The Xothic Legend Cycle

IN his working notes Carter dubbed this tale "Diary of a Madman." That fits the theme well enough, but of course it was the title of the famous tale by Guy de Maupassant, and Lin was no doubt planning co come up with a title of his own, which in due time he did. The result seems like a combination of Jack Chapman Miske’s story "The Thing in the Moonlight" (credited to Lovecraft when Miske published it in his magazine Bizarre because Miske had added a few sentences onto either end of an account of a dream from one of Lovecraft’s letters) and Derleth’s "Something in Wood." Remember, Lin was not simply filching material from others, as unperceptive critics have often alleged. Rather, his point was to salute the originals by recombining their DNA, so to speak, into new patterns that would induce simultaneous reactions of both novelty and nostalgia in the reader.

“Something in the Moonlight”, which appeared in Weird Tales #2 (Zebra Books, 1981), makes an interesting use of the "unreliable narrator" device (see Wayne Booth’s discussion in The Rhetoric of Fiction). An unreliable narrator is a means of casting the whole story in an ironic mode, opening a gap between the narrator and the reader, who understands the situation better than the narraror does. Of course this is because the author has planned it this way. He has placed sufficient clues to alert the reader that the narrator is oblivious co certain important things that the reader will see. The author lets the reader in on the joke, while keeping the narrator in the dark. For instance, in Robert Bloch’s "Notebook Found in a Deserted House", the child narrator’s naiveté prevents him from understanding the ominous character of the events until too late, creating in the reader an acute sense of frustration and anxiety: He would like to warn the child but can’t.

In “Something in the Moonlight”, the main character is committed to a lunatic asylum for his beliefs about the imminent appearance of a Mythos demon. Of course, outsiders deem these beliefs delusions. The reader is already prepared to accept the reality of the Mythos in the Lovecraftian narrative universe, and so we at first regard the protagonist as something of a martyr, his confinement a product of the Inquisition conducted by the lords of the mainstream plausibility structure against those who dare take a dissenting view (see Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness). Then, the more we read of the prisoner’s diary, with its claustrophobic, margin-to-margin cataloguing of Mythos data, the more we begin to suspect that he actually has gone round the bend, has lost more than a few sanity points. It’s supposed to be pretty common for Mythos protagonists, after all. So just how delusional is he? That’s where the suspense element comes in. The reader, familiar with the Mythos, can not be sure just how reliable or unreliable the narrator is supposed to be, until ...

What is surprising is that Lin did not make the protagonist of this tale the hapless Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins from "The Horror in the Gallery." Having been committed to the very same loony bin for delusions of the same general character, he might well have been pictured seeking desperately to evade the revenge of Zoth-Ommog. We already know of Hodgkins’ tendency to dump massive amounts of Mythos textual data into his diaries, so that, too, would have fit perfectly. So I will forgive you if you want to edit silently as you read, substituting Hodgkins’ name for Horby’s.