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 Terrible Old Man,” first published in the Tryout in July 1921. You can read the story here. Spoilers ahead.
Summary: No inhabitant of Kingsport remembers a time when the Terrible Old Man was young, and few know his real name. Rumor has it he was once captain of an East India clipper; since he pays for all his purchases with antique Spanish coins, rumor also has it he’s hidden a considerable fortune in his ramshackle house. The front yard of this ancient abode features gnarled trees and standing stones painted like idols. (Scary stones are an ongoing theme in this story.)
Small boys who’d otherwise taunt the Terrible Old Man keep away, but the occasional curious adult creeps up to a certain small-paned window looking into a room unfurnished save for a table laden with peculiar bottles. Each bottle contains a bit of lead suspended like a pendulum. When the Terrible Old Man addresses these bottles with names like Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, and Mate Ellis, the pendulums vibrate in seeming response. (Presumably these names can be heard due to breaks in the window from the “wicked missiles” hurled by the boys.)
Angelo Ricci, Manuel Silva and Joe Czanek aren’t put off by what the curious have to tell. To professional robbers like themselves, the lure of a feeble old man sitting on treasure is irresistible. One night Ricci and Silva venture up to the window and observe the Terrible Old Man in uncanny conversation with his bottles. Still undeterred, they mask and knock on the door. Meanwhile Czanek sits in the getaway car in the street behind the Terrible Old Man’s house. The screams he hears from inside don’t bode well for the poor old fellow, and Czanek nervously watches the rear gate for his colleagues. At last footsteps approach the gate, but it’s only the Terrible Old Man who appears, leaning on his cane and grinning. For the first time, Czanek notices that his eyes are yellow.
Kingsport inhabitants long gossip about three unidentifiable bodies that washed up with the tide, “horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels.” The Terrible Old Man takes no part in speculation. After all, he probably saw many more remarkable things in his long-ago sea captain days.
What’s Cyclopean: Absolutely nothing.
The Degenerate Dutch: The thieves’ names are notably ethnic. They are “of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions.” One is left with the worrisome feeling that Lovecraft might have expected one to root for the terrible old man. And he, of course, must have something foreign about him too to be properly scary—the “Eastern idols” in his yard.
Mythos Making: The story takes place in Kingsport—the same town where Ephraim-as-Asenath went to school. And the terrible old man, for whatever it’s worth, has yellow eyes.
Libronomicon: The terrible old man is apparently not much of a reader.
Madness Takes Its Toll: This story contains absolutely no mentions of madness or asylums.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
The Terrible Old Man is a remarkable thing: a succinct Lovecraft story. It’s a piece of minimalist brushwork, with most of the narrative suggested by negative space.
While the racism is subtle in this one—subtle for Lovecraft, I mean—it’s clearly there, and clearly supposed to contribute to the mood of the story. This is the very standard horror trope of a criminal running into a bigger monster who, for all that he’s a monster, ultimately reinforces the social norm. [ANNE: Heh, the winner for me in this story category is a pulp comic in which the thief knocked over an old lady to snatch her purse. Then the PURSE ate him. Urp.] The terrible old man is inside “the charmed circle of New England life and traditions” and keeps that circle strong and safe in a horribly traditional manner.
But the real narrative isn’t the overt events—the attempted theft, and the violent response. It’s in the unspoken background that this story breaks away from the standard tropes and queasy-making racial subtext to create something memorable. Where Shadow Out of Time tells you every detail of Yithian architecture, here there are only fascinating questions. How did a 200-year-old retired pirate captain come to live in Kingsport? Why does he keep his crew as lead pendulums swinging in bottles? What do the stones in his front yard have to do with it all? It would be easy to come up with three or four wildly divergent stories answering those questions, each several times the length of this tidbit.
Terrible Old Man appears to be very much at the edge of the Mythos. In fact, it’s not at the edge but at the start: this is Lovecraft’s first mention of the fictional New Englandtowns that eventually form the geographic center of his oeuvre. It takes place in Kingsport, presumably on the other side of town from the HallSchool. Kingport will eventually be joined by other towns around the Miskatonic river valley, and get at least a little fleshing out. Here, it’s a name and a couple of streets.
Perhaps this is why there’s no sign of the larger cosmos—not unless the terrible old man is secretly a deep one or a servant of Nyarlathotep or a leftover cultist who occasionally offers aid to wayward Yith in exchange for help with his little mortality problem. And he could be any of those things—or he could be something completely different that never comes up in any of the stories. There are more things in heaven and earth, and they are all pretty terrifying.
