The Hellier Lovecraft Connection
Part 2: The Whisperer in Darkness
I’ve written several love letters in the past, published here, that bridge the gap between gaming and gnosis. I’ve also written about the many esoteric notes that the documentary series, Hellier, hits during their investigation but misses, due to the crew just not being aware of this detail or that. But now I bring to you a breakdown of what might be my personal grand unification theory. All my favorite shit rolled into one ambitious study: Gaming, Hellier, the occult, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Because I can’t just can’t be concise about this stuff and Substack eventually drops a gavel and tells me to cut the shit and get to the point, I’m going to break this up into several parts.
Part 1: Delta Green
Part 2: The Whisperer In Darkness
Part 3: Crowley, Lovecraft, and Grant
Part 4: Putting It All Together
Important note: I am in no way associated with the Hellier production, Planet Weird, etc. I’m just a fan with a substack and too much time on their hands. These articles are in no way endorsed by the Newkirks.
Part 2: The Whisperer In Darkness
I was thirteen when I discovered H.P. Lovecraft. Younger than that, actually, as my parents had a number of the old Bantam paperbacks on our bookshelves. Being a kid during the age of afternoon cartoons and Atari, I wasn’t big on reading, though. I just remember finding them on the shelves and thinking that they were such strange-looking books. Even among the other pulpy sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks on the shelf.
When I was in seventh grade I was tasked with doing a sort of research and report project on any topic that interested me. The real challenge of the project was that we had to stand in front of the class and read the report. Around the same time, The Boston Globe Sunday edition ran some piece about Lovecraft and Providence in their middle-of-the-paper magazine that I think was called Parade. This was back in the late 80’s and Lovecraft was still a sort of genre idiosyncrasy. My mom, familiar with his fiction, brought it to my attention and suggested that I do my paper on Lovecraft to which I shrugged and said, hey. Why not, eh?
One quick bike ride to the library later I had a fairly innocuous hardcover collection of a selection of Lovecraft’s fiction. I opened the book that night and did not close it until I had read all of it. The first story I read was The Rats In The Walls and the first thing to strike me about it was, “He named his cat what?”
The second thing, however, was an unpleasant dissonance which came over me, the result of Lovecraft’s formally clinical writing style used to tell a story about a man who comes to a terrible revelation that his family has, for generations, maintained a vast underground complex for the express purpose of breeding people like cattle so that they might be eaten. And not only that, but that many of these captive people devolved into walking on all fours and behaving like docile animals.
Cold sweat, my friends. Cold sweat.
I ended up being a finalist in the oral report contest with my report about Lovecraft, by the way.
This came to me in the golden age of Stephen King and the rise of Clive Barker and splatterpunk, shiny new riffs on horror that were informing a new generation’s taste. I was hooked and like most things compared to drug use, nothing hit quite as hard as the first time I read The Rats In The Walls, not even those new-fangled authors with their dense tomes of killer clowns and hell priests. And I chased that high. Oh man, did I chase it!
A great gulf of time separates me from that time and now and I’ve since familiarized myself with all of Lovecraft’s fiction. I’ve even read some of his correspondence with friends and I’d like to think that I have a slightly greater understanding of the man and his fiction than most folks. I’m a lifetime member of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society and have made several pilgrimages to Providence, a city I’d gladly take up residence in, given the chance. Eat at Bucktown when you’re there. Trust me.
Needless to say, I’m a fan. Do I have a favorite story? Kind of. It’s always changing and right now my favorite is The Whisperer In Darkness. If you’ve never read it, you’ll likely want to stop here and bang it out because I’m going to tell you how it ends. What’s the problem? It’s, like, 90 pages long. Shut up and do it.
The Whisperer In Darkness is one of Lovecraft’s mid-period riffs on science fiction. Where the sci-fi of the time was John Carter of Mars type stuff, Lovecraft’s brand was suitably original and his very own. The bulk of the story was something that Lovecraft was very familiar with, seeing as how he was a prolific writer of letters. The story is primarily constructed from the correspondences of Albert Wilmarth, a folklorist and lecturer at Miskatonic University, the fictional college of Lovecraft Country based on Brown University, and Henry Akeley, an eccentric but educated man living in Townshend, Vermont, a town in the southern part of the state and smack-dab in the middle of what we call The Bennington Triangle. When the story begins, a series of flash floods (which actually took place at the time of the story’s setting) have washed troubling things down from the Green Mountains. Things which get the locals talking about local legends stretching back to the days when Vermont and New Hampshire were a large parcel of land called The Grantlands. The things in question are pink and crab-like. Enduring evidence of their existence is hard to keep since they seem to evaporate not long after death and attempts to photograph them fall flat as they react to film like vampires and don’t show up.
