Beyond the Wall of Sleep

An old rule about short fiction asserts that a story should not quote its title because it will have a false clang (even more true of a film as those being filmed should not be aware that they have an audience). While numerous great works defy such wisdom – those whose main character gets top billing do not really count in this regard – the sentiment contains more than a few kernels of truth. Philosophy, as many who don't understand a lick of it have said, is a pursuit of the rich. The put-upon, the oppressed, and the marginalized have no time for the distant diatribes of the ivory tower. How could the meaning of the universe or even simply earthbound life resonate with those who struggle for daily necessities? Yet in stories of horror, incorporating the title verbatim into the narrative does not result in a wooden echo, but an omen. It becomes a chant, a legend, a premonition of unspeakable evil prophesied in riddles and warnings which any normal, reasonable mind would interpret as unbesought mercy. And despite all good sense to the contrary, we see another learned man lured into the fantastic in this story.

Our narrator identifies himself only as an intern in "the state psychopathic institution," the state in question being New York since we will be patrolling these mountains. Literary doctors always need literary patients, otherwise they cease to be of any interest at all, and our narrator's subject was foisted upon him by chance itself:

His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts .... This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say what he did.

As well it should be forgotten, since Slater will commit a hideous crime against a man called Slader, a likely cousin amidst all this "degeneracy," and leave behind "an unrecognisable pulp-like thing." Acquitted of murder on grounds of insanity, Slater, an illiterate who "had apparently never heard a legend or fairy tale," will come under the examination of our fascinated narrator. Fascinated by what, you ask? By the fact that Slater's visions imply an ocular homologue of glossolalia, of sights his dim realm could not possibly know. Our intern explains:

The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. How, I often asked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific colleagues.

Experience has a rather unfortunate tendency to diminish imagination, and not only that of otherwise blithe and hopeful scientists. One wonders whether our intern would have been so keen on learning the secrets housed in Joe Slater's terrestrial form had his fellow boffins been more receptive to those "great edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys." He does not relent in his aims, which means that he will have his chance alone with his "barbarian" of a patient, should that really be Joe Slater behind those blue eyes. 

Lovecraft was a stylist of indefinite genius often waylaid by his own nightmares and henchmen. And while the detail he lends his descriptions bespeaks the idolater, it is perhaps even more impressive that no one could ever deem his krakens and godlets familiar. How can prose convey the eerie sensations that linger in the crevasses of a sleep-flushed brain, how can wickedness in its most awesome manifestations possibly jostle our spines? The monsters of most horror tales are but ghoulish parodies of homines sapientes: it is through our own reflections, our solipsistic urgings, that we imagine life corrupted and distorted. But what if we heard a voice insist, Watch me in the sky beside the Daemon-Star, what then? Would we, akin to our ever-curious narrator, be so inclined as to gaze upon the firmament in search of signs and wonders? Not if our idea of fun is a "plain tale of science," and our reaction merely a dismissive shrug of the shoulders. 

The Thing on the Doorstep

You may have never considered reading this author's work because, as it were, horror or fantasy or some hybrid of these two genres with particularly impassioned readerships has never appealed to your aesthetic enjoyment. And while such a prejudice may be accurate for the vast majority of such writers, missing out on Lovecraft would be criminal. His style is utterly and invariably impeccable; he may often employ old and arcane words, but his subjects are often old and arcane. And while he aims at horror, he does not aim at gore or hideous violence: his achievement, even more remarkable for someone who always insisted that he had no faith whatsoever in the supernatural, was to dissect in all seriousness the wicked portals of eternal evil and their occasional manifestations in our realm. That type of Herculean task is so easily butchered by the melodramatic hack and shunned by writers of true genius as beneath their artistic ambition, which makes Lovecraft an even rarer bird, as his absolutely first-rate prose gleams with precision and beauty at every indentation. And among the many masterpieces he composed, this tale is certainly one of the finest.

