by Kenneth Hite
[February 24-March 22, 1931]
What has haunted my dreams for nearly forty years is a strange sense of adventurous expectancy connected with landscape and architecture and sky-effects…. I wish I could get the idea on paper—the sense of marvel and liberation hiding in obscure dimensions and problematically reachable at rare instances through vistas of ancient streets, across leagues of strange hill country, or up endless flights of marble steps culminating in tiers of balustraded terraces. Odd stuff—and needing a greater poet then I for effective aesthetic utilization…
— H.P. Lovecraft, letter to August Derleth, Jan. 1930
This quote is true, not only of Lovecraft, but of myself, although my architectural sensibilities are more urban and more modern than his, so I would substitute “vistas of neglected alleys” and “up endless flights of granite and steel setbacks culminating in dizzying chrome and glass coronets” or some such. One can (or at least I can) get “adventurous expectancy” also from hidden literary allusions (The Crying of Lot 49), hinted conspiracies, or even sufficiently ill-tended archives. In adventure movies it gives me the sense that the movie is still happening outside the frame, and I occasionally absorb it from such things as the pseudomythology in the background of Ghostbusters (“During the rectification of the Vuldronaii, the traveler came as a large and moving Torb! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Mekhetrex supplicants, they chose a new form for him, that of a giant Sloar!”) and, of course, from Lovecraft’s own para-history. I’ve attempted it myself throughout GURPS Cabal, among other works.
But more importantly, this quote, and this concept, is a vital key for unlocking what Lovecraft was attempting aesthetically, not merely in his Innsmouth and in the haloed Providence of Charles Dexter Ward, but in the hills outside Dunwich and the ice deserts of Antarctica. As Joshi points out in a note to this novel (n. 33 in the Penguin edition), Lovecraft uses the term “adventurous expectancy” in Dyer’s recounting of the Miskatonic Expedition.
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This novel (of novella length) is a deliberate attempt at what Robert M. Price calls “demythologization,” but which I think is better expressed as “remythologization” of the Cthulhu Mythos. It is a hard-core SF story of alien contact, a cutting-edge technothriller at the real-world fringe of scientific exploration, and a punishing, hard-bitten story of psychological disintegration. And again, as with most of Lovecraft’s real masterpieces, there’s not a lot of useful commentary to add. It’s a kind of re-imagining (not a sequel) of Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, with plenty of contributions from Verne and a purely Lovecraftian bleak humor as the humans and Old Ones serially vivisect each other (shades of “Reanimator”!), while only slowly becoming aware of the surviving shoggoths that still hunt both.
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What do I mean by “remythologization”? I mean a couple of somewhat related things. Before I get to them, let’s hear from Lovecraft on the purpose of belief in the scientific age:
It is, then, our task to save existence from a sense of chaos & futility by rebuilding the purely aesthetic & philosophical concept of character & cosmic pseudo-purpose—reestablishing a realisation of the necessity of pattern in any order of being complex enough to satisfy the mind & emotions of highly evolved human personalities.
This passage, from an October 1933 letter to Helen Sully, comes close to providing not just a moral purpose for human action, but perhaps even an artistic purpose for writing about the chaotic and futile cosmos. It’s essentially the weird tale as Platonic noble lie. Or, to put it another way, as remythologization.
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So back to “remythologization” and the two somewhat related meanings, or aims, I give the term, or the project.
First, Lovecraft was attempting to provide a plausible entryway for “adventurous expectancy” not through a world-view that saw everything as magic (or divine) but through a new world-view, one that saw everything as rational. To provide an example of what Lovecraft did not want to do: Part of the reason we have “steampunk” in all its variations is that it is easier to get “adventurous expectancy” from the romantic than the familiar11. (Cf. Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us.”) Lovecraft (and Poe, in Pym) didn’t take the easy way out and present a romantic past, but a hard-bitten present day of Antarctic exploration. It’s obviously much harder to pull that off, although Verne and Wells and company were pointing the way toward such things for a few decades before Lovecraft, presenting the very vastness and immensity of our technological potential, and of the natural world (and cosmos), as subjects of wonder and terror. Lovecraft’s mythology attempts to answer the same questions about the universe, and provide the same cosmic thrills, as all mythologies, but Lovecraft insists—in At the Mountains of Madness, at least—that the answers are grounded in geology, and biology, and paleontology, while still scaring the bejezus out of us.
