Classic Audiobook Collection - Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft ~ Full Audiobook [horror]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Section 1. Introduction The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts, few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of the shafts of the world. of a materialistic sophistication, which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism, which deprecates the aesthetic motive, and calls for

Starting point is 00:00:41 a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smoking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition, the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection, founded as it is, on a profound and elementary principle, whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness. The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow, because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tapings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of

Starting point is 00:01:28 such feelings and events will always take first place in the taste of the majority, rightly perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head, so that no amount of rationalization, reform, or fraudian analysis can quite annull the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper, or the lonely wood. involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind, co-evil with the religious

Starting point is 00:02:10 feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species. Men's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand, and the universe teemed with them in the early days, were naturally woven such personifications, marvels interpretations and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having

Starting point is 00:02:53 few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities, visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extraterrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence, whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world and in general all the conditions of savage dawn life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural but we need not wonder at the

Starting point is 00:03:32 thoroughness with which men's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition this saturation must as a matter of plain scientific fact be regarded as virtually permanent so far as this subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous

Starting point is 00:04:16 tissue which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalized by conventional religious rituals it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficient side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore this tendency too is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty in danger are always closely allied thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of

Starting point is 00:04:58 peril and evil possibilities when to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is super-added there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of it necessary endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life, which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions, which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse. With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a

Starting point is 00:05:44 literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist, and no better evidence of its tenacious vigo can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives, Browning, the hideous poem Child Rowland, Henry James, the turn of his crew. Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel, Elsie V. Marion Crawford, the upper birth, and a number of other examples. Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, the yellow wallpaper, whilst the humorist

Starting point is 00:06:31 W.W. Jacobs produced that able melodramatic bit called the Monkees' Pole. This type of fear literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different, the literature of mere physical fear and the mandanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story, where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural. But these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer unknown forces must be present and there must be a hint expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject of that most terrible conception of the human brain a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the demons

Starting point is 00:07:40 of unplanned space. Naturally, we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious, appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose mass effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing. for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot, but the creation of a given sensation.

Starting point is 00:08:14 We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear. But it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true supernatural horror literature. Therefore, we must judge a weird tale, not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot, but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a high spot must be admitted on its own merits

Starting point is 00:08:56 as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this. Whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown spheres and powers, a subtle attitude of old listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere,

Starting point is 00:09:29 the better it is as a work of art in the given medium. End of Section 1. Section 2 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Librivox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visitlibrivox.org. Read by Piotr Natter. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Starting point is 00:09:59 Section 2. The Dawn of the Horror Tale. As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves. Cosmic Terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallized in the most archaic ballads, chronicles and sacred writings. It was indeed a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of demons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations.

Starting point is 00:10:39 Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the clavicle of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions, whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a ballad literature, which parallel to the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward expression, and east and west alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and have academically formulated magic.

Starting point is 00:11:24 and cabalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bards and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale, or song, from the formal literary composition. In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous coloring and sprightliness, which almost transmuted it into sheer fantasy.

Starting point is 00:11:53 In the West, where the mystical tuesday, had come down from his black boreal forest and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices and druidic groves it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told half-hinted horrors much of the power of Western horror lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds were rooted in the most

Starting point is 00:12:32 revolting fertility rites of immemorial antiquity this secret religion stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the druidic Greek Roman and Christian faiths in the regions involved was marked by wild witch's Sabbaths in lonely woods and at up this hills on Walpurgis night and Halloween, the traditional breeding season of the goats and sheep and cattle, and became the source of vast riches of sorcery legend, besides provoking extensive witchcraft prosecution of which the Salmifere forms the chief American example. Akin to it, in essence, and perhaps connected with it, in fact,

Starting point is 00:13:12 was the frightful secret system of inverted theology or Satan worship, which produced such horrors as the famous black mass, whilst operating toward the same, and we may note the activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical, the astrologers, Kabbalists and alchemists of the Alberto's Magnus or Raymond Lolley type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depths of the medieval horror spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gouged by the grotesque carvings, slightly introduced into much of the finest later ecclesiastical work of the time, the demoniac gargoles of Notre Dame, and Mont Saint-Michel

Starting point is 00:13:57 being among the most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst, educated and uneducated alike, a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural, from the gentlest doctrines of Christianity to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists was Stradamus, Tristamius, Dr. John D., Robert Flood, and the like, were born. And his fertile soil were nourished types and characters of somber myth and legend, which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or altered by modern technique.

Starting point is 00:14:39 Many of them were taken from the earliest oral sources and formed part of mankind's permanent heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones, the demon lover who comes to bearer of, way his still living bride, the death fiend or psychopump riding the night ride, the man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer, all these may be found in that curious body of medieval lore which delayed Mr. Bering Gold so effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense, for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality, which denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour,

Starting point is 00:15:24 so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings. Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose. As the werewolf incident in Petronius, The gruesome passages in Apuleus, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Surah, and the odd compilation on wonderful events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Flegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse bride, Pignon and Mahathes,

Starting point is 00:16:05 later related by Proclos, and in modern times forming an inspiration of Gettes, bride of Corinth, and Washington Irving's German student. But by the time the old northern myths take literary form, and in that later time, when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it mostly in metrical dress, as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Edas and sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Imir and his shape was spawned, whilst our own Anglo-Saxon Beulv and later, continental nibelong tales are full of eldridge weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spencer's stately stances will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror and landscape, incident and character.

Starting point is 00:17:01 Prose literature gives us Mallory's Mordartour, in which are presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad sources. The theft of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel Perilus by Sir Galahad, Whilst other and cruder specimens were doubtless set forth in the cheap and sensational chapbooks, vulgarly hocked about and devoured by the ignorant. In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster, we may easily discern the strong hold of the demoniac on the public mind, a hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft,

Starting point is 00:17:40 whose terrors, wildest at first on the continent, began to extolling, loudly in English ears as the witch-hunting crusaders of James I gained headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long line of treatises on witchcraft and demonology, which aid in exciting the imagination of the reading world. Through the 17th and into the 18th century we behold the growing mass of fugitive legendary and balladry of darksome cast. Still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chuck books of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimps the eager interest of the people,

Starting point is 00:18:20 through fragments like Defoe's Apparition of Mrs. Veal, a homely tale of a dead woman's spectral visit to a distant trend, written to advertise covertly a badly-selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translation of Eastern Tales, in Queen Anne's reign, and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling.

Starting point is 00:18:51 The era of new joy in nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day, such as Smollets, Adventures of Ferdinand, count fathom. The release instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school of writing, the Gothic school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity

Starting point is 00:19:25 is destined to become so numerous and, in many cases, so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable, that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse in the atmosphere are as old as men, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child of the 18th century. End of Section 2. Section 3 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain.

Starting point is 00:20:08 For more information or to volunteer, please visitlibrivox.org, read by Piotrnauter. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Section 3. The early Gothic novel. The shadow-hounded landscapes of Ossion. The chaotic visions of William Blake. The grotesque witch dances in Burns Tamushanter. The sinister demonism of cholerous christabel and ancient mariner. The ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny.

Starting point is 00:20:40 And the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of kings. other poems are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature our teutonic cousins of the continent were equally receptive to the rising flood and Burgers Wild Huntsmen and the even more famous demon bridegroom ballad of Lenore both imitated in English by Scott whose respect for the supernatural was always great are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the gulish statue bride, later used by Prospermererimei and the Venus of Illa,

Starting point is 00:21:20 and traceable back to great antiquity, which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of the ring, whilst Gettus' deathless masterpiece, Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose. But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman, none other than Horace Walpole himself to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror story as a permanent form. Fond of medieval romance and mystery as a dilettantes diversion and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published the Castle of Atranto, a tale of the supernatural, which, though thoroughly and convincing

Starting point is 00:22:09 and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird. First, venturing it only as a translation by one William Marshall gentleman from the Italian of a mythical Onufrio Muralto, the author later acknowledged his connection with the book, and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity, a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatization and wholesale imitation, both in England and in Germany. The story, tedious, artificial and melodramatic, is further impaired by brisk and prosaic style, whose urban sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line,

Starting point is 00:22:58 who, after the mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad, on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth, the lad, by the way, having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from his design and encounters in subterranean crypts, beneath the castle and noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant, yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso, who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter, supernatural phenomena assailed the castle in diverse ways. fragments of gigantic armor being discovered here and there a portrait walking out

Starting point is 00:23:43 of its frame and thunderclub destroying the edifice and a colossal armored specter of Alfonso rising out of the reins to ascend through parting clouds to the bottom of St. Nicholas. Theodore having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death for she is slain by her father by mistake is discovered to be the son of Alfonso and a rifle heir to the estate. He concludes the ten by wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst Manfred, whose usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own supernatural harassings, retires to a monastery for penitence, his sudden wife seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent.

Starting point is 00:24:25 Such is the tale, flat, stilted, and altogether devoid of a true cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangers. touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history what it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene puppet characters and incidents which handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn

Starting point is 00:25:06 inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror the line of actual artists beginning with Poe this novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle with its awesome antiquity vast distances and rambling deserted or ruined wings damp corridors unwholesome hidden catacombs and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends as a nucleus of suspense and demoniac fright in addition it included tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as villain, the saintly, long-persecuted and generally insipid heroine, who undergoes the major terrors, and serves as a point of view and focus for the reader's sympathies, the valorous and

Starting point is 00:25:47 immaculate hero, always of high birth, but often in humble disguise, the convention of high-sounding foreign names, mostly Italian, for the characters, and the infinite array of stage properties, which includes strange lights, damp trapdoors, extinguished lamps, moldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras and the like. All this paraphernalia reappeared with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect throughout the history of the Gothic novel, and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forced it to assume a less naive and obvious form.

Starting point is 00:26:25 An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity. German romance at once responded to the vocal influence, influence and soon became a byword for the weird and ghastly. In England, one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbot, then Miss Akin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called Sir Bertrand, in which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand. A novelman, on a dark and lonely moor,

Starting point is 00:26:58 attracted by a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient torretted castle, whose doors open and close and whose bluish will of the wisps lead up mysterious staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady whom Sir Bertrand kisses is finally reached

Starting point is 00:27:17 and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquette in honor of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his So Tranto, the Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, published in 1777.

Starting point is 00:27:40 Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery, which distinguishes Mrs. Barbaud's fragment, and though less crude than Walpole's novel, and more artistically economical of horror and its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here again we have the virtuous air to the capitalized. castle disguised as a peasant and restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father. And here again we have a case of wide popularity, leading to many editions, dramatization and ultimate translation into French.

Starting point is 00:28:17 Miss Reed wrote another weird novel, unfortunately unpublished and lost. The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply bewilderingly as the 18th century draws towards its close. The recess, written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and though devoid of the supernatural, employs the wall-pul scenery and mechanism of great dexterity. Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary order, Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, 1764, 1823, whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion. and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere, despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through labored mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors, Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly,

Starting point is 00:29:19 unseen, an incident which closely approached genius. Every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness, which she wished to convey. A few sinister details, like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groaned from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest, can, with her, conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror, surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaborations of others.

