Dreadful Thoughts Story Club 14: “The Outsider” & “The Rats in the Walls”
Snuffling and shuffling figures pick their ways gingerly o'er awesomely white icescapes. The fallen lie wailing in slush-choked gutters – hips and hopes shattered. Frozen water everywhere, but not a drop to drink (or flush the foetid loo with). Doomed cars spinning hideously into gaping chasms.
January, 2010. A non-stop horror show of chilblains, slight inconvenience, and unwashed stinkiness. God help us all…
But wait. All has not yet turned to hypothermic and frigid despair. There is still warmth (sort of) and joy (er…) left in the online world. For the next 7 days, Dreadful Thoughts will be keeping a Lovecraftian (hell)fire burning. So gather ye round this gnarled, gargantuan and ancient fireplace and let some H. P. sauce warm your brittle bones.
"The Outsider" (html) & "The Rats in the Walls" (html), (html), (pdf).
Thoughts? Reactions? Wild fancies?
January 11, 2010
21 responses to Dreadful Thoughts Story Club 14: “The Outsider” & “The Rats in the Walls”
Welcome horror pals! Fans of the standard customised DT Story Club header must forgive me. I had no time for such things over the last few days – what with trying to find precious supplies of water and all.
Tonight – in place of my usual blood red wine – I’ve been reduced to drinking diluted orange. And our undead and monstrous friend in “The Outsider” thought he had it tough…
I’ll kick off. There’s a clear association in Lovecraft (and I think it’s on show in these two tales) between antiquity/great age/one’s ancestors etc and suffocating oppressiveness and evil. The sheer weight of time (and its forces) crushing fragile bodies and souls beneath it.
On the other hand, modernity doesn’t seem to fare much better – at least in his personal correspondence which are suffused with a dread and anxiety and hatred for the “teeming”, bustling, cosmopolitan metropolises of his day. He was almost phobically racist…(apparently) experiencing real fear and revulsion from the “immigrant hordes” that surrounded him.
So there seems a desire to be alone there too…except loneliness also seems a source of despair.
Oh and he really did own a cat called “Nigger-Man” as a boy. Really.
Hmmm, like The Outsider I too appear to be alone in my vast and dismal chamber. But I shall persevere till some fellows join me (if they ever do).
The downward descent/upward ascent into/from the grim bowels of the earth conveniently (and accidentally, on my part) links the stories together.
In “The Rats in the Walls” in particular, the descent is not just a physical and archaeological one but a descent through ages and cultures into ever more “primitive” and barbaric states. The narrator’s final frenzied babble or languages illustrates this neatly.
HP channeling Finnegan’s Wake here! So we go (I think) from English, to Middle English, to Latin, to Gaelic and on to animalistic grunts. Charming to think that our native tongue lies a mere (thin) layer above the braying of beasts. Thanks a lot, HP.
The popularity of notions of gradual evolutionary perfection and phrenology are clearly on show here (as, inescapably [again], is HP’s deep, chasmic racism!). The hideous/bestial past is ever there – waiting to erupt into modernity. Waiting to reconnect with that “savage” part of us that can never be excised or defeated.
Poor ol’ H.P.
Where’s the love? No wonder he had such a long face.
The fact that his mother used to describe him as hideous probably didn’t help his self-esteem much either… (And the thing that people forget is that he was married to a Jewish woman, which failed after a few years due to outside pressures rather than his anti-semitism, and, according to her, was an “adequately excellent lover” (I love that “adequately”!). He may possibly have yelled out “Yog-Sothoth” while climaxing, but she is silent on those details).
I think that The Rats in the Walls is about degeneration, as you say, but what’s interesting is the helplessness of the central protagonist. Like in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, once the taint of evil gets into your blood, there ain’t nothing you can do but await the inevitable descent into madness. I find the descent in Rats a bit rushed, though. I’m not really a fan of Lovecraft outside of his Cthulhu stories, which are admittedly stupendous; most of his bad reputation as regards preposterous language comes from his earlier works. Although Rats and The Outsider are enjoyable, but I wonder how much of the latter’s impact derives from its thinly veiled autobiographical tone (and I wonder how much is slightly self-aggrandising; Lovecraft had a subtle sense of humour, a very wide acquaintance through his letters (he wrote 100,000, apparently) and wasn’t the recluse that the myth suggests he was).)
I read somewhere – might be in the appendices to the Penguin collections I have – that he found the baroque and overwrought language of “The Outsider” something of a…well, not an embarrassment exactly…more a bracing reminder of past excesses (if you want to call them that).
He’s clearly (and I think he admitted as much) hugely indebted to Poe – with “The Outsider” (early work) being a good example of this. What he shares with Poe (and Lovecraft took this up a notch or two) is that he’s much less a ghost story writer (in the traditional sense) and much more a creator of horror. In that sense, it’s not a surprise that he still has a big fan-base among Fangoria-type fan-boys! (those who might consider M. R. James a bit too genteel). His stuff is physical & visceral – full of abject and pulsating monstrosity.
