HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) master of horror and the macabre is best
known for his sixty or so short stories, novelettes, and short novels featured
in publications such as Weird Tales, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Amazing
Stories.
Lovecraft’s work, in his Edgar Allen Poe-inspired writing style, conveys,
according to S.T. Joshi, biographer and leading Lovecraft authority, "...a brutal sense of mankind's
hopelessly infinitesimal place in the cosmic scheme of things."
In Lovecraft’s own words, "…all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that
common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance
in the vast cosmos-at-large…To achieve the essence of real externality, whether
of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic
life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a
negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. …when
we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside
– we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold."
The enduring popularity of his work testifies that Lovecraft’s imaginary pantheon
of alien races populating tales set in the bucolic backdrop of rural New
England unqualifiedly succeeds in leaving the familiar behind.
An example of this, from “The Lurking Fear”: (1922)
"...Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another
through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless
phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scenes; forests
of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking
unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils;
mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ...
insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with
fungous vegetation ..."
If you consider yourself an aficionado of
horror, the weird, the macabre, ya gotta love Lovecraft.
