The Whisperer in Darkness: H.P. Lovecraft a la Carte No. 4

By H. P. Lovecraft

If The Dunwitch Horror engendered any doubts about the trend of Lovecraft’s horror fiction into a less-supernatural, more-science-fictionish direction, The Whisperer in Darkness put them definitively to rest. This deeply unsettling narrative blurs the line between and among weird fiction, dark

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pulp-Lit Productions
• Release date: Sep 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781635910681

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant twentieth-century authors in the genre.

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 The Whisperer in Darkness:

H.P. Lovecraft a la Carte No. 4

H.P. LOVECRAFT

Copyright ©2016, 2019 Pulp-Lit Productions.

All rights reserved, with the exception of all text written by Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft and his collaborators, and on all text and art originally published in pulp magazines, on which copyright protections have expired worldwide. In the spirit of good stewardship of the public domain, no copyright claim is asserted over any of H.P. Lovecraft’s original text or any magazine art as presented in this book, including any and all corrections and style changes made to the originals. 

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ISBN: 978-1-63591-068-1

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The WHISPERER in DARKNESS.

26,000-word novella

1930.

If The Dunwitch Horror engendered any doubts about the trend of Lovecraft’s horror fiction into a less-supernatural, more-science-fictionish direction, The Whisperer in Darkness put them definitively to rest. This deeply unsettling narrative blurs the line between and among weird fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction, and arguably makes better use of its scholarly-but-a-little-thick professorial narrator to evoke subtextual horror than any previous work.

By the time he was writing this story, Lovecraft was acutely aware that he and his primary literary outlet — Weird Tales — were not exactly a match made in Valhalla. They had different literary goals in mind when approaching any given story. Weird Tales liked fairly conventional shudder-pulp tales, especially ones that delivered a big finish; and Lovecraft had learned by experience that if he let his writing get too subtle and sophisticated, it would be shot right back to him with an apologetic note from Farnsworth Wright.

The Whisperer in Darkness may have been his attempt to bridge these two worlds. It features plenty of pulpy action, to the point of getting roundly criticized by some Lovecraft fans for borrowing too much from writers like Robert E. Howard. And it does have that oft-parodied final crowning horror line, the last piece of evidence withheld until the very last sentence that reveals The Horrid Truth; but it is voiced by Professor Wilmarth, and for a careful reader (who has figured out the truth already, long since), it functions not so much as a crowning horror, but as a line that rings true to a character who we know really isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.

If such was Lovecraft’s goal, it must be counted as a great success.

This story also takes greater advantage of the whole Cthulhu Mythos than most previous works. Clark Ashton Smith is incorporated into it (as an Atlantean priest, Klarkash-Ton), as is his toad-god Tsothoggua; August Derleth becomes M. le Comte d’Erlette, the author of the dread tome Cultes des Goules. The Cthulhu Mythos was starting to take shape as a real shared science-fiction universe from which Lovecraft and his friends could draw characters and references to enhance the realism of their weird tales. 

Lovecraft started on this story on Feb. 24, 1930, just after finishing The Mound for Zealia Bishop, and it’s easy to draw parallels between the two — as with The Dunwitch Horror’s relationship with The Curse of Yig, The Mound feels a bit like a long, highly polished warm-up exercise to The Whisperer in Darkness. 

Lovecraft took his time writing The Whisperer in Darkness; by the time he finished it, on Sept. 26, he had also written Medusa’s Coil for Zealia Bishop, as well as two more travelogues: Account of a Visit to Charleston, S.C. and An Account of Charleston, in His Maj’ty’s Province of South-Carolina. 

The Whisperer in Darkness was, of course, snatched right up by editor Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, despite its cumbersome length, and the check Lovecraft received for it was $350 — the most he’d ever be paid for a single story. It was published in the August 1931 issue.

I.

BEAR IN MIND CLOSELY that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred — that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night — is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all Akeley’s disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.

The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organized relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumors.

The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved — one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centering in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.

What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared