The Dunwich Horror Explained

The Dunwich Horror
Author:H. P. Lovecraft
Country:United States
Language:English
Publication Type:Periodical
Published In:Weird Tales
Media Type:Print (magazine)
Pub Date:April, 1929
Wikisource:Weird Tales/Volume 13/Issue 4/The Dunwich Horror

"The Dunwich Horror" is a horror novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in 1928, it was first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales (pp. 481–508). It takes place in Dunwich, a fictional town in Massachusetts. It is considered one of the core stories of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Plot

In the desolate, decrepit Massachusetts village of Dunwich, Wilbur Whateley is the hideous son of Lavinia Whateley, a deformed and unstable albino, and an unknown father. Strange events surround Wilbur's birth and precocious development; he matures at an abnormal rate, reaching manhood within a decade. Locals shun him and his family, and animals fear and despise him due to his repellent appearance and an unnatural, inhuman odor emanating from his body. All the while his grandfather, a sorcerer called only Old Whateley, indoctrinates him into certain dark rituals and the study of witchcraft. Various locals grow suspicious after Old Whateley buys more and more cattle, yet the number of his herd never increases and the cattle in his field become mysteriously afflicted with severe open wounds.

Wilbur and Old Whateley have sequestered an unseen entity at their farmhouse; this entity is connected somehow to a being known as Yog-Sothoth, which is Wilbur's father. Year by year, the entity grows to monstrous proportions, requiring the two men to make frequent modifications to the farmhouse. People begin to notice a trend of cattle mysteriously disappearing. Old Whateley eventually dies, and Wilbur's mother Lavinia disappears soon after. The colossal entity eventually occupies the entire interior of the farmhouse.

Wilbur ventures to Miskatonic University in Arkham to procure their copy of the Necronomicon—Miskatonic's library is one of only a handful in the world to stock that book. The Necronomicon has spells that Wilbur can use to summon the Old Ones, but his family's copy is damaged and lacks the page he needs to open the "door". When the librarian, Dr. Henry Armitage, refuses to release the university's copy to him (and, by sending warnings to other libraries, thwarts Wilbur's efforts to consult their copies), Wilbur breaks into the library under the cover of night to steal it. A guard dog, maddened by Wilbur's alien body odor, attacks with unusual ferocity and kills him. When Armitage and two other professors, Warren Rice and Francis Morgan, arrive on the scene, they see Wilbur's semi-human corpse before it melts completely, leaving no evidence.

With Wilbur dead, no one attends to the mysterious presence growing in the Whateley farmhouse. Early one morning, the farmhouse explodes, and the thing, a towering, invisible monster, rampages across Dunwich, leaving huge prints the size of tree trunks. The monster eventually makes forays into inhabited areas. The invisible creature terrorizes Dunwich for several days, killing two families and several policemen, until Armitage, Rice, and Morgan arrive with the knowledge and weapons needed to kill it. The use of a magic powder renders the monster visible just long enough to send one of the crew into shock. It babbles in an alien tongue, then screams for help from its father Yog-Sothoth in English just before the spell destroys it, leaving a massive burned area. In the end, its nature is revealed: it was Wilbur's twin brother, but it "looked more like the father than he [Wilbur] did."

