Beyond the Wall of Sleep (short story)
| "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" | |
|---|---|
| Author | H. P. Lovecraft |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Published in | Pine Cones |
| Publication type | Magazine |
| Publication date | October 1919 |
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is a science fiction short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1919 and first published in the amateur publication Pine Cones in October 1919.
Lovecraft said the story was inspired by an April 27, 1919 article in the New York Tribune. Reporting on the New York state police, the article cited a family named Slater or Slahter as representative of the backwards Catskills population.
The nova mentioned at the end of Lovecraft's story is a real star, known as GK Persei; the quotation is from Garrett P. Serviss' Astronomy with the Naked Eye (1908).
The title of the story may have been influenced by Ambrose Bierce's "Beyond the Wall"; Lovecraft was known to be reading Bierce in 1919. Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam, which concerns the concept of hereditary memory, contains the passage, "Nor...did any of my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep."
An intern in a mental hospital relates his experience with Joe Slater, an inmate who died at the facility a few weeks after being confined as a criminally insane murderer. He describes Slater as a "typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region, who corresponds exactly with the 'white trash' of the South", for whom "laws and morals are nonexistent" and whose "general mental status is probably below that of any other native American people". Although Slater's crime was exceedingly brutal and unprovoked he had an "absurd appearance of harmless stupidity" and the doctors guessed his age at about forty. During the third night of his confinement, Slater had the first of his "attacks". He burst from an uneasy sleep into a frenzy so violent it took four orderlies to strait-jacket him. For nearly fifteen minutes he gave vent to an incredible rant. The words were in the voice and couched in the paltry vocabulary of Joe Slater but the onlookers could construe from the inadequate language a vision of:
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