| “ | Let me tell ye suthin' - some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father on the top o' Sentinel Hill! | „ | |
| ~ Old Whateley |
The Dunwich Horror is a fictional entity created by H. P. Lovecraft for his eponymous short story.
Background[]
The Dunwich Horror is the inhuman child of Lavinia Whateley and Yog-Sothoth, who was conceived to free the Great Old Ones so that they may reclaim the Earth. Its existence was kept secret by its grandfather, mother and eventually its twin brother, Wilbur Whateley. It fed on cattle growing up, draining them of blood before devouring them completely. The intense stench of the abomination kept away most passersby.
On September 9th 1928, the creature broke free from the Whateley farmhouse, littering the hillside with wooden planks soaked with an odd viscous substance. Barrel-sized tracks were found leading to a meadow where over half a herd of cows were drained of blood.
In its natural state, the being is invisible to the human eye, but a special powder can render it visible for a few seconds. A distant relative of him, Curtis Whateley, was immensely disturbed by the hideous sight of it and was barely able to form a sentence to describe it. Curtis described it as bigger than a barn, made of wiggling strings that are tied together and shaped like a chicken egg. The creature possesses dozens of legs that are as big as barrels, has big eyes all over it and ten or twenty grey mouths of trunks on its side with blue or purple rings over them that are as big as oven pipes. On top of the creature, there is half a face, which lacks a chin, has red eyes and white, frizzly albino hair. The face looked just like the face of Wilbur Whateley's grandpa. It is also described as not solid and as if it is made of jelly. Curtis also described it as something like a squid, a centipede or a spider.
Its final words were a cry of help to its father, after which the creature was destroyed for good by the spell cast by Henry Armitage and his colleagues, its essence banished back to the realm of its father. (HPL: "The Dunwich Horror")
According to one account, Lovecraft based the Dunwich Horror on John-Divine Wheatley through Robert Black's Commonplace Book. (EXP: Providence)
In the Demonbane series[]
The Dunwich Horror appears as a cosmic horror monster and Wilbur Whateley's twin brother in the Demonbane series by Nitroplus, sharing many similarities with Lovecraft's original depiction.
Comparable to the size of a ten-story building, the monster has a ball-shaped form like wriggling ropes that are intricately entangled with each other. Its body is covered by a jelly-like membrane with many huge eyes pointing in various directions and roughly thirty crawling mouth-shaped protuberances. Due to its invisible nature, the monster can only be seen via the Powder of Ibn-Ghazi. It confronted Henry Armitage in the Sentinel Hill and was later killed by Al Azif's Deus Machina, Aeon. (EXP: Deus Machina Demonbane)
In the sequel, the Dunwich Horror returned as one of the nightmare entities created by Another Blood from Al Azif's memories of the previous world. (EXP: Kishin Hishou Demonbane)
In Other Media[]
- Haiyore! Nyaruko-san: In episode 4 of the anime television series, Kuuko stated that she can make a sandwich called the "Dunwich", presumably made using meat from the Dunwich Horror.
- Mini Mythos: The Dunwich Horror appears in the children's book Cliffourd the Big Red God, based on Lovecraft's original story.
Gallery[]
- Main article: Dunwich Horror (being)/Gallery