physical transformations

[Tinsel]

On the topic of physical transformation:

1. In "The Dunwich Horror", Wilbur and his family have goat like chins.
2. In "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", some of the frog like fish were human converts.
3. In "Rats in the Walls" there is talk of hogs or pigs that were maybe human. I read that story a couple months ago, but the point is made.

I have not read that many other stories, but have the big names covered that topic? Does another author deal with this theme? There is also the element of eternal life and various beasts such as Yog-Sothoth, Shoggoth, etc. What exactly is going on here in these stories, regarding the cult? I'm not exactly clear on this.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I don't know if it is transformation so much as reverting to type, with non-human strains in the blood of these people/creatures becoming dominant. Lovecraft was not comfortable with the idea of hybrids, and these recurring motifs in his stories may have been a reflection of that.

As for what is going on here: I think, broadly, non-human forces are attempting to gain/regain control of the world and cultists are either irrelevant adjuncts or simply tools used by these forces.

Lovecraft's own conception of his mythos was fairly fluid, adapting to the needs of the story. He did not cast his terminology (Old Ones, Elder Gods, etc) or the identities associated with names in steel (Cthulhu seems to shift in character a bit from the powerful being of The Call Of Cthulhu to a less powerful description in The Dunwich Horror), much of the sytematisation of the Mythos was done by Derleth and others.

I am sure other members will offer a much better answer than this.

 

[Tinsel]

When you said, "...broadly, non-human forces are attempting to gain/regain control of the world..." that makes sense, and I agree.

What I see is witchcraft in the Dunwich story. They called the one character, a wizard, and than there is what appears to be animal sacrifice, and human blood being used. On the other hand, in the Innsmouth story the inhabitance are cross breeds that turn as they age, yet you have uncle Douglas who begins life as a human and has no choice, and others that are outside the cult that did not accept all of the oaths (1st, 2nd, 3rd), but there isn't any witchcraft in the Innsmouth story.

I will try to get my hands on that author's book which when I looked it up returned "The Quest for Cthulhu". It said that August Derlith was a contemporary of Lovecraft. That is than a necessary book.

If there isn't much more said about this subject than there seems to be a void in this subject that is prevalent, and I have many stories left, yet it is already evident that there is more than one form or shape of evil.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Re: Derleth, he was indeed a contemporary of Lovecraft, and after Lovecraft's death did a lot to keep the late writer's name and legacy alive. At the same time, he wrote and encouraged the writing of a number of stories in Lovecraft's tradition which, while they are enjoyable in a basic sort of way, reduce, in my opinion, Lovecraft's multi-faceted presentation of his horrific visions into a single, mechanistic mythos.

Derleth's take on Lovecraft's world is influential but I feel it narrows the scope of Lovecraft's own creation (although it does help codify the Mythos as a set of rules and entities that can be translated into gaming settings and suchlike). As for piecing together Lovecraft's own conception of what is going on - on the one hand he regarded the Mythos elements ('Yog-Sothothery' as he called them) partly as a fun way to give verisimilitude and continuity to a large body of weird fiction, including works by others. His conception of what he was trying to convey is best explained in his own words, and J.D. Worthington would be better placed than I to find you an apropos quotation from Lovecraft's letters or essays.

 

[j d worthington]

As J. P. has noted, Lovecraft's own conception of these things varied over time, and he also adapted certain things to the needs of a particular story. He was much, much less interested in the codifying aspect, as he felt that went against the entire idea of a genuine myth-cycle -- most such have numerous variant versions of even the primary stories -- just as fairy-tales, while often strikingly similar in basic outline and motifs, nonetheless present wide divergences in important aspects, even when coming from the same original source. (If you want a good example of the latter, go through Andrew Lang's Fairy Tale Books of Many Colors, and you'll see plenty of instances of this.)

But in Lovecraft's work, it is seldom that these entities are actually interested in gaining control of our world (much less us), as both are simply negligible in the overall scheme of things. We just aren't that important, and neither is our little flyspeck of a planet. The encounters are where we just happen to be in the way, or stumble across some evidence of their existence; in which case, if we become a nuisance, we are treated accordingly... but most often they simply don't even take note of our existence. (Their servitors, such as the Deep Ones, however, are another matter entirely. They are themselves either products of this planet's evolutionary diversity, or are on about the same plane as we as far as importance goes -- though usually considerably more powerful. And we can be of interest to them; though again it is strictly for their own ends, not anything intrinsically interesting in us.)

