The Tree

The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

—> You can read or listen to the short story for free here.

The Tree

“On a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, there stands an olive grove about the ruins of a villa.”

The Tree opens with a quote in Latin that basically says, “The Fates will find a way.” This opening establishes destiny and maybe even justice as core themes: the universe will find a way to correct itself, to right a wrong. Injustice will not prevail forever, it seems to promise. This is a crucial element to help us understand a narrative that ends on an obtuse note, denying us access to character motivations to make us unable to fully grasp the true nature of the climatic events.

The story is set in Greece, and the narrator is recounting what a beekeeper told him of the strange tree that stands in mount Maenalus. This titular tree is described as “oddly repellent”: its grotesque shape reminding people of a “death-distorted body of a man” – a fitting description given that the tree grew over the tomb of one.

This is the story of this very man, Kalos, and his close friend, Musides. They’re both famous sculptors who one day receive the order to build each one a statue of Tyche – the Goddess of Chance – to be placed in the city of Syracuse. They’re to compete with each other, but since they are very close friends (full of “brotherly love”) Kalos and Musides “instead of concealing his work from the other, would offer aid and advice.”

At the beginning, the narrator only talks about them together, with one name always being followed by the other (“All men paid homage to Kalos and Musides”/ “But Kalos and Musides dwelt…”), which marks the strength of their bond. It’s said that there was not a hint of jealousy between the two men – a key point when it comes to analyzing the ending – and that they “dwelt in unbroken harmony.” The initial focus, then, is on painting their friendship in bright colors, making us believe it’s sincere and inviolable.

But despite their unbroken harmony, Kalos and Musides had radically different natures. Musides liked to party: every night he reveled “amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea,” seeking banquet halls to feast. Kalos, on the other hand, preferred the solitude of home: he passed time in his olive grove, where it’s said he communed with all sorts of strange beings, fauns and dryads, whom the sculptor liked to represent in his work.

Kalos’s connection with the supernatural is, of course, central to the story. The hideous tree that eventually grows on his tomb is said to stand on “the chosen haunt of dreaded Pan,” with the god of the wild appearing here immediately attached to negative adjectives to indicate how to associate oneself with the supernatural can’t lead to anything good.

Kalos, therefore, doesn’t take long to get sick, plagued by a mysterious illness. He gets more pallid by the day and no one knows why: “As Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the ministrations of puzzled physicians and of his assiduous friend, he desired to be carried often to the grove which he so loved.”

Musides feels hurt by his friend’s fondness for the grove and its wonders. His dear friend has chosen the forest creatures over him, so jealousy starts to sprout: “his eyes filled with visible tears at the thought that Kalos should care more for the fauns and the dryads than for him.”

Kalos knows he’s not long for this world, so he asks Musides to take some twigs from his olive trees and bury them next to his tomb. When Kalos dies “sitting alone in the darkness of his grove,” Musides fulfills his promise and buries the twigs, which makes a strange human-shaped tree grow in that place. It’s a tree so hideous that people fear passing by it at night, alarmed as they are by its menacing aura and uncanny shape. Its rapid growth also surprises everyone, who are “at once fascinated and repelled.”

And so, right before the fateful day when Musides must deliver his sculpture of Tyche, there’s a big storm, and part of this strange tree falls onto his house. When the people arrive to see what happened, they find neither the sculptures of Tyche nor Musides himself. It’s said that the human-shaped olive tree still stands on that tomb, and that those who pass near it at night hear in the wind a voice saying, “I know! I know!”

This ending is enigmatic, but the possible interpretations don’t make the story more complex. The heart of the matter lies in the last line of the text, the sentence whispered by the tree. What does Tree-Kalos know?

The first hypothesis is that this is a revenge story: Musides poisoned his friend trying to win the contest, but Kalos’ spirit lived on in the tree and punished him for it. The quote that opens the story, then, would make reference to this revenge after death: fates found a way to avenge a murder.

The rub is the text doesn’t seem to support this reading, too much: the narrator never once puts in doubt the purity of their friendship – on the contrary, actually – and even tries to dispel any doubts about one being jealous of the other’s work. We could be dealing with an unreliable narrator, of course: the story that’s being told here, after all, is a man telling us what a beekeeper told him. So, there could very well have been jealousy and bitterness involved between Musides and Kalos, and the people around them just didn’t notice.

The real issue with this reading, then, is that it means that Pan, the fauns, and dryads are all a positive force in the narrative now, as they have become agents of destiny, helping Kalos have his revenge – which doesn’t quite fit their characterization as “dreaded beings,” let alone the rest of Lovecraft’s work.

While this reading turns the events into a revenge story, there’s another that goes in the opposite direction: this “I know! I know!” may be imbued with guilt, with Kalos confessing he finally understands the mistake he made by associating himself with Pan and his ilk, who now assume a negative, monstrous form: by having dealings with them, Kalos ended up condemning not only himself but also his friend. He acquired knowledge – maybe it was the creatures that made him good at his job in the first place, which would further explain why he made sculptures of them – but this ended up costing Kalos his life.

This reading makes the story a cautionary tale about the dangers of dealing with the occult, very similar to many others written by Lovecraft. The initial quote, then, makes reference to what happens when you associate yourself with dark beings: your destiny becomes equally dark. Your life is bound to end in tragedy.

We could also read some homoerotic tension in their “unbroken harmony” and “brotherly love”. Their deaths, consequently, are framed as punishment for their supposed “transgression,” while the last line would mean that Kalos knows why they were punished. We may be putting more meaning to the text here than it seems to have, but as Mandalorians used to say: this is the way.

The Tree, then, is a story that survives because of its ambiguity. We start to conjure up theories about its enigmatic ending, which push us to scrutinize everything that came before – even if those things were not particularly interesting by themselves.

September 14, 2025.