Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

Author’s Note: I wrote this thesis back in 2012 as an undergrad in my senior year at SUNY Purchase. While a copy of it sits in Brown University, I don’t have any way of sharing my work with THE PEOPLE. I doubt many of you will read the entire paper or even half of it, but it’s here, presumably forever.

The thesis is not perfect. Looking at it now with two years of grad school under my belt, I’m seeing lots of grammatical issues. It still works, though, and there are great ideas put forward.

So, to the three of you out there reading this, I hope you enjoy it.

Where Do We Start?

Lovecraft once said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (Bloch vii). This phrase perfectly sums up the work of Lovecraft; he might have found a niche in the realm of supernatural-horror, but it is a niche that many readers fall in love with and are unable to forget. He makes the reader descend into rabbit holes of insanity, and one cannot just un- see what they have read.

In the beginning of Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, a Lovecraft anthology, author Robert Bloch writes a lengthy introduction, entitled, “Hermitage of Horror”. Robert Bloch is the author of Psycho, which director Alfred Hitchcock adapted into a film in 1960. Just as Psycho shocked the audience with its forward attack of violence on the viewer, Lovecraft terrorized readers with characters’ going insane or witnessing horrible and graphic deaths. Bloch comments on the visceral and brutal nature of Lovecraft’s works, compared to those of his contemporaries: “The few horror stories approved by the literary establishment dealt almost exclusively with polite antiquarians and retired English gentlemen encountering a ghost. Fear was an isolated phenomenon born of some usual individual experience” (xvii). Fear may be from some sort of isolation in Lovecraft’s work, but it’s born out of a worldly experience or without anything supernatural. Before Lovecraft, horror was presented with ghosts and haunted mansions. It was never about madness.

Lovecraft was a horror writer; there is no denying that, and horror as a genre is important in the way we view each other. Horror, in its many forms, has existed for year and it continues to build a strong fan base. Shows like The Walking Dead and Dexter have entered the mainstream. Horror is just as much a part of society as is politics or religion; it has the ability to stress and bring to light our fears about people or trends in society.

Project Purpose

The name of Lovecraft has brought nightmares to many who have read him. He was a quiet intellectual who challenged the idea of what we take as safe and took advantage of our imaginations. Lovecraft’s style of horror stems from something that is inherently natural to our world but at the same time, completely in the realm of fantasy. Most of his ideas are attached to the beginnings of our earth but require us to lose ourselves in the narrative and become lost in the fiction. His ideas were connected to the beginnings of our earth because most of the “evils” discussed, or the gods that he created, were not from another planet per se; they have just been hidden away in the earth for Eons and happened to be discovered by some unlucky individual.

Lovecraft was not well received in his time and rather controversial with his attacks on religion and the New England lifestyle; but now, after years of being cited, the literary community is beginning to see the influence that this writer had on fiction. Lovecraft started out as a horror/fantasy short story writer, but as the years went by, he wrote longer stories that could be considered novellas. Throughout his work, Lovecraft played on the idea of the “unknown” for readers. Lovecraft wanted the darkness of our closets to be filled with monsters from the abyss, or to tell us that the universe once held deities who ruled over the earth, but who now have receded in the depths to allow humanity to destroy itself. Lovecraft didn’t have faith, and certainly didn’t believe in “god,” but he was in love with the earth/universe and the alleged secrets that it held.

This paper will explore Lovecraft’s use of the unknown throughout several of his works. Lovecraft was influenced by authors that academics have come to study; Nathanial Hawthorne and Edger Allan Poe influenced Lovecraft and they had stories with similar themes. I will also look at contemporary authors, such as Stephen King and Clive Barker who very obviously pay homage to the mythos of Lovecraft’s work. Lovecraft’s influence on the horror genre will be discussed at different points in the paper.

The second point of focus of this paper alongside my discussion of the Lovecraft’s literary style is an analysis of why horror is important in our culture. Horror is often shrugged off as being “trashy” or as something that is not fit to be taken seriously by the academic community. Sure, Shelley and Poe have their place with their renditions of horror but only because they came before the 20th century. I intend to show how deeply horror has affected literature and society as well as discuss the mode of operation of Lovecraft, our New England heathen.

Lovecraft’s Life

Howard Philips Lovecraft was born on August 20th 1890, in Providence Rhode Island. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, two important Lovecraft scholars, comment on Lovecraft’s intellectual childhood in the prologue to Lord of a Visible World: The succession of intellectual and aesthetic interests that came to him from earliest infancy — a natural sense of meter at the age of two; reading at the age of four; enthusiasm for the Arabian Nights at five, for classical myth at six, for music at seven, for chemistry at eight, and for astronomy at eleven — testifies to an innately curious and adventuresome mind, while his delightful stories of play (the building of toy landscapes on tabletops; the construction of elaborately designed playgrounds in the vacant lots next to his birthplace) bespeak more than simply a wholesomely ‘normal’ childhood and point to a creative instinct that led him to write his first stories at the age of six (viii-xi). This sentence verbalizes the extent of Lovecraft’s mind, suggesting that there was never an end to his imagination.

Lovecraft grew up primarily with his mother and aunt; his father was stricken with syphilis in 1893 and had to be moved to a sanitarium, where he died 5 years later. The family’s primary income was from Lovecraft’s successful grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, who was an industrialist. In 1904, Phillips died, forcing the Lovecrafts to move to a smaller house and without an inheritance. Lovecraft attended Hope Street High School in Providence, from 1904 to 1908, but while there, he became ill and had to leave his studies. This was a hermit period for Lovecraft (one of many), and little is known about his life until he reemerged in 1914, when he began a long career in pulp magazine publication. Bloch states that “Poor health kept him from college and economic necessity eventually caused him to neglect amateur journalism in favor of ghostwriting or revising the work of others for professional publication. Gradually he began to produce poetry and fiction on his own” (viii). Lovecraft bloomed in the world of amateur journalism; the magazines he wrote at this period in his life were something closely similar to what we have on college campuses, namely “zines”. He was offered a job creating these magazines by the UAPA (United Amateur Press Association), and as he pressed on with his writing for them, he eventually, in 1920, became the official editor/president of the UAPA.

At this point, Lovecraft was able to get away from his mother with whom he had lived with for fifteen years. In 1919, Lovecraft’s mother had a breakdown and was placed in the same mental institution that her husband once was. Her death in 1921 was a reawakening for Lovecraft, a new sense of liberation, “Grudging as he was to admit it (at least publically), Lovecraft felt a sense of liberation upon his mother’s death. His health began to improve radically, and he previous nervous ailments were sloughed off” (Joshi and Schultz xii). There is some Freudian thinking at work here in the way Lovecraft’s mother affected him so profoundly. Lovecraft saw his mother’s death as a release. With this new freedom from the matriarch, he went to explore the New England and New York area; these locations provided settings for his later and more important stories.

Lovecraft thought he was a poet; he didn’t realize how terrible he actually was because he lacked input from an academic. It wasn’t until the advice of W. Paul Cook, an esteemed amateur publisher that Lovecraft saw the errors in his poetic form. Cook didn’t care for Lovecraft’s poetry (not many did) and encouraged Lovecraft to pursue his fiction, in terms of stories (xii). If it were not for this man’s intervention, we may not have ever gotten the chilling stories know today.

1923 was a monumental year for Lovecraft because he became part of one of the more influential horror publications, one that increased his popularity and gave him a venue to express his work. The magazine in question was called Weird Tales, and Lovecraft became a large part of its publications success: “The pinnacle of his early involvement with Weird Tales came in 1924, when he was both considered for the editorship of the magazine (he declined the offer) and asked to ghostwrite a tale for Harry Houdini” (xiii). Weird Tails gave Lovecraft a reliable place to publish his stories and gain an audience. Years prior he had to make his own publications but now he was in an “esteemed” magazine and though he was still not ever going to reach a high level of popularity, he had already made the initial steps to gaining his cult following.

A year later (1924) was another epic year for Lovecraft, and one that provides more questions than answers. A few weeks after his mother’s death, Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene, a Jewish and well-to-do immigrant with whom he maintained a correspondence with for several years after meeting her at a journalist convention. They got married in Manhattan and moved into an apartment in Brooklyn Joshi and Schultz comment on the oddness of the marriage, “For one who had purported to scorn “amatory phenomena” in his earlier years (and, indeed, there is every reason to believe that he had never has a relationship with a woman before Sonia), it is remarkable that he believed he could marry a woman whom he had known largely through correspondence” (xiii). If Sonia had any reason to marry Lovecraft other than love, we will never know. She destroyed all the letters she received from Lovecraft and no one knows for sure what was said between them.

