Okay, Lovecraft, this time you've gone too far
"The Loved Dead" (1924)
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Here's a notorious little charmer. (No, it's not about Jerry Garcia) It was written by C.M. Eddy and largely revised by H.P. Lovecraft (some say to the point of being essentially ghostwritten, more Lovecraft than Eddy). "The Loved Dead" was first published in 1924 in WEIRD TALES and caused an uproar with its shocking content. I'm not sure just how much a commotion a short story in an obscure pulp magazine already close to cancellation actually would have stirred. Perhaps, like the exaggerated accounts of the panic over the 1938 radio version of WAR OF THE WORLDS, the account of outraged citizens demanding WEIRD TALES be removed from newsstands is basically true but has been overstated (just because it makes a good anecdote).
And, as movie producers and publishers know, a vocal howl of moral outrage will often make something immensely popular for a while, as curious folks go to see for themselves what the fuss is about.
Be that as it may, "The Loved Dead" IS a gruesome piece of work. Even after devouring all sorts of lurid tasteless Grand Guignol over the years (growing up on EC Comics), I was a bit aghast at this story. Some of the effect comes from the unexcited, matter-of-fact way our unnamed narrator relates his experiences. Mostly, though, it's just a sick puppy.
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We start with our protagonist is on the run. He tells us that before dawn the authorities will almost certainly catch him and throw him in a cell, where he will suffer terribly because he cannot be around dead bodies ("...for the presence of death is life to me!"). So he spills his autobiography. He was always a sickly, melancholy boy, always an outsider and chronically lethargic. That is, until he was sixteen and went to a funeral for the first time. Suddenly, his heart began to pound and ferocious excitement blazed through his nerves. For most of us, this abrupt flare of vitality comes with our first crush on a cute classmate but for this guy, it's from standing next to a corpse. Our boy describes the experience with the same intensity a teenage boy normally uses for something like a new girl in town or driving around in his first jalopy.
For a while, our narrator is more animated and livelier than ever before but the charge eventually fades. Back to being a mope. The deaths of his parents in close succession does cause him some grief of course, but more importantly, it again revs him up by being next to a corpse. It's clear that this guy is a ghoul of some sort, even if the effect is all in his mind.
Getting a job with an undertaker seems a logical next step. The ghoul has many happy evenings working all alone in the mortuary, sucking up some sort of jolt from the presence of one cadaver after another. It's not enough. Soon, he's stalking the night and personally creating a supply of fresh corpses to be brought in for him to work with, Then, like a drug addict, he inevitably goes too far. One morning the boss comes in a bit too early. "[He] came to find me stretched out upon a cold slab deep in ghoulish slumber, my arms wrapped around the stark, naked body of a fetid corpse!" Well, this calls for a time-out, young man. Our creep starts to drift from one town to the next, landing jobs in funeral homes, crematoriums, cemeteries. This was long before computer background checks and Social Security numbers of course, when it was easier to start fresh under a new name.
As if the situation wasn't bad enough, along comes World War One. ("I was one of the first to go across, one of the last to return.") Four years of the bloody disaster that ruined a generation is bliss for this guy. When he finally returns to his home town, the old game of hanging out in funeral homes just isn't enough of a kick anymore. It's time to start going out after dark again with a straight razor....
Ewww and ick. It's not just the subject matter that squicks the reader, it's the way the story is told. Eddy and Lovecraft really get into it. They go on and on about the passion this ghoul feels for the departed ones and their hyperbole is strangely convincing. I had a definite unpleasant feeling of reading some serial killer's confessions in a criminology book. (Not that I think for a moment either Eddy or Lovecraft had such tendencies; it's just a strongly-written horror story.)
There are a few moments that come right out and say this goon is not simply absorbing some sort of psychic energy from being around stiff. Nope, he's a necrophile and proud of it. "During long nights when I clung close to the shelter of my sanctuary, I was prompted by the mausoleum silence to devise new and unspeakable ways of lavishing my affections upon the dead that I loved -- the dead that gave me life!" Stop, we don't need to know any more. Tell it to the court appointed psychiatrist if they don't lynch you.
Whew. Think I'll go read some P.G. Wodehouse and watch MEERKAT MANOR for a while.
