The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) [ペーパーバック]

Having read the two previous collections it was a logical step to go on and get the third (and apparently final)one. So what to expect with this book? Some really good stuff and some really bad stuff (my opinion).

Various kinds of stories are gathered here, as was the case with the previous publications by Penguin; that is, there are some "macabre tales", "dreams and fantasies tales" and some "Great Old Ones tales".

"Polaris", the first story, really gave me a bad impression. It's a short piece but its worthiness is just as short. The second tale is not great either. Fortunately this goes up with the third "The Terrible Old Man," though it's nothing properly astounding.

One of the biggest stories in this collection (100 pages or so), namely "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the only Lovecraft story I did not finish after having started it. But this one is just too much. It's a dream tale, lots of beautiful imagery with flowery descriptions, weird names of people and towns and god knows what else, etc... etc... The problem is that its length is way too much for a tale of that kind. The fact that it's all a dream completely kills any kind of suspence or tension or expections: in a world where cats can jump off roofs to go behind the moon to gather is a world where you expect absolutely anything. And that's where the weak spot is. If anything can happen then you're just expecting anything and whatever happens is not surprising. So that is not your usual Lovecraft story; but I expect some readers may like that kind of thing; it's not bad it's just so incredibly long that in the end the potential power of such a tale is flattened entirely because of its unfit length and crowding stuff. I only read half of it but after that my interest was so lacking that I just found it useless to go, besides I had lost the thread of what was going on.

I would say this collection is slightly weaker than the two first ones. It's still worth getting if you like Lovecraft. I was just a bit disappointed by some stories in there that are really weak. Yet there are also some good surprises: "The Nameless City", a kind of pre-At the Mountains of Madness is a very interesting story; "In the Vault", however simple and classical it is, still is a pretty good tale.

I'd recommend you check out "The Call of Cthulhu" if you have never read any Lovecraft before and are interested in doing so. Otherwise this book is worth getting (even if some tales do suck).

PS: the footnotes and individual presentations on each story is as always very interesting and informative.

Following a fascinating introduction by editor S. T. Joshi, the contents of the book are these tales:
Polaris
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Terrible Old Man
The Tree
The Cats of Ulthar
From Beyond
The Nameless City
The Moon-Bog
The Other Gods
Hypnos
The Lurking Fear
The Unnamable
The Shunned House
The Horror at Red-Hook
In the Vault
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Silver Key
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Shadow Out of Time.

I chided S. T., at last year's WFC, for naming this book after what he thinks of as one of Lovecraft's worst stories. I guess he likes the title more than ye actual tale itself. He writes of it, in his notes: "'The Dreams in the Witch House' was written in February, 1932. HPL's working title was 'The Dreams of Walter Gilman,.' Stung by the rejection of AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS by Fanrsworth Wright of WEIRD TALES the previous summer, HPL refused to submit the tale to Wright, but August Derleth, in spite of his low opinion of the story (see HPL to Derleth, June 6, 1932: 'your reaction to my poor "Dreams in the Witch House" is, in kind, about what I expected--although I hardly thought the miserable mess was QUITE as bad as you found it." ...submitted it to Wright without HPL's knowledge or permission; it was accepted, appearing in WEIRD TALES for July 1833.
"The story is, as Fritz Leiber has demonstrated, HPL's ultimate modernization of a conventional myth (in this case, witchcraft) by means of modern science. Leiber notes that it is 'Lovecraft's most carefully worked out story of hyperspace-travel. Here (1) a rational foundation for such travel is set up; (2) hyperspace is visualized; and (3) a trigger for such travel is devised.' Nevertheless, the tale suffers from plot holes and florid prose and cannot be ranked among his better later efforts."
Perhaps. The one very curious matter to me is the conventional treatment of Nyarlathotep as the Black Man of Witches Sabot lore. This dark lord, this Crawling Chaos, is such a rich and wonderful creation that I loathed to see Him treated so clumsily in this story, where he has a mere walk-on role that adds nothing to plot structure or atmosphere.
Some of these tales are called Lovecraft's "Dreamland" stories, although only two or three of them actually occur within the Dreamlands -- the most interesting and delightful of which is the short novel, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which Lovecraft never revised for publication (it was left, unpublished, in manuscript at the time of his death, as was "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"). Here we have two tales set in mist-soaked Kingsport -- my favourite Lovecraftian town -- the racist "The Terrible Old Man" and the so peculiar "The Strange High-House in the Mist." "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" has the distinction of inspiring Brian Lumley to pen one of his interesting and entertaining Lovecraftian novellas ("Beneath the Moors, if memory serves right). "The Nameless City" is minor Lovecraft, and yet I find the story fascinating and return to it often. It was never professionally published in HPL's lifetime. I love the Gothic atmosphere of "The Unnamable," atmosphere that one also finds in such stories as "The Hound" and "The Statement of Randolph Carter." "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" is a story that Lovecraft wrote in collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price -- I find it mildly interesting. The outre clock described in the story has also been used heavily by Brian Lumley, especially in his Mythos novel THE TRANSITION OF TITUS CROW.

