Richard Corben: Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls

[alicemacher]

In memory of Richard Corben, I'm once again posting his adaptation (under the appropriate name "Gore") of Lovecraft's 1924 short story, from the underground Skull Comics #5 (Last Gasp, 1972). 3 of 10 pages.

Warning for gore.


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 story; it'll surprise no one that this was the name of Lovecraft's own cat) 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.










The original story, by the way, is ambiguous as to whether Delapore did in fact cannibalize Norrys. There, 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 maybe, mad though he is, he's telling the truth when he says the rats did it.

Translations for the final page (with a tip of the hat to Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi's annotations for the Latin and Gaelic bits):

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?" (Corben condenses the ravings a bit; there was a longer Elizabethan English bit after "'Sblood, thou stinkard" and before the Middle English rant. In case you were wondering why a fourteenth-century dude would talk like someone from the Tudor period. :-) )

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

[tripodeca113]

Breeding people to eat, is a very inefficient way to go about cannibalisms.

[lissa_quon]

One think Lovecraft has taught me is never dig a hole. Ever. Nothing good happens in a hole.

[silicondream]

Not entirely true; sometimes a hole can lead to the Dreamlands, which is more wonderful than horrifying. Usually. As long as you don't go too far Inside or too far Outside or--look, just enjoy the view and eat some grapes, okay?

Also, holes have ghouls in them, and ghouls are honestly pretty awesome dudes. If you wanted to pick a Mythos species to exemplify Chaotic Good, it's ghouls. They're loyal, outgoing, and clean up other sentients' mess. Just don't look too hard at the dinner table if you had a recent death in the family.

[cyberghostface]

Nice story. I need to read more Lovecraft.

[silicondream]

He was my favorite author as a teenager, mixed-race though I am. If you haven't read it before, be prepared for most of the original stories to be far more racist than their adaptations. I tend to read it as fantasy and sci-fi, as conveyed by an incredibly unreliable narrator who thinks he's in a horror story because the universe keeps denying his bigotry and xenophobia. Makes it quite satisfying when the protagonists' illusions are finally stripped away.

[silicondream]

This has always been one of my favorite Lovecraft short stories, partly because of the style and the cool perspective shift at the end, partly because the highlight is on the atrocities of a white culture for a change. Lovecraft has plenty of other stories where someone's undone by their impure heredity; it turns out that great-grandma was a fish-monster or an intelligent gorilla or, even worse, a black woman. But the de la Poers are pure European aristocracy, turned pure American aristocracy when they established a plantation in the South. They've been guarding their bloodline and their traditions for at least a few thousand years, if not longer. They were Roman before they were French and they were Celtic before they were Roman; by Lovecraft's standards they're as well bred as humans can be. It's just that they've spent all that time being assholes.

Turns out, three thousand years of literally preying on the lower classes corrupts you as thoroughly as a touch from the Old Ones.