Cool Air

Short Story by H.P. Lovecraft

This story is very clearly influenced by The Novel of the White Powder and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. I wrote about the overall commonalities of the three stories here. But I recommend reading all of them first. I'll put the spoilers there, and keep this post shorter.

Our narrator lives below an eccentric old Spanish doctor. He gradually befriends him (with shades of Erich Zann), and then things get a bit gross and weird. This is easily the best of Lovecraft's New York stories, really the only one I'd recommend to people. It is suspenseful and you really want to keep reading even if you know what is going to happen, or picked up on all the foreshadowing.

It's not typical or cliched in really any sense, despite my being able to cite two clear influences on Lovecraft here. I think the atypicalness of the story is best summarized by one of my favorite quotes from the introduction of the story:

"It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangor of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side."

Overall, a really nice, unusual piece of horror writing that shows some maturity from Lovecraft. A personal favorite, although certainly not his best.

3.5 out of 5 kinds of dark, slimy trails end in terrible little pools.

The Shunned House

Novelette by H.P. Lovecraft

"Long-winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical" is how Lovecraft describes the narrator's uncle, Eli Whipple, and his book of research. And that's exactly how most readers will describe the first half of this novelette.

We get a long, past-tense description of the strangeness of the titular house, and how everyone who lived there seems to die an early death. We learn that some residents spoke in French before dying without ever having know French. And we learn all about the family history and renovations made to the house. Lovecraft lets slip that not only does the narrator survive, but the mysterious problem has been solved and now people don't die or have anything weird happen in the house. I'm inclined to either stop here, or fall asleep.

The narrator tosses around a few theories about vampires and werewolves, and tells of previous residents trying to kill their own families and being found drained of blood. Eventually he sees a human-like gaseous form rise from the fungus in the cellar, and he and his uncle decide to go in, watch the spot, and attempt to eliminate the threat. This whole story has a distinct feel of the Call of Cthulhu pencil and paper RPG. And the main characters seem a bit munchkiny.

They bring two absurd methods of fighting the unknown thing (which they take some wild guesses at that Lovecraft implies to have been not too far off): a pair of WWI flamethrowers, and a giant Crookes Tube (LASER). They have an option for either the corporeal or incorporeal menace with little reason to how they got such ridiculous bullshit.

Anyway, they have an interesting and tense night in the house and eventually vanquish the monster, which ends up a little weirder and more difficult than anyone, including me, had expected. The night vigil is actually scary and interesting and I like the sciencey method of victory. I do quite like the last two chapters and especially the night spent in the house, but overall the story leaves a lot to be desired. 2.5 out of 5.

P.S. the most significant thing in this story is the beginning of Lovecraft's use of scientific justifications and solutions to his supernatural problems. We'll see a lot more of this later on.

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Short Story by H.P. Lovecraft

My least favorite story of Lovecraft's New York period, which was the worst period of writing in his career. The main value of this story is in the autobiographical aspects on Lovecraft's feelings about his move to the city.

A writer moves to New York City, then hates it (and all the immigrants of course). While wandering around one night, he meets an old guy who also loves history, and this man shows him around, and then takes him to a window that can magically see into the past and future. Then shit gets weird.

Honestly, not enough happens in the story, and it was tough to get through despite being very short. And then it is tough to actually remember. But Lovecraft isn't a complete failure; there are some nice bits of description, particularly the view of the future and the creepy ghost ooze thing at the end. I also like the first line: "I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision."

But overall, the story doesn't make a lot of sense and has little point besides hatred of the city. Although there is a bit of a stealth moral about not being too hung up on the past, I'm not sure Lovecraft meant it.

Lovecraft's visions of the future aren't good enough for more than 2 impious pyramids out of 5.

The Horror at Red Hook

Novelette by H.P. Lovecraft

Detective Malone was caught in a building collapse and now screams and runs at the sight of tall buildings. The story is about how Malone developed his phobia. He is apparently "sensitive" to magic and mysterious happenings, sort of a prohibition era Agent Mulder. He, like Lovecraft, is big believer in the theories from The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and believes that there remains one big cult among all the foreigners in New York.

