I have loved horror stories since I learned to read. For a long time, beginning at the age of eleven or twelve, it was all I would read. In Woolworth’s, I stood spinning the wire rack of dime store novels, reading there in the aisle while my mother shopped. Sometimes, after she’d ticked off all the items on her list, she would consent to buy me one. She was a reader herself, although, back then, she didn’t have much time for it and I believe she felt more than a little sorry for me, a quiet, loner kid transplanted unhappily at eight to my stepfather’s bleached-board farm in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan, a place so starkly isolate I retreated even further into imaginary worlds.
Perhaps in part because of this increasing withdrawal, my mother’s sympathies did not extend to my choice of reading material: The Amityville Horror, Ghost Story, The Moonchild. Anything by John Saul. Anything by Stephen King. Glancing down at the cover, she would be openly dismayed. Why do you buy those things? she’d ask. I did not know. So dark, she’d say, and shake her head. I sensed she was talking not about the book, but about me. She’d scan the rack for a copy of Anne of Green Gables, her personal favourite. To this day, I have not read it. I’m sure it’s a lovely story. It’s just not my story. It was this affinity for darkness which disturbed her. Still, she usually bought the book of my choosing. Her indulgence had its limits, though, and it was only when I had money of my own, and she was not with me, that I would buy a comic—Eerie, or Vampirella, or my favourite, Creepy. What a waste of money, she’d say when I brought them home, making unclear whether the issue was my taste for the macabre or my profligacy. You read them once and throw them away. If only she knew. How I pored over those pages, reading again and again the stories of tentacled sea monsters and murderous ghost lovers and ships manned by crews of the dead.
By such reading tastes, I became acquainted early with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and, somewhat later, H.P. Lovecraft. I did not find him, HPL, until I was a teenager. Then, I was not taken with him. Perhaps my tastes ran more to the gothic—a tradition for which HPL held little respect—or, perhaps, living where and how I did, I had more than enough of existential bleakness, more than enough of that lonely fishbowl cosmos stretching over and around me. In truth, I could hardly escape it.
It was not until I returned to HPL as an adult, and as a writer myself, that I began to appreciate the kind of horror he created. A certain state of writerly despair—a condition with which HPL himself was only too well acquainted throughout his lifetime—led to me sitting with writer friends in the cloistered heat of an un-air-conditioned Italian restaurant in Moose Jaw in July. We pushed clumps of spaghetti around our plates, our damp flesh sticking painfully to the vinyl booth, discussing the possibilities for a novel about HPL: He was a pretty odd guy, I think. Didn’t he go insane? Not him, his father. I thought it was his mother. Terrible racist. Wasn’t he a recluse?
That night I could not sleep and sat, instead, in my darkened hotel room, with the constant, eerie hum of the air conditioner, researching this man, his bizarre family history, his strange idiosyncrasies. The more I read about him, the more I thought about him, the more I felt called to write about him.
I returned to his stories, found I was drawn deeper this time around, discovering a new appreciation for his preoccupations. The stories were richer, eerier, far darker with the knowledge of the author’s life behind them. (I am no Barthesian, but HPL might well have been.) I found in his vast mythos—in his bleak and dreadful philosophy—obvious shadows of his own fears and insecurities and losses. He was like one of the shadow men (the ones his mother claimed to see) walking around the fringes of his own stories. As, I suppose, are we all, deny it though we may. The realization cast me back to those unhappy years of my own childhood, standing bare-legged in the aisle of Woolworth’s, reading horror stories. Why? my mother had asked. Because I was unhappy. Because horror provided a way of addressing or combating or, maybe, accepting the great cloud of darkness that often, in those years, lay heavy over my heart. Because I felt I had lost a great deal then. Indeed, I had, and I wanted to know there would be an end to it. In fact, there was, not eight years later, when my stepfather was killed one icy November morning in a highway accident and my mother, my much-younger brother and I left that godforsaken place forever, hurriedly, in shock and grief and, for me, guilt, with the weight of another long, bitter, isolated winter already at our backs.
Of course, I could not have predicted such terrible events. I was sixteen. In anger and misery, I had made terrible wishes. I wanted an end. I did not know yet that, as in W.W. Jacob’s story “The Monkey’s Paw,” the granting of wishes sometimes comes at great cost.
