Pulp Fantasy Library: "The Music of Erich Zann"

First published in The National Amateur (March 1922), “The Music of Erich Zann” is one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most haunting short stories, and one he himself ranked just behind “The Colour Out of Space” as a personal favorite. It's easy to see why. Unlike his larger, more expansive tales, this story operates on a smaller, more intimate scale and it is precisely this narrow focus that gives it so much of its enduring power. Though not literally derived from a dream, as several of Lovecraft’s stories were, it nevertheless possesses a distinctly dreamlike quality, a quality that, I would argue, heightens rather than diminishes its effect.

The plot is straightforward. A poor student takes a room on the Rue d’Auseil, a street so narrow and steep that it seems scarcely real. Indeed, the narrator later admits to the "singular and perplexing" fact that he has never been able to locate the Rue d'Auseil again. It's within this uncanny setting that he meets his neighbor, Erich Zann, an aged, mute viol player whose nightly music he finds as compelling as it is disturbing.

The tale that follows is less concerned with action than with revelation or perhaps more accurately, with the withholding of revelation. The narrator is drawn to Zann’s strange playing, which he describes as “weird harmonies” and “vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth.” Lovecraft underscores the uncanny not by explanation but by stressing its alienness, evoking a sound beyond human experience. This method of suggestion – describing the indescribable by circling it – is one Lovecraft would refine throughout his writing career, but it's already well in evidence.

Zann himself is an enigma and his muteness only deepens the mystery. He can communicate only by gesture or, in one crucial moment, through a note. He is portrayed as a man consumed by terror but equally by duty. His music is not artistic expression but desperate necessity. As the narrator observes in one of the story’s most chilling lines, “He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out – what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be.” Zann’s nightly performances are revealed as acts of resistance against an unnamed intrusion, his bow and strings a fragile bulwark against the void.

The climax comes when the narrator, finally left alone in Zann’s garret, dares to look out of the high barred window. Expecting to see the city below, he instead beholds “only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth.” The juxtaposition of Zann’s frenzied playing with this abyssal vision conveys intrusion from Beyond, but Lovecraft never specifies what lies outside. The horror is not defined but suggested, leaving the narrator (and the reader) with only a glimpse into the abyss before the curtain falls.

What makes “The Music of Erich Zann” remarkable is not simply its atmosphere, but its economy. The tale unfolds in a handful of tightly constructed scenes. There are no digressions into history, no catalogs of forbidden tomes, no elaborate mythological scaffolding. Instead, it is a study in mood, memory, and the limits of human perception. Even in its restraint, however, the story anticipates many of Lovecraft’s enduring themes, such as the fragility of the human mind when confronted with the unknown, the inadequacy of language to capture the truly alien, and the inescapable persistence of memory. The disappearance of the Rue d’Auseil when the narrator later searches for it reinforces the dreamlike quality and denies any possibility of closure. Both the place and its terrible secret have been effaced, leaving only recollection, an echo, much like Zann’s music itself.

Despite how early it was written, “The Music of Erich Zann” remains one of Lovecraft’s most polished and effective works. Its imagery is unforgettable: the steep vanishing street, the mute musician, the barred garret window opening onto infinity. More than a century after its publication, it continues to demonstrate that Lovecraft’s genius lay not only in constructing elaborate mythologies of cosmic horror but also in crafting stories where suggestion, atmosphere, and ambiguity achieve the same, if not greater, effect.