Lovecraft moved into New York City because Sonia’s job as an executive in a hat shop was located there. Lovecraft lived in the city for a total of two years and he considered it his exile. Financial issues plagued the couple and Lovecraft’s inability to make substantial money from his work did not help matters. Events created a collapse for Lovecraft: “By the end of 1924 Sonia had to leave New York to take a position in the Midwest; Lovecraft was left alone in a small apartment at 169 Clinton Street, in then decaying Brooklyn Heights, plagued by poverty, mice, and finally robbery of nearly all of his clothes” (xiv). Lovecraft had nothing in New York at this time and he was not going to move with Sonia to the Midwest. His journey brought him back to where it all started.

In 1926, Lovecraft’s aunts invited him to come back home. Sonia was going to open a store up in Boston, but thought it might do her well to open one in Providence instead. Lovecraft’s aunts did not want this and openly expressed their view; they did not want their genealogical line to be ruined by a non-New Englander. Lovecraft seemed not to express any opinion on this matter and sat by while his aunts made all the decisions.

He knew they wouldn’t want Sonia in the family, which is why in 1924, when he got married, he didn’t tell them about Sonia until weeks later. Part of Lovecraft’s not fighting for his wife is most likely due to him not wanting to be involved with anyone, “No doubt that he wished to resume his life of relative solitude, and he saw nothing wrong with continuing marriage by correspondence; but this is not what Sonia had in mind, and she forced Lovecraft to go through a divorce in 1929” (Joshi Schultz xv). After only four years, Lovecraft’s only (presumably) sexual relationship came to an end, but this was the dawning of some of the best years of Lovecraft’s life.

After grounding himself back at home, Lovecraft wrote his most influential story, “The Call of the Cthulu” and proceeded to write other short stories enthusiastically. With a mind clear of relationship and financial troubles (he didn’t have rent to pay anymore), Lovecraft went on to do what he loved most of all, travel. During the course of five years (1928–1931), Lovecraft went to Vermont, central Massachusetts, upstate New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida. During this time, he kept in contact with his aunts with letters, and they contained extensive knowledge of the places he visited, “Beyond their meticulous detail (derived from both guidebooks and travel diaries that Lovecraft kept), their exhaustive charting of the history and topography of the regions he visits, and their piquant, deliberately archaistic diction, it is their heartwarming enthusiasm that makes them imperishable human documents” (Joshi and Schultz xv). Keeping the details of his journey were not the only thing that Lovecraft was working on; while he was creating new ideas for stories, this is also the point in his life where, due to the amount of travelling, he honed his philosophy in understanding how small everything is in “the grand scheme of things.”

Lovecraft’s view of the world may be depressing to some but he saw this “smallness” as a way to promote his idea of socialism. Towards the end of his life, Lovecraft became more concerned with an individual’s place in society. He may have been brought up as New England conservative but his mind, free from religious ties, was able to think farther than his family and “friends.” Joshi and Schultz comment on Lovecraft’s political views: “Initially Lovecraft perhaps adopted socialism out of fear that the economic depression of the decade might engender a revolution of the dispossessed masses that would end civilization; but later he understood that society must, for the sake of simple human justice, ensure everyone a place in its fabric, and that unfettered capitalism merely meant that victimization of the weak by the shrewdly cunning and mercenary” (xi). Lovecraft saw the evils of capitalism and wanted to improve social welfare; this is not an uncommon desire among creative people and even with his racial hatred, Lovecraft wanted to better society as a whole.

Lovecraft died on March 15th, 1937. Joshi and Schultz comment on the final days of his life: “Even though Lovecraft, towards the end of his life, was plagued increasingly by ill health (he would die at the age of forty-six of intestinal cancer, caused at least in part by a poor diet that was itself a product of severe poverty) and by the doubts over the merit of his work, he remained a faithful correspondent to the end; the unfinished document found on his desk upon his death was not a story, a poem, or an essay, but a letter” (xvii). Lovecraft wrote to many people in his final years, and maybe this was his way of remaining a hermit while still being able to socialize, in a sense. He left a legacy that would pick up popularity in later years, but it’s a legacy that is not as big as the man, himself.

Lovecraft’s World View/Religion

Lovecraft’s work deals with belief as well as the potential existence of something “out there,” which we could think of as a “god.” Lovecraft grew up in Puritan New England where religion was a foundation to life, as well as a rigid lifestyle. Lovecraft saw the hypocrisy of these “godly” people and immediately turned away from them. Most people to this day assume that Lovecraft was an occultist, but to everyone’s surprise, he was an atheist. Robert Price, who has a doctorate in theology, comments on this assumption, “What an irony that some of his most ardent fans insist on seeing Lovecraft as an occultist when he in fact advocated naturalism, being a mechanist materialist, rationalist, and atheist! He crossed swords in his letters with religious friends and colleagues, albeit in a cordial manner” (26). Though he may have had disdainful nature towards Christians, he remained lovely in his own weird way by writing letters to his Christian friends that attacked their religion but still was cordial and understanding.

Lovecraft has a theory on why being an atheist creates such a great horror-writer. Price comments on the theory: “On the one hand, Lovecraft held that it is the unbeliever in the supernatural who is liable to be the most effective horror writer, not the believer, since only the unbeliever, the strict rationalist, would find a supernatural occurrences truly flabbergasting, genuinely horrifying, subverting his or her most dearly held convictions” (27). Lovecraft loved the supernatural and loved the idea of what we humans don’t know about our universe. He just didn’t fall for the absurdity and hypocritical nature of the Puritans, or believing in a Judeo-Christian god.

Lovecraft saw the idea of “god” as something that was not supernatural but as something that exists on a higher dimension. Two critics, by the names of Paul Halpern and Michael Labossiere, comment on the nature between the supernatural and higher dimensions and how people in Lovecraft’s time confused the two, “These stories not only thrill, they remind us of the effect of the emerging modern physics and higher mathematics on the psyche of those who fathomed the implications of these subjects. Moreover, they offer a valuable record of an age in which many thinks associated higher dimensions with supernatural experiences” (531). Math and science were deconstructing the religious beliefs of the zealots in New England and Lovecraft could not have been happier. You see the clash of ideals later on in stories like “The Picture in the House” and “Call of the Cthulu,” where old ways interfere with what the truth is. Timothy Evans speaks directly to this clash of ideals, “His fiction, on the other hand, juxtaposed the symbols and artifacts of traditional culture with twentieth-century images of a vast cosmos and relative values, deriving horror both from tradition lost and from fears that tradition is meaningless in the first place” (Evans 101). Traditional seems to go hand in hand with the supernatural, or the notion of god.

Lovecraft’s world view is grim, and depending on who you are, you might be upset at the things he promotes. Robert Price addresses Lovecraft’s dark view on the world: “Lovecraft scoffed at the notion that humankind is central in the scheme of things — a belief held in different ways by religious people and by some who would call themselves humanists. He considered humanity no more important in the big picture than the vanished pterodactyl” (28). The immensity of space was always on the writers mind and it led to be the crux of all his stories. James Sallis comments on the importance of this notion in Lovecratft’s life: “Lovecraft hailed as twin watersheds in his intellectual life the time when he discovered the Hellenic world and that in which he truly embraced the immensity of space, of the great void that surrounds us” (42–43). George Carlin had similar views, stating that the human race will be nothing but a sneeze in terms of how long the earth has been here (4 billion years).

Let’s just say that I have similar world views to Lovecraft (being an atheist), and I find his writing effective because I am more afraid of the option of the “other,” or the possibility of something supernatural existing that wants to destroy me. If I believed in god or had any belief, I wouldn’t be scared because I would know I had a “the hand of god” on me, but if I only have myself, what/who do I hold onto?

The Unknown: An Extended Definition

So what is the unknown? I have been discussing the idea and I keep referencing it, but I don’t think that I have expressed what the word encompasses in this literary context.

It is easy to say the unknown is what we don’t know, but in Lovecraft’s work, it represents something more. Purposeful ambiguity is a technique that Lovecraft was comfortable in using; he explained situations and “individuals” by telling the reader what it wasn’t and more of what it represented. Here are some examples as to what I mean by his unique descriptions:

I saw again the twilit grotto, and the swineherd with his unmentionable fungous beasts wallowing in filth, and as I looked at these things they seemed nearer and more distinct — so distinct that I could almost observe their features (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 13). The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphics left by a rumored titan race whose glories live only in rare, deep dreams. (171)

These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter (370). These descriptive sentences speak to the way in which Lovecraft used his language to transform basic nouns into shadowy, monstrous, and unknown creatures. These creatures are not always literal but they are simple objects turned into devices of our nightmares.

