Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Lovecraft’s framework was not programmatic or rigid; it was, instead, a flexible aesthetic construct, adaptable to the author’s developing vision and varying narrative requirements. He considered his strange entities (e.g., Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, etc.) to be symbolic rather than representative. Lovecraft created what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos because he needed a more powerful and aesthetically refined set of symbols than found in traditional superstition. Taken to task by a colleague about his use of a personal myth-cycle, Lovecraft defended himself this way:

  I really agree that Yog-Sothoth is basically . . . unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached really serious literature as yet. But I consider the use of actual folk myths as even more childish than the use of new artificial myths, since in employing the former one is forced to retain many blatant puerilities & contradictions of experience which could be subtilised or smoothed over if the supernaturalism were modelled to order for the given case. The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothoery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given embodiment & crystallization. (Selected Letters 3.293)

  The impetus for Lovecraft’s “symbolic phantasy” was his imaginative enchantment with the natural world. In a letter he explained how he tried to effect or embody his artistic impulses by using

  as many as possible of the elements which have, under earlier mental and emotional conditions, given man a symbolic feeling of the unreal, the ethereal, & the mystical—choosing those least attacked by realistic mental and emotional conditions of the present. Darkness—sunset—dreams—mists—fever—madness—the tomb—the hills—the sea—the sky—the wind—all these, & many other things have seemed to me to retain a certain imaginative potency despite our actual scientific analyses of them. Accordingly I have tried to weave them into a kind of shadowy phantasmagoria which may have the same sort of vague coherence as a cycle of traditional myth or legend. . . . [A]n artificial mythology can become subtler & more plausible than a natural one, because it can recognize & adapt itself to the information and moods of the present. (Selected Letters 4.70ff)

  In his early years as an author, Lovecraft experimented with Dunsanian fantasy (e.g., “The White Ship,” 1919), ethereal stories of fantastic, dreamlike worlds in the vein of those produced by one of his literary idols, the Irish writer Lord Dunsany (1878–1957). These works are sometimes termed the “Dreamlands” stories. (Like his other work, these stories never saw print during his lifetime beyond amateur journals, pulp magazines, and a few private press editions.) By 1926, however, he had established his unique and characteristic blend of literary realism and the weird. Literary realism uses detailed observation of everyday life with almost forensic levels of detail and precision to produce a sense of reality. But in Lovecraft, the generally accepted “sense of reality” is shown to mask something that is incoherent and inimical to sanity.

  Above Dunsany, Lovecraft’s primary fictional influence is Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s emphases on psychological terror using first person narration, on the cultivation of weird atmosphere, and on a high level of artistic finish all are amplified by Lovecraft. The literary stream than runs from Poe through Charles Baudelaire to the Symbolists, and ultimately to the Surrealists, is likewise manifest. Following the lead of the Decadents (notably J. K. Huysmans), Lovecraft carefully employed bursts of linguistic energy bordering on delirium. We find, too, an intense interest in dreams and what the Surrealists called hasard, roughly equivalent to “chance,” but with connotations of disorder and the irrational.

  Lovecraft saw horror fiction as his especial domain; his letters and essays reflect refinement of an aesthetic of the “weird” over his literary career (1918–1937). Its most notable exposition is the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (written 1925–1926, published 1927), a survey from ancient times. Lovecraft declares: “Atmosphere is the all-important thing [in horror fiction], for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation” (Lovecraft 2012, 28). In all Lovecraft’s stories, a characteristic atmosphere seems to flow from the very first sentence, as if a switch had been thrown. He typically employs the first-person voice of a refined, sensible, and slightly imperious narrator, modulating his tone to a hyperbolic and sometimes surreal rhetoric when describing his horrors. Lovecraft’s skill as a poet is reflected in the metrical and rhetorical adroitness of his prose. (Fungi from Yuggoth, 1929–1930, a cycle of thirty-six sonnets, is a poetic achievement worthy of his best fiction.) He also developed a distinctive set of cosmic imagery—largely revolving around the concepts of chaos and asymmetry—to suggest the utterly nonhuman.

  While Lovecraft emphasized the importance of atmosphere over plot in horror fiction, his tales show great skill in construction. The stories often nested narratives and documents, requiring the reader to participate in (as he writes in “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1928) the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge” that reveals “terrifying vistas of reality” (Lovecraft 2002, 139). Lovecraft was also ingenious in foreshadowing, weaving explicative narrative content—including key phrases that become significant only in retrospect—into the prolegomena of his tales to clear the way for the creation of atmosphere. This technique, derived from detective fiction, makes his work endlessly re-readable. The remarkable merging of real and unreal gains force by Lovecraft’s use of autobiographical materials—numerous aspects of the stories are transmuted from events, locales, and persons he knew.

