It’s a Shrieking Shack with a real and malevolent ghost. The Shunned House is a different type of Lovecraft story than we’ve encountered thus far, and here are some discussion points. If I don’t hit a topic you wanted to talk about, just bring it up in the comments!
- As opposed to the other Lovecraft stories we’ve read, this one ends with the defeat of evil, and its protagonist is much more of a hero (whereas in “Innsmouth” and “Rats,” the protagonist is transformed into the evil). Does this make the story more or less effective as “weird literature” or as a “scary” story?
- Lovecraft is a master of the shocking moment, often with the simple use of one word. In “Rats in the Walls,” it was “plump.” In this one, reyhan mentioned “elbow.” The word that struck me was “grinning” (during the the terrifying death of Uncle Elihu). What moment made this story “scary”?
- Lovecraft argued that to later explain away the sense of horror was to disqualify a story as “weird” or as a “horror story.” Compared, for example, with the Shrieking Shack, and the lore surrounding it in Hogsmeade, “The Shunned House” is real “weird literature,” whereas the Shrieking Shack is later explained to us.
A point of interest, from Wikipedia:
“The Shunned House of the title is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, built around 1763 and still standing at 135 Benefit Street; Lovecraft was familiar with the house because his aunt, Lillian Clark, lived there in 1919-20 as a companion to Mrs. H. C. Babbit.
But it was another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey that actually provoked Lovecraft to write the story. As he wrote in a letter:
On the northeast corner of Bridge Street and Elizabeth Avenue is a terrible old house–a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds–with a blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, and an outside flight of stairs leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed. It reminded me of the Babbit House in Benefit Street…. Later its image came up again with renewed vividness, finally causing me to write a new horror story with its scene in Providence and with the Babbit House as its basis.”
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And now for something completely different …
… what is it about New England that produces all these gloomy writers like Poe, Melville, Lovecraft? Something in the water?
The only real moment that was ’scary’ for me was when it became obvious that the flamethrower would not work. To me, a key point of true terror is the fact that you’re opposing something that is invincible, unkillable.
After all, humans have done more horrible things to each other than all the mythical monsters in the world combined. But no one’s truly horrified of human beings despite the Killing Fields because 1) Even the most evil human often has some redeeming quality, is some mother’s son. 2) Human beings *can* be killed, and fairly easily.
What breaks the horror is when we lose suspension of disbelief. For example, *why* would acid work when fire doesn’t? A true horror story — to my mind — needs to oppose someone with a truly terrifying enemy, which is dealt with in a logical and satisfactory way … but to be a horror story the victory can’t be complete. There has to be some lingering unease that the creature … or something like it … will come again. LOTR isn’t a horror story despite the presence of the ringwraiths because, at the end of the story, the ringwraiths are totally destroyed.
Even so, I like happy endings better. So “The Shunned House” gets my vote as the best *story* we’ve read so far, but not my vote as the best *horror story*. “Call of Cthulthu” still tops my list in that regard.
The Shunned House has been my favorite story so far of the Lovecraft horror stories. I like happy endings, with evil destroyed and new life emerging from the old apple trees. Here are some rather unorganized thoughts: I liked the touch of “elbow”; I had noticed that word before reading Reyhan’s comment-it really was a striking word.
I was amused that the evil entity was French. Reflecting the classic attitude of English antagonism to French?
I was very touched by the fleeting faces of all the various victims, appearing in rapid succession to the hero, and also by all that was left of his beloved uncle, the solitary straw hat.
His use of the name Mercy for one of his characters reminded me of my ancestress Mercy Disbrow, the Connecticut “witch” and my ancestress whom I mentioned in an earlier post. Since her trial was rather famous in New England, I wondered if some of the other names were also associated with some of the accused witches whose names I do not know so well.
The protagonist’s firm stance on the side of the good and the rational was comforting after some of the trips HPL took us on. But it does make for a less disquieting story. I found this story less scary than some of the others because I didn’t get a real sense of danger to the hero. I don’t think the two are necessarily related: in Stephen King’s 1408, which is a mini-haunted house story, there is no possibility of the hero merging with the evil but the sense of threat is huge.
Brian, to your list of gloomy New England writers we can add Hawthorne (House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter) and of course, Stephen King.
Brian and Mary Jo bring up an interesting topic of discussion: which was your favorite HPL story and why? Worth a post?
Edgar Allen Poe was from Baltimore, Maryland, where his family had served in US military defence of the city in the war of 1812. He spent time in New England, but was a Marylander.
I would like to point a sentence by HPL in the second paragraph which I thought quite striking. The final sentence of that paragraph: “that house…equals or outranks in horror…stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous” could be turned into a very interesting piece of music. He starts with the harsh voiced “that House”, with a rough glottal stop between the two words. The harsh K sound continues in “equals” and “outranks” and then we return to the harsh H of ‘horror’. The following phrase begins melodically, smoothly, with “stands” but then incorporates the harsh k with “starkly”
“ly” of ‘leering’picks up the ‘ly’ sound and the next few words “as a symbol of all” are at once both smooth with the ‘l’ sound and slightly threatening with the sibilant ’s’. Then we have a return to the harsh, voiced ‘th’ in ‘that’ , the pounding ‘t’ being echoed in ‘unutterably’ and the series of ‘u’ grunting sounds ‘unutterably(‘a’ pronounced as ‘u’) and ‘hideous’ (ous pronounced as ‘u’).
I think I might find listening to HPL’s stories by a well trained reader to be more frightening than reading them.
Mary Jo, the right voice can make music out of a shopping list, but I agree that HPL’s works might sound more compelling read out loud.
There are quite a few choices of audio versions of HPL’s stories, especially The Rats in the Walls, but the others as well. I haven’t listened to any of them. I did find three versions of Poe’s The Raven on YouTube, by Vincent Price, Christopher Walken, and John Astin. I listened to the first few lines. Price and Astin both felt bland to me. Walken imbued his reading with a sense of menace, or maybe just a sense of undercurrents, which gave it some impact. He might not do a bad job with HPL.
I think what you really need is a stage trained actor (a lot of British actors also act on the stage, and have a lot better voice control and projection than Hollywood actors).
It seems that in the HPL stories we’ve read so far evil loves its job. The grinning, and the old woman laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. It’s bad enough evil doing what evil does; why does it have to enjoy it too?
I like how he continues to put the wierd/evil right in amongst everyday events. Although I’ve never been to New England it sounds genuine. And the way other people see the wierdness but put it down to other causes (factory waste, bad water pipes) reminds me of muggles. There is much happening if only we have eyes to see it.
The explanations the narrator sounds out throughout the story (vampires, werewolves) is almost another version of the muggles’ behaviour. Those horror creatures are bad, but we know about them. But this thing in the bottom of the pit is something else again. To see only its elbow hints that it is something outside even our most scary paranormal explanations. That ain’t no vampire!
So even though everything is happy at the end we’re left with the unsettling question: what was that?
I couldn’t get too spooked out by the critter belonging to the elbow. I mean, elbow suggests a humanoid skeleton. At least a vertebrate. Not tentacles. But I was curious: what was it doing buried under a house in New England? Was it dead? Alive? Sleeping? Biding its time? Wasn’t it cramped? Didn’t it ever want to get up and stretch its legs?
And I still don’t see how six demijohns of sulphuric acid could have done the job.
That one word certainly tweaks the imagination: elbow.