Table of contents for #11: The Weird World of H.P. Lovecraft in RUE MORGUE

THE STRANGE AND UNIQUE INDIVIDUALITY OF HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT HAS A SPECIAL PLACE IN THE FIELD OF HORROR FICTION: that of a cosmic outsider, out of space and out of time. Much mystery, mystification and myth is woven around his name, and a legend larger than life makes him seem at the same time familiar and a total stranger. Can we really define a man who loathed this world so strongly that most of his existence was devoted to dreams – of the past, of alien worlds and of Earth’s imminent destruction? The best position for understanding Lovecraft may lie in that which is unnameable, which looms from beyond, in the realm of Hypnos beyond the wall of sleep, locked away with a silver key. Can we glimpse the outline…

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF THE FACT THAT WOMEN ARE PRACTICALLY NONEXISTENT IN LOVECRAFT’S FICTION. The single (sort of) exception to this rule is Asenath Waite from “The Thing on the Doorstep,” a young woman revealed at the end of the story to have been just a vessel bearing the spirit of her evil wizard father. Therefore, one could claim that there is a female body present, but not a female character. When femininity is alluded to in Lovecraft’s tales, it is usually linked with female reproductive power (e.g. the feeble-minded Lavinia Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror” who bears the monstrous offspring of Yog-Sothoth) or with soul-shattering witchcraft (e.g. Keziah Mason, the old witch from “Dreams in the Witch-House”). There are no affectionate mothers or sisters, no loving wives or…

BEFORE LOVECRAFT EMBARKED UPON THE CAREER OF A FULL-FLEDGED HORROR WRITER, THERE WAS A PERIOD IN WHICH HIS WRITINGS WERE CLOSER TO FANTASY – although of a pretty dark sort. Not all of the vivid and elaborate dreams, that accompanied him since his childhood were nightmares, just as not all of the stories written in the early part of his career (roughly 1919-1923) were purely horror. The turning point that instigated a series of short dark fantasy stories was the discovery of Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany in late 1919 – namely, his two collections, The Gods of Pegãna (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906). These had a profound effect, as Lovecraft admitted in a 1923 letter to Clark Ashton Smith: “Truly, Dunsany has influenced me more than anyone else…

LOVECRAFT’S KEY CONTRIBUTION TO HORROR LITERATURE, BUT ALSO TO 20TH CENTURY CULTURE, REGARDLESS OF GENRE, IS HIS CTHULHU MYTHOS. This neo-mythology is entirely a product of Lovecraft’s imagination, with only the vaguest semblance to existing world religions. It’s a pantheon created by an atheist, made up of anti-gods, or rather entities whose metaphysical character is vague: neither gods nor demons in the usual sense, they are mostly unknowable, vastly powerful alien creatures who seem godlike from the limited perspective of frail and insignificant humans. This mythology grew almost on its own, playfully, from one story to another, and never with a consistent plan or system. Its inconsistencies and interior contradictions are frustrating for those readers who fail to see that this was precisely the point: the universe is an immeasurable…

IF ONLY LOVECRAFT LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO WITNESS THE FAME AND POPULARITY OF HIS CREATIONS, HE’D BE HORRIFIED TO SEE HOW THEY HAVE BEEN RE-CONTEXTUALIZED AND COMMODIFIED TO FIT CONSUMER SOCIETY. The creatures that he took pains to keep in the dark now are brought into broad daylight and sharp relief, rendered clearly, with stunning detail, in plastic, metal, vinyl, porcelain, etc. The gruesome Cthulhu, once the source of nightmares, is now available as an action figure with intricate sculpts and multiple points of articulation – or, if that is too horrific, Lovecraft’s most popular creation is also available as a cuddly plush doll, green with some yellow on its belly and face, which also sports four tentacles and cute black eyes. The sold-out series Nightmares of H.P. Lovecraft offered…

DESPITE ITS NOTORIETY, THE CTHULHU MYTHOS CANON IS BASED ON ONLY FOUR KEY TALES: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Whisperer in Darkness (plus several minor ones, such as “The Haunter of the Dark“). These have established a unique world of primeval interdimensional cosmic horrors infesting the human scenery and corrupting it into a landscape of uncanny, inhuman terror where man is suddenly alienated from his own surroundings (which are no longer “his own”). All of them embody, in various degrees, Lovecraft’s ideal, which was stated in a 1927 letter to Donald Wandrei: “I have often wished that I had a literary power to call up visions of some vast and remote realm of entity beyond the universes of matter and energy; where…

