Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (2 page)

Degenerative mutation also figures in “The Outsider,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and in the grotesque miscegenations of “The Dunwich Horror” and “Arthur Jermyn.” Some critics cite this as a disguised example of the racism they find evident in “He,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” and other stories.

If Lovecraft was a racist we must recognize that the term was not generally considered pejorative during his own time. In the twenties and thirties, Anglo-Saxon superiority was virtually taken for granted not only in literature but in daily life. And nowhere was this belief more pronounced than in New England. Here the D.A.R. held sway, and the inhabitants of the self-styled Shrine of Liberty shuddered as their communities were invaded by immigrants. Ignoring the fact that most of these “foreigners” had been imported by blue-blooded, 100 percent Americans to provide cheap labor for their factories, they watched in dismay as cities became crowded, old landmarks gave way to new construction, and their political, economic, and social control gradually vanished.

To Lovecraft these changes were anathema, and he expressed his attitude both privately and in print. But his views were not inflexible. As he matured he gradually came out of his shell and his outlook broadened; the racist element of earlier efforts is muted or absent in later tales. And what sort of anti-Semitic author marries a Jewess, associates with Jews as friends and correspondents, and retains one as his literary agent?

The one theme incontrovertibly constant in both his life and his work is a preoccupation with dreams.

From earliest childhood on, Lovecraft’s sleep ushered him into a world filled with vivid visions of alien and exotic landscapes that at times formed a background for terrifying nightmares.

His earlier fiction often utilized the strange settings glimpsed in these dreamworlds; they were ideal for the prose poems he fashioned in the manner of Poe or Dunsany. Later, as his own style evolved, he confronted the nightmare elements as well and translated them into chilling, convincing realities. Many of the characters in his tales are dominated by their dreams. His alter ego in several stories, Randolph Carter, is a dreamer; “The Silver Key” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (written in collaboration with E. Hoffman Price) both emphasize Carter’s nocturnal fantasies. The novel-length
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
enters Carter’s dreamworld and the first story in which he figures, “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” derives directly from one of Lovecraft’s nightmares. Dreams figure in “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and many other tales. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” the first story to deal fully with what later came to be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos,” the dreams of a neurotic artist and his counterparts all over the world herald the resurrection of a hideous Elder God from his lair beneath the sea.

The so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” represents Lovecraft’s chief claim to fame and the stories in which it evolves bring together all of his major influences and interests.

An affinity for colonial New England and fears regarding its decadence both found embodiment in fictional settings for those tales. Kingsport and Innsmouth are ancient seaports; Arkham is an old city steeped in traditions of the witchcraft craze and now the site of Miskatonic University. In this milieu dwell the sensitive scholars who serve as narrators or protagonists of the stories. At Miskatonic some of them find access to one of six known remaining copies of a strange book containing the secrets of a race older than mankind—the Great Old Ones. Invaders from other dimensions and other worlds, they once ruled earth but were vanquished and expelled by other cosmic forces. In some cases they were merely imprisoned, like Cthulhu in the sunken city of R’lyeh, or in subterranea beneath deserts and polar ice caps. But their legend survives, as does their telepathic influence, and they are still worshiped by certain primitive people as well as more sophisticated members of cults dedicated to bringing about their return and reign.

“When the stars are right” the Great Old Ones could plunge from world to world through the sky or rise again from deathless sleep. And the blasphemous book,
The Necronomicon
, contained incantations that would aid their advent, as well as other spells and ceremonies designed to defeat them.

The original Arabic version had been lost, but the text was translated into Greek, then Latin, and the volume was sought after by both those who worshiped and those who opposed the Ancient Ones. It is these entities—creatures like Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep—who haunt the “Cthulhu Mythos” tales.

