Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre
Contents
INTRODUCTION:
Heritage of Horror
by Robert Bloch
Heritage of Horror
Robert Bloch
*
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
This is the opening sentence of “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” one of the finest essays on horror fiction ever written. Its author, H. P. Lovecraft, is considered by many to be one of the finest writers of such fiction.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20, 1890. He was the last lineal descendant of an old New England family that had seen better days. His father died of paresis in 1898; his mother survived until 1921, but her own mental instability increased as the family fortunes declined.
Lovecraft wrote, “As a child I was very peculiar and sensitive, always preferring the society of grown persons to that of other children.” Actually it was his neurotic mother who labelled him peculiar and “protected” him from contact with other youngsters. A precocious child, he learned to read when he was four and soon experimented with writing. Poor health kept him from college and economic necessity eventually caused him to neglect amateur journalism in favor of ghostwriting or revising the work of others for professional publication. Gradually he began to produce poetry and fiction of his own.
After his mother’s death he lived for a time in New York, married an older woman from whom he separated amicably two years later, then returned to Providence. Here he made his home with two elderly aunts. One of them died in 1932; he and his surviving relative resided together until his own death on March 15, 1937.
Lovecraft’s career as a professional writer was largely compressed into a span of about sixteen years. He remained virtually unknown except to the limited readership of pulp magazines such as
Weird Tales
in which his work appeared. It earned only a pitiful pittance to supplement the income from a meager inheritance, and he continued his anonymous chores for other writers. At the same time he brightened and broadened his uneventful existence with a widespread correspondence among fellow writers and readers of fantastic fiction. The most constant and devoted members of this group formed what would later be called “the Lovecraft Circle”; his lengthy letters of comment, criticism, and literary advice encouraged them to write or attempt writing in the genre. When a combination of cancer and Bright’s disease claimed his life at the age of forty-six the loss was mourned by far-off friends, many of whom had known him only as a correspondent.
Lovecraft’s literary style was distinctive and frequently imitated by protégés. With his approval, they and others borrowed the imaginary settings of his stories, together with the weird books and grotesque gods he created to heighten horror.
At the time of his death he had already become what would now be called a “cult figure.” But the cult was comparatively small and had absolutely no influence on contemporary critics or publishers. It took long years to bring the man and his work to the attention of a larger audience.
Today Lovecraft is established as a major American fantasy writer, frequently ranked as the equal of Poe. His work is in print here and abroad and the mild-mannered, old-fashioned, conservative New England gentleman has become an acknowledged master of horror fiction.
But certain critics disagree. Perhaps the earliest negative verdict was pronounced by Edmund Wilson, writing in
The New Yorker
in 1945 to accuse Lovecraft of “bad taste and bad art.” Other nonadmirers broadened their attacks to include the man as well as his work. In recent years Ted White, former editor of
Amazing
and
Fantastic
, expressed the belief that this sort of “sick” writing is the product of a “sick” mind—and suggested that anyone attracted to it is also “sick.”
The notion is interesting, but its revisionist attitude toward literature could have far-reaching implications. If safeguarding our mental health requires us to avoid the work of those whose life-styles depart from the accepted norm, then our bookshelves would soon be stripped bare. The literary efforts of chronic alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, and victims of psychosis with suicidal tendencies can indeed be dismissed, but we must be prepared to accept the consequences.
We will, of course, lose the efforts of Poe, Hawthorne, de Maupassant, and Kafka. But we will also be deprived of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
,
Huckleberry Finn
,
Moby-Dick
,
Crime and Punishment
,
A Farewell to Arms
,
The Great Gatsby
,
Remembrance of Things Past
, and hundreds of other titles that some regard as literary masterpieces. We must avoid O Henry, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, André Gide, Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, Christopher Isherwood, William Faulkner, and Oscar Wilde, to name only a few. The same applies to such diverse talents as Dashiell Hammett, Nietzsche, Brendan Behan, Raymond Chandler, Schopenhauer, and Hans Christian Andersen. Poets would vanish; Byron, Auden, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Swinburne, Verlaine, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman. We would also cast into oblivion the plays of Marlowe, Genet, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Noel Coward and—according to some authorities—the complete works of William Shakespeare.
It seems a high price to pay for our mental hygiene, particularly in the case of Lovecraft. After all, the man didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs. His sex life was apparently limited to a brief marriage but his wife pronounced him an “adequately excellent lover” and even his most ardent detractors have failed to find any evidence of homosexual activity. Although he admittedly suffered from psychological handicaps, his sedentary existence was unmarred by antisocial behavior.
“Sickness,” like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes it takes the form of personal convictions; Arthur Conan Doyle really believed in fairies and Emanuel Swedenborg had literal visions of heaven and hell. Both wrote earnestly about their unorthodox concepts but neither are generally regarded as “sick.”
In terms of pure imagination, what are we to make of someone who devotes much of his adult life to writing about hobbits, or the land of Oz? Despite the upbeat content of works by Tolkien and L. Frank Baum, there are dark and dreadful creatures lurking in the caverns beneath the sunny worlds they created; gnomes and monsters, evil entities with demoniac powers of sorcery and witchcraft. Were these men also “sick”?
And what of those who placed their horrors in the context of contemporary reality? Was little Mary Shelley unbalanced when she wrote
Frankenstein
? Does mental illness account for Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
? How crazy must you be to destroy the world, like H. G. Wells, or alter its future as morbidly and mercilessly as did Huxley and Orwell?
