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.