H. P. Lovecraft is an odd writer. Probably because he was an odd man – learned and well-read, but socially awkward. Often ill, often impoverished. Married to an older woman in a possibly loveless relationship, he never had children. Apart from a few years in New York City he never lived outside the town he grew up in, living mostly with two elder aunts. But his work has understandably secured his fame in the annals of early fantasy and horror writing.
He belongs to that strange, obscure, underpopulated and unappreciated terrain in fantasy literature that straddles the expanse between the brash optimism of the late Victorian era (with its Vernes and Wellses) and the Golden Age of science fiction (with its Clarkes, Asimovs, and Heinleins). Thus the antagonists of his horror are usually some strange and obscure combination of the gothic demonic and the Atomic Age alien invader.
His prose tends to give the reader a rigorous workout; big chunks of big-worded exposition, page-length paragraphs the basic building bricks of the edifices of even the shortest of his tales. He’s impassioned with adjectives; he’s never met, oh, say for example, a triangle that could not be described as “that most nightmarish and terrifying triangle, odious and invidious, a three-sided entity that should never have been, bringing forth shudders and driving all to the edge of madness! Oh that stygian and opprobrious triangle, unhallowed and mephitic, that will forever haunt and plague my overwrought dreams!” I’ve read that the man simply can’t write dialogue, and I agree with that assessment. The evidence is the fact that even in his longer works, such as At the Mountains of Madness, you’d be challenged to find even more than a few words enclosed with quotation marks. So even though H. P. doesn’t have an ear for the way normal human beings talk, what he does well is to establish an authentic, eerie atmosphere of foreboding in each and every one of his stories.
I went through a phase back in 2000 where I blazed through a whole bunch of his short stories, perhaps a dozen or more, in two or three months. They’re usually of the “thing that shouldn’t be but is” genus, with that “thing” being hideous and horrible with dire consequences, either for the narrator, his local New England village, or the entire human race. It’s always one of those three. They’re always first-person narratives (or a tale retold by the ever-present “I”), so you know our hero doesn’t die. But he never really resolves the situation, either. Oftentimes he goes mad. Or the original teller of the terrible tale told to him goes made. Regardless, someone always goes mad in an H. P. Lovecraft story, mad in that late-19th century locked-up-in-an-asylum way.
Lovecraft has his fame due primarily to what is known as the Cthulhu Mythos. This is a created mythology which links up all the baddies in his oeuvre – monsters, god-like beings, aliens-from-the-deepest-evilest-recesses-of-outer-space – into a loose interrelated chronology or history of their ... diabolic interests in Earth. It’s named after a particularly evil monstrosity, but by no means the most powerful or the most meanest, buried and slumbering deep below the depths of the Pacific, but preparing to waken. The Mythos was partially consciously-developed and partially self-evolved by H. P., though he also had enthusiastic assistance from at least two of his friends, horror-slash-fantasy writers Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and to a lesser extent, August Derleth. Each contributed to the Mythos as well as wrote stories pulling from it. I am not an expert in it to the extent of those who devote years of time and study to it; but I do appreciate it when I read a Lovecraftian work, no matter how many years intervene.
At the Mountains of Madness is his longest work; rare in that it is novel length. Lovecraft’s primary outlets for literary exposure were the pulp magazines of the early decades of the 20th century; Mountains was actually serialized in three installments over the course of three months in 1936, five years after it was written, after spending four years and ten months in a desk drawer.
The novel is in the form of a warning; a warning from one of the few survivors of one of the earliest Antarctic explorations to the world and, more specifically, to another expedition in the process of gearing up. Our unnamed hero, a member of the faculty of Miskatonic University and a geologist, describes in minute details the expedition to the ice-bound continent and the horrors they find and then find them. Not only are the eponymous mountains, higher than the Himalayas, teeth-like fortresses hiding a most ancient city, they also hide something else – in Lovecraftian language, something hideous, noxious, loathsome and vigilant.
The set-up was masterful; it is said that H. P. was extremely interested in the early polar explorations as a lad and followed their newspaper reports quite closely. He is the closest thing to being an Antarctic explorer despite never heading south of the Big Apple. Very soon biological entities – or their remnants, whether fossilized or not is undetermined – are discovered and dissected, and I think you can almost smell the formaldehyde, if not that whiff of visceral fear in those lonely tents as we all know something bad will happen. Which it does, resolving itself to where the narrator and a hapless graduate student (the unfortunate fellow designated to go “mad” as is explained early on) must mount a rescue mission and come upon the original Native Antarcticans. Though this part was perhaps a tad bit too long (remember those page-long paragraphical blocks of novel DNA), the ending, vague with just the barest amount of suggested sufficient detail, is, it seems to me, a justified payoff.
As I’ve mentioned before, every October, about the week before and after Halloween, I like to read something spooky, atmospheric, and dark, to get me and keep me in the late-fall mood. In the past I’ve read Poe (and it’s been posited that Mountains is a sequel-of-sorts to Poe’s tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which itself details a terrible and eventful expedition into the southernmost earthly regions); this year I’ll read some more Lovecraft. The anthology I have still has a couple of longer, unread stories that I will attempt to assail, one Lovecraftian adjective at a time.
