Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird

by H. P. Lovecraft

  Or so in theory. But of course “we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model,” as Lovecraft sensibly avers. And he recognizes, too, that “much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast.” (It is curious in this regard that the fascination today with “outsider art” has not been accompanied by a parallel interest in “outsider writing,” though a few such texts, most famously Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, composed contemporaneously with many of the tales here, have succeeded in imposing themselves on the public consciousness.) For all that, Lovecraft was adamant in his insistence that the best tales of cosmic horror manifest a particular art, a particularly difficult one indeed since the trick is to describe the indescribable, even the unbearable (something which at times threatens to reduce even the most careful examples of the genre to hysterics). “Atmosphere is the all important thing,” Lovecraft declares. Not plot. The story will not proceed to a single horrifying revelation, but instead cultivate a state of ongoing suspense that, even when the story is told, should prove next to impossible to dispel. The story prolongs itself as near as it can to the point of the unendurable. Here again one thinks of the images of deliquescence and decay so dear to Lovecraft—images of substances literally fallen, slow-motion pictures of dissolution indistinguishable from the stirrings of some hideous new breed of life.

  This collection begins with Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle” and ends with Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” presenting a selection of weird tales that have established themselves as classics of the genre. In making it I have been guided to a large degree by the recommendations of Lovecraft himself. Thus one finds Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” M.P. Shiel’s “The House of Sounds,” all of which Lovecraft discusses in “Supernatural Horror” and which later he included in a list of favorite weird tales assembled for the magazine Fantasy Fan. Walter de la Mare’s “Seaton’s Aunt” was also a particular favorite. I should say, though, that among the three stories by Ambrose Bierce included here the one Lovecraft liked above all, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” is not to be found. I have chosen instead of that longish story several shorter ones, hoping to represent something of this toughminded, yet elusive writer’s unusual range, as well as the influence he exercised on other writers. Thus “The Damned Thing” lurks behind Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” while “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” helped to stimulate Robert Chambers’s short story sequence The King in Yellow (notable for featuring a range of characters reduced to madness after reading an addictive book entitled— The King in Yellow), which is the source of “The Repairer of Reputations.” Bierce’s story would seem to be a send-up of a communication transmitted in a séance, but, as is often the case in his work, the satirical, the farfetched, assumes an unlikely life of its own, leaving the reader in doubt as to how to take it, though of course the frantic narrator of the Chambers story takes it very much to heart.

  Two of the stories may be thought to have a more tenuous relation to the central argument of “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Everybody knows of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Lovecraft joins the chorus singing its praises. He doesn’t however mention “The Squaw,” and it might well be argued that this story is not an example of cosmic horror at all but rather a piece of grisly grand guignol acted out on a historical stage, one that improbably yokes together the Middle Ages, the Wild West, and a couple of—as it turns out quite justifiably—antsy American tourists. But then who is to say that this irruption of inhuman savagery within a historical context that seems almost Disneyfied isn’t as cosmic—and telling—an example of horror as any extraterrestrial invasion? Finally there is Henry James, not much admired by Lovecraft, who scolds him for his “prolixity and pomposity,” though condescending to praise The Turn of the Screw. I have chosen, however, the less-familiar later work “The Jolly Corner,” for there James pushes the psychological currency of his fiction to a very weird place indeed.†

  Lovecraft’s disdain for James may in part reflect the antagonism, rapidly widening when he wrote, between writers for popular markets and so-called literary writers. But if there is an occasion for issuing this gathering of stories under this cover, it is in hope of contributing somewhat to the subversion of such a distinction. For the works here, long rightly prized by afficionados of horror literature and devotees of Lovecraft, alter our perception of literature and its possibilities. They provide a context, for example, in which James’s hypertrophically subtle style may appear to be an efflorescence of the uncanny, and the compulsive, as much as it is an exercise in the high style. Lovecraft duly notes the connection between the weird tale and such varied literary productions as the French conte cruel and German Hausmärchen, while an affinity may also be seen to exist with Lautréamont and Rimbaud, as well as the surrealists. Or what about a link to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders? Looking further forward yet, one may find a surprising something of Bierce in Borges (who admired Machen), of Chambers in William Burroughs, and of Shiel in Beckett.

