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| "The Disinterment" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by H. P. Lovecraft Duane W. Rimel | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror |
| Publication | |
| Published in | Weird Tales |
| Publication type | Periodical |
| Publication date | January 1937 |
The Disinterment is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel.
Plot
editAfter discovering that he might have contracted leprosy, the narrator agrees to undertake an experimental procedure. In order to prevent the authorities from discovering his condition, he agrees to be injected with a drug that will completely mimic the signs of clinical death, down to rigor mortis. After some time passes, he is disinterred and brought to the manor of Marshall Andrews in Hampden. He is informed that leprosy has altered the effect of the drug on him and that the rigor will slowly pass. However, during his recovery, he sees that Andrews has come to regard him as an experimental subject, and not a fellow being.
Eventually, after decades, his strength returns and, as Andrews is sleeping one night, he rises and takes a candelabrum to Andrews' room, where he bashes his head in. He also strangles the other man, Simes, before leaving and returning to his manor. On the way, he passes the graveyard where he was briefly buried and spots his own tombstone. He digs down to the coffin and opens it. What he sees causes him to faint. Later he finds himself on his own doorstep and rises and goes inside. Safe in his own study, he waits until dawn when he resolves to throw himself into an old well nearby, unable to live with what he has discovered, namely that instead of removing his whole body, Andrews removed his head and grafted it onto another, implied to be an ape.
Publication
editThe story was written in September 1935, first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales, with The Thing on the Doorstep.
It was not republished until 1989, with the publication of the revised edition of The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.
Authorship
editThere is some debate over this story was ghostwritten by Lovecraft for Rimel or mostly by Rimel.[1]
Researcher Will Murray, in his Lovecraftian studies, was the first to suspect Lovecraft's intervention in this story. Subsequently, Rimel himself maintained that Lovecraft's intervention was slight, subsequent letters discovered about Lovecraft, seem to attest to its veracity. In all probability, it is thought that Lovecraft did not write much of the story but that he intervened in some crucial points in the story, as in the finale. It seems that the researchers S. T. Joshi and Will Murray had the good fortune to interview Rimel still alive, obtaining in this way precious information according to which the collaboration between Lovecraft and Rimel, would not have been limited to the previous two stories, but there would be a third and last lost collaboration.
References
edit- Marc A Michaud (1977). H.P. Lovecraft: The Californian 1934-1938. Hyman Bradofsky and Dirk W Mosig (foreword). West Warwick, Rhode Island: Necronomicon Press. 67 pages. ASIN B0007AKJTA.
- Hyman Bradofsky (ed.). "The Californian". California: Hyman Bradofsky. OCLC 21324341.
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- Lovecraft, H. P. (2016). David E. Schultz; S.T. Joshi (eds.). Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, Duane W. Rimel, and Nils Frome. New York: Hippocampus Press. ISBN 978-1-61498-157-2.
External links
edit
Works related to The Disinterment at Wikisource- The Disinterment on hplovecraft.com
- The Disinterment title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- "Episode 112 – The Disinterment". The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. 16 May 2012.
- Italian Editions of The Disinterment, in the Vegetti Catalog of Fantastic Literature, Fantascienza.com. (updated until January 2010)
