“Pointing to a chair,
table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I sat down to
read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old
Morryster’s wild Marvells of Science, the
terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of
Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of
all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of
the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a
book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things
whispered.”
[Excerpt from ‘The Festival’, by H.P. Lovecraft]
Howard Philips Lovecraft, a famous and cult-inspiring horror writer. His approach to his chosen
subject was original and iconic, and has had a long-lasting effect on the
popular culture of today. Strangely enough though, he wrote mostly in the
medium of short stories and novellas; never anything that can be considered a
proper novel. As such, because I wanted to give this writer my attention, there
was no single thing I could read with which to judge him by. So I just read
everything that this gambrel-roof obsessed, oval-headed old nut had to hand. Or
at least, three different anthologies of his fictional works, because I wanted
a fairly conclusive selection.
And now, a brief biography, just so’s you know who we're
talking about. H.P. Lovecraft spent most of his life in the city of Providence,
Rhode Island, born in 1890 to a family of aristocratic pretensions. His father
died when he was young, and his childhood was one of sickness and isolation -
troubles made worse by the financial difficulties of his family after the death
of his grandfather in 1904. Despite being a bookish lad, Lovecraft was an academic
failure, and in 1917, having no real contact with the outside world, he turned
to the writing of peculiar horror fiction as an outlet. The only way he could
make money from his lone pursuit in life was by selling his strange stories to
the pulp magazines of the day, most notably Weird
Tales. In 1924 he married a certain Sonia Greene and moved to New York with
her, a couple of years after the death of his mother. He hated New York,
and the pair of them had to dance with poverty and separation over the next
couple of years until, in 1926, Lovecraft finally packed it in and returned to
Providence to live with his aunts, effectively ending the marriage. From then
until his early death in 1937 he wrote most of his most famous works, and built
up a long list of pen pals around the U.S. with whom he would write on a vast
number of subjects. When he died, his own unique brand of weird fiction was not
yet established, and his tales would have been lost to history were it not for
the efforts of the people he had corresponded with over the course of his life.
This
group, known sometimes as ‘the Lovecraft Circle’, was made up of other pulp
fiction writers, many of whom had never met the man face-to-face. Some of them
clubbed together to form their own publishing house specifically to save
Lovecraft’s writings from oblivion, and since then these stories and their themes
have gradually become more deeply ingrained in the popular psyche. Amongst
their number were such names as August Derleth, the real creator of the
so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap
Long, Robert Bloch, and Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian and
Solomon Kane, though he actually died shortly before Lovecraft).
The
thing to note about this collection of writings is the style they’re in. The
quintessential ‘Lovecraftian’ style is quite distinct and can be parodied very easily, and I’m going to try and break it down for
you here. They are short, self-contained stories with a first-person narrative,
in which a 'rational' mind comes into contact with something that they can barely
comprehend - some horrifying or otherworldly entity or force. The physical dangers presented by the monsters/people/events in the
stories are usually of secondary importance. The real threat is to the
protagonist’s mind, as he struggles to come to terms with what he has just
discovered, and the possible earth-shattering consequences for the human-race
as a whole. Lovecraft stories never have happy endings; most of the time the
protagonist ends up either in a mental asylum, or on the verge of suicide, or
else with him having to spend the rest of his life knowing about the horrors of
the outer realms, unable to do anything about it, with the prospect of
sectioning or suicide left to some year in the future.
Lovecraft’s
horrors are all about futility of humankind in the face of greater and older
forces. Mankind had spent so long believing he was at the centre of the
universe, and now they see proof of just how insignificant they are in the
grand scheme of things. It’s quite a fitting subject for a new scientific
world. Lovecraft must have been fascinated by the idea that the world was
around for a lot longer than anyone had previously thought, and many of his
stories are about the older and greater beings and civilizations who had risen
and fallen before humans had ever existed, and who will yet return to restore
themselves to supremacy. The octopus-faced god-like Cthulhu creature is just
one of many such beings whom mankind should dread the day of return.
