Books: The Dream Lurker

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The Dream Lurke

THE TOMB; AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS; THE LURKING FEAR; THE SHUTTERED ROOM by H.P. LOVECRAFT Ballantine Books. $.95 each.

Along with Ballantine Books' new edition of horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft and his disciples, TIME came into possession of the following self-explanatory document.

I write this as much to soothe my trembling nerves as to leave a record of the horror that threatens to pitch me into the final abyss of madness. The dreams, if they are indeed dreams, have long since passed nightmarish intensity, though they began innocently enough. The first took me to a benighted, strange city of shuttered houses with sway-backed gambrel roofs that I dimly recognized as Providence, R.I. As I moved through the maze of twisting, whisper-haunted streets, I realized that I seemed to be inexplicably pulled to a preordained destination—the Swan Point Cemetery. There I was drawn in particular to one granite tomb, on which the human eye could discern under the fungoid moon these chiseled letters:

HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT 20 August 1890-17 February 1937 Since I was born after Lovecraft died, I knew of him only through seeing his books' lurid covers on paperback stands in airports and bus waiting rooms. The usual dust-jacket photograph of the author shows a youngish man with a lantern jaw and a rather startled expression. A bit of research at my university library revealed that his entire oeuvre consists of some 53 stories, plus assorted fragments and collaborations. Yet the writer has become a sort of cult figure and his books sell both consistently and well—over 1,000,000 copies since 1970 alone.

About Lovecraft's life, surprisingly little has yet been recorded. He was the only son of a traveling salesman who died when Howard was but eight, leaving the boy in the cloying clutches of a genteel but overbearing mother. Sickly, precocious, reclusive, Howard began writing eerie fiction early, nuzzling in imagination up to decay, decomposition and other horrors softer and stickier than a mother's kisses. After a hiatus, he resumed writing in his late 20s, finding a ready market in the cheap magazines of the day—mainly Weird Tales —and becoming the center of a small cadre of writers of similar bent.

Open Sepulcher. My second dream, six days later, brought me once again into that cemetery. This time, however, I noticed that the trees were unnaturally large and gnarled, as if they sucked some secret vitality from the inner earth. To my ears came a faint, loathsome piping, like the whining, thin mockery of a single feeble flute that was to start an unwholesome elfin celebration. Just before I awoke, feverish and gasping, I noticed a cowled figure Who beckoned slowly to me, and with a gaunt finger pointed into Lovecraft's open sepulcher.

The effect was such that I hastened to read some of Lovecraft's stories. I admit I disliked his stylistic mannerisms. He tells his tales through a troubled, dim, first-person narrator, and he saves the grisly denouement for the last sentence and then prints it in italics, as though that gives it greater shock value. Also repellent at first is the man's habit of stuffing his leisurely, Latinate sentences to repletion with adjectives and adverbs to modify, often tautologically, a stark noun or gruesome verb.