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User:Auric/The Diary of Alonzo Typer

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"The Diary of Alonzo Typer"
Short story by William Lumley; H. P. Lovecraft
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)weird fiction
Publication
Published inWeird Tales, 31, No. 2
Media typePrint
Published in EnglishFebruary 1938

The Diary of Alonzo Typer is a 1938 short story by William Lumley, with revision done by H. P. Lovecraft.

Plot

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The story is largely about the diary of Alonzo Hasbrouch Typer, an Occult researcher who visited Chorazin, N.Y. and disappeared there in 1908. His diary was found in 1935.

He was last seen heading to a long-abandoned manor house that once housed the van der Heyl family. The settlement eventually became the village of Chorazin, near Attica, New York. The house was constructed in 1760 by the family, who had left Albany under suspicion of witchcraft. The house was near a ring of standing stones frequented by the villagers. The house was abandoned by the clan in 1872 and thereafter sat vacant. Various odd people visited it who either died, disappeared or went mad. Eventually, the house collapsed and the diary was found among the rubble by a Chorazinite.

Typer arrives just before a storm breaks, on April 17, 1908, around the time of the Walpurgis Sabbat. He intends to observe the local Sabbat and a strange creature reported to him by a person known only as "V———". He camps in an upstairs room and explores the house. Most of the furnishings are in a state of decay, and a hall of portraits of the van der Heyls is faded, though not enough to obscure their general outline, mostly ophidian or porcine. He senses a malign presence and ghostly black paws push him on the stairs. He has arranged with villagers to have supplies delivered to the gate, but a wall of brambles have blocked the way. Somehow they arrive anyway.

In the meantime, he discovers a locked room with a secret chute that appears to have its end behind a brick vault in the cellar with a locked iron door. He hears slithering noises behind it. The room has a library with tomes of volumes in Aklo, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and the Eltdown Shards. In the attic, he discovers a trunk containing “a Greek Necronomicon, a Norman-French Livre d’Eibon, and a first edition of old Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis.”

He also puzzles over the portrait of Trintje van der Heyl Sleght, as he thinks he has heard the name before.

He discovers that the briars only allow him to visit the circle of standing stones, where he finds a well in the center that points in the direction of the cellar vault. He also finds hidden enciphered journals by Claes van der Heyl, written in the 1500s, ancestor to the New York van der Heyls. He learns about the Forgotten One and a chant he can use to transfigure it during the Sabbat. He searches for the key to the vault in the cellar and finds it in the locked room wrapped in the hide of a reptile. The hide has a message on it, telling that Claes visited the primal city of Yian-Ho, and something followed him home, which he imprisoned using a lock and key he brought from there. The message prophesies the building of the vault and the eventual release of it by one of his remote descendants.

The villagers gather around the stone circle and begin chanting. Too late he remembers that the Adriaen Sleght that married Trintje van der Heyl was one of his ancestors. He swears not to finish what Claes started, but black paws appear and drag him to the cellar.

The house eventually collapses following a gale on November 12, 1935. A state policeman is sent to investigate the collapse on November 16. Most of the contents of the house were in an unidentifiable state at that time. When the brick vault in the cellar is blasted open, the walls are found to be covered with undecipherable hieroglyphs carved in the brickwork. The rear of the vault terminates in a blocked chute extending upward. There is a slimy substance in a line on the floor and the air is reminiscent of a snake-house.

Authorship

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The bulk of the story was written by William Lumley (1880–1960), but was edited and rewritten by H. P. Lovecraft.

Lumley reportedly believed that Lovecraft's works represented real beings and situations.[1][2]

The original unedited draft was published in Crypt of Cthulhu #10 (1982). Lovecraft is responsible for the addition of the framing story and various Mythos tomes. He accepted a copy of Budge's translation of the Book of the Dead for his revisions.[3] Lumley submitted it to Weird Tales in 1936, receiving $75 (equivalent to US$1,647 in 2023) for it.

The published story was illustrated by Virgil Finlay.[4]

Reviews

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E. F. Bleiler reviewed the story in The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983) [5]

Publication History

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References

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  1. ^ Clark Ashton Smith (1 January 2009). The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith: The Last Hieroglyph. Night Shade Books. pp. 461–462. ISBN 978-1-59780-366-3.
  2. ^ Dennis P. Quinn (19 August 2010). "Cults of an Unwitting Oracle: The (Unintended) Religious Legacy of H. P. Lovecraft". PopMatters. Retrieved 11 November 2019. He wrote in a 1933 letter that the author William Lumley believed that Lovecraft and his literary pals who used his pseudomythology were "genuine agents of unseen Powers in distributing hints too dark and profound for human conception or comprehension."
  3. ^ Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft v. 5. Arkham House. 1976. p. 208. ISBN 0-87054-036-X.
  4. ^ Lumley, William (February 1938). "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" . Weird Tales. Vol. 31. Popular Fiction Publishing Company. p. 153  – via Wikisource. [scan  ]
  5. ^ Everett Franklin Bleiler (1983). The guide to supernatural fiction. Kent State University Press. pp. 295–454.
  6. ^ Loucks, Donovan K. "H.P. Lovecraft's "The Diary of Alonzo Typer"". www.hplovecraft.com. (partial bibliography)
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