Starting point is 00:29:49 Nor are these images in themselves any less potent, because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong. strong and appears as much in her delightful landscape touches, always in broad, glamorous pictorial outline and never in close detail, as in her weird fantasies. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history, and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems attributed to one or another of the characters.

Starting point is 00:30:24 Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels. The Castle of Atlin and Dunbane, 1789, a Sicilian romance, 1790, the Romance of the forest, 1792, the Mysteries of Udolfo, 1794, the Italian, 1797, and Gaston de Blonde Ville, composed in 1802, but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these, Udolfo is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parent and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle, the scheming nobleman Montoni. Mysterious sounds,

Starting point is 00:31:14 opened doors, frightful legends and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant Annette. But find Finally, after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow prisoner whom she has discovered. On the way home, she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors, the abandoned wing where the departed Chattelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black paw. But this finally restored to security and happiness with her lover Valancourt. After the clearing up of a secret which seemed for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only familiar material reworked, but it is so well reworked that Udolfo will always be a classic. Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of her forerunners,

Starting point is 00:32:07 and in atmospheric creation she stands preeminent amongst those of her time. Of Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles Brogden Brown stands the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he injured his creations by your. natural explanations, but also like her he had an uncanny atmospheric power, which gives his horrors a frightful vitality, as long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing modern American scenes for his mysteries. But this repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and type of incident.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Brown's novels involve some memorably frightful scenes, and excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's. in describing the operations of the perturbed mind. Edgar Hunily starts with a sleepwalker digging a grave, but is later impaired by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister secret brotherhood that and Arthur Mervin both described the plague of yellow fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's most famous book is Weeland, or The Transformation,

Starting point is 00:33:19 1798, in which Pennsylvania German engulfed by a wave of religious fanaticism hears voices and slays his wife and children as a sacrifice his sister Clara who tells the story narrowly escapes the scene laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on the Shilkill's remote reaches is drawn with extreme vividness and the terrors of Clara be said by spectral tones gathering fears and the sound of strange footsteps in the lonely house are all shaped with truly artistic force In the end, a lame ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the atmosphere is genuine while it lasts.

Starting point is 00:33:59 Karwin, the Maline Ventriloquist, is a typical villain of the Manfred or Montoni type. End of Section 3. Section 4 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Libervox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit liverbox.org. Read by Piotr Natter. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Section 4, The Apex of Gothic Romance. Horror in Literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory-Lewis, 1773, 1818, whose novel The Monk, 1796, achieved marvelous popularity and earned him

Starting point is 00:34:50 the nickname monk Louis. This young author, educated in Germany and saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in forms more violent than his gentle predecessor that ever dared to think of, and produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare, whose general gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghouishness. The story is one of a Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of over-prouded virtue is tempted to the very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda, and who is finally, when awaiting death at the Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase escape at the price of his soul from the devil, because he deems both body and soul already lost.

Starting point is 00:35:37 Forthwith, the mocking fiend snatches him to a lonely place, tells him he has sold his soul in vain, since both pardon and a chance for salvation were approaching at the moment of his hideous bargain and completes the sardonic betrayal by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes and casting his body down a precipice whilst his soul is born of forever to perdition the novel contains some appalling descriptions such as the incantation in the vaults beneath the convent cemetery the burning of the convent and the final end of the wretched abbot and the subplot where the marquis de las cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestors the bleeding nun

Starting point is 00:36:18 there are many enormously potent strokes, notably the visit of the animated corpse to the marquis's bedside, and the Kabbalistic ritual whereby the wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his death tormentor. Nevertheless, the monk drags sadly when read as a whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its potency is marred by flitancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those cannons of the Corum, which Louis at first despised as poor. prudish. One great thing may be said of the author, that he never ruined his ghostly visions with natural explanation. He succeeded in breaking up the Redcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than the monk. His drama The Castle

Starting point is 00:37:05 Spectre was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in ballad form. Tales of Terror, 1799, The Tales of Wonder, 1801, and a second and a second to succession of translations from the German. Gothic romances, both English and German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey was by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sung far toward absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its final subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person of Charles Robert Maturin, 1782, 1824, an obscure

Starting point is 00:37:55 and eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing, which includes one confused Radcliffean imitation called the Fatal Revenge, or the family of Montario, 1807, maturine at length involved the vivid horror masterpiece of Melmoth, the Wanderer, 1820, which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright, which it had never known before. Melmoth is the tale of an Irish gentleman, who, in the 17th century, obtain a preternaturally extended life from the devil, at the price of his soul. If he can persuade another to take the bargain of his hands, and assume his existing state,

Starting point is 00:38:36 he can be saved. But this he can never manage to effect, no matter how assidiously he hounds those, whom despair has made reckless and frantic. The framework of this story is very clumsy, involving tedious length, digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and labor dovetailing and coincidence. But at various points in the endless rumbling, there is felt a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind, akinship to the essential truth of human nature, and understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer's part which makes the book a true document of aesthetic self-expression rather

Starting point is 00:39:17 than a mere clever compound of artifice. No unbiased reader can doubt that with Melmoth an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror tale is represented. Fear is taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over mankind's very destiny. Maturion's shudders, the work of one capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince Mrs. Radcliffe and Louis are fair game for the paradist, but it would be difficult to find a false note in the feverishly intensified action and high atmospheric tension

Starting point is 00:39:50 of the Irishman, whose less sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the finest possible natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt, maturing is a man of authentic genius, and he was so recognized by Balzac, who grouped Melmoth with Molière's Don Juan, Gethes Faust, and Byron's Man as the supreme allegorical figures of modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece called Melmoth Reconcile, in which the wanderer succeeds in passing his infernal bargain on to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a chain of victims, until a revelling gambler dies with it in his possession, and by his damnation ends the curse.

Starting point is 00:40:33 Scott, Rosetti, Thackeray and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave maturing their unqualified admiration and there is much significance in the fact that Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace in exile, chose for his last days in Paris the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth. Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread. It begins with a deathbed, an old miser is dying of sheer fright because of something he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read, and a family portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of his centriced home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College Dublin for his nephew John, and the latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the

Starting point is 00:41:18 portrait in the closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait appears momentarily at the door. Dred hangs over the house of the Melmuffs, one of whose ancestors, Jay Melmoth 1646, the portrait represents. The dying miser declares that this man, at a date slightly before 1800 is alive. Finally, the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the portrait and a manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was written late in the 17th century

Starting point is 00:41:52 by an Englishman named Stanton, young John learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677 when the writer met a horrible fellow countryman and was told of how he had stared to death a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil. Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music

Starting point is 00:42:20 and whose eyes have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the wanderer, for such is the malign visitor, offers the captive freedom if he will take over his bargain with the devil. But like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton is proof against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a madhouse used to tempt Stanton is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton is at length liberated and spends the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is badly ruinous and fragmentary.

Starting point is 00:42:59 John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves him. a black and blue mark on his wrist. Young John soon afterward receives, as a visitor, a ship-tracked Spaniard, Alonzo de Moncana, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly, and the descriptions of his experiences under torment and the vaults through which he wants essay's escape, are classic. But he had the strength to resist Melm of the Wanderer when approached at his darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after his escape, he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth, including his wooing of an Indian island maiden,

Starting point is 00:43:45 Imali, who later comes into her birthright in Spain, and is known as Don Nizidora, and of his horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead Angkorite at midnight in the ruined chapel of a shant and abhorrent monastery. Moncada's narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book, this disproportion being considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition. At last, the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance of Melm of the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and the creptitude swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he has come home after a century and a half to meet his fate, warning all others from the room, no

Starting point is 00:44:31 matter what sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and Moncada hear frightful eululations, but do not intrude till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayay footprints lead out a rare door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the edge of the precipice as a truck indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy body. The wanderer's scarf is found on a crack some distance below the brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him. Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this modulated, suggestive

Starting point is 00:45:10 and artistically molded horror, and, to use the words of Professor George Sainsbury, the artful but rather dejuned rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the sometimes slipshot style of Lewis. Maturian's style in itself deserves particular praise for its forcible directness and vital lifted together above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes that, with all his faults, Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths. Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatized, but its late date in the evolution of the

Starting point is 00:45:52 Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of Udolfo and the monk. End of Section 4. Section 5 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, port volunteer, please visitlibrivox.org, read by Pietr Mater. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Section 5, the aftermath of Gothic fiction. Meanwhile, other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethorral,

Starting point is 00:46:31 trash like Marcus von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries 1796, Mrs. Rochaise, Children of the Abbey, 1798, Mrs. Dacres's Zofloya or the Moore, 1806, and the poet Shelley's Schoolboy effusions Zastrotzi, 1810, and St. Erwin, 1811, both imitations of Zofloya, there arose many memorable weird words, both in English and German. Classic and Married and markedly different, from its fellows, because of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than in the Wolpelesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated history of the Caliphatec, by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first written in the French language, but published in an English translation, before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to European literature

Starting point is 00:47:22 early in the 18th century through Gaian's French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights had become a reigning fashion, being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humor, which only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness, had captivated a sophisticated generation, till Baghdad and Damascus names became as freely strewn through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well-read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity, and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, slight disillusion, bland cruelty, arbane treachery,

Starting point is 00:48:03 and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom marrs the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Harun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-telestial power, pleasure and learning, which animates the everid Gothic villain or byronic hero, essentially cognate types, is lured by an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans

Starting point is 00:48:39 in the fiery halls of Ebli's, the Mohammedan devil. The descriptions of Vatik's palaces and diversions of his scheming sorceress mother Karatis and her witch-tower, with the fifty-one-eyed negresses, of his pillory. pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Ishtakar, Persepolis, and the impish bride, Nuronihar, whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Ishtakar's primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible cyclopean halls of Ebli's, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander and anguish forever. His right hand upon his blazingly ignited and eternally burning heart are triumphs of

Starting point is 00:49:20 weird coloring, which raise the book to a permanent place in letters. No less notable are the three episodes of Vatech, intended for insertion in detail as narratives of Vatech's fellow victims in Ebly's Infernal Halls, which remained unpublished throughout the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Louis Melville, whilst collecting material for his life and letters of William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism, which marks the acutest form of the weird, so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright. But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient.

Starting point is 00:50:03 Other writers, closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of terror literature in these times may be mentioned the utopian academic theorist, William Godwin, who followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams, 1794, with the intendedly weird St. Leon, 1799, in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of Rosicrucians, is handled with ingeniousness, if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest, exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan calliostro,

Starting point is 00:50:48 and the publication of Francis Barretz de Magius, 1801, A curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Balwer Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity, which struggled far down into the 19th century, and was represented by George W.M. Reynolds, Faust and the Demon, and Wagner the Wellwolf.

