Weird Fiction discussion

This month our H.P. Lovecraft read is "The Rats in the Walls." A free copy of this 52-paragraph story can be found here: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/.... I'll be reading it from my hardback anthology personally.

There is a famous motion comic version of this story available on YouTube I will put in our group's video section.

I have a dicegame based on this story, created by Henning Poehl: https://www.sphinx-games.com/black-se.... I've yet to find anyone interested in playing it with me though. Everything is in its original packaging. Maybe some day.

This is one of the earliest stories Lovecraft published in Weird Tales. He submitted it originally to Argosy All-Story Weekly soon after writing it the previous year, but they rejected it for being too strong for their reading public's sensibilities. Weird Tales' publisher was thrilled to get the story and said it was the best he had yet seen. Needless to say Lovecraft never looked back, and this was the beginning of a long, professional relationship with that periodical for Howard P. The story appeared in the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales. The magazine had only been publishing for a year. Incidentally, that was the month Lovecraft married his wife, Sonia Greene, after which they moved to Brooklyn.

I've not yet read the story. So here's looking forward to a great read. Please feel free to discuss your interactions, past and present, with the story here at this topic.

Just finished it and enjoyed it thoroughly. Okay, some key elements we always expect are included.

The Cellar
Rats
Madness in the family
Abhorred lines
Cannibalism
Asylum

All subjects that make a great HP story.

Of course, this story has the cat name that causes all the problems, but it is a 100-year-old story, so it doesn't matter one way or another.

The inference that we carry the madness from our ancestors into future generations I like, I enjoyed the slow creeping reveal even more finally ending with the last of line enjoying a fine meal!

Don't wanna spoil it too much for you all but as always HP is a master writer.

If I ever had a way of planning my own death, it would be Lovecraftian in its epicness! :)

I think I'm going to try to finish NOS4A2 before tackling this. I know "The Rats in the Walls" isn't that long, but I hate to split focus.

To quote Bond "You have all the time in the world!"

I finished the story. I thought it was okay, but I guess I was expecting more. Ghost rats infest some dude's house after he fixes it up.

Yeh, I just read your review and replied.

I am not sure you can apply modern ideas and styles to Lovecrafts work, in the same way that you cannot compare Picasso to Turner as painters.

In the tyme he was writing much of this was new ideas and themes and the horror is in the little things that now we are cyncial enough that we just go *Bleugh* Cannibalism *Bleugh* Incest and so forth.

Then it was more WTF?

Anyway, I replied in a little more depth on your review.

Bottom line, the ghosts rats are not the horror, they are the symptoms of his returning to the old family ways. Of the madness returning that blights his family. And then as we travel below his narrative internal becomes more and more twisted until the final scenes.

Also the use of dream sequence's and race memory to strengthen the story ties in with the nature of Lovecraft himself.

I read this late at night as I was falling asleep. I should probably give it another go. I was enjoying all the family history in the first third. It sort of reminded me of the Lees of Virginia. Why all the emphasis on the cats do you think? I just read some commentary on the story, and yeah, I remember very little of the last half. Definitely have to give this another read.

One thing of note: Before moving to Exham Priory, Delapore lived in Bolton, Massachusetts, a factory town where Herbert West performed some of his experiments. I checked and Bolton is mentioned 12 times in Re-animator. Bolton, no relation to the real Bolton, MA, only gets one brief mention in this story.

I've gone back and edited out my writing that this story was his first written for Weird Tales. I was mistaken. It's actually his fourth. Well, third or fourth: he had two stories featured in the March 1924 issue.

Okay, I have now re-read the story. I still think it moves too slow and has too many details that do too little to advance the plot. But I also see that I failed to read the last two paragraphs sufficiently closely the first time I read the story. They contain much in the way of explanation of the fifty paragraphs that precede it and I see now the story is not really about a ghost rat infestation. I'm updating my review correspondingly.

Three stars, again, means I like the story. I'm glad I read it. I just don't like it a great deal--four stars.

LOL! You didn't need to change your rating I was just explaining the underlying plot of the piece.

As for the question on the Cats, Lovecraft loved cats, he wrote an entire story around cats at one point. Most of his stories have elements of cats in them, often as protectors.

This is odd given he was well aware of Bastet and her dual nature.

Maybe I should mention that in your review of the Lurking fear you mention the alien was not that scary. But the idea that the incestuous relationships going on over centuries had warped them to less than human, but to a degree still human? Rather than alien breeding experiments.

Just keep in mind that with Lovecraft is that he is at the forefront of a movement and style that now is well explored and understood so the elements of horror and surprise and so forth are now rather old hat and been borrowed many a tyme since then.

I didn't change my rating. A second reading enhanced my understanding of the story, but not my appreciation for it, which is present, just not great. I did substantially change my review.

