WHAT DEFINES A “LOVECRAFTIAN” STORY? THIS SEEMINGLY simple question is in fact full of ambiguities, perplexities, and paradoxes, for the term could encompass everything from the most slavish of pastiches that seek (usually unsuccessfully) to mimic Lovecraft’s dense and flamboyant prose and mechanically replicate his gods, characters, and places, to tales that allusively draw upon Lovecraft’s core themes and imagery, to parodies ranging from the affectionate (Fritz Leiber’s “To Arkham and the Stars”) to the faintly malicious (Arthur C. Clarke’s “At the Mountains of Murkiness”). My goal in the Black Wings series has been to avoid the first at all costs and to foster the second and, to a lesser degree, the third. The days when August Derleth or Brian Lumley could invent a new god or “forbidden book” and therefore declare themselves as working “in the Lovecraft tradition” are long over. What is now needed is a more searching, penetrating infusion of Lovecraftian elements that can work seamlessly with the author’s own style and outlook.
That being said, it becomes vital for both writers and readers to understand the essence of the Lovecraftian universe, and the literary tools he used to convey his aesthetic and philosophical principles. One of the great triumphs of modern Lovecraft scholarship has been to demonstrate that Lovecraft was an intensely serious writer who, as his letters and essays suggest, continually grappled with the central questions of philosophy and sought to suggest answers to them by means of horror fiction. What is our place in the cosmos? Does a god or gods exist? What is the ultimate fate of the human species? These and other “big” questions are perennially addressed in Lovecraft’s fiction, and in a manner that conveys his “cosmic” sensibility—a sensibility that keenly etches humankind’s transience and fragility in a boundless universe that lacks a guiding purpose or direction. At the same time, Lovecraft’s intense devotion to his native soil made him something of a regionalist who vivified the history and topography of Providence, Rhode Island, and all of New England, establishing a foundation of unassailable reality from which his cosmic speculations could take wing.
How contemporary writers have adapted these and other central ideas and motifs into their own work is well demonstrated by the tales in this volume. Cosmic indifferentism is at the heart of Melanie Tem’s “Dahlias,” which does not require explicit horror, or the supernatural, to convey its effects. The uniquely topographical, even archaeological horror that we find in such a tale as At the Mountains of Madness is powerfully demonstrated in Richard Gavin’s “The Abject” and Donald Tyson’s “The Skinless Face.” Tom Fletcher in some sense draws upon the claustrophobic horror that Lovecraft created in “The Dreams in the Witch House” in his unnerving tale, “View.” Nicholas Royle’s “The Other Man” is a searching and terrifying meditation on the theme of identity, a theme is that found in such of Lovecraft’s tales as “The Outsider” and “The Shadow out of Time.”
Alien incursion is at the heart of many Lovecraft tales, and John Langan (“Bloom”) and Jonathan Thomas (“The King of Cat Swamp”) ring very different but equally engaging changes on this complex theme. Thomas’s story is a clear nod, both in setting and in character, to Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” as are, in a very different manner, Jason C. Eckhardt’s “And the Sea Gave Up the Dead” and Brian Evenson’s “The Wilcox Remainder”; Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Houndwife” is a tip of the hat to “The Hound,” and Nick Mamatas’s “Dead Media” plays a riff on “The Whisperer in Darkness.” But in all these cases, subtle character development of a sort that Lovecraft generally did not favour raises these tales far above the level of pastiche. A rent in the very fabric of the universe is at the heart of Darrell Schweitzer’s inextricable fusion of fantasy and horror, “The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives,” while Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Waiting at the Crossroads Motel” fuses setting and character in a tale whose cosmic backdrop is thoroughly Lovecraftian.
One of the most interesting developments in recent years—perhaps inspired by the mountains of information on Lovecraft’s daily life and character that have emerged through the publication of his letters—is the degree to which Lovecraft himself has become a character, even an icon, in fiction. In very different ways, John Shirley’s “When Death Wakes Me to Myself” and Rick Dakan’s “Correlated Discontents” draws upon Lovecraft’s own personal idiosyncrasies to convey terror and weirdness. The proliferation of Lovecraft’s work in the media—especially film and television—is at the heart of Don Webb’s “Casting Call” and Chet Williamson’s “Appointed,” tales that skirt the borderland of parody while remaining chillingly terrifying. Jason V Brock takes on Lovecraft’s voluminous letter-writing directly with an epistolary tale that suggests far more than it tells.
The fact that writers of such different stripes have chosen to work, however tangentially, in the Lovecraftian idiom is a testament to the vibrancy and eternal relevance of his central themes and concerns. As he memorably wrote, “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.” But it is the very purpose of the writer of fiction to venture, in imagination, beyond that placid island, and very often the result is a harrowing sense of our appalling isolation in the cosmic drift. Lovecraft himself spent a lifetime seeking to probe beyond the limitations of the human senses toward the vast cosmos-at-large, and it is evident that a growing cadre of writers are eager to follow him.
S. T. Joshi