Let's read five stories from my hardcover copy of the Corrected Ninth Printing of Arkham House's Dagon and Other Macabre Tales by H. P. Lovecraft. In his introduction to the volume, T. E. D. Klein tells us that the pieces presented in Dagon have been considered "secondary" and "minor," and I certainly thought 1922's "The Lurking Fear," which I just read here in Dagon, a weaker than average spot of work on HPL's part. But let's hold out hope that at least some of today's selections, all of them written before "The Lurking Fear," will be worthwhile. I chose these five because I don't think I've read them before, while specifically avoiding "Dream Cycle" stories, which I plan to read some other time.
"The Tomb" (1922)
I am told this was written in 1917, but first published in 1922 in The Vagrant, an amateur press publication; it would appear in Weird Tales in 1926.In the first paragraph of the ten-page story our narrator, a wealthy young man named Jervas Dudley, reports that he writes from within an insane asylum. This tale is the story of his solitary and strange life. Ever since he was a little boy he has been able to sense things, see and hear things, that others cannot, and, unconstrained by work or school, has spent a lot of time in the woods near his home, apparently watching and communicating with such spirits as "dryads." This manuscript focuses on a padlocked mausoleum in those woods, where are buried the Hydes, an almost extinct family whose only surviving member is twenty-something Jervas himself, who is descended from the Hydes on his mother's side. Jervas is fascinated by this tomb and the nearby ruins of the Hyde house, which was destroyed in a fire caused by a lightning bolt back in the 18th century. Jervas spends long hours lying before the padlocked door to the tomb, sometimes asleep, sometimes awake, and begins acquiring the knowledge and even personality of an 18th-century gentleman, surprising his family by speaking with the diction and wit of a free-thinking sophisticate of almost 200 years ago. Lovecraft even includes in the story a sort of libertine 18th-century-style poem about drinking and wenching. (This brought to mind Brian Lumley's first Necroscope novel, in which a guy can speak to the dead and uses that ability to gather material for his historical fiction.)
Jervas aspires to be buried in the Hyde tomb when he dies, and even gains access to the mausoleum and reclines in an empty coffin within, though it is unclear whether Jervas has physically entered the tomb after his ghost-acquired knowledge has guided him to the location of the padlock's key, or if his long visits within the tomb are in fact out-of-body experiences. Jervas's father, worried about his son's odd behavior at the tomb entrance and the ruined Hyde house, sets a spy to watching him, and when Jervas throws a sort of fit at the ruin (in his mind he is reliving the night of the party at which the house was burned down) the young man is seized and put into the mad house.
This is a good creepy story that also, I suspect, represents a sort of wish-fulfillment tale for Lovecraft, who thought the 18th century the height of civilization and who was himself, like the narrator, unsuited for (or unwilling to take on) the work of a real job or the pursuit of a college degree. Also interesting is the reference to Plutarch's Life of Theseus. Thumbs up for "The Tomb!"
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| Fun 1960s Panther editions of H. P. Lovecraft stories; The Lurking Fear and Other Stories includes "The Moon-Bog" and "The Hound." |
Like "The Tomb," with its reference to Plutarch, "The Tree" reflects an interest in the classical world, being set in ancient Greece, with "The Tyrant of Syracuse" as a pivotal character. Two sculptors, residents of Arcadia, are our main characters; they are best friends, as famous for their steadfast brotherly affection as for their artistic ability. While they are devoted to each other, these two pals have very different personalities, Musides being a guy who loves to party at night while Kalos prefers to meditate in the solitude of an olive grove, where he, perhaps, communes with dryads (not unlike the guy in "The Tomb.")
The Tyrant of Syracuse wants a colossal statue of Tyche, and asks the two buddies to each build one, in hopes the friendly competition will inspire them to new heights of artistic excellence that will bring glory to Syracuse. But Kalos falls ill and dies before the competition is barely begun. Musides builds Kalos a beautiful tomb, and, as Kalos asked him to, buries close to his friend's head twigs from particular olive trees. As the years go by and Kalos toils on his statue of Tyche, a preternaturally huge and twisted olive tree grows next to Kalos's tomb, near where the dead sculptor's head rests--the tree's roots actually extend into and under the sepulchre. When finally the statue of Tyche is finished, and a Syracusan delegation comes to collect it, there is a storm and the over-sized olive tree falls, killing Musides and demolishing the statue.
I have to admit I'm not quite grokking what is going on here. Are we to think that Kalos didn't really love Musides so much and was in fact envious that his friend was going to "win" the competition once he had cleared the field by dying? How much are we supposed to blame the dryads for coming between the two friends--did the dryads manipulate Kalos against Musides, or did Kalos seek their help in making sure his reputation as an artist was not eclipsed by Musides? One of the things that makes the story hard to unravel is that Musides is a good friend to Kalos--Kalos has no rational reason to resent this man, who is sincerely brokenhearted upon his friend's death. As I read the story, Musides is an innocent victim of Kalos and/or the dryads.
Acceptable; I wish Lovecraft had made Kalos's and/or the dryads' motives a little more clear.
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| 1969 and 1985 Panther editions of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales |
The text of "The Temple" is a manuscript penned by a U-boat commander, discovered in a bottle on the eastern coast of Mexico. The narrator relates how he accepted the surrender of a British merchant vessel's crew and then murdered them; one of the German officers looted the corpse of one of the British sailors, finding a handsome ivory carving of a young man's head, crowned with laurel. After this war crime the U-boat is plagued with ill luck which includes mechanical failures and trouble among the men, many of whom fear they are cursed, some even claiming to see the ghosts of their victims through the portholes--some of the sailors even go violently insane. The narrator's response to these problems is to torture and execute his subordinates, until, after an actual mutiny, only he and the officer with the looted classical head are left alive on the disabled boat as it drifts southward, gradually sinking.