Characters

Old Whateley
  • Lavinia Whateley's "aged and half-insane father, about whom the most frightful tales of magic had been whispered in his youth".[1] He has a large collection of "rotting ancient books and parts of books" which he uses to "instruct and catechise" his grandson Wilbur.[2] He dies of natural causes on August 2, 1924.[3] Whateley was given no certain first name by Lovecraft, although Fungi from Yuggoth mentions a John Whateley. According to S.T. Joshi, "It is not certain where Lovecraft got the name Whateley," but there is a small town called Whately in northwestern Massachusetts near the Mohawk Trail, which Lovecraft hiked several times, including in the summer of 1928.[4] Robert M. Price's short story "Wilbur Whateley Waiting" emphasizes the obvious pun in the name.[5]
    Lavinia Whateley
  • Born circa 1878, Lavinia Whateley is the spinster daughter of Old Whateley whose mother met an "unexplained death by violence" when Lavinia was 12. She is described as "a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman...a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys...She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her...Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations." Elsewhere, she is called "slatternly [and] crinkly-haired". In 1913, she gave birth to Wilbur Whateley by an unknown father, later revealed to be Yog-Sothoth. On Halloween night in 1926, she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, presumably killed or sacrificed by her son.
    Wilbur Whateley
  • Born February 2, 1913 at 5 a.m. to Lavinia Whateley and Yog-Sothoth. Described as a "dark, goatish-looking infant"[6] —neighbors refer to him as "Lavinny's black brat"[7] —he shows extreme precocity: "Within three months of his birth, he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age...At seven months, he began to walk unassisted,"[8] and he "commenced to talk...at the age of only eleven months."[7] At three years of age, "he looked like a boy of ten,"[9] while at four and a half, he "looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break."[10] "Though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of...well-nigh preternatural intelligence," Lovecraft writes, though at the same time he is "exceedingly ugly...there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears."[7]

    He dies at the age of fifteen after being mauled by a guard dog while breaking into the Miskatonic library on August 3, 1928. His death scene allows Lovecraft to provide a detailed description of Wilbur's partly nonhuman anatomy: "The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin...It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated. Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest...had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws."[11]

    This death scene bears a marked resemblance to that of Jervase Cradock, a similarly half-human character in Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal": "Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth, a slimy, wavering tentacle," Machen writes.[12] Will Murray notes that the goatish, partly reptilian Wilbur Whateley resembles a chimera, a mythological creature referred to in Charles Lamb's epigraph to "The Dunwich Horror".[13] Robert M. Price points out that Wilbur Whateley is in some respects an autobiographical figure for Lovecraft: "Wilbur's being raised by a grandfather instead of a father, his home education from his grandfather's library, his insane mother, his stigma of ugliness (in Lovecraft's case untrue, but a self-image imposed on him by his mother), and his sense of being an outsider all echo Lovecraft himself."[14]

    Henry Armitage
  • The head librarian at Miskatonic University. As a young man, he graduated from Miskatonic in 1881 and went on to obtain his doctorate from Princeton University and his doctor of letters at Johns Hopkins University. Lovecraft noted that while writing "The Dunwich Horror", "[I] found myself identifying with one of the characters (an aged scholar who finally combats the menace) toward the end".[15]
    Francis Morgan
  • Professor of Medicine and Comparative Anatomy (or Archaeology) at Miskatonic University. The story refers to him as "lean" and "youngish". In Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars"—written in 1966 and apparently set at about that time—Morgan is described as "the sole living survivor of the brave trio who had slain the Dunwich Horror". According to Leiber, Morgan's "research in mescaline and LSD" produced "clever anti-hallucinogens" that were instrumental in curing Danforth's mental illness.[16]
    Warren Rice
  • Professor of Classical Languages at Miskatonic University. He is called "stocky" and "iron-grey".

    Inspiration

    Geographical

    In a letter to August Derleth, Lovecraft wrote that "The Dunwich Horror" "takes place amongst the wild domed hills of the upper Miskatonic Valley, far northwest of Arkham, and is based on several New England legends—one of which I heard only last month during my sojourn in Wilbraham," a town east of Springfield, Massachusetts.[17] One such legend is the notion that whippoorwills can capture the departing soul.[18]

    In another letter, Lovecraft wrote that Dunwich is "a vague echo of the decadent Massachusetts countryside around Springfield, Massachusetts—say Wilbraham, Monson and Hampden."[19] Robert M. Price notes that "much of the physical description of the Dunwich countryside is a faithful sketch of Wilbraham," citing a passage from a letter from Lovecraft to Zealia Bishop that "sounds like a passage from 'The Dunwich Horror' itself":

    The physical model for Dunwich's Sentinel Hill is thought to be Wilbraham Mountain near Wilbraham.[20]

