The story came about almost as a whim. Robert Bloch had written “The Shambler from the Stars” in the spring of 1935, in which a character—never named, but clearly meant to be HPL—is killed. HPL was taken with the story, and when it was published in WT(September 1935), a reader, B.M.Reynolds, praised it and had a suggestion to make: “Contrary to previous criticism, Robert Bloch deserves plenty of praise for The Shambler from the Stars . Now why doesn’t Mr. Lovecraft return the compliment, and dedicate a story to the author?” (WT 36, No. 5 [November 1935]: 652). At the time HPL read this, he had just learned of the acceptances by Astounding Stories of At the Mountains of Madnessand “The Shadow out of Time.” Bolstered by the news, he took up Reynolds’s suggestion, and the resulting story tells of one Robert Blake (a very transparent allusion to Robert Bloch, to whom HPL dedicated the story) who dies a glassy-eyed corpse staring out his study window. Several of the surface details of the plot were taken directly from Hanns Heinz Ewers’s “The Spider,” which HPL read in Dashiell Hammett’s Creeps by Night(1931). This story involves a man who becomes fascinated with a strange woman he sees through his window in a building across from his own, until finally he seems to lose hold of his own personality. The entire story is told in the form of the man’s diary, and at the end he writes: “My name—Richard Bracquemont, Richard Bracquemont, Richard—oh, I can’t get any farther….”
Many landmarks described in the story are manifestly based upon actual sites. The view from Blake’s study is a poignant description of what HPL saw from his own study at 66 College Street. The same view can be seen today from such a vantage point as Prospect Terrace on the brow of College Hill. Blake’s address, as given in the story, was Bloch’s actual address in Milwaukee. The church that figures so prominently in the tale was St. John’s Catholic Church on Atwell’s Avenue in Federal Hill (torn down in 1992). This church was situated on a raised plot of ground, as in the story, although there was (at least in recent years) no metal fence around it. It was, in HPL’s day, the principal Catholic
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church in the area. The description of the interior and belfry of the church is quite accurate. HPL heard that the steeple had been destroyed by lightning in late June of 1935 (he was not there at the time, being in Florida visiting R.H. Barlow); instead of rebuilding the steeple, the church authorities simply put a cap on the brick tower (see HPL to Richard F.Searight, December 24, 1935; Letters to Richard F.Searight[Necronomicon Press, 1992], p. 70).
See Steven J.Mariconda, “Some Antecedents of the Shining Trapezohedron,” Etchings and Odysseys No. 3 [1983]: 15–20 (rpt. in Mariconda’s On the Emergence of “Cthulhu” and Other Observations [Necronomicon Press, 1995]).
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864).
American novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne was a central figure in early Gothic literature in America and a major influence on HPL, who at the age of six first developed a fascination with Graeco-Roman mythology by reading Hawthorne’s rewritings of Greek myths, A Wonder Book(1852) and Tanglewood Tales(1853). The House of the Seven Gables(1851)—which HPL in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” deemed “New England’s greatest contribution to weird literature”—probably influenced HPL’s “The Picture in the House” (1920), “The Shunned House” (1924), and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward(1927). “The Outsider” (1921) may in part have been inspired by Hawthorne’s “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man.” HPL’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath(1926– 27) shows the influence of both Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun(1860) and his short story “The Great Stone Face” (in The Snow Image, and Other Twice-told Tales[1852]); “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) was heavily influenced by Hawthorne’s unfinished novel Septimius Felton,as “The Unnamable” (1923) was by Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret(1883).
See Dirk W.Mosig, “Poe, Hawthorne and Lovecraft: Variations on a Theme of Panic,” RomantistNos. 4–5 (1980–81): 43–45; Donald R.Burleson, “H. P. Lovecraft: The Hawthorne Influence,” Extrapolation22, No. 3 (Fall 1981): 262–69.
Hayden, Ben.
In “The Man of Stone,” a friend of the narrator who takes the narrator with him to investigate the uncannily lifelike sculptures of Arthur Wheeler.
“He.”
Short story (4,310 words); written on August 11, 1925. First published in WT(September 1926); first collected in O;corrected text in D;annotated version in CC
The narrator ruefully announces: “My coming to New York had been a mistake….” He had hoped to find literary inspiration in the “teeming labyrinths“ of the city, but instead finds only “a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.” The narrator confesses that the gleaming towers of New York had captivated him at first, but later he came to realize that “this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.” He seeks out Greenwich Village
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as the one area in the city where antiquity can still be found; it is here, at 2:00 one August morning, that he meets “the man.” This person has an archaic manner of speaking and is wearing similarly archaic attire, and the narrator takes him for a harmless eccentric; but the latter immediately senses a fellow antiquarian. The man leads him on a circuitous tour of old alleys and courtyards, finally coming to “the ivy-clad wall of a private estate,” where the man lives. In the manor house the man begins to relate an account of his “ancestor,” who practiced some sort of sorcery, in part from knowledge gained from the Indians in the area; later he conveniently killed them with bad rum, so that he alone now had the secret information he had extracted from them. What is the nature of this knowledge? The man leads the narrator to a window and, parting the curtains, reveals an idyllic rural landscape—it can only be the Greenwich of the eighteenth century, brought magically before his eyes. The narrator, stunned, asks harriedly, “Can you—dare you—go far?” In scorn the man parts the curtains again and this time shows him an apocalyptic sight of the future (“I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows”). The narrator screams in horror, inadvertently summoning the spirits of the murdered Indians, who manifest themselves in the form of a black slime, burst in on the pair, and make off with the archaic man (who is himself the “ancestor”), while the narrator falls through successive floors of the building and then crawls out to Perry Street. Later we learn that the narrator has now returned to his native New England.