Artistic License – Biology: It'd be extremely difficult to maintain a breeding population for generations that relied entirely on inbreeding, since the chances of dying young from genetic abnormalities or being sterile would greatly increase with each generation (see: Tutankhamun and Charles II), rendering the idea that the lineage would have survived long enough to become ape-like quadrupeds highly unlikely (and that doesn't take into account the fact humans would make terrible livestock due to a very slow breeding cycle, and the diseases that would surely set in from keeping so many people packed together in squalor for centuries).

Aristocrats Are Evil: The protagonist's ancestors fit the bill quite nicely, save for the Defector from Decadence that became his direct ancestor.

Arc Welding: The Atlanta Radio Theater Company version mentions that the cult of the Magna Mater is associated with The Great Old Ones of the larger Cthulhu Mythos.

The complete story can be read online here. Then the cats start acting weird, the narrator starts having troubling dreams and the newly renovated ancestral home may be overrun by an army of nocturnal rats. Helped by a friend of his son's, who just happens to be the nephew of the man currently in possession of the land, he discovers generations of mistrust and suspicion aided by local traditions of horrible, nasty deeds attributed to the land and his ancestors specifically. After his son dies from injuries sustained during the Great War a man named Delapore leaves New England, with his nine cats, to purchase and restore the hereditary lands of his ancestors, the De la Poer family, in England.

It represents a rare Lovecraft story that does not contain any overt supernatural elements, other than the mention of ancient worship and the imaginings of an increasingly unreliable narrator. Lovecraft, written in August-September 1923, and published in Weird Tales in March 1924.

The Rats in the Walls is a short story by H.

Rat in the wall lovecraft