Starting point is 00:51:17 Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of murder and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as the iron chest and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious

Starting point is 00:51:42 teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece. His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful and her inimitable Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus, 1817, is one of the horror classics of all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori, in an effort to prove supremacy in horror making,

Starting point is 00:52:07 Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion, and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being, molded from charmed of fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created by its designer, in the mad pride of intellectuality,

Starting point is 00:52:37 the monster possesses full intelligence, but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all whom, Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a wife for it, and when the student finally refuses in horror, lest the world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat to be with him on his wedding night. Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster,

Starting point is 00:53:12 even into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator's room, parts the curtains of his bed and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight with watery eyes, if eyes they may be cold. Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man, but never duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places.

Starting point is 00:53:55 Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampire, in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunt Grecian wood. In the same period, Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing such independent bits of narration as the Tapestry Chamber or Wandering Willis' Tale in Red Gauntlet,

Starting point is 00:54:29 and the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830, Scott published his letters on demonology and witchcraft, which still forms one of our best compendia of European witch lore. Washington Irving is another famous figure, not unconnected with the weird, and though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions. The German student, in Tales of a Traveller, 1824,

Starting point is 00:55:05 is a slightly concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the cosmic tissue of the Manitigurs in the same volume, is more than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the Maccabre artist in the poem at Al-Sifron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel The Epicurean 1827. Though merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of Sapturinean frights, and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis.

Starting point is 00:55:48 The Queen's sea more than once rebels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp, which deny him the rank of specialists. This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem with the Erie and de Brouson. Captain Marriott, besides writing such short tales as the werewolf, made a memorable contribution in the phantom ship, 1839, founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and a cursed vessel

Starting point is 00:56:19 sails forever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like the Signal Man, a tale of ghastly warning, conforming to a very common pattern and touched to aversimilitude which allied it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At this time, a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindu theology, and such matters, much like that of the present day, was flourishing, so that the number of weird tales

Starting point is 00:56:50 with a psychic or pseudoscientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these, the prolific and popular Edward Balwer Luton was responsible, and despite a large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving

Starting point is 00:57:07 of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied. The house and the brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and a malign and deathless figure, perhaps suggested by Louis XIV's mysterious courtier Saint-Germere, yet survives as one of the best short-hunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni, 1842, contains similar elements more elaborately handled and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible dweller of the threshold,

Starting point is 00:57:40 who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood, kept alive from age to age, till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero, an ancient Chaldeon sorcerer, surviving in the pristine bloom of youth, to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution,

Starting point is 00:57:59 though full of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel and can be read with genuine interest by the not-too-sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood, the author cannot escape using the stock gothic castle of Wolpollyan lineage.

Starting point is 00:58:32 In a strange story, 1862, Balwer Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences and an atmosphere of homilatic pseudoscience designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative, evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent, somewhat melodramatic, tabloss and climaxes. Again, we have the mysterious user of Life's elixir in the person of the sole magician Margraith, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the

Starting point is 00:59:15 modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush. And again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us, this time handled with much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation passages where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavolom of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told.

Starting point is 00:59:53 Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleepwalker, and as he repeats them, the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stop athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleepwalker's spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind, and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell.

Starting point is 01:00:24 This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual comp and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic. fear, which belongs to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies. In the course of which, he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist Alphonse-Louis Constant, Elie Vasslevi, who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic

Starting point is 01:00:54 and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard, Apollonius of Tiana, who lived in narrowest times. The romantic, semi-gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the 19th century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan Lefano, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Ryder Haggard, whose she is really remarkably good, Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunting mannerisms,

Starting point is 01:01:27 created permanent classics in Markheim, the body snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hayden. Indeed, we may say that this school still survives, for to it clearly belongs such of our contemporary horror tales as specialize in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect, rather than a maligned tensity or psychological versimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its human element, commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence.

Starting point is 01:02:13 Quite alone, both as a novel and as a piece of terror literature, stands the famous Wuthering Heights, 1847, by Emily Bronte, with its mad vistas of bleak, wind-swept york. folk share moors and the violent distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life and of human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified byronic villain hero, is a strange, dark wave found in the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish, till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins.

Starting point is 01:02:50 that he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child ghost at the bow-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion.

Starting point is 01:03:26 He says he feels a strange change approaching and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies, the casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces too are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Bronte's eerie terror is no mere Gothic echo but a tense expression

Starting point is 01:04:07 of men's shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a literary transition and marks the growth of a new and sounder school. End of Section 5. Section 6 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Read by Pietrenater.

Starting point is 01:04:41 Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Section 6. Spectral Literature on the Continent. Section 6 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This Legamos recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose. Read by Piotr Natter. Spectral Literature on the Continent On the continent, literary horror fared well. Celebrated short tales and novels of Erz Todor Wilhelm Hoffman

Starting point is 01:05:12 1776, 1822 are a byword for mellowness of background and matured of form, though they inclined to levity and extravagance and lacked the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror, which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally, they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the continental weird tales is the German classic Undine, 1814, by Friedrich Heinrich Harl, Baron de la Motte Focque. In this story of a water spirit who married a mortal and gained human soul, there is a delicate of craftsmanship which makes it notable in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which places it close to the genuine folk myth. It is in fact derived from

Starting point is 01:05:58 a tale told by the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus in his treatise on elemental sprites. Undine, daughter of a powerful water prince, was exchanged by her father as a small child for a fisherman's daughter in order that she might acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble youth, Hultbrand, at the cottage of her foster father by the sea, at the edge of a haunted wood, she soon marries him and accompanies him to his ancestral castle of Ringstetten. Hultbrandt, however, eventually worries of his wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of the appearances of her uncle, the malicious woodland, waterfall spirit Culeborn, a weariness

Starting point is 01:06:39 increased by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out to be the fisherman's child, for whom Undina was changed. At length, on a voyage down to Danube, he is provoked by some innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the angry words which consigned her back to her supernatural element, from which she can, by the laws of her species, return only once to kill him, whether she will or no, if ever, he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Hultbrand is about to be married to Bertalda, Wondina returns for her said duty and bears his life away in tears.

Starting point is 01:07:14 And he is buried among his fathers in the village churchyard, a veiled, snow-white female figure, appears among the mourners, but after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen a little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost completely around the new grave, and empties into a neighboring lake. The villagers show it to this day, and say that Undine and her Hulbrand are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouquet as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre, especially the descriptions of the haunted wood of its gigantic

Starting point is 01:07:51 snow-white man and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the narrative. Not so well known as Udine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic genius of the earlier 19th century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript, found in an old church at Kosserov, and censures around the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber, which she keeps secret for various reasons,

Starting point is 01:08:29 and the unexplained wealth obtained from this, lends color to the accusation, an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting noblemen, Wittich Appelman, who has vainly pursued her with aftain noble designs. The deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a terrible supernatural end in prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria, and after a typical witchcraft trial with first confessions under torture, she's about to be burned at the stake, when saved just in time by her lover, and noble youth from a neighboring district. Minehall's great strength is in his air of casual and realistic very similitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of the

Starting point is 01:09:11 unseen by half persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very close to the truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once published the main points of the Amber Witch as an actual occurrence of the 17th century. In the present generation, German horror fiction is most notably represented by Hans Heinz-Evars, who brings to bear on his dark conceptions and effective knowledge of modern psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Al Rune and short stories like The Spider contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic level. But France, as well as Germany, has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victoria Goh in such tales as Hans of Iceland and Palsak in the Wild Essis skin, Serafita and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent,

Starting point is 01:10:07 though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and demonic intensity which characterizes the born artist in shadows. It is in Teofil-Gutier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not continuously used, is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like Avatar, The Foot of the Mummy,

Starting point is 01:10:36 and Claremonde display glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure tantalize and sometimes horrify, whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in one of Cleopatra's knights are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of Eon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and cyclopean architecture, and uttered once and for all the eternal horrors of its nether world of catacombs, where to the end of the time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stir up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons. Gustave Lobert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic fantasy, like the temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias,

Starting point is 01:11:23 might have been an arch-were of taper street terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantasists of the history. symbolic and decanent schools whose dark interests really center more in abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural and subtle storytellers whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black veils of cosmic unreality of the former class of artists of sin the illustrious poet Baudelaire influenced vastly by Poe is the supreme type whilst the psychological novelist Joris Karl Huismans a true child of the 18th 90s

Starting point is 01:12:02 is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is continued by Prosper Merrimé, whose Venus of Ilde presents in terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bright theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in the ring. The horror tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Montposson, written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own, being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward fantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen

Starting point is 01:12:42 nevertheless they are of the keenest interest in poignancy suggesting with marvellous force the eminence of nameless terrors and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness of these stories the horla is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extraterrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate on overwhelming mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department, notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz James O'Brien for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Potently Dark creations of the Montposson are Who Knows the Spector he the Diary of a Madman the White Wolf on the River and the grisly verses entitled horror The collaborators Erkman Chatryan enriched French literature with many spectral fancies like the Man Wolf in which a transmitted curse works toward its end in a traditional Gothic castle setting

Starting point is 01:13:56 Their power of creating a shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous, despite a tendency toward natural explanations and scientific wonders. And few short tales contain greater horror than the invisible eye, where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce the successive occupants of a certain in-cham to hang themselves on a crossbeam. The Oars' ear and the waters of death are full of engulfing darkness and mystery. the latter embodying the familiar overgrown spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de Lille-Adam likewise followed the macabre school.

Starting point is 01:14:35 His torture by hope, the tale of a stake condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of a capture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself, the so-called Count Cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice Levelle, whose very brief episodes have landed themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the thrillers of the Grandignolle. As a matter of fact, the French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to the

Starting point is 01:15:21 suggestion of the unseen, since the latter process requires, for its best and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the northern mind. A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird literature, is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the somber heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations, and the wealth of underground horror lore surviving in ghettos and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined. Kabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the universe as emanations of the deity,

Starting point is 01:16:07 and involving the existence of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world, of which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament and attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a circumstance which has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied, is likely to exert considerable influence on weird fiction.

Starting point is 01:16:44 The best examples of its literary use so far are the German novel The Golem by Gustav Meyring and the drama The Dubuque by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym Anski. The former, with haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague and describes with singular mastery that city's ancient ghetto with its spectral peaked gables. The name is derived from a fabulous artificial giant, supposed to be made and animated by medieval rabbis, according to a certain cryptic formula. The dibbook, translated and produced in America in 1925,

Starting point is 01:17:24 and more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular power the possession of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dibukes are fixed types and serve as frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition. End of Section 6. Section 7 of Supernatural Holies. Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Starting point is 01:17:50 This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visitlibbox.org. Read by Pieternatr. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Section 7, Edgar Allan Poe. In the 1830s, occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weirds tale, but that of short fiction as a whole, and indirectly molding the trends and fortunes of a great European aesthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn is our own,

Starting point is 01:18:28 for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow countrymen, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame had been subjected to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion among the advanced intelligentsia to minimize his importance, both as an artist and as an influence. But it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas.

Starting point is 01:18:59 True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated, but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his. But again, we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept, the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths.

