Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories. Today we’re looking at “The Lurking Fear,” written in November 1922 and first published in the January-April 1923 issues of Home Brew. You can read the story here. Spoilers ahead.
Summary: Unnamed narrator of the week seems to be an independently wealthy bachelor with an obsessive taste for the weird. Today he’d have a ghost-hunting reality show. In 1921, he must settle for motoring to the Catskills to investigate a massacre near Tempest Mountain.
A local village has been reduced overnight to “human debris.” Locals connect the slaughter to the ruined Martense mansion which crowns Tempest Mountain. State troopers disregard this theory: not so our narrator. He’ll root out the culprit of the inexplicable attack (one of many over the years), be it supernatural or material. Establishing himself among reporters covering the story from Lefferts Corners, he waits for excitement to ebb so he can launch an unobserved investigation.
Thunder seems to call forth the creeping death. Therefore the narrator and two trusty companions hole up in the mansion on a night threatening storm. The narrator’s no fool—though he’s chosen the room of murdered Jan Martense (possible vengeful ghost) as his center of operations, he’s provided for escape via rope ladders out the window. The hunters rest on an improvised bed by the window, across from a huge Dutch fireplace that keeps drawing the narrator’s eyes. After turning sentinel duty over to companion Tobey, he dozes through troubled dreams. Companion Bennett seems similarly restless, because he throws an arm over the narrator’s chest. Or something does. Agonized screams rouse our guide. Tobey, nearest the fireplace, is gone. Lightning casts a monstrous shadow that can’t be Bennett. When the narrator looks toward the window, where Bennett lay, the man’s gone.
Whose arm lay on the narrator, and why was he, in the middle of the bed, spared?
Shaken but more determined than ever, the narrator befriends reporter Arthur Munroe, who proves both shrewd and sympathetic. They hunt on together, with the locals’ help. One afternoon finds them going over the violated village yet again. The creeping death normally travels under forest cover, so how did it cross the open country between Tempest Mountain and this hamlet? On the night of carnage, lightning caused a landslide on a neighboring hill. A clue? While the pair considers, a thunderstorm drives them into a hovel. Lightning strikes the hill again, and earth rolls. Munroe goes to the window. Whatever he sees fascinates him because he stays there until the storm passes. Unable to call Munroe away, the narrator spins him playfully around—to find the reporter dead, head chewed and gouged, face entirely gone.
The narrator buries Munroe without reporting his death. Is this enough to drive him away from Tempest Mountain? Nope. He now thinks the killer must be a “wolf-fanged” ghost, specifically Jan Martense.
He’s researched the Martense clan. Its founder Gerrit built the mansion in 1670, having left New Amsterdam in disgust at British rule. He refused to leave after finding Tempest Mountain well-named, prone to violent thunderstorms. Trained to shun contact with other colonists, his family became increasingly isolated. Jan Martense escaped to fight with the colonial army, returning in 1760 to a family with whom he shared nothing but the dissimilar eyes (one blue, one brown) that were its hereditary distinction. A friend, receiving no reply to his letters, visited. The animalistic aspect of the Martenses repulsed him; disbelieving their account of Jan’s death by lightning, he dug up the corpse and found the skull crushed by savage blows.
Courts couldn’t find the Martenses guilty of murder, but the countryside did. The family became entirely isolated. By 1816 they seemed to have left the mansion en masse—at least no one alive remained.
Did Jan’s ghost stick around, still blindly enacting vengeance? Knowing his actions are irrational, the narrator digs in Jan’s grave under a lightning-sparked sky. Finally the earth collapses under his feet and he finds himself in a tunnel or burrow. The only irrational thing to do is to squirm through the burrow until his flashlight begins to dim and two eyes glow in the darkness before him. Two eyes and a claw.
Lightning strikes just above, collapsing the tunnel. The narrator digs back to open air, emerging from the cleft side of one of the hummocks that crisscross the mountain and surrounding plain. Huh. Just glacial phenomena?
Later the narrator learns that while he gazed into the weirdly suggestive eyes underground, creeping death attacked twenty miles away! How could the demon be in two places at once?
The narrator can now only explain his persistence by noting that fright can so mix with wonder that it’s relief and delight to throw oneself into the vortex. One night, as he looks toward Tempest Mountain, moonlight shows him what he’s missed. Those hummocks and mounds? They radiate from the cursed mansion like tentacles, or molehills. Frenzied, the narrator digs in the nearest mound and finds—another tunnel! He runs to the mansion and finds in its weedy cellar, at the base of the center chimney, another tunnel entrance!
