Pulp Story Review: “The Dunwich Horror” by H. P. Lovecraft

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Greetings, explorers of the strange and mysterious.

For those of you who might not know, H. P. Lovecraft was a writer who specialized in horror and weird fiction, published in the 1920s and 30s. Many of his works were part of what we today call “the Cthulhu Mythos”, a shared fictional universe (c’mon, you know what I’m talking about, you’ve watched Marvel superhero movies). The main feature of the universe was its focus on the god-like extra-terrestrial Great Old Ones, and other scary entities.

If you kept up with my series of Robert E. Howard reviews (and if you didn’t, you can start here! I am totally without shame), you may have noticed that I referred to H. P. Lovecraft quite a few times. In fact, the two authors were friends, and often shared ideas with each other. So I thought it only natural that when we left Howard, we move to Lovecraft.

The thing is, though, that Lovecraft can be a bit more… divisive, shall we say, than Howard. Trust me, we’ll have plenty of time to get to that baggage. This will be interesting.

As with Howard’s tales, the next few stories to review will come from Arcturus Publishing’s Classic Fantasy Collection. I already reviewed Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” for Halloween last year, and quite liked it. So much so, in fact, that I have a feeling it’s going to be a high bar to clear for the other stories. But let’s see for ourselves, starting with “The Dunwich Horror” (going by the title, it’s obviously a fantasy romance).

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The novelette begins with a description of Dunwich, Massachusetts, a desolate small town, and the surrounding area. There’s something off about the whole place, from the “queer circles of tall stone pillars” that crown the surrounding mountains to the “gorges and ravines of problematical depth” that bisect the road into town.

As a start, Lovecraft does a good job of vividly describing the setting and conveying how unpleasant and sinister it is. As he often does, he walks a fine line between detailed description and purple prose, but he stays on the right side of it. Well, mostly.

The only thing that bugs me is how Lovecraft keeps saying stuff like “when the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears”. Sometimes the effectively eerie description is hindered by Lovecraft going “If YOU were here, YOU would be totally creeped out!” Bringing up an observer, as opposed to just letting the readers observe directly, puts a distance between the readers and the setting. Sometimes it can work, but here it doesn’t. Fortunately, the rest of the description is strong enough to make up for it.

Following this introduction, we are told about Dunwich’s spooky history of superstition. We also get a description of the locals that isn’t exactly flattering.

Now, a very common element in Lovecraft’s fiction is, to be frank, racism. Ugly, ugly racism. “Over-the-top-even-by-the-standard-of-his-time” racism. While that isn’t really an issue in this story, the way Lovecraft describes the Dunwich folk that still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They are “repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters”. He even says that they’ve become “a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding”. Only a few old families have mostly escaped from being “sunk into the sordid populace”. Very little sympathy or empathy is shown for the citizens of Dunwich for most of the story. There is a general disdain for everyone in the town. It may not be racism exactly, but think of it as a soft introduction to the racism issues we’ll talk about more in later reviews. An appetizer in Lovecraft’s bountiful banquet of prejudice.

Well, moving beyond that, we learn about Dunwich’s shadowy history of superstitions, cults, and otherworldly activity. It’s not essential to the story, but it’s fairly intriguing and it provides good atmosphere. The story proper then begins with the information that Wilbur Whateley is born in 1913.

The Whateleys have a sinister reputation, even to other Dunwich folk. Lavinia, Wilbur’s mother, is an unattractive and antisocial woman who lives with Old Whateley, her father. No one knows who Wilbur’s own father is.

Old Whateley has a reputation for being involved in black magic. He may have murdered his wife when Lavinia was a child. And the general populace regards him as a lunatic. Your average grandpa, really.

The Whateley house is so isolated from the rest of Dunwich that nobody else knows about Lavinia’s baby until a week after it’s born. Old Whateley shows up at the general store and starts babbling to everyone who will listen about the child and its father. No one can get him to say exactly who the father is, but Old Whateley implies that it’s someone very important and powerful, a proud lineage. What sticks with everyone the most is when he says “some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill!” By the way, if the all the little touches that Lovecraft uses to transcribe the accent bother you, then oh boy are you in for a fun ride.