Malone was assigned to investigate the smuggling of illegal Kurdish immigrants into Red Hook, and later he investigates an epidemic of child kidnappings. Both cases lead to Robert Suydam and the weird rituals he and his immigrant friends participate in. It's actually a fairly creepy story with some weird twists, but the cultish phrases and whatnot all come verbatim from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is less exciting than Lovecraft's usual occult flavor. The conclusion is the other disappointment, and on reflection, the entire story makes zero sense.

The incident on the boat seems unlikely, and a terrible way to orchestrate things, relying on a lot of stupidity and perfect coordination which could have been much more easily accomplished in Suydam's house or something. The thing with the pedestal makes no damn sense at all, nor does Suydam's last-minute change-of-heart. And the whole concept of Lilith and a demon-marriage just isn't that scary. And it's surprising coming from an atheist like Lovecraft. Touches like the children who burn up in sunlight, pregnant kidnapped women, Suydam's magical rejuvenation, and the building collapses just seem tacked on, irrelevant, and built up as a lot more significant than they should be given the lack of discussion or development.

Even for Lovecraft, the story is long and rambling (as he points out himself in a letter) and the language is even more overwrought than usual. It's also pretty racist and xenophobic. I could go on complaining for longer, but the point is that this isn't a very good story.

Still, I like it more than a lot of people do. It certainly isn't the worst of Lovecraft, and I feel "The Horror at Red Hook" is underrated in the sense that it is a bad story with some merit, rather than having nothing to offer at all. I don't feel that racism is the entire point and the concept of a secret cult in the city with underground boat passages for smuggling and secret movement is a fun concept with room for horror, if not terribly original. I guess the main redeeming quality is in the description. I find the scene with the claw marks on the boat pretty scary (even if it doesn't make much sense), and the concept and descriptions of the caverns and underground waterways is pretty nice. So it is maybe worth reading if you like Lovecraft a lot, but certainly one of his worse pieces. "The Rats in the Walls" has some nice cavern description, and is a hell of a lot cooler and more original.

2.5 out of 5 immigrant children were recovered in the police raid.

The Rats in the Walls

Novelette by H.P. Lovecraft

Delapore buys Exham Priory, his family's ancestral home in England, has it restored, and moves in. It had been abandoned for hundreds of years, ever since his ancestor killed the rest of his family and fled to Virginia. The first half of the story is about family history and all the horrible stories the townspeople have about the de la Poer family. One night, the cats start acting weird, one thing leads to another, and Delapore and his friend Norrys discover a secret passage beneath the deepest cellar. They gather a bunch of experts from London and go exploring. Delapore goes insane.

The Poe influence is still strong with this one, and the description of it as "Lovecraft's take on House of Usher" isn't far off. But the descriptions and the whole secret-world-beneath-the-one-we-know theme are decidedly Lovecraft. I enjoyed this story quite a bit, it was tense, nervous, a bit scary, but not terrifying. The imagery is great and sticks with you for a long time. The plot and the supernatural rat aspect are a bit weak, and the insanity at the end came a bit out of nowhere for me, despite the long build-up to it. But it is a good secret, and the imagery really is just that great. And I don't mind the rats that much.

4 rats out of 5.

Oh, and I recommend the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, in general for all Lovecraft stories, but especially for this one, as it has a great elaboration on Lovecraft's distractingly racist cat naming.

The Lurking Fear

Serial by H.P. Lovecraft

1. The Shadow on the Chimney

Our unnamed narrator and his two beefy henchmen are investigating a "lurking fear" that lives on Tempest Mountain, in the Catskills. Fifty or so poor villages are killed one night and so they think there might be something to the stories of the haunted, abandoned Martense mansion. They have a little sleep-over in the bedroom of long-ago-murder-victim Jan Martense and both companions vanish. The narrator sees a scary shadow but doesn't die. 3/5

2. A Passer in the Storm

Foreshadowing the real solution in a way too subtle to notice at first. The narrator makes friends with another reporter, Arthur Munroe, who helps him research the Martense family. The are investigating an abandoned hamlet and take shelter from a storm in an old cabin. Arthur opens the window to look outside and something comes by and stealthily eats off his face. The narrator notices this only when he turns him around. 2/5

3. What the Red Glare Meant

Lots of history on the Martense family and how they murdered Jan and eventually vanished. The narrator digs down into Jan's grave for some reason (he is a bit crazy and thinks the monster is Jan's ghost). He digs his way into a tunnel leading out from the mansion and while crawling through it, meets a monster with a claw. He is saved by a lightning strike, and a few days later learns that one was killed in a village miles away. There are more than one of them. 4/5