Lovecraft
gets damn-near all his narrative across without the need of dialogue, instead
just laying on the story-telling as thickly as possible. I am in two minds
about this. While a good writer should generally ‘show-not-tell’, Lovecraft’s
style does in fact hold together for the most part, with his stories being more
in the style of post-hoc accounts communicated to the reader afterwards, rather
than something that draws the reader right in amongst the action to see what’s
happening with their own eyes; always we have our vision filtered through
Lovecraft’s voice, like a proper campfire horror-tale. The only occasions when
the dusty speech-marks are ever used is when he wishes to switch the style of
narrative for a moment, to have a different character explain their own view of
events. It is a bit jarring when he does this, especially because he tries to
emulate different dialects with varying degrees of success - and it can never be
described as dialogue because only one character is ever allowed to speak.
Really it is an external monologue, and the thicker he lays on the accent, the
more difficult it is to follow.
In
terms of characters... well... there aren’t any. Seriously. Oh, he supplies
names all right, but actual characters? You’d be hard-pressed to tell Stanley
Adams from Wilbur Whateley, and Randolph Carter appears so many times in so
many different guises that there’s no telling if he’s actually meant to be the
same person or not. And female characters are sorely missing throughout the
collection, almost as though he’s forgotten the existence of another gender.
The humans who appear in Lovecraft stories are only really plot-devices or
victims for things to happen to – they have no real identity other than
whatever Lovecraft deems absolutely necessary for them to possess. He’s far
more interested in the overall tale and the ideas presented therein, rather
than the characters who appear during its course. But that’s not to say that
they are devoid of ‘character’, for there is usually one character who appears
in Lovecraft stories and gives them some degree of humanity, albeit a strange
type of humanity – that of Howard Phillips himself. The voice with which the
narrating characters speak is all the same voice, Lovecraft’s own, and it is
certainly interesting enough to be deemed distinctive and memorable, if not
actually good. When we are told of the nameless horrors witnessed by his
protagonists, when our guide is describing the dreadful ghoulish behaviour of
Herbert West during his search for resurrection of the dead, it is in Lovecraft’s
eloquent though nigh hysterical tones that we hear of them. In this respect,
the best character in these stories is Lovecraft himself; and considering that
under many pseudonyms he has somehow managed to kill himself of numerous
occasions, as well as ending up in around half-a-dozen different mental
institutions on either side of the Atlantic, just goes to show the sorts of
things he puts himself through.
This
narrative technique can only go so far, though, and whenever Lovecraft decides
to abandon the subjective first-person style for a third-person tale, he loses
a lot of the strengths he would otherwise have. His longest work of fiction,
the short novel The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward, is fundamentally let down by his choice of third-person
narrative. In this, he does not compensate by giving his characters any more
identity outside of their immediate relevance to the story, and he certainly
does not allow them to speak any lines of dialogue (except for right at the
end, the final scene of the novel containing the only circumstance in the whole
of Lovecraft that I’ve read that contains two characters actually engaging in
something that can be described as a conversation). The entire thing is just an
incredibly waffle-filled description of a number of events, with the
forgettable characters of Ward, his father, and some doctor as little more than
glove-puppets to help keep the story limping along to its long overdue
conclusion.
