The Dunwich Horror

"The Dunwich Horror" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Written in 1928, it was first published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales (pp. 481–508) and is 17,524 words total. It takes place in Dunwich, a fictional town in Massachusetts. It is considered one of the core stories of the Cthulhu Mythos. "The Dunwich Horror" is one of the few tales Lovecraft wrote wherein the heroes successfully defeat the antagonistic entity or monster of the story.
==Inspirations==
===Geographical===
The action "takes place amongst the wild domed hills of the upper Miskatonic Valley, far northwest of Arkham, and is based on several old New England legends — one of which I heard only last month during my sojourn in Wilbraham," a town east of Springfield. (: letter to August Derleth, August 4, 1928, : The Dunwich Horror and Others)
One such legend is the notion that whippoorwills can capture the departing soul. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others) 
Dunwich is "a vague echo of the decadent Massachusetts countryside around Springfield — say Wilbraham, Monson and Hampden." (: Selected Letters 3.508)
It is noted that "much of the physical description of the Dunwich countryside is a faithful sketch of Wilbraham:"
The physical model for Dunwich's Sentinel Hill is thought to be Wilbraham Mountain near Wilbraham. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others)
Researchers have pointed out the story's apparent connections to another Massachusetts region: the area around Athol and points south, in the north-central part of the state (which is where Lovecraft indicates that Dunwich is located). It has been suggested that the name "Dunwich" was inspired by the town of Greenwich, which was deliberately flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir,Charles P. Mtchell, The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography p.9 (2001) although Greenwich and the nearby towns of Dana, Enfield and Prescott actually weren't submerged until 1938. Donald R. Burleson points out that several names included in the story—including Bishop, Frye, Sawyer, Rice and Morgan—are either prominent Athol names or have a connection to the town's history.Donald R. Burleson, "Humour Beneath Horror: Some Sources for 'The Dunwich Horror' and 'The Whisperer in Darkness'", Lovecraft Studies, No. 2 (Spring 1980), pp. 5-15, cited in Joshi, pp. 105, 111, 138; Price, p. 82.
Athol's Sentinel Elm Farm seems to be the source for the name Sentinel Hill. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others) The Bear's Den mentioned in the story resembles an actual cave of the same name visited by Lovecraft in North New Salem, southwest of Athol. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others) (New Salem, like Dunwich, was founded by settlers from Salem—though in 1737, not 1692.Will Murray, "In Search of Arkham Country Revisited", Lovecraft Studies, Nos. 19/20 (Fall 1989), ppp. 65-69; cited in Joshi, p. 110.)
The book Myths and Legends of Our Own Land,Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, Charles Montgomery Skinner, 1896; online version available from Project Gutenberg by Charles Montgomery Skinner, mentions a "Devil's Hop Yard" near Haddam, Connecticut as a gathering place for witches. The book, which Lovecraft seems to have read, also describes noises emanating from the earth near Moodus, Connecticut, which are similar to the Dunwich sounds decried by Rev. Abijah Hoadley. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others)
===Literary===
Lovecraft's main literary sources for "The Dunwich Horror" are the stories of Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen, particularly The Great God Pan (which is mentioned in the text of "The Dunwich Horror") and "The Novel of the Black Seal". Both Machen stories concern individuals whose death throes reveal them to be only half-human in their parentage. According to Robert M. Price, "'The Dunwich Horror' is in every sense an homage to Machen and even a pastiche. There is little in Lovecraft's story that does not come directly out of Machen's fiction."Price, pp. ix-x.
Another source that has been suggested is "The Thing in the Woods", by Margery Williams, which is also about two brothers living in the woods, neither of them quite human and one of them less human than the other.
The name Dunwich itself may come from Machen's The Terror, where the name refers to an English town where the titular entity is seen hovering as "a black cloud with sparks of fire in it".Price, p. 1. Lovecraft also takes Wilbur Whateley's occult terms "Aklo" and "Voorish" from Machen's "The White People".Price, p. 48.
