by Pa Rock
Word Sprite
As mentioned previously on this blog, I have recently finished reading the Library of America edition of Lovecraft Tales, a compilation of works of H.P. Lovecraft that were selected for publication in this volume by horror author, Peter Straub. While Lovecraft's stories are exceedingly dark and disturbing, he sprinkles them with words that glisten. Lovecraft employs a vocabulary that is somewhat arcane, especially by modern standards, yet it is elegantly arcane. The following examples come from the first story in the collection, The Statement of Randolph Carter, which is a mere seven pages in length.
...confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice...
And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade - or some nameless thing I cannot describe...
But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken.
...for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.
...so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years.
On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude...
Over the valley's rim, a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seem to emanate from unheard-of-catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades...
My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre...
...we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene...
The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror.
Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre.
I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulcral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate.
Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary.
...and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality - a half-sentience.
Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the week-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside...
...and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren...
I have said that aeons seemed to elapse...
Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied?
Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.
The tales of H.P. Lovecraft are strewn with gems of language, sparkling across every page. It is a sad sign of our increasingly vulgar homogenity that Microsoft Word does not recognize many of them!
