Lovecraft, H P - The Picture In The House

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The Picture in the House

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 12 December 1920?

Published July 1919 in The National Amateur, Vol. 41, No. 6, p. 246-49.

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais,

and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of

ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones

of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines,

and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure

in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and

justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of

backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness

and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled

ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic

outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there,

while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost

hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the

small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which

wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never

seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their

ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race

indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling

slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of

civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their

isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came

to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By

necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins.

Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment

above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only

the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since

the early days, and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness

which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down

these houses, for they must often dream.

It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in

November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to

exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic

Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and

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