The Beast in the Cave

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.

We’ll start with the story he wrote when he was just 15 years old: The Beast in the Cave.

—> You can read or listen to The Beast in the Cave for free here.

The Beast in the Cave

“The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty.” This is how Lovecraft’s first short story starts: with a sentence that manages to encapsulate the horror that will become the foundation of his following work – the horror based on a thought so terrible that the mind of a man can’t process it, being overcome by confusion in its refusal to accept it. In other words, the horror comes more from an unfathomable idea – from a horrible conclusion – than from simply a monstrous creature with tentacles.

The Beast in the Cave is a story narrated in first-person about a man who, after getting separated from his guide, finds himself hopelessly lost inside the Mammoth Cave, whose name already hints at its wildness and at how it will tower over the protagonist –  it’s a cavern that is “terrible yet majestic.”

When the story begins, the protagonist is trying to remain calm, despite the paths of desperation and guilt his thoughts travel. He initially thinks about how men tend to go mad at similar circumstances and then tries to come to terms with the fact that he’s bound to die from starvation and that he has only himself to blame for the terrible situation he’s in.

The cave, immense and dark, is a maze with “forbidden avenues” that form the “bowels of the earth.” He’s lost, he’s not supposed to be there – worse, his presence is framed as a transgression, something unnatural – and now he’s going to be carefully digested by the earth that surrounds him, never to be seen again. The suspense is quickly built by the presentation of a small time frame for the protagonist to save himself: the light of his torch is soon to fade and envelop him in the cold darkness of the cave.

Things, then, take a turn for the worse when, possibly attracted by his cries for help, something unhuman gets close to him. Lovecraft is definitely not subtle in his early work, and here he marks in italics how the footsteps the protagonist was hearing “were not like those of any mortal man.”

The narrator describes the sounds of a strange beast that sometimes moves like a human, sometimes on all fours. To increase the horror, the character remarks how the light of his torch has extinguished: the time frame to save himself has closed forever and now there’s only darkness, which seems to hold physical pressure on his body, and the beast, whose form he’s not capable of distinguishing in the dark.

As it will be a common thing in Lovecraft’s stories, the sheer terror the narrator feels inflicts in him a kind of paralysis, making him unable to speak, shout, move, or react. This feeling, however, is temporary, and the protagonist is able to pick up some limestones and throw them in the general direction of the creature.

Here is when the tension disappears from the story, for the protagonist’s guide suddenly and miraculously arrives with a torch to save the day. They both cast the light at the creature and see an ape-like beast with snow-white hair and a general “unearthly whiteness” with deep black eyes with no iris.

When the creature emits its dying sounds, the narrator makes his most surprising and terrible discovery: the thing he was seeing in front of him had once been a man – a discovery that nowadays is turned incredibly silly by Lovecraft’s decision to put “MAN” in all caps and also follow it by a good number of exclamation points, emphasizing an emphasis.

But the horror at the end simply doesn’t work. First, the narrator describes the creature in detail, almost scientifically, describing even its nose and stating that its face was “less prognathous than that of the average ape, and infinitely more hairy,” which removes the creature’s menacing aura. Then, the fact that the figure the narrator killed is a human being that horribly adapted to that environment is lost since the story ends at the exact moment of the revelation, going only for shock value.

If the story begins with the horror being built around ideas, it sadly ends up being about a creature. One could argue that what is really horrible is the realization that nature could do that to a man, that it could transform a human being into a monster, but here’s the problem with the story: that idea is never discussed. The story ends with the revelation and so its effect is shock alone.

The Beast in the Cave, then, starts as an efficient horror and atmospheric story but ends up sounding more silly than horrifying by its last paragraphs.

December 11, 2024.