Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Lurking Fear

Here, we jump into a story that at first glace seems to be traditional horror fare from Lovecraft.  We have our monster hunter/ ghost hunter narrator (who is made to be unreliable because of his ambiguous motives.  He is surrounded by death, and every person he recruits to help him dies, or mysteriously dispersal, but yet he soldiers on, for reasons unknown) who is seeking out his “Lurking Fear” whom he thinks is using an the old Martense Mansion as it’s diabolical abode.

He hires some muscle, whom he has been with before on different cases.  And they go to the Mansion.  While sleeping there, they disappear.  Then he hires another man, and while they look out into the forest, the helper stands at the window and is unresponsive.  When our narrator shakes him, thinking him asleep, he discovers that something ate his face off whilst he looked out the window.

Then our narrator is convinced that the perpetrator is the ghost of one of the previous residents of the Mansion, Jan Martense, whom supposedly died by lightning strike.  Our narrator finds nothing during his exhumation except for ashes.  But he does find a passageway, some deep tunnel that he sees a horrible paw of some unknown creature.

During this time there is another storm and a shack is burned to the ground.  The squatters who lived there tell our narrator that a creature burned up in the shack and it had one victim.  Searching the ashes, our narrator finds the squatter victim, and what looks like a human skull.  Curious.

He goes back to the Mansion, and during another Thunder storm, he finds a tunnel, at the base of the chimney, and while he is standing there, hundreds and thousands of these creatures come out, some with tentacles, or just what look like tentacles.  He shoots one as they exit and finds that they have the same genetic mis-colored eyes of the Martense’s.

Seems like a normal monster story, but then when we dig deeper we find that it is indeed a cosmic horror story.

The first an most obvious connection is the tentacles.  This is a Lovecraftican trope, and though I haven’t seen it too much in his stories, the image of Cthulhu is enough.

The second is the fact that the monsters are Cthonic (meaning dwelling underground.  Funny how that and Cthulhu are so similar, no?).  The Elder Gods are buried in the earth and they await being awakened, so it bears to reason that their followers would dwell under the ground.

The final connection is in the lightning and thunder.  Something that connects the heavens to the earth.  The Outer Gods and the Elder Gods communicating…Or even coming to earth?

What makes all this so interesting is that, in the story, the creatures don’t begin to appear until Jan Martense is supposedly struck down by lightning.  Could this be a ritual that the Martense clan had found?  Did their ritual call down the lightning and thunder and transform their brood?

Provocative and fun stuff.

Join me on Thursday for a Blind Read Through of “Dagon” and let me know what you think!