Of the events which took place at the Norton Mine on October 18th and 19th, 1894, I have no desire to speak… But I believe that before I die I should tell what I know of the – shall I say transition – of Juan Romero.

The unnamed narrator speaks of having served at one time in India and of having “delved not a little into odd Eastern lore” in his past. He eventually wound up in the American West, employed as a laborer at a gold mine. While there, he made the acquaintance of Juan Romero who became fascinated with the narrator’s “quaint and ancient Hindoo ring,” which was adorned with hieroglyphs. Their friendship was only hampered by the language barrier between them.

The mine was expanded by the detonation of dynamite which revealed that “a new abyss yawned indefinitely below the seat of the blast; an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lame illuminate it.” This scared some of the workmen who refused to enter the chasm so no work was completed that evening. Late that night Romero awakened, agitated, and telling the narrator about the sound he was hearing. The narrator gradually began to hear it as well.

Deep, deep, below me was a sound – a rhythm, just as the peon had said – which, though exceedingly faint, yet dominated even the dog, the coyote, and the increasing tempest. To seek to describe it were useless – for it was such that no description is possible… Of all its qualities, remoteness in the earth most impressed me.

The narrator and Romero then begin involuntarily moving toward the mine, drawn by the sound. As they go deeper in the mine, the narrator’s ring begins to glow and lights his way. Romero runs ahead and gets swallowed up by the abyss. The narrator looks over the edge.

At first I beheld nothing but a seething blur of luminosity; but then shapes all infinitely distant, began to detach themselves from the confusion, and I saw – was it Juan Romero? – but God! I dare not tell you what I saw!… Some power from heaven, coming to my aid, obliterated both sights and sounds in such a crash as may be heard when two universes collide in space. Chaos supervened, and I knew the peace of oblivion.

The narrator awakens in his bunk, safe and sound. Juan Romero lies next to him on a table, apparently having died while he slept. Neither man had been observed leaving the cabin during the night. The storm caused the mine to cave in, closing the abyss. And the narrator’s “Hindoo ring” was missing. The end.

It is definitely not one of Lovecraft’s top-tier stories and I can understand why he shelved it. What would have made it more interesting is having the narrator actually describe something… you know… relevant. He starts the story by saying he has no desire to speak. He then spends the entire story relating details which aren’t all that important to the story. Then when he gets to the pit and looks down he sees something. What is it? What does it mean. I dare not tell you what I saw! Take that! Whatever it was, it is important enough to relate the tale before he dies but not important enough to actually describe in any sort of meaningful detail.

Lovecraft’s teasing aside, it does contain seeds of other themes which he later develops in detail. Juan Romero is not a particularly scary story and might have been better off left on the shelf.

First up is Memory which was written in 1919. There’s… just not much to this story. He paints a poetic picture of a nature setting juxtaposed with ancient ruins and this description takes up most of the story. It’s lovely and dreamlike in its prose. The two characters are the Daemon of the Valley who has a conversation with the Genie “that haunts the moonbeams”. The Genie wonders who built the ruins and the Daemon replies that it was creatures “like to that of the little apes in the trees… These beings of yesterday were called Man.”

And that’s it. Memory is a nice story but there’s not much to it. One thing I do appreciate is that it is short. Many of Lovecraft’s stories rely on a “Holy crap!” twist at the end and this one is no exception. Sometimes it is nice to get right to the point. Go ahead and read Memory. It’ll take about 2 minutes if you take your time.

Old Bugs was also written in 1919 and is a horse of a different color. It is a type of morality tale about the evils of alcohol. It tells of a bar and a young man who comes to take his first drink. In the bar is a strange man, an alcoholic named Old Bugs and when the young man is served liquor, Old Bugs takes a mop and knocks the alcohol to the floor where it spills.

Numbers of men, or things which had been men, dropped to the floor and began lapping at the puddles of spilled liquor, but most remained immovable, watching the unprecedented actions of the barroom drudge and derelict. Old Bugs straightened up before the astonished Trever, and in a mild and cultivated voice said, “Do not do this thing. I was like you once, and I did it. Now I am like – this.”

