The Picture in the House
| "The Picture in the House" | |
|---|---|
| Author | H. P. Lovecraft |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published in | The National Amateur |
| Publication type | Periodical |
| Media type | Print (Magazine) |
| Publication date | Summer, 1921 |
"The Picture in the House" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft. It was written on December 12, 1920, and first published in the July 1919 issue of The National Amateur—which was published in the summer of 1921.
"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:
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." 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".
The story introduces two of Lovecraft Country's most famous elements:
Neither location is further developed in this tale, but Lovecraft had placed the foundations for one of the most enduring settings in weird fiction.
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".
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. Scott Connors has stated that "the use of an archaic dialect in "The Picture in the House"...represents an early example of (the notion of plunging through time), transforming what might otherwise be a mundane tale of cannibalism into a meditation on the paradoxes of time."
Peter Cannon has pointed to parallels between "The Picture in the House" and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches".
The story is narrated by a lone traveler (a genealogist conducting research), riding on his bicycle in the Miskatonic Valley of rural New England, who seeks shelter from an approaching storm in an apparently abandoned house, only to find that it is occupied by a "loathsome 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". "His height could not have been less than six feet." The narrator notices that the house is full of antique books, exotic artifacts, and furniture predating the American Revolution. The old man is apparently harmless and ignorant, but shows a disquieting fascination for an engraving in a rare old book, Regnum Congo, and admits to the narrator (who becomes increasingly nervous and frightened during the man's story) that it made him hunger "fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy"- presumably human flesh. It is suggested that the old man in the house was murdering men who stumbled upon the shack to satisfy his "craving", and that the old man has extended his life preternaturally through cannibalism. The narrator realizes the old man has been alive from at least the early eighteenth century to the year 1896, when the story takes place. The old man denies that he ever acted on his desire, but then a red drop of blood falls from the ceiling, clearly coming from the floor above, and splashes a page in the book. The narrator then looks up to see a spreading red stain on the ceiling; this belies the old man's statement. At that moment, a bolt of lightning destroys the house. However, the narrator manages to escape from the house.
...
Wikipedia