Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Titan of Terror
A Howard Phillips Lovecraft tribute - Part 1
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
H.P. Lovecraft: Lord of Fiction
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, one of the greatest authors of fiction to have ever lived, was born on the 20th of August, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island1. His youth was scarred by tragedy and mental illness. His father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was a traveling salesman of silverware. He suffered a nervous breakdown when Lovecraft was three and remained in a hospital for five years. He died on July 19, 1898, when his son was almost eight years old. Lovecraft's upbringing then fell to his mother, Sarah Susan Phillips, his two aunts, and his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, who introduced him into classical literature and acted as father figure following his father's death. The blame for the destruction of Lovecraft's life lies solely on his mother. A psychotic and overprotective woman, she wouldn't let him out of her sight and would constantly try to shield him from external dangers. This treatment played a huge role in his character and works later in life. Even as a grown-up, Lovecraft never truly connected with the human world, remaining an outcast and giving the impression of an immature individual.
Lovecraft was a child prodigy. He would recite poems by the age of two, read by the age of three, and write by the age of six. Although he was severely prone to illness from very early in his life, his literary genius found a way of expressing itself in the form of weird, fantastical stories. In his isolation, initially caused by his mother and later continued by choice, he created worlds of terror and colorful dreams of cities lost in the clouds or buried in the frozen wastelands of the Earth, inhabited by fantastical creatures and magical civilizations lost in the histories of the Earth. His interest in the weird was also fostered by his grandfather and his first work may date as early as 1896. But it was his obsession with Edgar Allan Poe that sealed his fate:
... at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!
- H.P. Lovecraft in Selected Letters II (1925-1929)
In 1904, the death of Whipple Van Buren Phillips plunged the Phillips family into despair and financial difficulties. This pushed Lovecraft to the brink, often contemplating suicide, but his passion for learning seemed to silence these thoughts. However, in 1908, he dropped out of high-school after having a nervous breakdown and spent the following 5 years in solitude, writing poems, pursuing his astronomical interests, and taking correspondence courses. During this period Lovecraft also developed an, even more so, unhealthy relationship with his mother who still suffered from the trauma of losing her husband.
It was in April 1914 that Lovecraft fully emerged from his isolation when he joined an amateur journalist organization, the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA). In his own words in 1921, he says:
In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateurdom was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be... With the advent of the United I obtained a renewal to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening world.
Some of his earliest tales include The Beast in the Cave (1905) and The Alchemist (1908), and in 1917, after being urged by W. Paul Cook, a leading figure in the world of amateur journalism, he resumed his career in fiction. Others urged him as well and, as a result, he wrote The Tomb and Dagon in quick succession in 1917. It would not be until 1926 that he blossomed into the “Lord of Fiction”, writing short novels such as the iconic The Call of Cthulhu (1926), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), and At The Mountains of Madness (1931), by many considered one of his crown jewels.
In 1919, Lovecraft's mother suffered a nervous breakdown as her mental and physical strength deteriorated. She was admitted to Butler Hospital, same as her deceased husband in 1893. Her death on May 24th, 1921, devastated Lovecraft but by the summer of the same year he gathered enough money to attend an amateur journalist convention in Boston. There he met the only woman he would ever love, Sonia Haft Greene, later to become his wife. She was a widowed Russian Jew and seven years older than Lovecraft, but their relationship seemed uneventful in the beginning. He would visit her in her apartment at Brooklyn in 1922, the same year they co-authored The Horror at Martin's Beach, and the couple got married on March 3, 1924.
Life was not kind to Howard Phillips Lovecraft and troubles immediately descended upon the newly wed couple. Sonia decided to open a hat shop in Brooklyn which ended in failure, and Lovecraft turned down a chance to edit Weird Tales magazine since it required him to move to Chicago. Sonia's mental health quickly gave way and she was forced to spend time in a sanitarium in New Jersey. She proceeded to take up a succession of jobs in Cincinnati and Cleveland, in 1925, visiting New York only intermittently. Lovecraft then moved into a small apartment in a Brooklyn slum known as Red Hook. His disdain for people and prejudice against ethnic minorities grew much in this time, and he became increasingly depressed in a city full of foreigners. The change is obvious in his writings as well, The Horror at Red Hook (1925) and He (1925) being particular examples of the suffocation he felt living under these particular conditions.
It was in early 1926 that Lovecraft returned to his hometown on Providence, Rhode Island, where he would spend his remaining days. He continued to express his appreciation for his wife, but she was barred from visiting by his two aunts. They said she would taint his pseudo-aristocratic lineage no more, her being a tradeswoman and all. Lovecraft's own distant character played a definite part in their separation, and in 1929 Sonia finally filled for a divorce, although he never signed the final decree.
