If you want to read H.P. Lovecraft in the original collections of short stories he published during his lifetime, you will come up empty-handed. Lovecraft couldn’t find a commercial publisher willing to issue his stories in book form—the first widely-available collections were issued posthumously by Lovecraft’s friend August Derleth. Derleth and his collaborator Donald Wandrei encountered so much resistance from publishers that they founded their own imprint, Arkham House, to release these now classic tales. Lovecraft faced the same fate with his short novels. During his lifetime, At the Mountains of Madness only appeared as a pulp magazine serial, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward didn’t get into print in any format during the author’s lifetime.
H.P. Lovecraft spent his final days in abject poverty. “Outgo persists, income shrinks to invisibility,” he wrote in dismay in one of his letters. The author’s newest suit was almost a decade old, and he still wore the overcoat he had owned as a teenager. “I have reduced nourishment to $2 and $3 per week, and continue to wear the raiment of yesteryear,” he admitted to Fritz Leiber. Sometime he went without food to pay for the postage necessary to maintain his activity as an author. (And he needed plenty of stamps—he wrote around 100,000 letters during his comparatively short lifetime, and perhaps ranks as the most prolific correspondent in the history of American literature.) Lovecraft lived with an ailing aunt to save on expenses, and may have delayed seeking treatment for the cancer that eventually killed him, because of his financial hardships.
He got little consolation from his literary achievements in his final days, and the Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi is probably right in claiming that “as he saw death approaching, Lovecraft envisioned the ultimate oblivion of his work, as he had never had a true book published in his lifetime.” His oeuvre was scattered in old pulp magazines, garish periodicals such as Weird Tales and Astounding despised by the highbrow literary community. Some of his best work simply existed in typescript in his files.
Fast forward to the present day and marvel over the changed state of affairs. Lovecraft’s stories are widely read, and available in various editions, including an impressive 800-page volume from the Library of America, where he can be found on the shelf between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Madison. His tales have served as the basis for dozens of film and TV adaptations, with more appearing every year. A bizarre cottage industry in Lovecraft inspired collectibles—jewelry, medallions, T-shirts, playing cards, greeting cards, games, key chains, and other items large and small—testifies to the devotion and creativity of this author’s legion of fans.
When I visit the gym to workout, I routinely wear a sweatshirt emblazoned with the insignia of Miskatonic Univeristy—a non-existent institution (loosely based on Brown University) that solely exists in the pages of Lovecraft’s stories. Earlier this week I was confronted by a barista in a café, who had glimpsed me out of the corner of his eye. “Does that sweatshirt say ‘Miskatonic University’?” he asked. “What do you know about Miskatonic University?” I responded. At that point, my interlocutor simply rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and showed me a tattoo that read “H.P. Lovecraft.”
Such is the passion of Lovecraft’s admirers, a passion that burns brightly almost eighty years after the author's death. Indeed, his influence shows up in the strangest places—much of it far afield from Lovecraft’s native soil in New England. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have drawn on his example in their work A Thousand Plateaus . French novelist Michel Houellebecq has written a full-length study of Lovecraft’s work. Jorge Luis Borges dedicated a short story to him. You will find echoes of his work in Japanese manga and heavy metal music.
But even this impressive list of achievements fails to measure the scope of Lovecraft’s influence on literature and popular culture. With the exception of Edgar Allan Poe , no author did more to establish the horror genre and create its ground rules and formulas, and here his ethos can be traced in virtually every form of contemporary storytelling, from motion pictures to video games. But when I consider Lovecraft’s legacy, I marvel first and foremost at his prose style. Virtually every paragraph in every Lovecraft story is immediately identifiable as his work. The cadences of his elaborate sentences, the density of his modifiers, the macabre and melancholy tone of his narratives: these are his trademarks, as essential to the Lovecraftian universe as his gripping plots or arcane private mythology.
Such dark, demented and dense writing almost demands parody, even as it stirs admiration. Here is Michael Chabon ’s send-off of Lovecraft’s prose:
“This record of sorrow is being penned in human blood on parchment made from the hides of drowned sailors. Its unhappy author—O pity me, friend, wherever you lie at your ease!—perches by the high window of a lightning-blasted tower…chained at the ankle to an iron bedstead, gnawing on the drumstick of a roasted rat….A prisoner of ill fortune, a toy of destiny, a wretched cat’s-paw for gods of malice who find sport in plucking the wings from the golden butterfly of human happiness! Thus shorn of liberty and burdened with the doubtful gift of time do I propose to ease the leaden hours in setting down this faithful record, the memoir of a king in ruins.”
