Blind Read Through; H.P. Lovecraft: The Festival
Welcome back! We’re getting into it today! Thus far through the blind reads I have read a number of stories which were written before the Cthulhu Mythos truly began. I have enjoyed these stories for their literary merit, and for the genesis of Lovecraft as a writer. Then we get the The Festival and we finally get to the feel and nomenclature that I associate with Lovecraft. This is the first mention of The Necronomicon, the first mention of Miskatonic University, and the first mention of Arkham that I have come across in the readings.
Our story begins with the narrator heading back to “the ancient sea town where my people dwelt…” It is a horribly beautiful description, that portrays a town built centuries before and is somehow still standing. He is heading back there for a Yuletide celebration, as he got a message summoning him back to join his family for this celebration.
He heads through town to find his ancestors home and knocks on the door. He is met by an old man who’s face is so soft and un-moving that it looks like a wax mask instead of skin, and there is an old woman off spinning in the corner. The old man doesn’t speak, but tells our narrator to sit and wait for him (he writes it down on a tablet, I assume he doesn’t speak because the wax mask wouldn’t move and he doesn’t want to break the illusion yet). The narrator sits down and sees a number of books on the table in front of him, one of which is The Necronomicon. He picks it up and reads a bit while the old woman continues to spin in the corner. Eventually the old man comes back, dons a robe and beckons our narrator to follow him. They head out through the snow, in a congregation of hooded figures, until they get to an old church. They head down a trap door in the church to a tomb underneath. There is a flame that gives off no heat and a strange oily, putrid stream that flows through the tomb. The old man gets up and raises The Necronomicon, says a few words and horrible creatures come out of the flame. They are fetid and rotting and have wings. The group gets on and flies out of the church. The old man beckons our narrator to get on one, and gives him a watch that had been buried with his grandfather in the 1600’s. The narrator freaks out and jumps in the fetid stream. He wakes in the hospital and finds out that the town he was in has not existed for quite some time, and everything has been updated. He is then sent to Arkham for psychological surveillance.
We are led to believe that the old man is in fact his great-great-great-great grandfather, and that the narrator actually has ties to the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred who wrote The Necronomicon.
Though less literary than a number of his other stories; this straight forward horror tale is indicative of everything I’ve come to love about Lovecraft’s legacy. I’ts been amazingly fun to read through it, and I loved this one. Absolutely my favorite thus far in the cannon.
Next week there will be no Blind read through, because of a vacation, but join me September 7th for The Nameless City.
Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; From Beyond
This one was fun. Obviously, it was very heavily influenced by Poe (Tell Tale Heart comes to mind), but wonderfully unique and unutterably Lovecraftian. This was, thus far int he blind read through’s, the least literary. What the story has going for it is it’s horror, because it is by far the most horrific and terror filled story I’ve read by him.
Our narrator tells us of a friend of his, Crawford Tillinghast, who has gone a little off the reservation. Tillinghast invites our narrator to his house one evening and relates the story of what he has been working on.
He has recognized that the pineal gland can be altered to view the world for what it really is. To see beyond what we perceive. He creates a device he calls a resonance wave machine and turns it on. The whine creates a wave that gives the pineal gland an altered sense and the narrator begins to see jellyfish like creatures that surround him. We find out that Tillinghast had servants and the narrator thought they were dismissed, but we find out here that in fact one of the servants turned the light on when the Resonance Wave was turned on and creatures from beyond dissolved them. That is the plot of Tillinghast. He invited our narrator because he thinks the narrator held him back from his potential.
We find out that one of the horrible creatures that has the ability to dissolve is right behind the narrator and he shoots the Resonance Wave. The machine explodes, the creatures disappear and Tillinghast dies of apoplexy.
Not a whole lot to read into in this one. The interesting thing is that Tillinghast somehow tied the machine to his brain, and that’s why he suffered the stroke, because his pineal gland burst, this leads me to believe that if the narrator had shot Tillinghast instead of the machine the same outcome would have come about.
There seems to be a theme in Lovecraft where the Old and Elder Gods (and all their children) don’t really care about humans. They are so much greater and bigger than we can imagine that it is only when some human summons them that the havoc is wreaked. Even when they do this damage however, it is not of their malevolence (with the exception of Nyarlahotep), they are just going about their own business, but their norm is so far beyond and bizarre to our human sensibilities, that it destroys us.
Join me again tomorrow for another blind read through of The Festival. If you want to read along I’m reading “The Doom that came to Sarnath” by Del Rey.
Blind Read through: H.P. Lovecraft; Nathicana
I have to admit on this one, I wasn’t sure while reading through if these was some knowledge I needed to prepossess to understand what was going on here. I eventually went seeking some more information to see if my initial impressions were correct or if, in fact, I had some ignorance to the material Lovecraft was writing about. I’ll describe what my first impressions were and then talk about what I could find in a cursory search.
