2. Although I have assembled a concordance of the sonnets, it awaits a decision as to whether it will be published or not. A wider concordance, covering the complete poetic works of H. P. Lovecraft, is currently under construction.
3. Unfortunately, such other poems are beyond consideration in this essay.
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Briefly Noted
The H. P. Lovecraft Forum, an annual conference held at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is planning a substantial convention for October 19–20, 2007. Planned events are tours of the Lovecraftian sites in the area (Lovecraft visited the nearby towns of Kingston, Hurley, and West Shokan on several occasions), panel discussions, and much else. Such leading scholars as Peter Cannon, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Ben P. Indick are expected to attend. Michael Cisco is the writer guest of honor; S. T. Joshi is the critic guest of honor. For further information, please contact John Langan ([email protected]) or Robert H. Waugh ([email protected]).
One of the most innovative discussions of Lovecraft occurs in Jason Colavito’s The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (Prometheus Books, 2005), which maintains that Lovecraft’s fiction was critical in the proliferation of “extraterrestrial invasion” accounts in the decades following his death. Although perhaps anticipated by Charles A. Garofalo and Robert M. Price’s “Chariots of the Old Ones?” (Crypt of Cthulhu, Roodmas 1982), Colavito presents exhaustive evidence of the similarities in the work of Lovecraft and that of such writers as Erich von Däniken, Louis Pauwels, and others. Colavito is careful to indicate that Lovecraft was a complete disbeliever in the possibility of extraterrestrial invasion by alien species.
“They Have Conquered Dream”:
A. Merritt’s “The Face in the Abyss”
and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Mound”
* * *
Peter Levi
H. P. Lovecraft was profoundly influenced by Abraham Merritt, reading and admiring all his tales. Lovecraft was clearly influenced by them; for example, Merritt’s “The Moon Pool” played a role in the genesis of “The Call of Cthulhu”). One such influence that has gone hitherto unnoticed is that of Merritt’s “The Face in the Abyss” on Lovecraft’s revision, “The Mound.”
Merritt’s tale first appeared in the Argosy in 1923, later to be “rehashed” (Lovecraft’s word) as “The Snake Mother” in 1930. Lovecraft owned the story in its 1931 novelization (LL 603), and admits that he bought the 1923 Argosy issue containing the earlier version.1 Lovecraft wrote “The Mound” in 1929–30, and while Merritt’s work may not have been fresh in his mind at the time, there are clear correlations between the two works.
The stories are both told by an unnamed intermediary narrator (in Merritt a vacationer discovers the hero Graydon [FF 22], while in Lovecraft a researcher finds the records of Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez [HM 113]). Both Zamacona (HM 117) and Merritt’s Graydon (FF 24) are treasure-seeking, and both are part of groups with Native guides (HM 117) or followers (FF 25) who know something of the horror ahead. Both are going to regions known to be haunted (HM 98, FF 25), and each dismiss the haunting as superstition (HM 99, FF 28). Each of the regions, the Oklahoma mound and the Cordillera de Carabaya, are found to be the home of an ancient race who are the ancestors of modern humanity (HM 118, FF 73), and in both cases, anomalously white).
