Episode 68 - The Dunwich Horror - Part 4

[Bulbatron]

Well now we've come to the end of this story, I may as well just say how much I like it.  I never really thought about it before, but yes, it is a nice change to see a Lovecraft story with a happy ending, even if it is only a minor victory in the grand, cosmic scheme of things.

It was also nice for the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society adaptation to get a mention.  In fact, I think that was my first exposure to the story.  I definitely think their adaptations are the best place to start with Lovecraft if you're not actually going to read them at first.

I've seen the 70s film of The Dunwich horror, but not the more recent one which, if I understand correctly, has Jeffrey Combs in it.

So, as ever great episode!

[fubarinpittsburgh]

I nearly died laughing when you made the Spinal Tap reference!

Keep up the good work.

[Dr.Vincent]

Spinal tap reference? What Spinal tap reference?  Grrrrr.... ok give me a sec and I'll be back in 30 min.....

[old book]

Having read the comment first, I listened intently for the Spinal Tap reference. I didn't hear an overt reference but assumed the stuff about miniature Stonehenge crushing a dwarf was the reference in question. Someone built a scale replica of Stonehenge in SW Washington state near the Columbia River, but "fixed" it, making sure all the stones were arranged orderly and in good repair. I think there's a museum attached to it with some curiosities as well, black stone heads of Africanoid types found in the area...

[Talleyrand]

Fantastic job boys on one of the bigger HPL Stories, and the references to This is Spinal Tap were most welcome. Loved the backing track of the last Dunwich episode, esp the piano at the end of the episode, it really matched the mood. Do you know who wrote the piano track.

I remember the original 1970 version of the film with Dean Stockwell , which I saw as a kid staying up late, hoping my parents did not catch me watching this, and send me to bed. The sexual overtones with Sandra Dee and the Necronomicon between her legs in orgasmic splendor, went over my 9yo head. But the weird hippy Old Ones running across a psychedelic landscape was a highlight for me as a boy.

I recall you mentioning you had not seen the original film version; you probably already sourced a copy of the 1970 Film, if not check out :
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Dunwich-Horror/60021073

This guy says that he found out his grandparents live in the reference Randolph Beebe house Wilbraham , Massachusetts, that inspired HPL with the whippoorwills legend.

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=56130825118&topic=6614

[Ryan Strong]

Someone built a scale replica of Stonehenge in SW Washington state near the Columbia River, but "fixed" it, making sure all the stones were arranged orderly and in good repair.

Yeah, that's the Maryhill Museum. Interestingly, the "someone" who built it was actually Sam Hill.

It' a really interesting old place, and definitely worth a look if you're in the Portland, OR area.

http://www.maryhillmuseum.org/index.html

[Mirko Stauch]

Great episode, no doubt!

The last time I read it was in a new apartment I moved in, on the first night alone in there. It was in summer 2001 and it was so great. Being all alone in this room, reading the Dunwich Horror...uh.

Re-reading it was great fun.

When the guys are watching through the telescope, HPL uses a writing technique named Teichoscopy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teichoscopy so he changes the point of view, wich I think is very cool. This shows his permanent growing improvement in writing.

The happy ending in a kind of traditional way is -I am sure - not meant to be one. Chris mentioned it, that there is still the possibility of the return just like with Great Cthulhu. The peace is malicious.

HPL's philosophical view is displayed in the Necronomicon phrase. Once again the Necronomicon is a link to the whole corpus of his texts.

Chris said that HPL was not the recluse that most of the people think he was and that is very important to mention. He stayed alone, took his walks almost alone and was happy when being alone, but he also enjoyed company when he was in control of the situation, e.g. when visiting a penpal or when his friends visited him. He was a big traveller, when he could afford it. My friend Daniel (who is Dr. Clownerie at cthulhu.de and SystemMatters) and me, we are working on an essay about travel habits of HPL. And still there are people, even CoC RPGs and HPL readers, who think that he only was sitting in his room, shutters down, electric light on, writing all this stuff, but this isn't true. He was -in his financial situation- a great traveller and -of course- a great travelessaist. Besten displayed in Hippocampus PressCollected Essays Vol 4- Travel. There Joshi  says that some "of the most heart-warming pages in Lovecraft's letters are those in wich he discribes the surprisingly far-flung travels in wich he engaged over the last decade of his  life" (p. 7). True. Rich detailed essay, sometimes very long handed and tiresome....but nevertheless worth reading.
It is in my opinion important to be said that HPL wwas a recluse but not a recluse, right in this ambiguous sense.

