It’s a testimony to how minds trained to see the world according to binary heteronormative preconceptions cling to this conditioning in knee-jerk fashion. Nothing in the story is kept secret for long, and yet Asenath’s absence eludes me. I’m struck in re-reading this story how difficult it is to see Asenath as Ephraim when I’m in the thick of the narrative, despite the pointed physical descriptions comparing his/her expression to a wolf, despite clocking frequent, overt parallels between Ephraim and Asenath’s behaviors, and despite the fact that I already know how it’s going to end. A few paragraphs later, as Edward continues to rant after waking from this involuntary mind exchange with Asenath/Ephraim that has taken his body into the coven’s ceremonial pit of shoggoths, he lays out his suspicions plainly through questions such as “Asenath… is there such a person?” and “ Was it old Ephraim’s soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom?” We’re introduced to Asenath as “she” and the pronouns and gendering stick even when, less than halfway through the story, the spirit or mind inhabiting Asenath is recognized as Ephraim by his underground coven.

In fact, Edward and Ephraim (posing as Asenath) are married. Now Ephraim, from within Asenath’s body, is trying to affect the same scenario with the narrator’s best friend Edward. All of this happened before the story began. Asenath’s father Ephraim has hijacked her body by magic, locked her mind or soul away in his own aging body, and killed it. We’re talking about Asenath Waite the way she’s presented early in the story, when in fact Asenath is not really in the story at all. There’s some sleight of hand at work here.

There’s nothing beautiful about the woman’s demise in Lovecraft, no ecstatic mourning of the beloved dead only, as in real life, a malodorous heap of unrecognizable remains.īut wait a minute. Although “The Thing on the Doorstep” owes some conceptual devices to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Asenath Waite seems very unlike Madeline Usher and more a literary descendant of Poe’s Ligeia, with all the romance removed. She’s one of Lovecraft’s few prominent female characters, and a very striking figure both visually and emotionally according to the other people in the story.

Dental records will identify the skull as belonging to Asenath Waite, the small, dark, witchy woman who seduced and manipulated the narrator’s best friend Edward. Not just dead, but self-disinterred, reduced to a mass of “liquescent horror,” a few bones, and a crushed skull.

Let’s start at the end of the story, when the woman is already dead.

Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys