He wants slowly to build up a sense of increasing revelation of the dreadful truth, but already by the fourth paragraph (p. You can see Lovecraft trying to build up the whole "sub-mythos" of this new story, but he struggles with his materials. You've got the scholar in the remote hills with folkloric interests, the mysterious black stone with hieroglyphic markings, and even a study with a bust in it - in Machen's story a bust of Pitt figures in a loathsome incident, but here the bust is of Milton.ģ.I've said recently that Lovecraft's writing can seem "laborious," and the first paragraphs of this story will bear out that generalization. Here he gets at my interest in America before the changes brought by and after the Second World War (including, but not limited to, the "old weird America").Ģ.It's also Lovecraft's Machen's "Black Seal" story. Some observations relating to the first few pages:ġ.This story bears out my contention that a "Lovecraftian" story is going to develop a sense of place more deliberately than is typical for such fiction this is Lovecraft's Pluto story but it's also his Vermont story. What with all the great stuff from Pluto lately, I'm going to reread HPL's Pluto story, "The Whisperer in Darkness," which I've always liked but I'll try not to make a bunch of special pleading for it. Thus, I think the ending works very well on that level that it not only resolves the question of the whisperer being an impostor, but of what has happened to Akeley, and of the game of cat-and-mouse which is being played out, not necessarily by the aliens themselves, but quite possibly by Nyarlathotep, perhaps for his (its?) own amusement. A touch of the conte cruel there, I think, and certainly in line with the sardonic humor Nyarlathotep displays elsewhere in Lovecraft's work. or at least the part of him he saw was actually Akeley, or a part of Akeley. it also adds a touch of grim, ironic humor in that (in a sense), Wilmarth was talking to Akeley. I feel that the last line was not only the clincher for all that had gone before - something which, at that point, was scarcely needed - but added the particularly horrific touch concerning the nature of that final confirmation: "For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance-or identity-were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley." Without being baldly stated, this puts a different, and rather gruesome, spin on the bit about Nyarlathotep putting on the "waxen mask", etc. On that last point I will, very slightly, disagree with you, I think. The phonograph record, the footprints, etc, all work to build a convincingly eerie atmosphere in the early stages, and later the false Akeley's passing revelations about the nature of its race and the vast multi dimensional reality of which we are a part helps in establishing a more cosmic background against which these events can take place. Where the story really works I think is in its hints and implications. Sort of like a far future society that has mastered hyperspace travel but still uses rocket jets. That these clunky cannisters are expected to make the journey beyond the edge of known space and the inconceivable gulfs beyond just doesn't ring true to me. I also found the notion of the brain jars to be incompatible with the generally advanced state of science and knowledge which the beings are said to possess. The aliens are reduced to too human a role (and rather bungling humans at that) to really work on the level of threat which Lovecraft seems to want. The effect is a subtler one, in that it relies not on providing a shock or surprise, but a gradual piling up of evidence to confirm what the reader has long since suspected to be the case, thus leaving no real outlet for avoiding the implications (both on the physical and emotional planes) of that fact. This is one of the many examples of what Henry Kuttner (if memory serves) rightly called HPL's "confirmational" rather than "revelational" endings. Incidentally, though, the ending was never intended to be particularly revelatory, as it is strongly indicated from the very first page of the story. The same can be said for "The Dunwich Horror" in that the Old Ones there are presented as having much too "human" motivations, and the concept of evil is made too simplistic as a result. It simply reduces them too much to be genuinely awe-inspiring, and that gravely detracts from the atmosphere of the story. The behavior of the aliens, for instance, is a serious drawback, as it is petty and, worse, inept (the telegram, for instance). My views on the story itself is that it is a wonderful, but seriously flawed, attempt.
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