The Classic Horror Stories

by Roger Luckhurst

  His philosophical pessimism was tinged by cynicism, arguing for maintaining certain illusions to pacify what Lovecraft called ‘the herd’. Lovecraft praised Joseph Wood Krutch’s book, The Modern Temper, for its fearless expression of the shattering effect of modern science. Krutch suggested that mythology, religion, and metaphysics had ‘all collapsed under the face of successive attacks’ since the nineteenth century, leaving the West haunted ‘by ghosts from a dead world and not yet at home in its own’. To avoid chaos, Krutch suggested a need to maintain traditions however hollowed out of meaning. This was a stance Lovecraft often adopted: ‘Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally and pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from the devastating sense of “lostness” in endless space and time.’14

  The clearest position Lovecraft came to articulate, though, was cosmic indifferentism. In an important letter to the editor of Weird Tales, resubmitting ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ for consideration, Lovecraft said:

  Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind have any existence at all.

  This was a strictly in-human stance, a different emphasis from the cynical or pessimistic strands of Lovecraft’s thinking. ‘Contrary to what you may assume,’ he said in a later letter, ‘I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists … Both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept … of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other.’15 This philosophy appears fitfully in Lovecraft’s actual fiction, but supplies some of his most chilling moments of climax. It is a stance that is allergic to every moral or humanistic defence of the purpose of literature explored by his contemporaries.

  Modern philosophers have expanded on the radical possibilities of Lovecraft’s stance. His fiction has been read as an attempt to think outside the subject and give priority to the weirdness of the object world, making Lovecraft a key figure for thinkers like Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker. ‘The weird is the discovery of an unhuman limit to thought, that is nevertheless foundational for thought,’ Thacker suggests, defining Lovecraftian horror as an attempt to think about ‘the world-without-us’.16 Whilst exploring ‘real externality’ in these abstract, philosophical ways, Lovecraft’s ‘weird realism’ is also a particular reflection on his times.

  Pulp Fiction for a Morbid Age

  By Armistice Day in 1918, it was estimated that ten million military personnel has been killed in the Great War. Civilian deaths were nearly as high, and the catastrophe was compounded by the outbreak of ‘Spanish flu’ which killed many millions more between 1918 and 1920. There was a widespread view among intellectuals that the Great War marked the end of European culture: the ‘suicide of civilization’ was a common phrase. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, which forced punitive reparations on Germany, sowed the seeds for collapse and the rise of extreme politics across Europe. Amidst civil war in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a meeting of Communist parties announced the principles of the Third International as the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, by armed force if necessary. In America, paranoia about immigrants bringing Bolshevism into the country meant that ‘nonconformist aliens’ were targeted by legislation and persecution in the Red Scare of 1919. One English journalist called America ‘hag-ridden by the spectre of Bolshevism. It was like a sleeper in a nightmare, enveloped by a thousand phantoms of destruction.’ As capitalism tottered, the authoritarian Fascist solution to crisis found power first in Italy and then in Germany. From his prison cell in Italy, the Marxist Antonio Gramsci composed the famous epigram: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’

  We can count Lovecraft’s fiction amongst these symptoms. In some respects, it was typical of its age, but driven towards pathological intensity by Lovecraft’s perception of himself as the last scion of New England civilization. Lovecraft was an Anglo-Saxon Nativist. The sources for Lovecraft’s politics are easy to trace because they are so dispiritingly derivative. American Nativism was a movement that demanded tighter immigration laws to exclude those who did not come from northern European stock, and was panicked about not just Asian immigration (the so-called yellow peril), but about Mediterranean stock—all those lowly Italian peasants passing through the Ellis Island immigration halls in New York. They were also suspicious of the ‘Alpine’ races, since they had worrying Slavic and Asiatic taints in their blood. This spurious racial taxonomy had been popularized by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race in 1916. The great race under threat was the ‘Nordic’ type, ‘the white man par excellence’, best represented by the British, German, and Scandinavian immigrants in the first wave of settlers, now menaced as America headed towards ‘a racial abyss’. As Grant put it in an introduction to another racist text, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, if other races were not ‘Nordicised and vitalised’, then civilization would end in a chaos of an ‘unstable and bastardised population’.17 Grant, an important figure in New York, active in the Zoological Society and a founder of the zoo in Central Park, was an ardent believer in eugenics. This movement advocated the betterment of the race through the control of the ‘breeding’ of lesser races and the arrest of the dilution of pure racial stocks by preventing miscegenation.

