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    Case of Charles Dexter Ward
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    Case of Charles Dexter Ward
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    Case of Charles Dexter Ward
    Ebook198 pages4 hours

    Case of Charles Dexter Ward

    By H. P. Lovecraft

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    About this ebook

    H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateFeb 3, 2014
    ISBN9781609772758
    Author

    H. P. Lovecraft

    Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

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    Reviews for Case of Charles Dexter Ward

    4/5

    291 ratings12 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A master of infered horror.
    • 5/5
      4.5

      Lovecraft must be the only author whose works I've read and don't mind certain things most readers seem to hate. Yes, it can be slow. Yes, he can be overly descriptive. Yes, there is an omniscient narrator. Yes, there is lots of retelling. And in most cases, some of those annoy me too.
      However, all of it pales in front of his extraordinary imagination and the atmosphere you find in his stories. It doesn't matter if it is a short story or a longer one. He is one of a kind and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is one of those stories that shows just how great Lovecraft was.'What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and contraventions of Nature, had come back after a century and a half to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires and domes?' It starts with the escape of Charles Dexter Ward from a private hospital near Providence, Rhode Island. He 'was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind'. Charles seemed to switch his personality to the one from eighteenth century. Even his physical appearance was changed. The last person to talk to him before his escape is his family physician, Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett. The only thing left in the room is a strange blue powder. 'This is no common case—it is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with.' From there, the story goes back to where and when it all started. From Ward's unhealthy interest in his ancestor Joseph Curwen who came from Salem during the witch-hunt trials to all the changes everyone noticed. It goes even further in the past, because there is a story within a story here. Who was Joseph Curwen? What did he do? What happened to him? Why would someone try to erase every trace of him? From Ward's research, private letters and rare diaries he managed to find, he found out that his ancestor 'was marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague'.

      You already know where Charles Dexter Ward would end up, but his path from a solitary young antiquarian to the changed man the doctor left in that hospital room is a remarkable story. Considering that Dr. Willett is the one who brought him into this world, the ending is extraordinary and the doctor one of my favourite characters I've read.
    • 4/5
      Set across 18th and early 20th Century New England, this Lovecraft’s longest single story, telling of the eponymous Charles and his fateful obsession with a powerful ancestor, and the darkest of arts. Lacks some of the impact of his best short stories, but does create a good atmosphere that keeps the reader entertained until the end. Some predictable aspects of the plot, but the anticipation of the worst is part of the enjoyment of horror.
    • 4/5
      I first discovered Lovecraft when I was young, perhaps in junior high? I read everything of his at that time, but this particular work was a bit beyond me.Now, re-reading it decades later, I understand and respect it more. I like his masterful use of dramatic irony as the characters are slow to discover or understand the cosmic horror which the reader is already privy to, creating a tension that ensnares the reader. I think this novella is less ambiguous than many of his other works, and he tells us almost everything about what finally befell poor Charles Dexter Ward. The setting of Old Providence is beautifully done, and the scenes set underground are particularly chilling. Granted, there are some rambling, slow passages, and a smidge of the racism that mars some of his writing. It is a product of its time, but still enjoyable.
    • 3/5
      Lovecraft's longest work, but also one of his more underwhelming ones. I think, with some judicious editing to remove repetitive passages and to straighten out the meandering plot a bit, this could have been one of his good ones, but it just didn't quite hit the marks for me.
    • 4/5

      " What the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the carvings on the hellish altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made it in this form, for it was too palpably unfinished. The deficiencies were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities of proportion could not be described."

      That was just a sample of the type of writing found within this short novel by H.P. Lovecraft. Reading this reminded me how much I love this type of writing.

