Howard Phillips Lovecraft
The Dreams in the Witch House

"Pains - Dr. Jones takes a blood sample from me - bath - pains - electric blanket - AEPG visit." These are the last words written by H. P. Lovecraft on March 11, 1937, in his lucid, almost scientific, illness diary. The writer would die four days later, practically in anonymity, known only to a small circle of friends, many of whom he met only through correspondence. Eighty years later, the situation has extraordinarily changed: not only is Lovecraft today a true cult writer (and who more than him could be) among enthusiasts of fantastic or supernatural fiction, but his name continues to tenaciously make its way even at the academic level, a field in which the legitimization of his work is testified by the multiplying of theses and monographic courses (not in Italy, unfortunately) dedicated to him in universities and by the arrival of his writings in the Penguin Classics.

The posthumous rediscovery of a writer, however, most often brings with it a trail of disputes and controversies, and in the case of Lovecraft, the chorus of detractors is particularly fierce, often not without reason. His deliberately antiquated style, the inability to act of the protagonists of his stories, the bizarre creatures that populate his imagination, the almost total absence in his literary corpus of some important perspectives (the female perspective, for instance, or even sexual dynamics) have led more than one illustrious reader to question the real quality of the work of the "recluse of Providence," and the case of "The Dreams in the Witch House" is particularly paradigmatic in this regard.

In fact, the story seems not to please even his most devoted scholars. S. T. Joshi, in particular, currently the most authoritative editor of Lovecraft's work, finds it full of contradictions, narrative gaps, and various ingenuities; for her part, the grande dame of fantastic literature, Ursula Le Guin, wrote about the story that "Lovecraft appears to us as a rabbit struggling in the jaws of his own unconscious."

Personally, however, I want to recognize "The Dreams in the Witch House" as a masterpiece without "if" and "but," despite being aware of its many flaws, precisely as an emotional reaction, for the necessity to see redeemed a piece of writing of such imaginative power that it fears no rivals. The feeling is that many of Lovecraft's critics relate to his work by trying to assess whether the writer fits or not into their model of an author, without actually attempting to truly surrender to his literary proposition. Ursula Le Guin, for example, is entirely right, but what would a reader of "The Dreams..." do with rationality and logic faced with a story where, quite unprecedentedly (especially for the years it was written), relativistic physics and witchcraft meet and merge? Why should Walter Gilman, the protagonist of the story, who finds himself living in a room that turns out to be a diabolical tesseract, appear lucid and able to find a solution to the threat looming over his life? Why should we be given a coherent explanation for the combination of interdimensional travel and the kidnapping and sacrifice of children to foul deities?

The dramatic story of Walter Gilman, his shocking encounter with the witch Keziah Mason, her familiar Brown Jenkin (an extraordinary and exceedingly ingenious hybrid between rat and human) and Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, his being tossed between different dimensions and cosmic abysses, is one of the most vivid representations of an incomprehensible, impenetrable horror that overwhelmingly submerges its victims. Gilman, the mathematician, can only understand the most rational dimension, namely the direct use in reality of high-level mathematical and physical principles in the form of spells and magical formulas, but the ultimate purpose of his situation will never be grasped. Evil, in this story as in other Lovecraft's works, is an end in itself, for which humans are puppets destined for ignorance; hence the heap of disjointed facts and images that are capable only of wreaking havoc, destroying, causing pain and death. This is why I especially love the finale of the story, perhaps the most criticized part, where the mathematician Gilman finds himself using a crucifix in a scene whose colors and pace seem to foreshadow the editing of Roger Corman's films and the entire psychedelic imagery: in the face of extreme horror, man can only cling desperately to anything that might represent hope. It's obviously an illusion, and the final word belongs to Brown Jenkin, making us understand that Gilman hadn't even grasped who or what was at the center of the malevolent plots he was ensnared in.

Lovecraft, for his part, made that dimensional leap exactly eighty years ago, leaving us the fruits of his often disorganized and chaotic work like the universe he conceived, on which many have speculated (and profited, one might say), creating even more chaos. But if there is one thing that the many lovers of his work have learned over these years, it's that it must be surrendered to without reservations or preconceptions: the seeds of madness (well, Carpenter understood this well in his day) are all there, ready to sprout and disturb the nights of those who know how to listen.