Anne’s Commentary
I have an enduring fondness for this tale, a tiny seed pearl steeped in the influence of Lord Dunsany and also, to my reader’s ear, of M. R. James. No overwrought first person narrative here—instead our narrator is a third person divinely distant from the action but sparing of his omniscience. The voice is educated, ironic and wry. The style verges on prose poem with its descriptive repetitions, the gnarled trees and painted stones and feeble old man. In sharp contrast to the central Mythos tales, the horror is allusive and oblique, the violence kept off-stage. Yet as in the best of Lord Dunsany and James, the reader gets plenty of fodder for his imagination to work itself into a shiver, or two, or many.
Who, and What, is this Dude?
I imagine the Terrible Old Man rather liked being called “terrible,” but I like to think of him as TOM. Meaning no disrespect, bottles, I swear. I doubt TOM was the most reputable of sea captains. In fact, I have a feeling (squeeish fan girl variety) that he was a pirate or at least a business associate of pirates. Spanish gold and silver; buddies named Spanish Joe and Long Tom; black magic, come on. So TOM is a pirate (retired) and a sorcerer (present), a kind of necromancer perhaps, the way he appears to store souls in bottles for reconstitution into deadly material form as needed. This magic reminds me of the technology used by the Fungi from Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness,” except they preserve their pilfered minds in cans. Factor in the Yithians’ ability to transfer minds in “The Shadow Out of Time” and the twist Ephraim Marsh gives this feat in “The Thing on the Doorstep”, and could be that we start to see a pattern of authorial anxiety. Hey, guys? Know what would be really awful? How about the alienation of one’s mind from one’s body into a rugose cone, or a woman, or a bottle or can? Brrr!
To his other neat achievements, TOM adds the spice of unnatural longevity and…what? He has freaking yellow eyes! Dogs bark at him! Look up “Dogs, barking” on TV Tropes: not a good sign, because canines always know when something weird is walking around. (Cats know, too, only they like weirdness unless it’s likely to eat them personally.) Is TOM some form of demon, or vampire? Is he the acolyte of a god who’s marked him with its own unholy ocular aspect? I pick the last possibility, but that’s just me. The beauty of this kind of story is the malleability of its mystery. Hey, if you want to think TOM is a Soong android, go for it. No way, unless maybe Lore, but again, it’s your sandbox, have fun!
The Bad Guys:
So, an Italian and a Portuguese and a Pole go into a bar, I mean, an old sea captain’s house….
Yes, there aren’t any Yankee thieves in this story, only immigrant types who don’t know any better than to ignore the warnings of their betters, that is, the earlier immigrant types. Oh well, at least the Polish guy feels bad about robbing and maybe torturing to death a pathetic old man. I guess we can assume that TOM himself is Anglo-Saxon, though it would be an assumption since we don’t know his name or anything about his appearance apart from his long white beard and yellow eyes.
The Polish guy still gets it in the end, because though the “alien” thieves are bad, TOM is badder and ultimately more alien. On the surface the story looks like a revenge-of-the-increasingly-beleaguered-white-man drama. Another pattern may be squirming under the surface. I glimpse the Lovecraft sucker punch: Whoa, you think that’s scary, what about this? As in, oh no, star-headed radiates; OH NO, SHOGGOTHS! Or, oh no, Yithian cones; OH NO, SPACE POLYPS!
The narrator speaks of a “charmed circle of New England life,” to which the thieves do not belong. In a tale as ironic as this one, I wonder if we should only take that remark at face value. After all, in Lovecraft, New England life is much more often cursed than charmed, even at its upper-crustiest levels.
Join us next week for disturbing underground cities—and a possible example of how to suppress women’s writing—in H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop’s “The Mound.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s “The Litany of Earth” was recently published on Tor.com. Her work has also appeared in Analog and Strange Horizons, and she can frequently be found on Livejournal and Twitter. While she currently makes her home outside Washington DC, she’s originally from Massachusetts, and it really isn’t at all like that.
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 now available from Tor Teen. She currently lives in a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island.
So there is this terrible old man, who is rude and scary to everyone and comes from the upper crust of the upper East Coast, living in this creepy old house where no one ever dares go, with a creepy gaze and nasty things happen when theives and other ill-sorts turn up…..is this an early pitch for Batman Beyond?
I still don’t like this story anywhere near as much as I should. It’s early Lovecraft, I think that he was still trying to find his distinct narrative voice here and the whole thing just feels a little slight. There are neat touches but aren’t sinister supernatural pirates all a bit William Hope Hodgson? Still, it’s interesting to see that the mythos and the Miskatonic County setting were already starting to form in some way.