Long before the “unreliable narrator” became fashionable in literary fiction, Lovecraft mastered his own distinctive variant, namely the terror-stricken narrator who questions his own sanity, perhaps even craves the disclosure that he has lost his marbles, because this would allow him to doubt the reality of the fearful and loathsome story he is recounting. (A typical Lovecraft line: “I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more….”) Again and again, we encounter this troubled character in the Lovecraft oeuvre. Some hapless soul, due to excessive curiosity, scientific pride or just sheer bad luck, gets a glimpse of a horror best left unseen, and usually with cataclysmic implications for the human race. In “The Colour Out of Space,” one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, the danger arrives via a meteorite from the sky. In another much cherished tale, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” it crawls out of the sea. In At the Mountains of Madness , it emerges from the frozen wastelands of Antarctica.
Beyond these many variants, Lovecraft maintained a surprisingly coherent vision in story after story, drawing on a recurring mythology of his own invention. Derleth coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe the lore, bestiary and alternative history constructed by Lovecraft during the several decades of his writing career, refined over the course of dozens of works, and later drawn on and expanded by other storytellers. In time, the Mythos encompassed not only the supernatural threats faced by Lovecraft’s haunted protagonists, but also a species of intelligent life that inhabited the earth before the rise of human society, and a successor race (of intelligent beetles) that will eventually succeed us. He brought in some elements of preexisting myth, such as the story of Atlantis, with the addition of new twists of his own devising. But most of this material came only from the fevered inspiration of his seemingly inexhaustible imagination. Eventually, as Lovecraft aimed to branch out from pure horror to science fiction, he drew on elements of quantum physics and Einsteinian space-time jargon to buttress his mthology with a thin veneer of technological plausibility. These theoretical elements added little to stories that relied on suspense, not futuristic science for their appeal, and in some instances undermined perhaps the key allure of Lovecraft’s work, namely the reader’s instinctive repulsion at the inexplicable and unmentionable. But they testify to the author’s obsession with expanding the scope and rigor of his homegrown system, his unified theory of horror.
When Lovecraft gets too caught up in science, I lose interest. The long drawn-out opening of At the Mountains of Madness , filled with techno -speak and musings on geological matters, will exasperate all but the most patient readers. Lovecraft is at his best, in my opinion, when he leaves the horror unexplained, and all the more ominous for its amorphous qualities. The same is true of this author’s prose, which at first glance appears obsessed with explaining everything in the most intricate detail. Indeed, few writers have used adjectives and subsidiary clauses with more abandon than H.P. Lovecraft. But, in his most inspired moments, Lovecraft find a ways of explaining very little even while he appears to try to convey every detail. The web of description proves as fragile as a spider’s web, and much of it is simply an enumeration of different gradations of shadow, mist and darkness. We hear the screams, we feel the chill wind, and vaguely make out, through the suffocating smoke and fog, the dim outlines of a present menace.
My favorite Lovecraft work, his novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward , displays a casual mastery that may surprise those who see this author as limited to short works, long on mood and light on structure. Here Lovecraft presents an expansive work, covering several generations and a wide range of narrative stances. This ambitious story spans two continents and hundreds of years, incorporates a considerable amount of historical detail, and involves a shifting array of characters and protagonists. Lovecraft is so bold as to telegraph his ending in the very first sentence of the novel, yet manages to withhold various key details until the proper moment when they can strike the reader with the greatest amount of shock and awe. Judging by this work, Lovecraft had all the skill required to flourish as a novelist or screenplay writer. How strange that he put such little effort into marketing this manuscript, which didn’t appear in print until after his death.
But Lovecraft didn’t need a hundred pages to pull off his well-honed effects. Like Poe, he could construct terrifying vignettes that cut to the quick in just a few pages. And the careful student of H.P. Lovecraft will dissect this author further, exploring how paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, he draws the unsuspecting reader into his elaborate alternative universe of the macabre. I’m reminded of a comment from a character in one of Lovecraft's early works: "Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities." That’s Lovecraft in a nutshell: a peering into a future that always echoes with the past, a gauging of the real that tells us as much about the possible as the actual, and the ever-present suspicion that these shadows from afar, the horrible flickerings on the wall of a demented Plato’s cave, are a burden beyond enduring. If horror is more than a kind of entertainment, but actually a type of metaphysics or aesthetic, this is its essence— one that, nowadays, we often simply call ‘Lovecraftian’.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His most recent book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , is published by Oxford University Press.
If horror is more than a kind of entertainment, but actually a type of metaphysics or aesthetic, this is its essence—one that, nowadays, we often simply call ‘Lovecraftian’.