Adventure classics – It ain’t easy being a Lovecraft rat

“The Rats in the Walls”

by H.P. Lovecraft

***

Was it the loss of his son from injuries suffered in the Great War that began the mental deterioration of the protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic “The Rats in the Walls”? Or was he doomed by a hereditary curse emanating from his ancestral manor? “A few of the tales surrounding it were exceedingly picturesque,” says the narrator, known only by his family name of Delapore, “(including) the dramatic epic of the rats – the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst from the castle. . . the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent.”

Following his son’s death, Delapore returns in 1923 to his ancestral holding from America, where his 17^th century ancestor took refuge after killing his father and five siblings. It was a bizarre multiple murder for which, strangely, he was never prosecuted. With nothing else to live for after his son’s death, the modern de la Poer determines to use the fortune he amassed from his business dealings to restore the family mansion, whose foundations are built on pre-Roman ruins. He has barely settled in the restored castle with his menagerie of pet cats, however, when his favorite black cat begins acting very strangely.

Lovecraft’s horror stories (or as he described them, “weird” stories) don’t always lend themselves to humor, but an item in Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth’s commentary on “Rats” earlier this year at Tor  gave me a giggle at poor Lovecraft’s expense.

He gave Delapore’s favorite cat the name of one of his own pets, a cat, as Emrys and Pillsworth put it, “whose unfortunate name starts with N (hereafter referred to as Cat With an Unfortunate Name or CWUN for short)”. The unfortunate name is a racial epithet not necessarily considered offensive in the early 20^th century – unless you were the one it was applied to.

When Delapore tries to settle down in his newly rebuilt castle on land uninhabited by rodents for centuries, only he and CWUN (and, admittedly, the rest of his feline friends) can hear the army of rats who infest the walls. It’s a talent which may well lead readers to wonder if the rats exist outside of Delapore’s increasingly tenuous hold on reality.

The rats are inaudible to the other human beings in this story published in 1924. Are they real? Or only the product of Delapore's deteriorating mental state? What ever the reason, a group of experts (including an archaeologist and a psychical investigator) that he assembles are willing to let him lead them on the trail of the rats, deep under the foundations of the ancestral castle, through the relics of a ghastly cult in which the earlier members of the Delapore family had participated, a cult rooted in thousands of years of blood.

Lovecraft’s willingness to reveal his narrator’s (and maybe his own) inner life through a tour of a haunted castle is eerily similar to that of dream by Carl Jung cited in editor S. T. Joshi’s The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. “I dreamed that I was in ‘my home,’ apparently on the first floor. . . I was astonished that I had never seen this room before, and . . . wanted to see more of the structure of the whole house. . . . ”. And so Jung descends to the depths of his dream house, much as Lovecraft’s protagonist did. Except that Delapore’s Lovecraftian descent, which will send him to the madhouse, is more horrific than anything Jung was willing to admit to.

And about those rats: Pillsworth finds them “kind of sympathetic,” more opportunistic than malevolent, which admitting that “they make for cool, slithering, scamper ghosts, too.”

S. T. Joshi’s The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft with its many references is available on Amazon. Or give yourself a good chill in preparation for Halloween and check out Emrys and Pillsworth’s post, which includes a link to the complete tale of “The Rats in the Walls.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes an October of Halloween horror with Patricia Highsmith’s “Engine Horse.”)

Adventure classics – Girls having (bloody) good fun

“Carmilla”

by Sheridan LeFanu

***

Can we blame the notorious repression of the Victorian age for giving vampires their aura of forbidden sensuality? By now, the association of vampires with violent sexuality is an expected trope of the horror genre, given a kick start thanks to the propensity of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula to prey on nubile young women. But surely, I thought, before researching classic horror stories for this month’s post, it took Anne Rice to bring gay vamps out of the closet. Then I met “Carmilla,” Irishman Sheridan LeFanu’s 1871 Victorian lesbian vampire.

To an extent unusual for his time, “LeFanu was concerned with penetrating the hidden recesses of the psyches of his characters and mapping out the strange areas where the sense of reality can manifest itself to cover equally what is perceived and not-perceived,” editor E.F. Bleiler writes in his introduction to Best Ghost Stories of J.S. LeFanu. “As a result, there is nothing in (Victorian) contemporary literature. . . comparable to the perverse eroticism of ‘Carmilla’". (Despite the volume’s title, its stories of the supernatural are not always about ghosts, leaving room for the vampire, Carmilla.)

The story begins with a framing device similar to that Emily Bronte had used earlier for her own story of obsessive love, Wuthering Heights. A narrator (nameless in the case of “Carmilla”) claims to have heard the story from a source which quotes the original narrator, Laura,daughter of an Englishman who served in the Austrian military and used a small inheritance to settle into a feudal castle.

“Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary,” Laura relates in her manuscript. “The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat. . . sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets of water-lilies.”

It’s a lovely place, but so lonely that Laura, the only child of her widowed father, longs for companions her own age. She looks forward to an anticipated visit from the daughter of one of her father’s fellow officers, only to learn that the daughter has died suddenly, the victim, as the old general writes, of “a fiend who betrayed our . . . hospitality.”

While the general is pursuing those he believes responsible for his child’s death, a carriage dashes down the narrow road and wrecks in front of Laura’s castle. Laura and her father rush to the aid of the passengers, an apparent noblewoman and her injured daughter. The older woman declares that she is on an errand of life and death, and pleads with the rescuers to take her daughter into their care until she is able to return for her. Moved, perhaps by his daughter’s wish for companionship, the father offers his hospitality for the injured girl, Carmilla.

She and Laura are soon fast friends. But as Carmilla recovers physically, Laura falls victim to a debilitating illness. Its first symptom is a “sensation like two needles piercing the skin” as she sleeps, followed by horrible dreams. Soon the old general arrives, reporting that his daughter suffered from similar symptoms before her death, and that he has followed the trail of the killer to Laura’s door. With his arrival, Carmilla disappears and Laura faces the possibility that her dearest friend is far from innocent.

But is Carmilla solely to blame for Laura’s illness? Does she even have an independent existence, or is she, as Bleiler says of many of LeFanu’s characters, one of the “potentially evil mental fragments (that may assume) semi-independent existence," brought to life in a lonely young woman's imagination? Read the whole story, and decide for yourself. Although not available on Google Books, “Carmilla” is widely available from Amazon and other sources. If your local library doesn’t have it, talk to a librarian about an interlibrary loan.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics deviates from its previously announced schedule to look at another tale of the supernatural, “The Phantom Coach,” by LeFanu’s contemporary, Amelia Edwards.)

Adventure classics -- A pit and a pendulum and rats, oh, my!

“The Pit and the Pendulum”

by Edgar Allan Poe

***

I wrote Monday about what Texas authors consider the essential works of horror writing. Nobody mentioned Poe. I could understand excluding Robert Louis Stevenson, although his "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is undoubtedly a horror classic. Or excluding Oscar Wilde, although his Picture of Dorian Gray is also a classic. After all, neither Stevenson nor Wilde specialized in horror.

But what about Poe? Sure, he invested modern detective fiction, dabbled in what would now be termed science fiction, and prided himself on his poetry. But can anyone dispute that in the realm of psychological horror, he’s the original master?

Published originally in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1843, “The Pit and the Pendulum” seems at first glance to be an odd choice for a Christmas present. A prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition is subjected to a mock trial, apparently after torture, then whisked away to the Inquisition’s deepest dungeon for an over the top execution by inches.

The execution relies on bizarre devices of the kind beloved by modern thriller writers. In practical terms, , although the cost of building a prison cell designed to force a prisoner to fall or jump to his death in the cell’s central pit doesn’t make sense from an accounting standpoint. It can’t even count as a deterrent, since nobody is supposed to know the final end of prisoners in this situation. And what’s with that crazy pendulum? What government with the faintest sense of fiscal responsibility would fund such things?

Seriously, and fortunately for readers for the past hundred and seventy years, accountants couldn’t put a price on Poe’s ingenuity.

Being Poe, he also threw in enough (slightly-skewed) history and elegant vocabulary to make his story suitable for elegantly bound books. And although he couldn’t have known, his works have spawned dozens of films. (The 1961 film based on “The Pit and the Pendulum” relies only loosely on Poe’s story, which at approximately 6,000 words had to be expanded to fit the needs of a ninety-minute movie. The 1961 screenplay was by a noted horror writer of the twentieth century, Richard Matheson.)

The original story opens as the judges of the Inquisition pronounce sentence on the unnamed prisoner/narrator. Although the Inquisition was on the wane by the time of the early nineteenth century setting for Poe’s story, it was and is still a handy byword for terror.

“I was sick¾ sick unto death with that long agony,” the story opens, “and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.” Still only semi-conscious¾ and possibly hallucinating¾ the prisoner is carried from the courtroom to a lightless dungeon. While exploring his unseen, unseeable cell, he stumbles and falls. Reviving, he says, “I put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pit.”

Foiled in their first attempt, the prisoner’s jailers provide him with drugged food and water, tie him up and turn the lights on, the better for him to see an enormous razor-edged pendulum descending on him from the ceiling. And to see the rats, the large, ravenous rats, shown in the accompanying 1909 illustration by artist Byam Shaw for another lushly bound setting of Poe’s stories.

Give yourself a treat this Halloween or any time, and read the story. Or reread it. Or get a free listen at www.online-literature.com/poe/40/. Just don’t turn the lights down too low.

(Next Wednesday Adventure classics continues an October of Halloween horror with Richard Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” And tune in later this month for works from those by-passed horror authors Stevenson and Wilde, as well as modern-day mistress of the macabre Anne Rice.)

Wordcraft -- The essential reading list for horror

It’s the last days of September and my grandsons already have their Halloween costumes. Actually, the boys begged me to take them to Party City a month ago to look at costumes, only one of them asked me to cover his eyes until we got past the creepy stuff. So there I was, leading a little boy through a store devoted to festivities. He longs to be among terrors. He just can’t bear to look at them.

What is it about Halloween that makes it one of the most popular holidays in the United States, and probably one of the most lucrative? It's a holiday that celebrates¾ or at least commemorates¾ the return of the spirits of the dead among the living. And along with ghosts, we’ve added goblins and all manner of bizarre supernatural creatures, as if the daylight world doesn’t contain enough horrors. What’s the fascination? What is it that makes horror stories, horror movies, horror TV series so popular? Why do we just plain love being scared out of our wits?

With this in mind, and because I blog on horror stories for the coming month, I marked a panel discussion of “required horror reading” as a must-hear at this year’s ArmadilloCon science fiction and fantasy convention in Austin, Texas.

“The appeal of horror is the appeal of the uncertainty of what lies over the hill,” panelist/horror writer Rhiannon Frater said. “Horror taps into that fear of loss, the human condition.”

And it’s because of this primal nature, screenwriter C. Robert Cargill said, that “horror ages better than any other genre.”

So here, as Virgil offered Dante, as I offered to a small boy in a costume shop, are suggestions for trustworthy guides through the hell of our human condition.

“The genesis of all modern horror is (H.P.) Lovecraft,” Cargill said, “the Cthulhu mythos as well as his stand-alone monster stories, with their great, dark detail.”

Panelists’ Lovecraftian favorites included: “Rats in the Walls” and “The Color out of Space.” And they didn’t forget one of the writers who inspired Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood and his “Wendigo,” among the favorites of panelist Aaron de Orive.

“My mother was an English teacher, so I didn’t read any modern horror until I was almost in my late teens,” Frater said, citing Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as early favorites.

Among more modern writers, the late Richard Matheson drew applause from science fiction writer and columnist Robert Johnson for his numerous Twilight Zone-adapted stories and seminal vampire story, “I Am Legend” which “set the scene for the whole zombie apocalypse,” de Orvive said.

Other much praised twentieth century horror writing included Ray Bradbury’s October Country, and the works of Clive Barker, Stephen King and his son, Joe Hill, Phillip K. Dick, Anne Rice, and Tanith Lee. And panelists couldn’t leave out favorite titles Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.

But wait a minute, panelist Frater said. If horror pervades the culture, why, she asked, do “a lot of bookstores shelves no longer shelve books as horror? In movies and TV, horror is alive and well (but) in books, you almost have to recategorize them.”

In fact, panelists believed horror has become a victim of its own popularity. Audiences crave it the way we crave fatty and sugary snacks. We just don’t feel right calling them by their rightful names, whether it’s “heart attack with a side of fried grease” or “horror.“

So if a horror devotee searching in vain for the shelf labeled “horror”, where’s she supposed to look for a good read? Try the thriller section, Cargill suggested. After all, “we don’t give an Oscar to a horror movie. We give it to a ‘psychological thriller’.”

But if she’s searching the snack aisle at the grocery store, I’m out of advice.

Adventure classics -- A woman dying to get out of the house

“The Fall of the House of Usher”

by Edgar Allan Poe

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Sometimes I wonder what Edgar Allan Poe’s life would have been like if so many doomed and abused women hadn’t crossed it. From his mother, Elizabeth, dead of tuberculosis after her husband abandoned her with three small children. To his foster mother, Frances Allan, whose husband became completely estranged from Poe after her death. To childhood sweetheart Elmira Royster, succumbing to parental pressure to marry another suitor. And finally and most famously, to the child bride and cousin, Virginia Clemm, whose illness and early death poured grief-stricken fuel on Poe’s alcoholism.

Over Poe’s life, these women would give spiritual birth to a succession of literary heroines suffering at the hands of husbands and family members whose abuse ranges from hatred to physical, possibly even sexual abuse. Invariably, the cause of the women’s death is listed as some vague, nameless disease. Invariably they die while still young and beautiful -- that is, while still able to excite desire and jealousy.

And sometimes they strike back. As in Poe’s 1839 story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” whose Lady Madeline, barely glimpsed in life, literally brings the house down on the brother who buried her prematurely.

