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Unspeakable Tales
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Library of Lovecraft Mythos in Miskatonic University

Miskatonic Archives

H.P. Lovecraft Wikipedia

Lovecraft Mythos. Forbidden Knowledge.

Tagged: Delapore

Themes & context

Ancestry and transformation

Ancestry and transformation repeatedly turn Lovecraftian investigation back upon the investigator. A family record, portrait, inherited object or bodily change can reveal that the apparent outsider belongs to the history being uncovered. The stories use this reversal in different ways: as horror of descent, recognition of another identity, repetition of violence or a problem of distinguishing inheritance from possession.

6 min read · 1,064 words

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

An ancient stone priory and later manor additions rise above a limestone cliff at dusk, with dark openings beneath the terraces.
Places

Exham Priory

Exham Priory is the English ancestral estate restored by the narrator of The Rats in the Walls. Its layered foundations conceal a vast complex in which successive occupants maintained a cannibal institution, making the building an architectural record of a history its modern owner does not understand.

4 min read · 781 words

Investigators descend through the buried layers beneath Exham Priory.
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