Changes and apologies

Hey, crowd.

Just wanted to drop a brief note to reassure you that you’re not going crazy (probably), I have changed around the theme of the blog significantly. While I liked the old skin, it had two problems that annoyed the web designer in me: a fixed-width layout and a sans-serif font scheme, both of which are no-nos when you’re trying to design a site for readability. My thanks go out to Stefan Nagtegaal and Steven Wittens, designers of the Garland WordPress theme that I’ve adopted and modified into what you see here.

Second, I apologize for letting myself go so long without adding a new Lovecraft review. I haven’t forgotten about it, but other things have distracted me enough to keep me from my self-appointed task. I’m not going to put my foot in it again by promising to have the next piece up by a specific date, but I certainly hope it will be sooner rather than later, and that I can keep to a less punctuated schedule from here on out.

Caverns of Dream Errata: Merry Christmas to All

The cottage hearth beams warm and bright,
     The candles gaily glow;
The stars emit a kinder light
     Above the drifted snow.

Down from the sky a magic steals
     To glad the passing year,
And belfries sing with joyous peals,
     For Christmastide is here!

– H.P. Lovecraft, “Christmastide”

Sorry I’ve been so slow with the updates, but I did warn you back at the start. In any case, I still need to get cracking on “Dagon,” which I’ll hopefully be able to do during my holiday break. In the meantime, I figured I’d tide you over with one of Lovecraft’s holiday-themed poems, seen above. And while I may not technically consider myself Christian, I can’t help but get into an atheistic holiday spirit. Woo!

Besides, I love Christmas songs, and I only get one month a year to publicly indulge in them. I especially like Christmas carols concerning nameless horrors that Man Was Not Meant to Know™. Like, for instance, this one, courtesy of YouTube and the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s A Very Scary Solstice album:

In all seriousness, check out the HPLHS. They’re good people, and they do excellent work. They did a truly amazing silent film rendition of The Call of Cthulhu and are working on an early-1930s-style film version of The Whisperer in Darkness. Plus, they’ve done a number of period-style radio dramas based on Lovecraft’s stories, including At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Out of Time, and, most recently, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. If you liked the above song, they’ve got the lyrics and a free downloadable MP3 available here.

Caverns of Dream: The Tomb

“It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience.”

Jervas Dudley is a introverted, imaginative young man who, from an early age, has been fascinated by an abandoned crypt near his home. The crypt once belonged to the Hyde family, whose old mansion was destroyed centuries ago in a fire. Eventually, Jervas finds the key to the old crypt and spends much of his time there, and his personality changes rapidly as he adopts numerous habits and eccentricities of a bygone age. One day he explores the ruins of the old Hyde mansion basement, where he experiences a vision of a party hosted by Jervas Hyde two centuries earlier. The party, and the vision, ends horribly as a lightning strike burns the mansion to the ground, killing Jervas Hyde and destroying his body. The vision concluded, Jervas Dudley’s father has his son institutionalized, insisting that the Hyde family crypt has been untouched for half a century. A faithful family servant, though, assures Jervas that his vision of an unoccupied grave in the Hyde family tomb is real, and Jervas Dudley vows that he shall be buried within it.

Written in 1917 and published nearly five years later, “The Tomb” is an odd little piece. As with the best of Lovecraft’s work, it raises more questions than it answers. Unlike, say, The Call of Cthulhu or At the Mountains of Madness, however, the narrative itself feels somewhat disjointed. For me, though, the biggest problem is that the narrator and protagonist, Jervas Dudley, doesn’t so much descend into madness as plummet headlong into it, without much buildup or rationale.

Clearly, Jervas Dudley is mad, but it’s not clear how much of his experiences in the tomb and the destroyed basement are real, and how much are his delusions. The postscript where Jervas’s loyal servant confirms his visions muddies the waters further. Presumably, then, Jervas Dudley has some sort of psychic connection to Jervas Hyde, and this seems to be confirmed by the suggestion that the former’s personality is gradually supplanted by the latter. All of this is well and good, and presages, in some respects, later Lovecraft work like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The problem is, what’s the point of it all? What does Jervas Hyde want, if anything? Is there anything other than “pitiful monomania” behind Jervas Dudley’s obsession? The story feels rather slight and inconsequential, which seems at odds with the portentious language that is Lovecraft’s trademark. If anything, some of the language employed here is even more over-the-top than I expected from Lovecraft.

