"The Picture in the House" (1921) by H. P. Lovecraft, with Notes and Comments

"The Picture in the House"

© 1921

by

H. P. Lovecraft

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous (1).
      

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more (2) they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things (3).
      

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream (4).
      

It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data (5); and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, the house none the less impressed me unfavourably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biassed me against places of this kind (6). Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.
      

I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure; for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I glanced at the neighbouring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odour (8). I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.
      

Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector’s paradise (9).
      

As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta’s account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598 (10). I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher’s shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy (11).
      

I had turned to a neighbouring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents—an eighteenth-century Bible, a Pilgrim’s Progress of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (12), and a few other books of evidently equal age—when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound sleep; and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the panelled portal swing open again.
      

In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description (13).
      

The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation (14).
      

“Ketched in the rain, be ye?” he greeted. “Glad ye was nigh the haouse en’ hed the sense ta come right in. I calc’late I was asleep, else I’d a heerd ye—I ain’t as young as I uster be, an’ I need a paowerful sight o’ naps naowadays. Trav’lin’ fur? I hain’t seed many folks ’long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage.”
      

I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologised for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he continued.
      

“Glad ta see ye, young Sir—new faces is scurce arount here, an’ I hain’t got much ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don’t ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see ’im—we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in ’eighty-four, but he quit suddent an’ no one never heerd on ’im sence—” Here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him (15). He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humour, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it; but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one; for the old man answered freely and volubly.
      

“Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap’n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in ’sixty-eight—him as was kilt in the war.”(16)  Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution (17). I wondered if my host could help me in the task at which I was labouring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.
      

“Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an’ picked up a sight o’ queer stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess—he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin’ hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. ’Tis a queer book—here, leave me git on my spectacles—” The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.
      

“Ebenezer cud read a leetle o’ this—’tis Latin—but I can’t. I hed two er three schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond (18)—kin yew make anything outen it?” I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:
      

“Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin’. Take this un here near the front. Hev yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a-floppin’ over an’ daown? And them men—them can’t be niggers—they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky (19). Some o’ these here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an’ half men, but I never heerd o’ nothing like this un.” Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator (20).
      

“But naow I’ll shew ye the best un—over here nigh the middle—” The old man’s speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate shewing a butcher’s shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men—the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.
      

“What d’ye think o’ this—ain’t never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, ‘That’s suthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle!’ When I read in Scripter about slayin’—like them Midianites was slew—I kinder think things, but I ain’t got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it—I s’pose ’tis sinful, but ain’t we all born an’ livin’ in sin?—Thet feller bein’ chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at ’im—I hev ta keep lookin’ at ’im—see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar’s his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an’ t’other arm’s on the graound side o’ the meat block.” (21)
      

As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.
      

“As I says, ’tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin’. D’ye know, young Sir, I’m right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I’d heerd Passon Clark rant o’ Sundays in his big wig (22). Onct I tried suthin’ funny—here, young Sir, don’t git skeert—all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for market—killin’ sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin’ at it—” (23) The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice it.
      

“Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin’ gits a holt on ye— As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye?—I didn’t do nothin’, only I wondered haow ’twud be ef I did— They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ’twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same—” (24) But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual happening.
     

The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher’s shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it (25). I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind (26).

END.

NOTES

(1) - As I will discuss at length in the Comments, this was then an unusual setting for horror fiction.

(2) - Since Lovecraft is writing in 1919 about an incident which happens in 1896, "two hundred years and more" means roughly "1700 and earlier," meaning that some of these houses were built during the creepy Puritan late 17th century of witch-hunts and other religious manias which Lovecraft was to mine so effectively in his later work.

(3) - To translate from the Lovecraftian, these houses were badly-maintained, practically falling down.  Lovecraft was pointing out that the rural life was also one of decay, once one got off the main roads.

(4) - In the time when Lovecraft was writing, the New England Puritans were mostly also seen as the epitome of good rock-ribbed American wholesomeness (even though Hawthorne had discussed the dark side of this as early as the 1830's).  Lovecraft (an atheist brought up by two highly-religious aunts of dubious sanity) is pointing out that religious manias can go in some very strange directions, and foreshadowing the very strange man whom the narrator will encounter in the tale.

(5) - This is the first mention of the Miskatonic Valley in any of Lovecraft's fiction. 

(6) - This hint is left completely open:  we never find out just what fearful family legends he discovered.

(7) - Why is the narrator willing to approach this strange and possibly-abandoned house?  He's caught in a downpour, he wants shelter from the storm, and people in 1896 were both less afraid of getting injured in abandoned houses and more willing to ask for or give shelter in these sort of situations than most Americans are today.

(8) - Given what is later implied to be in the upper storey, this might be a "hateful odor" indeed.

