Upon reading H.P. Lovecraft

Great Tales of Horror by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

H.P. Lovecraft has a particular way he likes to tell stories. A quaint way, I suppose. Rather than tell the story of an active hero who confronts his main conflict and either succeeds or fails in his efforts, he gives us second hand stories, with the action told out of order, and the conflict approached sideways.

The author puts most of the action offstage, seen by reflection rather than by natural light. The heart of the action either takes place long, long ago, or it takes place in a hidden way, behind closed doors, coming to light later. Most of the narration is rather like a police report, or a long diary entry explaining research that has taken years to collect. (Most of his stories are guilty of unnecessary detail and redundant action. I wondered again and again if it would have struck me in a different way 80 years ago, whether I would have relished what I often found dreary.) Rarely do his characters participate in the real story, with the major crisis occurring in real time; they usually are there to investigate what has already happened, to piece it together by hints and clues, more detective story than action story.

The result is that the truly horrific or amazing or terrifying actions are only partly seen, only partly revealed, and only a bit at a time. They are glimpsed, and guessed at, and hidden from or run from, but rarely experienced by the narrator directly. (Some stories, like "The Thing on the Doorstep," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," feel more cinematic and more modern by having moments of true action, but they are the exception.) Sometimes ancient objects or alien relics are catalogued completely, blandly, scientifically, as in "At the Mountains of Madness," or "The Shadow out of Time," but at the same time with much fainting and upset all around, with key portions left out by the narrator because they are too terrifying to reveal.

Lovecraft's strategy is to make the strange and exotic remain somewhat veiled, only partly seen, protecting it from the sanitizing light of first person experience. He feared making his cosmic or supernatural creatures too familiar, robbing them of their impact. For the same reason that movie monsters are not revealed for as long as possible, remaining more frightening the longer they are in the shadows, his horrors are usually kept away from our close scrutiny, with details hinted at but left unsaid.

80 and 90 years after they were written, after decades of science fiction and horror in books and movies dealing with similar themes, our reaction is doubtless much different from that of the original audience. For Lovecraft, the essence of horror is realizing the cold truth revealed by science, by Darwin and astronomers and archaeologists and physicists: that humans are not the only creatures in the universe, or even the original creatures of earth, and that our assumption that we were a special creation, one that is watched over by a loving creator, is nothing but a comforting myth. It is realizing that almost the entire history of life preceded our own, and we are not central to the story of the universe. We are, in fact, minor characters, or nearly invisible and inconsequential props, overshadowed by greater, wiser, more powerful, less comprehensible others.

Lovecraft's fiction uses scale to dethrone humanity, to reduce us to insignificance--galactic distances, deep time measured in eons, unfathomable intelligences without compassion or even sanity--awakening his reader to the notion that humans and human history are vanishingly small and unimportant and fragile and impermanent in a universe that doesn't need us and doesn't care whether we exist another instant. He takes us, thematically, into a terrifying, giant room off our house that we never knew existed. Then, as we are adjusting to this new reality, he shows us a door to a room off that one which dwarfs the first--and then hints at a terrifying door at the end of that room leading to something greater and more incomprehensible and soul-shattering than anything so far.

After that, disoriented, mind blown, we are brought back to small town America to emphasize how our secure and pleasant existence is an illusion. He feeds the fear that perhaps there are malevolent actors, titanic and remorseless, who would gladly squish us if we foolishly succeeded in getting their attention. Over and over in the stories, his characters are like Jack, too curious for their own good, tapping the giant on the shoulder, wondering what happens next.

Usually, the squishing comes next. Thematically speaking.

Lovecraft would very much like us to quit trying to wake the giant.

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