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New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft This page intentionally left blank New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft Edited by David Simmons NEW CRITICAL ESSAYS ON H. P. LOVECRAFT Copyright © David Simmons, 2013. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-33224-0 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 978-1-349-46166-0 ISBN 978-1-137-32096-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137320964 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New critical essays on H. P. Lovecraft / [edited] by David Simmons. pages cm. 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 This book is dedicated to all those readers of Lovecraft, past, present, and future. Long may you enjoy his work. This page intentionally left blank 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 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 FIGURES 9.1 Dr. Fate confronts octopoid horrors and black magicians 164 9.2 Dr. Fate battles the Fishmen of Nyarl-Amen 165 9.3 Dr. Fate fi nds the ancient lost city of Nyarl-Amen 166 9.4 The Justice League face Starro the Conqueror 169 9.5 Claustrophobia and psychological breakdown 171 9.6 Alberto Breccia’s Cthulhu, from Los mitos de Cthulhu 171 9.7 The eerie mood of Lovecraft’s stories is captured 173 9.8 For whom the bell bongs? 174 9.9 A telepathic attack from beyond the stars? 176 9.10 Shattered perspectives and contact with the unrepresentable 178 9.11 Hellboy by Mike Mignola 180 9.12 Cthulhu Tales and The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft 181 9.13 At the Mountains of Madness by Ian Culbard 183 9.14 “The Call of Cthulhu” by Ian Edginton and D’Israeli 183 9.15 Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows 184 This page intentionally left blank FOREWORD The emergence of H. P. Lovecraft from a significant figure in the tiny fields of amateur journalism and pulp fiction to a writer of canonical status in American and world literature is little short of incredible— perhaps unparalleled by any other writer in Western literature. Only the self-imposed obscurity of his New England contemporary Emily Dickinson is even remotely akin to Lovecraft’s failure to publish even a single book of his stories (apart from the shoddily printed The Shadow over Innsmouth, 1936) in his lifetime. In 1914, when Lovecraft began publishing in the amateur press, he was emerging from a six-year period of reclusiveness following his abrupt withdrawal from high school without a diploma. At this time, his focus was on poetry, essays, and editorials; it was only through the encouragement of W. Paul Cook and others that he resumed the writing of fiction in 1917 after a nine-year hiatus. Cook’s brief essay “Howard P. Lovecraft’s Fiction” (1917) 1 remains a perspicacious analy- sis of his early writing, but other amateur journalists, not accustomed to weird and supernatural literature, were less enthusiastic. The founding in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales was, how- ever, a mixed blessing. To be sure, the magazine provided the first steady professional market for Lovecraft’s tales, but in appearing there, Lovecraft and other practitioners of weird fiction began a process of self- marginalization that was not overcome for decades. There is, however, a vexing quandary over cause and effect here: Did the establishment of Weird Tales and other pulps cause mainstream magazines and publishers to eschew the publication of weird fiction, however skillfully written, or did broader cultural changes affecting literature—whether it be the avant-garde Modernism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound or the social real- ism of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis—result in the banishment of nonmimetic fiction to the aesthetic ghetto of the pulps? xii Foreword I suspect the latter; but whatever the case, it was at this time that all the recognized genres (horror fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, romance fiction, the Western) were established, at least in nucleus. For such a self-effacing and unworldly writer as Lovecraft, the result of his relegation to the pulps was doubly unfortunate. Not only was he unsuccessful in his rather clumsy attempts to secure book publication for his tales with such publishers as G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Vanguard, and Alfred A. Knopf, but the general literary world almost entirely failed to notice the increasingly dynamic and revolutionary work that he was producing in the course of the 1920s and 1930s. The number of references to Lovecraft in “literary” venues during his lifetime can be counted on the fingers of one hand, ranging from a brief mention in a column by William Bolitho in 1930 to an embarrassingly silly article by J. Randle Luten on “What Makes a Story Click?” in an obscure writer’s magazine. 2 The bulk of “critical” work on Lovecraft, if it can be called that, was to be found in the readers’ columns of the pulp magazines—notably, Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. Some of these comments are surprisingly acute, but on the whole they are distin- guished more for their enthusiasm than for their critical sagacity. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Lovecraft’s emergence from the obscurity of the pulps was posthumous. And yet it is notable that a lengthy review in Publisher’s Weekly of Lovecraft’s first true book, The Outsider and Others (1939), was devoted more to praising the idea of the book—as a monument to friendship, given that August Derleth and Donald Wandrei had formed a publishing company, Arkham House, specifically for the purpose of publishing the work of their departed friend and colleague—than to the actual contents of the book.3 The early Arkham House volumes of Lovecraft’s tales and other writ- ings never received extensive notice, but the enthusiasm of mystery devotee Will Cuppy is apparent in his several reviews for the New York Herald Tribune. While T. O. Mabbott expressed pride in being the first academician to review Lovecraft, and his laconic comment in American Literature (March 1940)—“Time will tell if his place be very high in our literary history; that he has a place seems certain” 4 —may be seen to signal the beginnings of Lovecraft’s ascent into the critical fraternity. Other reviewers, such as comic novelist Peter De Vries and Marjorie Farber, were less welcoming. This set the stage for Edmund Wilson’s “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous” ( New Yorker, November 24, 1945), which initially appears to bury Lovecraft by wholesale condemnation: “The only real horror in most of [Lovecraft’s] fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad Foreword xiii art. Lovecraft was not a good writer.” And yet, as Wilson’s article con- tinues, one is struck by the grudging praise that emerges in the course of his overall attack: “Lovecraft himself . is a little more interesting than his stories . his long essay on the literature of the supernatural is a really able piece of work . The story called “The Colour out of Space” more or less predicts the effects of the atomic bomb, and “The Shadow out of Time” deals not altogether ineffectively with the perspectives of geo- logical eons and the idea of controlling time-sequence.” 5 And so on. Only a few months after Wilson’s review article appeared, the critic Fred Lewis Pattee praised Supernatural Horror in Literature as “a brilliant piece of criticism.” 6 J.

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