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Fantasy Fan, v. 2, issue 6, whole no. 18, February 1935
Page 82
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82 THE FANTASY FAN, February, 1935 SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE by H. P. Lovecraft (copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook) Part Seventeen Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmospere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. "Edward Randolph's Portrait," in "Legends of the Province House," has its diabolic moments. "The Minister's Black Veil" (founded on actual incident) and "The Ambitious Guest" imply much more than they state, whilst "Ethan Brand"-- a fragment of a longer work never completed --rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer--an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and the public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from a very ancient grave. But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, "The House of the Seven Gables," in which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister background of a very ancient house--one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England coast towns, but which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as "Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition thruout the United States, but one well-known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is in deed an object well-calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He heard, too, many rumors of a curse upon his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692. From this setting came the immortal tale--New England's greatest contribution to weird literature--and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atmosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder-- old Colonel Pyncheon--snatched the
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82 THE FANTASY FAN, February, 1935 SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE by H. P. Lovecraft (copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook) Part Seventeen Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmospere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. "Edward Randolph's Portrait," in "Legends of the Province House," has its diabolic moments. "The Minister's Black Veil" (founded on actual incident) and "The Ambitious Guest" imply much more than they state, whilst "Ethan Brand"-- a fragment of a longer work never completed --rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer--an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and the public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from a very ancient grave. But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, "The House of the Seven Gables," in which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister background of a very ancient house--one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England coast towns, but which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as "Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition thruout the United States, but one well-known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is in deed an object well-calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He heard, too, many rumors of a curse upon his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692. From this setting came the immortal tale--New England's greatest contribution to weird literature--and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atmosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder-- old Colonel Pyncheon--snatched the
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