“Sick” or healthy, all creative activity—including writing—is the product of individual imagination, colored by personal viewpoint, an attitude toward life. And it seems generated by an intense desire or need to communicate with others.
Most of us satisfy such urges in a simpler fashion. The physically attractive and the energetically aggressive seldom find a need to become “creative” in order to enjoy the rewards of our society. The losers and loners escape from competitive situations as “dropouts” or members of the counterculture; even the criminal element enjoys a shadowy status of its own. Rebellion and misbehavior become ways of attracting attention, even admiration.
Before society became so openly permissive the introvert had to find other solutions to his problems. If no one responded to a child’s need for favorable attention—if no one answered the cry of “Look at me!”—then perhaps the pleas could be rephrased. “Look at my pictures—hear my music—listen to my story.” In that context all writers can be called “sick,” including those who assume the superior role of critic.
Not all creative artists are physically unattractive or without charm and social graces. But for one reason or another most possess feelings of inadequacy or insecurity that they are impelled to overcome—and thus it must have been since time immemorial.
Hence the artists who decorated the walls of caves in our distant past, the singers who chanted and played upon primitive instruments in those echoing caverns, the tellers of tales who squatted beside the flickering campfires. And though means and methods changed, the impulse and conditions generating creativity remain constant; hence today’s talent.
Hence Lovecraft, the child who was sickly and studious; the growing boy whose own mother inculcated a belief in his “ugliness”; the young man who found himself ill at ease and ill-equipped to compete socially or economically with his peer group. Like others not naturally endowed with qualities to make them easy winners but who are not satisfied to abandon the contest entirely, he had to find a vehicle for recognition. Writing solved the problem of communication, of gaining notice. If he found difficulty going out into the world he could send his writing out instead, and perhaps the world would come to him.
But what sort of writing? He tried his hand at many things— juvenile imitations of Poe, which he destroyed in his late teens; astronomy articles for local newspapers; scientific and literary essays self-published as a member of amateur journalism societies; poetry; criticism; then the ghostwriting and revision. None of this brought him the recognition he craved. He rationalized the lack by claiming to despise commercial success; a true gentleman wrote only as an amateur, free of all restrictions. Nevertheless he gradually resumed production of his own fiction.
Fiction, as we know, takes many forms, from gritty realism to farfetched fantasy. In recognizing categories we can also recognize the reasons why certain writers choose to work within them. Their efforts establish an image—often as wish-fulfillment—of the brawny he-man, the unshockable sophisticate, the romantic lover, the keen and objective analyst of human behavior, the cynical realist, the compassionate idealist, the wise philosopher, the sexual athlete, the poet, the carefree adventurer, and every possible persona in the Jungian pantheon of archetypes.
Writers are role players, but the role is not the man, even though it may incorporate certain of his beliefs and attitudes.
Lovecraft’s work offers obvious examples of this. His lifelong aversion to cold is apparent in stories such as “Cool Air” and his short novel, “At the Mountains of Madness.” An allergy to seafood is embodied in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and a tone-deaf distaste for music as dissonance echoes in “The Music of Erich Zann.” A love of cats is obvious in many tales; so is a fondness for colonial architecture and outrage over its gradual destruction.
The literary detective will have no trouble finding clues pointing to Lovecraft’s lifelong Anglophilia; it surfaces even in his preference for English modes of spelling, as in “The Colour Out of Space.” His style betrays a bias in favor—or
favour
, as he would put it—for the language, literary forms, and life-styles of the eighteenth century that he professed to find superior to our own. Privately he often declared a longing to have lived as a loyal colonial subject of King George III in pre-Revolutionary days, and perhaps he truly believed this.
With tongue more obviously in cheek he began referring to himself as an “old gentleman” and signing his letters “Grandpa” while still in his thirties. But the pose reveals a preoccupation with age and aging that is omnipresent in his work. Old houses and old tombs are abundantly in evidence and often their presence is unpleasant, even unnatural. Ancient edifices hold monstrous secrets in “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Shunned House,” “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and a dozen other tales. Old people are often equally evil; Wizard Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror” is not exactly the sort of farmer the Department of Agriculture would approve of, nor would nutritionists endorse the diet of the elderly owner of “The Picture in the House.” Other oldsters in “He,” “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” and “The Terrible Old Man” do not represent advances in geriatrics, while both dwelling and dweller are equally disturbing in “The Strange High House in the Mist.” And the Elder Gods—the “Great Old Ones” of his later stories—are hardly qualified to bridge the generation gap. At best, Lovecraft’s attitude toward age is ambivalent, but his obsession with the subject is literally mirrored in “The Outsider.”
So is his interest in astronomy and the physical sciences; the avowed antiquarian was also a lifelong student of developments in modern research. Generally regarded only as a writer of fantasy, a good share of his output contains more of a scientific element than much of what today is classified as science fiction or—at higher word rates—“speculative fiction.”
“The Colour Out of Space,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time” were first published in science fiction magazines, and rightly so. But most of his work saw print in
Weird Tales
, and its appearance there blinded readers to its actual content. “Cool Air” anticipates cryogenic research; “The Dreams in the Witch-House” suggests that advanced physics will recapitulate the discoveries of powers used in witchcraft. “The Whisperer in Darkness” is an outstanding early example of one of science fiction’s major motifs—the “aliens among us” theme. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” offers its own portraits of architectural decay and dirty old men, together with a perverted worship of perverted beings, but the main thrust of the story doesn’t depend upon anything supernatural. Its grotesque monstrosities are the product of biological mutation rather than black magic.