To take a very different example, the horror in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which the movie version cannot keep from looking cartoonish, strikes deep for the sensitive reader since a great length of the noose rope has been strung upon the gallows of an excruciatingly rendered family tragedy surrounding the gratuitous death of a beloved child. If not for the subtext of too-real tragedy, the text of dripping zombies could never convince.
And I am suggesting that one big reason Lovecraft’s fiction is so hypnotically effective for many of us is that we see ourselves reflected in the mirror it holds before us. When we discover HPL we are likely to be adolescent bookish types, unathletic or at least uninterested in the hormone-driven lemming-existence of our peers. Thus we identify with the scholarly misanthropes populating Lovecraft’s stories. We love books, and by the time we have discovered our favorite recondite authors, most of their works are probably out of print, so we, like the doomed bibliophiles in Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” and Howard’s “The Thing on the Roof,” learn what it is to covet unobtainable volumes and to go to what seem to us (and even more to others who do not share our love of books) to be fantastic, fanatical lengths to possess our treasures. Securing a copy of The Outsider and Others would scarcely be less of an event than stumbling upon a copy of John Dee’s Necronomicon.
Some notice with an element of unease that fandoms tend to take on the overtones of a religious commitment. To those fans, the more mundane issue the challenge to “Get a life!” Ah, but you see, Montressor, we have a life! It’s more a question of where. As Debbie Harry sang in her song “The Real World,” “I’m livin’ in a magazine [Weird Tales, in our case]… I’m not livin’ in the real world… no more, no more, no more.” Or if you prefer REM, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” There is no objective “real world.” All lives are essentially scripted fictions running their course in the context of some fictive narrative universe or other. Everyone is a “creative anachronist,” but we Lovecraftians, like our cousins in other Buddha-fields of fandom, have elected to live a minority, sectarian existence in what sociologists Berger and Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality) call a “finite province of meaning.” We are willing to bear the reproach of the walking dead around us, the same who persecute poor Dilbert. We are proud of HPL for not being able to hold down a worldly job, even if we ourselves are able.
Lovecraft has become our Christ, our God. In a dream an angel appeared to the erudite Saint Jerome to rebuke him for his love of the Classics: “Thou are not a follower of Christ, but of Cicero.” Guilty as charged!
Some despise fandom-as-[a substitute for]-religion because they assume, as Paul Tillich did, that a religion must center about, and must symbolize, one’s ultimate concerns, and that these concerns must be appropriately ultimate in their scope, dealing with issues of timely relevance and eternal significance. But this is a sad and Puritanical definition of religiosity. It gets the focus wrong and neglects the role of imagination in religion, i.e. in myth. I think religious sensitivity is essentially an aesthetic stimulation of the imagination contributing to an aesthetic apprehension of life and the world through whatever filters we may choose to view it, whether that, e.g., of the great salvation-epic of the Bible, or that of the cosmic history of Lovecraft. It is such living fantasies as these which valorize an otherwise dull and utilitarian life. Moral convictions which, admittedly, everyone needs, are a different matter, and it is a dangerous confusion to make them dependent on, a function of, religious convictions. If you make that confusion, morality will always be subject to dogmatic decree, and holy wars, heresy hunts will sooner or later come to pass. So we Lovecraftians, we acolytes of Cthulhu, do not pretend to derive our varied moral stances from Lovecraft (except insofar as we read his essays and letters where he treats of such matters and happen to find him convincing). And we don’t think others should necessarily derive their moral compasses from their religions either. What a better world it would be if we could come together and derive our moral scruples from a common-sense, this-worldly set of considerations and agree to disagree on what choice will nourish our imaginations, generate the symbolic universes we will breathe the air of day by day.
But the Lovecraft cult, I fear, is on a more infantile level than the Baker Street Irregulars and the cult of Sherlock Holmes.
Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous”
…the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1926
Adolescence is a time when intelligent people have begun to attain enough independence from family-circle influences to place all inherited beliefs under severe scrutiny. If you are going to become a rationalist, a skeptic, an agnostic, adolescence is the prime time to do it. It is a rebellion mechanism. It is a way of standing up on your own, for yourself. That doesn’t mean you are not correct in throwing out childhood catechism. You have also come into possession of critical reasoning skills for the first time. If there is something rotten in Dogma Denmark, you have the keen nose to smell it. And all this, too, primes one for HPL. One catches sight of Lovecraft’s scientific, rationalist, cosmicist worldview, where the myth of human self-importance is overthrown by realization of the yawning eternity of (as William Jennings Bryan summed it up) universal dust.
Thus cut off from the common run of conservative sitcom watching parents and prom-attending contemporaries, the young Lovecraft reader clutches his secret lore gleefully to himself, contemptuous of the surrounding herd, even as Lovecraft himself was, and for the same reasons. Such a reader will see himself reflected just as truly in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s novel The New Adam.
The trouble with Edmund Wilson, which led him to those blasphemous words about our God of fiction that we can never forgive, any more than Vietnam veterans can ever forgive Jane Fonda, is that he was getting frostbite and enjoying it. Unlike the Transactional Analysis theorists who urge us to keep the child inside us alive and well, Wilson belonged to a cigar-chomping, scotch-sipping generation addicted to the stale smoke and the bitter reek of “realism,” of boring adulthood, and who thought literature should reflect that outlook, the pages of “good books” merely wallpaper sheets for the prison cell of adulthood. We come on the scene with a childlike second sight which enables us to see the roaring glories of the Zen initiate. Growing up applies cloudy cataracts to the soul, and we can see the magic no longer, though fans have found a way. We use Lovecraft’s fiction (and other fan-idols) like the jaded Randolph Carter used the Silver Key, to return to that brilliant world of dream, which is meaning. And Lovecraft, like Proust, freely admitted it was a regression to childhood. But why put it so nastily? Why not choose another metaphor, say, turning about and becoming as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, since only their like will gain it.