A strange fever gets a hold on Walter, bringing him terrible nightmares of the old witch and her inhuman familiar, Brown Jenkins, a human-faced rat with small human hand-like paws. These nightmares grow worse with the approach of the Wilburgis night, a nigh all the old people and immigrants of Arkham are deadly afraid of.
In his nightmares, Keziah is coercing Walter to be her aide in an upcoming human sacrifice of a small child. He is to sell his soul to an evil entity known as the Black Man, who is a messenger between the witches and Nyarlathotep. While Walter manages to kill Keziah in his dream, he later dies when a giant rat tunnels its way through his chest. When the Witch House is finally demolished, centuries forth of child's bones are found from its debris.
The Dreams in the Witch House is a rather nasty little story. While Lovecraft had always a penchant towards stories with grim ends, he takes some extra steps here in how Walter, a man who gets trapped in the matters of cosmic horror, meets his end in a very grim manner. The story wasn't favourably received up in Lovecraft's lifetime and it has gained more positive views only recently.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is, that it's not told as a 1st person narrative, as was common for Lovecraft. While he had written 3rd person narratives before, he commonly did prefer the 1st person view.
I don't find this a bad story; it does go, perhaps a bit too far, in lengths in trying to explain the unexplainable euclidian geometry-based planes between time and space, making it a tad baffling read, but that said, the horror elements of the tale are pretty gripping. Keziah Manson is a terrifying entity on her own right as is her familiar Jenkins, the little human-faced rat fiend. It's well worth checking out and you'll know soon enough if you want to read it through.
The Thing on the Doorstep (1933) After confessing to shooting his best friend, Daniel Upton decides to tell the story of why he shot Edward Derby and why it wasn't a murderer. Edward was a young, coddled child prodigy, who in Arkham University fell in love with Asenath Waite, a daughter of an old magician Ephraim Waite. Asenath herself was from the ill-reputed fishing port of Illsmouth and while she was free of the more disturbing features usually joined towards Illsmouthians, she did have frightening eyes.
After marriage, Edward began to change, abandoning his old friends and showing traits unusual to him, in all mental, skills and physical. Later Daniel learns that Asenath isn't really Asenath, but Ephraim, who had taken his daughter's body as his own and was now trying to possess Edward as he wants a male body and Edward is weak of will.
After Asenath leaves their home, Edward has learnt ways of keeping the old magician out of his head, he begins to renovate his old family home in order to move back there as he plans on divorcing Asenath. This is not to be, as he ends up in a Mental Asulym, where it takes some for him the recover. When he does, Daniel is certain it's not his old friend, but Ephraim, who has managed to finally take his body.
A couple of nights later, a short figure knocks on Daniel's door, handing him a message. It reveals, that the figure is actually a rotting corpse of Asenath's, whom Edward killed, but that didn't destroy the soul of the old Ephraim. Having been banished from his own body, he still managed to drag the lifeless carcass of poor Asenath to Daniel's house, where he begs him to destroy Ephraim and burn the body.
There are very few, if any, surprises in store in The Thing on the Doorstep for those who have read Lovecraft's stories. I guess even those not familiar with his stories will pretty quickly realise what's going on in the story. It follows his basic formula about people partaking in matters they should not, as those matters will swallow them whole.
What does make it stand out is, that here Lovecraft pays more attention to his characters, fleshing all the main players out more than he usually does. For him, this feels almost like a personal story and it has been noted, that Edward feels an autobiographical character.
Generally speaking, The Thing on the Doorstep is thought of as one of Lovecraft's weakest stories. The story is predictable and, as some have noted, melodramatic and formulaic. Because it's more of a personal story in nature, Daniel Upton doesn't really witness any of the matters Edward tells him about, there's even a lack of a larger presence of the ancient beings trying to take over the world. They are mentioned and their effect on Edward is clear, but we don't really experience any of that beyond his short blurts.
I don't find this a terrible story as such, Lovecraft has written far worse. Depending on what you are looking for, The Thing on the Doorstep is a perfectly readable tale and perhaps even a memorable one.
The Evil Clergyman (1933) Yet another one of Lovecraft's stories, that was dug out from his vast correspondence and released only after his death. The short story begins from an attic of an old house, where the narrator is warned of touching a small, rectangular object on the table. He does not heed the warnings and ends up projecting a strange light towards it from an electric light he had in his pocket.
There's an electric crackle and snap, then he sees how a thin, tall and evil-looking man dropped in Angelical clerics clothing comes in the room and throws books in the fire. Other men enter, again dropped in the clothing of Angelical church, but the man who entered first takes the deice from the table, which causes the others to flee. Then he grabs a rope and begins to turn it into a noose like he were to hang himself, but then the narrator intervenes. With an evil smile, the clergyman turns to the man, who then shines his special light on the evil man, causing him to stagger down the attic stairs.
The narrator follows but finds no corpse from there, but the villagers now return to the old house. The man, who brought him up, tells of a change that has taken place on the narrator and presents him with a mirror. To his shock, he now looks like the clergyman.
The Evil Clergyman reads more like a concept draft. It has a decent idea and from the looks of it, Lovecraft might have been toying with the idea of writing a story about time travel. While this is a nice concept, that's where it stays. Nothing special to see here.
The Book (1933) is A short, unfinished story, where a narrator, who has found a mysterious book that allows him to travel in the dark corners of the universe. There's very little to be said about it, as it's merely 3 pages long draft. that doesn't manage to go much further than giving a small introduction to the setting.
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