Category: Writing

The Terrible Old Man

It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man.

They’ve got foreign names, though, so the safe bet is that these three are actually the villains and the Terrible Old Man is either misunderstood or else (more likely) brings well-deserved suffering on those who dare be Italian, Polish, and (according to Barnes and Noble) Portugese.

The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man

There’s more to this sentence, but what matters here is that Kingsport is now a thing. This shows up in a couple of other Lovecraft stories and also in Arkham Horror. Honestly, if you wanted to condense the Cthulhu Mythos down such that Kingsport and Arkham were the same town, that’d be defensible. They’re both New England towns and the only things that really distinguish Kingsport from Arkham are which specific stories and landmarks happen to be placed in one location or another. If you wanted to combine them, you could.

The Terrible Old Man, not otherwise named, is super creepy and weird. He lives in a creepy old house, he talks to bottles with little bits of lead suspended in them, and the lead moves, apparently in response. The people of Kingsport mostly leave him alone on account of how spooky he is, but our protagonists are immigrants, and therefore evil/stupid:

Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions, and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless greybeard, who could not walk without the aid of his knotted cane, and whose thin, weak hands shook pitifully. They were really quite sorry in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow, whom everybody shunned, and at whom all the dogs barked singularly. But business is business, and to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a challenge about a very old and very feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for his few necessities at the village store with Spanish gold and silver minted two centuries ago.

The plan is for two of the robbers to break into the house and torture the Terrible Old Man until he reveals the location of his hidden pirate treasure, whereupon the third robber will be waiting outside in the getaway car. Things do not go according to plan, in an ambiguous but spooky way:

Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in. And some people even spoke of things as trivial as the deserted motor-car found in Ship Street, or certain especially inhuman cries, probably of a stray animal or migratory bird, heard in the night by wakeful citizens. But in this idle village gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all. He was by nature reserved, and when one is aged and feeble one’s reserve is doubly strong. Besides, so ancient a sea-captain must have witnessed scores of things much more stirring in the far-off days of his unremembered youth.

Intriguingly spooky, but also possessed of strong undertones of racism. This story is pretty much Lovecraft in a nutshell, and it’s basically a replacement level Lovecraft story in terms of quality. If you picked a Lovecraft story at random, you’d probably get something about as good as this.

Continue reading “Mythos: The Terrible Old Man, The Tree, and the Cats of Ulthar” →

The Street

This is the fictional biography of a New England road. Lovecraft describes how it was made by Puritan settlers, expanded in the colonial days, got industrialized, and was then ruined when all those immigrants came, because Lovecraft.

Then came days of evil, when many who had known The Street of old knew it no more; and many knew it, who had not known it before. And those who came were never as those who went away; for their accents were coarse and strident, and their mien and faces unpleasing.

 

New kinds of faces appeared in The Street; swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit slept.

But Lovecraft doesn’t just hate immigrants. He also hates Communists!

 Swarthy and sinister were most of the strangers, yet among them one might find a few faces like those who fashioned The Street and moulded its spirit. Like and yet unlike, for there was in the eyes of all a weird, unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or misguided zeal. Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death-blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins; even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the heart of that plotting was in The Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the appointed day of blood, flame, and crime.

I say he hates Communists. Really, it’s more that he hates Russians, and would probably have been perfectly okay with Communism had it ever become popular in New England.

Continue reading “Mythos: The Street, the Doom That Came to Sarnath, and the Statement of Randolph Carter” →

I keep finding myself writing so late in the night that I discover I have no time left for a blog post before I need to sleep, so then I shuffle the blog post somewhere else and it ends up on the wrong day or at a weird time. I’m not even writing especially quickly, only about 1,000 to 1,500 words a day, which is good but not great and definitely not indicative of spending 3-4 hours a day on the work. I only hope that the extra time is coming through in the quality of the writing.

That has more connection than today’s story than just an explanation for why it’s being posted alongside a Tuesday article instead of on Monday where it belongs. The White Ship was written by HP Lovecraft after being inspired by Lord Dunsany, whose work he had recently been reading (we don’t even have to resort to guesswork on this one, as we often do, because Lovecraft conveniently says as much in one of his letters – that, or Barnes and Noble is lying to me). My current writing distraction was inspired by my recent study of Lovecraft.

Our hero today is Basil Elton, the latest in a long line of lighthouse keepers, because all lighthouse keepers without exception are grizzled old men in sailor’s coats with salty white beards whose father kept the same lighthouse, and his father’s father before that. Hereafter referred to as Lighthouse Guy, because this story is like five pages long and no way is that enough time to lodge the protagonist’s name in my head.

Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet.

As my past and current literary investigations suggest, I tend to wander back through the history of media, paying relatively little attention to the big new thing and instead examining the past to see what has not crumbled. It’s an easy way to make sure I read mostly good literature. In fact, if you dig through my readings more randomly selected, like from the LitRPG genre where people largely directed me to whatever was popular right now or when I selected short stories almost at random from a Humble Bundle by a specific publisher, you’ll notice that I tend to be surprised and alarmed at how common certain shitty tropes or hacks are, because I’m used to reading the greatest fiction of any given decade, and that’s obviously a Hell of a yardstick to be measured against (I like to imagine that my focus on the greatest books improves my writing, but there’s no way it’s been improved to that level).

All this being a long walk towards saying that I feel a kinship with Lighthouse Guy here, whenever I wander into a multiplayer game whose time has come and gone. Like Lighthouse Guy, I didn’t personally see the golden age. I just hear about it from the greybeards left behind. Once, they say, there were so many players here that every town and quest hub, no matter how obscure, had at least a half-dozen other people visiting. Now? Now you see fellow travelers in the newbie zones leveling their latest alt, and you’ll see the main toons gathering in the designated last bastion of player interaction, but the rest of the game may as well be single player.

I feel for you, Lighthouse Guy. We did not see the golden age. We just live in its aftermath. Not ruined, but empty.

Continue reading “Mythos: The White Ship” →

It’s another double feature! A lot of Lovecraft’s short stories are seriously only like eight pages long, so unless they require a lot of commentary, they can frequently be crammed two to a single blog post. Really, 15-20 pages of story per 2,000 words of commentary is a pretty bad ratio, but the problem with short story collections is that the constant gear shifting to new characters, concepts, and situations tends to thwart summary.

Old Bugs

This is Lovecraft’s second (published) comedy. That sounds like the setup for a joke, but the dude did have a bit of range.

Sheehan’s Pool Room, which adorns one of the lesser alleys in the heart of Chicago’s stockyard district, is not a nice place. Its air, freighted with a thousand odours such as Coleridge may have found at Cologne, too seldom knows the purifying rays of the sun; but fights for space with the acrid fumes of unnumbered cheap cigars and cigarettes which dangle from the coarse lips of unnumbered human animals that haunt the place day and night.

I said a bit.

Probably the most interesting part of this story gets dropped on us at the end of the first paragraph:

Over and above the fumes and sickening closeness rises an aroma once familiar throughout the land, but now happily banished to the back streets of life by the edict of a benevolent government—the aroma of strong, wicked whiskey—a precious kind of forbidden fruit indeed in this year of grace 1950.

Funny enough, this story was written in 1919 (probably, it wasn’t published until 1959, when Lovecraft was sufficiently well-regarded that you could dig through his back-catalogue and pick stories written on a lark for publication), which is very nearly the same year as when the King in Yellow takes place. Written in 1895, the stories (or at least some of them – I haven’t read them in a while) take place in 1920, although it’s not clear how much of the changes are real and how many are the fevered delusions of an insane protagonist.

In this story, Lovecraft imagines a future after thirty years of prohibition, not yet signed into law from when he was writing in 1919 (or perhaps very recently made law, if we’re wrong about the date and he actually wrote it sometime in or after 1920). Or at least, I think prohibition is supposed to be in effect? The eponymous Old Bugs is an alcoholic employee (paid mainly in booze) at a drug den where the chief items sold appear to be liquor and hashish, with emphasis on the liquor. On the other hand, a young patron of the establishment is said to have been part of a mock fraternity in college called “Tappa Tappa Keg,” which strongly suggests that some kind of alcohol consumption is legal? Back on the first hand, Tappa Tappa Keg is an unofficial fraternity and may be engaged in illegal but widely known and quietly tolerated alcohol use, like marijuana use is rampant on college campuses today and basically no one cares even though it’s still illegal in like 47 states.

Continue reading “Mythos: Old Bugs and Juan Romero” →

After a paragraph of preamble about how dreams may actually be a transport to some other life, no less real than the one we live in the material world, our protagonist gets around to the actual plot:

It was from a youthful reverie filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the winter of 1900–1901, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an interne was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “white trash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.

Just in case you were worried that Lovecraft was only racist against black people. Have no fear: Lovecraft’s racism contains multitudes. Seriously, though, Lovecraft really wants you to know how sub-humanly incompetent he thinks Appalachian people are:

Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.

