The Other Gods and More Unearthly Tales (2 page)

This collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, which spans much of the length of his sadly short career, showcases the diversity of his work and takes us from the tops of mountain peaks
(“The Other Gods” and “The Strange High House in the Mist”) to the depths of the sea (“The Temple”), from Saharan desert sands (“The Nameless City”)
to the labyrinthine streets of New York (“The Horror at Red Hook”), and from ancient Greece (“The Tree”) to millions of years in the future (“He” and
“Through the Gates of the Silver Key”). Organizing this vast geographic and temporal range, however, is Lovecraft’s darkly satiric approach to mankind’s misguided sense of
self-importance—call it Lovecraft’s “Copernican revolution,” his pricking of mankind’s pretensions to grandeur through the revelation that, rather than being at the
center of the universe, human beings are really barely a blip on the radar at the outmost periphery of being. This theme takes the form of a pattern that recurs so insistently in Lovecraft’s
fiction that it may be considered its fundamental organizing principle: the human quest for knowledge reveals mankind’s powerlessness, which the mind is not prepared to accept—the truth
about humanity’s impotence and inconsequentiality in the larger scheme of things is inevitably catastrophic. Lovecraft handles this theme, however, in three characteristic ways that reflect
the three main (and often overlapping) categories of his work: his Poe-inspired horror stories, his Lord Dunsany-inspired “dream cycle” stories, and his stories of cosmic horror that
have come to be called his Cthulhu Mythos.

Lovecraft, as Joshi has observed, initially found in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe a model for both style and plot structure, and his early work, light on dialogue, heavy on narration, and
overloaded with adjectives, clearly reflects Poe’s influence.
⁴
In this volume, the stories “The Tomb,” “The
Moon-Bog,” “In the Vault,” and “The Shunned House” fit this mold. “The Tomb,” one of Lovecraft’s earliest published stories (appearing in 1922),
while leaving up in the air the exact nature of the phenomena experienced by the story’s first-person narrator, is arguably a tale of psychic possession in the same vein as Poe’s
“Ligeia.” “The Moon-Bog,” which seems to derive its inspiration from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” concerns a mansion in the midst of a gothic,
haunted landscape and the uncanny forces that lurk beneath the surface of a swamp. And both “In the Vault,” a ghoulish tale of supernatural revenge, and “The Shunned House,”
one of Lovecraft’s most straightforwardly supernatural stories, show the influence of Poe as filtered through American Gothic writer Ambrose Bierce. In essence, each of these fictions is a
ghost story, a tale about haunted locations and the persistence of the past into the present. They insist upon an expanded conception of the universe in that the supernatural phenomena must be
reconciled with the laws of physics as we know them. The tales, however, in good Poe-esque fashion, remain fairly local in scope, dealing as they do with specific protagonists who are haunted by
very particular histories. While they imply more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in rationalist philosophy, they do not require the same sort of wholesale epistemological reevaluation
necessitated by Lovecraft’s later tales of alien civilizations and extraterrestrial “gods.”

Like his Poe-inspired stories, Lovecraft’s tales in the vein of Lord Dunsany also deal with the persistence of the past into the present, but are less horrific stories of gruesome events
than fantastic stories of unsatisfied desire and hubris that shift us out of the world we know into the realm of dreams. In 1919, the same year his mother experienced her psychological breakdown,
Lovecraft discovered the work of Lord Dunsany, an Irish fantasy writer and dramatist, and spent the next two years writing Dunsany imitations. What Lovecraft found so appealing about
Dunsany’s fiction was the “remoteness” of his fantasy lands, which come complete with their own gods, history, and geography.
⁵
Lovecraft’s attempts to model his fiction after Dunsany are clearly evident here in the stories “The White Ship,” “The Other Gods,” “Celephaïs,” and
“The Strange High House in the Mist.” Both “The White Ship” and “The Other Gods” are tales of hubris and loss of innocence, of human beings who push too far and
desire too much. In “The White Ship,” lighthouse-keeper Basil Elton recalls a mystical journey into wondrous realms and his own refusal to be satisfied. In “The Other Gods,”
Barzai the wise believes that his vast knowledge of the gods will allow him to look upon their faces unscathed and thus resolves to climb the forbidden mountain Hatheg-Kla. Both “The White
Ship” and “The Other Gods” are tales of overreaching—in typically Lovecraftian style, of pursuing knowledge at all costs and with disastrous results.
“Celephaïs” and “The Strange High House in the Mist,” by contrast, are less tales of hubris than of the desire for a world of wonders. In the former, a man stays young
as long as he clings to the belief in the magical city of his youth, while in the latter philosopher Thomas Olney yearns for—and discovers—something apart from daily routine and
“well-disciplined thoughts.” Taken together, the two stories offer a concise snapshot of both the promise and peril of fantastic fiction. The desire to escape from the world of mundane
reality and to believe in something more is natural, but if one lingers too long in other realms, the danger is that one may never return—at least not entirely, or intact.

