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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Fans, detractors and Lovecraft-inspired writers respond to Laura Miller's "Master of Disgust."
Feb 15, 2005 | [Read the story.]
There is a lot to criticize H.P. Lovecraft for, but a lack of horror in his writings is not one of them. Lovecraft's monsters may not be as scary as a sewer-dwelling clown and today might seem no more frightening than a Japanese karate student in a rubber mask, but they were never the point of the story.
The true horror of Lovecraft does not spring from exploiting our fear of mortality -- as so many other writers hash and rehash -- but from our fear of our own cosmic insignificance. In many ways, this is a much deeper and ineffable horror than the fear of dying, and a fear that was almost unknown before the 20th century.
Lovecraft should be rightly praised for trailblazing in this new vein of horror. While often verbose, his stories encapsulate the dread horror of standing at the edge of the universe and recognizing that despite all humanity's arrogance we are still painfully ignorant. This, to me and many others, is where the true horror of existence lies.
-- Jason Cranford Teague
I quote: "If Lovecraft, unlike Poe or King, hasn't the psychological acuity to get under our skin and make us feel real fear, he does offer us the spectacle of his own unfettered morbidity."
Getting under your skin is a momentary thing -- I will say quite honestly that most Hitchcock movies don't "get under my skin" while watching them, but movies like "Vertigo" and "Strangers on a Train" are the kind of things that make me dream weird dreams. I honestly haven't read any of Lovecraft's books, but the snippets I read pull out my own horror at what it is to be alive.
-- George Black
There may be some truth to the appeal through disgust that this article notes. However, the very indescribable nature of Lovecraft's supernatural antagonists, what he probably would have called their "unknowable horror," is also a large draw, and it's one that writers continue to evoke today. Even if he won't admit it, much of Stephen King's work covers this same territory, with his descriptions of It and other monsters from Derry, Maine. Clive Barker has used this device from time to time, and newer writers like Warren Ellis do their best to exploit Lovecraft's legacy. The real horror of his stories is how Lovecraft attempts to invoke a dread something that we can never understand, a madness under the outwardly rational universe. Claiming that he was going for outright shock value is missing the point.
-- Thomas Wilburn
As Ms. Miller "would not call it wholesome at all," I am left to speculate on whether she would, in fact, call it pestilential, noxious, vile beyond all measure of human understanding, perhaps even the first vestiges of a condition beyond sense that, even at the barest fringe of recognition and comprehension, would drive men reeling and screaming into a bottomless, reeking abyss of violent madness.
If not, she hasn't read enough Lovecraft.
-- Tom Davidson
Was Lovecraft a bad writer? No. He broke many of the rules of the 20th century literary idiom esteemed by creative writing instructors (minimize the use of adverbs, "show, don't tell," etc.), but he wasn't a bad writer by any means. He had his own aesthetic, one that combined the innovations of Poe with the 17th and 18th century writings he absorbed as a child prodigy from explorations of his grandfather's library of antiquarian works. Lovecraft is no more a bad writer for his style than Jack Kerouac is for his tumbling rivers of sentences.
Was Lovecraft scary? The final revelations of his stories often weren't, but he was able to evoke dread and keep the mood building far more effectively than most contemporary horror writers. His best stories, like "The Shadow out of Time," capture the "cosmic awe" of a limitless universe in a way that give most modern readers chills, adverbs or no.
Of course there are Cthulhu toys and the like; every real fear is eventually reduced to kitsch ("The Producers," anyone?), and that's fine, but there are a number of current writers who work in the Lovecraftian mode, and their work offers more modern chills. Thomas Ligotti is probably the leading practitioner of Lovecraft's sort of weird fiction.
Is Lovecraft's bizarre life one reason for his continuing popularity? Certainly. The same can be said of any number of writers who are as widely talked about as they are read: Plath, Salinger and, again, Kerouac. My own novel "Move Under Ground," a Beat/Cthulhu Mythos pastiche, takes advantage of many of the connections between Kerouac and Lovecraft, in fact.
Finally, on the issue of Lovecraft's racism, of course he cannot be forgiven for his opinions. It should be noted, however, that late in his life he repudiated most of his racist attitudes and virtually all of his Yankee conservatism to become an ardent supporter of the New Deal.
-- Nick Mamatas
