Gothic Lovecraft Read online

  GOTHIC LOVECRAFT

  Edited by Lynne Jamneck & S. T. Joshi

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press and Cycatrix Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 Jason V Brock

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  Introduction © 2016 by Lynne Jamneck & S. T. Joshi

  Cover Art and Standalone B&W Illustrations (including the signature page in the Deluxe Edition) © 2016 by Jason V Brock

  Contributor Photos © 2016 by the respective contributors unless otherwise noted (Joshi image by Emily Marija Kurmis);

  Used by kind permission.

  Book Design © 2016 by JaSunni Productions, LLC

  The works contained herein are all unpublished and/or original to this anthology unless noted otherwise:

  “The Shadow over Lear” © 2016 by Donald R. Burleson

  “The Revelation at the Abbey” © 2016 by Don Webb

  “Old Goodman Brown” © 2016 by Jonathan Thomas

  “Square of the Inquisition” © 2016 by Lois H. Gresh

  “The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner” © 2016 by John Shirley

  “A Yuletide Carol” © 2016 by Mollie L. Burleson

  “Curse of the House of Usher” © 2016 by Donald Tyson

  “The Rolling of Old Thunder” © 2016 by Mark Howard Jones

  “Always a Castle?” © 2016 by Nancy Kilpatrick

  “As Red as Red” © 2010 by Caitlín R. Kiernan;

  First published in Haunted Legends,

  edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas (Tor, 2010)

  “Four Arches” © 2016 by Robert S. Wilson

  “The Old Schoolhouse” © 2016 by Gwyneth Jones

  “Dream House” © 2016 by Orrin Grey

  “The Unknown Chambers” © 2016 by Lynda E. Rucker

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction (unless noted otherwise); any and all similarities to the contrary are purely coincidental. Not to be reproduced in any format—electronic, print, or photographic—without express written consent from the Publisher, except for brief excerpts (shorter than two paragraphs) used in reviews.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  The Shadow over Lear

  The Revelation at the Abbey

  Old Goodman Brown

  Square of the Inquisition

  The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner

  A Yuletide Carol

  Curse of the House of Usher

  The Rolling of Old Thunder

  Always a Castle?

  As Red as Red

  Four Arches

  The Old Schoolhouse

  Dream House

  The Unknown Chambers

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  One may be forgiven for at first not conceiving H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction as particularly “Gothic,” at least not in the traditional, English sense of the word. Many of the genre’s stock tropes do not immediately come to mind when considering stories like “The Call of Cthulhu,”

  “The Color out of Space,”

  “The Dunwich Horror,” or “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Instead of imposing castles we are embedded within decaying fishing villages, rural farmlands, or sea voyages to mysterious islands. There’s no male posturing with the sole intention of rescuing a virgin-in-waiting; not a whiff of a Byronic hero—though to be fair, the often-cited description of the Romantic poet by one of his mistresses as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” can surely be applied to more than one of Lovecraft’s protagonists (ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you Herbert West).

  Nonetheless, despite the enormous popularity of Lovecraft’s fiction today, his work remains difficult to categorize. While he may have written in a Gothic vein— haunted spaces and places, haunted people, found things, and insanity—his subject matter differs from those writers we traditionally associate with Gothic fiction.

  Lovecraft dutifully read the founding writers of the Gothic tradition—Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1764), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk, 1764), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818), and Charles Robert Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820)—for his pioneering historical study “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), although it becomes evident that his enthusiasm for much of this writing was less than robust. And yet, for one who so was so respectful of the long heritage of weird fiction, it would have been difficult for him to have escaped the influence of Gothic fiction altogether.

  And so, while we do not encounter the standard vampires, witches, or werewolves of Gothic fiction, we see Lovecraft expanding upon and in some cases radically transforming these tropes to make them his own. For

  Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne was a key link to the Gothic era, and “The Shunned House” could be considered his rewriting of The House of the Seven Gables—and its innovative psychic vampire is dispatched not by a cross or a stake through the heart, but by quantities of sulfuric acid. “The Dreams in the Witch House” is an ingenious adaptation of the witch motif, fused with highly advanced speculations about hyperspace drawn from the science fiction of his own day.

  But it is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward that constitutes Lovecraft’s grandest evocation of Gothic motifs. Initially broaching the standard Gothic theme (found in such works as Melmoth the Wanderer and William Godwin’s St. Leon) of the quest for eternal life, the novel goes on to weave a tapestry of Gothic themes—the search for all-encompassing knowledge, psychic possession, the power of spells and incantations found in forbidden books, and much else besides.

