The Classic Horror Stories Read online

  THE CLASSIC HORROR STORIES

  THE CLASSIC HRROR STORIES

  H. P. LOVECRAFT

  Edited by

  ROGER LUCKHURST

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

  United Kingdom

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  Selection and editorial material © Roger Luckhurst 2013

  The stories in this volume are reprinted by arrangement with Lovecraft Holdings, LLC.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  First published 2013

  Impression: 1

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  ISBN 978–0–19–963957–1

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of H. P. Lovecraft

  THE TALES

  The Horror at Red Hook

  The Call of Cthulhu

  The Colour out of Space

  The Dunwich Horror

  The Whisperer in Darkness

  At the Mountains of Madness

  The Dreams in the Witch-House

  The Shadow over Innsmouth

  The Shadow out of Time

  Appendix: Introduction from ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  Here be monsters—and spoilers. Readers may wish to cross the threshold unaided and treat this introduction as an afterword.

  THE fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, it is safe to say, divides opinion. He has been called ‘sick … hysterical and neurotic’, the writing ‘ghastly’, and even a sympathetic biographer regards him as an ‘eccentric recluse’, writing ‘stilted, artificial and affected’ work. Lovecraft’s fiction was demolished by the eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson with the damning judgement that ‘the only real horror of most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art’.1 Yet at the same time, Lovecraft was adored by the great experimental novelist Jorge Luis Borges, has been compared to Franz Kafka in significance, and was the subject of the first book by the leading contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq. He helped define the genre of ‘weird fiction’ and give a new direction to modern horror, fusing science fiction and the Gothic within a rigorous and bleakly materialist world view. The novels of Stephen King are unthinkable without Lovecraft, as are the films of the Alien series or the fantasy cinema of Guillermo del Toro. Lovecraft invented a whole ‘mythos’ of terrifying gods and aliens to which thousands of stories have been added. Several occult religions have been established in ambiguous worship of Lovecraft’s menacing god Cthulhu. His influence stretches from Japanese manga to contemporary philosophy, from heavy metal music to ritual magic and the contemporary writers of hybrid fictions known as the New Weird.

  All of this is not bad for a man of fragile health who only circulated his stories to close friends in handwritten form or published them in tiny networks of amateur journals. Later, he eked out a living by publishing in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. He was dismissive of his own efforts and was often disdainful of pulp horror and science fiction. He would leave manuscripts around for years, unable to bear the thought of typing them up, an effort he abhorred. There were no collections of his stories in book form during his lifetime. Utterly marginal in life, barely surviving on a dwindling inheritance until he died in 1937, Lovecraft has only become a major writer posthumously.

  Lovecraft’s Life (and Afterlife)

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in the family home in Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island. Except for short holidays and a disastrous couple of years in New York, Lovecraft stayed close to home and buried himself in antiquarian studies of New England. He lived in the oldest settlements of the first Puritan arrivals in America, and Lovecraft fashioned himself as an old Colonial, a man out of time, writing letters in stilted eighteenth-century English, imitating the poetics of those Enlightenment wits Addison and Steele, signing off his letters with ‘God Save the King!’ in defiance of this newfangled American Republic. Lovecraft was born into America at the moment that it became a world power, yet he lived and wrote with his back turned steadfastly against the American century.

  Whilst Lovecraft adored Colonial era houses, pottering about New England on pilgrimages to notable survivals, his obsession with the past was never retreat. The inheritance of New England was ambiguous. The Puritans wanted to throw off priestcraft and establish the kingdom of God. To clear the ground for that celestial city, they slaughtered Native Americans and built the nation on the backs of African slaves. The sublime wilderness pressed in on their feeble footholds. And the settlers only brought their fallen ways with them. In Salem, a place Lovecraft visited and used as the basis for his fictional town Arkham, the notorious witch-hunts turned the community against itself in a fever of denunciation in 1692. Nineteen people were hanged as witches on Gallows Hill before the grip of paranoia eased. The great American Gothic writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was haunted by the fact that an ancestor had served as one of the hanging judges; the threat of such a guilty inheritance was the subject of his Gothic romance, The House of Seven Gables. Ancestral horrors lurked in the family trees of New England. This was the direct theme of Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, because for him these inheritances were intensely personal.

  Lovecraft was the last descendant of two notable New England families. In 1893, his father collapsed with paresis, and spent the remaining years of his life in an asylum. Paresis was the degenerative muscular weakness that was associated with the late stages of syphilis, the then incurable sexually transmitted disease in which spirochaetes devour the nervous system over long years of decline. The disease was regarded as a moral failing and hushed up. It was also transmissible to children, and H. P. Lovecraft must have lived under the shadow of the disease. In 1896, his grandmother died, prompting the young Lovecraft to suffer horrifying nightmares mixed up with his already precocious reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in an edition illustrated with images of hell by Gustav Doré.

