The Recluse; A Lovecraftian Horror Story eBook David Barker
Download As PDF : The Recluse; A Lovecraftian Horror Story eBook David Barker 
"The Recluse" is a Cthulhu Mythos short story in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft. My goal in writing it -- aside from creating an entertaining work of fiction -- was to have a character that is mysteriously isolated from other humans (much like the narrator of Lovecraft's "The Outsider") discover in his family background an extraterrestrial horror (such as that revealed in Lovecraft's "Fungi From Yuggoth".) In blending themes borrowed from "The Outsider" and "Fungi From Yuggoth", I hoped to create an original weird tale of generational horror.
Most of my horror stories are Lovecraftian in concept and technique, but are not explicitly Cthulhu Mythos stories. This one is an exception, being an overt Mythos tale.
4,200 words.
The Recluse; A Lovecraftian Horror Story eBook David Barker
In this short but very effective story, author David Barker tackles alienation and solitude, parentage and sex, themes important to early 20th Century SF writer HP Lovecraft, with whose writing Barker seeks to resonate, but which are also concerns and/or fears of most people from time to time. In a setting redolent of Lovecraft's "The Outsider," a youth grows into self-aware adolescence in a crumbling warren of a house, well stocked with books, shadows and secrets. The adults in his life are vague presences, when they are there at all, except for his tutor, whose job appears to be keeping him from learning too much too soon about himself, and nothing at all of the outside world. The enforced solitude of the unknown narrator feeds into his feeling of alienation, his fears of physical deformity, concerns familiar to everyone at some stage in his life -- no one likes me, I have no friends, everyone is against me, I am ugly, etc. As the narrator reads more in the library made available to him he comes across suggestions that there are very real reasons why he and his pathologically reclusive family are different from others in the world...the males of the family, when they come of age, mate with a monstrous female being from Yuggoth, a planet on the rim of our Solar System...as if sex were not traumatic enough on its own. At various points in our lives, we have fears that we were adopted; this is often followed by hopes that we really were adopted, because we want nothing to do with our enforced families. We feel we are nothing like them, that they are perhaps not quite human, but where we have the irrational fear that our parents are monsters, the narrator is faced with the realization that his parents really are monsters, the mother fully so and the father progressively so, generation after generation, echoing a theme Lovecraft explored in "The Dunwich Horror" (and to a lesser degree in "The Whisperer in Darkness"), but which Barker looks at here not from the outside, but from the inside. It's tempting to pass off this story, which Barker wrote in the early 90s, as nothing more than an extremely well-written pastiche, filtering Lovecraft's 19th Century idiosyncrasies and reticence through 20th Century sensibilities, but the story is more than that, exploring our own deep-seated fears in a surreal, dreamlike setting that opens our minds to ideas that we would not otherwise entertain.Product details
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The Recluse; A Lovecraftian Horror Story eBook David Barker Reviews
Another great one. This one mixes horror and sci-fi, plus has some great mysterious character development. I can see this story made into a great, short experimental movie. Very Lovcraftian, but also very original and interesting. Well worth the price of admission.
David Barker's "The Recluse" is a captivating pastiche of Lovecraft, riffing, at it's core, on "The Outsider," but with a decidedly cosmic twist. Recommended.
The telling of this story is in the voice of an abomination. I know the everyday voice of David Barker, and I was absolutely amazed at how much his voice was altered in this work. He becomes a creature bred of horror. The voice of the prose is quintessential Lovecraft. This is one of those stories whose imagery and tone stick with you long after you have read it.
The vivid prose of the tale reminded me both of Lovecraft's The Alchemist and The Outsider. I am glad, the tired invocation of the Necronomicon was presented in a fresh fashion. I would have enjoyed a little more delving into the hive mind of the MiGo, but otherwise a worthy, if not albeit short read.
In this short but very effective story, author David Barker tackles alienation and solitude, parentage and sex, themes important to early 20th Century SF writer HP Lovecraft, with whose writing Barker seeks to resonate, but which are also concerns and/or fears of most people from time to time. In a setting redolent of Lovecraft's "The Outsider," a youth grows into self-aware adolescence in a crumbling warren of a house, well stocked with books, shadows and secrets. The adults in his life are vague presences, when they are there at all, except for his tutor, whose job appears to be keeping him from learning too much too soon about himself, and nothing at all of the outside world. The enforced solitude of the unknown narrator feeds into his feeling of alienation, his fears of physical deformity, concerns familiar to everyone at some stage in his life -- no one likes me, I have no friends, everyone is against me, I am ugly, etc. As the narrator reads more in the library made available to him he comes across suggestions that there are very real reasons why he and his pathologically reclusive family are different from others in the world...the males of the family, when they come of age, mate with a monstrous female being from Yuggoth, a planet on the rim of our Solar System...as if sex were not traumatic enough on its own. At various points in our lives, we have fears that we were adopted; this is often followed by hopes that we really were adopted, because we want nothing to do with our enforced families. We feel we are nothing like them, that they are perhaps not quite human, but where we have the irrational fear that our parents are monsters, the narrator is faced with the realization that his parents really are monsters, the mother fully so and the father progressively so, generation after generation, echoing a theme Lovecraft explored in "The Dunwich Horror" (and to a lesser degree in "The Whisperer in Darkness"), but which Barker looks at here not from the outside, but from the inside. It's tempting to pass off this story, which Barker wrote in the early 90s, as nothing more than an extremely well-written pastiche, filtering Lovecraft's 19th Century idiosyncrasies and reticence through 20th Century sensibilities, but the story is more than that, exploring our own deep-seated fears in a surreal, dreamlike setting that opens our minds to ideas that we would not otherwise entertain.
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