THE DEEP ONES: "The Lurking Fear" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Lurking Fear" by H.P. Lovecraft.

Discussion begins on February 7, 2018.

Originally published in 4 parts in Home Brew, beginning January, 1923.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/lf.aspx

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41888

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
The Lurking Fear and Other Stories
H. P. Lovecraft: Masters of the Weird Tale
Black Seas of Infinity

MISCELLANY

https://tentaclii.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/home-brew/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/19/united-amateur-press-association/
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/study-the-king-james-b...
http://tinyurl.com/y9cfdtx9

Appearing in America's Zippiest Pocket Magazine (full of Peppy Stories and Pungent Jests): the latest installment of "The Lurking Fear"!

Funny.

>2 paradoxosalpha:

By "Howard P. Lovecraft", full of zip and pep as he was.

That's Grandpa Pungent for you! (Why, "Pungent" is his middle name!)

I'm reading from that essential little workhorse volume, Black Seas of Infinity.

All my HPL volumes are in storage, but from the list under SELECTED PRINT VOLUMES I may not own it anyway. Regardless, online for me.

ETA Correction, I'd forgotten my recent purchase of Dagon and Other Macabre Tales and rue this missed opportunity to bring it out.

The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men’s skulls swelled to gigantic proportions..

I always enjoy it when HPL takes us out into the wild woods, and here the Catskills are one of the main characters in the story. They make a novel location for him to work with. I'm not clear on just what thunder actually does in order to summon the fear, but it's a nice effect, and now I know about fulgurites!

A recurrent usage that I found odd was "overnourished vegetation." By the story's end, a reader could make some inferences about the gruesome nature of the nourishment, but I wondered how one looks at a forest and judges the trees to be "overnourished."

Arthur Monroe getting his face eaten off would be trite in a 21st-century horror flick, but I think it was pretty "out there" in a 1923 issue of Home Brew! Pungent!

Here we have the chronically racist Lovecraft, with his irrational animus against the insular Dutch. But seriously, the monstrous fate of the Martenses is in its way an indictment of xenophobia, surprising in a tale from HPL.

And I loved this little elaboration of the "mountain mongrels":

When we came to know the squatters better, we found them curiously likeable in many ways. Simple animals they were, gently descending the evolutionary scale because of their unfortunate ancestry and stultifying isolation. They feared outsiders, but slowly grew accustomed to us; finally helping vastly when we beat down all the thickets and tore out all the partitions of the mansion in our search for the lurking fear.

>8 paradoxosalpha: but I wondered how one looks at a forest and judges the trees to be "overnourished."

I wondered the same thing. HPL uses similar expressions in other tales, and I've rarely felt entirely clear on what he's envisaging. I, too, noted the positive, albeit paternalistic, attitude to the "squatters". Not an exactly enlightened attitude, perhaps, but distinctly better than that expressed about the Catskill people in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep".

This was a re-read, but it's quite a few years since I read it last, and I'd forgetting most except the central setup of the degenerate Martenses. And I'd somehow got into my head that they'd devolved to rat-size, which surely isn't meant by the narrator's "dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes".

There's no invocations of eldritch tomes or antehuman gods here, but in the multi-part structure and the emphasis on researching the Martenses' history it sort of prefigures later "Mythos" works like "The Call of Cthulhu".

This one had to have been influenced by Arthur Machen's little people.

Even though the rhetoric didn't seem so very appropriate to the events where it appeared, there were preliminary trickles of Lovecraftian "cosmicism":

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth’s supreme horrors—one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint daemon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. ...

Then, as I playfully shook him and turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.

HPL's treatment of the mountain folk as a bunch of sometimes-useful idiots made me appreciate the far more vivid characterizations found in Manly Wade Wellman's tales all the more. Even so, I found it interesting that none of the "squatters" pose any kind of threat. No Deliverance-style menace here; just monster fodder. I still enjoyed the story quite a bit. Nice to see a reporter get involved, especially since there is a whole group of them gathered around looking for a lead. Poor Arthur Munroe doesn't last long, though.

I really enjoyed the following paragraph, which is a good early example of Lovecraft's often misunderstood, but powerful, signature technique :

Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky . . . formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion . . . insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...

It's those jarring, forced incongruities like "shrieking... shadows" "insane lightning", "polypous perversion" that conjure some uncomfortable imagery for the reader. The paragraph also seems to indicate that the "overnourised oaks " are a by-product of the "cannibal devils" themselves.

I'm pretty sure this was a first-time read for me. Until the end, I was envisioning something along the lines of a Gibbering Mouther (especially as depicted by the peerless Erol Otus) but the revelation the "thing" is actually a community of individual beasts put the kibbosh to that idea.

