The Whisperer in Darkness

The story is told by Albert N. Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. When local newspapers report strange things seen floating in rivers during a historic flood in Vermont, Wilmarth becomes embroiled in a controversy regarding the reality and significance of the sightings. He sides with the skeptics, blaming old legends about monsters living in uninhabited hills that abduct people venturing too close to their territory.

Wilmarth receives a letter from Henry Wentworth Akeley, a man living in an isolated farmhouse near Townshend, Vermont, who claims to have proof that will convince Wilmarth he must stop questioning the creatures' existence. The two exchange letters that include an account of the extraterrestrial race chanting with human agents in worship of several beings, including Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, the latter of whom "shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides".

The agents intercept Akeley's messages and harass his farmhouse nightly. They exchange gunfire and many of Akeley's guard dogs are killed, as are several of the agents. Later, Akeley reports having killed members of the extraterrestrial race, describing them as bleeding a sickly greenish fluid. Although Akeley expresses more in his letters, he abruptly has a change of heart. He writes that he has met with the beings and has learned that they are peaceful. Furthermore, they have taught him of marvels beyond all imagination. He urges Wilmarth to pay him a visit and to bring along the letters and photographic evidence that he had sent him. Wilmarth reluctantly consents.

Wilmarth arrives to find Akeley in a pitiful physical condition, immobilized in a chair in darkness. Akeley tells Wilmarth about the beings and the wonders they have revealed to him. He also says that the beings can surgically extract a human brain and place it into a canister wherein it can live indefinitely and withstand the rigors of space travel. Akeley says he has agreed to undertake such a journey and points to a cylinder bearing his name. Wilmarth also listens to a brain in a cylinder as it speaks, by way of attached devices, of the positive aspects of the journey and why Wilmarth should join it in the trip to Yuggoth, the beings' outpost on Pluto. During these conversations, Wilmarth feels a vague sense of unease, especially from Akeley's odd manner of buzzing whispering.

During the night, a sleepless Wilmarth overhears a disturbing conversation with several voices, some of which are distinctly bizarre. Once all is silent, he creeps downstairs to investigate. He finds that Akeley is no longer present, but the robe he was wearing is discarded in the chair. Upon a closer look, he makes a horrifying discovery amid the folds of the robe which sends him fleeing the farmhouse by stealing Akeley's car. When the authorities investigate the next day, they find nothing but a bullet-riddled house. Akeley has disappeared along with all the physical evidence of the extraterrestrial presence.

As the story concludes, Wilmarth discloses the discovery from which he fled in terror: Akeley's discarded face and hands. These were utilized by something inhuman to disguise itself as a man. He now believes with a dreadful certainty that the cylinder in that dark room with that whispering creature already contained the brain of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

The following passage from The Whisperer in Darkness lists the names of various beings and places that occur in the works of Lovecraft and other writers:

I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum…

Among the more obscure names mentioned here are:

Bethmoora

Bethmoora is a fabled city in an eponymous story by Lord Dunsany, a favorite author of Lovecraft.[11]

Bran

Bran is an ancient British pagan deity. However, in this context, Lovecraft refers to Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Picts in Robert E. Howard's swords-and-sorcery fiction. The reference is a homage to Howard, one of his correspondents.[12]

L'mur-Kathulos

L'mur may refer to Lemuria, a fabled land bridge but a sunken continent in the Cthulhu Mythos.[13] Kathulos is an Atlantean sorcerer, the titular character of Robert E. Howard's story Skull-Face. A reader had written to Howard asking if Kathulos derived from Cthulhu. Howard mentioned this in a letter to Lovecraft; Lovecraft liked the notion, and in his reply said that he might adopt the name into the mythos in the future.[14]

Magnum Innominandum

Magnum Innominandum means "the great not-to-be-named" in Latin.[15]

Yian

Yian probably refers to Yian-Ho. In the short story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (1934), a collaboration between Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price, Yian-Ho is a "dreadful and forbidden city" on the Plateau of Leng. Yian also may refer to the fictional city of Yian, in the "weird" short story "The Maker of Moons" (1896) by Robert W. Chambers (one of Lovecraft's favourite authors).[16]

H. P. Lovecraft on July 11, 1931

In "The Whisperer in Darkness", narrator Albert Wilmarth initially dismisses those who believe that nonhuman creatures inhabit the Vermont hills as "merely romanticists who insisted on trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking 'little people' made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen."[17] This line, Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price argues, is an acknowledgement of the debt Lovecraft's story owes to Machen's The Novel of the Black Seal (1895). He writes:

I would go so far as to make essentially a rewriting, a new version of Machen's. In both cases we have a professor, an antiquarian, following his avocational interests in what most would dismiss as superstition on a dangerous expedition into a strange region of ominous domed hills. He is lured by a curiously engraved black stone which seems a survival from an elder prehuman race now hidden in those mysterious hills. ... Lovecraft splits the role of Machen's Professor Gregg between Professor Wilmarth and the scholarly recluse Akeley. ... [I]t is Akeley, not the Professor, who eventually disappears into the clutches of the elder race. Wilmarth remains behind to tell the tale, like Machen's Miss Lally.

