What the Moon Brings

Lovecraftian horror has become a particular interest to me in recent years. I find the focus in the stories in the fear of the unknown to be really quite interesting, and I feel that this story provides a perfect example of that type of horror that he is so well known for.         
The whole story is focused around his fear of how the moon transforms the landscape and world into a new, different, more terrifying one. This easily falls within the themes commonly expressed within most of his body of work. The way he describes the world, and the way it transforms in front of him also pushes forward those themes of the unknown. In fact, Lovecraft even says this in the piece, “And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon.”
To add to this, using the moon to transform the known, into the unknown, and therefore terrifying, is extremely Lovecraftian, and extremely smart. He takes a world we understand, and then changes it to something we can’t. I feel like that’s a big part of why so much of his work deals with water, and that’s no different here. It’s add to our fear of the unknown. We don’t understand everything within, and in this story, we see that. “And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world.” This paints to us a picture of a world, common to us, but still yet vastly unknown, and therefore terrifying.

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