The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
by H. P. Lovecraft
Penguin Books
H. P. Lovecraft is not a good writer. He is, nonetheless, an important writer, who for too long existed only as arcane hints in avant-garde novels, sleazy-covered editions and as a role-playing game. Penguin's recent edition of a selection of his stories, ably edited by S. T. Joshi, may redress this imbalance.
Lovecraft's prose style is often archaic and verbose; places are 'accursed' rather than the more mundane 'cursed,' and he may have used the word 'gibbous' more frequently than any other writer in the English language. When the monstrosity is revealed in each story, there is an explicitness which can lead to banality: the suspense is genuinely chilling up till the point where we are shown "immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick distensible limbs spreading from the apexes."
That said, Lovecraft is an important writer. With him, the nature and method of horror writing underwent a sea-change, away from the quaintness of the English ghost story as typified by M. R. James. Lovecraft's horror is a metaphysical horror. Mankind is a brief, fleeting species in a universe populated by chaotic and inconceivable entities. This is the first post-Darwinian horror writing; Lovecraft's historical context is the cusp of the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, a period when Einstein had discovered relativity, but Howard Carter had not yet opened Tutankhamen's tomb. Lovecraft's world is balanced between immense scientific discovery and a sense of real world still being unexplored. It's no wonder he is obsessed with Antarctica, and the remains of a lost civilization in the polar ice-caps.
Where he is truly unique, and worthy of serious consideration, is in his utter dread of modernism. Modernism is a metonym in many of these stories for a universe gone out of kilter. In the title story, he writes "Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something close to it when he spoke of the city ... he had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal."
Anyone in doubt of Lovecraft's influence need only pick up Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves." In another story, the protagonist attempts to recite the Lord's Prayer, but his terror turns it into something "like Mr T S Eliot's 'The Waste Land.'" Time and again, modernism and the modern world provide Lovecraft with his imagery. In "The Whisperer in Darkness," this reaches an extreme when Akeley, a character obsessed with alien creatures in the hills, eventually succumbs to them and narrates his voyages among the stars. The catch is that the voyage was accomplished by only his brain, stored in a cylinder. As he explains "It was as simple as carrying a phonograph record about and playing it wherever a phonograph of corresponding make exists."
Reading this collection, the reader constantly has to remember Lovecraft wrote these stories prior to the cinematic exploitation that rendered them clichéd. He is among the first to truly explore the idea of the alien being something genuinely other, something other than prosthetics on humans. His work founds the long tradition in horror writing and horror cinema that the usurpation of territory is the catalyst for disaster. Unfortunately, he also initiates the tradition that hybridisation and 'miscegenation' are the hallmarks of the occult: Lovecraft knew America was a melting-pot, but thought it a witch's cauldron. But he did at least make America a potential locus for this kind of literature, unshackling it from the Gothic European castle. Without Lovecraft, there is no David Lynch.
Lovecraft will never truly be in the canon the way Poe or Lautréamont is. Nonetheless he represents a singular vision, and in his shell-shocked approach to the conditions of modernism, he may well be the pulp-fiction parallel of Dadaism.
— Stuart B. Kelly (stuart_b_kelly@hotmail.com)
