Skull Comics: Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls"

[alicemacher]

A repost of one of my Hallowe'en 2014 selections! H.P. Lovecraft's classic 1924 tale of horrific family secrets gets the Richard Corben (writing as, appropriately, "Gore") treatment in the underground comic Skull #5 (Last Gasp, 1972). NSFW warning for gore.



Three of 10 pages.

The narrator, Delapore, moves from Massachusetts to his ancestral family estate, Exham Priory, in England, and begins restoring it. As he's the last of the centuries-old de la Poer clan, he reflects that his new neighbours, who've long hated and feared his family, will be glad when he's gone.





Norrys tells Delapore about the hints and rumours of unspeakable acts and maddening sights associated with his ancestors. In particular he mentions a plague of rats which spilled out of the priory and devoured both animals and humans, shortly after the last English de la Poer had fled the country.

Having settled into the estate, Delapore and his cat Nigaman ("N****r-Man" in the original Lovecraft story) both hear something at night that no one else can: countless numbers of rats in the walls, scurrying down to the sub-cellar. Delapore also finds himself having troubling dreams of both rats and people, in centuries past, eating people. He asks Norrys to help him explore the bottom floor of the priory, where they discover a Roman-era vault bearing an inscription to "Atys" (Attis), a Phrygian and Greco-Roman deity. Spending the night in the vault with Norrys, Delapore once more hears the rats, while his cat smells something beneath the altar.

Norrys suggests they bring in a team of experts, consisting of an archaeologist, an anthropologist and a psychic investigator, to help them explore further. The five men discover, beneath the altar, the skeletal remains of human-like quadrapeds who'd apparently been kept penned up and, over time, devolved from actual humans. They also find a Stonehenge-like monument and, to their horror, pictographs indicating the practice of cannibalism.

At this point Delapore begins to devolve mentally, recapitulating his family history in his ravings.







Translations for the final page:

1. 'Sblood: "God's blood," a common swearword in Elizabethan times.

2. Wolde ye swynke me thilke wys? Middle English, "Would you employ me this way?"

3. Magna mater! Latin, "Great Mother," an allusion to the goddess Cybele with whom Atys was associated.

4. Dia ad [...] agus leat-sa! Gaelic. Lovecraft took this from Fiona Macleod's story "The Sin-Eater." Macleod, in a footnote, translated it as: "God against thee and in thy face… and may a death of woe be yours… Evil and sorrow to thee and thine!"

Comments

P.S.

[alicemacher]

When I first posted this, big_daddy_d noted that the original Lovecraft story is ambiguous as to whether Delapore actually ate Norrys. The others find him raving while "crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat." So in the original, it's possible he's telling the truth when he assures the reader the rats were responsible. (He's still quite mad, though.)

[cyberghostface]

lol that was apparently the name of Lovecraft's cat irl.

I remember when Creepy did their version the cat was called Salem.

[tripodeca113]

When my family was in Scotland, we went to visit my mothers cousin who owned a dairy farm. He had a cat named after a racial slur as well. SIGH