As for some of the other points you raise:

1. In "The Dunwich Horror", Wilbur and his family have goat like chins.

Actually, more a goatish appearance overall. The chins are receding chins, almost nonexistent.

2. In "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", some of the frog like fish were human converts.

These were the product of cross-breeding between the species; again, Lovecraft's take on miscegenation appearing.

3. In "Rats in the Walls" there is talk of hogs or pigs that were maybe human. I read that story a couple months ago, but the point is made.

Not hogs or pigs, but humans who had been debased to such an animalistic level for so long that it had affected their actual evolutionary development -- they had, as it would have been termed at the time, "devolved" back toward the primal state; a theme that is quite important in Lovecraft's work: see, for instance, "Innsmouth", "The Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", the denizens of Dunwich, the strange hermit in "The Picture in the House", Joe Slater and his tribe in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", etc.

What I see is witchcraft in the Dunwich story. They called the one character, a wizard, and than there is what appears to be animal sacrifice, and human blood being used.

There isn't any actual animal sacrifice here -- you simply have Wilbur's brother's appetite as he continues to grow at an almost exponential rate. Ditto for the human blood. As for witchcraft... that's a possibility, but debatable; at least in the "classical" sense of the term. The rituals certainly resemble "black magic" one sees in most horror tales featuring such, but there is reason to question whether it is actually magic or a very alien type of science... something which has been raised over the years by various commentators. A way of opening portals by use of sound and thought... and (as Lovecraft indicates in "The Dreams in the Witch House") perhaps the origin of our ideas of magic itself.

On the other hand, in the Innsmouth story the inhabitance are cross breeds that turn as they age, yet you have uncle Douglas who begins life as a human and has no choice, and others that are outside the cult that did not accept all of the oaths (1st, 2nd, 3rd), but there isn't any witchcraft in the Innsmouth story. [/quote]

Douglas (as with the narrator himself) was the descendant of one of the cultists who had so cross-bred. It is a matter of heredity, of genetics, at that point. So no, he would have no choice. What makes this both so horrible and so pitiful is that he would have no knowledge of this; thus the effects of such a change would be terrifying to him in the extreme, as well as likely to cause mental aberrations as he attempts to retain his humanity against the call of nature. And no, there is no witchcraft as such in the story, but there is that summoning of the Deep Ones via the golden object thrown into the water, and the cult's worship of Dagon, Mother Hydra, and Cthulhu, all of which have magical (or witchcraft) trappings.

I will try to get my hands on that author's book which when I looked it up returned "The Quest for Cthulhu". It said that August Derlith was a contemporary of Lovecraft. That is than a necessary book.

The Quest for Cthulhu is actually a republication, in combined form, of two earlier Derleth volumes: The Mask of Cthulhu and The Trail of Cthulhu (the latter an episodic novel combining Lovecraftian -- or Derlethian -- Mythos and the psychic detective type of tale). To be frank, it isn't very good, though (as J. P. notes), it can be entertaining; and it certainly did a good deal of the "codifying" of the Mythos mentioned above... along with Derleth's The Lurker at the Threshold (probably his best contribution to the Mythos), etc. If you are approaching the whole thing from a gaming perspective, then it might be of use to you. If you want to get the real picture of Lovecraft's Mythos, avoid Derleth until you've read the whole of Lovecraft. Once you get Derleth's simplistic "good-evil"/"Old Ones-Elder Gods" schema in your head, it takes a lot of doing to get it out... it took nearly 35 years for that view to be challenged properly, and most people still see Lovecraft through Derleth-colored lenses. The two ain't the same thing. They're about as far away from each other as two writers who knew each other could be.

If there isn't much more said about this subject than there seems to be a void in this subject that is prevalent, and I have many stories left, yet it is already evident that there is more than one form or shape of evil.

