You know, it’s been a little while since I dunked on discussed a story by H. P. Lovecraft. Let’s change that, shall we?

Let’s talk about “The Terrible Old Man.”

“The Terrible Old Man” is about, well, a terrible old man. He is so terrible, in fact, that the story refuses to refer to him by anything other than the terrible old man. I don’t want to have to type that up ten million times, so we’re just going to call him Tom. Tom is believed to be an old sea captain, but no one’s really sure.

Tom lives in a sleepy New England town of ambiguous statehood called Kingsport. He is super old and feeble, but the townsfolk know a lot better than to fuck with him because he’s also super creepy. He has a bunch of rocks in his yard that Hewlett Packard Lovecraft says “resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern temple.”

Which sounds just a little bit racist, but that’s kind of par for the course when it comes to Lovecraft.

Anyway, Tom also has a bunch of bottles with sailor names like Spanish Joe and Mate Ellis that he likes to talk to. They actually respond to him by way of lead pendulums sitting in the bottles.

Oh, and I should also mention that he has yellow eyes, which unnerves people even more.

So, yeah, the locals don’t really have much to do with him. Three not local dudes named Joe Czanek, Manuel Silva, and Angelo Ricci didn’t get the memo though. See, Tom is also ridiculously wealthy, so the three men come up with the bright idea to rob him. I mean, he’s one old man, what could he possibly do to them?

Yeah, this does not turn out well for them.

Anyway, the plan is as follows: Silva and Ricci are to go into the house, incapacitate the old man, nab his stuff, then go back Czanek in the getaway car. So the three men take their respective places and things seem to be going well, up until Czanek hears screaming.

This confuses him, since the two were supposed to incapacitate Tom quietly, which doesn’t seem to be happening. Of course, he very quickly realizes that Tom isn’t the one doing the screaming when he comes out and grins ominously at the thief.

Some time later, the town is abuzz with gossip about the three unidentified bodies that recently washed up on the beach. Interestingly, the bodies seem to have been hacked at with a cutlass. Tom seems conspicuously uninterested in what’s going on, but the townsfolk chalk it up to him having seen a lot of shit in his time. That, or everyone’s too fucking scared of him to say otherwise.

Now, one of the things you may notice about the two thieves is that they have Italian, Spanish, and eastern European names, respectively. This seems to be Hit Points Lovecraft’s prejudices coming though in his work.

Another thing is that exactly what happened to the three isn’t explicitly stated, but can be pieced together. The most likely scenario is that Tom’s bottles contained the souls of his sailor buddies, and he had the ghosts kill the thieves. Which is kind of understandable, as they were trying to steal his shit, but still seems a little excessive.

So the morals here seem to be 1) don’t rob old people, and 2) Hippopotamus Lovecraft really disliked anyone who isn’t a WASP.

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