“The Terrible Old Man” was reprinted in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Alongside it in that appearance were:
“The Woman of the Wood” by one of Lovecraft’s inspirations, A. Merritt.
“The Devil’s Pay”, an early story by August Derleth.
“The Monster-God of Mamurth”, the debut of “Captain Future” pulpster Edmond Hamilton.
A reprint of Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”.
There were also stories by B. Wallis, Alanson Skinner, Wright Field, G. G. Pendarves, Willis Knapp Jones and Greye La Spina.
I wonder if some of the shortness here is due to this having been for an amateur publication. Got to keep things short to keep the costs down, right?
On the whole, this feels like a forerunner of what would become the backbone of pre-code horror comics and the later media that would harken back to that. I can easily see this as a half-hour TV episode with the Cryptkeeper cracking jokes as bookends. But there is also a definite hint of MR James. It’s rougher than James’ work, certainly, but it does have the feel.
Part of me wonders if after this there are three new bottles on TOM’s table for him to talk to.
Something else that that occurs to me is that at the time this was written it was rather unlikely that these men from 3 different ethnic groups (and, Ann, I think Joe Czanek is not Polish, but rather, to use the term of the day, a Bohunk, i.e. Eastern European but farther south than Poland), anyway I think it’s unlikely that they would be working together. Marginalized minority ethnic groups tend to stick to those of their own cultural background.
Anne and I actually argued about Czanek’s ethnicity a bit–while the name could be from several different countries, I voted for Polish because Lovecraft County is later shown to have a significant population of Polish immigrants.
The Terrible Old Man also makes a cameo appearance in Lovecraft’s later story, “The Strange High House in the Mist,” giving him the distinction of being one of the very few more-or-less human Lovecraft characters to appear in more than one story (the others being Randolph Carter and Richard Upton Pickman).
The TOM will return in the “Strange High House in the Mist”! Stay tuned!
M.R. James or EC Comics? I agree with DemetriosX that this has a Tales from the Crypt vibe, with bad men hoisted by their own petard. As with those stories, the force of karmic retribution is both just (in a law-&-order sense) and meant to provide the shock of the eerie. (Hints of Horror at Red Hook, eh?)
Though it’s curious to see this old man as an exemplar of New England community. To stretch a little: last week’s story showed us the Yithians as sort of multi-culturalists (“come tell us about your culture for our archives”) and genocidal colonists (“we’ll take your land and your bodies”). So here, the TOM has all these markers of the cultures that he’s moved through BUT they seem like the spoils of plunder (and/or under his command, like those bottles with weird names).
It’s like, if you have to be in contact with other cultures–which is pretty much a given for a coastal community economically tied to other people–make sure you’re on top.
(I mean, the Yithians may grant some freedoms to cooperative minds that they swap with–but what do they do with the uncooperative?)
It would have made a lovely Twilight Zone episode. I’m with DemetriosX- does he have new bottles?
@5 Russell H
There are a few others. As noted last week, William Dwyer was on both the Peaslee expedition to Australia and the Miskatonic expedition to Antarctica. Some others like Albert Wilmarth and Henry Armitage (I think) at least get name-dropped a few times in other stories. Pickman and Carter are the biggies, though.
Is there any rugosity in this story? Any squamoseness?
No there is not.
DemetriosX @@@@@ 3 I initially thought Czanek might be Hungarian, but it seems some Poles also have the name, and Poles are more of a presence in Lovecraft’s towns, as we’ll see in The Color Out of Space and The Dreams in the Witch House. I agree that the robbers in this story seem refreshingly diversity-minded for their time.
I remember Dud the dumpkeeper in Salem’s Lot thinking that Barlow must be one of them bohunks, though, so it’s an epithet with New England horror heritage! Weird the things that stick in your mind.
@@@@@ 9 Yep, we hear of William Dyer twice, both in connection with MU expeditions into worldview-shattering territory! Yet Bill doesn’t seem to go very mad over it all, unlike his poor student Danforth. He’s on my shortlist for the MU expedition to Rl’yeh.
Raskos @@@@@ 10 I know, right? But at least we can hope that the Terrible Old Man has some ancient callouses from pacing the poopdeck and wielding a mean cutlass.
Anne @@@@@ 12.
Thank you. I will imagine this. It helps.
As one whose eyes are yellow underneath the brown, I wonder if 1926 is early enough for the word “terrible” to retain some of the earlier meaning of “awesome or astonishing”.
And I wonder if his friends were alive and well somewhere, using an early and secret version of Skype.
My copy of HPL’s work is not at hand so I don’t recall if any of the stones in the yard were basalt.
