After covering Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) recently, we had a closer look into the world of horror fiction. Unsurprisingly, one name consistently popped up.
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was the Titan of Terror and this compendium gathers many of his most famous short stories. Cthulhu is here.
Cthulhu, the squid-faced winged deity of unspeakable horror, is a curious short story. We’re examining it below alongside the writer’s various behaviour issues to piece together how Lovecraft shaped modern horror.
The Call of Cthulhu and the Existential Prescence of Cosmicism
The novelist was so influential you’ll still hear Lovecraftian horror as a genre to describe modern works. Think “cosmic horror” or weird fiction.
Themes that constitute a sense of intergalactic:
- Dread
- Confidential dismay (through forbidden knowledge)
- Madness
- Alien influences on humanity
- Religion
- Superstition
Lovecraft was influenced by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), with the former going on to influence the likes of horror legend Stephen King.
The Call of Cthulhu is his most famous work and the one we’re mainly focussing on here in this review.
Pronounced “khlul-loo” the short story was written in the summer of 1926 and was published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928. This started his process of revolutionising horror fiction with announcements such as this:
“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
And such delightful nihilistic turns of phrase as:
“The most merciful thing in the world, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
The moribund nature of his writing appealed in an era emerging from longstanding religious beliefs, enlightened as the ’30s and ’40s were with a new era of scientific discovery.
Lovecraft spread the work across three interconnected sections based on the notes of one Francis Thurston, who’s investigating an intergalactic deity called Cthulhu. As he wades through the notes of his deceased uncle he uncovers various accounts of the beast and its cult of worshippers.
Cthulhu is described as a monstrous being—a human, dragon, octopus hybrid belonging to the corpse city of R’lyeh. Its dreams influence the real world.
Ultimately, Thurston believes he’s researched too far into this cult, knows too much, and may have to face the wrath of the despicable being.
The themes abounding there being how humanity should comprehend its limitations; that too much knowledge could lead to the downfall of the species (prescient for later events in the 20th century with the development of atomic energy and weapons).
Other works in this compendium of short stories includes:
- Dagon
- Celephaïs
- Nyarlathotep
- The Hound
- The Rats in the Walls
- The Colour Out of Space
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Horror is the overriding theme to the stories! However, fantasy is prevalent, too.
Of the above, some are heavily documented in modern culture. We cover this further below, but Colour Out of Space was turned into a move starring Nic Cage in 2019.
In some respects, we found a lot of this writing analogous to Franz Kafka’s works (such as The Metamorphosis).
We prefer Kafka’s work to Lovecraft’s depraved considerations, but we still got plenty of enjoyment of of this book and its weird stories.
Horror isn’t a genre we spend much time wallowing in, but from the other Stephen King works we’re going through we believe he’s advanced on Lovecraft’s style significantly.
But there’s no denying the weird fiction writing in this compendium of work has some landmark concepts, many of which shaped modern culture, and if you want to imbue some dark tales into your literary world then this is definitely worth a read.
The Insular World of H. P. Lovecraft
The writer wasn’t the most stable person to be around.
This was likely a hereditary issue as his parents were committed to the same mental institute. His father was diagnosed with psychosis when H. P. Lovecraft was three and subsequently died in 1898. His mother was committed in 1919 and died two years later.
Throughout his adult life, H. P. Lovecraft held racist views.
He was deeply conservative and hard right with his political opinions. He was against democracy and felt a ruling aristocracy should run the United States (akin to the British monarchy system, which he supported wholeheartedly).
However, after the Great Depression (1931-1933) he did a total about-face and became a socialist.
Logical in his thought processes (INTP in modern parlance) he was introverted and insular—very reclusive.
He rarely went outside during the daytime, choosing instead to leave his home after sunset. A night owl, he’d then study late on topics including astronomy and science. This lifestyle led to him being pallid and gaunt in appearance.
Earlier in life his mother had called him “grotesque” and was deeply embarrassed about her son, warning him to hide indoors away from other children.
A prolific writer, he penned at least 100,000 letters during his 46 years of life.
He completely immersed himself in reading and gained an abstract comprehension of various common human behaviours. For example, with sex.
At age 34 he married Sonia Greene (1883-1972) and bought a batch of sex books to piece together in his mind how the act should go about (being a virgin at that point). His wife later reported:
“The very mention of the word sex seemed to upset him. He did, however, make the statement once that if a man cannot be or is not married at the greatest height of his sex-desire, which in his case, he said, was at age 19, he became somewhat unappreciative of it after he passed thirty. I was somewhat shocked but held my peace.”
He was living in New York at that time, but fled the city and his new wife (returning to solitude in the process) as the city’s tall buildings freaked him out enough to have panic attacks.
From the various personality descriptions above, there’s a clear pattern of behaviour. All of which aligns with a pretty obvious autism diagnosis.
German psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler named the condition in 1911, but it wasn’t until 1943 that physician Leo Kanner advanced medical understanding of it. Some six years after Lovecraft’s death.
Since his passing the writer’s reputation as the Titan of Terror has continued unabated. Cthulhu enjoys regular pop culture references in films, TV shows, and particularly video games.
That includes 2018’s Call of Cthulhu or 2020’s Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones, which you can check out below.
Then there’s the case of Lovecraft’s books, which are readily available and most of them are still in print.
There’s a huge amount of interest in the writer to this day and the online era only seems to be furthering his remorseless popularity.
If you think you can stomach some of his depraved tales of despair and otherworldly, nightmarish concepts… feel free to read his stuff, mortal. As of his weird, frightening literary visions Lovecraft wrote this in 1921:
“The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its most essential sense … He is a painter of moods and mind pictures—a capturer and amplifier of elusive dreams and fancies—a voyager into those unheard of lands which are glimpsed through the veil of actuality but rarely and only by the most sensitive … Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.”
