Reaction
August Derleth's negative reaction to the unpublished story was conveyed by Lovecraft to another correspondent: "Derleth didn't say it was unsalable; in fact, he rather thought it would sell. He said it was a poor story, which is an entirely different and much more lamentably important thing." Lovecraft responded to Derleth: "our reaction to my poor "Dreams in the Witch House" is, in kind, about what I expected—although I hardly thought the miserable mess was quite as bad as you found it.... The whole incident shows me that my fictional days are probably over."
Thus discouraged, Lovecraft refused to submit the story for publication anywhere; without Lovecraft's knowledge, Derleth later submitted it to Weird Tales, which indeed accepted it.
Many later critics have shared Derleth's view. Lin Carter calls the story "a minor effort" that "remains singularly one-dimensional, curiously unsatisfying." Peter Cannon claims that "most critics agree" that "The Dreams in the Witch House" ranks with "The Thing on the Doorstep" as "the poorest of Lovecraft's later tales." S. T. Joshi referred to the tale as "one of poorest later efforts."
In stark contrast, Lovecraft biographer and Prix Goncourt award winning novelist Michel Houellebecq situates the story within what he calls Lovecraft's "definitive fourth circle," classing it alongside seven other tales that comprise "the absolute heart of HPL's myth what most rabid Lovecraftians continue to call, almost in spite of themselves, the 'great texts.'"
Recently, more favorable criticism of "Dreams" has appeared. Weird Tales's current Lovecraft columnist, Kenneth Hite, calls the story "one of the purest and most important examples of sheer Lovecraftian cosmicism," suggesting that it is the most fully fleshed-out expression of the author's "From Beyond" motif, also explored in such stories as "The Music of Erich Zann," "Hypnos," and "The Hound."
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia complains that "hile the tale contains vividly cosmic vistas of hyperspace, HPL does not appear to have thought out the details of the plot satisfactorily.... It seems as if HPL were aiming merely for a succession of startling images without bothering to fuse them into a logical sequence."
Read more about this topic: The Dreams In The Witch House
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