The story opens with the arrival of the unnamed narrator, on a “dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year,” at the family home of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, and of Usher’s twin sister, Madeline. Although the narrator has not been in contact with the Ushers for years, he has responded to a letter imploring his company to combat Roderick’s progressive mental and physical illnesses. Or is the narrator responding more for the sake of Madeline than of Roderick?

It’s tempting to consider what Poe left out, wondering why Madeline managed to raise herself from what was becoming her death bed to catch merely a glimpse of the narrator. Or why even a brother as self-absorbed as Roderick could allow days to elapse without visiting his dying sister. Or exactly what the nature of Roderick’s “inexpressible agitation” was when his sister collapsed at the news that the narrator would arrive the next day.

Madeline is known have suffered from cataleptic seizures that induced almost death-like states. Following her supposed death, the narrator agrees to help her brother entomb her body in a dungeon-like crypt beneath the house. This precaution, Roderick hints to the narrator, is to protect the body from grave robbers. But considering the nature of Madeline’s illness, it seems likely he fears she may simply be in a trance, one he is determined for her not to wake from.

But wake she does, and escape -- unscrewing the lid from her coffin, bursting from the locked vault of the crypt, and finding her way to her brother’s room, “the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.” Her advent brings about his death. Is it from terror or did Madeline find some other way to choke out her murder’s life?

As both brother and sister die, a once barely-discernable fissure in the house’s structure rapidly widens, tearing the house apart. The fleeing narrator sees “the
mighty walls rushing asunder -- there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters -- and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’”

So what is it with all this violence against women, supposed grief turned to fear of a vengeful woman? From the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, it’s tempting to see such stories as inside out expressions of Victorian repression -- of the possibly incestuous jealousy of Roderick for Madeline, the insane desire to demonstrate his possessiveness of his sister to an outsider, the female sexuality symbolized by the many blood-spattered motifs. It’s also tempting to see Madeline’s quirky ability to move objects as an early version of telekinesis that would propel Stephen King’s Carrie to fame more than a century later.

Read or listen to it yourself and decide, or just get lost in Poe’s gorgeous language.  Long out of copyright, you can get free printe and audio downloads at
www.online-literature.com/poe/31/.

(Next Wednesday, speaking of wronged, vengeful women, Adventure classics looks at Stephen King’s Carrie.)

Adventure classics -- A phantom's perfect haunt

The Phantom of the Opera

by Gaston Leroux

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It’s hard to imagine a story more shaped by its setting than Gaston Leroux’s belle époque thriller, The Phantom of the Opera. As George Perry relates in The Complete Phantom of the Opera, the 1860 neo-Baroque design wasn’t a unanimous choice. But when Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, insisted petulantly that she didn’t understand what style it was supposed to be, architect Charles Garnier assured her, “The Napoleon III style, ma’am.”

How could an empress resist?

The building was big, gaudy, and a technological marvel of its day, with an underground lake to operate hydraulic stage machinery, a grand staircase requiring a new-fangled steel structural framework, and a seven-ton chandelier which, yes, once caused a terrifying accident. How could an author fail to write a fascinating story when he had such a setting?

Strangely, Phantom failed to knock Parisians out of their silk stockings on its first outing. Leroux was a journalist turned novelist better known in the early twentieth century for the daring, if sometimes unethical lengths to which he was willing to go for a story, Perry writes. He gained further, if minor, fame as a writer of locked room mysteries, turning out potboilers to support his gambling habit.

But when the president of Universal Pictures vacationed in Europe in 1922, reading the story and determining that legendary silent film actor Lon Chaney must play the lead, Phantom took on new life. And over the next century, its story proved it had legs as long as those of its ballet corps.

Leroux’s journalistic instincts had led him to use a faux-documentary style for the writing of Phantom. As part of this documentation, he provided a detailed account of the phantom’s history, claiming him to be a “monster” from birth who traveled extensively with circus sideshows, acquiring the eclectic fund of knowledge and experience that enabled him to live hidden within the opera building before becoming the mentor and suitor of singer Christine Daae.

Publicists for Universal Pictures urged theater managers to stock smelling salts for “nervous ladies who were likely to faint” when the horror of Chaney’s face -- with makeup of his own design -- was finally revealed. Further adaptations made the phantom’s deformities, rather than being part of his nature, the result of horrific accidents, from acid attacks to, in 1974’s campy Phantom of the Paradise, being caught in a vinyl record press. (For a list of the various descriptions, see  http://operaghost.scriptmania.com/face.html/.)

Mercifully, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and its further spin-offs chose not to explain the phantom’s appearance. After all, the romance at the heart of Leroux’s novel, of the beast who loves a beauty, is one that needs no explanation.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics looks at another example of Halloween horror and romance with an unforgettable setting, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.)