Lovecraft review: "The Whisperer in Darkness"

This novella was originally published in the August, 1931 issue of Weird Tales. The cover went to a Tarzan clone called Tam, Son of the Tiger by Otis Adelbert Kline. Not even a naked woman!

This is the story where Lovecraft’s famous Mi-Go were introduced… sort of. They come from Yuggoth, and Lovecraft had already written a sonnet cycle called “Fungi From Yuggoth”. Lovecraft would allude to them a third and final time in At the Mountains of Madness as competitors of the crinoid Old Ones who caused their decline during the Jurassic.

Anyway, the story is told in past tense in May 1930 by protagonist Albert Wilmarth, who teaches literature at Miskatonic University and doesn’t want to admit that he’s crazy. In May of 1928, he started getting mail from a Henry Akeley forcefully arguing for the truth of Vermont hill folklore about a pre-human race described as human-size, pinkish, crustacean-like, with a distinct head bearing multitudes of short antennae and “vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs.” From an 1839 monograph collecting folklore from the oldest people in the state, Wilmarth described Puritans calling them familiars of the Devil, Scots-Irish linking them to the malign fairies and “little people” of the bogs and raths, and best of all, native Pennacook saying they’re extraterrestrials “from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other world. They did not live here… They could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food from the stars.”
He tried to tell the credulous these stories must be false, because they’re no different from the fairy delusions of Ireland and Wales, “belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or ‘Abominable Snow-Men'”, etc, which they just tried to turn around on him as the folklore being evidence of the beings’s being real and active in the past.

This same debate would later play out in real life between UFO believers and skeptics with no acknowledgement of Lovecraft.

However, in Akeley’s description, the aliens aren’t associated with eerie flying objects, but “being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the ether”. Why Lovecraft chose to make it thus, I don’t know: the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment had discredited outer space being filled with light-bearing aether (and the rapid acceptance of special relatively after 1905 removed the theoretical need for something to propagate light waves), and by 1897 there were already alien sightings in the United States associated with spacecraft.
Akeley said he found “great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth to where they come from.” He offered to mail it and a phonograph recording, which Wilmarth accepted in the name of Science, though at the same time Akeley’s claims gave him a stereotypical Lovecraft scholar anxiety attack:

I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum—and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way.
…
I am almost glad that the letter and record and photographs are gone now—and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.

Then came the record, made around 1 AM on “May-Eve—the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend”, “near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee’s Swamp.”

(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)

. . . is the Lord of the Woods, even to . . . and the gifts of the men of Leng . . . so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!

(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)

Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

(HUMAN VOICE)

And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being . . . seven and nine, down the onyx steps . . . (tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom Thou hast taught us marv(els) . . . on the wings of night out beyond space, out beyond th . . . to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim. . . .

(BUZZING VOICE)

. . . go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. . . .

(HUMAN VOICE)

. . . (Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among. . . .

It then transpired that Akeley’s attempt to ship the hieroglyphic stone was intercepted by a person whose eerie description could correspond to a Mi-Go in a mask and trenchcoat just as well as a human agent. Summer vacation dragged on, and on August 15 Wilmarth received a letter from Akeley claiming that three of his dogs had been shot, human and claw prints on the farm, his phone line cut and a tree felled across the safest road to town. We get it already, but Lovecraft gilds the lily with more letters, meant to raise tension but just making Akeley look like a farmer who’s gone violently insane, shooting up his home to the point of accidentally killing one of his own dogs. That said, he does convey that the aliens have strange bodies despite being as fragilely mortal as humans:

It was dead, of course. One of the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And here’s the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the film there wasn’t anything visible except the woodshed. What can the thing have been made of?

Well, Wilmarth finally travels to visit his penpal on Wednesday, September 12 (shouldn’t he be teaching a class by now?), only after receiving a typed, not handwritten, letter in which violent anxiety has been reversed into a message that the aliens are friendly:

What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.
…
Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed.

