Not even five years ago I wrote the introduction for New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, an anthology that showcased some of the best “New Lovecraftian” short fiction of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Now we’re back with a sequel of equally excellent “recent weird” published from 2010 through 2014. (Although this is only a sampling. My Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series covering the same period, for just one example, reprints a dozen or so New Lovecraftian stories by some of the authors included here and others.)
I’ll recap some of that earlier introduction here, but also provide some newer opinion toward the end. (The earlier introduction can be found at paulaguran.com/new-cthulhu-intro.)
It took close to seventy years for Howard Phillip Lovecraft’s fiction to be deemed respectable. His influence on horror, fantasy, and science fiction may have been established decades ago, but his place in the literary canon had no conformtion until 2005 when The Library of America series recognized his significance with H. P. Lovecraft: Tales, edited by Peter Straub. And, even thus “canonized,” his respectability is still being debated.
During his life Lovecraft did “not expect to become a serious competitor” of his “favorite weird authors.” After his death in 1937 he was usually dismissed, outside of genre and often within, as nothing more than a pulp fictionist who wrote outdated florid prose.
Respectable or not, Lovecraft’s fiction and the fictional universe he established have provided inspiration not only for writers, but for creators of film, television, music, graphic arts, comics, manga, gaming, and theatre as well. And it continues to do so. Even if you’ve never read a word of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, you have been introduced to his imagination without realizing its origin.
Born in 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was little known to the general public while alive and never saw a book of his work professionally published. Brilliant and eccentric, he was also decidedly odd.
His father, probably a victim of untreated syphilis, went mad before his son reached age three. The elder Lovecraft died in an insane asylum in 1898. (It is highly doubtful that HPL was aware of his father’s disease.) Young Howard was raised by his mother; two of her sisters; and his maternal grandfather, a successful Providence, Rhode Island, businessman. His controlling mother smothered him with maternal affection while also inflecting devastating emotional cruelty.
Sickly (probably due more to psychological factors more than physical ailments) and precocious, Lovecraft read the Arabian Nights and Grimm’s Fairy Tales at an early age, then developed an intense interest in ancient Greece and Rome. His grandfather often entertained him with tales in the gothic mode. HPL started writing around age six or seven.
Lovecraft started school in 1889, but attended erratically due to his supposed ill health. After his grandfather’s death in 1904, the family—already financially challenged—was even less well off. Lovecraft and his mother moved to a far less comfortable domicile and the adolescent Howard no longer had access to his grandfather’s extensive library. He attended a public high school, but a physical and mental breakdown kept him from graduating.
He became reclusive, rarely venturing out during the day. At night, he walked the streets of Providence, drinking in its atmosphere.
He read, studied astronomy, and, in his early twenties, began writing poetry, essays, short stories, and eventually longer works. He also began reading Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and pulp magazines like The Argosy, The Cavalier, and All-Story Magazine.
Lovecraft became involved in amateur writing and publishing, a salvation of sorts. HPL himself wrote: “In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be . . . ”
His story, “The Alchemist” (written in 1908 when he was 18), was published in United Amateur in 1916. Other stories soon appeared in other amateur publications.
Lovecraft’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was admitted to the same hospital in which her husband had died. Her death, in 1921, was the result of a bungled gall bladder operation.
“Dagon” was published in the October 1923 issue of Weird Tales, which became a regular market for his stories. He also began what became his prolific letter-writing with a continuously broadening group of correspondents.
Shortly thereafter, Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene—a Russian Jew seven years his senior—at a writers convention. They married in 1924. As The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant, puts it, “ . . . the marriage lasted only until 1926, breaking up largely because HPL disliked sex; the fact that she was Jewish and he was prone to anti-Semitic rants cannot have helped.” After two years of married life in New York City (which he abhorred and where he became an even more intolerant racist) he returned to his beloved Providence.
In the next decade, he traveled widely around the eastern seaboard, wrote what is considered to be his finest fiction, and continued his immense—estimated at 100,000 letters—correspondence through which he often nurtured young writers.
Lovecraft’s literary significance today can be at least partially credited to this network with other contemporary writers. Letter writing was the “social media” of his time, and he was a master of it. Although he seldom met those who became members of the “Lovecraft Circle” in person, he knew them well—just as, these days, we have friends we know only through email or Facebook.
H. P. Lovecraft was probably the first author to create what we would now term an open-source fictional universe that any writer could make use of. Other authors, with Lovecraft’s blessing, began superficially referencing his dabblers in the arcane, mentioning his unhallowed imaginary New England towns and their strange citizens, writing of cosmic horror, alluding to his godlike ancient extraterrestrials with strange names, and citing his fictional forbidden books of the occult (primarily the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred): the Lovecraft Mythos—or, rather, anti-mythology—was born.
There were certainly “better” writers of science fiction and fantasy of roughly the same era—like Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and Olaf Stapledon—whose work may be influential, but is now mostly ignored by the general public. Lovecraft’s survival, current popularity, and the subgenre of “Lovecraftian fiction” is due in great part to his willingness to share his creations. His concepts were interesting, attracted other writers, and ultimately other artists.
Lovecraft’s universe was fluid: the “Great Old Ones” and other elements merely serving his theme of the irrelevance of humanity to the cosmic horrors that exist in the universe. As S. T. Joshi wrote: “Lovecraft’s imaginary cosmogony was never a static system but rather a sort of aesthetic construct that remained ever adaptable to its creator’s developing personality and altering interests . . . there was never a rigid system that might be posthumously appropriated . . . the essence of the mythos lies not in a pantheon of imaginary deities nor in a cobwebby collection of forgotten tomes, but rather in a certain convincing cosmic attitude.”
