Pulp Fantasy Library: The Thing on the Roof

When I restarted the Pulp Fantasy Library series back in September, I did so primarily because I knew I could devote myself to writing about every H.P. Lovecraft story associated with the Dreamlands, even tangentially. Because there are a lot of stories that fit this description, I didn't have to think much about which story I'd write next, which eased a lot of the burden I'd previously felt about the series. Now that I've concluded that project, I find myself once again pondering what next to write about and I felt some of my former apprehension return. After all, with 350 entries to date, I've written about most (though not all) of the obvious stories.

Because I'd devoted the first month of the year to Clark Ashton Smith rather than to his colleague and fellow January baby, Robert E. Howard, I thought a good way to solve my immediate problem was to find one of his stories I'd never covered before. REH was a prolific writer and, while his tales of Conan and Solomon Kane are probably his best and most well-known, there's still a wealth of options to choose from, especially if I wanted something a little off the beaten path. That's when I remembered "The Thing on the Roof."

Originally published in the February 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Thing on the Roof" is a horror story in the vein of Lovecraft's tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I first came across it in the early '90s in an anthology of Howard's horror fiction edited by David Drake and then, later, encountered an adaptation of it from an early '70s Marvel comic book (Chamber of Chills issue #3). Compared to, say, "Pigeons from Hell," which is likely the most celebrated of Howard's horror yarns, "The Thing on the Roof" is a much more modest affair, but it's still interesting nonetheless, if only for its slightly different take on "Lovecraftian" subject matter.

The story itself is quite short and fairly straightforward. Its unnamed narrator is a scholar and book collector. He is unexpectedly approached by his academic rival, Tussmann, who offers to publicly retract his previous aspersions on his work in exchange for help obtaining the rare 1839 “black book” edition of Friedrich von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. Tussmann has become obsessed with a passage describing a remote “Temple of the Toad” in Honduras, where a mummy wearing a toad-shaped red jewel supposedly guards a hidden treasure and believes only the 1839 edition contains a full description of the temple. After months of effort, the narrator secures a copy and Tussmann confirms that the original text contains crucial details omitted from later editions. Claiming firsthand knowledge of the temple from a previous expedition, Tussmann then departs for Central America determined to recover the treasure of the temple, convinced that the jewel is, in fact, a key to a store of gold concealed beneath the altar.

Months later, Tussmann summons the narrator to his Sussex estate, where he reveals that he found no gold, only the mummy and the strange jewel, which indeed opened a hidden passage beneath the temple. His account of what lay below is evasive and unsettling and he appears increasingly unstable, hinting that he may have awakened something when he used the jewel to open a subterranean crypt. The narrator, rereading von Junzt, realizes the horrifying implication: the “treasure” was not gold but the temple’s monstrous god. That night, amid strange noises and signs of an unseen presence, Tussmann locks himself in his room with the jewel. The narrator later breaks in to find him dead, his skull crushed by what appears to be the imprint of a gigantic hoof and the jewel missing, suggesting that whatever was released from the temple has followed its key back to England.

As a story, "The Thing on the Roof" is a modest affair. Most of the story consists of conversations between the narrator and Tussmann, as the two discuss historical details about von Juntz, the Temple of the Toad, and related matters. For a Robert E. Howard tale, it's devoid of almost any action, which is probably its most remarkable quality. As a story, it's fine – nothing special but perfectly serviceable for the kind of story it is. For whatever reason, Howard himself really like the tale, writing in a 1930 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith that "this story is by far the best thing I have ever written and one which I am really inclined to believe approaches real literature, distantly, at least." Even overlooking an author's inevitable blindness about his own material, REH's self-assessment is overly charitable.

"The Thing on the Roof" is worth a read, because it's quick and has a few interesting elements, even if it's far from Howard at his best. Sometimes, even Homer nods.