The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

[Randolph]

I've always felt that this story is one of Lovecraft's best, despite what he himself said about it, and I think it has been unfairly overlooked through the years. The two stories from the two different time periods are woven together excellently, and even though I usually knew what was going to happen next, the entire story had Lovecraft's trademark tension slowly building up all the way to the climax. The ending is one of his best too - it didn't fall on it's face like some of his earlier attempts at "traditional" horror.

Anyone else have thoughts?

 

[nixie]

Having recently discovered Lovecraft, I found The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by far the best of the ones I read.

 

[Nesacat]

One of the first Lovecraft tales I ever read. It does have his trademark building of tension and darkening of the atmosphere until the climax. It's like Mountain Of Madness for me. Both are long tales that seem to be either loved or hated. Some people think they are unnecessarily long and nothing happens forever and ever.

I personally like Dexter Ward. The prose is very descriptive and evolves into a pretty complex tale. I like the slow and almost unconscious build up of tension. The tale flows slowly and lulls you into thinking you know exactly where it's going and it's therefore less creepy somehow. But it's not. What it's really doing is slipping under your skin and chilling your blood very slowly. And then end when it comes is very good indeed and yes ... it does not fall flat at all.

 

[ravenus]

Well I thought this story was rather too stretched out what is essentially a very straightforward tale in most part. It was decent enough for me to finish it but nowhere near stuff like At the Mountains of Madness or my favorite The Shadow over Innsmouth

 

[j d worthington]

I've got to admit that this remains one of my favorite tales, for several reasons. For one, I think it's one of his most successful forays in the realm of (more-or-less) traditional horror, dealing with something close to necromancy (the quote from Petrus Borel to the contrary notwithstanding). For another, his extremely careful blending of genuine and mythical history is astounding; especially given that there are several elements in this short novel that one would take to be pure fiction that are actual history, and vice versa. It also brings Providence to life as a character rather than a simple setting, which is something I always enjoy (seeing setting become a character in a tale). It is, in truth, near a love-song to his hometown. And his achievement with the tale set in the late 17th through the 18th centuries is damned near unsurpassed by any modern writer in the field (Hodgson, for all his strengths, was absolutely atrocious at this aspect). As with Hawthorne, Lovecraft here achieves an historical depth to his story that is quite impressive, to say the least, and his use of his growing mythos is kept to a minimum touch, to add an allusive quality that avoids explicitness. Some of the concepts he addresses here, too, are very impressive, the more one thinks about them, such as the outline that Dr. Willett sees in the pit; Lovecraft here gets the reader to actually trying to envision something so outside the geometry of our reality that it becomes an assault on reason and emotion by its mere existence, and I think he handles that quite well.

I know that Lovecraft felt it was a bit of "creaking antiquarianism" but I've always found it to be a superb performance, and I'd continue to count it as one of the better novels in the field from the twentieth century. It's a book that continues to grow more impressive on each reading, and the more carefully it's read, rather than less, and that's something not too many seem to manage.

 

[Nesacat]

His detailed description of the town and the houses is a big reason why I like the story. The attention to detail brought the surroundings alive and made the story so much more vibrant since the place itself played a large part in the tale.

I also liked, a jd pointed out, the careful entertwining of fiction with reality and the fact that he kept references to his mythos down to the minimum. I've grown to like this story better with each reading though I'll admit that the parts I linger over now are the descriptions of town and house.

While it'll never unseat Shadow Over Innsmouth and Mountains of Madness as far as favourite long tales go ... it's still a very good read and gets better for re-reading.

 

[Karsa Orlong]

I love it too; one of my favourites.

 

[Sibeling]

I really liked the text because it was frightening and kept me in the state of suspense - to the very end I could not guess who the supposedly mad Charles Dexter Ward was. All the description of the events and historical background of things together made the story very unusual.

Some parts were really frightening, like those about all the slimy things in the cellars of that old house.

The motivation of the characters was not clear for me, though - what did they want to acheve by bringing dead people back to life and finding out their secrets? If they bring back a scientist, it's unlikely that the scientist will make a new invention, or, for example, a poet will write a new masterpiece. Such things are not done under pressure.

They could find out where people had hidden their valuable things, but how can they know which dead people had anything valuable? Of course, they could always find out family secrets and blackmail the living family members, but that woud not bring them closer to world domination, if that's what they wanted..

 

[j d worthington]

The motivation of the characters was not clear for me, though - what did they want to acheve by bringing dead people back to life and finding out their secrets? If they bring back a scientist, it's unlikely that the scientist will make a new invention, or, for example, a poet will write a new masterpiece. Such things are not done under pressure.

They could find out where people had hidden their valuable things, but how can they know which dead people had anything valuable? Of course, they could always find out family secrets and blackmail the living family members, but that woud not bring them closer to world domination, if that's what they wanted..

Well, that's addressed at different points in the novel, though never bluntly stated. Essentially, they're collecting the knowledge of the greatest minds of history -- not only that known, but that forgotten, as well as occult knowledge which was lost due to book-burnings, etc. The intent is to correlate all this knowledge in order to have power over the basic nature of entity itself -- to control the laws of nature and therefore the universe itself.

Probably the most explicit statement of this is when Willett has just been sifting the contents of the containers he found, and realized:

God! Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, "all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system, and the universe"?

This a common theme in a lot of Lovecraf't work -- the hybris of humans who believe they can transcend nature and control the whole show; it shows up in "Hypnos", for instance; in much lesser form in "From Beyond"; in a more poetic form in "The Other Gods", and so on. And this also plays into the dichotomy of Ward and Curwen (and his cohorts): Ward's search for knowledge is just that -- a search for learning, to understand, purely to gain knowledge; Curwen & Co. are out to gain this knowledge for power over everything -- for illicit ends, as it were.

 

[Sibeling]

I see what you mean, it's just that usually the people who want to rule the world start by creating an army, not by gathering information..

BTW, I didn't even notice that the story "From Beyond" had a similar theme - I thought it was just a 'crazy scientis' story about a guy with a grudge against the world, who wants to show everyone that he was right and everyone was wrong.. So thanks for pointing out that it belongs to a whole group of stories, I still have to read the other 2 you mentioned.

 

[j d worthington]

I'm not sure I'd call them a group of stories, but they are stories that develop one of Lovecraft's major themes: that of our terribly limited perception of reality, how other, more powerful forms of life might perceive much more, and the correlative note of how those humans who exceed (or try to exceed) those limits tend to pay a high price.

 

[Fried Egg]

I can't help but be impressed with the detail HPL put into this story and the careful building up of the story and tension. Purely from an entertainment point of view, the story could have been shortened a little to speed up the pace somewhat. But of course, thinking about this story from a purely entertainment point of view, would be wrong. It is more than that.

 

[Lobolover]

Hmm,I'd put it up with The Shadow over Innsmouth .

 

[w h pugmire esq]

This is my favourite tale by Lovecraft -- and it astonishes me that what we have is a rough draft. I'd love to read the original manuscript. Maybe some future day, if S. T. and I are together in Providence, he can shew it me at John Hay. Joshi has edited an annotated single volume edition of it, and that is a book my wee hands burn to hold. Now that I've been to Providence, the novel comes more to life. On our walking tour, S. T. took us to the mansion that was mentioned as Ward's childhood home. Then he took us a wee but further to 10 Barnes Street, where Lovecraft lived when he wrote the novel. I've held off reading it again since my trip to Providence in October 2007 as I want to read it in the new single hardcover edition -- but thinking of it now makes me ache to read it now, so I think I'll begin a new re-reading in ye B&N book -- see if I detect all of the misprints of if I am too swept away by the narrative to notice.