As noted above, these are themes that run through a good deal of Lovecraft's work, so there is actually quite a bit more to be said about them. The "transformations" aren't always the same sorts of things (De la Poer's "transformation" was not physical, for instance, but he nonetheless descended that evolutionary ladder as certainly as did any of the "flabby fungous beasts" kept as fodder by his ancestors, and in drastically less time; while Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee has his own "transformation" into a member of the Great Race when he finds his intellect trapped in the body of the being who has, in turn, taken over his own corporeal form; Randolph Carter, in his quest for his land of dreams, finds himself in the body of Zkauba, a very alien wizard from a distant time and world who is, nonetheless, a very distant version of himself; and so on), but they are quite frequently there.

 

[J-WO]

I suppose a lack of definition-- 'inbetweenyness' if you will-- is a staple of horror generally. Our animal brains instinctively fear that which we cannot define.

Lovecraft was a master of it. Knivesout, in another thread, mentioned a sentence in The Hound where the foliage is both 'unhealthy' yet 'luxuriant'-- a fecund sickness.

Unsettling contrast was at the heart of his mythos, IMHO.

 

[Tinsel]

Re: Derleth, he was indeed a contemporary of Lovecraft, and after Lovecraft's death did a lot to keep the late writer's name and legacy alive. At the same time, he wrote and encouraged the writing of a number of stories in Lovecraft's tradition which, while they are enjoyable in a basic sort of way, reduce, in my opinion, Lovecraft's multi-faceted presentation of his horrific visions into a single, mechanistic mythos.

Derleth's take on Lovecraft's world is influential but I feel it narrows the scope of Lovecraft's own creation (although it does help codify the Mythos as a set of rules and entities that can be translated into gaming settings and suchlike). As for piecing together Lovecraft's own conception of what is going on - on the one hand he regarded the Mythos elements ('Yog-Sothothery' as he called them) partly as a fun way to give verisimilitude and continuity to a large body of weird fiction, including works by others. His conception of what he was trying to convey is best explained in his own words, and J.D. Worthington would be better placed than I to find you an apropos quotation from Lovecraft's letters or essays.

So all of this talk about the Cthulhu mythos/cult/call isn't actually Lovecraft himself but an attempt to describe his body of work? That is interesting because I see something different so far based on what I read, although I'm not saying that anything is wrong, but a lot seems to be ignored. Still I will have to read Derleth's book and find out exactly what he said and did, if I can get a copy.

 

[Tinsel]

j.d.:

I think that the situation with Uncle Douglas in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", is a great horror technique and an important point to understand, that once the people accepted the third oath of Dagon, they locked in their offspring.

Oh, and in "The Dunwich Horror", it almost appears that the family was using the cattle for sacrifice and drinking blood? No?

In "The Rats in the Walls", there were altars in that story, so you would think that sacrifice was involved, but yes that is quite something, the animals/humans were locked up in cages and made to be on all fours. I'm going to have to read that story again. What I also wondered about it was at the end, did the main character fall into a pit? and did he go insane or not?

Okay, I'll finish reading the stories before I look at any other views. The only other point that I can think of is that I wonder if Lovecraft was influenced by his contemporaries. If so, he may have tried to write a number of stories outside of his genre.

 

[j d worthington]

I suppose a lack of definition-- 'inbetweenyness' if you will-- is a staple of horror generally. Our animal brains instinctively fear that which we cannot define.

Lovecraft was a master of it. Knivesout, in another thread, mentioned a sentence in The Hound where the foliage is both 'unhealthy' yet 'luxuriant'-- a fecund sickness.

Unsettling contrast was at the heart of his mythos, IMHO.

Lovecraft was very fond of such seeming oxymorons which, upon examination, are actually very subtle, nuanced examples of impressionism. Perhaps my favorite is his "ecstatic fear" in "The Rats in the Walls"; that is a very acute psychological observation, and far too often overlooked; yet it may well lie at the heart of the attraction of such tales....

j.d.:

I think that the situation with Uncle Douglas in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", is a great horror technique and an important point to understand, that once the people accepted the third oath of Dagon, they locked in their offspring.

Indeed, that is a good point, and one of the horrific aspects of the whole. All future generations must, willing or no, follow that path. The only out, the only way to retain one's humanity is, ironically, suicide; something the narrator realizes too late to actually follow through with... which becomes the ultimate horror of the tale, really. As Lovecraft put it in "The Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family": "If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night" (Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, p. 72).

Oh, and in "The Dunwich Horror", it almost appears that the family was using the cattle for sacrifice and drinking blood? No?