That’s why he lay in the middle and wasn’t taken! Something from the fireplace grabbed Tobey, something from the window Bennett! There are many demons, none ethereal. Thunder rolls overhead. The narrator hides in a basement corner, and witnesses the emergence of an entire extended family of devil-apes with whitish matted fur, all hideously silent—the others devour a weak one that barely squeals. As they disperse in search of prey, the narrator shoots a straggler. The dying creature’s eyes are dissimilar: one blue, one brown.
The narrator arranges to have the entire top of Tempest Mountain dynamited and all discoverable burrows stopped up. Still he lives in dread of thunder and underground places—and “future possibilities,” for could there not be other Martense clans in the unknown caverns of the world?
What’s Cyclopean: The rage of the lightning bolt that saves the narrator from the underground lurker.
The Degenerate Dutch: This is, in fact, the story with the “degenerate Dutch” living in the Catskills. They are poor mongrels! They whine! They build malodorous shanties!
Mythos Making: Not a particularly Mythos-oriented story—except that every once in a while the narrator randomly goes on about “trans-cosmic gulfs” just in case you forgot this was supposed to be cosmic horror.
Libronomicon: We need to put more stories with unspeakable tomes on the roster.
Madness Takes Its Toll: This narrator may be correct—as many are not—that he’s become a bit unhinged, what with all the cackling and shrieking while digging maniacally in the earth. He’s also a patronizing jerk.
Anne’s commentary
‘Tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed;
Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.–Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2
Youthful enthusiasm and a case of sympathetic angst led me to commit very much to heart the first three acts of Hamlet. Occasionally this Cyclopean memory-carcass puts forth tendrils of more or less pertinent verbiage. Like recently, when I was walking with “Lurking Fear” in hand. Add to rumination on the overwhelming corruption in this story the sight of wasps swarming on fallen crabapples, and naturally “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” popped out of my mouth.
That was natural, right?
Anyhow, something is definitely rotten in the Catskills, a picturesque region of New York State more commonly associated with the Hudson River School of landscape painting and the Borscht Belt. Lovecraft hustles us past these delights to the desolate countryside surrounding Tempest Mountain, upon which broods the Martense mansion. Local lore’s always connected the house with a terror that bedevils the area, and for good reason. As Hamlet’s Claudius moans of himself, the Martenses have brought “the primal eldest curse” upon themselves, “a brother’s murder.” The primal brother was Abel; the doomed Martense was Jan, whose comparative normality led his kinsmen to bash in his head.
But what sort of curse have the Martenses courted? Local lore favors a supernatural explanation, that is, Jan Martense’s ghost. Our narrator starts with an open mind. Could be the problem’s supernatural; could be it’s material. As it turns out, the correct answer is behind (should-have-been-left-shut) Door Number Two. Boy, is it ever. It’s telling that the narrator should describe the scene of the first attack as one of “disordered earth” and “human debris” and “organic devastation,” because the material and organic sure show their nastiest faces here.
I’ve mentioned noticing how Lovecraft personifies or gives a certain sentience to the moon, that pale-faced mocker of terrible revelations. Here the moon is the very agent of the reveal as it throws the topography of Tempest Mountain into high relief. However, more pervasively sentient and malign is the diseased landscape itself. As we saw in “Color Out of Space,” Lovecraft often renders vegetation as sinister. “Lurking Fear’s” plants are ”unnaturally large and twisted… thick and feverish.“ Trees are ”wild-armed” and “morbidly overnourished,” with “maniacally thick foliage” and “serpent roots.” Balefully primal, they toss insane branches and leer and hush the wind, which itself is “clawing.” Briers choke the cellar. The long-abandoned gardens feature “white, fungous, foetid, overnourished [again] vegetation that never saw full daylight.” And why shouldn’t the flora be strange and bloated, considering how it sucks “unnamable juices from an earth verminous with cannibal devils”? And we thought cemetery trees were bad.
Animals, so terrifying in “Color,” aren’t found around Tempest Mountain. Either they’re too smart, or the creeping death’s consumed them all. That’s okay. The geography itself is animate—anomalous mounds and hummocks snake across the land, and eventually the narrator realizes that they are “tentacles” centered on the mountain and its crowning ruins.
