I’ve recently started trying to get into Lovecraft and educate myself about his work. Some of his ideas are interesting and his language can be really evocative, but the idea that something is horrifying because it is really big or really old just leaves me feeling… bemused, I guess. It seems very much the quaint perspective of someone who didn’t grow up with modern science. Also several of the stories I read featured “We mustn’t let this information get out because people would go out of their minds with terror and revulsion if they knew.” And then the characters actually do have mental breakdowns. It doesn’t sound plausible enough to me to be scary. Maybe I’m just not approaching it with the right mindset.
The stories of his I’ve liked best so far were the basic “Oh crap, my foot’s stuck in this coffin!” ones. I’m sure that doesn’t reflect well on my level of intellectual and philosophical literary appreciation!
Another vote against Mountains of Madness and CDW. They make me feel very impatient, even though I’m a big Lovecraft fan.
The Color out of Space is one of my favorite stories ever.
The Rats in the Walls is dynamite, and displays his vocabulary very well.
Call of Cthulhu is classic, but I think other stories like The Dunwich Horror and Shadow over Innsmouth are more evocative.
I have a soft spot for Under the Pyramids/Entombed/Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, which involves Houdini.
Hello,
I tried to read Lovecraft when I was in my 30’s. Didn’t finish any story I started. My brother said I was too old to start reading him. He said he first read him in his early teens on a dark and stormy night. (really) Scared the crap out of him and has enjoyed rereading him ever since.
It’s a great story, but about as far from typical Lovecraft as you can get. It’s been said that, had Lovecraft hung Poe’s name on it, people would have believed it.
Actually, in some ways, I think it can be seen as the perspective of somebody just being confronted with modern science, and realising that the classical ideas about the world do not hold up – that time and space aren’t what Newton taught us to think they are, that the basic facts about the world are so alien to human experience as to appear nigh-incomprehensible. I’ve often wondered (though never enough, it seems, to actually investigate) whether there might not actually be some influence of the work of Einstein on special/general relativity, or the work of Planck, Bohr et al. on quantum theory, on Lovecraft’s writings. Einstein proposed that the true geometry of the world should be non-Euclidean, while quantum theory reconciled seemingly contradictory concepts – waves and particles, for instance – in a way suspiciously similar to beings not made of ordinary matter entirely, that do not exist in the same, solid way we do.
In any case, Lovecraftian horror derives from the utter insignificance of humanity in the universe – it transcends the usual theater of malicious or beneficial forces, introducing a realm to which humans simply have no access, or of which we have no comprehension, and which is, in turn, totally indifferent towards us. Lovecraft’s creations are for the most part not evil, or at least harbour no direct evil intent towards us, rather, the harm they cause is derived directly from their utter alienness – they simply do not fit in with our logic, our innate conception of how the world should be; they offer us a glimpse into the realisation that our world really is just the surface of a far more vast, chaotic, and incomprehensible reality, within which we can’t exist, and even whose knowledge we can’t bear.
In a sense, it is really just xenophobia writ large, but given the sufficiently strange and different, any human experiences a degree of fear or revulsion, and Lovecraft, through his own rampant xenophobia, knew to tap that fear – so that, in reading his works, you learn to feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. He was a fascinating mirror of his times, showing one way a really creative, introspective human might confront modern life. And to make it as scary as possible he tried pushing his ideas as far as they could possibly go, which sometimes resulted in goofiness and sometimes was really chilling. (My uninformed opinion, having only read about a dozen of his short stories.)
And it seems that I haven’t been completely off – wiki mentions a letter to one James F. Morton in which "Lovecraft specifically points to Einstein’s theory on relativity as throwing the world into chaos and making the cosmos a jest"and there’s a letter to that same Morton (part of which is reproduced here) in which he describes an early experimental challenge to Einstein’s relativity, and expresses the hope that, should the results hold up, “the whole fabrick of relativity collapses, and we have once more the absolute dimensions and real time which we had before 1905”.
As always, I recommend The Festival. It’s quintessential Lovecraft. It’s creepy. It’s only about 10 pages.
I admit that Lovecraft has flaws and shortcomings. But, his writing positively drips atmosphere. In HP’s world, every normal seeming thing has cosmic and ancient horror underneath just waiting to break through.
Well, as with many things, it appears the copyright in Australia has expired. You can find all Lovecraft’s stories online at Project Gutenberg Australia, here.
As for poetry, here’s his complete “Fungi from Yuggoth” cycle.
