H.P. Lovecraft: An Overview

“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.

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)