Starting point is 01:19:28 Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done, and to him we owe the modern horror story in its final and perfected state. Before Poe, the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark, without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions, such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to uptrude his own emotions,

Starting point is 01:20:06 into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived, the essential impersonality of the real artist and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are regardless of how they tend or what they prove good or evil attractive or repulsive stimulating or depressing with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher sympathizer or vendor of opinion he saw clearly that all faces of life and thought are

Starting point is 01:20:44 equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and bloom decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure decay rather than growth terror rather than tranquility and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind and to the health sanity and normal expansive welfare of the species Poe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity, possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror.

Starting point is 01:21:26 The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude not often found before, whereby Poe studied the human mind rather than the usage of Gothic fiction, and worked with the analytical knowledge of terror's true sources, which doubled the force of his narratives, emancipated him from all absurdities inherent in merely conventional shudder coining. This example, having been said, later authors were naturally forced to conform to it in order to compete at all, so that in this way a definite change begin to affect the mainstream of macabre writing. Poe too set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship, and although today some of his own work seems slightly melodramatic and unsophisticated,

Starting point is 01:22:12 We can constantly trace his influence in such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous pairing down of incidents to such as have a direct pairing on the plot and will figure prominently in the climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the short story in its present form. His elevation of disease, perversity and decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching an effect.

Starting point is 01:22:44 For avidly seized, sponsored and intensified by his eminent French admirer, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal aesthetic movement in France, thus making Poe, in a sense, the father of the decadence and the symbolists. Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and affectations. His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and labored pseudo-humor, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognized and forgiven.

Starting point is 01:23:23 Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was the master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavours in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling, that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallizations and transmutations. Till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 30s and 40s, such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi, as not even the nether slopes of Saturn may boast.

Starting point is 01:24:03 Verses and tales alike sustain the burden of cosmic power. The raven, whose noise and beak, pierces the heart, the ghouls that toiled iron bells and pestilential steeples, the vault of Ullulambe in the Black October night, the shocking spires and domes under the sea, the wild, weird climb that live, sublime, out of space, out of time. All these things and more leered us amidst maniacal rattlings in deceiving nightmare of the poetry. And in the prose, their yawn open for us, the very jaws of the pit, inconceivable abnormalities slightly hinted into a horrible half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the crackled tension of the speaker's hollow voice bids its fear their nameless implications demoniac patterns and presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a shrieking revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in memorable and cataclysmic echoes a witch's sabbath of horror flinging of decorously

Starting point is 01:25:07 robes is flashed before us. Aside the more monstrous because of the scientific skill with which every particular is marshaled and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of material life. Those tales, of course, fall into several classes, some of which contain a purer essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and raciocination for runners of the modern detective story are not to be included at all in weird literature. Whilst some Certain others, probably influenced considerably by Hoffman, possess an extravagance which relegates them to the borderline of the grotesque.

Starting point is 01:25:45 Still a third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania, in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, however, represent the literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form, and give their author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and fountainhead of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen ship poised on the below chasm's edge in MS. found in a bottle?

Starting point is 01:26:15 The dark intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of unseeing gray beers, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through the eyes of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by some resistless devil current toward a vortex of Eldridge Enlightenment, which must end in destruction. Then there is the unutterable M. Waldemar, kept together by hypnotism for seven months after his death,

Starting point is 01:26:43 and uttering frantic sounds at a moment before the breaking of the spell leaves him a nearly liquid mass of loathsome of detestable putrescence. In the narrative of A. Gordon Pim, the voyagers reached first a strange self-polar land of murderous savages, where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravins have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcana of earth, and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist, which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea.

Starting point is 01:27:23 Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints of a monstrous metempsychosis. The mad nobleman who burns the stable of his hereditary foe, the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building after the owner has perished therein. The vanishing bit of ancient tapestry where was shown the giant horse of the victim's ancestor in the Crusades. The madman's wild and constant riding of the great horse and his fear and hatred of the steed,

Starting point is 01:27:52 the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring houses, and finally the burnings, of the madman's palace and the death therein of the owner, born helpless into the flames and up the vast staircase astride the beast he had ridden so strangely. Afterward, the rising smoke of the ruins take the form of a gigantic horse. The man of the crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quite their effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical

Starting point is 01:28:32 dialogue a tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space. Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form, which makes them veritable beacon lights in the province of the short story. How could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast, employing that archaic and orientalized style with jeweled phrase, quasi-biblical repetition, and recurrent burden, so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsani. And in the cases where he has done this, we have an effect of lyrical fantasy almost

Starting point is 01:29:16 narcotic in essence, an opium pageant of dream in the language of dream, with every unnatural color and grotesque image bought it forth in a symphony of corresponding sound. The mask of the red death, silence a fable and shadow a parable are assuredly poems in every sense of the word, save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to oral cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in the two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligea and the fall of the House of Asher, especially the latter that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their supernatural magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and

Starting point is 01:30:06 collocation of ever-leased incident. Ligaea tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who, after death, returns to a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of the second wife imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment despite a suspicion of prolixity and top heaviness the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power usher whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked hence shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and

Starting point is 01:30:48 isolated family history, a brother, his twin sister and their incredibly ancient house, all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment. These bizarre conceptions, so awkward and unskilful hands, become, under post-spell, living and convincing terrors to haunt our knights, and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness the essential details to emphasize the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror the exact incidents and illusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or

Starting point is 01:31:31 prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous denune amount to come the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effects effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuance of scenic and landscape vault to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalizing the desired illusion, principles of this kind, and dozens of obscure ones too elusive to be described, or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Metal drama and unsophistication there may be. We are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's, or Bain, and Galleys, and Galle. modulated translation, but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible, which gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme

Starting point is 01:32:33 genius. Poe's weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be. Like most fantasists, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances, usually deeply learned in strange lore and darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this character obviously does, derives little from the early Gothic novel, for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the

Starting point is 01:33:21 diabolical villain of Radcliffean or Ludovician romance. Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of genealogical connection, since his gloomy, ambitious and antisocial qualities savors strongly of the typical byronic hero, who in turn is definitely an offspring of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. particular qualities appear to be derived from a psychology of Po himself, who certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness, which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of fate. End of Section 7.

Starting point is 01:34:04 Section 8 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Read by Pieternatir. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Section 8, The Weird Tradition in America. The public, for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt.

Starting point is 01:34:39 America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon, so that spectral legends had already been recognized as fruitful subject matter for literature. Charles Brogden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Rathcliffeian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic.

Starting point is 01:35:03 This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer Moore has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast, gloomy virgin forests, in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk, the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin.

Starting point is 01:35:31 The free reign, given under the influence of Puritan theocracy, to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful god of the Calvinists, and to the sulfurous adversary of that god about whom so much was stunned in the pulpits each sunday and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwards life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood harassed by commands for theological self-examination keyed to unnatural emotional repression and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whispered, of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the solemn nightmare. Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned

Starting point is 01:36:26 and more technically finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school, the tradition of moral values, gentle restrained, and mild leisurely fantasy, tinged more or less with the whimsical, was represented by another famous, misunderstood and lonely figure in American letters, the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sion of Antique Salem, and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old witch club judges. In Hawthorne, we have none of the violence, the daring, the high-colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity,

Starting point is 01:37:03 and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul, crammed by the Puritan, of early New England, shadowed and wistful and grieved at an unmaral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary, and the visible world becomes, in his fancy, a theater of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen health-existent influences hovering over it and through, it, battling for supremacy and molding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form

Starting point is 01:37:46 its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of American weirdness was his, to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life. But he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his fantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical caste, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal, the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn, despite his insight into its hypocrisy.

Starting point is 01:38:24 Supernatural horror, then, is never a primarily object with Hawthorne, though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality, that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach. Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent

Starting point is 01:38:52 in the teutonized retelling of classic myths for children, contained in a wonder book and tanglewood tales, and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural. As in the macabre posthumous novel, Dr. Grim shows Secret, which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem

Starting point is 01:39:18 and abutting on the ancient charter street-bearing ground. In The Marble Fown, whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine fantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight And the glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance, which cannot help being interesting, despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery, which has caused the modern writer D.H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. Septimus Felton, a posthumous novel whose idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Doliver romance,

Starting point is 01:40:05 touches on the elixir of life in a more or less capable fashion, whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called the ancestral footstep show what Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition, that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked, which appears incidentally in both Septimus Felton and Dr. Grimshaw's secret. Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident to a remarkable degree. Edward Randolph's portrait, in Legends of the province house, has its diabolic moments.

Starting point is 01:40:44 The minister's black veil, founded on an actual incident, and the ambitious guest, imply much more than they state, whilst Ethan Grand, a fragment of a longer work never completed, rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the blazing desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the byronic unpardonable sinner, whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night, as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer, an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger

Starting point is 01:41:24 who appeared now and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come, and go from a very ancient grave. But foremost, as a finished artistic unit among all our author's weird material, is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, the House of the Seven Gables, in which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power,

Starting point is 01:41:49 against the sinister background of a very ancient solemn house. One of those peaked Gothic affairs, which formed the very first regular building up of our New England coast towns, but which gave way after the very, the 17th century to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as colonial. Of these old gabled gothic houses, scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition throughout the United States, but one well known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street solemn and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the seen and inspiration of the romance.

Starting point is 01:42:25 Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second-story, its grotesque corner brackets, and its diamond-paint lattice windows, is indeed an object well-calculated to evoke somber reflections, typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers, which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the 18th century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He heard too many rumors of a curse upon his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692.

Starting point is 01:43:08 From this setting came the immortal tale, New England's greatest contribution to weird literature, and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atmosphere presented to us. stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-rusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed. And we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder, old colonel Pynchon, snatched the land with peculiar rootlessness from its original settler, Mafu Moul, whom he condemned to the gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Mowl died, cursing old Pynchon. God will give him blood to drink. and the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Mowl's carpenter's son consented to build the great gabled house for his father's triumphant enemy,

Starting point is 01:43:59 but the old colonel died strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of obvisicitudes, with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Mowls, and sometimes terrible ants befalling the pensions. The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house, almost as alive as Poe's House of Asher, though in a subtler way, pervades the tale as a recurrent motive pervades in operatic tragedy. And when the main story is reached, we behold the modern Pynchons in a pitiable state of decay.

Starting point is 01:44:33 Poor old Hepsiba, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman, childlike unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment, sly and treacherous Judge Pynchon, who is the old colonel all over again. All these figures are tremendous symbols and are well matched by the stunted vegetation and anemic fowls in the garden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairly happy ending with a union of Sprightly Phoebe, cousin and last cyan of the pinches to the prepossessing young man who turns out to be the last of the moles. This union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or movement and keeps his implications of terror well in the background. but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity.

