THE DEEP ONES: "The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft

Discussion begins February 13.

First published in the August 1931 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.asp
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Whisperer_in_Darkness

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41904

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Whisperer in Darkness
The Hastur Cycle
H.P. Lovecraft: Tales

MISCELLANY

http://tinyurl.com/b62epwh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whisperer_in_Darkness
http://www.cthulhulives.org/whisperer/trailer.html
http://philosophicalasides.blogspot.com/2011/06/whisperer-in-darkness.html
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/h_p_lovecraft.html
http://tinyurl.com/anpceh6

I'll re-read this one out of The Dunwich Horror and Others, but I'll also read Price's notes in The Hastur Cycle.

H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction for me, as well as checking out Joshi and Schultz' remarks in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia.

Caveat lector: "Whisperer" is a novella-length tale (26,700 words), so you might wanna get an early start on it.

>1 semdetenebre:

Just a guess, but I'm thinking that it must have injured Grandpa's pride a little bit to have an Otis Adelbert Kline story get the cover over one of his.

I'll be re-reading it out of The Dunwich Horror and Others.

>3 artturnerjr:

Thanks for the heads-up Art. I think that just for fun I'll read this out of the 900-pound gorilla that is the Centipede Masters of the Weird Tale: H.P. Lovecraft volume. Will also check the Joshi bio for additional commentary.

I must admit that I'm not familiar with Otis Adelbert Kline. Never read him that I can recall, but check out his bibliography:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Otis_Adelbert_Kline

I see that he was giving John Carter a run for his money.

>5 semdetenebre: Straying off topic ... Kline was a very prolific Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator. According to the ERB chapter in Sam Moskowitz's Explorers of Infinite, Kline would do Tarzan knockoffs. He even cites a rumor that "Tam, Son of the Tiger" was so popular it saved Weird Tales from extinction and allowed it to go back to monthly circulation. Burroughs started his Venus series to compete with Kline and, in fact, Argosy picked Pirates of Venus over Kline's first Venus novel. The latter ended up in Weird tales as "Buccaneers of Venus".

>6 RandyStafford:

I love it! That's what he gets for trying to top The Man, eh? :D

Yeah, one of the reasons that I still consider myself not-so-thoroughly read in sword-and-planet is that I have yet to get to any Kline. I haven't even acquired any.

So maybe, in some weird literary alternate history, Argosy takes Kline's stuff. Weird Tales folds. Lovecraft has no popular outlet for his stuff, drops below the critical threshhold of literary visibility, and vanishes as an influence from 20th Century literature.

I'd have to subtitle this one "Gullible's Travels". Not one of my favorite HPL tales, but it still makes for a fairly enjoyable excursion if the reader is more than a bit lenient in the suspension of disbelief. Such aspects as the looong, incredibly detailed quotations from memory of Akeley's letters with constant acknowledgements of same are laborious at best (yes, Howard, we realize that this helps to explain the gaping plot hole that would exist if you didn't cover it). Also, bits like this don't help:

Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction because we had come to know too much?

Yes, dammit, YES!!!

I didn't remember it from previous reads but it seems like a good number of the Lovecraftian pantheon, if you will, gets name-checked in "Whisperer".

I did very much enjoy Akeley's pro-Outside Beings speech and the very strange, pre-Basil Wolverton idea of brains being slipped into cylinders for intergalactic shipping. A pretty crazy idea from Grandpa in 1931!

> 10

Yes, the name-checking is huge, along with shout-outs to Klarkash-ton and others. And explicit reference to Machen's evil fairies.

The somewhat tendentious correspondence-reconstructed-from-memory device seems to have two functions:
a) to sustain the conditions of genuine (but non-fatal) loss in Wilmarth's trip to the Akeley place, and
b) to give the whole thing a level of plausible dismissability, "all you have is my words," much like the conclusion of "The Fortress Unvanquishable" that we just read!

A couple of things stood out for me in this re-read.

Sleep, I decided, would be out of the question; so I merely extinguished the lamp and threw myself on the bed fully dressed. No doubt it was absurd, but I kept ready for some unknown emergency; gripping in my right hand the revolver I had brought along, and holding the pocket flashlight in my left.

I was reminded here of a passage from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth":

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flashlight from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something—listening for something which I dreaded but could not name.

It made me wonder if Grandpa was mining his own experience here. Did he sleep fearfully and uneasily when away from home? (Did he leave his trousers on?)

The Akeley canister is set up on the table with all of its sensory attachments, but no expressive/speech module. "But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone." Hardly! If Akeley was an uwilling participant in his extraction, as seems the case, then he had the torture of seeing his one potential liberator be present, hesitate, and flee. (ETA: "Torture by Hope," as it were!)

This is one of the two stories that Joshi mines for epigraphs in Unutterable Horror volume 2 (UH2) because they both contain that phrase: " ... for the next three hours I was immersed in a gulf of unutterable horror." The other story using that phrase in the 20th century was Machen's The Novel of the White Powder.

