The Rats In The Walls

“In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no longer young, I resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession.”

Delapore cannot talk directly about the death of his son, but this passage implies that the loss was difficult for him. Restoring Exham Priory and reconnecting with his ancestry is a way for Delapore to stop feeling aimless and instead feel that he is part of something greater than himself. Delapore’s determination to restore his ancestral home develops the theme of Family History and Identity.

“The fireside tales were of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented my ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons beside whom Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade would seem the veriest tyros, and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearances of villagers through several generations.”

Delapore hears a lot of stories about his ancestors, but the people of Anchester are not specific about what crimes the de la Poers committed. By referencing Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade, Delapore makes light of the hyperbolic stories that he has heard. This passage develops the theme of Violence and Morality and foreshadows the de la Poers’ true crimes by suggesting they abducted multiple villagers.

“Their persistence, and their application to so long a line of my ancestors, were especially annoying; whilst the imputations of monstrous habits proved unpleasantly reminiscent of the one known scandal of my immediate forebears—the case of my cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.”

Darkly ambiguous word choices and imagery develop the theme of Violence and Morality. The “monstrous habits” that Delapore hears about in the villagers’ stories are murder, enslavement, imprisonment, and cannibalism. Delapore compares these stories to his cousin, suggesting that living in a different culture is a terrible scandal. Delapore, like Lovecraft in his real life, often expresses racist views. Ironically, Delapore is uncomfortable with the crimes of the de la Poers but does not seem to see the similarity between their actions and those of his more immediate family, who enslaved Black people in the antebellum South.

“I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in the barren, windswept valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the graveyard stenches after the spring rains; of the floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir John Clave's horse had trod one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day.”

Lovecraft uses ominous imagery to foreshadow the story’s climax. He references “graveyard stenches” from the area near the underground grotto, which were actually due to the pits of dead bodies that the rats fed on. He also implies that Sir John Clave’s horse stepped on an escaped prisoner from the grotto—possibly an infant or child that did not appear fully human. Finally, he suggests that some people experience a psychological crisis when they learn the truth about Exham Priory.

“And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats—the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion—the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the village homes and brought curses and horrors in its train.”

A key recurring motif is rats. After Walter de la Poer killed his family and put a stop to the cannibal cult of the underground grotto, the rats lost their source of food. They ate the remaining bodies before leaving the priory to terrorize Anchester in search of food. Like all the stories that Delapore hears, this one is based on truth, though he does not really believe it until it is too late.

“I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.”

Delapore describes his recurring nightmare about the “swineherd” and the beasts. Eventually, he realizes that the beasts are quadrupedal humans, and one of them even looks like Norrys. Thornton believes that the dreams are giving Delapore important knowledge; this turns out to be true, as the swineherd represents Delapore’s ancestors and Delapore himself, while the beasts represent the victims of the grotto.

“This time I did not have to question the source of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankle, unconscious of their effect; for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound—the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats.”

Delapore wakes in the night to find Black Tom anxiously staring at the wall. Lovecraft uses vivid imagery to describe the sound of the rats. Their sound is “nauseous,” and although Delapore cannot see them, he imagines that the rats are “ravenous” and “gigantic.” In this passage, Lovecraft uses his narrator’s imagination to increase the horror of the scene.

“These rats, if not the creatures of a madness which I shared with the cats alone, must be burrowing and sliding in Roman walls I had thought to be solid limestone blocks…”

This is one of several passages that calls the rats’ existence into question. Delapore does not understand how they could be crawling through solid limestone, but he cannot deny the evidence of his own senses or the behavior of the cats. Lovecraft’s horror functions in part because it refuses to provide all the answers.

“They were mostly lower than the Piltdown man in the scale of evolution, but in every case definitely human. Many were of higher grade, and a very few were the skulls of supremely and sensitively developed types.”

Thematically, Phrenology and Pseudo-Evolutionary Theory inform the narrative. When Delapore refers to “supremely and sensitively developed types,” he is using phrenology to express racist ideas. According to Lovecraft’s narrative, it is more horrifying if intelligent, affluent, and upstanding people (who were most likely white) were also the victims of the cannibal grotto. This passage suggests that the suffering of other groups of people is less disturbing.

“Not Hoffmann or Huysmans could conceive a scene more wildly incredible, more frenetically repellent, or more Gothically grotesque than the twilit grotto through which we seven staggered […].”

E. T. A. Hoffmann was a German horror writer. Joris-Karl Huysmans was a French novelist. By alluding to these two writers, Lovecraft is connecting his work to a broader literary landscape. He is also rather cheekily implying that his own ideas are much more frightening than the literary ideas of the other authors.

“What I did venture to enter was the low Saxon building whose oaken door had fallen, and there I found a terrible row of ten stone cells with rusty bars. Three had tenants, all skeletons of high grade, and on the bony forefinger of one I found a seal ring with my own coat-of-arms.”

During his time in the grotto, Delapore sees a skeleton in a prison cell wearing his family’s ring. This brief moment suggests that the de la Poers and other cannibals may even have imprisoned members of their own family. Again, Delapore is more frightened by the idea of upper-class individuals being imprisoned and enslaved than he is by other groups of people suffering in the same way.

“I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under the endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.”

Lovecraft creates a vivid image of a corpse on a river to describe the sound of rats. By using a simile, Lovecraft incorporates yet another horrifying concept without even needing to include it in the actual events of the narrative.

“Why shouldn't rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things?...The war ate my boy, damn them all…and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames [...].”

This passage thematically underscores Violence and Morality and reveals Delapore’s justification for killing and eating Norrys. He aligns himself with his family’s history of eating “forbidden things,” by which he means human beings. He goes on to use consumption as a metaphor for the other kinds of violence that have hurt him throughout his life: the loss of his son and his home because of wars.