Starting point is 01:45:23 Incidents like the bewitching of Alice Pynchon in the early 18th century and the spectral music of her harpsichord, which precedes a death in the family, the latter, a variant of an immemorial type of arian myth, link the action directly with the supernatural, whilst the dead nocturnal vigil of old Judge Pinchon in the ancient parlor, with his frightful ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and genuine sort. The way in which the judge's death is first adubrated by the motions and sniffing

Starting point is 01:45:55 of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact is suspected by the reader or by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have surpassed. Later, Strange Cat watches intently outside that same window in the night, and on the next day for something. It is clearly the psychopump of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite deftness to its latter-day setting. But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude belonged to the age which closed with him,

Starting point is 01:46:29 and it is the spirit of Poe, who so clearly and realistically understood the natural basis of the horror appeal and the correct mechanics of its achievement, which survived and blossomed. among the earliest of post-disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman Fitz James O'Brien, 1828, 1862, who became naturalized as an American and perished honourably in the civil war. It is he who gave us what was it, the first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the prototype of the Montpossons Horla. He also, who created the inimitable diamond lens, in which a young microscopist falls in love with a maiden of infinitesimal world, which he has discovered in a drop of water.

Starting point is 01:47:16 O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror, though his genius was not, properly speaking, of the same Titan quality which characterized Poe and Hawthorne. Closer to real greatness was the eccentric and Saturnine journalist Ambrose Beers, born in 1842, who likewise entered the Civil War, but survived to write some immortal tales and to to disappear in 1913 in as great a cloud of mystery as any he ever evoked from his nightmare fancy. Beers was a satirist and pamphleteer of note but the bulk of his artistic reputation must rest upon his grim and savage short stories, a large number of which deal with the Civil War and form the most vivid and realistic

Starting point is 01:48:00 expression which that conflict has yet received in fiction. Virtually all of Beers's tales are tales of horror and whilst many of them treat only of the physical and psychological horrors within nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly supernatural and form a leading element in America's fund of weird literature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a living poet and critic who is personally acquainted with beers, thus sums up the genius of the great shadow maker and the preface to some of his letters. In Beers, the evocation of horror becomes for the first time not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and Montposson,

Starting point is 01:48:40 but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hack, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation. In Poe, one finds it a tour de force, in Montposson, a nervous engagement of the flagellated climax. To beers, simply and sincerely,

Starting point is 01:49:04 diabolism held in its tormented death a legitimate and reliant means to the end. Yet a tacit confirmation with nature is in every instance insisted upon. In the death of Halpin Fraser, flowers, verdure and the boughs and leaves of trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural malignity. Not the accustomed golden world, but a world pervaded with the mystery of blue

Starting point is 01:49:31 and the breathless recalcitrance of dreams as beerses. Yet, curiously, in humanisticity, is not altogether absent. The inhumanity, mentioned by Mr. Loveman, finds vent in a rare strain of sardonic comedy and graveyard humor, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty and tantalizing disappointment. The former quality is well illustrated by some of the subtitles in the darker narratives, such as, one does not always eat what is on the table,

Starting point is 01:50:02 describing a body laid out for a coroner's inquest, and a man, though naked, maybe in rugs, referring to a frightfully mongled corpse. Beers's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style deride from journalistic models. But the grim malevolence, stalking through all of them, is unmistakable, and several stand out as permanent mountain peaks of American weird writing. The death of Halpin Fraser, called by Frederick Tabor Cooper, the most fiendishly ghastly tale

Starting point is 01:50:40 in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, tells of a body, skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly insanguined wood, and of a man, beset by ancestral memories, who met death at the clause of that which had been his fervently loved mother. The damped thing, frequently copied in popular anthologies, chronicles the hideous devastations of an invisible entity that waddles and flanders on the hills and in the wheat fields by night and day. The suitable surroundings evokes with singular subtlety, yet apparent simplicity, a piercing sense of the terror which may reside in the written word. In the story, the weird author Koston says to his friend Marsh, You are brave enough to read me in a streetcar, but,

Starting point is 01:51:26 in a deserted house, alone in the forest, at night, bah, I have a manuscript in my pocket that would kill you. Marsh reads the manuscript in the suitable surroundings, and it does kill him. The middle toe of the right foot

Starting point is 01:51:42 is clumsily developed, but has a powerful climax. A man named Manton has horribly killed his two children and his wife, the latter of whom lacked the middle toe of the right foot. Ten years later, he returns

Starting point is 01:51:56 much altered to the neighborhood, and being secretly recognized, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held in the now abandoned house where his crime was committed. When the moment of the duel arrives, a trick is played upon him, and he is left without an antagonist, shot in a night black-ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, with the thick dust of a decade on every hand. No knife is drawn against him, for only a thorough scare is intended but on the next day he is found crouched in a corner with distorted face dead of sheer fright at something he has seen the only clue visible to the discoverers is one having terrible implications and the dust of years that lay

Starting point is 01:52:40 thick upon the floor leading from the door by which they had entered straight across the room to within a yard of manton's crouching corpse were three parallel lines of footprints light but definite impressions of bare feet the the outer ones, those of small children, the inner, a woman's. From the point at which they ended, they did not return. They pointed all one way, and of course the woman's prints showed a lack of the middle toe of the right foot. The Spook House, told with a severely homely air of journalistic verisimilitude, conveys terrible

Starting point is 01:53:14 hints of shocking mystery. In 1858, an entire family of seven persons disappears suddenly and unaccountably from a plantation house in eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions untouched, furniture, clothing, food supplies, horses, cattle and slaves. About a year later, two men of high standing are forced by a storm to take shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble into a strange subterranean room lit by an unaccountable greenish light, and having an iron door which cannot be opened from within. In this room lay the decayed corpses of all the missing family, and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace a body he seems to recognize,

Starting point is 01:53:58 the other is so overpowered by a strange feater that he accidentally shuts his companion in the vault and loses consciousness. Recovering his senses six weeks later, the survivor is unable to find the hidden room, and the house is burned during the Civil War. The imprisoned discoverer is never seen or heard of again. Beers seldom realizes the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly as Poe. And much of his work contains a certain touch of naivete,

Starting point is 01:54:27 prosaic angularity, or early American provincialism, which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror masters. Nevertheless, the genuineness and artistry of his dark intimations are always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no danger of eclipse. As arranged in his definitively collected works, Beers's weird tales occur mainly in two volumes. Can such things be, and in the midst of life?

Starting point is 01:54:55 The former, indeed, is almost wholly given over to the supernatural. Much of the best in American horror literature has come from pens, not mainly devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes' historic Elsie Vennar suggests with admirable restraint and unnatural Ophidian element in a young woman prenaturally influenced, and sustains the atmosphere with finely discriminating lands. touches. In the turn of the screw, Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace, depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jesso, over a small boy and girl who had

Starting point is 01:55:42 been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, to anxiously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realize fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations, but for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class. F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now collected in a volume entitled Wondering Ghosts. For the Blood is the Life, touches powerfully on the case of moon-cursed vampirons. near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South Italian sea coast the

Starting point is 01:56:24 dead smile treats of family horrors in an old house and an ancestral vault in Ireland and introduces the banshee with considerable force the upper birth however is Crawford's weird masterpiece and is one of the most tremendous horror stories in all literature in this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the spectral saltwater dampness is strangely aware open port-hole and the nightmare struggle with the nameless object are handled with incomparable dexterity. Very genuine, though not without the typical manored extravagance of the 1890s, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness,

Starting point is 01:57:18 and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere, made popular by Dumourier's Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is the yellow sign, in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman, with a face like a puffy grave warms. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickenes as he relates a certain detail. Well, it's God's truth that when I eat him, he grabbed

Starting point is 01:57:52 me wrists, sir, and when I twisted his soft, mushy fist, one of his fingers came off in the end. An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him.

Starting point is 01:58:08 The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head, like thick, oily smoke from a fat rendering vat, or an odor of noisome decay. What he mumbles is merely this. Have you found the yellow sign? A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman

Starting point is 01:58:25 picked up on the street by the sharer of his dream is shortly given the artist, and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors, the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless yellow sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur,

Starting point is 01:58:46 from Primordiar Karkosa, whereof the volume. treats and some nightmare memory of which seeks to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds soon they hear the rumbling of the black plumed hairs driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman he enters the night shrouded house in quest of the yellow sign all balls and bars rotting at his touch and when the people rush in drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter they find three forms on the floor two dead and one dying one of the dead

Starting point is 01:59:18 shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, That man must have been dead for months! It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his Eldridge land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Beers. Other early works of Mr. Chambers, displaying the Otre and Macabre elements, are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognized master. Horror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New England realist Mary E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, the wind in the rose bush, contains a number of noteworthy achievements.

Starting point is 02:00:06 In The Shadows on the Wall, we are shown with consummate skill the response of a staid New England household to uncanny tragedy, and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well prepares us for, the climactic moment when the shadow of the secret murderer, who has killed himself in a neighboring city, suddenly appears beside it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow Wallpaper, rises to a classic level in subtly lineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in a hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined. In the Dead Valley, the eminent architect and medievalist Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague region,

Starting point is 02:00:48 horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description. Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile humorist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely weird specimens. Fishhead, an early achievement, is banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake, which at the last avenge their by Patkinsman's murder. later work of Mr. Cobb introduces an element of possible science, as in the tale of hereditary memory, where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words in African jungle speech,

Starting point is 02:01:29 when run down by a train under visual and oral circumstances, recalling the maiming of his black ancestor by a rhinoceros, a century before. Extremely high in artistic stature is the novel The Dark Chamber, 1927, by the late Leonard Klein. This is the tale of a man who, with the characteristic ambition of the Gothic or bironic hero villain, seeks to defy nature and recapture every moment of his past life through the abnormal stimulation of memory. To this end he employs endless notes, records, mnemonic objects and pictures, and finally odors, music and exotic drugs. At last his ambition goes beyond his personal life and readies toward the black abysses of hereditary memory.

Starting point is 02:02:16 even back to pre-human days amidst the steaming swamps of the carboniferous age and to still more unimaginable deeps of primal time and entity he calls for matter music and takes stranger drugs and finally his great dog grows oddly afraid of him an noxious animal stench encompasses him and he grows vacant-faced and subhuman in the end he takes to the woods howling at night beneath windows he is finally found in a thicket mangled to death Beside him is the mungled corpse of his dog, they have killed each other. The atmosphere of this novel is malevolently potent, much attention being paid to the central figure's sinister home and household. A less subtle and well balanced, but nevertheless highly effective creation is Herbert S. Gorman's novel, the place called Dagon, which relates the dark history of a western Massachusetts backwater, where the descendants of refugees from the solemn witchcraft still keep alive the morbid

Starting point is 02:03:15 and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbath. Sinister House by Leland Hall has touches of magnificent atmosphere but is marred by a somewhat mediocre romanticism. Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and short-story writer Edward Lucas White,

Starting point is 02:03:34 most of whose themes arise from actual dreams. The song of the siren has a very persuasive strangeness, while such things as Lucundoo and The Snack The snout arouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very peculiar quality to his tales, and oblique sort of glamour which has its own distinctive type of convincingness.

Starting point is 02:03:58 Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as the California poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith, whose bizarre writing, drawings, paintings, and stories are the delight of a sensitive view. Mr. Smith has for his background a universe of remote and paralyzing fried jungles of poisonous and iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis, the Muria and forgotten elder worlds, and Dunk Morasses of spotted death fungi, in spectral countries beyond Earth's rim. His longest and most ambitious poem, The Hashish Eater,

Starting point is 02:04:38 is in pentameter blank verse, and opens up chaotic and increasingly, incredible vistas of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces between the stars. In sheer demonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions, and lived to tell the tale? His short stories deal powerfully with other galaxies, worlds and dimensions, as well as with strange regions and eons on the earth.