Merritt’s Yu-Atlanchi are immortal, ancient, living in a region nearly impossible to find, cut off from outside humanity and ruled by a snakelike god (FF 73). They use dinosaurs called Xinli (FF 30) and have part-human, part-insect creatures as servants and for sport (FF 60). Invisible birdlike beings help defend their land from interlopers (FF 69). Graydon, Merritt’s adventurer, learns a great deal from his love-interest, Suarra of the Yu-Atlanchi. She tells him that the Yu-Atlanchi are the most ancient people, living in Cordillera de Carabaya because of the upheavals of land over time, but also enjoying their isolation:
“[T]hey let the years stream by while they dream—the most of them. For they have conquered dream. Through dream they create their own worlds; do therein as they will; live life upon life as they will it. . . . Why should they go out into this one world when they can create myriads of their own at will? . . . Why should they mate with their kind, these women and men who have lived so long that they have grown weary of all their kind can give them? Why should they mate with their kind when they can create new lovers in dream, new loves and hates! Yea, new emotions, and forms utterly unknown to earth, each as he or she may will. And so they are—barren. Not alone the doors of death, but the doors of life are closed to them, the dream makers!” (FF 73–74)
Lovecraft’s Xinainan (usually called K’n-yan [HM 113]) are also immortal and ancient, having come from the stars and begotten mankind, from whom they eventually sundered themselves (HM 117–18). They live in isolation underground, the doors to their realm shut, worshipping Yig, the Father of Snakes, as well as Tulu (aka Cthulhu [HM 118–19]). They use half-human, half-animal servants (called gyaa-yothn, HM 139), their animated dead, and a subhuman slave class to run their society (HM 134). The people of K’n-yan are capable of becoming immaterial (HM 132), and use that state for both pleasure and defence. Like Graydon, Zamacona develops a local love-interest (T’la-yub, HM 150), who also helps him attempt to escape the hidden country. The people of K’n-yan, like the Yu-Atlanchi, spend their time trying to amuse themselves: “He [Zamacona] felt the people of Tsath were a lost and dangerous race—more dangerous to themselves than they knew—and that their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare and novelty-quest was leading them rapidly toward a precipice of disintegration and utter horror” (HM 147).
I cannot imagine so many similarities are simple coincidence. However, it is not to be thought that Lovecraft has merely calqued his story on Merritt’s. “The Face in the Abyss” contains no social critique (except very simplistic moralizing about greed, FF 86), nor does “The Mound” contain a sappy romance (Zamacona’s thoughts on T’layub as they try to escape are anything but romantic, HM 151). Merritt’s tale ends without resolution (we do not know if Graydon successfully reunites with Suarra), while Lovecraft’s Zamacona suffers a horrible fate (HM 163).
Merritt, perhaps too pulpish to gain mention in Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” was considered highly by him nonetheless. “The Mound” is much more than what we see in “The Face in the Abyss”—a horror story that explores Lovecraft’s beliefs about society and its phases (LL 468). While Lovecraft lifted some images and elements from Merritt, “The Mound” is very much his own work.
Works Cited
Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick: Necronomicon Press, 1996.
———. Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue. 2nd ed. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002. [Abbreviated in the text as LL.]
Merritt, Abraham. “The Face in the Abyss” (1923). In Famous Fantastic Mysteries, ed. Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Gramercy Books, 1991. [Abbreviated in the text as FF.]
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1. See Lovecraft to August Derleth, 16 February [1933] (ms., State Historical Society of Wisconsin).
* * *
Briefly Noted
Jack Morgan’s The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002) is one of several academic studies of horror literature containing random discussions of Lovecraft but is one of the few that takes account of recent scholarship. Morgan discusses “The Shadow over Innsmouth” throughout the volume, citing in the process the annotated edition prepared by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Necronomicon Press, 1994/1997).
The Master’s Eyes Shining with Secrets:
H. P. Lovecraft’s Influence on Thomas Ligotti
* * *
Matt Cardin
Introduction: The Shade of Lovecraft
Jonathan Padgett, the originator of Thomas Ligotti Online, relates the following anecdote in his Ligotti FAQ: “In a phone conversation I had with Mr. Ligott
i in the Spring of 1998, he explained that Lovecraft’s fiction had had the most profound influence on his life rather than his fiction, as reading HPL’s work was the impetus for Ligotti’s writing career. Aside from this fact, Lovecraft really has had very little to do with the subject or style of Ligotti’s writing.” From this, one might infer that Lovecraft’s influence is not readily apparent in Ligotti’s work. But if this is so, then what are we to make of the phenomenon noted by Ramsey Campbell, who in his introduction to Ligotti’s first book, the short story collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer, stated, “At times [Ligotti] suggests terrors as vast as Lovecraft’s, though the terrors are quite other than Lovecraft’s” (SDD ix). In other words, if it is true that “Lovecraft really has had very little to do with the subject or style of Ligotti’s writing,” then how can we account for the fact that, as Ed Bryant has put it, “Hardly anyone seems to discuss or even mention the Ligotti name without evoking the shade of H. P. Lovecraft”?
