Other Gods and More Unearthly Tales Read online

  THE OTHER GODS AND MORE UNEARTHLY TALES

  THE OTHER GODS AND MORE UNEARTHLY TALES

  H. P. LOVECRAFT

  Introduction by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

  Introduction and Suggested Reading

  © 2010 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10011

  ISBN: 978-1-4114-3825-5

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE TOMB

  POLARIS

  BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

  THE TRANSITION OF JUAN ROMERO

  THE WHITE SHIP

  THE STREET

  THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH

  THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER

  THE TREE

  THE TEMPLE

  CELEPHAÏS

  FROM BEYOND

  EX OBLIVIONE

  THE NAMELESS CITY

  THE MOON-BOG

  THE OTHER GODS

  HYPNOS

  WHAT THE MOON BRINGS

  AZATHOTH

  THE HOUND

  THE LURKING FEAR

  THE UNNAMABLE

  THE FESTIVAL

  UNDER THE PYRAMIDS

  THE SHUNNED HOUSE

  THE HORROR AT RED HOOK

  HE

  IN THE VAULT

  THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE IN THE MIST

  THE DESCENDANT

  HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON

  THE VERY OLD FOLK

  THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY

  THE EVIL CLERGYMAN

  THE BOOK

  ENDNOTES

  SUGGESTED READING

  INTRODUCTION

  ALL OF US, INSISTS THE FICTION OF H. P. LOVECRAFT, ARE LIKE CHILDREN lost in the woods at night with only a flashlight to illuminate our way. We think we are safe and know where we are going, but lurking just beyond the perimeter of the flashlight’s weak glow are horrors beyond description—monsters and gods, demons and ghosts. We think we know where we are going, but we are lost in the woods, the monsters are hungry . . . and our flashlight is dying. This is H. P. Lovecraft’s signature achievement—his creation of “cosmic horror,” stories describing a universe full of ominous powers and forces lurking just out of sight with the capacity to wipe out humanity. Collected in this volume are spine-tingling tales showing us that below the ground and at the top of mountain peaks lurk nameless gods and ghouls, powerful and horrific. In cemeteries and desert wastes and swampy bogs, the evidence of past civilizations remains waiting to be uncovered, ominously portending mankind’s own inglorious future conclusion. Even more disconcerting in Lovecraft’s fictional world is that one need not even leave home to come face-to-face with the cataclysmic revelation of man’s insignificance. Monsters not only skulk in underground crypts and exotic foreign lands, but swarm all around us, just out of sight. Ignorance, insists Lovecraft in his fiction, is ultimately bliss because true knowledge of humanity’s precariousness and inconsequentiality in the larger scheme of things is too horrific for the mind to comprehend unscathed. To realize just what lurks beyond the flashlight’s weak glow is to go mad—as so many of Lovecraft’s narrators ultimately do.

  Like his narrators, Lovecraft’s own life was not untouched by mental instability, depression, and insanity. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the final descendent of an old New England family, was born on August 20, 1890, at the family home in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, could trace her family tree back to the seventeenth century, while his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, could trace his back even further to the Middle Ages in England. In 1893, Lovecraft’s father, a traveling salesman plagued by what Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi refers to as a “sexual obsession” related to his wife being raped, suffered a psychological breakdown while on the road in Chicago and had to be confined to Butler Hospital in Providence (an insane asylum) where he suffered from paranoia, dementia, and delusions of grandeur before dying five years later of what was most likely tertiary syphilis.1 Lovecraft’s mother, traumatized by her husband’s condition, grew increasingly mentally unstable and suffered a psychological breakdown herself in 1919. In 1921 she passed away due to complications from gallbladder surgery.

