Supernatural Horror in Literature: And Notes on Writing Weird Fiction

By Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Two of Lovecraft’s best essays on the subject of supernatural horror fiction and how to write it. Within these essays, Lovecraft explores the origins and traditions of the genre in Britain, America and beyond with special reference to the most notable movements, themes, motifs, techniques, and writers past and present. A unique little book highly recommended for readers and writers interested in Lovecraft’s literature and writing style. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American writer of supernatural horror fiction. Though his works remained largely unknown and did not furnish him with a decent living, Lovecraft is today considered to be among the most significant writers of supernatural horror fiction of the twentieth century. Contents include: “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”. Other notable works by this author include: “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Rats in the Walls”, and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. Read & Co. Books is publishing this brand new collection of essays complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528790345

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of science fiction and horror stories. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to a wealthy family, he suffered the loss of his father at a young age. Raised with his mother’s family, he was doted upon throughout his youth and found a paternal figure in his grandfather Whipple, who encouraged his literary interests. He began writing stories and poems inspired by the classics and by Whipple’s spirited retellings of Gothic tales of terror. In 1902, he began publishing a periodical on astronomy, a source of intellectual fascination for the young Lovecraft. Over the next several years, he would suffer from a series of illnesses that made it nearly impossible to attend school. Exacerbated by the decline of his family’s financial stability, this decade would prove formative to Lovecraft’s worldview and writing style, both of which depict humanity as cosmologically insignificant. Supported by his mother Susie in his attempts to study organic chemistry, Lovecraft eventually devoted himself to writing poems and stories for such pulp and weird-fiction magazines as Argosy, where he gained a cult following of readers. Early stories of note include “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Tomb” (1917), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). “The Call of Cthulu,” originally published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is considered by many scholars and fellow writers to be his finest, most complex work of fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft became one of the century’s leading horror writers whose influence remains essential to the genre.

Book preview

1.png

SUPERNATURAL

HORROR

IN LITERATURE

AND NOTES ON

WRITING WEIRD FICTION

A Guide By

H. P. LOVECRAFT

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Books

This edition is published by Read & Co. Books,

an imprint of Read & Co.

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

To

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Essayist, Poet &

Master-writer of the Weird

1890-1937

He lived—and now is dead beyond all knowing

Of life and death: the vast and formless scheme

Behind the face of nature ever showing

Has swallowed up the dreamer and the dream.

But brief the hour he had upon the stream

Of timeless time from past to future flowing

To lift his sail and catch the luminous gleam

Of stars that marked his coming and his going

Before he vanished: yet the brilliant wake

His passing left is vivid on the tide

And for the countless centuries will abide:

The genius that no death can ever take

Crowns him immortal, though a man has died.

Francis Flagg

(

George Henry Weiss

)

Contents

H. P. Lovecraft

SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

I INTRODUCTION

II THE DAWN OF THE HORROR-TALE

III THE EARLY GOTHIC NOVEL

IV THE APEX OF GOTHIC ROMANCE

V THE AFTERMATH OF GOTHIC FICTION

VI SPECTRAL LITERATURE ON THE CONTINENT

VII EDGAR ALLAN POE

VIII THE WEIRD TRADITION IN AMERICA

IX THE WEIRD TRADITION IN THE BRITISH ISLES

X THE MODERN MASTERS

NOTES ON WRITING WEIRD FICTION

I

II

III

H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Rhode Island, USA. Although a sickly boy, Lovecraft began writing at a very young age, quickly developing a deep and abiding interest in science. At just sixteen he was writing a monthly astronomy column for his local newspaper. However, in 1908, Lovecraft suffered a nervous breakdown and failed to get into university, sparking a period of five years in which he all but vanished.

In 1913, Lovecraft was invited to join the UAPA (United Amateur Press Association)—a development which re-invigorated his writing. In 1917, he began to focus on fiction, producing such well-known early stories as Dagon and A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson. In 1924, Lovecraft married and moved to New York, but he disliked life there intensely, and struggled to find work. A few years later, penniless and now divorced, he returned to Rhode Island. It was here, during the last decade of his life, that Lovecraft produced the vast majority of his best-known fiction, including The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Thing on the Doorstep and arguably his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu. Having suffered from cancer of the small intestine for more than a year, Lovecraft died in March of 1937.

FACT AND FANCY

How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind

Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind;

Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude,

And wreck the solace of the poet’s mood!

Young Zeno, practic’d in the Stoic’s art,

Rejects the language of the glowing heart;

Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws;

Condemns th’ effect whilst looking for the cause;

Freezes poor Ovid in an ic’d review,

And sneers because his fables are untrue!

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,

But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!

Stay! vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast

The graceful legends of the story’d past;

Whose tongue in censure flays th’ embellish’d page,

And scolds the comforts of a dreary age:

Would’st strip the foliage from the vital bough

Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou?

Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye

Discerns a Pantheon in the spangled sky;

Finds Sylphs and Dryads in the waving trees,

And spies soft Notus in the southern breeze;

For whom the stream a cheering carol sings,

While reedy music by the fountain rings;

To whom the waves a Nereid tale confide

Till friendly presence fills the rising tide.

Happy is he, who void of learning’s woes,

Th’ ethereal life of body’d Nature knows:

I scorn the sage that tells me it but seems,

And flout his gravity in sunlit dreams!

H. P. Lovecraft

SUPERNATURAL

HORROR IN LITERATURE

I

INTRODUCTION

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

Man’s first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings around all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil