Revising Lovecraft: The Mutant Mythos

By Paul StJohn Mackintosh OCTOBER 17, 2018

A VAST TIDE of Lovecraftian fiction, revisionist or otherwise, is published every year. I remember reading a claim — which I’ve been unable to track down — that roughly 50 percent of titles published each year in the weird/dark fiction metacategory are more or less Lovecraftian. Why do we see this current fascination with Lovecraft, and why is revisionism necessary in the first place?

Enough unreconstructed pastiches, homages, and Mythosian works have thrived in the ever-expanding universe of the Lovecraftian canon to make a case for continuing to mine the same seam without revision, despite its impurities and toxic contaminants. There are very good reasons, though, why fidelity to Lovecraft can’t be continued unproblematically anymore — reasons that transcend accusations of virtue signaling or kneejerk political correctness. Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price, for example, attempted to valorize Lovecraft from an alt-right perspective in his keynote speech at NecronomiCon 2015; right-wing reappropriation of Lovecraft looks to be on the rise, and some readers and fans (such as Michel Houellebecq) appear genuinely ready to swallow Lovecraft’s ethnic bigotry and apocalyptic nihilism whole. In these circumstances, revisionist Lovecraftian fiction looks like a proper and sufficient counterbalance.

As a reader, one may be able to enjoy Lovecraft without agreeing with him. As a writer, though, one almost certainly won’t be able to produce meaningful, enduring, or even enjoyable Lovecraft-inspired work (for anyone other than white supremacists) without understanding the author’s underlying credo. In short, you can’t understand the artist without engaging the bigot. The title of Alison Sperling’s 2017 LARB review on Lovecraftian scholarship “Acknowledgment Is Not Enough” cuts more ways than one: it’s impossible to understand the writer’s intellectual roots and concerns, even his aesthetic, without tackling his mindset. It’s also become almost impossible to write well within Lovecraft’s Mythos without addressing what it was a myth of. Revisionism is not just The Right Thing, it’s also The Smart Thing.

You can’t understand Lovecraft’s conflation of personal miscegenation and hereditary flaws with outside threats, social decay, and vast panoramas of evolution across Deep Time without first understanding the turn-of-the-century traditions within mainstream experimental literature and polemical pseudo-scientific writing that influenced him. Lovecraft may have been a bizarre, original outlier in the context of 1920s horror or science fiction, but he was completely comprehensible (and even representative) within these older and larger traditions. Many other far-right literary figures on both sides of World War I share much of Lovecraft’s grab-bag of Symbolist, Decadent, Spenglerian, and world-weary fin-de-siècle values and tropes. Period clichés of Yellow Book dandyism and racial doomsaying abound in this context. D’Annunzio, Hamsun, and Jean Lorrain would all have recognized a kindred spirit in Lovecraft, and period readers of Max Nordau’s Degeneration and sponsors of the Race Betterment Foundation would recognize familiar ideas, thinly recast, in Lovecraft’s oeuvre.

You don’t need the vast apparatus of Lovecraftian scholarship, or Lovecraft’s voluminous correspondence, to deduce that nasty racist statements and attitudes are likely to start falling out of such a mix once you shake it. Even S. T. Joshi, the arch-priest of Lovecraftian traditionalist connoisseurship, provided a confirmation of such critical perspectives in his book H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990).

It’s not hard to see how Lovecraft’s intellectual and aesthetic stance correlates with Theodore Millon’s definition of the insular paranoid personality subtype: “Reclusive, self-sequestered, hermetical; self-protectively secluded from omnipresent threats and destructive forces; hypervigilant and defensive against imagined dangers.” Lovecraft’s paranoid pathology is contiguous with his social bigotry, which is also contiguous with his aesthetic. Clinical paranoia is deeply associated with exactly the kind of socially marginal existence that the “Old Gentleman” endured in reality.

How to Revise Lovecraft

Given this context, revisionist Lovecraftian fiction has a heavy load of toxic waste to haul. What, then, makes it work when it actually succeeds? One outstanding example, Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), has practically cornered this market, winning a Shirley Jackson Award and a finalist’s placing for both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, among other honors. To my mind, it’s not just LaValle’s account of historical and modern African-American experiences that elevates his work. His terse, laconic prose certainly helps — and it is a refreshing contrast to his source material, the overwrought prose of “The Horror at Red Hook,” where Lovecraft’s protagonist, the detective Thomas Malone, runs into a Beardsleyesque entourage of creatures: “[G]oat, satyr, and aegipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness.”

Essentially, though The Ballad of Black Tom is successful because it captures the horrific imagination at play in basic Lovecraftian themes. (Thomas Malone’s fate, for instance, and the reasons for it, are revoltingly evocative and persuasive.) LaValle reads like James Baldwin transposed into cosmic horror and Black Tom articulates sentiments that, ironically, Lovecraft himself might have shared. Ryan Teitman’s review of the novella in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which declared that the story “Out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft,” accurately applauds both LaValle’s ability to write straightforward horror and his ability to infuse that horror with broader social concerns.

Other revisionist writers often lack LaValle’s mastery of Lovecraft’s horrific dimensions. Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) subtly, lovingly subverts Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in more ways than just inserting female protagonists and a struggling women’s college into the narrative. The charming, whimsical work evokes Jack Vance at his most fantastic, but is it Lovecraftian? What does it mean to particularize and detail Lovecraft’s Dreamlands down to tractors and bakeries, when the whole point of Lovecraft’s oneiric realm is a paranoid rejection of reality? Johnson captures the world-building aspect of Lovecraft beautifully, but she sidesteps much of the horror implicit in his paranoia.

Put a similar approach into a different context, though, and it works just fine. Interviewed in the Lovecraft eZine, LaValle described his evocation of New York:

What I wanted to get across most about uptown as a whole was the sense of life and community, exactly the things Lovecraft missed, or simply couldn’t see. His depictions of the immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn were so baffling to me because I simply couldn’t recognize the kinds of places he feared as exactly the kind of places I’m so happy I grew up in, and where I still live now. So my depictions of Harlem had to work as a kind of corrective.

Nick Mamatas takes a different approach: he has graduated from a series of mashups which recast the Mythos in the vein of the Beats (Move Under Ground) or Hunter S. Thompson (The Damned Highway) to offer what might be the last word about the cult of Lovecraft, the detective drama I Am Providence (2016), where the decaying corpse of a murder victim struggles to solve a murder at a Lovecraft convention.

Like most pulp authors, Lovecraft was writing escapist fiction. Why should anyone want to escape to a malign cosmos such as Lovecraft’s? Crime writers struggle with similar questions every time they come up with a fresh atrocity. But genre fiction is all about conventions — in more than one sense, as any fan or observer of cosplay can attest.

As Joyce Carol Oates suggests in “The King of Weird,” her 1996 New York Review of Books article,

Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call “literary fiction,” assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? However plot-ridden, fantastical, or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo-characters, genre fiction is always resolved.

The Risks of Revision

One risk that revisionists sometimes face is taking Lovecraft too seriously, which sometimes leads to cutting away the tentacles (and other weird stuff) in favor of dark psychological realism. Just like Bram Stoker or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who Neil Gaiman spliced brilliantly with the Mythos in “A Study in Emerald,” Lovecraft is the creator of one of the great modern myths, and just like with those predecessors, the myth factor — and the fun factor — is the one thing you lose if you start to take the creator too seriously as a thinker, as Michel Houellebecq arguably did with his H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991). The pulpy, mythic flavor of the Mythos is also what explains Lovecraft’s pervasive influence in modern culture. As editor Paula Guran says in her introduction to her 2016 anthology, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu:

Cthulhu and the “Cthulhu Mythos” (more properly the “Lovecraft Mythos”) has become a brand name recognizable far beyond genre in every facet of popular culture: mainstream literature, gaming, television, film, art, music; even crochet patterns, clothing, jewelry, toys, children’s books, and endless other tentacled products.

Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu is the quintessential Lovecraftian escapist experience, the Pepsi of RPG franchises, second only to D&D. A large subset of Lovecraft fans aren’t looking for probing explorations of existential dread and cosmic indifference. They’re looking for shibboleths, signposts, and landmarks within that same imagined country: sniffing for any mention of shoggoths or tomes so that they can get more of the same Lovecraftian buzz. “Lovecraft is an adolescent fascination,” observes Mamatas in his LARB essay on the writer. “Lovecraft demands the careful attention that only a teen boy with little else to do — no high school romances, no sports practice — can muster.”

