“The Events at Poroth Farm” (1972)

My first foray into T.E.D. Klein is this long story which Klein reworked with variations and later developed into a novel, The Ceremonies. Often classified as cosmic horror, and thus duly under influence of H.P. Lovecraft (perhaps even making a bid for place in the Cthulhu universe), it also has some of the smooth smarty-pants style of Ray Russell in his gothic mode. “The Events at Poroth Farm” is presented as an affidavit that incorporates a summer’s worth of journal entries, when our narrator repaired to the deep New Jersey countryside to study. So it also takes a classic epistolary approach of horror. Our guy is some kind of academic specializing in early gothic and horror literature. Among other things he can’t stop talking about what he is reading, and I can’t stop jotting down the titles: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794), The Monk by Matthew Gregory (1796), Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (1820), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Arthur Machen’s “White People” (1904), The Lost Traveller by Ruthven Todd (1943), and many more. You should see the reading list you get just from this story. The narrator is renting an outbuilding at a remote farm owned by a couple who belong to a Mennonite sect. The couple, Sarr and Deborah Poroth, are religious but they are often surprisingly more sophisticated than might be expected. They like to drink, though they know the church frowns on it. Meanwhile, our guy is phobic about insects and especially spiders, attacking them with strong toxic chemicals. The mildew keeps climbing the exterior of his building. Giant white moths flap at his screens, obscured by ivy. The Poroth couple are in their 30s, with no children, but they love cats and have seven of them. This also seemed to me to mark them as more urban. They both also attended college. It’s an ANTI-Lovecraft story in one way because his beloved cats, particularly a specific one, are the source of all the evil that transpires. But it’s not the cat, it’s the god-like being passing through the cat and inhabiting others as well. Klein manages it pretty well, with a slow but inexorable build-up of terrible things and tension. This is so good I’m almost afraid to look at the rewrites. It also appears to be Klein’s first publication, an auspicious start. He didn’t write a lot and he generally favored long stories. I’m looking forward to reading more.

A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Listen to story online.