It is tempting to try to answer this question simply by turning to the available Ligotti interviews and assembling a montage of quotations, since he has spoken repeatedly and extensively about his relationship to Lovecraft. But a more thorough and satisfying answer can only come from examining the evidence and extrapolating independent conclusions from it. This will also give us the opportunity to examine in depth some of Lovecraft’s own writings and representative attitudes, and to compare and contrast them with Ligotti’s in order to arrive at a general understanding of where both men stand in relation to each other.
We may begin, however, with the aforementioned interviews, and in perusing them construct a chronology of Ligotti’s acquaintance with Lovecraft, and also with the field of horror fiction in general, that may prove instructive.
I. Dark Guru, Personal Presence:
Lovecraft in Ligotti’s life
Ligotti was born in July 1953 and, by his own account, had no significant exposure to horror fiction, nor any serious desire to read it, until he was eighteen years old and accidentally discovered Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at a garage sale in 1970/71. In fact, prior to this he had never felt much interest in books and literature at all. In his own words, “Until reading Jackson’s horror novel, I had read only a few works of literature in my entire life and almost all of those were reluctantly scanned under the duties of assignments in school. Having been something of a burnout in the late 1960s, I never really learned my way around a library and the concept of bookstores was wholly alien to me.” When he began reading Jackson’s novel, it came as a sort of revelation to him to realize that the book had served as the basis for a film he had liked, director Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963). Upon finishing the book, he “felt a definite hunger for more horror stories, but not necessarily those of the Jacksonian type.” What he wanted to read were not stories about modern characters set in modern times, but ones more like the movies he had enjoyed as a child, “the more clichéd Gothic horror movies set in the Victorian era. . . . [T]his was the kind of horror fiction I was seeking, the progeny of Poe’s tales” (Ford 31).
Before going on to describe Ligotti’s successful search for this type of story, it is necessary to step back briefly and look to an event that had occurred prior to all this, and that had laid precisely the right emotional and philosophical foundation to render him exquisitely responsive to Lovecraft’s fictional vision of the universe. It had occurred when Ligotti was seventeen years old and under the influence of drugs and alcohol. He himself describes the event, and also his mindset leading up to it, thus: “As a teenager I had a tendency to depression. To me, the world was just something to escape from. I started escaping with alcohol and then, as the sixties wore on, with every kind of drug I could get. In August of 1970 I suffered the first attack of what would become a lifelong anxiety-panic disorder” (Angerhuber and Wagner 53). Elsewhere he has described the event as an “emotional breakdown” and averred that although it occurred “following intense use of drugs and booze,” we should not assign a purely causal role to these intoxicants, since they “served only as a catalyst for a fate that my high-strung and mood-swinging self would have encountered at some point” (Schweitzer 30).
More than a mere panic attack, the episode involved a terrifying vision of the universe, and of reality itself, that permanently altered his worldview in a direction that was, although he could not know it at the time, proto-Lovecraftian. He has made this connection clear in several interviews, such as the one conducted by Robert Bee, in which Ligotti described Lovecraft’s famous “cosmic perspective” as “the idea, as well as the emotional sensation, that human notions of value and meaning, even sense itself, are utterly fictitious,” and then added, “Not long before I began reading Lovecraft’s stories I experienced—in a state of panic, I should add—such a perspective, which has remained as the psychological and emotional backdrop of my life ever since.” Similarly, he told Thomas Wagner and Monika Angerhuber that he discovered Lovecraft “not too long after” that first attack and “found that the meaningless and menacing universe described in Lovecraft’s stories corresponded very closely to the place I was living at that time, and ever since for that matter” (Angerhuber and Wagner 53).