  The gothic quality of Lovecraft’s family life was matched by and perhaps carried over into his own interest in the macabre. In his father’s absence, Lovecraft found a substitute in his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, who entertained him with gothic tales of his own invention and introduced the young boy to children’s versions of the classics, including The Odyssey. A precocious reader, Lovecraft was apparently mesmerized by the Arabian Nights at age five (which led to his inventing for himself the name Abdul Alhazred, a figure subsequently incorporated into his fiction as the “mad Arab” and author of the book of forbidden occult knowledge, The Necronomicon), and then transfixed at age six by Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (likely the edition containing magnificently gloomy illustrations by Gustav Doré)—a work that was clearly among the principle literary influences shaping Lovecraft’s taste for weird fiction and one that is arguably reflected in “The White Ship,” an early tale included in this volume. Of even greater significance to Lovecraft’s artistic development was his discovery of Edgar Allan Poe in 1898. In typically arabesque prose, Lovecraft reflected on Poe’s influence, writing. “It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I was the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!”2 Later in his life, the fantasy tales of Irish author Lord Dunsany would also exercise considerable influence on his artistic development.

  Lovecraft himself suffered from a variety of health-related concerns—likely largely psychosomatic—and suffered a psychological breakdown of his own (the first of several) in 1898 at the tender age of eight. His official schooling as a result of his health issues was sporadic, but he compensated for his lack of formal education through voracious reading with particular interests in chemistry and astronomy; indeed, in his teenage years he produced his own scientific journals for circulation among family and friends. His first print publication in fact was related to astronomy: in 1906, at the age of sixteen, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Providence Sunday Journal correcting an astrologer’s statement about the orbit of Mars. He subsequently wrote columns on astronomy for both a local rural newspaper and the Providence Sunday Journal. In 1908, he suffered another nervous breakdown, this time leading to his withdrawal from high school altogether after having finished only three years and without a diploma. The next five years he spent doing little but studying astronomy, writing a bit of poetry, and taking some correspondence courses.

  What brought Lovecraft out of his shell was his association with the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA)—a relatively small group of amateur journalists who published journals and circulated them among themselves in the 1910s and 1920s. Lovecraft, who found the UAPA to be an encouraging venue in which to explore his literary interests, contributed poetry and essays to UAPA journals and published thirteen issues of his own journal, the Conservative—a periodical that reflected his own conservative cultural views. In 1916, his first published story, “The Alchemist,” appeared in the United Amateur, but it was not until six years later that he broke into professional fiction (at the age of thirty-one) with the publication of “Herbert West—Reanimator” (one of se
veral stories to be adapted after Lovecraft’s death into lackluster horror films) in a semi-professional publication called Home Brew.

  As Lovecraft moved beyond amateur magazines into the world of professional publications, the principle venue for his work became the celebrated “pulp” magazine Weird Tales, which was founded in 1923 and published the early work of such notable authors as Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Theodore Sturgeon. Lovecraft became a fixture in Weird Tales to such an extent that he was apparently offered the editorship of the magazine in 1924, a position that would have necessitated his relocation from New York to Chicago. For better or worse—likely worse, at least for Lovecraft—he rejected the offer, choosing to remain in New York with Sonia Haft Greene, a widowed Russian Jew seven years his senior, whom he married in March 1924 after a two-year courtship.

  Lovecraft’s ill-fated marriage to Sonia is one of the more perplexing episodes in his life, given his notorious and frankly indefensible anti-Semitism. The only explanation critics have been able to suggest is that, flattered by her attentions, Lovecraft found Sonia secular and acculturated enough to allow him to overlook her religious background. However, while he may have been able to put aside concerns about her religious background, other troubles for the couple began soon after their wedding as Sonia was let go from a lucrative executive job at a New York department store and the two quickly found themselves subject to pressing financial concerns. Sonia attempted to open a hat shop but failed and then experienced health problems leading to a stay at a New Jersey sanitarium; Lovecraft tried to earn a living through a combination of writing, ghostwriting, and editing the work of others, supplemented by unsuccessful stints working for other businesses including a collection agency and a lamp-testing company. It is hard to say whether their relationship would have lasted had money not been such a pressing matter. As things stand, however, Sonia moved to the Midwest in 1925 to pursue several job opportunities and, after that, returned to New York only occasionally. The couple never lived together again and Sonia ultimately filed divorce papers in 1929 (papers which Lovecraft never actually signed).