No, though I can see where you might get that impression. They were using them as food for Wilbur's brother. The incisions on the throat of Wizard Whateley and Lavinia were, most likely the same or for Wilbur

In "The Rats in the Walls", there were altars in that story, so you would think that sacrifice was involved, but yes that is quite something, the animals/humans were locked up in cages and made to be on all fours. I'm going to have to read that story again. What I also wondered about it was at the end, did the main character fall into a pit? and did he go insane or not?

The altars there, though, dated back to very ancient times -- pre-Roman, in fact; though the idea is that the practices were in fact kept up until the one scion of the house rebelled and murdered the rest of the family before fleeing to America. As for the narrator... no, he didn't fall into a pit (at least not literally, though one could well say he fell into the ultimate pit metaphorically). He retrogressed, descended the evolutionary ladder, in a very concentrated span of time; hence the various types of dialect. Here is some stuff I sent another member some time ago on this aspect:

First, here's an excerpt from a letter by HPL to his friend Frank Belknap Long on the subject:

That bit of gibberish which immediately followed the atavistic Latin was not pithecanthropoid. The first actual ape-cry as the "ungl". What the intermediate jargon is, is perfectly good Celtic -- a bit of venomously vituperative phraseology which a certain small boy ought to know; because his grandpa, instead of consulting a professor to get a Celtic phrase, found a ready-made one so apt that he lifted it bodily from The Sin-Eater, by Fiona McLeod, in the volume of Best Psychic Stories which Sonny himself generously sent! I thought you'd note that at once -- but youth hath a crowded memory. Anyhow, the only objection to the phrase is that it's Gaelic instead of Cymric as the south-of-England locale demands. But -- as with anthropology -- details don't count. Nobody will ever stop to note the difference.

the following is taken from William Scott Home's passage on "The Rats in the Walls", from his essay on "The Lovecraft 'Books': Some Addenda and Corrigenda" (The Dark Brotherhood, pp. 134-152):

In Lovecraft's best and most important story, which exemplifies his basic theme -- the nearness of the beast-self to the surface of modern man and his capacity to revert to it instantaneously -- the mutterings of the protagonist at the climax supply a key to the immediately preceding, unrecorded act of horror, casting a flicker of light on the steps of that ladder to the black pit of the animal past which the returned De la Poer had descended. The phrases, with the exception of the two final terms of gibberish, are genuine, and successively earlier in time and context, a more striking illustration of the devolutive process than any physical description would have been.

"Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do!" expresses not so much anterior language as a new identification with the rustic speech of De la Poer's modern, rural (but ancestral) English environment. As he is presented as an elderly manufacturer who, prior to his arrival at Exham Priory, possessed no knowledge of history or its traditions, it is extremely unlikely that he would have had the linguistic background necessary to speak as he does in subsequent lines -- his statements being then certain, physical (not merely mental) manifestations of his reversion.

"'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust ..." contains three words which characterise Elizabethan speech circa 1600 A.D. 'Sblood, of course, abbreviates God's blood; stinkard is hardly equivocal, but was a rather stronger epithet than its modern cognate, and throws a sinister note into the line as it was generally applied to odorous domestic animals -- such as pigs. Gust means to relish the taste...

"God's blood, you pig, I'll teach you to like the taste ..."

The following line is Middle English of Chaucer's and Langland's period -- the mid-fourteenth century. Some of the words are surviving Anglo-Saxonisms, but Lovecraft's use of certain variant spellings over the standards (denoted by moderns for an age which had no standards) were culled from manuscripts dating specifically from this period, leaving doubt neither as to the time nor to the perfectionism and depth of Lovecraft's scholarship.

"Wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?" means "Would you toil for me in such a manner (wise)?"

Following the invocations of the Phrygians Atys and Cybele (the Magna Mater) are oaths in Gaelic of Scottish orthography. This is a language which has changed very little in the past millennium, but Lovecraft does what he can to indicate age by the use of archaisms (dunach is old-fashioned as is its English equivalent) and semi-archaisms -- dhonas and dholas in altered form are used in Irish today rather than in Scottish, indicating that HPL intended the speech of a day when the two cultures were not so distinct. The shortening of agus (and) to 's is of immemorial usage.

"Dia ad aghaidh 's ad aodaun..." Aghaidh and aodaun (an old spelling for aodann) have the same meaning -- face, visage, or forehead -- so the oath is probably a standard one -- "God in thy face and thy visage!"

