“I could not help
feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose
farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That
seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions
of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial;
and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness,
desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed
austral world.”
The above passage from
the short story/novella 'At The Mountains Of Madness (1931), is
typical of Lovecraft's writing style. It's dense, occasionally
clumsy, with a penchant for arcane language and seemingly
old-fashioned even by his contemporary standards. Yet H.P. Lovecraft,
a New England writer who died in 1937 and was largely unrecognised in
his own lifetime has had a profound influence on horror and science
fiction ever since. His influences can be seen in the works of
Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Guillermo Del Toro, H.R. Giger
and Ridley Scott.
Arguably out of all the individual monsters
and occult horrors that spilled from Lovecraft's mind, the greatest
is the collected mythology, the tentacles of which have spread into
the public consciousness and continue to grow thanks to his ever
growing fan-base. What is it about the writings of Howard Phillips
Lovecraft that endure and resonate with modern audiences? After all
in was nearly a century ago when the New England native began penning
his weird and macabre tales of unimaginable cosmic horrors. Yet the
mythology he created around primordial galactic gods and foolish
mortals driven to madness has become a staple of modern popular
culture with nods to his work found everywhere from films to
cartoons.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is
fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the
unknown.” —
'Supernatural Horror in Literature' (1925 —
1927)
Born on 20th August, 1890 in
Providence, Rhode Island into an old family by US standards. When
Lovecraft was only three-years-old, his father suffered a nervous
breakdown in a hotel room in Chicago before being brought back and committed
to Butler Hospital, where he remained for five years before dying on
19th July, 1898 from what is suspected to be paresis, a form of
neurosyphilis. Lovecraft was subsequently raised by his mother, his
two aunts, and grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips.
Lovecraft
was an avid reader from an early age and became obsessed with Arabian
Nights, even adopting an Arabic pseudonym for himself in “Abdul
Alhazred,” to whom he would later attribute as the writer of the
mythical Necronomicon.
Lovecraft was a sickly child and
suffered from a number of psychosomatic ailments, which would lead to
him infrequently attending school. Despite this Lovecraft was an
advanced reader and developed an aptitude for chemistry and
astronomy, indeed some of his earliest published works were in
scientific journals. Lovecraft would ultimately suffer a nervous
breakdown of his own shortly before graduating high school and as
such never received his diploma. Lovecraft would retreat from the
public and develop a love/hate relationship with his mother, who
never got over the death of her husband, Lovecraft's father. His
mother would later have a breakdown and ultimately die from botched
gall bladder surgery in 1919. It was during this time however that
Lovecraft began to see his letters and poetry published in various
journals.
Lovecraft's writing style was heavily influenced by
writers and poets such as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen,
Alexander Pope, Lord Dunsany as well as the macabre gothic horror of
Edgar Allen Poe. This gave Lovecraft's prose an archaic but
authoritative air that instilled even his contemporary-set fiction with a sense of
blurred time that complimented his weird themes. His stories slowly
began to be circulated and his first published story, 'The Alchemist'
would appear in United Amateur in 1916. However it wouldn't be until
1922 that Lovecraft would see his first commercially published work.
Lovecraft's unique blend of science fiction, horror and the
occult stood out amongst his peers at the time. Reoccurring motifs
such as the unseen hand of ancient powers and races influencing
modern man, horrors not fully comprehensible, deep time, madness and
forbidden knowledge drew his readers in and slowly unveiled a world
that forced them to draw on their own subconscious fears.
“I
choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of
my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,
momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of
the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for
ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite
cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These
stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is
our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends
itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.” — 'Notes On
Writing Weird Fiction' (1937)
The Simon "Necronomicon"
It is perhaps fare to
say that Lovecraft is a writer for the scientific age. Gone are the
supernatural horrors, ghosts, ghouls, and demons of the horror fiction that
preceded him. In their place are indifferent creatures from the
depths of time and space. Evil looking down from the stars that
science continues to yearn to reach. They are older than man, older
than the Earth itself. In the same way explorers wrote 'Here Be
dragons' on the unexplored portions on the slowly expanding maps of
the world, so Lovecraft looked into the depth of time and vastness of
the cosmos and filled the gaps with his own monsters.
Many of
Lovecraft's stories would feature a character (or characters) who,
usually against sound judgement and woefully unprepared, would
endeavour to push beyond the realms of human endeavour spiritually,
scientifically or simply out of idle curiosity. Often meeting a
terrible fate at the hands of some unknown horror.
Although
Lovecraft's works were populated with monsters, cults and occult he
let the reader do a lot of the work and avoided the mistakes of over
explaining every detail to give everything a back story. Instead
these horrors simply existed, ambivalent towards mankind. Even the
contents of the occult tools he imagined, such as the legendary
Necronomicon were never explored in depth. This suggestiveness was
slowly built upon until it formed a mythos, thinly threaded together
and open to interpretation and addition.
“The one test of the
really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the
reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres
and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the
beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and
entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” —Supernatural
Horror in Literature' (1925 —
1927)
Lovecraft spent the
majority of his life in Providence Rhode Island, aside from a period
where he moved to New York City with his wife Sonia Haft Greene who
was a Russian Jew and several years older than him. They moved
to Borough of Brooklyn where initially Lovecraft began to get a
foothold as a professional writer, while Sonia ran a hat shop on
Fifth Avenue. However soon things took a disastrous turn and before
long Lovecraft found himself in an apartment near Red Hook. It was a
bleak period that was reflected in his writing. Stories such as 'He'
and 'The Horror At Red Hook' is unequivocal in his disdain for New
York and the growing immigrant population.
“My
coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for
poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient
streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and
waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten,
and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly
Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of
horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and
annihilate me.” —
'He' (1925)
Lovecraft harboured a deep sense of
identitarianism in his writings and his views even at the time were
deemed distasteful. They came forward in his work from his earliest
amateur journalism in his own publication The Conservative, and more
so in the form of disparaging remarks and descriptions of not only of
those of a non-northern European origin, but in the humanoid
creatures he envisioned in his fiction. Even though Lovecraft's later
correspondence with friends would see him engage in discussions about
race and creed that would serve to soften his views, the xenophobia
of his youth continues to be a main source of reticence for his
detractors.
“He had a narrow
head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat
nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears.
His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost
beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and
curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly
irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. [...]
“His oddities
certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid,
yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have
thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.” — 'The
Shadow Over Innsmouth' (1936)
“Examined at headquarters
after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all
proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant
type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes,
largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands,
gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.” — The
Call Of Cthulhu (1928)
Although the themes
and ideas of Lovecraft's work appeal to the modern era's existential
obsession with the unknown and the fear of what lurks there, his
writing style was heavily set in antiquated eighteenth century
literature he grew up with. A major criticism of Lovecraft that is
often brought up is his use of baroque description and heavy use of
convoluted adjectives, with words such as “Cyclopean” and
“Eldritch” regularly featuring in his work. He also had a
tendency to write stories from a first person perspective which, while
providing a deep psychological insight into the horror the narrator
was experiencing, did often mean that the stories were wrapped-up in
a somewhat clumsy manner with something hideous and out of sight
coming for the narrator while he is writing his experiences down and
making no attempts to save himself.
“The end is near. I
hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering
against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window!
The window!” — 'Dagon' (1917)
One of Lovecraft's greatest
literary achievements though was in a very different use of language.
Names such as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth are almost
Sumerian in their construction and imply lineage that has walked,
unseen besides mankind. There are also small snippets of ancient,
unpronounceable languages hint at a greater truth that has been all
but lost except to a few pockets throughout the globe.
“Ph’nglui
mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. (In his house at
R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.)” —
'The Call of Cthulhu' (1928)
Yet for all of
Lovecraft's personal foibles, often clumsy, dense and anecdotal
writing style. His grip on the modern imagination has not waned.
Although there was a danger that it may have been forgotten
altogether if it hadn't been for the dedication of his friends to set
up the publisher Arkham House to produce hardback collections of his
work posthumously. His writing has influenced some of the
greatest works in horror and science fiction that have come since with 'At The
Mountains Of Madness' reflected in Ridley Scott's 'Alien' and the
body horror of 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' in 'The Thing',
and the aesthetics of the Lovecraftian bestiary are plain to see in the menagerie of creatures prominent
in the films of Guillermo Del Toro. Even in children's cartoons such
as Maxwell Atoms' 'Grim Adventures Of Billy & Mandy' creatures
such as Cthulhu making an appearance.
“There will always be
a small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about
unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the
prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of
incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up
to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and
flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.” — 'Notes On Writing Weird
Fiction' (1937)
The wider Cthulhu Mythos was added to, under
the encouragement, of Lovecraft himself during his lifetime by his
friends such as Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth,
and with every new generation of writers with the likes of Neil
Gaiman, Stephen King, Joanna Russ and J. Ramsay Campbell, more and
more continue to add to the collective tapestry of the mythos. It has
almost become a rite of passage for aspiring horror/sci-fi writers to
imitate Lovecraft and add their spin to the mythos with even yours
truly having penned a few Lovecraftian horrors while undertaking
Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. Perhaps the best of which
'The Devil In The Crypt' – a story of a malignant horror discovered
after some ill advised exploration of an old church on the Yorkshire
coast – still remains locked away on an old floppy disk yearning
for revision.
Lovecraft died st the turning point of his
career from intestinal cancer. His work finally looking like it would
start to bring him commercial success. Today Lovecraft's work has
been translated into different languages, his most famous creature
Cthulhu has become a merchandising favourite with toys and games
bearing its likeness. His works have been transferred (with varying
degrees of success) to the big screen. Even his Necronomicon has been
fleshed out and produced as a pseudo grimoire for the ever growing
masses with an interest in occult studies. His work has continued to
grow after his death and as long as humanity continues to push
unfettered into the unknown of science, so to will his creations
remain all the more relevant.
“That is not dead
which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
— 'The Nameless City' (1921)
Beyond Lovecraft:
'The
Mist' by Stephen King
'A Study In Emerald' by
Neil Gaiman
'The Shadow From The
Steeple' by Robert Bloch
'Beyond The Threshold'
by August Derleth
'The Courtyard' by Alan Moore
'My Boat' by Joanna
Russ
'Alien' Directed by
Ridley Scott
'Hellboy' Directed by
Guillmo Del Toro
'Re-animator' Directed by Stuart Gordon
'Alone In The Dark'
(series) by Infogrames
'The Grim Adventures Of Billy & Mandy'
Created by Maxwell Atoms (Season 4, Episode 13)
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