I’ve been trying to get in the habit of reading more fiction again. This past week I went through a couple of short stories: The Cabin In The Woods by Richard Laymon and Black Man With A Horn by T.E.D. Klein.

Both stories are Lovecraft homages. When I comes to Lovecraft’s stories, I often find the idea of Lovecraft better than the reality of Lovecraft. This is not to say I do not recognize Lovecraft as a literary great. It is simply that I do not delve into his works on a regular basis. Hence, I am not as familiar with the Lovecraft monster pantheon as others. If the above two stories reference particular Lovecraft works, I am not the one to point them out.

However, when it comes to The Cabin In The Woods, I do believe it is perhaps inspired by Lovecraft’s Whisperer In The Darkness story.

The Cabin In The Woods is about a couple and a third-wheel brother who tromp out to their father’s old cabin deep in the woods. Once there, the trio is confronted by a Lovecraft beastie and things go awry.

One thing I took note of with Laymon’s story is how sparsely it was written. Paragraphs are typically two to three sentences long. Once in awhile, a paragraph becomes a tome…reaching up to five sentences.

Laymon’s Cabin In The Woods is a great example of how little the reader’s imagination needs to work with on some occasions. Despite the lack of detail, I had no problem visualizing the woods, the cabin, the monster and the characters. I also had no problem feeling the narrator’s desperation. I liked the idea of someone trapped in the woods by a monster. Basically, the narrator is safe by daylight, so he tries to hike out of the woods when the sun is up, but he can only hike half the day. If he can’t make it to safety by the afternoon, he has to hike back to the cabin to be sheltered again before nightfall.

The only drawback of The Cabin In The Woods is it ends too soon.

On the other side of the spectrum, one has Black Man With A Horn. I have no idea which Lovecraft story it is referencing. It is about an aging weird-tales author who personally knew Lovecraft, so there is a bit of meta-fiction in play. The man encounters a missionary who is returning from working among a lost tribe in Malaysia. The tribe worships a Lovecraft entity, and the missionary believes the tribe wants to kill him.

Black Man With A Horn is much more elegant than The Cabin In The Woods. The paragraphs contain more sentences, more world-building, the inner-life of the main character is more explored and the plot is more intricate. The story is also more subtle. So subtle, I’m not sure exactly what happened. Hints of the lurking evil are dropped only sporadically and not really expounded on. It is up to the reader to try to piece them together into some sort of weird-tale conspiracy. Black Man With A Horn also contains an underlying commentary on racism.

As said, at the end of the day, I’m not sure what happened in Black Man With A Horn. Apparently, the tribe could “grow things” in people, and there was an entity that could suck people’s lungs out, but I’m not sure of the connection between the two. Was the entity grown in someone and then went around and sucked people’s lungs out? If I was more familiar with Lovecraft’s bestiary, maybe the answer lies there. I am okay with making the reader work a little bit, and if Klein peaked my curiosity enough to make me want to know more, then he wrote well.

Black Man With A Horn also ends on an ambiguous note. Unlike, The Cabin In The Woods, I thought it was exactly the right length. I did not need anymore story.

Did the ambiguous ending work for both stories? My ambiguous answer is that I’m not sure.

Ambiguous endings can be good or bad. They can be good when they are employed in a way that leaves the ultimate fate of the character up to debate, but they can be bad when they are ambiguous as to what actually happened. The nature of a story is to tell what happened. As long as what happened is clear, ambiguity to other things is fine.

What happened in The Cabin In The Woods is pretty clear, but we have no real idea why it happened. What was the monster’s motivation? Laymon does not say, but its actions clearly show it had a method and a plan. The question is…do we need to know? Perhaps not. It was a Lovecraft monster, after all. To know too much would drive us to madness…

Meanwhile, what happened in Black Man With A Horn is presented in snippets, but how it all comes together is a bit vague. Again, do we need to have it spelled out? Probably not…but I would have liked to know. I went away from the story a bit frustrated because everything else about it was beautifully delivered. Nevertheless, I can craft my own answers in my imagination. That is perhaps the best gift of the ambiguous ending.