There is something Freudian about his language though; the extracting of everyday “knowns” and making them alien to the reader. Freud called this, “The Uncanny” and he wrote a paper detailing what it is for the uncanny to exist. Freud states, “How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows” (2). Lovecraft’s work showed that the circumstances usually happened in one’s own mind, but he never spelled out his theory as well as Freud did. Freud also explains, as I did earlier to a degree, that the unknown or uncanny is just something that we don’t know, “It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that everything that is uncanny fulfills this condition” (15). This is not an eye- opening statement, but it covers the basics.

Death and insanity play into every Lovecraft story and they always seem to teeter at the edge before consuming the pages; death seems to be uncanny to most, a natural function of human existence, yet we put it on a pedestal as some foreign, unknown event. Freud comments on the complexity of death: “Biology has not yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable event in life” (13). We could not possibly know if it’s avoidable but it’s an interesting statement because life/death is only understood in the way human beings can understand it, as opposites. Death is the ultimate silence, the ultimate darkness. Though there are those who believe in life after death, there is no way to picture what happens when the lights go out (so to speak). As Freud is one to do, he relates the silence and darkness to our beginnings, as people, “Concerning the factors of silence, solitude, and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free” (20). The silence and finality of death creates the anxiety and that may be the reason why Lovecraft’s characters go insane. The silence of not living can be too much for the human psyche to handle.

In Edger Allen Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart”, the protagonist has killed a man and is being overrun with guilt. First, we have to acknowledge that the character is insane to begin with, if he has murdered a man and hid the body parts under the floor board. There is nothing uncanny about a dead body, to an extent, or at least not physically, but this story pushes the idea of how death can become uncanny to an individual. Police arrive to the character’s house to question about the murder that has happened, unaware that he is the killer, and the character begins to hear a beating or thumping. With all the guilt that he feels, he believes that the heart of the dead person is beating and he rushes to undo the floorboards, convinced that the person is still alive. Poe was skilled in the macabre and certainly influenced Lovecraft, in that respect. Once again, Freud seems to grasp the narrative in horror-fiction. In this instance, he seems to speak to Poe’s story directly, “Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves — all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove able to move of themselves in addition” (14). Yes, a dead body is unsettling (to most) and could be considered the “other” if one is not able to grasp the reality of their mortality, but it is far more upsetting when that said body gets up and moves.

Freud, Poe, and Lovecraft should have gotten together for a picnic to discuss their views of the unknown and the uncanny. I bet that each could solidify the other’s ideas and come to a better understanding of that which they could never experience. Freud knew enough about literature to comment on it and its place in the world of the uncanny. As I said, Poe and Lovecraft could have been wonderful friends with the man. Freud speaks to the horror-fiction directly in his paper, “The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. To begin with, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life” (18). Literature, and most notably the works of Lovecraft, is able to explore the unknown/uncanny in an exaggerated way that would be far more difficult to do in a real setting. To sit a person down and explain the uncanny would not only frighten them, but it would sound unrealistic. Stories, literature, film, and even music are better ways to navigate in the world of the abstract because the context is not rooted in “real life”.

With all this talk of the unknown/uncanny in more abstract ways, I think Freud has a way to sum of the word and its usage in more basic terms. I held off doing this first because the understanding of the concept can be portrayed in many ways that is relevant to fiction and our own lives. Freud sums up the idea as such, “This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes, and so on” (15). This is as if the beating heart under the floorboards in “Tell Tale Heart” was actually beating. We, the readers, know that the heart cannot still beat, but the protagonist imagines that it is, and when we opens the floorboards, sees the still beating heart, it throws the character into full insanity.

The Uncanny/Unknown in “Young Goodman Brown ”

I have presented extensive definitions of the unknown and how its use of the uncanny can provide the reader or individual with horror. To provide one last example, I want to look at Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”. No one will classify Hawthorne as a horror writer, but some of his stories do divulge into the macabre and the unknown.

In another story called, “The Birth-Mark,” a scientist is trying to make the perfect wife by performing experiments on her. The short title explores Shelly’s Frankenstein but sets the framework in New England, as opposed to Antarctica. Hawthorne may be mostly known for his tribute to romance novels as in The Scarlet Letter, where he attacked the idea of a “love story.”

“Young Goodman Brown” takes a familiar setting and then throws the “unknown” at the main character. The story starts like this: “Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem Village; but put his head back after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife” (Hawthorne 1). A much known setting in the New England-Puritan world where everyone speaks correctly and has a love for god. Brown sets off to the woods to make a journey that is unspecified, and as he goes deeper and deeper into the forest, he meets a man that looks uncannily like himself: “As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveler was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than feature. Still they might have been taken for father and son” (2). Already Brown has run into something that is known to him, that being his own image, yet it is unsettling to our New England patriot.

After meeting this strange, uncanny individual, Brown pushes forward into the woods and the night. He hears what he thinks is his wife’s voice and calls after her, becoming panicked that she may be in danger. He then hears hymns and the sound of a congregation singing in the middle of this mysterious forest. Brown sees lights through the trees and hears the congregation calling the “converts” forward, Brown reacts:

At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from the smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back (6–7). Brown has apparently stumbled into a witch congregation that consists of the town peoples with whom he has known the majority of his life. He sees Faith, his wife, amidst the people in the middle of the ceremony. Brown calls out to Faith to resist this inauguration into the coven but she acts as if not hearing him, “Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which died heavily away through the forest” (7). With this, Brown passes out and remembers not what happened.

The next day, Brown walks around the Salem Village and is shocked at how everyone in town acts as if nothing has happened, as if they don’t remember being in the woods and performing satanic rituals on Goodman and his wife. He questions himself in the third person, “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (8). He goes to church on the Sabbath but is removed mentally from the religion that he once held dear, “When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of the future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the grey blasphemer and his hearers” (8). Brown would live the life of the uncanny until his death, all because he had his then, familiar world turned upside down. He fell into the world of the uncanny and never resolved what had happened the night in the woods; the unknown threw itself at his feet and never tried to explain what it was or what it wanted from him. At the end of the story, we are left with Brown’s sad fate, “And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly precession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom” (8). We could easily speculate that this story dealt with Hawthorne’s own view of religion and the New England lifestyle but in creating this narrative, he has dived headfirst into the uncanny/unknown. For Brown, the village of Salam was his life, his love but that became distant to him when his perspective changed.

I have provided a few examples in both Poe and Hawthorne to provide a setup for Lovecraft’s own style. Lovecraft took the devices from stories like “Young Goodman Brown” and “Tell Tale Heart” and made his own work that went more into the theater bizarre. The unknown coexists with the uncanny and they should be seen as the same thing, but when talking about Lovecraft, I will refer to it as the unknown because the depth is bigger than the uncanny. Lovecraft did use different styles of the unknown and they ranged from the simplistic to the cosmically complex.

The Stories

The next four short stories that I have selected will employ the unknown in gradients. The first story, “The Picture in the House” will be a simplistic story in terms of the devices that Lovecraft uses. This tale focuses more on suspense rather than using the full arsenal that Lovecraft is capable of. Each story will get increasingly complicated with the narrative thread, and presumably, more horrific. It will also be interesting to look at how fears and horrors within the texts also shed light on the way Lovecraft saw the other dimensions, Timothy Evan comments, “Lovecraft’s stories are fascinating not only because of the fears they inscribe, but also because of their author’s creative response to those fears” (127). James Sallis also comments on the importance of Lovecraft’s narrative style and how that plays into horror, “The stories are told after the fact, almost always in narrative summery by a discounted teller, a man who cannot assimilate, who can neither quite believe nor comprehend, what he has seen and suspects” (43). The uses of space, unknown, and narrative combine together to create a horrific experience for the reader because they synthesize so well in terms keeping the reader unprepared for the journey ahead.

I have selected these stories to show the spectrum of what the unknown is and its many definitions. I will follow up each synopsis with an analysis in order to bring understanding to how the literature’s complexity can be broken down.

“The Picture in the House”: Synopsis

Lovecraft’s short story entitled “The Picture in the House,” is brief, but remains concise and enthralling in terms of the material he presents. The story is ostensibly about a wandering genealogist who is on his way to Arkham through the backwoods of New England. He (the narrator remains unnamed) is bicycling through the area when he is caught in a rainstorm, and at this, he begins searching for shelter. He comes across an allegedly “abandoned” house that appears “suggestive” and “secretive” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 21). The narrator knocks a few times on the front door but does not get a response. He lets himself in anyway and is drawn to a book which is lying on a table. He finds that the book likes to open to a page that depicts cannibals butchering people.