  Childhood trauma was compounded by the death of his grandfather in 1904. Whipple Phillips was the last tie to hereditary family wealth, and reduced circumstances forced the family to leave the ancestral home and move into a smaller property. It left Lovecraft feeling exiled for the rest of his life and this event drove his antiquarian and genealogical fascinations. Lovecraft was a sickly child, nervous illnesses disrupting his schooling to an extent that he could not graduate to attend Brown University in Providence. A breakdown at 18 left him a recluse in his mother’s home for several years. In letters Love
craft declared himself a neurotic: ‘Nervous exhaustion always intervenes between me and success,’ he said: ‘I am only about half-alive … My nervous system is a shattered wreck.’2 In an attempt to escape, Lovecraft tried to join the army in 1917, even while suspecting that basic training would kill him before he got to the trenches in France. His mother intervened with military authorities and Lovecraft was declared permanently unfit for service. Family catastrophe was crowned by his mother’s mental collapse in 1919 from nervous debility. She died in a sanatorium two years later.

  After his mother’s death, Lovecraft’s health improved, yet he must have identified himself as a Decadent. One of Lovecraft’s favourite Poe stories was ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, featuring Roderick Usher, the last, peculiarly sensitive member of his ancient family. Although Lovecraft disliked the work of French Decadent Joris-Karl Huysmans, Lovecraft’s life recalls the anti-hero of his strange novel Against Nature, Duc des Esseintes. Des Esseintes’s mother is nervous, his father dies from an ‘obscure illness’, and he is weak in body with shattered nerves. He is the last of his line, marking the final decline of his ancient house, yet has precocious intelligence, is reclusive, hypochondriac, lives only at night, and is obsessed by the stories of Poe. Both Usher and des Esseintes dedicate themselves to the overstimulated imagination. The Decadent embraces the private world of the dilettante, despising the public and professional world of bourgeois taste. To the Decadent, the market in art and culture is vulgar, yet any gesture of refusal is thoroughly defined by the market. This was also Lovecraft’s dilemma.

  Lovecraft was an autodidact who immersed himself in his grandfather’s mouldering library. His precocity resulted in passions for mythology, chemistry, and astronomy. At 16, he published his first journalism on astronomy, and wrote for various New England newspapers. He then abandoned science for years of writing verse in imitation of English eighteenth-century men of letters. In 1914, he encountered the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), a network of amateur writers who circulated their work by mail. The UAPA made Lovecraft a prodigious letter-writer to a network of friends and young writers he often never met. These included writers Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. In this circuit, he worked as an editorial adviser and ghostwriter, sometimes for a small fee. He wrote and distributed his own magazine, The Conservative, a vehicle for his anti-democratic views, but found his métier when he began writing short pieces in the Gothic mode, starting with ‘Dagon’ in 1917.

  ‘Dagon’ is the last confession of a traveller dying from the horror of what he has encountered in an incalculably ancient, far-flung terrain ‘putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish’ and ‘black slime’. It is the vision of a ‘Cyclopean monolith’ that breaks the narrator, a statue in honour of a monstrous god worshipped by hybrid ancestors, ‘damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall’. The story is laced with references to Poe, Gustav Doré, and Gothic novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, yet seems most indebted to the prose poems of Lord Dunsany, the Irish writer whom Lovecraft travelled to see read in Boston in 1919.

  ‘Dagon’ anticipates many of Lovecraft’s key themes: a narrator driven mad by the horror of a revelation of the truth of the origins of humanity, communicating extreme experience in dense and cluttered prose always on the verge of collapsing into comic overstatement. For all the awkwardness, ‘Dagon’ conveys a glimpse of a wholly other cosmogony of malignant gods, ancient others indifferent to humanity. Like Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana (1905), Lovecraft would go on to elaborate whole orders of these hideous ancestral gods, weaving his stories together in a dense matrix of cross-references. Throughout this present selection of stories, the reader will catch glimpses of the Old Ones, the Elder Gods, the Deep Ones, monsters buried in our deep ancestry or arriving from extraterrestrial worlds unimagined aeons ago. ‘Dagon’ was published in an amateur journal, but was the first tale of Lovecraft’s to appear in the commercial magazine Weird Tales in 1923. It was to begin a stormy association with that famous pulp journal.

  In 1924, Lovecraft made a decision that astounded his friends and family, given his lack of interest in what one letter called ‘amatory phenomena’. He married Sonia Greene and moved from Providence to New York to live with her. He had met Sonia, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, through UAPA gatherings. She was in the haberdashery business, and seemed willing to support Lovecraft’s writing. They lived modestly, but within months the couple’s New York plan went awry. Sonia’s business failed. They began selling their belongings and moving to cheaper accommodation. Lovecraft undertook to find salaried work. Letters advertising his gentlemanly virtues and writing skills went unanswered. The couple ended up on the edges of Red Hook, the Brooklyn area that housed one of New York’s busiest docks, a poor and sometimes desperate area of transients. After this unlucky experiment, the couple parted amicably in 1926. Sonia went to work out West; Lovecraft was offered a home back in Providence with his aunts. He returned to Rhode Island with immense relief.

