The Picture in the House

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"The Picture in the House" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft, connected to the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction. It was written on December 12, 1920,[1] and first published in the July 1919 issue of The National Amateur--[2]which actually was published in the summer of 1921.[3]

Contents

[edit] Lovecraft Country

"The Picture in the House" begins with something of a manifesto for the series of horror stories Lovecraft would write set in an imaginary New England countryside that would come to be known as Lovecraft Country:

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

As Lovecraft critic Peter Cannon writes, "Here Lovecraft serves notice that he will rely less on stock Gothic trappings and more on his native region as a source for horror."[4] Lovecraft's analysis of the psychological roots of New England horror is echoed in his discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature".[5]

The story introduces two of Lovecraft Country's most famous elements:

I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data.... Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham.

Neither location is further developed in this tale, but Lovecraft had placed the foundations for one of the most enduring settings in weird fiction.

[edit] Inspiration

The book referred to in the story--Pigafetta's Regnum Congo--actually exists. According to S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's knowledge of the work derives from Thomas Henry Huxley's Man's Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays.[6]

The ending of the story, in which the narrator is saved by a thunderbolt that destroys the ancient house, may have been inspired by the similar ending of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".[7]

Critic Jason Eckhardt suggested that the dialect the unnaturally aged man uses in the story is derived from one used in James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers (1848-62). Even in Lowell's time, the dialect was thought to be long extinct.[8]

Peter Cannon has pointed to parallels between "The Picture in the House" and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches".[9]

[edit] Synopsis

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The story is narrated by a traveller in rural New England who seeks shelter from a storm in an apparently abandoned house, only to find that it is occupied by an old, white-bearded, and ragged man, speaking in "an extreme form of Yankee dialect...thought long extinct", whose face is "abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect." He shows a disquieting fascination for an engraving in an old book depicting a butcher shop of the "cannibal Anziques" (from the historic Congo kingdom of Anziku),and admits to the narrarator(who becomes increasingly nervous and frightened throughout the man's story) that it made him hungry for human meat. It is suggested that the old man in the house was murdering men who stumbled upon the shack to satisfy his "craving", but this is not revealed, as before he can finish his story the two men notice blood leaking down from the ceiling and, subsequently, a lightning bolt destroys the house.

[edit] Connections

  • A phrase from the story provided the title for An Epicure of the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by S. T. Joshi.

[edit] References

  • Lovecraft, Howard P. [1920] (1984). “The Picture in the House”, S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon (eds.): The Dunwich Horror and Others, 9th corrected printing, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-870-54037-8. Definitive version.
  • Lovecraft, Howard P. [1920] (1999). “The Picture in the House”, S. T. Joshi (ed.): More Annotated Lovecraft, 1st, New York City, NY: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. With explanatory footnotes.
  • S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Lovecraft's Fiction", The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.
  2. ^ "H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Picture in the House'", The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.
  3. ^ S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon, More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 11.
  4. ^ Peter Cannon, "Introduction", More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 2.
  5. ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 207.
  6. ^ S. T. Joshi, "Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo", in The Horror of It All, Robert M. Price, ed., pp. 24-29.
  7. ^ Joshi and Cannon, More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 24.
  8. ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 207.
  9. ^ Peter Cannon, Lovecraft Studies No. 1 (Fall 1979); cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 207.
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