That idea may characterize an infantile geekery and fanboy culture, as pernicious as Gamergate at its worst, but it literally underwrites all kinds of endeavor, from the woefully derivative to the sublime. Yes, it may help explain why some Lovecraft fans become so defensively hostile around their idol and around traditional Lovecraftian fiction in general. It’s tempting to dismiss challenges to your little imagined world as PC snark when you don’t want to face up to the sentiments underpinning its insidious appeal. But that is not the same argument as genre fiction versus literary fiction, entertainment versus edification. If Lovecraft covered both bases, even slightly, that feat in itself is surely worth emulation.

I doubt a writer can create quality work in the revisionist Lovecraftian vein by simply cutting out the squamous bits. If you’re not looking to play in that imagined world, you’ll lose those who are drawn to world-building. And those omissions won’t answer the prayers of a genre writer looking to be taken seriously: genre writers of every stripe struggle with that anxiety, but ditching the identifying marks of your particular subgenre may not help cure it. As Mamatas says, “Lovecraft is a perfectly capable writer when it comes to pacing, to invention, to story logic, and even when it comes to generating the occasional quotable phrase — all the attributes needed for a successful career in the pulps.” An author who revises away those qualities may disappoint more than just Lovecraftian reader expectations.

Revising and Revitalizing

The escapist aspects of Lovecraftian fiction are open to one obvious interpretation: the Mythos creates a fictive safe space for the reader’s inner racist. Fortunately, I don’t think applies overall, but it is relevant to the case for revisionist Lovecraftian fiction in the first place. This is where I disagree with a very able, black, and sometimes Lovecraftian writer Craig Gidney, who argues that Lovecraft “turned his eugenic/racist/misanthropic beliefs into art. Uncomfortable ugly art, but art none the less. It’s a great way to stroll in the mindset of a racist.” One can enjoy and appreciate Lovecraft’s fiction as art, but reading it to stroll in the mindset of a racist surely implies more than just enjoyment for some.

I don’t think that inoculating Lovecraftian narratives with POC protagonists, or reframing them from the POV of the Other, accomplishes very much unless you dig deeper into the intellectual, cultural, and social legacy underpinning those stories. On this issue, in my opinion, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) falls short. Inspired as it is to incorporate The Negro Motorist Green Book into modern fantastic fiction, with a cast of feisty 1950s African-American protagonists fighting dark white occult conspiracies in a landscape where any careless rest stop might mean death, Ruff’s narrative doesn’t delve deeply enough into the traditions behind Lovecraft himself, or Lovecraft Country. There just isn’t much Lovecraft to justify the title. Intense nostalgia and an intense sense of place make for strong subsidiary elements in Lovecraft’s appeal, not least for world-building fiction and RPGs, and that blood-and-soil ethic deserves deep interrogation as part of Lovecraft’s paranoid sensibility and racism. Plus, if you’re going to rehash Lovecraft from the viewpoint of his supposed menaces, you should approach with the sensitivity and imaginative intensity of Ruthanna Emrys in her Winter Tide (2017). Simply flipping the Lovecraft narrative is a tactic that can get old fast.

Tap more deeply into the provenance of Lovecraft’s ideas, however, and you find an excellent set of tools for probing and dissecting the kind of social and cultural anxieties that form the basis of great fiction, and great horror. Lovecraft’s work is a great way to stroll in the mindset of a proto-fascist. It’s correspondingly helpful when tackling such ideas in their modern guises, as in, for example, the writing of Michel Houellebecq, or the dogmas of Steve Bannon, and Robert Price.

In one of his most famous passages, the opening of “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft’s protagonist Francis Wayland Thurston warns that:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents […] 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.

Umberto Eco’s typology of ur-fascism emphasizes that “no syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism” — i.e., the appeal of fascism lies in its brutal suppression of any attempt to correlate the mind’s contents. The siren call of Cthulhu is the nihilistic appeal of the peace and safety of that new dark age. Characteristically, Mamatas picked up on that passage brilliantly in his vertiginous short story “On the Occasion of My Retirement,” where the protagonist’s victims are coralled into the agony of correlating their minds’ contents.

Fearful Revisionism

The one key ingredient for powerful revisionist Lovecraftian fiction, in my view, is fear. Lovecraft himself kicked off the definitive statement of his own focus and intent, the essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), by declaring that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” For better or worse, few of his Terrors are now actually terrifying — which makes another sound case for revisionism. Perhaps it is impossible for a 21st-century writer to connect with a mindset where squamous squigglies could evoke genuine, personally felt existential dread, but loss of access to that mentality closes off a channel to Lovecraft’s unique appeal.

It’s hard to write truly fearful fiction unless you truly feel fear. Lovecraft very genuinely feared what lay behind his creations, and “cosmic horror” can easily find new and very fearful embodiments. We may not fear what Lovecraft feared, we may be very right not to fear it, but we have a plethora of new fears of our very own. Those are what some of the best revisionist Lovecraftian fiction tap into.

One writer in particular managed this feat by channelling an entirely different kind of paranoia. Charles Stross’s “A Colder War” (2000), where Reagan-era occult fumblings sleepwalk into global annihilation, is one of the most chilling, fearfully desolate short stories in modern horror fiction, of almost any genre or subgenre. Stross achieved that by evoking Cold War paranoia and the existential dread of nuclear annihilation. Caitlín R. Kiernan comes close to this in her Agents of Dreamland (2017) and its near-sequel Black Helicopters (2018), where black ops meet black horror. As I’ve argued above, Victor LaValle can evoke a similar experience of fear by merging Lovecraftian themes with the concerns of a Black Lives Matter moment.

Alan Moore once described Lovecraft as “an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread.” There is more than enough in the contemporary world to genuinely dread. Is it any wonder that a society fearful enough of the Outside and Alien to try to physically build a wall against it, one busy shooting down both its own schoolkids and its black citizens, is ripe with dread? Much of the dread wells up from the same fault lines of paranoia, disgruntled entitlement, marginalization, and division where Lovecraft originally quarried his Mythos.

H. P. Lovecraft is a monument of American paranoia. Lovecraft Country is rank with paranoia. The Trump-era United States is likewise stiff with paranoia. Revisionist Lovecraftian fiction gives its writers and their readers some of the most acute tools available for probing, questioning, studying, and tackling that paranoia, and it channels enough fear to engage an audience in an era that seems defined by fear.

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Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish writer of weird and dark fiction, poet, translator, and journalist. Born in 1961, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived and worked in Asia and Central Europe, and currently divides his time between Hungary and other locations.

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By Brian Kim Stefans APRIL 6, 2013

Lovecraft and Philosophy
By Graham Harman
Published 2012-09-1
Zero Books
277 Pages

H.P. LOVECRAFT’S WORK has not received a great deal of attention from literary critics. Until relatively recently, the majority of “treatments” of his oeuvre have been in the form of B-movies. While it’s surprising that Roger Corman, director of seven features based on the stories of Lovecraft’s great predecessor, Poe, only did one Lovecraft film (The Haunted Palace, itself marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace,” despite being based on Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), some of the stable of effects of Lovecraft’s fiction — his characters’ tendencies to simply tell you their emotions (usually on a scale between repulsion and disgust), their inability to adequately describe the most startling creatures and architectures — make his stories ripe for the B-movie treatment. The telegraphed emotions of his characters justify stilted or hysterical acting, and the incomplete, contradictory visual descriptions of creatures like Cthulhu or the Old Ones — not to mention the “strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars” hovering miles above us in At the Mountains of Madness — seem to cry out for a gauzy camera style that conceals the tawdriness of the set design, the recycled monster costumes, and the failures of the lighting crew.

Each Lovecraft story seems at once an absurd improvisation — pulling stuff out of his hat for the sake of filling pulp magazine column inches — and a careful extension of his basic principle that humans, were we to have any access to the true nature of the universe, would recoil with horror at how small a role we play in it and how much the universe doesn’t seem to care. He often introduces an entire new species of ancient, if not thriving, life form while also confirming, often by quick allusion or repeated phrase, the persistent powers of some previously introduced creature or cultural item, notably the monster Cthulhu or the writings of the “mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” contained in the Necronomicon. His oeuvre, expressed in fragments (Lovecraft never wrote a novel) did spawn a large body of what has come to be called “fan fiction” — even within his own lifetime, writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth devoted their careers to extensions of the Lovecraft universe — but little more than condescension from his intellectual contemporaries.

Lately this is beginning to change. The Library of America published a collection of Lovecraft’s best works in 2005, and today literary critics, and even philosophers, are finally beginning to pay attention to this defiantly unfashionable writer. In a way, this makes a certain kind of sense. Even if Lovecraft were not writing philosophy proper, much of the coherence of his “cosmicism” results not in the noncontradictory material or technological universes typical of most science fiction — think of the droids and lightsabers that populate the world of Star Wars — but in a singularly fraught metaphysical universe. In Lovecraft’s version of reality, laws seem to function in ways that make our foundational certainties — Euclidean geometry, the private experience of dreams, the inviolable divisions between human, animal, plant, and the nonliving, etc. — merely contingent: just the way things appear to us, rather than absolute necessities.

