Lovecraft created a genre of his own, cosmic horror or “cosmicism.” Think nihilism, with occasional cephalopods.
The
basic idea: Humans are an irrelevancy within the greater universe, a
cosmos governed by forces so alien and terrifying that our tiny minds
cannot encompass or bear their knowledge. Most characters who glimpse it
promptly go insane. Cosmicism’s big bad is Cthulhu, a winged,
octopus-like ancient god. But Cthulhu and his associates aren’t so much
evil as indifferent to pesky human life.
As
pantheons go, Lovecraft’s cosmogony is fairly imprecise, with much of
it enfleshed by his immediate disciple, August Derleth, and other
writers. There are Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods, the Elder Things and
assorted monsters like the Shoggoth, a slave race of many-eyed,
protoplasmic amoeba doodads. These gods are occasionally humanoid, but
more often sluglike, piscine, crustacean, gelatinous or a
lose-your-lunch buffet of unnamable horrors. Lovecraft typed these
beings as explicitly extraterrestrial, though some are former rulers of
the earth and still lurk within its depths and reaches. (So no more
expeditions to Antarctica, OK?)
Gods
to know and then run from in crazed terror: Dagon, a sea monster god;
Nyarlathotep, a malign shape-shifter god, who appears sometimes in the
form of a pharaoh and sometimes as an upsetting bat thing;
Shub-Niggarath, a cloudlike lady god sometimes called “the Black Goat of
the Woods With a Thousand Young”; Yog-Sothoth, the “All-in-One and
One-in-All,” a collection of glowing circles, but scary.
Five Essential Works
If
Lovecraft remains a prized writer, that has more to do with the
atmosphere his stories evoke than with the turgid prose. His pacing can
be slow, his dialogue stilted, his humorlessness suffocating. But for a
taste of his crawling chaos, here are some ghastly places to begin.
‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1936)
Dr. William Dyer, a professor of geology at Miskatonic University (think Harvard, but eerier), joins a trek to Antarctica in this harrowing novella.
His team discovers frozen prehistoric life-forms. Then mayhem begins.
Dyer uncovers the remnants of an ancient alien civilization, a race of
Elder Things and intimations of an even greater evil waiting nearby.
‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928)
This twisty story
follows a man piecing together various writings left behind by his
recently deceased professor uncle. Had his uncle stumbled on a series of
cults devoted to the worship of an Elder God? He had! Note Cthulhu’s
big debut: “It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed
Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.”
‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927)
A
surveyor assigned to an odd corner of Arkham, Mass., discovers that a
fallen meteorite has poisoned the local floral and fauna in this short story.
The meteorite, which produces a color unlike any on the visible
spectrum, affects humans, too, driving one farm family to depredation
and death.
‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1929)
In this story
set in Dunwich, Mass., strange things are afoot at the Whateley
farmhouse. So strange that Wilbur Whateley tries to break into the
Miskatonic library and steal a copy of the “Necronomicon,” an ancient
spellbook. With Wilbur thwarted, an invisible horror begins to roam the
countryside.
‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (1936)
A novella
dripping in genre elements, this odd tale stars an unnamed 21-year-old
college student who stops off in Innsmouth, a dumpy, insular fishing
town. Our narrator notices that the locals have narrow heads, bulging
eyes … and hey, are those gills?
