Il Rito

by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. It is considered to be one of the first of his Cthulhu Mythos stories.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Lovecraftian, Fiction, Fantasy, Classics, Audiobook

18 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

— Wikipedia

Reviews

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main character (who is nameless) visits Kingsport, New England, to celebrate Yuletide. They feel their forefathers and ancestors have been somehow calling them to come. But when they arrive, they find it isn’t what they expected it to be.

An enjoyable and strange short read with an eerie and sinister atmosphere.

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This early Cthulhu mythos story, first published in Weird Tales in 1925, is central to Lovecraft’s development, powerfully atmospheric in its earlier passages, but finally unsuccessful for a typically Lovecraftian reason: not content with the haunted mood he first evokes, he rachets up the rhetoric, doubles down on the adjectives, and thus dissipates, by his strenuous efforts, every little bit of the horror.

What a pity, since the second paragraph of the story ably conveys what Lovecraft would call “the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence”: his first visit to Marblehead, Massachusetts, a city which embodied “the stupendous totality” of “the past.”

...with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars.

However, by the middle of the next paragraph, the bad writing has begun:

I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind.

There is even worse writing still to come, but, since such prose is part the true horror that is “The Festival,” I will let you discover it for yourself.

I’ll concede I’m making this sound worse than it is. All in all, it is an effective prose poem with a handful of genuine thrills, and it does an excellent job mixing reality and reverie, shifting imperceptibly from one to the other and back again.

Still, I can’t help but wish that H.P., in honor of Marblehead, had—just this once—trusted his poetic instincts and left the purple prose machine alone.

[Mutasim Billah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten."

One of the earliest stories Cthulhu mythos, The Festival was originally published in 1925 in Weird Tales. An unnamed narrator is visiting Kingsport, Massachusetts to participate in Yuletide. It is an ancient sea town, one that seems centuries out-of-date of modern practices. He locates his relatives' house, which has an overhanging second story, and is greeted by an unspeaking old man with "flabby hands, curiously gloved," and a "bland face" that he comes to suspect is "a fiendishly cunning mask". This mysterious greeter directs him to wait next to a pile of old books that includes a Latin translation of the Necronomicon, wherein he discovers "a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness."



Whether or not our narrator survives the expedition is for the reader to find out as eerie events lead us from one to another setting as horror and madness takes over.

"The nethermost caverns...are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lonely wanderer enters the town of Kingsport to celebrate with his family Yuletide (a festivity similar to Christmas but much older). He arrives at a very old house, enters and from then on the horrors begin. He finds the Necronomicon, has a close look at a mysterious church and meets subterraneous evil when entering the crypt. Will the first person narrator survive the night? This is a very descriptive, uncanny and compelling story by Lovecraft, one of the earliest on the Cthulhu-mystery. I really enjoyed it. Shivers were running down my spine. What a festival of eerieness. Highly recommended!

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cthulu and Ray Bradbury walk through a carnival, discussing The Festival by H.P. Lovecraft.

Ray: Lovecraft could convey an eerie sense of place and time better than I could or Hawthorn or even Poe, his was the atavistic link to the elder times.

Cthulu: True, he had a dark gift.

Ray: The terms he used, the ubiquitous words like “oozed” and “crept” and “stalked” he was focused on a dark vision and never let the reader up.

Cthulu: In The Festival, we see a solitary traveler –

Ray: Another staple Lovecraft element.

Cthulu: Yes, a solitary traveler who had come to a New England town to visit the site of an old family tradition.

Ray: In my Something Wicked This Way Comes, but especially in my The October Country and From the Dust Returned, this was a setting that I sought and I think I got but Lovecraft was a master.

Cthulu: You did succeed in both Something Wicked and October Country, Ray, those were tales of the same kind of darkness that he was after.

Ray: Thanks, Cthulu, The Festival was a great short work for him, he was able to succinctly capture a familiar quintessence with the kind of ancient and paranormal connection that I was after and also Charles Addams in his cartoons. His was a macabre vision.