Nyarlathotep emerged directly from Lovecraft’s dreams, as did some of the weird locales he mentions—the plateau of Leng, and Kadath in the Cold Waste. Yuggoth, the dwelling place of certain terrifying extraterrestial beings, was another name for the planet Pluto; in a poem cycle, “Fungi From Yuggoth,” there are allusions to many more fantastic figures and places referred to in his prose.

Some of these were borrowed from the work of other writers and the basic concept of the “Cthulhu Mythos” probably owes a great deal to Arthur Machen, who wrote about a stunted and debased race of primitive beings still secretly existing beneath the lonely Welsh hills. Lovecraft was much impressed with this concept but he alone expanded the notion of a localized prehuman survival into a vast cosmology of his own creation.

Gradually he built up a rationale for both reality and dreams, nothing less than a history of the entire universe. As such, the “Cthulhu Mythos” is a literary creation far surpassing the word-worlds of Cabell, C. S. Lewis, or Tolkien in breadth and scope.

While imaginary worlds abound in modern fantasy, few of today’s writers set their sagas in Poictesme, Perelanda, or Middle-earth. But stories and novels based on the Mythos continue to proliferate. In terms of imitation and inspiration, Lovecraft may well have had more influence on other writers than any contemporary except Ernest Hemingway.

It didn’t happen overnight. As noted, he received scant critical attention during his lifetime. The annual “best” short-story collections list only two of his tales as “also-rans”; they printed none. And in
Weird Tales
, the lowly pulp magazine where most of his output appeared, he was never even granted a cover illustration for anything he wrote. Such honors were reserved for more popular authors and their creations—Seabury Quinn’s French detective, Jules de Grandin, or Robert E. Howard’s barbarian adventurer, Conan.

During the latter years of Lovecraft’s life the most successful purveyors of short fiction found a hospitable and high-paying market in the weekly “slicks”—
Collier’s
,
Liberty
,
The Saturday Evening Post
—and the big-circulation monthly magazines. Authors with “serious” aspirations often opted for
The Atlantic Monthly
,
The American Mercury
,
The New Yorker
,
Story
, or regional periodicals. The world’s greatest short-story writer was William Saroyan; we knew, because he told us so.

Lovecraft made no such claims. At the time of his death glowing tributes graced the letter column of
Weird Tales
and some of the amateur “fanzines” privately circulated among a few devotees of fantasy or science fiction. But their readership was minimal and their influence nugatory.

Aside from a small Canadian edition of
Weird Tales
, Lovecraft’s efforts had appeared abroad only in Christine Campbell Thompson’s sleazily printed British “Not at Night” series. One story was reprinted in an American anthology but attempts to publish two of his novellas in hardcover had failed. There were no foreign translations at all. In the years that followed, a single tale was adapted for radio. Filmmakers weren’t interested; television didn’t exist, nor paperback books. Lovecraft was dead, and to all intents and purposes, so was his work.

But the “Lovecraft Circle” of correspondents remained. Two of them, fellow-writers August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, tried to interest publishers in putting out a collection of his stories. Meeting with no success, they then founded a company of their own called Arkham House and announced the publication of
The Outsider and Others
. This imposing volume of over three hundred thousand words would sell for $5, but could be purchased at a prepublication price of $3.50. Despite wide advance publicity throughout the fantasy and science fiction field, only 150 orders were received, and the remaining 1,118 copies took more than four years to sell out.

Determined to overcome indifference, Arkham House went on to print a companion volume,
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
, then gradually extended its list to include the work of other contemporary fantasy authors. A series of complications subsequently arose, involving royalty bequests from Lovecraft’s aunt who died in 1941, the suicide of his literary executor ten years later, plus legal disputes between Wandrei and Derleth.

Lovecraft’s work survived it all. It even survived Derleth’s imitations of his style and subject matter, which he began writing in the forties. Derleth had won deserved praise for his “Solar Pons” pastiches, based on the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle. But his pseudo-Lovecraft efforts were less convincing. Using a line or two from Lovecraft’s commonplace book scarcely justified calling the total work a “posthumous collaboration.” And when he abandoned this pretext his attempts to convey the essence of Lovecraft’s style didn’t come off; he sounded the notes but lost the music.