Perhaps the reason Lovecraft never wrote a novel is that he refused to be authoritative, a god in full control of a world, with total access to every drive and thought of its well-rounded characters. Novelists, with their pretenses to total access to their universes, invariably argue for the distinctiveness, not to mention the primacy, of human agency. Instead, Lovecraft wrote fragments of a novel, bits and pieces that never reveal the whole story but which, put together, poignantly suggest the impotence of human aspiration. If the short list of “failures” of Lovecraft as a writer drives away the average literary critic — who, like the novelist, will want to project some degree of panoptic vision — it’s proven fertile ground for the American “speculative realist” philosopher Graham Harman, whose new book on Lovecraft is not only an odd and exciting addition to his own rapidly expanding bibliography but also an affront to those critics who have mistaken Lovecraft’s virtues for faults.

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Few movements in recent philosophy have had as startling a rise as that of the writers loosely grouped under the heading “Speculative Realists.” Attention to this movement, which includes Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Levi Bryant, and Quentin Meillassoux — sidestepping the controversy of whether it in fact is a “movement,” and, if it is, whether “speculative realism” accurately describes their program — is growing exponentially, not just in universities but also among the unaffiliated continental philosophy junkies who troll the blogosphere. The one principle that is inarguably shared by these philosophers is quite simple: they wish to retrieve philosophy from a tendency initiated, or at least made unavoidable, by the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that the subject (meaning a human being) can ever know anything about the external world due to the very fact of subjectivity. For him, reality is always mediated by cognition, and the thinkable has a basic handicap: it is just thought. Nothing comes from outside into the mind, in other words, that is not turned into thought; the radical epistemologist argues that all we can know lies in the firm foundations of what is available to the senses, while the radical idealist argues that nothing remains in this thinking of whatever it was that spawned the thought, leaving one at the impasse of believing that all of reality is virtual, a bunch of mental actions. The result, according to the speculative realists, is that philosophy since Kant has been stuck with making this very mind→object relationship the locus and subject of philosophy, thus shutting down the project of metaphysics, the search for absolute laws beyond what can be established by experimental science.

Quentin Meillassoux has dubbed this mind→object relationship — the impasse that is at the heart of the Kantian tradition — “correlationism,” and the term has become a rallying cry for speculative realists. Harman’s philosophy displaces the mind→object relationship with that of object→object, the “mind” being just one object among many. Oddly, though Meillassoux names correlationism as the primary curse of the Kantian tradition, he also seems the most devoted of his peers to preserving the best part of it by making it the one place where he claims anything like an absolute exists. To Meillassoux (who, coincidentally or consequently, is also a fan of Lovecraft), the universe is not characterized by necessity (God-given or inevitable laws) but by a radical contingency, a “hyper-chaos” amidst which the only thing that could be seen as absolute is the mind→object relationship itself. How Meillassoux gets there is not our concern here; suffice it to say that the two philosophers share a fairly Lovecraftian attitude. They believe that there is a form of “realism” available to metaphysics, even when mucking in the world of what will always be unknown to human consciousness. This second Copernican revolution in philosophy, which situates the mind as one object in dizzying free-fall among many, might seem “the end of the world as we know it” for normative humanists, but the speculative realists, like Michael Stipe before them, “feel fine.”

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Harman, for all of his concern with objects (his branch of speculative realism has been christened “object-oriented ontology”), is not a materialist, and he’s certainly no empiricist. He believes that scientific pursuits that seek the elemental building blocks of the universe are getting most of the story wrong, for though we might be able to learn of the subatomic composition of, say, uranium, the banana or the West Nile virus, none of that knowledge exhausts the ways that an object can affect reality — which is to say, the way objects can relate to each other. An idiosyncratic feature of Harman’s philosophy is that “objects” for him are not just things, and certainly not just natural things, but also concepts, imagined entities, and nearly any entity that can have some effect on reality for however long or short a time, on however large or small a scale, and at whatever level of availability to human perception or “science.”

In Harman’s universe, then, not only are bananas objects, but so are aggregate things we create out of bananas (like banana splits), the component things that make up the banana (like the banana’s skin and its pulpy interior), imagined things we derive from bananas (like the Bananaman cartoon, or, I guess, Bananarama), as well as the corporations behind the cultivation, delivery, and marketing of bananas (like Chiquita Banana). This free-flow among a plethora of relations — from artificial to nature, from human to nonhuman, from “thing” to “idea,” with no possibility for hierarchy or a taxonomy — is a theme Harman picks up from “actor-network” theory, a creation of sociologist Bruno Latour, which posits the necessarily “hybrid” nature of a reality in which an arcane experiment in quantum physics could be affected by a sex scandal, an epidemic, Hurricane Sandy, political indifference, or a speed bump.

Harman worked as a sportswriter while pursuing his degree in philosophy, and any baseball fan knows that limiting your study of “reality” to the operations of physics misses nearly the whole story. Like a scientist, a fan might speculate on ball speed, the fitness of players, and even the level of oxygen available in Coors Field, but the play-by-play is incomplete without banter about the outrageous contracts, speculations about drug use, general kibitzing about the mythologies behind certain stadiums or franchises, the scandalous press relations of certain players, the classic games, the world records, and so on. We can discuss “baseball,” then, as an object composed of hundreds of other objects all in interrelation; to discuss the game merely on the level of physics — what empirical science would be able to tell us exists — would be absurd.

Harman is unusual in the metaphysical tradition in that he is comfortable with the fact that objects will never be fully revealed and that they in fact are always in a state of retreat, not simply from the mind (which is just another object) but also from each other. In Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Harman enlists Lovecraft in his battle with epistemology and materialism — Lovecraft himself expressed loathing for normative science, and certainly had no love for legitimate academics — but also against correlationism: the conviction that all the mind could ever know are purely mental phenomena, which ultimately led (and here we are brushing with broad strokes) to the so-called “linguistic” turn of much 20th-century philosophy (most characteristically that of Wittgenstein and Derrida). To that extent, Lovecraft’s failure to engage in the linguistic experimentation of his high Modernist contemporaries does not make him some kind of recalcitrant provincial, but rather a sensible (if xenophobic) voyager who simply did not want to make the claim that language was all there was. Lovecraft’s language “fails” only insofar as the narrators fail to get into words, to journalize, some experience that simply cannot be fully available to the meager human senses and mind. For the most part, Lovecraft is happy to use language as a simple, functional tool, rather than to insist at every moment through linguistic estrangement — like, say, a Stein or a Beckett — that language is not what you think it is (and, consequently, that language is everything). For Lovecraft, it’s the universe, not language, that is not what you think it is. So what is it then? Well, weird.

Weird Realism opens with an idiosyncratic set of short essays that lay out the method of the book. Harman notes that there is a choice that philosophers generally make between being a “destroyer of gaps” — those who want to reduce reality to a simple principle — and “creators of gaps” — those who point to those areas to which we will possibly never have access. He deems the latter “productionists” (in contrast to reductionists) and writes: “If we apply this distinction to imaginative writers, then H.P. Lovecraft is clearly a productionist author. No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.” He then describes the more literary aspects of his method. “The Problem with Paraphrase” takes aim at critic Edmund Wilson’s tendency to rewrite the “content” of Lovecraft’s stories in his own terms and then attack that effigy rather than the writing itself. “The Inherent Stupidity of All Content” develops Slavoj Žižek’s theme of the “inherent stupidity of all proverbs” (in The Abyss of Freedom, in which Žižek amusingly proves that any proverb can be entirely reversed and give us access to an equally wise perspective). Harman combines both Wilson’s and Žižek’s techniques — ridiculously literal paraphrases in a variety of styles and attempted textual reversals — in a method of his own that he calls “ruination,” arguing that “after all, the fact that a statement can be ruined means that this has not already occurred. It also means that we can use possible ruinations, and sometimes possible improvements, as a method of analyzing the effects of a literary statement.” This is, in some ways, a scientific method: Harman wishes to isolate qualities of Lovecraft’s writings by driving them out of their hiding places, like subjecting a bacterium to a stain, intense heat, or a college lecture by Newt Gingrich in order to elicit new behaviors.