RE; “Rats” – there is, as you say, an inevitability about the descent. It’s not even a comeuppance in the traditional (moral) supernatural tale sense either. There’s nothing to be learned, I don’t think – bar (possibly) the dangers of not letting ghosts of the past lie. The narrator is drawn from America to England, from his lofty tower bedroom to the crypt, from the crypt to the nightmarish underworld beyond. The progress (or regress!) seems impossible to sidestep. It’s just what you are. It’s in you.
This, of course, might owe something to HP’s regressive notions about blood, race and so forth.
Rats is curious in this regard, in that there’s clearly something – some supernatural force – that causes his degeneration into the monstrous cannibalism that his ancestors enjoyed (what with the dreams, the ghostly rats). By comparison, in the Cthulhu stories the monsters that stalk Arkham or wherever are always material, and usually aliens. I also think that Rats comes across to me as a trial run for Charles Dexter Ward in its themes.
As regards the conclusion of Rats: you’d think Norrys, an ex-soldier, would put up more of a fight against his maddened assailant, and wouldn’t the noise of the struggle, and the yells of “ungl! ungl!” (in a cavern!) bring back the others rather quickly? Too quickly to allow our cannibal friend to kill and begin eating Norrys? I wonder…
Not a lot of time for dreadful thinking: also sourcing potable water in its liquid form. I liked both stories but I enjoyed Rats more than The Outsider, I think this was precisely because the former is more of a straight ghost story (a la Poe) which relies on the foundations laid down in the latter which is more in the “creator of horror” mode that Fústar already mentioned. As both narrator of the story and unwitting victim of his ancient past, de la Poer (there’s Poe again!), there is something very satisfying and horrible about his inexorable and inevitable descent into ancient pagan barbarity. The descent is physical, moral and historical: de la Poer was never in control of his own fate: his past beckoning to him and drawing him in even in the New World. Great stuff! On a pedantic note…I couldn’t help but notice the descent into Gaelic rather than Cymric (geographically more correct) dialect, I think Lovecraft might want to pay more attention to his HPs and HQs!
I imagine that Lovecraft probably viewed anyone living on the British Isles before the Romans as a subhuman savage anyway, so he probably wasn’t bothered about the accuracy of their (to him) guttural tribespeak! (One wonders what he would have thought of Jackie Healy-Rae and his clan…)
And aliens who were worshipped as gods by nasty human followers, no? Funny you mention aliens as the description of the vast cavern beneath the priory remined me (instantly) of the Giger-designed alien ship in Alien. I’m sure Giger must have read (and absorbed) Lovecraft so…er…um…I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this.
@Cnuimh
Something about de la Poer (and his relationship with Norrys) which we haven’t mentioned yet is the death of his son – a theme that pulsates gently in the background throughout (and reaches quite moving conclusion in the final scenes of madness: “The war ate my boy, damn them all”).
There’s also the notion of forgetfulness as a balm and a release that connects (again) with “The Outsider”.
“Rats”: “Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.”
“Outsider”: “But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe”.
Lovecraft’s heroes don’t get much of a break: if they succeed in solving whatever mystery is placed before them, they either go stone raving mad, or are devoured by a monstrosity, or wish desperately to forget, or believe everything they saw to be a hallucination! They seem driven by a quest for knowledge, combined with a belief that they don’t want to find what they’re looking for. You’d sometimes wonder why they bother. If I ever see a strange octopus idol washed up on Morriscastle Strand I’m leaving it in the sand for someone else to investigate. A mortgage is enough trouble without Nyarlathotep crawling down your chimney…
Off topic tangent: I have a thing in here on girls’ comics this month. Tangent over. Back to Lovecraft.
Well done, sir, and “ungl! ungl!”.
Well done, sir!
I’m not sure quite what happened there…
I guess that in contrast to traditional mystery stories – where the investigator is leant some sort of potency & agency through the act of investigating & uncovering the truth – the bleak outlook for Lovecraft’s heroes is down to their utter powerlessness. Their cosmic meaninglessness. They can uncover (through cunning & determination) whatever they like but they’re still a mere speck of nano-dust blowing in a vast cosmic gale.
The truth isn’t liberating – it only confirms how hideous and meaningless human existence is!
This also ties in with the point I was trying to make above about the pleasures of oblivion and forgetfulness.
The Dreadful Thoughts Story Club looks like it could be a lot of fun to take part in. Are you not doing these any more? I’m sure we’d come and play if you did.
(Is there some way to do this though Twitter now, maybe?)
Hi Johann,
We’ve just resuscitated it! And the 15th meeting starts tonight at 9 pm (GMT). Details here:
http://www.fustar.info/2011/01/04/dreadful-thoughts-the-pattern-is-torturing/
Please do come and play. We’d love to…er…have you.
I’ve thought about the Twitter option and some jazzier live-blogging options but I kind of like having the discussion thread archived neatly for posterity. Old-fashioned I know. I may reconsider – if the kids want it!