TALES (BY) H.P. LOVECRAFT

Published 2005, 807 pages
Characters: C-

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B-

Poignancy: A

Most people have heard of H.P. Lovecraft, or at least something he created, but many that I talk to don't seem to realize it.  Mostly unknown during his lifetime, with no singular novel or story to stand as his masterpiece, Lovecraft's immense catalog of short fiction was left to slowly seep into the public consciousness, creating the sort of cult phenomenon that people casually reference without fully understanding.  A pioneer of macabre fantasy, Lovecraft clearly took after one of his idols, Edgar Alan Poe, and the two are together responsible for nearly every trope and cliche of modern fantasy horror.  Lovecraft introduced the world to Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and a mythology of cosmic terror that drew from the forward-thinking pulp fiction of the day. For a reader only now discovering his writing, it's hard to know where to start, but a bit of research led me to Tales, The Library of America anthology of his most notable works. Even at 800 pages, it still excludes a great deal of Lovecraft's stories, but by all accounts includes all the vital ones.

Undoubtedly the best time to read Lovecraft is when you are a 15 year old boy.  That's not to say his work is immature, or won't appeal to anyone else, but there is a reason why fantasy is extremely popular in that demographic, and Lovecraft really hones in on that sense of unbridled imagination and limitless fantastic potential.  Possibly to the point of fault — his stories, no matter their length, pretty much all follow the same formula. Characters are secondary to Lovecraft's vision of vast, secret planes of reality and lurking ancient terrors, and his protagonists are unfailingly upper-middle class white males of an inquisitive yet reserved nature.  They are generally from an intellectual background, so as to be appropriately skeptical, and upon discovering a hint of intrigue, they investigate and uncover, expressing strained disbelief, shock, fear, and ultimately revealing some terrible, dangerous secret that threatens their very sanity.  In many of the stories, nothing actually happens to the protagonist himself — he merely uncovers some earlier events, or discovers a mystery so terrifying that he must flee it at once.  Lovecraft didn't write tepidly, and it's both the reason for his success and the major flaw of his stories.  Everything that happens is so earth-shattering that grown men regularly faint with terror, and these revelations are usually described with every colorful, antiquated adjective Lovecraft could get his hands on.  By the end of the collection, you'll wonder if he was getting paid by the number of times he used the word "eldritch".  It was clearly not the strength of his prose that made Lovecraft a horror-fiction icon, but his imagination.

With that said, I very much enjoyed this collection, despite Lovecraft's flaws.  It's the sort of fiction that functions best in hindsight, in the reader's own imagination, where it was meant to exist.  Lovecraft was ahead of his time in the scope of his stories, yet somewhat limited by his own technical abilities and publication niche — I can only imagine the sort of tale he would have been forced to concoct if he'd been contracted to write a full-length novel.  His world is a grim, hopeless place, where mere humans are helpless against the ancient gods that sometimes awake to harass them, and the overwhelming sense of entropy and nihilism in his stories is one of the reasons Lovecraft endures so well, and remains unique.  His protagonists are helpless to confront the things they face, often questioning their own sanity as a result.  Unlike most fantasy authors, Lovecraft never suggested that any man would be able to stand in the face of true evil and survive.  It is the primary reason for there being so little action in any of Lovecraft's stories, and the reason his expositional narratives ultimately work.  In most of these tales, the protagonist is forced to flee, and human bravery rarely has any consequence.  When the world of humans survives for another day, it is not by heroics or cunning but sheer luck.  Lovecraft made it explicitly clear that he expected our species to be extinct within a short time, that we were but one of many intelligent civilizations that might inhabit the earth.  Such a dismal view of humanity is still quite rare, even in horror fiction.

When his stories are taken together, it's clear that Lovecraft often flailed about, finding horror in far too many things to be taken entirely seriously.  Every run-down house or distant hill, every gust of cool air or strange smell, every cave and crevasse and distant mountain range might conceal some terrible secret.  Foreigners are all "swarthy" racial stereotypes linked to a sinister cult — The Horror at Red Hook is interesting if only because it so clearly links the "otherness" Lovecraft feared from supernatural horrors to the "otherness" born of racial tensions in 1920's New York City, revealing both as essentially the same psychological mechanism, the fear of the unknown. With such broad material, Lovecraft often comes across as just a paranoid, racist old man.  Nonetheless, there was an astoundingly rich vision behind these tales, a mind that was imaginative enough to write about entities so vast that no human could fully comprehend their existence, and yet realist enough to see that such things were contrary to our own existence, that even glimpsing such unnatural beings only meant that our end was near, like an ant finally comprehending the great shadow above it moments before it is crushed.