The practice of “ruination” demonstrates the incredible precision with which Lovecraft approached description. If Harman is enlisting Lovecraft as a foot soldier against bland, realist empiricism, he has to prove that Lovecraft’s apparent failures to describe were a form of intellectual honesty rather than simply bad, clumsy style. Harman describes two stylistic techniques of Lovecraft’s that highlight this very theme of failure. The first is the “vertical” or “allusive” style, typified in this passage from the “Call of Cthulhu”:

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing […] but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

For Harman, such a passage draws us away from trying to recreate the creature in the terms of our loathsome, mundane world of Euclidean time and space. Lovecraft situates the creature partly in the diseased imagination of a narrator who claims that the description is “not unfaithful” but hardly correct, and also “asks us to ignore the surface properties of dragon and octopus […] and to focus instead on the fearsome ‘general outline of the whole.’” In this way, Lovecraft opens up a “gap”: things are moving along swimmingly in the story, with the narrator sane and physical reality recognizably accessible and ordered; just at the moment when the narrator experiences something truly astounding — the color out of space, the shadow out of time, like in the title! — language breaks down, and all you are left with is the “general outline of the whole.”

The opposite method, which Harman calls “horizontal” or “cubist,” occurs when Lovecraft begins a description by claiming that he’s at an impasse, but then lets fly with an abundance of information, as in this passage from “The Dunwich Horror”:

It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known three dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous […] Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest […] had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worse; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.

And that’s just the beginning. “The power of language is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality,” Harman writes. “Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing.” It’s like one of those scenes that seem to occur at the climax of any long-form Japanese fantasy anime: a creature starts to expand, but rather than simply getting fatter, every aspect begins to take on its own form, like a Rembrandt turning into an Arcimboldo. Both methods isolate moments of “crisis,” in the sense Thomas Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: observations can be made but there is no place for them in the dominant scientific paradigm and hence no language, setting the stage for a “paradigm shift” that not only turns the apparent anomalies into “facts” but also drives a few scientists bonkers in the meantime. Maybe that’s why Lovecraft’s heroes are always getting nauseous when I, a Star Wars kid, would most expect them to be quite thrilled.

¤

The bulk of Weird Realism is comprised of 100 mini-essays, many only a page long, each of which examines a short passage of one of Lovecraft’s major stories. Most expand outward to examine narrative tropes and stylistic tics that recur across several stories. Fans of Lovecraft will be satisfied: Harman seems to have missed nothing. Of the volume of writings by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred called the Necronomicon, Harman outlines the many ways Lovecraft establishes its reality: by reminding us of the copies scattered in libraries across the world (notably a heavily-guarded copy in Harvard’s Widener library); by having the book appear in several lists with actual and fictitious books; by referring to several translations of the book; and finally — this goes beyond Lovecraft himself — by the fact of the book’s appearance in the stories of his circle of friends. (Curious to me is that Harman doesn’t address whether or not the Necronomicon actually exists, if not as a book then as a concept that has reality-effects. But perhaps that is a foregone conclusion for Harman.)

Harman’s take on a certain famous passage in which a sailor is “swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse” gives a particularly good sense of how he is able to skirt between literary and philosophical language with ease:

Lovecraft introduces a problem. Not only is Cthulhu something over and above the three creatures he partially resembles […] we now find that even acute and obtuse angles must be something over and above their qualities. There seems to be a “spirit” of acute angles, a “general outline of the whole” which allows them to remain acute angles even in cases where they behave as if they were obtuse. Not since Pythagoras have geometrical entities been granted this sort of psychic potency, to the point that they have a deeper being over and above their measurable and experienceable traits.

While the lovers of novels might be less pleased when Harman makes grand statements about Lovecraft’s greater importance to literature than Proust or Joyce (he does!), those of us with no visceral knowledge of the nooks and crannies of the history of philosophy can find pleasure in learning that there is, after Pythagoras (and before Kandinsky!), a tradition of attributing “psychic potency” to squares and circles. “[I]t is unclear how the mere fact of ‘behaving as obtuse’ would allow an angle to ‘swallow up’ an unwary sailor,” Harman continues:

Sketch the diagram of an obtuse angle for yourself, and you will see the difficulty in intuitively grasping what has happened. If the phrase “she looked daggers at him” is an example of catachresis in language, a misapplication of a word to gain metaphorical effects, then the acute angle obtusely swallowing a sailor is a fine example of catachresis in geometry. We might as well say: “It was the number 21, but it behaved as though it were the number 6.”

One way of reconciling this might be to consider the problem of painting. Any image that pretends to take place in “Renaissance perspective” is bound to have a “vanishing point” at which parallel lines will appear to converge. Consequently, in films — say an Expressionist one like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or the finale to Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, or Michel Gondry’s delirious music video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” — we are repeatedly confronted with seemingly depthless triangles turning out to be boxes with hidden monsters or dancing girls in them, not to mention the reverse (poor Wile E. Coyote): landscapes with deep perspective turning out to be flat, painful façades.

But Harman’s approach is more interesting. Rather than treating the passage as a problem of ekphrasis (from my perspective it appeared acute, but it was really obtuse), he treats it as a statement about reality: the angle really is acute, but lo and behold, it has properties it simply hasn’t revealed to us yet! The knowledge that acute angles actually have four equal sides, or that an acute angle is really the discorporated spirit of Liberace, may be just around the corner.

There are some places where Weird Realism seems to fail, most notably when Harman makes evaluative claims about other writers; he doesn’t seem content to merely situate Lovecraft among the likes of Proust and Joyce, but suggests, if only briefly, that he surpasses them. He also doesn’t engage with any literary critical method later than that of Edmund Wilson and the New Critics. His apparent conviction, expressed largely through exclusion, that no features of other writers seem to produce the sorts of “gaps” that he finds so valuable in Lovecraft will no doubt be tested. I couldn’t help thinking of John Ashbery’s mid-career poetry, for example, or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, both of which are filled with such mystifying gaps between object and description. The mini-essays seem to peter out at around 85 or so, especially during the last 11, where Harman seems content to note how the late story “The Shadow Out of Time” is just not as good as the earlier stuff; a little nip and tuck might have been in order. On occasion, it doesn’t quite seem like Harman is writing “philosophy” so much as noting a feature of the Lovecraft universe — which is to say, he slips into writing “literary criticism,” and might be just as happy citing Lovecraft’s linkages to Shelley and, say, later weird realist writers like Philip K. Dick or Samuel Delany as noting a feature of Hume or Kant.

But all of this points to what is one of the most salient aspects of Harman’s philosophical writing as a whole, which is that he sees his project as an ongoing conversation with his readers and with other philosophers. The title of his excellent book on Quentin Meillassoux, Philosophy in the Making, might just as well refer to his own work; philosophy, for Harman, isn’t just great minds articulating correct ideas, but philosophers building a structure together, testing it, revising it, and trusting that they will continue to disagree. So the porousness and apparent brokenness of these structural components of Weird Realism might just be my own misreading of the acute angle that chooses to act obtuse — as if a critic of literature could ever hope for things to be otherwise.

¤

Loving Lovecraft: How an obscure 1920s author became the world’s favourite horror writer


HP Lovecraft created cosmic worlds and riveting fantasy horror, before dying impoverished and obscure at the age of 46. More than 80 years later, his genius has finally been unearthed, along with his racism. As one of his books is adapted into a film starring Nicolas Cage, Ed Power explores his personal experiences as a Lovecraft devotee

Sunday 6 October 2019 08:29

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'A wretched individual whose misery somehow alchemised into fiction of lasting impact, influence and insight': Nicolas Cage in ‘Colour Out of Space’ ( XYZ Films )


Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, is the most appropriate location in the world at which to suffer an onslaught of existential horror. Not that this was any comfort as I arrived there one summer, my more-than-slightly unenthusiastic girlfriend in tow, only to be confronted by rows of headstones bristling into the horizon. We had come for one grave in particular. But how to find it amid this riot of marble and faded lettering?

Our dreaded sunny day at the cemetery gates had already involved a winding drive from central Providence past the Rhode Island School of Design, where the future members of Talking Heads had met in the mid-Seventies (and where Seth MacFarlane created Family Guy).

Now came the true challenge. Swan Point is the final resting place of HP Lovecraft, father of modern horror and among the greatest pulp authors of all time (and also a racist of considerable derangement). The world is about to receive another reminder of his gibbering genius with a Nicolas Cage-starring adaptation of cosmic fright-fest Colour Out of Space, premiering at the London Film Festival on Monday.

As a fan of Lovecraft’s writing (his racism was not yet on my radar), I’d begged that we go out of our way on our holiday to visit Providence. This was our second attempt at honouring Howard Phillips. The first had come unstuck several days previously when we missed our Greyhound stop in the city centre and ended up at staring at the Cyclopean battlements of the Foxwood Casino in Connecticut (cue bonus cosmic terror). But now, finally, we’d made it.

The only problem – and this hadn’t detained us earlier because we were young and flying by our pants – was that Swan Point is vast: more than 200 acres and with some 40,000 individual plots. In America, even the baroque New England graveyards are supersized. Just then a chap wearing a uniform and driving a miniaturised tractor trundled up. He was a dead ringer for Richard Farnsworth in David Lynch’s The Straight Story. I explained that we had come with a particular purpose in mind.

