First published in Rue Morgue #50, Halloween 2005
Most writers and editors I know have cultivated a kind of memory for words; it is, after all, our trade. That’s certainly true for me, and while I can’t with any degree of accuracy remember when I first read or heard the word “horror”, I can remember when I first understood what it meant. H.P. Lovecraft taught me that.
I was reading The Shadow Over Innsmouth for the first time, and I became so overwhelmed by the sheer terror of it that I suddenly became aware of something happening in my skin. Lovecraft’s conception of horror was all-consuming – it was cosmic, delirious and bizarre.
Like Poe, Lovecraft seemed to suffer from a weird loneliness that set him intellectually and spiritually apart from his peers, even though he was baroque like the early gothic writers and archaic like the fantasists of his time. But in Lovecraft we find the first sample of an obsessive, pervasive interest in what he himself termed “the morbidly unnatural.”
Two years after his death in 1939, Lovecraft’s non-fiction essay called Supernatural Horror in Literature finally saw the light of day, and in it, he argued that the horror story (or weird tale as he preferred to call it) had one overriding concern: to exploit the reader’s sense of fear, and specifically the fear of the unknown. Truly horrific stories were, according to Lovecraft, single-minded in their pursuit of eliciting in the reader “a profound sense of dread” made possible through a simulated “contact with the unknown”.
In Lovecraft, I think, we find the first instance of this literary distillation – fiction as an expression of sense experience penned by an impersonal author. Poe had mystery, Poe had romance, but Lovecraft was entirely devoted to penetrating the black recesses of his darkest dreams, and itemize the nightmares he found there. Lovecraft dreamed unnameable slithering things without form or name, the mere sight of which would drive the human mind to madness. Lovecraft perfected the pulp prose that gave life to his strange imaginings.
Perhaps I came to understand horror in Lovecraft because I recognized that it is a rare taste and appeals to the few. He seemed to have recognized in a story called The Outsider, in which a tormented young man realizes he is a monster to other people.
H.P. Lovecraft was an odd man. Biographer S.T. Joshi calls him “one of the most asexual beings on record”; his lantern-like jaw and long, dignified features have made him an unlikely icon of the genre. But despite his complexities and mannered mysteries, he was an easy man to understand, I think. His love of cursed houses, dilapidated villages and doomed seaside towns is something we can all relate to.
In 1933, Lovecraft wrote a story called The Festival in which he described (in his particular fashion) being invited by relatives to a lonely village to partake in an annual ceremony. He finds himself caught up in a midnight procession that leads the town’s inhabitants into the bowels of the earth where they consort with creatures not quite of this world.
I can’t help thinking that, at some point, Lovecraft no longer saw himself as a solitary outsider. I’d like to think he recognized a common ancestry with those with whom he shared his love of the morbidly unnatural – a procession through history of huddled, shrouded bodies that, like him, were drawn to wander into places where no one else would dare go.