While
on the subject of terrible examples of Lovecraft fiction, it must be pointed
out that alongside his more noteworthy science-fiction horror, he was also an
early proponent of something that can be described as a type of fantasy, which
he churned out in the style of one of his favourite contemporaries, the Irish
fantasist Lord Dunsany, a guy who was very much in vogue at the time amongst
certain literary circles, Lovecraft’s in particular. They’re terrible, by the
way. Stories such as ‘Polaris’, ‘The Doom that came to Sarnath’, ‘The Other Gods’,
‘Hypnos’ and ‘Celephais’ are written in a weird, dream-like narrative style in
which he describes these exotic fantasy landscapes and imaginative cities – at
least he would do, if he would just stay still long enough for you to actually
take note of what’s there and not just have a load of meaningless made up names
spewed over you, before you’re yanked by the nose to the next place in the tour
to have a similar barrage of senseless description and ridiculous names dumped
into your still-reeling mind. Aside from the ungraspable narrative and the
total lack of character, nothing actually happens in these pieces; they’re
little more than a tour of a place you have no desire to visit, and every
moment you spend there is mind-numbingly dull! The only one of his
Dunsany-inspired fantasy pieces I came close to not hating was ‘The White
Ship’, which aside from actually having some allegorical worth, was mercifully
short. That perhaps is the only good thing about Lovecraftian fantasy – they’re
short enough to not drive you to madness yourself, which is something I only realized
when he abandoned this one strength. The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was Lovecraft’s first short novel, and he did
it in that thrice-fucked Dunsanian style of his – one-hundred pages of
directionless, meaningless, storyless, characterless, plotless trippy bullshit,
in which armies of cats and ghouls and terrible monsters battle for no purpose,
the protagonist spends the entire book just trying to get from one place to
another, and all told in the flattest of third-person narratives. I hated this
book so very much – at the end of the first paragraph I was bored to tears, but
I forced myself to read the whole thing to the finish in the vain hope that it
might get better, and have a point, or something, but aside from some gambrel-roofed
New England worship and the trippy cat wars, there was nothing. This is
genuinely my least favourite of Lovecraft’s pieces, longer than every one of his
other fantasy stories put together, and a hundred times more dreadful.
Rest
assured that his non-Dunsanian pieces are generally better, and that I was merely
trying to illustrate that there was more to him than as a writer of niche
horror stories. Many of the trappings of his stories get dragged up and reused
by later writers, film-makers and artists, and even if you’ve never read any of
Lovecraft’s stories, then you might well have heard somewhere else of things
such as the city of Arkham (from which the comic-universe of Batman gets Arkham
Asylum), Miskatonic University, the dreaded book Necronomicon by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the ancient beings
Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos, and the lost city of R’lyeh.
Such things crop up on occasion in all sorts of weird places, and people in the
past can be forgiven for believing that the Necronomicon
was actually a real book, considering that Lovecraft wrote a fictional history
for it, and that it appeared in the work of other writers. But, just as a last note
here, I must dispel any myths about the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’; Lovecraft
never invented any ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, just the characters and concepts that
would provide its framework. It was actually another member of the ‘Lovecraft
Circle’, August Derleth, who took the god-like creatures that Lovecraft had
invented for his tales, and fleshed them out, inventing new ones in a sort of
pantheon to create a fictional framework in which he and other writers could
easily base their own stories. Lovecraft’s creations were simply plot-devices
with which to convey his themes of a greater universe and human insignificance
and ignorance, whereas Derleth’s attempts to categorize them and set up Cthulhu
and the other elder-beings as villains undermined their intended purpose.
One last minor point to consider - Lovecraft's overt racism. Many writers and artists from bygone centuries hold attitudes which make us modern readers feel uncomfortable to read today, but which were generally accepted and were not even intended offensively back then. Lovecraft however held a disgust and hatred of other peoples which was extreme even in comparison to his contemporaries. His xenophobic and arguably eugenic beliefs occasionally make their way into his fiction, such as in the famous 'Call of Cthulhu' where he sets up a cult of antagonists populated by, and I quote: 'men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type,' ('The Call of Cthulhu', pg. 155), described elsewhere as 'foreign mongrels' (pg.159) and in other ways besides. That this is an attitude Lovecraft held to heart, evidenced in his correspondence, where he held what he believed to be his own race - which he declares to be 'Anglo-Saxon' - to be better and more civilized than all others. In many ways the opinions and beliefs of Lovecraft are far more horrifying than anything he actually wrote about, and they speak of a lonely, miserable young man consumed by his own disdain and arrogance. I am quite certain that if he knew that his stories would later inspire board-games and quirky collectables, cuddly Cthulhu toys and hilarious parodies, he would be very bitter about it.