“Lovecraft,” he guessed, and then we were back in the car following him as he zag-zagged through a blur of mausoleums. Not for the first time that afternoon my girlfriend and her pals, who had driven us from Boston, were throwing me funny glances. What exactly were we all doing here?

Lovecraft has been my favourite author since I was a teenager. I’d discovered him first through tabletop role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, named after one of his best-known stories (in turn named after its famous octopus-headed demigod). At Mountains of Madness and Other Stories was the first Lovecraft book I’d purchased, from my local Waterstones with money saved during a summer spent potato picking at a nearby farm.

The connection made more sense than you might imagine. The sensation of kneeling in wet potato tubers, which spatter and spray slime in the manner of an HR Giger alien egg, has stayed with me. It and my memory of At the Mountains of Madness are inextricable linked. The sensory horror of flapping about in decaying tuber is bound up with reading for the first time of the doomed Dyer expedition to Antarctica, and its run-ins with giant penguins and evil sentient pudding.

At the risk of me sounding like a Nirvana fan who insisted they never did better than Bleach, it’s fair to say that the Lovecraft industry was in its formative stages when I discovered him. Even when I visited Providence and finally came upon his grave – it was surprisingly small and overshadowed by a nearby tree into which HPL fans had etched Cthulhu-themed graffiti – his reputation was still ascending. The stars were not yet quite right. 

Giant penguins and evil sentient pudding: a portrait of Lovecraft (The HP Lovecraft Estate)

Today, by contrast, Lovecraft is mega-box office. Downstairs at the Forbidden Planet flagship store in London there is a dedicated Lovecraft section. It offers not just anthology after anthology of his work but literary tributes by other writers, card games, novelty children’s books and, of course, the ubiquitous plush Cthulhu teddy bear. No other genre writer receives such VIP treatment – not Tolkien, Rowling or George RR Martin.

Lovecraft fans are, moreover, legion. One of my weirdest ever journalistic experiences was interviewing Irish actor Jack Reynor, then best known for playing a vapid hunk in Transformers: Age of Extinction.

He copped my Miskatonic University T-shirt – the name of Lovecraft’s fictional university – and gushed about his fondness for the author and how he’d always wanted to bring HPL to the screen. A few heads turned when the jock-ish Reynor fetched up in Ari Aster’s pagan horror Midsommar recently but not mine. This guy had been with the programme quite a while.

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro is another member of our little funny handshake coven. He sweated blood attempting to make a $150m adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness. Tom Cruise – who, as his Oprah couch-bouncing confirmed, knows all about conjuring terrifying forces beyond our understanding – was even attached at one point. Alas, the project fell apart as the thematically similar Prometheus quasi-flopped.

But at least Del Toro’s Cthulhu credentials were beyond questioning. The amphibious romantic lead of his gong-garnering The Shape of Water (2017) was essentially a derivation of Lovecraft’s water-dwelling race of Deep Ones. And when invited to direct a Simpsons title sequence, he made sure Cthulhu – all eight eyes present and correct – featured.

Guillermo del Toro creates couch gag for The Simpsons

Nicolas Cage has now joined the club and, really, it is no surprise. He has teamed up with Richard Stanley, who made the fantastic Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992) and then was famously fired from 1996 Marlon Brando dumpster fire The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Together they have updated Lovecraft’s 1927 story The Colour Out of Space for the 21st century. As in the original text, the setting is a remote farm where a mysterious asteroid has crash-landed. The borders of reality warp. Soon locals are behaving peculiarly. And then things get nasty. Once again, I’m reminded of my summer picking potatoes.

If the premise sounds familiar it is because it has been plundered on multiple occasions. Every Cold War American sci-fi film in which an isolated community is overrun by extra terrestrials bears a little of its DNA. And the recent Netflix/Alex Garland adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is essentially a big-budget homage to the Lovecraft yarn.

“It’s the story that inspired half the sci-fi movies of the 1950s,” Stanley said at a recent Q&A. “The Thing from Another World, The Blob...”

Yet the cult of Lovecraft has also brought attention to the author’s less savoury qualities. Raised in genteel poverty in Providence, he was an unabashed Anglophile who perceived himself as a British gentleman living in the wrong time and place. Unfortunately, he was under the impression that part of a British gentleman’s make-up was to be a bug-eyed xenophobe.

“A maze of hybrid squalor” is how he describes an ethnic neighbourhood of New York in his 1925 chiller The Horror at Red Hook. He writes of “Asian dregs” and the “swart, insolent” crew of a tramp steamer.

These descriptions are largely incidental. One could enjoy Red Hook with the racism expunged. Yet Lovecraft’s obsession with racial purity and the danger of tainting the blood lines is front and centre of some of his most important stories. Consider, my favourite, The Shadow over Innsmouth from 1931. It tells of an obscure New England fishing village where the locals have, through decades of miscegenation with Deep One fish-men from the South Seas, horrifically diluted their humanity.
Cosmic fright-fest: Joely Richardson and Nicolas Cage in ‘Colour Out of Space’ (XYZ Films)

Lovecraft’s evocation of a decaying fishing town is so acutely drawn you can almost smell the brine and the sea breeze. It’s a riveting read, too: the tension as the narrator clops around, gradually realising he has placed himself in terrible danger, tightens like razor wire around your neck.

Alas, the ultimate message that “superior” races must forbear from mingling with their lessers is the stuff of white supremacist fever dreams. I still love The Shadow over Innsmouth. But I’m not sure I would recommend it today.

A backlash was inevitable. The point of fracture was the World Fantasy Awards, a sort of Oscars for fantastical writing. Until 2016, the awards took the form of a bust bearing Lovecraft’s likeness. For authors of a minority background, having a HPL effigy on the shelf was understandably problematic.

“A statuette of this racist man’s head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honours as a writer,” said Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor, the first black person to win the WFA for best novel. The trophy has since been redesigned: recipients of the prize no longer have to stare into the vacant visage of an author who approved of Hitler.

“The racism is a BIG problem with HPL as a person and it does pervade some of the stories,” says Julian Simpson, the writer, director and dramatist who adapted Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as an acclaimed BBC podcast last year (a follow-up retelling of Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness debuts in December).


“Sometimes it’s overt, sometimes you feel like it’s in the subtext. I didn’t worry about it with Charles Dexter Ward because it’s not really present in the story anyway and because our adaptation is sufficiently loose to be able to avoid anything that might have been a problem.”
He feared nearly everything. I read an account of him nearly fainting from the site of a fish on a platePaul Carrick

“His racism is an uncomfortable fact about him which can’t be denied and mustn’t be ignored,” adds fantasy and sci-fi writer James Lovegrove, who has made his own contribution to Lovecraftian lore by pitting Sherlock Holmes against the “mythos” in his fantastic Cthulhu Casebooks novels.

“He was a product of his times, yes, but even by those standards his views were pretty extreme. Even if we can separate the work from the man, it’s still there in the numerous references in his writings to ‘subhuman’ and ‘inferior’ races who are more susceptible than the ‘purer’ races to the gods’ evil influence. I attempted to tackle this in the second of my Cthulhu Casebooks trilogy, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities, by having an overtly racist character get his comeuppance.


“But it’s a nettle I was extremely unwilling to grasp. We just have to accept, I feel, that Lovecraft himself was a pretty wretched individual whose misery and misanthropy somehow alchemised into fiction of lasting impact, influence and insight.”

Artist Paul Carrick, whose Lovecraftian illustrations have drawn considerable acclaim, agrees. “I cannot argue that Lovecraft did not have some racist feelings. Would I prefer it that he didn’t feel what he felt? Absolutely. Might we not have the stories as we know them if he was a model citizen of today’s standards? I bet we wouldn’t. His uncomfortable feelings were the sand in the oyster which created some incredible pearls.”

Lovecraft, as Carrick points out, wasn’t just a racist: he had all sorts of hang-ups. If there’s a phobia, he probably suffered it. “He feared nearly everything. He was afraid of change, and so immigrants were a source of change. He was afraid of the sea, which explains why so many of his creatures and alien races had aquatic elements within them. I read an account of him nearly fainting from the site of a fish on a plate.
“He more or less lived in a bubble for the first 20 or so years, and unfortunately many people born in the 1800s had racist views. I think we all like to imagine that if we were in his shoes we would act as if it were the present day, but I tend to regard this as wishful thinking.

“Fortunately, we can say that, as he got older, he started to experience more of the world and loosen his views about other races and cultures. He married a Jewish woman and also gained friends outside of his culture, both of which I would imagine was unthinkable to a younger Lovecraft.”

