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, and 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.

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 that decide to rob the wrong person’s house. These robbers are Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manual Silva, whose names are often repeated together so we view them not as proper individuals, but as a single unit. 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 that used to sail to the East. Now, this captain is just a feeble old man that remains recluse in his decrepit home even though he supposedly hoards a fortune in gold. He is infamous in the city of Kingsport for his strange behavior. He talks to bottles with pendulums of lead inside, calling them by human names, and the lead is said to vibrate in return as if it’s 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 that come near the house: this Oriental influence has corrupted a good captain and it’s so “evil” that children are instinctively repelled by it.

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 are going 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.

The robbers don’t see the signs. They don’t look at the Eastern idols and see danger: how could they, if all three come from foreign lands themselves? They are of “alien stock,” after all. The old man’s wickedness is so evident that even the dogs bark at him, and yet Ricci, Czanek, and Silva don’t heed the warnings.

And they are not just simple robbers. The three of them are described as having the“soul” of a robber, which means that criminality is in their very nature. Consequently, the promise of riches far outweighs the possibility of danger in their eyes.

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.”

Ricci and Silva are about to break into the old man’s house when the narrative jumps in time and shifts to Czanek, who is waiting in the car. He hears cries coming from the house, but assumes they are from the old man – but we know better, so the suspense begins to build when he hears footsteps approaching him. 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 Ricci, Silva, and Czanek – three immigrants – and even the old man himself is said to have not paid too much attention to the matter, for his past housed many more important events. In other words, the story ends by depicting how insignificant the robbers were to the city.

The story’s main 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. The conversations with the pendulums, the stone idols, the gnarled trees, the moon, all the elements in the story 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.

Without a climax, then, the story in The Terrible Old Man just amounts to its bigoted message: 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.

April 15, 2021.

—> You can read or listen to The Terrible Old Man here.