<span class="vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://lisashea.com/lisabase/blog/index.php/author/lisashea/" title="Lisa Shea" rel="me">Lisa Shea</a></span>

We are at story eleven in the H. P. Lovecraft library. It’s really important to have a good understanding of United States History before you begin this. Lovecraft is in essence playing a game of ‘know the era based on the fashion’. Also, it’s good to know that right when Lovecraft wrote this, in 1919, World War I had just ended. There was discontent and bombings happening in New England. Also, the Boston police went on strike due to AWFUL working conditions and wages. So in this environment, Lovecraft wrote The Street.

In essence The Street is a view of the history of the British in Boston starting in Colonial times and up through Lovecraft’s current life in 1919. It’s an EXTREMELY white-rich-male-centric view.

We begin with colonial British arriving and taking control of land from the Native Americans who are dismissed as fire-arrow savages. A breath later, the colonials have completely destroyed the Indians, and good riddance. Those heathens were blocking the process of the white people. And of course these white people were great – never mind that women were being beaten and murdered, children were abused, but all that mattered was that the rich white men were in control and getting richer.

So we move through the eras with fairly amateur descriptions. This feels like a high-school assignment of “tell me which era you’re in with just a few words of fashion sense.” Always in the street the rich white men are happy with rose bushes and silver and china. They don’t care that slaves are being beaten or children are in workhouses. They have their gilded carriages and life is good.

On we go through the Civil War and steamships and the industrial revolution and telephones.

World War I comes with the British Flag, US Flag, and French Flag. All is fine – but there is also some evil happening. Because strange accents are arriving!! This is really funny for me, given how notorious the Boston accent is. They are complaining about strange accents? And Boston is also notorious for its mistreatment of the Irish and Italians.

And then we descend right into anarchy. Again, Lovecraft lived during the time of bombings and the Boston police strike. So you could say this story is in reaction to that. Still, it’s a fairly extreme reaction. The street knows that only it can manage to face down the threat of strangers. And the only way it can manage that threat is to commit suicide and collapse itself down on all the strangers. Because of course only evil bomber strangers live in its structures – no innocent women or children.

And, at the end, The Street dreams of better times, with rosebushes, when rich white men were rich white men and everyone else stayed out of their way.

This is my least liked story so far by Lovecraft. The plot is silly. It’s just a listing of objects which represent each era, like some sort of bizarre history test. It’s testing to see if readers actually know US history. And the underlying message, that rich white men with china and silver are all that matter …

Read The Street for yourself:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/s.aspx

My video review of The Street –

It’s story ten in the Lovecraft world! I enjoy the story immensely. The racist aspects of it? Those are of course completely unnecessary. Let’s take a look.

The main character is living a hum-drum life in a cottage at the edge of a swamp. There’s a cemetery nearby. He can’t sleep at night, and mostly he stares out his window at the star Polaris. The star seems to be an evil presence.

Finally, the character falls asleep and dreams.

In this dream-world he’s in a ‘ghastly’ marble city which of course has domes. It’s interesting that Lovecraft, who adores cities of onyx and gold and silver, with ivory thrones, thinks marble is ‘ghastly’. No marble for him.

When he wakes up, he misses the city. Over the coming nights, he keeps dreaming of the city and it seems more and more real to him. It is sometimes eternally day, sometimes eternally night, so somewhere in the Arctic. When he wakes, he is bored with his swamp-house and its cemetery-view. The marble city is where he wants to be.

And then one night he actually starts interacting with the marble-city people. He realizes one is his friend Alos. Their fine city is under attack! There are evil squat yellow-people from the West attacking! The strong manly grey-eyed white-skinned men must resist!

But our poor main character is weakly and frail. He can’t fight.

Note that in real life Lovecraft WANTED to join up for World War I. His mother actively prevented him from going. Not only that, but his mother went around telling all her friends and family that Lovecraft was too feeble to be a soldier. Now, I’m not saying Lovecraft would have made it through basic training. But Lovecraft thought of himself as an able-bodied prime example of manhood. He was born in 1890. World War I was from 1914-1918. So Lovecraft was 24 – 28 during the years of World War I. For those years, as a man in his mid-twenties, Lovecraft had to read newspapers and talk to people about all the challenges of World War I, all the time with people wondering why he wasn’t doing his part. And with his mother going around telling everyone who would listen that her darling son couldn’t possibly go to war because he was too weak and frail.

