And the Lovecraft series continues with the last story he put his name to.
From here on, the Lovecraft series will be covering his juvenalia and ghost writing efforts.
Raw Feed (2005): “In the Walls of Eryx”, H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling, 1936.
This was the second to last piece of fiction Lovecraft worked on, and it’s about as close to a traditional science fiction story — specifically of the planetary romance variety — that Lovecraft ever did.
Still, even here, in this tale of an invisible maze which turns out to be lethal, there are some Lovecraft touches (though, of course, they could be Sterling’s contribution).
Like Lovecraft’s “The Temple” this story is an account left by a dead narrator. Lovecraft reverses the exploration of alien ruins found in his “The Nameless City“, “At the Mountains of Madness“, and “The Shadow Out of Time“. Here there are no reliefs carved in stone. The whole alien edifice is invisible.
Lovecraft does work out some characteristic horror in the narrator’s growing realization that the seemingly simple aliens possess a much more sophisticated and deadly technology than believed — so potent that Earthmen should consider abandoning Venus.
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