SOMETHING IS LIVING UNDER TEMPEST MOUNTAIN

There are places sensible people avoid.

Old houses with no lights in the windows. Roads which disappear into the woods. Villages where nobody wants to talk about what happened last summer. Hills where the thunderstorms seem rather too frequent and the locals have spent generations developing elaborate reasons not to go outside after dark.

Naturally, H. P. Lovecraft sends an investigator straight up there.

The Lurking Fear, written in 1922, is one of Lovecraft's nastier early tales: a story of violent storms, an abandoned mansion, local legends, unexplained deaths and something moving beneath the earth.

This unabridged audiobook edition, read by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot, runs for approximately 54 minutes and gives the whole story room to accumulate its particular mixture of dread, grotesquerie and increasingly poor investigative decisions.

Because when an entire settlement appears to have been destroyed during a thunderstorm, the appropriate response is obviously to spend the night in the abandoned house everybody believes is connected to the killings.

Investigative journalism was more committed in the 1920s.

THE MARTENSE MANSION

High on Tempest Mountain in the Catskills stands the deserted Martense mansion.

It has been empty for years.

This has not improved its reputation.

The surrounding country has accumulated stories about the place for generations: disappearances, strange deaths and something vast and dreadful moving through the darkness during summer storms.

Most such stories can be dismissed as folklore.

Then a storm sweeps across the mountain and an isolated community is effectively wiped out.

Something has torn through the settlement.

Something with claws.

Now the rumours about the mansion become rather harder to laugh off.

An unnamed investigator, already fascinated by tales of the strange and horrible, travels into the Catskills to find out what happened.

He has companions.

Initially.

He has a revolver.

This is reassuring for approximately as long as it takes to remember that this is an H. P. Lovecraft story.

LOVECRAFT BEFORE THE MYTHOS BECAME A BRAND

The Lurking Fear comes from an interesting period in Lovecraft's development.

He had already written stories such as Dagon, The Doom That Came to Sarnath and The Nameless City, but many of the elements now popularly associated with the “Cthulhu Mythos” had not yet settled into the familiar constellation of forbidden books, recurring gods and New England occult scholarship.

This story is more direct.

More gothic.

More physical.

There is an old house.

There is a family history.

There are graves.

There are tunnels.

There are things glimpsed in lightning.

The horror is not sitting several dimensions away contemplating the philosophical insignificance of mankind.

It is considerably closer.

Probably underneath you.

That gives The Lurking Fear a slightly different flavour from some of Lovecraft's better-known cosmic tales. It retains his obsession with ancestry, degeneration and buried history, but wraps them around something closer to a traditional monster story.

Albeit a traditional monster story written by a man pathologically incapable of allowing an adjective to travel alone.

BUILT TO KEEP YOU READING

The story was originally written for serial publication.

It appeared in four instalments in Home Brew between January and April 1923, and you can feel that structure in the way the tale progresses.

Each stage of the investigation pushes deeper.

First the disaster.

Then the mansion.

Then the graves.

Then the truth beneath the mountain.

Lovecraft repeatedly allows the narrator to believe he has understood what is happening before revealing that he has merely peeled away the next layer.

For audio, that structure works particularly well.

You are not listening to an enormous novel which requires keeping twenty-three characters and three generations of Russian aristocracy straight while driving.

It is a compact descent.

Fifty-four minutes.

One mystery.

A mountain.

A ruined family mansion.

And something which really ought to have stayed underground.

A STORY MADE FOR A DARK ROOM

Lovecraft's prose is unusually suited to being read aloud when the reader knows how to handle it.

The sentences are long.

The vocabulary is elaborate.

Descriptions accumulate rather than arriving efficiently.

On the page that can sometimes tempt a modern reader to race ahead looking for the next event.

Read aloud, the rhythm becomes much more apparent.

The repetition builds tension.

Descriptions have time to sit.

The storm has time to gather.

The narrator's increasingly obsessive pursuit of the truth becomes part of the performance rather than simply another paragraph to get through.

Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot reads the story unabridged, allowing that deliberate accumulation to remain intact.

No abridgement.

No dramatisation replacing chunks of prose.

No attempt to “modernise” Lovecraft's language by sanding all the corners off.

Just the story, read in English, in its entirety.

THUNDER

The storms are practically characters themselves.

Tempest Mountain earned its name for a reason.

Thunderstorms hang over the story from the beginning, connecting past and present, superstition and evidence. Lightning illuminates things characters would rather not have seen. Thunder covers noises which might otherwise have provided useful warning.

It also provides Lovecraft with exactly the sort of theatrical weather he enjoyed.

Nobody in this story discovers a horror on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon beneath lightly scattered cloud.

The heavens have standards.

This makes The Lurking Fear particularly effective as an autumn or winter listen: headphones on, lights down, weather behaving badly outside.

You can listen to it on a sunny train journey if you insist.

The story cannot stop you.

It will judge you.