Then Old Bugs goes crazy and throws a fit and drops to the floor, dead. In his possession is a picture which the young man examines and discovers that “the gentle and noble features were those of his own mother.”

The moral of the story: drinkin’ will ruin yer life, son. Old Bugs is an amusing story but doesn’t have much to recommend it other than as a stepping-stone on the way to bigger and brighter stories to come.

The narrator tells us that he works for a “state psychopathic institution” as an intern.  A patient is brought in named Joe Slater.  He is described as

one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation… has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy… Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “white trash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.

Joe is described as having “an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity”, is known for sleeping a lot and, upon waking, would often talk and act bizarrely. One morning he murders someone while in this state, “leaving behind an unrecognisable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an hour before.” He was apprehended and taken to the institution for confinement and treatment.

While there, the narrator witnesses Joe having more of these attacks.

Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of great edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him.

The narrator becomes increasingly fascinated by the case of Joe Slater. He begins to speculate that Slater essentially becomes a different person while he dreams at night and the narrator devises a plan to better understand what is going on. You see, the narrator had previously developed an apparatus to transmit and receive telepathic communications which failed. Undeterred, he retrofits this device to allow him to receive Slater’s dreams.

Of course, the device works as planned and the narrator spends the evening with a “brother of light” who “drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought.” Once the dream ends, Slater wakes but his voice is now the luminous being of light.  He announces that Slater is essentially dead and that the being must face his foe.

You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence – you who without knowing idly gave to its blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Daemon-Star.

Then presence then leaves, Slater is dead and the narrator leaves the scene. The story then ends with a newspaper report of a new star discovered near Algol which briefly grew in brightness and then essentially disappeared.

So what are we to make of this? First, it is difficult to escape the idea that Lovecraft (or at least his narrator) is a prick, demonstrated by the condescending manner in which he describes Joe Slater and other people like him. This would be easier to overlook if the rest of the story did a better job keeping us afloat. It does not.

Aside from the silly, rabbit-pulled-out-of-hat-quality of the telepathy machine, the story is devoid of most of what I look for in a Lovecraft story. There is nothing fearful within, nothing that sticks with me and makes me think “Hmm” hours later. There’s a dream-world with beings who sometime war with each other. A simple mountain man begins to channel one of these beings and a hospital intern becomes aware of the whole thing. That’s it.

There’s nothing really to see here, other than a pretty neat title to the story.  We move along.

Into the north window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light.  All through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there… winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

These first three Lovecraft stories are all very different from each other, though Polaris leaves the other two behind and goes way out into left field. It is written in a dreamy prose that effectively suits its narrative.

The story is about an unnamed narrator who is suffering from insomnia, caused by the intrusion of the North Star Polaris’ “insane watching eye” into his bedroom.  He lives in a swamp and, try as he might, the light from the star won’t allow him to sleep. He lies there through “the long hellish hours of blackness”, frustrated and despairing.

One night he does finally fall asleep after viewing the light of the Aurora Borealis, followed by clouds which obscure Polaris.

And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time. Still and somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow betwixt strange peaks.

In his dream he views the city and watches the inhabitants rise from slumber, go about their business and then fall asleep again. He awakens but “not as I had been.” He becomes preoccupied with the city and views it several more times during his dreams. It seems so compelling to him that he begins to think that the city is real and his “other life in the house of stone and brick” is the dream.

One night as I listened to the discourse in the large square containing many statues, I felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form.

That was not the only change for him.  The city was now known to him as Olathoë in the land of Lomar and his friend Alos (“a true man and patriot”) talked about the advance of the Inutos.  These are “squat, hellish, yellow fiends” who have been attacking the civilization of Lomar. Alos speaks to the citizens of Olathoë, preparing them for war with the Inutos.

To me Alos denied a warrior’s part, for I was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships.  But my eyes were the keenest in the city…

Alos sends the narrator to the watch-tower with instructions to light a signal fire if the Inutos attempt a surprise attack. Initially determined in his task, he sees the Pole Star “fluttering as if alive, and leering like a fiend and tempter.” He perceives Polaris whispering a mysterious rhyme over and over and he struggles to stay awake.