We begin with a confession that will turn out to be more of a McGuffin – and I give nothing away with such a disclosure. A man in his fifties, but twelve years older than his victim and best friend Edward Derby, has killed Derby with a full revolver round to the head. The murderer, Daniel Upton, also happens to be our narrator. The motive for such a slaying is poorly secreted from first to last paragraph, as the person Upton murders is not Edward Derby at all – and perhaps, in the strict physiological sense, not quite a person, either. We are eventually led to believe that the being inside of Derby may be the bizarre creature he chooses as his wife; I should say, it is the wife who chooses Derby: 

Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-three at the time .... She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people .... Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of knowledge and language very singular – and very shocking – for a young girl; when she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her present situation. Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality – as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression.   

There are many other unsettling facts about Asenath, not the least of which is her provenance. She hails from Innsmouth, a "run-down fishing port" around which rumors have swirled about the cause of its depopulation – something involving the breeding of human residents with some inhuman marine visitors, but I digress. That Asenath is a demon, or at least of demon stock, is never doubted by Upton or the reader; perhaps it is not even doubted by Derby himself, although he seems inexorably drawn to Asenath as a great mind can be lured by commensurate evil. As in many formidable Gothic tales, we the readers know that a certain acquaintance is bad news and the end of hope in one package. Yet we sadistically flip the pages forth in wonderment over what precisely will befall him who has chosen so unwisely. 

What becomes of Edward Derby is already revealed on the opening page, and still the suspense of how he achieves his wicked fate is as tremendous as in any whodunit or thriller. Along the way, those who admire the sublimity of the English language sweeping dust off old tomes and vile images will surely be engaged by Upton's report. There are myriad examples of this perfection: "I perceived," says a worried Upton about this new, horrible couple, "that their intimacy was beyond untangling"; "Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips – ostensibly to Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations"; "He repeated names which I recognized from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency – of convincing coherence – which ran through his maundering." But I have been omitting the meat dish from our courses. Asenath comes from a long line of Waites, nefarious the whole lot of them, with the primary malefactor having been none other than her father Ephraim, a wizard of some significance. Father, like daughter, was a student of magic with some alleged command over the elements and willpower that exceeded all known human exertions:

The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane – under rather queer circumstances – just before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.    

I suppose it is natural enough to abhor someone whose soul you somehow sense has long since been blackened by ambition and pacts; but Upton's reaction may be a mild case of twenty-twenty hindsight. After all, don't daughter and father resemble each other, at times more than just physically, and wasn't Asenath "very good-looking"? And we haven't even mentioned Edward's long, fast drives down Innsmouth road.  

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Without some mild prompting, horror fans may not be able to confirm that there exist two types of scare tales: those about the unfamiliar awash in the shadows and tricks of the light, and those about very familiar things that turn out to be not what they seem. For whatever reason, I have on numerous occasions toyed with scenarios from the latter grouping and they have invariably resulted in dissatisfaction. Why is our first type so superior? Perhaps because in our second, there is no suspense, no chance for understanding when something you have always treated as safe is transformed into a parlous and despicable trap (zombies, those beloved catch-all cannibals, come to mind). And while many a work has been constructed on the premise that someone – a family member, a co-worker, a respected citizen – is not what he or she appears to be, a pervasive obliviousness is the only plausible explanation; otherwise, we would simply have random whims and haphazard betrayal. It is this first premise that both makes this work so outstanding and reduces numerous whodunits to a pure guessing game. And yet there is also another genre that borrows liberally from both these types, a perfect example of which careens through the pages of this short novel.

Our eponymous character is a young man in Rhode Island; the time is that brief, sweet lull between the twentieth century's two European cataclysms. The young man has been diagnosed by alienists and other nostrum-peddlers as mentally ill, but the cause of his malady is never ascertained by modern science (and since we are reading this author, we know it never will be). No, our man is ill all right, but his is the illness of having crossed boundaries of human experiences that should remain just that, boundaries. Boundaries, as it were, to gaze upon from a comfortable distance and then be forever shown the backs of us. Young Ward's life was changed in dramatic fashion by uncovering a hitherto unknown ancestor with the ominous name of Curwen, a corruption of the Latin word for this bird. Joseph Curwen, as his forebear was called, seemed to have lived a very long and ignominious life in the region, and was somehow implicated in the witch trials that devoured Puritan England over two centuries before. And yet, chroniclers maintain that Curwen didn't age, or at least, not enough ("this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less than a full century old"). Stranger still is this greedy and reclusive hermit's Georgian habitat, from where the wickedest midnight sounds and smells are said to emerge. This attracts the attention of local law enforcement, who choose to do nothing that could repercuss in their disfavor. Instead, one dark night they assemble an extrajudicial band and invade the premises. What they find is never made explicit, but we gather they may have been better off not interfering in such machinations:   

