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Episode 436 - Beyond the Door (Patreon)

Published:
2019-01-17 20:02:05
Edited:
2024-12-12 19:03:30
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

This week, we're reviewing one of HPL's favorites: Beyond the Door by J. Paul Suter!

Fifer also really goes on about an article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, as one does.

Special thanks to our reader, David Moore!

Next up: Men Without Bones

Comments

Steve

Rats and quicksand, what became of them? Perhaps some kind of rat-quicksand combo, a bit like Sharknado, might work. Ratsand! It's coming at you out of your basement!

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

Regarding "Men Without Bones," (much like "The Horror of the Heights" which I recommended so long ago and "The Human Chair") friend of the show Patton Oswalt did an October blog post on the tale years back which is probably worth checking out.

Richard Horsman

Chad mentioned marrying a ghost, which reminded me: any plans to return to Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio? I've been picking away at it, and like half these things are about marrying a woman who turns out to be a ghost oh and also a fox.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Granted it is not a weird story, the writing is - I'd wager - rather weird. Had a good time listening to you two wrestle with it. And even more fun enjoying your delight over the sweet and well-meaning article.

Explosion the Aquarius

When I first saw the author's name, I was like, "Wait, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote weird fiction????" Then I saw my mistake...now I'm wondering what kind of weird fiction Jean-Paul Sartre would write....

Sanjay Mathew

Wasn't there another story you guys covered which involved "nuzzling" as a peculiarly unwholesome characteristic?

Sanjay Mathew

"The Diary of Mr Poynter" which you refer to in the episode is one of the less well known James stories but is still good. It's very concentrated on the build up to that one moment of horror. I think Suter's *trying* to do a Jamesian story but he flubs the build-up.

Rafe Ball

MULDER: Scully, what do you make of it? SCULLY: I’ve checked the fingerprints against the old microfiche records; the body is definitely J. Paul Suter. MULDER: So what, sombody dug him up? SCULLY: No. That’s the thing. He may look like a mummified corpse on the outside, but I put time of death at earlier today, about five to six hours ago. MULDER: But... that would make him 135 years old! SCULLY: I can’t explain it, but yes. MULDER: Can you at least determine cause of death? SCULLY: Oh, that’s easy - living author mentioned on the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. MULDER: The poor soul... He never stood a chance.

Christine M

I accidentally discovered a story of the same name that qualifies much more as weird fiction, IMHO! Philip K. Dick wrote a very short tale by the same name, which I quite enjoyed. Maybe you can cover it some time!

Ben Mund

Jesus Christ, Chad. ANOTHER Cleveland Plain Dealer podcast?! That whole "Hot Takes on CPD" genre is pretty played out.

Ben Mund

You mentioned "Men Without Bones" and it got me obsessively trying to ID a story from an old horror comic I read in probably the late 70's / early 80's. It involved either a scientist or a man who was cursed, but either way he ended up with either no bones or bones that were rubbery. As the story went on he became less able to hold his shape. I have a vivid memory of a panel where he gets hit by a car and body splays out like Plastic Man, his face horribly distorted. Does that ring any bells or can anyone ID what it was?

