Now a Lovecraft Phase

All right, I am officially in an H.P. Lovecraft phase. Particularly, those stories / novellae that deal with his Cthulhu Mythos.

On a whim a week ago I began reading Lin Carter’s Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, a 190-page paperback I bought online a few years ago. I also bought a similar book of his book on Tolkien, which I read back then. Basically, they are quite readable general introductions into the subject at hand, with a little bit of history mixed with biography and peppered with Carter’s own subjective thoughts and opinions on the authors and their stories and tales.

Carter is a man from my past – I found his Barbarian at World’s End in one of my father’s drawers thirty-five years ago, read it, and was inexplicably enjoyably perplexed. A fantasy author since the Korean War and up until the mid-80s, he was nearly forgotten until I came across Barbarian in a dusty old used book store around the turn of the century. Re-read it on the train to NYC and did some research into the man. He died painfully of oral cancer (a result of smoking and alcoholism) just a few towns away from me in 1988. The Tolkien and Lovecraft books were the nonfiction entries of his that immediately appealed to me, so I ordered them.

I reviewed Carter’s book on Tolkien, here. And read another of his fantasy books, with a short review, here.

Anyway, Carter is – was – a huge fan of Howard Philips Lovecraft, the highly eccentric horror / science fiction writer whose career spanned about twenty years, ending with his death at age 47 in 1937. Allow me to quote from a review of his “At the Mountains of Madness” I posted here about five years ago:

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.

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I like that; I’m going to give myself a pat on the back for writing it.

So now I’m back into H.P., thanks in no small part of Lin Carter. I just treated myself and bought The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales, a 600-page compilation of 23 stories that fall within his dark mythology.

And what exactly is “his dark mythology”? His “Cthulhu Mythos”?

That is the subject for a later post …