Tour de Lovecraft- The Tales by Kenneth Hite

Author:Kenneth Hite [Hite, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780981679204
Publisher: Atomic Overmind Press
Published: 2011-04-06T21:00:00+00:00

The Shunned House

[mid-October 1924]

In “The Shunned House,” Lovecraft can be seen gathering his legs beneath him for his mighty spring into greatness. It’s not quite as pure as “Erich Zann,” and not quite as powerful as “Rats in the Walls,” but there’s something in this story that stretches up past both of them toward the towering heights of “Call of Cthulhu,” which HPL would write within a year and a half.

The rigorous scientism of the horror presages At the Mountains of Madness just as the rigorous historicality of the setting presages Charles Dexter Ward. (“Cthulhu” takes from both strands, but lightly.) With “The Shunned House,” Lovecraft has assembled almost his entire mature repertoire of themes, effects, and methods—only the transcendence is missing, and this story is all the more impressive for its absence.

This despite the fact that its most notable overture toward cosmicism, the “titan elbow” of the thing in the basement, is just plain silly. Fortunately, the tremendous amount of scientific hugger-mugger Lovecraft deploys—mentions of relativity, quantum mechanics, lines of force, and so on—goes quite a way to cushion the blow. Indeed, the introduction of this scientific lore alongside with the (very authentic) ghost and werewolf lore collected in the earlier part of the story serves to emphasize the span of time between the primitive Huguenot vampire in the cellar and the present-day ghost-breaking Whipples, and to point up the multi-dimensional nature of the evil in the house.

I would go so far, contra Joshi (and contra Farnsworth Wright, who rejected “The Shunned House” when Lovecraft submitted it to Weird Tales) as to say that the slow, labored buildup of historical and spectral details and the equally dense justification that the modern, scientific Whipple narrator gives for the continuing horrors are both structurally necessary for the narrative (especially the pacing) to work correctly, and thematically necessary for the transmission of the exact weird sensation—of paranormality, not supernaturalism—that Lovecraft intends. It’s not as able and seemingly effortless as some of Lovecraft’s later work would usually be (although anyone who finds this story “dry and long-winded” with a “bathetic” ending, as Joshi claims to, shouldn’t be as fond of “Shadow Out of Time” as Joshi claims he is), but it’s much, much better than the critical consensus seems to have it.

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