I agree about Wilmarth's gullibility. He obviously had not read enough Weird fiction because he missed the obvious tropes such as 'if somebody is disguised and doesn't move naturally, maybe it isn't him', 'a typewritten letter with typewritten signature is a forgery' and 'bring all the evidence with you (so we can destroy it)'.

I enjoyed the story more on this re-read because I paid closer attention to the fine description of the landscape when Noyes was driving Wilmarth to Chateau Akeley. This is 'unspoiled New England' because it has not been polluted by foreigners (!)

The few paragraphs where HPL links in Yoth, N'kai, Hounds of Tindalos, Yig, etc. are fun but slow the narrative a bit.

This has one of my bugaboos about visibility: if you can see something, it reflects photons and therefore it can be photographed, even if the Fungi from Yuggoth (FfY) are made of weird matter.

The physics is confused. HPL hints at General Relativity by talking about curved space, but has the FfY travel by flapping their ether-resisting wings. I love the pedantry about the FfY being 'cormophytic fungi' -- I was worried that they might be the wrong kind of fungi and this eased my mind.

Concerning whether the typewritten letter was forged or dictated by Akeley after his brain was already jarred, it makes me wonder whether Akeley really consented to the trip.

Joshi in UH2 says "Substantially better, but flawed in other ways, is the rich novella "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930), which unforgettably etches the rural landscape of Vermont in its tale of extraterrestrial entities (the fungi from Yuggoth, a planet identified with the newly discovered Pluto) besieging a hapless farmer. Here the several fascinating conceptions -- notably, the ability of the fungi to extract a human brain and send it on cosmic voyagings throughout (and perhaps beyond) the known universe -- are marred by an unwittingly comical cowboys-and-Indians scenario where the fungi battle the farmer, who resists with guns and dogs, and by the credulity shown by the protagonist, Albert N. Wilmarth, who has come into correspondence with Akeley and strives to aid him." Joshi thinks this story may have influenced C. L. Moore's No Woman Born.

Added:

> 12

I agree that Wilmarth should have checked out the Akeley canister. I also noticed that, for all the learning of the FfY, their sensory and speech attachments for the canisters are pretty much 1920s earth technology.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

Good call on the comparison!

>12 paradoxosalpha:/13

The linking of the cylinders/cannisters and their assorted accessories reminded me of of your average computer setup. If HPL had portrayed this without wires being necessary, today he would be considered a wifi visionary.

Wilmarth need not have read any weird fiction to realize that something was not right with Akeley. I'm more surprised that Grandpa didn't simply have Wilmarth make mimeographs or even hand-copy the original letters.

"Cowboys and Indians"... I was wondering why, since someone was obviously shooting at the house, they didn't simply shoot all the dogs.

In Price's notes to this story, he cites the research of Donald Burleson regarding HPL's June 1928 visit to his friend Vrest Orton in Vermont. Orton's rented summer farmhouse was built by a Samuel Akeley, and Orton wrote occasionally for the Brattleboro Daily Reformer (HPL's visit being one such occasion) in the "Pen-Drift" column. (Cf. "The Pendrifter" in our story.)

Much of "Whisperer" was constructed on the frame of this visit, with HPL ~ Wilmarth, and Orton ~ Akeley.

I agree this isn't HPL's strongest effort.

Somewhat like AtMoM, but more jarringly, it can't quite decide if it's a horror story about scary aliens or a SF story about aliens that are primarily astounding.

I think that this story was more impressive to me as a teenage reader tantalized by the lore of the "Mythos." It is certainly of interest from the perspective of a De Profundis player, as the initial contact between the characters is through correspondence.

I still like it for exactly the ambiguity that Andreas objects to in #16. It involves the lure of the horrible in a way that has nothing to do with sexy vampires or delightful sacrilege. It's strictly a matter of inhuman sublimity.

I don't object to the lure of the horrible (as a literary concept, anyway), but I think the two elements have an unfortunate tendency to detract from one another in late HPL. The horror is undermined by too much explanation, and the SF visions are interrupted by horror "action".

This not to say I don't like late HPL - I do, and the abovementioned AtMoM is among my favorites among his works - but I do think this indecision is a weakness.

>17 paradoxosalpha:

It is certainly of interest from the perspective of a De Profundis player, as the initial contact between the characters is through correspondence.

My thoughts, exactly!

I think that Wilmarth the intellectual adventurer is definitely tempted by the idea of sending his brain on an interstellar journey, whatever the sinister cost. He just chickens out in the end. :)

While I would be hard-pressed to come up with a description of HPL's writing that didn't contain the word "science" somewhere (science-horror?), and despite the bad physics noted by Bertilak, "Whisperer" does contain some fun and outrageous concepts, especially with the Rube Goldberg quality to the cylinder setup. I like the story for this aspect.

Well, this is at least the third time I've read this one, and I have to say I didn't like it as well this time.

I'll first note that there must have been some interesting discussions in the faculty lounge at Miskatonic U in September and October 1928. Wilmarth has his Vermont adventure, and Dr. Armitage visits Dunwich.

