On the Lovecraftian
At some stage, we should review all of Lovecraft's stories but we mention two only to start the ball rolling, the first only to dispose of it as juvenilia. The Alchemist must be regarded as one of Lovecraft's weakest stories but then he was only 17 or 18 and it was his first. The basic story line is fairly trite (which we will not repeat for the sake of spoilers although it is barely worth the effort). However, Lovecraft is good at absorbing Gothick memes and replaying them effectively. In other words the story is worth reading for its 'atmosphere' as an antiquarian throw-back to the world of 'The Castle of Otranto' or of Ann Radcliffe over a century before. Lovecraft was always then and to be an antiquarian whose happiness lay in past forms and habits.
The Cats of Ulthar is a remarkably good early (1920) story, slightly marred only byLovecraft's insistence at the end on spelling out what we know already, Lovecraft weaves dark fantasy, a suggestion of Egyptian mythology and true horror into a tale of magical invocation and the revenge of cats on vicious humans. Lovecraft holds our attention throughout. Dunsany is frequently cited as an influence but Poe is in there as well. Certainly this is a story for those who love and respect cats but who have considerable doubts about their fellow humans. What we see in these two stories is how much Lovecraft owed to previous writers (in these cases, the Gothick, Poe and Dunsany) so the fact that later writers would owe a great deal to him should not be a surprise. They are all part of a great tradition and it allows us to look at three anthologies with that in mind before turning to the man.
Cthulhu's Reign, an anthology of original work, has a simple
postulate - that Cthulhu and his monstrously indifferent hordes have
arrived and that humanity has to die or survive in their midst. After
that, the writers have been left to their imaginations and, as you
might expect, the results are highly variable, crossing genres and even
the two traditions of the mythos (orthodox Lovecraftian and heterodox,
and tainted to us purists, Derlethian). The best are short and
keep to the essence of Lovecraft - a sense of unease or cosmic horror at
the world turned upside down and a hint of psychological states that
are mad in form but real in content. There is a fair anount of the
visceral but none of the writers over-indulge and the one that is most
brutal in this respect (Ian Watson's) is fully justified by the story
line.
Watson's has a pure Lovecraftian title, The Walker in the
Cemetery and others of this quality include contributions by Mike Allen
with his psychological nightmare Her Acres of Pastoral Playground as
well as a tale of true spiritual horror that will unnerve anyone with
faith in religion in Will Murray's What Brings The Void. There
is a bleak but thought-provoking tale of mutating human resistance in
the cracks of the new world from Jay Lake in Such Bright and Risen
Madness in Our Name and a work of true imaginative cosmic horror in The Holocaust of Ecstasy from that old master Brian Stableford.
Indeed,
only Stableford thinks his way with any depth into the Mythos, creating
an extension of it that is a cogent update of Lovecraft's own vision,
not dwelling on the horror of pain and suffering caused by the monsters
but, like Will Murray, on the utter cold indifference of Lovecaft's
creations to what we aspire to or want. The underlying horror of
the Mythos is that the forces out there are not our enemy, we are just in
the way. It is our projection of what we do to flies, wasps, slugs and
cockroaches. 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us
for their sport' (King Lear).
Others are good enough anthology
material - solid work by Don Webb that echoes Stephen King (a good mix
of the two masters' styles in Sanctuary), Matt Cardin's noble attempt
to get inside the skin of a theologian of the new regime, a traditional
tale that slips over the edge into acceptability from John R. Fultz and a
jolly bit of adventure with no side to it from Gregory Frost. Laird
Barron's ambitious but ultimately over-written Vastation gets an
honourable mention for effort - this could be a seriously good book with
some discipline but cannot be contained within a short story.
As
a footnote, in a book with remarkably little contemporary commentary
and thankfully no obvious fashionable eco-think, Don Webb neatly manages
to bring the current and recent scandal of priestly paedophilia into
play, However, the instinct of most of these writers is to make the stories highly
personal and familial or get lost in Golden Age tropes or accept that
the new world of Cthulhu can have little concern with the old and will
present us with existential challenges that place our current concerns
as trivial.
The interesting psychological aspect of the
anthology is that, faced with radical cosmic horror, the story tellers
tend to let the destruction of humanity be pictured like a Hollywood
disaster movie and then move on, consciously or subconsciously, quickly
and far away from the social towards family, buddy and individual
responses. The irony, of course, is that Cthulhu's indifference
results in a form of Stirnerism in which individuals shrink back into
their existential selves with concern only for the remnants immediately
around them. Is this what would happen if Professor Hawking is right and
the aliens that we may attract one day are powerful and malign? Are we
not, after all, more like rats than ants?