So, clearly, this impacted Polaris which was written in 1918 and published in 1920.

In any case, the dream-character is sent for an important mission – to man the watchtower. This brings up a strong Lord of the Rings vision for me, of the fire-based watchtowers which need to be lit to summon help. Our character actually has something vitally important to do.

But Polaris the Evil Star has other plans. Polaris lures our character into falling asleep. Not only that, but Polaris tells him he won’t awaken for 26,000 years, which is when Polaris cycles back around into the same position. Maybe that’s the time when Polaris is at its strongest and able to impact humanity.

So here we are, in modern times, and our character realizes that 26,000 years ago there was a wonderful civilization in the arctic and HE let it get destroyed so thoroughly that nobody in modern times even knows it existed. All trace of it – all legend of it – is completely wiped out. Only the evil Eskimo remain, the descendants of the invaders.

It’s not that our character is an immortal being who has forgotten about this all this time. It’s more that his soul has been in stasis and is now awakened in a fresh body so that he can be agonized by his lack of will-power all that time ago.

I find the boring-reality-to-exciting-dream flip to be quite interesting. I actually wrote a story just like this myself, before I knew anything about Polaris. In my story we start in a quiet life of an antique shop owner. She dreams about a more exciting life of being a cop in Boston. It turns out she really IS a cop in Boston and her dreams are about having a quiet life instead. So I really like that Lovecraft also approached it in this way and how he handled it.

I also love the idea of the old civilization so thoroughly destroyed that we don’t even have a hint that it was there. What if there really was a space alien civilization outpost on Earth maybe 26,000 years ago and it was wholly destroyed? How would we even know it had been there? What would we look for? Or, similarly, what if we develop space travel and visit a ‘dead’ planet? How would we know that there once was a civilization there long ago, but all their structures had long since been destroyed?

So there’s lots here for me to enjoy. And I wish there wasn’t the ‘yellow menace’ aspect to it.

Here’s the original story:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/p.aspx

My video review of Polaris –

I’m now on Lovecraft story number 9! We have gone from delightful revenge stories featuring fishy-people and cats. Our new story is about dark, unfathomable cosmic horror. Perfect.

Our main character, we’ll call him Z, tells us right from the beginning that he is alone and the world is lost. Then he takes us back a few months.

Z lives in a time of political chaos, turbulence, with pale-faced worried people. Also the seasons are out of whack and autumn just drags on. Sounds like our actual reality!

Into this comes Nyarlathotep, a person from Egypt who apparently actually is from 27 centuries ago and who has talked with space aliens. Nobody seems to worry too much about this. In fact, Nyarlathotep is researching modern technology, building cool machinery (with space alien knowledge?) and holding public seminars about electricity and the future. Unfortunately, everyone who goes to hear him becomes really upset about the state of the world.

Again, seems very familiar.

Of course Egypt isn’t ‘civilized’. Nyarlathotep has to come to the US before he is in ‘civilization’.

So Z hears about all of this. And then Nyarlathotep comes to Z’s city – let’s say New York City – and holds a seminar there. Z of course goes. It seems just like static electricity, but Nyarlathotep of course gets grumpy about this and kicks everyone out into the streets.

And suddenly it’s Stranger Things and they are in the Upside Down. Everything is the same – but decayed. Tram-cars are fallen over and collapsed. The world has gone to kibble (thanks Philip K Dick). And then the people start vanishing.

The final paragraph is really a work of beauty. This is where Lovecraft shines. The shadow writhing in hands that are not hands. The screamingly sentient but dumbly delirious. The maddening drums and whining flutes. This is much more ‘unsettled’ than his previous worlds.

But what is Lovecraft’s hatred of imperfect dancing? Once again we have ‘slow awkward absurd’ dancing as if this is the ultimate offense against the universe. Dance as if nobody is watching!!

I enjoy this one a lot. Sure, nothing much ‘happens’ except Nyarlathotep pulling the world down into hopeless chaos. It’s well written, though.

Read Nyarlathotep here –

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/n.aspx

My video discussion of Nyarlathotep is here –

OK this makes it two Lovecraft stories in a row which are supposedly horror but which I read with great pleasure as a justified and wholly appreciated result. Hmmm. I’m not sure this says good things about my morals …

In The Cats of Ulthar we are hearing a tale about a ‘nearby town’ Ulthar, as told by a cat lover. Apparently currently in Ulthar it is illegal to kill any cats. But, it’s explained, it wasn’t always this way. Clearly something happened to change this.