Lovecraft also seems to have found inspiration in Anthony M. Rud's story "Ooze" (published in Weird Tales, March 1923), which also involved a monster being secretly kept and fed in a house that it subsequently bursts out of and destroys. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others)
The tracks of Wilbur's brother recall those seen in Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo", one of Lovecraft's favorite horror stories. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others) Ambrose Bierce's story "The Damned Thing" also involves a monster invisible to human eyes.
==Plot summary==
In the isolated, desolate, decrepit village of Dunwich, Wilbur Whateley is the hideous son of Lavinia Whateley, a deformed and unstable albino mother, and an unknown father (alluded to in passing by mad Old Whateley, as "Yog-Sothoth"). Strange events surround his birth and precocious development. Wilbur matures at an abnormal rate, reaching manhood within a decade. Locals shun him and his family, and animals fear and despise him (due to his odor). All the while, his sorcerer grandfather indoctrinates him into certain dark rituals and the study of witchcraft. Various locals grow suspicious after Old Whateley buys more and more cattle, yet the number of his herd never increases, and the cattle in his field become mysteriously afflicted with severe open wounds.
Wilbur and his grandfather have sequestered an unseen presence at their farmhouse; this being is connected somehow to Yog-Sothoth. Year by year, this unseen entity grows to monstrous proportions, requiring the two men to make frequent modifications to their residence. People begin to notice a trend of cattle mysteriously disappearing. Wilbur's grandfather dies. His mother disappears soon afterwards. The colossal entity eventually occupies the whole interior of the farmhouse.
Wilbur ventures to Miskatonic University in Arkham to procure their copy of the Necronomicon – Miskatonic's library is one of only a handful in the world to stock an original. The Necronomicon has spells that Wilbur can use to summon the Old Ones, but his family's copy is damaged and lacks the page he needs to open the "door". When the librarian, Dr. Henry Armitage, refuses to release the university's copy to him (and has, by sending warnings to other libraries, thwarted Wilbur's efforts to consult their copies), Wilbur breaks into the library at night to steal it. A guard dog, maddened by Wilbur's alien body odor, attacks Wilbur with unusual ferocity, killing him. When Dr. Armitage and two other professors arrive on the scene, they see Wilbur Whateley's semi-human corpse before it melts completely, leaving no evidence.
With Wilbur Whateley dead, no one attends to the mysterious presence growing in the Whateley farmhouse. Early one morning, the Whateley farmhouse explodes and the thing, an invisible monster, rampages across Dunwich, cutting a path through fields, trees, and ravines, leaving huge "prints" the size of tree trunks. The monster eventually makes forays into inhabited areas. The invisible creature terrorizes the town for several days, killing two families and several policemen, until Dr. Armitage, Professor Warren Rice, and Dr. Francis Morgan arrive with the knowledge and weapons needed to kill it. The use of a magic powder renders it visible just long enough to send one of the crew into shock. The barn-sized monster screams for help - in English - just before the spell destroys it, leaving a huge burned area. In the end, its nature is revealed: it is Wilbur's twin brother, though it "looked more like the father than Wilbur did."
==Reaction==
Lovecraft took pride in "The Dunwich Horror", calling it "so fiendish that [Weird Tales editor] Farnsworth Wright may not dare to print it." Wright, however, snapped it up, sending Lovecraft a check for $240, equal to $2800 in modern dollars, the largest single payment for his fiction he had received up to that point. (: Selected Letters 2.329)
Kingsley Amis praised "The Dunwich Horror" in New Maps of Hell, listing it as one of Lovecraft's tales that "achieve a memorable nastiness".Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. Victor Gollancz, 1961, p.25.
Lovecraft biographer Lin Carter calls the story "an excellent tale.... A mood of tension and gathering horror permeates the story, which culminates in a shattering climax".Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, pp. 71-72.
