A Taste of Lovecraft

Given his influence on the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres (even Tolkien borrowed ideas from him) I figured it was time I read a significant amount of H. P. Lovecraft. I got a collection of his short stories, and it has been interesting so far.

The book was assembled by Joyce Carol Oates, and the first three stories (the stories I have read) are The Outsider, The Music of Erich Zann, and The Rats in the Walls.

I'm enjoying the writing, with some important caveats. One of the really strange things I'm noticing is the similarity to a lot of writing I do. As Oates points out in her introduction, Lovecraft had a fascination with setting and atmosphere, often favoring an establishment of mood over nuanced characters. While I strive to make my characters interesting, I do think that this element of storytelling does draw me. I think my favorite story of the three I've read is the Music of Erich Zann.

In this story, the narrator recounts living in a tall house on a narrow and steep street in "the city" (one assumes Paris or at least somewhere in France.) His upstairs neighbor is a mute musician named Erich Zann, and the narrator is drawn to meet him after hearing incredibly strange but beautiful music coming from Zann's attic apartment.

Ultimately, of course, it turns out that this strangest of music is not coming from Zann, but from some unfathomable void that his window opens out into - not the city skyline that the narrator would have reasonably assumed.

The "of course" there is a consequence of Lovecraft's influence. Having been an establishing trope codifier, some of the "twist" endings to his stories wind up feeling rote and familiar, but I wonder if they felt original when first written. The Outsider's ending, when the narrator describes, in italics, the sensation of touching the horrific monster's hand was, in fact, the act of touching a cold glass mirror, seems utterly hackneyed, though of course there is fascinating imagined geography to the bizarre underground (or other-planar) castle that the narrator grew up in.

Two stories in, I was pleasantly enjoying the work, but the Rats in the Walls confronted me with one of the biggest problems with Lovecraft, namely his racism. Not only does the protagonist have a beloved cat named N---Man, but there seems to be a kind of matter-of-fact acceptance of phrenology as a respectable science. (The story's ending is also very abrupt, with the madness that descends on the narrator and mentions of Nyarlathotep coming sort of out of the blue, as if Lovecraft was thinking "hm... how do I end this?")

I had compared Lovecraft to Poe in an earlier post, and I think that comparison is apt. Lovecraft was clearly working from the Gothic Horror template, and was fascinated by the notion of protagonists reduced to madmen - his modification of the genre was the extrapolation of a universe built on madness - that there was a material cause for madness rather than guilt, trauma, or cruelty.