Price points out parallel passages in the two stories: Where Machen asks, "What if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived...?"[18] Lovecraft hints at "a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the remoter hills". Where Machen mentions "strange shapes gathering fast amidst the reeds, beside the wash in the river,"[19] Lovecraft tells of "certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers." Price suggests that Machen's reference to accounts of people "who vanished strangely from the earth"[20] prompted Lovecraft to imagine people being literally spirited off the Earth.[21]

As noted by critics like Price and Lin Carter,[22] The Whisperer in Darkness also makes reference to names and concepts in Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow, some of which had previously been borrowed from Ambrose Bierce. In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft wrote that "Chambers must have been impressed with 'An Inhabitant of Carcosa' & 'Haita the Shepherd', which were first published during his youth. But he even improves on Bierce in creating a shuddering background of horror—a vague, disquieting memory which makes one reluctant to use the faculty of recollection too vigorously."[23]

The Vermont floods mentioned at the start of the story by Wilmarth, initiating his interest in the case, were a real natural disaster.

The idea of keeping a human brain alive in a jar (with mechanical attachments allowing sight, hearing, and speech) to enable travel in areas inhospitable to the body might have been inspired by the book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by J.D. Bernal, which describes and suggests the feasibility of a similar device. The book was published in 1929, just a year before Lovecraft wrote his story.

In addition to being a textbook example of Lovecraft's characteristically non-occult brand of horror, in an age when the genre consisted almost entirely of ghosts, vampires, goblins, and similar traditional tales, "Whisperer" is one of the earliest literary appearances of the now-cliché concept of an isolated brain (although the alien brain case is not transparent as with later cinematic examples of this trope).

The story retains some seemingly supernatural elements, such as its claim that the alien fungi, although visible to the naked eye and physically tangible, do not register on photographic plates and instead produce an image of the background absent the creature (an impossibility by any known laws of optics, though a trait commonly attributed to vampires), although the story does mention that this is possibly due to the creatures' fungoid and alien structure which works differently from any known physical organism. It is stated that the electrons of these fungoid aliens possess a different vibrational frequency that would require the development of a novel technique by a chemist in order to record their image.

In a letter to the January 1932 Weird Tales, Donald Wandrei praised The Whisperer in Darkness, as well as "The Seeds of Death" by David H. Keller and the stories of Clark Ashton Smith.[24] Robert Weinberg claimed the story's ending was "predictable". However, Weinberg also praised "the detailed buildup" of The Whisperer in Darkness, arguing it created "the superb mood that needed no surprise to make it a classic of fantastic horror".[25]

• Alberto Breccia illustrated a fifteen-page adaptation in 1979.
• The story was adapted into comics and expanded upon in the first three issues of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness with a script by Mark Ellis and Terry Collins, with art provided by Darryl Banks and Don Heck in 1991–1992.
• The third segment of the anthology film Necronomicon is loosely adapted from the story.
• The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society has produced a film version made like a 1930s horror film, which premiered at the 2011 Seattle International Film Festival. Sandy Petersen, author of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, contributed financially to the film in order to finish its production.[26]
• A video game adaptation by Nathaniel Nelson (writer, designer, programmer), Quincy Bowen (artist) and Mark Sparling (composer, sound designer) was created in 2014 for The Public Domain Jam.[27]
• In 2017, Caitlín R. Kiernan published a sequel novella, Agents of Dreamland, set in 2015 and involving the New Horizons probe's flyby of Pluto.
• In 2018, Lawrence King published a sequel novel, Haunted Hills, set in 2018 as part of his Miskatonic University trilogy. This novel expands on the Mi-Go "whisper's" plot to return to Yuggoth and the efforts to prevent him.
• In December 2019, BBC Radio 4 aired an adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness as part of The Lovecraft Investigations, taking the form of a modern-day true crime podcast set in Suffolk, as a sequel to the 2018 adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The adaptation incorporates such elements of British folklore as neopaganism, numbers stations, and the Rendlesham Forest incident.[28]
• In May 2020, the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society released an audio adaptation of the story as part of their Dark Adventure Radio Theatre series.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Whisperer in Darkness

• The Whisperer in Darkness title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Whisperer in Darkness, by H. P. Lovecraft.
• "The Novel of the Black Seal", by Arthur Machen (Project Gutenberg)
• Film adaptation trailer