If You Love His Craft, You'll Want This Collection
by Tony Fonseca
01/05/2005
Lovecraft, H. P. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin, 2004. 453 p.
Stephen King calls H. P. Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." Readers who are fans of the traditional scary story and pick up S. T. Joshi's most recent Lovecraft collection, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, will find much truth to this statement. This latest Lovecraft volume, which follows on the heels of two previous Penguin editions, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (1999) and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (2001), contains twenty-one tales of terror, along with an introduction and end notes by Joshi, the premier scholar of all things Cthulhu.
The Dreams in the Witch House includes works published between 1920 and 1936: "Polaris," "The Doom that Came to Sarnath," "The Terrible Old Man," "The Tree," "The Cats of Ulthar," "From Beyond," "The Nameless City," "The Moon-bog," "The Other Gods," "Hypnos," "The Lurking Fear," "The Unnamable," "The Shunned House," "The Horror at Red Hook," "In the Vault," "The Strange High House in the Mist," "The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath," "The Silver Key," "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," "The Dreams in the Witch House" and The Shadow Out of Time. Most readers who have looked at the first two editions of collected Lovecraft will find that likewise, this new text contains some truly inspired stories, such as the fairy-tale like "The Cats of Ulthar" and the classic "The Lurking Fear," as well as tales that seem to be the work of a hack. Many of the earlier tales in the collection ("The Doom that Came to Sarnath," "The Terrible Old Man," "The Tree," "The Nameless City" and "Hypnos") would fall into that category.
But this is to be expected with any comprehensive collection of a single author. The strength of Joshi's edition is that he does a good job of making sure that various types of Lovecraftian stories are gathered, rather than just those that are concerned with a single theme or mythos. Readers will find here macabre tales reminiscent of Poe, surrealistic stories that are based on nightmares and fantastical visions, a couple of antiquarian studies, a la M. R. James, and a handful of Old Ones tales, those concerned with the Elder Gods and their desires to re-establish a kingdom here on Earth.
"Polaris," the first story, will give readers a real taste for the melodramatic quality of Lovecraft's early prose. Though interesting linguistically, it comes across as a bit overblown, and has a most unsatisfactory ending, which leaves a bad taste in the reader's mouth, despite the narrator's (and Lovecraft's) mastery of the English language. Unfortunately, the other early Lovecraft tales in this volume are, like "Polaris," short pieces that seem to go nowhere. The single exception is "The Cats of Ulthar," perhaps because this reviewer is what many of you would call a cat person, and therefore is one who appreciates the idea of cats taking their revenge on cruel humans by eating them alive, or perhaps because the fairy tale format is unusual for both Lovecraft and for this type of story.
This is not to say that Lovecraft's tales get better with length, or as he became a more seasoned writer. The lengthy dark fantasy "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is one of those Lovecraftian tales that is just impossible to NOT put down. Similar to his early dreamscape stories ("Polaris," "The Doom that Came to Sarnath," "The Nameless City"), none of which I cared much for by the way, "Unknown Kadath" is an extended dream tale, dependent on description and language more than on plot. The problem with this kind of literary landscape art is that it tends to get bogged down in its own technique. In other words, these stories tend towards being much ado about nothing, and one hundred pages of poetic description does not make for much of a story, especially not in the horror genre. If there is one selling point to this story, it is that it marks one of Lovecraft's rare forays into the realm of pure fantasy.
"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" stands out among the later tales in the collection as being the weakest. The others published at approximately the same time include "The Lurking Fear," "The Horror at Red Hook" and the title story, as well as the novella The Shadow Out of Time, a piece which will make Lovecraft fans ever thankful of Joshi's decision to include it. My personal favorite in the volume, "The Lurking Fear," has some of the most straightforward language in Lovecraft's oeuvre, as well as one of the few instances where he does not eschew borderline gratuitous gore, in passages where the narrator describes the seventy-five bodies left strewn around by the unknowable creature which is terrorizing a rural community. The title story is another of those surreal nightmares, but it works. The protagonist, Walter Gilman, is believable as a Miskatonic University antiquarian. "The Dreams in the Witch House" includes an appearance by Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon, which will make it appealing to die hard Lovecraft fans. Here, Lovecraft posits a connection between higher mathematics and the mysterious magic of the Elder gods.
My ambivalence about the collection as a whole is resolved, however, because of Joshi's inclusion of the version of The Shadow Out of Time which is based on the text he and David E. Schultz co-edited in 2001. This text restores the story to the version that Lovecraft seems to have intended, for it goes back to his original manuscript that was lost until 1995. This first person narration tells of Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee's fainting spell in 1908. The professor "sleeps" for five years, and awakens with absolutely no memory of those years. Nonetheless, he discovers that during that time he has interacted with his colleagues, albeit a bit strangely. Peaslee pursues the mystery, and finds himself plagued by nightmares of ancient alien beings. These dreams lead him to examine the excavation site of a prehistoric city, where he discovers that he had been possessed by one of these alien creatures.
The inclusion of The Shadow Out of Time is an extremely thoughtful one by Joshi, for in purely practical terms, it saves Lovecraft fans from having to find the 2001 corrected text, which may be difficult to come by. Such editorial decisions, combined with an excellent introduction and useful notes on the stories, makes The Dreams in the Witch House worth owning, especially since it reminds readers why Lovecraft is considered one of the masters of twentieth-century American horror.
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