Life. Born in 1890, died in 1937, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England, specifically Providence, Rhode Island, where he’s buried – with a brief spell spent in New York City when he was married to Sonia Greene. Hardly surprisingly, most of his stories take place there too – with one story, “The Horror at Red Hook”, based in NYC. He wrote short stories for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, plus a fair amount of amateur journalism, the latter recently compiled into a book called Miscellaneous Writings, which collects his nonfiction. He missed out on WWI (“The Great War”). He travelled to the South and was both a major Anglophile – making it a point to give all his words English spellings when appropriate – and a Confederate sympathizer despite being a Yankee’s Yankee.
Stories. These were published separately during his lifetime and mostly ignored except by other writers in his circle of friends, which included Robert E. Howard of “Conan” fame. His friend August Derleth compiled them into book format in the 60s, and at this point finally – long after his death – people began to pay attention to him at last. They vary from short stories and poems all the way to longer epics like “At The Mountains of Madness” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”
By now there are two volumes of “Annotated H.P. Lovecraft”, which include extremely helpful and illuminating annotations to the stories, explaining obscure references or archaic terms, in many cases clarifying points which may have been common knowledge to a reader of Weird Tales in the 20s and 30s but would be completely alien to a modern reader. Unfortunately the two books come nowhere close to covering all of Lovecraft’s stories.
Lovecraft’s angle is that there are vast, cosmic secrets which man is too small, puny, and insignificant to understand or even grasp. Man is alone in a hostile universe. Strange entities from outer space, including Cthulhu, the Deep Ones, the Old Ones, the Great Race, all colonized Earth before even the dinosaurs roamed the planet, building vast cities in what are now remote, desolate areas. These deities and races consistently pop up in his stories, referred by him as “Yog Sothery” but today are well known as “the Cthulhu Mythos”. His top stories are:
At the Mountains of Madness. Actually published in Astounding Stories instead of Weird Tales, which rejected it. Antarctic explorers find an ancient alien civilization dating before the dinosaurs, buried deep within the mountains. The aliens are the Old Ones, barrel-shaped with star-shaped heads and membranous wings. Their slaves are the shoggoths, semi-sentient gelatinous beings. The hero, stunned enough to find all this, finds even more horrors: the civilization isn’t quite dead….
The Call of Cthulhu. Considered his masterpiece. An artist has mysterious dreams, and finds that others around the world have been having similar nightmares at the same time. A police detective finds a bizarre cult in the swamps of Louisiana – which matches other cults in equally remote locations across the world, all disturbingly similar. Finally, a ship finds Rl’yeh, a city of non-Euclidian geometry sunken deep in the Pacific, which rises above the waves “when the stars are right.” The HP Lovecraft Appreciation Society produced a B&W silent movie version of this story which is probably the best movie adaptation of any Lovecraft story produced by anyone at any time.
The Shadow Out of Time. A university professor falls into a bizarre trance for 5 years, then wakes up with a strange, but imperfect, form of amnesia. Soon thereafter he starts having strange nightmares of a prehistoric city in Australia full of cone-shaped aliens – and he is one of them. Eventually he goes to Australia and finds the city…and finds that he knows his way around despite never having been there before. As if the city itself wasn’t horrifying enough, he finds something even worse.
The Colour Out of Space. A strange meteor lands in backwoods New England. Soon the farm near it is corrupted, everything turning to grey dust. The family goes mad and eventually perish in a horrible fashion. The excellent horror of this is that the malevolent entity is not some doofus in a hockey mask or a Fedora with wisecracks and razor nails, but an impersonal, mindless substance from outer space which defies the scientists’ best efforts to identify it or analyze it.
The Whisperer in Darkness. A Vermont man is abducted by strange fungi-like aliens from Yuggoth (Pluto) and horribly corrupted. The HPLHS people followed up "The Call of Cthulhu" with an adaptation of this one as a "talkie", which they couldn't resist: the buzzing sound made by the Mi-Go as they attempt human speech. The film adaptation is super creepy and very well done.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth. A Massachusetts town has a horrible secret: it has been cross-breeding with bizarre monsters from beneath the waves. The protagonist discovers the secret and barely escapes, for the time being. After doing some research into his own genealogy, he finds his own relationship to Innsmouth is closer than he imagined – too close.
The Dunwich Horror. A corrupt family breeds a half-monster son, Wilbur Whatley, whose quest for The Necronomicon at Miskatonic University ends in his death. But the monster he had been hiding at home, an invisible monstrosity, no longer fed prodigious amounts of raw meat, breaks out and terrorizes the local town. Finally a doctor, who has himself educated himself with The Necronomicon, leads a small group of brave townspeople to defeat the monster – with magic.
He also liked fantasy, indulged in the extended epic “Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath”. It’s good, but not nearly as good as Howard, Tolkien or Moorcock. He has one (1!) science fiction story, “In The Walls of Eryx.” He co-wrote a story with Harry Houdini, “Imprisoned with Pharaohs”, which I read on my trip to Egypt in high school.