LOVECRAFTIAN THEMES AND MOTIFS SURVIVED THE ORIGINAL “LOVECRAFT CIRCLE” AND ITS IMMEDIATE DESCENDANTS, more-or-less connected to Arkham House, and were brought even more forcefully into the new age of horror inaugurated by Stephen King: the times when the genre left the confines of cult and entered the mass market. King’s poetics are quite different, almost opposite to Lovecraft’s, with his patent humanism and devotion to everyday realism, pandering to the popular taste and wallowing in pop culture with his brisk, action-oriented and dialogue-heavy prose. True, he had a few brief, nice things to say about Lovecraft in his survey of the genre, Danse Macabre (1981), and admitted that, while Lovecraft “does not figure largely in this book, the reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow, so…

LOVECRAFT’S INITIAL STANCE REGARDING MOVING PICTURES WAS PREDICTABLY ELITIST. As he stated in a 1934 letter, “By the time of the first cinema shows (March, 1906, in Providence), I knew too much of literature and drama not to recognize the utter and unrelieved hokum of the moving picture.” Still, he was intrigued by the medium and watched films of various genres, becoming “a devotee of the motion picture.” Sadly, films with fantastic and weird themes only bored, disappointed and angered him. A rare instance when a genre film delighted him was the Lon Chaney classic, The Phantom of the Opera (1925), praised in a letter from that year: “What a spectacle it was!! It was about a presence haunting the great Paris opera house… but developed so slowly that I…

LOVECRAFT’S DEVOTION TO SHORT STORIES WOULD SEEM TO MAKE SHORT FILMS THE PERFECT MEDIUM FOR THEIR ADAPTATION. In theory, that is probably so. In practice, however, there are a few obstacles. Some have to do with the general problems of conveying his attitude in cinematic form, regardless of length – and sometimes creating proper mood in a tenminute film is more difficult than in a feature. Others have to do with the fact that short films often tend to be short on budget and mostly serve as stepping stones for rising filmmakers whose skills may not yet be honed up to the high tasks that HPL’s writings demand. On the other hand, the more experienced artists, who could do these weird tales justice, rarely make short films. It boils down…

LOVECRAFT HIMSELF HAD NO MUSICAL INCLINATIONS, BUT HIS EVOCATIVE PROSE WAS MORE THAN INSPIRING FOR VARIOUS BRANDS OF POPULAR MUSIC. His influence is most prominently felt in heavy metal’s subgenres, from melodic to very brutal, but also in various dark ambient electronic projects. The influence can be multifaceted; sometimes it stays on the surface, merely in the band’s name, as in H.P. Lovecraft, a rather unremarkable folk-rock quintet from Chicago, formed in 1967. Then there are bands with names such as Arkham, Azathoth, Brown Jenkins, Hypnos, Ktulu, Necronomicon, The Old Ones, Shub-Niggurath, La Voce de Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, etc. The author is sometimes referenced in song lyrics, as in Black Sabbath’s “Behind the Wall of Sleep” (the title taken from Lovecraft’s tale “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”), or more profoundly and…

H.P. LOVECRAFT’S LIFE WAS NOT EVENTFUL IN ANY USUAL SENSE. HE WAS NOT A BIG-GAME HUNTER, DID NOT PARTICIPATE IN ANY WARS, HAD NO GREAT LOVE AFFAIRS, AND DID NOT TRAVEL MUCH OUTSIDE OF HIS NOOK OF THE WORLD. Like most horror writers, he lived mostly inside, in his imagination and dreams. And yet, those were certainly fuelled and shaped by his background. HPL was born into a moderately well-to-do family that went bankrupt after his grandfather’s death, when Howard was fourteen. His father ended up in an asylum when the boy was only three, and died there when he was eight; his mother ended her life in the same asylum when he was 31. Small wonder, then, that fears related to the legacy of one’s ancestors (both familial and…

THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL AND PROBLEMATIC ASPECT OF LOVECRAFT’S LEGACY IS RELATED TO HIS RACIAL VIEWS. To put it bluntly, he considered the white man to be the apex of humanity while the black race (not only Afro-Americans but, even more, those in Africa and Australia) was, for him, barely above the level of apes. Lovecraft was not openly racist, but he privately held views which were widespread in his day and age, especially in New England, where the predominantly white population felt threatened by the upsurge of immigrants from around the world. This threat is reflected in his minor, practically worthless early short story “The Street“(1920), which laments the “forgotten lore of nobler, departed centuries; of sturdy colonial tenants and dewy rose-gardens in the moonlight,” now overshadowed by the new…