In his list of "The 13 Most Terrifying Horror Stories", T. E. D. Klein placed "The Dunwich Horror" at number four.T. E. D. Klein, "The 13 Most Terrifying Horror Stories" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, July–August 1983, (p. 63). 
Robert M. Price declares that "among the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, 'The Dunwich Horror' remains my favorite."Robert M. Price, "What Roodmas Horror", The Dunwich Cycle, p. ix.
S. T. Joshi, on the other hand, regards "Dunwich" as "simply an aesthetic mistake on Lovecraft's part", citing its "stock good-versus-evil scenario". (: The Dunwich Horror and Others) However, he has also noted that it is "richly atmospheric".
==Characters==
===Old Whateley===
Lavinia Whateley's "aged and half-insane father, about whom the most frightful tales of magic had been whispered in his youth".Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror", p. 159. He has a large collection of "rotting ancient books and parts of books" which he uses to "instruct[s] and catechise" his grandson Wilbur. He dies of natural causes on August 2, 1924.
He is given no certain first name by Lovecraft, although Fungi from Yuggoth mentions a John Whateley; he is referred to as "Noah Whateley" in the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.
According to S. T. Joshi, "It is not certain where Lovecraft got the name Whateley," though there is a small town called Whately in northwestern Massachusetts near the Mohawk Trail, which Lovecraft hiked several times, including in the summer of 1928. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others) Robert M. Price's short story "Wilbur Whateley Waiting" emphasizes the obvious pun in the name.Robert M. Price, "Wilbur Whateley Waiting", The Dunwich Cycle, Robert M. Price, ed., pp. 236-252.
===Lavinia Whateley===
One of Lovecraft's very few female characters. Born circa 1878, Lavinia Whateley is the spinster daughter of Old Whateley and a mother who met an "unexplained death by violence" when Lavinia was 12. She is described as a
Elsewhere, she is called "slatternly [and] crinkly-haired".
In 1913, she gave birth to Wilbur Whateley by an unknown father, later revealed to be Yog-Sothoth. Presumably, she is either forced or coerced into mating with Yog-Sothoth by her father, Old Whateley.
On Halloween night in 1926, she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, most likely killed or sacrificed by her son, whom the villagers claimed had an immense dislike of Lavinia. 
===Wilbur Whateley===
Born February 2, 1913 at 5 a.m. to Lavinia Whateley and Yog-Sothoth. Described as a "dark, goatish-looking infant"—neighbors refer to him as "Lavinny's black brat"—he shows extreme precocity: "Within three months of his birth, he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age.... At seven months, he began to walk unassisted," and he "commenced to talk...at the age of only eleven months." At three years of age, "he looked like a boy of ten," while at four and a half, he "looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break."
"Though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of..well-nigh preternatural intelligence," Lovecraft writes, though at the same time he is "exceedingly ugly...there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears."
He dies at the age of fifteen after being mauled by a guard dog while breaking in to the Miskatonic library on August 3, 1928. His death scene allows Lovecraft to provide a detailed description of Wilbur's partly nonhuman anatomy:
This death scene bears a marked resemblance to that of Jervase Cradock, a similarly half-human character in Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal": "Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth, a slimy, wavering tentacle," Machen writes. (: The Dunwich Horror and Others) Will Murray notes that the goatish, partly reptilian Wilbur Whateley resembles a chimera, a mythological creature referred to in Charles Lamb's epigraph to "The Dunwich Horror".Will Murray, "The Dunwich Chimera and Others: Correlating the Cthulhu Mythos", Lovecraft Studies No. 8 (Spring 1984), pp. 10-24; cited in Joshi, pp. 104, 140.
