"The Lurking Fear" by H. P. Lovecraft and "The Red Brain" by Donald Wandrei

isfdb image of jacket of
Mysteries of Time and Spirit

Via interlibrary loan I borrowed 2002's Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, a 400+ page volume edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, and have been desultorily sampling bits and pieces of it.  The letters are full of interest and entertainment as the foremost of the Weird Tales gang and one of his young disciples pass judgement on fantastic literature (in a January 11, 1927 letter Lovecraft calls Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" "most insidiously potent" and declares that M. P. Shiel's "The House of Sounds" is "the only first-rate story Shiel ever wrote") and architecture (Lovecraft in an April 12, 1927 letter laments that both the Capitol in Washington, D.C. and the Massachusetts State House have "been spoiled by wings") and America's cities; in a February 10, 1927 letter Lovecraft briefly tells Wandrei that he found Washington "delightful" but fills multiple pages with denunciations of New York, where HPL lived for over two years and where he says that "all life"

...is purely artificial & affected--values are forced & arbitrary, mental fashions are capricious, pathological, or commercial rather than authentic, & literary activity & conversation are motivated by a shallow pose, a sophistical concealment of ignorance, & a morbidly charlatanic egotism & cheap assertiveness far removed from the solid aesthetic intensity which ought to underlie a life of art & letters...the "aesthetes" of New York are less interested in art & beauty than in themselves...a case of inferior people trying to be conspicuous somehow, & choosing art as a form of ballyhoo more convenient & inexpensive than business or evangelism or sword-swallowing.

I find this sort of vitriol exciting and amusing, even when directed at my beloved New York City.  (I have to admit, however, that Lovecraft's dismissals of one of this blog's heroes, his fellow Weird Tales writer Edmond Hamilton, had me smh, as the kids tweet.)  Wandrei, in a March 21, 1927 letter, expresses his own appreciation for Lovecraft's "pricking of the New York bubble," suggesting that people around the country think NYC is getting too big for its britches but are too afraid to openly criticize The Big Apple!

In their letters Lovecraft and Wandrei talk quite a bit about Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" and Wandrei's "The Twilight of Time," published as "The Red Brain," spurring me to read these two stories, which I had never read before.

"The Lurking Fear" by H. P. Lovecraft (1923)

In the February 10, 1927 letter already quoted above, Lovecraft tells Wandrei that "'The Lurking Fear' was done to order for a wretchedly sensational magazine four years ago...."  Lovecraft refers to Home Brew, a humor magazine that described itself as "peppy," "piquant" and "zippy" and "America's Greatest Pocket Magazine;" opinions will differ, I suppose--in a December 11, 1926 letter our man HPL went so far as to celebrate the demise of the "abysmally wretched" Home Brew.  "The Lurking Fear" was serialized across four issues in 1923, and would later appear entire in the June 1928 issue of Weird Tales before going on to be reprinted in many books.  I read the version appearing in my 2001 printing of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, which, S. T. Joshi tells us in the introduction to that volume, is based on Lovecraft's typescript.

(You can actually read Lovecraft's typescript of "The Lurking Fear" yourself, which has been scanned and put up on the Brown University website, along with a pile of other documents related to HPL, like a postcard Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long sent to Wandrei from a whaling museum in New Bedford, Connecticut in August of 1929; Lovecraft jokes that he and Long are "seriously considering" becoming sailors.)

Atop Tempest Mountain in the Catskills sits the abandoned Martense mansion.  The mansion, long ago the site of a murder, is considered the sinister haunt of some kind of monster by the hillbillies who live in the area--the monster is connected, they believe, with the violent thunderstorms endemic to the area.  (Lovecraft never calls them "hillbillies," instead labeling them "squatters," "witless shanty-dwellers," and even "mountain mongrels," the last of which I found pretty funny.)  When a lightning bolt somehow causes a cave in that wrecks a hillbilly village--destroying many "shanties" and killing over two score of that village's inhabitants--the hillbillies insist the monster at the mansion is to blame, but a search of the mansion turns up no clues.

A 1947 anthology with "The
Lurking Fear" as the title story

Our narrator is a wealthy guy fascinated by the macabre ("I am a connoisseur in horrors") and, a few weeks after the disaster, when most of the state police and members of the mainstream media have left the area, their investigations having yielded nothing, he launches his own investigation, bringing with him to the Catskills two muscular he-men armed with automatic pistols.  The narrator decides that the first step of his investigation will be to spend a stormy night in the room of the decrepit mansion once inhabited by Jan Martense, who was apparently murdered by his family in the middle of the 18th century.  The three men are to take turns keeping watch, so that one of them is always awake, his gun at the ready.  However, when the narrator is aroused in the middle of the night and witnesses a lightning strike that shakes the entire mountain and casts a hideous shadow against the fireplace, he finds that his two bodyguards have vanished, never to be seen again!