LORD DUNSANY’S TALES, AS WE SAW, CREATED A TEMPORARY INFLUENCE UPON LOVECRAFT’S WORKS THAT WAS MOSTLY MINOR, OR MIDDLING AT BEST; his single but significant contribution was introducing the idea of a neo-mythology attuned to a world without gods, which Lovecraft would develop further in his most significant works. On the other hand, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe were the single most important and lasting source of awe and inspiration for our author, and are reflected in almost everything that the grimscribe from Providence ever wrote. Lovecraft discovered Poe at the tender age of seven, and it was love at first sight. This life-long passion was nourished by a sympathy for Poe’s strangeness and gloom; the dark poet’s preference for disease and perversity, for pain rather than pleasure, decay…

“FROM EVEN THE GREATEST OF HORRORS IRONY IS SELDOM ABSENT,” WROTE LOVECRAFT IN THE OPENING OF “THE SHUNNED HOUSE.” But irony abounds in the fact that the hardcore rationalist and occult-basher from Providence should become the guru and prophet of so many occult orders! “No – I’ve never read any of the jargon of formal ‘occultism,’” he wrote in a 1925 letter to Clark Ashton Smith, “since I have always thought that weird writing is more effective if it avoids the hackneyed superstitions and popular cult formulae. I am, indeed, an absolute materialist as far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism….” The occult, for Lovecraft, was merely a potent source of story ideas, not a belief system to which he subscribed…

LOVECRAFT’S MYTHOS IS MADE UP OF SEVERAL KEY GROUPS OF ENTITIES, MORE OR LESS GODLIKE, BUT IT IS NOTHING LIKE THE CLEAR-CUT ANCIENT GREEK PANTHEON. Our author used various names for same or similar beings whose interrelations, unclear originally, are blurred by flippant use in later tales, and the mess is additionally aggravated by August Derleth and his followers (who significantly altered HPL’s conceptions). Insult is then added to injury by the role-playing games and other later re-imaginings. Even at its original source, it’s futile trying to untangle the distinctions between The Great Ones, Great Old Ones, The Outer Gods, The Other Gods, The Elder Gods, The Deep Ones, The Cthulhu Spawn and sundry others because Lovecraft never bothered to do it. Apparently he preferred Walt Whitman’s dictum: “Do I…

FRITZ LEIBER, A CLASSIC WRITER OF FANTASY, HORROR AND SCIENCE FICTION, CALLED LOVECRAFT “THE COPERNICUS OF THE HORROR STORY” in his essay “A Literary Copernicus,” explaining, “He shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space,” that is, towards “a universe consisting of light-years and light-millennia of black emptiness.” Obviously, to do this he had to make a shift from occult horror towards sci-fi horror – and that’s exactly what he did. In Lovecraft’s later tales, the demon-gods and monsters were identified as extraterrestrials, and the Necronomicon was changed from a book of spells into a book of history. Sci-Fi themes and motifs became prominent and include hibernation (Cthulhu “asleep” in R’lyeh,…

LOVECRAFT CLOSELY FOLLOWED POE IN HIS BELIEF THAT AN EFFECTIVE STORY SHOULD BE SHORT ENOUGH TO BE READ IN ONE SITTING, which is why short stories make the majority of his oeuvre (plus a few novellas and very short novels). When he died at age 46, he left a relatively slim body of work consisting of about 50-some titles, all of which could fit in one largish, Necronomicon-sized volume. Once his cult started growing, however, the addicts of the Lovecraft-juice just could not get enough of the good stuff and started looking for additions and surrogates to get their eldritch fix. Famed anthologist and editor Ellen Datlow noted: “During his lifetime and soon after, a whole subgenre developed of what today we would call fan fiction. Writers among his circle…