"... Augus bas dunach ort! ..." "... And death-woe on thee!"

Dholas (grief, desolation, abhorrence) and dhonas (mischief, misfortune, bad luck) are next wished on Norrys, followed by the leat-sa of which the -sa is an adjection of great emphasis -- perhaps rendered best as, "Grief and misfortune on thee, and with thee for ever and ever!" (pp. 149-151)

That last (as noted in the letter excerpt from Lovecraft) was from "The Sin-Eater", by "Fiona Macleod" (William Sharp), who, in notes to the tale, translates it thus: ""God against thee and in thy face ... and may a death of woe be yours ... Evil and sorrow to thee and thine!"

Incidentally, he was wrong about nobody noticing. Robert E. Howard did, and his writing to Lovecraft on this led to a correspondence which lasted the rest of Howard's life....

 

[J-WO]

Now that's what I call research! And all for a short story in a pulp. There's no mistaking that kind of craftsmanship.

 

[Tinsel]

J.d:

What I got out of that reply was that the Whateley's were feeding Wilber's brother. That makes sense, and they did all of that building in a tower? So it is verified, but I still don't understand why there were incisions involved, and I am not convinced that there was not ritual involving sacrifice and blood due to the incisions. How did this brother come about? This is where I saw some similarity in the the story about "Beyond the Wall of Sleep". There is talk of a brother of light?

You make the point that in "The Rats in the Walls" that the alters were pre-Roman. The alters might not have been used, but it may have been a site of a deity or some religious significance. That is a good point to be made and is necessary to include as support for some theory, yet I still wonder about how to look at that story, and I would rather still believe that he fell into a pit, and did not go insane. The evolutionary talk is very strange and it is another mystery. The story is complicated but it should be solved. I'm looking for something that is more than an unexplained mystery.

Robert Howard wrote Kull, Conan, and other fiction that frequently was based on some historical culture, clan, etc. I can see that style of writing in Lovecrafts "The White Ship", but I'm not sure if I like it because Howard used Conan to close everything up. If you take out Conan, you have nothing since there is no conflict, although you might have one thing and that would be a world that is different than this existence which for Lovecraft might have been what he was looking for when he had no place to go. To me it all sounds like baloney and I don't want to read it. I want to read great horror, and certainly Lovecraft deals in that with a number of stories that are probably the greatest ever written.

 

[j d worthington]

J.d:

What I got out of that reply was that the Whateley's were feeding Wilber's brother. That makes sense, and they did all of that building in a tower? So it is verified, but I still don't understand why there were incisions involved, and I am not convinced that there was not ritual involving sacrifice and blood due to the incisions. How did this brother come about? This is where I saw some similarity in the the story about "Beyond the Wall of Sleep". There is talk of a brother of light?

First: you've thrown me a bit... tower? I don't recall there being any tower in "The Dunwich Horror", though I have read the story more times than I can count. There are the standing stones at the top of Sentinel Hill, but they are more like a "mini-Stonehenge", if you will... not a tower. As for how the brother came about... he was Wilbur's twin; they were born on the same night but, having more of the father (Yog-Sothoth) in his makeup, he was much closer to the alien than even Wilbur was... and grew at an exponentially greater rate. (Recall that even Wilbur grew at an alarming rate and far, far faster than any truly human child ever has.) As for the incisions... these were seen on both the cattle and (occasionally) Old Whateley and Lavinia only during the early months following the birth of the Whateley twins, while they were infants. These were used to provide nourishment (blood) for the unearthly offspring, indicating they had some tinge of a vampiric entity to them. So there was not any actual sacrifice in the usual, ritual sense; but you could say the animals were "sacrificed" as fodder for the growth of Wilbur and especially his brother, in order to bring about the goal of the Old Ones which Wilbur's grandfather had in mind. And it is true that Lovecraft envisioned blood playing its part in such sorcerous doings -- cf. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and "The Dreams in the Witch House", for instance; though only in the latter does it serve any genuinely ritual purpose. In the other instances, it is just as above: nourishment for "the thing that should not be", as it were.

As for the connection to "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" -- that's an interesting idea. I am rather doubtful about its applicability, but it's definitely an intriguing take on the matter. I'll have to give that one some thought, and get back to you....