What differentiates Lovecraft’s Dunsany imitations from both his Poe-inspired stories and his later Cthulhu Mythos is their setting. These are not stories set in the world we know, but
rather they take place in “The Dreamlands,” a fantasy world of marvelous cities, magical creatures, and strange gods. Associated with childhood, The Dreamlands is generally off-limits
to adults, with the exception of rare, visionary dreamers who retain a link to childhood and a willingness to push beyond common boundaries. For those intrepid souls willing to venture outside time
and space, the dubious reward is truth—knowledge of the beauty, horror, and fundamental strangeness of the world and of mankind’s peripheral role in its functioning. Lovecraft’s
universe of dreams in this sense parallels the interruption of the supernatural in the Poe-esque tales through an insistence on an expanded understanding of the universe and the powers governing
it.

The necessity of rethinking humanity’s place in the larger scheme of things is at the heart of the stories most commonly associated with Lovecraft—what have come to be called his
Cthulhu Mythos (a name never used by Lovecraft himself), his collection of stories depicting alien civilizations and powerful extraterrestrial monsters referred to as “gods.” These
stories, which vividly develop Lovecraft’s signature form of cosmic horror, foreground what critic David E. Schultz has referred to as Lovecraft’s “anti-mythology,” a
“pseudomythology brutally show[ing] that man is
not
the center of the universe, that the ‘gods’ care nothing for him, and that the earth and all its inhabitants are but a
momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the universe.”
⁶
To an even greater extent than Lovecraft’s Poe- and
Dunsany-inspired stories, his Cthulhu Mythos represent human beings as arrogant dupes of our own egotism—we think we’re the top of the food chain when, in reality, we’re on the
same order of krill to intergalactic leviathans.

The stories in this volume develop this theme in three characteristically Lovecraftian ways which I will call the “lost civilization” approach, the “degeneration”
approach, and the “monsters among us” approach. Lovecraft’s lost-civilization stories feature protagonists who uncover evidence of older civilizations—often alien
civilizations having achieved social and scientific heights only aspired to by mankind—that either were destroyed entirely or still exist somewhere in debased form, generally below the
surface of the earth. This theme is the premise of one of Lovecraft’s greatest works, his novella
At the Mountains of Madness
, and it is developed here in several stories, including
“The Temple,” “The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” and “The Nameless City.” These stories, clearly influenced by Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic thesis in
The
Decline of the West
(1918) that all civilizations eventually decline, seem to predict humanity’s own future fate (which is certainly the case in “He”). The sands of time are
destined to sweep over our achievements as surely as they have those of Lovecraft’s lost civilizations.

Although decay and death are the inevitable fate of even the most advanced races in Lovecraft’s stories of lost civilizations, his tales of human degeneration take an inverted approach.
These stories suggest that all humanity’s future achievements ultimately will be buried and forgotten, instead emphasize that, for all our pretensions to superiority, our civilized
façade masks an underlying barbarity and we always have one foot on the slippery slope of evolutionary atavism and reversion. To put it another way, stories such as Lovecraft’s famous
“The Rats in the Walls” or, featured here, “The Lurking Fear,” insist that human beings are only slightly removed from being animals and are always on the verge of
regressing to an animalistic state. We carry our primitive past with us in our genes and we are, Lovecraft’s stories suggest, just as likely to go backward as forward.

While Lovecraft’s lost civilization and degeneration stories respectively point to an apocalyptic future and animalistic past, most unsettling of all are his monsters among us stories that
depict the universe as a hostile place filled with all manner of horrific alien entities. In these stories, such as Lovecraft’s famous “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The
Whisperer in Darkness,” human protagonists discover mankind’s vulnerable state and go mad as a result. While “The Call of Cthulhu” is the most notorious illustration of this
theme, there is perhaps no better representation of this typically Lovecraftian concept than in “From Beyond,” featured in this volume. In this disquieting story, scientist and occult
researcher Crawford Tillinghast invents a machine that extends human sensory perception beyond its normal limitations, revealing the loathsome monstrosities that surround us and that, should they
become aware of us, possess the potential to destroy us.

Again and again in Lovecraft’s fiction, human beings in various ways catch glimpses of an expanded reality. His writing demands, as in his famous formulation in his treatise on horror
fiction,
Supernatural Horror in Literature
, that we “tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or
press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”
⁷
From the distant past to an
apocalyptic future by way of an uncertain present, the stories collected here showcase Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, his literary meditation on mankind’s necessary but perilous
self-delusion. The stellar winds that blow through Lovecraft’s fiction, bringing with them intimations of a beyond teeming with monstrous life, are chilling indeed.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
is professor of American literature and culture at Central Michigan University. He is the editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s
The Call
of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales
and
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Weird Tales
for Barnes & Noble and has written extensively on uncanny fiction, cult film, and popular
culture.

E
DITOR
’
S
N
OTE

The commentary opening each chapter has been provided by S. T. Joshi.

I
N RELATING THE CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH HAVE LED TO MY CONFINEMENT
within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a
natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated
phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the
unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the
majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal
studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the
fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this
I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient
for me to relate events without analysing causes.