It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odor about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes and never think or speak of the night's doings or of him who had been Joseph Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction which his mere words could never have conveyed; for though he was a seaman well known to many of them, there was something obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him evermore apart.

Curwen may well represent Poe's ancestry to Lovecraft since the latter considered the author of The Raven to be the greatest of all literary influences on his artistic development, but Poe's worlds are small and self-destructive. They collapse upon themselves like tombs or old, creaking houses, with a character or two invariably trapped within. Lovecraft's work is, however, about the abyss, the immensity of horror that is only intensified by our basal apprehensions about hell or nothingness or an oblivion that will consume us over the course of millions of years. How much better then to leave undescribed what these soldiers saw that fateful night in what they had expected would be a warlock's cave, a night during which Joseph Curwen – ageless, baleful, deal-hungry Joseph Curwen – was at last destroyed.

This terrible event, of course, does nothing to dissuade young Ward, who is under the care of a certain Dr. Willett. Willett, true to his oaths, likes facts and treatments. He is averse to the spiritual in the same way that one can be allergic to something as fundamental as milk. Even when Ward betakes himself for three years to Europe to visit notorious black magic practitioners, Willett implies that Ward could be actively mimicking his ancestor's activities and language in his correspondence out of some kind of obsessive fascination. There is, of course, another explanation, and one that has to do with the menacing portrait of Joseph Curwen uncovered at the house that Ward will soon inhabit. Giving away too much of Ward's psychic shift would be unfair to the tale's future readers, but we can mention Willett's venture to the house that Curwen built:    

It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.

What would be the most earth-shattering vision one could imagine? Many works have tapped into the personal, that which is unknowable except to the visionary himself, as in this incredible masterpiece, but this is not the picture painted here. What our doctor sees is objectively horrendous, not simply a byproduct of an active imagination and a few too many late night readings; in fact, Willett absconds from the house with the firm conviction that he may never sleep well again.   

What remains valuable in reading something like Charles Dexter Ward (not that there is much like it) is the holistic notion of terror that can grip any mind, non-believing or staunchly devout, broad enough to allow its horizon to expand to the width of our ignorance. Any stab at that ignorance, any advance in the ways of realm and reason, must be attributed to otherworldly sources, even if this has evolved in contemporary literature into a variant of deus ex machina, an extraterrestrial. Lovecraft enjoyed the world in its crevices and secrets and did not care much for justifying his nightmares; he dreamt up savage lands and weird chants and thought little of their implications. In this way his art is the finest of its kind: visions without egoism, fears without psychobabble, evil without redemption. His worlds cannot be captioned as the neuroses of a single, fretful mind, and not only because they draw upon centuries of lore. His truth is a hellish abyss, and one of luxurious malevolence where things that seem foul are undoubtedly foul, fouler than one could have ever feared. Too bad no one told young Ward.       

At the Mountains of Madness

Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.

                                                                                                            Professor William Dyer

It spoils almost nothing to mention that this classic tale of horror has been declaimed by some abler-minded cineastes as the glorious forerunner to this recent film. I have not seen Prometheus, nor do I anticipate doing so; but if its online summaries are remotely accurate, the comparison may not be specious. There would appear to be, however, at least one very important difference: regardless of the science fiction component of both works, for which I care little, the motif of At the Mountains of Madness does not involve knowledge or the discovery of the origins of mankind. Its anthem is a sheer, relentless dread at the demonic roots of our realm, at hundreds of millions of years of ignorance that dwarf those worthless atheist claims of two thousand years of deception. No, only those who admit that the ineluctable modality of the visible cannot be our only reality are not deceived by it. Which brings us to the baleful travelogue of Professor William Dyer.