  After Sonia’s departure, the depressed Lovecraft moved into a single apartment near the Brooklyn slum known as Red Hook and his fiction from the period—such as “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He” included here—reflects his sense of loneliness and despondency in a city full of what he perceived as ominous foreigners. Then in 1926 in order to preserve his sanity, he abandoned New York altogether and returned to Providence, the place of his birth. Since his mother had died five years earlier, Lovecraft moved in with his two maternal aunts. This transition touched off the most fertile period in Lovecraft’s creative life: in a nine-month period between 1926 and 1927, he produced several of his best known and most celebrated works, including “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Colour Out of Space,” and the novels The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

  Despite his best efforts, Lovecraft lamentably found it difficult to sell his increasingly lengthy and complicated later work and his revision efforts for others brought in diminishing returns. While he nurtured the careers of many young writers, including August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Fritz Leiber, becoming in the process one of the most prolific letter writers of the twentieth century (and producing a body of correspondence that Joshi speculates may one day be recognized as his greatest achievement3), his final years were plagued by poverty and hardship. In 1936, Lovecraft was saddened by the suicide of his correspondent Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan the Barbarian stories, and he himself succumbed to intestinal cancer on March 10, 1937, at the age of forty-seven, having never seen a true book publication of his work.

  This collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, which spans much of the length of his sadly short career, showcases the diversity of his work and takes us from the tops of mountain peaks (“The Other Gods” and “The Strange High House in the Mist”) to the depths of the sea (“The Temple”), from Saharan desert sands (“The Nameless City”) to the labyrinthine streets of New York (“The Horror at Red Hook”), and from ancient Greece (“The Tree”) to millions of years in the future (“He” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”). Organizing this vast geographic and temporal range, however, is Lovecraft’s darkly satiric approach to mankind’s misguided sense of self-importance—call it Lovecraft’s “Copernican revolution,” his pricking of mankind’s pretensions to grandeur through the revelation that, rather than being at the center of the universe, human beings are really barely a blip on the radar at the outmost periphery of being. This theme takes the form of a pattern that recurs so insistently in Lovecraft’s fiction that it may be considered its fundamental organizing principle: the human quest for knowledge reveals mankind’s powerlessness, which the mind is not prepared to accept—the truth about humanity’s impotence and inconsequentiality in the larger scheme of things is inevitably catastrophic. Lovecraft handles this theme, however, in three characteristic ways that reflect the three main (and often overlapping) categories of his work: his Poe-inspired horror stories, his Lord Dunsany-inspired “dream cycle” stories, and his stories of cosmic horror that have come to be called his Cthulhu Mythos.

  Lovecraft, as Joshi has observed, initially found in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe a model for both style and plot structure, and his early work, light on dialogue, heavy on narration, and overloaded with adjectives, clearly reflects Poe’s influence.4 In this volume, the stories “The Tomb,” “The Moon-Bog,” “In the Vault,” and “The Shunned House” fit this mold. “The Tomb,” one of Lovecraft’s earliest published stories (appearing in 1922), while leaving up in the air the exact nature of the phenomena experienced by the story’s first-person narrator, is arguably a tale of psychic possession in the same vein as Poe’s “Ligeia.” “The Moon-Bog,” which seems to derive its inspiration from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” concerns a mansion in the midst of a gothic, haunted landscape and the uncanny forces that lurk beneath the surface of a swamp. And both “In the Vault,” a ghoulish tale of supernatural revenge, and “The Shunned House,” one of Lovecraft’s most straightforwardly supernatural stories, show the influence of Poe as filtered through American Gothic writer Ambrose Bierce. In essence, each of these fictions is a ghost story, a tale about haunted locations and the persistence of the past into the present. They insist upon an expanded conception of the universe in that the supernatural phenomena must be reconciled with the laws of physics as we know them. The tales, however, in good Poe-esque fashion, remain fairly local in scope, dealing as they do with specific protagonists who are haunted by very particular histories. While they imply more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in rationalist philosophy, they do not require the same sort of wholesale epistemological reevaluation necessitated by Lovecraft’s later tales of alien civilizations and extraterrestrial “gods.”