The narrator hears footsteps from upstairs and waits nervously as he hears the person coming closer to the room. An old man greets him with a smile and apologizes for not waking up earlier. The old man speaks in a thick New England accent that is barely readable; for example, “Glad to see ye, young Sir — new faces is scurce arount here, an’ I hain’t got much ta cheer me up these days” (24). The narrator is able to understand but can’t grasp every word, leading to some odd conversations. As they talk about the surrounding New England area, the wanderer switches topics and asks about the book lying on the table. The old man gets excited and tells about how he acquired it, but all begins to turn dark when he brings up the cannibal chapter. He says that it’s strange how pictures get you thinking, and how he started to kill sheep first but couldn’t get rid of the taste for blood. With that, a drop of blood falls on the book, the narrator looks up and sees that there is some seeping through the floorboards. At the exact moment, a thunderbolt rips the house apart, bringing the narrative to a close.

“The Picture in the House”: An Analysis

Like any good horror film, “The Picture in the House” keeps you in suspense, letting you think that danger is right around the corner (and it is). Lovecraft starts off by acknowledging his readers directly, assuming they enjoy his work, “Searchers of horror haunt strange, far places” (20). Lovecraft goes on to describe these exotic and far off places but he eventually comes back around to tell you that the greatest horror is in New England. As an atheist, Lovecraft despised the Puritans and this story is an attack on their way of life, “ — these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of the cold Northern heritage” (21). This rather bold statement sets the tone for the story as well as the personal views of Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft loved to throw tradition against modernization; the protagonist is archeologist of sorts and is thrown into an archaic world. Leif Sorensen comments on this unique dichotomy, “In both cases, Lovecraft’s interests are shaped thoroughly by his antiquarian interest in Anglo-colonial folklore and his conviction that the twin encroaching forces of modernization and multiculturalism threatened this cultural tradition” (Sorensen 504). Lovecraft was indeed interested in science and its role in reshaping or destroying an area that was deeply rooted in heritage.

Lovecraft uses the unknown to propel the plot (even if it’s short) forward, building up to a rather grim ending. He repeatedly tries to lure us into a false sense of security with phrases such as, “Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road” or “I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 21). While directly telling us that there are no signs of life or anything worth noting visually, he is at the same time, filling us with dread by using the terms “apparently” and “suggestive.”

The narrator of the story begins to feel there is something wrong with the house right around the same time the reader does. This methodical pacing adds a beat-by-beat feeling of an impending horror. What I mean to say, is that every time the narrator turns a corner, we do as well, both aesthetically and emotionally. When the narrator surveys the apartment/house, we feel his nervousness, “Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets what should be forgotten” (22). Leave it to Lovecraft to keep everything ambiguous, but we get the sense of dread for the character and for ourselves for deciding to read this story.

When the old man comes downstairs, we are prepared for a violent encounter or at least something that is a little supernatural, but we are robbed and the narrator acknowledges that, “The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality” (23). Where did the danger go? We are treated to a nice old man who is living out his years in the comfort of his New England home. Of course this sense of security is used against us when the climax of the story comes barreling at us.The reader returns to being frightened when the old man fumbles for his favorite part of the books, “The book feel open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consolation at the place, to the repellent twelfth plate showing a butcher’s shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it” (25). The fear grows as we understand that the man has a fascination for the macabre and could be involved with the butchery himself. The old man does indeed allude to the fact that he partook in the act of cannibalism as he explains that sheep were no longer satiating his needs, “They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ‘twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ‘twas more the same” (26). The italicized words are pointing their way to human flesh and just after the old man says that, a drop of blood falls for the ceiling. A moment of shock could not have been better timed as the climax of suspense comes to its end. We understand now that this old, seemingly harmless man is a cannibal.

“Slashers” and Suspense

This type of the unknown seen in “The Picture in the House” is a trope used in horror cinema to this day because it is the easiest to employ when trying to get “jumps” from the audience. In the 1980 slasher film, Friday the 13th, we are treated with the same application of the unknown as being used for a plot device. To be clear, a “slasher” film is a subgenre in the horror genre and is probably the most referenced and identifiable when dealing with any horror-film discussion. A “slasher” contains a group of people (teens, friends, family, etc.) who are terrorized and brutally murdered by either a masked or an unidentified individual. This sort of subgenre became blockbuster big in the 1980s after 1979 hit, Halloween. There is always a survivor in these films, usually a female who is independent and has a sense of self, unlike her dead hormone-enraged friends. Slashers are a look at feminism conquering the misogynistic male, who obliterates his victims with phallic objects. Slashers are also a great look at the unknown’s use as a suspense device; because of their short and rather simple structure, they don’t leave room for anything grand.

Friday the 13th was set in a summer camp, a place commonly devoid of danger to kids. Sure, there were times when a child would get hurt, or someone would drown, but overall, it was a setting enveloped in “fun.” John Carpenter’s Halloween took the idea of suburbia and turned it against the viewer, making even the safest American location the deadliest. Friday the 13th gave us teenagers with raging hormones who were only looking for a good time, but of course, they begin dying in strange and violent ways. The viewer does not have any clue of who the murderer is, or what their motive may be but we are glued to the screen because this unknown has to be identified for closure.

In this type of film (and “The Picture in the House”), the lack of information is used as a tension device, something that keeps you at the edge of your seat and wondering about what’s around the corner. Both of these pieces are thrilling in their own ways, and suspense, though effectively, is rarely useful a second time around. That is to say, anticipation builds off what you don’t know. “The Picture in the House” should be used as an introductory story to Lovecraft’s work. It is easy to read, and the horror given to the reader at the end, is terrifying. Suspense in slashers and “The Picture in the House” is used for quick, jump scares. The “unknown” is usually revealed at the conclusion, and only then are the reader’s questions are answered. Friday the 13th and “The Picture in the House” both use the unknown as a plot device, a jumping off point for basic, “trashy” horror. That is not to say that Lovecraft’s story is trashy by any means; it just means that the trope was later used excessively in the slasher movement.

“The Outsider”: Synopsis

The second story to look at is called, “The Outsider.” While the “Picture in the House” gives us beginner’s course on Lovecraft’s style, “The Outsider” takes the reader to the next level of “understanding” the unknown. The story opens up with the narrator reflecting on his childhood in a lonely castle. These memories bring him only perpetual fear. The narrator clings to these brief pictures, though: “And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other” (27). The character remembers growing up in a giant castle that never had proper light, and it was never light out either, always dark. He was raised by himself for all he knows and has been left to wander this dark dimension.

There is something striking about an aspect of the castle, “There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone” (27). The narrator found comfort in lying in the grass, reading books, and trying to imagine the beauty of being among a crowd. This need for contact proves to be his awakening.

Unable to go on living in darkness for the rest of his life, the narrator decides that he should climb that ominous tower in order to do something out of the ordinary. The climb, dangerous as it is, leads to a payoff, “All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless crawling up that concave and desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and knew I must have gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor” (29). On this floor, there is a door that the narrator is anxious to open, in order to find anything other than darkness. He opens the door to find something worth the life threatening climb up the tower, “The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight” (30). The narrator makes his way through the stones and trees, heading towards the light coming from the windows of a church.

The mysterious and somewhat supernatural elements of the story become replaced by horror once the narrator makes his way inside the church to meet the people he has longed to be part of. As he walks through the window, the narrator is greeted by screams, “Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat” (31). The crowd flees the room, leaving the narrator with the thing that made everyone stark mad. The unknown that comes into play here in the ambiguous description of what the character comes across inside the church. This scene is a token way of explanation within Lovecraft’s work, “I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity what had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives” (31). Even though the description of the creature that scared the guests gets more coherent, it still remains mysterious, “God knows it was not of this world — or no longer of this world — yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its moldy, disintegrating appeal an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more” (31). One can only guess that this creature is some sort of zombie, or ghoul.

The narrator flees the area, and makes his way back to the marble place of entry into this alternate world. He is relieved that he is unable to open it back up and return to the darkness of his previous life, even if he is forced to be alone in this world as well. He takes on the role of the “outsider” and runs through the woods at night, while playing in the catacombs during the day. The revelation at the end brings understanding to the reader, “This I have known even since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within the great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass” (31). The narrator does not understand that he saw his reflection in the mirror, attributing the creature to a mystic portal instead. The ending leaves the character unaware of the true monstrosity he actually is.

