The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
1941
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
1941
Charles Dexter Ward is a gentleman antiquarian from Providence, Rhode Island, with a passion for genealogy and the occult. When he discovers his blood connection to Joseph Curwen, a 17th-century wizard rumored to have practiced alchemy and witchcraft, his scholarly interest curdles into an obsession that will consume him entirely. Ward begins duplicating his ancestor's rituals, delving deeper into forbidden texts and darker arts until he crosses a threshold from which no one returns. His psychiatrist, Dr. Willett, watches helplessly as his patient transforms into something inhuman, and must ultimately confront what Ward has unleashed. This is Lovecraft at his most personal: a Providence native writing about his own city's buried horrors, layering genealogical dread with the terror that our ancestors' sins might not stay buried. The novel builds toward one of his most disturbing revelations, a conclusion that reframes everything that came before it. For readers who want their horror intellectual, atmospheric, and rooted in the mundane corruption of bloodlines.
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“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,And with strange aeons even death may die.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone;””
— H. P. Lovecraft
