HP Lovecraft

Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 CONTENTS List of Figures ix Foreword by S. T. Joshi xi Acknowledgments xvii Introduction H. P. Lovecraft: The Outsider No More? 1 David Simmons Part I Lovecraft and His Fiction One “A Certain Resemblance”: Abject Hybridity in H. P. Lovecraft’s Short Fiction 13 David Simmons Two “Spawn of the Pit”: Lavinia, Marceline, Medusa, and All Things Foul: H. P. Lovecraft’s Liminal Women 31 Gina Wisker Three “The Infinitude of the Shrieking Abysses”: Rooms, Wombs, Tombs, and the Hysterical Female Gothic in “The Dreams in the Witch-House” 55 Sara Williams Four Slime and Western Man: H. P. Lovecraft in the Time of Modernism 73 Gerry Carlin and Nicola Allen Five Looming at the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft’s Mirages 91 Robert Waugh Six On “The Dunwich Horror” 105 Donald R. Burleson Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 viii Contents Part II Lovecraft and His Influence Seven The Shadow over Derleth: Disseminating the Mythos in The Trail of Cthulhu 119 J. S. Mackley Eight From the Library of America to the Mountains of Madness: Recent Discourse on H. P. Lovecraft 135 Steffen Hantke Nine Co(s)mic Horror 157 Chris Murray and Kevin Corstorphine Ten “Sounds Which Filled Me with an Indefinable Dread”: The Cthulhu Mythopoeia of H. P. Lovecraft in “Extreme” Metal 193 Joseph Norman Eleven “Comrades in Tentacles”: H. P. Lovecraft and China Miéville 209 Martyn Colebrook Twelve Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture 227 Mark Jones Notes on Contributors 249 Index 253 Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 NEW CRITICAL ESSAYS ON H. P. LOVECRAFT Copyright © David Simmons, 2013. All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–137–33224–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New critical essays on H. P. Lovecraft / [edited] by David Simmons. pages cm. ISBN 978–1–137–33224–0 (hardback) 1. Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890–1937—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Horror tales, American—History and criticism. I. Simmons, David, 1979– editor of compilation. PS3523.O833Z79 2013 813Ј.52—dc23 2013002508 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 INTRODUCTION H. P. Lovecraft: The Outsider No More? David Sim mons A nameless protagonist, looked after by an elderly confidante, yet cut off from the world around him for many years, emerges from his isola- tion in a subterraneous dwelling determined to ascend what he believes is a nearby ruined tower. After climbing the tower and discovering that he has in fact just reached the ground level of the forest he has been living underneath all his life, our protagonist vows to head toward the light he spies in a nearby castle. After several hours of traveling, he views a party of revelers and makes toward them, wary, yet eager to befriend them. However, when he nears the partygoers, they are struck by an unknown source of abject horror and flee from the hid- eous entity they apparently perceive. Left alone, our protagonist gradu- ally and unknowingly approaches a mirror and upon seeing his own reflection realizes that he is, in fact, the monster from whom all those he hoped to befriend have fled. While this story outline should be immediately recognizable to read- ers of Howard Phillip Lovecraft’s early Gothic tale “The Outsider,” it is an apt demonstration of popular impressions of Lovecraft that so many critics interpret the tale as being partly autobiographical. Even those who have tended to refrain from such an interpretation have had to admit that “in a very general way ‘The Outsider’ may possibly be indicative of [Lovecraft’s] own self-image” (Joshi and Schultz 199). Indeed, it is possible to see how the story’s concluding line, “I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men,” has proven to be too fine an opportunity for those Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 2 David Simmons seeking to read the author as adhering to that familiar model of the genre writer as a reclusive outcast, at odds with the world (Lovecraft 49). Nevertheless, the last few years of Lovecraft’s life do seem to indi- cate a withdrawal, voluntary or otherwise, that apparently positioned him as an outsider of sorts. For, at the time of his death, Lovecraft was separated from his wife, Sonia Greene, living alone with his surviving aunt in meager lodgings in Providence, and while he had published a number of stories to moderate acclaim among his contemporaries, he remained a poor man, largely unheard of among the general reading populace. Lovecraft’s increasing feelings of alienation, his dislike of modernity, coupled with his apparent failure to reach the audiences that would come to love his work posthumously, seem to suggest a man ill at ease with himself and his writing. Indeed, as S. T. Joshi notes “In 1936 Lovecraft made what to us seems the astonishing assertion that “I’m farther from doing what I want to do than I was 20 years ago” (Joshi 2007). Such a statement is certainly astonishing given the skill and power on display in so many of Lovecraft’s best stories. While it is difficult to attempt to summarize the range of approaches and influences apparent in the entirety of Lovecraft’s fiction, drawing as he does from Poe, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen to name just a few, he is perhaps most well known for the series of stories that have been retrospectively classified as constituting the “Cthulhu Mythology” (a term coined by August Derleth, and which would later become known in the popular imagination as the “Cthulhu Mythos”). The primary element of this fictional construct is the idea that a pantheon of ancient beings, the “Great Old Ones,” once ruled earth but have since fallen into a deep slumber from which they are increasingly threat- ening to awake. Lovecraft’s stories, while often variable in quality, became more accomplished as his own voice matured. Examples such as “The Colour out of Space” (1927), “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), At the Mountains of Madness (1936), and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941) retain their ability to shock, scare, entertain, and stimulate. The best of Lovecraft’s tales present the reader with a brand of cosmic horror reliant on a kind of existentialist terror (which Lovecraft referred to as “indifferentism”)1 that is arguably much more relevant to a twentieth-century reader than the standard Gothic tropes of haunted houses, maidens in distress, vampires, and werewolves. Often edging into the realm of science fiction, Lovecraft’s work has more latterly been classified as “Weird Fiction” by writers and critics such as Ann and Jeff Vandemeer, and China Miéville, whose Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 Copyrighted material – 9781137332240 The Outsider No More? 3 essay on this nascent critical classification positions Lovecraft as “the preeminent figure in the field” (510). Due in large part to the work of a number of small publishers (most notably Arkham House, founded by Derleth and Donald Wandrei), often modified versions of Lovecraft’s fiction remained in print despite his initial lack of any appreciable critical and commercial success, sub- sequently garnering a growing number of fans who discovered the author’s work in the decades following his death. Nowhere was this nascent adulation of Lovecraft more apparent than with writers of genre fiction, among whom Lovecraft’s contribution to the development of the field has long been acknowledged, yet this following until recently had little impact on Lovecraft’s marginal status within the canon. The academic community has often been reticent to concede the writer’s influence. Although the preeminent horror writer of the late twentieth century Stephen King, famously declared that H. P. Lovecraft should be considered as “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale” (King npg), and more recently the respected nov- elist Joyce Carol Oates similarly suggested that Lovecraft be placed alongside Edgar Allen Poe as having exerted “an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction” (Oates), for many years there was a scarcity of sustained scholarly material on this significant American writer. Indeed, a great deal of the responsibility for this regrettable state of affairs must be laid at the feet of the many critics who continued until relatively recently to accept Lovecraft into the canon at all; figures such as Edmund Wilson and Damon Knight decry Lovecraft and his followers “for poor writing and for imaginative sterility” (Joshi 2007 , 116). Yet in contrast to the scholarly elision of the writer’s work, during the last ten years Lovecraft’s standing among producers and consumers of genre fiction has undoubtedly been in the ascendancy. This turn- around may be a result of the fact that as time passes there is now a whole generation of academics who grew up with the author’s stories.

Load more