the Pyramids
[February 1924]
[Originally published in Weird Tales as “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs,” which is how us old-school Lovecraftians grew up referring to it.]
Lovecraft ghost-wrote this tale in February of 1924 for Harry Houdini, as a sales-building ploy for Weird Tales. (Walter Gibson, creator of the Shadow, may have ghost-written the other two “Houdini” stories published in WT.) Apparently Houdini liked it, which is more than I can say. S.T. Joshi and Lin Carter (whose generally good editorial taste shouldn’t be confused with his less than stellar prose) agree with Houdini, so I guess you pays your money and you takes your chance.
Me, I think the whole thing reeks of a half-planned rush job padded out by desperate research-dumping, and believe me, I know one of those when I see it. Any hint of cosmicism in the end is drowned completely by the increasing hilarity of the narrative as Harry Houdini, our heroic narrator, continuously faints and swoons like a maiden aunt…or like a Lovecraft protagonist. (Joshi reads this as a “tart spoof.” Mmm-hmm.) Lovecraft was absolutely correct when he wrote that he had little facility with the “action” genre, and this story proves it.
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But Houdini and Lovecraft—there’s a team-up! (They do team up in the novel The Arcanum, which I haven’t yet read.)
In honor of “Under the Pyramids,” then, here’s some half-digested research passed off as riveting narrative. (Much of this info comes from Chris Perridas’ excellent ‘Lovecraft and His Legacy’ blog10.)
Lovecraft saw Houdini perform in Providence in 1898. HPL was eight years old.
Lovecraft collaborated with/revised stories for C.M. Eddy, a ghost-writer for Houdini and one of Houdini’s agents—Eddy and his family and circle of acquaintances gathered personal information for Houdini to use in fraudulent séance work (which Houdini did to expose mediums, of course).
In November 1923, Lovecraft and Eddy wander around Chepachet, R.I., looking for the “Dark Swamp.” They supposedly find nothing.
HPL wrote the story for Houdini in February 1924, and met Houdini in person by September 1924. Houdini spent much of the fall of 1924 trying to work his connections to get Lovecraft a job.
Houdini’s book A Magician Among the Spirits appears in May 1924; he gives HPL an autographed copy: “To my friend, Howard Lovecraft / Best Wishes, / Houdini / “My brain is the key that sets me free.”
Lovecraft got tickets from Houdini for his show at the Hippodrome in New York for January 15, 1925.
On February 1 (Candlemas, like I need to tell you that), 1925, H.P. Lovecraft and C.M. Eddy visited Houdini at midnight. The next day, Eddy and HPL had a dinner party at an Italian restaurant frequented by Houdini; Eddy then went to meet Houdini at the Hippodrome. The day after that, Houdini gave a “séance” to expose spirit mediums in New York.
Cthulhu rises, per Lovercraft’s story, between February 28 and April 2, 1925.
Muriel Eddy recalls a dinner-date at the Waldorf with Lovecraft and Houdini on September 20, 1925 (I’m not sure if the date is from Muriel or Perridas), which she calls Houdini’s last appearance in Providence. This might be the wrong year, as Houdini’s last tour came through Providence on September 20, 1926.
During that tour, Joshi speculates that Houdini commissioned another ghosted piece that HPL mentions in his letters, an article debunking astrology, which has not survived. Possibly as a result of that essay, Houdini, Eddy, and Lovecraft planned to collaborate on a general debunking book, The Cancer of Superstition.
During the 1926 tour, Bess Houdini got food poisoning in Providence. At the dinner with Lovecraft? Did she eat something meant for HPL or her husband?
Per DeCamp’s biography, Houdini asked Lovecraft to meet him in Detroit to work on another article, debunking witchcraft. Before HPL could do so, Houdini had died (under murky circumstances, with his appendix on the wrong side of his body) in Detroit, on Halloween, 1926.
Also on Halloween, 1926, Lavinia Whateley vanishes, likely Assumed by Yog-Sothoth. (Justin Geoffrey and Richard Upton Pickman also die or vanish in 1926, no dates given.)
So…Lovecraft and Houdini—both New Yorkers at this time—hook up at midnight on Imbolc. Houdini carries out a fake séance—a protective ritual against Cthulhu’s imminent (and immanent) rising? The next year, they are just about to start a major anti-occult campaign when first Bess is poisoned (in Providence!) and a month later Houdini dies unexpectedly of peritonitis (though DeCamp repeatedly refers to Houdini’s death as “cancer”). On Halloween, while Yog-Sothoth is tangent to North America. Lovecraft backs off the project in public, but dies 11 years later, also of a multiply-diagnosed ailment of the renal area. I smell the spoor of the Black-Winged Ones, and perhaps a rascally Lascar or two.
The Shunned House
[mid-October 1924]
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 in the Walls,” 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 At the 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 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.
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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.
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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.
The Horror at Red Hook
[August 1-2, 1925]
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 clearl
y 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.
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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.