"The Festival" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in October 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales.
Inspiration
The story was inspired by Lovecraft's first trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in December 1922. Lovecraft later called that visit "the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence." The narrator's path through Kingsport corresponds to a route to the center of Marblehead; the house with the overhanging second story is probably based on Marblehead's 1 Mugford Street. The church in the story is St. Michael's Episcopal Church on Frog Lane. Built in 1714, it is the oldest Anglican church in New England that is still standing at its original site. The church is on a modest hill; for most of the 18th century, it had a steeple. Its crypt, where parishioners were interred, remains. Since Lovecraft visited the church, he may have spoken with the rector and learned such details about the church. Lovecraft was also influenced by two books he had recently read: Hence, he describes the narrator's folk as: The idea of "pre-Aryan" survivals was the basis of "The Novel of the Black Seal", a story in Arthur Machen's 1895 novel The Three Impostors. This story, too, had impressed Lovecraft when he read it not long before writing "The Festival"; it influenced the development of some of his later stories, including "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Dunwich Horror", and The Whisperer in Darkness.
Synopsis
"It was the Yuletide," the story begins, "that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind." An unnamed narrator is making his first visit to Kingsport, Massachusetts, an "ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten." The town he comes to, which shows little sign of habitation, seems centuries out of date He locates his relatives' house, which has an overhanging second story, and is greeted by an unspeaking old man with "flabby hands, curiously gloved," and a "bland face" that he comes to suspect is "a fiendishly cunning mask". This mysterious greeter directs him to wait next to a pile of old books that includes a Latin translation of the Necronomicon, wherein he discovers "a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness." At the stroke of 11, he is led outside to join a "throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway", heading to the "top of a high hill in the centre of the town, where perched a great white church." He follows the silent crowd, "jostled by elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy", into the church. The procession enters a secret passageway below the crypt, eventually coming to "a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean." There they engage in a "Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him", while "something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute". The flute-playing summons The narrator resists joining this expedition, even when his guide points out the family resemblance on his mask-like face, and shows him a watch with his family's arms that he recognizes as having "been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698." When a sudden effort to control one of the mounts "dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his head", the narrator throws himself into the river "before the madness of my screams could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal." He awakens in a Kingsport hospital, where he looks out to find a much more modern town, and is told that he was rescued from Kingsport Harbour after footprints revealed he walked off a cliff. Agitated to learn that he is near Kingsport's old churchyard, he is transferred to St. Mary's Hospital in nearby Arkham, where he is allowed to read a copy of the Necronomicon and find the passage that so disturbed him at his ancestral house; he dares quote only one paragraph of it:
Reception
Lovecraft himself did not think much of the story. Even so, Clark Ashton Smith, in a letter to Lovecraft dated October 1933, wrote: "In spite of your disparagement, 'The Festival' holds its place in my affections, and has an imaginative quality that puts it above the new stories in the current W.T." S. T. Joshi described "The Festival" as a story "of considerable interest", and stated "the story can be considered a virtual three-thousand-word prose-poem for the sustained modulation of its prose".
Connections
, author of , calls "The Festival" "the first Mythos story to use witch-haunted Kingsport as a setting", and also credits it with advancing the lore of the Necronomicon, saying that it is "the first tale to give a lengthy quote from the imaginary book and to tell us something about its history." S.T. Joshi cites "The Unnamable," written a month before "The Festival," as the first story to use Arkham as a setting, but "The Festival" clearly has closer connections to the mythos than "The Unnamable." The Case of Charles Dexter Ward mentions "the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the province of the Massachusetts-Bay," an apparent reference to "The Festival". The motif of a character's nonhuman identity being concealed by a mask is used again by Lovecraft in "The Whisperer in Darkness", The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key". It is suggested by enthusiasts of the Cthulhu Mythos that the short story features the first appearance of the byakhees, the winged creatures mentioned. They would be later included in August Derleth's tale "The House on Curwen Street".
Adaptation
"The Festival", "The Picture in the House", and "The Dunwich Horror" were adapted into short claymation films. These were released in the DVD-Video collection H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories by Toei Animation in August 2007.
