Catch The Lurking Fear (Young Reader) Translated By H.P. Lovecraft Presented As File
on The Lurking Fear (Young reader)
Lurking Fear consists of four chapters: “The Shadow on the Chimney”, “A Passer in the Storm”, “What the Red Glare Meant” and “The Horror in the Eyes”.
After a slow start where we are introduced to an unnamed narrator and his obsession with Tempest Mountain and an unexplained massacre that happened there, The Lurking Fear turns into a great horror story with quite a few hairrising moments whose arm or leg did the narrator feel when he explored the Martens mansion at night or the moment he touches one of his companions and he doesn't reply.
Not much was left to imagination though, The explanation probably worked better for people who read this when it came out the first time, but after a lot of films/stories with similar topic, it isn't as surprising as it should be.
Not Lovecraft's fault, of course, Lovecraft is probably better known for his stories involving tentacled oily nasties from other dimensions aka the cthulhu mythos, but he also does an excellent line in 'speculative genetics' as per this story.
Where these stories lag a little in their predictableness they easily compensate for in the sheer tentacularness of prose:
Shreiking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguinated condors of purple fulgurous sky.
. . formless phantasms and kalaidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils moundlike tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion.
. . insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation, . .
As I read this the voice in my head morphed into the painter from The Fast Show screaming "BLACK.
. . ! BLACK! I'M A FLY, TRAPPED IN A JAR OF SHADOWS!" I wouldn't be surprised if Lovecraft was a source of inspiration for that sketch arc now.
One of a kind horror tale by H, P. Lovecraft. He is able to create a horrific , dark and creepy world by his writings and the way he writes kept me captivated and fascinated throughout the book.
Oh, I loved it. The first Lovecraft thing Ive touched in English, and I really wanted to highlight and quote so many moments.
Lovecraft writes beautiful things,
The plot is that sort of unnerving and creeping fear that I love, The anticipation is totally worth it,
I loved it, This guy is stimulating at best and boring at his worst, the bottom line is that he is verbose, I did not feel a damn, pardon my french, The shudders of horror must be conveyed through the way the words are used not the words per se in this very case, embellished metaphors and savant words in patches that all they say all in all is nothing mostly.
Demonic incest and cannibalism made for some lovely Sunday morning reading! This is a story aboutor so pages long and it in Lovecraft is able to set a mood and show the protagonist devolving into madness.
The guy does have a break with his senses and he does find out what the lurking fear is.
I do wonder if Lovecraft hated nature as much as he hated the cold, In this story, the forest and trees are evil demonic things, What is so horrible about trees and even storms for that matter,
There is a deserted mansion in this story and a terror that haunts the area.
Our protagonist much find out and he keeps hunting as everyone around him dies over months, I really did love the ending of the story, I should have seen it coming and missed it, It was a great bit of writing,
Lovecraft sets a tone here and it's all gloom and doom, The storms are horrific and the terror is horrific and the fear is horrific, It's a well done piece, Again, the language is archaic, but well written, I find it easy to settle into, but many words are spelled oddly and I had to adjust to that.
I'm enjoying these stories. I see why they are so popular,
I'm throwing up some Spoilers:
Spoilers ahead:
So, there was a family that built the mansion in thes, the Martense family, a very awkward name.
They disappeared sometime in thes and the mansion has been deserted accept for squatters since, Before, the Martense's were very isolated and in thes they had begun inbreeding,
Our protag comes face to face with this horror several times and he finally sees at the end that the horror lives underground in tunnels like moles in a huge mole hill.
We do find out what the fear is and what happens to the family, It was a great surprise ending for me, I didn't catch it and I probably should have,
.for this book.
Although the writing was okay, I couldn't really pay attention to the whole story,
It wasn't really my cup of tea, But maybe it is yours, So you can read it here: sitelink hplovecraft. com/writings/t Ah yes, the Furking Lear, This is one of those tales where upon completion you have to draw a deep breath, "Whoo," and ask yourself, "Did I really read what I think I read" I doubt anyone other than HP Lovecraft could have pulled off such a piece of absolute looninessalthough I do recall a later stories from thes by Frederick C Davis called "The Mole Men Want Your Eyes" that had a similar premise.
Davis' story was much more gruesome however, but it had to have been built upon the bones of thismasterpiece.
A "masterpiece" of WHAT I can't exactly say, but it's definitely
a masterpiece of whatever it's supposed to represent.
Here we have one of those cases where the phrase "you need to get out more" could not be more appropriate.
SPOILER Old Man Martense and his clan withdraw from the society of men, over time devolving into a race of degenerate cannibalistic apemen who go underground, inhabiting molelike tunnels, and coming out only during thunder storms to kill the squatters living on the lands nearby.
END OF SPOILER It was written inbut I wonder if HPL didn't have a glance ahead to today when crazy militia groups hole up in mountain compounds as they await the inevitable invasion from totalitarian government forces.
Perhaps they are the ones who should be reading this to get an idea of where they're headed.
Assuming of course such people can comprehend words of over two syllables,
Or, you can simply accept this as HPL wildly piling one thing on top of another and having a hoot while doing it, giving us something so utterly insane he had to be laughing the entire while he wrote it.
This to me is what I love about HPL, that his stuff is so outlandish and outofthisworld that it's impossible to take any of it seriously.
And yet so many do, Pictures of HPL tend to make him look sour, but in my eyes I sense a sly Mona Lisa type of smile that says he knows full well he's putting one over on you.
Maybe that's why I prefer those writers who follow his style who actually communicated with him, They understood the dense prose and arcane adjectives were part of the act, the rubber chicken if you will, that signaled none of it was to be taken seriously.
And it's why modern writers who never knew him turn out such inferior product, because they don't get it, the idea that there's no way you can write this sort of stuff without having your tongue firmly in cheek, if not outright howling with laughter.
HPL has been called many things, some good, some bad, but for me he is one of the outstanding humorists of the earlyth century for putting across a joke and a genre of humor that people to this day still don't understand.
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