Almost nobody catches a glimpse of Wilbur for a month or two, but the Whateleys start regularly buying livestock, even though their herds never seem to grow. With the onset of spring, Lavinia starts taking Wilbur out to roam with her. When everyone’s finally seen Wilbur, their interest soon wanes, even though he starts to develop much more quickly than other children. After three months he already looks a year old, and continues on from there until he starts talking at eleven months and keeps advancing rapidly beyond that. On Halloween a villager sees what he thinks are Wilbur and his mother running around a great fire on Sentinel Hill. They both seem to be naked, and something seems weird about Wilbur’s body, but the observer can’t put his finger on it. It seems like this news somehow reaches the Whateleys, because from then on, whenever Wilbur is seen in by anyone he’s always wearing heavy clothing, and the slightest possibility of so much as his shirt getting ruffled makes him angry.

Despite this, the more Wilbur goes out, the more everyone starts to agree with the Halloween witness: there’s something off about the boy, even by Dunwich standards. His voice sounds strange, his face looks too mature for his age, and he has an almost goatish look about him. Also, dogs don’t like him, so you know this kid is bad news.

This chapter is really the point where my main issue with the story starts to reveal itself. The whole thing is told in a “realistic” fashion, more like a historical account than fiction. This is interesting enough, but it means that we get very few first-hand descriptions of situations or people. When Lovecraft describes how the townsfolk perceive Wilbur, he says that the boy isn’t talkative, but still speaks sometimes. But we never actually read any dialogue from Wilbur. We aren’t really shown him so much as told about him. And I, for one, am curious to hear what Wilbur has to say. The mystery of the character is compelling, but there’s nothing to really sink our teeth into when everything is told second-hand.

As Wilbur grows, Old Whateley keeps buying cattle, and also starts to repair the damaged sections of his house. The rare visitors to the Whateley place see the old man doing surprisingly well with the carpentry, and filling the room that will be soon be Wilbur’s with ancient books. Whateley says that Wilbur will make better use of them than he did. Old Whateley also starts instructing Wilbur, who at one year and seven months resembles a four-year-old, out of the mysterious crusty books.

When the house restorations are finished, people notice that one of the upstairs windows has been replaced with a closed door, and a wooden runway extends from it to the hill next to the house. No one can figure it out, but no one dares ask. One man, when meeting Old Whateley to sell him some cattle, smells a horrible stench that he says “could not come from anything sane or of this earth”. “But then,” Lovecraft points out, “the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness”. Ohhhhh! Is the “Dunwich Horror” a huge fire? Because the entire town just got burned.

A few months go by, as Dunwich citizens feel tremors and hear strange sounds coming from within the hills. Wilbur, at four years old, looks like he’s ten. The villagers swear they can see an evil look in his eyes, and the rare times that he speaks are peppered with strange and unfamiliar words. When somebody visits the Whateley house, they usually find Lavinia sitting downstairs by herself while weird sounds come from upstairs. She refuses to say what the other two are doing up there, and gets frightened if anybody tries to go up and see for themselves.

A few years later, in 1923, Wilbur is ten years old with the body of a young adult, and Old Whateley dies. On his deathbed, Old Whateley tells Wilbur that Wilbur needs to make “more space”, and that something is growing which will soon be ready to serve him.

Whateley instructs Wilbur to “open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye’ll find on 751 of the complete edition, an’ then put a match to the prison”. You might think I’m joking here, but no. That is a verbatim quote. I’m not making it up.

Is it just me? Is that quote weirdly hilarious to anyone else? It just seems so out of place when describing an ancient eldritch tome. But, nevertheless, it will become an important plot point.

Under the eyes of Wilbur, Lavinia, and a local doctor, Old Whateley passes away.

By this time, Wilbur has become something of a scholar, corresponding with distant librarians about rare and ancient books. His main pastimes are using the old store of Whateley money to keep buying the cattle, and inviting scholars down to consult with.

Wilbur grows contemptuous and abusive to poor Lavinia, who one day complains to a woman from the village that she is afraid of him. Lavinia claims that there’s more to Wilbur than even she knows, and that he has some sort of important task to do that he’ll tell her nothing about. I talked above about how the story wastes the opportunity to get inside the characters’ heads, and I think Lavinia is the worst casualty of this.

