Lovecraft Retrospective: The Whisperer in Darkness (1931)
George and I burrow deep into the accursed hills of Vermont in search of the hidden meanings of one of Lovecraft's late great tales; The Whisperer in Darkness, published in 1931, is a genuinely spooky paranoid thriller about the battle of wits, nerves, subterfuge, espionage, guns, and dogs (just so many dogs) between a lonely recluse and a conspiracy of indeterminate, weird, occultic, ruthless, alien colonists and their sinister human agents. Featuring an unnerving emphasis on sound and recording - and meditations on colonialism, landscape, technology, the body, and consciousness - we ponder the ways in which this story prefigures modern cryptid tales and found footage urban folklore horror stories.
Also features some discussion of why Transformers is now such a gay franchise, why Masters of the Universe paradoxically isn't, and why Harry Potter is just unfathomably bad, even factoring out the author's raging transphobia.
Comments (4)
Wonderful episode! I read Lovecraft as a teenager and have never revisited him until these exegeses, I’m having a blast with them. Looking forward to the Mound which I’ve never even heard of.
Incidentally, I recently finished reading an indirect adaptation of this story, the second novel from James Lovegrove’s The Cthulhu Casebooks, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities. The plot of The Cthulhu Casebooks is somewhat serialized (rather than purely episodic), so the second novel works better if you have already read the first, but regardless I’d be curious what you think of the novel (and the series more broadly).
Another excellent listen. Thanks for this, guys. Were you not aware of this adaptation of the story? https://youtu.be/pd5gWGfnK5M?si=lBStLTYupe3QUsE7 It's a production by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. The same bunch who did the silent Call of Cthulhu film.
I discovered that immediately after we recorded!