There was, for instance, the belief that a legion of bat-winged devils kept Witches’ Sabbath each night at the priory-a legion whose sustenance might explain the disproportionate abundance of coarse, vegetables harvested in the vast gardens. Over the years there have been many horrific stories attributed to the castle: The locals look upon the narrator’s restoration of the castle with horror.
The ancestral links go further back in time the castle was built in 1261 on the temple’s foundations and it is claimed that the site had been used as a place of worship in the Roman period and further back possibly even to the Celtic druids. The narrator recounts how he bought, then renovated Exham Priory (possibly in Northumberland) which was an old ancestral building that had fallen into another family’s ownership after the narrator’s ancestor, Walter de la Poer, fled the building and the country to New England in the seventeenth century, following accusations that he’d murdered several members of his household. The Rats in the Walls, for example, clips along at a steady pace and initially seems like a pretty standard ghost story until we descend further into a more typical Lovecraftian world of cannabilistic atavism and subterranean worlds…oops, I’ve given the ending away…never mind though as the real fun with Lovecraft is reading him rather than trying to work out the ending, especially as most of his stories end with the main character descending into madness. Lovecraft is a favourite author of mine but his overblown style and ‘cosmic horror’ subject matter is not to everyone’s taste.
This is hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. I decided to re-read this as part of The 1924 Club‘s fortnight of blogs centred around works published in 1924. Lovecraft which was first published in Weird Tales in March 1924.
The Rats in the Walls is a short story by H.P.
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