The Shunned House , livre ebook
90
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English
Ebooks
2020
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90
pages
English
Ebooks
2020
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Date de parution
01 janvier 2020
Nombre de lectures
2
EAN13
9789920738675
Langue
English
Date de parution
01 janvier 2020
Nombre de lectures
2
EAN13
9789920738675
Langue
English
TheShunned HouseBy H. P. LOVECRAFT
Adaptation & Test Designing ABOUSSAIF MOHAMMED
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Title : TheShunned House Writer: H. P. LOVECRAFTAdaptation & Test Designing ABOUSSAIF MOHAMMED Editor DAR ALKALAM ALARABI– KENITRA–MOROCCO N190 MAGHREB ARABI E mail: alqalamdar@gmail.com First edition 2020 D.L : 2020MO0419 ISBN 978-9920-738-67-5
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Howard Phillips Lovecraft(August 20, 1890– March 15, 1937) was an American writer of weird fiction and horror fiction. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he spent most of his life there, and his fiction was primarily set against a New England backdrop. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor, and he subsisted in progressively strained circumstances in his last years. He died of cancer, at age 46.
Lovecraft was virtually unknown during his lifetime and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of weird and horror fiction.
Among his most celebrated tales areThe Rats in the Walls,The Call of Cthulhu,At the Mountains of Madness,The Shadow over Innsmouth, andThe Shadow Out of Time. His writings were the basis of the Cthulhu Mythos, which has inspired a large body of pastiches, games, music and other media drawing on Lovecraft's characters, setting and themes, constituting a wider body of work known as Lovecraftian horror.
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Book
"The Shunned House" is a horror fiction novelette by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written on October 16– 19, 1924. It was first published in the October 1937 issue ofWeird Tales.
Inspiration
The Shunned House of the title is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, built around 1763 and still standing at 135 Benefit Street. Lovecraft was familiar with the house because his aunt Lillian Clark lived there in 1919/20 as a companion to Mrs. H. C. Babbit. However, it was another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey that actually compelled Lovecraft to write the story. As he wrote in a letter:
On the northeast corner of Bridge Street and Elizabeth Avenue is a terrible old house—a hellish place where night-black deeds must have been done in the early seventeen-hundreds—with a blackish unpainted surface, unnaturally steep roof, and an outside flight of stairs leading to the second story, suffocatingly embowered in a tangle of ivy so dense that one cannot but imagine it accursed or corpse-fed. It reminded me of the Babbit House in Benefit Street…. Later its image came up again with renewed vividness, finally causing me to write a new horror story with its scene in Providence and with the Babbit House as its basis.
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Plot
For many years, the narrator and his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, have nurtured a fascination with an old abandoned house on Benefit Street. Dr. Whipple has made extensive records tracking the mysterious, yet apparently coincidental, sickness and death of many who have lived in the house for over one hundred years. They are also puzzled by the strange weeds growing in the yard, as well as an unexplained foul smell and whitish 1 phosphorescent fungi growing in the cellar. There, the narrator discovers a strange, yellowish vapor in the basement, which seems to be coupled with a moldy outline of a huddled human form on the floor. The narrator and his uncle decide to spend the night in the house, investigating the possibility of some supernatural force. They set up both cots and chairs in the cellar, arm themselves with military flamethrowers, and outfit a modified Crookes tube in the hopes of destroying any supernatural presence they might find.
When Dr. Whipple naps, he tosses and turns and starts babbling in French until he suddenly awakes. He tells the narrator that he had strange visions of lying in an open pit, inside a house with constantly shifting features, while faces stared down at him. Many of the faces were those of the Harris family, whose members died in the house. When the narrator sleeps, he is awakened by a horrific scream. He sees a revolting yellowish "corpse-light" bubbling up from the floor, which stares at him with
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many eyes before vanishing in a wisp through the chimney. He finds his uncle transformed into a monster with "blackened, decaying features" and dripping claws. He turns on the Crookes tube, but seeing that it has no effect, escapes the house through the cellar door as his uncle's body dissolves, transforming into a multitude of faces of those who died in the house as it melts. The narrator returns the next day to find his equipment intact, but no body.
The narrator hatches a plan. He orders a military gas mask, digging tools, and six carboys of sulfuric acid to be delivered to the cellar door of the house. He digs into the earthen floor of the cellar, turning up fungous yellow ooze, and arranges the barrels of acid around the hole in the belief that he will happen upon some kind of monstrous creature. Eventually, he uncovers a soft, blue-white, translucent tube, bent in half and two feet in diameter at its widest point. He frantically climbs out of the neck-deep hole, and dumps in four barrels of acid, realizing that he had found theelbowa gigantic of monster. The narrator faints after emptying the fourth barrel. When he awakens, the narrator empties the two remaining barrels, to no effect, replaces the dirt, and finds that the strange fungus has turned to harmless ash. He mourns his uncle, but is relieved to be sure that the horrible creature is finally dead. The narrator records that the house has subsequently been rented to another family, and that the house now appears completely normal.
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Wikipedia
Introduction:
A posthumous story of immense power, written by a master of weird fiction—a tale of a revolting horror in the cellar of an old house in New England
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street—the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette—and his favorite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighboring hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose hidden expanse of Eighteenth Century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.
Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in
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horror the wildest fantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.
The house was—and for that matter still is—of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle Eighteenth Century—the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior paneling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street—at first called Back Street—was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.
At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with door and one window above ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and
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Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull gray brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.
The farm-like ground extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walks, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off the weather-beaten front door with its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.
Project Gutenberg
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