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 H. P. 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 its terrible nature. In other words, the horror here comes more from an unfathomable idea – from a horrible conclusion – than from simply a monstrous creature with tentacles: it’s a horror of the mind more than of the body.

The Beast in the Cave is a story narrated in the 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, its age, and how it will tower over the protagonist and oppress him – being a place “terrible yet majestic.”

When the story begins, the narrator is trying to remain calm, despite the many thoughts of desperation and guilt that permeate his mind. He initially recalls how men tend to go mad in similar circumstances, for example, and then tries to come to terms with the fact that he’s bound to die from starvation and, worst of all, only has himself to blame for that.

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 even, his presence is framed as a transgression, something unnatural, forbidden – 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 him to save himself: the light of his torch is soon to fade and leave him enveloped by the cold darkness of the cave. Things are bad already, but they manage to take a turn for the worse nonetheless when, possibly attracted by his cries for help, something inhuman 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. And to increase the horror, he remarks how the worst has happened: the light of his torch has finally extinguished. The time frame to save himself has closed forever, and now, around him, 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 become common in Lovecraft’s stories, the sheer terror the narrator feels inflicts on him a kind of paralysis, making him unable to speak, shout, move, or react. He just stands there, still and afraid. This paralysis, however, is temporary, as he’s able to eventually pick up some limestones and throw them in the general direction of the creature.

Here is when the tension simply dissipates, for the protagonist’s guide suddenly and miraculously arrives with a torch to save the day. They both cast light on 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.

The horror at the end simply doesn’t work. First, the narrator depicts the creature in exquisite 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, making it too tangible, too concrete. Then, the reveal that the monster was a human being who had horribly adapted to that environment is stripped of its impact, as the story ends at the exact moment of the revelation: it goes only for shock value, never developing the theme.

So, if the story begins with the horror being built around ideas, it sadly ends up being about a physical 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.