    Some researchers have pointed out the story's apparent connections to another Massachusetts region: the area around Athol and points south, in the north-central part of the state (which is where Lovecraft indicates that Dunwich is located). It has been suggested that the name Dunwich was inspired by the town of Greenwich, which was deliberately flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir,[21] although Greenwich and the nearby towns of Dana, Enfield and Prescott actually were not submerged until 1938. Donald R. Burleson points out that several names included in the story—including Bishop, Frye, Sawyer, Rice and Morgan—are either prominent Athol names or have a connection to the town's history, however Rice is also the name of a prominent Wilbraham family as well.[22] [23]

    Athol's Sentinel Elm Farm seems to be the source for the name Sentinel Hill.[20] The Bear's Den mentioned in the story resembles an actual cave of the same name visited by Lovecraft in North New Salem, southwest of Athol.[24] (New Salem, like Dunwich, was founded by settlers from Salem—though in 1737, not 1692.[25])

    The book Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896),[26] by Charles M. Skinner, mentions a "Devil's Hop Yard" near Haddam, Connecticut as a gathering place for witches. The book, which Lovecraft seems to have read, also describes noises emanating from the earth near Moodus, Connecticut, which are similar to the Dunwich sounds decried by Rev. Abijah Hoadley.[27]

    Literary

    Lovecraft's main literary sources for "The Dunwich Horror" are the stories of Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen, particularly "The Great God Pan" (mentioned in the text of "The Dunwich Horror") and "The Novel of the Black Seal". Both Machen stories concern individuals whose death throes reveal them to be only half-human in their parentage. According to Robert M. Price, "'The Dunwich Horror' is in every sense an homage to Machen and even a pastiche. There is little in Lovecraft's story that does not come directly out of Machen's fiction."[28] As one example similarity, both Wilbur Whateley and Helen Vaughan are the child of an invisible god and a human female, and both of them after dying quickly turned into black liquid.

    Another source that has been suggested is "The Thing in the Woods", by Margery Williams, which is also about two brothers living in the woods, neither of them quite human and one of them less human than the other.

    The name Dunwich itself may come from Machen's The Terror, where the name refers to an English town where the titular entity is seen hovering as "a black cloud with sparks of fire in it".[29] Lovecraft also takes Wilbur Whateley's occult terms "Aklo" and "Voorish" from Machen's "The White People".[30]

    Lovecraft also seems to have found inspiration in Anthony M. Rud's story "Ooze" (published in Weird Tales, March 1923), which also involved a monster being secretly kept and fed in a house that it subsequently bursts out of and destroys.[31]

    The tracks of Wilbur's brother recall those seen in Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo", one of Lovecraft's favorite horror stories.[32] Ambrose Bierce's story "The Damned Thing" also involves a monster invisible to human eyes.

    Reception

    Lovecraft took pride in "The Dunwich Horror", calling it "so fiendish that [''Weird Tales'' editor] Farnsworth Wright may not dare to print it." Wright, however, snapped it up, sending Lovecraft a check for $240, the largest single payment for his fiction he had received up to that point.[33]

    Kingsley Amis praised "The Dunwich Horror" in New Maps of Hell, listing it as one of Lovecraft's tales that "achieve a memorable nastiness".[34] Lovecraft biographer Lin Carter calls the story "an excellent tale...A mood of tension and gathering horror permeates the story, which culminates in a shattering climax".[35] In his list of "The 13 Most Terrifying Horror Stories", T. E. D. Klein placed "The Dunwich Horror" at number four.[36] Robert M. Price declares that "among the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, 'The Dunwich Horror' remains my favorite."[37] S. T. Joshi, on the other hand, regarded "Dunwich" as "simply an aesthetic mistake on Lovecraft's part", citing its "stock good-versus-evil scenario". However, he has also noted that it is "richly atmospheric."[38]

    Cthulhu Mythos

    See main article: Cthulhu Mythos.

