The Whisperer in Darkness
COLLECTED STORIES, VOLUME ONE
THE WHISPERER
IN DARKNESS
AND OTHER STORIES
H. P. Lovecraft
Selected and introduced
by M. J. Elliott
The Whisperer in Darkness first published by
Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2007
Published as an ePublication 2011
ISBN 978 1 84870 398 8
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INTRODUCTION
Lovecraftian. The word does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, but there can be few readers who are unaware of its meaning. ‘Lovecraftian’ implies a very specific type of supernatural tale – of ancient horrors imagined in the darkest regions of one’s subconscious, or glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his famed Cthulhu Mythos occupy a very special and rather un-settling place in our hearts and minds – it is reported that when veteran B-movie actor George Zucco was admitted to an asylum in 1960, he claimed that the Great God Cthulhu was stalking him.
The life and career of Lovecraft, who died in 1937 at the age of 46, is filled with contradictions. Undeniably a prodigy possessed of a photographic memory and coddled beyond belief not only during his formative years but well into adulthood, he did not attend university or even, for reasons of ill-health, graduate from high school. His name is known around the world, but he rarely ventured outside his beloved Providence and never left America. Despite his reputation as one of the foremost horror writers of the twentieth century, his works were never collected in print during his lifetime, and he never overcame financial hardship.
This collection focuses upon the early stories in the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft’s famous cycle of tales concerning the Old Ones, a race of beings from the depths of space; they once ruled our world and may do so again. The term ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ was coined not by Lovecraft but by his friend August Derleth. It might be argued that Cthulhu is not even one of the Old Ones and is therefore undeserving of this star-billing; The Dunwich Horror (1928) states that Cthulhu is a cousin of the Old Ones: ‘yet can he spy Them only dimly’. However, Lovecraft referred to his connected fiction as either ‘Yog-Sothothery’ or ‘Cthulhuism’, so the use of the name is not entirely unwarranted.
Equally, it is hard to identify where, precisely, the Mythos begins, since one cannot be certain when Lovecraft devised the sequence. L. Sprague de Camp identifies The Nameless City (1921) as the first story, while others opt for Dagon, written four years earlier. Not unreasonably, Robert M. Price favours the 1926 tale The Call of Cthulhu. After all, how can you have a Cthulhu Mythos without a Cthulhu? To complicate matters further, H.P.L. brought several of his earlier works within the cycle’s continuity. For instance, the race known as the Deep Ones are tied to the Mythos through the 1931 story, The Shadow over Innsmouth, but the Deep Ones make their first appearance in Dagon. Furthermore, the death of Dagon’s narrator is mentioned in The Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft had a horror of all seafood, and it is interesting to note how many of his monsters are aquatic in origin.
H.P.L.’s works, published in several amateur publications prior to 1923, came to the attention of J. C. Henneburger, publisher of Weird Tales, a pulp magazine edited at the time by Edwin F. Baird. Baird contacted Lovecraft, and the writer’s friends encouraged him to submit material to the publication, but H.P.L. was unenthusiastic, considering the life of a freelance author at odds with his status as self-proclaimed gentleman. Nevertheless, he sent several stories to Baird with a covering letter, all but begging him not to purchase them. Baird must have had a keen sense of humour, for he published the letter in the magazine along with an announcement that Dagon would follow in the next issue. Thus the fame of both H. P. Lovecraft and Weird Tales Magazine became inextricably intertwined.
Lovecraft often experienced extraordinarily vivid dreams, which he was occasionally able to use in his writing. So it was with The Nameless City, the first of his works to make mention of Abdul Alhazred, later an important figure in the Mythos as the author of the fabled Necronomicon, although he is not identified as such here. Who was Alhazred? None other than Lovecraft himself. At the age of five, he enjoyed playing at being an Arab, and a relative suggested the name to him.
Alhazred’s chilling couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die,
is repeated in The Call of Cthulhu.
The Nameless City’s equally nameless narrator refers in passing to a Lovecraft story written two years earlier, The Doom That Came to Sarnath, and this particular story is in turn mentioned in At the Mountains of Madness (1931). One of H.P.L.’s earliest writing influences, Lord Dunsany, is referenced here, as well as in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
As a youth, Lovecraft was a great fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In fact, he refers to the famous mystery writer in The Unnamable (1922). The inspiration for Lovecraft’s story The Hound, written that same year, is fairly obvious, but unlike the beast of the Baskervilles this creature does indeed prove to be of supernatural origin. The Holmes/Lovecraft connections continue: in 1996, a version of the fabled ‘missing’ Holmes adventure The Giant Rat of Sumatra appeared, attributed to Lovecraft, but actually written by Paula Volsky, and in 2003 a collection of stories bringing Holmes face to face with the Old Ones was published as Shadows Over Baker Street.
