The Dunwich Horror

What is the Dunwich Horror?  It surfaces late in the eponymous tale, and whether it meets the reader's expectations cannot be determined until one determines the reader.  There are many people who worship Lovecraft for his style; indefinitely more who just like him because, well, he writes about gooey stuff; still others who may be seeking what his characters invariably seek, which cannot under any circumstances be recommended.  Indeed, Lovecraft's style sets him distantly apart from other purveyors of the fantastic, with the possible exception of James, although James's cobwebbed ghouls could not be any more distinct from Lovecraft's extragalactic behemoths.  Which brings us to a wretched little town in Northern Massachusetts by the name of Dunwich.

Dunwich, now and then (to wit, at the time of "the Horror," the Fall of 1928), cannot pride itself on its hospitality.  It is rather the type of place you approach in slow dread, sensing somehow that evil's winds caress more than chimes and porch lights.  An early description confirms the narrator's fears:

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows .... Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror, all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down.  The scenery, judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists.  Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality.

The kinship with these trials is hardly coincidence, and Dunwich's actual proximity to Salem suggests that inexplicable phenomena were a daily occurrence in this troubled region.  One of these phenomena will be the birth of Wilbur Whateley on Feb 2, 1913, a "date recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name," and what name this may be needs no mention here.  Young Wilbur – he will remain ever young despite the astounding growth he will evince – develops both height and speech of near-inhuman dimensions, as guided by his maternal grandfather (as it were, his paternal ancestry is more than hinted at from the very beginning of the tale: "he was ... extremely ugly ... there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears").  As we learn more about Wilbur, about the nightly shrieks that rattle a clapboarded attic, about his vanished, hysterical mother, about the nature of the types of books he wishes to borrow from some of the world's finest libraries, we understand as much as can be understood from the situation.  Namely, that a smart person should walk quickly away, and if to speculate, then very far away as well. 

Alas, we cannot help but read on.  At length an old professor called Henry Armitage, a scholar at this fictional university, rejects Wilbur's in-person request for a Latin copy of the Necronomicon, a wicked tome Hellenists can tell you bodes poorly for all of us.  Wilbur, at this point, a "bent, goatish giant .... [and] probable matricide .... almost eight feet tall," retreats to his hellish estate with little argument.  His next appearance, in the same library, will be somewhat more dramatic, as Armitage and two other university professors can attest:

It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very man-like hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it.  But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.  Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest ... had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator.  The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes.  Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began.  The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.  Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system.  On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat.  The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws.  When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry .... Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it.

What is described in the above passage is very much Wilbur Whateley in the earthly form he bore for the duration of his life in Dunwich; it is his genetic admixture that we cannot ascertain.  Armitage does not really want to know, either, but takes it upon himself to decipher an ancient text and,with the horrible knowledge therefrom obtained, avert a catastrophe. 

The curious will already have used another intergalactic tool, Google, and acquired a notion if not a rendering of the beast, and so be it.  The Dunwich Horror, while suffering through far too many paragraphs in what Lovecraft concocted as a northern Massachusetts dialect, represents his genius at its peak, even if the plot has much of the straight path of destiny.  These types of stories engage the fancifulness of the curious, because it is only through re-imagination, through the reasoned categorization of images and meanings in the conscious and well-tuned brain that permits that same brain to become saturated with fear.  Such is Lovecraft's gift: even when his characters could not possibly be of benevolent origin, real suspense nevertheless builds as to the degree of their evil.  Some agenda-toting critics have alleged that for all his sublime sense of the eerie and the otherworldly, Lovecraft himself could not believe in anything greater than the coarse desert sands of the mirage-plagued materialist.   While we may accept his own doubts (these same critics declaim all Lovecraft's quotes that even imply a hesitation in this regard) as to his faith in something akin to a monotheistic deity, to insist that Lovecraft believed in nothing greater than the ambition of his five senses would be blasphemy itself.   No writer has ever portrayed the demonic undercurrent of horror with as much verve and composure.  And no one could imbue his reader with as much apprehension of what "kind of force ... doesn't belong in our part of space," and instead exists "not in the spaces we know, but between them."  And even if you turn to Lovecraft for the gooey stuff, I think you know exactly what I mean. 

