The lurking fear
The lurking fear ( English original title: The Lurking Fear ) is the title of a four-part fantastic horror story H. P. Lovecraft , which was written in November 1922 and from January to April 1923 in the magazine Home Brew was published. In June 1928 it was printed in pulp magazine Weird Tales and in 1939 it was included in the anthology The Outsider and Others , with which the story of Arkham House began. A German translation appeared in 1973 in the short story collection City without a Name in the library of the Usher book series , which was reprinted in 1981 in the 52nd volume of the Fantastic Library published by Suhrkamp Verlag .
The early, mostly derogatory work is reminiscent of a detective story and revolves around a monster that is up to mischief in the vicinity of the Catskill Mountains and afflicts the inhabitants. The story brings together a number of themes and thoughts that Lovecraft later revisited and that occupy a large space in his last decade. As in Arthur Jermyn , The Rats in the Walls, and in the late story Shadows over Innsmouth , hereditary degeneration plays a central role and is driven to the point of horror in the form of Lurking Fear .
Form and content
The work is divided into four parts and is rolled out from the perspective of a nameless first-person narrator , who at the beginning characterizes himself with his “predilection for the grotesque and the terrible”.
First part
In an area of the Catskill Mountains that is noticeably frequented by violent thunderstorms , he suspects the lurking fear , a creature that, according to the legends of the backwoods residents, has been up there for centuries. The dilapidated Martensens estate on Tempest Mountain seems to be at the center of the action. With feverish vegetation, furrowed earth and disgusting crooked, lightning-scarred trees, the surroundings leave a repulsive impression. Rumor has it that there is a demon kidnapping and dismembering the people of the area and supposedly being lured out by thunder .
After a thunderstorm with violent lightning strikes, a bloodbath and mass exodus broke out in a village near the property, which was reported in the press. Some of the surviving residents examine the ruin; but neither they nor the mounted police find usable traces and are faced with the question of why the remains of numerous victims cannot be found. The narrator is now convinced that the rumors about the origin of the horror have a real core. He quartered himself with his friends George Bennett and William Tobey in the abandoned manor house and wanted to check the uncanny processes from Jan Martensens' room, which had a large east window and a fireplace and was furnished with an iron bed that had been brought in. The three companions make arrangements for a possible escape and keep watch, but are overwhelmed by a leaden fatigue and fall asleep. Screams wake the narrator and he feels that Tobey has disappeared to his right. When a flash of lightning illuminates the room and Bennett starts up, he sees a monstrous shadow on the fireplace, and at the same time this friend is gone forever.
Second part
At the beginning of the second part, the narrator is so tormented by his memories that he has to confide them to a friend named Arthur Munroe in order not to lose his mind. He sounds understanding everything and helps him with further research. You roam the area, talk to mountain residents, look for the missing comrades and look at the haunted hamlet , which is about five kilometers from the manor house. A violent thunderstorm with heavy rain causes them to flee to a hut. When lightning strikes nearby, a landslide is heard, and the storm continues to flare up, Munroe opens the shutter and leans out to explore the cataclysms. The howling wind is so loud that the narrator in the background cannot understand what his friend is saying. After the storm subsided, he opened the door, but was unable to discover anything else. Since Munroe remains unchanged at the window, he turns him around and sees that his face has been torn to pieces and he is dead.
third part
At the beginning of the third section, the narrator confesses that he has hidden the death of his friend and that he has quietly buried him. Then he rolls up the story of the Martensen family and the ominous house. It was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy merchant from New Amsterdam who loathed the changes under British rule and English culture. In the lonely environment of the Catskill Mountains he had a pompous property built to retreat there. Raised in hatred of the British, his descendants avoided contact with the colonists and lived as a hermit. They withdrew further and eventually began to marry the servants. Some neighbors reported the degeneration and decline of the family and mentioned the uneven color of the children's eyes.
The first offspring who wanted to break the isolation was Jan Martense. When his pen pal Jonathan Gifford hadn't heard from him for a long time, he went to the family home and learned from relatives that he had been struck by lightning. The Martensens were sullen, spoke with ticked-off throats, and looked disgusting and animal-like with their multicolored eyes. Having grown suspicious, the friend dug out the coffin and saw that Jan Martensen's skull had been smashed. Since there was no usable evidence, the incident was not investigated further by the police, but led to the fact that the place was avoided and the family was outlawed from then on.
The narrator explores the property's garden and comes across Jan Martensen's resting place. He digs up the earth and opens the coffin , but sees only dust and saltpeter. Desperate, he keeps shoveling until the ground collapses and he comes across a horizontal tunnel that seems to extend infinitely. Forgetting the dangers, he squeezes through the tight turns and at some point loses his sense of time . As he slowly works his way up, he sees glowing eyes and a claw approaching him until it thunders, a saving lightning bolt with "cyclopean fury" crashes into the ground and he finds himself on the surface. In the south he sees a reddish glow and later learns that there, twenty miles away, at the same moment the creature penetrated a hut that was set on fire by the fleeing settlers.
fourth part
In the last episode the secrets of the being are cleared. The narrator must determine how he could see a monster that was simultaneously sighted in a village twenty miles away. Neither at the Jan Martensens burial site nor in the hamlet concerned can he find usable traces. He climbs the mountains and earth walls in the area and at some point realizes that all the ice age- appearing walls and hills extend from Tempest Mountain and that the old family estate forms the center, as if "tentacles of horror had been thrown out from there". Finally he thinks of molehills , he thinks the place is completely criss-crossed by corridors and remembers that his friends Bennett and Tobey were dragged off the sides of the bed. Desperate, he digs up an earth wall near him and comes across another tunnel, which confirms his suspicions. He walks across the moonlit and hilly meadows to the Martensens residence, digs up the floor of the cellar and discovers an opening in the foundation of the fireplace. When a thunderstorm approaches, he hides in the furthest corner of the room and at some point sees a swirling “mass of leper life” oozing out of the throat and out into the open. From the stream of deformed “devils or monkeys” a somewhat weaker comrade remains behind, is attacked by the others and left behind. After the last monster has left the room, he shoots the creature.