Oddly enough, the last years of his life were the most productive ones when he flourished both as a writer and as a person. As W. Paul Cook lovingly wrote: "He had been tried by fire and came out pure gold". He traveled regularly and nurtured his passion for knowledge by absorbing works of philosophy, literature, architecture and history. His interest in politics and The Great Depression contributed to him renouncing conservatism and supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also continued his vast correspondence with many soon-to-be titans of fiction, like August Derleth whom he took under his wing, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, and Fritz Leiber.
The few remaining years of Lovecraft's life, however, were not pleasant. The death of his beloved aunt Lillian Clark, in 1932, and the suicide of Robert E. Howard, one of his closest correspondents plunged him into great confusion and sadness. In the meantime his works, becoming increasingly lengthy and complex, were hard to sell and brought very small amounts of money forcing Lovecraft into extreme conditions of living. He would often brag about his ability to go by the whole week with just a can of beans! In the winter of 1936-1937, the excruciating pain of his case - cancer of the intestine - made it extremely difficult to work and carry through. It was on March 15, 1937, after five days in the Jane Brown Hospital, that H.P. Lovecraft died. He was buried on March 18 at the Phillips family plot in Swan Point Cemetery.
Lovecraft died believing he would never achieve fame and that this kind of art should exist only as a form of self-expression since any monetary aspirations were folly. He refused to tailor his work to the contemporary format and that certainly cost him the immediate recognition he desperately needed. Most of his works were scattered and unpublished, either as handwritten drafts or published in amateur and pulp magazines. The glory of Lovecraft was revealed when August Derleth and Donald Wandrei formed the firm Arkham House. As a way to honor their close friend they began a series of volumes where Lovecraft's stories, poems and short novels were published in astonishing success. Wandrei himself decided to also publish the mind-blowing collection of Lovecraft's letters. Believed to have sent over 100,000 letters, it was the close relationships and friendships with his most faithful correspondents that proved to be the roots of his future legendary status.
Without a doubt, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, has earned his place at the top as a courageous and elegant writer, and the greatest influence in the world of supernatural fiction ever to exist.2
Greatest Works
In no particular order3:
1. The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own.
The tale follows the investigations of a young man, whose uncle was a widely known professor and authority on ancient inscriptions. The plot picks up as he comes across some old newspaper pieces left by his uncle. Among them a strange artifact, a small statue of a figure with other-worldly characteristics. It was a creature standing on a monolith with human-like torso, tentacles, and dragon wings. This exquisite form of art puzzles the scientific community as not even the material from which it was made seemed earthly.
Filled with suspense, ecstasy and pure, unadulterated terror, the reader follows the protagonist in his investigations that lead to a horrible confrontation in the open sea. The crew of the ship came across a massive body of surfaces unknown to human architecture; monstrous monoliths with alien hieroglyphics, titanic chunks of stone used for staircases that no mortal could possibly descent, and an ominous door-like aperture shut tight as if protecting the world from the terrible reality of insane depths. What follows is the horrible revelation of the insignificance of mankind in the face of universal forces beyond comprehension; mountain-sized entities that lurk deep in the sea and far away in the shadows of the galaxy, operating across eons while humanity descends further and further into oblivion.
The Call of Cthulhu is perhaps the most widely known story written by H.P. Lovecraft. The tale spawned the Cthulhu Mythos, initiated by August Derleth, a fictional universe where characters, deities, locations and events co-exist to form a terrifying world of cosmic influence and madness.
2. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-1927)
There were towers on that titan mountain-top; horrible domed towers in noxious and incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of wonder and menace, all limned tiny and black and distant against the starry pschent that glowed malevolently at the uppermost rim of sight. Capping that most measureless of mountains was a castle beyond all mortal thought, and in it glowed the daemon-light. Then Randolph Carter knew that his quest was done, and that he saw above him the goal of all forbidden steps and audacious visions; the fabulous, the incredible home of the Great Ones atop unknown Kadath.
Inhabited by The Great Ones, The Dreamlands are an alternate dimension not accessible from the waking world. In their great ivory halls of unknown Kadath, the gods reign peacefully surrounded by the magical sounds of instruments not yet invented by human hands, covered by veil of flowery odour of unimaginable sweetness and views of vast evergreen gardens as far as any human eye can see.
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it.
Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.
