“…he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.”
The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft
We’re going to begin April/Halfoween with a creeping whisper rather than a bang.
There are authors who’ve created such a mesmerizing world that it grabs hold of our collective conscious and won’t let go. We have J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne, who wrote what we’d now call ‘cozy’ fantasies, and then we have H.P. Lovecraft, who produced from his tortured imagination a mythos of ancient, dreadful cosmic gods that contemporary and later authors felt compelled to add on to long before that became a ‘thing’.
The “Great Old Ones” are gods from space who’ve existed since Earth began, having the ability to travel between planets, and once ruled ours. Since then, they’ve fallen into in a deathlike sleep, but they’re not truly dead, and have the ability to influence our minds and dreams. They’re said to know everything happening in the universe.
They exist outside of normal space-time, and live inside the Earth, deep in the sea, and in other dimensions. Although they attract and are worshipped by crazed cults, anyone who sees their natural form is driven incurably mad.
Then there are the lesser gods, the “Great Ones” (not actually very great), who once lived on the world’s mountain peaks, but were driven off by the spread of humanity and had to leave Earth entirely.
This is a fairly dry-ish listing that doesn’t evoke the subtle, insidious horror of Lovecraft’s writing. He places the extraordinary among the ordinary, so that we can imagine ourselves in the shoes of the troubled protagonists/victims, trying desperately to survive.
Lovecraft’s own background could have been the basis for a horror story. Both of his parents ended up institutionalized, which perhaps gave him the idea of cosmic-induced insanity. As a child he also suffered from night terrors and vivid dreams involving shadowy creatures he called “Night Gaunts”.
Fortunately, his grandfather liked to tell him stories, and his childhood home had a large library that contained classical literature, scientific works, and early ‘weird fiction’. That’s not just a descriptor – it’s a subgenre of speculative fiction that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author China Miéville defines it as “usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring nontraditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)”.
Later on, Lovecraft cited Edgar Allan Poe as the first author of weird fiction, as in a type of supernatural fiction different from traditional Gothic literature, and Poe was himself a major source of inspiration for Lovecraft.
I think the appeal of weird fiction is how far it colours outside the lines. Lovecraft imagined a universe populated by vast monsters that would happily squash us like bugs, unless they could manipulate us into worshipping them in horrendously twisted ways. And that was the only way to survive knowledge of these alien gods without, or perhaps because of, losing one’s mind. Each story featured mysterious happenings and forbidden knowledge, always an intriguing combination.
He created a recurrently eerie setting: a warped version of New England, centering around the strange town of Arkham in Massachusetts, somewhere north of Boston, and its…unconventional educational institution, MIskatonic University. The countryside was populated with eerie towns like Dunwich and Innsmouth that reflected his own views of New England as a grim place with mysterious backwoods and abandoned farmhouses. To visit any of these places was to court doom, either from the abnormal inhabitants or the monsters they invited.
On top of that, Miskatonic U’s library was known for its collection of occult books (of course). It also housed one of the few genuine copies of the Necronomicon, a forbidden textbook of magic that contained an account of the Old Ones (the alien god-monsters), their history, and the means for summoning them. And there were plenty of people who wanted to get their hands on it.
Lovecraft said that the title came to him in a dream, and it was a creation that so captured the imagination that a lot of people thought the book wasn’t fictional. He felt guilty when he heard of fans searching libraries for copies of it (the Vatican regularly gets requests from people who believe it has a copy). He always felt that a well-written weird story should be believable in its own way, and wrote about the Necronomicon in several stories as ‘first-hand testimonials’. He also allowed other authors to build on the universe he created with additional stories and references to the book, creating “a background of evil verisimilitude”.
The verisimilitude clearly worked, as many contemporary writers of his, such as August Derleth, and succeeding creators, from writers to filmmakers, have either produced his novels as movies (live and animated), or homages to them.
