The House of the witch

the House of the witch ( The Dreams in the Witch-House ) is one of the large texts of H.P. Lovecraft. It is about a fantastic news of horror of forty pages written between January and February 1932 and published in the Weird Tales July 1933. She is published in French in the collection of news In the abyss of time and falls under the cycle of the myth of Cthulhu.

Synopsis

Walter Gilman is student in mathematical and Folklore at the University Miskatonic of the small town of Arkham. Exceptionally gifted in matters concerned with the quantum physics and the dimensional laws, it has been also feverish and suffering for several weeks. He lives indeed in an old house of the poor district of the city, at the sides of various joint tenants. The room which it occupies is particularly famous to have been used as hearth with Keziah Mason , an old woman Sorcière being itself escaped in extremis and by the average unknown ones of the prison of Salem in 1692.

Every night, made Gilman of the increasingly realistic dreams in which Keziah and its horrible servant Brown Jenkins , a Rat particularly developed equipped with a face and members human, come to visit it. Thinking of becoming insane, influenced by its courses of folklore, a neighbor of particularly superstitious stage and the readings of old and prohibited works (among which, the famous Necronomicon ), it entrusts to his/her friend Frank Elwood . Gilman is indeed persuaded to be Somnambule: in her dreams, the witch and her rat take it along in various places strange and unknown, probably in others dimensions or other times, and it awakes at the sides of tangible proofs of its night adventures (for example, an architectural element taken on an extraterrestrial construction).

The dreams turn to the nightmare to the approach of Walpurgis, the famous night of Sabbath at the end of May. It is understood that the witch and her familiar make use of knowledge and exceptional capacities of Gilman to travel through space and time, pretense to give reason to the revolutionary theories of the young student on the not-terrestrial geometry of his own room. A child is then removed, as it is the case since memory of man each year in the area of Arkham, child that Gilman finds in its night peregrinations whereas the Keziah old woman calls upon by secret formulas straight left the Necronomicon , the Black Homme , diabolic incarnation of Nyarlathotep…

Critical of the news

the House of the witch did not know a very cordial reception as well at the time of its drafting as in the posterior writings of the specialists in Lovecraft. In its correspondence with the author, August Derleth will announce its doubt about the news. Lovecraft speaks about it in a letter bound for an other corresponding: " Derleth did not say that it would not be sold; in fact, he thought more than it would be sold. He says of it that it is a “poor history”, which is completely different and much more lamentable ". Lovecraft answered also directly Derleth: " '' otre reaction to my poor " The House of the sorcière" is, with few things near, it what I expected -- although I do not think that this cloth is as bad as you do not think it… All this business shows me that my fictional career is probably finished. "

Discouraged by this exchange, Lovecraft refused to subject its history to the publication; without putting Lovecraft at the current, Derleth will subject it later to Weird Tales which, of course, accepted it.

Many critics divided the opinion of Derleth since then. Lin Casing treated the history d'" minor effort " who " remains singularly unidimensional, oddly not very satisfactory. ". Peter Canon says that " the majority of criticisms are of agreement " on the fact that this news, with The Thing one the Doorstep , is " worst of the late stories of Lovecraft. "

Joshi and Shultz themselves complain owing to the fact that " whereas the history contains formidably cosmic descriptions of the hyperspace, HPL satisfactorily does not seem to have thought of the details of the intrigue… It is as if HPL aimed simply a succession of incredible images without being bored to gather them in an obvious result. "

Elements of the myth of Cthulhu

Late news in the career of Lovecraft, the House of the witch refers to many elements of the personal mythology invented by the author and already exploited in his preceding writings. We quote them here with anecdotic goal, the references of page referring to the French version of pocket published at Denoël, Présence collection of the Future, in 1991 (ISBN 2-207-30005-6):

Place: the town of Arkham, p. 85.
Place: the university Miskatonic, p. 86.
Book : the Necronomicon , of Abbul Alhazred, p. 86.
Book : fragments of the Book of Ebon , p. 86.
Book : Unaussprechlichen Kulten , of von Junzt, p. 86.
God : The Black, later known Man under the name of Nyarlathotep, p. 87.
God : Azathoth, p. 96.
Entity : the Large-Race of Yith, quoted by name, but not described here clearly, p. 97.
Entity : the race semi-vegetable, winged, with the star head, of the Antarctic the Paleogene, p. 101.
God : Shub-Niggurath, the Goat with the Miles Kids, p. 118.

Trivia

According to Joshi and Shultz, the news is mainly inspired by the unfinished novel Septimius Felton , of the author Nathaniel Hawthorne.
H.P. Lovecraft shows once again its attraction for the exact sciences by quoting in this text several great names of the Mathématiques and the Physique: max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein and Willem de Sitter.
the House of the witch was adapted in Téléfilm in the saga Master off Horror in which one can see appearing the Necronomicon a short moment.

Random links: