The Picture in the House

"The Picture in the House" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft, connected to the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction. It was written on December 12, 1920, [ [http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/ "Lovecraft's Fiction"] , The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.] and first published in the July 1919 issue of "The National Amateur"-- [ [http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/ph.asp "H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Picture in the House'"] , The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.] which actually was published in the summer of 1921. [S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon, "More Annotated Lovecraft", p. 11.]

Lovecraft Country

"The Picture in the House" begins with something of a manifesto for the series of horror stories Lovecraft would write set in an imaginary New England countryside that would come to be known as Lovecraft Country:

:Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

As Lovecraft critic Peter Cannon writes, "Here Lovecraft serves notice that he will rely less on stock Gothic trappings and more on his native region as a source for horror." [Peter Cannon, "Introduction", "More Annotated Lovecraft", p. 2.] Lovecraft's analysis of the psychological roots of New England horror is echoed in his discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". [Joshi and Schultz, p. 207.]

The story introduces two of Lovecraft Country's most famous elements:

:I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data.... Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham.

Neither location is further developed in this tale, but Lovecraft had placed the foundations for one of the most enduring settings in weird fiction.

Inspiration

The book referred to in the story--Pigafetta's "Regnum Congo"--actually exists. According to S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's knowledge of the work derives from Thomas Henry Huxley's "Man's Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays". [S. T. Joshi, "Lovecraft and the "Regnum Congo", in "The Horror of It All", Robert M. Price, ed., pp. 24-29.]

The ending of the story, in which the narrator is saved by a thunderbolt that destroys the ancient house, may have been inspired by the similar ending of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher". [Joshi and Cannon, "More Annotated Lovecraft", p. 24.]

Critic Jason Eckhardt suggested that the dialect the unnaturally aged man uses in the story is derived from one used in James Russell Lowell's "Biglow Papers" (1848-62). Even in Lowell's time, the dialect was thought to be long extinct. [Joshi and Schultz, p. 207.]

Peter Cannon has pointed to parallels between "The Picture in the House" and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches". [Peter Cannon, "Lovecraft Studies" No. 1 (Fall 1979); cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 207.]

ynopsis

The story is narrated by a traveller in rural New England who seeks shelter from a storm in an apparently abandoned house, only to find that it is occupied by an old, white-bearded, and ragged man, speaking in "an extreme form of Yankee dialect...thought long extinct", whose face is "abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect." He shows a disquieting fascination for an engraving in an old book depicting a butcher shop of the "cannibal Anziques" (from the historic Congo kingdom of Anziku), and admits to the narrator (who becomes increasingly nervous and frightened throughout the man's story) that it made him hunger for "something more" - presumably human meat. It is suggested that the old man in the house was murdering men who stumbled upon the shack to satisfy his "craving", but this is not revealed, as before he can finish his story the two men notice blood leaking down from the ceiling and, subsequently, a lightning bolt destroys the house.

Connections

*A phrase from the story provided the title for "An Epicure of the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft", edited by S. T. Joshi.

References

*cite book|first=Howard P.|origyear=1920|last=Lovecraft|chapter=The Picture in the House|year=1984|title=The Dunwich Horror and Others|editor=S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon (eds.) |edition=9th corrected printing|publisher=Arkham House|location=Sauk City, WI|id=ISBN 0-87054-037-8 Definitive version.

*cite book|first=Howard P.|last=Lovecraft|year=1999|title=More Annotated Lovecraft|chapter=The Picture in the House|origyear=1920|editor=S. T. Joshi (ed.)|edition=1st|publisher=Dell|location=New York City, NY|id=ISBN 0-440-50875-4 With explanatory footnotes.

*S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia".

Notes

External links