Quick personal note: my first experience with Lovecraft came about when I picked up this 1967 Lancer paperback.
It printed five of HPL's best stories-- the titular "Colour Out of Space," "Cool Air," "Call of Cthulhu,' "The Whisperer in Darkness," and "The Shadow Out of Time," and this lesser effort, "The Picture in the House." These six stories made me an HPL fan for life, even though I must admit that the main thing I liked about "Picture" was its opening paragraph.
SEARCHERS after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
I would say that this paragraph by itself is the first time HPL really found his distinctive voice, his unchallenged ability to suggest indescribable horrors through a combination of poetry and pedantry. The whole story, though, is mostly a curiosity, and back in the day I didn't quite understand why it didn't have the same impact as the others. Part of the reason lies in the fact that it is a very early horror-story, though its inclusion as an "Arkham Cycle" tale depends entirely upon being the first tale to mention the city of Arkham itself, as well as the river of the Miskatonic Valley.
A nameless genealogist, while bicycling through New England for purposes of research, gets caught in a downpour, so he takes refuge in one of those "ancient, lonely farmhouses." Before he can even tell if the house is occupied, he sees numerous antique books. On opening one, he finds that it's written in Latin but features very explicit engravings of the cannibal butcheries committed by primitive African tribesmen. Then he meets a weird old man whose speech resembles that of Yankee settlers long extinct, and the unnamed fellow begins regaling his visitor with his enthusiasm for the weird pictures in the book, even though he cannot read Latin. He draws a strange comparison to the Bible: "When I read in Scripture about slayin'-- like them Midianites was slew-- I kinder think things, but I ain't got no picter of it." Slowly the narrator begins to deduct from the old guy's ramblings that he became unnaturally fascinated with the practice of cannibalism. Then, just as he sees possible evidence that the man has acted on his fantasies by killing some poor soul, the story abruptly ends when a lighting bolt hits the house. (The editor of the ANNOTATED edition thought the narrator survived; I think the story implies that the lightning kills everyone in the benighted house.)
The other reason this story doesn't work well is that HPL probably modeled it on some of Poe's less successful vignettes; those in which the author tried to evoke some transitory mood of gloom and then just brought the tale to a quick close, like THE OVAL PORTRAIT. Later HPL stories show a better "beginning, middle, and end" structure. On a related note, HPL is so cagey with his big reveal that I didn't clue until now that he meant to suggest that the old man might have been extending his life for decades via his cannibal-ritual, so that he actually hailed from the Puritan era. (Since this is only a suggestion, I would still categorize the story as "uncanny.")
The main reason I class the mythicity of PICTURE as "high" is that, as in BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP, the debased subject of the story is a white New Englander. Although HPL maunders a bit about the negative aspects of Puritan culture, at base he's still depicting a scion of the Anglo-Saxon race, of which HPL deemed himself a member, to be capable of descending to the subhuman depths of Black Africans. Thus for me, the nameless New Englander is, like Joe Slater, a projection of HPL's fears of degeneration. Against such powers, nothing, not even an individual with the right racial credentials, can survive--and in this, HPL ran counter to the majority of other writers who portrayed Caucasians in a more flattering light.
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