The Martense curse, then, has sickened everything around their homestead. Murdering Jan didn’t bring ghostly retribution down on them. Instead it set in unstoppable motion the three I’s of decadence already eating away at them. Lovecraft is explicit about two of the I’s: Isolation and inbreeding. These operate with less loathsome results among the local poor. Innsmouth, we initially think, is also plagued by the I’s; Dunwich definitely is. But those Martenses! What a piece of work is man, the paragon of animals yet the quintessence of dust! When he goes down, he goes down hard and becomes “the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration…the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life.”
Actually, he becomes a whitish gorilla, reminiscent of the central horror in “Arthur Jermyn.” Is that really so bad? Yes, Lovecraft answers, because the lurking fear isn’t just the Martense clan, it’s what might lurk now or in the future in other hidden lairs. The lurking fear, the chaos behind life, is genetics, my friends, and mutation and devolution and the final descent of all things organic into entropy. Huh, the crawling chaos of Azathoth at the beginning and a silent creeping death at the end. It is awful that the Martenses have lost the power of human speech. With that goes communication, story-making, humanity itself.
The third I of decadence isn’t mentioned in the text, but it’s powerfully implicit. Shakespeare, doesn’t mind talking about incestuous beds, all “rank sweat” and “stew’d in corruption.” Lovecraft? Not happening, except in the most violently violet of the purple passages for which “Lurking Fear” is notable. That “hypocritical” plain and “festering” mountain! What are they but an enseamed coverlet for “underground nuclei of polypous perversion”? Mounds and hummocks and unnamable juices! Oh my. Impossible to imagine that creatures who’ve gotten over that little taboo surrounding cannibalism won’t have gotten over taboos less mentionable. Lovecraft doesn’t mention incest in this story, though he does choke it out once in “Dunwich Horror,” where more degenerates do deeds of “almost unnamable violence and perversity.”
Lovecraft’s fears about what can happen if you reach too far outward, breeding wise, evolve from “Arthur Jermyn” (bad to mate with apes) through “Dunwich Horror” (really bad to mate with Outer Gods) to “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” (sorta kinda bad to mate with fish-frogs, but on the other hand, could be awesome.) Reaching too far inward, breeding wise? As the Martenses prove, that’s a no-no, period.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Of course, after last week’s discussion of the places where Lovecraft sometimes undermines his own prejudices, we get the source story for The Degenerate Dutch. There are bits I enjoy about this one, but the whole thing is a vicious rant on the supposed dangers of racial degeneration that encompasses everything that’s worst about HP’s oeuvre.
The further I get in this reread, the more I notice how HP’s hatred of other races is nothing compared to his patronizing derision of the rural poor. They are consistently degenerate, timid, superstitious, barely human. At best, they tell strange tales that give some clue that might allow Real Men to take action. Like dynamiting mountains, there’s privilege for you. Of course, I’m sure the locals were grateful for his “protective leadership.”
And of course the gentry have further to fall. Especially those that don’t recognize their own betters: the Martenses, after all, hated English civilization. From there, cannibalism was inevitable.
In spite of the nauseating attitude, there’s something about the sheer hysterical energy and pace of the descriptions that draws one in. There is absolutely no inhibition in the frenzied horde of lugubrious verbiage. Blasphemous abnormalities! Charonian shadows! Charnel shadows! Daemoniac crescendos of ululation! Fungous, fetid vegetation! The language is central here, if you can get past the actual action—it’s manic, uninhibited, boiling and festering and objectively absurd—and I find myself caught up in the rush, even while my inner editor curls gibbering in a corner.
Speaking of curling in a corner, we see here some of the oddities that occur when HP writes a man of action. He’s on record as believing such action to be one of the primary admirable thing about the English race (and lack thereof to be one of the abominably alien things about mine). And yet, he was rather more prone to imagining such things than doing them. So when he tries to write an intrepid adventurer, sometimes the motivation… looks a lot like the motivations driving a nervous horror writer. Here we have a “connoisseur of horrors,” an abomination tourist and ambulance chaser who goes where creepy things have been reported and faffs around “investigating.” He tells you how horrible the whole thing is even while digging maniacally in the earth, but doesn’t seem to care much about the “simple animals” whose massacre drew him in, beyond a distant sympathy. (We won’t even talk about the poor girl to whom one of the monsters “does a deed,” who gets burned to death off-screen alongside it. Why not, Lovecraft didn’t bother.)