It was Derleth who constantly used the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe Lovecraft’s cosmic concepts. Unfortunately, his own writing involved a distortion of its meaning that may have derived from his own status as a lapsed or lax Catholic. In any case, he divided Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones into what in effect were the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, fighting over possession of the earth instead of the ranch. Some later imitators picked up on this, straying far from Lovecraftian logic.

But when considering Derleth’s influence, one single fact remains all-important—he championed the revival of interest in Lovecraft’s work. After Donald Wandrei’s service in World War II his Arkham House activity was largely limited to editing Lovecraft’s letters, eventually published in five volumes. Derleth, however, continued to keep the stories in print, reissuing portions of the original collections under other titles. When fantasy anthologies began to flourish, he sold one-time reprint rights to various stories, including those in public domain, and until his death in 1961 he claimed control of the literary estate. As early as 1945 he compiled a paperback Lovecraft collection for an Armed Services edition. Its unexpected popularity with a wide readership encouraged later reprinting efforts by other paperback publishers here and abroad. Gradually this continued exposure led to the formation of a new fandom, enthusiasts interested in every aspect of the man and the work. Following recognition on the part of foreign critics, Lovecraft—like his predecessor, Edgar Allan Poe—finally came to the attention of the American literary establishment.

Shortly after L. Frank Baum began writing, certain guardians of young minds and morals instigated a campaign to keep his Oz books off public library shelves. Today it is evident that this ban-the-Baum movement has failed. That it did so is in no small part due to the success of the 1939 film
The Wizard of Oz
. But although a number of Lovecraft’s stories have been adapted for television and motion pictures, no first-rate film has yet seen release. As a result, Cthulhu is scarcely a household word.

Nevertheless, the writing of theses and serious critiques increases with each passing year. Lovecraft has been the subject of several book-length biographies and memoirs, plus innumerable scholarly disquisitions. His books are on the library shelves. There is a Lovecraft Collection at Brown University in Providence. The prose, verse, and a significant portion of his letters are in print and seem destined to remain so, while recognition and reputation continues to soar. The fame that eluded him in his lifetime has come to Lovecraft almost half a century after his death.

Why did interest in horror fiction lay dormant for so long a time? And what brought about its present popularity?

Perhaps the answer lies buried in Lovecraft’s own work. Great Cthulhu and the Elder Gods never truly died, but they could be aroused from their slumbers only when “the stars were right.” And what Lovecraft described as the oldest and strongest kind of fear—fear of the unknown—lay deathless but dormant in the years following his birth.

The age of materialism had dawned and science was hailed as a savior, freeing the world from those ancient fears of the unknown. Even those who still believed in the supernatural now engaged in psychic research to explain such phenomena on a scientific basis.

Emphasis on rationality dominated the fiction of the day. Dr. Jekyll’s transformation was the result of laboratory chemicals rather than demonic possession. And even if a few creatures like Dracula existed, they could be detected and defeated by scientists like Van Helsing.

The few horror stories approved by the literary establishment dealt almost exclusively with polite antiquarians and retired English gentlemen encountering a ghost. Fear was an isolated phenomenon born of some unusual individual experience.

World War I changed that concept. Catastrophe became common property, horror invaded the daily lives—and deaths—of millions. Rationalists sought to combat fear by denying those deaths; interest in spiritualism and psychic investigation became a popular preoccupation in the next decade.

But the depiction of legendary dread was another matter; such vulgarities were relegated to the pages of obscure publications such as
Weird Tales
. At the time Lovecraft penned his stories, no self-styled sophisticate dared presume to take them seriously, either as literature or as a metaphor for contemporary reality.

During the same period the printed page faced growing competition from film and radio. With the advent of sound in cinema the mass audience shifted allegiance to the new form.