The Lure of Lovecraft

21st October: I have been deciphering this arcane text for weeks now, and already I feel my fragile sanity beginning to crumble. I can scarcely suffer this loathesome torment any longer without going mad -- the eldritch, scarcely human prose style; the degenerate plotting, lacking all form or structure; the hideous relentless pacing!

Yes indeed, I've been reading the short stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and now I really, really want it to stop. Lovecraft may be one of the most widely-read horror writers of all time, and an enormous influence on authors in many genres -- but he really (and this must be whispered for fear of angering the Elder Gods) isn't all that good.

It's actually something of an accomplishment to reach adulthood as an S.F. geek without reading any H.P. Lovecraft at all: awareness of his work has infiltrated fandom at all levels, like a maismic taint creeping insidiously out of the slimy (You've done this bit - Ed).

On the other hand, his pervasiveness makes a familiarity with him remarkably easy to fake, and I've been bluffing a basic knowledge of Lovecraft for years now. B. and I even bought a cuddly Cthulhu doll for the recently-hatched spawn of the friends to whom I dedicated Of the City of the Saved... .

I could have carried on with life quite happily without ever dipping my toe in those stygian depths. Still, to say that Lovecraft has an impressive reputation is something of an understatement, and I've always felt I'm insufficiently versed in horror fiction. So I borrowed the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories from the library, to read through during the move. (Note to self: when selecting calming, fluffy reading matter to tide oneself through a time of stress, apter choices do exist than either Lovecraft or Nabokov.)

I'm now much better versed in Lovecraft's work, having read slightly more than half of the material in the book. I've read most of the really famous stories -- "The Outsider", "The Rats in the Walls", "Nyarlathotep", "The Colour Out of Space" and, obviously "The Call of Cthulhu". I've even read "Herbert West -- Reanimator". And I honestly can't take any more.

It's not that Lovecraft is bad, exactly. Certainly his prose style is grotesquely overblown and heavily-burdened with adjectives; and he has a predilection not only for using deliberately obscurantist vocabulary, but for revisiting it time and time again, often in the same story. He can, however, conjure up an atmosphere with the best of them, and his use of gothic techniques -- nested narratives, gradual revelations and the like -- can be interesting.

He has more profound faults, though, which, in a writer of his tendencies, are too significant to be overlooked. He flags his surprise endings far too far in advance, for one thing. He also has an imagination which, while impressive in its scope, is very very limited in anything resembling variety. Pretty much everything comes back to slime in the end -- slime, and madness.

(In fact, I found the information that his father died in obscurity of syphilis rather interesting, as the themes of inherited madness and appalling family secrets seem to crop up very frequently indeed. The annotator[1] maintains that Lovecraft was unaware of this, but I can't help feeling he must have suspected something.)

Most disastrously of all, though, Lovecraft simply doesn't understand his strengths. He's the living counterexample to that clichéd dictum of editors: "Show, don't tell". He's a master at evoking creeping unease, a gradually increasing sense of horror which mounts up during the story. He's really, really bad at bringing this to a climax in a satisfying way. He always ends up dragging his horrors out into the open, where mere hints would have been far more effective.

Great Cthulhu sleeping beneath the ocean at ancient R'lyeh, and sending men mad in their dreams, is pretty frightening. Great Cthulhu getting up and going for a swim -- and failing even to catch the sailors who have intruded upon his resting-place -- is just silly.

I imagine Lovecraft's fiction would work better if one read, say, a story every couple of years spread out throughout one's life rather than, as I have, ten stories in a couple of weeks. I also imagine it works a great deal better if you're a fourteen-year-old boy, which of course many of his most enthusiastic readers have been at one time or another. But in the final analysis, I can only put his inexplicable popularity down to the fact that he's such a phenomenally rich source of material to parody...

...and look, I got through that whole post without saying "squamous", "gibbous" or "rugose".


[1] S.T. Joshi's exhaustive annotations are even more po-faced than Lovecraft himself -- a fact which occasionally causes them an entertaining wobble:

35. That is, the First Baptist Church, founded in 1638 by Roger Williams. The present building dates to 1775. Lovecraft remarked after visiting it in 1923, "This is my maternal ancestral church, but I had not been in the main auditorium since 1895, or in the building at all since 1907, when I gave an illustrated astronomical lecture in the vestry to the Boys' Club." On this occasion Lovecraft tried to play "Yes, We Have No Bananas" on the church's organ [...]