"The Shunned House" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Shunned House"

Some thoughts on a novelette by H.P. Lovecraft

In my weird and horror reading, H.P. Lovecraft is a cosmic black hole, conspicuous by his absence. True – I had read, a decade and a half back, an anthology of his short stories expertly curated by S.T.Joshi (The Call of Cthulhu and other Weird Stories). I must admit, however, that I was not particularly impressed by Lovecraft’s overly dramatic and prolix style, sometimes bordering on self-parody. I have, since then, given his works a wide berth. 

Lately, however, I’ve been tempted to once again dip into Lovecraft’s dark and hostile universe. Possibly the latest cataclysmic and post-apocalyptic news reports had a hand in this. I opted to start with the novelette “The Shunned House”, which I downloaded off the Project Gutenberg website.

“The Shunned House” is a relatively early work, having been written in 1924. It was also close to being the first published book by Lovecraft, with approximately 250 copies printed by W. Paul Cook for Recluse Press. As it happened, the book was never issued, and the work was published posthumously in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

The story is interesting because whilst clearly indebted to the Gothic tradition, it also has some idiosyncratic elements which distinguish it as a Lovecraftian work.  The plot is quite similar to many other “haunted house” tales, with some reliance on tropes of the genre and, more limitedly, reference to elements of vampire literature.  The “shunned house” of the title has long lain untenanted and abandoned in a street of Providence, Rhode Island.  Local legends associate it with a string of mysterious sicknesses and deaths by “wasting away”.  The narrator who, as a boy, used to roam its fetid and dark rooms for a dare, develops an obsession with the place and his history, one that he shares with his uncle, Dr Elihu Whipple “a sane, conservative physician of the old school…a bachelor, a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and a local historian of note”.  The narrator’s research points to something horrible buried under the floor of the house’s cellar, which is infested with repellent “fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside…truly horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes”.  With a view to exorcising the terrible presence in the house, the narrator and his uncle spend a night in the cellar. This is, of course, always a rash course of action in a horror story, and the nocturnal sojourn, unsurprisingly, leads to a terrifying denouement.

Lovecraft’s story is a tribute to the conventional “haunted house” tale, especially in its eerie descriptions and scary backstory.  There are also several nods to the Gothic genre, not least the literary conceit that this story is a realistic account of an actual occurrence involving research of existing documentation.   The concept of a present cursed by the sins of the past is also quite typical of the American Gothic. 

What I found particularly interesting about this story is its “scientific”, materialistic approach.  Although black magic and dubious rituals seem to have given rise to the entity haunting the house, the narrator and his uncle plan to battle it not through spiritual/supernatural means but with a contraption which shoots “ether radiation” and, should that not work, two World War I flame-throwers. Eventually, it is six carboys of acid which will put the house to rest.   It is also significant that the “monster” is not a ghost in the traditional sense of the word, but a being much more physical and, in some ways, more horrible.  

Of course, this idea of old monsters haunting the present would loom large in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories and, in this regard, “The Shunned House” acquires particular significance.  The prose also points to Lovecraft’s mature style, with its preponderance of ornate, baroque descriptions replete with adjectives and adverbs.  I guess I can live with that in limited doses.  

(The title image is taken from Virgil Finlay's original illustration for the story)