Well, my 12 days of Lovecraft are nearing an end. I have a couple of gigantic stories to tackle, but I thought I’d warm up with a short one that was the basis of an excellent movie from the 80s, (Watch the whole thing for free here! Bargain!) so today we see what’s knocking on the door… “From Beyond”!
The Story
Our narrator has a buddy, Crawford Tillinghast, who, unsatisfied with having an awesome name, is making certain scientific and philosophical inquiries. Our narrator is of the belief that ol’ Crawford doesn’t have the cool, detached temperament necessary for such inquiries, and boy is he right! He tries to discourage his pal from pursuing these inquiries when he finds him drawn, unshaven, and lacking his former healthy chubbiness. Crawford angrily throws him out, only to invite him back a few days later “to see something.”
The servants have all disappeared, and Crawford takes our narrator into his lab where he turns on a machine that glows with an unearthly electricity. After a lot of hooey about the pineal gland, our narrator begins to see stuff—yucky stuff—that is all around us all the time. Then Tillinghast, who’s gone completely mad, mad I say, announces that this is his revenge for our narrator’s lack of support, and that there are far ickier things on the way—things which apparently devoured the servants and which will presumably devour our narrator. But, our narrator happens to have a pistol which he uses to shoot the machine. And, um, Crawford Tillinghast dies at the same time.
What’s Awesome:
As is often the case with H.P., we’ve got a real winner of a central conceit here. The very air around us, and, indeed, inside us, is crawling with gross creatures. That’s creepy, and it connects to H.P.’s OCD-esque obsession with purity and contamination that shows up in nearly every story. (I can’t help wondering if he was a guy who boiled his toothbrush every morning.) I also enjoyed the couple of twists in the story—to wit, it’s clear that Tillinghast has gone nutty from the get go, but I was as surprised as the narrator that Tillinghast was after revenge and not just eager to share his scientific discovery. There’s also clever business with the pistol where it appears that the narrator has shot Tillinghast, though of course it turns out he’s actually shot the machine.
What’s Less Than Awesome:
As he’s done in a couple of other stories, H.P. undermines the story by telling it in the first person. We know the narrator is going to escape unharmed to tell the story in the past tense, so there’s basically no suspense. Also, the pistol feels a little deus-ex-machina-y. “Oh, yeah, by the way, I just happen to always carry a pistol because I got mugged a while back.”
And then there’s the money shot issue. Tillinghast threatens the narrator with something that lives in this unseen dimension that is more horrifying and dangerous than the flopping jellyfish that are apparently passing through us even as we speak, and then we don’t really get to see them in action. There’s always a tension around this stuff—I liked, for example, the fact that we never saw the unseen menace in “The Music of Erich Zann,” but here it feels kind of like a cheat. These monsters presumably dispatch Tillinghast, and all we get to see is his corpse. I guess the bottom line is sometimes it’s scarier to know, and sometimes it’s scarier not to know. In this particular case, I really felt like I wanted to see the horrific menace from beyond.
Seamus Cooper is the author of The Mall of Cthulhu (Night Shade Books, 2009). He lives in Boston and invites you to come over later: he has something remarkable he’d like you to see. Purely in the interest of scientific inquiry, you understand. He bears no grudge for your lack of support in the past.
I have to pretty firmly disagree.
This is a very short story — it’s just 1500 words, three or four pages — but it manages to pack quite a punch nonetheless. And despite being short, it has pacing; after that first alarming paragraph, we have about a thousand words of exposition, and then a sudden rush to the conclusion.
This neatly matches the action, where the narrator has to spend most of the story sitting motionless:
“‘Don’t move,’ he cautioned, ‘for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to see. I told you the servants left, but I didn’t tell you how. It was that thick-witted house-keeper – she turned on the lights downstairs after I had warned her not to, and the wires picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must have been frightful – I could hear the screams up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from another direction, and later it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of clothes around the house. Mrs. Updike’s clothes were close to the front hall switch – that’s how I know she did it. It got them all. But so long as we don’t move we’re fairly safe. Remember we’re dealing with a hideous world in which we are practically helpless… Keep still!'”
Now, I submit that is creepy as hell; and also that it’s pretty good writing, especially given that this is one of Lovecraft’s earlier works. Empty heaps of clothes is, I submit, much more effective than bloodstains or whatever — it emphasizes that whatever Tillinghast has summoned is not only crazy dangerous, but utterly alien as well. And rarely has an adverb been inserted to better effect than “so long as we don’t move we’re fairly safe”.
So the narrator has to sit motionless while things bloom and squirm and writhe around him. And just when he — and we readers — thinks he has a grasp on things, Lovecraft ups the ante:
“‘You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren’t they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I’ve got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud?… Don’t know, eh! You’ll know soon enough..'”
The “you tried to stop me” insertion is, I agree, a little clunky. On the other hand, in a four page story, it works. And this brings us neatly to the climax:
“Things are hunting me now – the things that devour and dissolve – but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants… Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move. I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still – saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you. They didn’t hurt the servants – it was the seeing that made the poor devils scream so…
“I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are curious? I always knew you were no scientist. Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered. Why don’t you move, then? Tired? Well, don’t worry, my friend, for they are coming… Look, look, curse you, look… it’s just over your left shoulder…”
This is purple, but it’s also pretty damn effective. “They won’t hurt you… it was the seeing that made the poor devils scream so…” There were times when Lovecraft lifted up the sheet and showed us the monster in detail, and other times when he let our imaginations do the heavy lifting. Here he does the latter, and very effectively. First he shows us the gross squirming blob-things; then he tells us those are nothing, neither dangerous nor particularly upsetting. But something is coming that’s both and “it’s just over your left shoulder”. If that doesn’t make you jump a little… well, chaque a son gout, but this story freaked me the hell out when I first read it.
And shooting the machine is a nice twist — unexpected, but exactly right.
And then of course the narrator is never quite right afterwards anyway. Lovecraft’s narrators usually aren’t; from Pickman’s Model to the Thing on the Doorstep to the Shadow Over Innsmouth, the first-person narrators generally don’t go back to their lives unchanged. Well, would you?
Doug M.
Well said, Doug M. I nominate you to do the rest of the reviews!
I second the nomination!
Honestly, I read the “12 Days of Lovecraft” hoping to find a response from Doug M.