viding alternate versions of his history. Although
Stoker began writing professionally while still
young and was employed for a time by J. Sheridan
LE FANU, who wrote another classic vampire novel,
Carmilla (1871), his work prior to Dracula was
largely inconsequential and nonfantastic, although
Under the Sunset(1882) is a collection of dark fairy
tales and a few short pieces, notably “The Primrose
Path” (1875), that involve the supernatural.
Dracula,which was also adapted as a stage
play, is certainly Stoker’s masterpiece, and the
deadly count has joined the handful of fictional
characters—including Frankenstein’s monster, Dr.
Fu Manchu, Tarzan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a
few more—who have become so deeply rooted in
our culture, in large part because of motion picture
renditions, that they have an existence separate
from their original works. Stoker went on to write
several more novels, some of them supernatural,
but they never even approached the quality of his
vampire tale, although some of the later books are
still quite readable.
The Mystery of the Sea(1902) is a deservedly
forgotten novel of psychic insight, but The Jewel of
the Seven Stars(1903), in which the disembodied
spirit of an ancient Egyptian woman tries to reani-
mate her age long comatose body, is reasonably
good and is periodically reprinted, although it is
rather slow moving until the closing chapters. It
was the basis for the film The Awakening(1980)
and has inspired, at least in part, several others in-
volving mummies and Egyptian magic. The Lady of
the Shroud(1909) has most of its fantastic content
rationalized at the end. The woman who the
reader has been led to believe is a vampire actually
is not, although the psychic events are genuine.
The closest Stoker came to repeating his suc-
cess at book length is the very atmospheric Lair of
the White Worm(1910, also published as Garden of
Evil), which blends shape-changing, possession, an
underground monster, and a strange cult into a
sometimes confusing but occasionally very sus-
penseful story. The 1988 movie version, though
not particularly loyal, is considerably more coher-
ent. Stoker wrote no further novels of the super-
natural. His short fiction has been collected in
various combinations as Dracula’s Guest(1914), of
which the title story is an excerpt dropped from
the novel, The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion
(1973), and Midnight Tales(1990). The best of his
short stories are “The Judge’s House” (1891) and
“The Squaw” (1893).“The Strange High House in the Mist”
H. P. Lovecraft(1931)
Although H. P. LOVECRAFTis primarily remem-
bered as a writer of horror fiction, he also wrote
several fantasy stories, most of them just as original
as his weird fiction, including the short novel The
Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath(1943). This par-
ticular story, although technically set somewhere
in the fringes of the Cthulhu Mythos sequence,
which mixed horror and science fiction, is much
lighter in tone and only peripherally suggests any-
thing horrid or menacing.
Several of Lovecraft’s stories center on struc-
tures, whether they be “THE SHUNNED HOUSE”
(1937), the unearthly buildings of At the Mountains
of Madness(1936), or a mausoleum such as “In the
Vault” (1932). The house in this particular story is
perched atop a very high, reportedly inaccessible,
cliff adjacent to the decaying fishing village of
Kingport. There are many rumors about the struc-
ture, supposedly home to an ageless entity who
speaks to the mist and looks into other worlds, but
no one has ever seen the tenant. Few even like to
talk about it.
The situation remains unchanged until the ar-
rival of Thomas Olney and his family. Olney is cu-
rious and asks questions until he has heard all the
variations of the story. Unconvinced that the cliff
is unassailable, he eventually finds a way to reach
the top, where he is briefly frightened by sounds
within the house until he is invited in by an appar-
ently perfectly human tenant with whom he
spends the day in conversation. He returns to
Kingsport at dusk, but everyone can tell that the
man who came down is not the same as the one
who went up. He has lost his sense of imagination,
perhaps overloaded by what he discovered from
that strange high observer.
Like many of Lovecraft’s tales, the story is told
completely without dialogue, and the only charac-
ter about whom we learn anything substantial is
Olney himself. It is designed to invoke a sense of“The Strange High House in the Mist” 339