So admirable men don’t flee horror, but take action—driven by a sort of obsessive, morbid curiosity rather than any concrete goal. “But that fright was so mixed with wonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation.” Lovecraft in a nutshell.
In conclusion, “thunder-crazed” may be my new favorite adjective.
Next week, it might be better not to answer “The Call of Cthulhu.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land.” Her work has also appeared at Strange Horizons and Analog. She can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal. Unlike the Martenses, she is extremely fond of thunderstorms.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “Geldman’s Pharmacy” received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” is published on Tor.com, and her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen. She currently lives in a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island.
There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch. So I’m a bit ambivalent towards this story and the prejudices it shows. More seriously, this is not one of my favorites, not one of my most hated, just an OK story in my opinion.
I had to think for a minute to even remember anything about this story. Definitely one of Howard’s more pulpish attempts.
I saw “The Lurking Fear” as a summary of Lovecraft’s neuroses, c. 1921-2. When I first read this, I was curious why the relevant authorities didn’t pay more attention to our narrator, especially since people around him tend to die or disappear in suspicious circumstances. It also seems odd that this story was serialised: it makes it rather episodic.
Weird Tales roundup: reprinted in the June 1928 issue, which also featured Edmond Hamilton’s “The Dimension Terror”, August Derleth’s “The Philosophers’ Stone” and Manly Wade Wellman’s poem “The White Road”. The reprint story was Washington Irving’s “The Spectre Bridegroom”, from 1819.
I know I’ve read this many times — I even own the very book that makes up this weeks picture — and yet I had absolutely no recollection of this story. Sometimes I might not remember just from a title, but a little reading will remind me. But not this week. I read the whole thing with no recall of what was going to happen. Even now, inbred cannibal mole people? I might remember?
This one was commissioned to run as a serial and I’m not sure that HPL’s heart was really in it. There was thunder in the air on the night… It was not a wholesome landscape after dark… In other words, it was a dark and stormy night. Seriously, Howard? Seriously?
The first section reminds me a bit of some of the Carnacki stories of William Hope Hodgson. I don’t know if Lovecraft had read any of those at this point, but the whole setup in the deserted mansion is very reminiscent. In terms of influence, it just might have helped inspire the episode “Home” of The X-Files.
As Ruthanna notes, Lovecraft’s classism is really in play here. That is probably something that was drilled into him mercilessly by his aunts. Which is a bit odd, since their father was something of a self-made man, but he must have sheltered his daughters or something. And the only member of the rural poor I can think of who comes off even halfway decent is old Ammi from “Colour”.
It should be noted, though, that the whole inbred hillbilly thing was a bit of a national obsession in the teens and twenties. I don’t know if it started with the Kallikaks, but that book certainly gave the whole thing a big boost in the public eye. About all that’s left from all of that are a few tired jokes about Alabama and West Virginia, but in Lovecraft’s day, it was a big deal.
I’d say the (nonwizardly) Dunwichers are fairly sympathetic characters once we meet them during the Horror crisis. They don’t fit their blanket description as violent degenerates — in fact, they don’t seem to have enough energy or initiative for significant mayhem.
The difference between them and the men of action, as in “Fear,” is not race but class, specifically the advantages of education and wider experience that their higher class “rescuers” have. Not that “Fear’s” narrator is much of a rescuer. I doubt blowing up the Martense mansion wipes out the underground cannibals. While the narrator’s off nursing his new phobias, they’re probably busy digging new tunnels and awaiting the next thunderstorm….
And speaking of underground cannibals, that fine B-movie C.H.U.D. gives us an urban nest, tunnel-dwelling homeless people who’ve degenerated through exposure to toxic chemicals rather than through inbreeding. Our communal bugaboos do change over time, don’t they?
DemetriosX @@@@@@.-@@@@@: No classist like a self-made classist (or a “self-made” classist of the born-on-3rd-thinks-he-hit-a-home-run variety). And yeah, this one was not just or even mostly Lovecraft, but he sure does show it off.
AMPillsworth @@@@@ 5: I’m not sure “lack of energy or initiative” is really a sympathetic characteristic. It’s sort of the issue here, in fact, and for that matter it shows up in “Innsmouth” as well. If someone is described as degenerate, you never know whether they’re going to commit barely motivated violence, or stew in helpless apathy. Maybe both!
And yeah, Lovecraft’s men of action are not always the most efficacious actors.
Unnamed narrator of the week seems to be an independently wealthy bachelor with an obsessive taste for the weird.
