Monday, October 10, 2016

"The Rats in the Walls" (a book review post)

When I was a kid, we had squirrels in the attic. At night, sometimes, you could lie awake and listen to them roll pecans around -- we had two big pecan trees in our backyard -- and, whenever anyone needed to go up there -- which wasn't infrequent -- stray pecans could be found littering the attic floor. I actually wrote a short story, "The Squirrel Olympics," based on the whole thing, a short story that won some award or other and was published in an anthology in some local something-or-other. Hmm... I wonder if I still have a copy of that anywhere...

But I digress.

The problem with Lovecraft's story, "The Rats in the Walls," has nothing to do with lying awake and listening to rodents in your house, something I'm sure many people have experienced. The problem with the story is that it has a rather tremendous buildup that drags on and on, which is saying something for a story that's less than 8000 words, that, then, left me with the feeling of "that's all?" To say the least, I was unimpressed with where the story went.

Maybe if the story didn't follow so many of Lovecraft's normal conventions of storytelling, I would have ended up in a different place by the end of it, but it's stereotypically stereotypical Lovecraft. A man goes home to visit his ancestral home to find out there is some deep, dark family secret he knows nothing about. Of course, he is the last of his line, so he has no way of discovering the secret but, whatever it is, it has caused his family to be reviled in the place of their origin.

He sets about restoring his family home, which has fallen into ruin since his family abandoned it to escape their legacy in the new world. Once the restoration is complete and he begins living there, he begins to hear rats in the walls at night. The problem? The walls are stone. Solid stone.

But the cats in "castle" also hear the rats, and it drives them into a frenzy every night. Delapore is the only human who seems to hear the rats, though, so everyone else (the servants) are confounded by the actions of the cats.

Eventually, all of this leads to finding an underground cavern (spoiler alert!) where his family used to raise humans in pens for eating. In his horror at finding this out, Delapore immediately falls upon one of his companions and begins eating him, something Delapore can't remember after the fact.

At any rate, the reveal was not worth the build up, and the sudden cannibalism by the main character was not really believable. Not that it was less believable than a lot of Lovecraft's contrivances, but the blackout suffered by the character made it something too removed to be believed. Plus, the rats scurrying in the walls just wasn't creepy enough to make the story horrifying. Not a Lovecraft story I would recommend.

11 comments:

  1. I don't think I've read that one.
    Rats must scare someone, but they aren't that intimidating. Even in that Stephen King story with the mutant rats underground. (Made into a really lame movie.) It's just laughable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've read a few of what I think of as 'slow burn' stories recently, and they're hard to pull off. They're the "what's going on here, this is weird" type of stories, and the problem I think is twofold.

    First, the buildup too frequently substitutes for plot. If the buildup isn't itself interesting, the story stops.

    Second, the payoff has to be worth it. Rats and cannibals aren't worth it, not least because it wasn't actually the narrator doing it. This is like when Ben Affleck found out his ancestors used to own slaves, and asked that it be covered up. Why would we care that Affleck's ancestors a hundred years ago did something? Same with this protagonist.

    Amnesia, a slow buildup with a twist, and ultimately dissatisfying conclusion: Lovecraft was the Shymalan of his day.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. See, I feel the same way about the thing with Affleck but, I guess, a lot of people DO seem to care. I don't know.

      Lovecraft as Shyamalan. heh

      Delete
  3. Yeah, cannibalism just really isn't that scary, especially if it's nameless, faceless people being eaten across generations. If it was revealed that main characters who had gone missing during the story were being turned into meat and fed to the other characters, that might be a bit more scary/unsettling.

    Also, I'm one of those guys that finds rats to be kinda cute. So... a rat in the wall? Awww, I hope he's comfy!

    http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/cute-pet-rats-26__880.jpg

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ABftS: Well, it's supposed to be a lot of rats, like a horde. Or something.
      But still...

      Delete
  4. Yes, that's exactly my problem with the story. It was like the buildup went on forever and the payoff was almost nothing. Kind of interesting, but so not worth all the damn description. And OMG, the name of that cat. From the name of Lovecraft's real cat, because of course it is.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jeanne: Yeah, I didn't even know how to address the issue of the cat. I think that was a common way of naming black cats at the time, though. I could be wrong about that, but I picked up that impression somewhere.

      Delete
  5. Super creepy title, super creepy story--what with the cannibalism and all. Yuck. Sorry it wasn't more appealing, but I"m stymied to consider how it could have been.
    V :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I used to read some Lovecraft in high school. I always enjoyed his ability to use such beautiful language to tell stories of complete horror. I'm not into cannibalistic readings, but I love a good scary story!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Megan: I have not been impressed with his use of language, especially since he tends to use the same bag of words in every single story.

      Delete