In the end the stories that maintain the most excitement - "The Haunter of the Dark", for instance - reveal the least. The young man goes mad, but we wish we were back in the condition of being destabilised, of not knowing quite what was happening. But the moment this real becomes fully visible it collapses into banality: we find ourselves on the "green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tesselleted terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy" the god Azathoth is discovered, as usual, piping on his flute at the chaotic centre of the universe. He dreams of travel through "limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound", regions whose logic he can't begin to explain. Everyday topology begins to fail, and we're thrown with him into the anxiety of an unseen real. One night he notices that the proportions of his room suggest new perspectives, "lines and curves" which hint at travel in impossible directions. He's studying hard - "Non-Euclidean calculus" and quantum physics. In "The Dreams in the Witch House", a young mathematician moves into a garret in "the festering horror of the ancient town" of Arkham. The indescribable is so often described that it can only fall short of expectation. Despite its unnameability, the void is named. What began as unseen is summoned to light, what began as unfamiliar is familiarised. These stories are about ritual, but more often than not each one is a ritual in itself. The gods await their moment patiently, neither dead nor alive, just outside of Time: Cthulhu, R'lyeh, Yig, Yog-Sothoth and his Shoggoths. The landscapes unroll like metaphysical tourist destinations: Kadath in the Cold Waste, the Plateau of Leng, the Mountains of Madness. The titles roll off the tongue: "The Horror at Red Hook", "The Shadow out of Time", "The Shadow Over Innsmuth", "The Lurker on the Threshold". Their abandoned Cyclopean cities rear up out of the Antarctic ice, or hang off the Himalayan mountainsides as "curious clinging cubes and ramparts". Their monstrous servants, genetically modified from our ancestors, suck and slither in the waste spaces of Tibet. As an earnest of this the mysterious Old Ones, who "filtered" down from the stars a hundred million years ago, sleep beneath the Pacific, waiting to be woken by "mixed-blooded and mentally aberrant" worshippers. Lovecraft intended these tales to crawl with the unnameable, the meaningless horror that lies behind the world we see.
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