“The Outsider”: An Analysis

The tale of “The Outsider” is ostensibly about the birth of a loner into the “real world”. While the “monster” is not born physically in the text (by a mother), he is removed from his home in the castle and transported to a realm that he has never been to before. But the tale can be broken down even. Donald Burleson wrote Disturbing the Universe, a book that analyzes many of Lovecraft’s stories; in it he states: “At the outset, it is significant that the Outsider’s problem resides in the point that he is in fact inside — in the prison of his grim and cobwebbed home, his sepulchral castle. He is an insider here, though that term commonly suggests being in the midst of company such as he lacks” (Burleson 60). The Outsider is unaware of how or why he is “imprisoned” which leads him to be ignorant in understanding why he has been locked away in the first place.

Even the Outsider knows that there is something wrong with his current situation: “And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 27). “The other” has been emphasized for a reason; it represents the unknown and it speaks to the fear of treading into what we don’t know. The “other” addresses how the Outsider feels about himself as well, as if he shares moment of that which is uncanny: “The other, as a broad term in philosophy, figures into general problems of plurality and comes into play when one notices that a thing (the Outsider, for instance) is never ‘itself’ in any monadic way but rather is identifiable only by the way of all that is ‘other’ to it” (Burleson 65). Everything feels like a mystery to the Outsider and it is the cause of his disassociation. It compels him, though.

The tower itself represents a birth canal, though, in the text, it is seen as the unknown for the Outsider: “Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown sky” (Lovecarft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 28). As much as the tower represents the other, it is his portal into the real world, a birthing place. Burleson comments on the slight sexuality inherent in the tower, itself, “While much can be (and has been) said about the tale in Freudian or mythic-Jungian interpretation — the tower as a birth canal, the journey out into light as the quest for wholesomeness of the psyche — we will observe here, further that the text partakes a webs of self-subversion” (Burleson 59). The Outsider rebels against his current state in the other dimension, which leads to him climbing the (phallic) tower and entering the door (yonic) that takes him to what the reader can assume is the “real world”.T

he Outsider approaches the castle because he hears sounds of merriment and longs for a connection with something other than himself, “But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open windows — gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 30). The gazing into the window still symbolizes the outsider nature of The Outsider, even when he is “inside”, “In the manner in which the text subverts its own spatial symbolisms, the Outsider is most the outsider when inside and is least the outsider in the open air, where he has left his dungeon behind and possesses at least a hope, albeit ill-fated, of finding companionship and gaiety” (Burleson 60–61). When the Outsider approaches those who are in a merry way, they turn and run, screaming at what the Outsider is.

The mirror that the Outsider looks into is a symbol of self-knowledge, or self awareness, “The merry company, however, each member of which has no doubt glanced into the same mirror in the course of the evening’s pleasantries, can have found nothing there to be learned. The merrymakers have in fact fled from the lighted arena of self- understanding” (Burleson 61). The mirror has far more meaning to the Outsider and he does not take it for granted as the merrymakers did. After discovering his horrible and sad fate, we are left with a creature who can only remain “inside” when he is “outside:” “He is outside any reductive or unifying description or structural code with which we might be tempted newly to imprison him. As such, he is in a sense free after all, whether that means being inside or outside, or both” (Burleson 66). The Outsider is now free and able to know where he lies in context with the world. Though it is a horrific ending, at least the Outsider has come to terms to what it is that makes him the other.

“The Call of the Cthulhu”: Synopsis

“The Call of the Cthulhu” is split into a three part manuscript from the perspective of Francis Wayland Thurston. This manuscript was written as a way to document Thurston’s bizarre findings after seeking out the mysteries left by his dead granduncle, George Gammell Angell. Angell was a Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island and was seen as the leading man of ancient inscriptions. The first chapter depicts how Angell died mysteriously in the winter of 1926–1927 and left behind some enigmatic material. Thurston took it upon himself to look into the findings of his late granduncle and came across the bas-relief made of clay. The bas-relief is described as such: The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 73–74). That is just the description of the texture of the bas-relief and not the creature is forms. The being is something comic and of another world, “A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the genera outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful” (74). The creature that this bas-relief represented called for Thurston to dig deeper into his granduncle’s findings. Angall came across the bas-relief when a young sculptor came bearing it on March 1st, 1925. The name of the man was Henry Anthony Wilcox and after experiencing an earthquake, he began to have dreams that had this large and tentacled creature in it: “Upon retiring, he had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror” (75). Angall took it upon himself to study young Wilcox’s dreams to hope to find some meaning behind the unknown bas-relief. Wilcox’s malady did not last forever and one night he woke up and found to not be cursed by the visions of the idol. Angall went around the scientific community, trying to see if anyone had a lead on what this clay design was, but none knew and several scoffed at the notion of supernatural happenings (i.e. dreams, sudden fits of madness).

The second chapter titled, “The Tale of Inspector Legrasse” is a brief history of a “Cthulhu Cult” from 1908. Inspector Legrasse attended the meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis to find meaning in a bas-relief he found in New Orleans, a year prior. Legrasse brought forth the idol that represented the replica that Wilcox made, and the group of scientists was asked to find the origins of it. Lagrasse describes the hideous thing he has brought, “It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopuslike head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind” (79). Most of the people at the meeting had no idea what this represented but one man, by the name of Professor Webb, had come across the writing on the idol during an exploration. In Greenland, he had run into a group of Eskimos who worshipped a demon by praying to a bas-relief that looked exactly like the one that Legrasse had in his hands.

A year earlier, before the meeting Webb, Legrasse was asked to look into some disappearances that were happening in the swamps of New Orleans. Within the swamps, people had reported devil flames and heard satanic chants. Legrasse and twenty other police members dove into the “voodoo” area of the swamps were “white-men” never travelled. The men began to hear the chants and the drums and they came to a clearing where the orgy was taking place, “In the natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint” (83). Legrasse and his men fired on the orgy and tied up those who were not dead. One of the captured was named Castro and he told Legrasse everything he needed to know about the cult and what it represented. He described the “Great Old Ones” who were ancient gods that could plunge from world to world but who no longer made appearances. Castro goes one to talk about where the gods live, or more precisely, where Cthulhu lives: “They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of the mighty Cthulhu for glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them” (85). Castro claimed that worshipping Cthulhu would help them get ready for when the Great Old Ones returned and the followers could then be taught by these beings.

The section continues with Thurston seeking out Wilcox, the young sculptor from Angall’s notes. Wilcox was continuing a normal life and was happy to tell his memories of the dreams he had to Thurston. He then went down to New Orleans and spoke with Legrasse and others from the raiding party. Thurston felt he was getting close to finding out what this all meant but his curiosity may be leading down a path he shouldn’t have started.

The third chapter entitled, “The Madness from the Sea” recounts Thurston, now fully interested in the Cthulhu cult, seeking out recent tales of the idol. He finds a newspaper clipping that narrates a story about a boat named, Emma, which arrived in New Zealand with only one crewmember left alive and who was holding onto a strange idol. The name of the man was Johansen and the paper said he lived in Norway. Thurston travels halfway across the world to Oslo, Norway to seek out this man who came close to whatever Cthulhu is.

Thurston never met Johansen, for he died of a strange occurrence, one that was similar to how Angall died. Johansen did leave behind papers detailing what happened on the boat and why he was the only one who survived the ordeal. Johansen explains how the sailors had come across an island that was covered in ooze and did not have a place on the map. As they were exploring the island, an earthquake rattled the landmass and the ground opened up, swallowing most the crewmembers. Out of the crack in the earth, Cthulhu made its appearance: “The Thing can not be described — there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order” (95). After seeing this monstrous thing, Johansen fell into a delirium and was found in a state of madness. After reading the manuscript, Thurston realizes that he now knows too much about the Cthulhu and will face the same horrible fate as the other men did: “Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye” (97). Thurston understands that the god is real, but maybe he should have stayed away.

“The Call of the Cthulhu”: An Analysis

“The Call of the Cthulhu” is the first, significant text written by Lovecraft. That is to say that it is the most influential and renowned work of the author. Lovecraft did not think it was his best, but to this day, it is his most quoted text. Even South Park, the comedic cartoon written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, had a three part series dedicated to the Cthulhu mythos. There have been many poorly made film adaptations of this story but that can be attributed to the fact that this story is not for the cinematic eye. The way the story is paced and the way in which it is written calls for a reader to open their imagination. This is possibly one of the better stories that use the unknown in a way that blows the reader’s understanding of narrative out of the water. Nothing is resolved at the end of the story for Thurston, but he realizes with utter horror that he is the next to die. We, the reader, do not know any more about Cthulhu but we understand its cosmic power.