Dyer introduces himself as a survivor and geologist, "forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow [his] advice." His advice, as we soon shall see, will consist of henceforth avoiding anything to do with the ice continent of Antarctica. His reason? Something which will be fleshed out in agonizing slowness over the course of our narrative, and which can only be suggested here:

The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth – a truth which it would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.

This passage leaps forward a few steps, but it typifies Dyer's attempts to caption the unearthliness he has witnessed (one quickly loses count of how often "nameless," "decadent," "horrible," "terrible," and "monstrous" recur throughout the whole story). Given that our journey is an antarctic expedition, the "recent unexplained horror at the camp" can only mean a blizzard, cannibalism, or an inhuman phenomenon. What does occur there is never really described perhaps because it is never really understood by Dyer and his much younger colleague Danforth. When, very late in our tale, two missing members of the party turn up unexpectedly, we gain more information as to the details of the rest of the party's demise, at which point, of course, it is far too late for salvation.

Why have I omitted such a wealth of detail? What city could be millions of years old if we homines sapientes were merely "primitive archaic mammals" at the time? Danforth and Dyer do "a good deal of indecisive whispering" as they wander about the South Pole in search of – and here is where our doubts accumulate.  That a group of scholars and crewmen intended on "securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent" might seem plausible if oddly ambitious; that such an expedition was sponsored by Miskatonic University, the hub of abnormal behavior in the world of this author, will explain what actually transpires, especially the enthusiasm on the part of a biology professor by the name of Lake. Lake's curiosity ("the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect") is transmitted over radio, in what we know will be a doomed broadcast, to many of his colleagues as his party stumbles upon what can only be termed the greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind. Lake vanishes from the airwaves soon thereafter and, just as predictably, it is his camp and allies who fall victim to the "recent unexplained horror." Dyer and Danforth seek out their fellow explorers with solemn hope; this is, after all, the deadest patch of the globe, and Lake was indeed elbow-deep in – well, we don't really know, but "existing biology would have to be wholly revised." The creature or creatures in question possess attributes that promote a human fear that should not, and thankfully is not, ever fully verbalized, and about biology and its revisions we should now be silent.

Lovecraft has engendered a mass following owing to the slime-and-scare aspects of his fictional creations, but his foremost contribution remains his inimitable and gorgeous style. For perhaps precisely these reasons, At the Mountains of Madness, while clearly a work of genius, is ultimately less satisfying than his pieces on individual characters and their dark pacts. Too many turns of phrase echo prior sentiments; too many of those sentiments entail pseudoscientific reports on subjects well beyond science's scope; and too many times are we told that our author doesn't want to tell us anything at all, but is simply compelled to do so to avert further adventure in the region ("It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them"). Yet our tale has been consistently included among his masterpieces adapted into various media including a much-ballyhooed screen version that, allegedly because of the release of Prometheus, has been scrapped indefinitely. The text is itself an overlapping labyrinth of ineffable shocks and wonders that results in one rather repulsive conclusion regarding those very mountains in the title. The same mountains, mind you, whose height we have been chary of discussing because much like the "specimens" that Lake uncovers, the mountains and their configurations make no sense at all. At least not to homines sapientes.

The Temple

What do we know about war?  If we are fortunate, only the most attenuated of yarns, the most remote of whispers.  We do not wish to learn what powers or prophecies make men murder men, goad an otherwise upstanding people to thirst for the blood of another region's equally respectable denizens, and entomb those replete with a long and hopeful future in the lineaments of permanent youth.  Every historian by dint of his vocation must review the slaughters, the mayhem, the depravity of nations whose bare traces of civilization he likely plans to chronicle.  What remains after war?  Some say once you have lived through a war, you never live again.  Life becomes the endless repetition, both in sleep and waking, of the horrors witnessed and unimaginable wickedness done unto others.  Unto others?  Well, if we have survived, then necessarily unto others, because whatever was done unto us clearly failed in its intent.  Which brings us to a topical work of unforeseen literary endurance.

