Legacy of the Lurker

by Robert M. Price

copyright © 1982 by Robert M. Price
reprinted by permission of Robert M. Price

Of all August Derleth's "posthumous collaborations" with H. P. Lovecraft, the two which can claim the rubric "collaboration" with the most justice are "The Survivor" and The Lurker at the Threshold. The latter is Derleth's longest and probably best story in the Cthulhu Mythos. Indeed, having written this novel, Derleth might have saved himself the trouble of writing most of his other stories, several of which seem to be merely condensed versions of it (cf. "The Whippoorwills in the Hills", "The Shuttered Room", "The House in the Valley", "The Peabody Heritage", and "The Horror from the Middle Span"). All in all, it is quite an enjoyable story. Derleth evokes quite a bit of the decadent Dunwich atmosphere met with in Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror". And he creates some effectively eerie scenes, such as the meeting between protagonist Ambrose Dewart and old Mrs. Bishop. Thus it is all the more disappointing when the mood of suggestive fear and awful intimation is broken by the last of the three chapters, the "Narrative of Winfield Phillips". Abruptly the story resolves itself into another one of Derleth's "Hounds of Tindalos of the Baskervilles" stories, such as we find in the collection The Trail of Cthulhu. Seneca Lapham dispels any mystery hitherto attached to the "case" by explaining every particular. In fact it is all "elementary, my dear Watson", or my dear Phillips as the case may be.

The purpose of our discussion here will be to examine the sources underlying The Lurker at the Threshold, those Derleth acknowledged as well as those he did not, and the use of Lurker itself as a source in subsequent horror fantasy.

Derleth claimed to have based his story on two sets of Lovecraft's notes concerning a "round tower" and a "rose window". We will see that it is not quite so simple a picture. Instead, Derleth may be shown to have taken the main direction of the story from other Lovecraftian sources (see next section), and to have pretty much disregarded the interesting plot suggestions left in Lovecraft's notes.

In his Some Notes on H. P. Lovecraft (1959), Derleth reproduced the fragments he used, indicating most of the relatively minor changes he made incorporating them into The Lurker at the Threshold. Yet even Derleth's "purified" version of the original texts is not quite accurate. (The reader is advised at this point to refer to the corrected text of Lovecraft's fragments, elsewhere in this issue.)

The first thing to be noted is that there are three distinct fragments, not two as Derleth claimed. And whereas Derleth had admitted that the fragments about the round tower and the rose window were only possibly connected, these two would seem to be the most closely related, since both contain very similar descriptions of a cylindrical tower. The burial mound in "Evill Sorceries", by contrast, is only vaguely reminiscent of the tower in either fragment. And not only does "Evill Sorceries" have nothing to do with either "The Round Tower" or "The Rose Window", it is composed of two separate anecdotes. Derleth does break them up in Lurker, but he connects them in theme (making the bat-thing of the second anecdote the bastard offspring of Richard Billington, the subject of the first anecdote). And he attributes the second anecdote to a completely different book of his own devising, Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan, a title he erroneously ascribes to Lovecraft, making "Evill Sorceries, etc." into a mere chapter of the former.

Textual matters aside, it is apparent that Derleth's physical description of the round tower (the ultimate origin of which would seem to be the "Old Stone Mill" or "Viking Tower" in Newport, Rhode Island) owes more to "The Round Tower" than to "The Rose Window". Its sealing with the Elder Sign and its function of imprisoning a demon obviously derive from "Evill Sorceries". Interestingly, in none of the fragments is the tower depicted as on an island in the Miskatonic as Derleth has it. "The Round Tower" provided the detail of the dried-up tributary of the Miskatonic, but in this fragment the tower actually stood in the riverbed and had once been under water. The location on an island in the river comes, surprisingly, from "The Colour Out of Space", where we read of "the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious stone altar older than the Indians."

Who build the tower? According to "The Round Tower", "it was built by [the] Old Ones (shapeless & gigantic amphibia)." Accordingly, it is "supposed to be older than mankind". Another example, then, of Lovecraft's oft-used device of prehuman artifacts. But Derleth dropped this conception in Lurker, substituting for it the more prosaic expedient of having the tower built by Alijah Billington in the 1700s. As Lovecraft conceived the plot, it would have largely paralleled "The Nameless City". Like that city, the tower is the tip of a subterranean city (it extends downward indefinitely and connects with caverns where the Old Ones still dwell unbeknownst to men). And the tower, like the Nameless City, is the object of frightful legends of foolhardy explorers.

Derleth is somewhat more faithful to the fragment "Evill Sorceries". Of course, he does include most of it verbatim, including the reference to "Ossadogowah", the "child of Sadogowah". (Incidentally, this spelling of Tsathoggua implies that Lovecraft would have pronounced the Hyperborean Toad-thing's name "Tsath-o-goo'-ah," rather than "Tsath-o'-gwa" on analogy with Derleth's "Itha-qua".) It is plain, however, from this passage that for Lovecraft, the "lurker at the threshold" would have been this "Son of Tsathoggua". Derleth brushes this entity aside in favor of Yog-Sothoth. In one place he says the ancient Indian sorcerer Misquamacus was simply wrong, having mistaken Yog-Sothoth for Ossadogowah. As for the description of Ossadogowah, Derleth has slightly altered Lovecraft's description, adding that when it was "big and cloudy" it had a facefull of serpentine tentacles.

Something else in the "Evill Sorceries" fragment that deserves mention is the implicit parallel with "The Mound". In both cases, what appears to be an Indian burial mound is a cover for something else, a survival or invader from the elder world which will spell death for anyone whose curiosity has led him to do some exploring.

Regarding the appended anecdote concerning the bat-creature, which Derleth incorporates to no real purpose, we may point out two interesting parallels elsewhere in the Lovecraft canon. The "monstrous Bat with a human Face" was "brought out of the Woods near Candlemas of 1683." This is reminiscent of the backwoods birth of goatlike Wilbur Whateley ("The Dunwich Horror") at Candlemas, having been conceived nine months earlier in an occult rite at Roodmas. And something similar is implied in The Cage of Charles Dexter Ward, wherein the Roodmas invocation of Yog-Sothoth will cause "ye thing [to] breede in ye Outside Spheres", presumably to be born nine months later at Candlemas. Indeed, there is some reason to interpret Joseph Curwen's ultimate design as being the same as Wizard Whateley's --- to unleash Yog-Sothoth upon the world, threatening "all civilization, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe" (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). Perhaps something similar was in view in "Evill Sorceries", with the birth of the bat-thing. And though The Lurker at the Threshold does show the influence of "The Dunwich Horror", almost nothing is made of the monstrous birth of the bat-hybrid. It is mentioned, but vestigially, having no real significance in terms of the plot. This is too bad since Lovecraft's brief note was "pregnant" with horrific potential.

Derleth freely acknowledged his debt to Lovecraft's story-fragments, but his borrowing from HPL's finished works is no less obvious, even when Derleth did not openly admit it. For instance, just as Walter de la Poer ("The Rats in the Walls") loses a son and crosses the Atlantic to drown his sorrows in refurbishing an abandoned family estate, Derleth's Ambrose Dewart does the same thing. The only difference is that the two men crossed the ocean in opposite directions. (Derleth also lifted the ending of "The Rats in the Walts" for his own "The House in the Valley"). The device of the doomed protagonist performing occult rites in somnambulant dreams is straight from Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House" (a story completely plagiarized by Derleth in "The Peabody Inheritance"). The invisible behemoths who leave gigantic tracks all over the countryside (see also "The Shuttered Room" and "The Whippoorwills in the Hills") come right out of "The Dunwich Horror".

But the single largest Lovecraftian source for The Lurker at the Threshold is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Dewart, like Ward, researches the dubious legends of a sorcerous ancestor, whom he chances to resemble. Both reconstruct the old wizard's story by checking newspaper files, letters, and journals. Eventually, both Ward and Dewart become pawns of their ancestors, doing their dirty work and unwittingly preparing the way for their return. During this time, both protagonists waver back and forth between personalities. (The influence of "The Thing on the Doorstep" also seems to be great at this point.) And both are eventually accompanied by incredibly long-lived ancient magical colleagues.

There are even remarkable verbal parallels between the two stories. For instance, in an old letter, Joseph Curwen warned a colleague: "do not calle up That which you can not put downe. . . ." Likewise, an old letter of Alijah Billington's contains the advice "Doe not calle up Any that you cannot put downe." Or compare these two passages: "I laste Nighte strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE. . . . It said, that . . . with Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Verse thrice. This Verse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eve, and ye thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres" (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).

"To bring up Yogge-Sothothe thou shalt waite upon the sun in the fifth house, with Saturn in trine; then shall thou draw the pentagram of five, saying the ninth verse thrice, repeating which each Roodemas and Hallow's Eve causeth the Thing to breed in the Outside Spheres of which Yogge-Sothothe is the Guardian" (The Lurker at the Threshold).

