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 in the Witch-House” 55 Sara Williams Four Slime and 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 “” 105 Donald R. Burleson viii Contents

Part II Lovecraft and His Influence Seven The Shadow over Derleth: Disseminating the Mythos in The Trail of 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 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 “” 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, 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 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 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 (, , , 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 and had formed a publishing company, , 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. O. Bailey (who had briefly corresponded with Lovecraft as early as 1930), in the first academic treatise on science fic- tion, Pilgrims through Space and Time [1947]), spoke warmly of Lovecraft’s contributions to the genre. Richard B. Gehman, in a popular article on science fiction, “Imagination Runs Wild” ( New Republic, January 17, 1949), found much to praise in Lovecraft’s work and influence. Joseph Henry Jackson, a well-known critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, cited the early Arkham House volumes as having “something quite special in the line of shudders.” 7 When the first British editions of Lovecraft appeared in 1951, Eric Keown and the noted British novelist Anthony Powell generally praised Lovecraft, although with some equivocation. Derleth was also the spearhead of what would be called the “” (his term, not Lovecraft’s). This whole enterprise of imitat- ing, or adding to, the pseudomythological background that Lovecraft developed in his tales, beginning with “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), is itself so bewilderingly complex that it deserves separate study. 8 Suffice it to say that this too is a phenomenon virtually without parallel in the annals of literature—a phenomenon that began with Lovecraft’s own colleagues (, , Robert E. Howard, and several others), but to which Derleth devoted a substantial portion of his time and energies. His own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos are less than inspired, chiefly because he seriously miscon- strued the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of Lovecraft’s -cycle. It is only in recent years that more dynamic and innovative treatments of the Cthulhu Mythos have emerged. If Lovecraft was largely ignored in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was because the entire field of weird fiction 9 was then at a low ebb. With the demise of Weird Tales in 1954, many weird fictionists had few venues in which to place their tales; several writers, including , , , and , wrote weird fic- tion under the guise of science fiction or crime/suspense fiction. It is xiv Foreword possible that the increasing popularity of horror films and television shows in the late 1950s and 1960s 10 ignited a resurgence of interest in weird literature. It was certainly the case that revenue from several Lovecraft films of the early 1960s, such as The Haunted Palace (1963), allowed Arkham House to reissue Lovecraft’s tales after having allowed them to fall out of print. But it was Lovecraft’s sudden and surprising popularity in paper- back editions—f irst from Lancer, then from Beagle/Ballantine begin- ning in 1969—that catapulted him onto the world stage, at least in terms of pop-culture appeal. Time magazine took note of the wide sales of these volumes in a jocular but largely respectful review on June 11, 1973. It was just at this time that a renewed scholarly interest in Lovecraft was underway, ultimately revolutionizing our under- standing of the man and his work. Sadly, this work was in some sense triggered by the death in 1971 of August Derleth, for it was Derleth’s stranglehold on Lovecraft’s work—and his self-assumed role as Lovecraft’s authorized spokesman—that inhibited a proper under- standing of his work for decades. But Derleth laid the seeds for the overturning of his own misconceptions by publishing Lovecraft’s Selected Letters (ultimately issued in five volumes between 1965 and 1976), for these letters not only revealed the metaphysical and aes- thetic bases for his fiction, but also showed that Lovecraft was a keen thinker and observer of his times, very different from the “eccentric recluse” he had been thought to be. The scholarly revolution, led initially by Dirk W. Mosig, took wing with the dynamic work of such critics as Donald R. Burleson, Peter Cannon, David E. Schultz, and many others. I myself contributed to the movement at an early age by a series of fortunate accidents, issuing the first anthology of Lovecraft criticism from an academic publisher (H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, 1980) and compiling the first comprehensive bibliography of Lovecraft (1981). 11 During my years of undergraduate and graduate study at Brown University, I prepared accurate texts of Lovecraft’s fiction and other writing; this work even- tually led to Arkham House’s corrected editions of the 1980s. Evidence that Lovecraft had infiltrated the academy arrived with the H. P. Lovecraft Centennial Conference at Brown University (August 17–19, 1990), in which scholars from around the world congregated in a stimulating series of panel discussions that went far in exhibiting the richness of Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought. It was at this time that a number of important books on Lovecraft appeared, and on review- ing one of them, the prestigious journal American Literature was forced Foreword xv to conclude: “It’s getting to where those who still ignore Lovecraft will have to go on the defensive.” 12 My biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), sought to present a fuller and more sympathetic por- trait of Lovecraft’s than L. Sprague de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography (1975), although the latter volume, whatever its deficiencies, did bring Lovecraft to mainstream attention as never before. A few years later, I prepared annotated editions of Lovecraft’s work for Penguin Classics, and these three volumes (1999, 2001, 2004) appear to have triggered Lovecraft’s canonization in the Library of America edition of his Tales (2005). Lovecraft’s fiction, poetry, and essays have now been published in definitive, textually corrected editions, and thousands of his letters are being issued in a print edition that may exceed 25 volumes. And as my revised bibliography of Lovecraft (2009) establishes, his work has been translated into hundreds of editions in at least 25 languages worldwide, from Bengali to Serbo-Croatian. Criticism of his work is still rela- tively rare in standard academic journals, but such specialized journals as Lovecraft Studies (1979–2005) and the Lovecraft Annual (2007f.) have published many valuable studies. References or allusions to Lovecraft in books, magazines, newspapers, and online sites are now so numerous as to defy tabulation. But Lovecraft’s distinctiveness resides in the remarkable way in which he remains both a popular and a critically acclaimed figure. We can find praise of, or at least allusions to, Lovecraft in the writ- ing of , Paul Theroux, Gore Vidal, and ; but we can also find a commercially successful role-playing game, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1982f.), along with plush Cthulhu dolls and “Cthulhu for President” bumper stickers. Film adaptations continue apace, although few of them capture the essence of Lovecraft’s cosmic vision. No writer, not even his great predecessor , con- joins popular and critical renown in this manner. I believe that the time for defending Lovecraft as a genuine literary figure is long past; his ascent to the canon of American and world lit- erature is now complete. What remains is the continued analysis and evaluation of his entire work—fiction, poetry, essays, letters—and the placing of that work in the context of his times and in the overall history of weird and mainstream literature. It is the purpose of this book to carry on that process of analysis so that the true richness of Lovecraft’s writing can emerge.

