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By Root 349 0

impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapour from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight in its horror … And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.

(The Imp of the Perverse)

Poe can speak for himself on that last point, but this passage does serve to show us how Poe's approach varies from other writers of the tale of terror, for whereas Radcliffe, and in this century Lovecraft, gave their terrors supernatural guise, Poe was obsessed with the fears which sprang directly from the human mind. In those unpleasantly morbid stories like The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and Descent into the Maelstrom, most of the horrors stem from within the characters, not, as in the usual horror story, from without. Lovecraft could describe the Colour Out of Space or the Dunwich Horror, but he described them as coming from beyond the Earth we know. The affinities between Radcliffe, Poe and Lovecraft show that their inspiration came from the same source, but only Poe was really aware of the fact that he was actually describing certain aspects of his own mind.

I am not, I must admit, so familiar with the work of Lovecraft, since I find most of his stories hard going. He appears to lack the scope of Radcliffe and Poe at their best, but those stories I have read certainly seem to illustrate the point of this article. His hints of lurking horrors on the threshold of our awareness (described, of course, in supernatural terms), his landscapes and set-pieces all show the influence of those earlier writers, as well as being in close affinity with the visions of the mescalin-eater, madman or nightmare-sufferer. His “nightmare landscapes” are, of course, just that.

Though one could find more effective passages in Lovecraft, the following description ties in with Udolpho and Usher and shows Lovecraft using a similar device:

… A certain huge, dark church …stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimneypots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century or more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was the earliest experimental form of Gothic revival … The longer he watched the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things.

(The Haunter of the Dark)

It was, incidentally, the revival of interest in Gothic architecture which was responsible for the first Gothic novel—Walpole's Castle of Otranto. I shall deal with this aspect later. Several people have pointed out that the buildings which we term “Gothic” invest in people a strange, transcendental sensibility often almost as strong as similar feelings released by drugs.

Just as the sight of Gothic architecture releases the images and fears and fancies lurking beneath our conscious minds, so sleep acts to produce nightmares, opium to bring marvelous dreams, mescalin to alter our view of the world, or the fantasy tale to give us an insight into our unconscious lives. The feelings