The Dreams in the Witch House - H.P. Lov...

I'll start this off with a story from my grad school days. There is a point to all of this, I promise.

I don't remember being all that sleep-deprived as an undergrad – I think I maybe did one all-nighter during the whole four years – but my memories of grad school are filled with how sleep-deprived I was. This didn't happen every weekday, thank goodness, but there were times when I'd get up early in the morning to go to class, go to one or both of my jobs in the afternoon and/or evening, and then spend the late PM and early AM hours working on homework. On particularly horrible days, I'd get home with only a couple hours left before my alarm went off to start the next day. Some days, I had a choice between grabbing a bite to eat or sleeping, because I didn't have enough time or energy for both.

I remember one particular evening. I was in my apartment, working on an assignment. I was pacing my usual path around the room while thinking about what I was going to write when I spotted something I swear looked like an evil little gnome on the floor. It wasn't until after I jumped about a foot and made a strange little scared noise that I realized what I'd seen was not, in fact, an evil little gnome, but rather a warped reflection of myself in some shiny packaging material. Shortly after that, I decided it was time for bed.

Parts of “Dreams in the Witch-House” read like H.P. Lovecraft had had a similar experience and then had chosen to couple it with drug use. Gilman's more abstract dreams were extremely bizarre, to the point where I had a hard time even picturing what was supposed to be going on. The Brown Jenkin bits were more in line with my “evil gnome” experience, except that Brown Jenkin definitely wasn't Gilman's reflection in a bit of shiny packaging material.

Apparently this is the norm for Lovecraft works, but I thought I'd mention that this story doesn't end well for Gilman. Personally, I didn't mind that, since I didn't particularly like Gilman – I cared less about whether he lived or died than about what was going to happen next. What I didn't entirely understand was why Gilman didn't just completely move out of the Witch-House. Was it that he couldn't afford a more expensive room? Had he just become so obsessed with Keziah, his dreams, and his studies that it never even occurred to him that moving was an option? Was he too disturbed by his experiences to remember that he could leave? Whatever his reason for staying, it was frustrating for me that he continued to live in a place that was causing him so much mental distress.

Although I enjoyed the overall creepiness of this story, I think I liked At the Mountains of Madness more. Gilman's dreams of Brown Jenkin and Keziah were spooky and interesting, and I enjoyed the detail about Gilman's painfully sharp hearing (all the better to describe disturbing sounds and wonder at what those sounds might be hiding). The more abstract dreams were a bit much for me, though, and I never could shake that feeling that Gilman's problems would have been solved if he had just gotten a room somewhere else.

 

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

This is the third in the Penguin "modern classic" Lovecraft trilogy (the other two I have read previously). Edited and annotated by S. T. Joshi (reknowned Lovecraft scholar) these are supposed to be the definitive texts of Lovecraft's work and his introductions provide fascinating insights behind the stories to the man himself.

To anyone new to Lovecraft, this is not the place to start. One would do far better with the first in this trilogy: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.

The quality of the stories is quite variable, particularly in this collection. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that this collection pays particular emphasis on his "Dunsanian" phase, the era of his career when he came under his last great literary influence; Lord Dunsany. These stories are more like dark fantasies rather than horror and when writing in this mode he does not always successfully entertain, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" being poor but "The Cats of Ulthar" being good for example. His writing in this vein culminates in the intense "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" which is both his ultimate effort in this mode and his statement that he wants to get back to more earthier subject maters, back to his roots. An intense and unrelenting descent into the world of dreams and nightmare that makes references to many of his other Dunsanian tales, one of only three novellas he ever published (the other two being in the preceding book in this trilogy).

More enjoyable for me are the stories where he explores old folklore traditions such as vampirism, witchcraft and demons. "The Shunned House" and "Dreams in the Witch House" were both great stories in this vein.

But of most interest to me are his science fiction stories where he attempts to incorporate (then) modern scientific themes (such as relativity, quantum mechanincs and multi-dimensional mathematics) into his stories. Usually the utilisation of some more extreme and esoteric theories unlocks some nightmare or comes dangerously close to revealing the horror that lurks beyond our thin veil of ignorance. Stories in this vein include "From Beyond", "Hypnos" and of course the great "Shadow Out of Time".

Lovecraft certainly isn't for everyone. His prose is dense, wordy and the narrative is packed with multiple layers of detail that will repay re-reading. Some people will find it heavy going and his horror is certainly less visceral than to some modern tastes relying on more subtle and gradual means of building up tension. But when he's on form, there's not many to touch him.