Doctor Dugald Eldritch
Mystic
To express my love for Lovecraft, I have compiled a selection of my favourite Lovecraft tales. It is quite short yet these tales hold for me an unholy fascination that no other story has.
1- The Festival. For some reason beyond me, this remains my personal favourite story that Lovecraft ever penned. For me, it is the quintessential Lovecraftian tale. A lonesome and outsider protagonist returns to his ancient and world-shunned ancestral town where he is unwillingly lured into fantastic and daemonic rites practiced by his witch-condemned ancestors. I shall never forget the grotesque imagery of the unnamed narrator's return to the snow-drowned and bleak mountain that overlooks Kingsport and the graveyard with the gravestones that 'stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.'
2- The Hound. Another great tale of the macabre that shews Lovecraft's morbid imagination at its most powerful and expressive. It also borrows from another great idol of mine; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The deviant and abhorrent acts that St John and the narrator commit are epick and almost make me want to collect ancient corpses and store them in a nameless subterranean museum whence connoisseurs of the frightful and horrible may observe at their leisure. The settings, in particular the decrepit and fear-haunted Dutch churchyard where the doomed grave-robbers steal that accursed amulet from a certain skeleton, are wonderfully and vividly evoked. As an experiment in pure deathly atmosphere over coherent plot, The Hound towers from the earth like an re-animated corpse and refuses to return to the grave.
3- Nyarlathotep. A demented and delirious fable of the End as the fabled and antique Pharaoh Nyarlathotep returns from 'the blackness of twenty-seven centuries' and shews strange and frightful cosmic wonders to an enticed mankind. The terrifying visions experienced by the narrator, predating the Surrealists by a few years, are amongst the most potent and imaginative that I have encountered in horror-fiction. It is often said that horror works better if presented in a calm, subtle, scholarly and matter-of-fact tone, that may work for traditional ghost stories of the Jamesian school yet, in my honest opinion, visionary horror works best if everything is shown. 'Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods- the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.'
4- The Shunned House. Lovecraft was not one to be constrained by conventions, hence he created this creative and shocking tale of the loathsome vampiric evil that lurks underneath one 135 Benefit Street of Providence. The descriptions of the hellish entity, and the hideous fate that befell the narrator's unfortunate uncle, are gloriously ghastly. I even wrote a short tale at school once inspired by The Shunned House.
1- The Festival. For some reason beyond me, this remains my personal favourite story that Lovecraft ever penned. For me, it is the quintessential Lovecraftian tale. A lonesome and outsider protagonist returns to his ancient and world-shunned ancestral town where he is unwillingly lured into fantastic and daemonic rites practiced by his witch-condemned ancestors. I shall never forget the grotesque imagery of the unnamed narrator's return to the snow-drowned and bleak mountain that overlooks Kingsport and the graveyard with the gravestones that 'stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.'
2- The Hound. Another great tale of the macabre that shews Lovecraft's morbid imagination at its most powerful and expressive. It also borrows from another great idol of mine; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The deviant and abhorrent acts that St John and the narrator commit are epick and almost make me want to collect ancient corpses and store them in a nameless subterranean museum whence connoisseurs of the frightful and horrible may observe at their leisure. The settings, in particular the decrepit and fear-haunted Dutch churchyard where the doomed grave-robbers steal that accursed amulet from a certain skeleton, are wonderfully and vividly evoked. As an experiment in pure deathly atmosphere over coherent plot, The Hound towers from the earth like an re-animated corpse and refuses to return to the grave.
3- Nyarlathotep. A demented and delirious fable of the End as the fabled and antique Pharaoh Nyarlathotep returns from 'the blackness of twenty-seven centuries' and shews strange and frightful cosmic wonders to an enticed mankind. The terrifying visions experienced by the narrator, predating the Surrealists by a few years, are amongst the most potent and imaginative that I have encountered in horror-fiction. It is often said that horror works better if presented in a calm, subtle, scholarly and matter-of-fact tone, that may work for traditional ghost stories of the Jamesian school yet, in my honest opinion, visionary horror works best if everything is shown. 'Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods- the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.'
4- The Shunned House. Lovecraft was not one to be constrained by conventions, hence he created this creative and shocking tale of the loathsome vampiric evil that lurks underneath one 135 Benefit Street of Providence. The descriptions of the hellish entity, and the hideous fate that befell the narrator's unfortunate uncle, are gloriously ghastly. I even wrote a short tale at school once inspired by The Shunned House.