The recluse-shutters-down-door-closed-Loveecraft is a legend and a myth wich I first belived in, because in the late 80ies the information here in Germany was little information to get and this lived from the mythos of hermite HPL. This picture of HPL I love, but I have to admit that this picture is wrong.

Uff, that's a long text in bad english....I'm sorry, folks.

[Yojimbo]

Obviously, having posted in the four episode threads just now, I finally had a chance to listen to all of them (I like to wait until the story is covered entirely and listen to them all at once). Some great stuff. This is one of my favorite HPL stories.

I disagree with the "good vs. evil" idea. It's a "survival vs. destruction" sort of thing. I mean, Yog-Sothoth and the Whatelys are conspiring to eradicate ALL life from Earth. That's undoubtedly evil, and to some extent Armitage and Co. are doing "good" by opposing it, but in a cosmic sense, there is no more morality to this situation than there is when two rival colonies of ants go to war over resources, and one wipes the other out.

But even then, Armitage and the other Miskatonic professors don't save the world. They save Dunwich, or at least what is left of Dunwich after the Horror has tromped around for a while, but it's Wilbur's own incompetency that saves the world. He botches the theft of the Necronomicon and gets himself killed (or, looked at another way, it's man's best friend who saves the world, not man himself). If he hadn't, I'm not sure Armitage would have been sufficiently alerted and prepared to deal with the minor threat that he did handle.

As I said, I love this story. It's long, and it's packed with awesome. So many fun details and descriptions, great dialect, interesting characters, some truly horrific monsters, and great writing from HPL. I'm really surprised that there are Lovecraft fans who don't like it.

[Kryptych]

As Mr. Lackey and Mr. Fifer note that the intention was to "wipe the Earth clean," which I think we as human beings only perceive as evil out of pure ego. We often tend to associate villains with such motives even though they make the clear point that it is with regard to the greater good; I hate to quote The Matrix, but as Mr. Smith says, "Humans are a disease and we are the cure," after making the point that humans use up their natural resources and the world and ultimately race toward its own extinction. While the Whatelys and Yog-Sothoth are given a negative connotation, I don't see much evidence in the actual writing to indicate a purely "evil" mindset. They're clearly amoral by human standards... but they're not human, and Lovecraft's cosmic view has time and again shown us that the morals and sense of "right and wrong" that humans possess means nothing in the grand scale of the cosmos. For this, I agree that The Dunwich Horror is far from the standard "good vs. evil" scenario that S.T. Joshi deems it.

A much more glaring example of such a scenario I think would be The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Granted, Curwen's actual motives and plans with Orne and Hutchinson are never clearly spelled out, and one could say that since his powers of immortality and calling up the dead evoke Yog-Sothoth, then his sense of morality is inhuman. Despite that, HE is still human. As such, he IS evil by human standards by which he should be judged. If he were Wilbur Whately or some other non-human entity (albeit in human form), that would be another story. He's a human being who has renounced the morals of humanity. He murders his own descendant. He commits blackmail, robs graves, commits acts of vampirism, and sadistically keeps his mutants/experiments starving, imprisoned, and alive, and clearly gets a chuckle out of it in that chilling line - "that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster!"
Am I criticizing the story? Not at all! But with the utmost respect to Mr. Joshi, whose work is so integral to our understanding of Lovecraft, I do find it odd that he would consider The Case of Charles Dexter Ward to be so fine a story, while denigrating The Dunwich Horror for being a conventional good vs. evil scenario.

[Genus Unknown]

That's... actually a really good point. Kudos.

Suck it, Joshi!

[Chris Lackey]

Obviously, having posted in the four episode threads just now, I finally had a chance to listen to all of them (I like to wait until the story is covered entirely and listen to them all at once). Some great stuff. This is one of my favorite HPL stories.

I disagree with the "good vs. evil" idea. It's a "survival vs. destruction" sort of thing. I mean, Yog-Sothoth and the Whatelys are conspiring to eradicate ALL life from Earth. That's undoubtedly evil, and to some extent Armitage and Co. are doing "good" by opposing it, but in a cosmic sense, there is no more morality to this situation than there is when two rival colonies of ants go to war over resources, and one wipes the other out.

But even then, Armitage and the other Miskatonic professors don't save the world. They save Dunwich, or at least what is left of Dunwich after the Horror has tromped around for a while, but it's Wilbur's own incompetency that saves the world. He botches the theft of the Necronomicon and gets himself killed (or, looked at another way, it's man's best friend who saves the world, not man himself). If he hadn't, I'm not sure Armitage would have been sufficiently alerted and prepared to deal with the minor threat that he did handle.

