over-careful

The Thing on the Doorstep

"The Thing on the Doorstep" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft, part of the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction. It was written in August 1933, and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

Inspiration

Two novels suggested as inspirations for "The Thing on the Doorstep" are Barry Pain's An Exchange of Souls (1911), about a scientist's invention that allows him to switch personalities with his wife, and H. B. Drake's The Remedy (1925; published in the U.S. as The Shadowy Thing), in which a character with the power of mind-transference comes back from the dead by possessing the body of an injured friend.

Plot summary

The story is divided into 7 chapters:

I.

Daniel Upton, the story's narrator, begins by telling that he has killed his best friend, Edward Derby, and that he hopes his account will prove that he is not a murderer. He begins by describing Derby's life and career.

II.

He then tells of Asenath Waite, and how Derby and she wed.

III.

A few years later, people start to notice a change in Derby's behaviour. He confides in Upton, telling him strange stories of Asenath, and how he believes her father, Ephraim Waite, may not actually be dead.

IV.

Upton is called to pick up Derby who has been found in Maine, rambling incoherently. On the trip back, Derby tells of Asenath using his body, and suggests that it is in fact Ephraim who resides in the body of Asenath. Before finishing, he has a small seizure and rapidly changes personality, asking Upton to ignore what he might have just said.

V.

A few months later, Derby shows up at Upton's door and says he's found a way to keep Asenath away; to stop her using his body. Derby finishes renovations on his old family house, yet seems strangely reluctant to leave Asenath's old place.

VI.

One time, whilst visiting Upton, Derby starts and begins rambling again. Upton gets him to sleep, but with his condition getting no better, ends up committing him to Arkham Sanitarium. Upton gets a call, saying that Derby has regained normality, though upon visiting, Upton can see it is not the true personality of Edward Derby.

VII.

Upton, at home, is greeted by a fetid dwarf at the door carrying a letter from Derby. The letter explains that Derby had in fact killed Asenath and buried her body in their cellar. Despite this, Asenath had managed to take control of his body while he was in the Sanitarium, meaning that "the thing on the doorstep" was actually Derby inhabiting Asenath's liquefying corpse! The note implores Upton to go to the sanitarium to kill Derby, who has been permanently possessed by Asenath-Ephraim's soul. Upton does so, thus hopefully banishing Asenath-Ephraim's soul to the hereafter, though he reveals that he is afraid of having his soul transferred as well.

Characters

Edward Pickman Derby

(1890–1933)

The protagonist of the story, a poet and husband of Asenath Waite. Lovecraft's depiction of Derby's childhood is considered to be in large part autobiographical:

Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom....

In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by over-careful parents, so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities.

It is considered unlikely, however, that the typically self-deprecating Lovecraft was thinking of himself when he described Derby as a child prodigy and young literary sensation:

He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him... Young Derby's odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors.

The title of Derby's book suggests that Lovecraft had Clark Ashton Smith in mind, who won acclaim at the age of nineteen when he published a book of poetry called The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912). Another possible model is Alfred Galpin, a friend of Lovecraft's who was eleven years his junior, whom he described as being "immensely my superior" in intellect.

In writing that Derby's "attempts to grow a moustache were discernible only with difficulty", Lovecraft evoked his protégée Frank Belknap Long, whom he frequently teased for same reason.

Derby's correspondence with "the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey" is an homage to the Robert E. Howard Cthulhu Mythos story "The Black Stone" (1931).

Like Upton, Pickman and Derby are both old Salem names. There is a suggestion in Lovecraft's fiction that the three families are closely allied; Richard Upton Pickman is the title character of "Pickman's Model", while the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation underwrites the Antarctic expedition in At the Mountains of Madness.

Peter Cannon notes that the protagonist's character drives the plot of "The Thing on the Doorstep" more than in most Lovecraft stories. "Where cosmic forces usually overtake the typical Lovecraft hero such as Peaslee by chance, here Derby has only his own weak personality to blame for his falling victim to his wife's nefarious designs.

Daniel Upton

(ca. 1884–?)

The story's narrator and the best friend of its protagonist, Edward Derby. After attending Harvard University and apprenticing with a Boston architect, he sets up his own practice in Arkham. He is married and, at about the age of 28, has a son, Edward Derby Upton.

Upton is an old Salem, Massachusetts name, reflecting the fact that Arkham is largely a fictionalized version of Salem. Lovecraft described Winslow Upton, a Brown University professor, as a "friend of the family".

In Fritz Leiber's story "To Arkham and the Stars" (1966), Upton is credited with designing Miskatonic University's new Administration Building and the Pickman Nuclear Lab, described as "magnificent structures wholly compatible with the old quadrangle." Albert Wilmarth remarks in the story that Upton "has had a distinguished career ever since he was given a clean bill of mental health and discharged with a verdict of 'justified homicide'".

Asenath Waite Derby

(1905–1932)

The wife of Edward Derby and the daughter of Ephraim Waite. She is described as "dark, smallish and very good looking except for over-protuberant eyes"--a look common to people from Asenath's hometown of Innsmouth. Combined with the fact that her mother was Ephraim's "unknown wife who always went veiled", there is a strong suggestion that Asenath is a Deep One hybrid of the sort described in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

In the Bible, Asenath is the wife of Joseph and the mother of Ephraim. S. T. Joshi claims that her name translates as "she belongs to her father", and that "in the tale Asenath is literally 'possessed' by her father.

Peter Cannon writes that Asenath Derby makes "The Thing on the Doorstep" "the only Lovecraft story with a strong or important female character"--although the question is complicated by the tale's "gender-swapping situation".

Ephraim Waite

The father of Asenath Waite. He is said "to have been a prodigious magical student in his day", and is described as having a "wolfish, saturnine face" with a "tangle of iron-grey beard." He "died insane" at about the time that Asenath entered the Hall School.

According to Robert M. Price, the model for Waite was real-world occultist Arthur Edward Waite, best known for the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

Connections

The story makes frequent references to elements from other Lovecraft stories, including places (Arkham, Miskatonic University, Innsmouth, Kingsport), books (the Necronomicon, Book of Eibon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten), and entities (Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, shoggoths).

Lovecraft returned to the theme of mind-transference in "The Shadow out of Time" (1935).

Peter Cannon wrote two sequels to "The Thing on the Doorstep": “The Revenge of Azathoth” (1994) and “The House of Azathoth” (1996).

Reaction

According to Peter Cannon, "Most critics agree that 'The Thing on the Doorstep'" ranks among "the poorest of Lovecraft's later tales." He criticizes it for its "obvious and melodramatic plot, punctuated by patches of histrionic monologue", as well as its "rather formulaic" Arkham background.

Lin Carter likewise dismisses the tale as "curiously minor and somehow unsatisfying...a sordid little domestic tragedy...wholly lacking in the sort of cosmic vision that makes Lovecraft's best stories so memorable.

References

Lovecraft, Howard P. (1999). More Annotated Lovecraft. 1st, New York City, NY: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. With explanatory footnotes.
Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, Ballantine Books.
S. T. Joshi and David Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, 2004.
Robert M. Price, ed., The Azathoth Cycle, Chaosium.

Anne Rice makes a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's The Thing On The Doorstep in the novel, The Tale of the Body Thief. Lestat says that he has read The Thing On The Doorstep that was written by an author of whom he knew about, H.P. Lovecraft.