Dark & Twisty

Before reading “The Thing on the Doorstep”, I figured I could write this blog with ease.  A man is frightened to madness by what he sees on his door step.  Said madman will then relay his story to us with brooding language and minimal characterization.

Smack butt and call me biscuit if I wasn’t a bit wrong. Oh, there are characters torment to madness by fear and the horrible creatures that lay in the unknown, but it was the narrator.  He instead got to relay the changes he sees in his friend Ed as he is driven to madness. 

Lovecraft seems to have thrown a spanner in the works with this story.  He gives us an almost enjoyable story.  Typically, I cannot enjoy Lovecraft because of the trappings of Lovecraft.  I can see him in the story instead of the narrator or characters, but this was a bit better.  This round the madman is possessed.  But it isn’t that simple, he’s possessed by his wife who is possessed by her father.  That’s some kinky Freudian stuff right there. It takes a far more actual psychological turn than Lovecraft’s usual buffoonish attempts at psychopathology. At least Ed has a true reason to rant; he’s being possessed and controlled.  He is losing control of himself by magical means.

The other spanner is that the monster is killed, or so we think.  Oftentimes Lovecraft leaves the reader with the cliff hanger that the elder god or creature from the unknown is still lurking and that it may get us and make us mad or play mad songs or paint mad pictures.  In this case, Ed is shot and killed, but his story is different.  When the Thing visits the narrator, we discover it is Ed.  At the end of the story, we discover Ed’s psyche or personality if you will has been transferred to his wife’s dead, Innsmouth body. She was dead before she took control of Ed the final time.  This means that Ed isn’t dead, and that his wife’s evil psyche lives on as well, waiting to possess the next person, maybe even you.

I’ve read a variety of Lovecraft’s stories.  I won’t say all of them, but a lot.  This isn’t the scariest of his stories, but it has become one of my favorites.  The reason is that he broke from his tired, moss-covered, great cosmic horror and elder god mold, and it made the difference.