“The Shunned House”

Just read the story again, since the house is directly across the street from me.

It’s really a fine piece of work, and despite numerous elements of overlap with Lovecraft’s better-known stories, it points in a different direction that he might have taken.

But the overlap is certainly abundant as well, especially the trademark mix of folklore with science. The monster in the basement is treated in purely materialist terms, no matter how aberrant the material.

It’s also one of the scariest of his stories, especially the part where his elderly uncle is swallowed up by the thing.

It reminds me somehow of one of the scariest nightmares I had in childhood, at age 6 or so. We were stopped at one of those Illinois tollbooths, the kind where you drop the coins in and they are counted automatically, and my grandfather had been sucked down into the machine and was calling out for help. But there was no way to free him. I still remember the sound of his voice from that dream. There’s a scene vaguely like that near the end of “The Shunned House.”