Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in "A Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales," and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street Ground. In "The Marble Faun," whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which caused the late D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. "Septimius Felton," a posthumous novel whose idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished "Dolliver Romance," touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called "The Ancestral Footstep," shows what Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition—that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked—which appears incidentally in both "Septimius Felton" and "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret."
(Mr. Lovecraft tells you more about Nathaniel Hawthorne in the next issue. Don't miss Part Seventeen).
THE MONSTROSITY
(A True Experience)
by Hoy Ping Pong
(Apologies to Kenneth B. Pritchard)
Many people have seen freaks and monsters, both in the circus and in their nightmares, especially after a gay night, but this which I tell of happened when I was cold sober, on a crispy winter night in the middle of July. (Don't laugh—this might have happened in Australia—Editor).
I had returned from a party, and to be sure, I was half lit up, for I had dashed down several canters of buttermilk, but nevertheless, I was cold sober when I met the great adventure! I had just about reached home, when my sixth sense warned me that something was wrong. I looked about.
The snow covered the ground several inches thick, but as far as I could see, not a single footprint marred the beauty of it. I even turned to look behind me, but could not see my own tracks. Too peaceful. I had a grim foreboding of something evil. For want of something better to do, I bent over and tied my shoelace. And then I saw it!