And loss is really what lies at the heart of all horror—certainly at the heart of HPL’s stories. Loss of family, loss of security, loss of identity, loss of self. HPL suffered enormous losses as an adolescent. All his life, really. Loss, or fear of loss, is what drives his stories. And, one might argue, his racism—or misanthropy—as well.
But unlike other horror stories, in which monsters are faced and battled, and everything turns out all right in the end, HPL’s stories provide no possibility of succeeding against monsters. There is no reconciliation in the Lovecraftian universe. As Neil Gaiman put it, Lovecraft does not let you off the ghost train. Horror is for most of us, Gaiman says, merely an unpleasant ride; in the end, you’re okay, monsters defeated, or at least reconciled. Not so in Lovecraft. There is no defeating, nor reconciling, his brand of monster. No doubt this is why I was not drawn to him all those years ago. I wanted reconciliation, then. I wanted off the ghost train.
The absolute impossibility of slaying our monsters—either literal or psychological—is the great strength of HPL’s horror, and the reason he is notable within the genre. Of course, even admirers of his fiction must admit that he is not a writer without flaws. His stories (certainly his characters) can feel flat, cold, difficult to enter. They stray, at times, into the hysterical. When faced with horror, his characters faint, or scream, or, worse, scream and scream and scream. And then faint. But, in fairness, when confronting a tentacle shooting out of someone’s head—as HPL’s characters often do—perhaps the only possible reaction is to faint or scream and scream and scream. He has been dismissed by many. A terrible writer, some say; others, simply a campy one, a pulpy one.
But he was not a terrible writer. In fact, he had an impressive grasp of the English language and a broad knowledge of both classical literature and philosophy. He was, however, an extraordinarily idiosyncratic writer. His stories are gripping and mysterious, chilling and, yes, epic; deeply philosophical. He is a writer easy to parody, as Gaiman has pointed out. The same could be said, I suppose, of Hemingway, Faulkner, Austen. In the end, I find his idiosyncrasies endearing, a word he would have despised. It is in part what makes his particular brand of horror unique. I do not lose my heart to his stories, it’s true. But this is precisely as HPL would have wished, affairs of the heart being of little consequence to him. It was not his characters’ hearts which concerned him, but their minds. And, yet, loss of sanity for HPL was not quite the real horror; rather, it was specifically the potential knowledge of an indifferent universe. He wrote, “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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
In this dread philosophy lies the strength of the horror behind HPL’s work. That he was a flawed writer, as many claim, does not diminish this. His flaws are not flaws of conception, or philosophy, or even, really, execution, in spite of the accusations levelled against him. He was an intelligent man, an autodidact, with a deeply imaginative mind. He influenced the genre tremendously. Tendrils of HPL’s influence creep everywhere in speculative fiction. His legions of devoted followers stand testament to an almost intangible familiarity in his work, something we recognize innately, but which we reject as impossible. Something akin to looking into a slightly warped mirror. Or staring into the abyss.
Besides, criticisms of HPL are criticisms of the genre itself. How to portray horror without melodrama? How, more so, cosmic horror? We love things best when seeing them wholly; we love them in spite of their flaws, perhaps a little better because of them. Love, another word to which he would have objected mightily.
The following stories have been selected not as a representative sampling of HPL’s oeuvre—of which there are many examples—but simply as my personal favourites. The ones I consider his finest short stories, filled with the best he had to offer: they are atmospheric, haunting, at times darkly comic, a quality for which he is underrated. They are obviously, heartbreakingly autobiographical in their preoccupations and filled with the kind of empty, limitless horror that only a mind and a heart which has felt great loss could conjure.
Reader, you will not lose your heart to the following stories. HPL did not intend you to. You might lose some sleep, or find yourself looking over your shoulder as you read, into the dark corners of your living room. You will certainly never view the black depths of a night sea or sky the same way again. The stories of H.P. Lovecraft, like the best horror, are most unsettling after the fact, at a late hour, when the book is long closed and it is only you and the infinite darkness.
Jacqueline Baker
June 2014