Cthulhu, itself, can be traced back to some form of a natural tradition. Lovecraft was very aware of other cultures and knew a great deal about the world. His excessive travelling in America leads me to believe that he had a taste for exotic understandings for life. Philip Streffler in The Lovecraft Companion comments on where the idea of Cthulhu may have come from: “Cthulhu, the sea god of Lovecraft’s extraterrestrial pantheon, rules the submarine depths of R’lyeh, a city, according to its tradition, that will rise from the sea permitting its inhabitants to inherit the earth. In all probability Cthulhu is based on the Norwegian myth of the Kraken, a legendary monster thought to live under the waves of the northern sea” (43). This is accurate because in the story, Thruston travels to Norway to hear the tale of the sailor who presumably saw the ancient creature. Lovecraft was not concerned by making the supernatural something that went outside of nature or rational, in fact, all of his stories are rooted in the probably, even if they are a little extreme: “Rather than breaking laws of science with supernatural means and thus generating fear, he creates a feeling of horror by showing that the common sense views of physics and nature (that is, the old Newtonian views) are the comforting fantasy” (Halpern & Labossiere 513). Once again, that pragmatic nature of Lovecraft’s personality comes through even in the darkest and most absurd of stories.

Lovecraft’s approach to Cthulhu is interesting in itself. While the horror in “The Picture in the House” was brief and cheap, this story goes to another dimension in horror, to a place where we cannot comprehend. The general problem with horror is that the scares will not likely stick with you. Spielberg’s Jaws was a movie that stuck with people because it created a fear or exploited a fear that exists in every swimmer. Furthermore, it was a horror that lurked beneath a surface that you cannot see through, an unknown. Lovecraft created a creature that lasted in our memories and was not defined by borders. Streffler comments: “Whereas many authors might present us with a papier-mâché ghost or an enraged elf, giving us a scare that lasts about a half-hour, Lovecraft surrounds us with cosmic demons whose existence is supported by history and whose appearances in specific places at specific times have been chronicled” (173). The horror of the monster sticks with the characters in the story as well, like a crewmember on the boat that came across Cthulhu: “Briden looked back and went mad, laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 96). There is an echo here of Lot’s wife, who turned back to look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and turned to a pillar of salt. The reason for Briden going insane, or any of the character for that matter, is puzzling. I can only assume that they saw or inherited too much knowledge from the encounter and they were unable to comprehend any of it, throwing them deep into madness.

A greater part of the unknown in this text is that Cthulhu’s whereabouts or its end is not explained and lacks resolution. The most horrifying idea is that Thurston and the reader fully understand that Cthulhu is still out “there” and is waiting for the day when it can rise again. Streffler takes into account the way in which Lovecraft presents his demon/monsters: “And, above all they are monsters that do not perish at the end of the story and were not born at the beginning of the story” (Streffler 173). We do not see the birth or death of Cthulhu, it is an entity that has transcends life and death. The characters and the reader have no context or history for this manifestation, the idea of the monster is completely unknown to everyone, it can do anything. The fact that Cthulhu can speak to certain people through telepathy adds further mystery to the tentacled creature.

We meet young Wilcox at the beginning of the story, who is a sculptor and is the reason for Thurston decent into hell. Wilcox is the one who made the bas-relief and peaked Thurston’s interest in the matter of the god. But Wilcox did not act out of his own intentions; he was controlled by Cthulhu through telepathy. Burleson speaks about the power of Cthulhu when the god is far away: “Even in the Wilcox account, in which the narrator is in a sense closer to Cthulhu, stops short at the telepathic effects. Cthulhu is most significant, here as elsewhere, precisely for his effects in absence — his power from afar” (Burleson 81). Cthulhu transcends boundaries, he is what the Christains believe their god is like, one that is omnipresent and omnipotent. Cthulhu calls out to his followers like god did in the Old Testament (i.e. Moses and Jeremiah), but for far more devious purposes. The telepathy is a way of being controlled by something you can’t see or you don’t understand, and that is what happened to Wilcox. He was stuck in nightmares and images that were being transmitted from halfway across the world. The idea of borders was not a problem for Cthulhu, for borders are only physical.

Cthulhu seems to have a more powerful effect when he is not present, even when he drives sailors insane with his presence, he does not control their actions. Burleson comments: “Altogether, “The Call of the Cthulhu” stands as an allegorical exploration of the paradoxical nature of borders, of distances, of insides and outsides, of the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of centers, of the tendency of textuality to deal in absences that are more powerful than presences” (85). Time, space, and “gods” do not obey the boundaries that we see. While we see walking to our bedroom in our house as short and walking from Canada to Mexico as long, the creatures in Lovecraft’s fiction did not see. It is far more frightening to understand that the malevolent creatures in Lovecraft are not hindered by the same things humans are. This observation of boundaries goes back to the pragmatics in Lovecraft’s personality and how he does not let the supernatural govern the entire story: “Lovecraft takes a different approach in his stories. Rather than having science expand its boundaries to include genuine supernatural phenomena through brand new theories, the alleged supernatural phenomena are instead accounted for in scientific terms through existing models of nature. Thus, science is not so much embracing the supernatural as reducing it to a manifestation of the natural” (Halpern & Labossiere 513).

Cthulhu lives in the sea and comes from the stars; it is not something that is intangible or unbelievable (in the purest sense). The idea of Cthulhu is that it represents humanity and the universe, something that our human minds cannot wrap ourselves around. If we could fathom Cthulhu, then he we not be human, we would be nature or star-dust. Cthulhu shall never be a “known” to any reader or character. It represents the universe and the secrets held within.

“The Call of the Cthulhu” is not so much about Thurston’s understanding of what he has come across, it is more about his quest for information that cannot be obtained. Thurston went down a path that will lead him to his death, probably by the hands of a Cult member because no person should ever be able to understand what “Cthulhu” is.

“The Dunwich Horror”: Synopsis

The first chapter of “The Dunwich Horror” details the hamlet of Dunwich and how it is a town that is plagued by uneasy feeling. It is located in north central Massachusetts and is surrounded by dangerous ravines and wild weeds. People do not visit Dunwich unless they live there: “Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 99). The first chapter is hinting at the atrocities to come with both its descriptions and nods to past events. The town has been surrounded with cult-like personalities since it was created, and not any one person can really say what is wrong with the town, “No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below” (100). All of these unnatural descriptions lead up to the birth of “person” who would be the horror of Dunwich.

The second chapter starts with Wilber Whateley’s birth, who was born on February the 2nd, 1913. What was odd about this birth is the fact what Wilber’s mother has probably not been with a man, which we can infer from her description: “Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of 35, living with an aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth” (101). What is more odd about the birth of Wilber is his frightening growth rate and appearance: “Wilber’s growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his birth he has attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a year of age” (103). He, at the age of four, became a “fluid and incredibly intelligent talker” (105).

Things get even stranger for Wilber when he turns ten: “About 1923, when Wilber was a boy of ten who mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second siege of carpentry went on at the house” (107). The carpentry part is not the issue; it is the fact that Wilber has a beard at the age of 10. All this time, Wilber and his grandfather have been building things, a new shed and now a new addition to the second floor; each were made to house something and that something was dark.

The grandfather dies, leaving Wilber to carry on the “dark” activities that only the townsfolk can surmise in their minds. Around that same time, Wilber went up into the hills with his mother and came back alone. It is inferred that he murdered her for sacrifice. The monstrosity of a man went to look for the book of the dead at the Miskatonic University, in order to finish whatever his grandfather started and without the interference of his mother: “Almost eight feet tall, and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborn’s general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in the quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library — the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olus Wormius’ Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century” (110). Dr. Armitage is there to help Wilber and is curious not only by his appearance but for his purpose for seeking out this evil book. Armitage can make out in the text of the book that Wilber is looking up Yog- Sothoth, a god of the Old Ones, one of those related to Cthulhu. Wilber wants to borrow the book, but Armitage would not let him and told all the other libraries with a copy, to not give it to Wilber.

At this point in the story, the narrative focuses on Armitage and his heroic dealings with the horror in Dunwich. Wilber came back in the middle of the night to steal the Necronomicon but was killed by the guard dogs. While Wilber was odd in appearance, his true form is discovered at his death, Armitage looks on: “The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool 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” (114). At Wilber’s death, he mumbled about Yog-Sothoth, the god that is within the Necronomicon. Armitage is confused by all of this, and becomes curious when he hears that the shed on Wilber’s property had exploded and there are now reports of someone/something leaving large footprints everywhere. Armitage understands that someone similar to Wilber would have left those marks. He begins his quest to find out who has been destroying Dunwich and eating the cattle.