One last minor point to consider - Lovecraft's overt racism. Many writers and artists from bygone centuries hold attitudes which make us modern readers feel uncomfortable to read today, but which were generally accepted and were not even intended offensively back then. Lovecraft however held a disgust and hatred of other peoples which was extreme even in comparison to his contemporaries. His xenophobic and arguably eugenic beliefs occasionally make their way into his fiction, such as in the famous 'Call of Cthulhu' where he sets up a cult of antagonists populated by, and I quote: 'men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type,' ('The Call of Cthulhu', pg. 155), described elsewhere as 'foreign mongrels' (pg.159) and in other ways besides. That this is an attitude Lovecraft held to heart, evidenced in his correspondence, where he held what he believed to be his own race - which he declares to be 'Anglo-Saxon' - to be better and more civilized than all others. In many ways the opinions and beliefs of Lovecraft are far more horrifying than anything he actually wrote about, and they speak of a lonely, miserable young man consumed by his own disdain and arrogance. I am quite certain that if he knew that his stories would later inspire board-games and quirky collectables, cuddly Cthulhu toys and hilarious parodies, he would be very bitter about it.
So these considerations aside,
the question is this: is Lovecraft any good as a horror writer? This is what I’ve spent the last few months
trying to decide on, and my conclusion is this; it’s different. Some of his
stories I’ve enjoyed, and some almost even unnerved me a little, while others
were genuinely terrible. Many though were simply dull and a little forgettable,
so I’ve decided to present a short list of the ones I found most enjoyable for
whatever reason there may be. And now, in no particular order:
‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927) – Short
Story. One of my favourites. While most of the story takes place in the third
person, something that doesn’t generally work for Lovecraft, this time the tale
doesn’t need to be propped up by the narrator’s character. While scouting out
the site of a new reservoir near Arkham, the protagonist gets into a
conversation with an elderly local, and relates the story he hears of the
disaster that befell the region many decades before. A meteorite, and the
disturbing repercussions on the local environment over the next two years, the
scenes described here are genuinely unnerving, especially the fate of the
family whose lives were affected by it. It could be considered a foreshadowing
of the age of nuclear disaster, had Lovecraft actually known about such things
during the ‘20s, but we can at least say that the horror here is about the
environment rather than monsters. While it starts off slow, the story gradually
builds up into something truly spectacular, and I firmly recommend this to
anyone who wants to give Lovecraft a go.
‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ (1922) – Short
Story. The goal of the character, Herbert West, to find a way of reanimating
the dead only ends up with disastrous half-successful results. A piece
primarily hampered by its being sliced into six episodic chunks and
cliff-hangers, in which unnecessary recaps are included, all of which breaks
the flow of the overall story, ‘Reanimator’ is sometimes cited as Lovecraft’s
worst story. Certainly it’s completely over-the-top, and can almost be viewed
as a dark comedy, but overall I think it works quite well, and contains some of
Lovecraft’s most horrifically gruesome imagery. And while it’s far from his
best work, at least it’s not boring – and it’s nowhere near as bad as The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924) – Short
Story. Lovecraft finds himself at home in a wonderfully gothic setting, as a
wealthy American returns to his tumbled-down ancestral home in England and
resolves to rebuild the place. Unfortunately there are old family secrets to
raise an issue, as the place seems to be plagued by hordes of phantom rats, and
the local population are none too pleased to see the return of the descendant
of their old feudal superiors. This piece has a good atmosphere, and I can
thoroughly recommend it.
‘Pickman’s Model’ (1927) – Short
Story. Another one of my favourites, this one is another first-person jobbie
except with a slight twist, in that it’s one half of a conversation. Our
narrator, in a more chatty frame of speech than normally found in Lovecraft, is
telling his friend about the time he visited an artist by the name of Pickman,
in his decrepit old house/studio. A veritable gallery of ghouls, while the
ending I could see coming a mile off, it nevertheless has a well presented
finish and it still packed the punch that was needed. A definite thumbs up for
this one.
