Introduction

It is impossible to consider the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a writer whose name is a byword for post-19th century horror, without considering the nature of fear, lurking or otherwise. Some fears are universal: a fear of the dark, for example, has a logical basis, since the darkness can hide potential dangers, even if they are more likely to be tripping hazards than the aquatic horrors, spawned before the dawn of time, frequently to be found in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft.

Claustrophobia, too, is a common fear, and one exploited by Lovecraft in several of his stories, beginning with his two earliest pieces of weird fiction, ‘The Beast in the Cave’ – written in 1905 when he was just fourteen years old, and published thirteen years later in the amateur magazine The Vagrant – and ‘The Alchemist’ (1908). Both tales involve menace underground, a subject expanded upon in later works including ‘The Transition of Juan Romero’ (written in 1919 but, like the 1920 story ‘From Beyond’ not published until some years after his death), ‘The Rats in the Walls’ and ‘The Lurking Fear’ (both 1922). However, while the author might play on the physical restrictions which result from a foray beneath the earth, a route back is, by necessity, implied.

A fear of the oppressive is best conveyed by the unique setting of ‘The Temple’ (1920), Lovecraft’s first story for Weird Tales. There might be a way of returning from some previously-undiscovered cave, but the same cannot be said of a submarine that is gradually losing power and heading for the ocean floor with no possible hope of rescue. And though the notion of an ancient sunken city is not unique in his stories – others are to be found in ‘Dagon’ and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (both collected in Wordsworth’s The Whisperer in Darkness) – ‘The Temple’ is remarkable for giving its narrator a distinctive voice other than Lovecraft’s own. The majority of his narrators are too often unnamed and possessed of all of their creator’s qualities, flaws and attitudes, with little in the way of motivation other than a sense of curiosity. Critics deemed this a weakness rather than a commendable quality in his fiction, since any attempt to attain knowledge, either of oneself or of the wider universe, would result in either destruction or, at the very least, madness.

The use of a first-person narrator is employed by Lovecraft in the majority of his stories, but while this technique lends immediacy, it can also nullify the suspense to some extent, since it means in most cases that the storyteller must inevitably escape or else wind up committed to some asylum, with the world at large dismissing his fantastic claims.

Mental illness was not, however, simply a literary gimmick for Lovecraft. Both his parents were incarcerated in the Butler Hospital in Providence. His father, commercial traveller Winfield Lovecraft, was admitted to the hospital in April, 1898, only to die two months later, aged forty four. The cause of his instability and eventual death was most likely syphilis. Howard was only eight years old at the time.

Lovecraft wrote ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ at roughly the same time that his mother Susie entered the same institute for the insane as her late husband. However, her son’s depictions of the goings-on within such a hospital, as seen in this early blend of supernatural and science fiction, could not have been drawn from personal observations, since he never entered the building, preferring to meet his mother in its grounds. She died two years later.

While it is not uncommon for a horror writer to play on fears shared by the majority of the readership, H. P. Lovecraft was haunted by some quite particular and highly personal fears. It is more than probable that he imagined he was destined to lose his reason as both his parents had done, especially since he was unaware of the actual cause of their insanity. From his early twenties, Lovecraft adopted the habit of referring to himself in correspondence as ‘Grandpa Theobald’, even when writing to persons older than him-self. But it may have been more than a mere affectation; perhaps it represented a hope that he might one day pass the age at which madness and death claimed his father, and somehow evade the true lurking fear of his life.

A vast number of Lovecraft’s stories examine this very personal fear of hereditary traits. In his second and final serial for Home Brew magazine, ‘The Lurking Fear’, the unnamed narrator investigates mysterious incidents on Tempest Mountain. It is only once his compatriots have all been slaughtered – as a result of his careless habit of falling asleep at crucial moments – that he suspects a connection with the seemingly extinct Martense family. He eventually discovers that the clan is not only still alive but has evolved into a subterranean race of mindless inbred cannibals. Lovecraft displays even less restraint than usual here with his choice language, loaded with hyphenated adjectives. He is at his most verbose when describing ‘a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity’. The biggest flaw, which plagued his work throughout his career, was his tendency to use such phrases as ‘the nightmare creeping death’ to indicate horror to the reader rather than to attempt to inspire it through more detailed and graphic description.