I’ll leave how that first quoted sentence relates to Lovecraft’s attitudes to other human cultures to the reader.
But let’s backtrack to the phonograph. The aliens seem to be polytheists who believe in Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth, his Great Messenger Nyarlathotep and “Him Who is not to be Named.” Note that the source contradicts the subsequent Cthulhu Mythos, where each alien god has one or more “servitor races”. August Derleth assigned the Mi-Go to Hastur. Is there a term for the reading comprehension version of a malapropism?
As repeatedly requested in the last letter, Wilmarth told no one where he was going and traveled with the phonograph and every photo and letter Akeley sent him… only differing in arriving by train in the closest town around 1 PM rather than the trustworthy letter’s suggested 10 PM. Why yes, this man IS too dumb to live. He’s met at the station by a Mr. Noyes, an urbane man whom Wilmarth nervously felt to have a familiar voice as it politely pumped him for information. Gosh, I wonder where he could have heard his voice before! At the house, Noyes told him Akeley was ready to see him, but he had this asthma attack you know, he can only talk in a whisper and he’ll be clumsy for a couple days with his feet all bandaged…
OK, so he went to talk with Akeley and found him seated in a darkened room with “rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare”, a scarf high around his neck and a loose dressing gown too long to see his pants. He asked repeatedly for the return of everything he sent before starting to wax joyfully about Yuggoth, the nearest planet fully populated by this pan-cosmic genus of sapients of which others are but degenerate offshoots… it matters not that the Sun is no brighter than a star out there, for “They have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them,” said the totally normal human singing their praises in a darkened room. He went on:

You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters. They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings know nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came

The first part of this got contradicted just six months later when Lovecraft wrote AtMoM, while the latter stuff is a reference to “The Mound”, which he had ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop around January 1930.
Wilmarth got spooked by his host insinuating that tomorrow they’d discuss their voyage to Yuggoth… yes you too, if you choose. “complete human bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains” in high-tech jars. The portable brain can be kept alive with liquid nutrients, electrodes reach through and connect with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech, then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, there are mechanical bodies it can be plugged into. His host then showed him shelves with a dozen brain cylinders: “Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune…” Hugh Man Akeley, who was totally normal, invited Wilmarth to plug any into a certain machine to communicate with, but “Don’t bother that fresh, shiny cylinder joined to the two testing instruments—the one with my name on it.” Wilmarth obeyed and the system spoke:

“Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.

Behold, the first uploaded Singularity nerd! Wilmarth though reacted fearfully, internally calling this things normal human beings weren’t meant to know and “blasphemous influences”, yet somehow he took a nap in the guest room before bolting upright and driving away terrified in a stolen old Ford, from Akeley’s garage. A sheriff’s posse found bullet holes, the dogs and livestock all missing with no having bought them, and Akeley vanished with the clothes Wilmarth saw him in discarded. There were no cylinders or other evidence, of course. But Wilmarth insists it was no dream that he was awakened by sounds of extraterrestrials entering the bedroom, while “a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert”. When he regained muscle control, he tried to find Akeley to flee with, but instead his flashlight found in the easy chair metallic clamps attached to… “the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.”
Gosh, bet you didn’t see that coming. Seriously though, this story is fascinating in its precociousness. Here published in 1931 are aliens that have been operating on Earth so long that our science-ignorant ancestors identified them as Fair Folk (and yetis), who want to abduct people and do surgery on them. There’s a coverup involving human agents, and they’re in contact with American elites, though here it’s implied to be Lowell Observatory rather than the federal government.
It’s also an early example of the claim that it’s not viable for human bodies to explore outer space, but by discarding the body with advanced technology your consciousness could explore the visible universe and beyond as an immortal that can plug in to different bodies.
So this story prefigures by decades a chunk of real-world belief and a chunk of SF, and Lovecraft just kind of tossed it out there as opposed to being something he liked to revisit frequently once created (see Cthulhu, crinoid Old Ones). I’m impressed.

Weird Fiction review: "The Challenge From Beyond"

This was a round robin story by Catherine L. Moore (known for medieval French sword and sorcery and Solar system-set Weird SF), Abraham Merritt (a novelist whose staple genre was “lost races”), H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and someone named Frank Belknap Long. It was the brainchild of Julius Schwartz, then a literary agent, but better remembered for his work at DC Comics long after the deaths of Lovecraft, Howard, and Merritt. It was written in the summer of 1935 for the September issue of Fantasy magazine.

C.L. Moore

George Campbell, a geology professor, is camping during summer break. When an animal disturbs his campsite, he picks up a rock to throw at it, but it’s “Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners.” It’s an age-worn artificial cube of quartz, and inside is a small disc with “Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.” (He didn’t notice this while making camp?) He’s weirded out by how this could exist, his internal monologue running in the channel we now call “Lovecraftian”, even though it’s not his turn yet. “could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world?” He turns off his flashlight… did the cube continue glowing a moment?

Bare summary doesn’t do justice to Moore’s luxurious prose, the positive feature that balances her harebrained plot development.

A. Merritt

Campbell can’t sleep. He gets back up to experiment with the cube. It acts weird when photons hit it, but only if he’s paying attention. “His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until … what?” Much unnecessary detail of sights, sounds, etc. follows, then the object absorbs him.

And he passes the baton to…

H.P. Lovecraft

Campbell’s mind traverses the vast physical distance between where he was and some unknown cosmic destination. It’s scary to not have a body, especially if your internal monologue assumes materialism! He tries to think as he moves, and “Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube—and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror.” Because of course he remembers that, as a professor, he’s familiar with the Eltdown Shards, cuneiform-like clay tablets geologists found in pre-carboniferous strata in England thirty years ago. While a few scientists “hinted at” their heretical artificiality (in Lovecraft, do academics ever make clear claims rather than hinting or insinuating?), he only remembers something about a cube because he’s also read the far less reputable book by “a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings” purporting to translate the Eltdown Shards. If the Reverend is right (of course he is), on an extra-galactic planet “a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination” gradually colonized their entire galaxy. No technology could let them navigate to other galaxies in person, so in their thirst for knowledge of all space and time “They devised peculiar objects—strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe,” and when by chance a mind observed one some indefinite amount of time after it landed on a planet, the hypnotized mind will be beamed to the worm-people’s planet, where one of the natives can perform a mind-swap to go exploring the victim’s extra-galactic space-time coordinates.

Sometimes, when a potentially important race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomatic reasons—using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.

Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response on an inhabited world—since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. The third—and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system—had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years ago.

It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation” chiefly dealt.

Fortunately for Earth, it was then dominated by the Great Race, who knew a thing or two about mind transference, so their scientists reacted efficiently and “carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace.”

Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences—but all such cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.

 

(I love the mental image of tentacled, cone-shaped adventures, wielding weapons and bracing their mighty muscles.)

Fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead to escape a peril from the inner Earth, and the whereabouts of the cube were lost to Earthly minds ever since. In a delightful bit of self-parody, Lovecraft has Campbell note the length and detail of this “translation” relative to the small number of Eltdown glyphs.

He wakes up and tries to move, bu thoughts like “move my hand” have no coherent output, and his five senses are not what he’s used to. Good ol’ body horror. A fellow being comes in, like a pale grey centipede, and appears to threaten him.

Robert E. Howard

He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards.

Campbell mans up (centipedes up?) and thinks of his old body as just a cloak that would have been cast off upon a natural death anyway. What had that life “ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression?” The only positive things in memory were “the physical delights of his former life.”

But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

Bwah?

Campbell also has access to the neurons of the being who left this body, Tothe of the planet Yekub. “Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to…” power! He’s doing the full Nietzsche.

Understanding that the centipede threatening him with a metal box is Yukth, “supreme lord of science”, he kills him anyway. He uses Tothe’s memories to run to the shrine of a floating white sphere and seize it – the god of Yekub! (though why the aliens worship a dumb old sphere for an idol has been forgotten for a million years.) Conan the Centipede kills the nearby priest and glories in thoughts of how he’ll be king now! He, who dared the easy thing no “man of Yekub” ever would, for as an Earthling he is Beyond Good and Evil as the centipedes subjectively think of them! Muwhahaha!

Frank Belknap Long

In Campbell’s body, Tothe walks around like an idiot, frothing at the mouth. His fingers are clawed now?

Meanwhile Conan the Centipede streaks through fern-planted avenues between the cyclopean buildings under the alien sun. Woo, got your god!

Back on Earth, Tothe is overwhelmed by bestial human brain patterns and tries to eat a live fox.

Meanwhile thousands of worm-shapes prostrate themselves as the ex-Campbell undulates toward the throne of spiritual empire.

Back on Earth, Campbell’s body/Tothe dies by drowning and is found by a fur trapper. He finds it much hairier and beast-like than Campbell left it, and dripping black ichor instead of blood.

Meanwhile the divine sphere acts on Tothe’s body, burning with “a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.” Then it communicates:

“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”

Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.

Whoa, he ended it with a huge Take That to Howard’s intentions.

Well, you don’t read a round robin for narrative cohesion. You want to see the different authors’s styles contrasting in small chunks. And this one is better than most, because not everyone just spews their style onto the page with a straight face: Lovecraft in particular has the self-awareness to make fun of himself. Howard might have been doing the same: Conan the Centipede is a more over-the-top power fantasy than actual Conan, who often showed a code of ethics.

Merritt does the least by far. Moore had the job of creating a character and MacGuffin, so she couldn’t run wild like Howard or Howard. And not having read Frank Belknap Long, his section, while very distinct, has the least to contextualize it. How does an alien not understanding human instincts turn the body into a werewolf? What were Long’s psychological preoccupations as an author? That stuff about the unutterable cruelty of Earth life and how humans can only act better because of ten thousand generations of conditioning echoes the French Counter-Revolutionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre (e.g. Seventh St. Petersburg Dialogue), filtered through the later Darwinian paradigm shift.