The Lurking Fear

The Lurking Fear
Full story	online here
Author	Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story
Publisher	Home Brew
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"The Lurking Fear" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft in the horror fiction genre. Written in November 1922, it was first published in the January through April 1923 issues of Home Brew.

Origin

Like "Herbert West--Reanimator", earlier published in Home Brew, "The Lurking Fear" was solicited by editor George Julian Houtain expressly to be published as a serial. Unlike with "Herbert West", however, Houtain ran recaps of the story so far with each installment after the first, relieving Lovecraft of the need for objectionable repetition.

The March 1923 issue of Home Brew containing the 3rd installment of "The Lurking Fear"

The April 1923 issue of Home Brew containing the final installment of "The Lurking Fear"

Plot summary

The story is split up into 4 chapters:

I. The Shadow On The Chimney

The narrator, a monster hunter, hearing tales of a "lurking fear" upon Tempest Mountain in the Catskills, takes his two strongmen with him to investigate. They camp inside the deserted Martense mansion as a lightning storm approaches, and feeling strangely drowsy, they all fall asleep. The narrator wakes up to find both his companions missing, and in a flash of lightning sees a demonic shadow cast upon the fireplace chimney from a grotesque monster like the other one.

II. A Passer In The Storm

Continuing his investigation, the narrator teams up with Arthur Munroe, another journalist. The two find as much information as they can on the mansion and environs, until they find themselves trapped by yet another storm. Bunkered in a small cabin, they witness a bright flash of lightning. Arthur looks out the window to survey the damage. The narrator, curious as to why Arthur is still staring out the window, turns him to find his face chewed off.

III. What The Red Glare Meant

As the narrator digs open the grave of Jan Martense, he describes the history of the Martense family. Upon reaching the coffin, he continues to dig, and subsequently falls into a subterranean burrow. He crawls along, until he sees two eyes reflecting his torch-light in the darkness. Yet another lightning-strike causes the tunnel to cave in above the beast and the narrator has to dig his way to the surface. He spots a red glare in the distance that he learns was a cabin that the hillside squatters had set alight with one of the beasts inside.

IV. The Horror In The Eyes

The narrator continues to search for more clues, until it occurs to him that peculiar mounds of earth lead out in lines from the mansion. He finds a burrow entrance in the basement as another storm approaches. Finding a hiding place, he watches as countless creatures crawl from the hole. The narrator then sees one of the weaker members of the grotesque mob get attacked and eaten by one of its compatriots. He shoots one of the creatures as it straggles behind the rest of the pack using a clap of thunder to disguise the muzzle blast, and upon closer inspection, notices the creature's heterochromia and realizes that the deformed, hair-covered creature is in fact a member of the Martense family, who after many years of isolation have degenerated into ape-like creatures.

Characters

The narrator

The unnamed narrator describes himself as "a connoisseur in horrors", one whose "love of the grotesque and the terrible... has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life."

He reports that following his encounter with the lurking fear, "I cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering"—an example of the phobias that often afflict Lovecraft's protagonists as a result of their experiences.

George Bennett and William Tobey

Described by the narrator as essentially his trusty bodyguards. The exact wording was as follows - "two faithful and muscular men...long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness."

Arthur Munroe

A reporter who comes to the village of Lefferts Corners to cover the lurking fear, he is described as "a dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose education, taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not bound to conventional ideas and experiences."

The name Munroe may derive from Lovecraft's childhood friends, the brothers Chester and Harold Munroe. Harold had gotten back in touch with Lovecraft a little more than a year before "The Lurking Fear" was written, and they had revisited a clubhouse they had constructed together as boys. (EXP: An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia)​

Gerrit Martense

Gerrit Martense is "a wealthy New-Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British rule". He built the Martense mansion in 1670 "on a remote woodland summit whose un-trodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased him." His descendants, who are "reared in hatred of the English civilization, and trained to shun such of the colonists as accepted it," are distinguished by having one brown and one blue eye.

Martense is an old New Amsterdam name; there is a Martense Street in Flatbush, Brooklyn, near Sonia Greene's apartment where Lovecraft stayed in April 1922. (EXP: An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia)​

Jan Martense

Jan Martense is "the first of Gerrit's descendants to see much of the world"; he joins the colonial army in 1754, after hearing of the Albany Congress, a meeting that attempted to unite the North American colonies. When he returns to the Martense mansion in 1760, he is treated as an outsider by his family; he finds he can no longer "share the peculiarities and prejudices of the Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstorms failed to intoxicate him as they had before." When a friend looks for him in 1763, his relatives say that he had been struck by lightning and killed the previous autumn; when the friend, suspicious, digs up Jan's unmarked grave, he discovers "a skull crushed cruelly as if by savage blows."

Though acquitted of his murder, the Martenses are ostracized and the mansion appears to have been abandoned by 1810. Investigators in 1816 found the place more like an animal's den than a stately manor.

The Jans Martense Schenck house in Flatbush, built 1656, is the oldest surviving house in New York City. (EXP: An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia)​

Robert Suydam in "The Horror at Red Hook" lives in a "lonely house, set back from Martense Street."

Reaction

Comparing it to Lovecraft's earlier story in Home Brew, Lin Carter said that while "The Lurking Fear" is "a more serious study in traditional horror, it lacks the light, almost joyous touch of 'Herbert West.'" The book Science-Fiction:The Early Years describes the story as "digressive and clumsily written, perhaps because it was written for serial publication".

See also

• Dark Heritage, a 1989 film adaptation
• The Lurking Fear (film), a 1994 film adaptation
• Hemoglobin (originally titled Bleeders), a 1997 film adaptation
• Morlock, the underground race of ape-like cannibals described by H.G. Wells in his novel "The Time Machine"
• The Beast in the Cave

References

• Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos.

External links

Template:Wikisource

• "H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Lurking Fear'", The H. P. Lovecraft Archive; publication history