I thought for a minute you were switching to a Manly Wade Wellman re-read. (Which would be a cool idea)
Just discovered this blog (via the Recent Comments sidebar) and wanted to thank you for it. I’m ambivalent about much of Lovecraft, with its mix of magnificent monsters and revolting racism, but will enjoy exploring and discussing them more here. Particular thanks for covering “Innsmouth,” a story out of my wildest good dreams which I love dearly despite the fierce jealousy it induced.
“The Lurking Fear” seems to me to vie with “Herbert West: Reanimator” as
Lovecraft’s worst story: unrelieved melodramatic adjectivitis. The narrator
is certainly no tree-hugger: the account is full of “trees…unnaturally
large”; “twisted trees”; “wild-armed titan trees”; “baleful primal trees”;
“deformed trees”; “baleful branches”; “over-nourished trees.” And just about
every other feature of the environment is imbued with such ominous qualities,
even lightning which seems to have a sentient urge to collapse dirt tunnels. The horror is based only on HPL’s recurring themes of miscegenation and/or inbreeding bringing degeneration–the tale makes only a passing nod to “cosmic” qualities, and is devoid of philosophical depth.
Besides the conveniently localized lightning, there are many other
implausibilities, the silliest being when one of the subterranean apes pops up
beneath an open window and bites the face off the narrator’s sidekick–who
dies still standing, silently, without screaming, recoiling, or thrashing
about as one might expect. Then: “…there must have been thousands….an
earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils…” In-group cannibalism
would not support such multiplication, and it’s hard to see how this
demographic extravagance could be fed only by the occasional raid on a few
dozen “mongrel squatters.” The story is pulp horror at its least appealing; I
fail to find any merit in it.
I have loved “The Lurking Fear” for many decades. It has delicious atmosphere and wonderfully lurid melodrama. An early tale, Lovecraft wrote it for HOME BREW, where earlier his “Herbert West–Reanimator” had appear’d. Like the early story, Lovecraft was instructed to write individual chapters of 1,000 words, for which I believe he was paid $5@@@@@. Clark Ashton Smith was hired to illustrate this second story for the journal, and his phallic trees are beautifully decadent. People call this one of Lovecraft’s worst stories, but the writing is quite good for such an early tale by a young writer who, mostly, wrote stories for his own amusement and had no intention of becoming a writer by profession (this changed when he began to sell stories to WEIRD TALES). The narrator is emotionally and mentally unbalanced–as is fitting for one whose life is devoted to a love of the grotesque and the terrible, which led to a profession of quests seeking strange horrors in literature and life. Yet the narrative voice is mostly sober, until one frantic moment when the prose itself becomes wild, so as to echo the lunatic who expresses it. The story is wonderfully effective, and I am so charmed by it that I wrote my own “version” of “The Lurking Fear,” whut was publish’d in a journal last year and will be reprinted in my next book early next year. The tale’s opening sentence is one of Lovecraft’s delightfully effective beginnings: “There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear.” Perect.
I thought the third “I” was going to be “imbecility”.
How can trees be feverish?
It wasn’t one of my favorite stories–or even remembered–either. Note similarity of fortuitous lightning to same thing in “Picture in the House”.
And morbid curiosity is a subset or branch of normal curiosity, but a wise mind, a stable one, knows that sometimes it’s better not to look, to keep one’s eye on the road rather than glance at what the flashing lights at its edge are about. Or to get mixed up with hundreds of creepy creatures when by oneself.
With Hallowe’en coming up, it might be time to link to this again, one of the highlights of the Scottish TV sketch show “Burnistoun”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGTEOrX_I08
“What size is it?”
“Well, it’s kinda hard tae tell what size things are in that basement, because of the non-Euclidean geometry, ye know -”
“-aye, they are bad for that, those houses – ”
“- but I’d say it’s probably cyclopean in scale. Immeasurably huge. Such that it would blacken your very eyes wi’ madness.”
“Well, could it be a squirrel?”
Ah, good ol’ HPL. The equal opportunity (blank)-ist. As long as you deviate from the healthy white anglo-saxon urbanite norm, he’s got an -ism or two prepared for you. It’s almost like a superpower. “Ism-Man”. Or “The Ism”. Everyone read the new and exciting “Superman vs. The Ism #1”.
@11 Angiportus
How can trees be feverish?
I’d hazard a guess that they can be feverish much the same way that geometry can be non-euclidean…
“is nothing compared to his patronizing derision of the rural poor. They
are consistently degenerate, timid, superstitious, barely human.”