On the other hand, a
few writers (who I will have the good manners not to name) are prolix
and obscure in that way that only some self-consciously literary
Americans can be or are just plain lazy, predictable, obvious and dull
while the closing 'hopeful' Derlethian space opera (well hopeful, if the
billions that currently make up the human race survives as a boy, an
autistic girl, a tired mum and a dog, all of course from an American
professorial family), which was written in an ironically (I hope) pedestrian
style with a deliberate lack of imagination, should not be in there at
all. The least interesting always seemed to be the longest tales. In
other words, like all original genre anthologies, it is a mix of
talent with diamonds amongst the rough. Recommended for hard line
Cthulhu addicts but the rest of humanity may be puzzled by the
in-references or depressed by the sheer hopelessness of much of the best
content.
In Lockwood's graphic anthology, seven tales from Lovecraft are adapted and illustrated by different graphic teams in this excellent production. The standard is high throughout and well known stories are imbued with the appropriate level of fear and menace. Obviously not a substitute for the original corpus but either an attractive first introduction for those who should go on to the texts or a nice reminder of much-loved tales for the experienced Lovecraftian and a showcase for some serious and largely British illustrative talent.
Generally, and Cthulhu's Reign was a curate's egg of a book, my heart sinks when I pick up a genre
anthology - I usually end up severely disappointed and not a little
resentful at the pot-boilers I have had to wade through - but the first volume of what would be the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian tales, edited by S T Joshi, scholar of the weird and biographer of Lovecraft himself is a
wonderful exception. Not that it is perfect. Lovecraftian stories
do not easily translate to the American South West and California and
it is usually, though not always, a mistake to set such stories in
deserts and sunshine.
We can also do without literary
experimentation in a genre where the forms are well set, and everything
depends on clarity of story line and on an atmosphere that must not need
too much hard work to take in. But there are surprisingly few
lapses of this type and I must put this down to superb editing by the
estimable S T Joshi who has made Lovecraftian studies his own over
several decades. Of course, Lovecraftian is not Lovecraft.
Derleth is not Lovecraft. Anything that follows is going to be
derivative so our judgment has to be solely on what gives new insight
into cosmic horror.
Perhaps the best way forward is to give praise where praise is due. There are 21 stories and most of them are excellent. Caitlin
Kernan's opening Pickman's Other Model (1929)', which is not exclusive
to this anthology, is perhaps closest to Lovecraft himself although
it clearly comes from another type of mind - it is no pastiche. Pickman
also appears in an offering from that stalwart Brian Stapleford who
gives us a finely tuned and allusive piece soaked in his knowledge of
the literature.
Another genre master Ramsey Campbell also takes
his mission seriously in what amounts to a masterfully learned piece,
not without humour, brilliantly showing a descent into madness and a
horrible fate. Michael Cisco's Violence, Child of Trust gets
away with a bit of narrative experimentation, saying little that is not
suggestive, but what is being suggested is the stuff of our deepest
nightmares. The anthology really gets going with Michael Shea's Passing Spirits which is more existential than cosmic horror. We
cannot be sure if the Lovecraftian elements are caused by a brain
tumour.
Laird Barron's The Broadsword is genuinely horrific
with Lovecraftian themes being directed at bloody effects that cause
genuine discomfort. Tunnels by Philip Haldeman makes similar
effective use of place as unstable. Barron gives us that American meme,
the sinister hotel, and Haldeman forces us to worry about instinctual
forces beneath us. The murder of a child and their fear will
always tug at us. Barron's tale and Howling in the Dark by Darrell
Schweitzer play here with the borderline between madness and psychopathy
to great effect.
W H Pugmire's Gothic fantasy is also genuinely
disturbing in the way we find in some East European symbolic literature
or the works of Ligotti. It is indescribably mournful and sinister. I
strongly recommend it. Nicholas Royle's Rotterdam is
deceptively pedestrian compared to the other tales and is perhaps only
indirectly Lovecraftian but it still works as a picture of murderous
psychosis in a frustrated man. Jonathan Thomas' Tempting
Providence has moments of excessive literariness and description but it
builds up to an exciting climax that does what cosmic horror should do -
unsettle us about reality.
Norman Partridge's Lesser Demons was
probably my favourite because of its creative subversion of the
all-conquering zombie meme into an invasion of ghouls and lesser demons.
It works. I wanted more. Perhaps my second favourite was a wry
and very British tale of English town life by Michael Marshall Smith
that beautifully suggested the monstrous beneath the normal and our
preference for simply not knowing. None of these stories
represent pastiche and some manage to do something very difficult - show
a wry humour about the horrible without making the horrible any less
horrible. Very twenty-first century. Just because I have not
mentioned something does not mean that it is not good. This was a superb
collection and Joshi, the authors and Titan Books are to be
congratulated.
