The Unknown Terror of 'The Rats in the Walls'

Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls is very much a supernatural, rather than a fantastic, tale. Never is there any doubt in the reader’s minds that there is something otherworldly afoot in  Exham Priory- All the telltale signs, from the foreboding stories of the peasantry to the titular ‘rats in the walls’ provide sinister warning signs. However the obviousness of the supernatural does not lessen the terror inspired by Lovecraft. 

This terror is due in no small part to the way in which Lovecraft brings the supernatural world into the real; or, put more appropriately, destroys the tenuous laws of the real with the horror of the supernatural. This is best exemplified in the climatic sequence under the priory- the narrator and an assortment of scholars and archaeologists- are confronted with eldritch horrors from time immemorial; either going mad or choosing to ignore what they have witnessed. Only the narrator, incarcerated in a mental institution, relates the horrifying goings-on beneath the Priory, which even he does not fully comprehend.

Never is it implied that the narrator ‘imagined it all’, and to interpret the story thus would be to cheat it of its intended effect. Rather, Lovecraft’s confronts the reader with the unknowable, terrifying, and mysterious. Firmly supernatural, Lovecraft demolishes the boundaries of reality with the sheer incomprehensibility of his unknown terror- “Nyarlathotep” as physically embodied in the rats. It is this terror, so inconceivable as to be mind-boggling to both reader and narrator, which makes Lovecraft’s story first rate horror.