He belongs to that strange, obscure, underpopulated and unappreciated terrain in fantasy literature that straddles the expanse between the brash optimism of the late Victorian era (with its Vernes and Wellses) and the Golden Age of science fiction (with its Clarkes, Asimovs, and Heinleins). Thus the antagonists of his horror are usually some strange and obscure combination of the gothic demonic and the Atomic Age alien invader.
His prose tends to give the reader a rigorous workout; big chunks of big-worded exposition, page-length paragraphs the basic building bricks of the edifices of even the shortest of his tales. He’s impassioned with adjectives; he’s never met, oh, say for example, a triangle that could not be described as “that most nightmarish and terrifying triangle, odious and invidious, a three-sided entity that should never have been, bringing forth shudders and driving all to the edge of madness! Oh that stygian and opprobrious triangle, unhallowed and mephitic, that will forever haunt and plague my overwrought dreams!” I’ve read that the man simply can’t write dialogue, and I agree with that assessment. The evidence is the fact that even in his longer works, such as At the Mountains of Madness, you’d be challenged to find even more than a few words enclosed with quotation marks. So even though H. P. doesn’t have an ear for the way normal human beings talk, what he does well is to establish an authentic, eerie atmosphere of foreboding in each and every one of his stories.
I went through a phase back in 2000 where I blazed through a whole bunch of his short stories, perhaps a dozen or more, in two or three months. They’re usually of the “thing that shouldn’t be but is” genus, with that “thing” being hideous and horrible with dire consequences, either for the narrator, his local New England village, or the entire human race. It’s always one of those three. They’re always first-person narratives (or a tale retold by the ever-present “I”), so you know our hero doesn’t die. But he never really resolves the situation, either. Oftentimes he goes mad. Or the original teller of the terrible tale told to him goes made. Regardless, someone always goes mad in an H. P. Lovecraft story, mad in that late-19th century locked-up-in-an-asylum way.
Lovecraft has his fame due primarily to what is known as the Cthulhu Mythos. This is a created mythology which links up all the baddies in his oeuvre – monsters, god-like beings, aliens-from-the-deepest-evilest-recesses-of-outer-space – into a loose interrelated chronology or history of their ... diabolic interests in Earth. It’s named after a particularly evil monstrosity, but by no means the most powerful or the most meanest, buried and slumbering deep below the depths of the Pacific, but preparing to waken. The Mythos was partially consciously-developed and partially self-evolved by H. P., though he also had enthusiastic assistance from at least two of his friends, horror-slash-fantasy writers Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and to a lesser extent, August Derleth. Each contributed to the Mythos as well as wrote stories pulling from it. I am not an expert in it to the extent of those who devote years of time and study to it; but I do appreciate it when I read a Lovecraftian work, no matter how many years intervene.
At the Mountains of Madness is his longest work; rare in that it is novel length. Lovecraft’s primary outlets for literary exposure were the pulp magazines of the early decades of the 20th century; Mountains was actually serialized in three installments over the course of three months in 1936, five years after it was written, after spending four years and ten months in a desk drawer.
The novel is in the form of a warning; a warning from one of the few survivors of one of the earliest Antarctic explorations to the world and, more specifically, to another expedition in the process of gearing up. Our unnamed hero, a member of the faculty of Miskatonic University and a geologist, describes in minute details the expedition to the ice-bound continent and the horrors they find and then find them. Not only are the eponymous mountains, higher than the Himalayas, teeth-like fortresses hiding a most ancient city, they also hide something else – in Lovecraftian language, something hideous, noxious, loathsome and vigilant.
The set-up was masterful; it is said that H. P. was extremely interested in the early polar explorations as a lad and followed their newspaper reports quite closely. He is the closest thing to being an Antarctic explorer despite never heading south of the Big Apple. Very soon biological entities – or their remnants, whether fossilized or not is undetermined – are discovered and dissected, and I think you can almost smell the formaldehyde, if not that whiff of visceral fear in those lonely tents as we all know something bad will happen. Which it does, resolving itself to where the narrator and a hapless graduate student (the unfortunate fellow designated to go “mad” as is explained early on) must mount a rescue mission and come upon the original Native Antarcticans. Though this part was perhaps a tad bit too long (remember those page-long paragraphical blocks of novel DNA), the ending, vague with just the barest amount of suggested sufficient detail, is, it seems to me, a justified payoff.
As I’ve mentioned before, every October, about the week before and after Halloween, I like to read something spooky, atmospheric, and dark, to get me and keep me in the late-fall mood. In the past I’ve read Poe (and it’s been posited that Mountains is a sequel-of-sorts to Poe’s tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which itself details a terrible and eventful expedition into the southernmost earthly regions); this year I’ll read some more Lovecraft. The anthology I have still has a couple of longer, unread stories that I will attempt to assail, one Lovecraftian adjective at a time.
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