Cthulu: One thing I very much liked about The Festival was the procession of hooded and robed figures, that is an archetypal image that stays with you.

Ray: Yes, and The Festival is another of Lovecraft’s works that includes a reference to his nefarious ancient tome the Necronomicon –

Cthulu: Ha!, authored by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, yes that is another Lovecraft favorite.

Ray: Exactly! A learned reader knows when that grimoire is mentioned that something arcane is afoot.

Cthulu: But whereas your works still manifest the wholesome and familial ties to this world, like the alien but approachable and likeable Uncle Einar, Lovecraft completely disregards humanistic familiarity and produces a straightforward horror story.

Ray: That’s true, I crept towards the fringes of the light, out at the edge of the carnival, but Lovecraft went out into the night and kept going, taking his readers where they might likely not have gone on their own.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story started off excellently, and I found it to be wonderfully atmospheric. Sadly, as I read further, this quickly changed, and I thought that the horror side of this particular story, was dampened down, especially nearing the end, which left me disappointed.

I cannot say that what I read frightened me, or sent me running, but there is a certain amount of imagination present in this book, as is true with all Lovecraft stories. I also found idea's in this that were not expanded on, so I felt like the story failed to take off. Overall, this was an intriguing read, but it definitely wasn't the best Lovecraft story that I've read.

[[ J o ] · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second Lovecraft.

Another lonely traveller (I get the feeling, after only two stories so far, that this will become a recurring theme) travels to his ancient homeland for Christmas, but it's not your usual family tiffs and drunken uncles you need to worry about...

Hmm. This was greatly intriguing. Again, not horrified or even moved particularly by what was written (I'm not sure if they ever will bring any emotion from me) but I greatly enjoy the imagination and indeed the rhetoric, though I feel as I go along it may become dull with time.

Perhaps rather too short, however, as there were elements that just weren't expanded in to. Creating an eerie atmosphere however gets top marks. More "oooh" than "Ahhh" though. Is the the point? With more reading I'm sure I'll work that out.

[Sadie Hartmann]

This was actually a very short read. Not even 100 pages like it says--the formatting makes it feel longer than it is--this is a short story and I quite liked this introduction to Lovecraft's work. A secret society of people living in a quaint, New England town called Kingsport.

"I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it
pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed
against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the
old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared
lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had
never seen but often dreamed of."

The man follows an old man and woman into a procession of cloaked citizens who make their way to a church on top of a hill. Inside the church, the descend into a cavernous place under the town, where they perform a ritual. There are beasts and and all manner of madness--he wakes up from his nightmare in the hospital...losing his mind.

I loved the descriptions!

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

A man heads to his ancestral hometown for a strange holiday. He seems to have at least a general idea that he should expect Weird Stuff and at first I hoped that for once we were getting a Lovecraft protagonist who was deliberately getting himself into dark territory -- like if Pickman's Model were written from Pickman's point of view instead of his dim friend's -- but quickly he reverts to the standard horrified wet blanket behavior.

[Karl]

Contents:

ix - Introduction by S. T. Joshi
003 - "The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H. P. Lovecraft
013 - "The Unnamable" by H. P. Lovecraft
025 - "The Silver Key" by H. P. Lovecraft
043 - "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by H. P. Lovecraft (with E. Hoffmann Price)
097 - "The Hound" by H. P. Lovecraft
115 - "The Festival" by H. P. Lovecraft
133 - "The Nameless City" by H. P. Lovecraft
157 - "The Rats in the Walls" by H. P. Lovecraft

[ᴥ Irena ᴥ · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
A lovecraftian Christmas. A traveller is called back home for the festival. He is not eager, but family obligations prevail. What he finds would change his way of looking at the world.
The most prominent thing here is the atmosphere. It is both gloomy and eerie. The Festival is wonderfully creepy short story. You can read it here.

