The Classic Horror Stories Read online

  Genre Matters: The Weird

  What is it that snares the readers of Lovecraft? Can we even be sure what genre we are reading? In ‘The Dunwich Horror’, a wild sport of a child grows up wrong after an incantation to a demon, keeping an even nastier secret in the woodshed that ultimately erupts into a beleaguered community. In ‘The Colour out of Space’ anything with life near a lonely backwoods farm is poisoned by something carried to earth on a meteorite, a thing so alien it defies description. In Red Hook and in Innsmouth, the doors of the community hide foul secrets of shameful communions between men and monsters.

  Many of these tales have the trappings of Gothic literature, but Lovecraft refused the Christian underpinnings of that genre. Crucifixes do no good against these creatures, who are not demons in any religious sense. The protagonists never sin against moral codes, instead suffering the catastrophe of too much knowledge. Gone are the trappings of tyrannical priests, virgins menaced in convents, or men tempted to Faustian pacts by the Devil. Even New England witch-houses should not be feared for the reasons the Puritans suspected.

  What prompts this American horror is history, guilt at the state-founding violence buried in the white community. The transgressions are spatial, a street too far in Brooklyn, a mountain range too high in Antarctica. The historical costs of this expansion haunt the federation of American states: the modern republic has always been haunted by its excluded and exterminated others. Perhaps this is what allows modern horror to emerge out of the bowels of the traditional Gothic: the religious dread of the supernatural is snapped off in Lovecraft’s materialist tales. There is no super-natural, only the super-normal, things as yet to be inscribed within natural law. Lovecraft sought what he called ‘supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and mensurable universe’.4 Horror erupts from the edges of the known frontier or else slithers from the recesses of the body, its borders breached from within and without by nasty things. Puritan paranoia persists, but Lovecraft’s settings are modern and the terrors secular.

  Are they science fiction stories, then? Lovecraft is a post-Darwinian writer, exploiting the extension of evolutionary time in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The scientists in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ or the dreaming narrator of ‘The Shadow out of Time’ count off the millions of years in geological strata and aeons of biological time when humans had no existence. Freud once suggested that Darwin’s Origin of Species had delivered a terrible blow to man’s narcissistic belief in an anthropocentric universe, and Lovecraft precisely uses the expanded scale of biological and astronomical time to dethrone humanity from its illusion of biological mastery. This is what pulp writer Fritz Lieber recognized in calling Lovecraft the ‘Copernicus’ of horror, creating a change of paradigm, when he ‘shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed depths of space’.5 Lovecraft’s protagonists encounter beings sunk in primordial pasts or that arrive from extraterrestrial worlds, where aeons of evolving differently suggest wholly other biological pasts and futures. They are only gods to the sluggish minds of primitive humans.

  H. G. Wells had achieved a sense of the sublime extension of evolutionary time in the closing pages of The Time Machine, and opened The War of the Worlds with a remarkable reversal of the anthropological perspective, imagining humans the object of the merciless and superior Martian gaze. Lovecraft’s contemporary Olaf Stapledon also wrote visionary science fictions that extended beyond the evolutionary end of man. Lovecraft similarly aspired to cosmicism, evoking moments of freedom from ‘the galling limitations of time and space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis’.6 This is sometimes called the ‘sense of wonder’ intrinsic to the sublimity of science fiction. Yet pulp science fiction was expansive, confident, and optimistic, breathlessly invested in the technological progress of America, whilst Lovecraft was a pessimist, believing that he lived in decadent end-times. He was more interested in creating the intense, emotional effect of the kind Poe associated with horror or death. Fear, as Lovecraft said in the opening sentence of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, was ‘our oldest and strongest emotion’ (Appendix, p. 444). It is not the emotion generally associated with science fiction.

  In fact, there was already a term in use in the 1920s for this slippery writing: the weird. Collections of strange or unsettling stories—sometimes supernatural, sometimes not—began to be regularly titled ‘weird’ by the 1880s. It was a term applied to the fantastical visions in Rider Haggard’s imperial adventures, for instance, and to Kipling’s gossip tales that used the language of the supernatural to convey something of the oddness of encounters at the very limits of empire. Both of these writers of the weird encounter were global phenomena by 1890, so that Lovecraft’s spiritual home, Weird Tales, was in an emerging tradition. Yet the category did not get fixed down into identifiable rules and tropes, as science fiction or detective fiction did in the pulps of the 1920s, perhaps because it seems exactly concerned with what defies fixity or boundary. The weird concerns liminal things, in-between states, transgressions always on the verge of turning into something else. It is hard to define because it focuses on the horrors of the hard to define. Taxonomies of the genre have therefore only appeared later, such as Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s huge Weird Compendium (2011).

