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“From Beyond”

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“From Beyond” is one of many texts collected in an anthology of P. Craig Russell’s work, titled Isolation and Illusion: Collected Short Stories 1977-1997. An unnamed narrator recounts his tale of woe in which he returns to the home of Crawford Tillinghast after having been banished. Tillinghast has created a device that allows an individual to detect beings that are ordinarily outside of human perception—a portal to a hyper reality. Upon the narrator’s arrival, Tillinghast subjects him to the experience, and the narrator finds himself preyed upon by the Lovecraftian horrors as not only can he see but he can also be seen. Destroying the apparatus and preventing his own demise, the narrator discovers that Tillinghast has died and escaped the consequences of his actions. Contrasting realism with expressionism and a muted palette with a broad range of vibrant hues, Russell renders Tillinghast and his hyper reality more real than “reality,” leaving the narrator and the audience with a “hideous sense of pursuit [that] sometimes comes chillingly on … when [we are] weary” (24). Russell’s adaptation of this tale could serve as either an introduction to Lovecraft’s text or as one text among several that is studied as part of a multi-genre thematic unit about forbidden knowledge including works such as the myth of Prometheus, Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or; The Modern Prometheus, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.

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