The Hound is noteworthy as the first of Lovecraft’s works to feature the fabled Necronomicon, an ancient and forbidden text written by The Nameless City’s Abdul Alhazred. The Necronomicon crops up in many, many later Mythos stories. Inspired by H.P.L.’s inventiveness, other Weird Tales authors included the cursed volume in their own works, most notably Robert E. Howard in his 1931 story The Children of the Night. The Necronomicon also plays an important part in the famous Evil Dead movie trilogy.
Hound also contains one of Lovecraft’s most jaw-dropping uses of the language: the amulet stolen by the grave-robbing pair bears ‘the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng in Central Asia’. Leng is situated in the Antarctic in At the Mountains of Madness and proves to exist on another plane entirely in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927). The Hound was followed a year later by the minor chiller entitled The Festival, set in the fictional town of Kingsport, which Lovecraft first used in his 1920 story The Terrible Old Man. The events of The Festival are referred to in passing in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Up to this point, H.P.L. had produced five tales of terror with only tenuous connections to one another, and no indications of a greater theme. But everything changed with The Call of Cthulhu, which he outlined during his brief time in New York, but did not begin to write until after his return to Providence. This is the first story to establish The Old Ones, and their presence is felt throughout all the later Mythos chapters.
Mention is made within the story of Clark Ashton Smith, a fellow contributor to Weird Tales, whose talents also ran to poetry, sculpture and art – his paintings are discussed in At the Mountains of Madness. In his letters, Lovecraft addressed his colleague as ‘Klarkash-Ton’, a name he would later bestow upon an Atlantean high priest in The Whisperer in Darkness (1930). The character of the cultist Castro is probably named after Adolphe de Castro, an ‘amiable charlatan’ for whom Lovecraft ghosted several stories. The city of R’lyeh, in which Cthulhu is entombed, is referred to again in The Whisperer in Darkness, and explorers from the Miskatonic University uncover the story of Cthulhu’s arrival on Earth and the sinking of R’lyeh during At the Mountains of Madness (1931).
There was a strange and amusing incident following the publication of The Call of Cthulhu – the literary editor of the Providence Journal noted that Lovecraft had used his address in the story and threatened the author with a dire and monstrous revenge. Lovecraft’s lighthearted poem The Messenger is a response to that threat.
Astonishingly, Weird Tales originally turned down The Call of Cthulhu. This was not a reflection upon the quality of the story, since it was the editor Farnsworth Wright’s habit to reject a work upon its first submission, only to accept it at a later date. Thus, a year later, Wright asked to see the story again, and bought it for $165. Given the story’s tremendous scope and significance, Lovecraft’s passion for writing was severely dented by Wright’s original refusal, and thereafter his stories appeared with less frequency.
Weird Tales had a strict policy regarding the publication of serials, but given Lovecraft’s influence upon the magazine, the rule was cheerfully broken in order to bring The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, handwritten in 1927 and never typed up during the writer’s lifetime, to the reading public in the May and July of 1941, four years after H.P.L.’s death from cancer. In May of 1930, Lovecraft received a letter from publishers Simon & Schuster informing him that they would be interested in publishing a novel, should he ever buckle down and write one. Charles Dexter Ward is his longest piece of fiction, and Simon & Schuster might well have taken notice had he chosen to send it to them, but, oddly, he did not.
The character of Charles Dexter Ward shares many traits with Lovecraft, including his passion for an earlier age, his habit of taking ‘antiquarian walks’ around Providence, and his researches into his own ancestry (H.P.L. discovered that he was descended from the Elizabethan astronomer who introduced Copernicanism to England). Like Lovecraft, Ward did not graduate from high school or attend college, but his reasons are more fantastic than his creator’s. It is perhaps noteworthy that the kindly psychiatrist Marinus Bicknell Willet does not declare Ward insane until the troubled young man begins using archaic spellings in his correspondence, something H.P.L. insisted on doing all his life; note his insistence on using ‘shew’ instead of ‘show’ in The Nameless City, The Call of Cthulhu and, indeed, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Lovecraft made use of many names from his own experience in the telling of this tale. Ward’s cat is called Nig, presumably the writer’s nickname for his own beloved childhood pet, Nigger-Man (The animal also appears in his 1922 story The Rats in the Walls). The character of Captain Whipple owes his name to Lovecraft’s grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. One minor character lives at 598 Angell Street, HPL’s address in Providence for most of his life (A Professor George Gammell Angell plays a significant part in The Call of Cthulhu). Perhaps unconsciously, Lovecraft chose to use the name John Carter for one of the men under Captain Whipple’s command. Carter was, of course, the hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars stories, which he had read as a boy in All-Story Weekly.
