H.P. Lovecraft - "The Festival" (1923) [Short Story]
H.P. Lovecraft - "The Festival" (1923) [Short Story]
"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales ( Link Here ) . It is considered to be one of the first of his Cthulhu Mythos stories.The story was inspired by Lovecraft's first trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in December 1922.
The Festival By H. P. Lovecraft
Synopsis
The story is set at Christmas time. An unnamed narrator is making his first visit to Kingsport, Massachusetts, an "ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten." The town he comes to, which shows little sign of habitation, seems centuries out of date,He locates his relatives' house, which has an overhanging second story, and is greeted by an unspeaking old man. At the stroke of 11, he is led outside to join a "throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway", heading to the "top of a high hill in the centre of the town, where perched a great white church."
The procession enters a secret passageway below the crypt, eventually coming to "a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean."
"something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute"
This was the first Lovecraft story (reading them chronologically) that really stirred something in me from the very first paragraph. The way he describes the nighttime walk along the sea toward the village was incredibly immersive, and captured the vibe of a crisp winter night beneath the stars quite perfectly.