Come ON! “The Colour out of Space”?! “Sweet Ermengarde”?! Superstitious, maybe, but “degenerate” and “barely human”?
@11 Angiportus
Let us not forget “the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees.” They’re a sort of swamp acacia that early white settlers thought caused malaria.
@13 Randalator
But there is such a thing as non-Euclidean geometry. Basically it’s any non-planar geometry or a geometry which uses more than 3 dimensions. So, spherical geometry, 4D geometry, that sort of thing. I’m not sure how you build something like that (which is really a question for next week), but they know at the Laundry that such abstruse mathematics are ideal for calling up nasties from the Dungeon Dimensions.
@15: Why was Lovecraft so scared of “non-Euclidean geometry” in general? The geometry of a sphere is non-Euclidean, after all…
@15 DemetriosX
But there [i]is such a thing as non-Eucidean geometry.[/i]
Well, and there is such a thing as feverish trees in the Catskills, as our resident botany correspondent Howard would have you know.
q.e.d. or something…
@16 SchuylerH
Why was Lovecraft so scared of “non-Euclidean geometry” in general?
’tis of the devil, I tell you!
Actually, regarding Lovecraft I think we have to treat “non-Euclidean geometry” as a synonym for “impossible geometry”. Pesky other-dimensional deities with their non-obeying the laws of physics.
Or he was scared of curved surfaces, which given his attitude towards women and all that might not be too otlandish a supposition…jury is still out on those two theories.
@17: I found this while looking. Seems mathematics wasn’t Lovecraft’s strong point: http://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/lovecraft-and-mathematics-non-euclidean-geometry/
@18 SchuylerH
Well, it’s mathematics, what do you expect? If it had been “mathematism”, on the other hand…
If it had been “mathematism”, on the other hand…
In “The Shadow over Gottingen”, the narrator is horrified to discover that he is the result of a complex conjugation, and that one of his parents was in fact imaginary.
@19: I have infrequently seen “mathematism” used in philosophy, though like most philosophical terms I have no idea what it means.
@20: I approve.
I wonder if part of Lovecraft’s problem was that he saw the mathematical field he was best at made even more complex by Einstein and various other scientists who didn’t happen to be white Anglo-Saxon New Englanders?
@21 SchuylerH
I suspect in 98.5% of all cases philosophers are just making shit up as they go.
It probably started with a professor trying to get out of teaching duties by creating a weird course that no one would be interested in. “What could I teach, that no one would show up to and would let me grab a second breakfast every Tuesday morning instead? Hmmm, let’s see…’Rational projection of the irrational self in contrast to the inherent mathematism in Kirkegaard’s theological approach – A critical discourse”…yep, that should do it.”
And things just escalated from there…
@16: Yes, Lovecraft’s “non-Euclidean geometry”=”impossible geometry.” The illusions in M. C. Escher’s art are the best representation I’ve seen of this. Escher should have been Lovecraft’s cover artist.
Ye story has just been reprinted in S. T. Joshi’s mammoth hardcover omnibus of Mythos tales publish’d by Centipede Press, A MOUNTAIN WALKED. Thomas Ott has supplied many fine full-page illustrations for the story, included one superb piece shewing ye feverish trees. Reading “The Lurking Fear” again in this magnificent edition renews my love & admiration of the story.
It should be pointed out that a close and careful reading shows that it is not the trees that are described as “feverish” but the vegetation surrounding them. Here again we find this thread accusing Lovecraft of a thing he did not committ, which is common among those clumsy commetators who are inattentive to text.
I wonder if part of Lovecraft’s problem was that he saw the mathematical field he was best at made even more complex by Einstein and various other scientists who didn’t happen to be white Anglo-Saxon New Englanders?
“The Algebra of Calabi-Yau” has a distinctly Mythos sound to it.
@24: Do you know who illustrated “Black Man with a Horn” in A Mountain Walked? I ask because I’m currently reading the Klein story in a rather less expensive edition.
Steve Jones, Tim Eldred and Octavios Cariello did a comic book adaptation of The Lurking Fear in 1991 for Lovecraft in Full Color. It has been reprinted several times and is the only such version I know about.