Lovecraft also inserted his own literary views into the story, with a description of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as ‘a mnemonic hodge-podge.’ In an editorial for his self-published magazine The Conservative, he went further, calling the famous poem ‘a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation.’
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is linked to the Cthulhu Mythos via the Necronomicon and Yog-Sothoth, whose connection to the Old Ones – as ‘guardian of the gate’ – is not established until The Dunwich Horror, written a year later. Randolph Carter, hero of several of Lovecraft’s stories, also gets a brief mention.
Vincent Price played Ward in Roger Corman’s 1963 horror The Haunted Palace, which, because the film shares its title with a poem by one of Lovecraft’s literary heroes Edgar Allen Poe, is often attributed to the wrong author. Chris Sarandon starred in a 1992 remake entitled The Resurrected. Author and Lovecraft-expert Peter H. Cannon soundly spoofed The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie in his 1994 parody, Scream for Jeeves.
Like his 1924 story The Shunned House, Lovecraft based The Dunwich Horror upon a folk legend, embellishing the details in his own unique style. The Dunwich of H.P.L.’s fiction is, in reality, Wilbraham, Massachusetts. For writing this story, he received his largest fee from Weird Tales – $240.
In Dunwich, the character of Dr Armitage refers to the work of Welsh fantasist Arthur Machen, one of H.P.L.’s favourite authors and most enduring influences; the terms ‘Aklo’ and ‘Voorish’ are lifted from Machen’s 1899 story The White People. Another professor at Miskatonic University sings Machen’s praises in The Whisperer in Darkness; the narrator of The Call of Cthulhu is also familiar with Machen’s work. The powder of Ibn-Ghazi used to make the invisible creature materialise at the story’s climax may be named after the sixteenth-century general Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi.
Filmed in 1970 with Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee, The Dunwich Horror boasts a screenplay by Curtis Hanson, now best known for his Academy Award-nominated work on LA Confidential.
The Whisperer in Darkness marks the first appearance in a Mythos tale of the Mi-Go, also known as the Fungi from Yuggoth. The Mi-Go are identified as the abominable snowmen of myth, and that assertion is repeated in At the Mountains of Madness.
Yuggoth is the Mi-go name for Pluto, although Lovecraft had written with astounding foresight about the planet in a series of sonnets published in Weird Tales and the Providence Journal under the title ‘Fungi From Yuggoth’ some years before Pluto’s discovery in 1930. Harold S. Farnese, the dean of the Los Angeles Institute of Musical Art, hoped to collaborate with Lovecraft on an operetta based upon the Yuggoth sonnets; Lovecraft declined.
Whisperer is one of the few Lovecraft stories that can easily be categorised as science-fiction, but the Cthulhu Mythos nevertheless rears its head with a long list of terms relating to the Old Ones. Some – Cthulhu, Leng, Azathoth, Yig – are familiar, while others belong to the works of Lovecraft’s colleagues and idols. Tsathoggua, for instance, is the creation of Clark Ashton Smith, Hastur belongs to the works of Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers (Chambers also created the city of Yian, the Yellow Sign and Lake Hali), while the name ‘Bran’ is probably a reference to Robert E. Howard’s Pictish King Bran Mak Morn. Whisperer’s narrator, Albert Wilmarth of Miskatonic University, is mentioned in the next Mythos tale, At the Mountains of Madness, which also establishes the ancient war between the Mi-Go and the Old Ones.
In 1931, H.P.L. was contacted by the Reverend Dr Henry St Clair Whitehead, who wished to collaborate upon a zombie tale of his own devising, set in the Virgin Islands. Lovecraft cried off, claiming firstly that the results of such exercises were always disappointing for both participants, and secondly, that as a man who had travelled very little in his life, he could not do justice to the setting: ‘I am the sworn enemy of armchair exoticism, and believe in writing about those things one personally knows,’ he explained. One both counts, he was not being entirely honest; he continued to collaborate, not always willingly, for the rest of his career, and the Antarctic setting of At the Mountains of Madness seems to give the lie to his hatred of armchair exoticism.