This is a very Poe’esque poem. Reminiscent of “Annabelle Lee” in it’s lyrical qualities and repetition; also in congruence with it’s macabre nature. We begin by viewing a purely Lovecraftian landscape, a very Romanesque place called Zais. There the narrator, through the mists of Yabon (the moon?), he sees the horrible beauty of Nathicana. This woman (Goddess?) is someone he is obsessed with, and strives to find her again, but soon comes the dreaded season of Dzannin (the sun?), that interferes, with it’s red light, the dreams where the narrator can see Nathicana. So he develops a “draught” that once he takes he can escape life and rejoin the “divine” Nathicana.
Seems fairly straight forward, the narrator sees a Goddess in his dreams and he can’t get back to her because his dreams are interfered with, so he drinks poison, to go beyond life and back into the realm of dreams to get back into the graces of his Goddess.
What I was confused about was the nomenclature. It may have been because I hadn’t read much Lovecraft before this project, but I hadn’t heard Dzannin, nor Yabon, Nor Nathicana for that matter. So I did a bit of searching on the old interwebs.
The most interesting quote I came across was in a letter that Lovecraft sent to Donald Wandrei. In it Lovecraft told Wandrei that the poem was a “parody on those stylistic excesses which really have no basic meaning.”
How very David Lynch of him.
I stick with my original feeling about the poem. Now while I am a bit underwhelmed by the poem, it does fit within this beginning time frame where his style is developing and transmogrifying into one of the Cthulhu Mythos and that of the Dreamlands.
Join me next week for a blind read through of “From Beyond”.
Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Hypnos
Welcome back to the creeping revision of H.P. Lovecraft’s work! This week I’m delving into Hypnos and it’s duality meaning.
The basic story is that the classic unreliable narrator meets a man who had a god-like face almost as ‘white as the marble of Pentelicus.’ The man had passed out in a train station, and our narrator went to him and when the man opened his eyes the narrator knew ‘he would be thenceforth my only friend.’ They discuss the universe and everything within it, and the narrator sculpts his friend. Our narrators new friend has a secret desire that he dare not speak of, to rule and go past the barriers of our known world. They experiment in drugs and try to get into the sleep world (which I can only imagine is a precursor, or even the beginnings of the dream-cycle pantheon). Then one one of these trips the friend (unnamed…for now), goes past an impassible barrier in the dream world, and comes back terrified and visibly aged. The two then vow to sleep as little as possible, also with the help of drugs. They age horribly and they pass their time in big groups and go to as many parties as possible, until one night as they are sleeping something strange happens as a light glows over his friends head and our narrator can see the disembodied face that looks as his friend once did before he went through the impassible barrier. The police come and gather the narrator and tell him that he has been alone, that all along he has been alone…that there was no friend. the only evidence is a bust of his friend with the name Hypnos.
There is an emerging theme that I had never known about from hearing about Lovecraft and that is the drugs. There have been many stories thus far eliciting that the narrators are using drugs to help them get past the barriers and see what is beyond. One cant help but think of the drug dreams of Irving Welch, and wonder if these are stories of fever dreams. It would be a provocative theory, though probably an unpopular one, but I would need to read more to see if the thread continues.
The connectors in the story are traced back to Greece. The narrator is a sculptor and he says he spends his free time sculpting his friend, who has a forehead as white as the marble of Pentelicus…a mountain in Athens known for it’s marble. Then at the end we find that the friends name was Hypnos, which was the Greek demi-god of sleep. So we come to a crossroads. The story is either telling us that the narrator finds this marble bust, and through his drug or fever dream, thinks that the bust opens its eyes and becomes his friend. Remember that the friend was found asleep in the train station, a place where it would make sense for a bust to be. Our narrator is lost in the HYPNOtic gaze of the bust, steals it and the drugs bring him through the adventures. The strange light over his friend at the end, is actually light over the bust and the cracking of the narrators reality. Remember that the idea was put there by drugs (one can only guess that it was a hallucinogenic), and he then stayed awake with the help of drugs. Sleep deprivation on top of a psychotic break will only deepen psychosis.
The other option, is that the events of the story are unfolded exactly how they are told, but frankly with the evidence that Lovecraft deposits throughout the story, this is not very likely. In any case, this was probably my favorite story thus far, right up there with The Tomb and The Tree.
Join me on Thursday this week (08/17) for one of Lovecraft’s Poems “Nathicana”. and if you want to read along with me I’m reading the Del Rey edition of “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”. ISBN: 0345331052
Sean McBride 