Thus the quest to find unknown Kadath begins. Randolph Carter appears in a total of 7 stories written by H.P. Lovecraft making him a definite protagonist in the Cthulhu Mythos and a hero of the Dreamlands. This novella is perhaps one of the most colorful and astonishingly vivid tales of Lovecraft. Emotions of nostalgia, beauty, warmth, disgust, terror, and wonder will flood every reader. It works as a brilliant manifestation of the courage and the obsession one has when chasing their dreams, but also as a cautionary tale since not all dreams are what they originally seem.
3. Celephaïs (1920)
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
In dreams, people create the strangest and most beautiful of places. Such was the case with Kuranes, an insignificant nobody in the waking world, but when dreaming he became a noble explorer and founded Celephaïs, the most renown and magnificent city in the Dreamlands.
In the beginning, the city was but a memory of something distant and long forgotten. Kuranes would access the specific dream by following a cobblestone road in his childhood village, now asleep or dead. A gaping chasm stared menacingly whenever he reached the end of the cliff. Faith alone would permit such a leap, but Kuranes was led only by faith since all that existed for him in the waking world was an old, decrepit house and a city in which he had no name. Drugs helped him stay asleep even during the day, and he visited places in the Dreamlands so terrifyingly magnificent that he dared not describe them any further. So did Kuranes proceed, amidst endless vortexes of colours and smells and memories, and he finally arrived at the outskirts of his beloved city.
Lovecraft brilliantly ties this tale with his other masterpiece, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where Randolph Carter visits Celephaïs and talks with King Kuranes, and the latter shares his wisdom on dreams and obsessions. Celephaïs is a beautiful tale about the meaning of dreams and the nostalgic elements of responsibility-ridden adulthood when our childhood fantasies drift away while we hopelessly try to recreate the conditions of unconscious wonder and curiosity that once flooded our lives.
4. The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shriveled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened.
Walter Gilman, a young student of mathematics in the city of Arkham, finds himself living under the same roof as an old and forgotten dead witch.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain.
Obsessed with quantum physics and non-Euclidean geometry, he begins to have strange dreams of multi-dimensional realities the portal of whose is, mysteriously enough, his own gambrel roof. Haunted by a never ending fever, he begins a hopeless investigation into history about the life of the dead witch as well as the strange dimensions he encounters.
The Dreams in the Witch House is a very unique tale in which Lovecraft masterfully blends scientific inquiry with cosmic horror inducing a sense of reality and possibility. The young victim, as with every Lovecraftian story, is left in disbelief, horror, and wonder. At the same time, their mental capacity weakens and they slowly drift into paranoia. In what is one of the most realistic tales in Lovecraft's collection, the reader faithfully follows the protagonist in sharing their emotions, motives, and horrific experiences.
5. The Dunwich Horror (1928)
The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside.
It was in the rural city of Dunwich that Wilbur Whateley was born. Since his birth, mystery hung about him and his genealogy. Unusually strong and hideously deformed, he became the town's gossip. An absentee father and a mentally deficient mother added to the horror of his appearance and the strange knowledge and terrible sounds he would utter.
He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather’s time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying.
Dunwich slowly descends into madness as both peasants and cattle become victims of cosmic forces beyond human comprehension. The strange temple-like structure atop the mountain, consisting of unmovable stone monoliths, reveals a cloudy sky which beckons; what entity came into contact with human flesh long ago that produced such abominations that not even the blackest night can hide? After a series of horrific events, a party of men decide to take matters into their own hands.
Freakish rituals, blood-curdling cries in the night, and a monstrous mountain looking down upon the superstitious and ignorant peasantry, make this one of Lovecraft's most iconic tales.
6. Dagon (1917)
I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshiping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.
Set in the years of the Great War, a merchant travels in the open Pacific when a German sea-raider takes command of his ship. Managing to escape, he drifts alone in the open ocean under the scorching sun for un-counted days with no land in sight, only the never ending horizon. One day, upon waking, he witnessed the most horrendous of sights. A slimy expanse of hellish black mire took the place of the ocean as if the seabed rose from the depths to devour it. Having no choice but wander aimlessly, the castaway discovers secrets of ancient times hidden in the horrible ocean floor, waiting for the perfect time to be revealed to oblivious and unsuspecting mankind.
A classic case of paranoia and obsession, Lovecraft wrote this tale in 1917, shortly after writing The Tomb. He brilliantly encapsulates the un-forgetfullness one faces when cosmic realities are revealed to them. As one of his earlier tales, it is characterized by the cynical treatment of the protagonist, and hints of misanthropy can be detected as well. He is showing evidence of his career as a journalist when speaking about the war making this tale a case study of his early life and, although he never planned to do so, a brilliant introduction to the Cthulhu Mythos.
