Though I respect THE DUNWICH HORROR as a major Lovecraft work, I've never liked the story that much, and my re-reading of an annotated version didn't make that much difference. At most, the annotations made clear how much HPL was indebted to the Judeo-Christian mythology of angels mating with mortals-- which myth-trope was of course also derived from stories of pagan deities begetting demigods on humans. For instance, Klinger notes that one of the angel-references mentioned by HPL was to "Azazel," an angel with that precise reputation.
The opening of DUNWICH provides some strong description of the Massachusetts town of Dunwich, and of its multitudinous associations with the New England witch-trials and with the older pagan traditions of the Amerindians. In addition, HPL dumps on almost the entirety of the rural population of the area, expanding on his disgust for Joe Slater in 1919's BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP. I was rather surprised, for two reasons, to read a line in which the writer tore down these "white trash" for their history of "half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity." On one level I found this odd because subjects of murder and incest were the common coin of the Gothic fiction that HPL thoroughly lambasted in his overview of horror fiction, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE. On a second level, it's weird to hear DUNWICH associated with "incest," because it's about a mortal woman who has sex with an extradimensional creature-- which is about as "out-cest" as one can get. I can only conclude that HPL wasn't above associating one form of abominable sexuality with another, even though the fantasy of demon-coitus has nothing to do with familial interbreeding.
I also didn't like HPL's buildup to his big reveal. For most of the story, the author keeps the focus on the repulsive figure of Wilbur Whatley, the offspring of Lavinia Whatley and the demon-god Yog-Sothoth (making his debut as a "featured Old One.") While keeping the reader busy with Wilbur's peregrinations-- which are focused on obtaining information on occult rituals in order to unleash his demonic father on Earth-- HPL throws in a secondary mystery, about Wilbur's earthly father building a huge extra room atop the Whatley farmhouse and buying cattle that no neighbor ever sees again. Wilbur is slain at one point, and his half-alien body is revealed to onlookers. The big reveal, though, is that Lavinia Whatley also spawned a second son, a huge amorphous thing that occupied the extra room, with only tangential humanity, and this offspring is also killed when a Miskatonic U scholar, Doctor Armitage, is able to defeat the ritual and banish Yog-Sothoth.
Another problem with the story is that HPL is pretty bad with both his rural characters and their dialect. He kept dialogue to a minimum in THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE. But in DUNWICH, there's a lot of farmer-talk, and it's excruciating. Fortunately, in the next Mythos story HPL eschewed almost all dialogue in yet another of his ventures into rural New England, and the results were far better.
I note in passing that as far as I recall, the 1970 cinematic adaptation doesn't show Wilbur as being having a repugnant alien physiology that he hides from other humans, and the ending of the film is stronger for not "giving away the game" too early.
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