"The Loved Dead" (1924)
Here's a notorious little charmer. (No, it's not about Jerry Garcia) It was written by C.M. Eddy and largely revised by H.P. Lovecraft (some say to the point of being essentially ghostwritten, more Lovecraft than Eddy). "The Loved Dead" was first published in 1924 in WEIRD TALES and caused an uproar with its shocking content. I'm not sure just how much a commotion a short story in an obscure pulp magazine already close to cancellation actually would have stirred. Perhaps, like the exaggerated accounts of the panic over the 1938 radio version of WAR OF THE WORLDS, the account of outraged citizens demanding WEIRD TALES be removed from newsstands is basically true but has been overstated (just because it makes a good anecdote).
And, as movie producers and publishers know, a vocal howl of moral outrage will often make something immensely popular for a while, as curious folks go to see for themselves what the fuss is about.
Be that as it may, "The Loved Dead" IS a gruesome piece of work. Even after devouring all sorts of lurid tasteless Grand Guignol over the years (growing up on EC Comics), I was a bit aghast at this story. Some of the effect comes from the unexcited, matter-of-fact way our unnamed narrator relates his experiences. Mostly, though, it's just a sick puppy.
Collapse
We start with our protagonist is on the run. He tells us that before dawn the authorities will almost certainly catch him and throw him in a cell, where he will suffer terribly because he cannot be around dead bodies ("...for the presence of death is life to me!"). So he spills his autobiography. He was always a sickly, melancholy boy, always an outsider and chronically lethargic. That is, until he was sixteen and went to a funeral for the first time. Suddenly, his heart began to pound and ferocious excitement blazed through his nerves. For most of us, this abrupt flare of vitality comes with our first crush on a cute classmate but for this guy, it's from standing next to a corpse. Our boy describes the experience with the same intensity a teenage boy normally uses for something like a new girl in town or driving around in his first jalopy.
For a while, our narrator is more animated and livelier than ever before but the charge eventually fades. Back to being a mope. The deaths of his parents in close succession does cause him some grief of course, but more importantly, it again revs him up by being next to a corpse. It's clear that this guy is a ghoul of some sort, even if the effect is all in his mind.
Getting a job with an undertaker seems a logical next step. The ghoul has many happy evenings working all alone in the mortuary, sucking up some sort of jolt from the presence of one cadaver after another. It's not enough. Soon, he's stalking the night and personally creating a supply of fresh corpses to be brought in for him to work with, Then, like a drug addict, he inevitably goes too far. One morning the boss comes in a bit too early. "[He] came to find me stretched out upon a cold slab deep in ghoulish slumber, my arms wrapped around the stark, naked body of a fetid corpse!" Well, this calls for a time-out, young man. Our creep starts to drift from one town to the next, landing jobs in funeral homes, crematoriums, cemeteries. This was long before computer background checks and Social Security numbers of course, when it was easier to start fresh under a new name.
As if the situation wasn't bad enough, along comes World War One. ("I was one of the first to go across, one of the last to return.") Four years of the bloody disaster that ruined a generation is bliss for this guy. When he finally returns to his home town, the old game of hanging out in funeral homes just isn't enough of a kick anymore. It's time to start going out after dark again with a straight razor....
Ewww and ick. It's not just the subject matter that squicks the reader, it's the way the story is told. Eddy and Lovecraft really get into it. They go on and on about the passion this ghoul feels for the departed ones and their hyperbole is strangely convincing. I had a definite unpleasant feeling of reading some serial killer's confessions in a criminology book. (Not that I think for a moment either Eddy or Lovecraft had such tendencies; it's just a strongly-written horror story.)
There are a few moments that come right out and say this goon is not simply absorbing some sort of psychic energy from being around stiff. Nope, he's a necrophile and proud of it. "During long nights when I clung close to the shelter of my sanctuary, I was prompted by the mausoleum silence to devise new and unspeakable ways of lavishing my affections upon the dead that I loved -- the dead that gave me life!" Stop, we don't need to know any more. Tell it to the court appointed psychiatrist if they don't lynch you.
Whew. Think I'll go read some P.G. Wodehouse and watch MEERKAT MANOR for a while.
statistics: Posted by doctorhermes428 — 4:20 PM - 1 day ago — Replies 0 — Views 209