Under the Pyramids

When I first encountered the name of this author in the context of this film, I quite logically assumed it to be a pseudonym; I would marvel at one of literature's finest aptronyms only much later.  And while Re-animator horrified me as a child, I did not approach Lovecraft for many years for the simple reason that he was always recommended to me by the oddest among my classmates.  His creations appeared to inhabit the same escapist realm as the machinations of endless role-playing games and works of high fantasy, epitomized by the writings of this famous author.  Now I never played Dungeons and Dragons and other such time-gobblers, nor could I really read much Tolkien without drifting off in inattention.  But Lovecraft has gained in appeal, as in the terrible weirdness of this story. 

Our narrator is alleged to be none other than this renowned illusionist, which will explain presently the odd course of events.  Seeking a respite from his fame, Houdini and his wife travel to Egypt before the discovery of this tomb, with the mystery surrounding its ancient secrets at its hoopla's height.  Equally secret and equally publicized was Houdini's identity, which he takes pains to conceal until at length a mediocre magician evokes the perfectionist in the master and prods him to reveal his skills.  This proves to be a fateful error of pride.  Houdini finds a tour guide in "a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced, and relatively cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh, called himself 'Adbul Reis el Drogman,' [and] appeared to have much power over others of his kind."  Abdul Reis takes the foreigners on a broad tour of Egypt's sacred sites, and the descriptions regale themselves on lush details apparently only gleaned from academic and travel books – a most incredible feat of literary imagination.  He glimpses the Libyan desert, thinks himself again in "the extinct capital Memphis," and contemplates what had been erased from the countenance of the most famous of all monoliths and replaced four thousand five hundred years ago by King Khephren.  And it is in this last monument that Houdini senses an implacable power:

Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those terrible unseeing eyes.  On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince.  It was then that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at – depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon.  Then, too, it was I who asked myself an idle question whose hideous significance was not to appear for many an hour.

Combine these observations with Houdini's anxiety regarding what a German team of archaeologists might be hiding from public consumption, "a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons," and you have what is plainly known as a conundrum, and what others may view as a conspiracy.  A conspiracy of what, precisely?  Conspiracy is hardly the right term; rather, it is the perception which has crossed far greater minds than Houdini's that the original civilizations may have worshipped things not altogether benevolent to the affairs of man.  These thoughts are safely stowed away by nightfall as the Houdinis retreat to their hotel.  At which point, of course, the illusionist begins another adventure.

A militant anti-spiritualist and among the least susceptible to the wiles of mediums and necromancers, Houdini the historical figure might never have been affected by the arcana of Ancient Egypt in the way his ghostwritten counterpart suffers and muses.  So when Lovecraft's Houdini decides to reenter the night in the company of the unscrupulous Abdul Reis – Arabic for "slave of the leader" – the latter gets into a scuffle whose only resolution turns out to be a fistfight on the raised mesa of the Great Pyramid.  From there we proceed to an inevitability that someone like Houdini would surely have foreseen, and what happens could be deemed a nightmare, although it is depicted in colors and sounds unlike what we might encounter in the peaceful darkness of sleep:

From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before.  That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum.  In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling, and beating, I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth – a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies.  The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching.  Then – and may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the likes from my ears again – I began to hear, faintly and far off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.

Passages like these challenge the claims – buttressed by statements from Lovecraft himself, a notorious obfuscator – that our author did not believe in anything beyond himself, but let us not digress.  The fictional Houdini by dint of his reputation suddenly endures a test that the historical Houdini might not have survived, and we gain an impression of an ending that will not satisfy the reader (I must admit I guessed that we would wake up on a stage in one of Houdini's European parlors).  Lovecraft's prose is worthy of Houdini's legerdemain, and we would do well to accept that some tricks are not available for mass explanation.  Nor should we forget just how far the Sphinx's feet extend.