“At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world,
but only of the mad spaces between the stars.”
(The Festival, pg.267)
Welcome back to Our Daily Lovecraft. Do you hear something…?
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“In the intro to this story, Joshi writes that this is “a kind of essay on the nature of supernatural horror,” and I’m inclined to agree with him. The way Lovecraft went about putting this story together and how Carter, our narrator, presents his case to his friend Joel Manton is very essay-like. As though Lovecraft is using this short story as a medium to present the case of supernatural horror, both as a viable subject matter in fiction (whoa, meta), and that some of it is so horrific the human mind cannot fully grasp what it is presented with, thus “unnamable.”
Of course, the narrator’s friend is convinced in the end, though not through any natural discourse. Rather, the discussion takes a kind of turn into the telling of a horror story (a story within a story? So much meta!) with the bad thing suddenly right behind you.
It’s a really strange way of presenting a story, when you think about it. But it gets the job done. And if readers of Weird Tales, the publication in which this story appeared in 1925, weren’t there for the horror, perhaps they may have read the story and rethought their stance on certain things. Without any actual unnamable horror, luckily.
This story made me giggle. But not in a way that indicates the story is actually funny, nor in a disrespectful fashion. Here we have a narrator returning to the city of Kingsport (Reference alert! This city was featured in “The Terrible Old Man,” so it’s already got that going for it) where, every 100 years, folk take part in a Yuletide festival. If they’ve left, they are commanded to return should it arrive during their time on this earth. Such is the case for our narrator. One might think a Yuletide festival would be lovely – but we’re in Lovecraft territory, so let’s get weird.
Right away the narrator feels uneasy about this whole situation. The town isn’t as the people of Arkham described (Reference alert! Arkham is a town in which the two men from “The Unnamable” lived, and was also in “The Picture in the House”). It’s quiet. A little too quiet. The people inside the house he rings seem okay, except they have strange books lying about – including the one and only Necronomicon (Reference alert! This book was mentioned in “The Hound” as being written by Abdul Alhazred, who made his first appearance in “The Nameless City”). Eventually they, and most of the town, go to a church, then down underground (when are terrible things not underground?), where a greenish fire burns, a dark river runs, and the people call gargoyle-like creatures. They then mount them and ride off.
The narrator, however, is unable to process this insanity and instead dives into the river, eventually finding himself back in Kingsport and discovering it to be normal and bustling as it should have been the first time. But he knows what happened was real, because eventually he returns to Arkham, requests a copy of the Necronomicon from Miskatonic University (Reference alert! This is where the characters from “Herbert West- Reanimator” went to school) and manages to find the exact same paragraph he read that terrible night.
It’s a fine story, to be sure. Now, I giggle because similar to “Dagon,” the narrator freaks out over what he sees and sensed. But he’s never harmed. He has no stories of people being harmed during this Yuletide event. No legends. Then he sees the creatures and has decided enough is enough. And I have this funny thought in my brain of, “What if they’re just doing their own thing that doesn’t actually bother anyone and he’s just being rude?” Like in “Dagon” the man freaks out because he sees a fishperson and it’s ugly and scary – but it does nothing adverse to him otherwise. Everything is clearly meant to be horrific and awful; fear of the unknown and the bizarre and places of darkness and all that. But what would this man have seen if he’d hopped on one of the creatures? They sounded pretty chill in the story, to be honest. Like patient horses waiting for their riders to get on.
Granted, there is clearly more going on here than we’re privy to, as the man our narrator meets is actually wearing a mask, and of course the Necronomicon isn’t supposed to be a good thing (we’ve all seen Army of Darkness, c’mon). But it was just something that popped into my head.
Featured image © Nicole Taft
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