You make the point that in "The Rats in the Walls" that the alters were pre-Roman. The alters might not have been used, but it may have been a site of a deity or some religious significance. That is a good point to be made and is necessary to include as support for some theory, yet I still wonder about how to look at that story, and I would rather still believe that he fell into a pit, and did not go insane. The evolutionary talk is very strange and it is another mystery. The story is complicated but it should be solved. I'm looking for something that is more than an unexplained mystery.

Yes, they were pre-Roman, but were adapted for the worship of various deities as the times (and therefore the gods) changed -- the main ones mentioned being the Magna Mater and Cybele-worship, with its connection to the Atys legend (for which, see Catullus, as well as Frazer's Golden Bough, with which Lovecraft was at least somewhat familiar). So they were in use, but whether there was any genuinely mystical or magical thing going on there is never confirmed, the point of the story being, as he put it in "The Horror at Red Hook" 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" and that the protagonist of that story "had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be".

As for his falling into a pit or going mad... I'm afraid the text is rather explicit about that: the narrator is in a padded cell telling his story... and the "psychic" Thornton is in the cell next to his. However, it is much more than simply going mad: for all intents and purposes, De la Poer reverted, while confronting the secrets of his ancestors, to that "primitive half-ape savagery" mentioned above... not his physical form (at least, as far as we know) but his personality, his mind. He lost the human in the beast, in the primal slime, as it were (a common theme in Lovecraft, and one he addressed in some of his essays, as well, such as "More Chained Lightning" in Collected Essays 5. This ties in with his views on miscegenation and the like: Lovecraft really did have a strong view that such led toward a lack of differentiation from a more primitive state; it was an abandonment of the evolving of an enlightened intelligence and the things which make us uniquely human as opposed to some other form of animal -- or animals in general. Again, one can see this strongly at work in "The Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", as well....

If you can get hold of a copy of it (through a library, most likely, as it is long out of print... sadly), you might want to take a look at Barton L. St. Armand's The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. While it has its flaws (such as a too-strong reliance on the Derlethian schema), nonetheless it is a very rich examination of "The Rats in the Walls", and will more than repay the trouble of seeking it out.

Robert Howard wrote Kull, Conan, and other fiction that frequently was based on some historical culture, clan, etc. I can see that style of writing in Lovecrafts "The White Ship", but I'm not sure if I like it because Howard used Conan to close everything up. If you take out Conan, you have nothing since there is no conflict, although you might have one thing and that would be a world that is different than this existence which for Lovecraft might have been what he was looking for when he had no place to go. To me it all sounds like baloney and I don't want to read it. I want to read great horror, and certainly Lovecraft deals in that with a number of stories that are probably the greatest ever written.

Well, it isn't Howard you're seeing in "The White Ship" -- Howard hadn't even had his first story published when HPL wrote "The White Ship" in 1919; the influence you see there is that of the Irish fantaisiste, Lord Dunsany, who played a very important part in Lovecraft's career, not only in the overtly "Dunsanian" pieces he wrote, but also in giving an impetus to Lovecraft's own writing and even, to some degree, in his formulation of his "pantheon" of alien entities. While Lovecraft enjoyed much of Howard's writing, I don't think there was a great deal of any kind of substantial influence from REH to HPL; though there certainly was some the other way around, as REH wrote several Lovecraftian imitations himself (which have been collected together, along with related materials, in the Chaosium collection, Nameless Cults).

What "The White Ship" is/was is simply the first actual "Dunsanian" tale -- that is, written under the influence of Dunsany -- though he had written a tale in a similar vein the year before encountering Dunsany's work: "Polaris" (1918). He developed an entire cycle of tales which are interconnected, culminating in the short novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and its companion short tale, "The Strange High House in the Mist", though these, too, tie into much of his other work in various ways. Some of these may not be to your taste, but I think a close reading of them will reveal more of the truly weird than at first appears....

 

[Tinsel]

When I had read "The Rats in the Walls" a couple of months ago. I tried to read it carefully. My understanding was that the narrator was put into prison after the event, as if he was going to be wrongfully accused for what was found, and that he was not crazy but had a concussion after falling into a pit.

Anyway, if the influence of RH came from HL, than that is the case than. RH had a character called Yog-Kosha I believe in his story "The Tower of the Elephant".

