It’s three days until Halloween. Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft are considered the fathers of the modern horror tale. Most of us have read Poe, so let’s talk about Lovecraft. Stephen King has called Lovecraft “the twentieth centurys greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” Lovecraft created what is known as the “Cthulhu mythos,” a mythology about horrible aliens emerging from within the earth to wipe out humanity. These “old ones” were bound under the land and in the sea, but have been “called up” by foolish humans. Forbidden knowledge is a major theme of Lovecraft, who was fascinated by the scientific advances of his day. “Lovecrafts bleak vision of huge, evil creatures from outer space that once dominated Earth and will again has captivated sf-minded horror writers from the moment it began appearing in 1920s pulp magazines,” says Ray Olson of Booklist. Lovecraft sucks the reader in by having the narrator (who’s often a professor or antiques dealer) report events in a calm, rational manner, often using Latinate or archaic words to communicate the narrator’s intellect and worldliness. It’s what the narrator is reporting that eventually disturbs the reader. And Lovecraft is part of the “show, don’t tell” school of narration; he makes his horrors convincing by alluding and inferring, rather than with graphic descriptions that can too easily descend into silliness. In The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft “vividly creates a world where unnameable horrors creep across the sea, land and stars, and is fantastic at summoning a sense of dread and alienation. Cthulhu himself in all his tentacled glory embodies a world close by where madness does indeed lie,” says an article from The Bookseller magazine. “Lovecrafts style of writing adds to the sense that this is something borderline and may well have been frantically scribbled down by someone close to being devoured by their own nightmares.” His works have influenced horror writers such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker (Hellraiser, anyone?), Ramsey Campbell, Joe Lansdale, Brian Lumley, and Alan Moore. There’s even a nod to Lovecraft with the “Arkham Insane Asylum” in the Batman comics (Arkham, MA was a fictitious setting of Lovecraft). Lovecraft was essentially inducted into the American literary canon in 2005 when the Library of America published a collection of Lovecraft tales. Yep, there’s Lovecraft, sitting next to Faulkner, Hemingway, and Melville. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post writes, “A classic ghost story, no matter how frightening, generally confirms our fundamental metaphysical assumptions, even while playing upon primordial fears or showing us the malign, but oddly just, working out of an inexorable destiny. By contrast, the weird tale, especially in the cosmic form Lovecraft came to prefer, casts doubt upon everything we think we know--and so leaves us reeling. Our shiny and solid world turns out to be nothing but a flimsy puppet show, intended to distract us from the truth. We have been lulled--but for what purpose?--into a shallow, existential complacency. Life is but a dream. Or nightmare. One day the hapless and innocent suddenly realize that unknown forces have led to ‘a suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.’”
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 19:01:25 +0000