The Rats in the Walls

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"The Rats in the Walls" is a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1923, probably in late August or early September. It was first published in Weird Tales in March 1924.

Contents

[edit] Inspiration

Long after writing "The Rats in the Walls", Lovecraft wrote that the story was "suggested by a very commonplace incident--the cracking of wall-paper late at night, and the chain of imaginings resulting from it."[1] Another entry in Lovecraft's commonplace book also seems to provide a plot germ for the story: "Horrible secret in crypt of ancient castle--discovered by dweller."[2]

The idea of a character reverting to ancestral speech may have come from Irvin S. Cobb's story "The Unbroken Chain", published in the September 1923 issue of Cosmopolitan. The story depicts a Frenchman with a small percentage of African descent shouting out "Niama tumba!" when struck by a train--the same words spoken by a distant African ancestor attacked by a rhinoceros.

Critic Steven J. Mariconda points to Sabine Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1862-68) as a source for Lovecraft's story. The description of the cavern under the priory has many similarities to Baring-Gould's account of St. Patrick's Purgatory, a legendary Irish holy site, and the story of the priory's rats sweeping across the landscape may have been inspired by the book's retelling of the legend of Bishop Hatto, who was devoured by rats after he set fire to starving peasants during a famine.[3]

The Gaelic quoted at the end of the story is borrowed from Fiona Macleod's "The Sin-Eater"; Macleod included a footnote that translated the passage as: "God against thee and in thy face...and may a death of woe be yours.... Evil and sorrow to thee and thine!" Lovecraft wrote to Frank Belknap Long, "[T]he only objection to the phrase is that it's Gaelic instad of Cymric as the south-of-England locale demands. But as with anthropology--details don't count. Nobody will ever stop to note the difference." Robert E. Howard, however, wrote a letter in 1930 to Weird Tales suggesting that the language choice reflected "Lluyd's theory as to the settling of Britain by the Celts"--a note that, passed on to Lovecraft, initiated their voluminous correspondence.[4]

[edit] Reaction

The story was rejected by Argosy All-Story Weekly before being accepted by Weird Tales; Lovecraft claimed that the former magazine found it "too horrible for the tender sensibilities of a delicately nurtured publick".[5] The publisher of Weird Tales, JC Henneberger, described the story in a note to Lovecraft as the best his magazine had ever received.[6] It was one of the few Lovecraft stories anthologized during his lifetime, in the 1931 collection Switch on the Light, edited by Christine Campbell Thompson.

Lin Carter calls "Rats" "one of the finest stories of [Lovecraft's] entire career."[7] S. T. Joshi describes the piece as "a nearly flawless example of the short story in its condensation, its narrative pacing, its thunderous climax, and its mingling of horror and poignancy."[8]

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

"The Rats in the Walls" is narrated by the scion of the Delapore family, who has moved from Massachusetts to his ancestral estate in England, known as Exham Priory. On several occasions, the protagonist and his cats, specifically his favorite cat, "Nigger-man", hear the titular sounds of rats scurrying behind the walls. Upon investigating further, he finds that his family maintained an underground city for centuries and that the inhabitants of the city fed on human flesh, even going so far as to raise generations of human cattle (who eventually began to de-evolve due to their sub-human living conditions). In the end, the protagonist, maddened by the revelations of his family's past and driven by the stronger force of his own heritage, attacks one of his friends in the dark of the cavernous city and begins eating him. He is subsequently subdued and locked in a mental institution, where he continues to be plagued by the sounds of rats in the walls of his cell.

The name of the cat, "Nigger-man", has often been cited in discussions of Lovecraft's racial attitudes. Lovecraft himself owned a cat by that name until 1904.[9]

[edit] Characters

[edit] Delapore

The narrator's first name is not mentioned. He changes the spelling of his name back to the ancestral de la Poer after moving to England.

The name de la Poer is apparently an homage to Edgar Allan Poe, whose ancestors were reportedly named le Poer.[10]

[edit] Alfred Delapore

The narrator's son, born c. 1894. He goes to England as an aviation officer during World War I, where he hears stories about his ancestors for the first time. He is badly wounded in 1918, surviving for two more years as a "maimed invalid".

[edit] Edward Norrys

A captain in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, Edward Norrys befriends Alfred Delapore and amuses him by telling him the "peasant superstitions" surrounding the de la Poer family that Norrys picked up in his native Anchester. He is described as "a plump, amiable young man".

[edit] Sir William Brinton

One of the "eminent authorities" that accompanies Delapore's expedition beneath Exham Priory, Sir William Brinton is an archeologist "whose excavations in the Troad excited most of the world in their day." It is Brinton who figures out how to move the counterweighted altar that leads to the caverns, and who noted that the hewn walls "must have been chiselled from beneath." He is the only member of the expedition who retains his composure when they discover the horrors below the priory.