The terrors of inherited traits are also pursued in the 1920 tale, ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family’. The story was retitled ‘The White Ape’ when it appeared in Weird Tales, which Lovecraft felt gave away the twist ending, although there is really very little danger of anyone failing to anticipate Jermyn’s discovery of his unnatural heritage. While the plot shows influences of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, Lovecraft actually wrote this story in response to the Dubliners-like novel Weinsberg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson: ‘I had nearly fallen asleep over the tame book’s backstairs gossip of Anderson’s Weinsberg, Ohio,’ he recalled. ‘The Sainted Sherwood, as you may know, lay bare the dark area which many whited village lives concealed, and it occurred to me that I, in my weirder medium, could probably devise some secret in a man’s ancestry that would make the worst of Anderson’s disclosures sound like the annual report of a Sabbath school.’

It is probably in ‘The Rats in the Walls’ that Lovecraft’s fear of taking on the traits of his own ancestors is most apparent. The narrator Delapore discovers an entire township beneath Exham Priory, but the very absence of a population, as well as any of the titular rats, holds the key to the story’s disquieting revelation. The deeper Delapore ventures into the caverns, the further he descends into madness, unconsciously adopting the speech patterns of his ancestors before finally, it is implied, killing and devouring his companion Captain Norrys. The act is merely implied since the storyteller, who is, like so many Lovecraftian narrators, eventually incarcerated in a mental institution, denies both the murder and the cannibalism.

‘The Music of Erich Zann’ (1921), ‘Hypnos’ (1922, dedicated to friend and fellow amateur journalist Samuel Loveman) and ‘He’ (1925) all end with the disappearance of characters, structures or even entire districts as though they had never existed. His very first piece of published fiction, ‘The Tomb’ (1917, later expanded into the novella ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’) is the earliest example of this. Narrator Jervas Dudley bears some obvious similarities to Lovecraft himself. Like the writer, he finds that he is ‘temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances.’ Even at this early stage in his writing career, Lovecraft avoided the standard clichés of the genre. ‘The Tomb’, which first appeared in amateur magazine The Vagrant, concerns, in effect, a living character haunting the dead rather than the other way around. At the conclusion of the story Jervas Dudley never doubts that he has been cavorting with the long-deceased members of the Hyde family, despite the insistence of others that he never once entered their mausoleum.

As Dudley is believed to have done in the story, H. P. Lovecraft also experienced extraordinarily vivid dreams – both ‘The Very Old Folk’ (1927) and ‘The Evil Clergyman’ (1933) are, in fact, letters in which he describes two of his remarkable visions. Such fantasies, combined with the perceived hopelessness of his own situation – destined to succumb to the mental instability that claimed both his parents – resulted in a view, expressed in several stories, that the difference between the conscious and the unconscious is one of perception only, and that neither one has more validity. ‘Hypnos’ features two friends who pierce the boundaries of the dream-lands together. In ‘The White Ship’, lighthouse keeper Basil Elton boards a heavenly vessel out of a desire to attain fresh sensations and greater satisfaction, although, as with any Lovecraftian quest, it ends in tragedy. The author was not fond of the tale, however, claiming that it ‘makes me sick whenever I think of it!’ The prose poem ‘Ex Oblivione’ (1920–21) makes a further foray into the dream world, but goes a step further by proposing that eternal nothingness is preferable to either state. Perhaps it is the case that all writers take up their pen because of their dissatisfaction with life, but Lovecraft often expresses a revulsion from his surroundings and state of being. He returned to the futility of mankind’s existence again and again, in such works as ‘Memory’ (1919), set in a time when mankind has long ago ceased to exist.

One cannot honestly discuss the things H. P. Lovecraft feared most without noting his distaste for anyone whose appearance, behaviour and culture were markedly different from his own. In his private correspondence, this is often expressed as outright racism; in 1913, he penned a truly reprehensible poem entitled ‘On the Creation of Niggers’. In a letter to author Frank Belknap Long, he listed the ‘local curses’ he felt blighted New England: ‘simian Portuguese, unspeakable Southern Italians, and jabbering French Canadians.’ And though he found Adolf Hitler ‘ill-informed, badly balanced and neurotic’, he concluded ‘I know he’s a clown, but by God I like the boy!’

Such crude and unpleasant sentiments are rarely far from the surface in his fiction. He depicts the yokels in both ‘The Lurking Fear’ and ‘Beyond the Wall of Sleep’ as only slightly more evolved than cavemen. Joe Slater, who is unintentionally psychically linked to a highly advanced star-bound being, is almost wholly animalistic, a few steps removed from the inbred creatures of ‘The Lurking Fear’ and ‘Arthur Jermyn’. There is, in fact, a suggestion of inbreeding at the point where Slater murders a neighbour whose name is very similar to his own. It is also worth noting that the three robbers who come to grief in ‘The Terrible Old Man’ (1920) all have foreign names.