Well, I need to read "The Dunwich Horror" again, maybe tonight. I thought that they were building a high structure, but maybe that was a cartoon that I watched recently, Scooby Doo. Well I will know soon. Hmmm, there are a number of areas that are not put into perspective, and yes I remember the hilltop and I have not fully understood why that was in the story.

Lovecraft seems to use walls in a number of titles such as "Rats in the Walls" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep".

What needs to be done is an organized analysis of both stories, as well as "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

You said that Yog Sothoth was the father of the odd birth. There is more that needs to be explained.

I've heard of Lord Dunsany, but I've never read any of his books.

I can't wait to read ...the witch house... just have to finish these hockey games.

Well if you are up for your own full paper of whatever form, an essay, an analysis, than I will do one as well, or I could go first. There is not telling what I will actually focus on, but I could find out. My spelling is poor, but if I do an actual paper it will sound fairly good. At any rate, I will very possibly re-read "The Dunwich Horror" tonight on my Sony Reader. I was going to read it a few days ago but I failed to accomplish that task, however now I can do it because conditions are better.

I'm sure that I can understand that evolutionary talk in "The Rats in the Walls". It is an interesting subject. You mentioned ...Dexter Ward... I have not read that yet. Were the cattle emaciated, I can't remember. Oh and why were the dogs aggressive with Wilber? If it was a kind of virgin birth that Lavinia experienced, was it? Well those questions should be answered.

 

[j d worthington]

It is interesting you should mention his use of walls. This is a major motif in a great deal of his fiction, either walls per se or barriers which wall a person in (or, more usually, out): The locked portal of "The Tomb"; the "viscous" substances the dreamers must penetrage in "Hypnos"; the wall with the locked door hiding some supernal mystery in "Ex Oblivione"; the mountain range which hides the secrets of the city of the Old Ones, and the further mountain range which hides the original of Kadath in the Cold Waste, which lies even beyond that, and the mist which hides those mountains and their secrets, in At the Mountains of Madness; the oddly-angled walls which prove both barrier and passageway in "The Dreams in the Witch House"; the wall (or barrier) of the cryptography in Wilbur's diaries in "The Dunwich Horror"; etc., etc., etc.

An "organized analysis"? There have been several, over the years. At the moment, I am unable to devote the sort of time necessary to such, unless that time is spread out over a rather long period. (I state a long period, because I know from experience how rich Lovecraft's work is once you start doing an analysis of this sort; there are layers upon layers upon layers which you can find yourself getting into.) However, I will be happy to contribute when I have the time and opportunity, and certainly look forward to your -- and, for that matter, others' -- thoughts on any of these matters.

If you are going to go at Dunsany from a Lovecraftian perspective, I suggest his earlier collections of short stories; these were what first drew HPL to his work, and, in his own words, "electrified" him with their prose and the vistas they opened up literarily and imaginatively. S. T. Joshi has also argued (quite cogently) that he was influenced by certain passages in Dunsany's novel Chronicles of Shadow Valley (a.k.a. Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley). The titles of his early collections are:

The Gods of Pegāna
Time and the Gods
The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories
A Dreamer's Tales
The Book of Wonder
Fifty-One Tales
Tales of Wonder
Tales of Three Hemispheres

All of these can be found online at various sites... in fact, you can find much of this in my thread on the online sources for Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature essay -- though, where possible, I suggest reading the sites which provide both the text and the illustrations by Sidney H. Sime, as he was more than an illustrator; he and Dunsany tended to inspire each other, and influenced each others' works....

As for why the dogs reacted to Wilbur that way... well, in part at least, HPL was following a certain convention in weird fiction, of the dog (or cat) who reacts to the unnatural before the humans do. (He even draws attention to the cliche in "The Rats in the Walls".) In the story, this is likely because they are natural, whereas Wilbur is most definitely unnatural. But there is also the idea (so common in Lovecraft) of the smell put off by such beings. As it says in the Necronomicon passage in the story, "By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near"; and dogs are certainly more attuned to smell than people, and would react to such an odor much more violently. (This also plays a part in At the Mountains of Madness.)