My head, heavy and reeling, drooped to my breast, and when next I looked up it was in a dream; with the Pole Star grinning at me through a window from over the horrible swaying trees of a dream-swamp. And I am still dreaming.

He feels shame that he has let down his friends and the city of Olathoë yet cannot wake himself from the dream and return to the land of Lomar. He is helpless and trapped.

Polaris is a weird little story with interesting implications.  First, let’s get the necessary evil out of the way. The narrator talks about “squat, hellish, yellow fiends” he calls “Inutos”.  Later in the story he refers their possible descendants as “Esquimaux”. We know that Lovecraft, especially early on, was a bit of a xenophobe and his disdain for the Inuits/Inutos/Eskimos/Esquimaux is a pretty clear example. We can safely say “That’s Racist!” and Polaris unfortunately won’t be the last time we deal with the issue.

Yet we also understand that Lovecraft was a product of his time and his peculiar upbringing. It’s not fair to expect modern understanding about race from someone born late in the 19th century. We don’t give him a pass on the racism. It’s there and we observe it, shake our head and move forward.

Another notable thing about Polaris is the whole idea of what is real and what is a dream. The narrator starts out in our world and dreams of Lomar. Then he falls asleep while in Lomar and believes that his return to our world is a dream he cannot awaken from. He found himself at home in Lomar in ways he never felt in his little cabin in the swamp.

The theme of this story has to be frustration. The narrator begins by explaining that he wants to sleep and is frustrated by Polaris shining in his window. Once he journeys to Lomar, he wants to help with the invasion but is unfit for combat because he is “feeble and given to strange faintings”. He then is given an important job to do and falls asleep, possibly allowing the Inutos to invade. He knows he must be sleeping but cannot wake himself. The little I have read of Lovecraft’s life, the more I think frustration played a major role and certainly some of that bled through into the pages of Polaris.

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

Dagon is great Lovecraft story that was apparently written around the same time as The Tomb but has a lot more features which tie it to Lovecraft’s later stories. In many ways I like this a lot more than The Tomb.

We begin, of course, with a first-person narrator. This time he informs us that he is going to tell us a tale and then kill himself. The Tomb began similarly with its narrator explaining that he is in an insane asylum and, by the end of the story, that is where the narrator wound up.  Are we to expect the same from Dagon?  Will our narrator kill himself in the end?

First things first. The tale involves a man who is captured at sea by the Germans.  He escapes his captors and sets out in a small boat, a plan which does not bode well as it’s a very big ocean.

When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.

We are never told what happened here, only that “the change happened whilst I slept.” How did the narrator get out of his boat without waking up? Nevermind that. He waits a couple of days until the mire dries a bit and then he leaves his boat and begins walking toward a mound in the distance. He eventually reaches it several nights later and climbs to the top.

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

The sentence is notable as it seems to encapsulate both this story as well as many of Lovecraft’s later stories.  A mere mortal finds himself face to face with something far deeper and darker than he was prepared for. He teeters on the edge, usually of sanity.

At the top of the summit, he looks down into a valley and sees below him a gigantic monolith covered in hieroglyphics and sculptures depicting some sort of fish-men the size of whales.  As he’s pondering this, a “vast… loathsome” thing emerges from the waters and embraces the monolith. The fish-men are real. The narrator tells us he thinks he “went mad” at that point.

He escapes the situation, finds his way back to his boat and is picked up by a ship and taken to America. He finds no one who would believe his horrible story so he turns to morphine to provide relief.

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind – of a day when the land shall sink and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

Back where we started now, the narrator hears a noise at the door and believes it is a creature coming for him. “It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”

There is so much to like about this very short story.  We have a morphine-addicted, suicidal narrator.  A tale of a castaway on some hellish, slimy land. A race of giant fish-men, presumably waiting for the right moment to overthrow humanity and unleash their slimy dominion. And the only one who knows the truth of what is really out there will never be able to find anyone to believe him.

In many ways it is a perfect introduction to Lovecraft for someone unfamiliar with his style and themes. Much of what we see here will expand and mature in future stories.