And that something is an old cotter and his wife who are apparently PURE EVIL. If any of the neighbors’ cats get into the cotters’ yard, the cotter and his wife torture the cats to death. How are the villagers of Ulthar not gathering up torches and pitchforks and immediately stopping this??? Instead the villagers are AFRAID of this old guy and his wife, for no reason we can tell? I would not be afraid. I’d be gathering up friends and putting a stop to this immediately.

Well, along comes a group of “dark” folk, because this is a Lovecraft story. Among the folk is an orphan boy with a cute little black kitten. That black kitten is the only spark of joy in the boy’s life. And of course we know what happens next. The kitten goes missing. The villagers all TELL this sobbing little boy that the kitten was probably tortured and slain by the cotter couple?!? What?!? Just what kind of villagers are these?

The boy says a calm prayer and then all the travelers leave. That very night ALL the cats of Ulthar vanish. Some blame the travelers. But the saner ones (?) in this village blame the cotter couple. None of course want to go anywhere near the hovel to find out. It’s too dark. They decide to go to sleep instead. With their cat missing? If my cats were missing I’d be out all night trying to find them …

Morning comes and the cats are back home. So nobody goes to confront the cotters? Everyone just pretends nothing had happened? Oh, and the cats are plump and happy. And not hungry. And it is TWO WEEKS until the village leader decides to go check on the mysteriously missing cotter and his wife.

The two are, of course, skeletons.

Is there really enough meat on two humans to fill up an entire town of cats? Maybe it was magical meat.

In any case, after that the townsfolk decided that harming a cat was a bad idea and they passed a law forbidding it. Which makes it sound as if they were more afraid for their own skins than doing it out of love for the cats. The main threat was gone, after all. And maybe the villagers should have vowed to be more active in protecting their pets.

In any case, though, I was all in favor of getting rid of the cat-torturers. And why did they have to wait for the cats to take action, when tiny black kittens were being tortured?

The villagers don’t deserve those cats.

Here’s the story –

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cu.aspx

Here’s my video review –

Lovecraft wrote The Doom That Came to Sarnath only a short while after his mother was sent into an asylum. While Lovecraft was 30 at the time, he had lived his entire life with his mother, so this was an extra-traumatic event for him. It’s no wonder he is now writing about a completely doom-driven scenario.

This is a fairly hands-off telling with no actual main characters and no sense of urgency. We’re told there was a huge city back 10,000 years ago named Sarnath. We know this city was destroyed. So, in human terms, we’re talking about the era of hunter-gatherers. Long, long ago. And from there we go back FURTHER in time to 1,000 years before that, to when a stone city of Ib was in that location.

Ib descended from the moon, along with its fishy people, fully formed. The fishy people danced ‘hideously’. How can one even dance hideously? We should dance the way we want to dance! And he focuses on their bulbous eyes and flappy lips (and curious ears!) as being horrific. Poor fishy people. So the fishy people are living their happy fishy lives in their stone city.

Then along come dark-skinned hunter gatherers who are arrogant and greedy. Those warriors grab up their spears and slaughter the poor fishy people. Then the dark-skinned people build a giant city – Sarnath.

We get LONG PARAGRAPHS endlessly just describing the domes and temples and domed temples with rubies and diamonds and onyx. There’s, of course, an ivory throne which he borrowed from another author. There’s no ‘action’ in these scenes. Lovecraft could have talked about another conquest with a party in one room, or that sort of thing. Instead we just get a description-dump.

Finally we get to a party celebrating 1,000 years since the slaughter of the fishy people. This goes into a long description of what foods are at the party.

Finally the fishy-people have had enough. At midnight, under a gibbous moon, the fishy people descend from the moon and slaughter everyone including the slaves?!? I am re-interpreting this. I think all the slaves escaped to their homelands. The guests escaped. Only the descendants were slaughtered and tossed into the waters. Then the fishy people took down the egregious city and maybe drifted back up to the moon.

Several issues here.

