A Lovecraft Documentary

Notes on the Completion of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales

I have answered the call and journeyed into the dark and autumn of H.P. Lovecraft’s mind, a domed space in constant flux, forming itself anew as horrortension mounts, now a forest mossy, eldering, recapitulating the Unknown over and over again, now a mansion in ruins yet as enduring as the cavernous townships where dwarves do dwell. Lovecraft is not a man or a writer, but a world that one steps into and escapes only just in time. His stories center on a race of beings that predate humans by time immemorial. They are: maybe monsters, maybe gods, maybe both, maybe cosmic, evolutionary cousins with a bastard streak. They are: for the most part unknown to the populace at large, but in the New England hills of antiquity, legends passed down from one generation to another put a number of singular, typically racist (unfortunately) persons in the right position at the right time to be drawn into existential mystery. 

Dagon: A man lost at sea in a dingy is launched into a mucky country featuring geometry totally incongruous with the third dimension. He attributes the apparition to the floor of the sea shifting violently up in the wake of volcanic or seismic activity. Tramping through an alien terrain that matches his inner world in its meaningless features, he discovers that he is in the domain of Dagon, an antediluvian fish god. 

The Terrible Old Man: The plans of three robbers are turned on them when the Old Man they are targeting proves to be more cunningsinister than insane as they had assumed.

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family: Arthur Jermyn springs from an ancestral fountain stamped with insanity and eerie journeys into the Congo. When he becomes involved with the investigation of his genealogy, he learns more of the jungle sabbaticals and the race of beings that once worshipped in secret there. He also learns of the malign threads the Jermyns can follow back to this verdure-shadowed race and its primitive gods.

Nyarlathotep: A prose poem meditation on the god Nyarlathotep.

The Picture in the House: A storm-derailed man finds himself under the hospitable auspices of a man obsessed: obsessed with a certain engraved plate depicting a good-old-fashioned-family-o-cannibals at dinner.

Herbert West—Reanimator: The story that spawned the cult film—a Dr. Frankenstein pulled from a B movie, dead bodies shrieking out the horror of reemergence on the physical plane, a brood of monsters led by a wax-headed soldier with a black valise, a grotto gateway to subterranean nightmares.

The Rats in the Walls: A man settles to work in England where he intends to discover the more shadowy alleyways of his family history. With the maddening sound of gnawing rats accompanying him relentlessly, he uncovers an underground city of familial secrets that will challenge his conscious knowledge of himself and his forefathers.

The Call of Cthulhu: The tit-u-lar story and probably Lovecraft’s most famous. New England scholars, New Orleans voodoo cults, strange relics, and a call ringing out from ancient R’lyeh. To say more would be to resign myself to writing a page or two. Hype-worthy.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: After unearthing a fragment of family history shrouded in shadows and secrecy, Charles Dexter Ward, a man already predisposed to antiquarian and genealogical interests becomes singular in the focus of his researches. He discovers with certainty his relation to a man named Joseph Curwen, but less certain are the facts behind Curwen’s disappearance. Curwen was in fact preoccupied with matters of the occult, and in order to fully exhume the truth of his ancestry, Ward himself must look to the tattered pages of books that have centuries long made themselves obscure.

The Colour Out of Space: After a meteorite strikes the New England countryside, strange colors, smells, and aberrations in nature arise in the vicinity of its landing—right around the home of a well-loved family, the Gardners. At first the menace from the sky only seems to be having an effect on the surrounding landscape, but given enough time, family friends perceive an equally significant impression on the delicate inner life of the Gardner family members. 

The Dunwich Horror: The goat-faced Wilbur Whateley is shunned by the people of the neighboring hills of the Miskatonic Valley for a number of reasons. A grandfather with both feet in the black arts, an unknown lineage on his father’s side, and, perhaps more so than anything else, a profound ugliness of aspect repel all persons to come in contact with Whateley. The Whateley home, which is under constant renovation by grandpap and goat-faced progeny, imprisons a horror that meddling neighbors can only all too well suspect given the foul odors and loathsome noise that emanate from within. When the horror breaks loose, the abomination itself inspires perhaps less terror than the crude revelation of its origins.

The Whisperer in Darkness: When the flooded Miskatonic hills bring forth the bodies of beings unnatural and perverse, a professor of literature from Miskatonic University finds himself drawn into a mystery that takes him first into the dark abode of an old man knowingbaleful and from there to the cusp of the stars where legions of the Unknown threaten extinction of sanity.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth: Stopped over at the strange town of Innsmouth while en route to Arkham, a young man encounters ancestral degradation at its most extreme—a small and ancient cult consumed by ritual in the Esoteric Order of Dagon and maddened by primordial tugs toward Devil Reef and the cold ocean depths.

The Dreams in the Witch House: In the attic room where once boarded a witch and her shudder-worthy familiar, a scholar devotes all his time to studies in mathematics and antiquarian legends of the ghostly roommate that haunts his dreams. Studies which lead to the most obvious conclusion: interdimensional portals hidden in the lines and angles of an unearthly geometry!

The Haunter of the Dark: Geometry as a gateway to other dimensions is taken further in this final story. An elder monster is boarded up in a windowless steeple of the former, now defunct Church of Starry Wisdom. The unseen monster, however, is of less interest than the means of his invocation: he is brought out of the ether by priests of the Church of Starry Wisdom who look into the mystical and alien trapezohedron, a unique porthole that echoes visions of universes distant and close, familiar and utterly unknowable, dead and alive.

Obviously some stories are going to be better than others, but the overall effect of this collection keeps drawing me back, like an amnesiac slowly recovering a past unwelcome yet seductive in its otherworldliness.