MOST HORROR FANS WOULD PROBABLY AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENT EXPRESSED BY DAN O’BANNON IN LURKER IN THE LOBBY, A BOOK DEVOTED TO LOVECRAFTIAN CINEMA: “All attempts to film Lovecraft have simply failed to catch any of his special feeling.” To be honest, some of his special feeling can be found in bits and pieces: a shot here, a scene there, a character or creature in this one, a score or a setting in that one, but as of this writing there is still not a single fully accomplished adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s work that might be considered a model of success from start to finish. The reasons for this state of affairs have already been sketched in the previous pages, and they boil down to the fact that Lovecraft…

TELEVISION WOULD SEEM AN UNLIKELY PLACE FOR OUR GRIM AUTHOR, AT LEAST IN ITS CLASSIC STAGE, WHEN IT WAS MOSTLY OUT TO ENTERTAIN, NOT FRIGHTEN THE AUDIENCE WITH COSMIC DREAD. But not all of Lovecraft’s stories are cosmic: those that utilized reasonably recognizable gothic motifs were more likely to be adapted for the small screen. At first, some Lovecraftian plots were sneaked onto TV by HPL’s protégé Robert Bloch, who wrote several scripts for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65). The anthology series featured a pair of episodes bearing resemblance to well-known Lovecraft stories: “Water’s Edge” hints at “The Rats in the Walls,” while “Final Performance” is similar to The Whisperer in Darkness. Somewhat surprisingly, the gothic soap-opera Dark Shadows had a storyline about “The Leviathans” clearly inspired by “The Cthulhu…

MOST FANS AND SCHOLARS AGREE THAT CALL OF CTHULHU, THE ROLE-PLAYING GAME FROM CHAOSIUM, which debuted in 1981, is probably “the most distinctive and successful mythos-related phenomenon in popular culture in the last few decades,” as Mark Jones claims in his essay “Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture.” It’s based not only on Lovecraft’s writings but also on those of Derleth and other Mythos authors, plus it uses elements of other myths, occult lore, conspiracy theories, cults, etc. The game, currently in its seventh edition, is just like all the other games based on a system of rules that effectively undermines the true Lovecraftian spirit. “The game rules,” says Jones, “enforce a rational system onto its fantastical reality, and so playing Call of Cthulhu brings the cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s mythos…

LOVECRAFT IS SOMETIMES LAZILY LUMPED TOGETHER WITH OTHER “PULP” WRITERS, BUT ONE OF THE KEY ELEMENTS THAT MAKES HIM STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD IS THAT ALL OF HIS WRITINGS WERE BASED ON A VERY CLEAR AND DEVELOPED WORLDVIEW. Yes, the man whose name many know only from video games, heavy metal songs and lurid comics actually had a real philosophy behind his writings. And one of its key building blocks was his cosmic perspective, or cosmicism, which he summarized in this letter to Farnsworth Wright, Weird Tales editor, dated 5 July 1927: Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale…

“THE OLDEST AND STRONGEST EMOTION OF MANKIND IS FEAR, AND THE OLDEST AND STRONGEST KIND OF FEAR IS FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN.” Thus wrote Lovecraft in his celebrated essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” adding: “These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.” This oft-quoted statement provides the psychological and anthropological background for fear’s universal impact and for relevance of its artistic treatment. This insight, however, is only one among those which constitute Lovecraft’s concept of “the weird tale” (his preferred term for what we call horror fiction today). Lovecraft’s unique approach to horror is the direct outcome of his world view, sketched in the previous chapters, especially the cosmic vision…

LOVECRAFT HAD A VERY STRONG SENSE OF THE HORROR TALE’S TRADITION AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT, AND WAS VERY WELL READ IN THE WRITINGS OF HIS PREDECESSORS, AS EVIDENCED IN HIS CAPITAL ESSAY. While previous weird writers largely left criticism to the critics, Lovecraft constantly reflected upon his writings and upon those of his colleagues, living and dead. This makes him the first fully self-conscious horror writer in the entire history of the form. Nathaniel Hawthorne awoke in him an awareness that New England’s environment and history are rich with potential for genuine horror tales – what with the memory of the Salem witch-hunts, the grim Puritan tradition, the devil-haunted forests and villages filled with inbreeding and solitary eccentrics. After Lovecraft discarded Lord Dunsany’s fantasy-lands and Poe’s never-never-lands, he realized that…

