Literary Significance and Criticism
The story was rejected by Argosy All-Story Weekly before being accepted by Weird Tales; Lovecraft claimed that the former magazine found it "too horrible for the tender sensibilities of a delicately nurtured publick". The publisher of Weird Tales, JC Henneberger, described the story in a note to Lovecraft as the best his magazine had ever received. It was one of the few Lovecraft stories anthologized during his lifetime, in the 1931 collection Switch on the Light, edited by Christine Campbell Thompson.
It is notable in that Lovecraft uses the technique of referring to a text (in this case a real life works by Petronius and Catullus) without giving a full explanation of its contents so as to give depth and hidden layers to his work. He later refined this idea with the infamous Necronomicon so prevalent in his Cthulhu Mythos stories.
Equally important to the later development of the Cthulhu Mythos was that it was a reprint of this story in Weird Tales that inspired Robert E. Howard to write to the magazine praising the work. This letter was passed on to Lovecraft and the two became friends and correspondents until Howard's death in 1936. This literary connection became reflected in each author adding aspects from the others works to their own tales and Howard is considered one of the more prolific of the original Cthulhu Mythos authors.
Kingsley Amis listed "Rats" (along with "The Dunwich Horror") as one of the Lovecraft stories "that achieve a memorable nastiness". Lin Carter calls "Rats" "one of the finest stories of Lovecraft's entire career." S. T. Joshi describes the piece as "a nearly flawless example of the short story in its condensation, its narrative pacing, its thunderous climax, and its mingling of horror and poignancy."
The name of the cat, "Nigger Man", has often been cited in discussions of Lovecraft's racial attitudes. Lovecraft himself owned a beloved cat by that name until 1904.
Read more about this topic: The Rats In The Walls
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“There was a literary gentleman present who who had dramatised in his time two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out—and who was a literary gentleman in consequence.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
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—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)