7. Nyarlathotep (1920)
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet.
This short story focuses on Nyarlathotep, the entity that appears the most in Lovecraft’s fiction. He is the messenger of the Outer Gods, known as the many-faced god, the crawling chaos. His ability to shapeshift makes him particularly terrible and his sinister motives are yet unknown. He has a human-like appearance, swarthy, slender, and sinister, and is also characterized by the ability to manipulate and force behaviors. Humanity is his playground therefore its destruction is not his endgame. Chaos and mayhem is attributed to him, and folklore suggests that destructive historical figures such as Hitler, Stalin, or Genghis Khan, were in fact Nyarlathotep in disguise.
Lovecraft wrote this story as he awakened from a nightmare where he himself met the many-faced god. In a paranoid frenzy, he began to write in a state of semi-consciousness. This tale remains one of the most chilling descriptions of eldritch forces and the induced hopelessness in the face of the endless planes of existence beyond space and time.
8. The Colour Out of Space (1927)
Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way.
In a small open land west of Arkham lies a lonely farm, the place where the colour out of space spilled its alien existence.
Everything started when the meteorite hit. A great plastic, bulging, soft stone emitted a strange hue of light that was not of the visible spectrum. Amazed and horrified, both farmers and Arkham scientists were left puzzling over the hideous thing since no known instrument or experimental method could be successfully applied. On top of that, it was constantly shrinking while emitting no vapor at all defying the known laws of physics. What alien substance from unimaginable corners of the cosmos could have landed on that remote place?
The name "blasted heath" was coined immediately when the vegetation of the area, trees and flowers alike, gave away strange colours before finally disintegrating in grey dust. A whole year and a half later, the great expanse that once laid the peaceful pastures of the loving Gardner family was turned into a half-dead, ghoulish locale that resembled nothing of this world. The animals and cattle were also affected, the latter showing a kind of partial disintegration and dismemberment; it was the most grotesque thing that any human has ever witnessed. But nothing compared to what occurred to humans. What could possibly cause feelings of haunting restlessness and freakish hallucinations of formless monstrosities that gnaw and suck the life out of every inch of one's living body, leaving it without flesh or energy, only for it collapse under its own weight in a pile of fleshy, grey dust?
In a brilliant introduction, Lovecraft presents the setting of the story inducing the desired feeling of desolate helplessness when encountering an expanse of empty land starring at the gaping mouth of the starry blackness above. Lovecraft also demonstrates his knowledge in chemistry when he describes all the scientific experiments the professors attempted in order to classify the alien substance. The Colour Out of Space is definitely the most atmospheric tale written by Lovecraft; here science and cosmic horror are once again blended gracefully.
9. The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.
Dark, shadowy, rot-infested Innsmouth; it is ruled by the Deep Ones, entities that live underwater and have the power to subjugate or destroy the whole of mankind.
A young, amateur antiquarian decides to visit the town out of sheer curiosity of the rumors surrounding it. Rumors of disappearances, strange sounds behind the barred windows of decrepit houses, and horrifying creatures spotted to be roaming around in the blackness of the night. The inhabitants of this creepy place all have, some more than others, that strange Innsmouth look. Foreigners used to say that a plague struck Innsmouth few years back, but what kind of plague would deform the very shape of the head, torso, and limbs to such an extent as to seem alien none could explain. The young protagonist resumes his searches and all manner of secrets are revealed, some best to remain hidden.
Lovecraft never meant to publish this story as he wasn't very fond of it. He wrote it in 1931 and August Derleth personally received the draft which he published without Lovecraft's consent. The story was rejected at first by Weird Tales due to its length. Finally, it was published in 1936 by William L. Crawford's Visionary Press as a separate booklet.
10. The Shadow Out of Time (1934)
Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
Following his 5-year amnesia, Psychology Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University begins a journey of self discovery. Friends, family, and colleagues kept their distance sensing an unnerving presence after his consciousness was snatched in broad daylight. What ever happened to the esteemed professor that gave him unnatural knowledge of the arcane folklore, and what caused his obsession with long trips to far away places? What altered his behaviour and what happened that cursed evening when his consciousness returned?
After waking from his amnesia, he gradually began to experience strange dreams; he was flying above titanic structures of rectangle shaped buildings, cylindrical temples, and exotic gardens with alien flowers. He sensed he was looking back in time, in an era of the past where neither humans nor any other known life form existed. His quest for answers will bring him face to face with entities and worlds beyond the known limits of space and time, past or present.
This short novella is one of the later works by H.P. Lovecraft. It is a work of maturity and by many considered his best one in terms of quality and consistency.