But this book is important in that this was the first collection of Lovecraft's work to include the corrected text of what is considered by many to be Lovecraft's supreme masterpiece, "The Shadow Out of Time." The original manuscript, long thought lost, had been given to Barlow -- and it was found some years ago and sent to John Hay Library, where the core of Lovecraft's papers are preserved. S. T. Joshi worked on deciphering the text, with the assistance of David E. Schultz, and the corrected text was published as a single edition by Hippocampus Press. Its inclusion here is the tale's first appearance in a Lovecraft collection. It is a haunting tale, especially spooky.

I love the annotations of the three Penguin Classics editions. They help to tell the tale of the histories of the writing of these tales, using quotations from HPL's vast correspondence, detailing when and under what circumstances the tales were written, &c &c. Here is S. T.'s fascinating note concerning the "minor" tale, "The Unnamable":

Written in September 1923, "The Unnamable" first appeared in WEIRD TALES (July 1925). It is less a story than a fictional treatise on supernatural horror--specifically on stolid bourgeois unresponsiveness to the weird tale. As such it bears comparison with the IN DEFENSE OF DAGON essay of 1921...,where HPL first defended his brand of weird fiction as appealing only to "a very limited section of the public"....The story represents the first of several reprisals of the character of Randolph Carter, who first appeared in "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1919) and would return to experience adventures in dreamland in THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH and its sequels. Carter's antagonist, Joel Manton, is clearly based upon his longtime friend Maurice W. Moe..., although the name may come either from a character named Manton in Ambrose Bierce's "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" or from Manton Street in Providence. The story also explores the sense of lurking horror in New England history and topography, a dominant topos in HPL's later work. Influences on the tale may include the work of Arthur Machen..., especially the episodic novel THE THREE IMPOSTORS (1895), which features two characters debating at length on the nature of the supernatural, as well as Bierce's "The Suitable Surroundings" (in TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS, 1891), in which a writer challenges his friend to read his horror tale under the "suitable surroundings" of a haunted house at night.

Joshi has worked so diligently to give us Lovecraft's texts as H. P. Lovecraft wrote them and wished them to be preserved. Remember HPL's letter to his first editor at WEIRD TALES:

"My Dear Sir: Having a habit of writing weird, macabre, and fantastic stories for my own amusement, I have lately been simultaneously hounded by nearly a dozen well-meaning friends into deciding to submit a few of these Gothic horrors to your newly-founded periodical. ...
Of these the first two are probably the best. If they be unsatisfactory, the rest need not be read. ...
I have no idea that these things will be found suitable, for I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing. My object is such pleasure as I can obtain from the creation of certain bizarre pictures, situations, or atmospheric effects; and the only reader I hold in mind is myself.
My models are invariably the older writers, especially Poe, who has been my favorite literary figure since early childhood. Should any miracle impel you to consider the publication of my tales, I have but one condition to offer: and that is that no excisions be made. If the tale cannot be printed as it is written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection."

It was this kind of thing that drove HPL's first biographer, L. Sprague de Camp, bonkers:

"Lovecraft had done everything to assure rejection of his stories: the haughty tone, the art-for-art's sake pose, the deprecation of his own work, and the mention of a previous rejection." Poor de Camp; he, along with his buddy Lin Carter thought that Lovecraft's striving to write Literary Art was a foolish and pretentious "pose" -- and yet it was Lovecraft's striving for excellence in his writing that has assured his solid place in American Literature, with the publication of TALES from The Library of America. These clueless and ignorant critics cannot recognize sincerity in genre artists, which I find very strange and very sad. Thankfully, in S. T. Joshi Lovecraft has found the editor who realises his serious artistic intentions, and who has restored Lovecraft's texts "down to the very last semicolon and comma"; & thus S. T. has given us the corrected Lovecraft texts, beautifully publish'd in these fabulous editions from Penguin Classics. Superb!

