So this is the third Lovecraft story we’ve read for class and I will say it’s been my favorite so far. I suspect it has to do with the story being more about the characters than the setting.

We’ve ascertained that Lovecraft was a master of the “setting as character” skill. And while I have great respect for that, I find stories of that nature don’t hold my attention for very long. I have the same issue reading Tolkien, another master of this. When the story was about the characters (Fellowship of the Ring), I went along just fine. But in the later books, so much time was spent on the setting, I just put the books down. My own interest seems to always lie in the characters and their journey.

“The Thing on the Doorstep” is much more character-oriented than either “The Music of Erich Zann” or “Pickman’s Model.” Another story told in first person. Lovecraft seems fond of telling a story from a bystander’s point of view. Granted, in this case, the narrator has a direct hand in the end of the story, however, most of the frightening build-up of the story is left untold because we only get glimpses of it through a third person’s eyes.

This is an interesting way to build tension, I think. In life, it’s often what we don’t know which scares us the most. When we don’t know how badly we did on a test, we imagine failing the entire class. When we don’t know the details of an accident a loved one has been in, we think of the worst possible scenario. when we’re waiting for medical test results, we imagine the worst outcome. When we don’t know what to expect, we get anxious and freaked out.

Sometimes leaving the horrible thing to the imagination is the best way to completely squick the reader. The more I read of Lovecraft, the more I think that was his kink. Because he chooses not to write from the point of view of the character who is being haunted/hunted/corrupted, but rather a bystander, many details of the possibly horrific things done are lost, because this bystander isn’t on the inside. And so the reader begins imagining all these horrific things.

Our instructor recently engaged us in a discussion of our own fears and how we translate that into our stories in order to help engage our readers. I think this is what Lovecraft is doing. He is engaging the reader in the story – actually, he’s enlisting the reader to help tell the story. When the reader is left to imagine the horrors that Lovecraft leaves out, he’s going to imagine things that are much more personal to him than Lovecraft could ever have imagined. And using a bystander as the narrator is the perfect way to achieve it, I think. This is pretty brilliant.

As far as the story itself, I really enjoyed it so much more than the previous two. I did have an issue with all of the telling. I’d guess that 60% or more was simply told. I suspect that if the scenes were shown instead, we’d have a novella instead of a short story. But I still felt compelled to continue reading. I would have liked to have seen more detail at the end, though.

Overall, I did enjoy the story and I’m looking forward to reading more Lovecraft to see what other similarities and differences become apparent.

This is the first story we’ve had to read that was written during my lifetime. It was nice to be able to judge it by mostly modern standards.

I enjoyed this book very much. It was creepy and sometimes gross and that makes me happy! Creepy for the win! The use of atmosphere in this book was outstanding. Something that I think modern authors (particularly aspiring ones) don’t use enough are the senses besides hearing and sight. Hell House utilized smell often (the tarn jumps to mind) and tactile feeling (the ooze in the steam room) to great advantage. It really made the scenes exceptionally vivid.

The book is written in something of an omniscient point of view, which really lends itself to head-hopping. This is one of my pet peeves and often I’ll put a book down because of it because it’s too distracting. Hell House had a large amount of head-hopping, but I tried very hard to ignore it, in the same way I ignored structural issues I have with Phantom of the Opera and characterization issues I have with Lovecraft’s work. I really wanted to enjoy the story itself. I found the head-hopping bothersome, however.

I did find that the story, overall, had a somewhat misogynistic flavor. All of the women in the story – Edith, Florence, and the female doctor from the 1940 experiment – are all emotionally or mentally taken in by Belasco and ultimately cause the undoing of the teams. The men, even if they don’t survive or are otherwise attacked, are overpowered physically or psychologically (as in driven insane, not duped or being overtaken by Belasco’s will). Barrett believes throughout the entire book that he is correct, with the only moment of question being when he’s attacked in the steam room. Even when he’s killed, he never mentally acquiesces to the will of Belasco. That is reserved for the women. This implies that a woman is emotionally and/or mentally a more vulnerable person than a man. It’s the Eve Syndrome.

It’s especially surprising, I think, given the time frame of this book. It was written, most likely, in the late sixties, published in 1971. So this was at the height of the battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the time where women really started taking charge of their lives, and when the abortion debate was getting into full swing (Roe v. Wade was decided by SCOTUS in 1973, but the case began in 1969/1970). Seeing the Eve Syndrome in Hell House was off-putting and somewhat disappointing.

Although I found both the head-hopping and the Eve Syndrome difficult to swallow, I still enjoyed Hell House. A few years ago I watched Rose Red (conceived by Stephen King) and I would say that he may have taken some inspiration for that mini series from Hell House, though I don’t know whether he actually did. There are a number of similarities between the two, particularly the “ghost hunter” aspect.