  These terms saturate Lovecraft’s letters and creep everywhere into his fictions. He called the Nordics ‘THE MASTERS’, appealed to racial science as showing ‘the infinite superiority of the Teutonic Aryans’, and lapsed into formulations about ‘racial suicide’ when contemplating the war between England and Germany. He was an advocate of Americanism, which meant protecting ‘the great Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere’ in its purity. It could possibly assimilate the Celtic, but no ‘really alien blood’. He despised Bolshevism, ‘the noxious example of the almost sub-human Russian rabble’, and was suspicious of pushing the democratic experiment in America too far, particularly if equal rights were given to the black population of America. He dismissed ‘effeminate ideas of liberty’ because ‘it would retard the developments of a handsome Nordic breed’. Lovecraft voiced cautious praise for Fascism in both Italy and Germany, largely because authoritarianism was needed to keep the herd in check at a time of crisis capitalism.18

  These positions were intensified by Lovecraft’s traumatic experience of New York, where his racism conformed to the psychic mechanisms of demonizing immigrants at times of economic pressure. This is Lovecraft’s passage about his experience of the slums of the Lower East Side in 1922:

  The organic things—Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They—or the degenerate gelatinous fermentations of which they were composed—seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses … and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst an
d inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness.19

  Although composed in exorbitant language, this kind of discourse about the New York slums was common. The appalling conditions of the slums around the Five Points in Lower Manhattan were exposed by journalists and reformists, perhaps most famously by Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives (1890). Riis used new flash photography techniques to allow the horrors of the tenements to bloom onto film. Riis’s photos contributed to New York’s tradition of infernal nights. Lovecraft himself indulged in long night-walks through the slums of Manhattan.

  It can be completely disarming to realize that the crescendos of Lovecraft’s fiction share exactly the same rhythm and language of revulsion at miscegenate things as his disordered rants about New York. Lovecraft’s dialectic of the sublime and disgusting had thoroughly historical roots. The explicit disgust at the mixed race degenerates of Brooklyn in ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is pretty much the same as when Dyer encounters the slavish Shoggoths in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. Rural New England was hardly a refuge for Lovecraft. Industrial development and urbanization was sucking life from villages, leaving them sunk in economic decline and—for Lovecraft—open racial degeneration. The vision of the crumbling port of Innsmouth, cut off from the world and sunk in unspeakable inbreeding, is an evocation of economic decline. In ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, Lovecraft did not just demonize racial others, but suspected that the racial taints were coursing in the veins of respectable New Englanders. In the last tale collected here, ‘The Shadow out of Time’, the greatest horror is to discover that the contaminated, overmastered creature is none other than the narrator of the tale himself.

  It might be tempting to think that this racism is just part and parcel of pulp fiction, a sign of its limited sympathies. Yet when Henry James returned to New York in 1904 after over twenty years in Europe, he was appalled at what had happened to the city and used similar terms. ‘There was no escape from the ubiquitous alien,’ he wrote in The American Scene, calling New York ‘monstrous’. It left him with a disorienting ‘sense of dispossession’ of his homeland. The side streets were ‘darkened gorges of masonry’ that ‘put on, at their mouths, the semblance of black rat-holes, holes of gigantic rats, inhabited by whirlwinds’. He travelled into New England, where he encountered a worker on the road who was unable to answer James in English, French, or Italian. After a while, James established that the man was Armenian. James had no interest or understanding of the Armenian diaspora; he thought only that America was becoming ‘a prodigious amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients’.20

  Lovecraft, though, tied the Gothic and the weird directly to the question of race. This is not superficial, but integral to his work. In ‘The Supernatural Horror in Literature’, the Gothic is the product of northern tribes, the Goths and the Teutons: ‘Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense.’ His list of approved authors includes M. P. Shiel, who also wrote hallucinatory race-hate prose about the ‘yellow danger’ and aristocrats of august northern houses menaced by supernatural forces. Lovecraft’s pulp collaborator and correspondent Robert E. Howard wrote fiction saturated in fantasies of white racial supremacy. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, discussing the ‘ethereal mystick power’ of Poe, Machen, and Dunsany, Lovecraft calls their Gothic power ‘a purely Teutonick quality’ in which ‘you ought to find plain evidences of Nordick superiority; and derive therefrom a proper appreciation of your natural as distinguisht from your adopted race-stock’.21 Weird literature deals with encounters that are insistently racialized, produced in an era when colonial ideology of the ‘white man’s burden’ under the European powers curdled into explicit violence.

  Fiction, though, is never a simple extrusion from historical circumstances. Art—even pulp fiction—transforms its conditions. To some, Lovecraft falters because he is unable to complete a properly aesthetic transmutation of suffering of the kind expected from great art. Yet Weird fiction is insistently about transformation, always in a process of becoming something other than itself. This is why so many readers can take so many different things from Lovecraft’s fiction and why he speaks to an age where technology, globalization, and accelerated modernity put the question of the human under ever more pressure. Whatever one concludes, Lovecraft’s fictions are extraordinary documents of an extraordinary time.

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  THE selections of stories for this anthology primarily focus on Lovecraft’s work after his return from his traumatic years in New York in 1926. Most Lovecraftians agree that the period between 1926 and 1931 is when he produced his most successful works. The rejection of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by Weird Tales stopped him writing with any energy, and he was reluctant to offer the stories he wrote after 1931 to pulp magazine editors. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, composed in 1925, is included to point the way: it is Lovecraft’s engagement with the actual city of New York. After this, the horrors that erupt are located in far-flung terrains or the reimagined backwaters of Lovecraft’s New England.

  The texts have been checked against the first publication of the stories, nearly all in pulp magazines, with obvious mistakes silently corrected. The texts of these stories are mostly stable and were reprinted in the Arkham House editions as published in The Outsider and Others in 1939 and again in the revised Arkham editions of the 1960s, both overseen by August Derleth. There are, however, variant versions of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ in print. These stories were both published in the science fiction magazine Astounding Stories and were extensively reparagraphed by the editor, with some passages deleted and some of the phrasing simplified. I have chosen to reprint the original pulp versions of the tales with regard to paragraphing, in order to retain some of the pulp energy that Astounding Stories wanted to inject into Lovecraft’s tales. Readers may note a different prose rhythm in these two tales, but this breathless form was how they were first encountered by their audience in the Golden Age of science fiction. I have followed August Derleth in restoring deleted passages, and variants arising from S. T. Joshi’s work on the manuscripts are recorded in the Explanatory Notes.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Lovecraft’s Life and Works

  Carter, Lin, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ (New York: Ballantine, 1972).

  Joshi, S. T., H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996); condensed as A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in his Times (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001) and expanded into 2 vols. as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010).

  Lovecraft, H. P., Selected Letters, 5 vols. (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1965–76); a mere taster of Lovecraft’s tens of thousands of letters; highly selective choices nevertheless provide an essential background to Lovecraft’s life and thought.

  —— Miscellaneous Writings, ed. S. T. Joshi (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1995); important collection of essays by Lovecraft on weird fiction, his literary and political criticism, philosophical position papers, antiquarian travel notes, and autobiographical statements.

  Tyson, Donald, The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft: His Life, His Demons, His Universe (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2010).

  Critical Works on Lovecraft

  Berruti, Massimo, ‘H. P. Lovecraft and the Anatomy of Nothingness: The Cthulhu Mythos’, Semiotica 150/1–4 (2004), 363–418.

  Burleson, Donald, H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).

  Cannon, Peter, H. P. Lovecraft (Boston: Twyane, 1982).

  Evans, Timothy H., ‘A Last Defence Against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft’, Journal of Folklore Research 42/1 (2005), 99–135.

  Gatto, John Taylor, The Major Works of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Monarch Press, 1977).

  Gayford, Norman R., ‘The Artist as Antaeus: Love
craft and Modernism’, in D. Schultz and S. Joshi (eds.), An Epicure of the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honour of H. P. Lovecraft (London: Associated University Press, 1991), 273–97.

  Halperin, Paul, and Labossiere, Michael C., ‘Mind Out of Time: Identity, Perception, and the Fourth Dimension in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Dreams in the Witch House”’, Extrapolation 50/3 (2009), 512–33.

  Harman, Graham, ‘On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl’, Collapse 4 (2008), 333–64.

  Houellebecq, Michel, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni (London: Weidenfeld, 2008).

  Joshi, S. T., H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990).

  —— (ed.), H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Athens, O.: Ohio University Press, 1980); collects early responses and first critical essays before the later explosion in Lovecraft scholarship.

  Kneale, James, ‘From Beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the Place of Horror’, Cultural Geographies 13 (2006), 106–26.

  Levy, Maurice, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (1972), trans. S. T. Joshi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

  Lovett-Graff, Bennett, ‘Shadows over Lovecraft: Reactionary Fantasy and Immigrant Eugenics’, Extrapolation 38/3 (1997), 175–92.