First, why wait 1,000 years? The evil city-dwellers got to enslave and torture and capture people for 1,000 years without penalty. Then their far-distant kids got one brief night of slaughter when their only real crime was that they had a party. I’d like it better if there was a reason the fishy people couldn’t make the moon-journey until then.

What then happened to the fishy people? I’d like an ending moment of them happily dancing horribly on the moon. Or maybe in an underwater kingdom.

I’m iffy on the ‘saviors’ of this story, at the end, being the courageous blond-haired blue-eyed men who came to survey the scene.

Here’s the story to read it:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ds.aspx

Here’s my video discussion of the story:

Lovecraft was 29 years old and living with his mother. He’d lived with her his entire life. And then … she was committed to an asylum. He was all alone for the first time ever. He had a nightmare. It involved a friend, and in this dark dream the two of them went at night to a cemetery and found a crypt.

Lovecraft awoke, wrote down his dream, and decided to turn it into a story. I love the DREAM part of this story. It is very powerful. But the ‘surrounding introduction’ of the story feels completely fake and awkward.

In essence, the dream is that Lovecraft and his friend go out in the middle of the night to a Massachusetts cemetery. They struggle to pull a heavy stone slab off of an entrance to an underground complex. The friend goes down into the complex, leaving Lovecraft on the surface. The friend carries a telephone-with-wire so the two of them can talk to each other, even after the friend has trudged a full fifteen minutes into the underground complex.

Then the friend encounters something nasty. The friend never actually says what he finds. The friend just pleads with Lovecraft to run. Then the line goes silent. And then a mysterious voice tells Lovecraft that his friend has died.

Spooky, right? Really cool? And Lovecraft describes the nighttime cemetery very well.

Unfortunately, Lovecraft decides to “story-ify” this dream by setting it into a context. And the context is that Lovecraft is sitting in a Florida sheriff’s office the next day, being questioned by two police officers. Lovecraft is now telling them the tale for the 8th time, because clearly they don’t believe him. And Lovecraft recites (again) in precise detail the exact long dialogue shared, the exact details of the gravestones, etc. etc. All while these officers are actively looking for a missing, perhaps injured, person in a swamp.

That external story sucks a lot of the life out of the dream. We KNOW Lovecraft survives because he’s telling the story. It doesn’t feel very pressing as Lovecraft recites dialogue and descriptions that we know he’s already said 8 times already to the officers. And the fact that Lovecraft’s friend pleads with him for 15 minutes to run away, all the while nothing at all happening on the surface, makes any danger seem fairly distant.

I love the details in the cemetery. They feel very authentic to me, and I grew up exploring Massachusetts cemeteries with a father who adored genealogy. Those sights and smells feel authentic. But they lose their power when suddenly they’re supposed to be in a Florida swamp (with a deep subterranean lair?) and the main character is reciting them over and over again.

I do like the relationship between the two characters. They remind me of the men from The Rope by Alfred Hitchcock, which was based on a real life duo. The way one character supposedly is the ‘leader’ and pulling the other into the world of the occult. The way the ‘weaker’ man could easily have cancelled the evening’s events but actively wants to go forward.

Here’s the story to read:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/src.aspx

Here’s my video discussion of this story.

The White Ship was written by H. P. Lovecraft, and in my order of reading this was his fifth story. It is yet again fairly different from the first four stories, which is intriguing. This one is more of a ‘fairy tale’ / dream sequence. There really isn’t much horror here. Maybe it’s a cautionary tale.

The main character, Basil, grows up in a lighthouse. Apparently his grandfather spontaneously made his father, and his father spontaneously made him (Basil), because there’s no trace at all of mothers. Maybe both died in childbirth. In any case, life for these three men involve sitting in the lighthouse telling stories about ships.

As it happens, while there used to be lots of ships coming through this area, as the decades progress there are fewer and fewer. So Basil, now alone, sits and talks to the sea. He dreams of going to see places. Finally a mythical white ship appears and agrees to take him away. I took this to mean that Basil died, because after a three-generation legacy of manning this lighthouse, is Basil really going to just abandon it and let ships crash into the rocks?

Off Basil goes. He passes a city of barely-glimpsed ideas, which doesn’t lure him in much. The next city is about unfathomable things (including demons and gray walls) which also isn’t very alluring. The third city is about pleasures, but also about really nasty smells. A strange combination. So he gives up on that one.