4. The Horror in the Eyes

The narrator goes completely crazy, then discovers what the monsters are and goes a bit crazier when he realizes there are hundreds of them. He wraps things up with the exceptionally practical solution of dynamiting the top of the mountain into oblivion, mansion and all. 4/5

Although the answer tunnels are foreshadowed, the stupid, annoying red herrings: the forest vs. open land connection and the ghost thing are confusing and frustrating on the first read. Plus it makes no sense that one of them basically gave him a hug and let him live back in the mansion, or that it was so stealthy he didn't notice it eating off Arthur's face. All I can figure is that ninjas must have interbred with these monsters at some point.

The flurry of alliteration and big words at the end somehow works very well to instill a sense of horror and the mystery aspect to this one works well, even if frustrating at times. This story is a bit more philosophical once we get to the third installment, and that is where I start to like it a lot more. Both good and bad at the same time, this one gets 3.5 fulgurites out of 5.

Herbert West - Reanimator

Serial by H. P. Lovecraft

1. From the Dark:

Two med students at Miskatonic University Medical School are interested in bringing the dead back to life. They have some success with small animals and decided to move on up to humans. The dean thinks they're nuts, so they have to go behind his back getting the dead bodies. Horror with undertones of comedy ensues. Sadly, their "Sinister Haunt of Science" burns down in a freak knocking-over-the-bunsen-burner-while-screaming-and-running-away-like-a-couple-of-sissies accident. 3/5

2. The Plague-Daemon

A major typhoid fever outbreak hits Arkham and all the doctors and students go out to help. The dean becomes a local hero for saving so many, working so hard, and risking his life. He catches typhoid and dies. After the funeral, West and the narrator are out drinking with the other students and West says they should "make a night of it." So they steal the corpse of their dean and bring him back. The dead dean beats them up, jumps out the window and goes on a killing spree through the town that idolized him. Eventually he is caught, and locked up in an asylum. "He wasn't quite fresh enough." 4/5

3. Six Shots by Moonlight

Done with school, West and his buddy set up a private practice in a neighboring mill town. They reanimate a huge black guy that died in an underground boxing match. Lovecraft's racism comes out in this portion, but in this case it strikes me as the kind of thing you might not notice if you read it as a kid. The guy was big and scary and gorilla-like and happened to be black, while not what Lovecraft means, seems a viable interpretation of events. Both the narrator and West hate pretty much everyone: Black, Italian, Puritan-descendants, people that work at mills, other doctors, etc. Not to justify Lovecraft's racism, but people always talk about this story, while I think the descriptions tend to be less ignorable in some of the other stories. Anyway, the big black guy doesn't reanimate until after they bury him. So he rises from the grave and eats a little kid before coming after West, who shoots him six times. 2/5

4. The Scream of the Dead

West invents a new embalming fluid to keep corpses fresher, since that has been the excuse for all the failed resurrections. He then sinks to a new low in his acquisition of bodies, and a new level of success. 3/5

5. The Horror from the Shadows

West and the narrator join the Canadian army so they can get into WWI. He uses his post as a supply of parts, since he is now interested in reanimating dead tissue without a brain. Using a vat of embryonic lizard cells and some actual surgical technique, he is able to revive the headless corpse of another doctor who had studied reanimation under him. Just before the hospital is destroyed by artillery fire, the narrator thinks he hears the detached head say something. 3/5

6. The Tomb-Legions

West meets a terrifying end when his surviving creations gang up on him. Or maybe the narrator killed him and imagined it all. "They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer - probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent." 3/5

I've heard that this is supposed to be a bit of self-parody and Frankenstein-parody, and that comes across somewhat in passages that seem overwrought even for Lovecraft, and more clearly towards the end with the reptile vats and the reanimation of random bits of people, which is just absurd. Through the 4th installment, things were kept about as plausible as can be expected of 1920s zombie stories. But it goes downhill from there, either Lovecraft got sick of the story or just wanted to have some fun with it. Both main characters are also particularly cowardly and West says a few things like the "Let's make a night of it" line that I do find funny. But overall this was still a horror story, just one that was not as serious as some others.

Funny in bits, moderately scary (esp. earlier on), and one of the earliest cannibal zombie stories I've read, so it was innovative at least. 3 out of 5 scientists secretly refer to their lab as their sinister haunt of SCIENCE!