She’s the Whateley we know the least about. She becomes pregnant from (spoilers) unearthly sources, bears a son whom she clearly cares for but is unlike any other human she’s known, and is out of the loop from her family’s dealing with unearthly forces. I think her perspective would be fascinating, not to mention quite tragic. It’s just a waste of potential.

And besides, there’s something weird about a guy writing fiction about a woman getting pregnant by and with monsters, and then give her almost no focus in favor of the male characters. Now to be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with a guy writing a story about a pregnancy, or even a story about a pregnancy that focuses on a dude. But if you’re going to write a pregnancy, maybe the pregnant woman should be treated like an important character?

Unfortunately, after the next Halloween, Lavinia is never seen again. Now seemingly alone, Wilbur moves all his things out to a couple of sheds in the farmyard and closes up the ground floor of the house. Then, in the winter of 1927, he leaves Dunwich for the first time.

He heads to the Library of Miskatonic University, the nearest place that has one particular book. He shows up and requests to see a book called the Necronomicon, written by “the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” and translated to Latin in the seventeenth century. Wilbur brings his own copy of the book, which he inherited from his grandfather. Once he has access to the Miskatonic’s copy, he compares the two.

Henry Armitage, the librarian, (who was one of Wilbur’s correspondents) questions Wilbur. Wilbur admits that he’s looking for a particular “formula or incantation” (because those words are just perfect synonyms) which invokes the name Yog-Sothoth. As Wilbur finds the formula and copies it, Armitage accidentally (suuuuuuure) looks over Wilbur’s shoulder and sees, I kid you not, “monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world”. That is exactly how Lovecraft describes this random passage in an old book that Wilbur is copying, with absolutely no buildup. It’s hilarious. Totally zero to sixty.

According to the passage Wilbur is copying, beings called the Old Ones ruled the earth before humanity. Now, they lurk beyond some barrier we cannot perceive as they wait to rule again. Something called Yog-Sothoth is “the key and the guardian of the gate”, seemingly crucial to letting the Old Ones break through and overtake the human race. Props to Lovecraft, the passage is quite eerie.

This, coupled with Wilbur’s general unsettling nature, freaks Armitage out. Wilbur asks to borrow the book, as he needs it for a task back home. When told that he can’t, Wilbur pretends to take it graciously and leaves the library. After he’s gone, Armitage worries that Wilbur is planning to unleash unspeakable horrors on humankind using the book.

On the one hand, I appreciate how Lovecraft doesn’t waste time with drawn-out skepticism, as would be common for characters like Armitage at this point. But on the other hand, I find it a little hard to buy that just seeing a creepy guy reading an arcane book would be enough to convince Armitage that reality as we know it is in danger.

Ah, well. Anyway, he puts the book away and contemplates what he’s heard about Wilbur’s mysterious birth. Suspecting supernatural parentage, he scoffs at the people of Dunwich’s theories of incest. “Inbreeding!” he thinks, “What simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and they’ll think it a common Dunwich scandal!” Fun fact, that’s a real story, and many elements in The Dunwich Horror were inspired by it. So this is Lovecraft name-checking the story’s predecessor within the story itself. Pretty cool.

Over the next few months, Armitage collects as much information as he can about Wilbur, Dunwich, and the Necronomicon. Then, in August of 1928, Armitage is awakened in the middle of the night by the library’s watchdog. He and a small crowd rush to the library building. Along with Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan, Armitage enters the library and finds the body of Wilbur Whateley, mauled by the dog.

Armitage and his friends are horrified to see that below the waist, Wilbur’s body is completely inhuman. Concealed by the many layers he always wore, his lower body is furry and tentacled, with reptilian legs and a tail. Before their eyes, Wilbur expires, and his body rapidly melts away to slime.

But that’s only a taste of the horrors to come. On the tenth of September, the hills rumble, dogs go into hysterics, and there is a foul smell in the air. A hired boy at the Corey farm claims that there’s a giant monster roaming around, based on an area where the trees have all been knocked over and there are huge footprints in the earth.

Mrs. Corey starts to call around, asking the neighbors if they have seen anything like that. One neighbor says that the abandoned Whateley house has been destroyed, as if it was blown up by dynamite, but with more large tracks around it. Several cows have been mysteriously killed.