[edit] Dr. Trask

Another eminent authority, Trask is an anthropologist who is "baffled" by the "degraded mixture" he finds in the skulls below Exham Priory--"mostly lower than the Piltdown man in the scale of evolution, but in every case definitely human." ("Piltdown man", a supposedly prehistoric specimen discovered in 1912, was not revealed as a hoax until 1953.)[11] Trask determines that "some of the skeleton things must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty of more generations."

[edit] Thornton

Thornton, the expedition's "psychic investigators", faints twice when confronted with the nightmarish relics below Exham Priory, and ends up committed to the Hanwell insane asylum with Delapore--though they are prevented from talking.

Hanwell was an actual asylum, which Lovecraft probably read of in Lord Dunsany's "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap" in The Book of Wonder (1912).[12]

[edit] Gilbert de la Poer

The first Baron Exham, granted title to Exham Priory by Henry III in 1261. There is "no evil report" connected to the family name before this point, but within 50 years a chronicle is referring to a de la Poer as "cursed of God".

[edit] Lady Margaret Trevor

Lady Margaret Trevor of Cornwall married Godfrey de la Poer, second son of the fifth Baron Exham, probably in the 14th or 15th centuries. Such was her enthusiasm for the Exham cult that she "became a favourite bane of children all over the countryside, and the daemon heroine of a particularly horrible old ballad not yet extinct near the Welsh border."

[edit] Lady Mary de la Poer

After marrying the Earl of Shrewsfield (a title invented by Lovecraft), she was killed by her new husband and mother-in-law. When they explained their reasons to the priest they confessed to, he "absolved and blessed" them for their deed.

[edit] Walter de la Poer

The eleventh Baron Exham, he killed all the other members of his family with the help of four servants, about two weeks after making a "shocking discovery", and then fled to Virginia, probably in the 17th century.[13] He is the ancestor of the American Delapores. He was remembered as "a shy, gentle youth", and later as "harassed and apprehensive"; Francis Harley of Bellview, "another gentleman-adventurer", regarded him as "a man of unexampled justice, honour, and delicacy."

[edit] Randolph Delapore

Randolph Delapore of Carfax, the Delapore's estate on the James River in Virginia, "went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War." He is a cousin of the narrator, who regards him as "the one known scandal of my immediate forbears", and who sees this race-mixing life as "unpleasantly reminiscent" of the "monstrous habits" of the ancestral de la Poers.

Carfax Abbey is the name of Count Dracula's British outpost in the novel Dracula--a setting that has been suggested as an inspiration for Exham Priory.[14]

[edit] Connections

"The Rats in the Walls" is loosely connected to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories; toward the end, the narrator notes that the rats seem "determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth's centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players." In this reference to Nyarlathotep, the first after his introduction in the prose poem of the same name, the entity seems to have many of the attributes of the god Azathoth.

Before moving to Exham Priory, Delapore lives in Bolton, Massachusetts, a factory town where the title character of "Herbert West--Reanimator" performs some of his experiments. The town is also mentioned in "The Colour out of Space"; it is not thought to be the same place as the real-world Bolton, Massachusetts.[15]

[edit] Adaptations

Richard Corben and Donald Wandrei have adapted the story for the comic book format.

The Atlanta Radio Theater Company has produced a radio adaptation.

The film Necronomicon: Book of the Dead adapts three Lovecraft tales, including "Rats".

Stephen King's short story Jerusalem's Lot is something of a homage to this story as well, and features many similar elements.

[edit] References

  • Lovecraft, Howard P. [1923] (1984). “The Rats in the Walls”, S. T. Joshi (ed.): The Dunwich Horror and Others, 9th corrected printing, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-870-54037-8. Definitive version.
  • H. P. Lovecraft, More Annotated Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon, eds.
  • H. P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi, ed.
  • Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. V, p. 181, cited in Joshi, p. 23.
  2. ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 223.
  3. ^ Steven J. Mariconda, "Baring-Gould and the Ghouls", The Horror of It All, Robert M. Price, ed., pp. 42-48.
  4. ^ Joshi, pp. 54-55.
  5. ^ Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. I, p. 259, cited in Joshi, p. 23.
  6. ^ Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, p. 36.
  7. ^ Carter, p. 34.
  8. ^ Joshi, p. 10.
  9. ^ Joshi, p. 35.
  10. ^ Joshi, p. 26; Joshi and Schultz, p. 223.
  11. ^ Joshi, p. 49.
  12. ^ Joshi, p. 55.
  13. ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 63.
  14. ^ Joshi, p. 27.
  15. ^ Joshi and Cannon, p. 44.

[edit] External links

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