"The Festival" (1925)

Here is one of the many H.P. Lovecraft stories that did not make it into the skimpy Library of America collection edited by Peter Straub. In fairness, in most cases it's not hard to guess the reasons for exclusion—but, on the other hand, that collection had room for hundreds more pages and LOA projects devoted to an author generally bear some suggestion of completeness. A lot of stories were left out of that one. They could have been put in their own "approach with caution" section. So, right, not much happens in "The Festival." It's mostly Lovecraft laying an eldritch mood on thick. But making it a Christmas story redeems a lot of the inert qualities for me—or "the Yuletide," as our unnamed first-person narrator prefers to call it. He is obviously aware of the holiday's ancient pagan winter solstice origins. He is visiting the town of Kingsport for the holiday. He appears to have kin there who appear to know him. Or who anyway welcome him and bring him along to the festival. It's possible he is dead. The festival is held in a kind of cave next to an underground river reached by a stairway descending from a church basement. The church sits on top of a hill. There is a nice dream quality here as events unfold, an effect often sought by Lovecraft but less often achieved. This feels like a dream because it's in that realm where it almost makes sense, with careful use of details. The utter silence, for example—of the town, of the crowd of people shuffling to the festival, of the festival itself—is positively eerie and notably "off." Lovecraft had some mystical experience the first time he visited the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, the model for Kingsport. It gets mentioned a lot in relation to this story but I file it under Lovecraft's excitable temperament. ISFDB classes it as a Cthulhu story. The Necronomicon book is in it. The narrator's relative, "the old man," is a good character—he wears a subtle mask which is hard to notice at first and makes his facial features immobile. So lots of good stuff here but no real story—various horrors and grotesqueries of the scene at the festival proper, then over and out. That's not necessarily a bad thing when I think of the contrived getaway capers that mar some of his best stories, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or At the Mountains of Madness. Still, a dreamy march to a mysterious subterranean chamber and some grotesqueries don't feel like quite enough either, hence perhaps the reason it was left out of the LOA (S.T. Joshi did include it in his Penguin collection of Lovecraft). I like "The Festival" because it's a Christmas story after all, and I believe it is Lovecraft's only one. He always was a great one for respecting tradition.

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