ANCESTRAL HORROR

Lovecraft returned again and again to the idea that the past is not safely past.

Old families decline.

Names persist.

Bloodlines conceal things.

Houses remember what happened inside them long after the people involved are gone.

The Martense family sits squarely in that tradition.

Their old mansion has become the geographical centre of local folklore, and investigating the present horror inevitably means digging into the history of the people who once occupied it.

As usual with Lovecraft, genealogy is never merely genealogy.

If someone begins investigating your great-grandparents in one of his stories, start packing.

The deeper the narrator digs into the Martense history, the less comfortable the distinction between old legend and current danger becomes.

Eventually the investigation moves beneath the ground itself.

At which point anybody with functioning instincts would leave the Catskills and take up stamp collecting.

Our narrator does not possess functioning instincts.

This is why we have a story.

THE INVESTIGATOR PROBLEM

Lovecraftian protagonists possess a peculiar form of courage.

They are terrified.

They know they are terrified.

They frequently explain in considerable detail exactly how terrified they are.

Then they continue.

A modern horror protagonist hears scratching underneath the floorboards and calls somebody.

A Lovecraft protagonist hears scratching underneath the floorboards, develops a detailed theory involving ancestral catastrophe, retrieves a lantern and personally enters the tunnel.

This behaviour is tremendously useful to horror writers.

The narrator of The Lurking Fear is particularly afflicted.

He actively seeks out strange horrors and becomes increasingly determined to understand what happened on Tempest Mountain, even as the evidence shifts from disturbing to appalling.

Every discovery produces another question.

Every answer makes the mountain worse.

Eventually curiosity has dragged him much further than ordinary self-preservation would permit.

Which is probably the purest recurring lesson in Lovecraft's fiction:

There are things mankind was not meant to know.

Somebody will immediately attempt to find out anyway.

A DIFFERENT SORT OF LOVECRAFT STORY

If you know Lovecraft mainly through The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth or At the Mountains of Madness, this is a useful look at another side of his work.

There are no lengthy expeditions to Antarctica.

No elaborate occult conspiracy spanning the globe.

No pages of scholarly speculation about ancient extraterrestrial civilisations.

The scale is smaller and the horror more immediate.

One mountain.

One ruined mansion.

One dreadful family history.

One investigator who keeps going downward when every instinct available to the human nervous system is screaming up.

The story is closer to gothic and weird horror than fully developed cosmic horror, while still carrying recognisably Lovecraftian obsessions.

Decay.

Isolation.

Inheritance.

Degeneration.

The terrible consequences of discovering what happened before you arrived.

It is compact, nasty and unusually visual.

ABOUT THE READER

Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot is an audiobook narrator and producer whose recordings include works by H. P. Lovecraft, H. Beam Piper and other writers of classic horror and speculative fiction.

This recording was produced by FNH Audio.

Herriot's approach here is a straight reading rather than a full-cast drama. The focus remains on Lovecraft's language and the narrator's increasingly unpleasant journey into the mystery of Tempest Mountain.

That suits the material.

The Lurking Fear is told in the first person, with the entire story filtered through the investigator's memory of what happened.

Listening to a single narrator therefore preserves the feeling of somebody recounting an experience they survived but have not entirely recovered from.

Which, in Lovecraft, is about as close as anyone gets to a happy ending.

A SHORT AUDIOBOOK THAT ACTUALLY FITS INTO AN EVENING

At approximately 54 minutes, this is an easy one-sitting listen.

No twenty-hour commitment.

No remembering where you were three weeks later.

No discovering that the audiobook has ninety-seven chapters and the protagonist still has not reached the mountain.

Put it on during an evening.

Listen while painting miniatures.

Take it on a journey.

Use it as atmosphere before a horror RPG session.

Or sit somewhere dark and actually give it your full attention.

The story was originally consumed episodically over four months.

You now have the considerable advantage of not needing to wait until February 1923 for the second instalment.

Technology occasionally improves civilisation.

WHAT YOU'RE GETTING

This edition contains:

• The complete, unabridged text of H. P. Lovecraft's The Lurking Fear

• Read by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot

• Produced by FNH Audio

• English-language narration

• Approximately 54 minutes running time

• Digital audiobook download

The story itself was written in November 1922 and first published in four instalments of Home Brew between January and April 1923.

A century later, the Martense mansion is still waiting on the mountain.

There are probably safer ways to spend fifty-four minutes.

They are unlikely to be as interesting.

SOMETHING IS DOWN THERE

A storm destroys a settlement.

The old stories point towards an abandoned mansion.

The mansion points towards a dead family.

The dead point underground.

And the investigator, having been presented with every possible opportunity to reconsider his life choices, continues digging.

The Lurking Fear is Lovecraft at his pulpy, gothic, subterranean best: compact enough for one sitting, nasty enough to linger afterwards, and performed here in full by Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot.

Turn the lights down.

Wait for thunder.

Then find out what has been living beneath Tempest Mountain.