  “The Colour out of Space” (1927), Lovecraft’s most accomplished tale, mesmerizingly recounts how intergalactic life-forms of an indeterminate nature came in a “meteorite” and spread gray death. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), local legends veneer extraterrestrials possessing “prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill” (Lovecraft 2002, 267) that transport their victims’ conscious brains to an interstellar outpost on Pluto. “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) identifies the spells of witchcraft with equations of non-Euclidean geometry that breach other dimensions. Always lurking at the edge of Lovecraft’s indifferent universe is the threat that natural law may not hold, as hinted at by quantum mechanics: thus his concept of ultimate chaos, “wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth” (Lovecraft 2004, 329).

  Lovecraft joins Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in using detailed New England local color—history, folkways, landscape, and architecture—as a foundation for supernatural incursions. Lovecraft had a specialist’s knowledge of colonial history, and this is reflected throughout his fiction. In “The Shunned House” (1924), for example, descriptions of a sinister Providence residence are embellished with the convincing annals of its doomed inhabitants.

  Many New Englanders in the early twentieth century viewed immigrants who came to work in industrialized cities as a threat to tradition, and Lovecraft was no exception. His upbringing created a fear of “foreigners” impervious to the rationality he showed in other areas of thought. The terrors of “Dagon” (1918), “The Lurking Fear” (1922), and other tales may be seen as veiled projections of fears regarding an overthrow of nineteenth-century culture through immigration. This theme, inflamed by the carnage of World War I and the paranoia of the Red Scare, grows in stories such as “He” (1925), “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), and the brilliant prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920) to the scope of apocalyptic narrative.

  But Lovecraft’s racism is best understood in the context of his anthrophobia. In his most radically modern and innovative stories, the horror of “aliens” is supplanted by the horror of the self, the horror of being human. In “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1920) it is revealed that even a scion of an aristocratic English family is not immune from the savagery of human descent, as the protagonist discovers his great-great-great-grandmother was a Congo ape. Likewise, “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), “The Shadow over Inn
smouth” (1936), and others cunningly cultivate sympathy with an ostensibly reasonable narrator who is revealed at the end to be monstrous.

  Subsequent writers have been inspired by Lovecraft in varied ways. One way manifested prior to Lovecraft’s death: contributors to Weird Tales began to festoon their horror stories with his alien beings, geographical settings, and arcane books, and also to invent their own. There soon developed a “fan fiction” subculture of pastiche, which generates hundreds of “Mythos” works each year. But Lovecraft’s significant influence (in approach and in technique, rather than in embellishment) has been upon horror writers who offer their own unique talent: Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Thomas Ligotti, and others.

  Thanks to a group of scholars led by S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft has ascended from the literary slums of the pulp magazines to the pantheon of American literature. He also has become something of a cult figure and pop culture phenomenon. Lovecraft the man has been featured as a character in fictional works, and his imaginary worlds have been employed in every aspect of modern-day media, from movies to comics to television to video games.

  Steven J. Mariconda

  See also: Arkham House; At the Mountains of Madness; “The Call of Cthulhu”; Campbell, Ramsey; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; “The Colour out of Space”; Cthulhu Mythos; Dreams and Nightmares; “The Dunwich Horror”; Huysmans, J. K.; Joshi, S. T.; Klein, T. E. D.; “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraftian Horror; The Mind Parasites; “The Music of Erich Zann”; The Numinous; “Pickman’s Model”; Poe, Edgar Allan; “The Rats in the Walls”; Weird Tales.

  Further Reading

  Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 2010. “Terror Eternal: The Enduring Popularity of H. P. Lovecraft.” Publishers Weekly, July 12. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/43793-terror-eternal-the-enduring-popularity-of-h-p-lovecraft.html.

  Eil, Philip. 2015. “The Unlikely Reanimation of H. P. Lovecraft.” The Atlantic, August 20. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/hp-lovecraft-125/401471.

  H. P. Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown. 2009. Directed by Frank Woodward. Los Angeles: Cinevolve Studios. DVD.

  Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Joshi, S. T. 2010. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.

  Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz, eds. 1991. An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

  Joshi, S. T., and David E. Schultz. 2004. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Loucks, Donovan K. 2016. The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, June 12. http://www.hplovecraft.com.

  Lovecraft, H. P. 1965–1976. Selected Letters (five volumes). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

  Lovecraft, H. P. 2002. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin.

  Lovecraft, H. P. 2004. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR

  Lovecraftian horror is a subgenre categorized by a personal narrative chronicling a foreboding sense of what writer H. P. Lovecraft termed “outsideness”—detailing encounters with unknown external forces intruding upon the world of humans. These forces may be alien, ultra-cosmic, or other-dimensional. And while they might operate in a manner suggesting that they are inimical to humanity, they are more correctly indifferent to human emotions and aspirations. More than merely unknown, they are unknowable, as the hapless narrator discovers by degree.

  In 1927, Lovecraft expounded on his nascent vision, writing, “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. . . . when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold” (Joshi 2008, 16).

  Although there existed precursors to the worldview exemplified in Lovecraftian horror fiction—principally selected stories by Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, and A. Merritt—it was Lovecraft who gathered together the thin threads of disparate ideas and sensibilities to weave together a tapestry that placed humans not at the apex of the known universe, but at the bottom of a cosmic food chain in which they were less than insects in the eyes of higher intelligences. Posthumously, a portion of Lovecraft’s fiction has been categorized as belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos—a term not his own—despite scant evidence that the writer had any such fixed formal concept in mind.

  One of the unique innovations of Lovecraftian horror posits that, while there may exist supernatural monsters such as vampires or ghosts, the true monsters are of cosmic origin—seemingly godlike and remote beings such as Cthulhu (one of Lovecraft’s most famous fictional creations), with which humans are intellectually and emotionally unprepared to cope. Futility is a running theme, as well as the realization that ultimate reality lies beyond the senses of ordinary mortals and cannot possibly be comprehended by the human brain; otherwise, madness would result. Lovecraftian protagonists were therefore helpless in the face of cosmic forces beyond their comprehension. In these works, happy endings are out of the question, although temporary and ultimately inconsequential victories might be achieved, as in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” which represents a mere holding back of the inevitable crushing defeat and unavoidable fall of humanity.

  The type of stories H. P. Lovecraft and his adherents concocted were a direct response to the contrived formulaic horror fiction in which an intrepid investigator into the supernatural might overcome any manner of mundane monster, no matter how horrific, through ingenuity and the appropriate occult tools. Not so in Lovecraftian horror fiction, which is antiheroic and nihilistic in the extreme, and which postulates a vision of the supernatural that is cosmic in scope and truly alien in nature.

  Will Murray

  See also: Bierce, Ambrose; Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; “The Dunwich Horror”; Hodgson, William Hope; Lovecraft, H. P.

  Further Reading

  Joshi, S. T. 2008. The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos. Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books.

  Joshi, S. T. 2010. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Lovecraft, H. P. 2014. The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Liveright.

  LUMLEY, BRIAN (1937–)

  Brian Lumley is an author of horror fiction who began his career by adding to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and proceeded to find his own voice and write a large body of work, often mixing horror with fantasy and science fiction. Other influences include classic tales by Robert W. Chambers, Robert E. Howard, and William Hope Hodgson. Lumley’s stories have been characterized by some critics as Lovecraft stories turned into action-adventure. His protagonists do not swoon or faint, but fight back. His writing style has been described as “masculine,” and his stories generally feature strong male protagonists who can think as well as fight. By all accounts, Lumley is a writer who enjoys storytelling for its own sake and tries to appeal to readers who like good stories with no hidden meanings. His efforts have won him many enthusiastic readers, as well as many prestigious awards.

  Lumley was born in 1937 in Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom. The son of a coal miner, he was nonetheless raised in a home with books on the shelves, including two large anthologies of horror stories that he read as a child. He apprenticed as a woodcutting machinist, but was drafted and became a member of the Royal Military Police. He remained in the army for two decades while writing horror fiction as a hobby.

  He discovered Lovecraft’s stories as a teenager, and he corresponded with Lovecraf
t’s protégé August Derleth, who encouraged him to write. Eventually Derleth became the first to publish Lumley’s work; Lumley’s earliest published stories appeared in the Arkham Collector, a horror and fantasy magazine edited by Derleth and published by Arkham House, the publishing house that Derleth and another Lovecraft protégé, Donald Wandrei, founded to preserve Lovecraft’s work. These early Lumley stories were soon collected in Lumley’s first book, The Caller of the Black (1971), which was likewise published by Arkham House. The stories were not pastiches of Lovecraft’s style, but rather they employed the Cthulhu Mythos as a background. His first sale, “The Cyprus Shell” (1968), was inspired by Lovecraft’s horror of the sea. His first two novels, Beneath the Moors and The Burrowers Beneath, both appeared in 1974.

  Lumley went on to become an extremely prolific writer, creating several series of novels. The “Titus Crow” series (beginning with 1974’s The Burrowers Beneath) is about the eponymous occult detective, who fights against wizards and occult magic by employing spells from such forbidden Cthulhu Mythos tomes such as the Necronomicon, Cultes de Goules, and De Vermis Mysteriis (all imaginary books of dark magical lore invented by Lovecraft and those who joined him in creating a horror mythos composed of interlinked stories). Crow was originally inspired by Dr. Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with other occult detectives such as Hodgson’s Carnacki and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin probably serving as additional inspirations. Lumley’s Titus Crow stories are often narrated by a Watson-like figure named Henri-Laurent de Marigny, a descendant of Étienne-Laurent de Marigny, a character from Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1934).