Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (2 page)

Fiction, as we know, takes many forms, from gritty realism to farfetched fantasy. In recognizing categories we can also recognize the reasons why certain writers choose to work within them. Their efforts establish an image—often as wish-fulfillment—of the brawny he-man, the unshockable sophisticate, the romantic lover, the keen and objective analyst of human behavior, the cynical realist, the compassionate idealist, the wise philosopher, the sexual athlete, the poet, the carefree adventurer, and every possible persona in the Jungian pantheon of archetypes.

Writers are role players, but the role is not the man, even though it may incorporate certain of his beliefs and attitudes.

Lovecraft’s work offers obvious examples of this. His lifelong aversion to cold is apparent in stories such as “Cool Air” and his short novel, “At the Mountains of Madness.” An allergy to seafood is embodied in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and a tone-deaf distaste for music as dissonance echoes in “The Music of Erich Zann.” A love of cats is obvious in many tales; so is a fondness for colonial architecture and outrage over its gradual destruction.

The literary detective will have no trouble finding clues pointing to Lovecraft’s lifelong Anglophilia; it surfaces even in his preference for English modes of spelling, as in “The Colour Out of Space.” His style betrays a bias in favor—or
favour
, as he would put it—for the language, literary forms, and life-styles of the eighteenth century that he professed to find superior to our own. Privately he often declared a longing to have lived as a loyal colonial subject of King George III in pre-Revolutionary days, and perhaps he truly believed this.

With tongue more obviously in cheek he began referring to himself as an “old gentleman” and signing his letters “Grandpa” while still in his thirties. But the pose reveals a preoccupation with age and aging that is omnipresent in his work. Old houses and old tombs are abundantly in evidence and often their presence is unpleasant, even unnatural. Ancient edifices hold monstrous secrets in “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Shunned House,” “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and a dozen other tales. Old people are often equally evil; Wizard Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror” is not exactly the sort of farmer the Department of Agriculture would approve of, nor would nutritionists endorse the diet of the elderly owner of “The Picture in the House.” Other oldsters in “He,” “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” and “The Terrible Old Man” do not represent advances in geriatrics, while both dwelling and dweller are equally disturbing in “The Strange High House in the Mist.” And the Elder Gods—the “Great Old Ones” of his later stories—are hardly qualified to bridge the generation gap. At best, Lovecraft’s attitude toward age is ambivalent, but his obsession with the subject is literally mirrored in “The Outsider.”

So is his interest in astronomy and the physical sciences; the avowed antiquarian was also a lifelong student of developments in modern research. Generally regarded only as a writer of fantasy, a good share of his output contains more of a scientific element than much of what today is classified as science fiction or—at higher word rates—“speculative fiction.”

“The Colour Out of Space,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time” were first published in science fiction magazines, and rightly so. But most of his work saw print in
Weird Tales
, and its appearance there blinded readers to its actual content. “Cool Air” anticipates cryogenic research; “The Dreams in the Witch-House” suggests that advanced physics will recapitulate the discoveries of powers used in witchcraft. “The Whisperer in Darkness” is an outstanding early example of one of science fiction’s major motifs—the “aliens among us” theme. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” offers its own portraits of architectural decay and dirty old men, together with a perverted worship of perverted beings, but the main thrust of the story doesn’t depend upon anything supernatural. Its grotesque monstrosities are the product of biological mutation rather than black magic.

Degenerative mutation also figures in “The Outsider,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and in the grotesque miscegenations of “The Dunwich Horror” and “Arthur Jermyn.” Some critics cite this as a disguised example of the racism they find evident in “He,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” and other stories.