[Tyler Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh

[Sonya Ben Behi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I still don't get it! It begins so amazingly, very dark atmosphere, with a sense of place like only HPL can convey, and then he decides to wreck the havoc and to overdo everything so that every sentence becomes a labor, a horribly tedious one. Some parts are just so ill-written all the promised horror was diluted between the adjectives then their synonyms then their synonyms' synonyms all stuffed together.
Well it's probably just me who didn't get it, but as much as I loved the Nameless city, this one left me indifferent :(

[Latasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this story. somehow, I missed this one. I loved it all! the writing, the descriptions, all of it! I listened to this version:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

it's only 24 minutes long. I listened to it on my way to work.

[Valerie Book Valkyrie-on Holiday Semi-Hiatus · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 Forefathering Stars rounded up to 5 Yankee Yuletide Stars for a Most Satisfying Ending™.
Best to save this one for reading around the Christmas Holiday 🥵!

The unnamed protagonist journies to Kingsport, Massachusetts, a fictional town serving as one of the central locations within Lovecraft's mythos, known as Lovecraft Country. Kingsport is loosely based on the lovely real-life town of Marblehead, Massachusetts (the hometown of my late husband's mother's family), which happens to border on Salem, Massachusetts.

As the seasonal saga unfolds our protagonist is left to wait for awhile, before attending the festivities, in the parlor of the home of a distant relation where he happens upon several musty, mouldering tomes, one being the Necronomicon, "My dreams are filled with terror because of phrases I dare not quote."

Told with the titilating Lovecraftian tension treasured by many a fan, this seasonal story will stay with you long after The Holiday is put to rest! "Happy is the tomb where no Wizard hath lain."
Highly recommend for both fans of Lovecraft and fans of The Holiday Season alike 💛🧚‍♀️🙋🏼👍!

[Tempo de Ler · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

[Karan joshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Festival is not a mere horror story—it is a slow, suffocating plunge into ancient madness. What begins as a quiet pilgrimage to an ancestral town becomes a descent into something rotting, inhuman, and eternal. The air is thick with decay, the sky watches with malice, and beneath the earth, things long buried still stir. This is Lovecraft at his most atmospheric, weaving a tale where time itself seems diseased. By the time the final horror slithers into view, it is far too late. The reader, like the protagonist, has become part of something old, cold, and utterly unholy.

[Marcos Ibáñez Gordillo · Rating 2 out of 5]

"A punto estuve de desmayarme, vencido por un espanto que no pertenece a este mundo, ni a ningún otro, sino que proviene de las enloquecedoras inmensidades que existen entre las estrellas"

Me pareció una buena frase para resumir el terror de lovecraft, llamado cósmico.
Una variante concreta del miedo a lo desconocido que pretende turbar tambaleando todas nuestras ideas fiables e indudables de nuestro mundo... sin conseguirlo demasiado la verdad xD
Muchos me gustan de verdad, pero en general me parece que, o ha envejecido mal o eran ingenuos desde el principio. Supongo que el hecho de que siempre se sabe que el narrador efectivamente sobrevive es determinante para esto.
A ver si cambio de opinión cuando los lea todos porque por ahora no puedo parar

[Nτρεηκ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Soy consciente de que escribir terror es muy complicado, pero lo siento, no por repetir muchas veces que algo da miedo va a dar más miedo. Si eso da menos.

La ambientación y el estilo, sin embargo, siguen flipándome, la verdad: "Aquí el pasado nunca se había ido".

Aparecen el hospital de Santa María y la universidad de Myskatonic 😍 (La culura pop venció a la cultura)

[Alex | | findingmontauk1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Give me all the small town cults, secret societies, and cosmic realness with stories like this! Rituals and rites aplenty.

[David Sarkies · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Lovecraftian Christmas Tale
9 June 2023 – Leicester

I think the problem with this short story is that I drank way too much before reading it, and then drank way too much before rereading it. Well, okay, my Australian Rules Football team was playing, and I found a pub in Leicester who put the game on for me (because there was nothing else on) so I had been drinking from earlier than normal. Mind you, cheering on to a game in a country where nobody understands what is going on (which is generally the case with Aussie Rules) is an experience. Actually, one guy told me that Aussie Rules was a game with only one rule – don’t hit the umpire. I agreed because there was an incident where somebody decked an umpire and was banned for life.

