30 pages • 1 hour read
H. P. LovecraftThe Rats In The Walls
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1924A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Rhode Island in 1890. His father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, died in 1898. Winfield spent the last few years of his life in a psychiatric hospital following a psychotic episode caused by syphilis. Lovecraft was raised by his mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. There was a history of psychiatric illnesses in Lovecraft’s family, and he experienced a mental health crisis in 1908. He did not graduate from high school or attend college, but he wrote extensively throughout his lifetime. In 1924, Lovecraft married a woman named Sonia Haft Greene. The couple had a tumultuous relationship and divorced in 1929. Between 1926 and 1936, Lovecraft was a prolific writer. He died of intestinal cancer in 1937 at age 46.
H. P. Lovecraft held extremely racist views throughout his life. Even for the period in which he lived, Lovecraft’s xenophobia and racism were egregious. Many of his works of fiction use horror tropes and metaphors to deride “miscegenation,” or marriage between people of different racial groups. In his fiction and in his letters to friends, Lovecraft voiced his enthusiastic support for racist lynch mobs and for Adolf Hitler, despite the fact that his wife was Jewish. His racist views are present in “The Rats in the Walls.” Delapore comes from a family of enslavers in the Antebellum South, a legacy that he never interrogates. He seems to hold the implicit belief that some forms of enslavement are more acceptable than others.
The concept of human beings becoming quadrupedal or reversing evolution is also based on ideas of scientific racism that were still popular in some circles at the time that the story was published. Lovecraft’s works often express fears about familial purity or concerns about what could lie dormant in an individual’s DNA or psyche. These fears are connected to racism, but they are also connected to Lovecraft’s profound fear of mental illness. Mental health crises and depression were common in his family, and there is evidence that he spent much of his life worrying he would experience delusions or psychosis.
Genre Context: Cosmic Horror, or Lovecraftian Horror
Lovecraft is well known as a prolific writer in the genres of weird fiction and horror. In his lifetime, he wrote more than 65 short stories and novellas; he also cowrote stories with other writers. His influence on the horror genre in the 20th and 21st centuries is considerable, and many writers like Stephen King, Junji Ito, China Miéville, and Guillermo del Toro have cited Lovecraft’s works as a major source of inspiration.
Lovecraft’s fiction even generated a new genre of horror, dubbed Lovecraftian or cosmic horror. This genre is defined by elements like the fear of the unknown, forbidden or dangerous knowledge, the threat of nonhuman entities against humanity, and the dangers of scientific advancement. Lovecraftian horror has found its way into much of the broader horror genre; today, it is difficult to find a work of horror fiction that has not been influenced at least in part by Lovecraft. Cults, Eldritch abominations (evil ancient entities), secret knowledge, and cursed bloodlines are all staples of the horror genre, and they are not confined to the world of literary fiction. Countless films, TV shows, and even table-top games like Dungeons and Dragons draw on the tropes, themes, and aesthetic of Lovecraftian horror.
The world of Lovecraft’s stories is expansive. Most of his stories take place in the same universe, tied together by location, characters, or references to a collective mythos. “The Rats in the Walls” makes reference to a monster featured in other Lovecraft stories and poems: the god Nyarlathotep. Delapore briefly mentions “Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god” (Paragraph 51), just before he kills and eats Norrys. Delapore lives in Massachusetts before moving to Exham Priory; New England is the home of many of Lovecraft’s protagonists. These connections between Lovecraft’s works make the genre of Lovecraftian horror a cohesive world that other authors have populated with their own characters and stories. The established rules and mythos of the Lovecraftian horror genre create a rich world for writers to explore, expand on, and even subvert. This rich worldbuilding is part of why Lovecraft remains one of the most influential horror writers of all time.
Related Titles
By H. P. Lovecraft