If Lovecraft was a racist we must recognize that the term was not generally considered pejorative during his own time. In the twenties and thirties, Anglo-Saxon superiority was virtually taken for granted not only in literature but in daily life. And nowhere was this belief more pronounced than in New England. Here the D.A.R. held sway, and the inhabitants of the self-styled Shrine of Liberty shuddered as their communities were invaded by immigrants. Ignoring the fact that most of these “foreigners” had been imported by blue-blooded, 100 percent Americans to provide cheap labor for their factories, they watched in dismay as cities became crowded, old landmarks gave way to new construction, and their political, economic, and social control gradually vanished.

To Lovecraft these changes were anathema, and he expressed his attitude both privately and in print. But his views were not inflexible. As he matured he gradually came out of his shell and his outlook broadened; the racist element of earlier efforts is muted or absent in later tales. And what sort of anti-Semitic author marries a Jewess, associates with Jews as friends and correspondents, and retains one as his literary agent?

The one theme incontrovertibly constant in both his life and his work is a preoccupation with dreams.

From earliest childhood on, Lovecraft’s sleep ushered him into a world filled with vivid visions of alien and exotic landscapes that at times formed a background for terrifying nightmares.

His earlier fiction often utilized the strange settings glimpsed in these dreamworlds; they were ideal for the prose poems he fashioned in the manner of Poe or Dunsany. Later, as his own style evolved, he confronted the nightmare elements as well and translated them into chilling, convincing realities. Many of the characters in his tales are dominated by their dreams. His alter ego in several stories, Randolph Carter, is a dreamer; “The Silver Key” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (written in collaboration with E. Hoffman Price) both emphasize Carter’s nocturnal fantasies. The novel-length
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
enters Carter’s dreamworld and the first story in which he figures, “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” derives directly from one of Lovecraft’s nightmares. Dreams figure in “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and many other tales. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the first story to deal fully with what later came to be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos,” the dreams of a neurotic artist and his counterparts all over the world herald the resurrection of a hideous Elder God from his lair beneath the sea.

The so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” represents Lovecraft’s chief claim to fame and the stories in which it evolves bring together all of his major influences and interests.

An affinity for colonial New England and fears regarding its decadence both found embodiment in fictional settings for those tales. Kingsport and Innsmouth are ancient seaports; Arkham is an old city steeped in traditions of the witchcraft craze and now the site of Miskatonic University. In this milieu dwell the sensitive scholars who serve as narrators or protagonists of the stories. At Miskatonic some of them find access to one of six known remaining copies of a strange book containing the secrets of a race older than mankind—the Great Old Ones. Invaders from other dimensions and other worlds, they once ruled earth but were vanquished and expelled by other cosmic forces. In some cases they were merely imprisoned, like Cthulhu in the sunken city of R’lyeh, or in subterranea beneath deserts and polar ice caps. But their legend survives, as does their telepathic influence, and they are still worshiped by certain primitive people as well as more sophisticated members of cults dedicated to bringing about their return and reign.

“When the stars are right” the Great Old Ones could plunge from world to world through the sky or rise again from deathless sleep. And the blasphemous book,
The Necronomicon
, contained incantations that would aid their advent, as well as other spells and ceremonies designed to defeat them.

The original Arabic version had been lost, but the text was translated into Greek, then Latin, and the volume was sought after by both those who worshiped and those who opposed the Ancient Ones. It is these entities—creatures like Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep—who haunt the “Cthulhu Mythos” tales.

Nyarlathotep emerged directly from Lovecraft’s dreams, as did some of the weird locales he mentions—the plateau of Leng, and Kadath in the Cold Waste. Yuggoth, the dwelling place of certain terrifying extraterrestial beings, was another name for the planet Pluto; in a poem cycle, “Fungi From Yuggoth,” there are allusions to many more fantastic figures and places referred to in his prose.

Some of these were borrowed from the work of other writers and the basic concept of the “Cthulhu Mythos” probably owes a great deal to Arthur Machen, who wrote about a stunted and debased race of primitive beings still secretly existing beneath the lonely Welsh hills. Lovecraft was much impressed with this concept but he alone expanded the notion of a localized prehuman survival into a vast cosmology of his own creation.

