Although widely read and reviewed at the time of its first publication in 1927, Leonard Cline’s novel The Dark Chamber has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity. It is remembered today primarily by the devotees of H. P. Lovecraft, owing to Lovecraft’s high praise for the book in his classic essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

Among the Lovecraft circle, the first enthusiast for The Dark Chamber was Frank Belknap Long, who read it in late 1927 and immediately urged Lovecraft to do the same. Lovecraft put his name on the waiting list for the book at his local library, and his turn came up in the middle of March 1928. To Donald Wandrei he soon wrote:

“My only reading since Witch Wood has been The Dark Chamber by Leonard Cline, & this is an absolutely magnificent work of art! Poetry-song- & the ultimate quintessence of atmospheric morbidity & horror.”

Some years later, Lovecraft wrote of it to Clark Ashton Smith:

“God, but I’d give three-fourths of my soul to be able to write a book like that-with all sorts of shades of macabre mood poignantly crystallised without the least trace of extravagance or slipping-over!”

The theme of ancestral memory in The Dark Chamber struck a chord with Lovecraft and his friends, and this element from Cline’s novel soon found its way into their fiction. It appears first in Frank Belknap Long’s story, “The Hounds of Tindalos” (Weird Tales, March 1929), followed by Henry S. Whitehead’s two related tales, “Scar-Tissue” and “Bothon” (both published posthumously after Whitehead’s death in 1932). Donald Wandrei used the theme in “The Lives of Alfred Kramer” (Weird Tales, December 1932) and “The Man Who Never Lived” (Astounding Stories, November 1934), while Clark Ashton Smith followed suit in “Ubbo-Sathla” (Weird Tales, July 1933). Lovecraft’s own story “The Shadow Out of Time” (written 1934-35) shows some influence from Cline’s novel in the vast archives of the Great Race. Nearly twenty years later August Derleth wrote “The Ancestor,” a story fraudulently published as a “posthumous collaboration” with Lovecraft, but based on some plot-notes about The Dark Chamber that Lovecraft had written in his commonplace book. (”The Ancestor” was written for Weird Tales in 1954 but returned to the author when the magazine folded.) Even the two paperback reprints of The Dark Chamber, by Popular Library in the fall of 1972 and by Pinnacle Books in June 1983, are certainly due to the influence of Lovecraft.

Thus while Cline’s novel has been most often read and appreciated as a novel firmly placed within the weird tradition in literature, it may seem odd to say that this categorization does not offer the best approach to Cline or to his work. There is no doubt that Cline enjoyed the weird in literature, music and art. In fact, the references within The Dark Chamber tend to be exclusively on the macabre side, and Cline uses these allusions to build character and atmosphere. What a telling description it is for a character like Miriam Pride who is described as someone who “reads Baudelaire endlessly”!

Still The Dark Chamber is best approached from outside the genre rather than from within. Cline has assembled all of the elements of the Gothic- the crumbling mansion with its eccentric family, the mad scientist, his estranged wife, the ghostly daughter, the pathetic servant, into whose closed society enters the stranger, who tells the tale- and placed them in a contemporary nineteen-twenties setting, with talk of jazz and free love, in a place just far enough away from New York City (in fact, just up the Hudson River) that the cold light of realism is dimmed and these unusual characters give the impressions of all kinds of supernaturalism. Occasionally, Cline puts his tongue uneasily into his cheek- by naming the mad scientist Richard Pride, the crumbling mansion Mordance Hall, and the dog Tod (which he even points out is the German word for death). But for the most part Cline’s burlesque is gentle, and his sympathies clearly lie with an appreciation of the Gothic. Yet, somehow, the approach of the novel remains subtly on the outside of the genre looking in.

(c) 2005 by Douglas A. Anderson.
Used by permission.