(9) - He did knock, and it was raining hard, but searching the premises may be imposing more than a bit on even c. 1900 rural New England presumptions of hospitality.  On the other hand, this is a Lovecraft antiquarian character, and he's just entered a room out of one of his wildest fantasies.  When he says that there's nothing in the room of definitely post-Revolutionary origin, he's saying that he's in a room full of artifacts all of which are over a hundred years old.

(10) - Antonio Pigafetta (c. 1491 - c. 1531) was real:  he was Magellan's assistant and chronicler on the first circumnavigation of the Earth.  The book's full title is (in English) A Report of the Kingdom of Congo, and the Surrounding Countries, Drawn Out of the Writings and Discourses of the Portuguese, Duarte Lopez, according to the Miskatonic Museum website.

(11) - Books do tend to fall open on the favorite pages of the readers.

(12) - Both real books:  Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan, 1678) and Magnalia Christi Americana (Cotton Mather, 1702).  The first is easy to find in reprints, and the second is available online here.  These books are ironic, given the nature of their owner, who is certainly no true Christian any more, and has made a personal pilgrimage into utter depravity.

(13) - In other words, he looks both disgustingly-decrepit and terrifyingly-healthy, which makes perfect sense given that he's an immortal sustained by dark culinary alchemy.

(14) - This is a clue as to the man's true age:  he's speaking the dialect common at the time of his youth.  This is obvious in hindsight, but of course you wouldn't think it if you didn't know the truth about him.

(15) - I guess the old man invited him over for dinner.  (*cue Cryptkeeper chuckling*)

(16) - Lovecraft deliberately if briefly misleads his audience here.  Anyone saying that a year was "sixty-eight" in 1896 or reading this in 1921 would, naturally, think that the old man was talking about 1868, in which case "the war" couldn't be  the Civil War (because Holt is alive in "68" and the Civil War ended in 1865); nor could it be the Spanish-American War nor the Great War, because neither had yet started by 1896 -- so the "war" would have to be some Indian War.  But then why would the old man say "the war?" 

Of course the answer, as Lovecraft hints in the very next sentence ...

(17) - ... is that the old man means 1768, and "the war" in question is the American Revolutionary War (1775 to 1783), which means that the old man has to be something like a century and a half old to be saying this in 1896.  But of course if you haven't read this story before, and aren't all that familiar with the Really Seven Hundred Years Old trope (as Lovecraft's initial readers wouldn't have been) it's not so obvious.  The effect is one of chronological disorientation, which is exactly at what Lovecraft was aiming.

(18) - Visiting the old man would seem to be a high-risk occupation.  Note that the old man isn't directly lying -- his exact words are "... him they say got draownded in the pond ..." (emphasis mine).  Nice to know that even depraved immortal cannibals appreciate the virtue of honesty!

(19) - This might be due to ignorance on the part of the artist, or something more.  When Lovecraft wrote this, it was common to assume that only "higher" races (those that looked "white," or at worst "yellow") could possibly have cultures advanced in any way.  So if there were African cannibals who had learned a culinary spell which granted immortal life, by this logic they ought to be some lost white race who happened to live in Sub-Saharan Africa, rather than actual black Africans.  There is not enough information in the story to determine if this is what Lovecraft meant to imply.

(20) - This being Lovecraft, one suspects that the "fabulous" creature might have been drawn from a living model.

(21) - This is a pretty clear depiction of the more violent aspects of the Old Testament inspiring a sociopathic sadist to pseudo-sexual excitement at the thought of bloodshed, and hence religious mania feeding homicidal mania, and thus turning the religious sentiment in darker directions.  This follows the theme of the work as expressed in the story's initial paragraphs.

(22) - Another clue that the old man met Ebenezer Holt in the 18th rather than 19th centuries -- clergymen still wore "big wigs" in the late 18th century, but certainly not in the late 19th.

(23) - When a man tells you that killing sheep is fun, you know that it's time to leave his house.  The problem is that by that point he may not let you leave.

(24) - Mmm, delish.

(25) - A scene which has been much-copied in later horror fiction.

(26) - Saved by the deus ex machina.  There may have been something which saved the narrator beyond incredibly well-timed and well-aimed dumb luck:  but if so, there is no textual clue as to the reason.

COMMENTS

This story is significant because it is the story which introduced "Lovecraft Country" to the world.  Indeed, it introduced not merely Lovecraft Country but the whole idea of a writer setting stories in a fictionalized version of his home region, complete with Houses and Towns with Dark Secrets.

In the very first paragraph, Lovecraft's narrator argues that true horror need not be found in exotic European locales, but can be found in the countryside right at home in New England.  This is an important statement, because Lovecraft was writing in the Gothic tradition of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, and in that tradition true romantic horror is supposed to be found in Europe, preferably in some ancient ancestral castle with dark secrets in the vaults below.  Later stories in that tradition, by such writers as Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker and Lord Dunsany, located the realms of mystery in the deep wilderness, Eastern Europe, or the Orient.  Lovecraft grew up loving these stories set in strange lands, and he wrote some of them, but here he is trying something different.