Although titled The Lurking Fear, this actually an original story by Eric Koenig, in 2 parts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnVPMOZk0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTga4K3YCv0
There’s a sort of movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OQPC10ZvFg The main appeal I suppose is that it’s a Jeffrey Combs movie. No, really…
There are several decent recorded versions. This one has different narrators for each part:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u8OXxH6zkY – chapter 1 read by Matthew Dixon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiXacZ6OUg0 – chapter 2 read by Thomas High
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ES8j_0OWM4 – Chapter 3 read by Chris Schmidt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7QBBo38mPM – Chapter 4 by Discrimo
Check out the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast from 2010: http://hppodcraft.com/2010/02/11/episode-30-the-lurking-fear/
My favorite art from this story on the internet is by Jazon 19, I think from about 2010. http://jazon19.deviantart.com/art/Elder-thing-177540632#/art/The-Lurking-Fear-176666144?_sid=6bff7a36
Anyway, for this story the pickings are slim, maybe because, well, it’s not that great. I’m a diehard Lovecraft fan and this is one story I’ve read only maybe twice in 40+ years.
@28: The worrying thing about the 1994 movie is that it is the best-received of three alleged adaptations: Dark Heritage and Bleeders are reputedly worse.
ETA: In the front matter of the comic, I notice this paragraph.
“H. P. Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear is, in the words of Arthur Conan Doyle, “a real creeper”. This is a real compliment.”
Something tells me this passage could have been less ambiguous. However, I now want to start something like de Camp’s Tolkien-Conan rumour.
For that matter, was The Strength to Dream ever “respected” or “scholarly”?
Speaking of “Black Man with a Horn,” this is the T. E. D. Klein story I’d love to discuss in this blog if — when??? — we add other Mythosian writers. Not only does he conjure great and terrible creatures of his own, his narrator was a (fictional) member of the Lovecraft circle and addresses Howard’s ghost on such pertinent questions as what went so wrong with that NYC sojourn.
Hmm. Glancing again through Klein’s collection DARK GODS (1985), I notice that his characters often ponder the close-quartered yet segregated classes and races of the city, and not without nervousness. In “Children of the Kingdom,” the narrator is returning to NYC aboard a bus and has lost track of what “shabby, nameless” town they’re fleeing through:
“Except for my reflection, I saw not one white face. A pair of little children threw stones at us from behind a fortress made of trash; a grown man stood pissing in the street like an animal…I wanted to be out of this benighted place, and prayed that the driver would get us through quickly…Then a street sign caught my eye, and I realized that I’d already arrived. This was my own neighborhood; my home was only three streets down and just across the avenue.”
Sound kinda familiar? Bit of Innsmouth, bit of Red Hook? Interesting!
The narrator of ‘Shadow Over Innsmouth’ used ‘gently bred,’
seriously, in a sentence. In that story, I rather suspected the author
of self-awareness – perhaps even using the narrator to set personal
issues into perspective. For this story, not so much.
Perhaps HPL’s upbringing imposed views that were old-fashioned even for the period? I may be wrong about the timeline, but I thought that the early 20th century was a time when WASPs fretted over those degenerate Eastern European and Asiatic types, not so much over the Dutch and Welsh… At any rate, the attitudes the narrator expresses in this story struck me as quite plausible for a Jane Austen novel, less so for pulp action.
Thanks for clearing it up about the feverish vegetation [treelike or otherwise] and the references to mathematics of various problematic kinds. I think Schuyler H nailed it. My memory is imperfect, but I recall Lovecraft talking more, or at least as much, about screwy angles, as about anything curved. –Except for all manner of marine and alien lifeforms.
As for women, I seem to recall Sonia writing that he did just fine with her, it was the financial part of the marriage that went south. I never saw a human form with more curves than a male bodybuilder, anyway…
SchuylerH @@@@@ 18: Well, there’s a blog that’s going to take up more of my time than it probably should for a while. Thanks for the link!
Not a mathematician myself, I hadn’t properly considered the more literal interpretations of “non-Euclidean” architecture. I hadn’t known that math was one of Lovecraft’s nemeses either; it puts suggestions for its more esoteric uses (e.g., in Dreams in the Witch House) in a whole new light.
“Black Man With a Horn” is one of the best post-Lovecraft Mythos stories. Klein really managed to make the idea of slowly discovering the Mythos in real life credible. It was the best story in the ’80 “New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos” anthology.
@32 Angiportus
I never saw a human form with more curves than a male bodybuilder, anyway…
As far as I remember, female bodybuilders are a tiny tiny fraction more curved than their male counterparts.