      I hereby vow to read more of Lovecraft's work this year. Yeah, I made a vow, baby. A vow!
    • 5/5
      The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is the latest magisterial Lovecraftian publication from the University of Tampa Press. What connection could a Florida university have with a staunch Rhode Islander like HPL? Interestingly, RH Barlow of De Land, FL was a correspondent and friend of HPL who served as his literary executor. UT Press has made a small industry of publishing Lovecraftiana, including A Comprehensive Bibliography and Oh, Fortunate Floridian (the letters of HPL to RH Barlow). A major player in these publications has been ST Joshi, the eminent Lovecraft scholar, who edits these books. As you might guess, the content has been more of interest to readers fascinated with HPL’s life, with scholars and with collectors, rather than to general readers. Well, it is a university press!The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is their latest foray into Lovecraftian publishing. TCOCDW was written very quickly in 1927 and HPL never really made efforts to have it published during his lifetime. There are several reasons why it now merits an urgent recommendation. The production is simply wonderful. I have the hardcover and it is simply a beautiful book to behold. The editing is by ST Joshi and we may safely consider this to be a definitive edition, superseding all others. There are copious notes on the text by Mr. Joshi which do a wonderful job of keeping everything in its proper context. You can read the novel through but it helped me immensely to stop and refer to the notes. We then have a marvelous afterward by Mr. Joshi. Not only is it very scholarly but it is also quite readable, as interesting it its own right as the text itself. Finally we have the crowning glory of the book, a series of photographs of buildings from Lovecraft’s Providence by Donovan K. Loucks. For those of us not lucky enough to have trod the streets of Providence in the footsteps of HPL and Poe, these add immeasurably to the reading experience. I cannot imagine a better way to experience The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; anyone who is a serious Lovecraftian simply must have a copy.Now of course I could wish for one more thing and that would have been a street map of Providence with these locations marked out, and perhaps a map of greater Providence with neighboring towns indicated. Well I looked them up online myself and I guess I can’t be too greedy.The fly in the ointment of course, is HPL’s text itself, which even he did not have high regard for. For idle dabblers and or those new to Lovecraft, TCOCDW is not the place to start. I remember reading a version of the text at age 14 and it did not leave any sort of favorable impression, what with all the references to colonial Rhode Island that made no sense to me then. I got lost in a salad of words and names. Even today I find it almost to be a caricature of HPL’s writing. It can be viewed as a stepping stone on his way to his greater masterpieces, a sort of farewell to supernatural fiction and a turning towards science fiction. I read it as a personal love letter from HPL to Providence with a horror story thrown in. At the very least, the paperback is none too expensive and The University of Tampa Press has given us a model of how all of HPL’s works should be presented. I can only hope for more wonders from this source.
    • 3/5
      Well crafted and scary. Lovecraft uses too many antiquated words, and his prose can be pretentious. Even so, he masterfully instills fear, not by a direct, visual account of the horror, but rather by describing foul odors, woeful noises, eyewitnesses too traumatized to speak of what they saw, and ghoulish aftermath.
    • 5/5
      That's definitely the creepiest of the creepiest stories of all time! Here Lovecraft used all his talent to freak all his readers with a diabolic scheme filled with a frightful environment full of madness! Here the main character has discovered through Joseph Curwen's manuscripts (An ancient resident involved with macabre subjects) some obscurities of the underworld. The more he gets involved with those things, the more he changes in a queer and sinister way. All the facts about the terrible deeds of Mr. Curwen and Charles’s insane behavior are described step by step by a third person (Charles's doctor, Mr. Willett).Lovecraft doesn't used to write long stories, but he made it perfectly. I grant this as a masterpiece and it’s the best of his works I ever read!
    • 5/5
      This was the second Lovecraft story I read, after At the Mountains of Madness, so at the time I knew next to nothing about Lovecraft's mythos and other writings. (That didn't last long, though.) Now with two volumes of his work under my belt, this is still the story that has stuck with me the most. It takes a while to get into, and the old-fashioned, stuffy prose doesn't help the slow start, but once things start picking up with terrible revelations and horrible implications, there's no putting it down. I find it fascinating how Lovecraft is able to pull off such a terrifying story with no gratuitous visuals. Everything is implied rather than shown directly. When describing a monster, in this story at least, Lovecraft doesn't go into actual physical descriptions, but instead simply describes how terrifying in appearance the creature is. And the genius of it is, it works. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is easily the masterpiece of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
    • 4/5
      The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is H.P. Lovecraft's only Cthulhu novel. It is written in the voice of someone examining the case of the poor Charles succumbing to the ancient horrors. The odd writing style is off-putting at first, but as the story deepens, seems more and more fitting.The book is not a mystery, as the reader knows early on what is happening (if the reader has any knowledge of the Cthulhu mythos...). This may irritated me at some point, but soon I became enchanted about the way the mystery unfolded to the characters.
    • 5/5
      This superb tale of Horror begins -'From a private hospital for the insane near providence,Rhode island,there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person.He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward,and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind.A short but brilliant story of madness,evil,and the dark gods.Read it - If you dare.!