Assignment One, Vacation Necronomicon School: “The Haunter of the Dark”.

“Your assignment today is to discuss insanity as an inevitable consequence of encountering the unknown”

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“The Haunter of the Dark” was written 5th-9th November 1935 and published in Weird Tales in December 1936. It was a late Lovecraft story, written as a response and sequel to a story by the teenage Robert Bloch. Bloch had ‘killed’ Lovecraft in his Weird Tales story “The Shambler from the Stars”. Lovecraft replied in a sequel that ‘killed’ Bloch. Bloch later added a third story to make a trilogy that, in reading order, is: “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935), “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935), and “The Shadow From the Steeple” (1950). The title bears a similarity to a key line in the leaden but Arctic-set 1935 film adaptation of Rider-Haggard’s She… “You Haunters of Darkness!”.

The trilogy of stories has not been collected together as an audio book, and only “The Haunter of the Dark” appears to be available in that form. A free audio version of “Haunter” is Andrew Leman’s excellent full-reading podcast on H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast.

All three stories in the trilogy were adapted for comics in 1973, when they appeared sequentially in Marvel’s Journey into Mystery 3, 4 and 5. The first is eight pages and the art appears to have been ‘a rush job’ by Jim Starlin which the inker fails to rescue due to the cramped layouts. Horror veteran Gene Colan despatches the Lovecraft story in just ten pages, with deliciously flowing artwork and inks. The final tale was adapted in nine pages, very dynamically laid out by Rick Buckler.

John Coulthart’s acclaimed ‘semi- graphic novel’ adaptation of the story appeared in The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions (1999). There appears to be no faithful film or animated adaptation, although the 2010 feature film Pickman’s Muse apparently used elements of the story.

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Winds of insanity:

The first horror novel, Beware the Cat (1584), is partly an anti-Catholic text. One has to wonder if Lovecraft’s “Haunter” was continuing in this tradition. S.T. Joshi states that the church depicted in “Haunter” was St. John’s on Federal Hill, a real Catholic church whose steeple was destroyed in a lightning strike in June 1935. The church fathers had decided not to rebuild, and had merely capped the tower. Was “Haunter” and its depiction of Catholics partly a subconscious ‘revenge’ by Lovecraft, for this marring of the view from his writing room?

Some quick online research also uncovers another very interesting source. It seems that Lovecraft was sitting in the middle of a record-breaking hurricane season in Sept-Nov 1935, while writing “Haunter”. The strongest hurricane in history had struck the USA in September 1935. It made landfall in Florida and then curved around northwards to exit into the Atlantic over Norfolk, Virginia — whereupon it again reached hurricane status on 6th September over the seas off New England. Quite possibly Lovecraft felt the remnants of this storm rattling his storm-windows in Providence just two months before he wrote “Haunter”, and had felt the winds’ effects upon his nerves. He would most certainly have read about the storm and heard about it on the news reports for weeks afterwards. For more details on this major weather event, one can now consult several books:—

Drye, Willie (2003). Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. National Geographic.

Scott, Phil (2005). Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Labor Day Storm of 1935. Ragged Mountain.

Knowles, Thomas Neil (2009). Category 5: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane. University Press of Florida.

There was also a lesser storm while Lovecraft was writing “Haunter”, as described in “The Meteorological History of the Hurricane of November 1935” (Monthly Weather Review, Vol 63, No. 11, pp.318-322). The paper talks of long easterly winds stretching down from polar regions (“a strong outflow of polar air”), presumably passing over New England, making the Bermuda hurricane a most unusual one.

One imagines that the very strong winds would have put the ailing and depressed Lovecraft on edge, on both occasions. He may even have pondered the links between extreme winds and insanity. Some nations, notably Switzerland, apparently have laws that permit the blowing of extreme winds (“Foehn”) as mitigating evidence in court after a crime. Hans Christian Andersen also noted the malign effects of this same “Foehn”. Doubtless much folklore might be uncovered on ‘evil’ and ‘malign’ winds deemed to provoke madness and crime.

There is also fiction that attributes madness-inducing powers to extreme winds. One instance relevant to Lovecraft will suffice here. It is Dorothy Scarborough’s anonymous supernatural novel The Wind, published in 1925. Here the dry winds of Texas become…

“a demon personified, that eventually drives her [the heroine] over the brink of madness.”

The novel is a rural… “blend of realistic description, [and] authentic folklore” … set in the 1880s, just like Lovecraft’s own classic “The Colour Out of Space”. It might even seem to prefigure the elements of ‘madness caused by a semi-invisible and pervasive element’ in “Colour”. Even if he had not read The Wind, Lovecraft would have had his memory of the novel jogged when the film version was announced in the press (film buffs online state that… “production was shot early in 1927”) just as he was writing “The Colour Out of Space”.

But The Wind may also have been an influence on “Haunter”. Scarborough’s supernatural novel was a sensation that gained national publicity after the West Texas Chamber of Commerce raised a hue and cry about its harsh depiction of the state. As such it would have been remarkable if Lovecraft had not even read reviews of the novel. He had certainly read Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) in March 1932, and it would seem odd had he not also read her own very American classic of the supernatural at some point before November 1935.

The film adaptation was released as a major Lillian Gish feature-film in November 1928. This is a classic of the late silent cinema, but apparently it fared badly at the box office because the audiences were then being wowed by the first “talkies” and because the producers had by then also started heavily promoting Greta Garbo. Despite a hastily tacked-on happy ending, the film was probably not helped at the box office by its overall grim tone. Film buffs state that… “the original cut was even more depressing” than the version we have now. Bo Florin’s 2009 academic paper “Confronting The Wind: a reading of a Hollywood film by Victor Sjostrom” describes the film as depicting an…

“increasing degree of psychic instability, and culminating in a violent storm at night, where all boundaries are being transgressed.”

That sounds very much like “The Haunter of the Dark”. Or am I mad?