The Shunned House

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"The Shunned House" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft in the horror fiction genre. Written on October 16-19, 1924, it was first published in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

Contents 1 Inspiration 2 Characters 2.1 Elihu Whipple 2.2 Etienne Roulet 3 References 4 Notes

[edit] Inspiration

The Shunned House of the title is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, built around 1763 and still standing at 135 Benefit Street; Lovecraft was familiar with the house because his aunt, Lillian Clark, lived there in 1919-20 as a companion to Mrs. H. C. Babbit.^[1]

But it was another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey that actually provoked Lovecraft to write the story. As he wrote in a letter:

On the northeast corner of Bridge Street and Elizabeth Avenue is a terrible old house--a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds--with a blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, and an outside flight of stairs leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed. It reminded me of the Babbit House in Benefit Street.... Later its image came up again with renewed vividness, finally causing me to write a new horror story with its scene in Providence and with the Babbit House as its basis.^[2]

[edit] Characters

[edit] Elihu Whipple

Described as "a sane, conservative physician of the old school...a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and a local historian of note."

Peter Cannon writes that Whipple "is probably a composite portrait of Lovecraft's two learned uncles-in-law and maternal grandfather"; the grandfather's name was Whipple Phillips.^[3]

[edit] Etienne Roulet

A Huguenot from Caude, near Angers, France, who settled in East Greenwich, Rhode Island in 1686 and moved to Providence in 1696; the Shunned House was built on the site of his family's graveyard. According to the story, "The family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity--dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror." Etienne is said to have been "apt...at reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams." His son, Paul Roulet, is described as a "surly fellow" of "erratic conduct"; "old wives" intimated that "his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed at the proper object." The story's narrator suspects that the family is connected to Jacques Roulet of Caude, who was condemned to death for lycanthropy in 1598 before being confined to an asylum.

Jacques Roulet was a real person, whom Lovecraft had read about in John Fiske's Myths and Myth-Makers.^[4]

[edit] References

• Lovecraft, Howard P. [1924] (1999). “The Shunned House”, S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon (eds.): More Annotated Lovecraft, 1st, New York City, NY: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. With explanatory footnotes.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ S. T. Joshi, More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 107.
2. ^ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. I, p. 357; quoted in David E. Schultz, "Lovecraft's New York Exile", Black Forbidden Things, Robert M. Price, ed., p. 53.
3. ^ Peter Cannon, "Introduction", More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 5.
4. ^ S. T. Joshi, More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 106.