Thus ends the first of "The Lurking Fear"'s four parts.  (Here in Dagon each part is five pages long.)  In Part II the narrator joins forces with a journalist and the pair spend weeks interviewing hillbillies and searching the mansion, countryside and surrounding villages in order to learn as much about the Martense family and the monster as possible.   Then one day comes another powerful storm, and a lightning strike that causes a landslide.  While the narrator isn't looking, his journalist friend is killed--our hero finds the reporter's corpse  standing by an open window, through which some creature has chewed off his face.

In Part III the narrator lays on us all the information he and his now late friend (whom he buries secretly in the wilderness, opting to tell the authorities this guy just disappeared) uncovered, and we get a history of the Martense family and their mansion.  For reasons I couldn't quite pin down, and perhaps simply because he is going insane, the narrator has come to believe the monster is the ghost of Jan Martense, and decides to dig up Jan Martense's grave.  During this fruitless excavation he blunders upon a narrow tunnel and crawls around in it, meeting a monster he can barely see--"The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw.  But what a claw!"  Yet another of the lightning bolts that figure so prominently in this story starts yet another cave in, killing the monster and ejecting the narrator onto the surface.  The narrator later learns that at the same time he was confronting a monster in a tunnel, some hillbillies twenty miles away were attacked by another monster--the country folk had the presence of mind to trap the monster in a shack and set the shack on fire, thus slaying the creature.

You see, one of the "surprises" of "The Lurking Fear" is that for centuries people thought there was one solitary monster when in fact there is an entire population of monsters, hundreds or even thousands, all of them descended from the Martense family and living in a vast network of underground tunnels that radiate from the mansion.  The Martenses, Anglophobic Dutchmen, cut themselves off from society after the British took over New Amsterdam (they murdered the wayward Jan because he traitorously became accustomed to English ways while serving in the colonial forces during the Seven Years War) and over the succeeding centuries degenerated into simian beasts (and multiplied into a teeming army that has somehow kept itself secret.)  All this, hinted at before, is revealed starkly in Part IV when the narrator searches the mansion for the umpteenth time and finds a tunnel entrance at the base of the chimney and later hides behind a bush during a thunderstorm and watches an army of the monsters, short deformed white apes, stream out of the mansion and into the countryside.  He shoots down a straggler with his pistol and recognizes the distinctive eyes of the Martense clan in its monkey-like visage.  Then he hires some people to blow up the mansion and mountain and seal the tunnels, presumably ending the Martense reign of terror, but his experiences have damaged his mind and he can't stop worrying that some of these monkey people may have escaped, or that elsewhere in the world similar degenerates may exist.  "...why cannot the doctors give me something to make me sleep, or calm my brain when it thunders?" 

Lovecraft fans will recognize elements of "The Lurking Fear," like a family living in isolation from society and degenerating, and a climactic parade of semi-human monsters, that would reappear in "The Shadow over Innsmouth."  Such elements are used to much greater effect in that masterpiece; here, unfortunately, they are much less convincing and are embedded in a story we can only charitably call a mediocrity.  "The Lurking Fear" is not good, suffering many flaws and lacking compensating virtues.

The structure and pacing are bad--the story doesn't flow in a logical or satisfying way, Lovecraft failing to link causes with effects in a convincing chain with the result that characters' decisions don't make a lot of sense.  The narrator seems to know all about the mansion and Jan Martense's murder in Part I (he knows what room Jan Martense was killed in, for example) and yet Lovecraft makes a big deal out of all the research into Jan Martense's life and death in Parts II and III; at the same time the narrator pursues courses based on his knowledge of the Martense history, like sitting in the murder room and digging up the grave of the murder victim, that feel arbitrary and yield results only by chance.  Wouldn't a better story structure have the narrator discover clues that logically lead him step by step to a single climactic exploration of the mansion in the tale's finale?  As the story stands he investigates the mansion again and again and these explorations do little to advance the plot.

Characters appear simply to be killed but Lovecraft doesn't bother to give these victims any personality or relationship to narrator so we don't care that they have been killed.  Monsters are defeated in anticlimactic ways.  The monsters' relationship to thunder and lightning is unclear and thematically equivocal--sometimes it helps them, sometimes it hurts them, it seems to summon them to the surface and/or drive them crazy, etc.  The multiplication of the Martense family and the way lightning is always causing landslides and cave ins just feels too unbelievable.