Robert M. Price points out that Wilbur Whateley is in some respects an autobiographical figure for Lovecraft: "Wilbur's being raised by a grandfather instead of a father, his home education from his grandfather's library, his insane mother, his stigma of ugliness (in Lovecraft's case untrue, but a self-image imposed on him by his mother), and his sense of being an outsider all echo Lovecraft himself."Price, The Dunwich Cycle, p. 236.
===Henry Armitage===
The head librarian at Miskatonic University. As a young man, he graduated from Miskatonic in 1881 and went on to obtain his doctorate from Princeton University and his Doctor of Letters degree at Johns Hopkins University. 
Lovecraft noted that while writing "The Dunwich Horror", "[I] found myself identifying with one of the characters (an aged scholar who finally combats the menace) toward the end". (: letter to August Derleth, September 1928; : An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia)
Armitage also appears in the following stories by other authors:
*"The Terror From the Depths" - Fritz Leiber
*"The Horror in the Gallery" - Lin Carter
*"The House of Azathoth" - Peter Cannon
===Francis Morgan===
Professor of Medicine and Comparative Anatomy (or Archaeology) at Miskatonic University. The story refers to him as "lean" and "youngish".
In Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars"—written in 1966 and apparently set at about that time—Morgan is described as "the sole living survivor of the brave trio who had slain the Dunwich Horror". According to Leiber, Morgan's "research in mescaline and LSD" produced "clever anti-hallucinogens" that were instrumental in curing Danforth's mental illness.Fritz Leiber, "To Arkham and the Stars", Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, pp. 320-321.
===Warren Rice===
Professor of Classical Languages at Miskatonic University. He is called "stocky" and "iron-grey".
==Continuity==
*Yog-Sothoth's name is used in incantations, (: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) but it is revealed here that it is an extra-dimensional entity, part of the "Old Ones".
*The Necronomicon, Miskatonic University, Arkham and Dunwich appear.
*A librarian named Armitage appears in an alternate history where a juvenile Lovecraft witnesses the Martian invasion of Earth, from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. (: "To Mars and Providence" [Don Webb])
*According to some accounts, it was not an immaculate conception but Old Whateley who was the vessel used by Yog-Sothoth to impregnate his daughter Lavinia. (: "The Black Brat of Dunwich" [Stanley C. Sargent], Providence [Alan Moore])
==Adaptations==
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*The radio drama Suspense adapted "The Dunwich Horror". It stars Academy Award winner Ronald Colman as Henry Armitage, and aired originally on November 1, 1945.
*A film version was released in 1970. It starred Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley, Ed Begley as Henry Armitage and Sandra Dee. Les Baxter composed the soundtrack. It was the final film for Begley, who died in April of that year.
*Another film version of the tale, directed by Leigh Scott and starring Jeffrey Combs as Wilbur Whately, was first broadcast in October 2009 on the SyFy channel. Dean Stockwell also stars in this version, this time as Dr. Henry Armitage. The working title was The Darkest Evil.
*Comics artist Alberto Breccia adapted the story in 1974.
*Comics artist John Coulthart started to adapt the story in 1989. The unfinished story was published in 1999.
*"The Dunwich Horror", along with "The Picture in the House" and "The Festival", were adapted into short claymation films, and released by Toei Animation as a DVD compilation called H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories.
*In October 2011, Julie Hoverson, through her audio production company 19 Nocturne Boulevard, released an adaptation of "The Dunwich Horror" in a 4-part miniseries. Each episode was roughly 30 minutes long.
*In October 2013, The Company (a Yorkshire-based amateur dramatics society) produced a stage play adaptation of "The Dunwich Horror" at the Drama Studio at the University of Sheffield.
*A children's book, written by Kenneth Hite and illustrated by Andy Hopp in 2011.
*Another children's book, written by Tro Rex and illustrated by Eyona Bella in 2014.
==In Popular Culture==
==External links==
*"The Dunwich Horror" complete text at the H. P. Lovecraft Archive
*"The Dunwich Horror" at Wikipedia
==References==
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:H. P. Lovecraft works