  The point of such comparisons is not to justify the writers included here by comparison to others anointed, however reluctantly in some cases, by literary powers-that-be, but simply to suggest that the weird story provides a vantage, certainly as central as any, from which to view the landscape, literary and otherwise, of our time. And as well as satisfying the appetite, the work here does raise some interesting critical issues. In the dark corridors and church basements of the Gothic, one discovers not only specters of primal fear, but the dressed-up, artificially stimulated corpse of feudalism capering in the arms of dubiously enlightened young ladies; here, in a variety of stories spanning the divide between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stories of exploration, tourism, and invention, one sees a wavering reflection of the Victorian ethos of relentless expansion in that first era of globalization which Karl Polanyi dubbed “the great transformation” (itself a possible title for a further—or ongoing—tale of cosmic horror). Then, too, the sense that there is a secret at the heart of things, as in “Seaton’s Aunt,” one that is the particular property of an inscrutably malign elite, continues to enjoy an actual relevance even as it feeds the nightmares of paranoids. For that matter “The Colour Out of Space” might be read as foretelling the poisoned environment of the contemporary world. Which is not to detect there, or anywhere in these pages, some agenda of bien pensant rectification and amelioration. One of the things that sets the tale of cosmic terror off from run-of-the-mill literary fiction is that, unnerving though it may be, it is happily devoid of moral reflection, much less a moral.

  But no doubt the most important achievement of the weird tale is to have kept something, however mutant, of the mythological, in all its awestruck uncertainty and willful speculative farfetchedness, alive. And yet it is not just the strange doings recorded here that capture and hold the attention. In these stories of, among other things, impossible explorations, treacherous inventions, abortive communications, and inscrutable signs, language itself may be pushed towards a kind of impasse—in, for example, the blurtings and babblings of Machen’s possessed girl or the maddening echo chamber of Shiel’s “House of Sounds,” in the way Lovecraft resorts to the barest, most abstract of nouns, “shape” or “thing,” to evoke horror at its most inescapably imposing. The effect of both the mythmaking and the verbal invention may at times seem as nearly clumsy as wildly inspired, and yet that variability, and vulnerability, is crucial to the stories’ character and art. Certainly it contributes to what must be the strangest and most memorable of their qualities: their weird compassion. Fear may be our “oldest and strongest emotion,” but it emerges from these writers’ tellings as something more than that, something bigger than us, and something that puts us in touch with bigger—unimaginably bigger—things. Fear is the cement and solvent
of this and every world. Even the gods tremble. One thinks of Melville’s oddly tender aside in Moby-Dick, another extraordinary exploration of the depths:

  Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

  —D. THIN

  *See S. T. Joshi’s indispensable The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), as well as his critical study The Weird Tale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). The author would like to acknowledge his indebtedness to Joshi’s unequaled erudition and expertise in all weird things.

  † There are also of course important omissions. Lovecraft writes of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land:

  The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget. Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort—the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid—are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-bound landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author’s touch.

  Midway through the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years—and in his slow, minutely described day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–1914) was born in Ohio and served in the Civil War. A lifelong journalist, he disappeared mysteriously in Mexico in 1913 while on his way to meet Pancho Villa’s army. Among his works are two collections of stories, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Can Such Things Be?, and a brilliant satire, The Devil’s Dictionary.

  ALGERNON BLACKWOOD (1869–1951) was born into an upper-class British family. He emigrated to America at the age of twenty and stayed there some ten years, during which time he worked as a reporter for The New York Evening Sun and The New York Times. When he returned to England he turned to writing fiction and soon made a name for himself with the John Silence stories, which relate the exploits of a psychic detective. Blackwood became famous in later years for playing “the Ghost Man” on BBC radio.

