Miskatonic Arcihves

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An encyclopedia of strange fiction, its creators, places and mythos. Follow the sources; draw your own conclusions.

Tagged: Ancestral horror

Characters

Delapore

Delapore is the unnamed American businessman who narrates The Rats in the Walls and resumes the ancestral spelling de la Poer after restoring Exham Priory. His attempt to recover and redeem a family past ends in an underground discovery, the death of his companion and a denial that frames the entire surviving account.

4 min read · 777 words

Literature

The Rats in the Walls

The Rats in the Walls follows an American descendant of the de la Poer family who restores an English ancestral house and discovers the terrible institution preserved beneath its foundations. Written in August–September 1923 and published in March 1924, it moves from architectural recovery and family research to an archaeological revelation that the narrator cannot keep separate from himself.

8 min read · 1,520 words