"The Graveyard Rats" is a Lovecraftian short story written by Henry Kuttner that appeared in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales. Kuttner's first published piece, it caught the attention of H. P. Lovecraft and brought Kuttner into the Lovecraft Circle.
Synopsis[]
The old-timers of Salem, Massachusetts, speak of the dark and eldritch things which lurk beneath their town, guiding the huge rats and less-savoury creatures which plague Salem to do their dark bidding.
Old Masson, a cemetery caretaker with a sideline in graverobbing, doesn’t believe these tales. Aware of the rat problem, he wages a covert war with the beasts for years, as they keep dragging off the bodies which he is intent on looting.
When one night Masson unearths a body just as the creatures are dragging it off, he crawls down the oversized tunnel in an attempt to retrieve it. However, he is ambushed by the rats in the warren, and then attacked by an animated corpse before becoming trapped in a dead-end tunnel and suffocating.
Connections[]
While the story has no explicit references to Mythos elements, its depiction of corpse-eating humanoids who tunnel below cemeteries, a "moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth," seems to owe a great deal to Lovecraft's ghouls, as they appeared in stories like "Pickman's Model."
Kuttner's suggestion of "blasphemous secrets and mysteries...said to be hidden in subterranean cellars and caverns, where forgotten pagan rites were still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity" by "evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater in frightful orgies" evokes stories like "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Horror at Red Hook."
The setting of "ancient, witch-haunted Salem," whose "dark gabled houses still leaned perilously towards each other over narrow cobbled streets," strongly recalls Lovecraft's Arkham.
Characters[]
- Old Masson, a graverobbing cemetery caretaker.
Publication History[]
The Graveyard Rats was first published in the March 1936 issue of Weird Tales, and was subsequently reprinted in the short story collection The Gruesome Book (edited by Ramsey Campbell) in 1983, then again in Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror in 1997. The story was also included in Wildside Press LLC's eBook bundle The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack in 2012.
Adaptations[]
- Trilogy of Terror II (1997): A screen version was filmed for this TV movie anthology, although it bears little resemblance to the original story.
- "Graveyard Rats": An episode of the Netflix series Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities was based on the story, with a somewhat expanded backstory for Masson.