The Terrible Old Man

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 Terrible Old Man

“It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man.”

The Terrible Old Man is a story about three immigrants who decide to rob the wrong person’s house. These criminals are Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manual Silva, whose names often appear together so that we view them not as proper individuals, but as a single unit of “immigrant crooks.” Their names are also repeated in full to mark their foreignness: Ricci is of Italian origin, while Czanek is Polish, and Silva, Portuguese.

They decide to rob the house of the so-called Terrible Old Man, who was once a famous sea captain who used to sail to the East (never a good sign in Lovecraft’s stories). Now, this captain is just a feeble old man who stays recluse in his decrepit home, even though he supposedly hoards a fortune in gold.

He’s infamous in the city of Kingsport for his strange behavior, as he talks to bottles with pendulums of lead inside, calling them by human names, and the lead is said to even vibrate in return as if it were giving him an answer. This usually scares the people of Kingsport away: “Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him again.”

His front yard is rife with gnarled trees and some curious stones, large and strange, “grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern Temple.” The idols frighten the children who come near the house, of course, for this Oriental influence is so damning, so evil, that kids are instinctively repelled by it.

And while the good American people have the wisdom of leaving the old man alone, the immigrants, of course, don’t know better. The narrator clearly blames their foreignness for their lack of sense: they’re about to meddle with dark things because they don’t have the good judgment of a person born and raised in America. “But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the circle of New England life and traditions,” the narrator explains, exuding nationalism and prejudice.

The robbers don’t see the signs, then. They don’t look at the Eastern idols and recognize the danger they pose – and how could they, if all three come from foreign lands themselves, being of alien stock? The old man’s wickedness is so evident that even the dogs bark at him, even the kids run away, and yet Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva fail to heed the warnings.

But you see, they are not just simple thieves; the three of them are described as having the soul of one, which means that criminality is in their very nature. So, the narrator constantly points out how they should have noticed something was wrong but kept dismissing the signs: “although they did not like the way the moon shone down upon the painted stones through the budding branches of the gnarled trees, they had more important things to think about than mere idle superstition.”

Angelo Ricci and Manuel Silva are about to break into the old man’s house when the narrative jumps in time and shifts to Joe Czanek, who is waiting in the car. He hears cries coming from the house, but assumes they are from the old man –we know better, of course, so tension begins to build when he hears footsteps approaching him. Joe Czanek expects to be greeted by his colleagues, but it’s the old man who appears, “leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously.” His eyes are yellow.

The narrative, however, jumps again in time, robbing us of any sort of climax: the three characters are killed offstage. The narrator goes on to explain what happened to them in the last paragraph:

“Little things make considerable excitement in a little town, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentified bodies, horribly slashed and with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many boot-heels, which the tide washed in.”

Of course, nobody misses or identifies Angelo, Ricci, Manuel Silva, and Joe Czanek –foreign as they are – and even the old man himself is said to have not paid too much attention to the matter, for his troubled past housed many more important events than the irrelevant murder of three immigrants. In other words, the story ends by reinforcing how insignificant the robbers were to the city both in life and in death.

The story’s main narrative problem is the jumps in time at the end. The narrator builds to a climax – the confrontation between the robbers and the old man – and then shies away from revealing to us what happened. So, the conversations with the pendulums, the stone idols, the gnarled trees, the moon, all these elements become shallower as a result: they’re never developed or serve other purposes besides a warning about the Terrible Old Man’s true nature – even though his title was already revealing enough, we must agree.

Without a proper climax, then, The Terrible Old Man amounts to just its bigoted message and nothing more: beware the East and foreigners in general, for they are either terribly mischievous or downright evil. And if they end up killing each other, well, good riddance.

August 09, 2025.