Deborah
ENGL 3850-02N
Supernatural Lit
Dr. Coats
17 March, 1998
Boston Nightlife AAA Never Told You About
Brrrr. This is one of those stories that gives me the creeps by the sheer plausibility of it. My mother's family is Bostonian, and I've spent more summers there than any other single location. The proud, staid New Englanders could possibly be the national equivalent of the "quiet, polite" serial murderer next door. I can see it...Don't want to, but I do. Lovecraft captures the darker side of the whitewashed fences and saltbox houses by questioning their stability; that is- their foundations. (Pun)
The story is about an artist...but not really. It is really about why the artist is so gifted...but not really. It is about why the narrator won't ride the subway...but not really. What Lovecraft was really writing about is that nasty feeling that most of us in this particular era of science and sanitation get when something is not quite correct, or clean, or safe, or nice. A little dirt is nice and outdoorsy, but a great clod on the floor is not. And if we stop to think where the dirt came from, well, that's not pleasant at all. New Englanders, as a whole, are obsessively clean. Cluttered, but clean. Dirt is a sign that order has been abandoned. And if order has been abandoned, then evil is afoot.
As the narrator of the story gets progressively more and more drunk, the words he uses to describe the paintings get more and more disturbing.
And now I want to assure you again, Eliot, that I'm no mollycoddle to scream at anything which shows a bit of departure from the usual. I'm middle-aged and decently sophisticated....in spite of all this, that next room forced a real scream out of me... (48)
Now, I've seen Jaws about ten times in a vain attempt to cure my intense phobia of sharks (hasn't worked), but so help me, every time that damn thing surfaces so suddenly at the back of the boat right next to Richard Dreyfuss, I scream. Not only do I scream, I leap up on whatever stable surface is above the floor-- chair, bed, desk, sink. I know how the narrator felt. No matter how you steel your nerves for a shock or react to the previous shock, the next one catches you off guard. But the most terrifying thing about an experience like the one in the story is when you suddenly realize that it is really happening-- to you. The narrator is taken away from Pickman's work area and brought home. He awakes, safe and secure in daylight. (He even orders coffee at this point in his narrative.) But the nightmare is not over. The final shock occurs in daylight in his own home when he realizes that the photograph he holds is not of a pleasant background to be melded into the horrifying painting, but that of the creature he is painting. Pickman's model is not his grotesque imagination, but a real horror from the depths of Boston.
The most terrifying things in life are not movies about fantastic monsters and aliens. They are the kid at the end of the street, the shark just below your dangling feet, and the thing in the cellar. You know it. Lovecraft knows it. The thing knows it, too.
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