Tangentially: while looking for usable covers, I found Álvaro Nebot’s excellent Lovecraft illustrations. There’s a terrific Music of Erich Zann, and I love his Shadow Over Innsmouth. I encourage everyone to take a look.
The tale wouldn’t have been influenced by M. R. James, since Lovecraft didn’t read him until late 1925. I do think “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” influenced both “The Call of Cthulhu” and “Pickman’s Model”.
Nota bene: I can’t believe I’m following Ramsey Campbell. (Pause)
I think you guys are reaching a bit with the racial sub-text angle here (though there’s plenty in other Lovecraft stories to justify teasing this out in any of his stories).
I think the main point of these robbers’ names is that they were outsiders to the community. The locals knew not to mess with the old man. These guys did not. Therefore their nationality/ethnicity is not really important; they could’ve been John Smith, James Adams, and Gavin McGilitucky for all that.
On second thought, maybe Lovecraft is daydreaming of a sort of minority genocide program for New England.
@9 Another recurring character is Kuranes, first in “Celephais” and then in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.”
Also in “Dream-Quest,” it’s implied that Randolph Carter has heard of or met the lighthouse keeper who narrates “The White Ship.”
@9 Another recurring character is Kuranes, first in “Celephais” and then in “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.”
Also in “Dream-Quest,” it’s implied that Randolph Carter has heard of or met the lighthouse keeper who narrates “The White Ship.”
Then, of course, there’s Nyarlathotep, who as Soul and Messenger of the Outer Gods, must recur in avatars beyond counting, not all yet recognized as HIM/HER/ITSELF.
BenjaminJB @@@@@ 7: Ooh, interesting comparison!
I assumed that all minds eventually become cooperative. No reason for the Yith to hide their powers of undue influence when they’re at home.
Lach7 @@@@@ 17: Just so; we’re not analysing each story in isolation. And I do find it worth noticing how Lovecraft chooses to mark outsiders. It seems unlikely that he picked this particular method at random.
The story has intrigued and delighted me for decades, and I find myself returning to it and commenting on it in weird fiction of mine own. The idea of those bottles is so brilliant–such a little touch, and yet so sinister and potent, and I was delighted when an artist who crafted his own version of such bottles sent me one as gift. “The Terrible Old Man” is a classic example of how even Lovecraft’s minor tales contain depths of imagination that reward re-readings of the story. As a writer, the story teaches me that a tale can be complete and perfect in as few as 1,160 words. Lovecraft wrote the story before the existence of WEIRD TALES, in that period where he seems to have written fiction merely for his own amusement. (I believe that the publication of WEIRD TALES changed HPL’s mindset regarding his writing, in that he then approached writing as a minor profession, although it still remained for him, primarily, an art form.)
The prose reveals that Lovecraft was an excellent writer at the time of composition (January 28, 1920), and has many interesting features. The story is told almost in the form of folklore, The tense in which the tale is presented is peculiar, and I am too ignorant to know the exact literary name of the tense used in this story. Can someone who understands such literary things enlighten me? I want to call it “past tense present” or some such thing. I haven’t investigated to see if Lovecraft used this voice again in his fiction. It shews that Lovecraft was as experimental in voice as he was original in vision.
Kingsport is a fabulous invention, one that haunts me always.
@22: If my understanding and my sources are correct, TOM is initially described in the “static present” tense though the story later shifts to the past tense.
I agree that Kingsport is a fine creation, one we shall see rather more of in “The Festival”.
@@@@@ 22 and 23
I agree about Kingsport so much that I’ve put the best pizza parlor east of Providence (in my protagonist’s POV) in the town: Mama Jo’s, infamous for a pineapple/anchovy pie. True eldritch horror.
On second thought, a Rl’yeh pizza — calamari tentacles and seaweed — might be even tastier.
@24: The rational part of my intellect is revulsed at the indescribable horror of this aberrant dish, yet the lurking, degenerate, genes within me cry out “Iä! Iä!”
Is it just me or has this re-read been left out of the featured box?
I’ve always felt that TOM is a delicious little tale–the TOM looks like a victim; the attackers look like predators; but the prey is not so vulnerable as it looks. The story resonates all the more with us older people, more insecure as we get weaker, who can appreciate one of us having such uniquely effective self-defense methods!
I wonder whether the souls-in-lead-pendulums idea was entirely HPL’s own invention, or was adapted from some genuine antique belief or folk tradition, like the psychopomp whippoorwills in “The Dunwich Horror.”
