Lovecraft with Water Wings
Most people think of H.P. Lovecraft as a "weird fiction" horror hack. Neil Gaimen described his prose as "clotty with adjectival froth." More people have probably seen a "Chthulhu for President" bumper sticker than have read any of his actual stories. Much of what you even think of as Lovecraft isn't the Old Man's work -- the Mythos is a composite of hundreds of authors, filmmakers, and game designers over three-quarters of a century, none of them working from anything more than a loose playbook of continuity. Eldritch Errors is an apostrophy now in that long legacy of collective creativity.
Explaining why Lovecraft -- the author, the storyteller, the social critic -- became such a central part of the way I was thinking about the story I wanted to tell is difficult. The issues of computer security and my feelings about the "politics of the day" lead me to think alot about hopelessness and what to do if you feel insignificant in the face of huge forces. That summoned up Lovecraft metaphors from some deep part of my brain, not because I was fascinated with monsters or cults, but because I was fascinated with the way Lovecraft channeled his feelings about that topic into an artistic legacy that continues to be frighteningly modern.
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to try to start trying to explain that. My attempts will likely be messy, perhaps even clotty with adjectival froth, and probably not of much interest to more serious Lovecraft scholars. There's something deep and fascinating in Lovecraft himself that his work is but one wrinkle of, and I'm going to focus much more on Lovecraft the scientific critic, and Lovecraft the correspondant in the age of letter writing, and Lovecraft the Open Sourcer, and Lovecraft the ARG developer.
If you're an Eldritch participant, though, and are trying to figure out if you even want to dive into Lovecraft, you deserve some water wings. Here's my personal suggestions.
Start by jumping into the deep end of the pool with some of his fiction. If I had to recommend one story that might be easiest to fall in love with, it might be "Pickman's Model" (1926). If I had to pick one that felt the most "ARGish," it might be the turns and twists of "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), considered part of the "canon". Lovecraft himself, late in life, claimed that he was only satisified with one of his stories -- "The Colour Out of Space" (1927) -- so that one always seems worth studying as well. Conversely, if you're looking to "fill in the holes" of what you already know from Eldritch Errors, there's a slightly different set of works we find ourselves talking about alot: "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", "The Lurker at the Threshold", "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath", and "The Hound".
Lovecraft really comes alive, though, once you starting wading into the non-fiction. "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life" by S.T. Joshi is amazing, and Michel Houellebecq's "H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" is provocative (as is the forward to that book by Stephen King), but they are just the tip of the iceberg of his letters and essays. I'd highly recommend "Lord of Visible World: Autobiography in Letters" (again by S.T. Joshi) before jumping into the volumes and volumes of his letters, estimated by Joshi to be only about a fifth of what he wrote (and yet still over 20,000 letters survive for scholars to pick through.) There is the more rambling and protean version of what later emerges in his fiction.
That pool goes pretty deep, and the more I read of his non-fiction the more complex my picture of Lovecraft -- and his artistic legacy -- becomes. Currently I'm enjoying "H.P. Lovecraft Collected Essays Volume 3: Science" -- a combination of his scathing letters to the editors of various publications correcting their science, his amateur astronomy columns from his local newspaper, and some famous "flame wars" he had with astrologists (frequently conducted via pseudonym allusions in the "letters to the editor" of famous publications.) At least Joshi is my guide on that journey, with tidbits like, "it was his discovery of astronomy in the winter of 1902-03 that gave perhaps the greatest impetus to both his literary aspirations and his philosophical outlook; for it imbued in him that sense of the 'cosmic' which would ultimately find potent expression in his weird tales."
In 1906, he wrote a letter to the editors of Scientific American, demanding to know why "no vigorous efforts are being made to discover planets beyond the orbit of Neptune" especially since he had personally "noticed that a great many comets cluster around a point 50 astronomical units out." He suggested that if "all the observatories that possess celestial camera should band together" they might find another planet. In 1908, two years after that letter, H.P. Lovecraft dropped out of high school from a nervous breakdown. In 1930, 24 years after that letter, the exact method he described as a high school student in his pithy letter to the editor led to the discovery of Pluto. That same year, Pluto played a key role in his story, "The Whisperer in the Darkness."
The Old Man of Providence was an unusual bird even when he was the Young Boy of Providence. I just know he'd be writing scathing letters again to Scientific American about Pluto being downgraded from a planet if he were living today.
I read my first H.P. Lovecraft story just the other day, At the Mountains of Madness. I enjoyed it and didn't mind his extremely detailed explanations of everything. It made me want to get out a sketch book and draw some of the creatures and landscapes he described. I was, however, confused as to why anyone would ever describe a penguin as "grotesque". I'd understand, maybe, if he were only referring to the giant blind albino penguins near the end of the story, but he also describes the regular penguins this way.
His work frequently makes me blink like that. Another one that always comes to mind to me is, "Some say it lies in upstate New York or Asia ..." :)
Yay! ^.^ When all this got started I pretty much dove head-first into Lovecraft without much guidance (other than I have some friends who were really into him back in the day; when I was busy reading Tolkien). I just went out and bought one of the first anthologies I could find at the nearby bookstore. Some of what I read I liked (Pickman's Model, The Music of Erich Zann), some of it is a little too... Ethan Frome for me (that slightly wordy New Englandy style of writing has never really grabbed me). It’s been a very hit and miss experience for me thus far, so the guide will be very useful going forward (also helps me to understand some of where his voice comes from)… For some reason, tho, every time I sit down and try to read "The Call of Cthulhu" something comes along to distract me. =P Perhaps this weekend…
Yeah, been reading lots of Lovecraft lately. Totally into it right now... going to try to convince my English teacher to let me do LC for my term paper (it has to be on an author, don't know the parameters yet). I just finished Under the Pyramids because I'm running a RolePlay that is heavily based on Lovecraft and it involves pyramids. I also really liked Colour out of Space and I'm in the middle of Whisperer.
SO AWESOME.