  In New York, Lovecraft had written ‘He’, with its vision of New York as ‘in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things’. He wrote another nightmare vision of Brooklyn, ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, and researched his essay on the Gothic literature, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’. The return to New England prompted an explosion of writing, a period in which he began to compose his key texts. The jolt of New York had unlocked his imagination. The central work was ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, written in 1926, a compelling mosaic of partial accounts of cult worship in a structure he had borrowed from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (1886) but mainly from Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ (1894). Machen was a Welsh mystic and another lost Decadent, eking out a living in the margins from odd Gothic horrors about ancient terrors in modern London. Machen’s writing was one of the final pieces of influence that allowed Lovecraft’s work to mature.

  Lovecraft never resolved his feelings about writing to order or for money, and hated grinding out serial Gothic horrors. In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, Lovecraft would publish in various commercial pulps, including Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction. These throwaway magazines made of low-grade wood pulp paper with lurid covers in brash coal-tar dye colours became the places where the genre of science fiction was established. The buffeting Lovecraft received from editors and market pressures caused him misery. After ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ was rejected by Weird Tales in 1931, he lost energy for this kind of writing, moving back to amateur circulation.

  It is easy to caricature Lovecraft as a recluse, yet he travelled widely in the late 1920s and 1930s, throwing off the neurasthenia that had defined him. He spent summers in Florida and took trips to Quebec. His antiquarianism flowed into detailed evocations of the Colonial world. He polished his panoply of nasty gods, enjoying the joke of inventing an imaginary occult library with friends like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Howard. Even so, eccentric nocturnal habits, long-term poverty, and genteel self-neglect hastened his death from stomach cancer in 1937, untreated until five days before he died in hospital. He was 47, an unknown and unsuccessful pulp writer.

  It was Lovecraft’s friends that rescued him from oblivion. August Derleth was a teenage correspondent with Lovecraft in the 1930s, who took it upon himself to become Lovecraft’s literary executor, a task he pursued for the rest of his life. When mainstream publishers showed little interest in a collection of Lovecraft stories, Derleth established a press with fellow fan Donald Wandrei, which they called Arkham House. In December 1939, The Outsider and Others appeared with a small print run. Beyond the Wall of Sleep, a second collection including Lovecraft’s unpublished novels, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, appeared in 1943. A third volume, Marginalia, seemed to be scraping the barrel in 1944. It was the fannish devotion o
f this emerging ‘cult’ that caught the notice of literary critic Edmund Wilson in 1945, and prompted his dismissal of Lovecraft’s ‘bad art’.

  More controversially, Derleth began sifting Lovecraft’s papers for ideas and started publishing Lovecraft stories that he had expanded and completed himself. Lovecraft had worked in collaboration and as a ghostwriter for many years; he co-authored many stories with other amateurs. Derleth, though, unleashed an extraordinary process of extension and elaboration of Lovecraft’s whole cosmogony. This has become known (in a term never used by Lovecraft himself) as the Cthulhu Mythos—thousands upon thousands of stories that share the same bestiary of monsters and tentacled gods. This shared mythos reaffirms that the Gothic genre is a tissue of borrowings and quotations.

  Strange things started happening to Lovecraft’s reputation in the 1960s. Colin Wilson began his 1962 study The Strength to Dream with an assessment of Lovecraft as a man of ‘dubious genius’. There was something admirable in the purity of Lovecraft’s commitment to his vision, even if Wilson considered Lovecraft’s life ‘a spectacle of self-destruction’. In the late 1960s, the French academic Maurice Lévy wrote a thesis on Lovecraft as a serious fantaisiste, continuing the French love of all things tinged with Poe. In turn, the radical philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used Lovecraft as a touchstone for notions of unstable being and becoming-other in their revolutionary manifesto, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

  The mass market paperbacks of the stories released in the late 1960s finally brought Lovecraft to a large readership. The hallucinatory prose spoke to elements of the American counter-culture: there were concept albums and rocks bands steeped in Lovecraftian lore and a host of B-movies were adapted from his fiction. Magic cults worshipped Cthulhu and ufologists borrowed the Lovecraft’s particular fusion of Gothic and science fiction.3 This has oozed into popular culture everywhere, particularly after the Swiss artist H. R. Giger’s designs for the film Alien. In 2005, Lovecraft was finally recognized with a Library of America edition of twenty-two stories, a form of canonization that raised the hackles of some literary commentators.