Published March 1924
Illustration by Leo & Diane Dixon
Category: Cthulhu Mythos
This is the first story I ever read by HPL, back in the summer of 2002 and it made me devour the next five stories in the volume - before I ran back to the bookstore, bought the remaining two volumes in the collection so I could, before summer was out, read all of his short stories. His work has that effect for some - like the discovery of forbidden knowledge leads to the desire for more.
This story is set in England around an old estate the narrator has recently moved to, it being his ancestral home. He and his cats keep hearing the sounds of rats in the walls, and, with several compatriots, make an incredible and terrible discovery. "Making an incredible and terrible discovery" is Lovecraft's bread and butter, lemme tell ya!
This story, for several reasons, is not for the sensitive reader; it features some pretty overt "racism." The main character has a cat, a black cat, that is named, well, "N-word Man". I am old fashioned and think the word is really, really really bad, plus I don't want it to show up in searches. Anyway, he is racist in that today he would be considered an unconscionably hate-filled monster to some but I have a feeling that, being a WASP of the early 20th century, in New England, he was exactly like everyone else, which is why I put it in quotes. The word was actually really common for black cats and dogs (another story of his features another black cat named Nig) and he himself owned a cat with that name. It's a sign of those times. Throughout his stories there are some references to black folk being sub-human; I get past it by thinking the narrator or protagonist is a strange, flawed person with sad fears and hatreds. Really there are maybe ten references throughout the stories, including whole premises based on the belief that non-whites are lesser by nature. I look past it so that the other elements, the meat of the stories, takes the focus rather than an errant word or prejudice. His stories are fun, scary and gruesome, and yeah, sometimes insensitively racist.
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Not only is this the first HPL story I ever read but I read it in the first ever volume of his collected stories I ever owned. It's the classic Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, the single best collection of all of his best stories. It's part of the Del Rey Lovecraft push - they published many, many of his stories in volumes with the same branding. It's notable for the intense Michael Whelan cover art which was later divided several times to make smaller covers for smaller editions (I have those too! Look for them later in the month!)
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