On the other hand, if the language is overwrought in places, it does result in some lovely images. The eponymous crypt is memorably described as “the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets,” for instance. And there’s several pieces of “Eighteenth Century bacchanalian mirth,” or, if you prefer, drinking songs.

By no means one of Lovecraft’s better works, “The Tomb” isn’t exactly bad, so much as disposable. But we’re still dealing with his early material, and the best is yet to come.

Caverns of Dream: The Alchemist

“May ne’er a noble of thy murd’rous line
Survive to reach a greater age than thine!”

In medieval France, a count wrongfully kills an elderly wizard for the kidnapping of his son. The wizard’s surviving son, Charles Le Sorcier, subsequently curses the count and his descendants for his action. Centuries later, twenty-one year-old Antoine, the last surviving descendant of the accursed count, discovers that he is doomed by the curse to die shortly after his thirty second birthday.

Determined to make the last eleven years of his life worthwhile, Antoine spends his days studying black magic and exploring the ruins of his family’s ancestral castle. One week before his predestined death, he comes upon an ancient tunnel in the foundations of the castle, where he discovers an elderly man who threatens to fulfill the curse by killing Antoine. Defending himself, Antoine throws his torch at the man, setting him aflame, and ending the curse once and for all.

Written in 1908, when Lovecraft was eighteen, this is his first extant work of supernatural horror. It’s rough in a number of respects, of course. Most notably, the showdown between Antoine and the alchemist is goofy, James Bond-style villainy, with the alchemist stopping to explain his oh-so-nasty plans to Antoine. I’m also left feeling that I’m supposed to be shocked, or at least surprised, by the final line, revealing the identity of the sinister alchemist. The problem is that the revelation was strongly signposted during the first encounter a page and a half earlier. Perhaps I am being a bit too harsh, though: I have the benefit of experience with a century’s worth of horror storytelling that makes this kind of surprise familiar to me. Even so, it’s not a hugely impressive denouement.

On a more positive note, this story definitely showcases Lovecraft’s emerging skill at establishing mood. The ancient, rotting castle is almost a character in its own right, and it’s described in almost loving detail. There’s a palpable sense of loneliness and isolation running throughout the narrative, as Antoine is at first prevented from seeking the company of others, and later chooses to fully isolate himself to ensure that the curse dies with him. If the plot itself isn’t much to talk about, the atmosphere certainly deserves a mention.

All in all, “The Alchemist” is clearly the work of a young Lovecraft, still trying to find his rhythm. But for a freshman effort, it’s an impressive work.

Caverns of Dream: “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” and “The Secret Cave”

Like “The Little Glass Bottle,” both “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” and “The Secret Cave (or, John Lee’s Adventure)” were written by Lovecraft some time in 1898. Again, I don’t think it’d be right to offer scathing literary criticism of the work of an eight year old, so don’t think of this an actual review, so much as my brief thoughts and reflections.

One day a young man rushed in and exclaimed “The secret Is revealed!” and was gone.

“The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” is clearly inspired by Victorian-era detective fiction like Sherlock Holmes. The hero of the story, named King John, is a detective called in to investigate the disappearance of Mr. Dobson. Dobson disappeared during the funeral of a Joseph Burns while following the late Mr. Burns’s instructions to descend into the tomb before interrment and drop a ball onto a spot marked “A.” After a John Bell appears to demand ransom for the return of Dobson, King John arrests him and and his accomplice. At the trial, Dobson makes his dramatic reappearance, having escaped from his prison by making a wax impression of the key (and thereby doing a respectable McGuyver impersonation a good eighty years before anyone had even heard of McGuyver). Dobson reveals the mastermind of his kidnapping, Francis Burns, the brother of the late Joseph Burns, both of whom had plotted to do harm to Dobson for years for reasons unrevealed. The villains are punished, King John marries Dobson’s daughter, and the rest live happily ever after.