NECRONOMICON IS THE FABLED – YES, FABLED! – BOOK OF MAGIC THAT TELLS ABOUT THE GREAT OLD ONES AND THE MEANS OF SUMMONING THEM. It was invented – yes, invented! – by Lovecraft. He first mentioned it in “The Hound” (1922), in passing: “We recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.” It was mostly kept in the shadows via vague references, and in the entirety of Lovecraft’s work only three tales feature quotes from it. There’s a brief one in “The Festival” (which concludes with the memorable line: “Things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl”); a middling one in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”; and the longest and best one in “The Dunwich Horror,” with its…

“WHAT HAS HAUNTED MY DREAMS FOR NEARLY 40 YEARS,” LOVECRAFT WROTE, “IS A STRANGE SENSE OF ADVENTUROUS EXPECTANCY CONNECTED WITH LANDSCAPE AND ARCHITECTURE AND SKY-EFFECTS….” A significant part of his imaginarium is made of memorable places: dreamed, imagined or re-imagined (i.e. based on the real ones). As Angela Carter noted in her essay “Lovecraft and Landscape,” “Lovecraft’s is an expressionist landscape of imminent dread; his very world is inimical to man….” These are some of the most striking cities, towns, deserts etc. which have haunted the dreams of his readers ever since. MORE-OR-LESS IMAGINARY PLACES ARKHAM – Vaguely corresponds to Salem in terms of atmosphere and style of houses, but is more hilly. It is the home of Miskatonic University. The town is prominently featured in Herbert West – Reanimator,…

CONTRARY TO WHAT SOME PEOPLE CHOOSE TO BELIEVE, IT IS A WELL DOCUMENTED FACT THAT H.P. LOVECRAFT WAS ONE OF THE MOST GENIAL, FRIENDLY AND UNSELFISH PEOPLE TO HAVE EVER EXISTED. A big fat book called Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House, 1998) is just one more proof against the usual misconceptions about this “eccentric recluse” and “misogynist racist.” Together with countless volumes of his letters, it shows that his free time, knowledge and critical expertise were lavishly spent on friends, colleagues and complete unknowns who wrote to him asking for advice or opinions about their manuscripts. First they were amazed by his stories in The Weird Tales, then many of them had the privilege to correspond with him and thus be further inspired, not just by the writings but also, directly,…

WHAT MAKES A FILM “LOVECRAFTIAN?” MERELY SLAPPING HPL’S NAME ABOVE THE TITLE AND TAKING A MOTIF OR TWO FROM ONE OF HIS STORIES? If that were so, a shallow teens-in-peril-in-an-old-house monster-slasher like The Unnamable (1988) would be Lovecraftian. But it isn’t, not by any stretch of imagination. How about shoving tentacles and slimy sea-things all over the place? That would make a fantasy pirate adventure flick like Pirates of the Carribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) a contender for the title. But it isn’t. Maybe it’s enough to have a lot of squishy vaginal monsters, regardless of the genre, as in the action-adventure film Deep Rising (1998)? Sorry… Sumerian demons invading our world from another dimension? Not really, if fought comically by the Ghostbusters (1984). And no, just because Necronomicon Ex…

THE GENIUS OF LOVECRAFT WAS RECOGNIZED BY SOME OF THE TITANS OF COMIC ART, so we can freely skip all the by-the numbers in-name-only pulp “adaptations” lacking in both art and atmosphere and go straight for the meat – or tentacles – of the greatest visual artists and writers to have captured the cosmic vision on the comic page. Listed in order of proximity to Lovecraft’s spirit. GREAT DEDICATED AUTHORS ALBERTO BRECCIA The old master from Argentina (1919-1993) created his tribute to HPL in adaptations collected in Los Mitos de Cthulhu (1973). The 124-page collection contains quite condensed, but powerful versions of “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” The Shadow Over Innsmouth, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” “The Haunter of the Dark,” “The Nameless…

LOVE HIM OR HATE HIM, LOVECRAFT IS HERE TO STAY. As the previous pages have shown, the author left an indelible mark on fantasy and horror with his unique brand of nightmarish, mind-blowing badtrip Sci-Fi-gothic prose. He continues to be read, discussed, analyzed and reinterpreted. He’s popular with teenagers discovering their first weird tales, and among grey-haired academics dissecting his bibliography. His stories are the cornerstone upon which much of the best in modern horror has been built, and they remain the source of inspiration for the majority of the who’s who in contemporary horror. Even when questioned or openly disliked, he remains too titanic to be ignored. With Lovecraft, “meh” is not an option. His myth is so powerful, so much larger than life that volumes of expert dissertations…