Oct

13

Book ‘Em: For The Love Of Lovecraft.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 13, 2008 |

There’s something about the works of H.P. Lovecraft that makes them compelling. Sure, his critics will point out that he wrote mostly “pulp” works, that they were overwritten because he was being paid by the word, but, as he once said in a letter to August Derleth, ”I have to write what’s in  me at the time, or not at all.” And what was in him could be incredibly horrifying. Having heard about Lovecraft for years, I picked up a copy of The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre when I was in high school. The first story I read, The Picture In The House, about a man’s encounter with a cannibal in a New England house, kept me up half the night–not just because I was scared, but because I couldn’t stop reading.

His anachronistic style (including sometimes archaic or obscure spellings such as “connexion” or English spellings like “colour”) either frustrates or fascinates.  And, like Poe, who’s an obvious influence, or even O’Henry, Lovecraft often tried for surprise endings, though his attempts sometimes failed. The story Pickman’s Model, which clearly shows Poe’s influence, has an ending you can see coming from a mile away. And yet the story’s compelling in spite of that. We know what’s the going to happen, but Lovecraft tells it so well he’s able to keep stringing us along right up to the conclusion.

At times reading Lovecraft’s stories I thought maybe he suffered from a lack of imagination. In another story I loved, The Colour out of Space, he described the color of a meteor, saying,

The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.

What color could it possibly be, then? Couldn’t he at least have described it? Maybe not. I don’t really think it was lack of imagination on Lovecraft’s part; he was incredibly imaginative. What I really think he was doing was pushing the boundaries, trying to get us to imagine things well beyond our experiences. The creatures, the Old Ones, when they appear in their full glory, are often huge, towering over landscapes, just as the narrator in The Shadow Out Of Time finds himself, in dreams, moving through immense architecture. These might seem like impossible physics, but part of the beauty of the supernatural is that nothing is really impossible. I was tempted at one point to suggest that Cthulu, Yog-Sothoth, and others were a metaphor, that Lovecraft was reacting to the nightmare of the Industrial Revolution. The “Old Ones”, I thought, were perhaps signifiers of old empires–Sumerian, Egyptian, Roman–that had been reawakened to reshape the world in their less enlightened image. The Colour Out of Space could, in this view, be read as the first toxic waste spill. It’s a cute theory, but, like Dr. Muñoz of Cool Air, it doesn’t survive close scrutiny. H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are rich and frightening. That’s enough reason for them to survive.

Here’s a brilliant tribute to his work from Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. See if any of Professor Peabody’s students sound familiar.

Part 1

Part 2


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Baino on October 17, 2008 3:32 am

    Aww I loved Night Gallery and the Twilight Zone . . nothing like ‘em around today! “Colour” is spelled that way my dear American . . .as in splendour and candour! I’ve never read Lovecraft but your blog is inspiring me to do so. I’m such a crap reader *must get library membership* I have four books now in varying states of ‘unreadness’ (mmm not a word I suspect!) They were very silly videos! I remember an episode on Night Gallery where a guy wanted to be ‘put’ into a painting, he was a Nazi war criminal and the painting was a small boat on a beautiful lake . . .he ended up in the painting and was ‘crucified’ when it was moved and re-hung on a gallery wall! I like the cut of your Jib Waldrop!

  2. Christopher Waldrop on October 17, 2008 8:03 am

    I grew up on The Twilight Zone, and, for a brief time, loved The Outer Limits until my mother decided it was giving me nightmares and made me stop watching i.
    And “colour” is spelled that way in all parts of the Commonwealth but not in America, thanks to Mr. Wesbter who, when he wrote his dictionary, decided words like “colour” and “flavour” had too many vowels. But perhaps you’d agree with his fellow American Samuel Clemens who said, “Mr. Webster is dead. What a fine thing it would be if his dictionary were too.”
    Now go get your library membership!

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