Finally he gets to Sona-Nyl, a lovely city with no suffering or death. It’s nice there. Temples. Pagodas. “Pleasing clumps of bushes”. I kid you not. Apparently there are “folk” there but Basil the Lighthouse Keeper isn’t much for interacting with folk. Mostly he walks around for decades admiring the temples, pagodas, and pleasing clumps of bushes.

But after decades or centuries of this he gets bored. He wants to go try out Cathuria which reputedly has gold walls, gold ceilings, gold floors, and gold pillars. Mostly, I think, he just wants something new to look at. The ship-pilot tries to dissuade Basil but off they go. And, sure enough, they reach a waterfall and crash.

Basil comes to at his lighthouse, where his light is out and a ship has crashed. In the morning he just finds a white spar left and a dead bird.

I do love Tolkien and fantasy stories, but this one is just a bit too pedestrian for me. Basil could have found a lovely wife, they could have had 3 kids and played music together, written stories together, built boats, took turns watching the lighthouse, and lived a glorious life. Instead, Basil abandons his post, lets ships crash on the rocks, and then expects a world of temples and pagodas and “pleasing clumps of bushes” to make him eternally happy without any action on his own part.

Here’s the story to read:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ws.aspx

Here’s my video review –

I’m reading the works of H. P. Lovecraft in the approximate order in which they were written / published. In my order, the short story Dagon comes fourth, written when Lovecraft was about 30.

Story 1 / Alchemist was a teen story about wizards and castles. Story 2 / Johnson was about a young writer’s fantasy about meeting famous old-school authors. Story 3 / Sleep finally started to be about Lovecraft’s future area of expertise. An intelligent man faces off against a ‘slimy lower person’ who happens to become equal when a space alien takes over his mind.

Here, in story 4, Dagon, we start to get into the midst of what Lovecraft is more known for. Yes, there were hints of cosmic horror in Alchemist and 3, but in Dagon we are facing it full force.

The unnamed main character, a sailor-soldier, escapes capture and ends up alone in a small boat in the vast Pacific. He falls asleep and wakes up somehow beached on an immense black mud plain with no sight of ocean anywhere. It’s as if the very ground has come up underneath him for miles and miles. He feels utter revulsion at the black sticky mud, the fish carcasses, the cloudless sky, the silence, and the ‘sameness’ of it all.

He decides he has to try to find an edge to the ocean, so he can get back to civilization.

After days of walking, he finally finds a distant mound to get some perspective on this nasty never-ending silence and mud. He gets to the top and looks down into a deep chasm with water on the bottom. Across the way is a white monolith inscribed with crude symbols of fish, whales, octopuses, and other sea creatures. There are human-fish people with webbed hands and feet as large as whales. He finds those really nasty.

And then a fish-monster rises from the water, makes an infernal noise, and he goes completely crazy. When he finally awakes, he’s in a San Francisco hospital and is babbling. Even when he tries to talk with researchers, nobody believes him or can help him. So he gets addicted to morphine and at the end he kills himself.

I appreciate Lovecraft’s descriptive imagery here – how he involves all the senses and leans strongly into how ‘uncomfortable’ they make him feel. That being said, first, his main character is a SAILOR. It seems really bizarre that a sailor would be this icked out by octopus and fish and whales. I can see LOVECRAFT hating the smell of dead fish – he lived in Providence, after all – but a sailor?

Second, Lovecraft was notoriously anti-minority. In Lovecraft’s ideal world, everyone WOULD be the same – white, upper class male. It’s odd that everything being the same would viscerally seem so wrong to him.

And on a more personal level, as a reader, I adore sea-related things. If I was in a world full of symbols based on fish and whales and octopus I’d love it. It would be like Atlantis. If I was in a world where everything was quiet, I’d love that too! Peace! Mud? I’m really not afraid of mud.

Maybe it’s because I watch shows like Naked and Afraid, but a world where night is calm, things are quiet, there aren’t thorns, and you have food – that all seems fairly ideal to me. Yes I’d have to walk to find water, but that’s just a task. It’s not an ‘ultimate horror’ situation for me.

What are your thoughts?

Link to the Dagon story:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/d.aspx

Video review of Dagon –

Here’s an article about an actual appearing and disappearing mud island –

https://thedebrief.org/nasa-satellites-capture-ghost-island-appearing-and-vanishing-in-the-caspian-sea

Here’s my version of Dagon!