Heather Bell

Re: whether the punishment fit the crime In the modern era, being a jerk when breaking up with a girl is small potatoes. But go back less than a hundred years, and it's a totally different situation. This kind of reminds me how you guys thought Lord Ruthven was initially judged a bit harshly just for being a cad. But women's roles and their value in society wad so much more curtailed then. A young woman of middle or upper class had exactly one thing to accomplish in life: marry well. End of story; if you did that, well done, if not, miserable destitution and/or spinsterhood were your fate. Maybe if you're lucky, a relative will pity you enough to support you as a charity case. So to woo a young woman, to lead her on for any length of time, and especially to sleep with her, and then not marry her, was to absolutely ruin her life. Because her youth and chastity were her most valuable assets in making a good match, wasting her time or sullying her reputation had an incredible potential to reduce her chances of success in life, by the only metric of the time. (Sidebar: this is a super class-based problem. Poor women had much more flexibility in their dating lives, barring the fact that economic necessity often drove/still drives many to sex work. Point is, from the perspective of the story, Ruthven is a criminal not because he wanted to play house with a succession of women, but because he was toying with the wrong kind of woman.) All that said, I think Uncle Godfrey did something much worse than love and run. Remember, this girl was an orphan. She had no other relatives. She had moved from another continent to live with this cousin, who it seems likely became both her lover and surrogate father figure. She didn't have friends; Mrs. Malkin said she was so shy she hadn't even met the neighbors in the year she stayed. Godfrey was the only tether in her life. I don't think he meant to put her in that position, but he let it happen. When he rebuffed her, he thought only of his work, and not the unbelievable pain of being cruelly rejected by the one person in your life you thought cared. And this only a year after the trauma of losing her father. Then the final insult: faced with her suicide, out of self-preservation, Godfrey denied her a memorial and a Christian burial. He hid her body and lied and went back to his normal life. Another crime that seems less horrific to modern heathens like ourselves than it would have to people of that time and place. Tl;dr - yes, Uncle Godfrey totally got what he deserved. P. S. - I admire/regret your restraint in not mentioning some of the hilarious lines in the epilogue, when the body is being retrieved: "Somebody'll have to go down." "The policeman and the detective had adjusted the knots to their satisfaction." "It won't be much of a pull. I'll take the brunt of it." "I could catch the detective's rapid breathing now." "The policeman's big shoulders began straining, rhythmically." "Then it tightened suddenly, and there was an ejaculation from below - just below." "The rhythmic tugging continued." And so on. Once you take one line of that scene the wrong way, almost every part of it seems dirty. Anyway, great show, loved the story! Heather B.

Sellers Burgener

If you would rather study bugs all day than engage in a sexy taboo relationship with an adoring young woman who talks like Nicole Kidman, then maybe you deserve to be pinned underneath a stone slab and die a slow, horrible death. That's all I'm saying! As far as the Lovecraft endorsement goes, I mean, Ian Curtis absolutely loved The Wake, which today sounds kind of like boring Joy Division. I think there is a tendency to proclaim solidarity with the contemporaries of your day, even if time eventually proves the work is of an inferior quality.

Nickthulhu

I work in the machining business and, believe it or not, "cannibalizing" is a term that's frequently thrown around. When I first started, a bolt broke on one of the machines that I was working on. It was a "special order" bolt and we didn't have another one. You can imagine my surprise when my foreman, after pondering for some time, looked at me with a straight face and said: "Here's what we need to do — cannibalization." I was startled until I realized he meant we would simply take the same type of bolt from a different part of the machine that we currently weren't employing. So, I suppose the term could be used in general to mean something consuming itself for its own benefit, but I think Suter hadn't used it in this manner either!

Josh Decker

I can understand the lukewarm feelings the Lovecraftian fans might have towards Jamesian weird fiction. They're very different flavors of the genre. I think of it like British vs American mystery. The American version will center around an eviscerated incest rape victim's corpse and the British version will be set at a lovely dinner party in a stately home until Lady Tremberley's body is found in the garden and the murder will be solved by two goofy horticulturalists. In the end they will both be about murder but the setting and feeling of the story will be very different. But I think James' most "lovecraftian" story would be "An Evening's Entertainment" which is one of his least beloved stories but it does get gruesome and the forces at work are largely unknown horrors (not ghost bed sheets). I did enjoy it but you just have to wade through a lot of quaint and circuitous dialogue to get there.

Pete Williams

Perhaps you could do an M.R. June?

Hannah Kollef

I see what you did there... "well-coming" David Moore to the show broadcast from the well. I hope no other fans mist it.

Cacodaemoniacal

I think the reference to a fitting end is that he ended up being pinned like the bugs on his wall. I suppose you could say he "pinned" the girl into his scrap book of conquests, plus, you know, the sexual innuendo) I wonder when they started using ether to kill the insects rather than let them suffer. He could have pinned the bugs alive and let them suffer until death.