He also liked fantasy, indulged in the extended epic “Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath”. It’s good, but not nearly as good as Howard, Tolkien or Moorcock. He has one (1!) science fiction story, “In The Walls of Eryx.” He co-wrote a story with Harry Houdini, “Imprisoned with Pharaohs”, which I read on my trip to Egypt in high school.
Since by now I’ve read all the stories, some more than twice, my tolerance for his ponderous verbosity is less than when I was 15 and reading the stories for the first time. Even Tolkien is easier to digest in large quantities than Lovecraft. And I find that, unlike many other books, such as Atlas Shrugged, where I found something much different as a 30-something reader than I did as a 15 year old, with Lovecraft I still find the same thing over and over again. Even so, for a newcomer the charm and horror should be fresh and new.
The Necronomicon. Throughout the stories a fictional book, The Necronomicon, periodically plays a role, most importantly in “The Dunwich Horror”. Supposedly written by a mad Arab in the Middle Ages, it contains horrific knowledge and means to summon various unbelievably vile monsters and deities. Of course, the book doesn’t exist, it was merely created by Lovecraft as a plot device, though that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from believing, quite seriously, that it does exist. In fact, twenty years ago I found a “real copy” years ago at B. Dalton, of all places, which turned out to be a complete paperback Charmin – full of “Sumerian mythos” spells in Enochian and having zero to do with Lovecraft. Apparently someone thought they could throw this BS together, call it “The Necronomicon” and make some easy cash. Avoid at all costs, as it’s not even particularly interesting on its own merits. It’s not even worth picking up for $1 at a used book store, thrift shop, or garage sale.
More recently Donald Tyson took a stab at it, and scored 100%. Not only does he evoke the Mad Arab – giving him a complete motive behind his depraved lifestyle – he takes us on a tour of Egypt, Damascus, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, the Nameless City of Irem, Stonehenge, the Plateau of Leng, the Tower of Babel, and even the Garden of Eden. All your favorite Lovecraft villains are here: Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, and Dagon. He dovetails the Cthulhu Mythos into the Bible and everything we think of as pre-Christian Middle Eastern history, weaving it in with a subtlety and cleverness that even Lovecraft couldn’t manage. I like that he effected the style of how Arabs write, and didn’t fall into the trap of trying to evoke Lovecraft’s style of writing. It’s probably the best Lovecraft-related fiction not written by Lovecraft himself.
Movies. Some of his stories have been made into movies, with varying degrees of faithfulness and success. The most notable are “Herbert West: Reanimator” and “The Dunwich Horror” (featuring Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whately). John Carpenter’s “The Thing” takes place in Antarctica and has a definite Lovecraft influence. Even “Ghostbusters” had a Lovecraft element, this whole business of the post-WWI architect and the apartment building; and there is an episode of the animated Ghostbusters series in which they actually take on Cthulhu himself. Probably the best was the “Call of Cthulhu” silent movie mentioned above. Part of the problem with the Lovecraft movies is that he became popular in the 60s, and the idiots cluelessly expropriating the story names to make films had NO IDEA what his books were about and simply took a stock “ooh, scary spooky monster!” type film and slapped the Lovecraft name on it, obviously hoping to cash in on it. The recent Stuart Gordon films (“Reanimator” and “From Beyond”) are a case in point: 99% gross-out, disgusting crap, when Lovecraft was all about situations and horrible truths, a huge, horrible cosmic picture, not someone’s intestines falling out on the floor. I’m not a fan of horror movies, for that reason, aside from “The Sixth Sense”, which was put together like a Swiss watch and not simply an endless barrage of decapitations and disembowlments.
Music. The obvious one here is the band H.P. Lovecraft, a 60s psychedelic band similar to Iron Butterfly. They have two albums, but only one song, “At the Mountains of Madness”, based on Lovecraft: the rest is typical 60s pop music. Metallica have two songs, “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be”, based on Lovecraft. But I discovered that you can literally write a whole book just on Lovecraft-inspired music, because someone did: The Strange Sound of Cthulhu, by Gary Hill.
Of course, the best site to check out is the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society at http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html. Check it out.
Actually, one could argue (actually many do) that Lovecraft was really a Science-Fiction writer, even though he is considered an "American Horror Writer". Traditional horror doesn't usually include aliens or other types of monsters from outer space. A large portion of Lovecraft's work encompasses this type of story. I have a compilation book of Lovecraft's work called "The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Black Seas of Infinity" selected by Andrew Wheeler. It includes many of his more famous stories (that you mentioned also) and the jacket of the book is listed as "Science Fiction", which doesn't mean that much, but just goes to show you how opinion differs. Personally, I don't consider Lovecraft to be a horror writer; to me he is a Sci-Fi writer, but a damn good one at that.
ReplyDeleteOne thing we can all agree on though, is that Lovecraft was a master at what he did, whether you consider it Horror or Sci-Fi.