The Dark Chamber is a 1927 horror novel by American writer Leonard Cline. [1]
The novel concerns Oscar Fitzalan and his interactions with Richard Pride who, trying to remember his past life, goes beyond his own memory and sinks into the gulfs of "primal memory." [1]
The narrator, Oscar Fitzalan, a composer, is hired by Richard Pride to assist him at his estate and study at Mordance Hall. Here, he meets Hough, Pride's secretary; Miriam, Pride's wife; the Prides' daughter Janet; and their dog Tod, a German hound. They are later joined by Ramón Del Prado, one of Pride's employees. Also in the household are two black servants, old Mamie and her fourteen-year-old daughter Sally.
Pride brings Fitzalan to play music in order to awaken his memories. However, the household is devastated: Janet, Oscar's first love interest, elopes with Del Prado, and Pride's secretary, Hough, commits suicide. The dog becomes extremely aggressive. Pride's wife, Miriam, commits suicide as well.
In the end, Pride is reduced to a dirty and ruinous state from the memory therapy, and he finally leaves the house, letting the winds destroy his files regarding the recovered memories. He goes off into the night and there, when his daughter returns and elopes with the narrator, he is found dead, along with his dog in the woods - both having killed each other.
The Dark Chamber was praised by H.P. Lovecraft as a masterpiece of weird literature in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature . [1] Clark Ashton Smith, in a February 1949 letter to August Derleth, praised The Dark Chamber, saying "it depicts with singular power the retrogression of a human being." [2] It was also listed by horror critic R.S. Hadji in his list of "unjustly neglected" horror fiction, [3] and described by Neil Barron as "an intriguing story, prefiguring Paddy Chayefsky's ALTERED STATES (1978)". [4] Reviewing The Dark Chamber for Weird Tales , Scott Connors described Cline's treatment of his theme as "powerful" and stated that the "sheer pleasure of Cline’s style" was a reason to read the book. [5] By contrast, E. F. Bleiler's view of the book was negative: "H. P. Lovecraft regarded the novel highly, but I must confess that I found it almost unreadable because of its lack of focus and very turgid writing." [6]
Lovecraft passed his copy of The Dark Chamber to several of his fellow writers, including Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, Frank Belknap Long, and Henry S. Whitehead. All of these writers later wrote fiction about hereditary memory that were influenced by the novel. [5]
Clark Ashton Smith was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories and poetry, and an artist. He achieved early recognition in California for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures". Additional writers influenced by Smith include Leigh Brackett, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Fritz Lieber, George R. R. Martin, and Donald Sidney-Fryer.
Arkham House was an American publishing house specializing in weird fiction. It was founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish hardcover collections of H. P. Lovecraft's best works, which had previously been published only in pulp magazines. The company's name is derived from Lovecraft's fictional New England city, Arkham, Massachusetts. Arkham House editions are noted for the quality of their printing and binding. The printer's mark for Arkham House was designed by Frank Utpatel.
Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century".
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895.
Tsathoggua is a supernatural entity in the Cthulhu Mythos shared fictional universe. He is the creation of American writer Clark Ashton Smith and is part of his Hyperborean cycle.
Averoigne is a fictional counterpart of a historical province in France, detailed in a series of short stories by the American writer Clark Ashton Smith. Smith may have based Averoigne on the actual province of Auvergne, but its name was probably influenced by the French department of Aveyron, immediately south of Auvergne, due to the similarity in pronunciation. Sixteen of Smith's stories take place in Averoigne. In Smith's fiction, the Southern French province is considered "the most witch-ridden in the entire country." The most well-known citizen is Gaspard du Nord of Vyones, a wizard who translated The Book of Eibon into Norman French.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.
The Night Land is a horror/fantasy novel by English writer William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. As a work of fantasy it belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. Hodgson also published a much shorter version of the novel, titled The Dream of X (1912).
"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written between 5–9 November 1935 and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales. It was the last written of the author's known stories and is part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The epigraph to the story is the second stanza of Lovecraft's 1917 poem "Nemesis".
"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales.
The Whisperer in Darkness is a 26,000-word novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to The Colour Out of Space (1927), it is a blend of horror and science fiction. Although it makes numerous references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is not a central part of the mythos, but reflects a shift in Lovecraft's writing at this time towards science fiction. The story also introduces the Mi-Go, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures.
Farnsworth Wright was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday, editing 179 issues from November 1924 to March 1940. Jack Williamson called Wright "the first great fantasy editor".
The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions.
A Cthulhu Mythos anthology is a type of short story collection that contains stories written in, or related to, the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction launched by H. P. Lovecraft. Such anthologies have helped to define and popularize the genre.
Marginalia is a collection of Fantasy, Horror and Science fiction short stories, essays, biography and poetry by and about the American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was released in 1944 and was the third collection of Lovecraft's work published by Arkham House. 2,035 copies were printed.
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, was a writer of weird fiction and horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His works typically were published as W. H. Pugmire and his fiction often paid homage to the lore of Lovecraftian horror. Lovecraft scholar and biographer S. T. Joshi described Pugmire as "the prose-poet of the horror/fantasy field; he may be the best prose-poet we have" and as one of the genre's leading Lovecraftian authors.
"The Ninth Skeleton" is a short story by American writer Clark Ashton Smith. It was first published in the September 1928 issue of Weird Tales. It was his first story for Weird Tales.
Bryce John Stevens is a horror writer, illustrator and editor. He grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand and moved to Sydney in the mid-1980s. From childhood he was fascinated with the supernatural and terrifying consequences of events from stories such as "The Tinderbox", a predilection which continued through his high school years and beyond.
Leigh (David) Blackmore is an Australian horror writer, critic, editor, occultist, musician and proponent of post-left anarchy. He was the Australian representative for the Horror Writers of America (1994–95) and served as the second President of the Australian Horror Writers Association (2010–2011). His work has been nominated four times for the Ditmar Award, once for fiction and three times for the William Atheling Jr. Award for criticism. He has been a Finalist in both the Poetry and Criticism categories of the Australian Shadows Awards. He has contributed entries to such encyclopedias as S. T. Joshi and Stefan J. Dziemianowicz (eds) Supernatural Literature of the World and June Pulliam and Tony Fonseca (eds), Ghosts in Popular Culture and Legend.
"The Dark Eidolon" is a sword and sorcery short story by American writer Clark Ashton Smith, forming part of his Zothique cycle of stories. It was first published in Weird Tales in 1935 and has been variously republished, notably in the anthology The Spell of Seven, edited by L. Sprague de Camp.