FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!

[The moral of the story is: beware giving me an open-ended assignment, because I am super freaky.]


In August 1928, American pulp horror author H.P. Lovecraft finished his short story "The Dunwich Horror." After an initial rejection, it was published in the April 1929 issue of Weird Tales. The 17,500-word story was purchased for $240, at the time the most Lovecraft had ever been given for one of his stories. At the time, it was one of Lovecraft's most popular works and was anthologized several times during his life (de Camp 199-302).

In the years to come, it was not seen as one of his best short stories. "The Dunwich Horror" has been dismissed as amateurish and "a 'good guys versus bad guys' action-packed potboiler" by the very people who have spent years keeping Lovecraft's obscure body of work out of the dustbin (Burleson 148).

Whatever "The Dunwich Horror's" faults as "weird fiction," horror or even plain narrative, the explanation is simple: instead of being concerned with such petty details as characterization and pacing, "The Dunwich Horror" is a modern gospel relating the story of a Second Coming in the terms of the first.

The Scriptural connection to the climax of the story has not been overlooked in any commentary on the story - the invisible half-human monster chased up Sentinel Hill by irate townspeople and calling out to the heavens is a blatant Biblical reference:

Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayayaaaa ... ngh'aaa ... ngh'aaa ... h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff-ff-ff-FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH! ... (Lovecraft, 171)

As Burleson describes it, "One almost expects, 'Why has thou forsaken me?' The scene is a clear tongue-in-cheek parody of the crucifixion; the monstrous entity returns to the father" (145-146).

Although accurate and frequently made, that observation is not complete. The entire text of "The Dunwich Horror" is a typological version of the Gospels, ending in a failed Second Coming in which the Romans successfully put down all that ghastly messianic unpleasantness.

The opening quote, from Charles Lamb, is notable in that it has overtones of the Trinity, making mention in its first clause of three types of Greek monsters, each of which is more than one being in a body. Gorgons have many snakes for hair, Hydras have an ever-doubling number of heads, and, most tellingly, Chimeras are composed of three different animals - a lion, a goat and a snake (Lovecraft 103). While the purpose of the quote is largely to set the stage for a short story on the fear of the unknown and otherworldly, the hints toward the Trinity set the metaphor in motion.

Wilbur Whateley's birth (which is also the birth of his monstrous twin brother, although that is not revealed until the end of the story) is a twisted version of Jesus'. Wilbur's mother is described as "a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five" with "no known husband" (Lovecraft 115-116). Although the people in the rural Dunwich hills speculate about Wilbur's parentage, "she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant ... and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous future" (Lovecraft 116). Her bearing is as satisfied as the Biblical Mary, who placidly says about her mysterious child "my soul doth magnify the Lord" (Luke 1:46).

Lavinia's father, Old Whateley, also prophesizes about his daughter's child to the curious townsfolk sitting outside the general store:

Let me tell ye suthin' - some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill! (Lovecraft 117)

Also like John the Baptist, who said that "there cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose" (Mark 1:7), Old Whateley prepares to pass on his ancient and worn occult tomes to the divinely-inspired Wilbur:

"I made some use of 'em," he would say as he tried to mend a torn black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, "but the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em." (Lovecraft 121-122)

It is important that Old Whateley try to get his message across to the townspeople of Dunwich; typologically, they are Israel in the New Testament. In a parallel to the moneychangers who occupy the temple in Jerusalem (Matthew 21:12), in passing we learn that in Dunwich "the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet" (Lovecraft 107).

Their relationship with their oral and written tradition also bears mention. Like the wars and intrigues hidden in the Old Testament, "their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden violence and perversity" (Lovecraft, 109). The folklore of the hill people is referenced several times, most in connection with a superstition about whippoorwills lying in wait for the dying, hoping to catch their souls. The narrative voice goes on to mock the superstition: "These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times" (Lovecraft 113).

As it turns out, however, the whispered superstitions are correct, and the other text of ancient wisdom in "The Dunwich Horror," the Necronomicon, is equally accurate in its Biblical-sounding teachings:

As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth- is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where Man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again. (Lovecraft 134)

The downfall of the residents of Dunwich is in not paying enough attention to the superstitions, and only repeating them, not heeding them.

Wilbur grows up at an inhuman speed. He takes place in his first unholy ritual with his grandfather and mother while still a young boy; "the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him" (Lovecraft, 120). Compare Jesus' baptism: "And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17).

After learning all he can from the worm-eaten books and his deranged grandfather, Wilbur must travel to the city of Arkham and the library of Miskatonic University to fill out gaps in his translated Necronomicon with the original. This pilgrimage to a large city and what, to Wilbur, is a spiritual center, is Wilbur's entry into Jerusalem. At this point the parallels between Wilbur and Jesus become a little strange. Wilbur, like Jesus, has two conflicting natures within him: human and (un)holy spirit. They both show superhuman resolution but at times human, carnal failings - Jesus asks that the cup be taken away from him, Wilbur carries a pistol to defend himself from the neighbors' dogs.

Both Wilbur and Jesus also didn't like people touching their clothing. Jesus says in Luke 8:46 "Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me." Wilbur, after a neighbor catches a glimpse of his otherworldly body, "was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm" (Lovecraft, 119).

