The Road to Madness
Read The Road to Madness Online
Authors: H.P. Lovecraft
THE ROAD TO MADNESS
All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass. In an instant every moving entity was electrified; the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound—goat, satyr, and Ægypan, incubus, succubus, twisted toad and shapeless elemental—all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that squatted on the carved golden throne, bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse.
—From
The Horror at Red Hook
On the tempest-racked night of November 8, 1921, with a lantern which cast charnel shadows, I stood digging alone and idiotically in the grave of Jan Martense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon, because a thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had burst above the maniacally thick foliage, I was glad.
The scene of my excavations would alone unnerve any ordinary man. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain. Illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw full daylight.
—From
The Lurking Fear
“Lovecraft’s fiction is one of the cornerstones of modern horror.”
—Clive Barker
A Del Rey
®
Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Compilation copyright © 1996 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1996 by Barbara Hambly
Interior Illustrations copyright © 1996 by John Jude Palencar
Copyright © 1939, 1943 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
“Cool Air” and “The Terrible Old Man” previously appeared in
The Dunwich Horror and Others
, published by Arkham House Publishers, Inc. “Herbert West, Reanimator” previously appeared in
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
, published by Arkham House Publishers, Inc. These revised versions were edited by S. T. Joshi. The other stories in this work were previously collected in
The Doom That Came to Sarnath, The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Horror
, and
The Tomb and Other Tales
, published by Ballantine Books by arrangement with Arkham House Publishers, Inc. This edition published by arrangement with Arkham House Publishers, Inc.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890–1937.
The transition of H. P. Lovecraft: the road to madness/H.P.
Lovecraft. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Del Rey book.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-80769-4
1. Fantastic Fiction, American. 2. Horror tales, American.
I. Title.
PS3523.0833A6 1996
813′.52—dc20 96-2945
v3.1
Contents
INTRODUCTION: The Man Who Loved His Craft
by Barbara Hambly
The Man Who Loved His Craft
A Guidebook to the Mountains of Madness by Barbara Hambly
I
wish I could write like H.P. Lovecraft.
That’s not a fashionable thing to say in an era when writers are encouraged to strive for a “transparent” style—short, sleek, clear, without massive blocks of descriptive text—and many seem to have taken over the screenwriters’ dictum of “no paragraph over three lines long.”
And in many ways, the fascination of Lovecraft’s writing is not in his style.
Lovecraft was a man with a vision of the world: astonishing, macabre, intricate as a Giger drawing. His sense of cosmoses opening out of cosmoses, of dark abysses concealing in their hearts the entrances to further gulfs, infuses nearly everything he wrote with an atmosphere, not of horror, but of wonder. His worlds have an air of completeness. The civilizations he conjures and their denizens—the giant rugose cones in the steamy cities of pre-Cambrian Australia, the star-headed, barrel-shaped Antarctic radiates—may not have made a great deal of sense objectively, but they speak of histories, social structures, realities beyond our own.
This is the true stuff of fantasy.
Lovecraft had a master touch as a storyteller, a genius at what was revealed and when. This is clear even in his early, pseudo-Poe derivations, and his craft grew with the telling.
Even in his rare third-person narratives like “Haunter of the Dark” and, for all intents and purposes, “Call of Cthulhu,” he achieved the narrative voice of first-person, of someone caught within incomprehensible events and stumbling—with the reader’s own horror—upon the final, inevitable, and unspeakably incontrovertible evidence that the terror was, indeed, worse than they could have imagined.