Anyway, on to the story, not that I can say much about it, except that there was a mention of festivals, and that they are basically a means of cementing culture into a people. Well, that is certainly true because festivals exist simply to remind us of things, even if we end up just drinking ourselves stupid. Well, I don’t need a festival to drink myself stupid, I just need a pub that I haven’t been to before, and there are plenty of them in England.

This story seems to have little to do with festivals and more to do with the Necronomicon. Okay, the narrator travels to a New England seaside village for Yuletide, or Christmas, though Lovecraft indicates that the whole festival is a lot older than that. Anyway, when he arrives the village is deserted except for a few people, and one of them introduces him to the Necronomicon. He ends up in an asylum, the infamous Arkham asylum, which ended up being the prison for the mentally insane in the Batman comics.

Okay, there is something in between, namely that there is a ceremonial procession through the town, which he joins, but steps out after a certain point. The thing is that Yuletide has existed long before humanity, and that the town is celebrating a festival that was being celebrated by creatures that existed before the creation of humanity.

As is the case with Lovecraft, reality induces madness, and people descend into ignorance because it is easier to handle than reality. Honestly, this is truer than one might think, particularly with the anti-vaxers, the climate change deniers, and those who believe 5G created covid. In the end, these theories bring comfort, much the same as it does in Lovecraft’s world. In the end, fantasy is much more accepting than the truth.

[Montserrat♨️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

El pueblo, la nieve, la ceremonia, todo me gustó.
Otra vez sentí la sensación de no tener idea de donde estas parado, y de estar andando a tientas sin saber muy bien lo que haces, actuar por instinto. El relato es muy oscuro. Viví la ceremonia, con la hoguera de fuego verde, con todos los olores, con las visiones vertiginosas y extrañas. Vamos, lo disfrute, de echo soñé con que estaba parada a la entrada de la Iglesia viendo entrar a la gente, esperando mi momento para entrar también. Si tienes imaginación recomendable totalmente.

[Ayesha (Seokjin's Version) ☾ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovecraft- The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Al Hazred. It is abominable, disastrous, demonic, full of tales of eldritch beings...

Every Lovecraft protagonist ever- Imma read it

[Alex Bright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Filled with wonderful atmosphere, but little else.

[Marti Demo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe love craft is just too weird for me

[Крюкокрест · Rating 5 out of 5]

«- Это был Йолетид, день который люди называют Рождеством Христовым, хотя в глубине души они знают, что он старше Вифлеема и Вавилона, старше Мемфиса и всего Человечества. Это был Йолетид, и я наконец прибыл в древний морской город, где жили мои предки, жили и хранили этот праздник в древние врем��на, когда он был запрещен, приказав своим сыновьям проводить его раз в столетие, чтобы память о первобытных мистериях не была забыта».

[John Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

One very unforgettable Christmas...I’d settle for cinders!

Sublimely nasty writing to stimulate the senses.

[Dimitra Hellsing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Halloween 🎃 👻 vibes 😍❤️🩷

[Vaishali · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.”

Creepiest Christmas story ever.
With H.P. Lovecraft, you simply cannot overlook a single word, because each is precious, meticulously picked to evoke so much depth. Just glimpse the visual and emotional texture of these quotes :

“Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers.”

“Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.”

“I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long.”

“He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing.”


And then there’s this :

“I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons…”

I looked these titles up : they’re actual long-forgotten books on the Occult. Though old hat to Lovecraft fans, for me it’s a remarkable testimony to his intellectualism and literary cunning. You just keep returning to Lovecraft to see what other secrets he reveals.

Wow.


.

[Tinka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this one is okay. I really haven't much else to say about it.

It's for sure an interesting read, diving into weird cultist yuletide traditions with a sense of mystery, but when you except Christmas with Cthulhu it falls a little bit flat. There is a lot of build up, but unlike other Lovecraft stories I feel like it doesn't really deliver in the end.

Now, can someone make Christmas with Cthulhu - A Heartwarming Story about Holiday Madness a thing?