For ‘The Rats in the Walls’, Lovecraft chose to name the narrator’s cat after his own beloved childhood pet, the unfortunately-named Nigger-Man. The animal ran away after the Lovecrafts moved out of their original family home, and the author never owned another pet, but he retained a particular affection for cats all his life.

Of all the stories in this volume, ‘He’, a hate-letter to 20th century New York, comes the closest of all to a polemic. ‘My coming to New York had been a mistake,’ says the nameless narrator, but the words might just as well have come from Lovecraft’s lips, for his brief time in that city brought the author nothing but grief. His marriage to Sonia Haft Greene was over and, at the age of thirty-four, he found himself living side-by-side with people the narrator terms ‘squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes’. Lovecraft’s racism is apparent in his depiction of a nightmarish future New York inhabited largely by ‘yellow squint-eyed people’, a far cry from the ‘blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart’, that the narrator fancies himself to be. ‘Cool Air’ (1926), also expresses his bitterness at the treatment he received at the hands of that unforgiving city. Many critics have dismissed this tale as nothing more than a rewriting of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, but this story of a man who can only exist at low temperatures appears to be a subversion of Lovecraft’s own sensitivity to his environment; the writer could not tolerate a temperature below 80 degrees Fahrenheit. In his 1975 biography, L Sprague de Camp speculated that Lovecraft may have suffered from a rare condition known as Poikilotherism.

It is conceivable that if Lovecraft had achieved during his lifetime the success he now enjoys, his fatalistic world view might have altered or in some way expanded, but very few of his stories were anthologised before his death, and though he made several attempts at a novel, he never got too far. ‘Azathoth’ (1922), another account concerning dreams and out-of-body experiences intended to be a ‘weird Eastern tale in the 18th-century manner’ represents one such abandoned effort, and thus the Azathoth of the title never appears. ‘The Descendant’ (1926) is another fragment bearing a similarity to ‘The Rats in the Walls’, and is notable for containing some information concerning Lovecraft’s fictional book of forbidden knowledge, The Necronomicon (the book at the centre of his 1920 story ‘The Picture in the House’ is, unbelievably, a real volume). Despite reading like a rewrite of ‘The Descendant’, ‘The Book’ (1933), is, in fact, an attempt at a prose version of his lengthy poem ‘The Funghi From Yuggoth’, which appears in Wordsworth’s The Haunter in the Dark.

H. P. Lovecraft’s work enjoyed a cult following for many decades, only really entering the mainstream of popular culture in the early 1980s with the advent of role-playing games based on the unique and complex continuity of his stories.

In this volume alone, we have the character of Nyarlathotep, from the 1920 story of the same name, who reappears throughout Lovecraft’s work, in both his Dream-Quest stories and Cthulhu Mythos, as well as in the works of authors Robert Bloch and Stephen King. The main character from ‘The Terrible Old Man’ returns in somewhat less terrible form in ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’. But more significantly, ‘The Terrible Old Man’ marks Lovecraft’s first use of the fictional location Kingsport, modelled on Marblehead, Massachusetts. Kingsport is revisited in many of his stories, including ‘The Festival’, and ‘The Silver Key’. A story with no overt supernatural elements, ‘The Picture in the House’ introduces the famous fictional town of Arkham, home to the equally fictitious Miskatonic University, which recurs throughout his work.

This interconnectedness of creations and concepts is perhaps Lovecraft’s greatest legacy. Some of his literary devices and affectations have fallen by the wayside: female characters are virtually non-existent in his universe, his dense prose is often made all the more impenetrable by his steadfast refusal to use dialogue (witness the lengthy conversation in 1908’s ‘The Alchemist’ that is reported second-hand), and his habit of insisting that climactic supernatural incidents are indescribable can often be frustrating. But his myriad interconnected creatures, characters, locations and institutions serve as a sort of shorthand for all authors who have attempted to pen tales of supernatural and cosmic horror in the years following Lovecraft’s death in 1937. The merest mention of (to select just a few from several hundred examples) Dagon, Shoggoth, Hastur the Unspeakable, Shub-Niggurath, Arkham, or the Elder Sign hints at the existence of a universe of terrors only faintly comprehended by mankind, but all originating in the extraordinary imagination of one man – Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Matthew J. Elliott