#44 The Dreams in the Witch House- Lovecraft
The size and pace of this one reads more like a Novella, and
is likely one of the longer short stories I’ll tackle for this project. However, in reading H.P Lovecraft’s Omnibus 1
in its entirety, I’ve also read through a few of his mid-sized, namely At the
Mountains of Madness and The Case of John Dexter Ward. So far, I’ve enjoyed his shorter works. All his writing has been artful, talented
story telling, but the longer works seem to be struggling to accomplish a certain
mood or tension that I think could be accomplished in half the
space.
In Dreams in the Witch House I think he’s found a good
balance and the pacing was perfect. Once
again I immensely enjoyed his style of prose.
Its amazing that as I go through these collections, that someone like
Lovecraft can exist at the same period as Hemingway, Faulkner, Jack London,
etc. I guess its always the same with
writers of off-beat topics. Genre writers,
pulp authors have the freedom to break convention.
Lovecraft is the king of the macabre and hoary, the
mysterious and the grotesque. But in
Dreams, he shows you exactly how ahead of his time he was. This thriller is as much
a study in quantum physics as it is a gory horror tale. Gilliam, our protagonist, tracks down a story
of a 17th century witch, Keziah, as well as a foul hybrid creature haunting
this town. This “white fanged fury thing” that “nuzzled people curiously in the
black hours before dawn" is a local folk tale born of hyperbole and fear. It is a cross between a rat, a dog, and a
human. They name it Brown Jenkins.
As Gilliam increases his connection to these horrors through
dreams, “sharpest dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the
fullest depths of sleep”, he finds himself straddling special dimensions,
“perhaps one of infinite remoteness.” He
taps into knowledge heretofore only the likes of Plank and Einstein held. Sudden understanding of Riemannian Equations
and the connection of the fourth dimension.
I’m amazed that these thought experiments played out here nearly 100
years ago are still being discussed among quantum physicists today.
Whether these dreams lead to actual space space-time bending
or is just a mind-trick consequence of his known somnambulism, is left to us,
the reader to decide.
Lovecraft liberally references something called the
Necronomicon, it’s a grimoire, a book of magic he invents himself that has
since taken on a life of its own within the genre.
Notable Passage: “Non-Euclidean
calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one
mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of
multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the
wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free
from mental tension.”
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