Starting point is 02:05:14 He tells of primal hyperborea and is black amorcus god Sataguwa, of the lost continent Zootic and of the fabulous vampire-cursed land Avergwan in medieval France. Some of Mr. Smith's best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, 1933. End of Section 8. Section 9 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org.

Starting point is 02:05:56 Read by Pietrenatter. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Section 9. The Weird Tradition in the British Isles. Recent British literature, besides including the three, or four greatest fantasists of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it, and has, despite the omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery in such tales as the Phantom Rikisha, the finest

Starting point is 02:06:27 story in the world, the recrudescence of Imre and the Mark of the Beast. The slaughter is of particular poignancy, the pictures of the naked labor priest who mute like an otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim, and of the fear which horses began to display toward him, and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the malignant sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its mystery.

Starting point is 02:07:05 L'Fcadiohern, strange, wandering and exotic. departs still farther from the realm of the real, and with the supreme artistry of a sensible poet weaves fantasies impossible to an author of the solid-roast-beef type. His fantastics, written in America, contains some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature, whilst his quidon, written in Japan, crystallizes with matchless skill and delicacy

Starting point is 02:07:32 the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colorful nation. Still more of Helms' wizardry of language is shown in some of his translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flabé. His version of the latter's temptation of St. Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotous imagery, clad in the magic of singing words. Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for certain of his exquisite fairy tales and for his vivid picture of Dorian Gray. in which a marvelous portrait for years assumes the duty of aging and coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile plunges into every excess of vice and crime without the outward loss of youth, beauty and freshness. There is a sudden and potent climax, when Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks to destroy the painting, whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy.

Starting point is 02:08:31 He stabs it with a knife, and a hideous cry and crush are heard, but when the servants enter they find it in all its pristine loveliness lying on the floor was a dead man in evening dress with a knife in his heart he was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage

Starting point is 02:08:49 it was not until they had examined the rings that they recognized who he was Matthew Phipps Sheel author of many weird grotesque and adventurous novels and tales occasionally attains a high level of horrific

Starting point is 02:09:05 magic. Xilucha is a notoriously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shield's undoubted masterpiece, the House of Sounds, floridly written in the yellow 90s, and recast with more artistic restrained in the early 20th century. Ibis' story, in final form, deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic island of the coast of Norway, where, amidst the midst the sweep of demon winds and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a brazen tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, pose fall of the house of Asher. In the novel The Purple Cloud, Mr. Shield describes with tremendous power,

Starting point is 02:09:55 a curse which came out of the Arctic to destroy mankind, and which, for a time, appears to have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The sensation of this lone survivor as he realizes his position and roams through the corpse-littered treasures strewn cities of the world as their absolute master are delivered with skill and artistry falling a little short of actual majesty unfortunately the second half of the book with its conventionally romantic element involves a distinct letdown better known than sheel is the ingenious Bram Stoker who created many starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels

Starting point is 02:10:35 whose poor technique sadly impairs their net effect. The lair of the white worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile. The jewel of seven stars, touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best of all is the famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard modern exploitation of the frightful vampire myth, Count Dracula, a vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but finally migrates to England with the design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman fares within Dracula's stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot of domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now justly assigned a permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps

Starting point is 02:11:36 The Beetle by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch Queen by Sax Romer, Arthur Sarsfield Ward, and The Door of the Unreal by Gerald Bliss. The latter handles quite dexterously the strandard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more artistic and told with singular skill through the juxtapel narratives of the several characters is the novel called Harbour by Francis Brett Young in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerful delineated. The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred Montoni type of early Gothic villain but is redeemed from triteness by many clever individualities. Only the

Starting point is 02:12:23 slight diffuseness of explanation at the close and the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from approaching absolute perfection. In the novel, Which Wood, John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of the evil sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black forest, with the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic adjumbrations when the horror is finally extirpated, will repay one for wading through the very gradual action and plethora of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's short stories are also extremely vivid in their spectral intimations. The Green Wild Beast, a tale of African witchcraft, the wind in the portico, with its awakening

Starting point is 02:13:09 of dead Britann Roman horrors, and Scullus Carey, with its touches of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable. Clemens Houseman, in the brief novelette, The Werewolf, attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In The Elyxer of Life, Arthur Ransom attains some darkly excellent effects, despite a general naivety of plot, while H.B. Drake's, the shadowy thing, summons up strange and terrible vistas.

Starting point is 02:13:44 George McDonald's, Lilith, has a compelling bizarrery all its own, a first and simpler of the two versions, being perhaps the more effective. Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen mystic world is ever a dose and final reality is the poet Walter de la Mere, whose haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear consistent traces of a strange vision, reaching deeply into veiled spheres of beauty and terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. In the novel The Return, we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries, and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes exist, many are unforgettable for their command of fears and sorcery's darkest ramifications, notably Seton's own, in which their lowers a noxious background of malignant vampirism, the tree, which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard of a starving artist,

Starting point is 02:14:52 Out of the deep, wherein we are given leave to imagine what thing answered the summons of a dying waste-twell in a dark, lonely house, when he pulled a long-feared bellcourt in the attic of his dread-haunted boyhood. A recluse, which hints at what sent a chance guest flying from a house in the night. Mr. Kempe, which shows us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human soul dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region, beside an archaic abandoned chapel. and all hallows, a glimpse of demoniac forces besieging a lonely medieval church and miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. The Lamere does not make fear the soul or even the dominant element of most of his tales, being apparently more interested in the subtleties of character involved. Occasionally, he sings to sheer whimsical fantasy of the Bury Order. Still, he is among the very few to whom unreality is a vivid living presence,

Starting point is 02:15:50 and as such he is able to put into his occasional fear studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve. His poem The Listeners Restores the Gothic Shudder to Modern Verse. The weird short story has fared well of late, the important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose the man who went too far, breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan's hoofmark on the breast. of a dead man. Mr. Benson's volume, visible and invisible, contains several stories of singular power. Notably, Negotiam Perambulance, whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster

Starting point is 02:16:33 from an ancient ecclesiastical panel, which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and the horror horn, through which lobes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited alpine peaks. The face, in the another collection is lethally potent in its relentless aura of doom H.R. Wakefield, in his collections, They Return at Evening, and Others Who Returns, manages now and then to achieve great heights of horror, despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable stories are The Red Lodge with its slimy aqueous evil. He cometh and he passeth by, and he shall sing, The Cairn and

Starting point is 02:17:20 look up there, blind man's buff, and that bit of lurking millennial horror, the 17th hole at Doncaster. Mention has been made of the weird work of H.G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in The Ghost of Fear, reaches a very high level, while all the items in, 30 strange stories, have strong fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in the captain of the pole-stableness. a tale of Arctic ghostliness and lot number 249 wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill Hugh Walpole of the same family as the founder of Gothic fiction has sometimes approached the bazaar with much success his short story mrs. Lundt carrying a very poignant shudder

Starting point is 02:18:13 John Metcalfe in the collection published as the Smoking Leg attains now and then a rare pitch of potency, the tale entitled The Bad Lands, containing graduations of horror that strongly sever of genius. More whimsical and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous fantasy of Sir J. M. Berry are the short tales of E. M. Foster, grouped under the title of the celestial omnibus. Of these, only one, dealing with a glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright,

Starting point is 02:18:47 may be said to hold the true element of cosmic horror. Mrs. H. D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories, The Death Mask. L.P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and extremely ghastly tale, a visitor from down under. May Sinclair's uncanny stories contain more of traditional occultism, than of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this field,

Starting point is 02:19:22 and are inclined to lay more stress on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a cosmos utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness and impressiveness, then do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order. Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life,

Starting point is 02:20:05 is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it, and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adubrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities, through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal, in connection with regions or buildings. In the boats of the Glen Carrig, 1907, we are shown a variety of malign marvels and a cursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a lead-down in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs towards the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce 18th-century prose detracts from the general effect. But the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor. The house on the borderland, 1908, perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works,

Starting point is 02:21:25 tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland, which forms a focus for hideous other-world forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the narrator's spirit through limitless light years of cosmic space, and calpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature, and everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality, this book would be a classic of the first water.

Starting point is 02:22:04 The Ghost Pirates, 1909, regarded by Mr. Hortson as rounding out a trilogy with the two who previously mentioned works is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea devils of quasi-human aspect and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers, that besieged it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power. The nightland, 1912, is a long-extended, 538 pages, tale of the Earth's infinitely remote future, billions of billions of years ahead after the death of the sun.

Starting point is 02:22:53 It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the 17th century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation, and is seriously marred by painful verbosness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language, even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glenn Carrick. Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-dead, black planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast mental pyramid, and besieged by monstrous hybrid and altogether unknown forces of the darkness,

Starting point is 02:23:36 is something that no reader can ever forget. Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort, the prowlers of the black men-forsaken and unexplored world outside the pyramid are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency, while the nightland landscape, with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism, takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch. Midway in the book, the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by men for millions of years,

Starting point is 02:24:12 and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness, there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy, unrivaled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole. Mr. Hartston's later volume, Karnaki the Ghostfinder, consists of several longest short stories, published many years before in magazines.

Starting point is 02:24:44 In quality, it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the infallible detective type, the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood's John Silence, moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere of professional occultism. A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power,

Starting point is 02:25:11 and a foreglims of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author. Naturally, it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern uses of the terror element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all work, both prose and verse, treating broadly of life, and we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet Browning, whose child Roland to the dark tower came, is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist Joseph Conrad,

Starting point is 02:25:43 who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the demoniac driving power of fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally resolute men. Its trail is one of infinite ramifications, but we must here confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state, where it determines and dominates the work of art containing it. Somewhat separate from the main British stream

Starting point is 02:26:09 is that current of weirdness in Irish literature which came to the fore in the Celtic Renaissance of the later 19th and early 20th century. Ghost and fairy lore have always been of great prominence in Ireland and for over a hundred years have been recorded by a line of such faithful transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T. Crofton Crocker, Lady Wild, Mother of Oscar Wilde, Douglas Hyde, and W.B. Yeats. Brought to notice by the modern movement, this body of myth has been carefully collected and studied,

Starting point is 02:26:43 and its salient features reproduced in the work of later figures like Yates, J.M. Syng, A.E., Lady Gregory, Patrick Collum, James Stevens, and their colleagues. Whilst on the whole, more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such folklore and its consciously artistic counterparts contain much that falls truly within the domain of cosmic horror. Tales of burels in sunken churches beneath haunted lakes. Accounts of death heralding banshees and sinister changelings. Ballads of spectres and the unholy creatures of the wraths.

Starting point is 02:27:21 All these have their poignant and definite shivers and make a strong and distinctive element in weird literature. Despite homely grotesqueness, and absolute naivety, there is genuine nightmare in the class of narrative represented by the yarn of T. Coquine, who in punishment for his wildlife, was ridden all night by Hydeus corpse that demanded Buryo and drove him from churchyard to churchyard, as the dead rose up loathomely in each one, and refused to accommodate the newcomer with a birth.