As I said, I love this story. It's long, and it's packed with awesome. So many fun details and descriptions, great dialect, interesting characters, some truly horrific monsters, and great writing from HPL. I'm really surprised that there are Lovecraft fans who don't like it.

I think on the surface it reads like a good versus evil story. Most readers would get that the Whatleys are bad and everyone else is good. But when you look at it underneath it all it's a lot more nuanced. Do any of the towns people really do any 'good?' Not really? Even Armitage doesn't really do anything that one would generally consider 'good.' He saves the world, but hey, he's part of it! He saves the world he saves himself.

I agree. It's not a good vs. evil story. It's just it feels more like it than most of Lovecraft stories because the 'good guys' have a clear victory.

[Kryptych]

That's... actually a really good point. Kudos.

Thank you.

You're all awesome!

[Cacodaemoniacal]

Lovecraft likes to undercut his archetypes/tropes. Like the bad guy who's brilliant, handsome and kind (Cool Air), or the hero that's simply lucky , or the monster that's not a monster (except it kinda is). Was that unusual at the time? It certainly gives his stories depth.

[Aristide Torchia]

I think on the surface it reads like a good versus evil story. Most readers would get that the Whatleys are bad and everyone else is good. But when you look at it underneath it all it's a lot more nuanced. Do any of the towns people really do any 'good?' Not really? Even Armitage doesn't really do anything that one would generally consider 'good.' He saves the world, but hey, he's part of it! He saves the world he saves himself.

I agree. It's not a good vs. evil story. It's just it feels more like it than most of Lovecraft stories because the 'good guys' have a clear victory.

Wow! It's interesting that this story left the exact opposite impression on me. It seems to me that any author (save maybe Derleth) would want his story to have a bit of nuance to give it a sense of realism or credibility, especially for a wary audience. There has been a lot of talk in this thread about the relative morality, human or otherwise,  of the characters in this tale. When considering if this is a 'good vs. evil' tale, I think it is first important to consider the morality of ones anticipated reader before that of any character.

Consider that there are many tales which have the intention of turning the morality of its reader on its end, or at least make them reconsider it. In order to do this the author must first work to move his anticipated audience in that direction. We sympathize with and relate to (or not) characters through our subjective morality, not theirs. The author may or may not share our perspective, but they are still banking on it. Subjectively, you may side with Yog-Sothoth or the Whatleys. I don't think that that was Lovecraft's intention and, if the bulk of the audience shared your viewpoint, I wager it would not have been a very popular story.

Particularly when compared to many of Lovecraft's protagonists, Armitage follows the hero archetype. You said it yourself: With Wilbur out of the picture the horrific monster terrorizing Dunwich is all for not. There will be no clearing the earth, at least for now. Armitage is up in age and the task is perilous. Were he acting in self interest, he'd likey say that the creature is someone else's problem and live out the mean years safe at home. He appears to be looking out for the townsfolk.

And now for my own bit of subjective metareading which clashes with both yours and Lovecraft's: I do see it as a good vs. evil tale, but I can't help but get the feeling that the victory is fleeting. Given the proliferation of Cthu-things around Lovecraft's New England, and their frequency of assault on it, this just buys them a few more years. Barely a bump in the road to ol' Yoggy!

I agree with Joshi. Good vs. Evil. Except I thought that though the story broke rank, it was good.

Oh, ...in the podcast you (or Chad) mentioned that you thought the death of the Whip-poor-wills was because they were somehow linked to the creature (at least that's what I got out of what you said). When I read it, I got the feeling that, sensing the creatures imminent demise, they tried to capture its soul and suffered from the "drink from the fire hose" effect.

Oh, one last thing. You guys (and Andrew, and Bob) were frackin awesome as usual!

[Kryptych]

Consider that there are many tales which have the intention of turning the morality of its reader on its end, or at least make them reconsider it. In order to do this the author must first work to move his anticipated audience in that direction. We sympathize with and relate to (or not) characters through our subjective morality, not theirs. The author may or may not share our perspective, but they are still banking on it. Subjectively, you may side with Yog-Sothoth or the Whatleys. I don't think that that was Lovecraft's intention and, if the bulk of the audience shared your viewpoint, I wager it would not have been a very popular story.

And now for my own bit of subjective metareading which clashes with both yours and Lovecraft's: I do see it as a good vs. evil tale, but I can't help but get the feeling that the victory is fleeting. Given the proliferation of Cthu-things around Lovecraft's New England, and their frequency of assault on it, this just buys them a few more years. Barely a bump in the road to ol' Yoggy!

To Aristide Torchia... great points.

It is true that an author should consider the morality of the audience, and when dealing with the average human being (fan of weird fiction or not), chances are they will easily side with humans and conventional human morality. For this, I certainly don't disagree with Mr. Price's assessment that if the story is a simple "good vs. evil" scenario, then it was likely Lovecraft's answer to the demands for such a story on the part of his readers/editors/whoever... as he said in the Fear of the Unknown documentary, something along the lines of, "Well, if that's what they want, I'll give it to 'em."

This comes back to my point earlier about the seemingly amoral standpoint of Yog-Sothoth and the Whateleys... they're not human; they operate on a different set of morals (if any at all) than we human beings do, and since that involves "wiping the Earth clean," that's an "End of the world" scenario that is both appealing to us in fiction and is a point of terror because... well, we fear death; we fear extinction. This is the very nature of Lovecraft's work and how he terrifies his readers. The reason this story seems like "good vs. evil" is because instead of the main character(s) being driven to madness and lacking the resolve to take action, they do take action, and they do succeed.
I found it interesting that Mr. Price said of Armitage that he's almost "like a Lumley character," and I do wonder to what extent Lumley was inspired by Armitage. It would make sense when considering that this is one of Lovecraft's few "actionable" characters who not only takes action, but also has some previous knowledge (and, by implication, experience) with Yog-Sothoth and the Necronomicon. Lumley has often said, "my characters fight back;" Armitage fights back... despite his age, he and his cohorts fight back without having to overcome any disbelief.

The problem is that it's not "good vs. evil." It's "humans vs. other creatures." We as humans ARE assigning our morality to the characters in the story, so you're right about that. Nor am I disputing that not many of us would side with Yog-Sothoth or the Whateley's; even I in my nihilism wouldn't. I like being alive. I like being human. I do have  moral qualms about killing and taking life (not just of other humans, but any living creature... okay, except insects). But when a friend of mine (named Ryan) asked me to explain Lovecraft's cosmic view to him, this was the conversation...

ME: Do you consider yourself evil?
RYAN: Of course not!
ME: What about ants?
RYAN: What? Do I think they're evil?
ME: No, do you think that they consider you evil?
RYAN: Why do I care?
ME: So, when one of them sees us about to crush them, you don't think they'd consider you to be some evil monster?
RYAN: Ants are too small; they can't think.
ME: And so we are but ants to creatures like Cthulhu, Azathoth, and Yog-Sothoth. We can think... but our brains and our conceptions of life and the universe are as nothing compared to theirs.

Or another example: the Alien from the Alien films. Was it malicious? Yes. Was it evil? I don't consider it so. As Ash states in the first film (which next to the third film is very Lovecraftian) - "It's a survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." Yes, it was an unpleasant and vicious creature, but it does what it must to survive. It's just that its life cycle involves killing off the host - in its case, a human.

This is the inherent moral problem with Lovecraft's cosmic view; and why I and many people take issue with Derleth's modifications of the Mythos... I hate to make it a matter of religious predilection, but Derleth was a lapsed Catholic whose views were steeped in notions of good vs. evil, black and white, something either is or isn't. Lovecraft's atheist, more malign universe had no use for such notions except to mock them... not contemptuously, but simply to point out that what we think and what we know are limited by our human perceptions, and that the true nature of the cosmos is beyond our ability to understand.
We see The Dunwich Horror as a "good vs. evil" story because we as humans are equating humans with good. Lovecraft's point in his stories was that this is not how the universe views us. Bad things will happen to good people... because that's life; that's the universe. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it" as Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven (wow, I'm almost as bad as Mr. Fifer with the movie references).

On a side note... while Lovecraft does state that he identifies with Armitage, it's funny how much of himself he put into Wilbur Whateley as well. He's a rather hideous child, dresses very uniformly, is very precocious, raised by his grandfather in lieu of a father (implications of incest aside), educated at home in his grandfather's library, the strange and mentally aberrant mother who dotes on him... all of these were points that Mr. Price has made in his Dunwich Cycle publication, yet he didn't mention any of it in the Podcraft. Lack of time I suppose.
But still, it's fun to think of Lovecraft coming up with the two characters... the one "villain" being somewhat of an analog for his self-image as an outsider, and the other being that of what he would aspire to be - a learned scholar who takes action.