The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Title: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Author: H.P. Lovecraft
Published: 1951, this Voyager Omnibus edition in 1999
Genre: Horror and creepy things
Pages: 159


Lovecraft! Yay! Apparently Mr. Lovecraft wrote this short novel already back in 1927, but it wasn't published until 1951, after the author had already died. It tells the haunting tale of young Charles Dexter Ward and his ancestor Joseph Curwen. As a teenager Charles finds out about the strange man who lived some 150 years ago, a man whose memory has been buried quite as deep as his body. At least, that was the intention. Becoming curious, Charles, and the reader as well, find out more about Curwen and his spooky shenanigans.

It's been yeaaars since I last read this one, and it was in Finnish. It was cool to get to read it in the original language, but I have to admit that I had some trouble with the oldish language, especially when Curwen's old letters and such surfaced. I still remembered how the story goes, pooh, so it wasn't as shocking as I'd hoped for. The mood is dark and I often found myself telling the characters not to go there, not to touch that, not to chant that fucking formula you bleeding idiot! Do they listen? Nooo. They never do.


   In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that even Dr Lyman hesitates to date the youth's madness from any period before the close of 1919. He talked freely with his family - though his mother was not particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwen - and with the officials of the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying to private families for records thought to be in their possession he made no concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as to what really had taken place a century and a half before at that Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find, and what Joseph Curwen really had been. 


Back away, Charles, just... back away. Now.