Dr. Armitage and his friends, Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan head to Dunwich to try and destroy whatever has been released in the area. The townspeople looked on as the three, old men made their way up the hill by the town where the creature was supposedly hiding. The three men destroyed the monster by shouting counter-spells and throwing “formulas” on Wilber’s twin. Before its death, the creature shouts, “FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH” (131). Much like Christ did on the cross, Wilber’s twin calls out to his god, asking why he has been forsaken.

“The Dunwich Horror”: An Analysis

“The Dunwich Horror” may be one of Lovecraft’s better known and popular stories, and it may be a simple take on “good versus evil,” but the tale is extremely complicated in the way it portrays that idea. The unknown is at first easy to understand but as the story progresses, the lines between the known and unknown become ambiguous. Donald Burleson comments on the crossing of the lines within the text: “The text deals in various kinds of self-subversion on various levels, raising questions of readability and figurality, questions of maintaining distinctions between subject and object, between human and horror, between cause and effect, and commenting allegorically upon its own self-perpetuating unreadability” (119). “The Dunwich Horror,” as I will discuss in a bit, tends to never stay on the path of cohesive narrative. Wilber certainly embodies this as he is always changing physically and at his death, he is almost indescribable.

The town of Dunwich is rather unknown by itself. It is secluded and no one seems to go to Dunwich but they tend to accidentally wind up there. In the critical essay, Outsiders and Aliens: The Use of Isolation in Lovecraft’s Fiction, author Stefan Dziemianowicz discusses the nature of the town in the beginning, “Lovecraft devotes the entire first chapter solely to establishing that the ominous qualities of Dunwich that set it apart from the normal world area natural part of its history” (11). Lovecraft wants to start the reader off by making them feel isolated and out of place in order to create a sense of unknowingness. The story will immediately make the reader question what Dunwich represents and why there is a horror, “The text will force us to ask, what is Dunwich, what are its people, what is the horror?” (Burleson 121). The bigger questions will always be left unanswered in Lovecraft’s texts. It’s not for the reader to know why it is happening; it is more up to the reader to try to see the relationships between the themes.

The town is secluded and outside the realm of normal. The context for the town is weird, but if one were to be inside the town, all would seem normal. Burleson comments on this dichotomy: “The problematic relation between externality and internality is in fact allegorized in the text by the Dunwich people (insiders in their own social system, yet outsiders in the in the more inclusive system) and the alien presences (outsiders, though significant only by being in Dunwich as encroachments)” (121). When the professors arrive at the end to “save the day,” it all seems rather normal compared to what is going on. Context plays a large role in this story, even if it can be simplified to a “good versus evil” tale: “Clearly the tale is one of humankind against a larger, possible menacing, nature” (123). The good being the professors with their knowledge of the world and nature, while the evil is that unknown that has set out to perform dark works.

The monster of Wilber Whateley is indeed more unknown to the reader than the town. He springs forth in a religious sort of way, “The alien presence, like Jesus and Buddha, springs from ‘miraculous’ or god-sired birth” (124). Wilber is a messiah of sorts for the dark god that inhabits the mountain of Dunwich, a biblical tale seen from the other side. Wilber is both god and man, a combination that defies definition and is the most earnest display of Lovecraft’s love for the unknown. The distinction between the unreal and real is convoluted and Dunwich itself seems far less enigmatic compared to the likes of Wilber Whateley.

Wilber could be seen as the connecting bridge to the unknown, a Rosetta Stone: “The fact that Wilber Whateley himself is half human and half monstrous does much to destroy any supposedly lasting barriers between the two poles of the opposition. He is a link, a nexus, a bridge ‘of dubious safety’” (124). Even at Wilber’s gruesome death, he acts as an unknown-catalyst for his twin brother, giving life after his death. The twin’s birth mirrors Wilber’s in a way, just more symbolically, “Wilber dies in the quest, and the twin (identified as the same hero-strain) is symbolically reborn from the ‘womb’ of the farmhouse” (124). The twin is born without the human traits, like Wilber and therefore makes his a bigger question mark. We do not see the twin talk to anyone, we only see him tear through the countryside, destroying everything in his wake. He lacked the human side and needed to be destroyed, the unknown element scares the people of Dunwich as well as the professors who come to help. The twin was not something that could be reasoned with, like Wilber.

“The Dunwich Horror” ends in a comedic fashion, and the climax is also something that one would not see in most of Lovecraft’s works. The evil is destroyed in the end, even if the majority of the details are left unanswered. Burleson comments on the nature of this odd ending: “In fact there is something decidedly comic in the spectacle of a doddering professor, accompanied by two colleges, chasing a monster up a mountainside with a can of bug spray — surely this amounts to a descent from pathos to bathos — and the comic impression would seem to threaten the horrific agenda of the tale” (125). Burleson is right, though. Lovecraft seems to tie a bow on the end of the story, letting the good side win. The evil has been vanquished and all will return to “normal” in Dunwich.

That seems like an easy out for Lovecraft. I would like to think that he has another chapter hidden somewhere that flips the story upside down. “The Dunwich Horror” has a way of making the reader question the line between reality and unknown: “From beginning to end, the text finds ways to eradicate its own rigidity of distinction, privilege, or choice between its human and alien concerns” (127). This story is the most confusing of the tales that I have looked at, not complex, just confusing in how it goes about the narrative. Nothing is set in stone for the characters or the reader, the narrative enjoys flipping itself on its head and the distinction between reality and the unknown becomes blurred.

Lovecraft and Poe

The above stories represent the layers of Lovecraft’s works. He is able to present his own personal style in several ways, and they can range from the simplistic to the most complex. If one were to find a single thread that held the stories together, it would be the smallness that a character feels in the world. The protagonists all seem to either fall into madness or come close to it. As much as Lovecraft might have created his own particular type of storytelling, he did borrow some ideas. Before the stories, I discussed how

“Young Goodman Brown” by Hawthorne had some similarities to Lovecraft. Hawthorne, like Lovecraft, despised the Puritan lifestyle and distrusted religious institutions. The biggest comparisons is having the main character slipping into madness or seeming crazy in a normal world, even if he knows the dark truth of that reality. Poe, as I mentioned earlier as well, was a large influence. Even though they came close in how they expressed their macabre senses, they did diverge, but we would not want them to be the same anyway.

Lovecraft and Poe shared the same room when it came to storytelling. Set the reader up in a macabre setting and then further push the envelope for how dark the narrative can go. Lovecraft didn’t rip Poe off or steal his ideas, he merely borrowed the style and threw his New England twist on it and crafted an era for horror-fiction. Lovecraft took these ideas and created his own storytelling with the unknown. In The H.P. Lovrcraft Companion, Philip Streffler comments on Poe’s influence on Lovecraft, “The fact remains, however, that Lovecraft did carefully mold his literary theory on Poe’s (a fuller discussion which appears later in this chapter) and that Lovecraft’s literary value has been championed recently primarily by French academics like Maurice Levy of the University of Toulouse and in the pages of the French literary magazine L’Herne, just as the standard of Poe was taken up by Baudelaire in the nineteenth century” (Streffler 5). The literary cycle continues, as one author takes another author’s ideas and makes their own version of it.

Lovecraft had “respect” for Poe and considered him the grandfather of weird fiction, Streffler comments, “Lovecraft saw Poe as rising to heights of ‘cosmic terror’ far above that which was achieved by any other author of weird fiction, adding that it was ‘to our good fortune as Americans’ to be able to claim Poe as our own. The great similarities between Poe and Lovecraft from the kelson of Lovecraft’s literary theory and thus demands scrutiny here” (Streffler 28). This is interesting because many would assume that Lovecraft was the grandfather of weird fiction due to the magazine that he would print his works in. Each author presented their characters in similar ways, that is, to focus on a character who is losing themselves, mentally, in the events of the narrative: “By focusing on a man whose psychological state is deteriorating, Lovecraft is echoing Poe’s treatment of the mind of Roderick Usher, and his technique casts and eerie and ghastly shadow over the entire work” (Streffler 30). Like Poe shows a man seeping into madness in “The Raven” or “The Tell Tale Heart,” Lovecraft shows a parallel in the protagonist in “The Call of the Cthuhlu.”

The two authors did diverge on certain topics.

