The Classic Horror Stories
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Maxwell, Richard, ‘Unnumbered Polypi’, Victorian Poetry 47/1 (2009), 7–23.
Nelson, Victoria, ‘H. P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies’, Raritan 15/3 (1996), 92–122.
Ringel, Faye, New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural from the Seventeenth through the Twentieth Centuries (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995); from early settlers via Salem to sustained reading of Lovecraft.
Schultz, David E., and Joshi, S. T. (eds), An Epicure of the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honour of H. P. Lovecraft (London: Associated University Press, 1991).
Schreffler, Philip A., The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977).
Sorensen, Lief, ‘A Weird Modernist Archive: Pulp Fiction, Pseudobiblia, H. P. Lovecraft’, Modernism/Modernity 17/3 (2010), 501–22.
Wilson, Colin, The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962; London: Abacus, 1976); early serious attempt to locate Lovecraft in literary tradition.
Reading for Context
Haeckel, Ernst, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Watts, 1903).
Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).
Jackson Lears, T. J., No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
Murray, Robert K., Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955).
Overy, Richard, A Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939 (London: Penguin, 2010).
Ramaswami, Sumathi, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).
Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives, ed. Hasia R. Diner (New York: Norton, 2010).
Sante, Luc, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (London: Granta, 1998).
Sharpe, William Chapman, New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting and Photography 1850–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934).
Gothic and Weird Traditions
Clute, John, The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (Cauheegan, Wis.: Payseur and Schmidt, 2006).
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr., ‘On the Grotesque in Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies 29/1 (2002), 71–99.
Fiedler, Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1997).
Miéville, China, ‘Long Live the New Weird’, Third Alternative 35 (2003), 3.
—— ‘M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological; Versus and/or and and/or or?’, Collapse 4 (2008), 105–28.
—— ‘Weird Fiction’, in Mark Bould et al. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2009), 510–15.
—— Nelson, Victoria, Gothika: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard University Press, 2012).
—— ‘H. P. Lovecraft and the Great Heresies’, Raritan 15/3 (1996), 92–122.
Thacker, Eugene, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
—— In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy, vol. i) (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011).
Vandermeer, Ann and Jeff (eds.), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (London: Corvus, 2011); vast anthology of materials that attempts to construct a new canon of the weird tale.
———— (eds.), The New Weird (San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008).
Woodward, Ben, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012).
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Late Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The House of Seven Gables, ed. Michael Davitt Bell.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature, ed. Nicholas White.
Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer.
A CHRONOLOGY OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
1890
(20 Aug.) Howard Phillips born in Providence, Rhode Island, the last in line of two respected New England families.
1893
Father, Winfield Lovecraft, committed to asylum with ‘general paresis’, linked to syphilis.
1896
Death of HPL’s grandmother; he suffers intense nightmares. A sensitive child, rarely able to attend school. Educates himself in grandfather’s library; reading includes Arabian Nights, Greek and Roman legends.
1899
Begins to publish his own journal, the Scientific Gazette.
1903
Begins to publish Rhode Island Gazette of Astronomy. Spends time at Brown University observatory.
1904
Death of his grandfather, Whipple Phillips. Family in financial crisis and move out of the ancestral home. HPL feels displaced for the rest of his life.
1906
First published essay, denouncing astrology, published in Providence Sunday Journal. Writes astronomy articles for local papers Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner and, from 1908, The Tribune in Providence.
1908–13
Period of being a virtual recluse.
1910
Following private researches, writes his textbook, Inorganic Chemistry.
1912
Abandons science for poetry. Over five years, he writes verse imitative of eighteenth-century British models of Addison, Pope, and Steele.
1913–14
Debates fiction in the letters pages of the pulp magazine The Argosy. As a result, HPL comes into contact with the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA). He becomes a lifelong advocate of amateur journalism. Letters to other amateur writers begin.
1914–18
Astronomy column for Providence Evening News.
1915
Begins to publish his amateur journal, The Conservative, which runs for thirteen issues. His uncle, Dr F. C. Clark, dies, a big influence on HPL’s development.
1917
Attempts to enlist in the army. Initially accepted, his mother intervenes and he is declared ‘totally and permanently unfit’. At the encouragement of editor W. Paul Cook, HPL writes Gothic tales,‘Dagon’ and ‘The Tomb’. Begins to revise and edit others’ fiction for small fees but often for free.
