Medusa's Coil

Cover of Weird Tales, January 1939

"Medusa's Coil" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop. It was first published in Weird Tales magazine in January 1939, two years after Lovecraft's death. The story concerns the son of an American plantation owner who brings back from Paris a new wife. It mixes elements of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos with the ancient Greek myth of Medusa, but it has also been noted for its racist aspects.

Plot summary

The unnamed narrator of the story is driving to Cape Girardeau, Missouri but gets lost in the unfamiliar country. He comes across a rundown plantation house and finds the only inhabitant is an emaciated old man called Antoine de Russy. The narrator asks if he can spend the night in the house: the old man agrees and begins to tell the tale of the place. He explains that he inherited the estate from his grandfather and married in 1885. He had a son Dennis who, as a young man, was sent to the Sorbonne in Paris. There Dennis met an artist, Frank Marsh from New Orleans, and the two men became involved in a mystical cult. Dennis became infatuated with the head of the cult, a woman called Marceline and married her. Around 1916 Dennis returned to Missouri with his new wife, but Antoine and his servants found her strangely repulsive. Frank Marsh came to stay, developed a friendship with Marceline and insisted on painting her portrait:

"I must paint her, Denny—must paint that hair—and you won't regret. There's something more than mortal about that hair—something more than beautiful—"

Aware that his son may become jealous, Antoine arranged for Dennis to be called away on business, while Frank Marsh set about painting Marceline. However, Dennis came home unexpectedly, entered the studio where Marsh was painting Marcelline, and a fight took place. It was then that the painting was first revealed, showing the truth as to what Marceline really was. In his terror Dennis killed Marceline, but her "blasphemous braid of coarse black hair" struck and killed Marsh "coiling around him as a python would". Dennis confessed all to his father but then killed himself. Antoine buried the bodies in the cellar, including the coil of hair around Marsh. Antoine comes to the end of his story but offers to show his guest the horrific painting:

It was as the old man had said—a vaulted, columned hell of mungled Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths—and what perfect completion could have added to it was beyond my power to guess. . . . The utmost horror of all, of course, was Marceline—and as I saw the bloated, discoloured flesh I formed the odd fancy that perhaps the figure on the canvas had some obscure, occult linkage with the figure which lay in quicklime under the cellar floor. . . . Surpassing all in horror was the streaming black hair—which covered the rotting body, but which was itself not even slightly decayed. All I had heard of it was amply verified. It was nothing human, this ropy, sinuous, half-oily, half-crinkly flood of serpent darkness. Vile, independent life proclaimed itself at every unnatural twist and convolution, and the suggestion of numberless reptilian heads at the out-turned ends was far too marked to be illusory or accidental.^[1]

Horrified, the narrator pulls out a gun and shoots the painting, but this, as the old man explains, has now unleashed a curse: "She and that hair will come up out of their graves, for God knows what purpose!" The narrator flees to his car and drives away just as the house is engulfed in flames. After several miles the narrator stops and talks to a farmer, but the farmer explains that the old man disappeared and the house burned down "five or six years" earlier. The narrator drives on, but mentions one final horror that he learned "from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh":

It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside, the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation, . . . for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.^[1]

Reception

The story is noted for its racist elements, especially with the final racist revelation which is intended to be the culminating horror of the tale.^[2] This racism may have formed an integral part of the original draft around which Lovecraft added elements such as the Cthulhu Cult.^[3]

When August Derleth published the story in an anthology in 1944, he changed the final line to: "though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a loathsome, bestial thing, and her forebears had come from Africa."^[4]

References

1 2 Lovecraft, H. P.; Bishop, Zealia. "6". Medusa's Coil.
↑ Joshi, S. T.; Schultz, David E. (2001). An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Greenwood. p. 166. ISBN 0313315787.
↑ Callaghan, Gavin (2013). H. P. Lovecraft's Dark Arcadia: The Satire, Symbology and Contradiction. McFarland. p. 217. ISBN 0786470798.
↑ Lovecraft, H. P. (1944). Derleth, August, ed. Marginalia. Arkham House. p. 84.

External links

Works related to Medusa's Coil 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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