In their letters, Lovecraft and Wandrei blame the weaknesses of "The Lurking Fear" on the need to conform to the format prescribed by Home Brew, and I guess there is something to that; the killings of the two bodyguards and the journalist serve as shock endings of Parts I and II, and if Lovecraft had ever revised the story as he suggests he might have in that February 10, 1927 letter ("Some day I may re-write it decently as a continuous unit") maybe he could have eliminated those three characters altogether as part of tightening up the piece.  Wandrei, like a good friend, on March 21, 1927 encouraged HPL to revise the tale, expressing great confidence in the possibility of improvement:

...I should like to see "The Lurking Fear" rewritten sometime with all traces and insidious reminders of "Home Brew" taken out....a few changes, I think, are all that are necessary....it seems to me that it might be made into one of your better or best stories.  

It doesn't seem that such revisions were ever made, and I have to give "The Lurking Fear" as it appears in Dagon a thumbs down; this is a component of the Lovecraft oeuvre that can be safely skipped by casual fans.

(Above I noted that opinions will differ, and SF historian Sam Moskowitz, who acquired some of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright's records, reports in his 1983 article "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales: 1924 to 1940" that "The Lurking Fear" was best received of all the stories in the issue of Weird Tales in which it appeared.)

"The Red Brain" by Donald Wandrei (1927)

In 1926, Wandrei's "The Twilight of Time" was rejected by Weird Tales (see Wandrei's letter to Lovecraft dated February 28, 1927), but it was later read by Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith, all of whom praised the story.  Lovecraft wrote to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, recommending Wandrei's work (see Lovecraft's January 29, 1927 letter to Wandrei for this and the encomiums from FBL and CAS) and in short order Wright purchased "The Twilight of Time" and printed it under the title "The Red Brain" in October, 1927; Moskowitz reports that "The Red Brain" was the most popular piece in that October issue.  "The Red Brain" was reprinted in Weird Tales in 1936, and Lovecraft in a May 14, 1936 letter reports to Wandrei on Robert Bloch's appreciation of the tale.  Obviously this is a story embraced by the weird community which I should read.

In a September 8, 1927 letter Wandrei complains that the version of "The Red Brain" appearing in Weird Tales has had 26 lines removed "from various places by some incomprehensible method of deletion" and in the May 14, '36 letter Lovecraft suggests that the reprint was equally deficient.  Hoping to get the best possible text of "The Red Brain," I spent seven bucks on an electronic copy of the 2017 volume edited by S. T. Joshi, The Red Brain: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

"The Red Brain" is the tale of the people of the Antares star system, billions of years in the future, when all of the other stars in the universe have gone dim and even collapsed into dust, along with their planets, so that the universe is a vast ocean of lifeless, lightless dust.  Antares, the largest star in the universe, is the last to die, and the civilization on its planet is the last to rise.

By the time of this story the people of Antares have evolved into sexless shape-shifting blobs that are all brain!  Because they don't have to waste time on erotic and familial relationships, they have plenty of time to develop super science, and have covered their planet with a dome that keeps out the dust and keeps in the atmosphere, have made for themselves immortal blob bodies, have abandoned any belief in religion and the supernatural, and so on.  But one thing they have been unable to do, despite working on the problem for millions of years, is figure out a way to prevent the death of Antares and reverse the spread of the dust and revive the universe which once glittered with burning stars and teemed with vibrant life.

But wait!  A new brain has been developed, a brain more powerful than all its predecessors, distinguished by the fact that it isn't a black blob like all the rest, but a blob of a unique red hue!  The Red Brain announces that it knows how to defeat the dust!  All the other brains open their minds to the Red Brain's message of salvation, only to be destroyed when a psychic explosion of hate erupts from the Red Brain--the Red Brain, the last living thing in the entire universe, is insane! 

This is a fun story, with its bizarre images and momentous tone and inconceivably vast scale and over the top downer of an ending.  Thumbs up!

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I'm not ready to put my copy of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales back on the shelf yet; more Lovecraft in our next episode.

More American Fantastic Tales by Women: Spofford, Jewett, Gilman and Wynne

In my last blogpost I wrote about stories written by major female American authors that are included in The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales Volume I, edited by Peter Straub. For this post I read stories from the book by women whom I don't think are quite as famous as Chopin, Wharton and Cather: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Madeline Yale Wynne.  I decided to read these four stories largely because of their evocative titles.  Could this be a good strategy for sniffing out good fiction?  Let's see.

