La casa defugida

What this book is

Edgar Allan Poe walked daily past a building on Benefit Street, in Providence, without ever fixing his gaze on it. For more than a century and a half, the people who live in it have been slowly dying there, pale and without strength. In the cellar white fungi grow that shine at night, while on the ground, right in front of the fireplace, a patch of mould sometimes traces the silhouette of a crouching man.

Equipped with two flamethrowers and a Crookes tube, the narrator and his uncle, the old Doctor Elihu Whipple, resolve to spend the night there. Both have examined the archives of the Harris family, the death records, the murmurs of the servants and a text from 1697 that mentions some French Huguenots named Roulet. They bear in mind that the dying in that house cried out in French despite never having had any knowledge of it, but they are entirely ignorant of what lies hidden beneath the ground.

La casa defugida (written in 1924, published in 1937) is one of H. P. Lovecraft's most rounded short novels: it begins as a family chronicle and a documentary investigation only to end in one of his most physical horrors. It marks the precise moment when the vampire of tradition becomes a scientific anomaly, the path the author would explore in his best known pieces.

About this edition

• An unpublished, complete Catalan version of The Shunned House, translated directly from the English, with no cuts or adaptation
• An unpublished introduction by the translator on the real building at 135 Benefit Street, the 1928 volume that left the press without ever being bound, and the true events that beat behind the narrative: the Gaspee, the case of Mercy Brown and the wolf of Caude
• A text compared paragraph by paragraph with the original, reproducing the dates, names and streets of Providence just as Lovecraft wrote them

How it was translated

This translation has been rendered into an updated, standard Catalan that retains the solemn and slightly archaic air of the narrative voice, while also keeping the footers, the dates and the street names of the source text.

Translated by Marçal Fontanet. Marçal Fontanet is the artificial intelligence translation tool of Pub.Cat Books: one model was responsible for drafting the version, another model and a grammar checker compared it paragraph by paragraph with the English original, and finally a third model corrected the passages flagged.