Lovecraft is staking the claim that you can find true horror anywhere, and he's going to show you a tale of true horror in as mundane (to Lovecraft) a place as the Massachusetts back country.  Indeed, to the popular fiction of the 1900's and 1910's, rural America was not merely not supposed to be a horrific place, but even a wholesome one, full of good, "salt-of-the-earth" people who at worst might occasionally figure in a murder or other scandal.  Ambrose Bierce had played around with the notion of rural horror in some of his sarcastic tales:  Lovecraft would take the idea and run with it.  And it started with this story.

The story makes some valid points.  It really is easy for someone living along a seldom-frequented stretch of rural road to be utterly-mad; even to waylay and kill strangers, provided that he is careful about it.  It's probably easier to do this and get away with it in the country than in the city, because the crimes are less likely to be witnessed.  This was even more true a century or more ago, when rural life was far more isolated:  no cars, no cell phones, in fact normally no phones or electricity outside of town.  Isolated, sometimes inbred country folk can become quite strange.

In this story, the resident of the house, who was even more isolated in the mid to late 18th century than he would have been in the mid to late 19th century, and who was obviously more than a bit insane to begin with, was driven completely mad by the revelations of the cannibal cult described in Regnum Congo, which had an unwholesome synergy with his previous religious mania.  The effect was to turn him into a compulsive cannibal, and what's worse:  the ritual actually worked, making him effectively emmortal as long as he regularly maintained his cannibal feasts.

And nobody noticed.  Is this plausible, for over a century?  Yes, if the old man was very isolated (and who would want to know him?) and was very careful about whom, where and how he killed.  It would be hard for him to get away with a similar string of murders today, but in the 19th century, village constabularies and state troopers were not equipped either technologically or mentally to detect and catch serial killers.  In fact the general concept of a "serial killer" was not widely grasped until the murders of Jack the Ripper -- which took place only eight years before the story's setting.

This leads to a moment of Fridge Horror.  The old man has been carrying out his cannibal feasts for a period stretching from sometime after 1768 to the narrator's encounter with him in 1896.  This is a period of roughly a century.  Even if the old man only kills one person a year to (literally) feed his unholy appetites, that means he's murdered around 100 human beings.  And given that when the narrator encounters the old man, he is obviously preparing one such feast (and thinking about picking up some extra meat in the form of the narrator), there is no reason to think that he limits himself to just 1 victim a year.

Somewhere near that old house, there are buried a lot of human bones.  Assuming, that is, that the old man doesn't somehow render those down too, to make other victuals (one can boil bones down into a sort of edible paste -- takes a while, but the old man has nothing but time on his hands -- he probably doesn't need to work for a living, if you consider just how long he's had to draw interest on his savings).

Which leads to another moment of Fridge Horror, picked up on and run with by Sandy Peterson of Chaosium Games in one of the Call of Cthulhu Lovecraft Country supplements.  There's absolutely no reason to assume that the old man is dead:  there is no mention of any corpse having been found, and we know that he has preternatural vitality.  He may be holing up somewhere, rebuilding his equipment, and preparing more cannibal feasts.  For all we know, he may have decided to train an apprentice ...

Lovecraft was to repeatedly re-use this basic background:  both the geographical one of the Miskatonic Valley and Arkham; and the plot background of Horror From Abroad Infects American Home (or Community) leading to it possessing a Dark Secret (note that the old man learned of the cannibal feasts from a book describing the Congo).  He did this most famously in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," where Obed Marsh learns of the Deep Ones and the cult of Dagon from Polynesian half-human hybrids, and uses them to take over a Massachusetts seaport for some eighty years (interestingly, a full Strauss-Howe Cycle).

Other writers, too, would adopt the basic idea of creating a fictional version of one's own home region and using it as a horror setting.  The big advantage of doing this is that one is writing what one knows, and so the fictional towns, counties and so forth can seem very real, greatly aiding verisimilitude when the fantastic elements are introduced.  Most famously, Ramsey Campbell set many of his Cuthlhu Mythos stories in a fictional Severn Valley, modeled after the vinicity of his native Liverpool; and Stephen King (many of whose stories are loosely tied to the Mythos) in a fictional version of Western Maine.

Another interesting thing is that this may be one of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories, since it takes place in the Miskatonic Valley setting, but there's no actual reference to any Mythos beings.  Even the cannibal cuisine which confers long life may simply be some sort of alchemical or shamanic secret.  The only religion mentioned in the tale is Puritan Protestant Christianity:  the cult of the Congo cannibals remains undefined. 

This may be quite deliberate:  Lovecraft was only 20 when he wrote this story, and this may have been a way for the young atheist to express rebellion against his religious aunts, who had raised him since the age of three.  There are at least two points in which the cannibal directly refers to (a warped version of) Puritan Christianity as fueling or excusing his actions, which certainly seems like a Take That to me.

This was not quite Lovecraft's first story, but it was his first story to really succeed both as prose poetry and straight narrative.  It clearly showed the talent which would make him the early 20th-century American master of horror fiction.

END.