Our time is a century ago – the last months of the most destructive war Europe had ever seen, if merely a foretaste of an even vaster calamity – and our place is the Yucatán, where a singular item has washed ashore.  A bottled message written by a German U-boat commander who has outlived his entire crew just to be able to communicate a story that has little place in our reality and has nudged the commander's towards a veritable pandemonium.  Any preface to the brutality, however, should come from his own pen:

On the afternoon of June 18, as reported by wireless to the U-61, bound for Kiel, we torpedoed the British freighter Victory, New York to Liverpool, in N. Latitude 45 degrees 16 minutes, W. Longitude 28 degrees 34 minutes, permitting the crew to leave in boats in order to obtain a good cinema view for the admiralty records. The ship sank quite picturesquely, bow first, the stern rising high out of the water whilst the hull shot down perpendicularly to the bottom of the sea.  Our camera missed nothing, and I regret that so fine a reel of film should never reach Berlin.  After that we sank the lifeboats with our guns and submerged. 

The ruthlessness of such an act is worsted by the appearance of a seaman's corpse, "young, rather dark, and very handsome; probably an Italian or Greek, and undoubtedly of the Victory's crew," atop the resurfacing submarine.  Why would someone blown off a boat seek refuge on the vessel responsible for his doom?  An answer to that question may lie in the "very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth's head crowned with laurel" found on the body.  The trinket is seized by the commander's deputy, a certain Lieutenant Klenze, who deems it "of great age and artistic value," although he does not wonder long at how such an object might have come into the possession of an impecunious mariner.    

What happens next should not be revealed on these pages, because the narrative rarely yields asides to contemplate the beautiful and the elevated (our commander is not a sentimental man).  The mischief begins with the very seaman whose charm so attracted the expert eyes of Lieutenant Klenze.  According to Müller (whom the commander, a Prussian, swiftly dismisses as a "superstitious Alsatian swine"), that same beautiful lad so callously murdered by the cowardly superiority of a German submarine did not plummet to Davy Jones's locker when thrown overboard, but "drew its limbs into a swimming position and sped away to the south."  Our commander can barely tolerate normal, hard-working soldiers, so we know Müller's time on our earth is short.  Again we must defer to the narrator:

What worried us more was the talk of Boatswain Müller, which grew wilder as night came on.  He was in a detestably childish state, and babbled of some illusion of dead bodies drifting past the undersea portholes; bodies which looked at him intensely, and which he recognized in spite of bloating as having seen dying during some of our victorious German exploits.  And he said that the young man we had found and tossed overboard was their leader. This was very gruesome and abnormal, so we confined Müller in irons and had him soundly whipped.  The men were not pleased at his punishment, but discipline was necessary.  We also denied the request of a delegation headed by Seaman Zimmer, that the curious carved ivory head be cast into the sea.

Those who admire modern horror films will find in The Temple a blueprint for such entertainment that, when the story was composed in 1920 and published five years later, could not possibly be more prescient.  That the tale turned out to be its author's first professional publication may seem even more ironic considering Lovecraft's subsequent transformation of the field of supernatural and science fiction.  As he plots his own demise, and abets others in theirs, suspicions linger and swirl around the commander's wilful mind, suspicions that are not as easily dismissed as a superstitious Alsatian.  He ponders the strangeness of his predicament as, in very contemporary fashion, his crew members fall prey to a variety of bitter ends, some even emanating from the tip of his pistol.        

A reader not attuned to the sentiments of the period – although written some five years afterwards, one may safely conclude that the anti-German tone reflects Lovecraft's outrage over this infamous torpedoing – may find the whole business offensive, but our commander may still be pitied.  After all, he is a learned man who has stocked his quarters with reference books on oceanic flora and fauna to be browsed during "spare moments."  He categorically refuses to surrender to an American warship even at the behest of one unfortunate seaman, "who urged this un-German act with especial violence."  His own U-boat, that terrible shark of war, is incapacitated and herded further and further south by, he notes (he has studied those fauna texts all too well), a school of dolphins to depths these cetacea could not possibly probe.  And what then of our story's title?  We may be reminded of a term for something so vile that it must remain before the temple gates, never to enter.  And we may also think of our commander, for all his faults, as the lesser of two evils.