  Like his Poe-inspired stories, Lovecraft’s tales in the vein of Lord Dunsany also deal with the persistence of the past into the present, but are less horrific stories of gruesome events than fantastic stories of unsatisfied desire and hubris that shift us out of the world we know into the realm of dreams. In 1919, the same year his mother experienced her psychological breakdown, Lovecraft discovered the work of Lord Dunsany, an Irish fantasy writer and dramatist, and spent the next two years writing Dunsany imitations. What Lovecraft found so appealing about Dunsany’s fiction was the “remoteness” of his fantasy lands, which come complete with their own gods, history, and geography.5 Lovecraft’s attempts to model his fiction after Dunsany are clearly evident here in the stories “The White Ship,” “The Other Gods,” “Celephaïs,” and “The Strange High House in the Mist.” Both “The White Ship” and “The Other Gods” are tales of hubris and loss of innocence, of human beings who push too far and desire too much. In “The White Ship,” lighthouse-keeper Basil Elton recalls a mystical journey into wondrous realms and his own refusal to be satisfied. In “The Other Gods,”
Barzai the wise believes that his vast knowledge of the gods will allow him to look upon their faces unscathed and thus resolves to climb the forbidden mountain Hatheg-Kla. Both “The White Ship” and “The Other Gods” are tales of overreaching—in typically Lovecraftian style, of pursuing knowledge at all costs and with disastrous results. “Celephaïs” and “The Strange High House in the Mist,” by contrast, are less tales of hubris than of the desire for a world of wonders. In the former, a man stays young as long as he clings to the belief in the magical city of his youth, while in the latter philosopher Thomas Olney yearns for—and discovers—something apart from daily routine and “well-disciplined thoughts.” Taken together, the two stories offer a concise snapshot of both the promise and peril of fantastic fiction. The desire to escape from the world of mundane reality and to believe in something more is natural, but if one lingers too long in other realms, the danger is that one may never return—at least not entirely, or intact.

  What differentiates Lovecraft’s Dunsany imitations from both his Poe-inspired stories and his later Cthulhu Mythos is their setting. These are not stories set in the world we know, but rather they take place in “The Dreamlands,” a fantasy world of marvelous cities, magical creatures, and strange gods. Associated with childhood, The Dreamlands is generally off-limits to adults, with the exception of rare, visionary dreamers who retain a link to childhood and a willingness to push beyond common boundaries. For those intrepid souls willing to venture outside time and space, the dubious reward is truth—knowledge of the beauty, horror, and fundamental strangeness of the world and of mankind’s peripheral role in its functioning. Lovecraft’s universe of dreams in this sense parallels the interruption of the supernatural in the Poe-esque tales through an insistence on an expanded understanding of the universe and the powers governing it.

  The necessity of rethinking humanity’s place in the larger scheme of things is at the heart of the stories most commonly associated with Lovecraft—what have come to be called his Cthulhu Mythos (a name never used by Lovecraft himself), his collection of stories depicting alien civilizations and powerful extraterrestrial monsters referred to as “gods.” These stories, which vividly develop Lovecraft’s signature form of cosmic horror, foreground what critic David E. Schultz has referred to as Lovecraft’s “anti-mythology,” a “pseudomythology brutally show[ing] that man is not the center of the universe, that the ‘gods’ care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.”6 To an even greater extent than Lovecraft’s Poe- and Dunsany-inspired stories, his Cthulhu Mythos represent human beings as arrogant dupes of our own egotism—we think we’re the top of the food chain when, in reality, we’re on the same order of krill to intergalactic leviathans.