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orange_eating_class 's review for:
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
by H.P. Lovecraft
"At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars."
The above quote is from Howard Philips Lovecraft's short story "The Festival", and it describes the narrator's reaction upon witnessing some terrible ancient rites practiced in the old Massachusetts town from which his family hails. But with the exception of the reference to "the lichened earth", the sentence could just as well have appeared in the climax any number of Lovecraft's stories. The details aren't especially important; it's the cosmic horror which is the most resonant feature of Lovecraft's fiction. If you, like Lovecraft, do not believe that humans are the center of a universe designed for us by some benign or at least comprehensible higher power, and if you, like Lovecraft, recognize the limits of human perception and understanding, then there is nothing to stop you, like Lovecraft, from concluding that perhaps the true nature of the universe is so alien to our understanding of it and so far beyond our comprehension that a glimpse of this true nature can be a terrible thing to behold. In probing the boundaries of human knowledge, we can learn things about the nature of things that can be truly horrifying, as Darwin noted when discussing his difficulty in reconciling the life cycle of the Ichneumonidae (a family of parasitoid wasps who lay their eggs inside the living bodies of other insects which are subsequently eaten alive) with the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator of the universe; likewise in Lovecraft's fiction, those who expand the boundaries of human knowledge frequently unearth unspeakable horrors, albeit of a supernatural nature.
And its that masterful evocation of cosmic, existential dread that is by far the most compelling element of Lovecraft's fiction to me. There's other stuff that I think is cool: the interconnectedness of Lovecraft's stories with each other and with the works of other writers of weird fiction, for instance. But the earlier works on display in this collection frequently suffer from badly telegraphed twists and even in better, later works, minor characters are prone to unsubtly relating plot-relevant information to the narrator via long, unrealistic monologues about strange goings on in the area. There's a lot of purple prose and Lovecraft has a lot of pretentious stylistic quirks; it's not bad writing, and I'd certainly rather read Lovecraft's prose than that of a lesser writer attempting to write in a similar style, but it's not really a highlight of his work.
He's also extremely racist, which mars otherwise great stories like "The Rats in the Walls" or "The Shadow over Innsmouth". Although I also find Lovecraft's stories fascinating in what they say about his own insecurities on that front. I'm kind of surprised that in his copious footnotes to the stories this collection (which include tedious amounts of details about New England architecture, geography, press, and surnames), editor and preeminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi doesn't make a single mention to scientific racism or the eugenics movement that was going strong throughout Lovecraft's career. Lovecraft's insecurities which present themselves in his stories through his characterizations of the numerous psychologically fragile narrators who are clearly stand-ins for the author himself, and his many protagonists cursed by an ancestral connection to awful rites which uncover unendurable cosmic horrors, are easier to understand in the light of a scientific movement which frequently crudely interpreted perceived physical deficiencies or ailments as more or less being inherently connected to perceived pyschological inferiority, and as more or less inherently connected to perceived mental inferiority. It's hard to imagine that Lovecraft, as a man with a deep love of science, would have been unfamiliar with eugenic ideas, and it's easy to see how he would have been deeply uncomfortable with what the "insanity" of both of his parents in later life said about him eugenically speaking. Especially given that many eugenicists saw even people several generations removed from family members with undesirable traits as being themselves inferior. But Joshi more or less glosses over Lovecraft's racism and his preoccupation with and revulsion of miscegenation, which is disappointing, not because I feel like "Lovecraft as a contemptible racist" is the only lens through which we should view Lovecraft, but because that his bigotry, and the bigotry of the society in which he lived in the scientific racism of that period, provide us with a better understanding of his fiction. But also, he was a contemptible racist, and while I like his fiction, that's something that Joshi either seems to think is fairly irrelevant, or wants to gloss over.
The above quote is from Howard Philips Lovecraft's short story "The Festival", and it describes the narrator's reaction upon witnessing some terrible ancient rites practiced in the old Massachusetts town from which his family hails. But with the exception of the reference to "the lichened earth", the sentence could just as well have appeared in the climax any number of Lovecraft's stories. The details aren't especially important; it's the cosmic horror which is the most resonant feature of Lovecraft's fiction. If you, like Lovecraft, do not believe that humans are the center of a universe designed for us by some benign or at least comprehensible higher power, and if you, like Lovecraft, recognize the limits of human perception and understanding, then there is nothing to stop you, like Lovecraft, from concluding that perhaps the true nature of the universe is so alien to our understanding of it and so far beyond our comprehension that a glimpse of this true nature can be a terrible thing to behold. In probing the boundaries of human knowledge, we can learn things about the nature of things that can be truly horrifying, as Darwin noted when discussing his difficulty in reconciling the life cycle of the Ichneumonidae (a family of parasitoid wasps who lay their eggs inside the living bodies of other insects which are subsequently eaten alive) with the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator of the universe; likewise in Lovecraft's fiction, those who expand the boundaries of human knowledge frequently unearth unspeakable horrors, albeit of a supernatural nature.
And its that masterful evocation of cosmic, existential dread that is by far the most compelling element of Lovecraft's fiction to me. There's other stuff that I think is cool: the interconnectedness of Lovecraft's stories with each other and with the works of other writers of weird fiction, for instance. But the earlier works on display in this collection frequently suffer from badly telegraphed twists and even in better, later works, minor characters are prone to unsubtly relating plot-relevant information to the narrator via long, unrealistic monologues about strange goings on in the area. There's a lot of purple prose and Lovecraft has a lot of pretentious stylistic quirks; it's not bad writing, and I'd certainly rather read Lovecraft's prose than that of a lesser writer attempting to write in a similar style, but it's not really a highlight of his work.
He's also extremely racist, which mars otherwise great stories like "The Rats in the Walls" or "The Shadow over Innsmouth". Although I also find Lovecraft's stories fascinating in what they say about his own insecurities on that front. I'm kind of surprised that in his copious footnotes to the stories this collection (which include tedious amounts of details about New England architecture, geography, press, and surnames), editor and preeminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi doesn't make a single mention to scientific racism or the eugenics movement that was going strong throughout Lovecraft's career. Lovecraft's insecurities which present themselves in his stories through his characterizations of the numerous psychologically fragile narrators who are clearly stand-ins for the author himself, and his many protagonists cursed by an ancestral connection to awful rites which uncover unendurable cosmic horrors, are easier to understand in the light of a scientific movement which frequently crudely interpreted perceived physical deficiencies or ailments as more or less being inherently connected to perceived pyschological inferiority, and as more or less inherently connected to perceived mental inferiority. It's hard to imagine that Lovecraft, as a man with a deep love of science, would have been unfamiliar with eugenic ideas, and it's easy to see how he would have been deeply uncomfortable with what the "insanity" of both of his parents in later life said about him eugenically speaking. Especially given that many eugenicists saw even people several generations removed from family members with undesirable traits as being themselves inferior. But Joshi more or less glosses over Lovecraft's racism and his preoccupation with and revulsion of miscegenation, which is disappointing, not because I feel like "Lovecraft as a contemptible racist" is the only lens through which we should view Lovecraft, but because that his bigotry, and the bigotry of the society in which he lived in the scientific racism of that period, provide us with a better understanding of his fiction. But also, he was a contemptible racist, and while I like his fiction, that's something that Joshi either seems to think is fairly irrelevant, or wants to gloss over.