Lovecraft never used the term “Cthulhu Mythos” himself. (HPL was known to refer to his “mythos” as the Arkham Cycle—named for the main fictional town in his world—or, flippantly, as Yog-Sothothery—after Yog-Sothoth, a cosmic entity of his invention made only of “congeries of iridescent globes.”) The term “Cthulhu Mythos” was probably invented by August Derleth or Clark Ashton Smith after HPL’s death in 1937. They and others also added their own flourishes and inventions to the mythology, sometimes muddling things with non-Lovecraftian concepts and attempts at categorization. Derleth misused Lovecraft’s name to promote his own work, and tried to change HPL’s universe into one that included hope and a struggle between good and evil. This accommodated Derleth’s Christian world view, but was at odds with Lovecraft’s depiction of a bleak, amoral universe. However, to his credit, Derleth—with Donald Wandrei—also founded Arkham House expressly to publish Lovecraft’s work and to bring it to the attention of the public. Without it, Lovecraft may never have had a legacy.
Authors like Robert Bloch (now best known as the author of Psycho), Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), and younger writers such as Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and Ramsey Campbell all romped within the Lovecraftian milieu and added elements to it. Later writers with no direct connection to HPL joined in as well.
Not all of Lovecraft’s work falls within the boundaries we now identify as “Lovecraftian,” but his best works were atmospheric tales that, to quote Stefan Dziemianowicz, “strove to express a horror rooted in humanity’s limited understanding of the universe and humankind’s arrogant overconfidence in its significance in the cosmic scheme.”
Lovecraft felt such stories conveyed “the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.”
HPL’s fiction also differed fundamentally from earlier supernatural fiction. In his introduction to At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition, China Miéville points out: “Traditionally genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo—one which the protagonist scrambles to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft’s horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in us acknowledging the fact.”
We also must acknowledge how H. P. Lovecraft’s personal beliefs tie in to his work. Lovecraft—as evidenced in his fiction, poetry, essays, and letters—was racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. He may not have hated women (misogyny), but he does seem to have feared them (gynophobia). His abhorrence of sexuality and physicality went beyond the Puritanical. In fact, ol’ Howard Phillip seemed to be afraid of a lot of things.
Although not a new discussion, HPL’s racism has lately become a topic of discourse in the fantasy writing and publishing community. In 2011 Nnedi Okorafor realized her World Fantasy Award for Best Novel—a statuette of H. P. Lovecraft’s unattractive head—honored a man who was deeply racist. As a Nigerian-American and the first black author to be recognized in the novel category, Okorafor was more than a little conflicted and posted about it on her blog.
She also quoted correspondance with China Miéville, another World Fantasy Award winner on the subject:
Yes, indeed, the depth and viciousness of Lovecraft’s racism is known to me . . . It goes further, in my opinion, than “merely” being a racist—I follow Michel Houellebecq (in this and in no other arena!) [Note: Houellebecq is the author of H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Believer Books, 2005] in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a “poetic trance.” He was a bilious anti-Semite (though one who married a Jew, because, if you please, he granted that she was “assimilated”), and if you read stories like “The Horror at Red Hook,” the bile you will see towards people of color, of all kinds (with particular sneering contempt for African-Americans unless they were suitably Polite and therefore were patricianly granted the soubriquet “Negro”) and the mixed communities of New York and, above all . . . “miscegenation” are extended and toxic.”
Surprisingly, some Lovecraft scholars and fans deny the author’s racism or brush it aside as “typical” for a man of his time. Yes, Lovecraft lived an age when racism was more overt and racial segregation was the law, but Lovecraft’s prejudice seems, at the very least, somewhat more pronounced than many of his contemporaries. More importantly, it is part of Lovecraft’s fiction.
Miscegenation, racial impurity, ethnic xenophia, “mental, moral and physical degeneration” due to inbreeding, interbreeding with non-human creatures . . . these were all integral to the fiction Lovecraft produced. Yes, we must consider the context: Lovecraft lived during what was probably the nadir of race relations and height of white supremacy in the U.S. But whether these were prevalent views of his day is beside the point: H. P. Lovecraft chose to make them “horrors” in his fiction.
Just because we recognize H. P. Lovecraft’s racism does not mean we must deny his influence or reject his work. We might even understand it better if we acknowledge it.
We can be cognizant of and discuss Lovecraft’s prejudices, even condemn him for them. But many authors are doing a great deal more. They are taking inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft and using it to write stories that often intentionally subvert his bigotry.
S. T. Joshi, considering what is meant by a “Lovecraftian” story, wrote in the introduction to his anthology Black Wings II: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror:
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. . . . 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. . . . [Lovecraft] 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.
Just as Lovecraft loved New England and used it in his fiction, he hated and feared people who were not of his own race and that attitude was also part of his work.
Although subversion of Lovecraft’s beliefs is not a theme of this anthology, it contains short stories, novelettes, and novellas that—for example—consider the fictional containment of the citizens of Innsmouth in light of Guantanamo Bay or the Japanese-American internment camps of World War Two, recognize Lovecraft himself as a killer of dreams, feature gay couples confronting the unknown, see pollution as the source and sustenance of a dark goddess, present sexualized transformations, soar into spacefaring horror, dive into virtual dread . . .
And, of course, the proverbial more.
Paula Guran
2 January 2015
National Science Fiction Day
[Note: The excerpts at the beginning of each story are simply my way of introducing them. (In the cases of Marc Laidlaw and John Shirley, they had already prefaced their stories with the quotations here.) The symbol found on the title page and at the end of each story is an “Elder Sign,” a symbol Lovecraft drew in a 1930 letter to Clark Ashton Smith. Apparently, if you are protected by an Elder Sign, the Deep Ones cannot harm you.]