    Although Lovecraft first mentioned Yog-Sothoth in the novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it was in "The Dunwich Horror" that he introduced the entity as one of his extra-dimensional Outer Gods. It is also the tale in which the Necronomicon makes the most significant appearance, and the longest direct quote from it appears in the text. Many of the other standards of the Cthulhu Mythos, such as Miskatonic University, Arkham, and Dunwich, also form integral parts of the tale.

    A librarian named Armitage appears in Don Webb's short story "To Mars and Providence", an alternate history where a juvenile Lovecraft is influenced by the events of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.

    The biannual NecronomiCon Providence has a Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium, and its papers are printed by Hippocampus Press.

    Adaptations

    Film and television

    Stage

    Audio

    Graphic novel and comics

    Short story collection

    The Dunwich Horror and Others is the title of a collection of H. P. Lovecraft short stories published by Arkham House, containing what August Derleth considered to be the best of Lovecraft's shorter fiction. Originally published in 1963, the 6th printing in 1985 included extensive corrections by S. T. Joshi in order to produce the definitive edition of Lovecraft's works. The collection has an introduction by Robert Bloch, titled "Heritage of Horror", reprinted from the 1982 Ballantine collection, Blood Curdling Tales of Supernatural Horror: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft.

    The stories included in The Dunwich Horror and Others are "In the Vault", "Pickman's Model", "The Rats in the Walls", "The Outsider", "The Colour Out of Space", "The Music of Erich Zann", "The Haunter of the Dark", "The Picture in the House", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Dunwich Horror", "Cool Air", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Terrible Old Man", "The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and "The Shadow Out of Time".

