It’s something I’ve picked away at since April, but I’ve just finished reading the entire collected works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Prior to beginning the collection, I had never read a single Lovecraft story, yet for a number of years now I had been meaning to. I was of course aware of arguably his most famous creation, Cthulhu, the god-like “Old One” with its iconic tentacled head, slumbering through the aeons below the Pacific. What had really got me interested, however, was a synopsis I’d read of the story The Shadow Out of Time, which awakened me to the true wonders of Lovecraft’s imagination–it occurred to me that this horror tale had a pronounced sci-fi element to it, which I hadn’t expected. I wondered at how no story I could think of from this master had every found its way into my hands. I now realize, even, that a semi-obscure video game I loved on Gamecube, Eternal Darkness, was Lovecraft-inspired to an enormous degree–right down to its story being centered on a house in Rhode Island–the author’s birthplace (you’d be hard-pressed to convince me it’s a coincidence).
No matter. With the lockdown flying into effect here in Thailand, and my travel plans for April with family cancelled, I downloaded the complete works to my battered and faithful old Kindle and delved in.
I doubt I could write much about any individual story that hasn’t already been covered by untold legions of Lovecraft fans and scholars in the 83 years since his painful and untimely death from cancer. I use his death as a marker because his true fame grew posthumously. His final years on Earth were, in fact, spent in relative poverty, the renumeration for the stories he published insufficient for even his basic expenses.
What I was most surprised and delighted by was the unexpected variety across his works. A sense of cosmic horror forms the underpinning of his writing, spanning a veritable pantheon of monstrous creatures, extra-cosmic beings, gods, and virtually indescribable lifeforms and other fiends (indeed, unnameable and supposedly indescribable horrors are a common features in these tales)–from the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, to Cthulhu and his ilk, to alien interlopers, to the Earth Gods of a sprawling Dreamland, to the terrifying Other Gods, and beyond. I loved the lore he created, added to piece by piece across multiple stories, stretching back through a vague history of the earth and its many (non-human) civilizations that have dwelt upon it since primordial times, their ruins now buried beneath the earth and sea in the deep and remote places of the world. Referenced in tale after tale, the widely-suppressed and deathly taboo Necronomicon, a fictional ancient book composed by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, is a great element to draw the reader into a literary universe teeming with forbidden elder knowledge.
Then there are the stories of his Dream Cycle, taking place in Earth’s Dreamland, explored most extensively in the wonder-filled novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The journeys through dreamland, often undertaken by characters escaping a dreary Earthly existence into a wondrous and adventure-rich non-corporeal world, are described beautifully. Lovecraft was able to create a sense of cosmic dread–fear for the very experience of the human mind and soul in the face of truths and realities so extreme in their alien-ness and horror that they drive it to utter madness, in addition to mortal terror–but he could also capture through prose a rare and fleeting sensation such as we get in those dreams, often as children, in which we find ourselves for a time in unknown worlds of limitless beauty, mystery and joy.
I sensed a sadness in these works of the Dream Cycle–in the sense that Lovecraft was very much each of these dreaming characters. Aided by a clearly vivid imagination, I feel it’s likely he was bent on escaping all that may have frightened him throughout his life, including a general existential fear of the unknown (the insane chaos he portrays as existing infinitely outside the sliver of order found in modern human civilization), deep insecurities about his own abilities or lack thereof (he met with relative failure holding regular jobs and was very sensitive about how his written work was received), and other races and foreign cultures (distrust and/or disdain toward non-Anglo-Saxons can be gleaned from the language and plot of a number of his stories, not to mention a horrendous poem; a common theme is an idealized image of the beauty and purity of Anglo New England, under which hidden occult and ancient horrors lurk, oft-facilitated by shifty and secretive people with dark complexions or “foreign” faces).
Yes, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, from what I’ve learned whilst tackling this collection, was a deeply flawed person. His life, as I understand it, was fraught with its own challenges and deprivations. His way of coping with the world as he saw it, and thus ultimately with himself, was to write stories of lurking horrors, gruesome abominations and fantastical dreamscapes, of death and gloom and shimmering glimpses of his own ideals. Though our views and perspectives differ greatly, that need to write, to navigate a complex world through the creation of stories, is something that I understand to my core, and in that I feel a connection with Lovecraft from across the decades–as I read his works here in 2020, during this unexpected and chaotic time of global plague.
Lovecraft not only takes his readers through the hidden (often subterranean) recesses of fictionalized New England locales, but as far as the unexplored wastes of Antarctica (one of my favorites, At the Mountains of Madness), to Australia (The Shadow Out of Time), to the Congo, to various corners of Europe, to the depths of the ocean, to vast cities that rose on Earth before the evolution of human beings, to the edges of the cosmos and beyond, and to the furthest reaches of Earth’s Dreamland. But it was something very concrete, tangible and grounded that captured my attention just as much when I stumbled across it: the first page of the first draft of his aforementioned phantasmagorical epic The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
Obviously Lovecraft didn’t have a computer and a trusty backspace key, so here we can see his edits. We can see where he was dissatisfied with his word choices, sometimes scratching out whole sentences, obsessing over every detail. Who knows how long or he lingered on this single page, or how many times he returned to it? I recognized this immediately, and I’m sure just about anyone else who writes will too–when I write a story by hand in a notebook, it ends up as a mess looking just like this. That was the second time I couldn’t help but feel some affinity with Lovecraft across the years. He was unsatisfied with his written work. He probably cringed at his first drafts. He wanted to get it right, just like all of us. He knew he was imperfect and utterly human–but he scratched and scribbled and frowned, wanting those words to be as perfect as they could be, perhaps because he hoped that his story would live on long after he was gone.
It did. We’re still reading.
