I have
nearly finished reading The Horror in the
Museum, a collection of 24 stories that represent the collaborative and
revision work H.P. Lovecraft completed with various aspiring writers over a
period of nearly two decades. Because
these stories span the length of Lovecraft’s career, they are critical to a
broader understanding of his importance as a writer. Though of uneven quality, all
are fascinating to read.
Even
the more pathetic efforts show how Lovecraft’s style and visionary ideas began
to influence up-and-coming writers in the early part of the twentieth
century. Ripples of this influence can
be seen in numerous contemporary anthologies of “Cthulhu Mythos” inspired
fiction and film. There seems to be no
immediate end to enthusiasm for Lovecraftian motifs in horror fiction.
The
Lovecraft-Rimel collaboration The Tree on
the Hill was written in 1934 but not published until 1940. Duane W. Rimel was a prolific author of
essays, poetry and some 26 stories, most published in the mid-1930s to the
mid-1940s. He was still actively
publishing his work as late as the 1980s.
Rimel collaborated with Lovecraft on three short stories—The Tree on the Hill, The Sorcery of Aphlar,
and The Disinterment, all
produced around 1934—and one poem, Dreams of Yith (1934). A fourth story, The Spell of the Blue Stone, referred to in correspondence, has not
been found. Rimel was just 19 years old
when he first sought Lovecraft’s guidance.
He died in 1996.
S.T.
Joshi reports that Lovecraft lent Rimel several books from his library in an
effort to help him become familiar with classic examples of weird fiction. He also advised him not to emulate pulp
fiction as he honed his skills as an author.
Interestingly, Rimel later went on to publish a significant amount of erotica
and lesbian pulp fiction.
Joshi
believes that the final section of The
Tree on the Hill is primarily Lovecraft’s contribution, especially the
passage from “The Chronicle of Nath”. He
describes Rimel’s story as “confused”.
However, in a letter to Rimel, Lovecraft praised the young man’s work “…despite
a certain cumbrousness & tendency toward anticlimax…” It may be that the story had promise. The notion of a horror that periodically
returns and is only visible with special technology is intriguing, and might
have been further developed in a longer work.
The Tree on the Hill, one of Rimel’s earliest stories,
seems to be a rewrite of Ralph A. Cram’s The
Dead Valley (1895), which is admittedly a much better story. Lovecraft was apparently impressed with
Cram’s work, making a brief, one sentence reference to the story in his classic
essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature
(1927):
In
The Dead Valley the eminent architect
and mediaevalist Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague
regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description.
Cram
was well regarded in the early twentieth century for his design of numerous
collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings.
However, in 1895, early in his architectural career, he published a slim
volume of short fiction called Black
Spirits and White: A Book of Ghost Stories. The book contained just six
stories, of which The Dead Valley was
the last and probably best known. It frequently
appears in anthologies of classic weird fiction from the late 1800s to the
early 1900s. An interesting discussion
of Cram’s story can be found at http://thetaleisallthatmatters.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-dead-valley-by-ralph-adams-cram.html.
There
are numerous similarities between The
Tree on the Hill and The Dead Valley. Both are relatively short, and can easily be
read side by side to illuminate and compare how each author developed the same
basic idea. Both stories feature an evil
tree that may be more animal than vegetable in nature. Despite a few minor differences, this tree
seems to be essentially the same organism in both stories.
As the titles suggest, one of the trees is
located on top of a hill while the other is in the center of a valley, but both
locations are desolate and oddly devoid of any other life form. Though not explicitly stated, there is the implication that something otherworldly occurred where the trees now stand. Perhaps a meteorite? The settings recall the “blasted heath” in
H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space
(1927):
There
was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust
or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about.
Both
stories involve an abrupt change of scenery that disorients the narrator. In the Lovecraft-Rimel story this is mediated
by a dream or hallucination, likely caused by the tree. There is the suggestion that the narrator has
been transported to a different planet or dimension—a mysterious temple also appears
in the landscape at one point.
In
Cram’s story two boys happen upon the strange valley and its tree while hiking
back to town near dusk. Proximity to the
predatory tree alters their consciousness to that of a nightmare, the type in
which desperate escape is hampered by the terrifying gravitational force of the
marauding horror. While the two boys in The Dead Valley flee in terror, the
narrator in The Tree on the Hill conquers
his fear long enough to snap several photos of the tree. In both stories the narrator eventually
faints from terror.
The Tree on the Hill contains numerous Lovecraftian
touches. There is the typical bromance
between two male scholars who live together, one who is timid and prone to
fainting, and the other who is more reckless and commanding. The relationship between the narrator and his
roommate Constantine Theunis is reminiscent of that between Randolph Carter and
Harley Warren in The Statement of
Randolph Carter (1920). There is an
ancient text of esoteric knowledge—here called “The Chronicle of Nath”—which
Theunis happens to have on his shelf. It
provides helpful information about the origin of the narrator’s frightening
vision beneath the tree.
There
is also reference to “the Year of the Black Goat”, an eons-long cycle in which
the tree-creature periodically appears on earth. Is this a manifestation connected with
Shub-Niggarath, also known as “The Goat with a Thousand Young”? This member of the Great Old Ones is
mentioned in Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in
Darkness, which had been published just few years before the Rimel
story. Finally, there is a diminutive
“shining trapezohedron”, in the form of an amber colored prism, that allows a
clearer, but also more terrifying view of the photographic evidence. Since mention of “the old Gem” precedes that of the shining
trapezohedron in Lovecraft’s The Haunter
of the Dark (1936), it is tempting to think that The Tree on the Hill contains the germ of this idea, or at least
another application of it.
Archetypically
speaking, the image of the tree has numerous religious and mythological
connotations, not the least of which is its unification of the underworld with
the earth and the sky. In many ancient
cultures, the tree is the axis mundi, around which the universe is organized, a
source of enlightenment and wisdom as well as spiritual nourishment and
sacrifice. There is of course the
Biblical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and its as yet unsampled
companion, the Tree of Life. Like
humans, trees are spread between two or more worlds, between the material and the
spiritual, earth and sky, and between the temporal and the timeless. Thus the tree is an especially potent symbol in
horror fiction.
********************
See
also
2. An
Island in a River (Algernon Blackwood’s The
Willows)
3.
Cain and Abel: the Later Years (Walter de la Mare’s The Tree)
“There
will be Guests at the Hall” (M.R. James’ The Ash-Tree)
Under the
Olive Tree (H.P. Lovecraft’s The Tree)
Forbidden
Tree and Forbidden Fruit in Zothique (Clark Ashton Smith’s Xeethra)
2.
Mad Scientist, Mad Gardener (R.G.
Macready’s The Plant Thing)
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