1919
Reads Lord Dunsany’s fantasy fiction for the first time, and also sees him read in Boston. Mother committed to a sanatorium.
1921
(May) Mother dies after two years of confinement for ‘nervous illness’. Meets Sonia Haft Greene, a divorced Jewish Ukrainian immigrant. Writes ‘The Nameless City’. First comes across the work of Californian visionary painter and pulp horror writer, Clark Ashton Smith.
1922
Struggles to complete the series ‘Herbert West—Reanimator’ for the Home Brew journal. Writes ‘Nyarlathotep’, based on nightmare. (Mar.) Travels to New York, the ‘Cyclopean city’. Appalled by Chinatown and slums of Lower East Side. Meets Frank Belknap Long, who becomes a devoted acolyte. Begins antiquarian travels, initially in New England. Travels to Salem, scene of the 1692 witch trials, and Marblehead. Also travels to Cleveland, first trip beyond New England.
1923
Begins his association with the new pulp magazine, Weird Tales, which publishes ‘Dagon’. Writes ‘The Festival’ and ‘The Rats in the Walls’. Reads the work of Gothic writer Arthur Machen for the first time and Eliot’s The Waste Land.
1924
In a sudden move, HPL moves to Brooklyn and marries Sonia Greene. Sonia’s business runs into trouble, meaning HPL has to look for work. The couple move to less expensive rooms, in the slum district of Red Hook in Brooklyn’s port district. For Weird Tales, ghostwrites the fictional tale ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ for the escapologist Harry Houdini. HPL is offered editorship of Weird Tales, but he refuses when it becomes apparent he would have to move to Chicago.
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1926
Sonia moves to Cincinnati. HPL returns to Providence (they divorce amicably in 1929). In a burst of energy, HPL completes his essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ and writes several key fictions: ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
1927
(Mar.) Writes ‘The Colour out of Space’. Publishes ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ in The Recluse. Antiquarian trip to Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
1928
Another two-month stay to help Sonia in New York leads to nervous collapse. (July) In Virginia, visits the ‘Endless Caverns’. Writes ‘The Dunwich Horror’.
1930
Completes his sonnet cycle, ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. (Apr.) Visits South Carolina. (Sept.) Travels to Quebec. Simon and Schuster ask Lovecraft if he is interested in publishing a novel; he offers only short stories.
1931
Completes antiquarian essay on Quebec. Weird Tales rejects HPL’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, which depresses him and his motivation collapses. Poverty intensifies. In Providence, his birthplace on Angell Street is pulled down. Writes ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’.
1932
Writes ‘The Dreams in the Witch-House’. Visit to New Orleans. Second visit to Quebec.
1933
Writes collaborative stories with Hazel Heald, including ‘The Horror in the Museum’. Third trip to Quebec.
1934
First visit to Florida, to visit Robert Barlow. Begins to write ‘The Shadow out of Time’.
1935
Spends two months with Barlow in Florida. At the end of the year, Astounding Stories buys ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ and ‘The Shadow out of Time’ for $595, his best sale.
1936
‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ is published in a limited edition of 400 copies by his friend William Crawford, the only book that HPL publishes in his lifetime. Friend Robert Howard commits suicide.
1937
(10 Mar.) HPL admitted to Brown Memorial Hospital. He dies five days later of stomach cancer, which he had left untreated.
1939
After rejections of proposals for a collection of Lovecraft stories by mainstream publishers Scribner’s and Simon and Schuster, HPL’s devotees August Derleth and Donald Wandrei establish Arkham House and publish The Outsider and Others. This collection is followed by Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943) and Marginalia (1944).
THE TALES
THE HORROR AT RED HOOK
There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.
ARTHUR MACHEN*
I
NOT many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome looking pedestrian, furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet;* and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.
He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden Colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket* specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.
So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much also, the most learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter incredulity was his portion. Thereafter he held his peace, protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn,* and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all said, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception—a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds—would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt’s far vision of weird and hidden things,* but the logician’s quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.
And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted—for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York’s underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy, and had smiled gently when all the New-Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not—despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review*—even write a truly interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the prophet’s words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story—for like the book cited by Poe’s German authority, ‘es lasst sich nicht lessen—it does not permit itself to be read’.*
II
To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was
always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley’s best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré.* He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.
He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets* lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call ‘Dickensian’. The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there—a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.