The Moon-Bog

"The Moon-Bog"
Author	H. P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story
Published in	Weird Tales
Media type	Print (Magazine)
Publication date	June, 1926

"The Moon-Bog" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in or before March 1921. The story was first published in the June 1926 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

The story was written at speed and to order, for oral delivery as an after-supper "shocker" for a Hub Club gathering of amateur journalists in Boston on March 10, 1921. The meeting had a St. Patrick's Day theme, and so required an Irish setting.^[1] "The Moon-Bog" is described by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz as "one of the most conventionally supernatural in HPL's oeuvre."^[2]

The unnamed narrator describes the final fate of his good friend, Denys Barry, an Irish-American who reclaims an ancestral estate in Kilderry, a fictional village in Ireland. Barry ignores pleas from the superstitious local peasantry not to drain the nearby bog, with unfortunate supernatural consequences.

As with many of Lovecraft's stories, "The Moon-Bog" has strong elements of his own autobiography woven into it - like Barry, Lovecraft had dreams of buying back his ancestors' home in England, and of reclaiming his standing among the landed gentry.^[3] The same theme is treated with greater depth in Lovecraft's more substantial story "The Rats in the Walls" (1923). There is also a further autobiographical element in "The Moon-Bog" - Lovecraft had seen his boyhood haunt of Cat Swamp purchased by the city authorities with the declared aim of protecting it from developers. But instead the city allowed it to be drained for development, and 200 new houses were erected on the site in 1919 .^[4]

In his story Lovecraft leans on authentic Irish legend, that of the first invaders of Ireland, the Partholonians - and the sudden plague that wiped them out in around 1200 BC. He also leans on the belief, then very common and persistent among the Irish, of the Mediterranean origins of the Irish race and that the Parthalonians had "originally come from Greece"^[5]

The story bears a similarity in its theme and approach to Lord Dunsany's later Irish novel The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933), although S. T. Joshi discounts the possibility of any influence of Lovecraft on Dunsany.^[6]

Notes

↑ S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Moon-Bog, The", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 171.
↑ Joshi and Schultz, "Moon-Bog, The", p. 171.
↑ S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Barry, Denys", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 17.
↑ "In the hollows of memory: on the Seekonk and Cat Swamp", in Lovecraft in Historical Context, a Fourth Collection, 2013.
↑ Walter Fitzgerald, The Historical Geography of Early Ireland, 1925, p.63.
↑ S. T. Joshi, Explanatory notes; "The Moon-Bog", The Dreams in the Witch House And Other Weird Stories, p. 409. ISBN 0-14-243795-6.

External links

Works related to The Moon-Bog at Wikisource

Works by H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle

Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time

Short stories	"The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"

Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"

Juvenilia	"The Mystery of the Grave-Yard" "The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist"

Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth

Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars The Cancer of Superstition Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity

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The Moon-Bog

See also

Notes

External links