This brings us to a magisterial and definitive biography of the man himself. S. T. Joshi produced a two volume definitive
biography of HP Lovecraft in the mid-1990s but was forced to cut around
150,000 words for reasonable commercial reasons at the time. This later
2013 edition from Hippocampus Press returns the lost text and adds new
scholarly findings. To say this work is magisterial does not do
it justice. It is the result of decades of scholarship by the foremost
academic interpreter of the weird in English literature. It seems
unlikely that it will ever be bettered as a guide to the facts of the
matter.
It took a very long time to read. Perhaps the full
version is almost too detailed (one would not be too surprised at the
appearance of a breakfast menu on a particular date) but I would not
have wanted anything else. Joshi paints a very different picture
of Lovecraft from the mythology that has surrounded him created by people who
assume that the works are the person and who project their own eldritch
fantasies on someone they can barely know. His legacy was also victim as
much as beneficiary of Arkham Press.
This is a man who lived for
well over forty years in straitened circumstances and yet managed to
have a full and interesting life, who was far more complex than we might
expect and who, like everyone, changed over time whilst retaining an
essentially unchanged core of personality. This is relevant in
particular in relation to his 'racism' (we have a similar problem with,
say, Heidegger's Nazism) - the tendency of unsophisticated modern liberals to detach a person from their time, impose 'post facto' absolute moral standards and then fail to realise
that any 'thought crime' in question was localised and temporary.
In
fact, Lovecraft comes across as, well, a really nice guy, essentially
kind, thoughtful, intellectually curious, loyal to his many friends who
were largely loyal to him, perhaps self-doubting at times, asexual and
more than a little unworldly - far more saint than devil. Where
Joshi scores is in positioning Lovecraft as a man of his place and time -
small town East Coast America when it could still be seen (just) in
traditional Anglo-Saxon terms and where an educationally aspiring
popular culture created keen opportunities for friendly correspondence.
Lovecraft
managed to combine an early nostalgia for Britain and pre-colonial
America which made him an instinctive traditionalist (although this
moderated with the years) with a startlingly modern scientific
materialist concept of the cosmos. All small towns tend to have
coteries of aspirant writers, poets and artists, mostly of limited
capacity. It is Lovecraft's luck that history allowed a mind clearly
more interesting than most the opportunity to craft a unique approach to
genre fiction thanks to the appearance of Weird Tales.
Amateur
writers from across the country connected through what we would call
fandom today and the correspondence columns of commercial pulp fiction
(the same phenomenon helped kick start America's contribution to science
fiction and fantasy). This was not the highly lucrative popular
cultural phenomenon of today, dependent on big capital and modern
technology, but a networked pan-American culture of enthusiasts writing
in hand or in very basic forms of print with the commercial pulps and
'journalistic' societies acting as the glue.
When someone visited
another writer, travelling across country, they might stay for a few
days or more seeing the sites, exchanging ideas and putting a face to a
letter, much as we might drop in on someone known only from Facebook if
we happened to be in their town. Lovecraft was generous and
people, often in just as much a straitened circumstance as himself,
would be generous to him. He travelled quite widely on the East Coast of
his country as well as to the Deep South and could be called reasonably
cosmopolitan if we add in his Anglophile literary knowledge.
His
sense of location is part of the appeal of his stories. This sense of
location derived from an active fascination with historical topography -
an antiquarian approach that allows us often to identify the buildings
in stories with buildings that existed, at least in his time. Although
Joshi is a scholar of texts, this work is restrained in dealing with
Lovecraft's output (indeed, I found Joshi often curt and quite critical
of the man's work) but this is right. This is a book about a man, his
life and his connections. It is also a reference work as much as a
biography.
Although we care about the work, the effect of Joshi's
intelligent, caring, restrained and thoughtful approach is to make it
clear that Lovecraft was a lot more than his more obvious output and
that it is the man that matters. You leave the book with a very
different conception of who HPL actually was. There is a
concluding chapter which reviews the subsequent construction of the
Lovecraft mythos and assesses Lovecraft most honestly in the light of
the preceding story of his life. One conclusion is that perhaps his
letters may become, in literary terms, as or more important than his
stories.
So, all praise to Joshi, a fine scholar who seems to have
abandoned youthful enthusiasm for restrained academic assessment of a
significant figure in Western popular culture and who has
single-handedly recovered him both from those who manipulated his image
for gain and from the over-enthusiastic. After Joshi's magnum
opus, it is impossible to take Derlethian fantasies, or indeed a lot of
early Lovecraftian pastiches, quite so seriously and perfectly possible
to see Lovecraft's menacing style and cosmic approach to horror as of
literary and cultural consequence on its own terms.