As for Sentinel Hill... well, for several reasons. Chiefly, though, because a genuine site of this sort had been seen by HPL in the Massachusetts hills, and had stimulated his imagination. But there is also the common idea that such sites as the menhirs here were used for pagan worship and the like; again, present in the story.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Tinsel, I can't respond here in the same detail as J.D., because I am currently reading a different batch of HPL's stories for a different set of reasons, and also because, like a Van Vogt superman, J.D. has at least two brains while I only have the more usual half. However, I would like to say that HPL's stories are a fascinating study for close reading and tracking down references/meanings and as J.D. has suggested this is a rich seam to mine.

One thing that might help is to read the right edition - if you can get a hold of S.T. Joshi's annotated editions, the ones for Penguin being a set that offer a good combination of affordability and a wide range of works his notes will help in setting things in context and suggesting areas to investigate. These books are called:

The Thing On The Doorstep and other weird stories
The Dreams In The Witch House and other weird stories
The Call Of Cthulhu and other weird stories

 

[j d worthington]

Not to sound like an escapee from a mutual admiration society, but... considering your acuity on things literary... that's quite a compliment! Thank you....

 

[Tinsel]

General Reply:

I have two of the Penguin books that were mentioned and I can get the third one soon. They are all on the Sony Store. It is a nice collection as long as there isn't too much repetition, but if there is no repetition, than that is the set to have.

Sometimes when you people mention the correct editions I am wondering if one set of these writings contains racism while the other does not!

With regard to animals having a dislike toward the antagonists and the issue with the dogs in the Dunwich case, it is a valid point that these characters have an odor that is offensive. This is also seen in the Innsmouth story. I remember something to the effect that horses did not like the Innsmouth natives and that there was a fishy odor.

I am going to keep reading and I'm not going to write anything yet because there are problems associated with writing and I might require competition, only because it is a necessary ingredient perhaps to an otherwise counter productive task.

Yes I will keep reading and I will get the third book of the series. As far as research is concerned, again, I am not the type to do research until it is time to find answers because my reading level is too low, also there is a mysterious element where in like Wilber did, he searched rather than researched because it was justified and necessary and unavoidable. It is nice to hear about the background information and I believe what you said in fact.

Yes, the ancient Gods/Goddesses were very important to the ancient Greeks. I read that they each had their own set of deities in each tribe and they met together in places like Athens when there was some neutrality in regions like Attica. At any rate, it was a very central issue and I would actually read more about the ancient Greeks, perhaps the Romans even. It would be a good break if sometime from HPL.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

General Reply:

I have two of the Penguin books that were mentioned and I can get the third one soon. They are all on the Sony Store. It is a nice collection as long as there isn't too much repetition, but if there is no repetition, than that is the set to have.

Sometimes when you people mention the correct editions I am wondering if one set of these writings contains racism while the other does not!

There's no repetition at all in the three titles I've named; taken together with the Del Rey publication of The Horror In The Museum which contains 'revisions', stories Lovecraft ghost-wrote for others, they make a reasonably affordable and comprehensive Lovecraft library.

Some older editions of Lovecraft's work, prepared by August Derleth for publication by Arkham do contain bowdlerisation; I think the texts in the Penguin editions are fairly reliable in that light. There is racism in HPL's works; the strongest example I can think of is The Horror At Red Hook. He was fallible, like all of us, and I do tend to make allowance keeping in mind HPL's times and his somewhat insular exposure to the world around him in person (as opposed to via books) because there is too much else that is good in his work to make this a show-stopper, as it were.

 

[Tinsel]

I saw "The Horror in the Museum" as well on the Sony Store so I can grab that too in the future. The three books were about $10.50 cdn each which is fine, especially if there is no overlap. That must be close to all of his stories in that set.

I remember that even less than ten years ago, they were showing TV shows in Canada that had racism. They were the older TV shows, mostly westerns. Basically racist talk was fully accepted as conversational language. It sounds bizarre to us now. I was basically joking around with you people, but yes, I see that there is some of that element in his writing. I did not read the story that you mentioned, but eventually I will hopefully read all of them regardless of racism, satanism, or plagiarism.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I don't think you'll find any plagiarism and any instances of satanism will only be on the part of the characters.

You've mentioned having a low reading level, which I don't think seems to be the case. I think it's important not to let these texts daunt you. I have found that I had many misconceptions about specific HPL stories in the past, and part of it is because his style takes some getting used to, and part of it is simply because you get more out of the stories the more you read them.