The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (3 page)

That Lovecraft did indeed have many sides to his personality is revealed most clearly in his prodigally vast correspondence; but in his fiction we also find many figures who in their varied character traits recall their gaunt, lantern-jawed creator. If, as Vincent Starrett said long ago, Lovecraft was “his own most fantastic creation,” then he chose a good source for the personalities of those hapless victims who face their ineluctable doom with the quiet stoicism of a well-bred New England gentleman.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Lovecraft's tales, essays, poems, and letters have appeared in many editions, beginning with
The Outsider and Others
(1939). However, only certain recent editions can claim textual accuracy; other editions (including almost all current paperback editions in the United States and United Kingdom) contain numerous textual and typographical errors. Lovecraft's fiction and “revisions” can be found in four volumes published by Arkham House (Sauk City, WI) under my editorship:

Annotated editions include
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
(New York: Penguin, 1999),
The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
(New York: Dell, 1997), and
More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
(1999).

Lovecraft's poetry has now been definitively gathered in my edition of
The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works
(San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2001), superseding all previous editions.

A large selection of Lovecraft's essays can be found in my edition of
Miscellaneous Writings
(Arkham House, 1995). Among other volumes of essays are:

The major edition of Lovecraft's letters is
Selected Letters
(Arkham House, 1965-76; 5 vols.), edited by August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, and James Turner. This edition, however, is not annotated or indexed, contains numerous textual errors, and presents nearly all letters in various degrees of abridgement. More recent, annotated editions of letters, edited by David E. Schultz and myself and published by Necronomicon Press, include:

Schultz and I have also edited a volume largely culled from Lovecraft's letters:
Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).

Since about 1975, the literature on Lovecraft has been immense. Much biographical and critical work prior to that time is of little value, having been written largely by amateurs with little access to the full range of documentary evidence on Lovecraft (exceptions include the work of Fritz Leiber, Matthew H. Onderdonk, and George T. Wetzel). The following presents only a selection of the leading volumes on Lovecraft; see the notes for citations of additional articles.

A useful reference work containing an abundance of information on Lovecraft's life, work, colleagues, and other subjects is
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia
by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).

The standard bibliography is my
H. P. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981). A supplement, co-compiled by L. D. Blackmore and myself and covering the years 1980-84, was issued by Necronomicon Press in 1985. The books in Lovecraft's library have been tallied in
Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue
(Necronomicon Press, 1980), compiled by Marc A. Michaud and myself. An expanded edition can be found on the Necronomicon Press Web site (
www.necropress.com
).

My
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
(Necronomicon Press, 1996) is the most exhaustive biographical treatment. L. Sprague de Camp's
Lovecraft: A Biography
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975) was the first full-length biography but was criticized for errors, omissions, and a lack of sympathy toward its subject. Many of Lovecraft's colleagues have written memoirs of varying value; these have now been collected by Peter Cannon in
Lovecraft Remembered
(Arkham House, 1998). Some further memoirs can be found in my slim collection,
Caverns Measureless to Man: 18 Memoirs of Lovecraft
(Necronomicon Press, 1996).

A selection of the best of the earlier criticism on Lovecraft can be found in my anthology,
H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism
(Ohio University Press, 1980). A substantial anthology of early and recent criticism is
Discovering H. P. Lovecraft
, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1987). Other recent critical treatments, on a wide variety of topics, can be found in
An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft
, edited by David E. Schultz and myself (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991). Some of the better monographs and collections of essays on Lovecraft are:

 

Timo Airaksinen,
The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror
(New York: Peter Lang, 1999), chiefly concerned with Lovecraft's use of language.

Donald R. Burleson,
H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study
(Greenwood Press, 1983), a sound general study.

Donald R. Burleson,
Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), a challenging deconstruction ist approach to Lovecraft.

Peter Cannon,
H. P. Lovecraft
(New York: Twayne, 1989), another good general study with up-to-date references to the secondary literature.

S. T. Joshi,
H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West
(Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990; rpt. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press, 2000), a study of Lovecraft's philosophical thought.

S. T. Joshi,
A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft
(San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1996; rpt. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press, 1999), a general study.

Maurice Lévy,
Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic
, trans. S. T. Joshi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), a revision of a Ph.D. dissertation for the Sorbonne and perhaps still the finest critical study of Lovecraft.

Steven J. Mariconda,
On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations
(Necronomicon Press, 1996), a collection of Mariconda's penetrating articles on Lovecraft.

Dirk W. Mosig,
Mosig at Last: A Psychologist Looks at Lovecraft
(Necronomicon Press, 1997), a collection of articles by a pioneering scholar in Lovecraft studies.

Robert M. Price,
H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos
(Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), a collection of articles on the “Cthulhu Mythos” as developed by Lovecraft and other writers.

Barton L. St. Armand,
The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft
(Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977), a penetrating study of “The Rats in the Walls.”

Barton L. St. Armand,
H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent
(Albu querque, NM: Silver Scarab Press, 1979), an analysis of the melding of Puritanism and Decadence in Lovecraft's thought and work.

Lovecraft Studies
(Necronomicon Press) is the leading forum for scholarly treatments of Lovecraft. Past and current issues can be consulted at the Necronomicon Press Web site (
www.necropress.com
).

Although the texts in this edition are similar to those found in my Arkham House editions of Lovecraft's tales (1984-86), they have been recollated from manuscripts and early printed sources, with the result that several additional errors have now been corrected.

“Sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam.”

 

 

IN RELATING THE CIRCUMSTANCES which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books,
²
and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon—but of these things I must not now speak.
³
I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes,
⁴
an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened
ajar
in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call “divine wrath” in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briers, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal carvings above the arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalisingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that
at any cost
I would some day force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.