  Lovecraft helped shape this field by establishing a canon of weird literature in his essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’. For him, the descent came through the English Gothic revival that peaked with Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis in the 1790s and inevitably gave Edgar Allan Poe the honour of giving modern horror ‘its final and perfected state’ in the short tale in the 1830s and 1840s. Lovecraft identified four modern masters of the weird: Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany we have already encountered; to these he added Algernon Blackwood, the English author who lived mainly in exile and wrote metaphysical horrors of men menaced by invisible forces obtruding through lonely landscapes in classics such as ‘The Willows’, and M. R. James, who wrote tales of diffident dons haunted by events that confound their cramped empiricism.

  Lovecraft moved to define the weird as having ambitions beyond the iconography of the Gothic:

  The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (Appendix, p. 446)

  This definition built on the Old English meaning of wyrd as a supernal force or agency that predetermines events—a distinctly northern sense of malign fates waiting to cross your destiny, like the ‘weird sisters’ in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It only really began to be associated with the uncanny and supernatural in Romantic and Victorian literature. Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is weird; so is Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. Edward Bulwer-Lytton subtitled his occult novel Zanoni ‘a strange tale’. In ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, Lovecraft further emphasized that the form was focused on specific striking moments or situations, ‘visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty and adventurous expectancy’. Poe, in his essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, gave primacy to effect. In turn, Lovecraft declared that

  Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid depiction of a certain type of human mood … Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion— imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of t
he strange reality of the unreal. Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.7

  One of the best accounts of the weird is by China Miéville, a writer of fictions sometimes called the New Weird. He suggests that the weird effect is one of surrender to an outside that ‘allows swillage of that awe and horror from “beyond” back into the everyday—into angles, bushes, the touch of strange limbs, noises, etc. The weird is a radicalised sublime backwash.’8 Miéville sees this surrender as potentially positive, reading against the grain of Lovecraft’s depictions of panic and disgust.

  Disgust lies at the core of Lovecraft’s work. Stomachs turn at what is revealed beneath the clothes of the Dunwich Horror or in the final revelations of what inbreeding has done to the community of Innsmouth. Men are broken by what they see and the stench that they smell in the mountains of the Antarctic in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ or the seas of the Pacific in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. The horror and loathing at shapeless, slime-coated, rank-smelling entities is a repeated moment of culmination in his stories. The revelations can barely hold on to language, as the narrators faint away or gag. Disgust is a response to things that overwhelm our senses, stick too close, ooze across borders, or refuse to keep a stable shape. Disgust is contaminating; we scrabble to escape the touch of the abject, to purify ourselves from its tentacled, slimy touch. Lovecraft’s weird is about horror turning to revulsion at this intrusion.

  At the heart of the weird, then, is a dynamic of the sublime and the disgusting or grotesque. Grotesque things revolt because they violate boundaries, commit category errors, mix up illegitimate elements. In Lovecraft, weirdness comes from the rapid lurch between the sublime and the grotesque, in sudden inversions of emotion. These opposites are rammed together in his fiction, where transcendence ends in vertigo and nausea.

  Lovecraft’s evocation horror and disgust are built in unbroken rhythms of incantatory prose, with little interest in character or society. They abandon the change or conflict that drives most conventional fiction. Lovecraft claimed to emulate Poe’s lack of concern with character: ‘If Poe never drew a human character who lives in the memory, it is because human beings are too contemptible and trivial to deserve such remembrance. Poe saw beyond the vulgar anthropocentric sphere, and realised that men are only puppets; that events and circumstances are the only vital things.’9 Lovecraft’s retrospective structure of narration anticipates the end in the opening sentences, leaving the text to build towards a revelation of horror that is already anticipated. Stories that are married to pulp plotting, such as the Antarctic expedition in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ or the fractured texts of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, generate forward dynamism, but the tendency of the prose is entropic, towards stasis. Beyond his early sketches, Lovecraft’s short stories are rarely that short, working by accumulations of details and by rhythms of repetition that slow the pace. It is a risky strategy, since shock or disgust are instinctive reactions of the moment, whilst Lovecraft stretches out and sustains a fever pitch of revulsion.