Lovecraft then moves on to describe the manner in which this Slaader fellow (I find the misspelling offered more compelling than the more common Slater, so Slaader it is) sometimes tells of “the unknown” in a way that frightens those who listen, and always soon after waking (presumably because of a venture into some terrifying dream world). But even now he’s not done insisting upon the stupidity of Appalachians:

He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, half-amiable normality like that of the other hill-dwellers.

Show me on the doll where the redneck hurt you, Lovecraft.

Continue reading “Mythos: Beyond the Wall of Sleep” →

A Reminisce of Dr. Samuel Johnson

According to the intro given by the eldritch entity that is Barnes and Noble, this story is Lovecraft writing a send-up of 18th century literature. As part of that tradition, Lovecraft attempts to pass the fiction bit off as being a truthful report, in the way of eighteenth century literature where everything is allegedly true despite it being very obvious that in fact it is total fabrication.

Tho’ many of my readers have at times observ’d and remark’d a Sort of antique Flow in my Stile of Writing, it hath pleased me to pass amongst the Members of this Generation as a young Man, giving out the Fiction that I was born in 1890, in America.

Oh, also, Words are capitalized at Random and all proper nouns are italicized, though I should imagine that the fictional 200-year old Lovecraft in this story would regardless put emphasis on how scandalous it would be to actually have been born in America. In the style of the eighteenth century, the entire piece is a meander through random vignettes, some of which have practically nothing to do with the nominal subject of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and some of which are just a list of people who attended a certain club that Johnson was a member of, punctuated by a random vignette concerning one of the club members dropped into the middle of the list apparently just because the author recalled it at exactly that moment and wanted to write it down before finishing the list. And it’s not clear why the list was even included.

Lovecraft knows exactly what he’s doing, though:

It wou’d afford me Gratification to tell more of my Experiences with Dr. Johnson and his circle of Wits; but I am an old Man, and easily fatigued. I seem to ramble along without much Logick or Continuity when I endeavour to recall the Past; and fear I light upon but few Incidents which others have not before discuss’d.

The whole piece is humorously self-aware of how flawed the 18th century style was, in a way that seems accurate to me (Barnes and Noble agrees), though I read very little of that time precisely because it’s so unrefined as to be almost painful to read.

This story is only like five pages long (and thank God, because it was starting to drag even then – which is the point and all, but still), so we’re doing a double feature by also covering the next story in the book, which is Polaris. Funny enough, it’s even shorter.

Continue reading “Mythos: Double Feature” →

This is the first of Lovecraft’s stories that can really be called a mythos story. Our hero opens by informing us that he plans to commit suicide as soon as he’s done writing, because the horror is too great. He begins his tale of horror by explaining how he was captured at sea by the Germans in the opening stages of the Great War:

The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.

See, buddy, this kind of thing is why the Germans wound up being jerks about the whole “sea warfare” thing by the end of the war. Anyway, he’s adrift at sea in a boat.

The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.

Really, I’m not sure why anyone in the Mythos comes within five miles of the ocean.

Continue reading “Mythos: Dagon” →

After nearly a decade truant, a twenty-seven year old Lovecraft has returned to us with another (according to Barnes and Noble’s unknown preface-writer) Poe-inspired tale. I doubt Lovecraft’s age will be a noticeable factor in his writing going forward, and it’s possible that some things which I had attributed to his youth will turn out to be just a thing that Lovecraft does and that I’d overlooked when I read him several years back.

By its opening lines, this story does appear to inaugurate one of Lovecraft’s most misunderstood tropes, the totally sane narrator who has been mistaken for mad due to their totally accurate recounting of a paranormal experience:

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. 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.

Having not yet read the full story, there could be a thing here where, like in The Repairer of Reputations, a King in Yellow story that Lovecraft had (I’m pretty sure) at this point read, where the narrator early on mentions having been confused for insane, and then is revealed over the course of the story to, in fact, be insane, calling into question how much of the paranormal activity and even perfectly mundane setting building was real (does the narrator of the Repairer of Reputations actually live in a near-future authoritarian America, or are these just related to his delusions of being a long lost heir to an American throne that never was?).

Plus, maybe this kind of thing comes up in Poe a lot? I know it cropped up in the Telltale Heart, but I’ve only read a few occasional scraps of Poe, and most of that as required reading for high school.