Truth be told, I had a hard time following this little tale, and I suspect few people actually managed to make sense of the above summary. But it’s definitely an ambitious little story, and shows how clever and imaginative Lovecraft was even at this young age. As I mentioned above, there’s a definite Sherlock Holmes vibe to the story, and it shows an affinity for the pulp fiction Lovecraft would later make his name writing. We still haven’t gotten any real horror fiction from him, but the appearance of the titular “grave-yard” is a good sign.

“Now be good children” Said Mrs. Lee “While I am away & dont get into mischief”

Next up is “The Secret Cave,” another pulpish adventure story from grade-school-age Lovecraft. Mr. and Mrs. Lee go out on the town and leave their two children, the ten year old John and the two year old Alice, to amuse themselves. John and Alice find a hidden passage in their cellar and decide to go exploring. In the passage, they find a mysterious sealed box, a boat, and an obstacle. Too curious for his own good, John removes the obstacle and unleashes a torrent of water that drowns his sister and almost drowns him. To show that the universe isn’t wholly without pity, however, John opens the sealed box after Alice’s funeral and finds a chunk of gold worth $10,000 “enough to pay for anything but the death of his sister.”

Well, “The Secret Cave” is certainly easier to follow than “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard,” but, wow, is that ending dark or what? The “box full of money” ending is essentially the same twist as we saw in “The Little Glass Bottle.” In both cases, the money is insufficient to fully offset the loss incurred obtaining it, even if it does take a bit of the edge off. It’s a bit morbid, but it’s not horror.

Incidentally (and apropos of nothing), I was curious enough at the $10,000 figure to go and do a calculation regarding the comparative purchasing power of $10,000 in 1898 and today. Apparently, $10,000 in 1898 money is equivalent to $257,888.06 in 2007 (which is the latest year available for the calculations at Measuring Worth).

Well, that concludes our brief look at Lovecraft’s “juvenilia.” It took me longer than it should have, and I suspect it wasn’t all that interesting to read my non-reviews. Next up I’ll be looking at “The Alchemist,” written in 1908, and the gloves are coming off. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope to have my review up by the end of the week.

Caverns of Dream: The Little Glass Bottle

“Heave to, there’s something floating to the leeward!”

And so we begin our odyssey of all things Lovecraft with “The Little Glass Bottle,” a short and fairly inconsequential story written in 1897. A sea captain and his crew recover a message in a bottle that directs them to a shipwreck laden with treasure off the coast of Australia. The excited captain charters a ship to salvage the wreckage, but the only thing they find is an iron bottle and note written by the same hand, informing the crew that they’ve been the victim of a somewhat pointless practical joke.

It’s not fair for me to judge this little throwaway in the same way I would judge Lovecraft’s later work, and I’m not going to do so. Since Lovecraft was born in 1890, he was no older than seven when he wrote this. It’s a cute little joke, and it’s effective. And that’s more than enough, really. There’s not much there that would suggest the author’s future career as a horror writer, save for burgeoning, New England-style obsession with the sea. There’s not much point in analyzing it much more closely than that. That being said, I don’t think I wrote this well when I was seven.

Anyone interested in having a look for his or herself can find the text for this one online.

Next up are a handful of other short pieces from prepubescent Lovecraft. I plan on getting through that ephemera in the next day or two, which will hopefully allow me to some real meat by the end of the week. Stay tuned for that.

Caverns of Dream: My H.P. Lovecraft Odyssey

I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.

