Thirty-One Days of Lovecraft: Day Eight

As we move into Day Eight, the Mythos gets set up a little more and there's just some general creepiness. After the jump!




Alright, so here's the deal. I fell behind in my reading, and while I've caught up (mega post coming later) some of these stories I read a few days ago and they aren't as fresh as maybe the would be otherwise. Luckily, Lovecraft isn't obscure or anything and so there are a multitude of resources I can use to refresh my memory.

In a sense, this is ideal, since most of Lovecraft's stories feature narrators that try to forget or wish they could forget the horrors they've seen. I'm not trying to forget, nor do I want to, but I fear (no pun intended) that my analysis won't be nearly as sharp.

One of the things that is interesting about Lovecraft's early stories is that he is, maybe not intentionally, setting up his mythos. There are references to gods, recurring characters, places, and items. From what I can tell, this early work doesn't officially belong to his mythos, but there are themes that will carry into it. In a sense, this anthology is a good way to read his work, because you can follow how the ideas develop.

The first story in this post, "Hypnos" explores an earlier theme: dreams being gateways to another dimension. This was last seen in Beyond the Wall of Sleep, which is one of my favorite stories so far. So, naturally, the narrator of Hypnos fears sleep, due to a pretty neat twist ending.

The basic premise is this, the narrator is lonely, and then meets a person who has "immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes" and decides that he will be his friend, because why not. He seems to be more than friends though, as the person with black eyes becomes something of a guru for him. The two explore the nature of the universe, until the friend suggests taking drugs to really explore the universe. While our narrator is scared, they go ahead and do it.

Which, as a reader, is a good idea because you get a passage like this: "I heard a clock strike somewhere - not ours, for that was not a striking clock - and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting point for idle wanderings. Clocks - time - space - infinity and then my fancy reverted to the local as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether."

I did a quick Google search, and it seems that no, Lovecraft did not do drugs. Perhaps he, like his narrator, was afraid of what could be found should the mind be expanded. In Hypnos, it turns out the guy dreamed up his friend and kind of loses it, but at least he got to go on an acid trip.

What the Moon Brings is a prose poem. Memory is still my favorite of those, but Lovecraft does lay out some good reasons for hating the moon. Azartoth is an abandoned novel, in which a man travels "out of life", which sets up themes from the mythos.

In "The Hound" Lovecraft's favorite book, The Necronomicon turns up, and even though the characters are afraid of the book, that doesn't stop them from stealing an amulet mentioned in it, until they are haunted to the point of one death and some madness.

In "The Lurking Fear" Lovecraft returns to one of his favorite themes: devolution, in which a family imbreeds to the point of becoming murderous ape things.

Assorted musings: I did like "What the moon brings" . What the moon brings is a twist on things. The narrator in the poem comes across a garden, which is normally a great thing in poetry. Not so! It is a horrible place with no end. Also there is a thing..."And when I saw that this reef was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shone in the moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below...." I think only Lovecraft could write "hellish ooze" and have it pay-off like he does too.

I really liked the beginning of Azaroth. The narrator is bored with life, until he studies the stars until he can glimpse unseen realities. Unfortunatly, Lovecraft only got a page and half out of it. I am encouraged that Joshi writes that Azaroth "anticipates The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath.

Madness meter: The narrator in Hypnos literally imagines a guy to take drugs with, the narrator in What the Moon Bring chooses death over the horrors of the world, Azaroth probably features a narrator well on his way to madness, because usually in Lovecraft, people who seek unglimpsed realities don't keep all their eggs in tact. The Hound features two people driven mad by some sort of hellhound because they steal and amulet. The narrator in The Lurking Fear goes mad because of the horrors he sees.

Is that racist? Lurking Fear possibly, because like his previous devolution story, the family turns into apes, and you can maybe read some racism into that. But, eh, not really. When Lovecraft is racist, he's Racist, so nope.

Up next: Mega-post upcoming featuring: The Rats in the Walls, The Unnamable, The Festival, Under the Pyramids, The Shunned House, The Horror at Red Hook, He, In the Vault, and Cool Air.