Continue reading “Mythos: The Tomb” →

I’ve never read these very early stories before, my reading of Lovecraft having previously been limited to very famous stories like Call of Cthulhu and Shadow Over Innsmouth. As such, I can’t say for sure when Lovecraft is going to really arrive in proper Lovecraftian style, but I’m pretty confident that he’s going to need a few more years to cook from this 1908 story, written when he was 18 (Lovecraft had the decency to be born in the nice round numbered 1890, making it easy to determine his age as of the writing based on a story’s publication date).

According to Barnes and Nobles’ intro (no specific writer is named as near as I can tell), this story is Lovecraft trying his absolute hardest to be Edgar Allen Poe.

High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors.

I don’t even know how much I’m joking here. Red Hook Studio’s name is a slightly obscure Lovecraft reference, which means the parallel between the house described here and the one in Darkest Dungeon may be a fully intentional homage.

Continue reading “Mythos: The Alchemist” →

I really liked the note the previous post ended on, so I’m splitting this off into a second post for later in the same day. This is our examination of what Barnes and Noble considers to be Lovecraft’s first “real” story. There’s a few creative ideas with atrocious execution in the appendix at the back, like a story with grammar so poor it impairs readability but which contains a decent joke about some sailors finding a message in a bottle claiming to lead to buried treasure, which then turns out to be a prank. Neat and all, but not exactly a Lovecraft story, despite having been literally written by HP Lovecraft.

Fifteen-year old HP Lovecraft brings us the first “real” Lovecraft story, the Beast in the Cave, in which Lovecraft writes about being lost in a cave despite having never been in a cave in his life, having done considerable research on the subject in the library instead. I think this definitely qualifies the story as Lovecraftian.

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty.

Yup, definitely a Lovecraft story. This is the opening line, establishing that our protagonist was taking a tour in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, when he decided it would be fun to wander off from the group and go exploring alone. He is now completely lost and facing inevitable death, because of course he is.

Fifteen-year old Lovecraft, far from having not yet grown into his style, is so very Lovecraftian as to come across as parodic. He would evidently tone down the sesquepedelian loquaciousness later in life, and would become less enraptured with how horrifying his own stories were. He’s got that teenage affectation that using lots of really weird words must be how good writing works. Lines like this:

As I stood in the waning, unsteady light, I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end. I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives, who, taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world, with its steady, uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found, instead, death in strange and ghastly form.

Would be out of place in a fan fiction only because there’s some actual interesting ideas underneath all the purple prose.

Our narrator is early on quite at peace with his imminent demise:

Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.

However, after his torch dies and he is in total darkness, he has an encounter with some strange beast that, from its footfalls, seems to switch freely between quadrupedal and bipedal locomotion. Hearing it make a beeline for him, he gropes about for a weapon, finds some stray rocks, and tosses them at the approaching footfalls until one of them connects and the unknown creature falls. He then flees in a panic and finds the guide of the sightseeing group, who had come looking for him.

I ran to meet the flare, and before I could completely understand what had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the guide, embracing his boots, and gibbering, despite my boasted reserve, in a most meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same time overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length I awoke to something like my normal consciousness.

This feels like the Lovecraft concept of horror in prototype: A certain and well-understood death at the hands of starvation doesn’t faze our protagonist, but one encounter with an unknown horror and he is reduced to literal gibbering. He recovers his senses pretty quickly, but still, he falls to his knees in gratitude upon rescue despite apparently having no fear of death in general.

With better access to light, the protagonist returns to the site of the confrontation to examine the creature he felled, and we get our twist ending.

Then fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave was, or had at one time been, a MAN!!!

That very fifteen-year old emphasis on the reveal is from the original.

I’m using the “Mythos” tag as a means of getting not only Lovecraft, but also August Derleth’s work in the immediate aftermath, sources of inspiration like Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow which were written before the Mythos, and much later modern addendums like FFG’s Arkham Files games (especially the Arkham Horror LCG, which is writing new stories in the same setting rather than being a vague remix of existing Lovecraft stories as most Arkham Files games have been) and the Lovecraftian Stephen King novels. By that categorization, the Beast in the Cave arguably doesn’t count. It’s definitely got Lovecraft’s style, but it’s not any kind of Mythos story. Someone just got lost in Mammoth Cave, survived off of rats and cave fish for however many years until their body was grotesquely adapted to their new environs, and then got killed by a panicked spelunker. No eldritch horror involved.

It’s in the Barnes and Noble collection, though, so I read it and now I’m writing a blog post about it.