- H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Over the past month, I’ve been rediscovering my interest in the works of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Lovecraft was one of the preeminent influences in the development of the modern horror and science fiction genres, and is cited by folks like Stephen King as the more important horror writer of the twentieth century. Though he was not as prolific as some of his contemporaries, his influence was all but unparalleled. Many people who’ve not read a line of his work are still familiar with his creations, including Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and the Great Old Ones, Arkham, Massachusetts and Miskatonic University, home of one of the three surviving copies of the Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred, insular, “decadent, smugly-rotting” Innsmouth, and so on. These creations have become part of the lexicon of modern science fiction and horror, and Lovecraft himself has been “adjectivized” such that we routinely see books, television shows, and movies described as “Lovecraftian.”

Beyond my interest in sci-fi/horror, though, Lovecraft appeals to me in certain other respects. First, he was at his most active during the 1920s and 1930s, which is coincidentally the same period I focused on while pursuing my master’s degree in American cultural history. His development of a quasi-mythology of aliens, monsters, and other nasty things appeals to the part of me that majored in religious history as a undergraduate. Arguably most importantly, though, is the fact that Lovecraft is fairly terse. His longest work of fiction, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, isn’t much more than a novella, and a lot of his material clocks in at only a few pages. Though I’m capable of reading fairly quickly, I frequently have trouble maintaining continuous interest in long-form works. So I find Lovecraft’s “bite-sized” short stories and novellas an ideal length.

With all that said, I’m announcing a first-of-its-kind project for me. I’m going to read, review, and (where appropriate) interpret all of H.P. Lovecraft’s prose works, collaborations, and revisions in chronological order (or, at least, as close to chronological order as I can reconstruct). I’m not the first to do this, and I’m sure I won’t be the most insightful, but I hope my opinions will at least prove interesting. I’m throwing a number of caveats into this, though:

1. I’m handling prose fiction only. Lovecraft wrote a huge number of works of verse, correspondence to his friends and fellow authors, and even a handful of nonfiction pieces studying the art and history of “weird fiction.” But I suspect that if I tried to handle these in sequence, they’d bog me down.
2. I’m including Lovecraft’s collaborative works (including posthumous collaborations) and ghostwritten pieces. I’ll probably mark these kind of works as distinct from everything else, but it feels wrong to pass over these.
3. I’ll be working chronologically from date of composition, not of publication. A fair chunk of material wasn’t published until after Lovecraft’s death, including some of his most significant work (like the aforementioned “Case of Charles Dexter Ward”). I’m relying on various online resources to determine the chronology, including Wikipedia and The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, all of which lean heavily on the work of Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi, who appears to be the recognized authority on Lovecraft’s life and work.
4. I’m making arbitrary exceptions where I see fit. I said I was only going to tackle prose above, but I plan on at least one exception to that rule: “The Fungi from Yuggoth,” a sonnet-form poem from 1930. In brief, it feels too important to leave out. I also intend on including at least two works not written by Lovecraft in any capacity: specifically, “The Shambler from the Stars” and “The Shadow from the Steeple,” both by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame). These three stories comprise the first and final parts of a trilogy of which Lovecraft’s own “The Haunter of the Dark” is the middle segment. Since I don’t feel like reading the trilogy out-of-sequence, I’ll be tackling all three stories in order. Finally, when all is said and done, I may go back and look at some of Lovecraft’s poetic, non-fiction, and correspondence work and write up my thoughts as addenda: in particular, I want to have a go at Lovecraft’s nonfictional “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi’s The Ancient Track, a complete collection of all of Lovecraft’s poetry.

I don’t exactly have a set schedule for updates here, but I intend to make at least one update per week, and more wherever possible. As I mentioned before, most of this material is going to be a pretty quick read, and I’m not doing a dedicated scholarly analysis here. I want to approach this material as an average reader, not a literary critic. For the same reason, I won’t be doing much in the way of outside research when writing my reviews. Plenty of other writers, from S.T. Joshi to Robert M. Price to Stephen King, have done that sort of thing, and since I don’t believe for a second that I can hold a candle to their efforts, I’m not going to bother trying. But for anyone interested in a more scholarly approach to Lovecraft, I strongly recommend Joshi’s annotated anthologies and Price’s “Cycle” collections.

