“Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling,
and sailed endlessly and languorously under strange stars.”
(Ex Oblivione, pg.131)
Welcome back to Our Daily Lovecraft. I don’t know if there is any turning back now…
If you’re just joining us, you can start your Lovecraftian journey here!
Meeting strange, unusual people in the backwoods of pretty much anywhere is always a less than stellar time. In our narrator’s case, he’s in the middle of nowhere in New England, where houses are decrepit and the people have gone all The Hills Have Eyes. Which is unfortunately true in this case.
Our narrator is out doing some genealogical studies when it begins pouring rain. He pulls his bike over to a decrepit house – that might not be decrepit after all. Sure enough, creepy old man comes downstairs where they talk like normal human beings until the discussion falls upon an old book the man has. Inside is an image of a cannibalistic tribe in the Congo area in the middle of their butchery. This is the old man’s favorite image and he waxes poetic about it until a drop of red liquid falls from the ceiling. We all know what that liquid is…but who might the victim be?
We’ll never know because suddenly lightning strikes the house and destroys everything.
What the hell, Lovecraft? It seemed a bit of a lame ending to me. Very abrupt and also not really in line with what I’ve seen so far from him in that the narrators don’t die mid story. Accounts are left behind (such as “The Temple”) or we’re being told of the story. I don’t recall reading a first person tale yet in which this happens so it feels very bizarre for it to end in such a way. It’s a shame because it was a good story that had a kind of “classic” spooky tale vibe to it (scary house, weird lone inhabitant, bad things about to happen) and then it’s all cut short via deadly deus ex machina. Quite unfortunate.
But not every story can be golden, and besides, we’re really still just getting started.
Another prose poem that actually does feel more prose-poemish than the others we’ve entertained so far. Once more we delve into the concept of oblivion as well as feature a character that utilizes dreams (and drugs) to get there. The dreamer first seeks out certain places in the dream, encounters beautiful places and helpful folk, before finally going through a gate and reaching full oblivion and living(?) happily ever after.
With so many stories to go, I wonder how many more will feature dream traveling – and for those that do, I’m quite interested in finding out what sort of places we visit next and what names Lovecraft has concocted for them. It never fails to be entertaining – I say, the more the better.
Featured image © Nicole Taft
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