As you know now already, Lovecraft was a traveler and loved to craft a setting for the reader. Not just in where the characters were, but the landscape and how it affected either the reader or the characters. “The Dunwich Horror” is a prime example of this, as Lovecraft spends an entire chapter detailing the hamlet of Dunwich and how the setting would set up the ominous tone for the story. Poe, on the other hand, was not as concerned with landscapes and textual paintings of the surrounding areas. He was more concerned with focusing on the pathos of his characters and how they reacted to their situations.

But, Lovecraft loved the idea of setting affecting the world around the narrative, Streffler comments on this, “But Lovecraft well understood what he was about. These long passages often amount to virtually Henry James-like descriptions of the main character’s psychological state or are given to physical descriptions of setting” (Streffler 29). Maybe that is why New England scares me in ways other than extreme religious principles. Lovecraft knew, because of his adventures, that the landscape can free you and it can imprison you. He took it one step farther than Poe, but Poe was an alcoholic, so I can’t expect much.

One other way that the authors separate is in their dealings with gender and sexuality. Poe was concerned with women and the power of losing a “true love.” The loss of a companion is detrimental to those who are depressive, like Poe. Lovecraft was not as concerned with women. As you can tell from his personal life, he was not sexually adventurous and even though he was married once, there is no telling what his sex life was like. Lovecraft avoided women in his stories and told all his tales from the perspective of a male figure. I guess misogyny could be tossed around, but I am inclined to not think that about him. Streffler makes the same connection that I do between the authors, “While for Poe the most effective emotional theme was the death of a beautiful woman, Lovecraft almost completely eschewed the introduction of women into his fiction” (Streffler 30). Lovecraft and women did not seem to be on the same page and judging from his personal life, he probably only felt controlled by them. He instead, took to the roads to free himself of his family and explore the meaning of “space.”

Though Poe and Lovecraft differentiated on a few things, they met each other with definitions of the uncanny and the unknown. Lovecraft never plagiarized Poe, but he did in fact repeat many of the themes, but in a more “New England” way. I would consider “Young Goodman Brown” by Hawthorne to be the story that Poe and Lovecraft worked on together. If they were to combine powers, they would turn into a pale, demented version of Hawthorne.

Lovecraft’s Influence

As you would expect from someone who published a large amount of works, Lovecraft influenced the horror genre as we know it today. Lovecraft was not popular during his time and was met with lukewarm appreciation. Unfortunately, he never saw the rabid fan-base that he has today. There have been film adaptations of his stories, fan fiction based around his universe, and his style, in general is used to this day. I want to look at a few artists and films who/that echo Lovecraft’s style and use of the unknown.

One of the more recognizable names who are influenced by Lovecraft, is Stephen King. King is known for his stories about killer dogs and girls who go crazy after going through their first menstruation, but he is far better than the way some critics paint him. It’s easy to knock King down because he is well known and successful, but he is more than a paperback novelist. King started writing about science fiction when he was a kid, though it was not “science-y,” it ran along the same lines of the genre. As he grew older, he started peppering horror into his works and eventually became a cross between the two, science fiction and horror.

In his story called, IT, a group of young friends live together in Maine and children from around the area begin to disappear. A clown has been seen luring the children and the book is ostensibly about the group of friends getting to the bottom of the murders. I use the word, “ostensibly” because it is a novel that is well over one thousand pages and deals with far more than just looking for a killer clown. When the group of friends do eventually find the monster that is killing the kids, it is not the clown which they originally though, it is a spider that is from the cosmos and is thousands of years old. That sure does sound familiar! As the children see the spider, this is how it’s described.

It was perhaps fifteen feet high and as black as a moonless night. Each of Its legs was as thick as a muscle-builder’s thigh. Its eyes were bright malevolent rubies, bulging from sockets filled with some dripping chromium-colored fluid. Its jagged mandibles opened and closed, opened and closed, dripping ribbons of foam. Frozen in an ecstasy of horror, tottering on the brink of utter lunacy, Ben observed with an eye-of-the- storm calm that this foam was alive; it stuck the stinking stone-flagged floor and then began to writhe away into cracks like protozoa (King, IT, 1004).

The way in which King describes the Spider is extremely Lovecraftian, especially the part about the Ben teetering on the edge of lunacy. Being on the edge of sanity is what Lovecraft was great at, just like his predecessor, Poe. The idea of a moonless night somehow evokes a feeling of “nowhere” or “limbo,” as if the friends were not in a place that was earthly, but more unknown. But, the passage is similar to what we saw in “The Call of the Cthuhlu,” when the bas-relief is described, “It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopuslike head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 79). It’s not the same monster, but the way in which the authors went about describing them is similar. King, though being heavily influenced by Lovecraft in terms of his description style, hated the way in which Lovecraft wrote dialogue. In King’s autobiography/instructional book called, On Writing, he goes to call out Lovecraft’s writing abilities with dialogue, “Lovecraft was, by all accounts, both snobbish and painfully shy (a galloping racist as well, his stories full of sinister Africans and the sort of scheming Jews my Uncle Oren always worried about after four or five beers), the kind of writer who maintains a voluminous correspondence but gets along poorly with others in person — were he alive today, he’d likely exist most vibrantly in various Internet chat- rooms” (King, On Writing, 181). Again, King is speaking to the way in which Lovecraft wrote dialogue, and to the man’s personal views. Sounds a bit harsh coming from one of the nicer writers in horror, but he was making a point.

Another author, who is not as heavily influenced by Lovecraft as King, is Clive Barker. Barker is known for not only his books that deal with sex and magic, but he is also very popular for his film, Hellraiser. In a collection of short stories that he wrote called, Books of Blood, there is one particular story that echoes Lovecraft is a more disturbing way than King’s writing. The story is called, “In the Hills, the Cities,” and it follows a gay couple as they drive across Eastern Europe. They come across two cities called, Popolac and Podujevo. The cities, every ten years, form giant skyscrapers out of forty thousand people and parade around the country side. The couple sees one of these giants made out of human bodies and this is how it’s described: Despite these malformations, it was horribly life-like. The bodies that were bound together to make its surface were naked but for their harshness, so that its surface glistened in starlight, like one vast human torso. Even the muscles were well copied, though simplified. They could see the way the roped bodies pushed and pulled against each other in solid cords of flesh and bone. They could see the intertwined people that made up the body: the backs like turtles packed together to offer the sweep of the pectorals; the lashed and knotted acrobats at the joints of the arms and the legs alike; rolling and unwinding to articulate the city (Barker 162).

Even though the reader knows what the narrator is describing, the giant takes on a whole new meaning with the description. It stops being a discussion about many bodies being thrown together and it becomes a discussion on how the bodies are operating as one, like a monster. What makes this passage Lovecraftian is that even though we are seeing the giant for what it is, the words run together creating an ambiguous look at the creature. Lovecraft did a similar thing in “The Outsider,” in which the creature was described and not described at the same time, “I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity what had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives” (Lovecraft, The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 31). The melding of the body into one indescribable lump is not new to Barker; he has seen it before and probably from the pages of Lovecraft.

Epilogue

Lovecraft was an amazing, and powerful force in the world of literature. Not the author that people would automatically name in “most influential” author, but if you look closely, you’ll see his presence in modern day works. I fell in “love” with Lovecraft because it opened up other parts of my imagination. I enjoyed horror before my meeting with Lovecraft, but he helped throw me down a darker well. Being scared or terrified might not be on everyone’s top list of emotions, but I enjoy it. Not because of some sick fetish, it has to do more with me being affected. When a work of art or a film affects you in some way, it’s doing its job by letting you know that both you and it is alive.

Lovecraft took the idea of the unknown and crafted a career out of it. Though he was not that successful in his time, he would later become not only influential, but a part of modern society with fan fiction and films dedicated in his name. It’s easy to shrug Lovecraft off as a horror-writer and see him as no more than trash, but he made an impact on people and artists which means he is worthy of our time. The unknown for Lovecraft was the answer to all the questions in the universe. They all could not be answered, but that’s the point. The universe, for Lovecraft, was not about “god” or any divine being, it was about nature and how everything keeps moving without the need of intervention. The unknown was not only the picture of the universe; it was also his way of describing the world around him. The reader was forced to use their imagination to create in their minds what Lovecraft was explaining. Those holes that Lovecraft made became filled with our own, dark fears.

Lovecraft will remain with all of whom come across his path. He was not poetic or a romantic, instead, he was a natural realist with an inability to relate to people. Lovecraft was part of something else, as if the stars threw him up on the ground and asked him to write about things the human mind could not comprehend. Maybe as time progresses, people and those in academics, will see the importance of this wild and nutty writer. As for now, we must continue to be afraid of the stars and seas, because they hold the secrets.

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