So: In August of 1970—the very month in which, eighty years earlier, H. P. Lovecraft had been born—a seventeen-year-old Thomas Ligotti experienced a horrifying vision of the universe as a “meaningless and menacing” place in which “human notions of value and meaning, even sense itself, are utterly fictitious.” Shortly afterward, near the end of 1970 or beginning of 1971, he discovered Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, read it, and hungered for a different type of horror fiction. Since he was not familiar with libraries or bookstores, his search took him in an unlikely direction that produced an equally unlikely, though fortuitous, result: “The first place I looked in my quest for horror literature was the local drugstore, of all places. What strange luck that contained in its racks was a paperback entitled Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen. And I soon discovered that this was exactly what I had been looking for” (Ford 31). Shortly after reading the Machen collection, at some point in 1971, he returned to the same drugstore and bought another book. It was the Ballantine edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1 (Ford 31; Bryant). And even though he had enjoyed the Machen book, the experience of reading Lovecraft did what Machen had not: it set off an explosive sense of identification and inspired Ligotti with a desire to write horror stories himself.
The reasons for this are various, but they all center around the overwhelming sense of empathy that he felt for Lovecraft’s outlook. Lovecraft was “the first author with whom I strongly identified . . . a dark guru who confirmed to me all my most awful suspicions about the universe” (Paul and Schurholz 18). Still fresh from the initial attack of his anxiety-panic disorder and still living in the grip of the horrific worldview it had opened to him, Ligotti felt “grateful that someone else had perceived the world in a way similar to my own view” (Angerhuber and Wagner 53). And although the inspirational connection may not be obvious or necessary, for Ligotti it was an organic part of his remarkably intense emotional response to Lovecraft: “When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I immediately knew that I wanted to write horror stories” (Wilbanks).
As it turned out, Ligotti did not actually undertake the writing of fiction or anything else besides school assignments until late in his college career, when he “found the required writing that I was doing to be very stimulating: it made me high, or at least distracted me from my chronic anxiety, and I wanted to do more of it” (Schweitzer 24). But his path as a writer had already been determined by that initial experience of responding to Lovecraft from the depths of his being, in the wake of which “there was never a question that I would write anything else other than horror stories” (Angerhuber and Wagner 53).
Recently (as of February 2005), he has provided a bit more explanation about the specif
ic nature of Lovecraft’s inspirational influence upon him:
As soon as a receptive mind discovers the works of someone such as Lovecraft, it discovers that there are other ways of looking at the world besides the one in which it has been conditioned. You may discover what kind of nightmarish jailhouse you are doomed to inhabit or you may simply find an echo of things that already depressed and terrified you about being alive. The horror and nothingness of human existence—the cozy façade behind which was only a spinning abyss. The absolute hopelessness and misery of everything. After publishing his first book in French, which in English appeared as A Short History of Decay (1949), Cioran learned from that volume’s enthusiastic reception that his manner of philosophical negation had a paradoxically vital and energizing quality. Lovecraft, along with other authors of his kind, may have the same effect and rather than encouraging people to give up he may instead give them a reason to carry on. Sometimes that reason is to follow his way—to communicate, in the form of horror stories, the outrage and panic at being alive in the world. (Ligotti 2005)
From what has already been said, it should be obvious that Ligotti is speaking autobiographically here. Elsewhere, he has stated directly that he took Lovecraft not only as a literary model, but also as a model for living itself:
It was what I sensed in Lovecraft’s works and what I learned about his myth as the ‘recluse of Providence’ that made me think, ‘That’s for me!’ I already had a grim view of existence, so there was no problem there. I was and am agoraphobic, so being reclusive was a snap. The only challenge was whether or not I could actually write horror stories. So I studied fiction writing and wrote every day for years and years until I started to get my stories accepted by small press magazines. I’m not comparing myself to Lovecraft as a person or as a writer, but the rough outline of his life gave me something to aspire to. (Wilbanks; emphasis added)
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