The ocean floor comes within sight, and the officer, claiming he is being called by some unnamed being, leaves the submarine, even though he can only expect to be crushed by the pressure at this depth. The commander is thus alone when the submarine lands on the sea bottom in the middle of the marble ruins of Atlantis!
Many Lovecraft stories feature a dude exploring an ancient and/or alien city, and "The Temple" is one of them. After carefully observing the "buildings, arches, statues, and bridges" of Atlantis with a search light from within the safety of the submarine, which apparently has enough air and electricity to stay submerged for weeks (don't use HPL as a source for your school reports on WWI technology, kids), the U-boat commander puts on a deep-sea diving suit and explores the city on foot. The style of sculptures in the city match the now lost ivory head.
As his electricity finally begins to run out he finds himself plagued by dreams of drowning men, including the British sailor who had the classical head, and irresistibly drawn to a huge temple; after he finishes his manuscript he will go to this temple, where he will no doubt die. We don't know what he will find in the temple, but there are clues that suggest that within its confines he will suffer a terrible punishment for his crimes.
Not bad. "The Temple" might be considered an interesting artifact of American attitudes about Germany after The Great War: Lovecraft indulges in a vehement satire of the German elite in this story, putting into the Prussian submarine commander's mouth loads of bombastic nationalism: "...all things are noble which serve the German state;" "Boatswain Muller, an elderly man who would have known better had he not been a superstitious Alsatian swine;" "...His mind was not Prussian, but given to imaginings and speculations which have no value....He was a German, but only a Rhinelander and a commoner...." It is perhaps ironic to find Lovecraft, whose letters and stories testify to his own racism and bigotry, spoofing a Prussian's prejudice against Rhinelanders and Alsatians.
My copy of Dagon suggests "The Temple" was written in 1920 but was not published until 1925, when it made its debut in Weird Tales.
"The Moon-Bog" (1926)
Denys Barry made a pile of money in America, and then returned to his ancestral homeland, the Emerald Isle, and the remote village of Kilderry, where his ancestors were lords who lived in a now decrepit castle. Barry purchased the castle and started repairing it; at first the local peasants were thrilled to have this big spender around, but when they learned he wanted to drain the local bog, which was reputed to be haunted, the villagers up and left! Barry had to import from the north servants to work in the castle and laborers to do that bog-draining which he was committed to, despite the protests of the superstitious peasants; after all, he wanted to put that land to good use, and he was an amateur archaeologist, and sought to investigate the ruins that were strongly suspected to lie under the bog.
Lonely, Barry summoned one of his American friends to come visit--this friend is our narrator. We know from paragraph one that Barry and a bunch of other people have vanished, and this eight-page story relates how they disappeared. In short, through vivid dreams and bizarre sights witnessed through the window of his room in the castle late at night, the narrator realizes that Kilderry was colonized by Greeks in ancient times, but their city was flooded and the population killed; the Greek ghosts haunt the bog, and they do not want their buried bodies and ruined city disturbed. The superstitious locals recognized this, but Barry and the workers from the north do not, and one night, as the narrator watches, ghostly naiads, to the accompaniment of weird flute music and sinister lights, draw the northern laborers and domestics, and Barry himself, into the bog where they are drowned...or, perhaps, turned into frogs!
Not bad.
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| Michel Parry included "The Hound" in his 1974 anthology of stories about man's best friend |
In the first paragraph of "The Hound" we learn that our narrator is about to commit suicide! He is going to blow his own brains out in order to avoid the fate suffered by his friend St. John, who is a gruesomely mangled corpse!
In the first part of the story the narrator explains that he and St. John were artists, jaded and decadent Englishmen always seeking some new thrill to ease their ennui. They took up the hobby of grave robbing, and even outfitted a secret museum full of the skulls of famous men, stolen grave markers, the corpses of beautiful women taxidermied such that they appeared to be alive, the heads of recently buried babies, books with covers of tanned human skin, etc. Their final grave robbing adventure was in Holland, the looting of the coffin of a man dead 500 years, a man himself infamous in his day for being a grave robber. In the casket with the centuries-old corpse they found a jade amulet carved in the form of a winged dog, an image they recognize from the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the symbol of an Asian cult of cannibals!
The second part of the story (which in its entirety is only eight pages here in Dagon) describes how the narrator and St. John were haunted by various fleeting sights and dimly heard sounds (most prominently the baying of a hound) after returning home to rural England to install the jade amulet in a prominent niche of their subterranean museum, how St. John was mauled by some mysterious creature, and how the narrator, desperate, returned to the Dutch cemetery in hopes of returning the jade figure to its rightful resting place and thus earning a reprieve from the uncanny forces tormenting him. This mission was a failure, serving merely to reveal to the narrator the true nature of the creature that killed St. John and would no doubt soon destroy him! Better to shoot yourself than be torn to pieces by such a monster!
Quite good; I can endorse this one with some enthusiasm--thumbs up for "The Hound."
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| "The Hound" was included by James Dickie in his 1971 anthology The Undead, published in the Netherlands in 1972 as Vampier! |
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I was pretty disappointed in "The Lurking Fear," perhaps more than I let on in my last blog post, and am pleased that every one of these five tales is superior to that mess in style, economy, structure, and basic premise. My faith in H. P. Lovecraft is restored!
More weird fiction in the near future, but first, in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, we tackle a 1970s science fiction novel.
Like you, I've found Lovecraft's work very uneven. Yet, despite the weakness of several of his stories, the unique dread that Lovecraft manages to infuse in most of his fiction comes through.
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