Starting point is 02:27:52 Yates, undoubtedly the greatest figure of the Irish Revival, if not the greatest of all living poets, has accomplished notable things both in original work and in the codification of old legends. End of Section 9. Section 10 of Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visitlibrivox.org.

Starting point is 02:28:25 Read by Pieternater. Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips, Lovecraft. Section 10, The Modern Masters. Section 10 of Supernatural Horror and Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This Legamos recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose. Read by Piotr Natter. The Modern Masters, Part 1. The best horror tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type,

Starting point is 02:28:54 possess a naturalness, convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skillful, intent of appeal quite beyond comparison with anything in the Gothic work of a century or more ago. Technique, craftsmanship, experience and psychological knowledge have advanced tremendously with the passing years, so that much of the older work seems naive and artificial, redeemed when redeemed at all, only by a genius which conquers heavy limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated romance, full of false motivation and investing every conceiving, event with a counterfeit significance and carelessly inclusive glamour, is now confined to lighter and more whimsical phases of supernatural writing.

Starting point is 02:29:41 Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by those consistency and perfect fidelity to nature, except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of fantasy, with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualization of a delicately exotic world, of unreality, beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen, if it but happen in true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain. This, at least, is the dominant tendency, though of course many great contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the flashy postures of immature romanticism, or into bits

Starting point is 02:30:24 of the equally empty and absurd jargon of pseudoscientific occultism, now at one of its periodic high tides. Of living creators of cosmic fear, raised to its most artistic pitch, few, if any, can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Macon, author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Macon, a general man of letters and master of an exquisitely the lyrical and expressive prose style has perhaps put more conscious effort into his picaresque chronicles of clemendy, his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and spirit translations, and above all his memorable epic of the

Starting point is 02:31:13 sensitive aesthetic mind, the hill of dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author's own, and lives a dream life in the Roman city of Iscasilurum, now shrank to the relics-strewn village of Kerylion on Ask. But the fact remains that his powerful horror material of the 90s and earlier 1900s stands alone in its class and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary reform. Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage, linked to keen youthful memories of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative life of rare beauty, intensity and historic background.

Starting point is 02:32:01 He has absorbed the medieval mystery of dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all things, including the Catholic faith. He has yielded it, likewise, to the spell of the Britann Roman life, which once surged over his native region and finds strange magic in the fortified camps desolated pavements fragments of statues and kindred things which tell of the day when classicism reigned and Latin was the language of the country a young American poet Frank Belnaplong as well summarized this dreamers rich endowments and wizardry of expression in the sonnet on reading Arthur Macon

Starting point is 02:32:42 Reader's note reading of the poem omitted because it is still under copyright. End of Reader's note. Of Mr. Macken's horror tales, the most famous is perhaps the Great God Pan, 1894, which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young woman, through surgery of the brain cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous deity of nature and becomes an idiot in consequence dying less than a year later. years afterward a strange, ominous and foreign-looking child named Helen

Starting point is 02:33:19 Vogan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales and haunts the woods in unaccountable fashion a little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of someone or something he spies with her and a young girl comes to a terrible end in similar

Starting point is 02:33:35 fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman rural deities of the place as sculpted in antique fragments. After another lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in society, drives her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable paintings of which Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide amongst the men of her acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dance of vice in London, where even the

Starting point is 02:34:07 most callous degenerates are shocked at her enormities. Through the clever comparing of notes, on the part of those who have had word of her at various stages of her career, this woman is discovered to be the girl Helen Vogan, who is the child, by no mortal father, of the young woman on whom the brain experiment was made.

Starting point is 02:34:27 She is a daughter of Hydeus Pan himself, and, at the last, is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of form, involving changes of sex, and a descent to the most primal manifestations of the life principle. But the charm of the tale,

Starting point is 02:34:43 is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following fully the precise order, in which Mr. Macon unfolds his gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis. But in the malign witchery of the tale as a whole, these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to repeat the words of one of the characters. It is too incredible, too monstrous, such things can never be in this quiet world. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.

Starting point is 02:35:31 Less famous and less complex in plot than the Great God Pan, but definitely finer in atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly disquieting chronicle called the white people, whose central portion purports to be the diary or notes of a little girl whose nurse has introduced her to some of the forbidden magic and soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-cult. The cult, whose whispered lore, was handed down long lines of peasantry throughout Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth a knight, one by one, to meet in black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies of the Witches Sabbath. Mr. Mackin's narrative, a triumph of skillful selectiveness and restraint,

Starting point is 02:36:18 accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle, introducing allusions to strange nymphs, dolls, vulas, white-green and scarlet ceremonies, aclo-letters, kian language, Mao games, and the like. The rights learned by the nurse from her witch-grandmother are taught to the child by the time she is three years. old, and her artless accounts of the dangerous secret revelations possess a lurking terror generously mixed with pathos. Evil charms, well known to anthropologists, are described with juvenile naivety, and finally there comes a winter afternoon journey into the old Welsh hills, performed under an imaginative spell which lands to the wild scenery and added weirdness,

Starting point is 02:37:08 strangeness and suggestion of grotesque sentience. The detail of the details of the details of the of this journey are given with marvelous vividness and form to the keen critic a masterpiece of fantastic writing with almost unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration at length the child whose age is then 13 comes upon a cryptic and banefully beautiful thing in the midst of the dark and inaccessible wood in the end horror overtakes her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in the prologue but she poised poisons herself in time. Like the mother of Helen Wogan in the great god Pan, she has

Starting point is 02:37:49 seen that frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood beside the cryptic thing she found, and that thing, a widely luminous statue of Roman workmanship about which dire medieval rumors had clustered, is affrightedly hammered into dust by the searchers. In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose merit is a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson Manor, occur certain tales which perhaps represent the high-water mark of Macken's skill as a terror river. Here we find in its most artistic form a favorite weird conception of the authors. The notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwells subterraneously

Starting point is 02:38:36 that squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves and the little people, and whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances and occasional substitution of strange dark changelings for normal infants. This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode entitled The Novel of the Black Seal, where a professor, having discovered a singular identity between certain characters scrolled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a prehistoric Black Seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery, which leads him to unknown and terrible things. A queer passage in the ancient geographersolinos, a series of mysterious disappearances in the lonely

Starting point is 02:39:25 reaches of Wales, a strange idiot son born to a rural mother after a fright in which her inmost faculties were shaken, all these things suggest to the professor a hideous connection and a condition revolting to any friend and respecter of the human race. He hires the idiot boy, who jubbers strangely at times in a repulsive hissing voice, and is subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after such a seizure in the professor's study by night, disquieting odors and evidence of unnatural presences are found. And soon after that, the professor leaves a bulky document

Starting point is 02:40:03 and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy and soon. strange terror in his heart. He never returns, but beside a fantastic stone in the wild country are found his watch, money and ring, done up with cadgoth in a parchment bearing the same terrible characters as those on the black Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh mountains. The bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas. Professor Gregg, from the mass evidence presented by the Welsh disappearances, the rock inscription, the accounts of ancient geographers, and the Black Seal, has decided that

Starting point is 02:40:43 the frightful race of dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity and wide former diffusion still dwell beneath the hills of unfrequented whales. Further research has unridled the message of the Black Seal, and proved that the idiot boy, son of some father more terrible than mankind, is the air of monstrous memories and possibilities. That strange night, in the study, the professor invoked the awful transmutation of the hills by the aid of the black seal and aroused in the hybrid

Starting point is 02:41:14 idiot the horrors of his shocking paternity. He saw the body swell and become distended as a blather, while the face blackened. And then the supreme effects of the invocation appeared, and Professor Greg knew the stark frenzy

Starting point is 02:41:31 of cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the abysmal gulfs of abnormality, that he had opened, and went forth into the wild hills, prepared and resigned. He would meet the unthinkable little people, and his document ends with a rational observation. If unhappily I do not return from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the awfulness of my fate. Also in The Three Impostors is the Novel of the White Powder, which approaches the absolute culmination of loathsome fright.

Starting point is 02:42:06 Francis Lester, a young law student nervously worn out by seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled by an old apothecary not too careful about the state of his drugs. The substance, it later turns out, is an unusual salt which time and varying temperature have accidentally changed to something very strange and terrible. Nothing less, in short, than the medieval Venum Sabati, whose consumption at the horrible orgies of the Witches Sabbath, gave rise to shocking transformation and, if injudiciously used, to unutterable consequences. Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder in a glass of water after meals, and at first seems substantially benefited.

Starting point is 02:42:53 Gradually, however, his improved spirits take the form of dissipation. He is absent from home a great deal, and appears to have undergone a repellent psychological change. one day an odd livid spot appears on his right hand and he afterward returns to his seclusion finally keeping himself shut within his room and admitting none of the household the doctor calls for an interview and departs in a palsy of horror saying that he can do no more in that house

Starting point is 02:43:25 two weeks later the patient's sister walking outside sees a monstrous thing at this secret window and servants report that food left at the locked door is no longer touched. Samons at the door bring only a sound of shuffling and a demand in a thick, gardling voice to be let alone. At last an awful happening is reported by a shuddering housemaid. The ceiling of the room, below Lesters, is stained with a hideous black fluid, and a pool of visit abomination has dripped to the bed beneath.

Starting point is 02:43:59 Dr. Hubbard, now persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the youngsman door and strikes again and again with an iron bar at the blasphemous semi-living thing he finds there. It is a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing. Burning points like ice shine out of its midst, and before it is dispatched, it tries to lift what might have been an arm. soon afterward the physician unable to endure the memory of what he has beheld dies at sea while bound for a new life in america mr macken returns to the demoniac little people in the red hand and the shining pyramid and in the terror a wartime story he treats with very potent mystery the effect of man's modern repudiation of spirituality on the beasts of the world which are thus led to question his supremacy and to unite for his extermination.

Starting point is 02:45:05 Of Atmos delicacy and passing from mere horror into true mysticism is the great return, a story of the growl, also a product of the war period. Too well known to need description here is the tale of the Bauman, which, taken for authentic narration, gave rise to the widespread legend of the angels of Mons. ghosts of the old English archers of Cressy and Ajancourt, who fought in 1914 beside the hard-pressed ranks of England's glorious old contemptibles. Less intense than Mr. Macon,

Starting point is 02:45:41 in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world, constantly pressing upon ours, is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and, and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius, there can be no dispute, for no one has even approached skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity, with which he records the overtones of strangeness

Starting point is 02:46:15 in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humorless psychological description above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual

Starting point is 02:46:58 objects and those excited by the play of the imagination. Mr. Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical didacticism, occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of Benignan's supernaturalism, and a too-free use of the trade jargon of modern occultism. A fault of his more serious efforts is that diffuseness and long-windedness, which results from an excessively elaborate attempt, under the handicap of a somewhat bold and journalistic style, devoid of intrinsic magic, color, and vitality, to visualize precise sensations and nuances of uncanny suggestions. But in spite of all this, the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level,

Starting point is 02:47:46 and evoke, as does nothing else in literature, an odd convinced sense of the imminence, of strange spiritual spheres of entities. The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter, sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned the willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognized by a pair of idle voyagers.

