H. P. Lovecraft: An Overview of His Work

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Leslie S. Klinger, in editing The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, provides an account of the development of the so-called “CthulhuMythos,” citing some of the specific short stories and the single novel by Lovecraft that furnished the hints, bits, and pieces that would become the basis of what another writer, August Derleth, transformed into Lovecraft's supposed mythology. This essay is based on Klinger's analysis and his insights into this topic, as set forward in the “Introduction” of his annotation of Lovecraft's work. Unless stated otherwise, the direct quotations are of Klinger. (Words in bold blue font are defined or discussed in more detail at the end of this essay.)

Derleth, not Lovecraft, is responsible for the idea that Lovecraft meant “to create a permanent or unchanging pantheon.” Actually, as stated, Lovecraft preferred his work to represent an “'open source' universe” that others interested in his work could visit. At most, Lovecraft referred only to an “Arkham cycle,” without identifying which of his stories comprised this group of tales. However, Derleth imagined that he saw, in Lovecraft's fiction, “a fixed framework,” based on the idea that earth had once been home to an ancient alien race who were prepared to repossess it. Lovecraft's supposed “Mythos” is really a creation of Derleth, who invented it in the stories that he, Derleth, wrote as addenda to Lovecraft's canon.

For Lovecraft, the universe is indifferent to human existence and to human aspirations. Rather than offering his readers reassurance as to their place in the cosmos, Lovecraft's fiction suggests that it is up to each individual to make his or her own way in the universe. Critics have labeled Lovecraft's position “cosmicism.”

Klinger identifies these narratives (all of which are short stories except for the novel At the Mountains of Madness) as providing the hints, bits, and pieces of what Derleth claims is Lovecraft's “Cthulhu Mythos.”

“Dagon” is “the earliest [of Lovecraft's stories] to contain any elements of . . . the Cthulhu Mythos”: “truly ancient beings, experiences and sensations that cannot be processed by human brains, and a deep sense of doom.” 

“Nyarlathotep” introduces a “persona” who reappears “in future versions of the Cthulhu Mythos.” 

“The Nameless City” introduces Lovecraft's mythology, such as it is, describing “an elder race and a civilization predating humans” and making references to the mysterious Necronomicon, though not by name). 

“TheHound” specifically names Alhazred's Necronomicon.

In “The Festival,” Lovecraft “revisits the true horror of 'Dagon'—the narrator's discovery that there are things still present on this planet that began before human history.” 

“TheCall of Cthulhu” offers Lovecraft's “first comprehensive view of his cosmicism as it [“The Call of Cthulhu”] expands on 'Dagon.'” 

“Buildingon 'The Call of Cthulhu,'” “The Dunwich Horror” provides an extended excerpt from the Necronomicon.” 

“TheWhisperer in the Darkness” gives an account, in some detail, of the origin and history of the Outer Ones, the alien race mentioned in Lovecraft's earlier story, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” 

Atthe Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft's only novel, mentions several themes and elements related to the Arkham cycle and to the Cthulhu Mythos, including the Shining Trapezohedron, Arkham's Miskatonic University, artifacts of a pre-human civilization (the “Elder Things”), and shoggoths (biologically engineered slaves who may have been the ancestors of all life on Earth). (This note is not based on TheAnnotated H. P. Lovecraft). 

“TheShadow over Innsmouth” is set in the New England village that is home to the alien race known as the Deep Ones.

In “The Dreams in the Witch House,” Lovecraft mentions the Old Ones and “tries to imagine the fourth dimension.” 

“The Thing on the Doorstep” recounts personality transference through “dark magic invoking Lovecraft's Cthulhian deities.”

The end of “The Shadow Out of Time” confirms humanity's “relatively minor role on the cosmic scale.”

In addition to providing “the history of an ancient cult,” “TheHunter of the Dark” adds “an element of cosmicism” while hinting that “an extraterrestrial stone [called] the Shining Trapezohedron” may be “a window on all time and space.”

Cthulhu Mythos: “Term coined by August Derleth, biographer and editor of H. P. Lovecraft, writer of supernatural fiction. The term denotes the mythology invented by Lovecraft for a group of horror stories. According to Derleth, Lovecraft once told him, 'All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on the outside, ever ready to take possession of this earth again' (“Cthulhu Mythos” in Encyclopedia.com). Note: Leslie states that Derleth invented this quotation; Lovecraft himself never made this statement. 

