The Dark Chamber

by Leonard Cline

Book Overview

Originally published in August 1927 while its author was bound over in jail awaiting trial, The Dark Chamber has achieved a legendary status among fans of weird fiction. Leonard Cline's third novel, it is remembered today thanks to H. P. Lovecraft, who called it "extremely high in artistic stature." The novel has been called a precursor to Paddy Chayefsky's book Altered States, for it tells the tale of a man, Richard Pride, who, in attempting to recall...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0523418795
• ISBN13: 9780523418797
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Pinnacle Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Jungian Gothic Horror

"The Dark Chamber" is full-blooded Gothic horror and a classic tale of Promethean ruin. Cline has his tongue firmly in his cheek at times and is deadly serious at others; Richard Pride, an independently wealthy thinker, has an odd theory about human memory and the function it serves. He believes that it is possible through all manner of reminiscence to scan ancestral memory and do a sort of time travel through the tunnel of dreams. To this end he isolates himself in a mansion, Mordance Hall, with an embittered wife unnaturally interested in astrology, a jealous alcoholic secretary, his whimsical daughter Janet, and a particularly nasty dog named Tod (the German word for death). Narrating all this is our dubious protagonist Oscar, a conceited musician who is called upon by Pride to construct a symphony which will penetrate his subconscious and further his dangerous goal. This novel reads like a bleaker "Against the Grain" at times, and at others it degenerates into decadent soap opera. Oscar's pathetic attempt to sleep with every woman in the house distracts from the disorienting nature of what is taking place in the mansion as things go from bad to worse, Oscar slowly losing his sanity and Pride becoming more and more of an unseen but increasingly sinister figure every chapter. The scenes that involve Richard Pride, his bizarre accounts of "ancestral memory" and obscure, nomad-like past are where Cline reaches his horrific height. He is the mad puppeteer of this beautiful dementia, and serves as the perfect backdrop for the surreal degeneration of each character. Though it starts out a little weak and meandering, the last half of the novel is unforgettable and shows what tremendous potential Cline had as an author of weird fiction, tragically cut short by imprisonment and a subsequent psychological breakdown. Flaws aside, this is essential bizarre literature.

The Dark Chamber - A Gothic Tale of Ambition and Ruin

Cline's Dark Chamber is a tale of a man, half Gothic hero, half Byronic villain, who has opted to defy Nature herself, as well as the natural order of things, by artificially coaxing his memories to the fore in an attempt to avoid facing the reality of his current, shattered reality. In an ill-fated quest to recapture the glories of his youth, he not only revisits his personal memories but accidentally unlocks those primordial memories of man's collective subconscious from a time when the division between man and beast was even more tenuous than exists today.The Dark Chamber is a sinister, malevolent journey back to our dubious hereditary history and a warning that the past and the present are often poor bedfellows.