“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.”
(The Outsider, pg.164)
Welcome back to Our Daily Lovecraft. Do you think you can hang onto your sanity?
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I liked the twist on this one. Our narrator (first person – should we expect anything less?) has no recollection but the old, crumbling castle he lives in. He’s never even seen the sky. Until finally one day decides enough is enough and climbs up, out, and to find actual people – where he then discovers what’s really going on with him.
It’s kind of a Phantom of the Opera vibe, and I feel bad for our poor narrator, because he seems like an okay person. The end is, as the introduction points out, a very Frankenstein-esque moment, and though the narrator has escaped whatever depths he spawned in, he’s still stuck being an outsider – hence the title. It’s a pretty basic story, in that sense, though I do wonder about the dimensions of the castle considering how it was overshadowed by trees, and yet the location the narrator emerges doesn’t make sense in relation to that. But oh well. It’s not something I intend to ponder over.
Moral of the story? Don’t go bother the gods – because you may end up meeting the wrong ones.
Here we’re told of the gods of the earth, who have abandoned lower peaks because man keeps on climbing them. But they still occasionally visit and dance and do things they did of old. Therefore Barzai the Wise, who knew much of the gods, decided he wanted to see them for himself and scaled Hatheg-Kla so he would be there when they alighted upon it. And that’s where the moral of the story comes into play.
While that’s unfortunate for Barzai, I found myself more intrigued by other factors. Such as, considering how Barzai never came back down because the gods he did bump into, while they weren’t the earth gods, were still associated with them. So I’m left wondering – why did the gods of the earth feel the need to ever move from any spot in the first place? These guardians took care of Barzai in some fashion and left everyone in the area afraid – more afraid of Hatheg-Kla than they were before. If the gods can take care of people with a snap of their supernatural fingers (so to speak), why are they so weak that they kept moving until they’re stuck living on the highest, coldest peak on the planet and only occasionally come out to party on their past homes? Barzai called them feeble, and while generally it’s never the best idea to yell that about anything god-like, I’m inclined to believe him. These gods didn’t even take care of Barzai – the other gods did. Their guardians. Although they’re kind of sucky guardians if the gods had to keep moving in the first place. So to me this story is less than scary and the gods not very terrifying.
On the upside, we get more references. In this case, the place of Ulthar where it is illegal to kill cats and Atal who dwelt there as a boy, now a young man accompanying Barzai, as well as the Pnakotic Manuscripts, which made their first appearance in “Polaris.” Fun times!
Featured image © Nicole Taft
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