Dreams in the Witch House by H P Lovecraft

The Dreams in The Witch House by H P Lovecraft.mp3

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"Dreams in the Witch House" was written in January and February 1932 and published in Weird Tales in July 1933, which places it in the middle of Lovecraft's mature period, after "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Colour Out of Space" had established his cosmic horror and shortly after "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "At the Mountains of Madness" had pushed that vision toward science fiction. It is one of his most explicit attempts to fuse two traditions that he usually kept apart: the New England witch-lore of Arkham, with its Salem-derived trial records and the cackling Keziah Mason and her familiar Brown Jenkin, and the modern mathematics and physics that fascinated him in the 1920s and 30s, here represented by Walter Gilman's studies in non-Euclidean geometry and quantum theory. Lovecraft proposes that the witch's escape from her cell centuries earlier was a matter of angles and curves rather than of devilry, so that the supernatural is recast as a higher geometry through which a person may slip into other dimensions and out among the strange spheres where Azathoth and the "Black Man" hold court. This rationalising of witchcraft looks forward to the Yith material in "The Shadow Out of Time," and the story's Arkham setting links it to "Herbert West" and "The Dunwich Horror" within the Miskatonic cycle. Lovecraft himself thought poorly of it, calling it a failure in letters, and critics have often agreed that the melodramatic climax, with its rat-faced familiar and the stolen child, sits uneasily beside the real intellectual daring of its premise. Even so, it remains an important hinge in his work, the point where the Gothic witch tale and the cosmic-scientific tale meet, and it gave later writers a durable model for treating magic as hidden mathematics.