11. At The Mountains of Madness (1931)
In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness.
The expedition in the Antarctic was led by professor William Dyer of the Miskatonic University of Arkham with the goal of exploring regions previously unknown to archeology, biology and geology. As a superbly prepared mission equipped with state of the art machinery such as drills, airplanes, sledges, and two ships commandeered by veteran captains, it was set up for huge success. And success it achieved.
After a number of fossils of increasing mystery, complexity and size are dug up, the crew begins a frantic journey in the arctic desolation in an attempt to find answers as to what kind of amphibian, aquatic, or avian life-form once existed as that deeply buried fossil. The inability to classify it forced the explorers to turn to myth. In the dreaded Necronomicon, the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred spoke of the Elder Things; beings of ancient origin that inhabited the planet in a forgotten age as far back as the Archean Eon. The similarities between them and the discovered fossils were hideously uncanny. But where did these mythical beings come from? They most certainly were not a product of the current scientifically known process of evolution. Could they have existed even before the formation of our planet? If so, where did humanity really come from?
The paintings of the great Nicholas Roerich constantly come to mind as the party’s exploration progresses:
Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.
Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich’s paintings. Impressive from distance.
—regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dream-like suggestions of primordial temple-ruins on cloudy Asian mountain-tops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery.
The great expanse that lied beyond the wall of the mountains, eerily resembled the Cyclopean city of a lost civilization. Only a master user of the English language can even vaguely describe the wonder and sheer malignancy of the sight:
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer giganticism.
The inevitable fate of the expedition is sealed when the explorers unleash monstrous cosmic forces they cannot hope to control.
In this terrifying novella, H.P. Lovecraft unfolds his true potential in a mesmerizing vortex of suspense, horror, adventure, philosophy, art, and scientific knowledge. From his brilliant description of the frozen wastelands, to the hauntingly beautiful arctic sky with its evanescent cosmic hues, and the claustrophobic sensation induced by the desolate plateaus of unexplored Antarctica, he takes the reader on a journey into the shuddering depths of the forgotten history of the world.
At the Mountains of Madness lives up to the hype as Lovecraft's crowning achievement. While he wrote many more stories until his untimely death, this one will forever exist as the pinnacle of human endeavour concerning the cosmic horror genre and the supernatural.
Concluding this "small" biographical tribute, it is worth noting that Lovecraft came into contact with the most primitive of human emotions; that of fear, and specifically the fear of the unknown. One cannot help but shudder inexplicably when reading his stories; they seem to touch the human psyche in the most fundamental level, manifesting thoughts that cannot be put into words. The terrifying reality of our existence, that which puts us on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, is an innate feeling of evolutionary origin. If we can contemplate death then we can wonder about our place among the stars. But the fear of death is not fundamental. It could be the case that human emotions emanate from us being conscious of time, and therefore of our own inevitable demise, but the fear of the unknown is the deepest one we face; it is an unconscious type of fear expressed in awe, dread, and terror, all of which are inherently inexplicable. The infinite gulfs of the universe mercifully hide knowledge that will destroy the very foundations of human civilization; faith, truth, and meaning will crumble in the face of a vast cosmic indifference. In this reality, is there a place for God and Science? If not, then what is even the point of living as conscious beings? Lovecraft doesn't judge us for reaching such conclusions. He merely points at the irony of human existence; that curiosity triumphs over any type of fear, and the quest for meaning will always trump the most depressing and paralyzing of emotions.
In the next part I am going to focus on some key aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos and explore the philosophy of Cosmicism, created and first adopted by H.P. Lovecraft. Some of the lesser known details will also be discussed since I am going to take a look into a significant portion of his correspondence letters. There, he expounded in great intimacy on his philosophy of life as well as his personal opinions on some of his works.4
For a more detailed archive of Lovecraft’s life, works, etc., visit the H.P. Lovecraft Archive, a brilliant website that exists as a dedicated library for the writer.
A great biography was written by S.T. Joshi who has brilliantly edited Lovecraft’s fiction over the years. I got much of the least known information by him.
For the artworks click on the link and consider supporting the artists. Lovecraftian art is not easy to pull through, and these people do an excellent job in depicting the other-wordly aspects of cosmic horror.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) is the only short horror novel that Lovecraft wrote which will also be discussed in Part 2.
This is a great biography of H.P. Lovecraft. A while ago my sister gifted my younger brother, then around 8 years old, a collection of his works, not knowing how terrifying some of the stories are. It gave my brother nightmares for weeks, but as an adult he’s now reread a good bit of them and can appreciate Lovecraft’s artistry.
Damn... 🥀🥀...🥀...✨