lurking fears (part 4)

Part 4 - 'The Horror in the Eyes'


Having survived three brushes with death by whatever the 'lurking fear' might be, our narrator continues his quest "with even greater zeal" - and he is still aware of being close to madness ("There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who...") but not yet fully over that threshold.

When I first read the story, it wasn't immediately clear to me what actually transpired at the end of Part 3 - helpfully it is explained more coherently here, with the narrator making it clear that the creature appeared over the shack ("twenty miles away") at the same time he was being transfixed by the sight of a horrible claw and eyes in the underground tunnel.

Weird Tales may have been primarily a horror magazine but it was 'pulp' through and through, and all such pulps - horror, sci-fi, thrillers, even Westerns - shared a kindred DNA. HPL himself may have loftily aspired to literature (or at least pretended to) but the fact that the pulps ended up as his literary home is not a mistake, less so an injustice. The narrator in 'The Lurking Fear' is hardly a two-fisted detective but here, in the final instalment, he puts together all the clues and threads of the previous three parts to reach a terrible conclusion - which is then confirmed by events.

That HPL's methodology seems especially 'pulp-like' here may have arisen from the way this story is serialised, along with space restrictions. Yet even in his longer tales and novellas we see a similar pattern of 'clue' accumulation, plot connection, and slowly dawning awareness (with, of course, the reader usually grasping the truth ahead of his characters). It is especially noticeable here because of the way this process has been contracted, and the narrator actually says it out loud:

"My God!... Molehills... the damned place must be honeycombed... how many... that night at the mansion... they took Bennett and Tobey first... on each side of us..."

Confirming his suspicions, he returns to the site of Part 1, and finally we get a payoff for that instalment's hint at the sinister fireplace... for creatures, in a very great profusion, emerge via that hiding place in a vivid passage that demands quotation:

[...] from that opening [came] a burst of multitudinous and leprous life - a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity.

Nor does HPL stop there- as the narrator looks on in horror he carries on his description  over the next two pages, until he arrives, with a killer of a literary kick, at the final paragraph's revelation:

It had looked at me as it died [...]
One eye was blue, the other brown.

These creatures that have plagued the locality, that started the legend and reputation of the Martense mansion's 'lurking fear', are themselves the now totally degenerated descendants of the Martense family!

*
I wonder what sort of impact the story had on its first readers. Home Brew was presumably a quite different, and more heterogenous, magazine than Weird Tales. Yet its readership evidently gave HPL positive feedback and confidence. I think (this is doubtless an unoriginal comment) that the HPL recipe relies on certain literary techniques and jargon (his voluminous vocabulary chief among them) wedded to what might be called pulpy thrills and the 'detective' style of his narrator-characters piecing together 'clues'. And as we have seen, the horror impact goes hand in hand with humour, even comedy - as the 'over-muchness' of his language inevitable creates humorous effects.

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