A week later he returns from Albany with some people and blasts the property with dynamite like the top of the mountain . He is haunted by traumatic images and fears that he may not have killed all creatures, degenerate mammals with sharp fangs, "the result of inbreeding, reproduction and cannibalism ". The narrator remembers that in the light of the muzzle flash he saw the face of the monster, whose eyes were two-colored, like those of the Martensens.
Emergence
After Lovecraft had finished the short story Hypnos , he made several trips that took him to New York for the first time from April 6-12, 1922 . When he returned to Providence , Goerge Julian Houtain asked if he could write another sequel, which would appear in four parts.
Houtain, amateur journalist and from 1915 to 1917 President of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA), had met him in July 1920 in Boston at a meeting of amateur journalists. The story was to be published in the raunchy humor magazine Home Brew , which Houtain had founded with his wife and in which Lovecraft's six-part sequel story Herbert West - the reanimator ( Herbert West - Reanimator ) had already appeared.
Lovecraft postponed the work until mid-November, but then went to work, possibly because his friend not only paid him the missing fee for the revival story about Herbert West, but also half of his new work in advance. Since The Lurking Fear arose faster than its predecessor, it seems a bit more closed, although the four parts have to end spectacularly here too. Presumably at Lovecraft's suggestion, Clark Ashton Smith illustrated the work with two drawings per episode. Lovecraft criticized Samuel Loveman for the fact that his pen pal, whom he was to euphorically praise a little later in the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, had strayed too far from the text. As Sunand T. Joshi explains, Smith's drawings of vegetation are reminiscent of female and male sex organs . According to Frank Belknap Long , Smith's art is characterized by a structure of sexual allusions, the dimension of which Lovecraft is unlikely to have recognized.
Background and interpretation
The biographical elements are visible, but not always clearly assignable. The name "Jan Martensen" can be traced back to the Jan Martense Schenck House in Flatbush , which Lovecraft did not visit during his first stay in New York, but only in 1928, but in a letter to Maurice W. Moe dated Mentioned July 31, 1923. Another origin could be Martense Street, which is not far from Parkside Avenue 259, where his future wife Sonia Greene lived. The name "Arthur Munroe", on the other hand, is obviously derived from the Munroe brothers, Lovecraft's childhood friends.
With the gradual elucidation of what happened, the work approaches a classic detective story and thus sets itself apart from most of Lovecraft's other stories. In doing so, he manages to postpone the solution of the riddle for a long time until the fatal truth shows up. Only in the last part does the mistake of the narrator become visible, who believes he is only on the trail of one creature when it is actually a legion, hideous "caricatures of the ape species."
As in the less cosmically oriented stories Arthur Jermyn , The rats in the walls and shadows over Innsmouth , degeneration and inbreeding also play a decisive role here. With the man-eating creatures that have undermined an entire area like moles , Lovecraft reaches a new dimension of horror. Joshi interprets the keen interest in degenerative phenomena with racial ideas and considers it inappropriate to point out his understanding of sexuality and the cause of death of his father Winfield Scott, who probably became infected with neurosyphilis through a prostitute or other sexual contact and died from it.
With regard to the later work, the third part of the text is most important for him, in which the narrator acts as a historian and brings terrible details to light. Even the abysses of the past, which are better left undiscovered, would need to be explored in order to understand man's place in the world and to help him endure his fate . If the first-person narrator notices that he was only interested in history “after everything else had ended in the sneering work of the devil”, he wrote in a letter to James F. Morton dated October 19, 1929: “The past is real - it is everything what we have. ”The historical-philosophical thoughts, which occupy a broader space in the later stories, are only hinted at here and plausible scientific justifications are not offered in view of the glaring effects.
Text output
- Home Brew Magazine , January, February, March, and April 1923
- Weird Tales , June 1928
- The Outsider and Others , Arkham House , 1939
- Dagon and Other Macabre Tales , 1986
- The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories , 2004
- City without a name. German from Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Library of the House of Usher , 1973
- City without a name. Fantastic Library, Vol. 52, 1981
- Cthulhu , horror stories. From the American by Andreas Diesel and Felix F. Frey, Festa Verlag , Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-86552-066-1 .
- The lurking fear , Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3865522887
literature
- Sunand T. Joshi . HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1, German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 3944720512 , pp. 559-563
- Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Lurking Fear, The. In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X , pp. 159-160
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The Lurking Fear. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 170
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The Lurking Fear. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 189
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The Lurking Fear. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 192
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The Lurking Fear. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 194
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The Lurking Fear. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 196
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi : HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 540
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 559
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Houtain, George Julian In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport, 2001, p 119
- ↑ So Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 559
- ↑ So Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 562
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 561
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 561
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The Lurking Fear. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 194
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 561
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 27
- ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 561
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: Time, Space, and Natural Law: Science and Pseudo-Science in Lovecraft. In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014