The other sense in which I use the term is to posit that Lovecraft provides a whole new vocabulary for mythologizing things, a whole new regime of gods and monsters in the world of aliens, genetic constructs, and Theosophically vast panoplies of evolution (both physical and social). This is akin to what Leiber calls Lovecraft’s “Copernican Revolution” in horror (moving it from the supernatural to the alien, and from the Earthbound to the cosmic), but I’m aiming for something more specific. Lovecraft conjures and super-charges various modern and post-modern mythemes such as the ancient astronauts (although Jason Colavito goes too far when he ascribes the whole complex to HPL in The Cult of Alien Gods), the Antarctic secret (from Hollow Earths to Nazi Refuges), scientific discoveries and secret histories that They are hushing up (although the atheist Lovecraft didn’t riff on Biblical themes as much as modern mythomania naturally does), cryptids, alien experimentation on humans, and so forth. Further, Lovecraft re-tunes a bunch of previous mythemes from the Frankenstein/Prometheus (genetically constructed shoggoths, which still live on in our nanotechnological nightmare of a “gray goo” apocalypse), to the taboo Mountain (see modern attitudes to Tibet, Sedona, etc.), to the haunted castle (now an archaeological site, viz. Exorcist or Indiana Jones), to the cavernous Underworld (from Kadath to Dulce is a short hop). All he needs in Mountains is a UFO or two, and the whole skeleton of modern mythology would be on display in one novella. Lovecraft didn’t invent our modern mythology, but he is its Hesiod, and At the Mountains of Madness is a twentieth-century Theogony.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
[November-December 1931]
I don’t think there’s a better structural analysis of this story to be had than Robert M. Price’s introduction to The Innsmouth Cycle. Among other things, Price makes the point that Obed Marsh is the prophet of a Cargo Cult, one which implicitly casts Lovecraft’s New England as a primitive backwater. We tend to oversimplify Cargo Cults as the pieces broken off by a clash between “forward-looking” modernity and “backward-looking” primitivism, when in fact, they are the patterns formed by an overlap between two world-views, both of which have firm myths of their origins and of their end states. Lovecraft’s story brilliantly inverts the colonialist understanding of the Cargo Cult by demonstrating that the Other (the non-white, the “Kanak,” the foreign) is the far more sophisticated myth, one with a better claim both on the past and the future than white Massachusetts Protestant Christianity. All this, of course, thirty years before the mechanism of the Cargo Cult was at all understood in American academia. Of course, Lovecraft likely picked this inversion up from Theosophy, which he had begun reading to get ideas for deep time stories, and which had formulated the same subversive narrative of Britain and India.
I tend to discount various breathless accounts of Lovecraft’s immense intellect, because as a partial autodidact myself, I know just how easy an immense intellect is to fake. But this story shows a firm grasp on the principles of anthropology (and sociology, and how life functions in small towns) that one wouldn’t have expected from the insular Lovecraft.
Equally importantly and c
onvincingly, Price analyzes the tale as a vision-quest, a coming-of-age ordeal ritual, which I have to say is pretty dead-on.
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To an extent, this might also be true of Lovecraft, given that the ending of this story has Olmstead, the protagonist, welcoming the kind of miscegenation that is supposedly one of HPL’s unbreakable taboos. On the other hand, I think we can also read this as Lovecraft attempting to get into the head of someone who surrenders to the Reality of the Outside, rather than being truly conquered or destroyed by it as most of his protagonists are. Lovecraft can express empathy with Olmstead without sympathy, just as one could write a story told from the perspective of a genteel Rhode Island racist without being one.
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And let’s not get into the rough waters of the pure-blooded Pacific islanders defeating the Deep One-Kanak hybrids with the “Old Ones’” swastika signs. It’s probably a coincidence. Although one almost wishes that Norman Spinrad’s alternate Adolf Hitler, the SF author of The Iron Dream, had written a Cthulhu Mythos story, just for the sheer glandular extremity of it.
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For me, by the way, this story is Lovecraft’s greatest use of setting—and Lovecraft was an absolute master at setting. I drew a map of Innsmouth right after reading this story for the second time, and I can still see the sawgrass in the rusting Rowley spur line if I think about it.
The first time I ever read this story, though, was by the mercury light on the dock at camp, where I had snuck after lights-out and curfew. So I can also still hear the lapping of water on rotten wood, and feel the wet air and mosquitoes, if I try. So that may be why it evokes its setting so very, very well in my mind.
The Dreams in the Witch House
[February 1932]
In his really quite excellent and thorough study A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft, Joshi approvingly quotes Stephen J. Mariconda’s description of this tale as “Lovecraft’s magnificent failure.”
Well, he’s half right. The story is magnificent. It is only a failure insofar as it doesn’t complete a full Lovecraftian arc. One of Joshi’s sounder arguments (possibly adapted from George Wetzel?) is that Lovecraft had only a very limited repertoire of story-elements, and that he continuously reused them, refining them as he went until eventually they became true masterpieces. So you can pick apart the earliest tales—such as “Dagon,” “The Tomb,” and “Polaris”—and discover the skeletons, if you will, of “Call of Cthulhu” (primordial sea cult alive in nightmares), Charles Dexter Ward (antiquarian shares soul with evil ancestor), and “The Shadow Out of Time” (man switches consciousness between aeons to the detriment of his identity). Obviously, some of—most of—the later masterworks draw skeletal elements from more than one early source, and some of the early elements are never really developed later (as with about half of the material in “The Tomb”), but the general progression is, I think, fairly clear.
I would argue that “The Dreams in the Witch House” is the almost-completed version of the skeleton first laid down in “From Beyond,” (man perceives Outside, Outside comes in) and that (with “Call of Cthulhu”) it is actually one of the purest and most important examples of sheer Lovecraftian cosmicism. (Other major iterations of the “From Beyond story” include “The Music of Erich Zann,” “Hypnos,” “The Hound,” “He,” and “Strange High House in the Mist”—although you could easily discover the “From Beyond story” in “Pickman’s Model,” “The Dunwich Horror” (in negative form), and “The Haunter of the Dark” among others.) What it isn’t is a fully perfected version of this story—it’s not “Call of Cthulhu” or Charles Dexter Ward, in other words. There’s at least one more iteration of this fugue left in Lovecraft, and unless you consider “Haunter of the Dark” to be the missing apotheosis, HPL never got around to writing it.
So it’s not Lovecraft’s best story by any means. (I’d call it about his tenth-best story.) But it is absolutely not a failure, and not at all the “step backward in his fictional development” (whatever that nonsensical phrase means, applied to a Lovecraft story written after 1925) that Joshi insinuates. Joshi, I think, really, really hates the crucifix, the Black Man, the trappings of witchcraft and evil and black magic in what (to him) should be a stark blast of cosmic higher mathematics. In fact, in A Subtler Magick, Joshi gives us his specific complaints, which (aside from defensibly, if exaggeratedly, objecting to the prose style of the story—Gilman is something of a Poe-character, and there are indeed a few lapses) uniformly circle around this ‘historicizing’ material. Joshi’s objections are almost cartoonishly facile, and my answers are similarly impatient:
“What is the significance of the Old Ones in the story?”
They indicate that hyperspace travel goes through time as well as space, and otherwise perform the same function that all of Lovecraft’s Mythos callbacks perform, enhancing cosmicism.