I’m not certain when I began reading Lovecraft’s works, but I certainly noticed his influence in my favourite television show ever, the original Dark Shadows. His imprint was all over the cursed Collins family and the spooky coastal fishing town they founded, Collinsport. The descendants of Isaac Collins all lived in a magnificently creepy mansion, a forty-room edifice built in 1795 near Widows’ Hill. Collinsport was a fully-realized town in the series, with places like the Blue Whale tavern and Todds’ Antique Shop. The antique shop became the centrepiece of a storyline about the Leviathans, a race of beings who ruled the Earth before mankind came into existence, with hideous and inhuman true forms. Sound familiar? Creator Dan Curtis produced something remarkable for the era, the first horror TV series. He took inspiration from all legends and stories – vampires, werewolves, witches, Jekyll & Hyde – but for me the Leviathan cycle was the best of all.
You’ll be familiar with some very well-known modern artists who cite Lovecraft as inspiration – writers Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, filmmakers John Carpenter, Roger Corman and Guillermo del Toro.
H.P. Lovecraft has many detractors for his sometimes virulent personal and political views, with deep prejudices against non-white races. But there was just something so potent about his stories that fans, while wrestling with his persona, continue to enjoy the universe he created.
If you’re already a fan, then you’re likely aware of the many tributes to his work, from movies to board games.
If you need an introduction, I can recommend a terrific vintage horror movie I was delighted to stumble across a couple of weeks ago, The Haunted Palace. Directed by Roger Corman in 1963, as a matter of fact.
It’s a marvellously eerie movie set in the seaside town of Arkham, filled with mists and cobblestones. We first see it in 1765, when the inhabitants believe that a grand “palace” overlooking the town is owned by Joseph Curwen (played by the wonderful Vincent Price), is a warlock who’s responsible for young maidens disappearing. They capture and burn him at the stake, but he curses the town and vows revenge. 110 years later, Curwen’s great-great-grandson, Charles Dexter Ward, and his wife Anne, have inherited the palace. When they arrive in Arkham, they find a town full of deformed people who are very hostile. When they finally arrive at the palace, Charles is surprised by struck by his strong resemblance to his ancestor, via a portrait on the wall, and how well he seems to know the palace despite never having been there.
I won’t spoil anything for you. The movie is based on Lovecraft’s story titled The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
There are far too many Lovecraft-referenced works to mention here. But I’ll give you a few fun ones.
In 1991 a movie called Cast a Deadly Spell featured a hard-boiled detective named Lovecraft who lives in an alternate reality where magic is accepted and practiced openly. Lovecraft has, for reasons of his own which we discover to the follow-up movie Witch Hunt, given up using magic, but still must navigate a dastardly plot to find and use – you may have guessed it – the Necronomicon. The movies are both campy fun if you want to watch a pair of light horror movies.
In the popular vein of piggybacking on existing stories/characters, author James Lovegrove has written a series of books called The Cthulhu Casebooks, in which he pits Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson against the world of Lovecraft’s monsters. The first in the series is called Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows. They’re an entertaining addition to the enduring alternate world that H.P. Lovecraft created a century ago, and there are other completely separate novels as well.
There are a variety of board games set in the Lovecraft universe. I’ve obtained a copy of one called Elder Sign for myself.
It’s promoted as a good introductory game, although I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to actually play it yet (or give you a review). The maker’s description sounds like fun, though:
It is 1926, and the museum’s extensive collection of exotic curios and occult artifacts poses a threat to the barriers between our world and the elder evils lurking between dimensions. Gates to the beyond begin to leak open, and terrifying creatures of increasing strength steal through them. Animals, the mad, and those of more susceptible minds are driven to desperation by the supernatural forces the portals unleash. Only a handful of investigators race against time to locate the eldritch symbols necessary to seal the portals forever. Only they can stop the Ancient One beyond from finding its way to Earth and reducing humanity to cinders.
I do also have the Monopoly: Cthulhu game. It sounded promising, and I played it with friends who were familiar with the Lovecraft world, but we petered out after a while. Interestingly, it no longer appears to be available on Amazon. The Boardgame Geek website gives it a 5.5 rating out of 10.
Well, I’ve offered you a number of ways to dive into the Lovecraft canon, if you’d like to see what all the fuss is about. Let me know which ideas you try out, and if you’re already a fan, I’d love to hear your thoughts about any of this, because you’ll find the same influence throughout my Chaos Roads Trilogy.
Happy start to Halfoween month!