Starting point is 02:48:19 Here art and restrained in narrative, reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note. Another amazingly potent, though less artistically finished tale, is the Wendigo, where we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest demon, about which Northwood's lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In an episode in a lodging house, we behold frightful

Starting point is 02:48:58 presences summoned out of black space by a sorcerer. And the listener tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about an old house where a leopard died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt, all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches

Starting point is 02:49:47 of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible and atmosphere reigns untrammeled. John Silence, physician extraordinary, is a book of five related tales, through which a single character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of the popular and conventional detective story atmosphere, or Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employed their remarkable power to aid worthy fellow men in difficulty. These narratives, contains some of the author's best work and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening tale, a psychical invasion, relates what befell a sensitive author in a house, once a scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of fiends was exercised.

Starting point is 02:50:37 Ancient sorceries, perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an almost hypnotically vivid account of an old French town, where once the unholy sabbat was kept by all the people in the form of cats. In the Nemesis of Fire a hideous elemental is evoked by new spilled blood, whilst secret worship tells of a German school where satanism holds sway and where long afterward an evil aura remained. The camp of the dock is a werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralization and professional occultism. To settle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror tales, yet possibly more truly artistic, in an absolute sense, are such delicate fantasies as Jimbo or The Centaur. Mr. Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and pulpitant

Starting point is 02:51:28 approach to the inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havoc with the conventional barriers between reality and imagination. Un-exiled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision is Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsony, whose stales and short plays form an almost unique element in our literature. Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsony stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty and pledged to eternal warfare against the coarseness and ugliness of durnal reality.

Starting point is 02:52:14 His point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the literature of any period, as sensitive as poe to dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details, and far better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style, based on the prose of the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly everybody of myth and legend, within the circle of European culture, producing a composite or eclectic cycle of fantasy in which Eastern color, Hellenic form, Teutonic somberness, and Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each sustains and supplements the rest without sacrifice of perfect congruity and homogeneity.

Starting point is 02:52:57 In most cases, Dunesanis lands are fabulous, beyond the east or at the edge of the world. His system of original personal and place names, with roots drawn from classical, oriental and other sources, is a marvel of versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination, as one may see from subspecimens as Argimenez, Betmora, Port Arnese, Camorak, Illuriel, or Sardatryon. Beauty, rather than terror, is the keynote of Dune's work. He loves the vivid green of jade and of copper domes, the delicate flash of sunset on the ivory minarets of impossible dream cities. Humor and irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle cynicism

Starting point is 02:53:44 and modify what might otherwise possess a naive intensity. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality, there are occasional touches of cosmic fright, which come well within the authentic tradition. Dune Sani loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous things and incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In the Book of Wonder, we read of Clow-Claw, the gigantic spider idol, which does not always stay at home, of what the sphinx feared in the forest.

Starting point is 02:54:19 Of Slith, the thief who jumps over the edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it. Of the anthropophagus gibelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure. of the Gnolls who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal, of the city of Never, and the eyes that watch in the under pits, and of the kindred things of darkness. A dreamer's tales tells of the mystery that sent forth old men from Bethmore in the desert,

Starting point is 02:54:50 of the vast gate of Perondaris that was carved from a single piece of ivory, and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose captain cursed the crew, and paid calls on nasty-looking isles, new risen from the sea, with low-thatched cottages, having evil, obscure windows. Many of Dunesany's short place are replete with spectral fear.

Starting point is 02:55:15 In The Gods of the Mountain, seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoy ease and honor in a city of worshippers, until they hear that the real idols are missing from their wanted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dust,

Starting point is 02:55:31 is reported to them. Rock should not walk in the evening. And at last as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good dancers ought to be. Then things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity in the day outraged. But mere plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play. the incidents and developments are those of a supreme master so that the whole forms one of the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama but to literature in general a knight at an inn tells of four thieves who have stolen the emerald eye of klesh a monstrous hindu god they lure to their room and succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are on their track but in the night mash comes gropingly

Starting point is 02:56:31 for his eye, and having gained it and departed, calls each of the despoilers out into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In the laughter of the gods, there is a doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a ghostly lieutenantist heard only by those about to die, confer Alice's spectral harpsichord in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, whilst the Queen's enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus, which a vengeful princess invites her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in denial to drown them. But no amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunson's pervasive charm. His prismatic cities and unheard-of rites are touched with a sureness which only mastery can engender,

Starting point is 02:57:20 and we thrill with a sense of actual participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative, he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory, so that we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a poet as well. At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsony, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes-James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on medieval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmas

Starting point is 02:58:05 tide, has become, by slow degrees, a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank, and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples. The art of Dr. James is by no means hafazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macawar composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modern period, in order to approach closely the reader's sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent, since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited.

Starting point is 02:58:46 And finally, the technical patois of occultism or pseudoscience ought carefully to be avoided, lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry. Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of everyday events, he introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually, relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the dose relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents,

Starting point is 02:59:29 thus being able to utilize very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and coloring. A favorite scene for the James tale is some censured cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in that field. Sly humorous vignettes and bits of life-like genre portraiture and characterization are often to be found in Dr. James' narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition.

Starting point is 03:00:12 For where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, The average James ghost is lean, dwarfish and hairy, a sluggish hellish night abomination, midway betwixt beast and man, and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more eccentric composition, a role of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings, and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and settle

Starting point is 03:00:53 suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers. He is an artist in incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere, and reaches the emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of course, with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks, as well as its advantages, and many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which writers like Macken are careful to build up with words and scenes, but only a few of the tales are open to the charge of tameness. Generally, the laconic unfolding of abnormal events in a droid order is ample sufficient to produce the desired effect of cumulative horror.

Starting point is 03:01:35 The short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections, entitled, respectively, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, more ghost stories of an antiquary, a thin ghost and others, and a warning to the curious. There is also a delightful juvenile fantasy, the Five Jars, which has its spectral adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material,

Starting point is 03:02:00 it is hard to select a favorite or specially typical tale, though each reader will no doubt have such preferences as his temperament may determine. Count Magnus is a sure of that. one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion. Mr. Raxhall is an English traveller of the middle 19th century, sojourning in Sweden to secure material for a book. Becoming interested in the ancient family of Delagardy, near the village of Rabak, he studies its records and finds particular fascination in the builder of the existing banner house, one Count Magnus,

Starting point is 03:02:37 of whom strange and terrible things are whispered. the count who flourished early in the seventeenth century was a stern landlord and famous for his severity toward poachers and delinquent tenants his cruel punishments were bywords and there were dark rumours of influences which even survived his interment in the great mausoleum he built near the church as the case of the two peasants who hunted on his preserves one night a century after his death there were hideous screams in the woods and near the tomb of count magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a great door next morning the priest founded to men one a maniac and the other dead with the flesh of his face sucked from the bones mr raxall hears all these tales and stumbles on more guarded references to a black pilgrimage once taken by the Count. A pilgrimage to Khorazim in Palestine, one of the cities denounced by our Lord in the Scriptures, and in which old priests say that Antichrist is to be born. No one dares to hint just what the black pilgrimage was, or what strange being or thing the Count brought back as a companion. Meanwhile, Mr. Raxall is increasingly anxious to explore the mausoleum of Count Magnus,

Starting point is 03:03:55 and finally secures permission to do so. In the case, company of a deacon. He finds several monuments and three copper sarcophagi, one of which is the counts. Around the edge of this latter are several bands of engraved scenes, including a singular and hideous delineation of a pursuit. The pursuit of a frantic man, through a forest by a squat muffled figure with a devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall, cloaked man on a neighboring hillock. The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks. one of which is lying open on the floor, reminding the traveller of a metallic clash he heard the day before

Starting point is 03:04:35 when passing the mausoleum and wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus. His fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Raxall pays the mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds another padlock unfastened. The next day, his last in Rabak, he again goes alone to bid the long dead count farewell. Once more, queerly impelled to utter a whimsical wish for a meeting with the buried nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that only one of the padlocks remains on the great sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock drops noisily to the floor,

Starting point is 03:05:13 and there comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then the monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise, and Mr. Raxhall flees in panic fear without refastening the door of the mausoleum. During his return to England, the traveller feels a curious and easiness about his fellow passengers on the canal boat, which he employs for the earlier stages. Cloaked figures make him nervous, and he has a sense of being watched and followed. Of 28 persons, whom he counts, only 26 appear at meals, and the missing two are always a tall, cloaked man and a shorter muffled figure. Completing his water travel at Harwick, Mr. Raxhall takes full. frankly to fright in a closed carriage, but sees two cloaked figures at a cross-road.

Starting point is 03:06:01 Finally he lodges at a small house in a village and spends the time making frantic notes. On the second morning he is found dead, and during the inquest seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never again inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later, his manuscript is discovered in a forgotten cupboard. In the treasure of Abbot Thomas, a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some Renaissance-painted windows, and thereby discovers a sentryed hoard of gold in a niche halfway down a well, in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafted depositor had set a guardian over that treasure, and something in the black well twines its arms around the searcher's neck,

Starting point is 03:06:46 in such a manner that the quest is abandoned and the clergyman sent for. Each night after that, the discoverer feels a stealthy presence and detects a horrible odor of mold outside the door of his hotel room. Till finally, the clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the stone at the mouth of the treasure vault in the well, out of which something had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of old about Thomas's gold. As he completes his work, the cleric observes a curious toad-like carving on the ancient wellhead, with the Latin motto, Depositum Custody, keep that which is committed to V. Other notable James tales are

Starting point is 03:07:28 the stalls of Barchester Cathedral, in which a grotesque carving comes curiously to life to avenge the secret and subtle murder of an old dean by his ambitious successor. O whistle and I'll come to V, which tells of the horror summoned by a strange metal whistle found in a medieval church ruin,

Starting point is 03:07:47 and an episode of cathedral history, where the dismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose lurking demons spreads panic and pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most shocking form, and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome province.

Starting point is 03:08:11 For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror, provides an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, has developed both through the fatigued reaction of occultists and religious fundamentalists, against materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy, by such enlarged vistas and broken barriers, as modern science has given us,

Starting point is 03:08:46 with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At the present moment, the favoring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage. Since there is unquestionably more cordiality shown toward weird writings than when, 30 years ago, the best of Arthur Macken's work fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure 90s. Ambrose Beers, almost unknown in his own time, has now reached some of the best of his own time, has now reached something like general recognition. Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either direction. In any case, an approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist,

Starting point is 03:09:28 and while we may justly expect a further subtilization of technique, we have no reason to think that the general position of the spectral in literature will be altered. It is a narrow, though essential, branch of human expression, and will chiefly appeal, as always, to a limited audience, keen special sensibilities. Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet Kusel declared the dark theme a positive handicap, radiant with beauty, the cap of the Ptolemies was carved of Onyx.

Starting point is 03:10:06 End of Section 10. End of The Supernatural Horror in Literature by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Classic Audiobook Collection - Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft ~ Full Audiobook [horror]

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