In horror stories, it takes many elements to create a sense of fear into the reader. In H.P Lovecraft’s short story “The Rats in the Walls”, he uses many different elements that help made this short story create a sense of fear for the reader. During the short story, the fear created in the reader starts out slow, but as the story progresses and the mysterious sounds in the house become too unbearable to deal with, the main character goes to investigate and finds a horrible family secret that instills fear into the readers. In this short story, H.P Lovecraft uses imagery and suspense to add fear into the readers as the short story progresses.

A way that helped ensue fear into the reader was the use of suspense slowly throughout the story. The suspense begins in the beginning of the book when the main character moves back to his ancestral estate and finishes rebuilding the estate. Once the main character moves in, the main character knows something is wrong because his cat starts acting up randomly. As sounds start coming from the wall, the suspense starts building up as the main character starts to have strange dreams. As time goes on, suspense continues to build, until the main character wakes up from a horrible dream, only to hear footsteps coming from behind the wall. When he hears this, he has his servants come and move the wall to find stairs that lead to a dark area under his home. As he looks down the stairs, the suspense has built up so much and the reader is fearful for what the main character might find when he goes down the stairs.

In “The Rats in the Wall”, H.P Lovecraft uses many examples of imagery to help create a sense of fear in the reader. The Imagery that H.P Lovecraft uses in the beginning of the short story is when the main character moves into his ancestral house in England. When he moves to the Exham Priory, it is a ruined house with a dark past. When the house was inhabited centuries ago, a hideous crime occurred where “the master, five of his children, and serval servants” were killed and the heir was of the estate was presumed to be the killer (Lovecraft 1). This piece of imagery adds to the fear in the reader because of how the main character is moving into a house with a terrible past that includes mysterious murders of the residents of the estate. Another piece of imagery that helps create fear for the reader is when the main character the underground city after investigating where the sounds in the walls were coming from. When the main character goes down into the city, he learns his family’s dark truth. While investigating the city, the main character finds “black picks of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls” (Lovecraft 13). This is when the main character finds out that his family would breed humans so they could eat them and this is the reason why he would hear the sounds in the wall. By using imagery in this short story, Lovecraft allowed the reader to be filled with fear slowly throughout the story until the story reaches its climax.

H.B Lovecraft’s short story “The Rats in the Wall” uses the slow pace of the story that builds suspense and the imagery used throughout the story help fill the reader with fear slowly until the climax of the story when the reader is filled with fear. In the story, fear starts slowly, but as the story progresses the pace of the suspense starts to increase until the reader is filled with fear to the point where the reader is afraid of what might be found in the underground city. By using suspense and imagery, H.P Lovecraft creates a sense fear in the reader as the story progresses.