Overall, even with its drawbacks, I enjoyed reading Hell House and the writing was good enough to drag me through without too much problem. This one does not go on the Milk Crate of Sharing (where I put books for my friends to steal); instead, it will remain on my shelf.

“The Music of Erich Zann” is the second Lovecraft story I’ve read. It’s about a young man who discovers an old musician up in the uppermost floor of his rooming house. This musician plays darkly. The narrator is drawn to try to befriend him in order to hear more of the music. When in the uppermost room, the narrator is drawn to look out the window but does not until the end of the story, wherein he sees not rooftops, as he should, but nothing.

There are a number of similarities between “Zann” and the previous story I read. Both are centered around an artist who is, in some way, tortured. Pickman seems a willing victim, though still a victim, while Zann is most definitely unwilling. Zann is tormented by what’s out the window. He’s frightened, terrified. Demons or nothingness. These are what await humankind.

Like “Pickman’s Model,” the setting is a key character. It’s really this device which sets up the horror of the piece. I think it could be equated to the ominous music in a scary movie. The settings in Lovecraft’s stories set the tone and the ambiance; they lure the reader into a dark place where we’re drawn by the danger which lurks just past our field of vision. It’s really the anticipation which is most effective. I almost don’t want to know the ending, because that will mean that all the things my imagination is dredging up aren’t really what’s going on. I think, ultimately, this is the brilliance of Lovecraft’s writing. To a modern reader, the endings aren’t even remotely surprising… but what our imaginations can slip into the dark corners that Lovecraft paints – well, there’s the real horror, sport.

This brings us neatly to another similarity. In both “Pickman” and “Zann” the frightening thing is what’s not seen. In “Pickman,” the narrator doesn’t see the demon which is the painter’s model, but sees a photo and interprets its existence. In “Zann,” the narrator literally sees nothing and that is what is terrifying. The nothingness calls to him. It’s the dark corners, again, which are the frightening places. It’s what we don’t know – or what we didn’t know, but know now. It’s almost like a warning, that old proverb: Be careful what you wish for. Don’t look down the rabbit hole. You don’t want to know how deep it goes.

Both narrators escape the horror, but yet are still drawn to it in one way or another. For the “Pickman” narrator, he relives it in the retelling to Eliot and one suspects he relives it more often than that. In “Zann,” the narrator relives the terror by trying to find the original street where the rooming house was located. And he cannot find it. Yet he searches.

That’s what we humans do. We ride rollercoasters; we go to haunted houses; we skydive; we race cars; we rubberneck at accident sites; we watch scary movies. We search and we’re drawn to what ultimately terrifies us.

It took me quite awhile to get into this book. I was probably about one third of the way through before I really wanted to continue reading. There are a couple inherent drawbacks to reading Phantom. First, it’s from an entirely different time. When this was written, books had a different flavor, a different format. So many things that would be considered mistakes making a manuscript un-publishable (head hopping, lots and lots of exclamation points) were common. Also, this is a translation. The book was written in French, originally, and I’ve found that there are always a few issues when reading a translated work.

So when I read this book, I tried to take those two things into account. I have to admit, the head hopping got to me. From paragraph to paragraph sometimes we were in different people’s heads. As a reader of mostly modern books, this is something that isn’t common anymore. We tend to usually have a point of view character. I admit that this issue was something that really kept tripping me up.

As far as the story itself, this really didn’t strike me as horror. Perhaps I’m jaded, but I found myself more interested in it as a mystery than horrified at it as a monster tale. I’ve never seen the musical based on the book, so I really went into it with fresh eyes and no pre-conceptions. I only had the vaguest notion of the story itself. But I was an avid reader of Stephen King (of course), Clive Barker, Dean Koontz and various other prolific and scary dudes who wrote in the 80s and 90s. So I think my sense of what horror is is very much based on those books I read as a young adult. And Phantom just doesn’t make the cut for me as horror.

I did get drawn into the story because I wanted to know what the actual deal was. I wanted to know just how crazy Eric was. I was a little disappointed in his virtue at the end and how he released Christine, but it really just compounded my confusion about who and what he was. It seemed as though Leroux wanted him to be this horrible bad guy, but then didn’t want him to be this horrible bad guy. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to like him or hate him. Subsequently, I did neither.

I think Phantom would do well as a modern re-telling. I suppose there are a number of books which pay homage to this story, but I think a close re-telling with modern writing styles would make it a really interesting and attention-riveting book. So overall, I was a bit disappointed in the horror element of this one and once I suspended my issues with the writing style, I did like following the mystery of who the O.G. was and how it all got resolved. I probably wouldn’t read it again though.