While reading the penguin omnibus *The Call of Cthulhu* a few years back - my first foray into the Cyclopedean mnemonic-Coliseum of H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre - it felt as if I were perusing fragments of a much larger cosmology, hinted glimpses of nightmarish mythology, an intuition given credence by the continual reference in the footnotes to other stories, most notably `The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.' As Lovecraft's work is usually self-contained, I continued through that first volume and the follow-up, *The Thing on the Doorstep*, and the gaps in my conception began to slowly and surely bridge together, fashioning an overall portrait of cosmic horror and lurking fear, gallows-humor and existential doom, all woven together by Lovecraft's gloriously-florid prose. Yet it wasn't until I held this volume, *The Dreams in the Witch House,* that I realized here was compiled at last the keystone and map to the underpinnings of the Cthulhu Mythos... and I recall, upon reading the first half-dozen stories, a sense of irritation, having just completed the Conan stores by Lovecraft's contemporary Robert E. Howard, recently published in their original forms and chronological order; why, I wondered, with the numerous printings of Lovecraft's horror throughout the decades, had a similar treatment not been done? *Dreams in the Witch House* spans the creative arch from the halcyon-phase of 1919 to very near the end, Lovecraft's second-to-last story `The Shadow Out of Time' (1935). I surmised that if Penguin and the editor S. T. Joshi had compiled Lovecraft's oeuvre in a chronological fashion, then all that mystery, all that tension-filled `unknown' from the first and second volume, could have been expanded, given a richer foundation.

Not until I delved deeper into this third (and, I presume, last) Penguin edition that the slow realization as to the particular compilation came forth. *Dreams in the Witch House* is unlike its predecessors in several ways, most notably that it contains the bulk of Lovecraft's more fantastical stories, `tone poems' of a mythology that expanded over the course of a pulp-fiction career, with the style differing from the `standard Lovecraft' treatment - in that, a first person narrative of mortal man stumbling upon the secrets to a vaster and inhumanly horrific universe, and the consequences that ensue from these visions of the Void. Although these `standard' stories filter throughout *Dreams in the Witch House*, around half the book is devoted to the more fantastic imagery inspired by the work of Lord Dunsany, and even the regular stories contain hints or progress themes from this concentrated legendry.

Therein lay the quandary, at least for this reader. Lovecraft's gift for horror lay in his hinting at the hideous and horrific, a struggling-obtuse framework for that beyond human conception; due to the writer's refined technique, this usually imparted both a growing tension and curiosity as to the mystery presented. Even when maddeningly diffuse, Lovecraft managed to reveal just enough to satisfy and stimulate, to give shape in the reader's head of the daemonic reality, despite his protagonist's oft-whimpered reluctance to reveal concise detail. That was Lovecraft's genius - in showing not enough, but just the right amount - a literary technique by and large failed by his predecessors and that, in this day and age of shock n' draung, seems downright antiquated. Yet for me it is the hint that haunts the most, as I find most modern horror with non-psychological basis a paltry swine-trough for necronerds and the emotionally stunted, a tawdry romp within the confines of Western culture's death-fixation through violence and adolescent revenge wish-fulfillment (the slasher/gore genre in general).

So - with the revelations of this volume - a mythology that grows through `The Doom that Came to Sarnath', `The Cats of Ulthar,' `The Nameless City', `The Unnamable' - and culminates with `The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath' - I found the magic dissipated with revelation, the climax of so much sinister suggestion found somewhat lacking in a mythos-construct eerily resembling a macabre Oz. Not to say I didn't enjoy `Dream-Quest' or its related stories in this realm-within-a-realm; I generally enjoyed every story of the three Penguin collections, ever-stirred by Lovecraft's prose and resultant imagery. This was simply a case of shattered illusions, the Pandora's Box opened to personal regret

It came clear by the end of *Dreams in the Witch House* that this collection contained a stronger thematic development than the previous two compilations, with the developmental flow between `Unknown Kadath', `The Silver Key' and the inferior follow-up `Through the Gates of the Silver Key' into `The Shadow Out of Time' - with nearly ten years separating this last from the former entries - giving a sense of apotheosis to Lovecraft's `Cluthu Mythos'. And it is this final story that, for me, seems to represent the absolute best of the author's work. Although the structure is very similar to `At the Mountains of Madness,' the concluding novella `The Shadow Out of Time' begins with an overview of the dimensional / space-time theme and progresses into an evocative yarn of alien-haunted beauty, disturbing in a sense that few of Lovecraft's tales managed to impart on this reader.

At last I understood Joshi & Penguin's intent in combining the more mythical and fantastic elements of Lovecraft's work into a concluding volume. Although the first two compilations can be considered more necessary in terms of story-craft and classical status, *The Dreams in the Witch House* nicely dovetails these two volumes and, in its own way, explains all. Venture with caution, however, lest you wish those illusions - of fitful mortal explorations into alien cosmology, of the delight in the horror of the unknown - revealed and subsequently shattered.

Also, a note: the cover is similar yet different than that presented above. Curious...