The avoided house
The shunned house (English original title: The Shunned House ) is the title of a short story by the American writer HP Lovecraft , which he wrote in mid-October 1924. In October 1937 she was in the magazine Weird Tales published in 1939 and in the anthology The Outsider and Others added, with the history of the publishing house Arkham House began.
A German translation by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem appeared in 1973 in the anthology Stadt ohne Namen der Bibliothek des Haus Usher , which was reprinted in 1981 in the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .
The work belongs to the genre of fantastic horror stories with points of contact with science fiction . Lovecraft describes the background of a house in which many people inexplicably fell ill and died and in the basement of which an evil creature is hidden.
content
The first-person narrator has long been concerned with the rumors, speculations and hints about an 18th century colonial house in Providence that has been in the Harris family for generations. In the course of time, many residents there became ill and died in unusual ways, while the neighboring houses were spared the evil. Because of these events, it has been uninhabited for a long time.
Most of the community's residents do not consider the building a classic haunted house because there are no stories of "clinking chains, cold drafts, blown lights or faces at the window" around.
The narrator, who played there with some friends as a child and is fascinated by the dark aura of the building, delves into its history and later also studies the annals of the owner family. Even as a teenager he recognized the “morbid weirdness of the eerie vegetation” and felt the ghostly atmosphere of the building. The peculiar tree roots in the garden and the mold spots were reminiscent of human contours. The disaster seems to condense in the dark and damp cellar, which exudes a bad smell and is surrounded by eerily shaped sponges that glow strangely as they rot . There is a stain made of saltpeter or mold on the floor , reminiscent of a person huddled together.
The narrator's uncle, Elihu Whipple, has done some research himself, which, after some urging, he tells his now grown-up nephew: It seems as if an evil power is breeding there that sucks out the life force of the residents, suffers from anemia, consumption, decreased intelligence and often lets die. It remains strange that shortly before their death some of the victims stammered a strange French idiom, although they had never dealt with the language.
The narrator continues his research and discovers a connection to French in the form of a Huguenot settler named Etienne Roulet. In the eighteenth century, the roulette had their own cemetery exactly where the avoided house was now. They had met with great opposition, which seemed to override reservations about immigrants. Worrying are the gruesome details about a man named Jaques Roulet, who was initially convicted of being a sorcerer, but was then locked in a "madhouse" . He was found covered with blood and bits of flesh in a wooded area where a child had been torn to pieces by wolves.
When the narrator re-enters the basement, he thinks he sees a glowing vapor that wafts up from the human-like mold. He and his uncle do not consider themselves superstitious and want to explain the facts scientifically. They suspect an unpleasant influence, which can be traced back to the French settlers with their fascination for forbidden knowledge and hideous spheres and "which is still present by means of rare and unknown laws of motion of atoms and electrons". In the light of new scientific insights such as the theory of relativity and “intra-atomic influences”, this assumption is not completely absurd.
Whether the being is hostile or driven out of blind self-preservation - to exterminate it is an obligation for every philanthropist. Hoping to lure it out through their presence and then destroy it, the two decide to spend a night in the basement of the house. Equipped with flamethrowers for a material threat and a shadow cross tube for an immaterial threat, they begin their watch. When Whipple gets tired, he lies down on a cot and falls into a sleep that becomes restless after a while. He breathes irregularly and begins to moan. When his nephew shines in his face, he is shocked by the distorted and strange facial features. He begins to mumble and the narrator realizes with horror that it is French. He wakes up screaming and tells of a dream that took place in a distant world and in which he recognized the faces of the Harris family.
His tired nephew also falls into a restless sleep, from which a loud scream from his uncle tears him. The room is filled with an unpleasant smell, a yellowish light lets the contours emerge. He looks around fearfully and freezes. A sickly corpse light rises and forms a cloud-like structure that consists of many scornful eyes and rises to the ceiling. It envelops his uncle and makes him horribly transform and dissolve. Since it seems to be an immaterial threat, his nephew reaches for the tube apparatus and directs the “etheric radiation” onto the monstrous cloud. He realizes that this remains ineffective apart from a few changes in color and shape and is chased from the basement by another horror: While Whipple liquefies, his face takes on countless strange and diabolical features until the now gelatinous mass spreads on the floor.
The next day the narrator procures six large balloon bottles of sulfuric acid and, overcoming his disgust, shovels a large hole in the cellar floor. At some point he comes across a fish-like surface that is reminiscent of half-wet jelly. In the deeper and deeper pit, which soon reaches up to his neck, he recognizes the exposed piece of a gigantic part of the body . He climbs up and pours the acid into "this cave, on the unimaginable abnormality whose huge elbows " he saw and which he can destroy in this way. In the following spring, the strange weeds and pale grass are gone and the house can be rented again.
Background and origin
Some details of the narrative have an authentic background.
The story relates to an actual house in Providence on Benefit Street that was built around 1763. The suggestion, however, came from a house in Elizabeth , which he had seen in October 1924 and described as a "terrible old house" and "infernal place". Horrible acts must have been committed there in the early 17th century. Further details such as straightening the road, flooding and exhumation also have a connection point in reality. The two-story house with an attic in Providence, which was built on a sloping hill, has a basement, but, unlike in the story, was never uninhabited. Another detail is the character of Elihu Whipple, whose model was Lovecraft's uncle Franklin Chase Clark, who died in 1915.
While the character of Etienne Roulet is fictional, Jacques Roulet has a real role model. Lovecraft took the description almost literally from the text Myths and Myth Makers by the American philosopher and historian John Fiske , a work that influenced his understanding of anthropological and religious questions.
As in many works of fantastic literature, locality has an important meaning in this story. It is about the topos of a gloomy place, which was strongly influenced by the style-forming English horror novels and which has only lost importance in the more recent literature. A dark and abandoned house, laden with the odor of the threatening, not only evokes an eerie atmosphere and influences the behavior of the respective characters , but also steers the reader's expectation in a certain direction.
This narrative is also set in New England , a region where Lovecraft often mixed the real with the fictional, and focuses on a narrator with a tendency towards the bizarre and out-of-the-way. As in his stories The Shining Trapezohedron , Dreams in the Witch's House and The Thing on the Threshold , the infamy of a place in this story leads to its isolation, the house is avoided .
Lovecraft brings the science fiction elements into play by trying to explain the existence of vampiric beings with new scientific developments such as relativity and quantum theory . It is also significant that the narrator does not kill the creature with a stake in the heart but with sulfuric acid. He had dealt with Einstein's theory six months earlier and was amazed at the deviation from the physical ideas of the 19th century.
literature
- Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Shunned House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X , pp. 241-244
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Shanned House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 241
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Shanned House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 243
- ↑ Quoted from: HP Lovecraft, Das Gemiedene Haus , in: Stadt ohne Namen , Horrorgeschichten, Fantastische Bibliothek, Volume 52, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 242
- ↑ HP Lovecraft, "The avoided house", in: City without a name , horror stories, Fantastic Library, Volume 52, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 242
- ↑ HP Lovecraft, "The avoided house", in: City without a name , horror stories, Fantastic Library, Volume 52, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 263
- ↑ HP Lovecraft, “The avoided house”, in: City without a name , horror stories, Fantastic Library, Volume 52, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 276
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Shunned House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 242
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Shunned House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 243
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Shunned House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 243
- ↑ Michael Koesler: Notes on Howard Phillips Lovecraft's storytelling . In: HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen, Franz Rottensteiner (Ed.), Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 115
- ↑ Michael Koesler: Notes on Howard Philips Lovecraft's storytelling . In: HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen, Franz Rottensteiner (Ed.), Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 117
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Shunned House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 243