“Now that time has given us some perspective on his work, I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the Twentieth Century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” – Stephen King
Let’s talk about Lovecraft.
During his lifetime, American author H.P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) was not well-known outside of the pages of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, but his stories and creations have become some of the most enduring in horror. A native of Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft was a child prodigy gifted in poetry and prose, but he suffered from isolation, frequent illness and depression. Similar afflictions caused the eventual deaths of both his parents.
Despite being a recluse, Lovecraft was a prolific writer of letters, and as a member of the United Amateur Press Association beginning in the 1910s, he cultivated friendships with Clark Ashton Smith (star Weird Tales author), Robert E. Howard (creator of the Conan the Barbarian stories, 1932 – 1936), and later, Robert Bloch (author of Psycho, 1959). Over the last two decades of his life, Lovecraft would become one of the leading contributors to Weird Tales and, despite his utter poverty and lack of renown in the greater world of literature, he indelibly transformed horror – away from the castles and forests of the Gothic tradition and toward a more modern conception that reflected 20th century fears.
Lovecraft was able to combine established elements of horror with the advances in technology and growing universal awareness that were more the mandate of science fiction. Eschewing science fiction’s optimism at the mastery of our world and beyond, Lovecraft created a new, contemporary brand of horror – “Cosmic Horror” – underlining the utter insignificance of humanity in relation to the immensity of the universe or the vast potential of the mind. Humanity’s journey into the far reaches of inner or outer space was not something to be celebrated, but rather to be feared. Some knowledge was never meant to be uncovered, and once learned, threatened to break the frail human shell. Lovecraft’s very real and personal ethos about existence can be summed up with the beginning of his landmark 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu”:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
With this statement, Lovecraft struck a universal chord that aches like a rotten tooth – the terrifying intimation that we are not in control of our destinies and our world; we are utterly insignificant, uncared-for, alone. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, loosely constructed within his various published stories, posits a pantheon of extra-dimensional, omnipotent beings who often use Earth as a playground. These entities, most prominently the tentacular, bat-winged Cthulhu, are so incomprehensibly powerful that the human psyche withers upon encounter. Confrontations, which invariably lead to the madness and death of the humans involved, often involve arcane books of power, such as the Necronomicon, as well as eerie New England locales, most prominently the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts, home to Lovecraft’s fabled Miskatonic University.
Lovecraft encouraged his friends and contemporaries to add elements to his Mythos, a practice which has continued after his death – creating what has become a massive shared universe, spanning thousands of works of literature, television, film, music, role-playing games, and other media, as well as creators including author Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988), metal band Metallica (“The Call of Ktulu,” 1984, and “The Thing That Should Not Be,” 1986), author Stephen King (“Jerusalem’s Lot,” 1978), comic book artist Mike Mignola (“Hellboy,” 1993 to present), and director Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, 1982).
Ia! Ia! Cthluhu fhtagn!
-Jacob