  This brings us to the charged question of Lovecraft’s style. The culminating horror, the revelation of the weird, usually pushes Lovecraft into a fever of adjectival clatter. ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ heads towards this notorious moment of Lovecraftian horror:

  That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membranous wings … It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway. (p. 49)

  The next paragraph screams: ‘The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God!’ (p. 49). It is safe to say that this breaks every rule of orthodox creative writing, which has been dominated for years by the model of Raymond Carver’s minimalism, which demands the erasure of all adjectival intensifiers and clausal repetitions. The moon is always ‘gibbous’ in Lovecraft, and things are often ‘eldritch’ and usually ‘slobber’. Adjectives move in packs, flanked by italics and exclamation marks that tell rather than show. His horror is premised on a contradiction: the indescribable is always exhaustively described. Edmund Wilson specified that the source of Lovecraft’s bad art was his recourse to these ridiculous adjectives: ‘Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words—especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.’10 This is funny but patronizing, because for Lovecraft this was a conscious aesthetic choice. In 1923, Lovecraft wrote a short story called ‘The Unnamable’, in which a writer is criticized by a friend: ‘Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnameable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standard as an author.’11 The tale shatters that objection by forcing them through an experience in a graveyard that can only be grasped by this awkward clatter of adjectives.

  The power of the weird crawls out of these sentences because of the awkward style. These repetitions build an incantatory rhythm, tying baroque literary form to philosophical content. Conceptually, breaking open the world requires the breaking open of language and the conventions of realism. In a story such as ‘The Colour out of Space’, the brokenness of the language is a logical consequence of trying to describe an absolute otherness, a colour for which no human language exists, thus prompting another convulsion of adjectives to catch the impossible: ‘No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone’ (p. 62). Can colours ever be ‘sane’, ‘wholesome’, ‘hectic’, or ‘diseased’? This rhetorical device is known as catachresis, the deliberate abuse of language, such as mixed metaphors. The contamination in the story follows the line of a linguistic collapse: as one character is infused with this otherness, ‘In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns’ (p. 63). Similarly, the call of Cthulhu itself is so alien that only severe abuse of language can approximate a transliteration. Lovecraft’s horror fictions employ a language that continually stumbles against the trauma of the unrepresentable Thing, the shards of the sublime falling back into the debris of his busted sentences.

  Disgust is everywhere, in his grotesque, tentacular gods, in the biological degenerations of ‘The Colour out of Space’ or the flopping, hopping fish-toad-men of ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’. The unspeakable creature that forms the physical half of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ oozes with sexual disgust: ‘Below the waist … it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began’ (p. 98). But this produces another aesthetic crisis. The opposite of the sublime is disgust, according to Kant, because ‘disgusting objects present themselves to the imagination with an inescapable immediacy that prevents the conversion of the disgusting into something discernibly artistic and aesthetically valuable’.!12 What disgusts is too instinctive to be sublimated; it is not possible to imitate it in art, only to feel revulsion. The Gothic tradition has always dallied with exploiting powerful emotions of horror and disgust to interrogate the claims of reason. Its rejection of the tasteful and beautiful has left it on the margins of taste.

  It is odd to discover that Lovecraft agreed on the abject status of the pulp worlds in which he published. ‘Literature and pulp writing can’t mix’, Lovecraft declared, and lambasted himself for the corruption of his vision by pulp formulas in the early 1930s.13 But Lovecraft equally despised the Modernist art emerging around him, reserving special contempt for T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He disdained both high and low culture. It meant that he could steer between the traps of high art
and low pulp, negating these torn halves of modern culture through an amateurism that resisted the literary marketplace. It was in this niche habitat, as a Poverty Row Decadent, that Lovecraft’s strange growths pushed out their poisoned petals.

  Lovecraftian Philosophy

  At its best, Lovecraft’s moments of oscillation between the sublime and grotesque approach metaphysical intensity. ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ opens with the statement: ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity’ (p. 24). The narrator of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ experiences a similar collapse of worldview as his ‘accustomed conception of external nature and nature’s laws’ is destroyed (p. 207). For many readers, one of the key pleasures of Lovecraft’s work is the way the fiction becomes a vehicle for the dramatization of a rigorous philosophy.

  Lovecraft was well versed in scientific materialism. He read the biologist Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe with admiration. The book argued that Darwinism had made it clear that there was only one order of reality and thus stripped humanity of any metaphysical illusions of soul or transcendental order. Lovecraft read Schopenhauer’s pessimistic account of blind striving Will and Nietzsche’s splenetic relativization of Christian morals. The strand of pessimism was strong in Lovecraft’s thinking, and was voiced in the late 1920s by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, an influential account of the cyclical decline of Western culture, in accord with iron laws of determinism. Drafted in the Great War and published in Germany in the crisis conditions of the 1920s, Spengler’s philosophy of history inverted many values: civilization marked the death throes of culture, not its apotheosis; imperialism was the last decadence, ‘a doom, something daemonic’; the great metropolitan city was the sign of imminent collapse of a race. All of this spoke directly to Lovecraft and is everywhere apparent in his fiction.