Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries… . But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

-H.P. Lovecraft, the Picture in the House

I was reading what appeared to be a simple children’s book to my offspring when I became aware of the terrible Lovecratian truths underlying the family history of the Berenstain Bears. Thankfully my son and daughter remained unaware, her just able to say “apple” and my son mostly communicating by drool. One day, their literacy with open up such terrible vistas inside the Berenstain Bears that they will surely go mad.

“That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things …” H.P.Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

This slim yet terrible volume starts with the children sneaking off, well-equipped for adventure.

You can see the sad acceptance in Momma Bear’s eyes. From their brandished tools, she must realize the terrible journey ahead of her children. Why does she let them go? Doubtlessly she herself discovered the terrible family secret in a similar way when she was a cub. No, the children’s birthright is inescapable; they must face the awful truth of their bloodline.

A short journey, and they find the Spooky Old Tree, a location named with the same conventions as Lovecraft’s Strange High House in the Mists. It seems almost animated by a terrifying spirit, as in HPL’s “The Tree.” What fiendish crimes warped the genus loci of this place?

The inside leads to a yawning cave, and …

… stairs? An intelligent hand shaped this madhouse.



Also, there’s friggin’ gators in there.

Will they turn back? No, theses bears will not not bugger off the way they came. Like poor, doomed Arthur Jermyn, who immolated himself when the hateful truth he sought was found, these bears will stop at nothing in their Pyrrhic quest for the truth. Do they dare to face the sanity-blasting answer to years of whispered truths and suspicious glances from the townsfolk?



Keep this in mind: everything inside this foul and hidden place has been deliberately locked inside. Curiosity is too much for our Lovecraftian protagonists. They will face the darkness, both inside and out. They dare.

The splendor and opulence of an ancient manor! Surely the tree has grown around the framework of some decaying structure. Subterranean things are always places of horror in the canon, from the Boston tunnels of “Pickman’s Model” to the ruins of the Nameless City. This underground structure particularly evokes aspects of the Martense Mansion from “The Lurking Fear,” a connection that will be made more implicit later.

It was only after the ancient spirits of the house tried to spare the children the horror by murdering them …

… that our luckless heroes encounter the awful truth

The world they live in is implicitly one of sapient bears. Why, then, is this one naked? What do they fear?

A simple examination yields staggering answers. When compared to the average adult bear from this serious, Great Sleeping Bear is huge, up to twice an adult’s height! No other bear in the series has his claws and teeth! Has it grown fat on the subterranean food, like the giant albino penguins from “At the Mountains of Madness?” This things is an atavism, a throwback to ancient savage bears, warped by his time in the caverns as the poor creature from Lovecraft’s “The Beast in the Cave.”

The great, bat-fed troglodyte has forgotten that its forefathers ever walked upright. In the dark underworld, it has degenerated like the horrifying Martense kin from “The Lurking Fear.” It pounces, hunger obvious in its eyes. This bear treats bears as food! A slavering, deformed cannibal lurks in the tree, and his will kill them if he can!

They run the gauntlet, never hesitating, feeling a strange familiarity in their bones as they access an emergency escape system obviously built to be too small to accommodate Great Sleeping Bear. They mercifully reach the outside world …

… only for the reader, in truly Lovecraftian fashion, to realize the true nature of the horror just before the protagonists do. Their mother will attempt to comfort them, but nothing can completely blot the stupendous realization from their brains except the sweet releases of either opium or death.

The girl looks back, knowing the awful truth that puts lie to the book’s line. That moment to degradation and cannibalism, that horrific prison for inbreed freaks is on their own property! Lovecraft laughs from beyond as the horrible question occurs to them at last. Where could that thing in the tree have come from?

Now the Lovecraftian explanation is the only one that may be reasonably considered.

Like the De la Poer heir from the Rats in the Walls, they have found something terrible on their own ancestral lands; the horror is from their own bloodline; they are kin to that terrible thing in the tree! Ancient acts resulted in the sealing away of their kin into a lightless prison. Oh, weep for the ancient bears, dear readers, who did not have the courage to give their own family a merciful death, and in so showing mercy doomed generations of cannibal murderers to a dark eternity.

As in so many horror stories, our protagonists are the very monsters they strain against!

Like the hero of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the bears must stare into the face of the deep one in the mirror. Will they accept it? Will they return to the tree, living out their life in the hellish tooth-and-claw struggle of their ancestors? Will they deny it? Perhaps they will find the courage to end their own life in fire as did poor old Arthur Jermyn, keeping from the world the hideous secret of the Spooky Old Tree

For myself, I will not bring this reading to the attention of my children. I swear to never draws close these dissociated threads of horror for them. To quote Lovecraft, “I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain.”

Next time on Children’s Cthulhu Corner: The Cat in the Hat - Avatar of Nyarlathotep