Arkham Cycle: Although Lovecraft never identified the stories he referred to collectively as the “Arkham cycle,” Leslie states that the 22 Lovecraft stories that he, Leslie, includes in The Annotated H. P. Lovecraftcomprise the group that Lovecraft described as the “Arkham cycle”: “Dagon,” “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” “Nyarlathotep,” “The Picture in the House,” “Herbert West: Reanimator,” “The Nameless City,” “The Hound,” “The Festival,” “The Unnamable,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Silver Key,” “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Haunter of the Dark.” 

Cosmicism: “Cosmicism sees the human race and all its 'civilization' as senseless against the backdrop of Deep Time . . . . Cosmicism says that beyond the 'reality' defined by our five-senses, human norms are not normal . . . . [Cosmicism views] the Universe is a cold, uncaring place,” i. e., as indifferent to humanity and its affairs. 

Necronomicon: Invented by Lovecraft, the Necronomicon does not exist except in the pages of his fiction. In his work, the Necronomicon is “a tome filled with secrets and rituals that can drive a reader to the brink of insanity. . . . Lovecraft mentions the book in 18 of his stories, more than any other mystical book (real or otherwise) that he references. Many fans of the mythos think of the 'Necronomicon' [sic] as the Bible of Lovecraft's pantheon. . . . the author of the book was the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, who perished in A.D. 738 after being eaten by one or more invisible monsters. . . . Alhazred mostly wrote about a race of extraterrestrial creatures with cosmic powers. He calls them the Old Ones,” one of whom was Yog-Sothoth; a distant relative of theirs is Cthulhu.” In short, “the book is a fictional history about our world and the creatures that eons ago ruled the Earth and other realms.” 

Outer Ones: The Outer Ones are a group of Cthulhu Mythos deities invented by August Derlerth. They are ruled by Azathoth. 

Deep Ones: “The Deep Ones are a race of intelligent ocean-dwelling creatures, approximately human-shaped but with a fishy, froggy appearance. They regularly mate with humans along the coast, creating societies of hybrids.”

Cthulhian deities: The Cthulhuian deities are comprised of the Outer Gods, the Great Old Ones, the Great Ones, and the Elder Gods. 

Shining Trapezohedron: A stone able to summon a dreaded being from deepest time and space. Once ensconced in a temple, it was thrown, in “The Hunter in theDark,” into the Narragansett Bay. The Trapezohedron is also featured in Lovecraft's “The Whisperer in Darkness,” his novel Atthe Mountains of Madness, and his tale “The Outsider.”

Thesis and Demonstration: Philosophical Horror Fiction

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Many of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories, like those of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, begin with a thesis-like assertion, the truth of which is then demonstrated, as it were, by the narrative that this philosophical premise introduces:

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal (“The Tomb”).

I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong (“Beyond the Wall of Sleep”).

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the craven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around monoliths on uninhabited islands [but]. . . the true epicure of the terrible to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection
of the hideous (“The Picture in the House”)

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent (“The Shunned House”).

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, and it was not meant that we should voyage far ("The Call of
Cthulhu").

I have dealt with this topic already, at some length, in a rather different (and some might say odd) manner in “Alien Androids: Another Plot-generating Method,” but I wanted, here, to provide a few examples of a celebrated writer of horror’s use of this technique.

The Nature of the Beast

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu

Adam Smith points out, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that, President Bill Clinton’s claim to “feel your pain” notwithstanding, people can know only their own feelings. To the extent that an individual empathizes and sympathizes with another, he or she does so only vicariously, by imaginatively putting him- or herself in the other’s place. The ability to identify with other people, only if imaginatively, creates a sense of community as a “fellow-feeling” develops, which allows people to regard others as their kith and kin. Occasionally (and usually to their regret) people project their own feelings onto animals, including bears, gorillas, and lions, regarding them as their fellows as well. Something of such a fellow-feeling between humans and animals may be evident in the half-human, half-animal hybrid creatures of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Indian mythologies.