The Music of Erich Zann

Short Story by H.P. Lovecraft

This unnamed narrator used to live on the Rue d'Auseil but now can't find it no matter how hard he looks. Fun not-in-the-story tidbit: Rue d'Auseil probably derives from "Rue au seuil", meaning "street on the threshold". Anyway, the narrator tried to befriend an elderly, brilliant musician named Erich Zann who lived in the apartment above him. At night he could hear Zann playing music unlike anything he'd ever heard. When asked, Zann will play music, but never like what he plays alone at night, and he seems nervous about even hearing it whistled. Our narrator is never able to figure out what's going on, but the story comes to a climax where all sorts of unexplained scary things happen, and the only hope of understanding goes right out the window, along with the narrator's ability to even find his old apartment, or the street it was on.

I really like the imagery of Zann frantically playing his viol in what I read as an attempt to save himself from ... whatever it is that's out there. This is sort of a horror-story-once-removed in that the real horror story is happening to the poor old mute musician and our character just gets to see the unexplained happenings in an even more unexplained way. We are presented with the strangeness/magicalness of the street vanishing at the very beginning, which prepares the reader for those sorts of happenings later in the story and keeps the possibility of such things in mind. It makes us less likely to assume Zann's secret is something mundane. This one is more subtle than seems typical of Lovecraft, and I really like it. Another one in the Things Happen Which The Human Mind Cannot Comprehend theme, but it's more implied this time. 4 out of 5.

Dear Internet, viols are NOT violins. Although it doesn't really matter what sort of instrument Zann was playing, the word viol appears many times. It is a real instrument. It is not another word for violin. Look it up.

The Outsider

Short Story by H.P. Lovecraft

The unnamed first person narrator lives in a sunless forest in a dark castle, with only books for company. One day he climbs a tower in hopes of finally seeing the sun.

The big twist that I'm avoiding spoiling for this story is a) done to death, even in Lovecraft's time, b) so heavily foreshadowed that you figure it out long before it is revealed and c) not really meant to surprise, in my reading of the story, although the final line makes it seem like we should be.

A very dream-like story, with heavy language and a sort of haziness. Lovecraft himself thought that this one was too imitative of Poe, and I can see where he's coming from, but that doesn't make it bad. But rather than horror, I see this more as a Gothic style story about loneliness. That is the one thread that really ties everything together, the narrator is doomed to be alone.

The last page or so gets a bit weird, with a couple paragraphs of unrelated, summed-up narration between when the Big Revelation occurs, and when the reader is told it (once again, everyone has figured it out already anyway). This part really threw me off, but the talk of Nepenthe really does tie the story together. Anyway, I guess this is a sad story rather than a scary one, and so the big scary revelation being obvious doesn't really hurt things, because empathy does not require surprise. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you get thinking about it, so it is important to focus on the atmosphere and the feeling of aloneness. 3 out of 5 unholy abominations would have better self-esteem with some Ancient Egyptian anti-depressants.

The Statement of Randolph Carter

Short Story by H.P. Lovecraft

Randolph Carter is found wandering around a swamp in a daze. When the police question him from his hospital bed, he tells the story of how he and his friend Harley Warren went to an old cemetery in the swamp and found something terrible. Warren never came back.

The horror of this story is all fear of the unknown. Warren descends into a tomb that leads somewhere, leaving one end of a portable telephone wire behind him for communication. He never really answers any of the questions Carter asks on the surface, but does mention legions of hellish things. The story ends rather abruptly, and for my taste, the last sentence breaks the horror a bit.

But this is all fridge logic. Why did Warren have so much time to talk, why does the bigger thing know English, why do ancient books from India talk about Florida cemeteries? These things don't hurt it too much, because I also spend time thinking about what they were actually looking for, the only clue being something about dead bodies that never decompose, and what was it they actually found?

The two things that stand out most about the writing are Lovecraft's excellent description of the cemetery, and his use of alliteration and rhythm in his description. He manages to talk about scenery and make it seem scary in it's own right. The vividness of the abandoned cemetery description contrasts with the lack of any description of what was found below ground, and this only adds to the sense of fear.

Overall I found this story scarier than it had any right to be given the plot and the ending. It wasn't brilliant, but it was good. 3.5 times out of 5, your buddy Warren is not there.