Akeley sends letter after letter to Wilmarth and they strike up a sort of friendship, but the tenor of Akeley’s letters are desperate and frightened. These things come out at night and mess with him. They kill his dogs, they mess with his house and farmland. Akeley becomes obsessed with them and eventually makes a wax-tube recording of what sounds like a ritual from the mouth of a nearby cave. A human voice recites an incantation, followed by an unsettling buzzing sound which approximates the sound of human speech, also reciting portions of the incantation. He also finds a black stone with strange glyphs carved into it and sends it and the recording to Wilmarth, who can’t believe what he’s seeing. It all comes to a head when a letter arrives to Wilmarth where Akeley is pretty certain that they’re coming for him and that the local population is, at least some of them, working with these things in the caves. He warns Wilmarth not to go poking around in Vermont. Wilmarth is suitably terrified.
But then another letter arrives. It’s typed and claims to be from Akeley, whose tone has now shifted dramatically and he explains that the things in the cave are an ancient fungoid race who have come to Earth to mine our planet for a sort of stone they need but don’t have on their home world, wherever that may be. They’ve set up an outpost on an as-yet undiscovered planet at the edge of our solar system that they call Yuggoth (Pluto, which was discovered the year of this story’s publication). Oh, any by the way, the Fungi From Yuggoth are the shit, pal. They can fly through space on wings without the need for a spacecraft. They don’t communicate like we do. They use colors, feelings, and emotions, and only make a buzzing sound in order to communicate with us monkey-men. They’re going to take Akeley to Yuggoth and beyond but that requires that they remove his brain from his body and put it in a sort of jar. But it’s cool. He’s cool with that and they’re going to preserve his body so it can be put back. It’s all on the level. Wilmarth is invited to come to Vermont and visit in spite of previous warnings, with the promise of Akeley pulling back the curtain entirely, but he is adamant that Wilmarth bring all the evidence that he was sent.
So Wilmarth goes to Vermont to see his friend, is picked up by this mysterious dude named Noyes and brought to Akeley’s, under the impression that Akeley is quite sick and needs to keep the room dark and cold, in order to recover. There’s also bullet holes all over the god damn place. Akeley holds court, tells Wilmarth all this wild Mythos-related business and demonstrates the brain-jar apparatus, which allows the captive brain to communicate via this kind of mechanical speaker setup. That night, Wilmarth overhears a troubling conversation, some of the voices sound like the buzzing voice in the cave. He sneaks down to see what’s going on, does not find his buddy Akeley but instead finds his discarded robe and among the folds of the robe on the floor he finds a waxen approximation of Akeley’s head and hands, implying that Akeley was gone and the person he spoke to was one of those things wearing a costume.
Any of this sound familiar to the Hellier folks? It should.
Desperate letters from a person under siege by an unearthly force that they lack the language to properly explain.
The things are very hard to capture proof of in any meaningful way.
They communicate in colors and feelings. Recall Dana and the God Helmet?
Holy shit! They’re coming for me.
Radio silence.
New correspondence from an entirely different person, who thinks it’d be just great if you looked into all this weirdness. Here’s some clues to help you, by the way.
Be careful of who you talk to. I think the locals are in on it.
Canisters. Cans.
Maybe some kind of nefarious plot? Question mark?
CRAZY BUSINESS HAPPENS!
The nefarious plot point is kind of hard to suss out because it’s never entirely clear what the Mi-Go are doing terrorizing Akeley, which I suppose it apropos for an alien race. They’re alien, after all. Their motives are supposed to be ineffable. There are human collaborators among the citizens of Townshend but they’re also trying to clean up any evidence of their existence. So why does he get the nasty business and the other locals slide? The Whisperer In Darkness definitely has some holes in the plot but it’s a hell of a read and implies so much that your imagination ends up doing most of the heavy lifting. It’s often the most-cited quality of Lovecraft’s writing, that being him giving you just enough to let your mind run wild with.
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society made an outstanding adaptation of the story, by the way. Their obsession with historical props shows an eye for detail that puts my own obsession with period and setting detail to shame. Their third act takes some liberties with the story but it just goes to show how great Lovecraft was at setting up all the pieces of a scary story and how rushed he often was to just be done with it all. The HPLHS movie, has an awesome stop-motion Mi-Go effect at the end that just have to see.
There are so many parallels to Hellier that I started feeling as though this might be some sort of ripoff but it’s not and I’ll tell you why in part three.