The World Fantasy Awards redesign has been almost universally welcomed. Ramsey Campbell, a doyen of British horror who has made his own contributions to the mythos, agrees that the feelings of authors should be respected.

“I was a judge at the first World Fantasy Awards back in 1975,” he says. “Kirby McCauley was my agent, and he was also one of the main organisers of the World Fantasy Convention, and responsible for choosing Lovecraft as the basis of the award. Since then I’ve received several, and eventually the Lifetime Award, which was in fact the last year that used Lovecraft’s image. I was and am proud to have them, not least because my old friend Gahan Wilson designed them with his typical dark humour.

“That said, I can understand why some candidates could feel offended or hurt by being considered for an award named for someone so dismissive of their race, and I wonder how I’d feel if I were one of them. On balance I think an award should give pleasure to the recipients, and so perhaps a neutral image is safer.”

Lovecraft died in 1937 at the age of 46. He was impoverished and utterly obscure. Decades would elapse before his stock would rise. One major catalyst was Sandy Petersen’s 1981 role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, which celebrated the pulpier elements of Lovecraft and cultivated a new generation of fans. Ever since, the cult has grown and grown.

“I like the fact that he’s dealing with something big and unknown and I like the mythos as an example of world-building,” says Julian Simpson. “He’s like dark Tolkien for me: a whole universe of horrors conjured from one person’s pen.”

“Lovecraft’s enduring popularity can seem strange, especially given that he had only modest literary success in his lifetime,” adds James Lovegrove. “Sometimes I think it’s a collective in-joke more than anything. People randomly alighted on a particular author who was fairly obscure and whose prose style was ungainly, to say the least, and decided to collaborate on making him posthumously famous by sharing, developing and expanding on his canon.”

But that’s a needlessly cynical view he feels. “More likely it’s the case that Lovecraft just hit on something, something universal that we all feel – a fear of unknown forces, a sense that in a world where capital-G God has lost much of His meaning and religion is used mostly for social control and fleecing its adherents, the only thing that makes sense is chaos.”

Colour Out of Space screens at the Prince Charles Cinema, Leicester Place, 7 October, 8.30pm. The Whisperer In Darkness podcast comes to BBC in December. Paul Carrick’s Lovecraft illustrations can be perused at nightserpent.com

Terror Incognita: The Paradoxical History of Cosmic Horror, from Lovecraft to Ligotti

By Mike Mariani APRIL 10, 2014

H.P. LOVECRAFT FIRST published “Supernatural Horror in Literature” in 1927, when the 37-year-old writer had recently returned to his birthplace in Providence, RI and was entering the most prolific period of his luckless, beleaguered career, a six year span in which he would write “The Call of Cthulu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and the novellas The Shadow over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness. For someone who died young, at 47, Lovecraft arguably managed to invent an entire literary genre—weird fiction. He left it with an oeuvre of fabulously original and mythopoeic texts, without which the fledgling young cousin to Gothic fiction and secular, nihilistic descendant of supernatural folklore would never have survived its infancy. In the essay, revised several times in his final years, Lovecraft sets forth a lucid and direct doctrine of his driving force and ethos, his fiction’s raison d’être. There is, of course, the opening sentence, quoted and referenced ad nauseam as if it were a tidy summation of not just Lovecraft’s fiction but of the entire history and canon of fear-inducing literature: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” But lost in the pithiness and easy eloquence of that opener is the cogent anthropological polemic that follows, a genealogy of fear, superstition, and metaphysical curiosity.

To appreciate the cosmic mystery that Lovecraft so obsessively tried to convey and conjure to hideous life in his stories, we are invited to consider human knowledge as a flat plane in the middle of black depths of outer space. The plane is thin, fragile, and ever-tilting, like a huge pane of glass. Everything within that plane has been explained and understood: terrestrial biology, classical physics, physiology, large swaths of human history. But as soon as you step near the edges, you face the abysmal immensity of all that is unknown: numberless galaxies, planets, and stars that have existed for billions of years; white dwarfs-cum-black holes dense enough to bend time; an infinite kaleidoscopic expanse, potentially just one of many infinite expanses in a hydra-headed multiverse that perpetually begs the question of its own sentience.

A great deal of Lovecraft’s legacy rests on the Cthulu Mythos, a sprawling mythology centered around the short story “The Call of Cthulu” but also enfolding numerous other works by both Lovecraft and other authors who expanded upon his universe and cosmogony. The story, framed as a manuscript discovered among the effects of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, concerns Thurston’s investigation into the far-flung cults, afflicted dreamers, and synchronous states of psychosis that all seem catalyzed by the telepathic powers of the bat-winged, tentacle-faced anthropoid Cthulu. As Thurston digs deeper, both through the notes of his late great-uncle (thereby creating a frame-epistolary narrative) and his own inquiry into the mysterious circumstances of a derelict ship in the Pacific, he surmises an underground network of hostile, primitive cults around the world that pray to the “great priest Cthulu,” who they believe sleeps in a mausoleum-city under the sea and will someday rise again to enslave the earth. 

But in the short story’s assiduous following, the specifics of plot and character have been stripped away over time in favor of the mythological framework Lovecraft built underneath them. Indeed, “The Call of Cthulu” is one of the major archetypes for weird fiction and horror stories that unfurl their own visions of alien histories and clandestine realities oozing into mankind’s painted veil. What would eventually become the major genre paraphernalia of cosmic horror are all present in “Cthulu”: bizarre, atavistic cults, with members crude and grotesque in appearance, suggesting indifference or outright contempt for anthropocentric concerns; sinister prehistories involving god-like species that existed before mankind, and are often all-powerful and eternal; and most importantly, a protagonist or central character who is traumatized, driven insane, or otherwise blown open by his brush with the cold impiety of outer realms not meant for human purview. 

Lovecraft would expand on this aesthetic with At the Mountains of Madness, his 1931 novella recounting an expedition into the furthest reaches of the Antarctic and the discovery of a colossal ancient city of skyscraping towers, monolithic architecture, and intricate labyrinths, all carved out of the glacial wastes with the easy majesty of a Roman metropolis. At the Mountains of Madness differs from some of Lovecraft’s earlier works in its continuity and steady narrative gaze. In “Cthulu,” Lovecraft relied on fragmentation, fixating first on the hypnotic creations of a young sculptor, then a Louisiana bayou pagan cult, and finally a derelict ship drifting in the Pacific Ocean. The story’s geographical sprawl underscores the exotic otherness of this elusive idol Cthulu, a sinister omniscient entity who pulls in its worshippers not by religious doctrine, proselytization, or even physical force, but through the invasive insistence of its veracity, communicated through dreams and hysterias. Thurston is sucked in by a horrifying global synchronicity that remaps the world in accordance with this insidious supernatural force. In Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft chose the perfect location to plumb the depths of the unknown without ever risking encroachment by the familiar. By conceiving a primeval, baroque metropolis rising out of the forbidding ice-mountains of Antarctica, obliterating man’s grasp on earth’s history and his own anthropocentric sense of it, Lovecraft did not need to deal with the deformed, depraved cult members that had heretofore been his middle men between human society and the horrors that lurched and swelled in the surrounding void. 

Through his fiction and famously flinty atheism, it’s clear that Lovecraft is a writer primarily focused on the horror inherent in philosophical materialism: matter is the only form of existence, and human beings’ minds shrivel in craven idiocy to grasp the sheer scale of that matter as it appears through space and time. Allegorically, Antarctica could easily be a stand-in for a planet in another galaxy, with a history and organic kingdom stretching backs tens of millions of years. The important point is that it shatters what Lovecraft called the “humanocentric pose” to tiny pieces, with protagonists never again able to reenter a society propelled by the underlying assumption of its own importance. 

But well before Lovecraft, there was The King in Yellow. The 1895 short story collection by Robert W. Chambers was recently dredged up from literary obscurity by Niz Pizzolatto for his HBO series True Detective. Unlike much Lovecraftian fiction, The King in Yellow is completely terrestrial, a series of ten stories vaguely connected by the play of the book’s title, a work of such beguiling power and artistic perfection that it drives insane whoever reads it. “The Repairer of Reputations,” the first and by far the best of the stories, begins with a concise summary of the U.S. 25 years in the future (1920): an immaculate, hermetically sealed state, ethnically cleansed by segregationist laws and strict isolationism, with edges sandpapered into smooth docility. The pristine veneer of a society flourishing with complete impunity brings to mind the fin-de-siècle movement that was gaining steam in the 1890’s; Chambers seems to hint at the inevitable decadence and spiritual rot unimpeded civilization brings. That very decadence is embodied in the play, which “could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.” The narrator, Hildred Castaigne, is slowly going mad as the play’s rapturous poetry percolates inside him, and harbors bizarre delusions of grandeur, fancying himself prince of an alternate American empire descended from the exquisite lost cities described in the play. The story ends with an Editor’s Note explaining that the narrator recently died in an insane asylum. 

