Something for a Halloween weekend. Hey there Cthulhu. A minor vice of mine is a love for old pulp science fiction and fantasy. One of the authors I treasure is H.P. Lovecraft, best known for his cycle of horror science fiction\fantasy stories centering around the Old Ones, evil supernatural entities that lurk in dark dimensions, waiting to unleash unspeakable horror on unsuspecting humanity. The best known of these demonic creatures is Cthulhu. I have always found these stories gut-bustingly funny due to the fact that Lovecraft, in these stories, has to be the worst writer of fiction, at least fiction that does not contain phrases like “Love’s Savage Unending Fury”, “The Davinci Code”, “Based On A True Story”, and “Stephen King”, since Bulwer-Lytton shuffled off to the world beyond. Some things are so spectactularly bad that I find myself liking them due to how hair-raisingly inept they are.
Only an example will do. Much of Lovecraft’s work can be found online. Here is a sample from the Mountains of Madness, which is one of Lovecraft’s better efforts:
“But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry- “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” and at last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths – given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed – had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.”
That is typical Lovecraft. Characters exist in his fiction as an afterthought. Plot is simply an excuse so that he can expound on the mythos he created. Never use one word when ten can substitute. Keep telling the dullard reader that he must be afraid, and that this is a horror story that he is reading. As Edmund Wilson, a great literary critic if also a left-wing loon, tax cheat and rather poor novelist himself, put it “The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art. Lovecraft was not a good writer”.
Well then, why bother with Lovecraft at all? A writer who is a poor writer is a waste of time to read, right? Not in the case of Lovecraft. Poor writer that he was, and in his more candid moments Lovecraft admitted that his writing skills were not of a high order, he had a great imagination and the loving detail he poured into the mythos he created is interesting, even if it was done with little craft. Reading his stories, other than the somewhat shameful pleasure of viewing a literary car crash, is somewhat akin to listening to a delightfully daffy uncle-in-law explain his theory as to how the Rosicrucians control the Fed. Taken in small doses this flight into unreason has a certain zany charm.
Since the death of Lovecraft many competent writers, including August Derleth and Robert Bloch, have authored stories in the Lovecraftian mythos. There is also a cottage industry of products produced by devotees of the saga. My personal favorite:
Just the thing for that little scamp in the family: My Little Cthulhu and victims!
Of course some people will always try to work in a political angle to everything, and the mythos is no exception. Cthulhu has been running for president now for decades, and his campaign slogan “Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?” does have a refreshing candor about it.
So I must say well done to Mr. Lovecraft. He has given many hours of amusement to millions of people over the years since his death as a result of his scribblings. Not an important accomplishment perhaps, but not a bad one for a bad writer.
Derleth? Derleth can’t hold a foetid tallow taper to Lovecraft. Derleth’s work always sounds like an imitation of HPL, his writing some how neater, tidier, lighter. Lovecraft’s work is thick, dark, dripping like the beings it described. His writing oozes over you, every sentence another heavy step, every phrase rumbled up through catarrh-wracked lungs, every paragraph bespeckled in fungus. So what that there’s no characterization, that character growth is measured in leaden paces toward the mad-house, that plotting is a thing he tried and cast aside. To read Lovecraft is to spend time in a world where it’s always an overcast day in early autumn, where healthy growth is a concept never seen in man, beast or plant, and where the only reason you have kept your sanity till now is that They haven’t taken notice of you. Good stuff! 😉
Don, have you ever seen the two movies made by the HPLS of “Call” and “Whisperer In The Darkness”? Both should be available though Netflix, and here creepyclassics.com
I wouldn’t say that Lovecraft is a bad writer, only that he wrote one story over and over. Some writers are all about dialogue, or characters; some write for the perfect kiss or the moment that the hero says “I love you”. Lovecraft writes for the moment when the lead character’s sanity is crushed by the unutterable. Everything else in his stories is in service to that moment. I think he does a great job of it most of the time, but after a while it loses all its impact, because you should never be able to expect the incomprehensible.
He’s also the most racist writer I’ve ever read. I know, these days it’s stylish to accuse dead white male writers of racism, but wow, he was racist. Everything good and wholesome is embodied by New England whites, and evil creeps forward from places occupied by minorities with unappealing faces (usually sailors). You start to realize that the realm of humanity is whiteness, and the scary unfathomable is any other culture.
“character growth is measured in leaden paces toward the mad-house”
Nice.
“A writer who is a poor writer is a waste of time to read, right?”
Not necessarily. It depends on how one defines “poor writing”. If it means “not High Literary Art worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature and not likely to be included in future English Lit classes,” then about 99.99% of the fiction currently in print fits that description — including numerous books that we have probably enjoyed reading and maybe even learned something from.
If it means “written in such an obtuse or muddled fashion that it becomes more of a burden than a pleasure to read,” then it is IMO a waste of time — and there are a number of works hailed as “classics” and even taught in English Lit classes (e.g. James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”) that fit this description. And actually, even this type of bad writing can serve a useful purpose if it inspires one to say “Heck, I could do better than that” and start cultivating one’s own literary talent.
Lovecraft was the first of many authors in this vein for me. When I got my Kindle, I began downloading a bunch of authors of early “weird” and “horror,” such as:
1. Algernon Blackwood
2. Arthur Machen
3. M.R. James
4. Robert Hugh Benson
5. Bram Stoker
6. H.R. Haggard
7. William Hope Hodgson
8. Clark Ashton Smith
“but wow, he was racist”
Pretty much. For most of his life Lovecraft adopted the pose of an upper crust Tory who thought this country went to Hell in 1776. Then FDR was elected and he flip-flopped to become a socialist which I guess fitted in at least with his life long atheism.
“As for the Republicans—–how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
“Don, have you ever seen the two movies made by the HPLS of “Call” and “Whisperer In The Darkness”? Both should be available though Netflix, and here creepyclassics.com”
Not yet.
“When I got my Kindle, I began downloading a bunch of authors of early “weird” and “horror,” such as:”
It’s an interesting genre Jonathan, chock full of striking personalities. Their lives are often as interesting as their writings.
“Heck, I could do better than that”
Which is precisely how James Fenimore Cooper got into writing after his wife challenged him to make good on his claim that he could write a better novel than the one they had been reading.
I actually wrote an artcle (see blog search function) about how the immediate and maddening terror of Cthulhu was a superior reaction to the deity than the careless service and banal hymns we give to the Holy Trinity. At least that’s how I remember it.
We also had many memorable role playing games of Call of Cthulhu. Elder Sign may be the best Cthulhu games: not too hard, or long, but lots of meaningful choices and flavor. It’s even available as an iPad game. Good group game in the boxed version. Fantasy Flight, I think.
He wasn’t much of a writer, but he was GREAT at painting with words. I read the bit that you quoted and I can see it. (I don’t like horror, but I can see it, and it inspires the desired reaction.)