An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

< previous page page_99 next page > < previous page page_100 next page >

Page 100

Gerritsen, Cornelia.

In “The Horror at Red Hook,” a society woman from Bayside, Queens, whom Robert Suydam marries to deflect attention from his bizarre activities and improve his social standing. She and her husband die mysteriously on their wedding day.

“Ghost-Eater, The.”

Short story (3,880 words); written in collaboration with C.M.Eddy, Jr., in October 1923. First published in WT(April 1924); first collected in DB;corrected text in HM

The first-person narrator needs to get from Mayfair to Glendale (two cities in Maine) but can find no one to take him. So he goes by himself on foot, stopping at night in a deserted wood. After sleeping for a time, he awakens in the night and realizes that it will shortly begin raining. Entering a clearing, he sees on the farther side of it a building—a “neat and tasteful house of two stories.” Knocking at the place, he is invited in by a “strikingly handsome” man who, with a faint trace of a foreign accent, invites him to stay for the night. Retiring to an upstairs bedroom, the traveler (who is carrying a large amount of money on his person) decides to exercise caution: he arranges the bedclothes to make it appear as if he is sleeping there, and prepares to settle down in a chair for the duration of the night. Shortly thereafter he hears footsteps ascending the stairs. The door opens and a man whom he had never seen before (“indubitably a foreigner”) enters the room. This man disrobes, gets into the vacant bed, and appears to go to sleep. The narrator is unclear whether the scene he has witnessed is real or merely a dream, so he reaches over the recumbent figure and seeks to grasp the man’s shoulder; but “my clutching fingers had passed directly through the sleeping form, and seized only the sheet below!”Horrified and confused, the narrator now hears the sound of additional footsteps on the stairs; his room is now entered by a “great gray wolf whose eyes “were the gray phosphorescent eyes of my host as they had peered at me through the darkness of the kitchen.”The wolf howls and springs at the sleeping figure on the bed, apparently tearing out the man’s throat. The traveler empties his revolver in the direction of the wolf, but every shot hits the wall without apparently harming the wolf in any way. Somehow the traveler staggers to Glendale, where he learns the story of Vasili Oukranikov, who came from Russia sixty years before and built a house in the woods. Oukranikov had the reputation of being a “werewolf and eater of men.” One day he invited Count Feodore Tchernevsky (who lived in Mayfair) to his home; that evening the count was found in a mangled state, with a gray wolf hovering over the body. The wolf was killed and buried in the house, and the house was then burned down. But at every full moon the wolf is seen to roam the area again.

A conventional ghost/werewolf story, the impetus for its writing clearly came from Eddy. HPL wrote to Eddy’s wife, Muriel, on 20 October 1923: “Here, at last, is the amended ‘Ghost-Eater’, whose appearance I trust Mr. Eddy will find satisfactory. I made two or three minor revisions in my own revised version, so that as it stands, it ought to be fairly acceptable to an editor” (quoted in DB,p. 97). The suggestion is that Eddy wrote the initial draft, HPL exhaustively revised it, and men slightly revised this draft.

Gifford, Jonathan.

In “The Lurking Fear,” a friend of Jan Martense who, wor

< previous page page_100 next page > < previous page page_101 next page >

Page 101

ried over the lack of correspondence from Jan, comes to the Martense mansion in the fall of 1763, only to be told that Jan is dead.

Gilman, Walter.

In “The Dreams in the Witch House,” the student of advanced mathematics and physics at Miskatonic University who resides at the old Witch House in Arkham. In his strange dreams and bouts of sleepwalking (induced by the strangely angled room in which lives), he observes bizarre landscapes and encounters the witch Keziah Mason, who formerly inhabited his room. Gilman is ultimately killed by Brown Jenkin, the witch’s familiar.

Glendale.

Fictitious town in Maine invented either by HPL or by C.M.Eddy and cited in “The Ghost-Eater” (1923).

Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn.

In “The Mound,” the leader of a cavalcade of men and beasts who comes upon Panfilo de Zamacona in a temple in the underworld realm beneath the mound and leads him back to the great city of Tsath.