H.P. Lovecraft

What the Moon Brings, while short, is very evocative. Indeed, the image for this week's post was inspired by the short story.

The story's protagonist despises and fears the moon, for he finds that under the light of the moon familiar scenes become warped and strange. One summer evening, the garden in which the protagonist wanders becomes haunted with a yellow light from the moon.

What interests me here is how the protagonist anthropomorphises the moon, the flowers of the garden, and the crystal stream that flows through the garden. He characterises the moon as a malevolent force, using words such as hateful and describing the stream as "moon-cursed". One by one lotus blossoms drop into and are carried away by this stream, and the protagonist states that these blossoms "[stare] back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces".

The protagonist follows the lotus blossoms, beckoned on by their whispering. Oddly, the protagonist does not encounter the boundary of the garden as he should; he instead finds new and unfamiliar vistas stretching before him. Before long the stream itself becomes a river and wends through marshland before joining a vast sea. The protagonist laments at the lack of a net, which he would use to save the lotus blossoms from their fate. He looks out to sea and seas a sunken city, which he knows to be the final destination of all dead things.

The protagonist spies a black condor, that he wishes to ask about the fate of dead friends. He watches as the condor lands on a black reef. He is struck by insurmountable fear as the tide ebbs low, revealing the reef to be the crown of some colossal creature, whose head shines in the moonlight and whose hooves paw at oozes miles below. Fearing the gaze of this creature, the protagonist casts himself to his doom into the stinking sea, where sea-worms feast on the flesh of the dead.

I believe it's an uncontroversial interpretation that the entire tale is a dream. The protagonist assigns human traits to the moon (which hates and curses) and the lotus blossoms (which beckon him to follow them down the stream). Familiar sights are missing, replaced by entirely new and alien vistas. The protagonist finds a cyclopean sunken city which draws to it the worlds dead, and a colossal basalt crowned monstrosity lies in the waters; its gaze is terrifying to even speculate.

I see in this story the seeds of many ideas which have grown to maturity 4 years later in The Call of Cthulhu. Of course there are the obvious parallels between the sunken city and the city of R'lyeh, and the basalt-crowned eikon with Cthulhu himself. There is also the common theme of death; the dead are drawn to the sunken city in What the Moon Brings while in The Call of Chtulhu, it is suggested, through the use of Abdul Al Hazred's famous couplet, that Cthulhu has some manner of dominion over death. Another similarity is in the use of dream to affect people. This story is evidently some manner of nightmare, while in The Call of Chtulhu, many artists of the mid 1920s are simultaneously haunted by maddening dreams of sunken cities and Dread Cthulhu. There are two more minor comparisons to make. The first is in the use of flowers. In What the Moon Brings the protagonist describes the time of year as a "spectral summer of narcotic flowers"; following these flower blossoms leads the protagonist to the sunken charnel pit of the worlds dead, and their perfume-conquering stench. In the penultimate paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu, the protagonist notes that "even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me". Finally, there is the fixation with the moon. An association between Cthulhu and the moon is seen in part III of The Call of Cthulhu. Upon discovering Cthulhu, one of the first words used is "lunacy". Lovecraft, being deliberate in his use of language and aware of the origins of the words he chose, made the decision to use a word for madness etymologically linked to the moon. A more concrete link is seen after Cthulhu reconstitutes himself while the Alert attempts to escape his retribution. The steamer is assailed by a great storm which conjures images of otherworldly voyages. One such image is that of "hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit".

I'm sure some will agree that it's incredibly interesting to see the early experimentation with ideas that later form the basis of some of Lovecraft's most loved famous stories.

The Hound is another Lovecraftian tale of cruel and unusual retribution, obsession with death, and lashings of the supernatural. Two grave robbers have created a secret museum of artifacts stolen from the graves of their victims. They are intrigued by the legend of the grave of a centuries old man, a "ghoul" who delighted in grave robbing as they do, and who met his end after one such robbery. The pair seek the treasure of that final robbery.

The two travel to Holland and uncover the coffin, while being haunted by some distant baying of a great hound. They are somewhat unnerved by the baying as legend speaks of the old grave robber meeting his end by such a hound. Still, they carry on. With the pristine skeleton of the ill-fated grave robber, they find a carved jade amulet of a winged lupine creature, described as a "sphinx with a semi-canine face". The pair recognise this amulet as an artifact described in the Necronomicon as some icon associated with the cannibal cult of Leng in Central Asia. They steal the amulet and retreat back to England, haunted by the sea winds which they fancy sounds like the baying of a hound.

The leader of the pair, St John, soon meets his poetic end as he is mauled to death by some great hound. Fearing the same fate, the narrator dashes back to Holland with the amulet, intent on returning it to its former resting place. He is foiled by thieves stealing the amulet from his room, while continuously haunted by the baying of the hound. During one night of particularly loud baying, a mass murder occurs in the same city. In a thieves' den a family is torn to shreds by some unknown beast.

The narrator returns to the graveyard without the amulet, in a desparate attempt to somehow atone for his sin. He notes the baying quieting and eventually ceasing as he reaches the grave of the old grave robber. He digs at the frozen ground only to find the earth suspiciously loose. Opening the coffin, he is confronted by the creature which bays. Rather than the clean skeleton that he previously encountered, the skeleton is soiled with flesh and hair, and cloaked in bats. It's canines are distinctly more fanglike, and it stares sentiently at the narrator with phosphorescent eye sockets. As the narrator notices that in its claw is clasped the amulet of jade, the skeleton's jaw yawns open and unleashes that same haunting baying as if of a hound.

Certain of his fate, the narrator shoots himself to avoid experiencing the horrible dismemberment of the Hound.

The Hound is only tangentially related to the Dreamlands in its mention of Leng, which is a location existing simultaneously on Earth and within the Dreamlands; it is referenced in the fiction as a place where realities converge and is therefore possibly one of many physical bridges between Earth and the Dreamlands.

Also of note is the mention of Abdul Alhazred and his infamous tome the Necronomicon. It was often my interpretation that this tome is very rare and surprisingly few complete copies exist, especially of the 16th century John Dee translation. Indeed, in The Dunwich Horror, the sorceror Wilbur Whateley risks his life in order to steal a complete copy from the library of the Miskatonic University. I find it odd that seemingly any pair of delinquents can obtain and study the volume. It could possibly be argued that it's an artifact recovered from one of their adventures. Admittedly I'm no expert on this topic, but my naive assumption would be that some leather bound tome such as the Necronomicon would be soon eaten away in a grave.

Finally, I'm fascinated by the vampiric creature that is the ancient grave robber. It's interesting to see Lovecraft's interpretation of traditional horror entities and how they fit within the Mythos. I'm left with some questions on the nature of this vampirism. Notably, we do not see the curse passed on to the victims of the creature, yet the creature itself was ostensibly transformed after a similar attack. Also of note is that the amulet remained with the grave robber, rather than being retrieved by his killer. I'm also interested how the amulet found its way into the possession of a Dutch grave robber from an inaccesible plateau in Central Asia (though we see in later tales that Leng is prone to moving and difficult to locate). I think it's plausible to conjecture that the construction of this amulet is part of some ritual communicated by some outer god. The purpose is that in death, the bearer finds unrest whenever the amulet is not in their possession. Thus it may be a item intended to bestow a poetic curse on would be grave robbers.