The Dark Chamber

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The Dark Chamber is a 1927 horror novel by Leonard Cline .It has been praised by H.P.Lovecraft as a masterpiece of the weird in his Supernatural Horror in Literature .

It deals with a man,Richard Pride, eager to remember every instant of his life, suddenly transgressing his own memory and sinking in the gulfs of "primal memory",has visions which compel the narrator to call him mad.

The story is told by Oscar Fitzalan, a musician and composer,who has an ardent dislike of Jazz and whose main work is a musical adaption of the poet Lauriér's work, "Helion".He is hired by Richard Pride to assist him at his estate and study at Mordance Hall.Here,he meets Hough, the bleak and pale secretary, Miriam, Pride's wife and a conjurer of horoscopes, her constantly unfocused daughter Janet and their dog, a German hound, Tod (as Cline points out, this is German for "death"). They are later joined by Ramón Del Prado, one of Pride's employees. Also in the household are two black servants, old Mamie and her fourteen-year-old daughter Sally.

Pride brings Fitzalan to play music for him,in order to wake memories. However,through a chain of events,the household is devastated, first with the Janet (Oscar's first local love interest) eloping with Del Prado, followed by the suicide of the secretary, the strange ferocious madness of the dog and at long last the suicide of Miriam,Pride's wife and Oscar's second love interest.

At the end,Pride,employing the use of drugs, is reduced to a dirty, unkempt ruinous state, ending in leaving his study, letting the winds maul his thousands of files, regarding his memories, and goes of into the night. There,when his almost death ridden daughter returns and,restored to health,elopes with the narrator,he is found, dead, along with his dog in the woods - both having killed the other.