This is the most explicitly technological of Lovecraft's stories. Wilmarth not only examines the usual carvings and manuscripts Lovecraft's scholar heroes do, but he also had "kodak pictures" and a wax cylinder. And, of course, there are the Mi-Go's cylinders.

>13 bertilak: Yes, this has to be, along with "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time", Lovecraft's greatest explication of his mythology and it includes contributions from Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. And, yes, the physics are confused. However, Joshi notes that, in 1936, Lovecraft attended a lecture by a physicist who claimed the Michaelson-Morley experiment had not completely invalidated the idea of the aether. So, Lovecraft probably thought there was no contradiction between relativity and aether.

I kind of liked the initial tone of Akeley and Wilmarth's correspondence. Akeley: "Well, of course, if I only knew what you did, I'd agree with you. And I wish I was ignorant like you." Wilmarth: "I'd like to know what you do -- I just wouldn't draw the same conclusions".

Once again the notion of censorship occurs in Lovecraft. Wilmarth thinks it's better if man didn't know about the Mi-Go -- but send me that stone, Akeley. I want to know more.

Joshi says Lovecraft had a lot of trouble with this story. He worked on it several months and even took it on his travels -- something he almost never did with his fiction projects. I think that trouble is reflected in the padded nature of the story. It's not only Wilmarth's improbable gullibility extended over several pages, "Akeley" constantly reminding him to bring the pictures and wax cylinder, but I even think it may explain the extended "mythos" section and even (however cool it is) the Yuggoth-Pluto connection.

And there is something of a contradiction with the ending. Wilmarth wishes he would have hooked up the Akeley cylinder so he could have gotten some answers. But then he tries to talk himself out of the conclusion that the "Akeley" face and and hands don't prove that he's been dealing with aliens. They point to the same conclusion as the cylinder. You've been talking to aliens, Professor. (Though, of course, a conversation with Akeley would have provided lot of concrete details and not insinuations.) I also find it interesting that the lying of the Mi-Go seems to only go so far. Granted, everything "Akeley" tells Wilmarth about the Mi-Go and cosmic history could be a lie but the cylinders confirm at least part of it.

I don't think that the horror of this story is really supposed to be that Wilmarth has been talking to a disguised alien. It's the violence threatened to a learned man's conception of the cosmos and man's place in it. As Akeley's brain is to be taken from Vermont, the story chronicles how this old, tranquil scholar's notion of the universe is uprooted by a new, horrible paradigm.

> 20 this old, tranquil scholar's notion of the universe is uprooted by a new, horrible paradigm

Excellent gloss there, Randy.

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely properties."

It should be noted that the HPLHS did a really admirable job of adapting "Whisperer" into a feature length film. They take a few liberties with the plot, but these mostly work in favor of the creators' cinematic vision. In beautifully-lensed black and white.

http://www.cthulhulives.org/whisperer/trailer.html

Like Randy, this was my second or third reading of this story, and I also enjoyed previous reads more, probably at least in part because I tend to read these tales more critically when I know we're going to be having a discussion on them.

This is mid-shelf HPL for me - better than early stuff like "The Street" and "The Temple", but not at the level of later masterpieces like At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow over Innsmouth, mostly due (as pointed out by Kenton et al.) the tremendous supension of disbelief required of the reader to get through the thing. You could almost read this as HPL's riff on George Orwell's remark that "there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them", except that there seems to be nothing parodistic or satirical in the tone of the story (and Orwell probably didn't write that before "Whisperer" was written anyway). Having said that, I enjoyed the literary shout-outs and Mythos-building as much as others did (particularly where they dovetail, as they do in the "Klarkash-Ton" reference) and the haunting New England landscape descriptions (which Grandpa handled better than just about anybody ever has or will, I suspect).

>22 semdetenebre:, Yes the HPLHS adaptation of the story is worth checking out. The last 15 years have seen some decent Lovecraft based movies put out.

> 20
This is the most explicitly technological of Lovecraft's stories. Wilmarth not only examines the usual carvings and manuscripts Lovecraft's scholar heroes do, but he also had "kodak pictures" and a wax cylinder. And, of course, there are the Mi-Go's cylinders.

I'm coming to this one late but I wanted to add to that the use of mundane techonology was one of the more interesting aspects of the story. It reminded me of Dracula in that regard. Unfortunately one of the readings you can walk away with is that old fashion modes of communication (like hand written letters) are better than modern ones (typewritten letters and telegraphs)! When looking it at from our even more modern point of view we see some issues that we're still grappling with (how to be sure of the identify of a sender) but there are others that no longer affect us - we could easily make copies of Akeley's "evidence" and good luck trying to erase all traces of an ongoing communication made today.

Overall, I agree with the group. I remember really liking this story in past reads but don't think it holds up that well anymore. Wilmarth's verbatim recall of letters, his failure to realize what's going on, the question of why the human agents of the Mi-Go don't just shoot the dogs, etc. all call for too much suspension of disbelief.

The name dropping is still fun - both to other HPL stuff, to other fictional works, and to real life events mixed in to give the work versimilitude (Charles Fort, the discovery of Pluto, and the bad flooding in Vermont which is apparently based on a real event).