>9 AndreasJ: I'd somehow got into my head that they'd devolved to rat-size

I shared that confusion, and I think it originates in HPL's description near the end:

The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a daemon, rat-like scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life

The rat-like scurrying I can appreciate, but it implanted the idea of size as well as sound. There was a lot of confusing description and plotting in this story. Perhaps HPL wanted to leave the frantic, inchoate impression that the narrator has. Better, I think, to have been more concise and so more evocative in telling this tale. As it is, though, I have to take this as a classic source of that madness typically associated with Lovecraft, and I'm glad to have read it finally. Not one I'd recommend as an introduction for others, though.

>12 elenchus: There was a lot of confusing description and plotting in this story.

Here's an example.

When crawling through the catacombs, our narrator encounters the lurking fear but can't see it clearly.

And as I raised my glance it was without preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two daemoniac reflections of my expiring lamp; two reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw!

Later, lying in wait outside the Martense mansion, he witnesses this:

God knows how many there were—there must have been thousands. To see the stream of them in that faint, intermittent lightning was shocking. When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms, I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes—monstrous and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe.

I understand these are two separate entities (perhaps better termed manifestations), and that a third presumably died in the cabin fire. But, presumably each of these three are part of what has been behind the regional slaughter and folk stories. Is the creature in the catacombs the Queen Bee? Or, just one of the "thousands" but this one unaccountably with a claw?

ETA I realise I had in mind a chitinous claw, as from a crustacean, but maybe HPL meant something more akin to a wolverine or other mammalian claw. That would be less confusing.

Yeah, I think it was just a mammalian-type claw. The confusion is all by a certain measure of design. Were the eyes "provoking maddeningly nebulous memories" because they were of mismatched colors? He doesn't say here, but it's implied.

Also, when he later imagines "tentacles" to account for the disappearance of his two assistants, he's really groping for the great numbers of the creature, but he doesn't want to admit the logical conclusion that they were numerous and closing in from all sides.

Clark Ashton Smith's "peculiar" illustrations for the story are found under the first MISCELLANY link (a facsimile of the Home Brew edition).

>13 elenchus: I shared that confusion, and I think it originates in HPL's description near the end:

Possibly, though in my case the vagaries of memory is at least as likely a culprit!

Yeah, I too imagined a mammal-style claw. That would, relatively speaking, be a reasonable result of human devolution.

>8 paradoxosalpha: an indictment of xenophobia, surprising in a tale from HPL

I don't know if it is, really; evil hiding in isolated communities suspicious of outsiders isn't rare in Lovecraft (think e.g. of Innsmouth). What matters, from his PoV, is rather what sorts of outsiders you shun. Shunning well-bred New Englanders is bad, shunning pesky foreigners is good.

This is a story I can easily imagine stoking the furnaces for those antagonistic to HPL and his racism, as well as for those who see something in addition to the racism, something admirable.

I see "preliminary trickles of Lovecraftian 'cosmicism'" at various points, but the race-based revulsion is also clearly broadcast, from the "devolution" of the Martense family to the denigration of the "simple animals" living in the region. I read that as HPL grasping for something that describes or evokes ultimate horror, but at this point his touchpoints are rooted in biology and physicality, which for him are inextricably linked to his racist views. Even here, though, it doesn't seem to match what he's after and there are inklings of the horror in the void.

This reading assumes there is an evolution of HPL's outlook, at least in terms of his fiction, with the theme of cosmic indifference as ultimate expression of horror coming in his later writings. I realise now I don't actually know that's the case, and am not familiar enough with the stories to review writing dates and thereby confirm or deny that premise. Anyone here have an insight?

>16 AndreasJ: Shunning well-bred New Englanders is bad, shunning pesky foreigners is good.

Touche!

>17 elenchus: This reading assumes there is an evolution of HPL's outlook, at least in terms of his fiction, with the theme of cosmic indifference as ultimate expression of horror coming in his later writings.

That's sort of the general S.T. Joshi thesis, as far as I've read. HPL's "cosmicism" is supposed to be his distinctive contribution to the form, and it gets refined as his oeuvre progresses. Certainly, his earlier work tends more towards traditionally gothic tropes, as well as--in this case and others--imitation of Machen and other stars of the previous generation.

>11 gwendetenebre: Yes there is some logical incoherence in those descriptions. That overnourished vegetation put me in mind of the later "The Colour Out of Space".

>10 paradoxosalpha: It's an interesting stage in HPL's development. As you say, there are hints of his later cosmicism, but the story itself is pretty restricted in its vistas of time and space: a horror out of Colonial America, the near past, and the action restricted to rural New York State. It's a bridge story between the gothic and cosmic horror.