Yeh, I read it :)

The review did feel about right this time.

I suspect we will always disagree to a degree on the great HP.

As a 40+ year fan I tend to enjoy his slow burn and destruction of so many accepted formats of writing. A process I tend to use myself in my writing.

HP is a state of mind, you cant just apply cold logic to it, he has to many darker hues.

I look forward as always to the new HP read, I am getting a lot from these monthly reads. Nice bite size pieces of genius every month.

I think part of the thing with Lovecraft is, if you didn't read his stuff early on in your readership, you've already heard all the melodies he uses as performed by other people. So, now when you read "they are all fish people and I am one of them," it's not such a big deal. That's why authors have graduated to things like "they are fish people and they are fucking delicious," or something like it. ALSO, they've taken out a lot of the slow burn/meandering to the spooky stuff and jump right in, instead.

(I didn't make up that example, it was from a thing I read on the interwebs sometime in the last two decades. I wish I had made that up.)

Thom wrote: "I think part of the thing with Lovecraft is, if you didn't read his stuff early on in your readership, you've already heard all the melodies he uses as performed by other people. So, now when you r..."

Actually that makes perfect sense, as a reader I am rather jaded now. Their is a lot of types of books that I just dont read or enjoy and yet Weird and Noir I thoroughly enjoy.

So for me I am stuck in that I read in my youth (Partially anyway) and also new material that covers new ground but what lies between not so much.

That would suggest the love of HP will slowly die down in society over time as less and less youth discover him. And as adults do they dismiss him in search of the quick fix?

Douglas wrote: "That would suggest the love of HP will slowly die down in society over time as less and less youth discover him. And as adults do they dismiss him in search of the quick fix?"

I see no sign of that happening any more than the historical predictions of obscurity for Edgar Allan Poe have ever come to pass. I think the love of Lovecraft has become a permanent fixture.

Reading Lovecraft in some detail now I must admit to some surprise at how highly regarded he was during his lifetime when he was writing. That high regard did not translate to commercial success, but was substantial nevertheless. I've read letters columns from the period demanding more Lovecraft from the editors who were publishing him. I've read published tributes of him from other writers, like Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long, to name a few, written during Lovecraft's lifetime. He was definitely a writer's writer.

He never fell out of favor, but became wildly popular again in the 1960s. That popularity and respect has shown no abatement since, at least none I can perceive, except among a few cancel culture nitpickers who want to criticize some of his perceived social stances while ignoring the power of his writing.

We in the group right now are going through his greatest hits (I've only recently become more aware of how many of his lesser works we are skipping) chronologically and are still in early Lovecraft. My view of him right now is thus soemwhat skewed. I've read one and maybe part of one of his later stories a long time ago. They made a deep impression on me for their writing craft and quality. I am not seeing anywhere near that level of craft or quality yet in these early writings we have been reading.

Dan wrote: "Douglas wrote: "That would suggest the love of HP will slowly die down in society over time as less and less youth discover him. And as adults do they dismiss him in search of the quick fix?"

I se..."

I suspect my take on reading Lovecraft is it is Rose coloured glasses I am wearing. Could I give a balanced view of his work? I doubt it as I remember the plots and the emotions it stirs up every time I read one of his.

He was such an important part of my youth, we even had a handfull of us that used to read and discuss his work at school. One of whom is an artist and did a lot of poster work over the years. All of which invariably involved Lovecraftian images in one way or another.

Is their a trick as an author to write something so deep it climbs into your head and refuses to leave?

As for not seeing the quality, a ongoing discussion between us since day one has been that you look at things scientifically, you tear it apart, analysis it and consider all the angles and options and then often write a technical manual on the subject. But you don't look at the soul of a story, where as many of us read the soul of a book (The Rats in the Wall is the prime example of that) and the rest is just secondary. Is either right or even wrong, no of course not. They are both valid ways of considering a subject, any artistic subject. Greg Bear for example writes scientific based stories and I have never been able to finish any of his work but many people like his style of hard science.

But neither sides will ever agree I fear. Lovecraft has aged, but for me he has aged like a fine whisky over the years certainly against a blander market that what he brings to it.

The obvious question to demonstrate this is compare styles of painting, from Picasso`s/Dali/Van Gogh/Warhol to the Pre-Raphaelite work of Waterhouse. Your choice may well demonstrate what camp as an individual you lie in?

Maybe one of these days we should look at which camp our various members belong, the answer would be interesting?

Anyway I am repeating myself on this subject, something I promised myself I would not do :)

I like the way the story builds up to its ending-or should I say down.
That ending was downright creepy!

I finished it late, but it was a fun read. I think, if HPL had wanted, he could have worked with this setting and future protagonists, with all the spaces they had left unexplored.