The horror that creeps out of Chambers’ King in Yellow is inverse to yet also philosophically aligned with Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic fear. Chambers is portraying the madness and psychotic narcissism that comes from a society too indulgent, too aesthetically opulent, and fueling delusions of its own grandiose history. But both authors evoke the mesmerizing, irresistible terror that is the natural response to the undermining of human history. Real or imagined by their respective narrators, the vast, sprawling, rococo cities, sublime in their existence outside of linear time, destroys those characters’ sanity and sense of historical proportions. The “purest poison” of The King in Yellow play is not unlike Lovecraft’s arctic city of stone: the briefest glimpse of the beautiful logic of another world serving as a drawbridge to madness. Whether or not these worlds actually exist in their authors’ fictional universe is not the most important factor; what matters is the horrific impression they leave on a character’s ontological assumptions and consciousness. In this way, the spectrum of sanity and insanity is circular: veer too far in either direction, and you’ve undermined the boundaries you were not supposed to know existed, thereby losing your blissful ignorance and suspension of disbelief forever. 

What’s most intriguing about The King in Yellow is how it seems to be a sort of arcane passageway between weird fiction and postmodern literature. “The Repairer of Reputations” is told from the perspective of an unreliable, neurotic narrator teetering on schizophrenia who is infatuated with an underground history of America. Works like Jorges Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius,” and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 similarly feature fanatical, faux-detective narrators obsessed with shrouded histories that either completely reconfigure the known world or open doors to fantastical alternate spaces. The similarities between The King in Yellow and The Crying of Lot 49, in particular, are striking and indisputable: both feature a mysterious play of shady authorship with bizarre, spellbinding contents; symbols — the Yellow Sign and muted post horn — representing cults and secret societies; and deranged psychotics who seem to hold the only keys to whatever secret kingdom the protagonists desperately seek. 

But is there any deeper connection to these works beyond their fetishization of esoterica? Well, I would argue that The King in Yellow, that inconsistent mishmash of stories that in some cases read like weird tarot incantations or sorcerer’s babble, introduces us to the flip side of cosmic horror. Instead of recoiling in abject fear at the materializing possibility of “hidden and fathomless worlds” completely autonomous from the mundane one we take for granted, characters in these works obsessively pursue the breadcrumbs to these phantom frontiers as if they were the truest form of salvation. Instead of wishing them away, as so many Lovecraftian narrators do so that they may regain their sanity, these characters actually participate in the perpetuation of these chimeras. Francis Thurston’s hell is Hildred Castaigne’s heaven. And so cosmic horror is also cosmic ecstasy. 

The forking paths introduced by The King in Yellow become paradoxical reflections of each other: on one hand, you have Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, which declares the insignificance of humanity and its diminutive powers of comprehension; and on the other, a lineage of fiction (seemingly spurred by the fin de siècle sentiment) so jaded by the smug success of civilization that it invented new realities for its self-absorbed protagonists to pursue simply to cure or alleviate the pervasive ennui they suffered from. What makes this literary bloodline such a sacrilege to Lovecraft, though, is how these alternate worlds—the lost city of Carcosa, the underground mail service W.A.S.T.E., the imagined world Tlön—do not negate or diminish mankind’s intellectual faculties or position in a cosmic scheme, but reinforce them. In fact, they reinforce them to such a point as to suggest that the ceaseless, unchecked power of human consciousness inevitably leads to solipsism, the most extreme permutation of the anthropocentric pose. 

So does the discovery of these exotic underpasses of human and alien history induce terror or rapture? The best way to answer that question is to conclude with one of the finest contemporary cosmic horror writers, Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti’s work, which includes anthologies and short story collections like Teatro Grottesco, The Nighmare Factory, and Grimscribe, has been described as philosophical, Kafkaesque, and nihilistic. And certainly one of his most famous stories, “A Case for Retributive Action,” which centers on a man who starts working for an insidious corporation in a ghastly border town, has the uncanny dream logic, dread, and allegorical overtones reminiscent of Kafka. But other works, like “The Last Feast of Harlequin” (which Ligotti dedicated to Lovecraft), and “In the Shadow of Another World” suggest not malevolent bureaucracies exerting totalitarian control but the narrator’s themselves as complicit agents in their exploration of surreal worlds. 

In “In the Shadow of Another World,” the narrator visits a house imbued with phantasmagoric powers. When the caretaker, a sort of ringmaster to the house’s lurid theatrics, opens the shutters, the windows reveal grotesque dreamscapes brimming with alien fauna, misshapen beasts, and human appendages. The house is a portal to the bubbling anarchy of shadows and nightmares, but unlike a Lovecraft story, there is no logical explanation or historical context for it. It is the stuff of dreams and imagination, alluring to the narrator because of its grisly disorder. Ligotti’s world is one of sensation and impression, like going to a carnival tripping on mushrooms. 

One thing so many of his stories have in common is the implied consent, the tacit willingness the protagonists have to enter these back alleys and decrepit schoolhouses and backwoods Mardi Gras ceremonies that are each gateways to the outer limits of human experience. They are junkies for the sensations that a hidden reality induces. And that seems to appropriately sum up just how far weird fiction and cosmic horror have strayed from the days of Lovecraft’s stuffy, Victorian professors and scholars gasping in never-ending horror as the boundaries of their world melt away. Ligotti’s narrators — part-time students, drifters, and curious nobodies — want to escape the banality and neuroses of the square world and become ravished by the annihilation of material existence. They don’t fear the subversion of human knowledge and existence; they long for it. And that implied consent extends to the reader, who wants her imagination to be spirited away from the manacles of what is known to a more grandiose vision that consummates dreams, intuitions, and memories.

The truth is that complicity has been there all along. Even Lovecraft’s heroes are drawn to dangerous territories and rabbit-hole texts because they know, deep down, that what scholar Douglas Cowen calls the “sacred order” of everything we assume to be true is a farce, a myth masquerading as fact. Despite the inevitable outcome that Lovecraft illustrated time and again — when we go digging around we’re likely to have our anthropocentric fables crumbled to dust — these characters always do it, and we as readers always want them to do it. For them and us, the cosmic ecstasy was always hidden in the horror. The imagination, weaned on a materialistic civilization and thoroughly disillusioned with it, yearns for that sublime unknown. 

¤

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The Mainstreaming of Cthulhu: How a Fringe Horror Creation Became Popular

Auroch Digital Feb 15, 2018 ·

In the summer of 1926, a then little-known writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, was writing what would become his most well-known work, The Call of Cthulhu. This story would be published in Weird Tales in 1928 and would go on to have an immense cultural impact — one that is still growing today.

It would inspire countless short stories, novels, video games, films, songs, and more, all created by writers and artists taking the core Cthulhu themes, and putting their own twist into the canon of Mythos. The various iterations and spins on Cthulhu have resulted in everything from deeply disturbing renditions of the Great Old One as a dark, alien destroyer, to being rendered as a cute plushie toy! Perhaps plushie-hood was inevitable once Cthulhu and its ilk became a meme replicated millions of times in many languages.

Lovecraft himself would never know the success and cultural impact this or any of his other works would have. When he died in 1937 he would only know that his works had reached a limited audience, never having made enough from his works to make a living as a writer.

Yet over 90 years since he set out the plot of The Call of Cthulhu, the idea, themes, and the eponymous creature has finally reached the mainstream. The majority of us have heard of “The Call of Cthulhu” in one form or another.

I speak as a convert to this call. When I was young I discovered the Mythos and have been reading, writing, and creating works ‘inspired by’ it ever since! Right now I’m one of the team working on an adaptation of the hit roleplaying game Achtung! Cthulhu.

Cthulhu by Dim Martin

Cthul-what? What Are the Cthulhu Mythos?

For those unfamiliar with the Cthulhu Mythos, the titular Cthulhu is a titanic alien being who slumbers in the inhuman sunken city of R’lyeh which lies in the South Pacific. Once, many aeons ago, Cthulhu and other beings like him ruled the earth. Such is Cthulhu’s power, that even asleep he is able to influence the dreams of humans and has created a fragmented but global cult of worshippers who consider him a god. Both deity and disciples await the time he’ll wake, breakout of his watery prison, and retake his rightful place as the planet’s ruler.

If upon reading this article, you’re somewhat struggling to pronounce “Cthulhu”, then you’re not alone, and that was kind of Lovecraft’s point with the name — it’s meant to sound inhuman, and we struggle to pronounce it using our puny human voice boxes.