A gang of Dunwichians tries to follow the tracks, but the trails leads into a dark ravine, and nobody wants to go down. The next few nights, citizens huddle together indoors, weapons at the ready. Then, on Thursday, a family disappears without a trace. Only a caved-in house and more monstrous prints are left behind.

Meanwhile, Armitage has been trying to decode the strange language that Wilbur Whateley’s diary (which Armitage had requested be brought up from Dunwich) is written in. When finally cracks it, he studies the log with panicked obsession, scrutinizing every last word. He eventually meets with Rice and Morgan, telling them of a plan to stop what the Whateleys have unleashed. When they get news of the trouble in Arkham, they set out for the village armed with a few supplies and a lot of desperate hope.

Once they get there, they try to meet up with a party of state police, who had been summoned after the local family disappeared. But the locals say that the officers went down into the ravine and never came back up. The professors set up shop in Dunwich, hoping to catch the monster one night after it leaves the ravine.

However, the monster proves to be not only elusive but also completely invisible, so this is easier said than done. The next day, during a storm, the monster starts leaving a trail of destruction and death through the town. Armitage and the professors follow the path of mayhem past the remains of the Whateley house and up Sentinel Hill.

The three professors climb the mountain to finish this once and for all, while several Dunwich citizens wait below. Among them is Curtis Whateley, a distant and considerably-less-insane relation Old Whateley, who watches from a telescope.

Curtis sees the professors spray a cloud of powder at the unseen mass, rendering it visible. The creature’s appearance horrifies Curtis so much that he passes out, but the others watch as Armitage recites a spell from the peak.

The light dims, the ground rumbles, lightning flashes. The Dunwichians hear a bellowing, inhuman voice roar hideous words. Finally, as Armitage completes the spell, the voice cries for help from its “father” Yog-Sothoth. And then, with an explosive sound and fierce wind, it’s all over.

Armitage and his friends come down from Sentinel Hill and tell the onlookers that the thing has been destroyed. It has apparently been “split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again”. Most of the monster’s alien matter has gone back to whatever extra-dimensional void its father dwells in.

In the ensuing shocked silence, Curtis comes to. He describes what he saw: an unholy combination of octopus, centipede, and spider, topped by a nightmarish human face that was several yards big. Another distant Whateley relative recalls the prediction that someday they would all hear a child of Lavinia’s calling its father’s name from the top of Sentinel Hill.

Another man asks Armitage what the creature was, and how Wilbur summoned it. Armitage describes it as being made of a force, a force which was also in Wilbur. A force from some other “part of space”. A force that serves beings who would, if they had the chance, “drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose”. The creature itself wasn’t summoned by Wilbur it all. It was Wilbur’s twin brother, who more closely resembled their father.

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“The Dunwich Horror” has a lot going for it. The atmosphere is great (per the norm for Lovecraft). The prose is striking when it needs to be. The pacing builds tension quite masterfully. And, unflattering descriptions of Dunwich notwithstanding, there’s little to no actual racism (NOT per the norm for Lovecraft). Just how inhuman Wilbur actually is makes for a good surprise. His monster twin’s full reveal is held off for as long as possible, and when it is revealed, the visual is so uncanny and disturbing that it’s an effective payoff.

But still, I can’t help but see the whole thing as something of a missed opportunity. The historical and factual presentation is a well-done touch, but in this case I thought it wasn’t the best choice for the story. The closest thing we have to a main character is Armitage, who is basically nothing but a plot device. There’s almost nothing more to his personality than “be scared of eldritch horrors, get rid of them”. The same can be said of most of the Dunwich citizens. The Whateleys seem like they would be far more interesting to explore.

How much does Lavinia know about Old Whateley and Wilbur’s activities? What was her pregnancy like? How does she feel toward her father and her son? Why, exactly, do the Whateleys want the Old Ones to overwhelm the Earth? What’s in it for them? Has Wilbur always known what he is, or did Old Whateley tell him?

If Lovecraft had answered these questions, I think they might have been the most interesting parts of the story. While we do get some hints into their psyches (Lavinia’s nervousness around her son, the snatches of Wilbur’s diary), I still end up wanting more.

Bottom line? This story is very good. But, if it had made the most of its characters? I think it could have been great.

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Thanks for reading. Up next, we continue on with Lovecraft’s stories and get to the big man himself. That’s right, tune in next time for “The Call of Cthulhu”.