Heh. Going from racist horror literature to discussing female bodybuilding in only 32 comments. We’re hilariously awesome and awesomely hilarious. Yay.
I thought New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was a strong anthology overall: I also count David Drake’s “Than Curse the Darkness” among my favorites while “Shaft Number 247”, “Crouch End” and “The Faces at Pine Dunes” are also strong. Worth a review, should this re-read expand.
@35: Eventually, this re-read will cover all topics except those relevant to whichever story is being discussed during the week in question.
@36 SchuylerH
As is only suitable…
All tangents will be welcome, as long as they include a token shoggoth or reference to tomes of noisome age.
Or Monty Python. Or interesting linguistic trivia. I’ve been enjoying these threads tremendously, overtly on-topic or otherwise.
I’m mentioned this in the last thread, right before this one got posted, but the first licensed game of the H.P. Lovecraft mythos is on Kickstarter now and needs help to meet its funding. “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” seeks to translate that story into a video game format, and looks pretty amazing for the effort. Since we are all fans of HPL here, consider checking them out! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/agustincordes/h-p-lovecrafts-the-case-of-charles-dexter-ward
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure the narrator’s interpretation of what caused the family to mutate into monsters works. That’s a lot of physical change in a relatively short period of time. It seems like inbreeding that caused that much alteration would lead to a lot of lethal traits showing up as well.
Personally, I’d bet on them being exposed to some eldritch/otherworldly force that is mutating them into its preferred form while killing off the animals that lived in the area. The force, whatever it is, works like the colour from out of space, making them more and more resistant to leaving and more paranoid of outsiders. Hence, the last member of the family to escape its influence and to try to get the others to reach out to the outside world is a threat who must be killed.
You could, if you want, easily turn the story around into the opposite of what Lovecraft seemed to intend. The family members consider themselves above outsiders and isolate themselves from contaminating influences, not realizing it’s costing them their humanity.
And it gives a somewhat better explanation for gory death by window. The ape-men are now just the pawns of the latest, eldritch evil. The eldritch evil helps hold hypnotize the guy and holdhim in place while he’s killed. It then keeps him propped up. The narrator was spared either because the EE wanted someone to tell people what had happened or because he was somehow protected. Maybe there really is a ghost, and it was able to protect the person near to the place where it died.
Alternately, maybe the family interbred with trolls back in the old country and these are just recessive genes coming to light.
re: “How is he still standing?”
Clearly the corpse remained standing a the window because after killing him the monster kept holding him and nibbling at his face till rigor mortis set in.
a1ay@12
That link made my day. Thanks!
Kind of late to the party, but I’ve been really enjoying these, and as this was one of the Lovecraft tales that made the biggest impression on me, I felt I had to comment here. In retrospect, I think it was a combination of my age (14 or so), the cover art above (which I still have trouble looking at), and the fact that my bedroom at the time was at the back of a daylight basement (I slept upstairs on the couch with the light on for the rest of the week) that really hit me so hard. I still haven’t been able to bring myself to re-read it, almost 20 years later.
I’ve always wondered about the sense of entitlement displayed in some Lovecraft stories. What, for instance, entitled the narrator of The Shunned House to set up shop in a property owned by someone else and start spraying sulphuric acid and energy weapons around?
Similarly, in TLF, what gives the narrator the right to rock up with a demolition crew and blow up the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest Mountain? Did he bother checking with the City Council or the Zoning Commisison? The whole thing stank of graft.
Anyway, plagued by these thoughts, I took myself off to the library and did some research. What I discovered was that the whole “Lurking Fear Affair” was a land-grab, pure and simple, engineered probably by WR Hearst or agents working on his behalf. The idea was to undermine, terrorise and disempower the squatters in every way possible in order to force them off the land. Most of them ended up in social housing or in hobo jungles closer to Albany and New York.
The usurpers held onto the land for a few years, then sold it on, at vast profit, to people unaware of its history – it was prime Borsht Belt real estate. The Thunderhead Hotel, which sprang up on the site of the mansion was the centrepiece of a complex which sprawled down the slopes of the mountain and into the lowlands beyond – with chalets, motels and lakeside camping grounds.
Shelly Berman and Henny Youngman appeared there many times during the fifties and sixties and it was the venue for one of Woody Allen’s first stand-up appearances.
The above is the trailer for a short story which I am, at the moment, frenziedly trying to complete.
I am intrigued and amused by the idea of the Martense property ending up as a Borsht Belt resort.