"The Moonstone Mass" by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1868)

One of the ideas I had when I decided to blog about stories from this anthology, an idea I haven't follow through on, was to assess if and how the stories were peculiarly American.  Could these stories have been written by someone from another English-speaking country?  Did the distinctive culture or attitudes of the people of the United States shine through each story?  If we look at the stories this way I think it may be significant that many of them have something to do with business and money; perhaps this makes sense, if we think of the society of the United States as a peculiarly individualistic, democratic and bourgeois one, a place where everybody thinks of himself as middle-class and people are often defined by their work and their income.

Harriet Prescott Spofford's story fits into this mold.  Our narrator has a "certain weakness" in common with his ancestors, "the fear of dying in poverty."  And so he goes on a dangerous adventure: sailing into the Arctic in hopes of discovering, or disproving the existence of, the Northwest Passage.  His uncle, a man very interested in this topic, promises to pay him a pile of money for participating in the voyage.

"The Moonstone Mass" reminded me of Poe's 1841 story "Into the Maelstrom," which I admit I read like ten years ago and do not remember well.  Spofford's narrator's voyage is a disaster, with our hero the only survivor.  Alone he rides a chunk of ice along some current, witnessing odd meteorological, electrical and magnetic phenomena.  Spofford's speculations as to what is going on in the unexplored areas around the North Pole reminded me of 20th century science fiction writers' speculations about conditions on the moon or Mars, but also reminded me of the Romantic Movement: our hero doesn't do anything, he just lies on a moving ice floe and is alternately awed and horrified by what he sees (like "a lance of piercing light" that shoots up into the heavens) and feels (like a magnetic force that holds him in place on his ice floe.)  Finally he sees the "Mass" of the title, a huge hunk of moonstone, which he realizes is very valuable.  The current carries him past this treasure, and the memory of it haunts the rest of his days.

The plot of this story is good, but the passages about the natural wonders are too long and boring; the long sentences made my eyes glaze over.  Spofford doesn't develop any human relationships between the narrator and anybody on the doomed ship, and the north where much of the story takes pace is desolate of all life.  I have to give "The Moonstone Mass" a marginal thumbs down, and admit I thought the "Mass" of the title was going to be a ritual attended by witches or Satanists.

The most memorable thing about the story may be that Spofford employs some words we don't hear very much in the 21st century, like "pelf," "niggard" and "diablerie."  If things are a little boring at the office tomorrow, sprinkle your vocal contributions to a meeting or your section of a report with these fine words--there's a good chance you will generate an excitement your colleagues will appreciate.

 "In Dark New England Days" by Sarah Orne Jewett (1890)

The two unmarried Knowles sisters, who are both over sixty years old, have just lost their father, a former sea captain, to a stroke.  Now they can finally open his sea chest, the chest into which he has been putting all the profits of their farm as well as his voyages.  The chest is full of gold coins!  Good news!  But that night a burglar sneaks in and steals the treasure! Bad news!  Why don't you old bags own a dog!?

The sisters accuse Enoch Holt, a business associate of the dead sea captain's, of the theft.  Holt and Captain Knowles had been on bad terms for years after the old sailor had accused Holt of cheating him out of his fair share of the profits of a business partnership.  There is no evidence Holt is the burglar, and so he is acquitted.  Enraged, in front of half the town one of the sisters curses Holt and his descendents.

"You stole it, you thief!  You know it in your heart!" 

"I swear by my right hand I never touched it."

"Curse your right hand then!" cried Hannah Knowles...."Curse your right hand and all your folks' that follow you!"

The rest of the story flashes forward some decades, and consists mostly of dialogue between gossipy women, in which it is related that Enoch Holt and his descendents all broke or lost their right hands in accidents and wars, while the Knowles sisters lived as wretched recluses, perhaps accompanied by the ghost of their father, Captain Knowles.  I think you can say the story has a subtle feminist spin: Captain Knowles, instead of allowing his daughters to "grow up" and pursue their own lives, dominated them psychologically in such a way that they remained children into their sixties, so that they could not lead happy lives nor contribute to the community.

This story is OK, no big deal.  It feels a little long.  Worse, it is afflicted by one of my pet peeves: the dialogue of many of the characters, for long stretches, is written phonetically, with lots of apostrophes, to indicate their accent and/or dialect:

"Why on airth don't ye git somebody to git some o' your own wood an' season it well so 't won't warp, same 's mine done, an' build ye a new one?"