  R. W. CHAMBERS (1865–1933) was born in Brooklyn and studied at the Art Students League and the École des Beaux-Arts, exhibiting in the Salon in 1889. He sold illustrations to fashion magazines in New York City before taking up writing and finding success with his collection of stories The King in Yellow, which includes “The Repairer of Reputations.” In later life Chambers published a number of highly successful popular novels, including The Restless Sex and Police!!!, the proceeds from which allowed him to settle in a mansion in upstate New York, where he devoted himself to hunting and fishing.

  WALTER DE LA MARE (1876–1956) was one of seven children of an official at the Bank of England. He did not attend university, but worked as a bookkeeper for an oil company for some eighteen years, in the course of which he published the poems and stories that secured his literary reputation. In 1908 a grant from the Civil List allowed him to write full time. De la Mare’s fiction includes the novels The Return and The Memoirs of a Midget, as well as many stories. His poems for children and adults and his brilliantly inventive anthologies were much admired by T.S. Eliot, who became his publisher, and by W.H. Auden.

  HENRY JAMES (1843–1916) was born in New York City. His father was a distinguished theologian and a follower of Emanuel Swedenborg; his older brother William James became one of America’s finest philosophers. James attended Harvard Law School and, with the encouragement of William Dean Howells, took to writing criticism and fiction. After 1866 he lived largely in Europe. His many works include the novels A Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, as well as many short stories.

  H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890–1937) was born and died in Providence, Rhode Island. His father died of syphilis when he was eight years old; his mother was later institutionalized for mental illness; and Lovecraft himself was a sickly child. In 1913 he joined the United Amateur Press Association, beginning a career as a writer in the course of which he published poems, journalism, and stories. Increasingly drawn to horror fiction, Lovecraft was a regular contributor to the Chicago pulp magazine Weird Tales. His first book-length collection of stories, The Outsider, did not appear until 1939, two years after his death.

  ARTHUR MACHEN (1863–1947) was born in Wales. After failing to gain admission to the Royal College of Surgeons, he worked, not very successfully, as a journalist and translator (most famously of Casanova’s memoirs). A friend of the mystic A.E. Waite and a member of the Order of Golden Dawn, Machen was deeply interested in the occult. His fiction includes The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, and The Hill of Dreams.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849) was the son of two traveling actors. Born in Boston, he was orphaned early and adopted by a tobacco exporter in Richmond, Virginia. Poe attended the University of Virginia, which he left because of gambling debts, and West Point, from which he was dishonorably discharged. “MS. Found in a Bottle” was Poe’s first significant success, and it helped him to obtain an editorial position on The Southern Literary Messenger in Baltimore, though he was soon fired for drinking. Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, and moved north, where he lived in New York City and Philadelphia while continuing to produce poems, criticism, and stories at a prodigious rate. After his wife’s death from tuberculosis, Poe’s behavior became increasingly erratic. In 1849 he was found drunk and delirious in a bar in Baltimore, the apparent victim of a political gang that had kept him inebriated while escorting him from ballot station to ballot station to cast repeat votes. He died four days later.

  M.P. SHIEL (1865–1947) was born in the West Indies, the son of a Methodist minister of Irish and African descent. Shiel studied classics at King’s College London, flirted with medicine, then took up journalism. His most popular work in his lifetime was his novel The Yellow Danger, and Shiel, who became increasingly xenophobic over the course of his life, is said to have invented the term “the yellow peril.” His best-known work today is the remarkable apocalyptic fantasy The Purple Cloud. Described by contemporaries as “gorgeously mad,” Shiel had become a reclusive religious maniac by the time of his death. His last book, Jesus, remains unpublished.

  BRAM STOKER (1847–1912) was born in Dublin and studied mathematics at Trinity College, by which time he was already composing horror stories. He published Dracula in 1897. Among Stoker’s other books are The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm.