Skip to main content

A Treasury of Modern Fantasy: The Platypus Reads Part CCXLVI

After finishing up Marion Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts, I've decided to add a little lighter reading to my list.  Interspersed with my academic reading will be A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, a collection of the best magazine fantasy short stories up to 1980 compiled and edited by Terry Carr and Martin Harry Greenberg.  It should be a nice complement to The Mammoth Book of Fantasy which I read several summers ago.  First up on the list of stories is an old favorite by H.P. Lovecraft: The Rats in the Walls.

The Rats in the Walls is one of Lovecraft's best short stories.  Lovecraft's normally over-articulate prose is paired down and his mythos is deployed in a careful, subtle manner that avoids any of the usual C'thulhu gooberishness.  As always, Lovecraft is careful to link the story back to his beloved New England, but the setting in old England adds a sense of the classically gothic that strengthens the tale's atmosphere.  We also get to see Lovecraft deploy his typical tropes of reversion and forbidden knowledge with a deft sense that is often lacking in his more experimental work.  What cinches the deal, ultimately,  is the pacing.  The best Lovecraft tales all feature a sort of creeping dread learned from the progenitor of the art in its short story form, Edgar Allen Poe.  Lovecraft is careful to seed The Rats in the Walls with subtle hints of the horror he intends to unveil that slip beneath the first time reader's radar but create a growing sense of unease.  The end, when it comes, feels completely natural and completely unexpected bringing about a true sense of horror and revulsion.  This isn't a mere one trick horse, either.  On a second read, knowing the ending only increases the horror as all the subtle clues Lovecraft has left for the reader stand out in all their ghastly significance against the calm naivete of the narrator.

So there you have it: The Rats in the Walls by H.P. Lovecraft.  Next up is a piece by another master fantasist, Abraham Merritt, The Woman of the Wood.  I read and enjoyed Merrit's The Moon Pearl several years ago, so I'm looking forward to this next piece.  I'll let you know what I think as soon as I finish.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...
3 comments
Read more

The Platypus and Theological Localism

My wife and I were listening the other day to Dr. Fred Sanders give a paper of California Theological Localism.  It was one of the more technical pieces we've heard from him, and it was fun to stretch our brains a little.  If I understand it right, the main idea of Theological Localism is that place matters and will shape the theology of its inhabitants in certain ways.  This could be seen as determinative, or merely as fodder for apologetic engagement, both of which Sanders rejects as insufficient or problematic.  What exactly is wanted seems to be a theological engagement with place, specifically California, in a way that Sanders and company feel has been neglected.  If that's not clear, the fault is mine as a listener or a writer. Of course, the idea of a theology of place caught my attention and my immediate response was "someone should do this for New England."  New England, after all, is its own peculiar place with, by American standards, a long, va...
6 comments
Read more