Weird Fiction discussion

The Whisperer in Darkness is a 26,000-word novella Lovecraft wrote in 1931 that was published in the August 1931 issue of Weird Tales. One issue. They must have devoted some serious space to this Lovecraft work.

From the Wikipedia article, I skimmed so as not to see too many spoilers. The story is a turn towards science fiction apparently and is one of the first stories to feature (view spoiler)[a brain independent of a body (hide spoiler)]. If you would prefer to listen to the story, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society sells an audio adaptation of the story as part of their Dark Adventure Radio Theatre series for just $12.49 as a downloadable MP3.

So who besides me plans to read this story come December?

I am finally getting to the reading of this novella. It's the third longest Lovecraft story we've read for this group. It's excellent so far, very clear, cut and dry for Lovecraft. It's a secret society of what? misfits? aliens? gathering secretly in the backwoods remotest part of Vermont. You know, the wilderness, at least as far as Lovecraft can conceive of one.

I think every remote part of the U.S. must have stories like this in order to scare kids and keep them from wandering off during group hikes and whatnot. In summers I was shipped off to a camp in a remote part of the Smoky Mountains. The counsellors told us these awful stories about a lost, secret tribe of Indians who had been ostracized and had devolved into cannibalistic monsters over time with one big eye in their foreheads (to help them see in the caves they lived in, apart from others) called yahoos, pronounced yay-hoos. If we kids were to ever stray too far from adult supervision, we were making ourselves easy prey for hungry yahoos.

I thought of Lovecraft's hiding monsters as being similar to the yahoos of my childhood until he described them better. Then I realized we've seen these guys before....

My short review of "The Whisperer in Darkness": https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I will be rereading this soon.

I've just finished my reread. I like the way the suspense keeps building, but the narrator took a long time to clue into what was going on.

I had the same impression at first, that Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq. was not too quick on the uptake. But then as I got further into the story I realized Lovecraft had not really made us privy to his thoughts. Wilmarth may have known or suspected more of what was going on than he told us, his readers, because he wanted us to reach out own conclusions. That was my impression anyway. It allowed me to cut Esquire Wilmarth some slack.

And he did get out of there in time!