I realize this is a device employed by the author to build character and a sense of time and place, but I find it obstructive and annoying.

"The Yellow Wall Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

After the labored and archaic Spofford and Jewett stories this one was like a breath of fresh air!  In its clarity and directness, use of an unreliable narrator, and feminist ramifications, it feels very modern, and I mean that in a good way.

Our narrator is an educated woman, married to a physician.  Her brother is also a physician.  These doctors think she is mentally ill in some way and requires rest, and so forbid her from working, even from simply writing--the husband actually has a schedule for her to follow, covering every hour of the day!  The narrator repeatedly admits that he does this out of love for her, but to the reader it is obvious she is treated like a child or a prisoner!

The couple has rented a big old estate for three months.  The husband decides they shall use a top floor as a bedroom, a room once used as a sort of nursery and as a gymnasium when the estate was a school.  There are bars on the windows, and a hideous yellow wall paper on the walls of this room.

The narrator, who spends most of her time in the bedroom, becomes obsessed with the wall paper, and her interpretation of its design evolves over time.  Eventually she comes to think that the wall paper depicts a woman, or women, creeping about, trapped behind bars, and she endeavours to aid the prisoner in her escape.  At the end of the story she identifies with the liberated wall paper woman, thinking she herself has escaped from the wall paper.  Her husband faints when he sees her creeping around the room and hears her bizarre repetitive speech.

The story is open to several interpretations.  Perhaps the woman is a nut, maybe suffering from postpartum depression (she gave birth shortly before they moved into the rented estate but never sees her child) and the wall paper has a negative effect on her mind.  Maybe the woman is normal, and the estate is haunted--there is some physical evidence that the yellow wall paper has driven other people insane, and the couple was able to get the estate cheap, as if the place has a bad reputation.  Maybe a ghost woman has even escaped the wall paper and invaded the narrator's mind! Obviously many elements of the story--women as prisoners, a woman kept from doing productive or interesting work, a woman treated as a child, a woman separated from her own baby--can be interpreted as symbolism of the way women are treated by men and by society.

A very good psychological story, thought-provoking, clear when it should be (lots of sharp images of the sinister room and estate) and mysterious when it should be (is the woman crazy? is there a ghost? should we trust this woman's descriptions?)  Thumbs up!

"The Little Room" by Madeline Yale Wynne (1895)

I like fictional descriptions of rooms, Proust's description of the seaside hotel room in In Search of Lost Time, for example, or the rooms in Ballard's "Billenium."  I have lived a more or less sedentary life, and spent lots of time in rooms, and having moved every two or three years since leaving New Jersey for New York in the '90s, I've lived and worked in many different rooms.  I've spent a lot of time tracing with my eyes the grain of woods, cracks in plaster, and wallpaper patterns, and thinking about the relationships between bookshelves and doors and windows and moldings and pictures.  Like a city street, where the buildings are all put up by different people but live in a relationship with each other, a room is a collective work of art--somebody designed and built the room, placing windows and doors, but generally somebody else decides where the furniture goes, what kind of pictures and curtains to hang.  A room builds up a character, a personality, in the minds of the people who spend time in it, because of how it looks and because of the good or evil things that have happened in it.

I was totally into the descriptions of the room in Gilman's "The Yellow Wall Paper," and started Wynne's "The Little Room" with hopes of a similar experience.  And I was not disappointed!  This is a great little uncanny story which includes a vivid description of a room, a room with great emotional resonance.

In Vermont live two wealthy old ladies, sisters, in a large house.  Sometimes relatives come for brief visits, or to stay for a season.  On the north side of the house, between the front and back rooms, is a door.  Some visitors to the old house vividly recall a little room being behind the door, while others remember a china closet being there. Both schools of opinion can describe the room and its furniture or the closet and the china in great detail, and people who saw a room think the closet viewers must be putting on an elaborate hoax or suffering some delusion, and vice versa.  Most shockingly, some individuals who saw a room as children are distressed to find the room gone when they visit as adults.

Two young people who recently visited the house separately, one who saw a room and one who saw a closet, set off together to solve the mystery once and for all, only to find the house has just burned down.

I love the plot, and the style; Wynne writes economically, something I strongly appreciate, and really paints an image in the reader's mind of the little room which may or may not be there.  She also does a good job conveying the reactions of the characters to this weird phenomenon.  Thumbs up!

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I can strongly recommend "The Yellow Wall Paper" and "The Little Room" to readers of horror and weird fiction, and to those interested in women writers of speculative fiction.  American Fantastic Tales is shaping up to be a quite good anthology.