The Lurker at the Threshold, indebted as it is to both "The Dunwich Horror" and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, has in a curious fashion repaid the debt. For the film versions of both stories seem to have been adapted under the influence of Derleth's story. For instance, the ending of the movie The Dunwich Horror actually bears more resemblance to the finale of Lurker than it does to the climax of "The Dunwich Horror". In the film version, Wilbur Whateley stands atop a stone altar ready to consummate a sacrifice to invoke Yog-Sothoth. The latter seems to appear (though it may be Wilbur's tentacled "twin") only to fade out as Wilbur is finally gunned down. The similarity to the ending of Derleth's story, and the difference from the ending of Lovecraft's, are both obvious.

The Haunted Palace, the film version of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, also seems to have been remolded along the lines of Lurker (as well as of Son of Frankenstein, but that's another story). The role of Curwen's colleague Simon (played by Lon Chancy, Jr.) is more analogous to that of Billington's Indian sidekick Quamia than to Simon Orne in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Also, in the movie Ward, like Ambrose Dewart, stumbles into the whole mess merely by reclaiming his ancestral mansion, unlike Lovecraft's protagonist who is first of all interested in the legends of his warlock ancestor. Most important of all, The Haunted Palace makes Curwen conquer and replace Ward not by engineering his own resurrection and then murdering his look-alike descendant, but by psychically possessing him, just as Billington expunges Dewart's psyche and replaces it with his own. In fact, so much has The Lurker at the Threshold come to color the reading of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward that it is not uncommon to hear the latter described as a "classic novel of psychic possession"!

If Derleth's story has been read back into Lovecraft's, this is not the only literary legacy of The Lurker at the Threshold. Graham Masterton's 1975 novel The Manitou is in some ways a sequel to it. One is tempted to judge The Manitou (a story of ancient American Indian sorcery) a more faithful development of "Evill Sorceries" (actually it's the Derlethian redaction), describing the demon Ossadogowah: "it was sometimes small and solid, like a Great Toad ye Bigness of many Ground-Hogs [HPL: "of a Ground-Hog"], but sometimes big and cloudy, with no shape, though with a face which had Serpents grown from it." [Lovecraft: "no shape at all". The rest is Derleth's.]

The story has taken the "ancient Wonder-Worker Misquamacus", who played Tonto to Billington in Lurker, and restores him to the centrality he possessed in "Evill Sorceries". In The Manitou, Misquamacus is magically reincarnated in the twentieth century, to gain revenge on the White colonizers and their civilization. His return after centuries derives from Lurker, where he flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and returns briefly in the twentieth, to aid Billington/Dewart in ushering Yog-Sothoth across the threshold. Masterton has him making ready to invoke "the Great Old One", "the most ravenous and hideous of all demons." Sure enough, he is "like a cloud with a face made of snakes," "sort of like a squid . . . with waving arms." He waits at a "gateway" sealed long ago by Indian magic, which "the ancient wonder-worker" alone can nullify.

Masterton shows that he understands Loveoraft's conception of the Great Old Ones well: "They're not evil in the sense that we understand it. But . . . the natural forces in this planet are not in sympathy with mankind." He also tips his hat to HPL in other ways, such as in this description reminiscent of "The Rats in the Walls": "I heard them first. Hushing and scurrying down the walls, like a phantom river. . . . Chilled with fright, we peered through the luminous gloom of the offices, and saw them. They were like ghostly rats --- torrents and torrents of scampering ghostly rats --- and they were pouring down every wall. They emerged from nowhere, and disappeared into the floor as if it wasn't solid at all."

There is even occasional Lovecraftian vocabulary, including the familiar words "loathsome", "piping", and "shambling", all three of which also appear in The Lurker at the Threshold.

In Lurker, Yog-Sothoth is foiled when Billington/Dewart and Quamis are simply shot down (with silver bullets no less!). In The Manitou, it is once again technology that vanquishes the Great Old One and kills Misquamacus, but it is technology magically (and imaginatively) transfigured. Since according to good animist doctrine, everything has a manitou (or spirit double) the good guys draw on the spirit-force of a computer system to banish the elemental power of the Great Old One. All right, it's literally deus-ex-machina, but at least it's not quite as anticlimactic as Derleth's "bang-bang-you're-dead" version.

Our inquiry has led us through a series of fragments, stories, and films including "The Round Tower", "Evill Sorceries", The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Haunted Palace, The Lurker at the Threshold, and The Manitou. Derleth's story is of interest both for its use of sources and for its role as a source. But no one would deny that, its flaws notwithstanding, the real legacy of The Lurker at the Threshold is the entertainment it provides as a work of fiction in its own right.