Book review; The Dunwich Horror

The Dunwich Horror

H P Lovecraft

(Penguin Classics, 2010)

Halloween is nearly here, there are pumpkins on sale and the neighbourhood kids will soon be round doing trick or treat, what better time to read H P Lovecraft, one of the fathers of the modern horror story.

First published as a Penguin Red Classic this attractive paperback contains six of his stories, they are, to be honest, something of a mixed bag.

The title story, ‘The Dunwich Horror’, in which a family of malcontents raise demonic forces out in the boondocks contains elements of the best and worst aspects of Lovecraft’s writing.

It is a richly atmospheric tale with the highly developed mythology you would expect, all dark shapes half seen in the fog and forbidden esoteric knowledge; unfortunately there is also something ever so slightly silly and over the top about the whole thing. It is hard not to read about the ensuing fuss and flap-doodle with invisible beasts and men in robes reciting incantations on hilltops without thinking how much fun Vincent Price and the other Hammer regulars would have had sending the whole thing up something rotten.

Other stories in the collection enter similar territory, although with less unintentionally comical results. In particular ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ and ‘Hypnos’, here the atmospherics and the unsettling, almost trippy imagery Lovecraft uses gives the reader a satisfying shiver and suggests why the sixties counter culture took to him so enthusiastically.

Enjoyable though they are these stories are essentially museum pieces; any potential they had to deliver a lasting scare has long since faded. Not least because within a decade of Lovecraft’s death in 1937 the world had had horrors he could never have imagined visited upon it by all too human agencies.

Maybe Auden’s image of the torturer’s horse scratching its back against a tree as life trundles on in wilful ignorance of the despicable deeds being done elsewhere is more lastingly shocking than anything to be found here. The mask evil wears isn’t that of a mad, faceless god reigning in some netherworld, it is that of a face as ordinary as the one we meet in the mirror every morning.