S. T. Joshi xvi Foreword

Notes

1 . See A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: , 2010. 48–49. 2 . William Bolitho. “Pulp Magazines” (New York World, 4 January 1930); J. Randle Luten, “What Makes a Story Click?” ( American Author, July 1932); in A Weird Writer in Our Midst, 231 and 56–62. 3 . [Unsigned], “Horror Story Author Published by Fellow Writers” ( Publisher’s Weekly, February 24, 1940), in A Weird Writer in Our Midst, 180–82. 4 . A Weird Writer in Our Midst, 183. 5 . Wilson’s article is reprinted in H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 46–49. 6 . Fred Pattee, review of Supernatural Horror in Literature, American Literature (May 1946); A Weird Writer in Our Midst, 207. 7 . Joseph Henry Jackson. “A Bookman’s Notebook” (San Francisco Chronicle, January 6, 1950); A Weird Writer in Our Midst, 222. 8 . See my Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos . Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2008. 9 . Lovecraft provides a lengthy explanation of what “Weird” fiction is in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” available in Supernatural Horror in Literature & Other Literary Essays . ed. . Maryland: , 2008. While space does not permit the inclusion of that whole essay here, of particular impor- tance to what is usually meant by the classification “Weird” can be found in Lovecraft’s opening remark that the “Weird” tale contains “the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natu- ral law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis” (113). 10 . Particularly The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) and The Outer Limits (1963–1965), episodes of which often showed a debt to Lovecraft’s fiction and the ideas of cos- mic horror therein. 11 . See H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism , and S. T. Joshi. H. P. Lovecraft & Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography. OH: Kent State University Press. 1981. 12 . Review of Donald R. Burleson’s Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, American Literature 63 (1991): 374. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My great thanks go to all of the contributors who provided work for this volume; your tireless efforts and enthusiasm have made it what it is. I am particularly appreciative to the team at Palgrave including Brigitte Shull who allowed me the opportunity to put this collection together. My father David Robert Simmons first introduced me to the perverse delights of horror fiction when he bought me a selection of children’s Ladybird classics adaptations of Dracula , Frankenstein, and The Invisible Man ; little did he know what he had unleashed, but I thank him for igniting the lifelong enthusiasm that led to this collection. I thank Michael Kleiske for the use of the image you can find on this book’s cover. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me throughout the process of bringing this collection together: my parents; my friends, Claire Allen, Lorna Jowett, Michael Starr, and Anna Everding; and my ever-loving partner, Nicola Allen.