‘Under the Pyramids (AKA Imprisoned
with the Pharaohs) (1924) – Short Story. This was
interesting first of all because it was ghost-written for the near legendary
escape artist Harry Houdini, a little gimmick for the pulp magazine Weird Tales. A first-person account
supposedly from Houdini, the man is travelling through Egypt and taking in the
various sights of the country when he is kidnapped and dropped into an unknown
crypt beneath the pyramids of Giza. The first half of the story is mainly a
look around at the rich history and monuments of Egypt, ranging from the
Medieval Arabic to the truly ancient, and serves really well as an exotic look
at the country. Houdini’s escape-skills come into play as a token nod to the
man, but even he finds himself at his wit’s end when facing the millennia-old
horrors beneath the Sphinx.
‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur
Jermyn and his Family’ (1921) – Short Story. A tale about
the sequence of events that led a certain Arthur Jermyn to set fire to himself
one fine day. There are more than a few skeletons in the Jermyn family closet,
and while it is quite simple to see where this one is going long before we get
there, stupidly I only realised where it was about to end up a couple of pages
before the end, and thus received my first genuine feeling of horror at a
Lovecraftian story. Even so, even in today’s modern world the overall
conclusion of this story is creepy as hell.
The
Shadow Over Innsmouth
(1936) – Novella. This is one of my favourites because it is
virtually built out of concepts and themes that already appeared in earlier,
shorter stories, to create the archetypal Lovecraftian tale. And it’s actually
really good. We have the old New England setting with its gambrel roofs that
form the background to so many other stories, we have the lurking horror of the
ancient being Dagon from one of his earliest short stories, we’ve got a
first-person narrative, another character who monologues in an antiquated New England
dialect for a big chunk of the story, we’ve got the Miskatonic University and
its own copy of the Necronomicon of
the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the idea of human degeneration that forms the
backbone of many of Lovecraft’s most disturbing pieces, and we’ve got the
protagonist considering suicide at the end. So much of his previous work has
been piled into this one story, and that it remains consistent and effective is
truly amazing. The story itself is really simple when it comes right down to
it; the protagonist (i.e. Lovecraft) visits the backwater town of Innsmouth,
with its surly and hostile locals, and the more he learns about it, the more
the dark reputation of the place comes to light. It is perhaps the only
Lovecraft story to have something akin to a happy ending; a creepy one that
chills to the bone, but one that simultaneously feels rather comforting, a
combination I have seen nowhere else – I’m not sure if it was meant to have
this effect, but it happened to me. I really liked it, and I recommend this be
a one to read if you plan to pick up any Lovecraft in the future.
‘The Unnamable’ (1925) – Short
Story. This is a cute little tale in which the protagonist engages a friend of
his in an argument about horror stories. In part this could be seen more as a
fictionalised essay in which Lovecraft defends his own particular style of
horror story, and particularly the phrase that goes to serve as the title of
this piece, before the pair of them end up being attacked by some terrifying
entity. Although hardly one of his most serious pieces, I like this one because
we get a bit more of Lovecraft’s personality and opinions than usual, and his
choice of discussing his own fiction in one of his own stories has a slight,
how shall we say, postmodern charm?
‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ (1937) – Short
Story. This one is starts well, is relatively good all the way through, and has
an ending that really makes you sit up and go “Oh No!” in a vague approximation
of shock. It’s also one of the only Lovecraft stories to contain a female
character, which makes it notable. And while it contains roughly the same story
as in his earlier novel, The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward, here we find it refined and more accessible, and with
a more horrifying overall twist at the end.
At
the Mountains of Madness
(1936) – Short Novel. This is a first person account of an
Antarctic expedition gone Lovecraftian, when deep in the unexplored depths of
the frozen southern continent they discover a vast plateau, upon which the
ruins of an incredible prehistoric city. While the story is slow, even by
Lovecraft’s standards, the attention to detail is well worth it if you can
remain awake, and there are moments of genuine excitement towards the end. And you’ll also discover a never-seen-before side to Penguins.
Biblios
Lovecraft, H.P. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.
Penguin: St. Ives. (1999)
Lovecraft, H.P. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird
Stories. Penguin: St. Ives. (2001)
Lovecraft, H.P. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other
Weird Stories. Penguin: St. Ives. (2005)
