Utente:JhonSavor/SandboxLPN
| La Pietra Nera | |
|---|---|
| Titolo originale | The Black Stone |
| 1ª ed. originale | Novembre 1931 |
| 1ª ed. italiana | Ottobre 1975 |
| Genere | Racconto |
| Sottogenere | Orrore |
| Lingua originale | inglese |
| Ambientazione | Ungheria |
| Protagonisti | Narratore anonimo |
| Serie | Ciclo di Cthulhu |
La Pietra Nera è un racconto horror dello scrittore americano Robert E. Howard, pubblicato per la prima volta nel numero di novembre di Weird Tales del 1931. La storia introduce il personaggio di Justin Geoffrey e approfondisce il libro fittizio Unaussprechlichen Kulten di Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt citato per la prima volta nel racconto I Figli della Notte.
Storia editoriale
modificahttps://reh.world/stories/the-black-stone/
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Justin_Geoffrey_(Earth-616)
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Justin_Geoffrey
https://www.cthulhufiles.com/stories/howard/howard-the-house.html https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Justin_Geoffrey
Trama
modificaPersonaggi
modifica- Justin Geoffrey: (1898–1926)
A poet who wrote "The People of the Monolith" after visiting the village of Stregoicavar and died "screaming in a madhouse" five years before the events of the story. He is remembered by the villagers as acting in an odd manner, with a habit of mumbling to himself. The story opens with this stanza, which is attributed to him:
They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell.
Lovecraft mentions Geoffrey in The Thing on the Doorstep, saying that he is a friend of Edward Derby, the protagonist of the tale. Lovecraft states in the story that Geoffrey "died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary".[1] This is a detail invented by Lovecraft and not part of Howard's original story.
An English poet who died in a lunatic asylum. Some years before, his already frail psyche had been warped by looking for too long at the Black Stone of legend near the village of Stregoicavar. He never witnessed the annual, nocturnal rite of 24 June. The narrator in "The Black Stone" mentions that if he had, he would have become insane much earlier. His poetry is used as prelude in The Thing on the Roof and his backstory was explored in the unfinished story, The House. Here it was revealed that Geoffrey came from a family of merchants with no interest in art or poetry. The fragment suggests that Justin's insanity began when, as a child, he went to sleep one summer night beside a long-abandoned, sinister-looking farmhouse. Afterwards, he developed an increasingly violent temper (in contrast to his family's well known friendliness and sociability) as well as the habit of sneaking out of the house late at night to go exploring. Justin left home at the age of 17, after reluctantly completing high school. The Thing on the Doorstep reveals that Geoffrey was a correspondent of Edward Derby and gives the year of his death as 1926. See "The Black Stone"
- Von Junzt: (1795–1840)
An eccentric German poet and philosopher noted for his extensive travels and membership in myriad secret societies. He is mainly remembered as the author of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults or The Black Book), which was published shortly before his death. Six months after his return from an expedition to Mongolia, he was found dead in a locked and bolted chamber with taloned finger marks on his throat.
Robert M. Price compares the death of Von Junzt to the demise of Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon: "[In] Lovecraft's tongue-in-cheek 'History of the Necronomicon'...he recounts the doom of Abdul Alhazred. 'He is said by Ebn Khallikan ... to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses.' ...And 'what of the monstrous hand that strangled out his life?' In both cases, the coroner reports the cause of death as a phantom monster suspiciously like the one that rent Lovecraft himself limb-from-limb in Robert Bloch's 'The Shambler From The Stars'."[2]
At the time of his death, von Junzt was working on a second book, the contents of which are unknown since it was burnt to ashes by his friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau. Having read the book before destroying it, Ladeau afterwards slit his own throat with a razor. Von Junzt was one of the few people to have read the Greek version of the Necronomicon.
Howard gave the name of the author simply as "von Junzt" without ever giving his first name. In a letter to Robert Bloch, commenting on Bloch's unpublished story The Madness of Lucian Grey, Lovecraft criticizes him for giving von Junzt the first name of Conrad. Lovecraft claims that he had already named him Friedrich in a story he ghost-wrote for another author on commission. This story has never been identified. The first known appearance of the first name Friedrich is in a fake death warrant for himself that Lovecraft sent to Bloch. Bloch had used Lovecraft as a character in his story "The Shambler from the Stars". The death warrant was by way of giving Bloch permission to kill off the character. Besides von Junzt, the death warrant is also signed, amongst others, by Abdul Alhazred,<Darrell Schweitzer, Discovering H.P. Lovecraft, p. 142–143, Wildside Press, 2012 ISBN 1434449122> the fictional author of the Necronomicon and a pseudonym of Lovecraft he used as a five-year-old.<Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, pp. 107–108, John Hunt Publishing, 2012 ISBN 1780999070.> The middle name Wilhelm is also due to Lovecraft.<Darrell Schweitzer, Discovering H.P. Lovecraft, p. 142–143, Wildside Press, 2012 ISBN 1434449122>
Critica
modificaS. T. Joshi ha definito il racconto come l'unica "storia esplicita dei Miti di Cthulhu" di Howard. Ritiene inoltre che la creatura con le fattezze di rospo vista dal protagonista sia lo Tsathoggua di Clark Ashton Smithadducendo come prova il fatto che Howard vi abbia fatto riferimento nel suo precedente racconto I Figli della Notte[3].
Robert Weinberg e E. P. Berglund all'interno del loro libro del 1973, The Reader's Guide To The Cthulhu Mythos, affermarono che La Pietra Nera è "la migliore storia dei Miti non scritta dallo stesso Lovecraft"[4].
Fumetti
modificaNote
modifica- ^ Lovecraft, H. P., Klinger, L. S., & Moore, A. (2014). The new annotated H. P. Lovecraft (First edition). Liveright Publishing Corporation. (p. 683)
- ^ Price, "The Borrower Beneath (Howard's Debt to Lovecraft in 'The Black Stone')", Crypt Of Cthulhu #3.)
- ^ Joshi, S. T. (2015). The rise, fall, and rise of the Cthulhu mythos (First Hippocampus Press edition). Hippocampus Press. (pp. 152-153)
- ^ Dennis Rickard, "Through Black Boughs:The Supernatural in Howard's Fiction", in Don Herron, The Dark Barbarian : the writings of Robert E. Howard : a critical anthology. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1984. (pp. 73-4 ) ISBN 9780313232817.
Collegamenti esterni
modifica
[[Categoria:Racconti di Robert E. Howard [[Categoria:Miti di Cthulhu