For no very good reason, I’ve decided to give the name “Caverns of Dream” to this project. It’s from a quote from “Hypnos,” a 1922 work that isn’t exactly one of Lovecraft’s best-remembered pieces. But I think it’s suitably catchy, and not quite as cliched as going with something like “Strange Aeons.”

That is not dead that can eternal lie…

I should know by now not to make any promises regarding regular updates to my blog. They always end up making me look like a liar. I know I never got around to writing about my gardening adventure, and I doubt that I ever will work up the motivation to do so now. The short story is that it went about as well as you would expect a city boy’s first-ever attempt at producing a garden plot to go. In other words, it was… somewhat less than spectacular. Even worse, I ended up moving away during the early summer, leaving my corn, beans, peas, and berries untended for over a month. A lot of things ended up growing in my garden, but relatively little of it was what I had originally planted. I’m not giving up, mind you, but I suspect I’m going to try for a less ambitious approach next year, probably with a smaller planter I can keep on my apartment patio. But more on that in the coming months.

The benefit of a low-key blog such as this is that no one seems to care that I struggle to post at least twice a year, because nobody really reads it to begin with. And since the WordPress account costs nothing, I’m free to leave it alone, collecting dust, until the urge to clean it up and try again takes hold of me. My plan, then, is this: I intend to make thrice-weekly postings (at minimum) to this blog until the end of December 2008. After that, I will decide where I stand, and whether or not I have any real interest in keeping this up as a going concern. By then, I hope I will have a better idea of whether or not my writing serves as a catharsis for me, and if it matters to me that I don’t have any regular readers (assuming that remains true through December). So consider this a rebirth, of sorts. A blog of the living dead, if you will.

And on the subject of rebirth and ghouls, I will awkwardly segue into the other thing I wanted to talk about today. In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten back into reading my collections of the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I don’t have much to say about Lovecraft himself that others haven’t already said at great length: he’s probably the progenitor of the modern horror story, and the cosmology and (anti-)mythology he constructed through two decades of short stories continues on through the work of those he inspired. I just finished rereading my favorite of his stories, The Shadow Out of Time, and it manages to cram in as many ideas in its 100 pages than many books five times as long ever manage. It’s getting a bit late to plan a Halloween costume, but I’m seriously considering putting together a quick-and-dirty Great Race of Yith outfit. Or a flying polyp. The only problem is, I’d have to explain it to most people before they’d understand it. Frankenstein never had that problem….

For those unfamiliar with the story, the Great Race originally hailed from a long-lost and forgotten planet from aeons before the creation of the earth. When their home planet began to wither and die, they used their immense psychic powers to cast their minds out to our world, taking refuge en masse in the brains of a race of “tall and cone-shaped” beings, “rising to a point with four strange appendages – two terminating in claws, a third in a ‘trumpet,’ and the fourth, a yellow globe which functioned as a sensory organ” that evolved during the early Triassic period. From these new bodies, the Yithians constructed vast cities and began to study the past, present, and future of their new home. They did this by projecting their minds forward in time, temporarily swapping consciousnesses with humans (and other intelligent beings) from various points in history. Eventually, the Great Race were driven away by their enemies, a race of interstellar parasites resembling flying polyps. They destroyed almost all evidence of their civilization and cast their minds forward into a race of human-sized, sentient beetles that evolved on the earth long after the extinction of humanity.

“The Shadow Out of Time” tells the tale of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor of economics at Lovecraft’s fictional Miskatonic University, who loses five years of his life when his mind is supplanted by a member of the Great Race. After returning to his own body, Peaslee slowly begins to piece together fragmented memories of his time as a guest and prisoner in the Great Race’s capital city of Pnakotus, and comes to term with the insignificance of himself and humanity against the backdrop of the interstellar struggles of the Yith and their adversaries. It’s one of Lovecraft’s few stories to seriously explore how a man copes with the realization of his own insignificance, and it features one of the most compelling narratives of insanity and depression Lovecraft ever put to paper. Plus, y’know, it repeatedly refers to “flying polyps,” which (call me juvenile if you must) always makes me giggle.