The difference between the two, both supernatural with human failings, is that while Jesus was man and God in one body, Wilbur's unearthly, monstrous twin, kept in a shed, the attic, and later the entire gutted house, is almost entirely his unearthly half. Instead of one body, two conflicting natures, the Whateley twins are two bodies and two natures, yet still joined. When a character exclaims "What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?" (Lovecraft 136), he is obviously making reference to the date of Wilbur's birth; May 3rd, the date of the finding of the True Cross or Rood. In medieval Christianity, most notably the Old English poem "The Dream of the Rood," the Cross was used to symbolize the physical half of Jesus Christ; described as suffering torments and bleeding while Jesus, standing for his own spiritual side, ascended. Elements from both the spiritual and physical twins' deaths come from the Gospels.

In the Miskatonic University library, Professor Henry Armitage stands guard over the Necronomicon. He is not a follower of the hideous teachings therein, but still believes in them enough to realize it would not be a good idea to let Wilbur borrow the book - "There was too much responsibility in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres" (Lovecraft 135). Wilbur is scornful of him as Jesus was of the official keepers of spiritual knowledge in his day:

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. (Matthew 23:13)

In the early morning of the 3rd of August 1928 (a Friday, although the text never states this), Wilbur comes like a thief in the night (Revelation 3:3) and tries to steal the Necronomicon. The guard dog has mortally wounded Wilbur, and in the process torn off all his clothing (Lovecraft 139). What is revealed is a form that could never be construed as human; Man is not alone in the universe. At a similar moment in the New Testament, the veil hiding the Holy of Holies from public view in the temple at Jerusalem "was rent in twain from top to bottom," symbolizing the end of the Mosaic code and the beginning of Christianity (Matthew 27:51). Wilbur's body begins to evaporate, so that by the time the medical examiner arrives, he is "only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards," his earthly body has disappeared while his spirit escapes the earth (and the whippoorwills) (Lovecraft 142). All that is left behind is a set of torn clothing - as in John 20:5-7, where the disciples find only Jesus' garment left behind in the tomb. The professors also find that Wilbur had no skeleton - perhaps also fulfilling the prophecy mentioned in John that "a bone of him shall not be broken" (19:36).

Six days later (unfortunately for Scriptural interpretation, not three), the monstrous twin escapes from the gutted house that had been imprisoning it. "Ol' Whateley's haouse is all blowed up, with the timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside" (Lovecraft 145). The enormous monster is loose, and wanders the countryside spreading fear and destruction. However, because its human half is dead, the people cannot see it except when it has drunk human blood (Lovecraft, 156). This is a reversal of Jesus' advising his apostles to drink his blood. The Thing goes down into the valley of Cold Spring Glen and harrows its inhabitants.

Rather than be driven to worship Yog-Sothoth by witnessing this passing of the baton from body to spirit and reading the recorded words of Wilbur in his diary, Professor Armitage begins gathering his associates Rice and Morgan to finish the job of exterminating the Dunwich Horror. The three wise men set out towards Wilbur's (and the Thing's) home town - a little late for the birth, but bearing gifts of, respectively, arcane formulas, an insecticide sprayer, and a big game rifle (Lovecraft 161).

The invisible Thing, pursued by the professors from Arkham, climbs to the top of Sentinel Hill in Dunwich, flattening grass and bushes in its wake. Sentinel Hill, when first encountered in the story, was described as being an Indian burial ground "deposits of skulls and bones" (Lovecraft 113). Compare this to right before the Crucifixion, when Jesus "bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha" (John 19:17).

As Burleson comments, "Ascension comes when the twin returns to his place of conception, the great table-rock atop Sentinel Hill, and is returned to the father" (148). The ending is more complex than that, however; the Thing is not simply sent into another dimension or banished. Instead, Armitage's incantation destroys the second half of the Dunwich Horror.

The thing has gone forever ... It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again .... It was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills. (Lovecraft 172)


Rather than complete the second Crucifixion and let the spirit half of the twins ascend while the physical half died, both parts have been destroyed, shattering the prophecy and the plans to bring the Father, Yog-Sothoth, to earth.

Armitage advises the townspeople to destroy their standing stones:

Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of - the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose. (Lovecraft 173)

One wonders if the nameless purpose the earth was almost dragged to would have been the Last Judgement.

"The Dunwich Horror" is a very detailed retelling of the life of Jesus in a modern, science fiction/horror context. The greatest horror is that humanity has grown to the point where it is able to prevent a Second Coming - whether it is the Second Coming or simply a tentacled, blasphemous mockery of the first - simply with the right knowledge and a big enough rifle.



Works Cited

Burleson, Donald R. H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Cannon, Peter. H.P. Lovecraft. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

de Camp, L. Sprague. Lovecraft: A Biography. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1975.

Lovecraft, H.P. "The Dunwich Horror." The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Ed. S.T. Joshi. New York: Dell Publishing, 1997.

[This edition of the text is worse than the original - unhelpful, obvious and/or just plain wrong annotations that distract from the text. I just didn't want to mark up my good edition of "The Dunwich Horror" with crazy crazy New Testament margin notes.]