Review of ‘The Lurking Fear’ by H P Lovecraft

This short story catapults the reader straight into the horror. The ‘lurking fear’ is mentioned in the first sentence as we are told of a quest to find it, involving a thunderstorm and a deserted mansion. What follows is a feverish nightmare tale, liberally sprinkled with favourite Lovecraft words such as ‘eldritch’, ‘grotesque’, ‘morbid’, ‘hideous’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘madness’ and ‘chaos’. The narrator, who has a special interest in horror, is drawn to a mountain where large numbers of isolated settlers have gone missing. The ‘lurking fear’ is thought to be some kind of demon, but where it lives and how it takes people without being seen, are unknown. The fear is therefore a concrete thing, as well as an emotional state, but when considering the reveal of the ending, the fear is also symbolic of the beast inside human nature. As always in Lovecraft there are dreadful and mind-bending suggestions of ancient evils, of which it is far better that we remain ignorant: ‘I had at last pried out one of earth’s supreme horrors—one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity.’

Published in Weird Tales, June 1928. I read this on Project Gutenberg. Illustration caption: “They were slithering shadows of red madness.”