The underground horror and family degeneration are, of course, motifs HPL would go on to use elsewhere.

I think the hero is interesting. He's a bit of an action hero ("ackshun hero" as HPL might have said). After all, he goes to investigate the mansion with two pistol-packing men. But he's also something of an aesthete of the weird like Randolph Carter. He seems the closest thing (with maybe the exception of the detective in "The Horror at Red Hook") to an occult detective in Lovecraft's fiction or the investigator characters in Lovecraft-based role-playing games.

I thought the sort of cryptozoology theme early in the story was interesting. The notion that we were dealing with some mysterious beast was there before the narrator decides on a "death-daemon". (Though I don't know what, exactly, the narrator means by that. A supernatural entity?)

And, of course, we don't have a single beast but something of a new species with the Martenese family.

Lovecraft also is on his way to learning the power of specificity that he showed in later tales. But the second section of the tale is surprisingly short of the sort of scientific and historical details we would expect of HPL though he does give us more of that in the third section.

The squatters surprised me a bit. I had to remind myself this was a 1922 story and not set in the Great Depression. America was relatively prosperous that year.

>20 RandyStafford: I think the hero is interesting. ... He seems the closest thing (with maybe the exception of the detective in "The Horror at Red Hook") to an occult detective in Lovecraft's fiction or the investigator characters in Lovecraft-based role-playing games.

Agreed. I think he's one of the few Lovecraft protagonists who doesn't seem odd being called a "hero."

The squatters surprised me a bit. I had to remind myself this was a 1922 story and not set in the Great Depression. America was relatively prosperous that year.

But their impoverishment was not that of a catastrophic downturn in the economy. They were a multi-generational rural underclass, bred to destitution.

>21 paradoxosalpha: Bred to destitution indeed.

It brings to mind how much of Lovecraft's fiction has "villains" who are not individual actors but represent threatening groups. Menace is rarely an individual, one-off in Lovecraft. Civilization and the status quo are products of groups, and, in Lovecraft, they are almost always threatened by groups. The only exception that readily comes to mind is the meteor in "The Colour Out of Space". Or, I suppose, Herbert West.

Lovecraft played on an epic scale and that meant the survival or extinction of groups is often at stake in his dramas. I think that's another reason this story is an interesting transition work for him. Here the contending groups are rustics and Martenses.

Lovecraft was dismissive of the serials he wrote for Home Brew in his letter of 22 November 1922: "stuff done to order for a vulgar magazine, and written down to the herd's level {...} I am about to start another hell-raiser for it, entitled "The Lurking Fear"." (Reprinted in Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill).

Nevertheless there are themes here that will be developed in later stories - as has already been noted. One that hasn't been mentioned yet is the sequence where the narrator crawled through the tunnel made by the devolved Martenses. It brought to my mind the underground city of "The Shadow out of Time". The situations aren't parallel by any means, but close enough to have similar effects when I'm reading about them. I must be at least slightly claustrophobic.

>23 housefulofpaper:
It's also effective to use a claustrophobic setting to evoke the figurative oppression associated with the threat to one's identity and being as posed by a group, such as HPL does here with the Martenses. He's making good use of this "vulgar" assignment, and it's telling he chooses the term "herd".

>22 RandyStafford:

The eponymous character of "Nyarlathotep" is another individual threat.

(... altho even he is said to be the soul of the ultimate gods, plural ...)

That story, incidentally, also offers an early example of cosmicness, albeit more phantasmagorial than the more sf-like approach in later works.

>23 housefulofpaper:

It would be interesting to know what the story would have been like if Lovecraft hadn't felt the need to write down to his audience? He does not appear to have felt any need avoid big words - we get both "eldritch" and "cyclopean" (tho not "squamous"), and "fulgurite" was surely as obscure in the 1920s as today.

>25 AndreasJ: Underground horror seems to have been a very early theme in Lovecraft. He wrote a piece of juvenilia called "The Beast in the Cave". And, of course, there's "The Festival".

I didn't have to look up "fulgurite" -- only because I had come across it in geology readings.

I didn't have to look up fulgurite either - but I have a sneaking suspicion I may originally have learnt it from this story when I first read it 10+ years ago.

I don't know that HPL was writing down to his audience, but this was one of his earlier published tales and he was still getting up to speed. He had already written "Dagon" by this point, however, and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", which was his only other tale set in the Catskills. When I think of "The Lurking Fear", its overall atmosphere and mood always come immediately to mind. I think that it succeeds quite well in those aspects.