Howard Phillips Lovecraft
L'Innominabile

We can define Innominabile as a bridge-tale, one of those works that serves as a link between the first period of HPL, the Dunsanian one, and the second period, which includes the New York exile and serves as an incubator for the so-called «Cthulhu Cycle». Written in 1923 and published two years later, despite its brevity, it is perhaps among his most chilling and disturbing pieces. Its power lies in the fact that almost all of Lovecraft is in the writing, and it is a masterful example of his creativity, which oscillates between contradictions and certainties, material and immaterial, science and magic. The protagonist is Randolph Carter, one of HPL's alter-egos, who appears here for the second time.

The story revolves around a querelle between Carter and a friend of his, Joe Manton: a dreamer, explorer of the unfathomable, convinced of the existence of the «innominable»; prosaic, a believer yet superstitious, ascribed to the categories of the average citizen the other. The story hinges on this clash of ideas and unfolds upon the contradictions of the Author's own soul. We find indeed his attachment to artifacts from the past, including tombstones and cemeteries, his passion for colonial architecture and historical reconstruction (also exemplified by the quotation of Cotton Mather), but there is also his horror for the obscurantism of the Puritan era, the stubbornness of its thinkers, the hypocrisy of its promises. Love and hatred for the colonial age, therefore, a tension that runs parallel to the other dichotomy of the story, between science and fantasy, between form and amorphism, between certainties and fears. Once again, Lovecraft plays with his alter-egos, enjoys arguing the antithetical positions, and introduces the horror element in an analytical and almost casual manner, presenting it as an ingredient of a fictitious story on which the two friends are discussing.  This story, written by Carter, revolves around a terrifying incident that occurred at the beginning of the 18th century, in the midst of the Puritan age, featuring an old man, a drunkard, and a dreadful creature grown in secret in the attic of an isolated house, surrounded by the silence of those who actually knew and whispered. An aberration that seems born from the fear and obedience imposed by a narrow-minded culture that claims to save the man from the Devil.

Here is all of Lovecraft's obsession with the submerged private, with the horror that walls can conceal, with the diabolic experience of the elderly, with the anguish that sinks into the past. There is also the terror of the stranger, the unknown, and, in the final scene, we also see emerging that intolerance for the material and the form that will only come to full fruition many years later, with the sickest creations of HPL, those that spill into an underground tunnel or evaporate without a trace when dead. We are not told who the monster is, because it is «born» and nor why it kills, we do not know who its father is; everything is left vague, suggested, indeed reported by Lovecraft through one of his favorite artifices, namely the diary from the past, which allows us to glimpse nightmare realities without fully understanding them. A stratagem that makes the tension even more oppressive, already heightened by the fact that Lovecraft always proves methodical and relentless in the narration of his horrors.

Personally, I find that Unnamable is one of his fundamental works, and, as a tale of terror, one of the most successful. Interesting because it helps retrace the formative path of this Author, from early Gothic tones to the cosmic horror that will be his fortune; to understand that HPL is not just Necronomicon and Cthulhu, and that his horrors do not only flood us from millennia or incalculable dimensions, but infect our recent past, and therefore our future, our everyday life, and the interiors of our own homes.