The Dreams in the Witch House: And Other Weird Stories

by H.P. Lovecraft

Book Overview

"The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity . . . "

Plagued by insane nightmare visions, Walter Gilman seeks help in Miskatonic University's infamous library of forbidden books, where, in the pages of Abdul Alhazred's dreaded Necronomicon, he finds terrible hints that seem to connect his own studies in advanced mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. The Dreams in the Witch House, gathered together...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0142437956
• ISBN13: 9780142437957
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

An Excellent and Important Final Penguin Collection

Following a fascinating introduction by editor S. T. Joshi, the contents of the book are these tales: Polaris The Doom That Came to Sarnath The Terrible Old Man The Tree The Cats of Ulthar From Beyond The Nameless City The Moon-Bog The Other Gods Hypnos The Lurking Fear The Unnamable The Shunned House The Horror at Red-Hook In the Vault The Strange High House in the Mist The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Silver Key Through the Gates of the Silver Key The Dreams in the Witch House The Shadow Out of Time. I chided S. T., at last year's WFC, for naming this book after what he thinks of as one of Lovecraft's worst stories. I guess he likes the title more than ye actual tale itself. He writes of it, in his notes: "'The Dreams in the Witch House' was written in February, 1932. HPL's working title was 'The Dreams of Walter Gilman,.' Stung by the rejection of AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS by Fanrsworth Wright of WEIRD TALES the previous summer, HPL refused to submit the tale to Wright, but August Derleth, in spite of his low opinion of the story (see HPL to Derleth, June 6, 1932: 'your reaction to my poor "Dreams in the Witch House" is, in kind, about what I expected--although I hardly thought the miserable mess was QUITE as bad as you found it." ...submitted it to Wright without HPL's knowledge or permission; it was accepted, appearing in WEIRD TALES for July 1833. "The story is, as Fritz Leiber has demonstrated, HPL's ultimate modernization of a conventional myth (in this case, witchcraft) by means of modern science. Leiber notes that it is 'Lovecraft's most carefully worked out story of hyperspace-travel. Here (1) a rational foundation for such travel is set up; (2) hyperspace is visualized; and (3) a trigger for such travel is devised.' Nevertheless, the tale suffers from plot holes and florid prose and cannot be ranked among his better later efforts." Perhaps. The one very curious matter to me is the conventional treatment of Nyarlathotep as the Black Man of Witches Sabot lore. This dark lord, this Crawling Chaos, is such a rich and wonderful creation that I loathed to see Him treated so clumsily in this story, where he has a mere walk-on role that adds nothing to plot structure or atmosphere. Some of these tales are called Lovecraft's "Dreamland" stories, although only two or three of them actually occur within the Dreamlands -- the most interesting and delightful of which is the short novel, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which Lovecraft never revised for publication (it was left, unpublished, in manuscript at the time of his death, as was "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"). Here we have two tales set in mist-soaked Kingsport -- my favourite Lovecraftian town -- the racist "The Terrible Old Man" and the so peculiar "The Strange High-House in the Mist." "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" has the distinction of inspiring Brian Lumley to pen one of his interesting and entertaining Lovecraftian novellas ("Beneath the Moors, if memor

The Key-Stone of Lovecraft's Oeuvre, or: Illusions Shattered

While reading the penguin omnibus *The Call of Cthulhu* a few years back - my first foray into the Cyclopedean mnemonic-Coliseum of H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre - it felt as if I were perusing fragments of a much larger cosmology, hinted glimpses of nightmarish mythology, an intuition given credence by the continual reference in the footnotes to other stories, most notably `The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.' As Lovecraft's work is usually self-contained, I continued through that first volume and the follow-up, *The Thing on the Doorstep*, and the gaps in my conception began to slowly and surely bridge together, fashioning an overall portrait of cosmic horror and lurking fear, gallows-humor and existential doom, all woven together by Lovecraft's gloriously-florid prose. Yet it wasn't until I held this volume, *The Dreams in the Witch House,* that I realized here was compiled at last the keystone and map to the underpinnings of the Cthulhu Mythos... and I recall, upon reading the first half-dozen stories, a sense of irritation, having just completed the Conan stores by Lovecraft's contemporary Robert E. Howard, recently published in their original forms and chronological order; why, I wondered, with the numerous printings of Lovecraft's horror throughout the decades, had a similar treatment not been done? *Dreams in the Witch House* spans the creative arch from the halcyon-phase of 1919 to very near the end, Lovecraft's second-to-last story `The Shadow Out of Time' (1935). I surmised that if Penguin and the editor S. T. Joshi had compiled Lovecraft's oeuvre in a chronological fashion, then all that mystery, all that tension-filled `unknown' from the first and second volume, could have been expanded, given a richer foundation. Not until I delved deeper into this third (and, I presume, last) Penguin edition that the slow realization as to the particular compilation came forth. *Dreams in the Witch House* is unlike its predecessors in several ways, most notably that it contains the bulk of Lovecraft's more fantastical stories, `tone poems' of a mythology that expanded over the course of a pulp-fiction career, with the style differing from the `standard Lovecraft' treatment - in that, a first person narrative of mortal man stumbling upon the secrets to a vaster and inhumanly horrific universe, and the consequences that ensue from these visions of the Void. Although these `standard' stories filter throughout *Dreams in the Witch House*, around half the book is devoted to the more fantastic imagery inspired by the work of Lord Dunsany, and even the regular stories contain hints or progress themes from this concentrated legendry. Therein lay the quandary, at least for this reader. Lovecraft's gift for horror lay in his hinting at the hideous and horrific, a struggling-obtuse framework for that beyond human conception; due to the writer's refined technique, this usually imparted both a growing tension and curiosity as to the mystery presented. Even w

Third Collection

Having read the two previous collections it was a logical step to go on and get the third (and apparently final)one. So what to expect with this book? Some really good stuff and some really bad stuff (my opinion). Various kinds of stories are gathered here, as was the case with the previous publications by Penguin; that is, there are some "macabre tales", "dreams and fantasies tales" and some "Great Old Ones tales". "Polaris", the first story, really gave me a bad impression. It's a short piece but its worthiness is just as short. The second tale is not great either. Fortunately this goes up with the third "The Terrible Old Man," though it's nothing properly astounding. One of the biggest stories in this collection (100 pages or so), namely "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the only Lovecraft story I did not finish after having started it. But this one is just too much. It's a dream tale, lots of beautiful imagery with flowery descriptions, weird names of people and towns and god knows what else, etc... etc... The problem is that its length is way too much for a tale of that kind. The fact that it's all a dream completely kills any kind of suspence or tension or expections: in a world where cats can jump off roofs to go behind the moon to gather is a world where you expect absolutely anything. And that's where the weak spot is. If anything can happen then you're just expecting anything and whatever happens is not surprising. So that is not your usual Lovecraft story; but I expect some readers may like that kind of thing; it's not bad it's just so incredibly long that in the end the potential power of such a tale is flattened entirely because of its unfit length and crowding stuff. I only read half of it but after that my interest was so lacking that I just found it useless to go, besides I had lost the thread of what was going on. I would say this collection is slightly weaker than the two first ones. It's still worth getting if you like Lovecraft. I was just a bit disappointed by some stories in there that are really weak. Yet there are also some good surprises: "The Nameless City", a kind of pre-At the Mountains of Madness is a very interesting story; "In the Vault", however simple and classical it is, still is a pretty good tale. I'd recommend you check out "The Call of Cthulhu" if you have never read any Lovecraft before and are interested in doing so. Otherwise this book is worth getting (even if some tales do suck). PS: the footnotes and individual presentations on each story is as always very interesting and informative.