When an animal attacks, without warning, as wild animals are wont to do, people who have invested the animals with personalities similar to their own are sometimes at a loss to account for the beasts’ apparent betrayal. Other times, such individuals make an attempt to psychoanalyze the animal, as a female diver did after the whale she was petting, gripping her leg in its mouth, dove to a depth of approximately fifty feet before releasing her, and, short on oxygen, she barely made it back to the surface of the water. The whale, she believed, was annoyed at her for her invading its personal space. In past times, animals have even been condemned and executed for the “crimes” they committed against individuals, and in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab stalks the great white whale that bit off his leg.

It may be that people prefer anthropomorphism to the truth that animals are not people and, therefore, do not aspire, believe, doubt, feel, imagine, or think as people do. Although animals are definitely sentient and may be capable of limited cognition, including the ability to experience emotions to a degree, they are obviously not as sophisticated as even a young child in their ability to engage in complex, prolonged cognitive processes. Most animals do not have opposable thumbs, of course, which is a serious handicap, no doubt, in using (or even manufacturing) tools, but there are many other obstacles to their creation, maintaining, and developing art, science, and the other accoutrements of culture. No matter how fond one may be of one’s goldfish, hamster, guinea pig, rat, snake, canary, cat, dog, pot-bellied pig, or horse, the animal is not going to write a symphony to rival one by Johann Sebastian Bach, devise an invention to rival Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb, or put one of their own on the moon.

Animals are not human. By nature--even by definition--they are other-than-human, the closest approximation that we have to the extraterrestrial biological entities of science fiction and horror, as alien as the great gelatinous mass of The Blob or H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. We cannot put ourselves in their places, because they are not the same as we; they are not our equals in consciousness, memory, cognition, imagination, emotion, or any other mental process. In short, they are as William Butler Yeats describes the “rough beast” that, in “The Second Coming,” “slouches. . . towards Bethlehem to be born,” its “gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun.” Anyone who has ever studied the eye of a rattlesnake, an eagle, or a tiger knows the gaze that Yeats describes. It is unnerving precisely because of its inhumanity. The eyes, for men and women, may be “mirrors of the soul,” but animals have no souls to mirror, which is the very reason that their “blank and pitiless” stare is horrible and terrifying to us. Their gaze proves, to the intuition, if not to reason, that the animal is other-than-human and that it may be dangerous. There is no “fellow-feeling” between a man or a woman and a serpent, a hawk, or a lion for the simple reason that there cannot be. Therefore, beasts are dreadful.

Poets know this, as Yeats’ description of his poem’s “rough beast” shows. Emily Dickinson knows, too, the alien nature of the animal, as her poem about the “narrow fellow in the grass” whose presence leaves her “zero at the bone” shows. D. H. Lawrence also knows the alien nature of the serpent, as his poem, “The Snake,” indicates. Steve Irwin believed that he knew animals, although he was never sentimental enough to suppose that they feel as he felt or think as he thought. He loved the beasts of the field and the forest, the air and the sea, but, the moment he was careless, he paid with his life, a stingray’s barb through his heart, and Roy, of the Las Vegas magic act billed as “Sigfried and Roy,” was mauled by the white tiger that the duo used in their act, despite his love for the great cat.

It is the otherness of animals' nature that compels horror writers to use them--or parts of them, such as their fangs, their claws, their scales, their wings, their impervious hides, to describe monsters. By assigning animal characteristics to human beings, such writers reverse the process of which Smith writes, causing readers to alienate themselves from the monster who is too unlike them, fanged and clawed as these monsters are, to allow identification and sympathy. There can be no fondness, no fellow-feeling, no trust between the human and the other-than-human, because whatever is inaccessible to the imagination is beyond empathy. This is true despite the fact that some people--the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers and Adolph Hitlers and Saddam Husseins among us--are worse than any lion, tiger, or bear, oh, my. Therefore, in science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction, readers may continue to expect such monsters as the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the ape-like mutants of “The Lurking Fear,” the gigantic spider of It and The Lord of the Rings, and the human-animal-alien hybrids of the thousands of horror stories, in print and on film, that have been are, and are to come.

Since the days of Job, when God asked his loyal servant whether he’d considered Leviathan and his ways, such has been the nature of the beast.