–Donald Davis
@27: There’s something similar in this story from 1825: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/yeats/fip/fip21.htm
@27 Ah, the type of tale that TvTropes calls Mugging the Monster.
Tracking down the comic book versions slowed me down from posting this week. Alas most of them are pretty weak. The best of the bunch as far as I am concerned was found in Vol 1, #3 of Tower of Shadows from 1970.
There are better animated versions on YouTube. Here is a particular favorite by Doug Simon and Sean Kearney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHpuAAnHdEc
Don’t forget the wonderful HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast: http://hppodcraft.com/?s=terrible+old+man&submit.x=-1063&submit.y=-190
There are a few short films; one version just funded on Kickstarter;
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1470117221/hp-lovecrafts-the-terrible-old-man-short-film?ref=nav_search
Some are free on YouTube. For example this animated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY7OxbKL7IU
Or this live action version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQS1ImFYoa0
Heavy metal Lovecraft? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20MInC5Ax7Q
Otis Jiry does a nice narration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVlyzF4x5-c
Does anyone else have a favorite version?
@30: One thing I’m noticing as I look through the adaptations is that many of them add the detail of the robbers joining TOM’s collection. (I think the Simon and Kearney is the best of the videos, though the comic is good considering that Stan Lee allegedy didn’t understand Lovecraft) Also, is this story pre-internet “creepypasta”?
I am very fond of the Terrible Old Man myself, and think it unfortunate that he doesn’t show up much in Lovecraftian stories post-HPL.
@3 DemetriosX: their individual ethnicities don’t matter. They’re all part of the same Swarming, Alien Hordes and as such there is no need to burden them with cultural perspectives of their own.
On a side note, I’m pretty sure I recall comics with oddly multi-ethnic street gangs as late as the 80s, although whether by that point it was a similar All Criminals Are the Same or an actual effort at being multicultural is hard to say.
Speaking of comics, is it just me, or does Mr. Ricci in the featured illustration look more space alien than Italian? (Mr. Silva looks cool, kind of like Antonio Banderas. As for Mr. Czanek, he’s a sad victim of expositional clunkiness in the way he self-refers as “ol’Joe.” He never struck me as the third-person type somehow.)
I’m wondering how this story influenced work a generation or so down- Shottle Bop, for instance.
You know, I initially thought that Bob Howards creepy “mentor” in the Laundry series, Angleton, was a Terrible Old Man expy – I was actually dissapointed that he turned out to be (SPOILERS)
“merely” an Eldritch Abomination embodied in human form.
BMunro @@@@@ 35 Man, so many of my bosses have turned out to be eldritch abominations, it’s gotten old. Job-seekers, always bring some Powder of Ibn Ghazi to interviews. Dust some on your palm: if after the usual handshake, your interviewer turns squamous or unspeakably gelatinous, get out of there.
Leaving this here for fans of the story and Lovecraftian games: http://gamejolt.com/games/adventure/the-terrible-old-man/57128/
Has anyone else seen the previews for the movie “Don’t Breathe”? It immediately reminded me of this story. Although the danger seems to be of the mundane serial killer variety, the premise (three burglars try to rob an old man who turns out to be far more dangerous than they bargained for) was very familiar, although I imagine the resemblance is coincidental.
“The Terrible Old Man” is possibly my all-time favorite among Lovecraft’s tales. Some features of it, e.g. the use of the “static present” and the characterization of one of the three robbers as “tender-hearted,” remind me strongly of Damon Runyon’s style in his shrt stories about crooks and hustlers in New York. (Note 1) Czanek is the Polish spelling of that surname; in Hungarian it would have been spelled with an initial “Cs” instead of “Cz,” and in Czech (Bohemian) with an initial Č. (Note 2) The use of pendulums in bottles as a tool for communication with the spirits of the dead was an uncommon device used by Spiritualists in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries. For a stage trick to mimic the effect, see David P. Abbott’s _Behind the Scenes with the Mediums_ (1907). chapter V. (It can be found as a PDF on line in several places.
I think maybe a key to interpreting the story can be found in Lord Dunsany’s “Poor Old Bill”. Lovecraft loved this one and he narrated it in detail in Supernatural Horror in Literature. The captain in this story, who happens to be also a sorcerer, tortures his crew by removing their souls and send said souls to any place that comes to his twisted mind: the seabed, the moon… I believe that it wouldn’t be very difficult for him to put them in a bottle. Maybe this dunsanyan tale could be read as a partial prequel to “The Terrible Old Man”.
That’s an interesting thought! We covered “Poor Old Bill” later in the reread, but I never made that connection. Anne came close, I think, commenting on the similar tone and language between the two stories.