Lovecraft wrote a bunch of stories set within the same universe as Cthulhu, using common themes, characters, and objects, such as the fictional book ‘The Necronomicon’ which documents much of this terrible “reality”. Other authors joined in with this world building, adding dark gods, strange races of creatures, myth cycles, lost artifacts, more forbidden tomes, and so on until together they’d created a vast and rich narrative universe which has become known as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. Since Lovecraft’s death in 1937 other authors have taken up the mantle and the Mythos has expanded in many new directions.

The only known drawing of Great Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft’s Writing Super Group

One of the interesting things has been how a circle of writers all borrowed each other’s names, places, and beings for their own work, creating in effect an “open source universe” in the Mythos. They delighted in referencing each other’s works, interweaving their stories into the Mythos tapestry. From their many letters to each other it seems this was as more an act of creative fun than a conscious effort of create a mythic narrative setting.

Yet the myth-maker’s work includes some highly accomplished writers. Robert E. Howard — who would become famous for creating Conan the Barbarian — penned a number of Mythos stories. For example “Worms of the Earth”, set during the Roman occupation of Britain, references the sunken city of R’lyeh. In return Lovecraft referenced a fictional forbidden tome Howard had created, Unaussprechlichen Kulten (also known as Nameless Cults) in his work. A young Robert Bloch — who would go on to write the famous novel Psycho that Alfred Hitchcock would adapt into one of the most influential horror films of all time — even appears as the character Robert Blake in Lovecraft’s short story The Haunter of the Dark. Lovecraft gleefully kills off the Bloch character, repaying some fun that Bloch had by adding a Lovecraft proxy to his tale The Shambler from the Stars.

They also referenced older works by authors they admired, such as Ambrose Bierce who created another fictional city — Carcosa — in 1886. Robert W. Chambers then reworked it into his 1895 highly influential collection of short stories, The King in Yellow, which Lovecraft and others then re-reference. Such examples are but a snapshot of how the Mythos is weaved into the works of a range of authors creating a mythic space that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I could go on, but if you want to explore Lovecraft and the work of his peers more, I strongly recommend subscribing to HPPodcraft, as they have some fascinating insight that goes into even further depth than I have here.!

H.P. Lovecraft

The Dreams of Cthulhu in Popular Culture

Wikipedia has a huge list of works inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos. In this article I’ll pick a few items to show the range of inspiration;
South Park — Has Justin Bieber destroyed by Cthulhu in one its most popular episodes.
Bloodborne — The critically acclaimed video game references the Mythos from its architecture, to the creatures within that architecture, to its narrative.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy — A trilogy that explores the idea of a global conspiracy. The trilogy references the Mythos many, many times and even has Lovecraft in it as a character.
True Detective — The HBO show’s first series is interwoven with references to the Mythos, most notably “The King in Yellow”.
Supernatural — The long running TV show explores the themes of the Mythos and also adds Lovecraft as a character within the show.
Hearthstone — Mythos fans will instantly recognise many of the references in the Whispers Of The Old Gods update.
The Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game — The critically acclaimed RPG is set within the Mythos worlds and has itself both popularised and expanded on the setting. Many fans discovered Lovecraft via the game, myself included.

The Attitudes of 1920s Towards the 2020s

It would be wrong to write of the Mythos and not to note its problematic side. As many of the seminal works were written in the early half of the 20th century it is sadly not surprising to find that many of its attitudes towards race, gender, and sexuality that we now find uncomfortable (to say the least!) are replete across much of the Mythos works. The debate on how to frame this today still rages.

What I find interesting is how those voices that were marginalised or derided back in the 1920s are now rising to the fore to reclaim and reinterpret the Mythos as it evolves ever-onwards. For example, in the excellent The Ballad of Black Tom, African-American author Victor LaValle gives a retort to the thinly-veiled racism in Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook. In the brilliant The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, author Kit Johnson re-works Lovecraft’s Unknown Cadith through the eyes of a female protagonist. In the recent meditation on Lovecraft’s work by the acclaimed comic book creator Alan Moore, Providence, he knowingly cast the central character as a gay man living in 1920s New York, which is both a reflection and a rejection of Lovecraft’s view on sexuality.

Why So Cthulhu?

So from a handful of pulp writers toiling away (mainly) in the 1920s and 30s on fringe publications, and often for little or no reward, to almost a hundred years later and a globally recognised cultural theme that undergoes constant reinvention, recombination, and recalibration, we have the Cthulhu Mythos today. Try a search on Twitter for Cthulhu for an example of how relevant the work still is today.

Why have the Cthulhu Mythos become such a huge cultural phenomena? My feeling as both a fan and a creator of Mythos materials is that it comes down to two main reasons;
The “open source” nature of the original Mythos means it was born within the concept of others adding their own take to it. This also mean that it comes with a sort of “mashup-malleability” — it can be eternally remixed.
The core theme of the Mythos, that humanity is but a minor footnote in the history of Earth, speaks to us as part of our own fear and fascination with death and the concept of “the apocalypse”.

Mythos Mashups

One of the reasons that the Mythos has been so prevalent and enduring is how well it can be mixed up with other narratives to create new spins on a story. There is a huge amount of new creations from this “mashup” approach — too many to mention them all — but as they are a key part of Cthulhu appeal, it is worth exploring a few key ones here.

For example in Achtung! Cthulhu the setting has the occult-obsessed Nazis finding the remnants of the Mythos buried under the earth and setting about plundering them to merge with their inhuman science programs to create terrifying new weapons with which to win World War II. Like all good mashups this takes a kernel of reality and drops the “what if” question into it. It is well documented how obsessed the Nazis were with occult knowledge and ancient sitesm so this mashup asks “what if the occult was real? What if that occult was the Mythos?” and suddenly we’ve got the terrifying prospect that, in this fictional universe, all the resources the Nazis were pouring into esoteric research would pay dividends, but also that they are no longer the most terrifying being within the war — they are making pacts with beings older than humanity and who seek humanity’s total doom. The desperate struggle of WWII now takes on an extra terrifying dimension as the Allies seek to uncover the true nature of the Nazis plans and attempt to stop them. What follows is a secret war within a war — battling to destroy a secret Antarctic bunker or recover a forbidden tome from a hidden library in occupied Europe. Having been working within this mashup for a while, the connections are both fascinating and scary — the perfect ingredients for a roleplaying game setting! It’s also cool that if you have to take on the creatures of the Mythos, you’d rather have some serious military grade firepower to do that with!

Artwork from Achtung! Cthulhu — Modiphius Entertainment

It’s worth noting a few other mashups too, as this is such a rich seam;
What if the great Sherlock Holmes had to investigate the Mythos? That’s the premise of the collection of stories Shadows Over Baker Street, one of which (by Neil Gaiman), became a board game — A Study in Emerald.
What if the cold war powers discovered the secret buried Great Old Ones and tried to enlist them? Read the excellent A Colder War by Charles Stross for an exploration of this idea.
From Tintin: A Cthulhu crossover right up to Cowboys, Romans, Dark Ages, Cyberpunk, and more, creators are wildly experimenting with the Mythos, and to often great effect.

We are but a Mote in Cthulhu’s Eye

Political philosopher John Gray’s book Straw Dogs makes the point that we humans have not really fully come to terms with what Darwin’s Theory of Evolution tells us — that just as we as individuals are born to die, so too our species is born to die. Our own mortality is guaranteed, but so is that of our species, for what the fossil records show us is that the way things are is that species evolve from their ancestors, then die, perhaps leaving a descended species to take their place. Us humans, for all our clever tools and tech, are not that special — we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs too. The only questions are “how” and “when”.

We are, undeniably fascinated with the apocalypse. As Quentin Cooper remarked;

“It is not easy to get our heads round the Earth having existed for billions of years, probably existing for millions if not billions more, and our own life in comparison — however long and fruitful — being an almost infinitesimally insignificant instant in the middle of it all. So fleeting and so far from either end of the story that many of us behave like individual black holes, mentally warping time to write ourselves into the grand finale.”

Thus he argues our fascination with the end times is about us trying to make sense of the enormity of it all and our tiny place within it.

The Cthulhu Mythos is this idea times ten! Not only will we and the world end, but the very forces that will do it are right now plotting it, and some people are even helping them! We could try to stop them, but that is little more than treading water before the waves drown us.

Yet what else can we do? There is no redeemer to save us, we are just motes in the eyes of titanic alien beings whose only interests in us are as fleeting as ours in a bothersome fly we are considering swatting. It’s a scary, yet beguiling thought, rendering humans as moths to Cthulhu’s flame. As Lovecraft himself wrote;

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

WRITTEN BY
Auroch Digital
Games consultancy & developer based in Bristol, UK. Wishlist our latest game Dark Future: Blood Red States 💥 http://bit.ly/wishlistDF