“To what purpose is the baby kidnapped and sacrificed?”
We don’t know. It’s a purposeless horror, on purpose. Gilman is meant to be off-balance the whole time, and Joshi can’t possibly believe the story would be better if Gilman, Keziah Mason, and Brown Jenkin got together on Walpurgisnacht and did really hard math! Any roleplaying game player can come up with a million possible reasons that Keziah would carry out such sacrifices, and any horror or SF fan—or even a critic who writes long divagatory books on the weird tale—should be able to stump up one or two good ones.
“How can Lovecraft the atheist allow Keziah to be frightened off by the sight of a crucifix?”
Hmmm. Let’s see. Maybe characters aren’t their authors? Maybe Keziah Mason, a 17th century witch and initiate of a witch-cult persecuted (for good reason) by cross-wielding folks, might be frightened briefly—not “off” as Joshi mischaracterizes the event—by a crucifix? Maybe in faultless Freudian fashion her subconscious is still anti-Christian instead of cosmically atheist? Either way, Joshi misses the joke, that Gilman winds up strangling Keziah with the chain of the crucifix—it has no magic witch-repelling power.
“Why does Nyarlathotep appear in the conventional figure of the Black Man?”
For the same reason that he appears that way in both the sonnet and prose-poem that bear his name? And maybe because he was summoned by a 17th-century European witch in the form that she expected—that she calculated, if you will—instead of as the Large And Moving Sloar?
“In the final confrontation with Keziah, what is the purpose of the abyss aside from providing a convenient place down which to kick Brown Jenkin?”
Well, Joshi’s got me there. In all my time spent in hyperspatial witch-attics, I’ve never seen an abyss, and Lovecraft is being downright unrealistic… Seriously, what kind of asinine question is this?
“How does Brown Jenkin subsequently emerge from the abyss to eat out Gilman’s heart?”
Didn’t Joshi just complain that we don’t know what the abyss does? Does he even read his own chapters? Maybe it’s a wormhole. Maybe Brown Jenkin—being the one who taught Keziah to use hyperspace, after all—is really good at emerging from abysses.
Hey, but don’t worry, S.T.—August Derleth didn’t much like this story either.
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
[Price: August 1932; HPL: October? 1932-April 1933]
I will say this—this is some kinda slam-bang story. There’s more wonderful loose ends, trippy metaphysics, and crazy fizzy-pop ideas in this story than in virtually any other Lovecraft tale of like length. And at the end, nothing much has happened—Carter is still missing, the time is still (literally) out of joint, and all we’ve got is tapir prints in the carpet and the comforting knowledge that in the year 2169 Pickman Carter will kick “the Mongol hordes” out of Australia.
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This is the only multiple-author story that Joshi sees fit to include in the Penguin series. On the one hand, this is defensible on the grounds that it concludes the “Randolph Carter Cycle” of tales. On the other, it definitely su
ffers by comparison to the pure-quill Lovecraft surrounding it.
This is not an inevitable outcome of Lovecraft’s collaborations. Counting his ghost-writing and revision work as “collaboration,” some of it was quite successful. I think “The Mound,” “The Curse of Yig,” and “Out of the Aeons” are worthy components of the canon at all but the highest levels—certainly they bear comparison to, say, “The Shunned House” or even “Haunter of the Dark.”
On a lower level—say “Picture in the House” or so—“The Last Test” and “Medusa’s Coil” are surprisingly effective on a lot of levels, too, and I enjoy the over-the-top qualities of “The Horror in the Museum.” “The Challenge From Beyond” is fun for what it is, namely an exquisite corpse.
A lot of people praise “The Night Ocean” very highly, but I’m not sure I’ve read it recently (or closely) enough to know what they’re talking about. I don’t remember being blown away by it, though.
That said, in contrarian fashion I’m quite fond of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach,” which HPL co-wrote with his wife Sonia, but then I’m just a big romantic who loves sea serpents.
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Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism.