An Introduction To H. P. Lovecraft

      Despite the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ambrose Bierce, America has no macabre tradition in its literature. Poe and Bierce almost alone produced a considerable body of writing in the genre; Edith Wharton, Henry James, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Robert W. Chambers and a handful of others who wrote in the domain of fantasy are associated primarily with writing that is not macabre. There is not in America a collection of prose in the genre of the fantastic comparable to that produced in England by such masters as Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, E. F. Benson, May Sinclair, Marjorie Bowen, A. E. Coppard, John Collier, H. R. Wakefield, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Thomas Burke, L. P. Hartley, John Metcalfe, Margery Lawrence, and others.

      It is therefore all the more interesting to note that a new generation of writers in America has turned consistently towards fantasy as a medium of creative expression. Perhaps it was the lack of any adequate outlet which dampened the ardour of prospective writers before our own time; certainly American magazines and book publishers have long been aloofly cool towards prose and poetry of the supernatural or bizarre. But with the establishment in 1923 of the magazine Weird Tales, interest in fantasy received a new impetus, and there came into modest prominence a group of writers including Clark Ashton Smith, the Reverend Henry S. Whitehead, Frank Belknap Long, Carl Jacobi, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and, surely at the head of the list, the late H. P. Lovecraft.

      Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who died at forty-seven in 1937, was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, where he was a devoted student of the antiquities of that city and, perhaps by natural inclination grown from his ancestry, throughout his life a pronounced Anglophile. He led a sheltered early life, since his health was uncertain, and his semi-invalidism enabled him to read omnivorously, as a result of which the sensitive, dreamy child he was early created a strange world of his own, peopled by the creatures of his fancy. Out of this world subsequently grew much of his fiction in the realm of the supernatural.

      Lovecraft was a shy child; he was a retiring, almost reclusive adult much given to haunting the hours of the night. He was tall and thin, and usually almost spectrally pale, though his eyes were bright and very much alive. His jaw protruded, but his character was gentle. In his conversation, his vocabulary was revealed to be of astonishing range and instant application; his fiction, too, gives evidence of his range.

      In the scarcely two decades of his writing life, Lovecraft became a master of the macabre who had no contemporary peer in America. He began to write early in life, but did not achieve publication in any national magazine until he was in his twenties. Of British ancestry, his literary influences, too, were British – Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany particularly – rather than American in the Gothic tradition of Poe, though at least one of his stories, The Outsider, might very well have been written by Poe.

      Lovecraft was never widely published, and during his lifetime only one slender book appeared, a novelette printed and bound by an amateur but enthusiastic publisher. Some fifty of his stories appeared in magazines, principally Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Astounding Science-Fiction. He was anthologized in his native country and in England, but it was not until two years after his death that an omnibus volume containing his best prose was published by Arkham House under the title of The Outsider and Others, a book which has since become one of the most prized collector’s items in America. This volume was followed by Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Marginalia, The Lurker at the Threshold (a novel finished by August Derleth), and Something About Cats and Other Pieces, all containing lesser work.

      Though his early work was more especially fantastic, influenced by Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft soon turned to themes of cosmic terror and spiritual horror in such remarkable tales as The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, and others, among them that unique and memorable horror-tale, The Rats in the Walls, quite possibly the best of its kind written in America since 1900. Soon after his stories began to appear in the magazines, the pattern which became known as the Cthulhu Mythology became evident in his work, deriving its name from The Call of Cthulhu, the first story clearly revealing Lovecraft’s design.

      That the theme of the Cthulhu Mythology had always been in Lovecraft’s mind was manifest when he wrote of his work: ‘All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.’ The similarity of this pattern to the Christian mythos, particularly in relation to the expulsion of Satan