“The Alchemist” by H.P. Lovecraft
I have an embarrassing admission. I regularly have described this story as ‘the one with the immortal wizard killing people with a gun.’ Yeah, there’s no gun. I don’t know why I thought there was a gun. There isn’t one.
Written in 1908, Howard Phillips Lovecraft would’ve been 17 or 18 years old when he wrote “The Alchemist.” This may or may not count as juvenilia. There’s a 9 year gap between 1908’s “The Alchemist” and the next Lovecraft work I’ll be covering, “The Tomb.”
Unpopular opinion: I think this story was ‘worse’ than “The Beast in the Cave.” “The Beast in the Cave” featured clear character growth and in a shorter timeframe. That said, Antoine, the protagonist of “The Alchemist,” shares a lot of traits with Lovecraft. Both were loners. Both lost their fathers at early ages. Both were raised by older men: Antoine’s Pierre, Lovecraft’s grandfather Whipple Phillips (what a name.) Both were from families that had significant financial troubles. Both were interested in older texts and the occult.
Obviously, there’s parallels drawn between Charles and Antoine that are made obliquely apparent as soon as Charles and curses’ backstory is revealed. However, there’s a third fatherless young man related to the text: H.P. Lovecraft, whose father died at a very young age. Lovecraft’s father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft,was institutionalized when Lovecraft was only 3, and died when Lovecraft was 5. Winfield was around 40 at the start of his instutionalization and died at age 44. I think the dynamic between Charles and Michel was interesting, and wonder if it reflects the feelings Howards Phillips Lovecraft had about his own father. Or, did Lovecraft identify more with Antoine: both of them bookish types, not exactly prone to violence?
This is Lovecraft’s first story featuring a clearly Gothic castle. There’s clearly a lot of Gothic language used: technical descriptions of parapets, the tracing of family lineage and events back to the medieval era. The stones falling from the parapets are very reminiscent of the helmet in The Castle of Otranto. I’d say it’s pretty sick fucking nasty.
I do think Charles de Sorcier was right to call the protagonist low-key kinda dumb. The protagonist knew Charles was studying alchemy. He knew Charles was trying to find an immortality elixir. The protagonist literally questions how Charles’ mission could’ve continued past the lifespan of a normal human being. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out Charles invented an elixir. Yet again, it’s another Lovecraft detective story where the detective (Antoine) stumbles upon the answer to a mystery through exploration rather than investigation. If Antoine had a Steam account, he would be the type of person that serendipitously achieves extremely rare and niche achievements in Pardox Games, entirely without intending to do so.