Gradually he built up a rationale for both reality and dreams, nothing less than a history of the entire universe. As such, the “Cthulhu Mythos” is a literary creation far surpassing the word-worlds of Cabell, C. S. Lewis, or Tolkien in breadth and scope.

While imaginary worlds abound in modern fantasy, few of today’s writers set their sagas in Poictesme, Perelanda, or Middle-earth. But stories and novels based on the Mythos continue to proliferate. In terms of imitation and inspiration, Lovecraft may well have had more influence on other writers than any contemporary except Ernest Hemingway.

It didn’t happen overnight. As noted, he received scant critical attention during his lifetime. The annual “best” short-story collections list only two of his tales as “also-rans”; they printed none. And in
Weird Tales
, the lowly pulp magazine where most of his output appeared, he was never even granted a cover illustration for anything he wrote. Such honors were reserved for more popular authors and their creations—Seabury Quinn’s French detective, Jules de Grandin, or Robert E. Howard’s barbarian adventurer, Conan.

During the latter years of Lovecraft’s life the most successful purveyors of short fiction found a hospitable and high-paying market in the weekly “slicks”—
Collier’s
,
Liberty
,
The Saturday Evening Post
—and the big-circulation monthly magazines. Authors with “serious” aspirations often opted for
The Atlantic Monthly
,
The American Mercury
,
The New Yorker
,
Story
, or regional periodicals. The world’s greatest short-story writer was William Saroyan; we knew, because he told us so.

Lovecraft made no such claims. At the time of his death glowing tributes graced the letter column of
Weird Tales
and some of the amateur “fanzines” privately circulated among a few devotees of fantasy or science fiction. But their readership was minimal and their influence nugatory.

Aside from a small Canadian edition of
Weird Tales
, Lovecraft’s efforts had appeared abroad only in Christine Campbell Thompson’s sleazily printed British “Not at Night” series. One story was reprinted in an American anthology but attempts to publish two of his novellas in hardcover had failed. There were no foreign translations at all. In the years that followed, a single tale was adapted for radio. Filmmakers weren’t interested; television didn’t exist, nor paperback books. Lovecraft was dead, and to all intents and purposes, so was his work.

But the “Lovecraft Circle” of correspondents remained. Two of them, fellow-writers August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, tried to interest publishers in putting out a collection of his stories. Meeting with no success, they then founded a company of their own called Arkham House and announced the publication of
The Outsider and Others
. This imposing volume of over three hundred thousand words would sell for $5, but could be purchased at a prepublication price of $3.50. Despite wide advance publicity throughout the fantasy and science fiction field, only 150 orders were received, and the remaining 1,118 copies took more than four years to sell out.

Determined to overcome indifference, Arkham House went on to print a companion volume,
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
, then gradually extended its list to include the work of other contemporary fantasy authors. A series of complications subsequently arose, involving royalty bequests from Lovecraft’s aunt who died in 1941, the suicide of his literary executor ten years later, plus legal disputes between Wandrei and Derleth.

Lovecraft’s work survived it all. It even survived Derleth’s imitations of his style and subject matter, which he began writing in the forties. Derleth had won deserved praise for his “Solar Pons” pastiches, based on the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle. But his pseudo-Lovecraft efforts were less convincing. Using a line or two from Lovecraft’s commonplace book scarcely justified calling the total work a “posthumous collaboration.” And when he abandoned this pretext his attempts to convey the essence of Lovecraft’s style didn’t come off; he sounded the notes but lost the music.

It was Derleth who constantly used the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe Lovecraft’s cosmic concepts. Unfortunately, his own writing involved a distortion of its meaning that may have derived from his own status as a lapsed or lax Catholic. In any case, he divided Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones into what in effect were the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, fighting over possession of the earth instead of the ranch. Some later imitators picked up on this, straying far from Lovecraftian logic.