Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family(1920), The Street (1920) by H.P. Lovecraft

Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family(1920) In many of the Cthulhu mythos stories the horror often revolves around old family lineages ruined ages back when some ancestor sold his life to the old ones. This isn't necessarily a Cthulhu mythos story, but it is an experiment in a narrative, where the Jermyn family lineage is tainted because of the actions of one man.

Sir Wade Jermyn was a Congo explorer, who returned home with a wife, not seen by other people. During his years in Congo, he had written books of the ancient, lost cultures of Congo, an idea that had been widely ridiculed. His new wife bore children which had a distinctive foreign look that Wade said to come from the side of the mother who was Portuguese.

This foreign look was strong in all of the future members of the Jermyn family. Arthur Jermyn, the great, great, great, great-grandson of Wade's, had supposedly the strangest look of all the descendants. He had a passion for being a scholar and ended up visiting the Belgian Congo to study the writings of Wade Jermyn. There Arthur meets a Belgian agent, who tells he knows of the culture of the white apes and their white goddess Wade Jermyn wrote of.

What happens next leads to the suicide of Arthur, as when he finally sees the coffin of the goddess, he finds a golden locket there, bearing the coat of arms of Jermyn's. But the biggest shock is the features of the mummy, which bear a resemblance to Arhut himself.

This style of tainted family history became one of the tropes Lovecraft used in his Cthulhu mythos stories. The idea of the lineage spoilt by ancestral behaviour might have had a deeper personal interest for him, as his both parents died in a mental asylum. Then again, you can see it as a continuation of Lovecraft's own believes in a racial hierarchy, where having children with a foreigner would definitely ruin a previously properly bred family for good. 

The Street (1920) In the world of Lovecraft, even the streets are racist. That is the conclusion too easy to draw from this short story, where the development of a New England town is described from the perspective of a street.

The story follows the evolution of the town from colonial times to modern ages when it falls from being a beautiful home for local people to a run-down slum inhabited by strange-looking, grim people, some of which are terrorists. In the end, the street itself spoils a terrorist plot by collapsing upon itself, thus killing the people who tried to harm the town and the country it was born on from the steps of the first settlers.

The Street is a silly story, but it also portrays in what kind of light Lovecraft viewed other people. So great was his belief in the superiority of the pure-blooded Americans, that even the streets they trod on are willing to take on the riff-raff threatening their existence. If you've ever wanted to convince someone of the unsavoury nature of Lovecraft's, the Street could be used for that.