Continuing his excellent adaptations of Lovecraft’s work, Francois Baranger delivers The Dunwich Horror in stunning detail and deep, disturbing horror.
The Dunwich Horror tells the story of the isolated, xenophobic and disturbed New England (natch) town of Dunwich. Somehow, in a story with zero immigrants, Lovecraft once again manages to be intensely racist and bigoted. In this case, the majority of his bigotry is targeted at the townsfolk themselves, implying that the plot of the story is more or less par for the course for isolated mountain towns. JD Vance the writer would probably not approve of this, but JD Vance the Senator is a complete dickhead so who cares.
There is also an implied black character who speaks in an Al Jolson-tier insulting patois. I bring it up here because Lovecraft’s racism is well documented, and these adaptations explicitly do not amend this language for reasons they elucidate at the back of the book, though they do acknowledge and denounce it, but it could still be shocking to the unaware reader.
Anyways, the story details a bizarre family who produce bizarre offspring that disturb the rural town. The son, Wilbur Whately, is raised by his mother and grandfather, who are largely considered to be wizards. If you’re wondering why they’d think something like that, Wilbur is seven feet tall and fully grown by age 4. Shit ensues, ultimately leading to a calamity in which professors from Arkham University are forced to intervene, fighting magic with magic. I will spoil this slightly by saying this story is almost unique in Lovecraft’s oeuvre because it has a “happy” ending, in which evil is pretty directly defeated. Compared with stories like Innsmouth, Cthulu, or Mountains of Madness, that’s downright Disney.
Baranger’s talents are on full display here. The monsters in this story are bizarre and described as such, and reading the original text years ago left me scratching my head as to what they look like. Seeing these creatures, even if the point of them is that they’re indescribable, is valuable. The final scenes of the action were so striking I showed them to my wife, who has no interest in Lovecraft, and she was impressed.
These stories are the best way to be introduced to Lovecraft. The full text is there (unfortunate racism and all), the visuals help introduce the weirdness and break up the gigantic blocks of text, and the style is perfect. The massive asterisk for the bigotry is there, but from the perspective of sci-fi and horror history, I recommend them.
