Doug Bolden's Reviews > The Dunwich Horror

I have been vaguely aware of PS Publishing's Illustrated Lovecraft series for a goodly minute. In fact, it was this volume that really got my attention. The late Wilum Pugmire posted a video to their Youtube channel discussing how they had intended for another essay to show up in this volume instead of "Lustcraft" (said video gives you a short reading for the intended essay). I do not know what went awry with the editorial choice there, but while "Lustcraft" is the weakest of the three essays I would say it is also the most personable.

To clarify, the Illustrated Lovecraft series has one (or more) stories per volume with illustrations by Pete Von Sholly and various essays (that seem to be reprints of older materials, though some might be original to the series). In this volume, there is around a dozen or so illustrations. It must be said that the art is definitely of a type. Faces are often leering with mouths agape. Colors pop from the page. For illustrations like Lavinia and Wilbur running towards the stones on Sentinel Hill or the scene of the Dunwich villagers overlooking the destruction left by the horror, this effect is evocative. For some others, such as the picture of Lavinia holding a young Wilbur, it is too much, making her more akin to the The Cryptkeeper than to a haunted, mad albino woman. For the most part it works and even when it does not, it is still interesting to see Von Shelly's take on these iconic Lovecraftian scenes.

I will not spend too long discussing the text of the main story in that it has been discussed quite a bit and has shown up more than once in other volumes I have read and reviewed. I will say that for Lovecraft, this "one story at a time" style works for his writings. It is easy to get caught up in the big hulking anthologies of HPL and lose the tiny little details squeezed between such....cyclopean and eldritchly-hyphenated words.* On its own, "The Dunwich Horror" is ripe with these hidden moments and asides. Here are just a few I noticed:

--The early depictions of Wilbur [before his more monstrous aspect is exposed] are written to play off fears of racial mixing with stereotypes linked to Mediterranean and African people. In general, Lovecraft has a few weak attempts to try and hide the mystery and it is not hard to imagine people being completely blind to the story not quite clocking all the hints and winks being thrown at the reader.

--The initial description of Dunwich is one of Lovecraft's strongest. That being said, its depiction of an area with many rounded hills and multiple sets of standing stones and walls close to the road feels like a fanboy fever dream trying to mash multiple miles of fictional English country-side into one rural New England place.

--The standing stones are (somehow) linked to Caucasian people implying that some European types have been active in that region for centuries or millennia, something never really developed elsewhere in Lovecraft's writings, at least not the good ones.

--Though this story clearly references "The Call of Cthulhu" in a couple of places, it technically hits at odds with the mythos. In this story, the Earth came from some other place and the general plan is to drag it back [as an explanation of why a tiny blue speck might have so much...otherworldly presence].

--Wilbur's full description around the middle of the story is strong weird horror writing. Ironically, the description is preceded by the Lovecraftian cliche about the difficulties of describing it in writing. I like to think that was HPL engaging in humor. His otherworldly appearance is definitely satyr-like (though with hints of elephant and sauropod), backing up my theory that Lovecraft intends Yog-Sothoth as a variation on Pan. The story "The Great God Pan" gets a direct, in-text mention, even.

Overall the story is a beautiful imperfection. Besides the "The Great God Pan", you can see Blackwood's "The Willows" and maybe even Bram Stroker's Van Helsing in the mix. As Donald Burleson points out in the included essay, 'The Mythic Hero Archetype in "The Dunwich Horror,"' there is a degree of mythical inversion in the story's telling. The first half has Wilbur being a brilliant outsider, the cast-off son of a god, physically and mentally above his peers. He goes off on a quest to fulfill his heavenly destiny. However, around the middle mark, Wilbur's death occurs at the failure of his task (a task aligned somewhat in the monomyth with a descent into Hell checked by a ferocious hound). After this, a new hero arises. Burleson connects this to the Horror but I think it is best to see the inversion passing the mantle to Armitage. The story shows the descent of a precocious outsider youth into hell and a quiet and somewhat fearful scholar rising instead. A literal transfiguration of characters with the task no longer being to uphold the god's wishes but instead to oppose the heavenly presence.

Such construction makes you almost forgive that the story's climax is seen from a distance and is probably only a temporary set-back to The Old Ones great plans, but so it goes. We are merely human, after all.

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* I do not remember who or where but a reviewer some twenty-plus years ago made the comment that the new tendency to anthologize Lovecraft in all-in-one type volumes had the unfortunate aspect of asking readers to stumble through a lot of badly crafted early writings to get to the increasingly better and more important stories later in his life. You could easily cut out half of HPL's stories and lose very little while generally improving the flow and saving a few trees.