    Influence

    Sources

    External links

    Notes and References

    1. http://www.mythostomes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=63&Itemid=70 Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror"
    2. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 163.
    3. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 166.
    4. Joshi, p. 115.
    5. Robert M. Price, "Wilbur Whateley Waiting", The Dunwich Cycle, Robert M. Price, ed., pp. 236–252.
    6. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 159.
    7. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 162.
    8. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 161.
    9. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 164.
    10. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 165.
    11. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", pp. 174–175.
    12. Cited in Joshi, p. 140.
    13. Will Murray, "The Dunwich Chimera and Others: Correlating the Cthulhu Mythos", Lovecraft Studies No. 8 (Spring 1984), pp. 10–24; cited in Joshi, pp. 104, 140.
    14. Price, The Dunwich Cycle, p. 236.
    15. H. P. Lovecraft, letter to August Derleth, September 1928; cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 81.
    16. Fritz Leiber, "To Arkham and the Stars", Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, pp. 320–321.
    17. Lovecraft, letter to August Derleth, August 4, 1928, cited in Joshi, p. 101.
    18. Joshi, p. 113.
    19. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. III, pp. 432–433; cited in Joshi, p. 108.
    20. Joshi, p. 114.
    21. Charles P. Mitchell, The Complete H.P. Lovecraft Filmography p.9 (2001)
    22. Donald R. Burleson, "Humour Beneath Horror: Some Sources for 'The Dunwich Horror' and 'The Whisperer in Darkness'", Lovecraft Studies, No. 2 (Spring 1980), pp. 5–15, cited in Joshi, pp. 105, 111, 138; Price, p. 82.
    23. Chauncey Edwin Peck, "The History of Wilbraham, Massachusetts", p. 374 (1914)
    24. Joshi, p. 147.
    25. Will Murray, "In Search of Arkham Country Revisited", Lovecraft Studies, Nos. 19/20 (Fall 1989), ppp. 65–69; cited in Joshi, p. 110.
    26. Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, Charles M. Skinner, 1896; online version available from Project Gutenberg
    27. Joshi, p. 112.
    28. Price, pp. ix–x.
    29. Price, p. 1.
    30. Price, p. 48.
    31. Joshi, pp. 118, 152.
    32. Joshi, pp. 144–145.
    33. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. II, p. 240; cited in Joshi, p. 101.
    34. Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. Victor Gollancz, 1961, p.25.
    35. Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, pp. 71–72.
    36. T.E.D. Klein, "The 13 Most Terrifying Horror Stories" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, July–August 1983, (p. 63).
    37. Robert M. Price, "What Roodmas Horror", The Dunwich Cycle, p. ix.
    38. Joshi, pp. 16–17.
    39. Web site: H・P・ラヴクラフトのダニッチ・ホラー その他の物語. https://web.archive.org/web/20120207202141/http://www.ganime.jp/dunwich/. 7 February 2012. 2013-08-12. ja. H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories.
    40. H.P.Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories is released on August 28, 2007 under the Ganime DVD label.. Toei Animation. 5 June 2007. 2013-08-12. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20120210150807/http://corp.toei-anim.co.jp/english/press/2007/06/hplovecrafts_the_dunwich_horro.html. 10 February 2012.
    41. Web site: Beyond Providence, Beyond Death; an Interview with Beyond the Dunwich Horror director Richard Griffin. Fife. Tim. CinemaSuicide.com. 15 May 2008. 2013-08-12.
    42. Color Out of Space Spoilers & Richard Stanley's Lovecraft Trilogy Plans – The Witching Hour . dead . Foutch . Haleigh . Nemiroff . Perri . . January 22, 2020 . July 15, 2020 . . December 14, 2021 . https://web.archive.org/web/20211214183354/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJK7y_FpQEI .
    43. Web site: 'Color Out of Space' Producers SpectreVision Cut Ties With Director Richard Stanley After Domestic Violence Allegations. 17 March 2021. March 18, 2021.
    44. News: Bay. Pod. Richard Stanley Knows the Ups and Downs of Hollywood Moviemaking (49-53 minute mark) . 24 September 2022 . Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin Podcast. 16 August 2022.
    45. Web site: Dunwich Horror 2013 stage play review.
    46. News: RADIO: 'Something New on the Radio--Stories!'. Brown, James. July 31, 1977. Los Angeles Times Calendar. 97. "Sorry, Wrong Number" will be the first of the Suspense reissues to air this September. Others on the schedule include the two-part science fiction classic "Donovan's Brain" starring Orson Welles; an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" with Ronald Colman; Bob Hope, in a rare dramatic role in "Death Has a Shadow"; "The Ten Years" starring Joan Crawford, and many other.... .
    47. https://www.newspapers.com/image/628623216/?clipping_id=127352679 "Radio: Thursday's Highlights; Lanny Ross Returns to Singing"
    48. Web site: H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror . https://web.archive.org/web/20100606144338/http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/whats-on/2010/h-p-lovecrafts-the-dunwich-horror . 6 June 2010 . 2013-08-11.
    49. Web site: 19 Nocturne presents The Dunwich Horror – part 1 of 4 . 19 Nocturne Boulevard . 8 October 2011 . 2013-08-11.
    50. Web site: Heavy Metal Magazine #v3#6 . Grand Comics Database . 6 October 2021.
    51. IDW Announces H.P. Lovecraft Adaptation Comic Series . . 15 July 2011 . 2013-08-11 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20131020162911/http://www.idwpublishing.com/news/article/1875/ . 20 October 2013 .
    52. MidtownComics. 763865155734233088 . 11 Aug 2016 . Midtown's Benjamin Granoff adapted H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror from Bag & Board Studios.
    53. Book: Granoff, Benjamin . 2016 . H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror . Bag & Board Studios . 978-1-68419-956-3.
    54. Web site: Boojum by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette. Lightspeed. September 2012. 2013-08-10.
    55. Web site: Nigen Isu discography. https://web.archive.org/web/20110917131924/http://ningen-isu.com/wp/?page_id=211. dead. 2011-09-17. 2014-03-10.
    56. Web site: Arkham Horror: Dunwich Horror Expansion. BoardGameGeek. 2018-03-27.
    57. Web site: The Dunwich Horror (Arkham Horror Expansion). 2006. Fantasy Flight Games. 2018-03-27.

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