There were certainly “better” writers of science fiction and fantasy of roughly the same era — like Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and Olaf Stapledon — whose work may be influential, but is now mostly ignored by the general public. Lovecraft’s survival, current popularity, and the subgenre of “Lovecraftian fiction” is due in great part to his willingness to share his creations. His concepts were interesting, attracted other writers, and ultimately other artists.
Lovecraft’s universe was fluid: the “Great Old Ones” and other elements merely serving his theme of the irrelevance of humanity to the cosmic horrors that exist in the universe. As S. T. Joshi wrote: “Lovecraft’s imaginary cosmogony was never a static system but rather a sort of aesthetic construct that remained ever adaptable to its creator’s developing personality and altering interests . . . there was never a rigid system that might be posthumously appropriated . . . the essence of the mythos lies not in a pantheon of imaginary deities nor in a cobwebby collection of forgotten tomes, but rather in a certain convincing cosmic attitude.”
Lovecraft never used the term “Cthulhu Mythos” himself. (He was known to refer to his “mythos” as the Arkham Cycle — named for the main fictional town in his world — or, flippantly, as Yog-Sothothery — after Yog-Sothoth, a cosmic entity of his invention made only of “congeries of iridescent globes.”) The term “Cthulhu Mythos” was probably invented by August Derleth or Clark Ashton Smith after Lovecraft’s death. They and others also added their own flourishes and inventions to the mythology, sometimes muddling things with non-Lovecraftian concepts and attempts at categorization.
Derleth misused Lovecraft’s name to promote his own work, and tried to change Lovecraft’s universe into one that included hope and a struggle between good and evil. This accommodated Derleth’s Christian worldview, but was at odds with Lovecraft’s depiction of a bleak, amoral universe. However, to his credit, Derleth — with Donald Wandrei — also founded Arkham House expressly to publish Lovecraft’s work and to bring it to the attention of the public. Without it, Lovecraft may never have had a legacy.
Authors like Robert Bloch (now best known as the author of Psycho), Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), and younger writers such as Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and Ramsey Campbell all romped within the Lovecraftian milieu and added elements to it. Later writers with no direct connection to Lovecraft joined in as well.
LOVECRAFTIAN WHAT?
Lovecraft’s best works were atmospheric tales that, to quote Stefan Dziemianowicz, “strove to express a horror rooted in humanity’s limited understanding of the universe and humankind’s arrogant overconfidence in its significance in the cosmic scheme.” Lovecraft felt such stories conveyed “the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.”
S.T. Joshi identifies four broad components of the Lovecraft Mythos:
• A fictional New England topography. (This eventually became a richly complex, historically grounded — if fictional — region.)
• A growing library of “forbidden” books and manuscripts. (Rare tomes or texts holding secrets too dangerous to know.)
• A diverse array of extraterrestrial “gods” or entities. (Often symbols of the “unknowability or an infinite cosmos, or sometimes the inexorable forces of chaos and entropy.”)
• A sense of cosmicism. (The universe is indifferent, chaotic, and humans are utterly meaningless nonentities within it.)
A fifth element — a scholarly protagonist or narrator — is not unique to Lovecraft, but is another identifiable motif.
Although Lovecraft occasionally attempted to emulate writers of supernatural fiction, his truly influential work differed fundamentally from such earlier fiction.
In his introduction to At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition, China Miéville points out: “Traditionally genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo — one which the protagonist scrambles to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft’s horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in us acknowledging the fact.”
“Lovecraft’s stories were noticeably devoid of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other traditional supernatural monsters appearing in the work of his pulp contemporaries,” noted Stefan Dziemianowicz in a Publishers Weekly article. “Though written in a somewhat mannered gothic style and prose empurpled with words like ‘eldritch’ and ‘squamous,’ his atmospheric tales strove to express a horror rooted in humanity’s limited understanding of the universe and humankind’s arrogant overconfidence in its significance in the cosmic scheme.”
WHEN: MERELY AM AN OF HIS TIMES?
We also must acknowledge how H. P. Lovecraft’s personal beliefs tie in to his work. Lovecraft — as evidenced in his fiction, poetry, essays, and letters — was racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. He may not have hated women (misogyny), but he does seem to have feared them (gynophobia). His abhorrence of sexuality and physicality went beyond the Puritanical.
The author’s prejudices have often been brushed aside as “typical” for a man of his era. Yes, Lovecraft lived an age when racism was more overt and racial segregation was the law, but Lovecraft’s prejudice seems, at the very least, somewhat more pronounced than many of his contemporaries.
To again quote Miéville (from published correspondence):
[The]depth and viciousness of Lovecraft’s racism is known to me . . . It goes further, in my opinion, than “merely” being a racist — I follow Michel Houellebecq (in this and in no other arena!) [Note: Houellebecq is the author of H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, 2005]in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a “poetic trance.” He was a bilious anti-Semite (though one who married a Jew, because, if you please, he granted that she was “assimilated”), and if you read stories like “The Horror at Red Hook,” the bile you will see towards people of color, of all kinds (with particular sneering contempt for African-Americans unless they were suitably Polite and therefore were patricianly granted the soubriquet “Negro”) and the mixed communities of New York and, above all . . . “miscegenation” are extended and toxic.
Bigotry is part of Lovecraft’s fiction. Miscegenation, racial impurity, ethnic xenophobia, “mental, moral and physical degeneration” due to inbreeding, interbreeding with non-human creatures — spawn of degenerate women who consorted with the abhorrent — these were all integral to the fiction Lovecraft produced. Yes, we must consider the context: Lovecraft lived during what was probably the nadir of race relations and height of white supremacy in the US. But whether these were prevalent views of his day is beside the point: H. P. Lovecraft chose to make them horrors to be feared in his fiction, to alarm and distress the primarily male, supposedly “superior” possessors of light-skinned Nordic genes. One must assume Lovecraft never considered anyone else as a potential reader.