  It was, however, in the Dark Romanticism of the Victorian era that Lovecraft found his closest Gothic predecessor in Edgar Allan Poe, of whom Lovecraft was a self-proclaimed acolyte. “The Rats in the Walls,” for example, is very much a Poe-esque story; it is, in effect, his “Fall of the House of Usher,” updated to incorporate the horror of Darwinian regression upon the path of evolution; it is also a story that employs several obvious Gothic tropes that strongly echo Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

  Notwithstanding, where P
oe centered his focus on the degeneracy of the human mind, Lovecraft opted instead for viewing madness as a condition imposed upon humanity largely as a result of our woefully inadequate knowledge about the world in which we live. This madness is generally the result of a confrontation with that which is not us—the totally, utterly alien. Lovecraft’s emotional responses are projected outward, into the world at large. Instead of a dilapidated, haunted house, we are hurled into a violent universe that is obscure, nameless, hostile, and entirely indifferent to our existence.

  Gothic Lovecraft gathers together fourteen stories that address Lovecraft’s Gothic sensibilities and present them in ways that uncomfortably crack our often romanticized notions of the genre. In “The Shadow over Lear” by Donald R. Burleson, we are given disturbing intimations concerning the true origins the king’s daughters and their mother in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Don Webb’s “The Revelation at the Abbey” and “The Rolling of Old Thunder” by Mark Howard Jones confront us with the dangers of knowledge contained in Old Books (and body-snatching!), and the havoc that ensues when knowledge is used haphazardly. Found manuscripts, as in the classic Gothic texts, is a theme Lovecraft often employed in his fiction and finds strong resonance in modern-day culture, perhaps most obviously in how it comments on society’s interpretations of religious texts.

  Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “As Red as Red” is as much a vampire story as it is a werewolf story as it is a ghost story. In the true Gothic and Lovecraftian sense, the story is pointedly influenced by its setting, an ever-encompassing, sometimes oppressive background that plays a pivotal part in the delivery of ominous events.

  Nancy Kilpatrick’s “Always a Castle?” and “The Old Schoolhouse” by Gwyneth Jones confronts us with our true selves, the masks we wear and the terrible things we do not only to others, but also to ourselves. In “Old Goodman Brown,” Jonathan Thomas takes us back to the Salem witch trials and evokes both Hawthorne and Lovecraft, a match made in heaven—or hell, depending on your point of view. John Shirley’s “The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner” expands on the original, already cosmically inclined poem by employing Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself as protagonist to reveal the unknown details of the poet’s original lost-at-sea epic, a story in which the dark depths the sea and stars both play a primary role.

  Donald Tyson’s “Curse of the House of Usher” sees Roderick Usher visited by Randolph Carter, and the madness of Poe’s original story taken to new heights, while in Mollie

  L. Burleson’s “A Yuletide Carol,” Ebenezer Scrooge is whisked to Dunwich, where a spirit reveals to him his true purpose. “Square of the Inquisition” by Lois H. Gresh sees the power of words deliver the tortured and oppressed—though deliverance may not always be exactly what we anticipate it to be. Robert

  S. Wilson presents in “Four Arches” an unsettling modern tale infused with claustrophobia that reveals Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, lying in wait in unexpected places. Orrin Grey’s “Dream House” is a feverish story that follows a writer’s irrational urge to discover the truth about a barely remembered TV show and the conclusion that sometimes, some stories are better left alone. Finally, Lynda Rucker’s “The Unknown Chambers” follows a researcher’s efforts to uncover the mysterious life of an obscure writer and find his strange and bizarre history leading her to a place she had been seeking all along.

  Lovecraft has been characterized as not being a particularly humanistic writer; it is said that he eschews the highly wrought emotions of Gothic initiators like Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Clara Reeve, his “Yog-Sothothery” bypassing the Romantics’, well, romance. While this may be true to some extent, let us not forget those elements of the early Gothic romances that so often crop up in Lovecraft’s stories, prominently so the ancestral curse and the found (thing) manuscript. Even as far back as Clara Reeve, we can find similarities in the way both Reeve and Lovecraft aimed at balancing realism and the fantastic as a means for creating more believable narratives. As for the Romantics, we have already noted some similarities between the quintessential Lovecraftian madman and that most famous of Romantic poets. Moreover, I dare anyone not to find resemblances between these same madmen and Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein.

  Lovecraft’s work is indeed as humanist as that of the Gothics, in some ways perhaps even more so. In a scientifically burgeoning context, Lovecraft took a human perspective and slanted it at an entirely rational and scientific angle that, perhaps uncannily, rendered his vision of the world as one riddled with terror. The threat in Lovecraft remains the unknown, but it is the unknown as presented by reality, not by superstition. Unlike the vampire and the werewolf, Lovecraft’s monsters were never human. It is a Gothic perspective from the opposite side of the shadowy coin—both are part of the same thing, yet we see things differently when we consider them individually.

  —Lynne Jamneck

  S. T. Joshi

  The Shadow over Lear

  Donald R. Burleson

  On the coast of Britain where the land drops off into the frothy waves and France lies like a nebulous rumor across the waters, the fog gathers from the sea the way dark thoughts gather in a troubled mind. Wild, wet fingers of mist and low-lying cloud caress the bleached stones of the cliffs of Dover as if eager to imbue the solid earth with the delirium of the ancient sea, to whisper timeless secrets known only in the court of Poseidon and not well suited to be spoken on the land.

  High on a giddy prominence in this setting there once stood the castle of the Earl of Kent, and high in a sky-flung tower of that gray edifice stood Kent himself, gazing out upon the sea-fog, lost in thought. He and his servants would later this day mount up for their ride inland to be with his master Lear, King of Britain, in whose sprawling, angled castle important matters were to be settled by royal fiat.

  In truth, Kent sometimes feared for the mind of the aging monarch. Four score years had in some ways not been kind to Lear. True, he retained a certain sinewy robustness remarkable for his years, but at times of late his meandering mind outran even the vagaries common to the petulance of age. This but sealed Kent’s resolve, though, to be caring and attentive to his noble king. But he had presentiments about the days to come.

  “Bring ‘round the horses,” he called to his servants in the hall. “We leave for London within the hour.”

  In the great hall of the royal castle, Kent stood aside watching the company that awaited Lear’s entrance. Near the empty throne the three daughters stood in expectant attendance, though no flourish of trumpets had yet announced the approach of their father. Kent would have liked to think that the daughters adorned the throne as three opulent jewels might have adorned a crown, but this ambitious conceit readily applied only to the fair Cordelia, Lear’s youngest, whose face any man worthy of the name of man would have given much to kiss. For Goneril, the eldest, and for Regan, the second daughter, it was otherwise. Kent could hardly put it straight in his mind what bothered him about the two women. It was something about their eyes, which seemed oddly protruded and watery-looking—Kent could swear increasingly so in recent days, though this must be some liverish morbidity goading his imagination. Yet there was something about the way they moved sometimes, too, that made his skin crawl.

  The men looked normal enough—Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, and Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall—standing over there beside their somehow strange duchesses, awaiting the drama to come. Off in a corner, Cordelia’s two suitors, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, stood studiously avoiding each other’s eyes. The only other people present, besides servants, were the Earl of Gloucester and his son Edmund, who was his child by a woman not his wife. Gloucester’s legitimate son Edgar was not present. There was a static sort of tension in the air, a tension that seemed heightened rather than relieved by the awaited flourish of horns and the entrance of the aged Lear, with attendants.

  Kent rushed forward to greet his master. “Your majesty’s health and happines
s.”

  Lear nodded to him, seated himself on the throne, and cast his gaze about the group of faces. “My family and friends, I gather you today for a matter that has been much on my mind. I am grown old and weary of the cares of state, to the extent indeed that if I cannot divest myself of age, I wish at least to divest myself of care, though retaining the title of king.”

  “Every inch a king,” Kent said.

  “Thank you, my old friend,” Lear replied, and went on. “Besides my title I will retain the right to dwell with my daughters in turn, a month at a time, and to keep a train of a hundred knights to attend me. Now, as you all know, the holdings of my kingdom are vast, and their disposition is no small matter. I wish to divide that kingdom in three parts, though not necessarily three equal parts, depending on what professions of love my daughters find it in their hearts to make to me. Consider your answers well, my children, for your fortunes depend on them. What say you, Goneril?”

  The eldest daughter stepped forward and bowed. Something about the dark and vacuous look of her eyes and the slippery way her body moved made Kent’s stomach lurch. She walked, he thought, with something almost like the motion of a frog.

  “My dearest father, my king,” Goneril began, in a voice that Kent found faintly repellent, wondering if Lear and the others found it so as well, “my love for you is as boundless as the arch of heaven that overlooks your domain. I love you more than I love my own life. You have my heart, and all of it, and more besides, you have my very soul, which I gladly give. No daughter ever loved a father more.”

  While Kent was reflecting on how revoltingly insincere this sounded to anyone with ears to hear, the king began his sadly predictable response. “My dearest Goneril, my no less esteemed Albany, I make you lord and lady of one third of my property, from this boundary to this”—he pointed to a sketch of the kingdom—”and may it bring you joy and contentment. And how speaks Regan?”